#2191 - Russell Crowe

26:27So everything, you're fine. I said, yeah, cool. But how are we going to do this? Is this going to be like a CGI thing or whatever? Oh, no, no. The tarantula man is here. Do I fucking what? The tarantula man is here. And he has shown a variety of creatures to the director and she has chosen the largest. It could be a great day. Anyway, good luck with it. And off he talks. So I go inside and they show him, he'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.

27:06They're going to place the tarantula on your chest. The tarantula wrangler will give 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. Your tickle, tickle, tickle. Tarantula will run up here and into your mouth. And then the guy will pluck it out of your mouth, you know. 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, whatever.

27:52I'm used to spiders, you know. That was a large one, right? So on my chest, tickle, tickle, tickle. And then the other one comes up and comes into my mouth, right? And 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, no. We're just going to shoot. We're just going to 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.

28:29So it's perfectly safe. 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. And we're taking a long time between takes, resetting lights or not. But after about the fifth take, I get a moment to talk to tarantula man. How you doing? And 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 watt. Okay, so what I thought was my only safety net got, right?

29:09So 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, clean lights, you know, because it didn't look like anybody used this studio for a long long time. And I'm heating up. And at one point in time, it was about take seven or eight. And the spot it 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. And then I'm sort of like just lying there, go, and then the tarantula guy tickles it up and goes. And I'm kind of like, well, what was that? How long does it have to sit in your mouth for?

29:49It'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. For as long as they see it going in, then they can cut around it to make it look like it's disappeared in that, 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, right? The next day, I wake up and I've got a rash all over me. My legs and my chest and my arms, you know, so I call production. They call a doctor who knows about these sort of things.

30:28He comes over to see me, he goes, ah, okay. All right. See, were you hot yesterday? The nose has had a very hot in under the lights, the thought of that, it gets right, right? And the spider's stopped and he goes, okay. See tarantulas on their legs have these very fine hairs. So fine, in fact, that they can easily go through a poor and 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, you're just going to have this rash. So here's this nightmare, 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, you know, pretty sure in the history of cinema.

31:23I'm the only Academy Award -winning actor who's ever been fucked in the neck by tarantula.

31:31Was that what he was doing? Apparently. They just decided that was a good spot. Just decided I was moist and juicy and it was going to 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 see your allergic 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 had major injuries and stuff, 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.

32:12Cortisol? Yeah, cortisol. I'm allergic to cortisol. Oh, yeah, cortisol. Yeah, that is odd. That could be a real problem, especially if you don't know. Yeah, well, that's when it was around about done I found out.

32:29God damn, man. So, is that like the most uncomfortable you've ever been in a scene? Hell no. Really? No, man. I had to go into the water on the southwest coast of Iceland, shirtless for a Darren Aronowski movie. Now, cold out water is man. Oh, yeah. You know, 15 minutes she dead. Yeah. And I was just walking in there and I had to drop into a chest first, right? You know, no collapses into the water or whatever it was. But it was weird. I hit that water. And like, I'm, you know, displayed out like that. But every muscle in my body contracted was like, I hovered back out of the water. You know, it's like I hit the water.

33:11I came straight back out. Back on the buffet. I don't know how I did it, but it was so cold. But, you know, I mean, temperatures one thing, you know, and you tend to in the film business, you know, if you're, if the script says 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, the whatever that most comfortable way of shooting that scene might be, there'll be something that makes it uncomfortable.

33:51But, you know, I mean, terms of discomfort on, comfort on film says, 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 Noah. I flew back to Australia to watch a football game, actually. My football team that I bought in 2006, it finally made a preliminary final after many years of trying. And I wanted to be there to witness that 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, right?

34:31And I was doing Noah. I fit as a bull, strongest and ox, absolutely. So I rock up to the little athletic day, you know. And they asked me if I would step in and do this, you know, little running race, you know, things I said, yeah, cool. 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, you know, 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 up behind him, he got really excited. And they jumped up and they were all standing on the finish line, right?

35:04And so I sort of, you know, I got up behind him and I let him like just pass me them and 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, boom. I'm lying on the ground like I'm like vibrating. And my little boy's there and he's only like seven or something at the time. He's like, that was fun, you know, dad, you know, I couldn't talk. And he was like, oh, God, 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.

35:39So 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 arc with 5 ,000 extras. You know, 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. So I'm getting rained on with these gigantic drops. I got 5 ,000 extras around me. Actually, no, not 5 ,000. Maybe about a thousand extras around me. And I've got no hamstrings and it's seen requires me to run. And because I've taken time off the set and everything, I can't tell anybody that I've injured myself.

36:22I just have to get on with it. I didn't want any insurance problems or anything else. So that was crazy. And that sequence went on for days. So I was like, you know, literally, man, it was just getting like KT tape and just taping them off. Jesus Christ. Both hamstrings blown, having to run. That's insane. Yeah, but at your skids, your kids athletics thing, it was like, that's just such a cliche. It's ridiculous. 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.

37:05It was like, I must have just been in 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 to 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 host 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.

37:52And 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'd see that. 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 arc and this rain falling. So we had that whole area had to have a rain. So here it is. Yeah, right. That's incredible. That's all done with towers. Yeah. Oh, 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.

38:31It's the time old story of the savior of the human race after God's wrath. Yeah. It's not a weak plan or all 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 push back press about how, you know, I 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's like what? It was just so weird. And it was like, article after article pushing back as if he had done something, you know, against Christianity or whatever, boy, boy, by connecting with you.

39:28By acknowledging that this is a story about our environment and how we treat our environment and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I quite enjoy the film, but it's harsh. It's a harsh, you know, telling. 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 roughing 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 your grape. So let's do a movie, a Roman movie. So Darren's version was that never at any stage, will I have you at the prow of an arc, flanked by a giraffe and a lion?

40:19Because the funny thing with Noah, man, 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. You know, 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.

41:04Right. And we can see it, we can see and date it, and everything with how we can view our world now with the science that's come along. So there's no doubt that there was a flood, you know, or 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 all it isn't it, because if that's the end, we should be then be able to have definitive proof of that.

41:51It seems like somebody should have gone there and figured that out yet. Right. Yeah, it's probably been discredited. What you were 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 dry's impact. The younger dry's impact is somewhere around, they think there's multiple times this happened somewhere around 11 ,800 years ago. And again, somewhere in the 10 ,000's, that this is what happened that caused the end of the ice age. This is what caused the great flooding across North America.

42:31That doesn't that that date coincides with what would be the end of Gebekli Teppi, right? Yes, yes. Coincides with that and it also there's a lot of physical evidence of it with core samples. And this used to be kind of a fringe theory, but they started doing core samples and they found a high level of a rhythm, which is a very common 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.

43:11He 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, immediate. So it's like the ice age and the meat. The date has happened. 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.

43:47That something slammed into the ice caps, which were at that point in time, between one and two miles high in 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 had washed over. Well, there's physical evidence of this all throughout, like the Pacific Northwest, you can find these things.

44:24And he thinks that's what ended the ice age, killed off 65 % of the megafauna in North America and that it happened like that. It happened very quickly. And that's the Noah's Ark story. I mean, that is it. That is the story, which is why it's so fat. It's so interesting that people wanted to dismiss biblical stories. They say, oh, it was an oral tradition for a thousand years, if it was ever written down, like, right, right. But what was it based on? What the fuck happened? Something happened. Every culture has a story of something like that happening. Very likely something happened. When I was doing the research building up to it, I was quite surprised because in my naivety, I actually had considered it was only a Christian thing and I didn't realize it was touched on everywhere until I was doing that film.

45:15Yeah, so, do you have, was there any hesitancy in taking on a religious character like that? Was such significance to it? No, that was the exciting bit. Yeah.

45:31It was a very busy year. It was 2012 in that year. I played Superman's dad the year before. I mean, I was the fittest I'd ever been. I worked with a guy called Mark Twight. You ever heard of him? No. 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, I 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.

46:14You know, I like that kind of mateship. You know, I mean, you've been in the trenches or whatever. And so the following year, 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 Miers with all that beautiful cast and so I 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, it was a lot of physical stuff on that movie.

47:04And 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 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. 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. What would you do if you had all the time that you wanted?

47:46Go and talk to people. 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 writings add junk to the Torah about Noah. I 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 beautiful to volume, old testament and New Testament that Darren got me. That was the beginning of the research. But there's not really much else you can do because you can't go and look up old photos or anything. Pretty much stepping into that world.

48:31So I'm trying to understand Darren's perspective on what he was trying to show that there had been a big civilization already. So there's a civilization prior to Noah. So you're already talking about a post -apocalyptic world that they're living in and another apocalypse is coming. And it's all based on human behavior and what have you. There's a sequence in the film that some people miss where Noah is looking into these people who are all the ones who have allowed themselves to give into their base desires or what have you. And within the group of people, he sees a man who looks like a rat, you know, gnawing away at the body of something, possibly another.

49:18Human and it's him. 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 four hundred million or something. It's bizarre that there's controversy attached to it being that it is about the climate. It's bizarre that that's become a weird political point. And that 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.

50:06Yeah, it's a bit odd. The fucking environment, the very thing we live in, that that's a political angle is so strange. It is so strange because 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, etc. That's a irrefutable fact. You can't sort of 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. The same things were being talked about in the early 70s, what a time it was in primary school, that are now actually physically happening.

50:56But some people just want to see it as yet another game or whatever. That's really much more important than that. It's strange because 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. What is the thing that's driving us the most and what is the thing that we can do to mitigate that? I think things like the cows farting, I think that's misinformation that just gets thrown out there to spread the blame or whatever. Because we are told over and over again that there were so many more animals on this planet at a certain point.

51:43So if we've killed off 80 % or whatever the animals had existed, what about their thoughts? That was a don as well thought compared to a cow fart. The thing is what we're doing is very unnatural. We're serving them grain and we're keeping them in pens and then 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 then actually sequester's carbon. A real regenerative farm is carbon neutral. It's not the issue. I run 220 angus on my place in the bush. Over time I learnt that all of those factory farming processes are just the absolute wrong thing to do.

52:42When I first had land and cattle I used to love getting up in the dawn and in the darkness. The cow had on, stock whip and getting out and hurting them and all that sort of stuff. Over time I started to realise that that's not good for them. That's not good for them. We developed this system of my place where we have a single laneway and all of the other paddocks go on to that laneway. The paddocks can be 100 acres or whatever. But you can muster one man, soft voice, handful of grain. Just to open the gate you call out a couple of times they come towards you. You can get every cow in that laneway and you get up behind them and walk them straight to the yards.

53:36We've taken all the fun out of it but it's safer, easier, sensible. We don't use host pipes, we don't use stock whip anymore, we don't muster on ATVs. It's either on foot or horseback and 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. 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 it's not a trend, it's a cattle. If you don't abuse them, it's just better. It's more tasteful, it doesn't have, really a trend, it gets a very gamey quality.

54:34The steak that we serve on the farm, 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 I found out that everybody in the butchery game is similar to working with people that sell used cars. They're only looking for the story, they don't really care about the animal. 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 for a great life. It makes sense. It's smarter, it's less karma. It's a better situation for them. They just feel healthier.

55:18I went fully organic at one point, took us five or seven years to get the certification. But then I would walk amongst the cattle. Because we couldn't douse them because they were organic cattle now. Things like buffalo fly and other little things that were just all over them. I thought, that can't be good either. It's like having a kid and never giving the kid a panadol if it gets a fever. By the time that kid's 14, it hasn't overcome it. It's not the biggest, best stronger. There's a little bloke in the corner. He spent most of his life sick because he never got the medicine to make it easier for his body to recover.

56:05That kind of was happening in the cows. They lost a lot of weight and they just looked in distress. I keep my pastures organic. But I do topical treatments for the cattle. They don't have to deal with ticks and buffalo fly and things like that. Where my place is, it's still considered coastal. We get all of the bitey things that can affect them negatively. I have that balance. I can't sell the meat as organic meat. But the hand raised organic pasture. As I say, they don't get adrenaline through their life. When we do call them, the meat is a profound experience. Do you sell it online? How does someone get it?

56:53No, no, I don't sell it. You don't sell it online. Well, occasionally there's one butcher near me that I trust. He's really into what he does. He will ask if he can have a couple of beasts and I'll let him have it. We do sell to some neighbors that we know, you know, needing a little bit of assistance. I don't want to sort of put it in any other terms. But we sell it to them. But we sell it to them for less than it costs to produce. And way less than they would be spending if they went to the supermarket. But basically, I have the cows to feed my family. So my kids are very snobby about steak.

57:41Because they've grown up with the best you can... Well, anyway, the most humane way to produce it, for sure. How did you get started doing this? It seems like you're a very busy person to be starting a regenerative farm. Well, it comes from when 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 mum and dad went 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.

58:23And I didn't really go home very much. And 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 mum 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 17, 100 acres or something now. But once I had the land, then I started feeling like well, you've got to do something with it. You know, it can't just be 100 acres of 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.

59:04You 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. I know they were big long horn 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 that 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 two o 'clock in the morning, I'm working up because the rain is coming.

59:48And 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 two thirty, oh my god, 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 you know, I looked around on the shed and I had enough bits and pieces to make a fence for one side.

1:00:30Right. 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 was 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 right. Absolutely like tropical, right. And it took me about, I don't know, 40 minutes, something like that. So it's deep in the middle of the night now to fix the fence. And then I got them running and they'd come into towards me. I could see one was about to jinker away. So I had to sort of dance along with my, but it was amazing.

1:01:09You know, I stopped that one little bloke and he rejoined 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 don't lay it out some hay and stuff. And I left a little light on. He told stories like that to farmers. And I think you're an absolute idiot. Wow. What are you doing, mate? He had to learn how to do it some way, but I think that's. But it's just for me the next day when the truck came to pick them up, they were all happy and healthy and, you know, not covered in brown shit, you know. So, yeah, but so I'm not really a farmer.

1:01:47So but I got land. I mean, that sounds like at least a practicing farmer. I mean, you actually did it. Yeah, well, we still do. 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 that sometimes the price of meat goes down or whatever, or the costs around calling 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.

1:02:26Right. So, 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 get so distorted when you have these factory farming operations. 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 damage the business. So, you know, we give grain to our cattle because there is, you know, a nice texture and stuff that comes to the meat beyond being grass fed.

1:03:03But 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 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 then, and I think it's partly to do with the fact that they stay active and everything, we get a natural 7 to 10 percent 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 stake is like an absolute protein pill.

1:03:47It'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. Just like humans are not so good. But I think again, that balanced thing of like their life on grass and then just before you call 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 never stop that. Right. And you've, and, but you have the thing of them being fit because you've never made them like stand still in a pen.

1:04:28Right. It's got to 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 do when we occasionally will have a fresh guest that's never been there before. And we'll do things like, you're going to love buttercup. She was such a... She's a Australian sense of humor. We just put somebody off their meal just as they're about to eat. Yeah. Yeah. But I did use to name them, but I stopped naming them because that was an extra level of pain. Yeah. And plus, you know, when you got 20 back in the 11th and 9th, but when you're 220, it's a bit difficult.

1:05:09Well, it's, yeah, you don't want to be naming something you're going to eat. It's just too weird. It's weird enough for me and people are so disconnected from where their food comes from already. Just the concept of killing it themselves seems important. But the concept of living without meat seems terrible, too. Just we're completely disconnected from the act of how it gets to the point.

1:05:33Yeah. And the thing that I'm going to announce is, 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 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, you know, at every corner in almost every city, there's a place where you can get a quick piece of meat.

1:06:13You know, quick, quick 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'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. Yeah. My mom was a caterer.

1:06:50Oh, right. 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 salt around. But that one's good. And it used to be available when I was a kid and they stopped selling it in Australia for years. So we'd have to, you know, every friend was coming over. It's like, I grab some garlic salt, but you can bite again there now. But yeah, that's really simple, just salt and pepper, you know. I don't do anything. What kind of grill? Extreme. I'm full 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.

1:07:38Because I like to have color on the steak. I like this. This is... Someone teach you this method or 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 photo officer 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 do like cook 150 steaks on a Monday night if I was in town.

1:08:16And you know, just over time, I cook it to my own taste, obviously. You use charcoal, hardwood, what do you use? I use gas most of the time. And you throw oil over the gas? Yeah, yeah. We got oil. Olive oil. Because I just want that absolute heat so it's 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 flame. That's your method. Yeah, well that's, you know, that only lasts 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.

1:08:58Really? Yeah, I want that first hit to see that outside of the steak and that's the side that gets presented to the person that's going to eat. Are you cooking a thin steak, a thick steak, height? Doesn't matter. But normally we only cook, you know, sort of restaurant cuts. So our, I feel it, I think is your tenderloin.

1:09:25Our porterhouse is your New York cut. Well, we have porterhouse, too. Yeah, one side of the porterhouse is the tenderloin, one side of the porter. Or with the filet mignon and the other side is the New York steak. Yes, that's a Scotch fillet. Oh, okay. Interesting. Funny we have a different name, so the same bits of meat. But, yes, our New York strip is a porterhouse where I come from. Oh. Really? Our porterhouse on this side of the pond always has a bone in it. Pretty much. Yeah. You guys don't know. Yeah, that's a tea bar. What's your ribeye? Out what you call ribeye, I believe, is tenderloin, right?

1:10:08No. So that's, that's our, I fillet. 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 along the back and underneath. And then the rib meat, like right where the rib hits that portion of the very fatty rib steak, that's the ribeye. And, you know, or a tomahawk. You get it with the rib bone on it. Right. It's a tomahawk. Right. Yeah. Well, our sort of tea bone is half New York's steak and half. I fillet. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we have that too. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm not 100 % sure of the top of all the different names for the meat in America.

1:10:54But, yeah, they tend to be quite thick cuts. You know, I don't really, we don't really do any of that steak in a thin cut. The first time I ever ate a steak in Australia, I was, this was like a long time ago. But before, before I really understood the difference between grass fed meat and grain fed meat, I was like, this is different. It tastes weird. It tastes weird. It tastes like, like richer. You know, at the time, I don't even think I liked it. At the time, I was expecting like an American style steak. Right. And I got it, this rich red grass fed steak. It's like, wow, the weird steak doesn't take like, tastes like American meat.

1:11:29Right. But when was the first time I went to Australia? It was for a UFC. It was quite a few years ago, at least a decade ago. Right. Yeah. What do you think of this one championship thing? It's great. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I like all of these organizations. I'm happy that there's more options for fighters. But one championship is huge. I started watching a dog about that guy the other day. I didn't finish it though. Chartres. 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.

1:12:04And 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 in. And he would, 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. Which is good for a film. And I did a rewrite on the script last year. It's really full of heart now, you know. So many times when people approach fighters particularly in that sort of, you know, mixed martial arts, whatever, everybody's insane.

1:12:57And that's just not really the truth, you know what I mean? Yeah, there 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. Right. And that's why I think this script now has a real beating heart. So I think it's going to be a good project. Daniel McPherson, young Australian actor, he's going to 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.

1:13:31The one that you did. Yeah, that's one of my favorite experiences actually. So you're a real man. Yeah, and the story of Braddock, that's an amazing story. Incredible story. Yeah, we met like funny resistance here with the release that the people couldn't get their heads around the fact that the movie called Cinderella Man was about a boxer. Fucking America. It was like, really? It's funny. It's that hard to get. Yeah. And it was like classic Cinderella story is a thing that is always used in sports. It's a chicken, right? But it's used for men and sports all the time. Well, it was, it was some famous American writer Damon Runion or whatever who coined the phrase.

1:14:16He wrote the story of James James James Jay Braddock. He's a Cinderella story. Yeah. That's where he got the nickname. But I just, you know, sometimes you're playing characters that you don't really write as a person or whatever, or you know, sometimes you're playing very negative characters. You know, earlier this year I did a new in book where I played home and going. So that's going to be coming out soon. Looking forward to people seeing that. But Braddock was such an experienced man because everything that I read about him, the stories I heard about him, I just liked him more and more. You know, which can be a bit of a dangerous thing as an actor.

1:14:57I try not to fall in love with the character. You know what I say is I'm in love with the job. You know, so my job is to show you who that person is, whether it's positive or negative. 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 what I mean? Yeah. It's sort of like, so that's how I sort of keep the 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 role really.

1:15:34And bring him back to a consciousness because people have forgotten about him. Yeah. What was the physical training like? I was Angela, man. I was Angela, come here. Okay, kid. Angela, don't be. There's one role. One role around here. That is you. Listen to me. That's how we do it. Right? I talk and you listen. And that I'm going to teach you to open anybody up like a can of tomatoes. That's what we're going to do, kid. Open them up like a can of tomatoes. Let's go. Wow. It 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.

1:16:16He was like, you know, I mean, occasionally, if you asked about somebody that had a negative experience with, you know, he would sort of like see, he was 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, less 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 opinion. But for his public part of that was to just like be positive, you know.

1:16:56And he'd work with so many fighters and 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 a beautiful thing happens, you can see it in Cinderella, man. There's a moment towards the end of the movie, right? Where Bratix won, is won the world championship. And I'm standing in the ring and I'm walking towards my corner, right? And this little bored man walks towards me, right? And it's just this shot. I start laughing and I bend forward and I kiss him on his head, right? Because he's walking towards me in the ring and he was going, number 16, baby, number 16.

1:17:43And that's what he called me for the rest of his life whenever I saw him. He would introduce me to people as, this is my friend Russell, number 16. Wow. Cool, man. But, you know, I mean, a normal day training for that film, you wake up in the morning, you go for 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. You have a little bit of lunch, then we'd do the second boxing session. After the second boxing session, we'd do weights. Then you'd have about 90 minutes off. Then we'd have dinner and then you go for a walk.

1:18:23And the next day, we'll 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. You know, all the old stuff, but he was aware of all the new stuff as well. You know, that's the oldest stuff. You know, just sitting, you know, well, I mean, we did yoga, but, you know, he only thought of it as stretching. You know what I mean? But it was, you know, yoga, and he was like, he set the schedule and pace on everything for that film. Wow. Yeah, I had him in my working life for six months, man. That's incredible. It's just gold. Did you think about having a fight?

1:19:04Oh, we had a few. Real ones? Like in the gym? There's real ones in the movie, man. Really, yeah. You get to a certain point. Five and a half thousand, six thousand choreographed moves. Right? You get to a certain point. How do you accelerate this? How do you change the rhythm, you know?

1:19:26So 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? James, who do we can find that? And what would be the scene? What would be the scene? It would look proper. It would 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, there's, you go through a series of fights. Currently forgetting the man's name. His first name is Troy. I can't remember his surname.

1:20:09He went on to become a light -heavoid 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 Southport and we both went in the same direction. We clashed heads. Fuck me. And then we just kept to keep going with the scene. But I'm like literally seeing stars. It was like somebody had put a piece of metal through my temple. We just, 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.

1:20:50He was fast and he was like on me all the time. Do you fit as fuck back then? A little bit. I was 40. 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 hospital. 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, man. You've got to, you know, you've got to put that effort in to, you know, to honor them. Yes. 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.

1:21:40You know, he used to do this little foot flick thing 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 like grabbing 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 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. It was a very interesting experience during that movie.

1:22:19And Ron Howard, as the director, you know, had 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. So when we first started that shoot, I don't know if you know this, but I sub -luxated my left shoulder. I was doing a little fight with a guy called Wayne Gordon, another Canadian Olympian. And he just caught me on that point in my elbow and just pulled 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.

1:22:59So I had to go and have an operation. I told the labrum tissue and broke the bone. So I had an op and the normal recovery is like three and a half months or something. 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, no, no. I've waited for years to do this film. And I've 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 cortisol? Yeah, which was, you know, really problematic on that situation. You know, but 20 days on the 21st day, for 21st day of rehab, I stepped in the ring and did 10, 3 minute rounds.

1:23:48On 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 to cut this short, you're 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 English who's actually from... How long are you in town for? After this. I leave tomorrow morning. What time tomorrow morning? About 10 or 11 or something. I might be able to get you treated before then. Really? There's a stem cell clinic I work with in town.

1:24:23Ways to well. Well, incredible. This is the thing I think it's the family of the guy I'm talking about. Really? Yeah. I met him here. I don't know if you know this member. Way back in the day, Austin was my place. Really? Yeah, yeah. We came here in 2000, 2001. August 14 or 15 is 30 of what a grunster. As Governor Rick Perry at the time, he declared it that because we bought so many tourist dollars into town. In the middle of August, bringing 2000 plus people who have flown in, got a motel, and they're going to go to a rock and roll show over at Stubbs. That was the thing. It's funny because we haven't sold out this time.

1:25:04We're here. We play tonight, but we haven't... Where are you at tonight? Stubbs. I love Stubbs. We did shows there at Dave Spell and I during the pandemic. When everything was shut down, we tested the entire crowd. We did outside shows. It was awesome. Oh, cool. I went there first just to have some barbecue with an Adam a conversation with Rodriguez, the director, you know, who lived here. And then, you know, a year and a bit later, I'm walking on that stage with unbelievable. I was here to record at William Elson's place. And we said, why don't we do on Friday's? We'll just do little shows in town, right?

1:25:46Cool. So, we booked a play at Stubbs because a friend of a friend knew Charles Atal and the boys that set Stubbs up. 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. It's cool. 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 of change. It's exploded.

1:26:32It's exploded. There's 250 ,000 people back there. Yeah. You know, it's nearly a million now. It's a million in the city and another million in the surrounding areas. Yeah. But coming in from the airport, I was like, I can't even, I don't know where I am. You know, the view point 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.

1:27:07You know what I mean? I'm 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. It's 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 is cooled down considerably. Yeah. Because whoever was going to move here moved here. Right. You know, and then it's like, everyone was expecting that the boom would keep going.

1:27:37Right. But it hasn't keep going. It hasn't kept going at all. It's gotten to a million. A million's good size for a city. It's about perfect. Yeah. You can get everything you need and you get at the speed that you wanted at in this competition in all areas. 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 it. I'm like, you guys are adorable. This traffic is cute. This is cute traffic. Living 25 plus years in LA. Right. I know what real traffic is like. Even in LA, I moved there in 94. It was nothing like it is now.

1:28:13It could be two o 'clock in the morning and you're bumping on traffic for an hour and a half. It's bananas. I mean, look at New York, man. I mean, I was shooting beautiful mind once we had a late night. 2 .30, 3 o 'clock in the morning. I mean, a tunnel coming back from Jersey. And we just stopped. Mobbed. We're there for an hour 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. I know they know how to fix it. I know they knew how to build it. It's been there forever. I know. But this is going to be that day, right?

1:28:45It's going to be one day. You can see enough movies to know. I see enough movies. It's going to spring a fucking leak. 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. And we can't meet the fuck out of here. We're 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 we're going over there all the time, right? I'm living right next to the Liberty Hellowed Pad in Chelsea.

1:29:17Just a ten minute trip. Yeah. Give me out of the freaking car. Yeah. Because that movie was so... It was a lot to carry around. The freaking mindset. I 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 an helicopter. Ten minutes. That's pretty nice. That's pretty cool. That was a fantastic movie. It really was. Beautiful mind. It was one of my favorite movies. It's cool. 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 get yourself into that mindset?

1:30:00The relief when that movie was over was huge. Because you do tie yourself in knots a little bit when you're playing a character like that. And that's part of the job when you just go with that flow. But yeah, I was very, very happy to put all of the detail of those diseases aside. Because the guy that wrote it, his mom and dad, you know, treat people with schizophrenia. So he had a lot of first -hand knowledge that he could pass on to me. 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. The thing about Beautiful Mind is it has a device in the film.

1:30:43The 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. If I'd been watching him or am I inside his head. And then that's the thing that, like, worldwide, that trick works. You know, I saw that movie a few premieres around the world. And there's this gasp that comes out of the audience. And it's only 15, 20 minutes in when they go, and they realize that they've been inside the head of a sick man. As opposed to watching some spy drama unfold. Right. That was, I read that script here. Really? Yeah. I was doing the shows at 2000 Stubbs.

1:31:29I'd read it 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 where it was 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 because I need you to read it now. And he'd been part of the Gladiator. So I read it and I ended up bringing him and thanking it because the experience of reading the script was 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.

1:32:10Your same experience of reading it is the experience you have when you're watching in the cinema. Yeah, man. So it was about two o 'clock 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 saw I read 10 pages that'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. I'm absolutely doing that fucking movie. Wow. 100%. Wow. Wow. So that's exactly what you're talking about.

1:32:50The kind of film that just gets in your skin. I've said it lots of times, but it's a physical response. It's like goosebumps. It's like I'm reading it and that'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. And 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've stuck true to that even as I was saying before, sometimes it can be a really imperfect document. But there's just a couple of things that resonate. So it's like, OK, you have to do it.

1:33:31My joke is that in that way I respect the gods of film. It's like I'm only there. It's like I have my reasons and I need to be there. And so that way now it doesn't always work out. But you can do the greatest pedigree movie and it tanks. You can have A -list and number one, A -list and number two, A -list director, great subject matter. Nobody goes and see it. See, there's a sort of a type of alchemy. And 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. But I still like to work in an independent world because if one hits, that's the one that's going to be fun and important or whatever.

1:34:17If it comes out nowhere. Yes. So, yeah, I don't, you know, studio films, it's great, you know, if it's the right situation. I'm not sort of saying that there's a negative in doing that. If you know what I've done, I've done 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 Hunters Russian father in Sony Marvel. So it's sort of like, you know, 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.

1:35:09You know, the thing about my job, man, is in reality most film directors who work with a genius, the genius people. You know, male film or whatever. The person 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 at 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 me working with Ridley, it's like I get to hold the paint palette for Titian.

1:35:49What Titian's doing is shit. And he turns to me and goes, Russell, I need more blue. 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. It's incredible. Super creative people. I love the thought of like appeasing the film gods. That attitude is the right attitude. You know, I know I say it as a sort of a witter sism as a joke, but it's actually what I fundamentally believe. Yes, I think it's real. I think there's something to it. But if you approach everything like that, everything. Yes, yeah. Yeah. I don't know if they're gods or I don't know what it is, but there's something.

1:36:31There's something there. Something real. 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 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.

1:37:10And I thought, you know, before there's another one and that water's muddied, you know, I'm going to take my kids over so they can really experience it. So I was talking to my mom and my father just recently passed away and I said, why don't 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.

1:37:49So she came along and we were doing all the normal family stuff together, touristy stuff, Spanish steps, Fontana de Triavi. I took the kids to see the old office, the Colosseum. You know, the old office. 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. I 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? Now I've done the tourist thing, you know, thousand new special friends and you in the Sistine Chapel. Natural light, I've done that.

1:38:30So the idea that we could walk in there by a side, 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 chatty fellow. I'm my old man. You know, he used to make friends very easily. So, you know, we went through that and I could see it affecting her. And then I took a sense of the Sistine Chapel. It's unbelievable, man. I'll do it exactly the way I do it on stage for you, man, because it's a funny moment.

1:39:17This guy comes up and goes, Raster, for you today, I will turn on the lights of the Pope. I said, sorry, I'm going to go, well, the Pope, he 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 his 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. You feel like you can see the paint strokes. So, you're there under Michelangelo's genius in the light.

1:39:57And I said to the guy, that was amazing. You know, what did you do that? And he goes, Raster, please, my symbol. You are the eighth king of Rome.

1:40:09But 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. 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. 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 that man, what's the music? And he says, well, it's a Wednesday. The Swiss God's band is rehearsing.

1:40:49They only play ecclesiastical music. But I can hear what they're playing and so come on, 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 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 God's band, they just happen to be playing. The song that played at my father's funeral.

1:41:31When 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. 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, if you focus on using your imagination and your personal energy to change things around you, they will change.

1:42:20You can do a lot of things with simply the power of your beautiful mind.

1:42:31So 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 a thing that happens occasionally in a person's life. 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 possible? Did you talk to the band? I would want to talk to them. Did you guys have played this before? Did you guys have a wild thought? I did actually. They wanted me to go and see their armory. Again, another experience that you would never have. So I get taken down, and here's the history of the Swiss guards and their connection to the Pope.

1:43:21Here'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. 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 you misheard it. They only played Cliziasco music. But apparently they were building up to some performance for some visiting dignitaries. That was the choice of sewing for that thing. It's just too many things. Too many things, man. The guy called me at that time. We made the thing on that date. I've convinced my mom to come. There's just lights.

1:44:03All of that. They're lights of the Pope. There's something undeniable about just being in the Vatican itself. St. Peter's Basilica to this day is one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had just walking through that place. They're just trying to imagine the worksmanship, 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 involved? The first time that I walked in there, which was 1991. It probably sounds a bit weird, but I got offended or something.

1:44:52It was so over the top. It's so incredible. I thought about it from the perspective of this is a group of men trying to build a mountain to show you there as powerful as God or something like that. I was probably a little more idealistic at that age. But I remember being like, it was so overwhelming. It shocked me. I got pissed here about it. I was like, man, that would trick a lot of people. They would trick a lot of people if they walked in there and they saw all that beauty. They'd go, all these guys must have a direct connection to whatever is going on. They would go, I should hang with. But they probably do, which is how they made it.

1:45:40It is the trick of being a person who walks into there and who is a devout religious person. You experience something that seems like a representation of the divine. That's what the art looks like. It's so incredible. There's that, I forget the name, but there's a statue there. It's carved from marble. It's like of Mary holding the body of Christ. We were just talking about that the other day. It's got that veil. It's carved. It's just insane. I believe in that thing of the incredible privileges and experiences that the Italian people give me. That's behind glass. You're 20 foot from it. I walk into the chapel.

1:46:31The guy taps me on the shoulder and says, come here.

1:46:36I could stand next to it. He took me inside the room, where it's in.

1:46:45It's just when you say, how old is this? What year was this?

1:46:541498, 1499, unbelievable. Just the level of detail of the anatomy. Look at the ankle. Go back to that larger photo again, Jamie. Look at that ankle. Look at how the detail and the toe was and everything. It's just unbelievable. How do you go about? I have this sort of thing with a lot of art. How do you go about looking at a rock, grabbing a chisel and a hammer and getting to that? What the hell? It's like when I see a painting by Arthur Street and he's painted a glass. How do you do that?

1:47:43It's insane. There's levels to every game. The level of that game was like every other sculptor had to look at that and go, oh my god, what am I doing? It was damaged between the wars, I think. By a Turkish guy, there was either born in Australia or had been living in Australia and he went to Rome. Back then they used to be able to walk right up to it. I don't know, you hit it with a hammer or something like that and damaged it, didn't they? I broke the arm off. How did they...? 72 Hungarian. I was just talking to Hungarian bonus right. I was there, 12th. Attack the sculpture with a geologist hammer while shouting, I am Jesus Christ, I have risen from the dead.

1:48:34With 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 a thing, right? It's perfect now. Wow, painstaking restore returns. Can you show me the photo of what it looks like now? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like imagine they repaired that. How? Yeah. Good fucking job. Look at that material, man. Look at the bodice of her costume there. It's all of it is incredible. The way his fingers grasp in between the two fingers, grasp the piece of cloth, insane. Yeah, so I was able to just walk right up to it and walk around it and at one point in time, these guys says you can put your hand on it if you want, so I did.

1:49:22Wow. 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. 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 a film called The Insider with Michael Mann. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that too. With your start and smoke and cigarettes before, after that film. Oh, wait, before. And I know all about the negatives involved in the process and it doesn't stop me.

1:50:05So it just goes to show how potent it is as a truck. Yeah, so I basically just stopped all exercise to try and sort of get into the shape of the guy that I was playing. And I met Jeffrey, who I gained, 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, you know, 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 is, ah, cool, cool.

1:50:50So I used that too as part of the personality of the guy. The guy thought his golf game was way better than it really was. It's just an interesting little detail. So there's one conversation where golf comes up and you can see this like a little color that comes up in his cheek because he wants to defend himself or beg himself up or whatever. It's just absolute minor detail. I've no concern to anybody else except me, better to be used to me. But in that conversation, you know, and I asked him some pretty tough questions. And, you know, probably, you know, at my age and hour questions, I would never ask somebody in that situation.

1:51:27But, you know, as, you know, 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. You know, I needed to want to cry. But he was sitting opposite me and he was sort of like emotionally affected and I was mad. 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. You know, so, then I met Ridley and I was coming off that film and I made a decision at the beginning because we kept like cutting my hair and dying and we've bleached it seven times. But it wouldn't behave like an old person's hair.

1:52:15You know, we could come into place and then the next day we go, you know, and we were, we took the hair line back, shaving the hair back and 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 week. This is just crazy, you know, I'll shave my head, just get me a week or a week. 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 I had a really weird sort of suntan because of wearing the wig.

1:52:59So 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 about three months, you know. So 35 pounds. Yeah. And fun muscles. So the first thing I did was I went back home and I went on a motorcycle ride for about 10 days. And I sent a guy ahead of me in a van with a cooker. So wherever I just started, I was going to stop that night or whatever. I could only eat his food, you know. And it was just really, really basic, just sort of salads and beans and stuff like that.

1:53:48It's changed so much over time, the knowledge we have, the nutrition and 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, everybody was told, you know, the Mediterranean diet 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, whatever they have, you know, food production methods that are like artisan methods that have been used for a long long time.

1:54:28And 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. You know, we borrow your food production methods. So we've got, you know, co -answer about the Jackson and everything, you know, 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 shirts coming off and all that sort of stuff, I had enough time and enough focus on it to get it to a certain place.

1:55:07So 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 third tier of the Colosseum, there's a room that's got Jim here in it. 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 as a whole bunch of gladiators in the gladiators, that'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 provides so 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.

1:55:46Right. And they're once like, yeah, call me. So it was quite a, you know, a good collaboration actually with all those, those guys. Wow. So did you ever wield 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. I was working as a set of clubs and stuff like that when I started moving into doing more acting stuff. So I was born in New Zealand. I moved to Australia when I was four. I 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.

1:56:31I'd lived there between four and 14. That's your formative years, you know. And I never felt like New Zealand even though there 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 underneath it. And one of the things that I'd planned on doing was working enough saving money to then go to night at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. And get a piece of paper that says I know how to do my job, right?

1:57:10So 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 theatre and a guy called Bruce Appelbaum, who had been my brother's biology teacher in high school, but who had become a friend of one of my uncles. 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. 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 NIDAR in October whenever it was.

1:57:55And you know, you just, what? You're going to go to drama school. I said, yeah, I want to turn it. He goes, I walked into this theatre tonight. As I was walking to the theatre, 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. But it was absolutely the right advice to 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.

1:58:43Acting is one of the strange things that some people have an ability to do. There's athletes that have gone into films that just play an athlete in a film. And do a fucking amazing job. Was it who's in Uncut Gems? Was it Kevin Durant? No. Kevin Garnett? Amazing in it. He's good at it. 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. And you can't operate yourself a little bit like a puppet master, emotionally or whatever. And as you're saying, some people can just accept that.

1:59:25Yeah. And they're fine with it. Other people find it very hard and they put a performance on which does not be driven from inside. And they feel it. They're doing something that they've constructed that they think, oh, people will think, I'm that guy if I do 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 back. Like, oh, he's faking it. Right. Yeah. And it takes you out of it. But just like the same way you see the opposite.

2:00:02Yes. Yeah. But you see that guy walking around turns his head and you go, oh, I'm with that guy. That guy's, you know, he's fantastic. Like 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 a nerve. It's another level of responsibility, right? Because you have, especially the insider. Yeah. Because 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 that assassinated if they were going to affect their business.

2:00:37And I saw that move. 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 cigarettes. They're doing some shit. Yeah. Well, like the responsibilities the right would, you know, that experience that I was, sharing with you where I sat in front of him and asked him some tough questions I could, and I pushed a button emotionally.

2:01:22Well, I can see he was still affected by it. And it was about his family and the question, you mean? Yeah. 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, emotionally I realized he's still all these years later is carrying this around. You know, there 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 petled 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.

2:02:19You know, you can take out the chemicals you can return, the tobacco tours, and 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 it 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. Well, there's been a lot of great work that was written on nicotine. A lot. Every major mathematician, every major scientist, they will smoke. There is something in that nicotine opening neural pathways that they might not be have access to normally.

2:03:13I 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. Yeah. All my friends that can't quit cigarettes say the same thing. Yeah. I think there's a, it's a different thing. I think they need it. I use Red Man plug on long haul flights. Yeah. That's how much of a nicotine addict I am. I got it chewing tobacco on the whole flight. I got a great Nor McDonnell story. Nor McDonnell deny just by luck sat next to each other on flights on two different occasions. Just total dumb luck. Right. Norm said, norm!

2:03:47What's up? Talking. He's talking to a quick smoke and he's telling me this whole thing about a quick smoke. Yeah, I was terrible. It's the hardest thing I ever had to kick. Yeah, I loved smoking, but you know what? It was fucking terrible for you. I had to quit. So he's telling me about 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 do you do? And I thought you quit. He was, yeah, I did. But then we started talking about it. I wanted to cigarette. And he's lighting it before he even gets out the door. He just couldn't wait to get it back in him.

2:04:16Well, there's the funny thing though, right, with somebody sort of said to me once, which, and it's a true thing, is 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. Right. At that moment. Yeah, it's not like other things that might, you know, get deeper and harder and more difficult or whatever. It's only ever going to be that craving. So you just have to sort of walk past it. 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.

2:04:59The most pressing physical things bothering you is you want to 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 mean 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.

2:05:38Get everything back in line. Well, it's a significant, neutropic. You know, it really is. It does affect in a very positive way cognitive performance. And it's undeniable. Yeah. Well, as we say, we say in that film, it breaks through that blood -brain barrier. That's why it's so addictive and so hot. 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 smokes and so I was a kid. 100%. No, 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.

2:06:18Right? His photographs. I had a guy. Because you can't take your gloves off on or on and on and on. And so I used to just go over to the corner. It's to get my mouth out of the puff. 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 doing a shooting day in the ring. You're in the ring all fucking day. So you're going to 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.

2:07:04And 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 re -happening from the shoulder. 35 days in a row. It's like, it's going to break down, man. Right. We have to, so we re -did 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 and then stopped and then done another 30 shooting days where I didn't have to box, you know, James J.

2:07:49Braddock would have changed shape to the course of the film. You know, 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 Angela 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.

2:08:19You know, wow. But when I did the real fight, I did it with the fellow Troy, who was, he was a really lovely, like great boxer, great athlete, incredible on the ropes, you know, on this skimming rope. Just superior, I did it with him because I wanted the challenge of doing it, you know, if we're going to do it for real, I want to do it with him. And, you know, we're chasing each other around that ring. It was incredible experience, but it wasn't, you know, it's just that thing is like, he's a good solid guy. And I know he was never going to kill me. Right. Right. Right. Right. There was a couple of blokes in that car.

2:08:58Host. Yeah. If he gets the opportunity, he's too feral. He'll just take my head off. If I give him half a freaking break, he'll just, you know, just go on straight 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, but it couldn't. That would have been, I would have started that when I was 12. Then I did Zendokai. And then I did like a street martial art thing as well. And I'd get to kind of like, you know, halfway up the belt ladder and, you know, then I'd move on to something else.

2:09:46But it's funny because all of that training comes into play later on in my life. And funnily enough, I always say to people, it's actually my musical theater background. And dance routines that make my five sequences so sharp. 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 this stuff that... Sure. ...to capture the audience to see. But it's a lot of people think I'm joking when I say it, but it's for real. Are you do aware of Vasili Lomachenko? No. He's a Ukrainian boxer.

2:10:28He's one of the best pound for pound fighters in the world. But you just want to be part of the other day. Yeah, he beat a comboces from Australia, who's also an elite fighter. But 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, you pull up just a highlight reel of the way this guy moves. Because it's so bizarre, he moves differently than any other boxer on the planet.

2:10:58And 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... Oh, not that. I did Buddha counter -style with then I did Sardol. Okay. And she's a Kung Fu. And then I did Zendekai, after that. Yeah. Which is more of a street fighting thing. Which is headbutts and shit. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, it's like, you know, it's a good... It's a crap -mogad type deal. Yeah. But 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 a group of boxing?

2:11:33I don't know. I don't know if there is a one. This is Loma Chanko. 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. Right. I think he's the quickest man to ever win a world title. I think you won a world title in like four bouts. Right. Incredible.

2:12:05Yeah. I used to love watching Costa Zoo. Oh, yeah. He was amazing. Yeah. He was fantastic. And his son, he's got two boys. And they're both up and come as at the moment. Yep. Yeah. Tim just lost for the first time. Yeah, watch that fight. In Nikita. Yeah. That was crazy. Yeah. Crazy fight. Yeah. It was a murder in his country. It was fantastic, man. Yeah. He knocked out Zab Judah one time. I remember that. Oh my God. I've never seen that happen before. And that was when Zab Judah was Zab Judah. He was the thing. Yeah. And everybody was like counting down how many seconds is it going to take for him to end Costa Zoo's life.

2:12:39Yeah. And it simply didn't happen. Well, he was so slick and so elusive himself. And Costa Zoo 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 nearly 300 fights or something as an amateur. We start with. 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 a complete rubber. I've only seen that boxing.

2:13:16Well, 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 two punch combination that really puts him into that situation, right? Yeah. Bang there. One, two, that hurt him. And boom. That's the big one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See, if he just stayed down, probably what the guy's legs back in eight seconds. Just by then, right now he's okay. Yeah. Exactly. But who knows? He would probably got caught again.

2:13:52That's the tricky thing about boxing. Yeah. And so, yeah. I was at the Costa Zoo Ricky Hatton fight when I got a mate who's a lawyer. So you have to be careful with befriending boxes, right? Because there will be that night. But it's just all over. Yep. And it was in Manchester. And Hatton was jacked, man. His body was chiseled in a way. I'd never seen his body before. And from my perspective, it looked like he was laying in some shots under the belt. But in an audience like that in Manchester, which was all about Ricky, they were all for him. He didn't have a lot of dissenting voices. But I was in the dressing room holding Costa over a bucket.

2:14:45Well, he pissed blood for about 20 minutes. I feel fine. And I was like, really made me understand what the boxing world was. But it really is. Yeah. It's every one of those takes something away from that fight or forever. They'll never be exactly the same. I don't think he fought again after that. Yeah. I've that big, long story, 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.

2:15:25And then who am I if I don't do that thing? And your whole life, for the time you're in sports, people, isn't it? I think for fighters, it's even more difficult than that. Oh, it's much more intense to fight it for sure. It's also you have to have this ridiculous belief in yourself that you're the best of all the elites out there. You're the number one. You're the guy that can get it done. Yeah. Ricky Hatton as prime was a bad man. Yeah, he was great. He was a mallard. He was a mallard too. Just so hard -nosed. Just come at you. Which is why some of his loss, the Floyd Mayweather one example, it just shows how great Floyd was.

2:16:00Right. He was able to weather that and figure out their openings. Yeah. And then Manipack, you all after that. Pack out. Water. He just fought again. He just had an exhibition fight in Japan. Just ridiculous. Didn't look that good. I liked him. I used to like watching Oscar Deloio. 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 the Rundeware dancing around. And it looks like he's on a pound of cocaine. He's got a jock strap on. He bounces dick around. She's bouncing her ass right. It's something that if somebody else filmed, you're like, don't post that.

2:16:39Right. Do not post that. Meanwhile, he put it on his own fucking account. See, you got it, Jamie? He's just been taken down. He's just been taken down. He's stepping a summer. What do you mean it's been taken down? He took it down. It says when I look 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. Well, they're blurring him out because he had like some little geese string around where his dangling was bouncing around. She's shaking her enhanced ass. The whole thing is just, I mean, what drugs?

2:17:14It 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. It 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 fellow? 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. It'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.

2:17:52And 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 to. Yeah. Yeah. Trains hard. 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.

2:18:25You're still 58. But 58 -year -old Mike Tyson is not 50 -year -old of Mike Jones, it 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, Kenny 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. He had that very good fight with Tommy Fury who's a legitimate boxer, which is a very good fight. He just beat up Mike Perry who's a bare knuckle champion. He's a real fighter. He can fight.

2:19:06If Mike Tyson and him are fighting and Mike can't catch him, and Mike has bad knees, he has his back's bad. I mean, I don't know what's going on with him physically. You get's hard to tell from a guy just hitting pads. When he's hitting those pads, he looks great. If he can do that, if he can actually do that for eight rounds or ten rounds over, how long his fight is? Well, that's going to be the key. Kenny do that. I don't know if he can do that. He had to pull out of the first fight because he had an ulcer. So it's, you know. The thing is, I was quite enjoying the second phase of Mike's life.

2:19:41He was terrifying as a boxer. He was terrifying. I met him at one point backstage at a stadium at a fight, and I was like, I'm still terrified of you from watching you. But 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. You know, what bothers me with this whole thing is that he's got a kind of slide back to that warrior, you know. And I'm not sure he needed to do it. Yeah. He's the reason why this table is so wide.

2:20:27Why so? Because I was going to make the table more narrow and be closer to the guest. 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 Jr. and he had lost about 60 pounds. He looked shredded. He had muscles bulging in his arms and he was very intense. It was like a completely different human being and he was terrifying. Just feeling the room was fucking terrifying. And I said, you know what, this table needs to be a little wider.

2:21:00I'm glad it wasn't only me. Yeah, I just wanted to be that close to him. He's fucking scared of me. I felt his energy. Even Jamie said it after he left. Jamie was like, that's a totally different person. Jamie was here for the first one, the second one. He was so fired up that he had reignited that thing inside of him that existed when he was the best in the world. And that force that caused him to try to achieve greatness was back. And he was fit. He was in middle of training and he was all in on this Roy Jones Jr. fight. And now he's... I'll just hope for the both of them that it transcends the sort of circus type atmosphere that's around it.

2:21:41Yeah. 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. It was a real big... I mean, if you just do it to yourself, right? Yeah. You know, me at 60 versus me at 28. Right. Forget about it. Yeah, it's different things.

2:22:13Yeah. And also there's an accumulation of injuries that everyone has to tell me about it. Just just no avoiding. But I do want to get in. I guarantee you stem cells will help that. Right. I've had tremendous success with stem cells. Right. And you had a lot of... In shoulder joint? Yeah. I was told by a doctor that I was going to have to have shoulder surgery. He said, well, he did all of these exercises. He pushed down on it and we did an MRI. He's like, it's so torn. He goes, you could try to rehabilitation. It's a little bit of labor on it, but I had a full -length rotator cuff tear. Okay. And he's like, it's going to have to be repaired.

2:22:49So I had another guy in Vegas, this guy, Dr. 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. 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 bands. 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 then I started working out again.

2:23:22And just being real careful. As soon as I feel pain, I'm going to stop. Now, I went back to him in six months. He got an MRI. But 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 my nail is that it's full of arthritis. So if they were going to repair it now, 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 some plastic bit.

2:23:59Don't do that yet. 11 months rehab. Don't do that yet. This is why I don't do that yet. Because there's breakthroughs right now. Or they 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 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. So 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.

2:24:37I guarantee you they're going to be implementing this stuff on people. I've got no cartilage in my big toes. No cartilage left. Because all the sports that I used to do are lateral nerve toes. And but also sometimes the shit goes wrong in a stunt. And you got to stop or you die. So this is it. Insulin -like growth factor one inarticular cartilage repair for osteosaritis treatment. So they're able to do this signaling pathway that's been implicated inarticular cartilage repair. IGF -1 is a member of the family of growth factors. Structurally closely related to pro insulin cabromote. I don't know what that word is.

2:25:17Cron -dice, crondro site prolification, enhanced matrix production, and inhibit catabolism. Moreover, we discussed the potential role of IGF -1 and OA treatment. Of note, we summarize 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 cheap right now. And they're able to regrow cartilage on cheap and they're about to begin human trials on that as well. Here, human discovery and animal models could sue into new human therapies.

2:25:58So 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 Dr. Neal Reardon and Panama's. 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, 10 years later at 90, was walking around. And this is after stem cell. It says they can do some pretty extraordinary stuff, especially outside of the country.

2:26:38Because 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 discs and growing disc tissue on people that have disc generation issues. We're real close. We're real close to being able to regenerate all kinds of stuff. So just gotta hang in there.

2:27:08Yeah. So just to 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 with my toes. I've got great four tears in both Achilles. I've got shin splints. I've got bone marrow ademis under both knees. Jesus. I've got one disintegrating hip. Oh boy. And I know exactly what fall that was from. What movie? Gladied. Of course. And then you go on my back. I've got ribs that pop off. I've got both shoulders, a shit, but the left one is particularly shit. And it's like, even on this tour we've been doing because we've been traveling 35 ,000 kilometres or something on this tour.

2:27:52And sometimes it's in a plane, but other times it's hopefully a bus, but most of the time just a car or one point we were traveling around, you know, 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 the band earns. Right, right, right. So definitely makes it a little more difficult for sure. But it's also real. You're doing it like a real touring band. Yeah. Lining up in funky little airports. Yeah. Yeah. And most of the flights have been, you know, once the tours begun have been, you know, economy flights and blah, blah.

2:28:38Well, I'm going to try to get you in the morning before you take your flight out of here. All right. I bet I can. Yeah, I'm 99 % sure. I'm making just a Bing Bang right now. 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. Guaranteed will help. Right. Yeah. You know, it sounds like your shoulders pretty fucked, but like I say, 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 of at 10 years of allowing myself to be in a certain shape and playing all sorts of roles with that.

2:29:14But 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. But what I'm looking forward to is that all of the guys that are 10 years my junior, who are going, mate, you fucking let yourself go. I'm having you. Okay, whatever. I'm going to just be passing them on the escalator as I go down. 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 going to spend more time for myself and not working, then I want to be in a particular place.

2:30:05So 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 much it can affect your friendships, what you look like. Really? For sure. Absolutely for sure. In what way? Well, just two stops calling you and stuff. They stop calling you if you can't wait. For sure. Really? Oh, those are 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 the best.

2:30:44I'm going to get there for about 100 and 405. Nice. Like that. You'll get there. Come on, man. Well, that should be relatively easy. Yeah. But for me, fighting weights, 80 kilos. Mm. That's, you know. Can you get there? I don't think so. Why not? I bet you can. But it's just the thing is, I can't because of all the damage everywhere. Mm -hmm. What I used to do was just to outrun my, you know, 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, abuse. Can you use an air dine, an air dine bike?

2:31:20Yeah, I've gotten. Yeah, those are the shit. Yeah. Those, I did that stupid thing today. That's torture. Yeah, but what I'm trying to do is actually make the adjustments without relying on, you know, Olympic level physical preparation. You know, I'm just trying to bring it down purely through diet and, you know, and the fact that I've been losing weight while I'm on a tool like this. Where you don't have consistency in the way you can exercise. And the food that's available to you, you know, two o 'clock in the morning, after you finish the gig is, you know, it's pretty hairy. The fact that I've actually still been able to come down is amazing.

2:31:56I've never been on a tour with a band in my life. And I've been doing this stuff since the early 80s. And lost weight. You go on tour, you gain weight. That's what happens. It's been pretty, I'm really looking forward to the being back on the farm where it can be consistent and that 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, you know, it exports people, can't use that.

2:32:31Right. Sports people can't use them here either, unfortunately. Well, they do is help you heal, especially things like BPC157. They just help heal injuries. And they've recently banned that here for some fucking stupid reason. None of it makes any sense. For 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. Right. And that's what they're in right now. But peptides can help you tremendously. Tremendously helps you heal, helps your body regenerate tissue, helps you lose weight.

2:33:06It can help you in a lot of ways. Yeah, there's a lot of different things you 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 everything. Oh, just eat only your steaks. Get on a carnivore diet. High protein, low carbs. Right. You just lose weight quick like that anyway. Because 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 knows how to regulate exactly what you have. And also then you'll be in a state of ketosis. Yeah, a lot of times.

2:33:35Now that I've made the decision, it's quite interesting what's happened to my just the food intake. 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. We've talked before about the power of the imagination or whatever. I've now made the decision that I'm going the other way. And as long as I'm clear about that decision, then things just start to fold in under what the decision you've made. Right. You move into that direction. I've just taken the attitude. I'm not slavishly weighing myself every day.

2:34:26There's nothing that's not scheduled specific, 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. I'm really taking it on board as a decision I've purely made for my own reasons. That is when at some time I like taking my shirt off by the pool. If I had 10 years without doing that, so now I'm going back the other way. What exercise can you do that doesn't hurt? Oddly enough. I would never have thought this. It doesn't seem logical. But when I got to a point with my Achilles that was affecting everything that I was doing, and they set me up, I did full blood injections, platelet -rich injections, did all of that stuff.

2:35:21Many of you banging yourself with pain killers because it's such a heavy hit when you do that sort of thing, particularly with Achilles, moon boot and all that. It just wasn't work, and I was doing the rehab exercises and everything. I could feel that with the rehab exercises, they were re -damaging the area. They weren't making it better. I said to the guy that I was working with, I got to stop. Every time I see you, then I limp the next day. But if I don't do the exercises, after a certain amount of time, the limp gets less. I have to come up with some other way of doing it. He said I was crazy at the time, whatever.

2:36:03Then 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. Our romance is based on the fact that the first time I played tennis, I couldn't beat her. I got to keep you around and play you enough times until I work out at a grind. You're into the dirt, young lady. But here's the thing with tennis, with a short burst of running. It's not constant, like 10Ks on a treadmill or an album. It's just a short burst of running. You've got a minute while you gather yourself together, you have a break between games or whatever.

2:36:45Another burst of running. I seem to have rehab my Achilles by playing tennis. That would be the last thing I would suggest. I would think that that springing would be the recipe for a disaster. But because it's like a momentary movement. But tennis, if you're getting to the ball, you've got to use 100 % of yourself. You're going for that ball and it's all in, but it's three or four steps. Then you have a little bit of a break or the next shot, you don't have to put so much effort into it. It just seems to I had years and years, man. I'm talking about from 98 onwards. That's through all of those movies we were talking about.

2:37:30Like Gladiator, like Master Commander, like Cinderella Man, Noah, whatever. The problem with my Achilles is always present. Always present. But since in the last five years, it's gone away. I don't think about it every day. I walk with that limp now. That'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've got to get good tennis in your mind. Your mind is saying to your body, all right, you've got to fix this fucking problem with Achilles. I'm going to need those. We're going to need those. We're going to need to fire up all the resources.

2:38:06It could 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. If you look at the tennis thing, it actually recreates the rehab exercises. But you're not doing five sets of tennis. You're doing a little bit. And then the next day you might do that same move again or whatever. But it's not wearing it down at the same time. That's what I found with the rehab exercises. That felt to me, as I said, I was re -enjuring. There would stretch, stretch, stretch, stretch, that's a certain point.

2:38:46That's good then. You do that one set of them too many and you feel that little kick again and you know that it's retorned. Yeah. That makes sense. It's like limited plyometrics. That's what it's like. It doesn't make sense. But it's funny that that's the thing that got you healthy again. That is, I mean, crazy, right? Yeah, so opposite of what I think anybody would recommend. And it doesn't seem, you know, biologic, but here it is, you know, sort of. And you know, I've started writing bicycles again now and everything because it got to the point. And with the pain, you know, if you went on a mountain bike for 15 or 20k's, it's just white hot paint in the back of my heels, you know.

2:39:30But now I'm enjoying it again and 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 it 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, I'm motivation is such a massive factor in success. Like, what are you actually enthusiastic about?

2:40:17It'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. Yeah, I have one of their edges. 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 big question. Yeah, I love it. Cool. It's bizarre. It's a bizarre education in who you are as a human being. Absolutely. The reflection you have on these. But possibly that greatest human privilege. Yeah. I used to think differently about it. I used to think that everybody, when I first started having kids, I felt like everybody should have kids.

2:40:59I don't think that now anymore, but I think that for me, it's been one of the most... It's one of the most impactful and powerful things ever in my life. It 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 like, oh, he used to be a baby. He used to be a kid.

2:41:33I think of the whole path of that person becoming an adult now. I never used to do that before. 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've 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 that my two favorite people have spent time within the world, you know. And the things that we can do now, you know, with this little head that was nothing but just a bundle of blankets. You know, I can now have these incredible discussions with you.

2:42:22My 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 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 going, if I can nail Latin and Greek, every language is available to me.

2:43:16So it's like, it's just, you know, I mean, to sit back and be impressed with your kids. That's amazing. Yeah. 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 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, you know, I'd follow into battle.

2:43:58So I'll just stop worrying about politics and go into something else, you know. But you see the same process as going with them, they're trying to reach out to something to believe in. And somebody that they believed in, you know, has a policy or whatever that, you know, is completely a barren to the way of thinking. So you can see them having to come to grips with, you know, it's very hard to find a hero. Yeah. You know, particularly in that world. It's in particularly in that world, but 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 -Rabba Timorice musical Avita.

2:44:39Politics is the art of the possible. So 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. It's the art 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 in office. Right. Which is just like, you're there. You're there. This is madness. Like this is the thing. 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?

2:45:11This 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 that it affects 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, who would 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.

2:45:56Yeah. It's a real problem. It's a real problem that'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. I'd recognize it. 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 is the thing. It's just like picking a collar and no matter what happens under the banner of that collar, you just stick him with the collar.

2:46:32You know, that's not really going to help any of us. No. You know, that's not the way it's kind of good. I don't know what your political systems 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. We're a non -party affiliated people are standing. And so now you have a situation where in the parliament you have a group of them. I don't know the exact number, it's 10 or 15 or something independence.

2:47:10So, you know, the main party has to deal with the fact that those independence are going to bring a non -party line series of points to the argument. And 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 can use that here for sure. Because people are just so sick of that color choice that 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 of both conservative and liberal perspectives, especially like liberal socially, physically conservative.

2:48:00There's a lot of people like that and they're not represented. 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 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. They support this side. I support that side. And I'm all in on my team and they're all in it. It's just it's a tribal thing. It's tribal is 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.

2:48:36And it's also the money in politics is so extraordinary, which is something that should have never been allowed to happen. Yeah, the old, you know, there's campaign fundraising situations. Yeah. And the amount of money they just pour into it. But also the rules around the engagement. I mean, 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. There's just all bullshit. But if you're leaning that way, then you know, they help your outrage.

2:49:15And it helps you confirm that, yes, well, that's, you know, I'm against that. 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. Right. 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 has just been anus. It's just a complete manipulation of the zeitgeist.

2:49:52We've got a situation in Australia at the moment where politicians are suing people for, you know, what they say is the loss of their reputation or whatever. Because that person might have commented somewhere on social media or something and said, you know, ex person is ex. And so now, you know, they've were the certain politicians have worked it out. Oh, I can make money out of this. Oh, Jesus. 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 much. Yeah, you got to put a stop to that.

2:50:32If you're in the public eye, you got to recognize people are going to throw rocks. Absolutely, man. You're standing for a parliament, you know, a congress or whatever. It goes for the territory, mate. Yeah. And it also, it stifles free speech because it scares people into censorship. Right. Well, 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 a very bizarre time for free speech.

2:51:09When we should have the most, we have the most access to information that's ever been available. And 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 the same as you saying something in a pub. Like, this is my opinion. Fuck that guy. And also, then you're on a lawsuit with that guy. You don't have any money. You're like, oh, Jesus. Do you use Twitter and things like that?

2:51:39Occasionally. 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, man. I, you know, I was probably a relatively early adopter, you know, of it. But for a while there, it was like, well, this is the thing that we've been looking for in that I can put a post up here saying that I'm going to do a show in Germany. And I don't have to spend a dollar on advertising or, you know, do the interviews and stuff, you know. And for a while there, it was really potent.

2:52:18But 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. It's a little better if I don't. Yeah, that's the problem. 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 involved with things that make them upset. That's what it distracts them from their daily life.

2:52:50Or maybe they're the, it's the thing that they think is an existential threat. And so it's consume them. And so they want to talk about it constantly. And so that's all you get. 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. And they 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 what their responses 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 Laudice Voice, which basically is the beginning of Fox.

2:53:38And Roger had been a political pundit. He'd worked on television in the 60s. But then he met Richard Nixon and became an advisor to Nixon. And he tried to set up, you know, a White House news service back in the late 60s. Tried it again in the 70s, tried it again in the early 80s, but the technology's as it 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, in a 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.

2:54:30Because 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 10 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. And I think it's something like, you know, it was 10 bucks 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 got that difference in 77 million subscribers times an extra $23.

2:55:20And that's the beginning of opinion -based news coverage, Fox News, yeah. Yeah, because that's when it's just a very full -run, 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 -bot -coms. It keeps the impression. Exactly. That there's, you know, more people in four particular situations 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 or bots.

2:56:07This makes the whole thing useless, 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 messy. 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. 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 get rid of those voices. But now you have the situation where there's ads running and stuff on your timeline and you're not allowed to block it anymore.

2:56:47You can't stop. You're so bad. But it's funny because they're running ads or they're popping up as ads, but it'll have something dark in there. That then, because it's on your timeline, we'll 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 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 a Facebook. I never really so I don't understand it. I don't really understand Instagram either, though.

2:57:26We 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 like, you know, and you're connecting to people all over the world. I've had some really funny situations arise, you know, because of something I commented on that and somebody gave me another piece of information about it or whatever. So I've learned a lot out of it, but just the last year or two, it's gotten worse. It's going to continue. To a kind of a harsh place. Yeah, it's going to continue in that way, too. That's how you get engagement, unfortunately.

2:58:01There'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. Yes. The 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 as a shot from Leim is where I'm looking this doorway and I'm, I mean, you know, police uniform of the time. And I just kind of go sliding to these two people apply it to so many different situations.

2:58:38The animated GIF, like when Homer Simpson melts into the bushes. Yeah, it's like that. Yeah, it's like that. Yeah, 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.

2:59:20You're going to get dissenting opinions, people to get 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, shit. I think I'm very hopeful about it. Right. But yeah, well, I always, you know, I try not to see a set out 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 just funny because to me, it felt like the beginning of the future. That we're now connected and information exchange was open.

3:00:10And I thought this is going to lead to great changes. And it has led to changes, but they're not so great. Yeah. And it's like, you know, even with a little operation like my band, somebody just pops up, they start telling, selling fake tickets, fake meat and greed experiences. You know, they take money in orders for merchandise that they're never going to produce. You know, it's just crazy. And there's nothing in there stopping them from doing it. Right. That is a problem. Yeah. But 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.

3:00:49It'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, but I like reading all that stuff. Yeah, I do too. I get too involved in it. But I try and shy away from coming up with a definitive opinion because then you sort of out on the edge of that limb. And you go, well, it looked like that to me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it would 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.

3:01:32In 2019, I finished the 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 calling 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 March 2021. And so often you talk to people and they say, you know, I wish it had one more dinner, one more hug, one more conversation or whatever, you know.

3:02:16But when I looked at it and it, because it was the surprise when he died it, it wasn't expecting it's 85. But you're seeing to be quite healthy, you know. And in reality, when I looked at it, it's like, well, I've got a whole year. I've got a whole year, 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.

3:02:54So now I have a 70 -megaliter lake in the middle of my place, which gives me enough water to feed the cattle and stuff for seven years, some of that, you know. And, you know, like one day we went out, I went out to show him this, you know, what was basically a hole in the ground at the time, about a, you know, football field size hole in the ground. And I took him out there in a buggy and the clouds came over and it started pissing down with rain. So I've got, you know, 83 -year -old old man who fucking, you know, doesn't move too fast to whatever I've got to put him back in the buggy and drive.

3:03:27And by the time we got like halfway back to the house, it was absolutely torrential, right? You know, and we just like getting covered in. I was so worried. I thought, oh my God, you know, I'm going to make him sick or whatever. You know, 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, you know, referring to my mother and the other people that, you know, are there to sort of like, you know, help him out against these people, they don't let me do anything. So we just had little moments like that where we, you know, just got to share some stuff.

3:03:59But, you know, then my schedule has been extremely busy since COVID, but I've been working in other places, you know, Thailand, Malta, Hungary, England, you know, just constantly working. But because of what we learnt with COVID in terms of being able to just drop in on a TV show, my studio on the farm, I mean, now push a few buttons and I can be live on, you know, a New York tonight show. 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. I'm beneath and I walk out of, you know, a day of press and I'm in the bush.

3:04:43You know, like the horses and the cows and the dogs and I'm, you know, cool. So it's 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. You might have something to do with the weed shops. Everybody was just a little more chilled, you know, but there's a fear in everybody at the moment here. I'm just not sure where that's going to go, you know, it doesn't feel healthy.

3:05:25Yeah, it doesn't feel healthy for me either. Listen man, I really think with America, right? You've 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 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 beacon. 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.

3:06:02You 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 everything. I'm very happy with you, and I'm very happy with you. I'm very happy with you, and I'm very happy with you. I'm very happy with you, and I'm very happy with you. I'm very happy with you, and I'm very happy with you. Thanks for that. Beautiful. Thank you. Cool. Thanks for everything. Cheers. Say, how do you son? Bye, everybody. Thank you.