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What's happening, man? Pleasure to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too.

It's always so odd when you've seen someone in so many movies and you meet them in real life. You're like, eh, real person, you know, it's strange, isn't it?

Yeah, well, you know, I do have that same thing myself. You know, when I meet somebody that, whose work I dig or whatever, you know, I'm still just the same fan that I was, you know, before I even got into the business. You know, I met Daniel Day Lewis in a motel eight in Canestoga, New York state. A guy saw us and he said, you know, do you mind if I take your photograph? So we went out into the car park of this motel aide and this guy took a photograph and about, I don't know, seven or eight months later, a copy of it arrived in my house in Australia, and the guy had basically just written Russell Crowe Australia and sent it to me. So I have a copy of it. And it's a funny thing. I was there. It was the boxing hall of Fame. I was there with Angelo Dundee, and he was there with Barry McGuigan. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's awesome.

It was, it was just unexpected and, you know, it was. Was a cool thing. He was such a nice fellow, too.

Daniel Day Lewis is a real legend because he's one of those guys just like disappears for a couple years and make shoes.

Yeah, yeah.

Just a real artist, quirky stuff, and.

Suddenly comes back with a, you know, a vengeance and a fury. Oh, my God, look at that. Yeah, he's, you know, some of us have to work for a living, mate. You know, he's probably got independent wealth.

He's just a different kind of human. You know, any guy who can just walk away like that and just decide to make shoes like, that's a. Yeah, that's the real deal.

It's pretty special.

Some, like, some people try to pretend to be quirky, you know, they try to pretend to be eccentric, and then there's, there's the real thing.

That's the actual eccentrics.

Yeah, the actual eccentrics are so fascinating to me. And, yeah, for a guy like, you know, to meet a guy like that, he's one of those odd ones, but you are too. It's like, it's always, it's interesting to hear from a person that's, that is a guy like you that still feels weird to meet people that are, you know, that you've admired their work. I always feel the same way, and I always feel like, this is gonna go away. And then I'm like, nope. Russell Crowe. Oh, wow. I met Dennis Quaid the other day, same thing. He's like, all right, Dennis Quaiden.

Cool.

It seems so strange.

Yeah. I, if I was to explain to my, you know, childhood self, my ten year old self, what was in front of me and the people that I would meet and the things that I would experience and the contacts that, you know, have come along in my life, it just. My little brain would have just exploded. There's just no way I could have possibly imagined this life was going to unfold in front of me.

How could you? I mean, you'd have to be so ambitious. You'd have to have the most crazy expectations possible.

Yeah. And my first thing when I was leaving school is just don't have a boring life. Just don't find some way of being able to express yourself. My first job out of school, my first official job was working for an insurance company, commercial union insurance, inputting the details of policies.

So not off to a great start, man.

It was a funny thing, though, because I learned a lot in my short time there. In the summer before, I'd worked as a nightclub dj, and I got fired because I couldn't talk. I was too nervous to talk on the microphone.

Wow.

So after, like, five or six weeks, they shuffled me off, you know, and the guy really, you know, dug what I was playing and how I got the dance floor moving and everything. But, you know, he says, you know, I need to sell toasted sandwiches, man. You have to tell people that the kitchen's open. So, you know, I left school partway through the last year. You know, in New Zealand, they have a different thing where you have a bursary year after normal high school finishes, and in your bursary year, if you achieve to a certain degree, you get money towards your university degree, you know. But it was clear to me in that last year, my dad was out of work, and I wasn't going to be able to go to university. We couldn't afford that sort of thing. You know, it would only cost, you know, three and a half or four grand or something like that back in the day. But that was beyond our means as a family. I started working at this insurance company, and I was the only person in the building of a big insurance company who had actually passed matriculation into university, you know, and the general manager of the company, you know, sat me down to tell me that one day, you know, you're the only person with, you know, the higher school certificate, what they call university entrance in New Zealand, in the building, you know, and I just watched this thing unfold.

The coolest dude in the building was this salesman, right? And he had a beard and he wore kind of cool sunglasses and everything. And I remember the day he bought a new pair of shoes and all the girls in the building, oh, have you seen whatever his name is? New shoes and hurrah. And they were all fluttering over him and stuff like that, and this guy was the best salesman they had and blah, blah, blah, you know, and in the time that I was there, I watched those new shoes get age on them and start cracking at the side and stuff like that, because he obviously used them a lot, did a lot of walking around, talking to people. And just as I was leaving, I overheard a discussion where he was planning on getting some new shoes again. And I was like, yeah, I definitely, definitely don't want to, don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be that guy.

I had a similar situation when I was driving limousines, we were driving limos, and it was one of my jobs that I was doing when I was trying to make it as a stand up comedian. And you would work long hours. Like if you tried to leave after 8 hours, they'd yell at you like they wanted you to work 1216 hours a day. And there was this one guy, and he had a Cadillac. And the boss pulls us aside, he says, look at this guy over here. He's got a cadillac, he makes $60,000 a year, and he doesn't have to bust his ass. He's sitting down all day in a nice car and driving people around. And this could be you, too. I was like, I gotta get the fuck outta here. It was my first thought. Cause I knew that guy was working 16 hours days. That's all he did. All he did was work. And yeah, he had a nice car. I'm sure he had a nice house. I was like, I gotta get the fuck outta here. Yeah, I gotta get the fuck outta here. Sometimes people like that are good for you.

They're like the universe puts them in front of you just so you can say this is a trap.

Yeah, well, here's your example.

Yes. Yeah.

So what do you want, option a or option b?

Did you ever meet anyone who was an actor? Did you know of anyone that had made a living doing that?

Well, all through my life, for sure, because my parents at a certain point in time were caterers on film sets. So that's how I got my first job. My mom's godfather was a tv producer who's famous in the australian industry. Not so much anymore because the generations passed, but he was the tightest producer to work for, the cheapest bastard on the block, you know, and he was famous for that. And I mean, I still know Jack Thompson today. You know, I did a scene with Jack Thompson when I was six years old, did my first line of dialog on camera, made a movie with him playing his son when I was 25 or 26, something like that. I bought a property near where his property is in the bush because he was kind of like a, you know, a mentor, you know, not, you know, I mean, still talking about an hour's driveway, but in the bush that's nothing, you know?

Right.

And, you know, I still know him today and he's in his eighties now, you know. So I had people like that and I like, when I was twelve, I went to a. So I did an acting job when I was six and another one when I was eight. And then I kind of forgot about it for a while. And I went on a school tour of a tv studio, and it was a tv show called the Young Doctors was being made in that studio. And there was a bit part actor, a guy called Roy Harris Jones, who had been on the couple of shows that my parents had done and I liked him a lot and blah, blah, blah. I hadn't seen him for years and there he was on that show and, you know, while the other kids are there going on their tour, he goes, are you here for an audition? I said, no, I haven't done anything like that for ages. And he goes, come on, let's go down the corridor and meet the casting director. So I split away from the tour. All the other kids go off and, you know, this is a camera, this is a control room.

They're doing all that stuff. Wow. And I go down and the casting director had a minute, so she sat me down and talked to me and all that sort of stuff. And two weeks later I was back in that building shooting a character on the tv show.

Wow.

And then that kind of reignited that part of my imagination. But coming out of school and everything, I really thought that I was simply going to, I was going to go into music. That was my thing. If I was going to pursue anything, it was going to be music. But basically I would accept any job that allowed me to be in a position of entertaining people. So that's why I went into the, you know, the nightclub thing with the. With being a DJ. And my first night, the second time, because, you know, obviously, I'd failed the first time around and been fired because I couldn't talk. The second time around, I'd auditioned for this place, but they hadn't given me the job. They gave it to somebody else, but they ended up firing him after two nights because him and the guy that ran the club didn't get on, you know. So they called me up on a Sunday afternoon, and they said, are you free tonight? Can you come and dj at the club? We've got a bunch of 1950s records, because it's a 1950s music only club, you know. And have you got a turntable?

You know, and I said, I've got one. So I went in that night with, like, an orange plastic, sharp turntable, right? Plugged it in through the headphone socket and played these records. But I had one turntable, so I couldn't switch. So I have to talk, because every time a song finishes, I have to pick up this needle, the arm, pick up the record, get the next one, put it down, then put things. So it was just a crazy circumstance. It was like it was created to make sure that I absolutely broke through whatever that fear was immediately. Now that I had another chance, I ended up staying and working pretty much full time for about four years in that job. But it expanded a whole bunch of other stuff because the guy started getting me to perform on stage. The guy that I was working with, once he started hearing my songs and everything, he said, all right, okay. My third set, the end of the night. You come on, just do your songs, though. You're not allowed to do songs. People know I have to go out. People have been listening to these old classic nine and 50 songs all night, and now there's some young, pimply bloke in front of them singing, bullshit.

What are you doing? But it was a real baptism of fire. He also had me tour with him. So we would be on Thursday, Friday, Saturday in Auckland in the big city, and then Sunday through Wednesday, we're in a truck and a car and everything, and we're touring. We're going playing in these other pubs and stuff. And he fancied himself, you see, because all anachronistic thing. His whole life, this guy that I was working for was about the 1950s of war. Blue suede shoes or winkle pickers, stovepipes, trousers, drape coats, you know, he had a Cadillac. Probably the only Cadillac in New Zealand at the time, you know. And he had this thing about, like, you know, Elvis used to have a comedian opening for him, so somebody should go out and tell jokes before I come on, right? And so part of my job was to walk out and tell a joke that he had told me to tell, right? I couldn't make up my own material. And these jokes were fucking terrible. They were just trash and trying to make that thing work. And one night I said to him, why don't you let me just go out and say something actually funny or whatever he goes, because I want people to be happy to see me.

Right.

Oh, my God. So he set it up on purpose?

Absolutely. He actually said to me at one point in time, never ever as a performer, never ever bring somebody on stage who's better than you. And as I was a guest for him on stage every night of the week, I was like, oh, right, so you're telling me I'm shit. The only reason I've got the job is because I'm shit? Because I make you look better. But I, you know, in my own sort of performing life, over time I changed that rule completely. I only ever bring somebody on stage who's gonna absolutely shred the room, you know? And over time, you know, with the live performances, you know, we've had guests like Elvis Costello, Sting. Last year, Michael Buble got up with us. He did an Elvis song at the end of a show. Sydney Opera house actually killed the room. Rita Ora got up last year. Rza from the Wu Tang clan. Whoa, he got up. He's a mate of mine, Bobby Diggs. We got up in like a 300 5400 standing room only little pub in Balmain, an area of Sydney. And then suddenly the Rizza's on the stage. Wow. So I learned a lot from him, but I didn't learn the things he was trying to teach me.

Well, that's a great philosophy, to have the best people going in front of you. We have a similar problem with that in comedy. Like a lot of big name headliners, they like to bring terrible opening acts so they're like a hero and they'll rescue the show. I have the exact opposite. I have your approach. I try to bring the best people possible. Makes it more fun. It's more fun for me too, but.

It'S more fun for the audience too. That's the whole thing about live performance, is catering for the audience.

Yes. The energy of the show. What do you enjoy? Do you enjoy one thing more or do you enjoy both things?

That's a very difficult question to answer without pages of nuance, you know, because mind join nuance. Well, I'll give it a go. The bottom line is, I love my job. I love working on films. Every single day that I'm walking towards the camera, you know, I will have a plan. I know what I'm about to do, you know, and I chose to be here, right. I work with lots and lots of actors who just took the role because of blah, blah. They're not really there because of the work. But when you know the job and you know that you're talking about 04:00 a.m. starts. You're talking about, you know, minimum 12 hours a day, you know, you're talking about working in extreme conditions and stuff like that, temperature wise or, you know, somewhere kind of whack to get an amazing shot, you know, when you know the job, you know how hard it is, you really got to have your reasons for being there. You know what I mean? So I'll read scripts, and I will generally do the one that got under my skin. You know, it can have a great pedigree. It can be a wonderful director.

It can have another great cast. But if I read it and I don't get personally attached to it, I just don't do it. And then I'll read something else that everybody else is like. It's kind of dodgy or whatever, but there's like, that scene. It gets me that one. I want to do that. I want to be the guy doing that dialog, you know? And so, you know, I know exactly why I'm at work. So when it gets hard and it gets difficult, it doesn't worry me because I chose to be here, you know, so I don't have that thing that some actors have of, like, getting disgruntled with it, you know? Sure. You know, it's. It's my employment. It's how I pay for everything. It's, you know, and all of those things, but it's also like a deep, deep passion, you know, and stepping into the shoes of other people and experiencing, to a degree, things of somebody else's life or learning a new skill or whatever it happens to be. This is exciting for me, and I'm 60 years old, and I still dig it. You know what I mean? I don't have any.

Because that one simple thing, I know why I'm there at 04:00 a.m. when it's like a ball busting wake up time because you had a big day the day before. I know why I'm there. Sort of like, my motivations and stuff are very clear in that respect. Now with music, it in itself is its own reward. To play a song, to sing a song, to be with a group of musicians and to sort of gel on something together, it's just like, thank you very much. That's the reward to then put it in front of a crowd and then have that immediate response. You know, obviously, I work with a lot of actors over the years that come from a theater background. And even though I've done a lot of theater, I come from a rock and roll background. I come from out of clubs. I come from standing on that stage singing my dweeby 16 year old songs authored by a 1617 year old. And to me, that's my reset place. People will talk to you like Anthony Hopkins. I was working with him and he'd done a series of films. This is way back in the nineties.

And I think he was off to do a season of King Lear and he was really happy about it because for him, that's a reset. You go back into that place where you came out of and you get all the benefits of doing the same performance over and over again. So you get to, you know, squeeze all the different character sort of parts that you can, you know, and enjoy it. And that's his reset. But for me, walking out onto a rock and roll stage, guitar in hand, where I do not know exactly what's going to happen that night because every audience takes things in a different direction, you know, that's my reset. You know, it's like jumping. That's me jumping out of a plane and I love doing it, you know?

Yeah, they have different. Different buttons they push.

Yeah. I mean, it's performance, but, you know, there's a visceral thing that happens in front of a live audience.

Yeah.

You know, that just doesn't happen in the sterile environment of a film set, you know, and you can have wonderful creative relationships on a film set and great collaborations and all that sort of stuff. The same that you can have in music, you know, but there's that other part of it. There's that thing that sort of. I don't know, it gives you something back, man, it fills you back up again.

Yeah, well, you're creating an experience for people and they're enjoying it in the moment and you're all sharing that moment. I always feel bad for people that have never done something like that, never performed in front of a live audience and gave everybody a great time because.

Yeah, I actually understand what you mean, because it is. It is something to have in your DNA.

It's a rare gift that a person gets to live their life doing that a lot.

I was thinking about what we might talk about, and there's a story I like to tell, if you're into it. It's quite a long story, though.

Please.

So back in the nineties, the thing about this story is it sort of like this casually shows you how much of a circus the film industry can be, you know what I mean? And part of the attraction of it, when I was a young actor and, you know, and, you know, later in my twenties, moving to Australia and doing theater and stuff like that, and then looking at film people as sort of like a rare breed, you know? And then you get into it and you realize you gotta be pretty much crazy to do this, you know, sort of like this, you know. Over time, it's gotten definitely safer, more insurance conscious, and all of these things, you know? But back in the day, not so much. You know, everything was about just getting the shot, you know? So 92 is the first time I go to Los Angeles, but I'd already made a bunch of films in Australia, and I'd been to the Cannes Film Festival. So my first time traveling outside of Australia and New Zealand was 1991, so I was, like, 27 or something like that, you know. And then the year after, I went to LA and got an agent, but I'd won a bunch of awards in Australia, and my films had been around to different film festivals and stuff, so there was awareness of.

Of what I was doing in the industry, so to think, so to speak. And I got this phone call to go and meet Bernardo Bertolucci, the italian director who won the Oscar for the last emperor. Fantastic director, you know. He also did last tango in Paris and a bunch of other films. And I was really excited. I was like, wow, fantastic. So I get to Barnardo's house, and he's watching a football game. It's Italy versus Brazil, right? He's got a bunch of people over to watch the football. So I'm sort of just, oh, you know, I thought we were having a meeting. I didn't realize there was a football game on. And Italy didn't do very well. They got beaten by Brazil. So I never had a conversation with Bernardo because after the game, he just went off to his room or something to have a cry, I'm not sure. But I met his wife, and her name was Claire Peploe, and she was a film director. And, you know, she said, look, you know, I encourage Bernardo to, you know, invite you to the house because, you know, I know he wants to talk to you about something, but I want to talk to you as well.

I've had this script, and she gave me the script and it was called Miss Shumwe Waves a wand. And I was, you know, very much in the independent film world at the time, so that sounded like a good title for an independent film, you know. And I read it and it was pretty good. It was based on this book and I liked the character, so I sort of, you know, responded to it and eventually ended up doing it. And Bridget Fonda was signed on as the female lead, so that was cool. You know, she was pretty happening at the time. I have a funny thing that goes on with my brain. If I'm, like, faced with, I'm reading something and there's, like, a difficult moment in something that I'm liking, right, where my brain just goes, hmm. To be dealt with later. Right. I'll worry about that when I have to. And there was this scene where a spider would crawl into the mouth of the character I was playing. I was thinking, hmm, I wonder how they're going to do that CGI or something like that, you know? Anyway, so off we go on this adventure, and we're shooting in Guatemala and Mexico, and it's an extremely disorganized shoot.

You know, we don't have nothing's right, you know. At one point in time, for seven days, we lived on refried beans and rice in Guatemala because they hadn't made any arrangement with any kind of catering company or anything, you know. So that was the only thing that they could get easily. So it was breakfast, lunch and dinner, refried beans and rice, you know. And the end of that week, one of the guys on the film crew found this, like, cafe that sold some form of grilled meat. And we all just, like, went there in the middle of this rainforest and ate this meat and realized later on it was more than likely we're eating the monkeys that were running around the trees around us because everybody got really sick. Really sick. Anyway, so we're going through this, this experience, and we eventually get back to Los Angeles and we've got, you know, like, a couple of weeks shooting in LA, and we go out to a place called Lancaster, I think it was. There's an old film studio out there, and I see on the call sheet, oh, it's the spider scene, you know. Cool.

So as I arrived at the studio, this guy, this producer comes out to meet me, and I russell, everything good? And I said, yeah, cool. So we're shooting the spider scene today. And he goes, yes, it's gonna be great. So everything. You're fine? I said, yeah, cool, but how are we gonna do this? Is this gonna be like a CGI thing or whatever? Oh, no, no, the tarantula man is here. The fucking what? The tarantula man's here. And he has shown a variety of creatures to the director. She has chosen the largest. It's going to be a great day. Anyway, good luck with it. And off he tots, you know, so I go inside and they show me, look, here's a piece of carpet. You're going to be lying down here. The carpet matches a place where, you know, a hotel room would shot in. And so what's going to happen is you're going to lie down here. They're going to place the tarantula on your chest. The tarantula wrangler will give it a little tickle, and as long as you keep your mouth open, it will head directly for your mouth. They always look for places to hide.

So you've just got to keep your mouth open. It'll tickle, tickle, tickle. The tarantula will run up here into your mouth, and then the guy will pluck it out of your mouth. You know, I'm like, okay, cool. So they turn on all these hot lights, right? I lie down on the ground. The tarantula gets put on my chest. Now, tarantula, bigger than my hand, right? It's a serious spider. Now, obviously, I've lived in Australia most of my life or whatever. I'm used to spiders, you know. That was a large one, right? So on my chest, tickle, tickle, up. It comes up. It comes into my mouth, right? And boom, the guy plucks it out. Done. And I'm thinking to myself, good little spider. One take, wonder fantastic. Did everything we need. And I'm like, cool. So that was good. They go, oh, no, no, we're just going to shoot it again. We just have to adjust the lights. Second take, third take. Now, one of the things that the producer had said to me in the car park, right? Looked me in the eye and said to me, it's not dangerous to use the tarantula because before doing something like this, they milk it of its venom.

So it's perfectly safe, you know. So I've taken that on board, right? So we take two, take three, take four. Around about after the fifth take. Now, these lights in that room are very, very hot, and my body is starting to really warm up, you know, and we're taking a long time between takes, resetting lights and all that, you know. But, you know, after about the fifth take, I get a moment to talk to tarantula man, you know, how you doing? All that sort of stuff. Pretty cool that you can milk the venom from the tarantula so they can do things like this. And he just looks at me really confused. You can milk the white. Okay, so what I thought was my only safety net gone, right? So take six, take seven, and I'm starting to really get hot. These are, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if they're old Klee glides, you know, because it, like, didn't look like anybody had used this studio for a long, long time, you know, and I'm heating up. At one point in time, it was about take seven or eight, and the spider just stops on my neck and starts to sort of like, spread its legs out and just sort of like, grab at me, you know, and it's sort of pulsing, you know.

And then I'm sort of like, just lying there. Go. And then the tarantula guy tickles that up. It goes, you know, and I'm kind of like, what was that?

How long does it have to sit in your mouth for?

It's only just a couple of seconds. As soon as it started going into the mouth, the guy would just grab it out, you know, because they can cut around that. As long as they see it going in, then they can cut around it to make it look like it's disappeared in there, you know. So take eight, that happens. The tarantula stops on the neck. Take nine, we're done for the day, right? So nine takes with a live tarantula crawling into my mouth. The next day I wake up and I've got a rash all over me, my legs and my chest and my arms. So I call production. They call a doctor who knows about these sort of things. He comes over to see me, goes, ah, okay, all right. See, were you hot yesterday or so? They're very hot, you know, the lights and stuff like that. He goes, right? And the spider stopped. Yeah, right. He goes, okay, see, tarantulas on their legs have these very fine hairs, so fine, in fact, that they can easily go through a pore in human skin. So currently what you have going on is your body is full of tarantula venom, but not enough to hurt you or even make you just going to have this rash.

So here's this ointment. Take this pill a few days from now, you'll be right. And the reason that I wanted to tell you this story and your listeners is because you can check this, you can google away. I'm pretty sure in the history of cinema, I'm the only academy award winning actor who's ever been fucked in the neck by a tarantula.

Is that what it was doing? Apparently they just decided that was a good spot.

Just decided I was moist and juicy and it was gonna have its way with me.

Oh, yeah, I know about those fibers. Those fibers are nasty. They cause a real problem with people. I was hoping you weren't going to say you were allergic to tarantulas.

No, but I did find out I was allergic to one of the things that they tried to fix it with. It comes up quite a bit every time I've had major injuries and stuff. There's. I can't even remember the name of it now, but there's the go to thing that they inject into you to take away the initial pain.

Cortisone.

Yeah, cortisone. I'm allergic to cortisone.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Odd, isn't it?

Yeah, that is odd. That could be a real problem, especially if you don't know.

Yeah, well, that's when it was roundabout. Then I found out.

God damn, man. So is that like, the most uncomfortable you've ever been in a scene?

Oh, hell no.

Really?

Ah, no, no. I had to go into the water on the southwest coast of Iceland shirtless for a Darren Aronofsky movie. You know how cold that water is, man?

Oh, yeah.

You know, 15 minutes, you're dead.

Yeah.

Just walking in there. And I had to drop into a chest first. Right. You know, Noah collapses into the water or whatever it was, but it was so weird. I hit that water and like, I'm, you know, splayed out like that, but every muscle in my body contracted. I was like, I hovered back out of the water. You know, it's like I hit the water. I came straight back out, back onto my feet. I don't know how I did it, but it was so cold. Yeah, but, you know, I mean, temperature is one thing, you know, and you tend to, in the film business, you know, if you. If the script says that it's bright and sunny and you're in the Bahamas, you're probably going to end up shooting that somewhere far away from the Bahamas, and it's going to be freezing, you know, it's always like that. You know, it's like a given that whatever it says is going to be the opposite for it. You know, whatever the most comfortable way of shooting that scene might be, there'll be something that makes it uncomfortable. But, you know, I mean, in terms of discomfort on comfort on film sets, you know, physical discomfort when you're doing fight sequences or things like that, you know, because they can sometimes take a long, long time.

I shredded both my hamstrings while I was doing NOAA. I flew back to Australia to watch a football game. Actually, my football team that I bought in 2006 had finally made a preliminary final after many years of trying, and I wanted to be there to witness it. We ended up losing the game, so it was a waste of money. But I flew back to Australia, and it was also coincided with my youngest athletic day at school. And I was doing Noah. Fit as a bull, strong as an ox. Absolutely. So I rock up to the little athletics day, you know, and they asked me if I would step in and do this, you know, little running race, you know, thing. So I said, yeah, yeah, cool, you know. So one of my son's friends was in the race, and he was coming last, so I ran up behind him, and I was talking to him about going fast or whatever, but I had to really sprint to catch up to him because I was a long way back, and I hadn't really noticed that all the kids, because I was out behind him, had got really excited.

They jumped up, and they were all standing on the finish line, right? And so I sort of, you know, I got up behind, and I let him, like, just pass me so he could win. They all go crazy and stuff like that. But then I have to put the brakes on. I put the brakes on, and my hamstrings went boom. I'm lying on the ground, like, vibrating, and my little boy's there, and he's only, like, seven or something at the time. He's like, hi, dad. That was fun, you know, dad, and I couldn't talk. I was like, unbelievable, man. And there was a teacher who'd seen what happened, and he went, hamstrings. And I said, I think so, man. And he had some tape, so I just taped my legs up under my shorts, and then he helped me stand up. I had to get on a plane that night and go back to the film set on Long island and run to the ark with 5000 extras 50 times with, you know, I mean, I think, you know, we had a rain tower set up that's the biggest in the history of cinema for that, you know.

So I'm getting rained on with these gigantic drops. I've got 5000 extras around me. Actually. No, not 5000. Maybe about a thousand extras around me. And I've got no hamstrings. And this scene requires me to run. And because I've taken time off the set, everything. I can't tell anybody that I've injured myself. I just have to get on with it, you know what I mean? I didn't want any insurance problems or anything else, you know, so that was. That was crazy. And that sequence went on for days. So it was like. And I literally meant was just getting, like, kt tape and just taping them up. Jesus, Craig.

Both hamstrings blown, having to run, that's insane.

Yeah, but at your skids, your cool, you know, your kids athletics thing, it was like. That's just such a cliche. It's, like, ridiculous. Yeah. But I think it was to do with the fact that, you know, even though I warmed up that morning and I went to the gym and I went on a bike ride and everything, and I got there, you know, in good shape. It was like. Must have just been the hour, sitting around watching the races and everything just cooled me down too much. And then having to stop so suddenly just to make sure I didn't barrel into those kids. But, yeah, that was. That was definitely uncomfortable.

What are the rain towers? How do they do that?

Well, basically get big cranes and they hoist up grids that are laid with hose pipe and the pipe comes down the tower to a water tank. And at a certain point, you know, they turn on the pump and they operate like sprinklers, basically. But if you imagine, like, a metal grid in the air where every joining point of pipes is another sprinkler head. And I think we had two and a half football fields worth of, you know, where we could soak. At the push of a button, all the rain starts and, you know.

Holy shit.

Yeah. Because you see the. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, but there's these big wide shots of all these people running towards the ark and there's rain falling. So we had. That whole area had to have rain.

So here it is.

Yeah, right.

That's incredible. That's all done with towers.

Yeah, well, that's after I've already. I think I've already run in at that point.

It was such an intense movie because the story is so crazy.

Yeah.

Is that. It's the time old story of the savior of the human race. After God's wrath. Yeah, it's a lot of weight playing a role like that.

Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. What I thought was that the funniest thing with that stuff is when that movie came out, all of this sort of pushback press about how, you know, look at this. Darren Aronofsky. This New York elite has made Noah into a story about the environment. It's always been a story about the environment. What are you talking about? This is about a flood, mate.

Literally.

It was just so weird. And it was like hardcore after article pushing back as if he had done something, you know, against Christianity or whatever by. By connecting, by acknowledging that this is a story about our environment and how we treat our environment and blah, blah, blah, you know. Yeah. You know, I quite enjoy the film, but it's harsh. It's a harsh, you know, telling, you know. But he did promise me, Darren, at the beginning of that experience, he said never at any stage, which I thought was funny because he was riffing off a thing that Ridley Scott did. Ridley Scott said, I promise you don't have to wear sandals. And I promise you you never have to lie on a couch and have somebody feed you a grape. So let's do a movie. Roman movie. So Darren's version was that never at any stage will I have you at the prow of an ark flanked by a giraffe and a lion. The funny thing with noahmen is most people think they know what's in the Bible. But in reality what most people know is what they read in the Golden Circle children's book of Noah.

You know, they've never read the very few mentions that there are in the Bible or the other religious writings which cover his story because there are other writings from pre biblical that never made it into the Bible.

The epic of Gilgamesh. It's a very similar story.

Right.

There seems to be some sort of a historical tale that is repeated through many cultures of a great flood.

I don't think there is an ancient religion that doesn't have a flood story.

Right. Yeah.

You know, and we can see it. We can see and date it and everything with how we can, you know, view our world now with the science that's come along. So there's no doubt that there was a flood. You know, there has been many floods.

Probably the real hardcore people think they've located Noah's ark. They've located the remains of it on Mount Ararat.

Yeah, yeah.

There's this bizarre feature in the rocks that they believe is where apparently it matches the Bible's description of the actual size of the ark.

Yeah, it's odd, isn't it? Because if that's there, we should be then be able to have definitive proof.

Then it seems like somebody should have gone there and figured that out yet. Yeah, it's probably been discredited, but. You ever familiar at all with the work of Randall Carlson? Do you know who he is?

A little bit more context.

Randall Carlson is an expert in asteroid impacts, and he kind of specializes in this theory about the younger Dryas impact. The younger Dryas impact is somewhere around, they think there's multiple times this happened somewhere around 11,800 years ago, and again, somewhere in the ten thousands that this is what happened that caused the end of the ice age. This is what caused the great flooding across North America.

And doesn't that date coincides with what would be the end of Gobekli Tepe? Right?

Yes, yes, coincides with that. And also there's a lot of physical evidence of it with core samples. And these used to be kind of a fringe theory, but they started doing core samples and they found a high level of iridium, which is very common in space, very rare on earth during that same time period. But what's really interesting about this guy is he got this idea when he was overlooking this enormous canyon while he was on acid. And it occurred to him that this is because of not just a river that ran through this for thousands and thousands of years. He felt like it was one immense event that took place. He just had this bizarre vision of this immense event that took place.

And now they're talking about those cataclysmic events not being something that is a build and through a period of time. Right. It's talking about it being immediate. Right.

Yeah, immediately. So it's like a ice age in a day.

This happens.

Exactly, yeah. His work is absolutely fascinating. Very controversial, of course, because it goes kind of against the conventional idea of what happened with the ice age. But he thinks the ice age ended almost immediately, that something slammed into the ice caps, which were at that point in time between one and 2 miles high, a gigantic chunk of North America, and that these asteroids slammed into it. And that's where these features that you see where it looks like, I don't know if you've ever seen some of the overhead features, but it literally looks like over massive amounts of space, huge water had risen. You know how water, when it goes over the sand, it leaves these kind of humps and ridges where the water washed over. Well, there's physical evidence of this all throughout, like, the Pacific Northwest, you can find these things. And he thinks that's. That's what ended the ice age, killed off 65% of the megafauna in North America. And then it happened. Like, that happened very quickly. Right, and that's the Noah's ark story. I mean, it's. That is it. That is the story, which is why it's so fat. It's so interesting that people want to dismiss biblical stories.

You know, they say, oh, well, it was an oral tradition for a thousand years before it was ever written down, like. Right, right. But what was it based on?

Right.

What the fuck happened? Something happened. Every culture has a story of something like that happening.

Yeah, very likely something happened. When I was doing the research, building up to it, I was quite surprised because in my naivety, I actually, you know, had considered it was only, like, a christian thing. And I didn't realize it was touched on everywhere, you know, until I was doing that film.

Yeah, it's a. Was there any hesitancy in taking on a religious character like that with such significance to it?

No, that was the exciting bit. It was a very busy year. It was 2012. In that year. I just. I played Superman's dad the year before and been on. I mean, I was the fittest I'd ever been. I worked with a guy called Mark Twight. You ever heard of him? There was this company for a while called Jim Jones, and they were considered to be the hardest asses in the physical training business. You know, it was very, very difficult to become a Jim Jones trainer and stuff. And Mark was the guy that trained the trainers, and he got assigned to me. Oh, my God, the things that he put me through. But it was all great. And we remain strong friends now because we did some shit together. You know what I mean? I like that kind of mateship, you know what I mean? Been in the trenches or whatever, you know? And so the following year, I was. I played the mayor of New York in a thing called Broken City with Mark Wahlberg, which is. It's funny, that's one of those performances that people just haven't seen, but I quite rate that performance.

And then I did les mis with, you know, all that beautiful cast and sort of spent three or four months on that and then straight into Noah. So I was exhausted before I started, you know, I'd had three really big jobs in a row, and then to drop into that, which was. There was a lot of physical stuff on that movie, and Darren shoots a lot, so those big wide shots, you're still doing the same action as you're doing when you're close in. So you're sort of working, you know, pretty hard. But I think, if anything, you know, I was really excited by the fact of, like, of being able to delve into that. I would have preferred what I'm getting at is a little more time, you know, because it's the quiet contemplation that really fills you up for the thing that you're about to do. And when you're coming straight off one film set pretty much onto another, I think I had a gap of about two or three weeks. It's not quite enough. You know, what would you like?

What would you do if you're. If you had all the time that you wanted?

Go and talk to people, you know, go and talk to people who've got a perspective? I would have probably wanted to spend a little bit more time with some jewish scholars because there's a lot of, you know, writings adjunct to the Torah about Noah and get to the bottom of that. But I really didn't have the time, so I just had to sort of plow into it with what I had, which is, you know, a beautiful two volume Old Testament and New Testament that Darren got me. So that was the beginning of the research. But, you know, there's not really much else you can do because you can't go and look up, you know, old photos or anything.

Right, right.

So you've been pretty much stepping into that world, so trying to understand Darren's perspective on it and what he was trying to show that, you know, there had been a big civilization already. So there was a civilization prior to Noah. So you're already talking about, you know, a post apocalyptic world that they're living in, and another apocalypse is coming, you know, and it's all based on, you know, human behavior and what have you. There's a sequence in the film that some people missed where Noah is looking into these people who are all the ones who've allowed themselves to give in to their base desires or what have you. And within the group of people, he sees a man who looks like a rat gnawing away at a body of something, possibly another human, and it's hime. So he sees himself on the other side of that. So Darren had a lot of cool things going in the movie, a lot of great ideas, and, you know, outside of America was a huge hit with. Massive hit in places like Russia or Brazil or whatever, but I don't think it's really considered to be a hit because it didn't hit the box office in the United States, but I don't know, it's three or 400 million or something.

It's bizarre that there's controversy attached to it being a. That it is about the climate. It's bizarre that that's become a weird political point and that it's. It's so ideologically connected that people either oppose it or go with it with no information other than the fact that my team believes this.

Yeah, yeah, it's a bit odd.

The fucking environment, the very thing we live in, that. That that's a political angle is so strange.

It is so strange because it's, you know, there's a whole lot of different things that I think not necessarily on the money, but the bottom line, that the burning of fossil fuels is having an effect on our air quality and how we receive sunshine, etcetera. That's irrefutable fact. You can't make up your own opinion on that because there's just too much stuff to prove that that's going on. And it has been going on in our entire lives, and it's just been getting worse. Things were being talked about in the early seventies while the time I was in primary school that are now actually physically happening. You know, but it's, you know, some people just want to see it as, you know, yet another game or whatever. And it's really much more important than that.

It's strange because it also. The problem with having this ideology attached to it is it stops the real research to actually be able to objectively understand what has the most effect. Like, what is. What is the thing that's driving us the most? And what is the thing that we can do to mitigate that?

Yeah, see, I think things like, you know, the cows farting, I think that's misinformation that just gets thrown out there to sort of spread the blame or whatever, because, you know, we are told over and over again that there were so many more animals on this planet at a certain point. Okay, so if we've killed off, you know, 80% or whatever of the animals that existed, what about their farts? Yeah, that was a dinosaur fart compared to a cow fart, you know.

Well, the thing is, what we're doing is very unnatural, right? So we're serving them grain and we're keeping them in pens, and then they're all the pig shit and all that stuff gets into the water. It's very different than a regenerative farm, an actual real farm where cows are grazing and then their manure fertilizes the land, and it actually sequesters carbon. A real regenerative farm is carbon neutral. It's not the issue.

I run 220 angus on my place in the bush. And over time, I sort of learned that all of those factory farming processes are just the absolute wrong thing to do, you know. I mean, when I first had land and cattle, I used to love getting up in the dawn, you know, in the darkness, coyote hat on stockwhip and getting out and, you know, herding them and all that sort of stuff. And then over time, started to realize that that's not good for them. You know, that sort of stuff's not good for them. So we developed this system of my place where we have a single laneway and all of the other paddocks go on where the cattle will be go onto that laneway. So. And the paddock can be, you know, 100 acres or whatever, you know, but you can muster one man, soft voice, handful of grain, just open the gate. You call out a couple of times, they come towards you. You can get every cow in that laneway. Then you get up behind them, walk behind them, and you walk them straight to the yards. Now, we've taken all the fun out of it, but it's just a lot more.

It's safer, easier, sensible. And we don't use hose pipes. We don't use stock whips anymore. We don't muster on ATV's. It's either on foot or horseback. We still use working dogs, but the cows don't get upset by the working dogs. They don't get freaked out by the same way as they get freaked out by an engine roaring up behind them, you know, so. And the reason for that kind of pastoral care is because at the end of the day, 100% true. The steak tastes better if you don't adrenalize the cattle, don't abuse them.

Right.

You know, it's just better, you know, it's like, more tasteful. It doesn't have, you know, really adrenalized meat gets a very gamey quality, you know? And, you know, the steak that we serve on the farm because, you know, I only do all this. I don't operate it as a business. I started to operate it as a business for a while there, but kind of found out that everybody in the butchery game is similar to working with people that are in that sell used cars. And they're only looking for the story. They're not really. Don't really care about the animal. And, you know, I do. I'm just like, you know, and I was laughed at for many years in the valley that I live in because of the way I care for the cattle, but I can't do it any other way. It's got to be. It's got to be for, you know, they've got to have a great life.

It makes sense. It's smarter, it's less karma. It's a better situation for them.

Yeah. And they just feel healthier. I went fully organic at one point, right? Took us, like, five or seven years to get the certification. But then I would walk amongst the cattle and because we couldn't, you know, douse them because they were organic cattle now, you know, things like, you know, buffalo fly and other little things were just all over them. And I thought, man, that can't be good either, you know, it's like having a kid, you know, and never giving the kid panadol if it gets a fever by the time that kid's 14, it hasn't, you know, it hasn't overcome it. And it's not the biggest, best, strongest. It's this weedy little bloke in the corner. You know, he spent most of his life sick because he never got the medicine to make it easier for his body to recover, you know, and that kind of was happening to the cows, that they lost a lot of weight and they just looked in distress. So I keep my pastures organic, but I do topical treatments for the cattle so they don't have to deal with ticks and buffalo fly and things like that. Where my place is, it's still considered coastal, so we get all of the bitey things that can affect them negatively.

So, you know, and now I have that balance. I can't sell them. It is organic meat, but they're hand raised, organic pasture, and as I say, they don't get adrenalized through their life. So when we do cull them, the meat is a profound experience.

Do you sell it online? How does someone get it?

No, no, I don't sell it.

You don't sell it at all?

Well, occasionally there's one butcher near me that I trust. He's really into what he does, and he will ask if he can have a couple of beefs, and I'll let him have it. We do sell to some neighbors that we know are, you know, needing a little bit of assistance. I don't want to sort of put it in any other terms, but, you know, we sell it to them, but we sell it to them for less than it costs to produce. So and way less than they would be spending if they went to the supermarket, you know, but basically, I have the cows to feed my family. So my kids are very snobby about steak because they've grown up with, you know, the best. The best, you know, the best you can. Well, anyway, the most humane way to produce it. Yeah, for sure.

How did you get started doing this? Like, what was it? Seems like you're a very busy person to be starting a regenerative farm.

Well, it comes from when I first I was getting a little bit of success. I could see things coming along and I sort of had a choice. I only had enough money to either buy a small apartment in the city or some land. And my mom and dad weren't in a great place and I hadn't really spent a lot of time with them in the previous decade because I'd been out trying to establish who I was, you know, and I didn't really go home very much. So what I did is I decided instead of buying an apartment in the city, I'd buy 100 acres in the bush and my mom and dad could go and live there and basically they could start fresh and have a sort of a new experience. But I bought 100 acres initially. But I think I've got, like, 1700 acres or something now. But once I had the land, then I started feeling like, well, you got to do something with it. You know, it can't just be 100 acres of a garden, you know? Right. And there's also that thing, too, of like, you know, you're walking into farmland, you want to see a horse, you want to see a cow, you know, you want to have something.

So over time, I started. I experimented by holding some cattle for a friend, you know, and I got used to what you had to do and stuff like that. Now, they were biggest longhorn beasts and they were quite difficult to deal with. So that made me decide to go with Angus. But, you know, here's another story. You know, I had 20 little calves down in the yards. They were being picked up the next day, right? And at this stage, I was living in a caravan because I hadn't started building or anything on the property. And so I go to bed and at about 02:00 in the morning, I'm woken up because it's raining, right? And I'm trying to get back to sleep, but all I can think of is these 20 little calves down in the yards and how the floor of the yards will turn into muck. And these guys have been picked up the next day and they will spend the whole night slipping over and sort of get covering each other with shit, and they'll be in great distress and blah, blah. So about 230 went. Fuck it. Got up, got dressed, went down to the yards, trying to figure out how to get them out of the rain.

I had a shed down there, but it was about 30 meters away from the edge of the yards. And I looked around in the shed, and I had enough bits and pieces to make a fence for one side, so I could make one side of this alley. So that's just me on the other side. So I got these big, long pieces of wood, and then what I had to do is I had to get them running towards me. Then I had to redirect them along that fence line so they would go inside the shed. Now, while this is happening, it's pissing down rain. Absolutely. Like, tropical. Right. You know, and it took me about, I don't know, 40 minutes, something like that. So it's. It's deep in the middle of the night now to fix the fence. And then I got them running and they coming towards me. I could see one was about to jink away, so I had to sort of dance along with my. But it was amazing, you know. I stopped that one little bloke and he rejoined the. The rest of them, and then they just went like clockwork, just so smooth, straight into the shed.

Right. So then in the shed, I'd laid out some hay and stuff, and I left a little light on. Yeah. You tell stories like that to farmers and they think you're an absolute idiot. What are you doing, mate?

You had to learn how to do it some way.

But I think that's just for me. The next day, when the truck came to pick them up, they were all happy and, yeah, healthy and, you know, not covered in brown shit, you know, so. Yeah, but. So I'm not really a farmer, so. But I've got land.

I mean, that sounds like at least a practicing farmer. I mean, you actually did it.

Yeah, well, we still do, and we still, you know, turn the meat out. But, you know, when I looked into it in terms of a business, you have to really have about 25,000 ahead to make it a business, you know, that covers you for, you know, when the. And sometimes the price of meat goes down or whatever, or the costs around culling go up. And I just didn't want to do it that way. I didn't want to have to be responsible in my heart for 25,000 living creatures when I couldn't be absolutely certain they were all being treated well.

Right.

And I think that's one of the big mistakes that we've made going into this thing of, you know, of farms getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Because at the end of the day, the thing that drops off is the duty of care.

Right. And it's also the humanity of it all just gets so distorted when you have these factually, factory farming operations that you're not even allowed. We have ag gag laws in America. You're not even allowed to film there because conditions are sometimes so horrific that it damages.

We give grain to our cattle because there is a nice texture and stuff that comes to the meat beyond being grass fed. But we never put them into a feeding pen situation. And I think that that's also part of the best part of the balance because, you know, they're still walking around on their home range. You know, this is where they're used to being. And then here's a pile of grain over here. So they supplement their grass with the grain, as opposed to just being fed grain purely to put on size. So we. What we turn off, Ben and I think it's partly to do with the fact that they stay active and everything. We get a natural seven to 10% fat ratio, you know, which is the bottom end of the scale, you know, but therefore, to me, you're getting more protein. And therefore, what we're giving you when we give you a steak is like an absolute protein pill. It's a hit, you know, it's better for you, too, physically, I think so.

It is. It's been proven that the nutritional balance of grass fed animals is just much better.

Right.

They're just. They're not supposed to live entirely on grain. No, just like humans.

But I think, again, that balance thing of, like, their life on. On grass. And then just before you cull them, you give them a little bit of grain, it finishes them off, you know, and gets them sort of, you know, ready to be consumed. But you still have the same benefits of the grass fed because you've never stopped that, right. And you've. But you have the thing of them being fit because you've never made them, like, stand still in a pen and.

Right. It's gotta be a cool feeling, too, to consume only the animals at your place that you've actually raised, like, you know, every step of the way.

We used to when we occasionally will have a fresh guest that's never been there before, and we'll do things like, oh, you're gonna love buttercup. She was such just australian sense of humor. We just, you know, put somebody off their meal just as they're about to eat. Yeah, yeah. But I did used to name them, but I stopped name them because that was an extra level of pain.

Yeah, yeah.

And plus, you know, when you've got 20, they can all have a name, but when you have 220, it's a bit difficult.

Well, it's. Yeah, you don't want to be naming something you're gonna eat. It's just too weird. It's weird enough for people are so disconnected from where their food comes from already. Just the concept of killing it themselves seems abhorrent, but the concept of living without meat seems terrible, too. Just. We're completely disconnected from the act of.

How it gets to you.

Yeah. We just go and see it wrapped up nicely at the butcher shop and we pick it up and. Oh, 16oz. Thank you. Bye. And that's your entire involvement in the death of a living creature.

Yeah, I definitely think people need to, you know, have an awareness of it, you know?

Yeah.

Because, you know, we're sharing the planet, you know, and they're helping us survive, so at the very least, a little due respect is in order.

Yeah. And that's what we don't get from factory farming. We get the opposite. We get the worst elements of human nature that kind of put into this very bizarre food supply system that we have, where at every corner in almost every city, there's a place where you can get a quick piece of meat, quick cooked piece of meat of unknown origin. Who knows how they raised it? Who knows where they got it?

And we just trust in the fact that it's still consumable.

And it's just bizarre that you can get a cheeseburger for $1.39, you know, like, how much work was involved in this.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And that, you know, that's what I mean. It's like, I know the dollar it costs me to produce the steak at that level, and there's just no way on the normal chain of how the business works that it's acceptable to have spent that much to produce it.

Right.

You know?

Do you cook yourself?

Oh, yeah, my mom was a caterer, so I love cooking. Absolutely. How do you prepare steak with farm steak? I use black pepper and I use Lowry's garlic salt. There's lots of garlic salts around, but that one's good. And it used to be available when I was a kid, and then they stopped selling it in Australia for years, so we'd have to, you know, a friend was coming over, we'd say, hi, grab some garlic salt, but you can buy it again there now. But, yeah, that's, that's. It's really simple. Just salt and pepper. You know, I don't do anything. What kind of grill stream? I open flame and I make it as hot as possible. And I've actually put oil onto the flame to make it go crazy for a while because I like to have color on the steak. I like this a little.

Someone teach you this method, or is there something that you devised over time?

Over time? Yeah, I did for a while there. I was a short order cook and I cooked steaks. That's what I did every Monday night. This is like when I was working in clubs and my name was in the paper every week and my photograph was in the paper and stuff. But my mother said, you still have to make a contribution to the family. So if you're in town on a Monday night, you have to cook in the restaurant. So I'd do like cook 150 steaks on a Monday night if I was in town. And, you know, just over time, I cook it to my, my own taste.

Obviously, you use charcoal, hardwood. What do you use?

I use gas. Most of the time.

You throw oil over the gas?

Yeah.

What kind of oil?

Olive oil. Because I just want that absolute heat so it sears the steak, you know, particularly when you first put it on the grill. So it hits the grill and it's actually surrounded in flames, you know.

That's your method?

Yeah. Well, that's, you know, that only lasts for a few seconds, but that's going to give you the color that you want. Because when I put it down on the grill, I want the color on that side because generally I'm only going to turn it once. So.

Really?

Yeah, I want that first hit to sear that outside of the steak, and that's the side that gets presented to the person that's going, are you cooking a thin steak?

A thick steak?

Doesn't matter. But normally we only cook, you know, sort of restaurant cuts. So our eye filet, I think, is your tenderloin. Our porterhouse is your New York cut.

Well, port, we have porterhouse, too. It's like one. Yeah. One side of the porterhouse is the tenderloin. One side of the port, or the. What's the filet mignon. And the other side is.

Yes, that's a scotch filler.

Oh, okay. Interesting.

Funny, we had different names for the same bits of meat, but, yeah. So New York strip is porterhouse where I come from.

Oh, really? A porterhouse on this side of the pond always has bone in it?

Pretty much, yeah. You guys don't know that's a t bar.

What's your ribeye?

What you call ribeye, I believe, is tenderloin. Right?

No.

So that's. That's our eye filet.

It's a rib steak.

Okay.

Yeah, the tenderloin, it's like filet mignon, and then there's beef tenderloin. It's like this stuff that along the back and underneath, and then the rib meat, like, right where the rib hits that portion, or the very fatty rib steak, that's the ribeye. And, you know, or a tomahawk. You get it with the rib bone on it. It's a tomahawk, right.

Yeah. Well, our sort of t bone is half New York steak and half I fill it.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, we have that, too.

Right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm not 100% sure over the top of all the different names for the meat in America, but, yeah, they tend to be quite thick cuts. You know, I don't really. We don't really do any of our steak in a thin cut.

The first time I ever ate a steak in Australia, this was, like, a long time ago, but before I really understood the difference between grass fed meat and grain fed meat, I was like, this is different. It tastes weird. Tasted weird. This is like. Like, richer. Like, you know, at the time, I don't even think I liked it at the time. I was expecting, like, an american style steak, and I got it. This rich, red, grass fed steak. I was like, wow, weird steak doesn't take, like, tastes like american meat.

Right. But when was the first time you went to Australia?

It was for a UFC. It was quite a few years ago, at least a decade ago, yeah.

What do you think of this one championship thing?

It's great.

Yeah.

Yeah. Look, I like all these organizations. I'm happy that there's more options for fighters. A one championship is huge.

I started watching a docker about that guy the other day. Didn't finish it, though. I like the idea that he's creating heroes. That's a line he said. That's pretty cool. I got a project that we're going to do at the end of this year. It's called the Beast in me, and it's about that sort of mixed martial arts fighting, really. And he's come forward as a potential sort of partner and what have you, and hooking up with him will give the film great production values, because we'll be able to shoot at one of his fights and stuff. So you'll have a, you know, a crowd of 15,000 or whatever, you know, that you haven't paid for.

Right, right.

Which is good for a film. And I did a rewrite on the. On the script last year, and it's really full of heartland now. You know, so many times when people approach fighters, particularly in that sort of, you know, mixed martial arts, whatever, everybody's insane. And that's just not really the truth. You know what I mean? Yeah, they certainly are insane people, but in their hearts, you know, they have their own, you know, reasons for doing things and their own morality, and so they would never think of themselves insane because they're on a journey, they're on a pursuit, you know.

Right.

And that's why I think this script now has a real beating heart. So I think it's gonna be a good project. Daniel McPherson, young australian actor, he's gonna be the lead in that.

Well, there's. This is a good time for a real good mma film. You know, there's been some real good boxing films. The one that you did.

Yeah, it's one of my favorite experiences, actually. Cinderella man.

Yeah. And the story of Braddock. That's an amazing story. Incredible story.

Yeah. We had met, like, funny resistance here with the release that the people couldn't get their heads around the fact that a movie called Cinderella man was about.

A boxer fucking America.

It was, like, really funny. It's that hard to get. Yeah.

Classic Cinderella story is a thing that.

Is always used in sports. Right.

But it's used for men in sports all the time.

Well, it. That's it. Was it Washington, some famous american writer, Damon Runyon or whatever, who coined the phrase, you know, he wrote that, you know, the story of James. James. James J. Braddock is a Cinderella story. Yeah, that's where he got the nickname, you know. But I just. You know, sometimes you're playing characters that you don't really rate as a person or whatever, or, you know, sometimes you're playing very negative characters. You know, earlier this year, I did Nuremberg, where I played Herman Goering to. So that's going to be coming out soon. Looking forward to people seeing that. But Braddock was such an experience, man, because everything that I read about him, the stories I heard about him, I just liked him more and more, which can be a bit of a dangerous thing as an actor. I try not to fall in love with the character. What I say is I'm in love with the job. So my job is to show you who that person is, whether it's positive or negative, you know, because it's kind of weird, you know, you can't fall in love with Hitler, you know what I mean? If you're playing that role, you know, it's sort of like.

So that's how I sort of keep objectivity. But, you know, I met Braddock's family and stuff like that, and they kept telling me stories that just made him. Made me like him more and more, you know? So it was. Yeah, it was an honor to be able to play that. That role, really, and bring him back to a consciousness because people had forgotten about it.

Yeah. What was the physical training like?

I was Angela, man. That was Angela kung. Yeah. Okay, kid.

Angelo Dundee.

There's one rule. One rule around here that is you listen to me. That's how we do it, right? I talk and you listen, and then I'm gonna teach you to open anybody up like a can of tomatoes. That's what we're gonna do, kid. Open them up like a can of tomatoes. Let's go.

Wow.

He was a great guy, man. I mean, what an incredible privilege to be given that beautiful man in my life, you know, with all his experience and his stories and, you know, and his attitude to things, man, he was. He was like, you know, I mean, occasionally, if you asked about somebody that he had a negative experience with, you know, he would sort of, like, see who's around or whatever, and he would just tell you the pure truth. But for the most part, anybody you asked him about, he was like, ah, what a great guy, you know? And I asked him about it one day, and he was like, life's too short for the negatives, man. It's too short to have grudges or, you know, opinions, you know, negative stuff, like, just let all that go. You know what I mean? So. But, you know, then, in reality, he would have an opinion. But for his. The public part of that was to just, like, be positive, you know? And he worked with so many fighters in so many different pursuits and under different pressures and what have you, Ali and Sugar Ray, blah, blah.

You know, 15 world champions he coached.

Wow.

That's incredible. And the beautiful thing happens. You can see it in Cinderella, man. There's a moment towards the end of the movie, right wherever Braddock's won, he's won the world championship. And I'm standing in the ring, and I'm walking towards my corner, right? And this little bald man walks towards me, right? And there's just this shot. I start laughing and I bend forward and I kiss him on his head, right? Because he was walking towards me in the ring and he was going, number 16, baby. Number 16. And that's what he called me for the rest of his life. Whenever I saw him, he would introduce me, me to people as, this is my friend Russell, number 16. Wow, cool, man. Right? But, you know, I mean, a normal day training for that film, you wake up in the morning, you go for a walk, you know, probably about five ks, right? Then we'd go and do yoga. Then we'd go and do the first boxing session which would take us to lunch. We'd have a little bit of lunch, then we'd do the second boxing session. After the second boxing session would do weights, then you'd have about 90 minutes off, then we'd have dinner and then you go for a walk and the next day we start all over again.

You know, it was full on.

Whose idea was the yoga?

His.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. That was the thing about Angelo. He had all the old stuff but he was aware of all the new stuff as well, you know? You know, just sitting, you know. Well, I mean, but for boxing, we did yoga, but, you know, he only thought of it as stretching, you know, but it was. It was, you know, yoga and was like. He set the schedule and pace on everything for that film.

Wow.

Adam. Adam. In my working life for six months, man.

That's incredible.

Just go.

Did you think about having a fight?

Oh, we had a few real ones.

Like in the gym.

There's real ones in the movie, mate.

Really?

Yeah. You get to a certain .5 and a half, 1000, 6000 choreographed moves. Right? You get to a certain point. How do you accelerate this? How do you change the rhythm? You know? So the fight with Troy, which I think is the last fight before the championship, that's 100%. The two of us in the ring beating the piss out of each other.

Really? Jamie, see if you can find that.

And he's.

What would be the scene? What would be the scene? We look forward.

It'd be right towards the end of the film and it's just sort of like little sharp cuts. No, that's. Mark, some of those scenes. No, not that one. That's the end fight. So just prior to this, he goes through a series of fights currently forgetting the man's name. His first name's Troy. I can't remember his surname. He went on to become light heavyweight champion of Canada. And a couple of these guys are Olympians and stuff that were in the fight. But the hardest hit I've ever received is in that fight with Troy because he was a southpaw, and we both went in the same direction. We clashed heads.

Fuck me.

And then we just had to keep going with the scene. Right. But I'm like, literally seeing stars. It was like somebody had, like, put a piece of metal through my temple, you know, we just went, you know, we both moved to get out of the way, and we just smacked heads. Yeah. This fight, that's all real. There's no choreography. Wow. And he was good, man. He was fast, and he was, like, on me all the time.

Dude, you were fit as fuck back then.

A little bit, you know, man, I was 40 at the time, so I weighed the same in the opening sequence of Cinderella, man. I weighed the same as when I left high school.

Wow. It was a great movie, man. You did it justice.

Well, that's the thing. When you're playing somebody that's real, you know, you've got to respect them, and you've got to, you know, you got to put that effort in to, you know, to honor them.

Yes.

You know?

Yeah. Especially someone as legendary as Braddock.

Yeah. And the thing is, you know, you have to dial into his body. You know, his body language. You know, he used to do this little foot flick thing, right, to get himself around, you know, where he always, like, he would move his front foot first. He wouldn't cross his feet over at all, you know, so he's just sort of crabbing up on somebody and then going back, you know, learning that, getting that drilled into my head because it felt so unnatural, you know, but it's there. And, you know, after a while, you get it. You can move quite fast here, you know, but that natural instinct is to sort of cross your feet over, but that leads to all sorts of problems. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a very interesting experience doing that movie. And Ron Howard as the director, you know, I'd worked with him the year before on a beautiful mind, and he's a very exacting guy, and he likes to do things over and over again. You know, when we first started that shoot, I don't know if you know this, but I subluxated my left shoulder. I was doing a little fight with a guy called Wayne Gordon, another Canadian Olympian, and he just caught me on the point of my elbow and just put my shoulder out, you know?

But because I was so fit at the time and so strong, it went out and back in, but it came back in with such force that it broke the bone. So I had to go and have an operation tore the labrum tissue and broke the bone. So I had an Awp, and the normal recovery is like three and a half months or something. Right. But I was making a movie. I couldn't do that. So I, you know, and they were going to cancel the film. They're going to just shut it down and all that. And I was like, no, no, no. I've waited for years to do this film, and I'm already done the training, so we've got to finish this. Just give me, you know, x amount of weeks.

And you're allergic to cortisone.

Yeah. Which was, you know, really problematic on that situation, you know, but 20 days on the 21st day, 21st day of rehab, I stepped in the ring and did ten, three minute rounds on the 21st day after the operation. So, but that has led to ongoing problems, which the doctor did say at the time, if you try and cut this short, the arthritis you're going to experience when you get older is going to be mind numbing. And he's absolutely right.

Have you ever gotten stem cells into it?

No. I've been starting to talk. I've got a friend in England who's actually from.

How long are you in town for after this?

I leave tomorrow morning.

What time tomorrow morning?

About ten or eleven or so.

I might be able to get you treated before then.

Really?

There's a stem cell clinic I work with in town, ways to l, this is the thing.

I think it's the family of the guy I'm talking about.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, I met him here. I don't know if you know this man, but way back in the day, Austin was my place. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We came here in 2000, 2001. August 14 or 15 is 30 odd foot of grunts day as governor. Rick Perry at the time, he declared that because we brought so many tourist dollars into town, you know, in the middle of August, you know, bringing, you know, 2000 plus people who have flown in, got a motel, and they're gonna go to a rock and roll show over at Stubbs, you know. Yeah, that was the thing. And it's funny because when we haven't sold out this time, we're here. We play tonight, but we haven't.

Where are you at tonight?

Stubbs.

I love Stubbs. Yeah, that's, we did shows there, Dave Chappelle and I, during the pandemic.

Okay.

Yeah. When everything was shut down, we tested the entire crowd and did outside shows. It was awesome.

Oh, cool. Yeah, I went there first just to have some barbecue with and had a, a conversation with Rodriguez, the director, you know, who lived here. And then a year and a bit later, I'm walking on that stage. It was unbelievable. I was here to record at Willie Nelson's place and we said, why don't we do on Fridays? We'll just do little shows in town. Right, cool. So we booked to play at Stubbs because a friend of a friend knew Charles et al, and the boys had set stubbs up. And, you know, and while, you know, I was in England working on another thing before coming here, they just said, hey, these tickets are going crazy, so can we go outside? So we came here, I think we were here recording for a month, and every Friday night we'd go and do a full house outside at Stubbs.

Wow.

And then we came back the year after in 2001 and raised some money for, like, an abused girls shelter. But I haven't been here since 2001, man.

Wow. Lots changed places.

Exploded.

It's exploded.

There's 250,000 people back then.

Yeah.

It's nearly a million now.

It's a million in the city and another million in the surrounding areas.

But coming in from the airport, I was like, I can't even. I don't know where I am, you know?

Yeah.

Your viewpoint on landmarks and everything is just completely changed. And, you know, before arriving just yesterday, you know, I had an absolute picture in my mind of what I was about to experience.

Right.

Because I came here so often in a two or three year period that, you know, I would tell you that I know the city like the back of my hands. You know, driving in from the airport, I was like, it's just gone.

Right.

It's not the place that I. That I know.

Well, it's changed a lot in the four years that I've been here.

Right.

It's exploded.

Yeah. Look at all the cranes downtown.

It's crazy.

Still going.

Yeah, it's bizarre. I think that's a mistake. I think they're kind of fucked. I think they kind of overestimated because the real estate market has cooled down considerably. Yeah. Whoever was gonna move here moved here.

Right.

You know, and then it's like everyone was expecting that the boom would keep going.

Right.

But it hasn't keep going. It hasn't kept going at all. It's.

It's gotten to a million's good size for a city.

It's about perfect.

Yeah. You can get everything you need and you get it the speed that you wanted at and this competition in all areas, so, you know, but you can still get around as long as your transport system is good. You can still get around.

Yeah, the traffic here is so easy. People complain about, I'm like, you guys are adorable. This traffic is cute. This is cute traffic. Living 25 plus years in laden. I know what real traffic is like. And even la, when I moved there in 94, it was nothing like it is now. Now it's just now. It could be 02:00 in the morning and you're bumper to bumper traffic for an hour and a half. It's bananas.

Yeah, but I mean, look at New York, man. I mean, I was shooting, shooting beautiful mind once. We had a late night, 233 o'clock in the morning, I'm in a tunnel coming back from Jersey and we just stop mobbed. We're there for an hour.

Yeah.

In the tunnel.

Yeah.

What's going on?

That freaks me out, by the way. Something about that fucking river being right above your head.

Yeah.

Like, I know they know how to fix it. I know they knew how to build it. It's been there forever.

I know, but there's gonna be that day, right?

It's gonna be one day.

You seen enough movies to know.

Leak and. And we're all done in the worst way possible. Fuck. I don't like it. Get me out of here. The moment I'm in the tunnel, I'm holding my breath, like, get me the fuck out of here. Okay, who are on the other side? I don't like it. I'd rather be in a helicopter. Be in that fucking tunnel.

Well, it's funny that you should bring that up because on that shoot, after that night, I said, if I'm, if we're going over there all the time, right, I'm living right next to the Liberty helipad in Chelsea. Right. Just ten minute trip.

Yeah.

Get me out of the freaking car.

Yeah.

Because that movie was so, it was a lot to carry around. The freaking mindset had to be in all the time for that. And so they ended up agreeing. So I would like literally walk to the helicopter pad, jump in a helicopter, ten minutes.

That's pretty nice.

In New Jersey.

That's pretty nice.

Yeah, it was pretty cool.

That was a fantastic movie. It really was beautiful mind. It's one of my favorite movies.

Cool.

Just, just the mind of a person like that, like playing a guy that's so troubled and brilliant. I mean, how difficult is that to train for? Like, how do you, how do you get yourself into that mindset?

The relief when that movie was over was huge, you know, because you do tie yourself in knots a little bit when you're playing a character like that, you know, and that's part of the job, and you just go with that flow, you know. But, yeah, I was very, very happy to put all of the detail of those diseases aside because, you know, the guy that wrote it, his mom and dad, you know, treat people with schizophrenia. So he had a lot of firsthand knowledge that he could pass on to me, you know, and a lot of that was to do with physical tells. And when the physical tells happen in the course of somebody's connection to the disease, you know, the thing about beautiful mind is it has a device in the film. The film begins. You believe everything that's unfolding in front of you, and then there's that click when you realize, hold on a second, have I been watching him or am I inside his head? You know, and then that's the thing that, like, worldwide, that trick works every time. You know, I saw that movie at a few premieres around the world, and there's this gasp that comes out of the audience and it's, you know, only 1520 minutes in when they go, ha.

And they realize that they've been inside the head of a sick man.

Right.

As opposed to watching some, you know, spy drama unfold.

Right, right.

That was how far out I read that script here.

Really?

Yeah, I was doing the shows, 2000 Stubbs. I rented a beautiful house over there on the other side of the river. I don't know why I'm pointing that way. I don't even know which direction the river is from here, but yeah, and Jeffrey Katzenberg busted my nuts about reading it. I was like, man, I'm doing the band shows. I'm recording with the band. I just want to be in this space. He goes, I need you to read it now. He'd been part of the gladiator, so, you know, I read it and I ended up ringing him and thanking him because the experience of reading the script was just fantastic. One of the best scripts I'd ever read. And I had that device on the page, so that wasn't a trick added by the filmmakers later. You know, your the same experience of reading it is the experience you have when you're watching in the cinema. Yeah, man. So it was about, I don't know, 02:00 in the morning, sitting on the back porch of that house. It was still over 100 degrees, it was really hot. And I read it in one go. I thought to myself, when I sat down to read it, I said, I'll read ten pages.

It'll put me to sleep and it didn't. Kept me awake. And I remember putting that script down and walking and jumping into the swimming pool at three or four in the morning or whatever, going, I'm absolutely doing that fucking movie. 100%.

Wow. So that's exactly what you're talking about. The kind of film that just gets in your skin.

You know, I've said it, you know, lots of times, but it's a physical response. It's like goosebumps. It's like I'm reading it and there's just a thing happens and I'm not even thinking about it. I just pick up a pen and I start writing down what I'm going to change in that bit. I just start working on it immediately. And if I work on it, when I read it, that's the one I'm going to do. And I, you know, I've stuck true to that even, you know, as I was saying before, you know, sometimes it can be a really imperfect document, but there's just a couple of things that resonate, you know? So it's like, okay, you have to do it. You know, my joke is that in that way, I respect the gods of film. You know, it's like I'm only there because I have my reasons and I need to be there, you know, and so, you know, and that way now, it doesn't always work out, but you can do the greatest pedigree movie and it tanks, you know, you can have, you know, a lister number one, a lister number two, a list director, great subject matter.

Nobody goes and see it, sees it. This is sort of a type of alchemy, you know, and, you know, I came out of an independent film world, and then suddenly a couple of those independent films got successful, and it led me to another place, you know? But I still like to work in an independent world because, you know, if one hits, that's the one that's going to be fun and important or whatever. If it comes out of nowhere.

Yes.

So, yeah, yeah, I don't, you know, studio films, it's great, you know, if it's the right situation, you know, I'm not sort of saying that there's a negative in doing that if you know what I've done, I've done, you know, all sorts of big studio budget films. You know, I've, you know, I'm Superman's dad in DC. I'm Zeus, the God of gods in Disney Marvel. And I'm Craven, the hunter's russian father in Sony Marvel. So it's sort of like, you know, the experience of doing those films is the same for me as other things. I go to work. I have a particular character thing in mind. This is what I'm trying to do. The thing about my job, man, is, in reality, most film directors you work with are genius. They're genius people, you know, male, female, whatever. The person that. That has worked to the point of getting to helm a feature film where you have to cover all of the aspects, you know, from the production design to the sound to how you're shooting or what lenses you're using. You know, the people that you're working with, where you shoot it. You know, all of those responsibilities come on the film director, you know.

So the joke I often make about working with Ridley it's like I get to hold the paint palette for Titian while Titian's doing his shit. And he turns to me and goes, Russell, I need more blue. And I go, right you are. I'll give you some blue. It's a good gig, you know, being able to work with super smart people, you know, that's incredible. Super creative people.

I love the thought of, like, appeasing the film gods. That that attitude is the right attitude.

It's. You know, I know I say it as a sort of a witticism, as a joke but it's actually what I fundamentally believe.

Yes. Yeah.

I think.

I think it's real. I think there's something to it if.

You approach everything like that.

Yes, everything. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if they're gods or I don't know what it is, but there's something there. Something real something. Yeah.

And I've been talking to whatever that is all the way through my life. Yeah, all the way through. I actually say this on stage at the moment because I have a song called Michelangelo's God which relates to an experience I had recently with my mom. You know, I decided that when I heard that they were making another gladiator that I was. I'm going to take my sons to Rome so they get to experience what I've experienced since that movie came out with the people of Italy and the people in the city of Rome in terms of the privileges that they give me and the experiences that they give me and the regard and what have you. And I thought before, there's another one and that water's muddied. I'm going to take my kids over so they can really experience it. So I was talking to my mom and my father had just recently passed away. And I said, you come with us. And initially she said that because she'd only ever been to Rome with my dad, that she didn't want to come because she thought it would just make her sad, you know, because that city connected, you know, her to him.

And I said to her, mom, listen to what you're saying. This is a place that connects you to my father. You have to come, you know. So she came along and we were, you know, doing all the normal family stuff together, touristy stuff. Spanish steps, Fontana di Trevi. I took the kids to see the old office at the Coliseum, you know, just normal family stuff. And then I got this call from a guy at the Vatican. And this is all based on, you know, that movie, right? Heard you're in town with your family. Would you like to come and walk through the Vatican museum and the Sistine Chapel by yourselves without any tourists? Wow. Now I've done the tourist thing, you know, a thousand new special friends and you in the Sistine Chapel, natural light, I've done that. So the idea that we could walk in there by ourselves. Absolutely. Absolutely. So. And I've taken my mom, and because it was such a big walk, she's in a wheelchair, right? So I'm pushing her around, but every corner we get to something of immense beauty. I can see her remembering when she was there with my dad and what he said or a friendship he made or whatever, you know, he was a bit of a.

He was a chatty fella, my old man. You know, he used to make friends very easily, you know, so, you know, we went through that and I could see it affecting her. And then they took us into the Sistine Chapel. It's unbelievable, man. You know, I'll do it exactly the way I do it on stage for you, man, because it's a funny moment, you know, this guy comes up, he goes, Russell, for you, today I will turn on the lights of the pope. I said, sorry. Well, the pope likes to come to the chapel to meditate. He likes to see all the beautiful colors. So we put in some lights, and he turns on these lights. I mean, that ceiling is amazing in natural light when it's got, like, 16 spotlights on it, man, and you can see the real color of the light blue of the sky and the reds. And, you know, you can almost, with that much light on it, feel like you can see the paint strokes. You see, you're there under Michelangelo's genius in the light. And I said to the guy, that was amazing, you know, why did you do that?

And he goes, Rasul, please Massimo, you are the 8th king of Rome. But so, later in that same visit, he took us to this little balcony. And to get onto this balcony, not the one on tv, it's another meditation balcony right on top of the museum. To get there, we have to go in this very small little elevator, you know. So I'm there, just me and my mom say, how you going? Enjoying it? And she just starts floods of tears, man. Crying, crying, you know, she goes, I can't explain. I just feel your father so close to me. We get up on that balcony, right in the distance. I can hear some music. So I asked our man, what's the music? And he says, well, it's a Wednesday. The Swiss Guards band is rehearsing. They only play ecclesiastical music, but I can hear what they're playing, and so can my mom. And it's that old irish folk song, danny boy. The reason that that comes into the conversation we're just having is we played that at my father's funeral. So here it is, right this moment. How does that timing work out? Where's the coincidence factor of that?

What's that? What's the odds of that? You know, they never play anything other than ecclesiastical music. But on the day that we're in a place where we can hear a private rehearsal of the Swiss Guards band, they just happened to be playing the song played at my father's funeral. When I've gone through this whole process of convincing my mom to come with us, and she says she can feel my dad all day, you know, she was saying that and shedding tears from it. And there we had that moment together. So I don't know how it works. I don't know, really what I do feel is that all religions are simply a human way of trying to explain the inexplicable. There is, definitely, because I have examples of it in my life, if you offer. And we can call it prayer, or you could call it just an introspective conversation, you know, if you focus on using your imagination and your energy, personal energy, to change things around you, they will change. You know, you can do a lot of things with simply the power of your beautiful mind.

Yeah.

So that's kind of. That's where I sit with it. I don't know what it is, but I know it's available, so I use it.

That is as close to a miracle. It's. It's a thing that happens occasionally in a person's life, and that moment will touch them forever, that you almost go. Too many things lined up, too many things lined up so perfectly.

How is this even?

How's it possible? Did you talk to the band? I would want to talk to them.

To the swiss gods band.

Yeah. Did you guys ever play this before?

Did you guys have a wild thought? I did, actually, because they wanted me to go and see their armory again. Another experience that you would never have, right, right. So I get taken down, and here's the history of the swiss guards, you know, and their connection to the pope. And here's all of the armor that's been worn by the guards over the centuries. Here's all the weapons and the swords and all that sort of stuff. And I did ask them about the Danny boy, and the first guy I talked to was like, no, they wouldn't have played that if misheard it, because they only play ecclesiastical music, you know. But apparently they were building up to some performance for some visiting dignitary, and that was the choice of song for that thing.

It's just too many things.

Too many things, man. The guy called me at that time, you know, we make the thing on that date. I've convinced my mom to come. You know, there's just lights, all of that, the lights of the pulp.

There's something undeniable about just being in the Vatican itself. There's, like, St. Peter's Basilica, to this day, is one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had. Just walking through that place and just trying to imagine the workmanship, the artisan, the artistic ability to duplicate the kind of incredibly intricate designs that are in that ceiling and how uniform they are and how gorgeous they are, and how many hundreds of years it took to accomplish how many people were.

The first time that I walked in there, which was 1991, and this probably sounds a bit weird, but I got sort of, like, offended or something. It was so over the top, right? And so incredible. And I thought about it from the perspective of this is a group of men trying to build a mountain to show you they're as powerful as God or something like that, you know? I mean, so I was probably a little more idealistic or whatever at that age, but I remember being like. It was so overwhelming. It shocking me, you know? And I got. And I got kind of pissy about it. I was like, man, that would trick a lot of people. It would trick a lot of people if they walked in there and they saw all that beauty. They go, all these guys must have a direct connection.

Yeah.

To whatever's going on. These are the guys I should hang.

With, you know, but they probably do which is how they made it. This. But this is the trick of being a person who walks into there and who's, you know, a devout religious person. You experience something that. That seems like a representation of the divine right? Because that's what the art looks like. It's so incredible.

Well, you know, that there's. That. I forget the name of it, but there's a statue there. It's carved from marble, and it's like, of Mary holding the body of Christ.

Yeah, we were just talking about that the other day, right? Yeah.

It's got incredible veil.

Yes.

That's carved.

Yeah, it's just insane. Unbelievable.

And that thing of, like, the incredible privileges and experiences that the italian people give me, you know, that's behind glass, and, you know, you're 20 foot from it. You know, I walk into the chapel, this guy taps me on the shoulder, says, come here, and I could stand next to it. He took me inside the room where it's in.

Wow. And it's just when you think, I mean, how old is this? What year was this? 1490. 814. 99. Unbelievable. And just the level of detail of the anatomy. Like, look at the ankle. Go back to that larger photo again, Jamie. Look at the ankle. I mean, look at all the detail in the toes of. And everything. I mean, it's just unbelievable.

How do you go about. How do you. I have this sort of thing with a lot of art. You know, how do you go about looking at a rock, grabbing a chisel and a hammer and getting to that, right? What the hell? You know? It's like when I see, you know, a painting by Arthur Streetn or something, and he's painted a glasse. How do you do that?

Right?

Yeah, you're just like. It's insane.

Yeah, it's insane. It's insane that. Well, it's. There's levels to every game, right? And the level of that game was like, every other sculptor had to look at that and go, oh, my God, what am I doing?

Yeah. You know, it was. It was damaged between the wars, I think, by a turkish guy who was either born in Australia or had been living in Australia, and he went to Rome. And back then, they used to. Used to be able to walk right up to it, you know? And I don't know, he hit it with a hammer or something like that and damaged it. And they.

Oh, he broke the arm off. Did they have to? How do they.

72. Hungarian. Oh, yeah, sorry.

Hungarian.

Hungarian born Australia.

Attack the sculpture with a geologist hammer while shouting, I am Jesus Christ. I have risen from the dead I with 15 blows, he removed Mary's arm at the elbow, knocked off a chunk of her nose, and chipped one of her eyelids. How did they repair it?

That's the thing, right? It's perfect now. So.

Wow. Painstaking restore returns. Can you show me the photo of what it looks like now? Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, imagine they repaired that.

How?

How? Yeah. Good fucking job.

Look at that material, man. Look at.

Yeah.

On the bodice of her costume there. It's.

All of it is incredible. The way his fingers grasp the. In between the two fingers grasp the piece of the cloth.

Yeah.

Insane.

Yeah. So I was able to just walk right up to it and walk around it. And at one point in time, the guy says, you can put your hand on it if you want. So I did.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. But that was, you know, I just wanted my kids to experience a little bit of that because it has been an incredible relationship I've had with that country.

Oh, I'm sure.

Just based on a film.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah. But it's based on a fucking amazing film.

It's not a bad one.

It's a fucking amazing film. How much training did you have to do physically for that?

Oh, man, I had to start. So it was heavy because I had done the film called the Insider with Michael Mann.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, too. Whether you started smoking cigarettes before or after that film.

Way before. And I know all about the negativities involved in the process, and it doesn't stop me. So it just goes to show how potent it is as a drug. Yeah. So I basically just stopped all exercise to try and sort of get into the shape of the guy that I was playing, you know? And I met Jeffrey Wiegand, the guy that I was playing. And it was a funny thing, because Michael Mann was convinced that Jeffrey was an expert golfer. And so I'd been doing these golf sessions and stuff, and I met him at a golf course and took him to the driving range, and he was not an expert golfer. And I asked Michael, where did you get that impression from? He said, well, the way he talks about it. Ah, cool, cool. So I used that too, as, you know, as part of the personality of the guy, the guy who thought his golf game was way better than it really was. It's just an interesting little, you know, detail. So there's one conversation where golf comes up, and you can see there's like a little color comes up in his cheek because he wants to defend himself or big himself up away.

It's just absolute minor detail of no concern to anybody else except me. But it amused me. But in that conversation. And I asked him some pretty tough questions and probably at my age now questions I would never ask somebody in that situation. But I was younger and had that kind of confidence. And I kind of crossed into some territory that wasn't comfortable for him. And I made him cry and he didn't want to cry but he was sitting opposite me and he was sort of, like, emotionally affected. And I was. Man, I have to honor this man. I have to put every effort I can into making sure that I tell his story the right way around. So then I met Ridley and I was coming off that film and I'd made a decision at the beginning because we kept, like, cutting my hair and dyeing it. We've bleached it seven times but it wouldn't behave like an old person's hair. You know, we could comb it into place and then the next day it would go, you know. And we were. We took the hairline back, shaving the hair back and everything. I mean, I just looked so fucking weird.

And at a certain point, I just said to Michael, man, I said, just give me a wig. This is just crazy, you know, I'll shave my head. Just get me a wig. I'll wear the wig. Because then my hair is going to be exactly right, you know? And that's what we did. So when I met Ridley I was maybe 35 or 40 pounds heavier than I'd been on LA confidential which was the last movie that he had seen me in. I was bald and had a really weird sort of suntan because of wearing the. So my face had some, but my head was white, you know. And I don't know how he could possibly have ever seen me as the character. But, yeah, that first conversation I had with him and I said, when are you starting? And he's like, january. And I was like, that's about three.

Months, you know, to lose 35 pounds.

Yeah. And find muscles. So the first thing I did was I went back home and I went on a motorcycle ride for about ten days. And I stand a guy ahead of me in a van with a cooker. So wherever I decide I was going to stop that night or whatever, I could only eat his food. And it was just really, really basic. Just sort of salads and beans and stuff like that. It's changed so much over time. The knowledge we have and nutrition and everything. Everything, you know, back then, you're pretty much, you know, you're working off some really dodgy information. You know, like, at one point in my life, man, everybody was told, you know, the mediterranean diet is the. Is the key. So eat pasta every day just like the Italians do. Cut to a whole bunch of big people. You know, the thing being, is the food production process is not the same necessarily in, you know, other countries outside of Italy. Right. Italy or France or whatever. They have, you know, food production methods that are, like, artisan methods that have been used for a long, long time. And pretty much most of the places you go that food hasn't necessarily been affected in the same way as it might in a more westernized country like America, like Australia, we borrow your food production methods.

So we've got corn syrup up the Jacksee and everything now as well.

New wheat.

Yeah, but, yeah, so I had three months to get ready, and that's, you know, I don't think. When we started, I don't think I was ready. But by the time we're halfway through the film and my shirt's coming off and all that sort of stuff, I had enough time and enough focus on it to get it to a certain place.

So did you have to train while filming?

Yeah, constantly, you know, because it was. Yeah, I mean, training in that, you know, at the top step of the. Of the third tier of the coliseum, there's a room that's got gym gear in it, you know, or you're in the middle of the desert and there's an extra tent. And that tent is a gymnasium, you know, and, you know, I had to sort of share the space. There's a whole bunch of gladiators in gladiators. There's a whole bunch of guys that desperate to work out and everything. So I just let everybody use the space as well. Just on the proviso that if I'm coming in and I've got 15 minutes between things and I need to be on the bench, just get off the fucking bench. Right? Like, yeah, call me. So it was. It was quite a, you know, a good collaboration, actually, with all those guys.

Wow, that. So did you ever wield a sword before? Did you have to learn how to do all those moves?

Yeah, I took it upon myself because I didn't get to go to drama school. You know, I just started working. You know, I was working as a set of clubs and stuff like that. When I started moving into doing more acting stuff, I was born in New Zealand. I moved to Australia when I was four, moved back to New Zealand with my parents when I was 14. Then at 21, I moved back to Australia by myself because I considered Australia to be my home. I'd lived there between four and 14. That's your formative years, you know, and I never felt like New Zealand, even though it was the land of my birth. It was really home. So I went back to where I felt comfortable, and I went back with the idea that, you know, I've been doing all these clubs and bands and stuff like that, but I'm going to sort of change the priority. I'm going to focus more on acting and put the music, you know, underneath it. And one of the things that I planned on doing was working enough saving money to then go to knight at the National Institute of Dramatic Art and get a piece of paper that says, I know how to do my job right.

So the year was 88. I think I'd been in Australia for a couple of years by then. I had an agent. Things were going really, really well. Solid work, being able to save money. And I was doing a show at this theater, and a guy called Bruce Appleboy, who had been my brother's biology teacher in high school, but who had become a friend of one of my uncle's. And he came to see the show, and he came backstage, and at that point, he was the technical director for the National Institute of Dramatic Art, you know, so he said, so what's your plan? And I said, well, you know, I've got the money in the bank. I'm auditioning for NIDA in October or whenever it was. And, you know, he goes, what? You're gonna go to drama school? I said, yeah, you know, I wanna turn. He goes, I walked into this theater tonight. As I was walking to the theater, there's a banner that says the name of the show above. The name of the show is your name. It's too late for you to go to drama school. You already do what you're supposed to learn at drama school.

The only thing that you'll pick up is bad habits. So in that one conversation, this dream I'd harbored for about four or five years just disappeared, you know, but it was. I mean, it was absolutely the right advice for me to receive at that time. It would have been probably a big waste of my time to go into a drama school situation at that point.

Acting is one of the strange things that some people have an ability to do. Like, there's athletes that have gone into films that, you know, just play an athlete in a film and do a fucking amazing job. Like, was it who was in uncut gems? Was it Kevin Durant? No, Kevin Garnett. Amazing in it.

He's good at amazing.

He plays a professional basketball player. He is a professional basketball player.

But there's that thing. Right. There's a simple thing to understand that you're just going to inhabit the character.

Yes.

You know, and you kind of operate yourself a little bit like a puppet master emotionally or whatever, you know? And as you're saying, some people can just accept that.

Yeah.

And they're fine with it. Other people find it very hard, and they sort of, like, they sort of, they put a performance on which does not being driven from inside.

And you feel it.

They're doing something that they've constructed that they think, oh, people will think I'm that guy if I had right this thing over here. But they're not actually experiencing what the character is experiencing. Therefore, it's not coming across as real.

Right. It doesn't resonate. Yeah, it doesn't. Whatever it is. And you see it sometimes, like, you'll see one actor stand out. Like, oh, he's faking it.

Right?

Yeah. It takes you out of it, but.

Just like the same way you see the opposite.

Yes.

Where you see that guy walk in the room, turns his head, and you go, oh, I'm with that guy. You know, he's fat. Fantastic.

You know, like when, when you're doing a character, whether it's Braddock or the gentleman from the insider, and you're playing an actual human being, that must come with enough. It's another level of responsibility. Right. Because you have. Especially the insider, because that, that was the first film where I had saw that kind of changed my perspective on things and made me openly consider the idea that a corporation would have someone assassinated if they were going to affect their business. And I saw that movie. I remember seeing that movie going, Jesus Christ. And it took me down a rabbit hole of reading about the history of the tobacco industry and lobbyists and what they had done to try to obscure the fact that it was causing cancer and addicting people and all the chemicals they had put into those things. You're playing a guy who risked his life to tell us to let everybody else know, hey, there's some nefarious forces involved in this business. It's not as simple as they're just selling you cigarettes. They're doing some shit.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, like, the responsibility is the right word. You know that experience I was sharing with you where I sat in front of him and asked him some tough questions and I pushed a button, emotionally.

What was it about?

I could see he was still affected by it, and it was about his family. And the question, you mean. Yes, it was about the effect of the situation on his family, and that took him to a place, and I could see him just get, you know, emotional. I realized he still, all these years later, is carrying this around, you know, so it was a big thing for him to do. As you say, he risked everything in his life, risked his professional reputation, the health and safety of his family, you know, to put that information in front of us. The weird thing for me about all of that is that this legal loophole kind of situation you get into, where if you admit something is unsafe, then you're liable for the fact that you pedaled something that was unsafe, because there's a whole lot of things that you can do to make these less potent in terms of how they damage you. You know, you can take out the chemicals, you can return the tobacco to its more natural state, you know, but we don't do any of that because that would be admitting that it's an unsafe product, and that opens up a whole bunch of more legal bullshit.

But, you know, it's a funny thing. I don't want to be an advocate for cigarette smoking, but there are, you know, there is a long, long history of us and, you know, wanting to smoke things.

Yeah. Well, there's been a lot of great work that was written on nicotine a lot.

Every major mathematician, every major scientist, they all smoke.

Mm hmm.

There is something in that nicotine opening neural pathways.

Yes.

That they might not be. Have access to normally.

I think it's the delivery method, too, because there's different ways of doing it as pouches. But there's a very different thing that happens when you smoke it.

Right.

Yeah. All my friends that can't quit cigarettes say the same thing.

Yeah.

Like, there's a just. It's a different thing. Like, they need.

I use Redman plug on long haul flights.

Yeah.

That's how much of a nicotine addict I am, mate. I got chewing tobacco on long haul flights.

I got a great Norm MacDonald story. Norm MacDonald and I, just, by luck, sat next to each other on flights on two different occasions. Just totally dumb luck. Norm. Norm, what's up? We're talking. He's telling I quit smoking. He's telling me this whole thing about it. Quit smoking. Yeah, it was terrible. It's the hardest thing I ever had to kick. Yeah, I loved smoking, but you know what? It's fucking terrible for you. I had to quit. So he's telling me about this the moment we land. He runs into the gift shop and buys a pack of cigarettes, and he's lighting them before he gets. I go, what are you doing? I thought you quit. He goes, yeah, I did. But then we started talking about it. I wanted a cigarette, and he's lighting it before he even gets out the door. He just couldn't wait to get it back in him.

Well, there's the funny thing, though, right, with somebody sort of said to me once, which. And it's a true thing. It's like, you know when you haven't had a cigarette for a while and you get a craving, right? That's all you have to deal with, right?

Right.

At that moment, it's not like other things that might, you know, get deeper and harder and more difficult or whatever. I. It's only ever going to be that craving. So you just have to sort of walk past it and, you know, and.

But also to satisfy that craving. When you do satisfy that craving, it's an immediate release of one of the most pressing physical things that's bothering you. The most pressing physical thing that's bothering you is you want a cigarette.

In the times when I've tried to give up, what I've found is that my brain doesn't work the way I want it to work.

Right?

I find it quite hard to make decisions. And so it's sort of like I've had experiences where, you know, for an extended period of time, I'm in this battle of trying to completely get rid of it out of my life. But all of these other things are being negatively affected because I'm not making decisions. My businesses are starting to wobble. My bank account's not looking good. You know what I mean? And so I've just gone, fuck it. Get everything back in line.

Well, it's a significant nootropic. You know, it really is. It does affect, in a very positive way, cognitive performance.

Yeah.

It's undeniable.

Yeah. Well, as we say, we said in that film, it breaks through that blood brain barrier. That's why it's so addictive and so hard.

Yeah, yeah. And why it's so effective, too. It's just too bad it's terrible for you.

Yeah. And I'm feeling it, man. At the age of 60, having smoked since I was a kid, 100% know, it's like a. You know, it's a short course for me.

When you were playing Braddock, did you smoke all through the training?

I smoked in the ring. Right. There's photographs. I had a guy because you can't take your gloves off. And so I used to just go over to the corner. You'd stick out my mouth and go pop.

Wow.

But then we developed a set of gloves that were velcroed. So they had the laces on the outside, but they're actually Velcro. I could get them out so I could have a cigarette.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. You know, not constantly, but, you know, we'd be, you know, doing a shooting day in the ring. You know, you're in the ring all fucking day, know, so you're gonna be in the ring doing boxing stuff for 12 hours. So when we started that film, Ron Howard's idea was to do the first 35 days of boxing and then do the scenes afterwards. But after we did the first fight, you know, which took six or seven days, you know, I said, you've got to rethink that. You know, I'm rehabbing from the shoulder 35 days in a row. It's like, it's gonna break down, man.

Right.

We have to. So we redid the schedule and we cycle back into the boxing. So I'd box Mondays and Tuesdays, and then basically Wednesday would be off physically, and then I would start the prep, gearing up for the next boxing day, you know. And what was good about it is that it kept me in shape through the whole shoot. You know, if we'd done 35 days of boxing, then stopped and then done another 30 shooting days where I didn't have to box, you know, James J. Braddock would have changed shape during the course of the film. It was because I was cycling back into the boxing that I stayed in shape and kept improving, you know, because we had gaps in between. So I'd learn a little bit more from Angelo or whatever and would be able to adjust something. So it was a really good choice to make because it made, and it was because of doing that that Ron was able to clearly see we need another gear change between now and the championship. And that's when we came up with the idea, well, the only way we can have a gear change is if we just do it for real, you know?

Wow.

But when I did that real fight, I did it with the fellow, Troy, who was. He was a lovely bloke, great boxer, great athlete, incredible on the ropes, you know, on the skipping rope, just superior. I did it with him because I wanted the challenge of doing, you know, if we're gonna do it for real, I wanna do it with him. And, you know, we were chasing each other around that ring. It was, it was, it was incredible experience. But I wasn't, you know, it's just that thing is like, he's a good, solid guy, and I know he was never gonna kill me.

Right, right.

There was a couple of blokes in that cast.

Yeah.

If he gets the opportunity. He's too feral. He'll just take my head off if I give him half a frickin break. Just, you know.

Yep. There's guys like that out there.

Yeah.

Did you have any experience boxing as a young man?

A little bit. A little bit. I did martial arts when I was a kid, so I started off with karate Buddha Khan. That would have been. I would have started that when I was twelve. Then I did Zendokaidae, and then I did like a street martial art thing as well. And I'd get to kind of like halfway up the belt ladder and then I'd move on to something else, you know? But it's funny because all of that training comes into play later on in my life, you know? And funnily enough, I always say to people, it's actually my musical theater background and dance routines that make my fight sequences so sharp, you know, because it's sort of like you're working with a rhythm, and if you're working with a camera and the camera's trying to catch something, you know, if you have that rhythm, then you can display the stuff that want the camera to capture and the audience to see, you know? But it's a lot, people think I'm joking when I say it, but it's for real.

Do you wear Vasily Lomachenko? No, he's a ukrainian boxer. He's one of the best pound for pound fighter.

Didn't he just won a big fight the other day?

Yeah, he beat Kambosas from Australia, who's also an elite fighter. But he, he was trained by his father from the time he was very young. And his father made him take two years off of boxing to learn ukrainian dance to help his footwork. And he has the greatest footwork of all time.

There you go.

His footwork is impeccable. You know, you have to see, pull up just a highlight reel of the way this guy moved because it's so bizarre. He moves differently than any other boxer on the planet. And he's by far the, he has the best footwork and the most elusive. He cuts angles and does movement and misdirects in a way that no one.

Else got that list wrong. I did Buddha Khan to start with. Then I did. Sir. Door.

Okay.

She's a kung fu.

Okay.

And then I did Zendokai after that.

Yeah.

Which is more of a street fighting thing, which is head butts and shit.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Well, it's like, you know, it's a.

Crop maga type deal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, let's make this short and sweet.

Yeah.

And just, you know, get it done. Yeah. Who's your favorite boxer? Over time, do you think? Or boxers?

I don't know. I don't know if there is a one. This. This is Lomachenko.

Right?

Just watch how this guy moves. Like his foot. Look at that.

Yeah, look at that.

That footwork is fucking insane. There's no one like him. There's no one like him. He's so elusive. And the punches come from angles that you don't expect them to come from. And he's moved up multiple weight classes. I think he's the quickest man to ever win. I mean, because he had an unbelievable amateur record. I think he's the quickest man to ever win a world title. I think he won a world title in, like, four bouts.

Right?

Incredible.

Yeah. I used to love watching Costa Tszyu.

Oh, yeah. He was amazing.

Yeah, he was fantastic. And he's his son. He's got two boys, and they're both up and comers at the moment.

Yep. Yeah.

Tim just lost for the first time. And, yeah, I watched that fight in Nikita. Yeah.

Yeah.

That was crazy.

Yeah. Crazy fight. Crazy fight. Constant Tzu was a murderous puncher.

He was fantastic, man.

Yeah.

He knocked out zab Judah one time.

I remember that.

Oh, my God. I've never seen that happen before.

That was when Zap Judah was zap Judah.

He was the thing.

Yeah, he was.

Everybody was, like, counting down, how many seconds is it gonna take for him to end Costa Zoo's life?

Yeah.

It simply didn't happen.

Well, he was so slick and so elusive himself. And Costa Tszyu just planted one on. Well, he planted a couple on him, but one big one. That really rocked him. And he had that little rat tail. That was his thing.

Well, that's the thing with Costa. I think he had, you know, nearly 300 fights or something. As an amateur.

He did the consequences of him hitting you. He was just such a murderous puncher that even if a guy was slick, it was just. You needed to make one mistake. Boom, there it is. And he got up, and his legs were just complete rubber.

That's the only time I've ever seen that in a boxing.

Well, he made a mistake there. He should have just stayed down. It was his ego that made him jump up to his feet. He should have taken a knee weight to the count of eight rows and.

Then he played that back again because he's got that one big. Right. But then it's a. It's a. A two punch combination that really puts him into that situation. Right.

Yeah.

Bang.

One, two. That hurt him. Bam. That's the big one. Yeah. Yeah. See, if he just stayed down.

Yeah.

Probably would have got his legs back in eight then. Yeah. Right, now he's okay. Yeah, exactly. But who knows? He would have probably got caught again. That's the tricky thing about boxing.

Yeah. And so, yeah, I was. I was at the Costa Zoo, Ricky Hatton fight when I got a mate who's a lawyer says you have to be careful with befriending boxers. Right. Because there will be that night when it's just all over.

Yep.

You know, and it was in Manchester, and Hatton was jacked, man. He was. His body was chiseled in a way I'd never seen his body before. And, you know, from my perspective, it. It looked like he was, you know, laying in some shots under the belt, you know, but in an audience like that in Manchester, which was all about Ricky, you know, they were all for him. You didn't have a lot of dissenting voices. Yeah. But I was, you know, in the dressing room holding Costa over a bucket while he pissed blood for about 20 minutes after that. And it was like, really made me understand what the boxing world was, you know, what it really is.

Yeah. Every one of those takes something away from that fighter forever. They'll never be exactly the same.

I don't think he fought again after that. Have that big, long stored career and multiple world championships and all of the things that he achieved, and then he just knew that that was the end of that for him.

Well, good for him for recognizing that. That's one of the hardest things for fighters to recognize when it's over, because their entire identity is based on this one thing that they do. And then who am I if I don't do that thing? And your whole life, sports, people, fighters, it's even. It's more difficult.

It's much more intense as a fighter, for sure.

It's also, you have to have this ridiculous belief in yourself that you're the best of all the. All the elites out there. You're the number one. You're the guy that can get it done. Yeah. Ricky Hatton, in his prime was a bad man.

Yeah. He was great.

He was a mauler. Boxer Mauler too. Just so hard nosed.

Yeah.

Just come at you. Just, you know, which is why, you know, his. Some of his losses to Floyd Mayweather, one example. It just shows how great Floyd was.

Right.

Is able to weather that and figure out the openings.

Yeah.

And then Manny Pacquiao after that.

Pacquiao, what a fighter.

He just fought again. He just had an exhibition fight in Japan, which is ridiculous. Didn't look that good.

I liked. I used to like watching Oscar de la Hoya.

Oh, his prime.

He was amazing.

He's off the reservation now, though. See what he posted on his Instagram today? Him and his girlfriend in their underwear, dancing around, and it looks like he's on a pound of cocaine.

Oh, dear.

He's got a jock strap on. He's bouncing his dick around. She's bouncing her ass around. It's something that if somebody else filmed you like, don't post that, right? Do not post that. Meanwhile, he put it on his own fucking account. See, you got it, Jamie. It's been taken down.

Having a summer.

What do you mean it's been taken? He took it down. It says that when I looked for it. It's been scrubbed from Instagram. So I found it. Well, that's it in the corner, in the right hand corner, you can see what the two of them are doing. So she's dancing. He's. Well, they're blurring him out because he had, like, some little g string around where Dingling was bounced around. She's shaking her enhanced ass. The whole thing is just.

I mean, what drug definitely needs to go and do some ukrainian folk dancing lessons?

Yeah, not the best footwork. I mean, in his prime, the guy moved like a butterfly. But, you know, things have changed. He was an amazing fighter in his prime.

Absolutely.

Unfortunately, it gets overshadowed by activity like we just witnessed.

What do you think of this Jake Paul fella?

I always say that if Jake Paul was not a YouTube star, if people just looked at him like an up and coming boxer, you would say, this kid's got a lot of fucking talent. He's dangerous. He's dangerous. I think his strength is that people, for whatever stupid reasons, they underestimate him because of what his background was, and they think there's no way that some guy who became famous off of YouTube is going to be an actual legit boxer. But if you look at what he's done, the time that he's put into it, and the ability that he has, just the sheer ability, he's a very good boxer.

Yeah, very good. Yeah. And he seems to treat his body the right way, too.

Yeah. Trains hard.

Yeah.

I mean, I've watched a lot of his training footage. I've watched a lot of, watched all of his fights. He can fight.

What do you think of the thing with Mike, though?

58 is 58.

Yeah.

No matter what. No matter what you're taking and what they're doing for you, and you're still 58, but 58 year old Mike Tyson is not 50 year old Mike Jones that lives down the street. It's a different kind of human being. He still can knock your fucking head into another dimension if he can catch you. The thing is, can he catch a 28 year old guy who's at the top of his career, who's winning legitimate boxing matches? I mean, he's beating former UFC world champions like Tyron Woodley. You know, he had that very good fight with Tommy Fury, who's a legitimate boxer, you know, which is a very good fight. You know, he just beat up Mike Perry, who's a bare knuckle champion. I mean, it's a. He's a real fighter. He can fight. He can. And if Mike Tyson and him are fighting and Mike can't catch him, and Mike has bad knees, if his back's bad, I mean, I don't know what's going on with him physically. It's hard to tell from a guy just hitting pads. When he's hitting those pads, he looks great. Like, yeah, if he can do that. If he can actually do that for eight rounds or ten rounds, however on this fight is.

Well, that's gonna be the key.

Yeah. Can he do that? I don't know if he could do that. I mean, he had to pull out of the first fight because he had an ulcer.

Right.

So it's.

You know, the thing is, I was quite enjoying the second phase of Mike's life. You know, he was terrifying as a boxer. Yeah, terrifying. You know, even when I met him at one point back, you know, backstage at the stadium at a fight, and I was like, I'm still terrified of you from watching you. You know? Then that guy, he started becoming where he became more explorative and he was looking into, what, the meaning of life and having a smoke every now and then and stuff like that, I was like, I'm enjoying this, Mike. I'm liking the evolution. What bothers me with this whole thing is that he's got to slide back to that warrior. And I just not sure he needed to do. Do it.

Yeah. He's the reason why this table is so wide.

Why is that?

Because I was going to make the table more narrow and be closer to the guests. I had him on once when he was retired and he was much heavier and he was smoking a lot of weed and he was contemplative and interesting and philosophical and just a fun guy to hang out with. And then I had him on again when he was about to fight Roy Jones Junior, and he had lost about 60 pounds. He looked shredded. He had muscles bulging in his arms. He was very intense. It was like a completely different human being. And he was terrifying. Just being in the room, it was fucking terrifying. And I said, you know what? This table needs to be a little wider.

I'm glad it wasn't only me.

Yeah. I just don't want to be that close to him. He fucking scares me. Like, I felt his energy. It was a dirt. And even Jamie said it after he left. Jamie's like, that's a totally different person because Jamie was here for the first one, the second one, it was just. He was so fired up that it was. He had reignited that thing inside of him that existed when he was the best in the world, and that that force that caused him to try to achieve greatness was back and he was fit and he was, you know, he was in the middle of training and he was. He was all in on this Roy Jones junior fight.

Yeah.

And now he's.

I just hope for the both of them that it transcends the sort of circus type atmosphere that's around it, you know?

Yeah.

It's a legit fight and they both do well and nobody gets hurt.

That would be nice, but it's probably not going to happen. It's probably going to be one of two things. It's either going to be Jake Paul's going to find out that 58 year old Mike Tyson is still a motherfucker, or we're going to find out that 58 year old men are 58 year old men no matter what they look like. And Jake Paul is a 28 year old athlete in the prime of his life. You know, it was a real.

I mean, if you just do it to yourself.

Right.

You know, me at 60 versus me at 20.

Right.

Forget about it.

Yeah. It's different things.

Yeah.

And also there's an accumulation of injuries that everyone have. Yeah. Just. No avoiding. But I do want to get you in to get. I guarantee you stem cells will help that. I've had tremendous success with stem cells in shoulder joints. Yeah. Yeah. I was told by a doctor that I was going to have to have shoulder surgery. He said. He said, well, he did all of these exercises. You pushed down on it, and we did an MRI. He's like, it's so tornado. And he goes, you could try to rehabilitate. No, it was a little bit of labrum, but it was. I had a full length rotator cuff tear, okay. And he's like, it's going to have to be repaired. So I had another guy in Vegas, this guy, Doctor Roddy McGee, and he's like, let's try stem cells. And he was doing them for the UFC. And, you know, this was. They could do some pretty potent stuff. This is before some of the new regulations have come into place that they're constantly trying to regulate this stuff because it's very effective. Well, I went in, he shot me up. I took it easy on it.

I did rehab. I started doing all these band. I used these crossover symmetry bands, and I started doing all these exercises to build my shoulders back up. And then I started feeling pretty good and I started working out again and just being real careful. As soon as I feel pain, I'm going to stop. I went back to him in six months and got an MRI. He said it was the most extraordinary thing he's ever seen. He said, the tear is gone. He said, I've never seen this before because I've never seen this. All my years of being an orthopedic surgeon, I've never seen a tear in a rotator cuff completely disappear.

What's happened with mine now is that it's full of arthritis, you know? So if they were gonna repair it now, right, they've got to cut it. They've got to pop the bone up, shave the top of the human head off, cut it off, put, you know, like some plastic bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't do that.

So eleven months research, rehab.

Yeah, don't do that yet. Don't do that yet. This is why I don't do that yet, because there's breakthroughs right now where they're regenerating cartilage. There's several studies. I believe one of them is out of Australia, and another one, my friend Brigham, who runs ways to. Well, I actually sent this to him. I'll send this to you, Jamie. But it is. There's a new study that came out that's showing that they're able to regenerate cartilage tissue. And this is very, very promising with. When they're able to do this kind of stuff. Now, if you could just hang in there. Here you go, Jamie. If you could just hang in there for just a year or so, I guarantee you they're going to be implementing this stuff on people.

See, I've got no cartilage in my big toes, no cartilage left, because all the sports I used to do a.

Lateral movement turf toe.

But also, you know, sometimes things. Shit goes wrong in a stunt and you got to stop or you die.

So this is it. Insulin like growth factor one in articular cartilage repair for osteoarthritis treatment. So they're able to do this signaling pathway that's been implicated in articular cartilage repair. Igf one is a member of the family of growth factors structurally closely related to pro insulin can promote. I don't know what that word is. Chondrocyte proliferation, enhance matrix production, and inhibit catabolism. Moreover, we discussed the potential role of igf one in OA treatment. Of note, we summarized the recent progress on igf delivery systems. Optimization of igf delivery systems can facilitate treatment application in cartilage repair and improve Oa treatment efficacy. So there's this, and there's another one that's in Australia where they're using it on sheep right now, and they're able to regrow cartilage on sheep. And they're about to begin in human trials on that as well here. Human discovering animal models, consulating to new human therapies. So this is the next stage, right? Because right now, there's nothing they can do about cartilage. What stem cells have been really effective at is soft tissue injuries, tendon repair, things along those lines, and a lot of neurological disorders that people have, especially iv versions, they've done a lot with.

Doctor Neal Reardon in Panama has had some great results with that and great results. Mel Gibson came in and talked about his experiences with that. And his father, his father was in a wheelchair when he was 80. Ten years later, at 90, was walking around, and this is after stem cell. They can do some pretty extraordinary stuff, especially outside of the country, because outside of America. America has the FDA, and the FDA is very strict on this stuff. But if you can go to Tijuana, there's a place called the Cellular Performance Institute. They send a lot of UFC fighters down there. They had amazing results. Amazing. They're shooting them into people's disks and growing disk tissue on people that have disk degeneration issues. It's just, we're real close. We're real close to being able to regenerate all kinds of stuff. So just gotta hang in there. Hang in there. But I guarantee you what the stem cells can do is help heal what can heal in that area, reduce inflammation, give you more range of motion and give you a much more pain free experience.

Because I've got that situation on my toes. Right. I've got grade four tears in both achilles, I've got shin splints, I've got bone marrow edemas under both knees.

Jesus.

I've got one disintegrating hip.

Oh, boy.

And I know exactly what fall that was from.

What movie?

Gladiator, of course. And then you go on my back, I've got ribs that pop off. I've got, you know, both shoulders are shit, but the left one is particularly shit like, you know, like even on this tour we've been doing. Because we've been traveling like, 35,000 kilometers or something on this tour. And, you know, sometimes it's in a plane, but other times it's in a, you know, hopefully a bus, but most of the time just a car. Or at one point we were traveling around in a pet transport van.

You do it at old school.

Yeah. Well, the thing is, the band doesn't generate cash like my day job.

Right.

So I've got to work to how what the band earns.

Right, right.

So definitely makes it a little more difficult, for sure, you know, but it's also real.

You're doing it like a real touring band. Yeah, yeah.

Lining up in funky little airports and. Yeah, yeah. And most of the flights have been, you know, once the tour has begun have been, you know, economy flights and. And blah, blah, so.

Well, I'm gonna try to get you in the morning before you take your flight out of here.

All right.

I bet I can.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm 99%.

They can just go bing bang, right?

Yeah, they'll just start injecting you in the morning. They'll give you an iv of stem cells. They'll inject them into the areas that are hurt.

Interesting.

Yeah, it'll help you. Guarantee it'll help, you know, it sounds like your shoulders pretty fucked, but. Yeah, like I said, hang in there. This shit's coming.

So I'm kind of. Probably doesn't look like it to you, but I'm actually in the process. I've had ten years of allowing myself to be in a certain shape and playing all sorts of roles with that. But when I finished Nuremberg in April or so, I just said, okay, that decade's over and I'm going to go back the other way. So I was 126 kilos when I came off Nuremberg. I'm currently 112 and a half.

Nice.

Just slowly and slowly, you know, that's.

The right way to do it.

It. But what I'm looking forward to is that all of the, you know, guys that are ten years my junior who are going, mate, you fucking let yourself go, haven't you? You know? Okay, whatever. I'm gonna just be passing them on the escalator as I go down. Go. Enjoying yourself? Yeah, I just. I feel even if I start working less, which is something that's also in the back of my mind, if I'm gonna spend more time for myself and not working, then I want to be in a particular place, you know, so I can enjoy it a little bit more.

Sure. Yeah. Just physically, you'll feel a lot better just moving around.

But it has been a very interesting decade, you know, and it's funny in my business on how. How much it can affect your friendships, what you look like.

Really?

For sure. Sure. Absolutely for sure.

In what way?

Well, just who stops calling you and stuff?

They stop calling you if you gain weight, for sure. Really? Oh, those aren't real friends.

Well, that's exactly right.

Yeah.

So it's been a lovely process of elimination. Just cleaning a few things out.

How bizarre.

I don't know where I'll get to, but in my mind I'm aiming for about 104, 105, nice. Like that.

You'll get there. Come on, man.

That should be relatively easy.

Yeah.

You know, but for me, fighting weight, 80 kilos.

Mmm.

That's, you know.

Can you get there?

I don't think so.

Why not? Well, I bet you can.

Well, it's just the thing is, I can't because of all the damage everywhere, is what I used to do is just outrun my, you know.

Right.

Go through a period of, you know, abusing yourself and then just outrun it. And I simply can't do that anymore. You know, I just can't outrun the years of, you know, of abuse.

Can you use an air dyne? An air dyne bike?

Yeah, I've got.

Yeah, those are the shit. I did that stupid thing today. That's torture.

What I'm trying to do is actually make the adjustments without relying on olympic level physical preparation. I'm just trying to bring it down purely through diet and the fact that I've been losing weight while I'm on a tour like this, where you don't have consistency in the way you can exercise, the food that's available to you, you know. 02:00 in the morning after you finish the gig is, you know, is pretty hairy. The fact that I've actually still been able to come down is amazing. I've never been on a tour with a band in my life. And I've been doing this stuff since the early eighties and lost weight. You go on tour, you gain weight, that's what happens. So it's been pretty. I'm really looking forward to being back on the farm where I can be consistent and at a little sort of consistent exercise to it.

I don't know what the rules in Australia are for peptides. Do you know what kind of regulations they have there?

I'm pretty sure that they're available. But you can't use them in a professional sense which doesn't affect my job. But sports people can't use, right?

Sports people can't use them here either. Unfortunately. All they do is help you heal. Especially things like BPC 157. They just help heal injuries. And they've recently banned that here for some fucking stupid reason. None of it makes any sense. What you can get versus what has not shown any adverse side effects. But then you have to go through this insane process to get it legalized. That takes forever and costs insane amounts of money. And just, that's what they're in right now. But peptides can help you tremendously, tremendously. Helps, helps you heal. Helps your body regenerate tissue. Helps you lose weight. It can help you in a lot of ways, right? Yeah. There's a lot of different things you can do but I'll connect you with these ways to. Well people, they can help you a lot. And also just eat nothing but steak. Eat every all, just eat only your steaks. Get on a carnivore diet. High protein, low carbs, right? You just lose weight quick like that anyway. Your body's like easily satisfied, right? If you're only eating meat and protein, you only eat so much and then you're done. Your body like knows how to regulate exactly what you have.

And also then you'll be in a state of ketosis a lot of times.

Now that I've made the decision it's quite interesting what's happening to my. Just the food intake. You know yesterday I was eating a steak. I was really enjoying it but I didn't finish it. I got to a certain point when actually I'm good. So. It's just a funny thing. Like we've talked before about the power of the imagination or whatever. I've now made the decision, yeah. That I'm going the other way. And, you know, as long as I'm, you know, clear about that decision, then things just, you know, you just start to fold in under what you've, you know, the decision you've made.

Right. Yeah, you're. You move into that direction. Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm just sort of taking, you know, taking the attitude. I'm not slavishly weighing myself every day. I'm not, you know, there's nothing. It's not schedule specific, you know, which has been so much of my life. I'm prepping for a thing that happens on a certain date. You've got x amount of time to get to that place, you know, this. I'm like, I'm really taking it on board as a decision I purely made for my own reasons, you know, and that is, you know, when it's summertime, I like taking my shirt off by the pool, you know?

Right.

So it's like, all right, I've had ten years without doing that, so now I'm going back the other way.

Do you. What exercise can you do?

That doesn't hurt, oddly enough. And I just. I would never have thought this, you know, I know it doesn't seem logical, but, you know, when I got to a point with my achilles that was affecting everything that I was doing, you know, and they set me up. I did, you know, full blood injections, platelet rich injections, did all of that stuff, you know, and then you're banging yourself with painkillers because it's such a heavy hit when you do that sort of thing, particularly with the achilles, you know, and moon boot and all that, you know? And it just wasn't working, man. And I was doing the rehab exercises and everything, and I could feel that with the rehab exercises, that they were re damaging the area. They weren't making it better, you know? So I kind of said to the guy that I was working with, that's just like, I got to stop. I gotta stop, because every time I see you, then I limp the next day, you know? But if I don't do the exercises, you know, after a certain amount of time, the limp gets less, you know, so I have to come up with some other way of doing it.

And he said I was crazy at the time or whatever. Then I started going out with a girl who loves playing tennis. I used to like playing tennis when I was younger, so, cool, let's play tennis. You know, our romance is based on the fact that the first time I played tennis, tennis, I couldn't beat her. Okay. I've got to keep you around and play you enough times till I work out how to grind you into the dirt, young lady. And. But here's the thing with tennis, with the short bursts of running, right? And it's sort of like, it's not constant, like ten ks on a treadmill or out on the road or whatever. It's just a short burst of running, right? And then you've got a minute while you sort of gather yourself together. You have a break between games or whatever, and then another burst of run. Another burst of running. I seem to have rehabbed my achilles by playing tennis.

Wow. That would be the last thing I would suggest. I would think that that springing would be the recipe for disaster, but.

Because it's like a momentary movement. But, you know, with tennis, if you're getting to the ball, you've got to use 100% of yourself. You know, you're going for that ball and it's all in, but it's three or four steps, right. You know, and then you have a sort of, like a little bit of a break or the next shot. You don't have to put so much effort into it, whatever. And it just seems to. I have, you know, I had years and years, man. I mean, I'm talking about from 98 onwards, right? So that's through all of those movies we were talking about, like Gladiator, like martian commander, like Cinderella man, Noah, whatever. The problem with my achilles is always present, present, always present, you know? But since, you know, the last five years, it's gone away. I don't think about it every day, and I walk without a limp now.

Wow.

And it's just tennis.

I wonder how much of that is the same thing. Like the direction you've made this direction. To beat this woman at tennis, you gotta get good at tennis. And your mind is. Your mind is saying to your body, all right, you gotta fix this fucking problem with the achilles.

I'm gonna need those.

Yeah, we're gonna need those. We need to fire up all the.

Resources to be also, too, that those platelet rich injections and stuff that they were doing in the timeline that they were considering to be. The right timeline is incorrect. The timeline is, in fact, a lot longer, perhaps.

Yeah.

And I think if you look at the tennis thing, it actually recreates the rehab exercises, but you're not doing, you know, five sets of ten.

Right.

You're doing a little bit, and then the next day you might do that same move again or whatever, you know, but it's not wearing it down at the same time. That's what I found with the rehab exercises that I felt to me. As I said, I think that I was re injuring, you know, that would stretch. Stretch set to a certain point. That's good. Then you do that one set of them too many, and you feel that little click again, and you know, that it's retort, you know.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's. It's like limited plyometrics. That's what it's like. You know, it does make sense. But it's funny that that's the thing that got you healthy again, because that.

Is, I mean, crazy, right?

Yeah. So opposite of what I think anybody would recommend.

It doesn't seem to, you know, bare logic, but here it is, you know, sort of. And, you know, I've started riding bicycles again now and everything, because it got to the point, man, with the pain, you know, if you went on a mountain bike for 15 or 20 ks, just white hot paint in the back of my heels, you know. Yeah. But now I'm enjoying it again and, you know, having fun with it, so, you know, it's cool.

That's a beautiful thing.

Yeah. So, love.

Yeah, love. Love in the ability to decide that you want to beat this person.

Yeah. And I did. Like, I ended up. There was one time in Melbourne, we played indoors on the practice course they have for the open six. Love. And I never let her forget it. She still will beat me quite regularly. But I do have that one pure moment of victory that I recall for her.

That's hilarious. The motivation. It's interesting how motivation is such a massive factor in success. What are you actually enthusiastic about? It's just that the direction that your mind will put your body through when you've made a decision like that.

Have you got kids?

Yes.

What are their ages?

I have a 28 year old. I have a 16 year old and a 14 year old.

Okay.

Yeah.

Cool. And that you dig being a dad? I mean, that's a silly question.

Yeah. I love it. It's bizarre. It's a bizarre education in who you are as a human being, the reflection.

You have on, but possibly their greatest human privilege.

Yeah.

Right.

I used to think. I used to think differently about it. I used to think that everybody should. When I first started having kids, I felt like everybody should have kids. I don't think that now anymore, but I think that for me, it's been one of the most. One of the most impactful and powerful things ever in my life. It's changed me as a human being in so many different ways. Dave Chappelle has a great phrase about it that I always repeat. He said, not only did it increase the amount of love I have, it increased my capacity for love for me, it also made me change the way I think about people because I used to think if I met a guy and he was 50 years old, I was like, that's a 50 year old guy. Now. I meet him, I go, he used to be a baby. That used to be a kid. I used to be a little kid. I think of the whole path of that person becoming an adult now. I never used to do that before.

Yeah, well, I'm at that place now where my eldest is in university and my youngest is about to finish high school. And we've. It's just, you know, it's amazing. We had a funky life in that, you know, there was divorce involved and things like that. So we haven't always been together, you know, but I can honestly say they're my two favorite people to spend time with in the world. World, you know, and the things that we can do now, you know, with this little head that was nothing but just, you know, a bundle of blankets, you know, I can now have these incredible discussions with you.

Yeah.

You know, my eldest went into university to do an arts degree, right? Didn't find it challenging, so without any discussion, just flipped his degree, and he's now doing a Latin and ancient Greek. Whoa. Yeah. And I'm like, that's a big change. And he's like, well, I just worked out how to make the education system work for me. And I'm like, this guy, wow, he's so impressive, you know, and it's like, you know, I remember the first time he said a word, you know? And now he has the intellectual capacity to realize that, you know, this is a moment in his life. If he grabs what he can in terms of his education, and he's looked at Latin and Greek and gone, if I can nail Latin and Greek, every language is available to me. Ah. So it's like, it's just, you know, I mean, to sit back and be impressed with your kids, that's amazing.

Yeah.

You know, and look, I think they're both really creative, but, you know, the navigation aspect, how you help people, you know, your children navigate the world, don't help too much. Yeah, but how do you explain some of the bullshit that goes on politically and stuff? Because I remember being extremely idealistic when I was like, you know, my teen years and very politically focused. And then I just got to a point where I was like, you know, everyone's a bullshit artist.

Yeah.

There's not one of these guys that I can really say that I'd follow into battle, so I'll just stop worrying about politics and go into something else. But you see the same processes going on with them. They're trying to reach out to something to believe in, and somebody that they believed in has a policy or whatever that is completely abhorrent to the way of thinking. So you can see them having to come to grips with. It's very hard to find a hero.

Yeah.

You know, particularly in that world.

It's. Particularly in that world. Well, that world is set up for fools. It's set up for people that can just become a figurehead.

I don't know who said it first, but it was used in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Tim Rice musical Evita. Politics is the art of the possible. So it's not. It's not really connected to anything. It's like, what can we get away with, right?

What can we tell you that we're going to do and then never do.

It right out of the possible?

Well, you're seeing that now in american politics more than ever, because the person that's actually in office is saying what she's going to do if she gets into office.

Right.

Which is just like, you there, you're there. This is madness. Like, this is. And people like, yeah, she's going to do it. Like, she's been in there for three fucking years. Like, what are you talking about? This is crazy. But people want to believe so badly. We want someone to be the person that rescues us from whatever situation we're currently in. And that's always been the case.

The unfortunate thing is, and it affects, you know, Australia as much as it affects here. You know, we have such an aggressive media situation and the media's need for new information, new stories, whatever that timeline is. You're just not going to get people of quality stepping into that world anymore.

No.

You know, no.

Who'd want to put themselves through that?

There's probably hundreds of potentially incredible presidents in this country, but they're too smart to walk that way.

Yeah, it's a real problem. It's a real problem. It's only going to get worse. And our desire and our hunger for bullshit and to focus on, what did he do when he was in high school? You know, what did she say when she was on Twitter when she was 22? Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, we have to put that shit aside, recognize that people are just human beings and stop dragging out old shit just to make your party win because it ruins the entire system.

Yeah, well, that, that is the thing, isn't it? It's just like, you know, picking a color and no matter what happens under the banner of that color, you're just sticking with the color. Yeah, it's like, well, that's not really going to help any of. No, that's not the way it's going to get.

I don't know what your political system's like, but we're completely trapped in this two party system.

Yeah, we have the same sort of situation, but we have a very interesting thing that's happening in Australia at the moment, which is the rise of independence. And it's happened federally and also at a state level, too, but also in city government as well, where non party affiliated people are. And so now you have a situation where in the parliament you have a group of them. As you know, I can't, I don't know the exact numbers. Ten or 15 or something independent. So, you know, the main party has to deal with the fact that those independents are going to bring a non party line series of points to the argument, you know, and it's, it's working well, you know, it's working for us in that it's making both of the main parties re examine who they are and what they stand for.

We could use that here, for sure.

Because people are just so sick of that color choice, they're reaching for something else.

Well, it's also, people recognize that a lot of us that claim to be on one side or the other really are somewhere in the middle. But most people have opinions that are a little bit of a conglomeration, both conservative and liberal perspectives, especially like liberal, socially, fiscally conservative. There's a lot of people like that and they're not represented.

Not at the moment.

No, not at the moment. And in this country, it's the worst that's ever been in terms of the polarization of the two sides and what, you know, you think of the other side as an idiot. No matter what. No matter what. That person's got to be a moron. They think differently than I do or they support this side, I support that side and I'm all in on my team and they're all in. It's just, it just, it's a tribal thing. As tribal as any other thing that we have in the world and in this country. It just doesn't work. And we just get captivated by corporations because of that. And it's also the money in politics is so extraordinary, which is something that should have never been allowed to happen.

Yeah, yeah. The old, you know, those campaigns, fundraising situations and the amount of money they just pour into. But also the rules around the engagement. You know, the rules of, you know, what you can say in an ad that's negative about the other person. It's like, come on, it's ridiculous. You know, it's like these apocalyptic two minute blasts that come out of your television. It's just all bullshit. But if you're leaning that way, then, you know, it helps your outrage and it helps you confirm that. Yes, well, that's, you know, I'm against that, you know, but when it's just a series of exaggerations and lies and it just doesn't help anybody.

Well, in this country, Kamala Harris recently got caught because the campaign was using articles and they changed the article. They changed, like, the titles of the article they put out, like, fake positive articles. And the fact that you can do something like that, you can persuade people to think that people are writing about something when you're actually putting it out there, which is just bananas. It's just a complete manipulation of the zeitgeist.

We've got a situation in Australia at the moment where politicians are suing people for what they say is the loss of their reputation or whatever. Right. Because that person might have commented somewhere on social media or something and said, you know, X person is x. And so now, you know, they've were. The certain politicians have worked out, oh, I can make money out of this.

Oh, jeez.

So they're using their privileged position to then go and destroy somebody's life who might have called them a name on social media.

Jesus Christ.

Really, mate, it's a bit of much.

Yeah. You gotta put a stop to that. If you're in the public eye, you gotta recognize people. Gonna throw rocks.

Absolutely, man. As he's standing for parliament, you know, Congress or whatever, it goes for the territory.

Yeah. And it also. It stifles free speech because it scares people into censorship.

Right. Well, that's. That's where it gets really dark.

Yeah.

So now you're saying that you can't make a negative comment about somebody who's in power because they will now take your house away.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

That's dark. Yeah. Well, in the UK, there's a lot of people that are getting jailed, too. It's. It's a very bizarre time for free speech when we should have the most. We have the most access to information. That's ever been available. Because of that, people are now weaponizing that access, right? Instead of, you know, it's not like there's someone in the pub listening to you say something negative about a politician, but when you say something on Twitter or on Facebook to your group of friends, you think of it as same as you saying something in a pub. Like, this is my opinion. Fuck that guy. And all sudden, you're on a lawsuit with that guy, right? You don't have any money. Oh, geez.

Do you use Twitter and things like that?

Occasionally, yeah. I do what I call post and ghost. I post it, and then I don't read nothing about what I said. Just get out of there. I don't want to be involved in anybody else's opinions.

I used to like it. It meant I, you know, I was probably a relatively early adopter, you know, of it. But for a while there, it was like, oh, this is the thing that we've been looking for in that I can put a post up here saying that I'm gonna do a show in Germany and I don't have to spend a dollar on advertising, right. Or, you know, do the interviews and stuff, you know, and for a while there, it was really potent, but it's definitely dropped off. You know, it seems like there's a whole lot of people, the people that you'd want to be reading your stuff that have just decided, you know, my life's a lot better if I don't.

Yeah, that's the problem.

If I just get away from this negativity.

Well, there's so much negativity because, you know, first of all, the algorithms. So the algorithms enhance what you get involved with. And for the most part, people like to get involved with things that infuriate them. They get in, they like to get involved with things that make them upset. That's what it distracts them from, their daily life. Or maybe it's the thing that they think is an existential threat, and so it's consumed them. So they want to talk about it constantly. And so that's all you do feel.

We've got so many people around the world, places like Australia, like New Zealand, like England, like here, you know, whose anger is all based on misinformation.

Mmm.

You know, and they're sort of like they've had their morality rewired because they've been pummeled so much by stuff, but by somebody who doesn't care, right, what their response is, doesn't care whether what they're publishing is true. You know, they just don't care. I mean, I don't know if you ever saw it, but I played Roger Ailes in a tv series called the Loudest Voice, which basically is the beginning of Fox. And Roger had been a political pundit. He'd worked on television in the sixties, but then he met Richard Nixon and became an advisor to Nixon, and he tried to set up a White House news service back in the late sixties, tried it again in the seventies, tried it again in the early eighties, but the technology just wasn't there and the money wasn't there. But then he met Rupert Murdoch and explained to Rupert that all you need to do to attract 50% of the news audience is just make a decision politically, because that's half the available audience, you know? Yeah. And the way, you know, I can't remember all the figures and everything, but the way he set up Fox News, it just became an absolute cash cranking machine, you know, because they got it into the affiliates and stuff like that by offering it at a lower price.

And then, you know, got to his, you know, subscriber numbers that still had it making money between advertisers and subscribers at that lower price. So when that first deal then changed after ten years and people were then charged, you know, the subscribers were paying a regular price, all of that was profit because he already had it working at the lower price. You know, I think it's something like, you know, it was $10 ahead in an atmosphere where it was normally 33. So then when that first contract finished and it went to the normal subscriber rate, you know, you've got that difference in 77 million subscribers times an extra $23.

And that's the beginning of opinion based news coverage.

Foxes.

Yeah, yeah. Because that's when one publishable option. Yeah, yeah. And then you have a real problem today on social media where you have bots, where there's a really unknown number of entities that are commenting constantly in one way or another about political issues that aren't even real people.

Right.

It's computer platforms.

It gives the impression, exactly that there's, you know, more people for a particular situation than there is. In fact, in actual reality.

There was an FBI analyst that he made an estimation that it could be as many as 80% of the people on Twitter are bots.

This makes the whole thing useless, then, doesn't it?

It kind of does, in a way, but also, there are real people. You just got to find those real people, and there's plenty of interesting people to find, and anything that's free and open is going to be massive, you.

Know, and that's what I used to do is just, if anybody got on my timeline and chucked in some negative shit, I just blocked them. Yeah, just get them out of there, you know?

That's good move.

And for a long time, it kept that sort of village of people in a sort of a comfortable place because I just got rid of, you know, those voices. But now you have the situation where, you know, there's ads running and stuff on your timeline and you're not allowed to block it out anymore. You can't stop. Yeah, but it's not. It's funny because they're running, like, ads or they're popping up as ads, but it's. It's kind of. It'll have something dark in there. You know, that then, because it's on your timeline will attract more darkness. But you can't get rid of it anymore. You can't just block it and chuck it out. I mean, you can do it with individuals, but that's just a strange thing. Little thing that's happened.

Yeah, it is a strange little thing that's happened. Like I said, I just don't engage. I only post things.

I never got into Facebook. I never really. So I don't understand it. And I don't really understand Instagram either, though. We use it for stuff to inform people about gigs with the band. But Twitter was the only one that I was interested in because it was whack. It was funny, and it was. And you're connecting to people all over the world. I've had some really funny situations arrive, you know, because of something I commented on that, and somebody gave me another piece of information about or whatever, you know. So I've learned a hell of a lot out of it. But just the last year or two, it's gotten worse. It's gotten to a kind of a harsh place.

Yeah. It's going to continue in that way, too. That's how you get engagement, unfortunately. There's also a lot of fun stuff. I mean, memes. I laugh harder at things that I find online today. I mean, I think there's more comedy online today than there's ever been before. There's more funny memes. I mean, it's like a completely new form of art.

Yeah.

Images with funny titles and funny captions.

Yeah, there's a few of me around.

Yeah, I'm sure.

I'm sure there's one particular one that comes up all the time. There's a shot from les mis where I'm looking in this doorway, and I'm in, you know, police uniform of the time, and I just kind of go slide into this doorway, and people apply it to so many different situations.

Gift. Like when Homer Simpson melts into the bushes.

Yep. It's like that.

There's a ton of those, you know, I mean, I think it's fascinating because it's a new thing. I think all this information that's being exchanged online, even though it's messy, even though it's kind of negative, I'm very hopeful because I think. I think we're going to figure all that stuff out eventually if we don't kill ourselves. And it's going to get to a better place of understanding human beings, because you're going to be human beings just interacting with human beings in a pure sense without forming our narratives from mass media, without forming our narratives from television, you're going to get dissenting opinions, people that give more nuanced perspective on things. And if you follow the right people and you read the right things, and you do kind of shy away from a lot of the more polarizing arguments and the ideological stuff, you can learn a lot, I think. I'm very hopeful about it.

Right. But, yeah, well, I always, you know, I try not to see us at our worst. You know, there's always sort of something that I can find that gives me a little bit of hope with people.

Yeah.

Yeah. But it's. It's. It's just funny because it, to me, it felt like the beginning of the future, that we were now connected, and information exchange was, was open, and I thought, this is going to lead to great changes, and it has led to changes, but they're not so great.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, you know, even with a little operation like my band, you know, somebody just pops up, they start telling. Selling fake tickets, fake meet and greet experiences, you know.

Yeah.

They take money and orders for merchandise that they're never going to produce. You know, it's just, it's crazy. I mean, you know, and there's no, there's nothing in there stopping them from doing it.

Right. That is a problem. Yeah, I'm optimistic, and even in the face of all this stuff, I'm optimistic. I think we're moving to a greater place of understanding each other. It's just going to be a wild ride.

Right. You know, full contact by 2027. Is that what they say?

I don't know. What do you think?

I don't know, man. I don't know. But I like reading all that stuff.

Yeah, I do. Too. I get too involved in it, but.

I try and try and shy away from coming up with a definitive opinion because then you're sort of out on the edge of that limb and you go, well, it looked like that to me.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

But it would. It just would be. It'll be interesting the next couple of years, for sure. You know, I think I'm a little worried about America in the next little while. You know, I haven't been here for five years, man. 2019. I finished loudest voice and I went home and then Covid hit, and I had kind of an incredible experience where, you know, I said to my boys, look, you know, you're cool in the city with your mom and everything, but I might go up to the bush and be with my parents because, you know, they're older and everything's going to change for them and stuff like that. So I ended up, you know, I've owned my place in the bush since 96, but 2020 was the first time I'd seen all four seasons of the same year at the farm, you know, and I got this thing where, you know, my dad dies in March 2021. And so often you talk to people and they say, you know, I wish it had one more. More dinner, one more hug, one more conversation or whatever, you know. But when I looked at it. Cause it was a surprise when he died, it wasn't expecting.

He was 85, but he seemed to be quite healthy, you know. And in reality, when I looked at it, it's like, well, I got a whole year. I got a whole year of, like, you know, having dinner pretty much every night with my mom and dad and asked him a million questions and stuff. Not because I thought he was about to pass away. It was just because, you know, we had the time together, you know, and it took him on a few adventures, you know, like, I was digging a huge dam on my place to try and make it, you know, drought proof, you know. So I now have a 70 megalitre lake in the middle of my place, which gives me enough water to feed the cattle and stuff for seven years, something like that, you know. And, you know, like, one day we went out. I went out to show them this, you know, what was basically a hole in the ground at the time, about a football field size hole in the ground. And I took him out in a buggy, and the clouds came over and it started pissing down with rain.

So I've got 83 year old old man who fucking doesn't move too fast or whatever. I've got to put him back in the buggy and drive. And by the time we got, like, halfway back to the house, it was absolutely torrential rain, you know, just, like, getting covered in it. I was so worried. I thought, oh, my God, I'm gonna make him sick or whatever. I got him back to the house, and I said, I'm so sorry about that. He said, are you kidding? That's the most fun I've had in years. These people referring to my mother and the other people that are there to help him out, he goes, these people don't let me do anything. So we just had little moments like that where we just got to share some stuff. And then my schedule has been extremely busy since COVID but I've been working in other places. Thailand, Malta, Hungary, England, you know, just constant, constantly working. But because of what we learned with COVID in terms of being able to just drop in on a tv show, my studio on the farm now push a few buttons, and I can be live on, you know, a New York tonight show, you know?

So I've restructured what I do with press. You know, I do my junkets at my house, you know, and I might have a nice shirt here, but just like today, I've got shorts on underneath, and I walk out of, you know, a day of press, and I'm in the bush, you know, I got the horses and the cows and the dogs, and I'm, you know, cool. So it still changed my life, but it's meant I haven't been here, so it's been a five year gap, you know, to flying into New York the other day, and it's a palpable difference in the way, you know, people regard each other and the way they talk and the fears they express. You know? Surprisingly, though, New York felt friendlier.

Really?

Yeah. It might have something to do with the weed shops. Everybody was just a little more chill, you know? But there's. There's a fear in everybody at the moment here, and I I'm just not sure where that's going to go, you know? Know? Doesn't feel healthy.

Yeah, it doesn't feel healthy for me, either.

Um, listen, man, I really thing with America, right. You got to remember that it is the beacon of freedom for everybody in the world. It's a huge responsibility, you know? And if people. If people are looking for something to change in their life or something positive, the vast majority of people will look towards America and say, well, that's the biggest. You know, I want to live like that, where people can say, what's on their mind and people can have differing opinions. People can be of all different, you know, races, religions or whatever and still be in the same community. You know, it's so important that America remains healthy into the future for everyone, not just for Americans.

Agreed. Thank you very much, man. Thanks for being here. I really enjoyed our conversation.

My pleasure.

It was beautiful.

Thank you for having me. Is going to be so happy that when he sees my name come off on the list of things, he's going to be very happy. And I want to just thank you on his behalf for being a voice that accepts different opinions and doesn't push a particular agenda. You've definitely helped his brain expand and helped him become curious, and so I. Thanks for that.

Beautiful. Thank you.

Cool.

Thanks for everything.

Cheers, man.

Say hi to your son. Bye, everybody.

Thank you.