In this episode of the podcast, I chat to actor, director, producer, writer and social media guru, Russell Crowe. We talk about how he got started in the entertainment industry, how he fell in love with the world of film and music, and how he went on to become one of the most successful actors in the world. We also talk about his early days as a nightclub DJ, his move into the music industry, and what it's like to work with some of the biggest names in British pop culture. It's a fascinating conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts! The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, and do not necessarily reflect those of any other companies or organisations. We are not affiliated with any of those listed below. Thank you so much for your support, it really means a lot to us. We do not claim any of the rights to any music used in this episode. Thank you again for all the support you've given us. We are a proud affiliate of Vevolution, and we do not own any rights to the music used on this podcast. I have no claim to any of that music used. The music used is copyright of any of our songs used in the show. This episode was produced and all credit given to any other creators. It was produced by my good friends and other artists. Music used is their work. Thanks to my good friend, Kevin Mclean.co.nz.uk.co - I hope that you enjoy the music and all rights reserved. - thank you for any feedback and support is appreciated by me and I appreciate all the love and support given by you all - I'm very much appreciate all of you all of the support given to me - I really do appreciate it - I appreciate it. - Thank you. P.E. and I really appreciate the support I get from you - I am so much love and appreciation. - - Kevin and I'm so much of you. - Kevin's words and support you all. - P.A. - Love you all around the world - Love you, thank you. I appreciate you, much appreciate you all so much. - KEVIN MCCARTO - MURDER.
00:00:25.000Yeah, well, I do have that same thing myself.
00:00:29.000When I meet somebody whose work I dig or whatever, I'm still just the same fan that I was before I even got into the business.
00:00:40.000I met Daniel Day-Lewis in a Motel 8 in Canistoga, New York State.
00:00:48.000A guy saw us and he said, You know, do you mind if I take your photograph?
00:00:54.000So we went out into the car park of this motel aid and this guy took a photograph and about, I don't know, seven or eight months later, A copy of it arrived at my house in Australia, and the guy had basically just written Russell Crowe Australia and sent it to me.
00:01:11.000So I have a copy of it, and it's a funny thing, you know, it's like I was there, it was the Boxing Hall of Fame.
00:01:19.000I was there with Angelo Dundee, and he was there with Barry McGuigan, yeah.
00:02:49.000Yeah, I... If I was to explain to my childhood self, my 10-year-old self, what was in front of me and the people that I would meet and the things that I would experience and the contacts that have come along in my life,
00:03:11.000my little brain would have just exploded.
00:03:14.000There's just no way I could have possibly imagined that this life was going to unfold in front of me.
00:03:26.000My first thing when I was leaving school is just don't have a boring life.
00:03:33.000Just don't find some way of being able to express yourself.
00:03:40.000My first job out of school, my first official job, was working for an insurance company, commercial union insurance, inputting the details of policies.
00:04:10.000So after like five or six weeks, they shuffled me off.
00:04:13.000And the guy really dug what I was playing and how I got the dance floor moving and everything.
00:04:18.000But he says, you know, I need to sell toasted sandwiches, man.
00:04:22.000You have to tell people that the kitchen's open.
00:04:25.000LAUGHTER So, you know, I left school partway through the last year.
00:04:31.000In New Zealand, they have a different thing where you have a bursary year after normal high school finishes, and in your bursary year, if you achieve to a certain degree, you get money towards your university degree, you know?
00:04:42.000But it was clear to me in that last year my dad was out of work and I wasn't going to be able to go to university.
00:04:48.000We couldn't afford that sort of thing.
00:04:49.000It only would have cost three and a half or four grand or something like that back in the day.
00:04:53.000But that was beyond our means as a family.
00:04:58.000I started working at this insurance company and I was the only person in the building of a big insurance company.
00:05:07.000Who had actually passed matriculation into university.
00:05:12.000And the general manager of the company sat me down to tell me that one day.
00:05:16.000You're the only person with the higher school certificate, what they call university entrance in New Zealand, in the building.
00:05:50.000And in the time that I was there, I watched those new shoes get age on them and start cracking at the side and stuff like that, you know, because he obviously used them a lot, did a lot of walking around talking to people, you know.
00:06:04.000And just as I was leaving, I overheard a discussion where he was planning on getting some new shoes again.
00:06:11.000And I was like, yeah, I definitely, definitely don't want to...
00:07:13.000Option A or option B? Did you ever meet anyone who was an actor?
00:07:17.000Did you know of anyone that had made a living doing that?
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00:07:33.000Gut health is super important to support your digestion, reduce bloating, and keep you regular.
00:07:39.000AG1 not only contains your daily vitamins and minerals, but it also includes pre and probiotics and other gut benefiting ingredients.
00:07:47.000There's so much good stuff packed into AG1 and gut health is a huge part of it.
00:07:52.000And I'm a big fan of that and I have been for years.
00:07:55.000On top of digestion, AG1 covers your bases with nutrients that are hard to get in a modern diet.
00:09:53.000So I did an acting job when I was 6 and another one when I was 8. And then I kind of forgot about it for a while.
00:10:02.000And then I went on a school tour of a TV studio.
00:10:06.000And it was a TV show called The Young Doctors that was being made in that studio.
00:10:11.000And there was a bit part actor, a guy called Roy Harris Jones, who had been on a couple of shows that my parents had done and I liked him a lot and blah blah blah.
00:10:22.000I hadn't seen him for years and there he was on that show.
00:10:26.000And while the other kids are there going on their tour, He goes, are you here for an audition?
00:10:32.000I said, no, I haven't done anything like that for ages.
00:10:35.000And he goes, come on, let's go down the corridor and meet the casting director.
00:11:13.000If I was going to pursue anything, it was going to be music.
00:11:15.000Basically, I would accept any job that allowed me to be in a position of entertaining people.
00:11:21.000So that's why I went into the nightclub thing with being a DJ. And my first night, the second time, because obviously I'd failed the first time around and been fired because I couldn't talk.
00:11:35.000The second time around, I'd auditioned for this place, but they hadn't given me the job they gave to somebody else.
00:11:40.000But they ended up firing him after two nights because him and the guy that ran the club didn't get on.
00:11:44.000So they called me up on a Sunday afternoon and they said, are you free tonight?
00:12:32.000It was created to make sure that I absolutely broke through whatever that fear was immediately now that I had another chance.
00:12:40.000I ended up staying and working pretty much full-time for about four years in that job, but it expanded a whole bunch of other stuff because The guy started getting me to perform on stage, you know, the guy that I was working with, once he started hearing my songs and everything,
00:12:56.000he said, all right, okay, in the third set, at the end of the night, you come on, just do your songs, though.
00:13:00.000You're not allowed to do songs people know.
00:13:20.000So we would be on Thursday, Friday, Saturday in Auckland, in the big city.
00:13:26.000And then Sunday through Wednesday, we're in a truck and a car and everything, and we're touring.
00:13:32.000We're going playing in these other pubs and stuff.
00:13:34.000And he fancied himself, you see, because it's an anachronistic thing, you know.
00:13:40.000His whole life, this guy that I was working for was about the 1950s.
00:13:43.000He wore blue suede shoes or winkle pickers, stovepipe trousers, drape coats.
00:13:47.000You know, he had a Cadillac, probably the only Cadillac in New Zealand at the time, you know.
00:13:52.000And he had this thing about, like, you know, Elvis used to have a comedian opening for him, so somebody should go out and tell jokes before I come on, right?
00:14:03.000And so part of my job was to walk out and tell a joke that he had told me to tell.
00:16:49.000I work with lots and lots of actors who just took the role because of blah blah.
00:16:53.000They're not really there because of the work.
00:16:57.000When you know the job and you know that you're talking about 4 a.m.
00:17:01.000starts, you're talking about minimum 12 hours a day, you're talking about working in extreme conditions and stuff like that temperature-wise or somewhere kind of whack to get an amazing shot.
00:17:15.000When you know the job and you know how hard it is, You really got to have your reasons for being there.
00:18:18.000But it's also like a deep, deep passion.
00:18:22.000And stepping into the shoes of other people and experiencing, to a degree, things of somebody else's life or learning a new skill or whatever it happens to be.
00:19:10.000To then put it in front of a crowd and then have that immediate response.
00:19:15.000Obviously, I've worked with a lot of actors over the years that come from a theatre background, and even though I've done a lot of theatre, I come from a rock and roll background.
00:19:37.000People will talk to you, like Anthony Hopkins, I was working with him.
00:19:40.000He'd done a series of films, this is way back in the 90s, and I think he was off to do a season of King Lear and he was really happy about it because for him that's a reset.
00:19:50.000You go back into that place where you came out of and you get all the benefits of doing the same performance over and over again so you get to squeeze all the different character parts that you can and enjoy it.
00:20:06.000But for me, walking out onto a rock and roll stage, guitar in hand, where I do not know exactly what's going to happen that night, because every audience takes things in a different direction, that's my reset.
00:20:20.000That's me jumping out of a plane, and I love doing it.
00:20:24.000Yeah, they have different buttons they push.
00:20:28.000Yeah, I mean, it's performance, but, you know, there's a visceral thing that happens in front of a live audience, you know, that just doesn't happen in the sterile environment of a film set, you know?
00:20:42.000And you can have wonderful creative relationships on a film set and great collaborations and all that sort of stuff, the same that you can have in music, you know?
00:20:59.000Well, you're creating an experience for people, and they're enjoying it in the moment, and you're all sharing that moment.
00:21:06.000I always feel bad for people that have never done something like that, never performed in front of a live audience and gave everybody a great time.
00:21:14.000Yeah, I actually understand what you mean, because it is...
00:21:19.000It is something to have in your DNA. It's a rare gift that a person gets to live their life doing that a lot.
00:21:30.000I was thinking about what we might talk about and there's a story I like to tell if you're into it.
00:21:45.000So back in the 90s, the thing about this story is it sort of like just casually shows you how much of a circus the film industry can be, you know what I mean?
00:21:54.000And part of the attraction of it when I was a young actor and, you know, later in my 20s moving to Australia and doing theatre and stuff like that and then looking at film people as sort of like a rare breed, you know?
00:22:11.000And then you get into it and you realise you've got to be pretty much crazy to do this.
00:22:18.000Over time, it's gotten definitely safer, more insurance conscious and all of these things.
00:22:34.00092 was the first time I'd go to Los Angeles.
00:22:37.000But I'd already made a bunch of films in Australia and I'd been to the Cannes Film Festival so my first time travelling outside of Australia and New Zealand was 1991. So I was like 27 or something like that.
00:22:51.000And then the year after I went to LA and got an agent.
00:22:57.000But I'd won a bunch of awards in Australia and my films had been around to different film festivals and stuff so There was awareness of what I was doing in the industry, so to speak.
00:23:09.000And I got this phone call to go and meet Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director who won the Oscar for The Last Emperor.
00:23:47.000So I never had a conversation with Bernardo because after the game...
00:23:51.000He just went off to his room or something to have a cry, I'm not sure.
00:23:57.000But I met his wife, and her name was Claire Peplow, and she was a film director.
00:24:04.000And she said, look, I encourage Bernardo to invite you to the house, because I know he wants to talk to you about something, but I want to talk to you as well.
00:24:14.000I've had this script, and she gave me this script, and it was called Miss Shumway Waves a Wand.
00:24:19.000And I was very much in the independent film world at the time, so that sounded like a good title for an independent film.
00:24:29.000And I read it, and it was pretty good.
00:24:30.000It was based on this book, and I liked the character, so I sort of responded to it.
00:24:37.000Eventually ended up doing it, and Bridget Fonda was signed on as the female lead, so that was cool.
00:24:45.000I have a funny thing that goes on with my brain if I'm faced with I'm reading something and there's a difficult moment in something that I'm liking, where my brain just goes, hmm, to be dealt with later.
00:25:34.000At one point in time, for seven days, we lived on refried beans and rice in Guatemala because they hadn't made any arrangement with any kind of catering company or anything.
00:25:44.000And that was the only thing that they could get easily.
00:25:47.000So it was breakfast, lunch and dinner, refried beans and rice.
00:25:51.000And at the end of that week, one of the guys on the film crew found this cafe that sold some form of grilled meat and we all just went there in the middle of this rainforest and ate this meat and realized later on it was more than likely we were eating the monkeys that were running around the trees around us because everybody got really sick.
00:26:12.000Anyway, so we're going through this experience and we eventually get back to Los Angeles.
00:26:21.000And we've got a couple of weeks shooting in LA. We go out to a place called Lancaster, I think it was.
00:28:43.000Now, 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.
00:29:32.000Okay, so what I thought was my only safety net, gone, right?
00:29:37.000So take six, take seven, and I'm starting to really get hot.
00:29:42.000I wouldn't be surprised if they're all Klieg lights, you know, because it didn't look like anybody had used this studio for a long, long time, you know?
00:29:49.000And I'm heating up, and at one point in time, it was about, take seven or eight, and the spider just stops on my neck and starts to sort of like spread its legs out and just sort of like grab at me, you know, and it's sort of pulsing,
00:30:05.000you know, and then I'm sort of like just lying there going, and then the tarantula guy tickles it, up it goes, you know, and I'm kind of like, well, what was that?
00:30:14.000How long does it have to sit in your mouth for?
00:31:10.000See, tarantulas on their legs have these very fine hairs.
00:31:15.000So fine, in fact, that they can easily go through a pore in human skin.
00:31:20.000So currently, what you have going on is your body is full of tarantula venom, but not enough to hurt you or even make you just going to have this rash.
00:31:37.000And the reason that I wanted to tell you this story...
00:31:42.000And your listeners is because, and you can check this, you can Google away, I'm pretty sure in the history of cinema, I'm the only Academy Award winning actor who's ever been fucked in the neck by a tarantula.
00:32:28.000Every time I've had major injuries and stuff, there's, I can't even remember the name of it now, but there's the go-to thing that they inject into you to take away the initial pain.
00:33:41.000I don't know how I did it, but it was so cold.
00:33:45.000But, you know, I mean, temperature's one thing, you know, and you tend to in the film business, you know, 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,
00:36:11.000And I had to get on a plane that night and go back to the film set on Long Island and run to the Ark with 5,000 extras, you know, 50 times with, you know, I mean, I think, you know, we had a...
00:36:28.000A rain tower set up that's the biggest in the history of cinema for that, you know?
00:36:32.000So I'm getting rained on with these gigantic drops.
00:37:23.000But 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...
00:37:48.000Well, they basically get big cranes and they hoist up grids that are laid with hose pipe and the pipe It comes down the tower to a water tank and at a certain point they turn on the pump and they operate like sprinklers basically.
00:38:09.000But if you imagine like a metal grid in the air where every joining point of pipes is another sprinkler head And I think we had two and a half football fields worth of,
00:38:25.000you know, where we could soak at the push of a button.
00:38:34.000Yeah, because you see the, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, but there's these big wide shots of all these people running towards the ark and there's rain falling.
00:38:41.000So we had that whole area had to have rain.
00:39:14.000What I thought was the funniest thing with that stuff is when that movie came out, all of this sort of pushback press about how, you know, look at this, Darren Aronofsky, this New York elite, has made Noah into a story about the environment.
00:39:35.000It's always been a story about the environment.
00:39:44.000And it was like article after article pushing back as if he had done something against Christianity or whatever by acknowledging that this is a story about our environment and how we treat our environment and blah,
00:40:12.000But he did promise me, Darren, at the beginning of that experience, he said never at any stage, which I thought was funny, because he was riffing off a thing that Ridley Scott did.
00:40:21.000Ridley Scott said, I promise you don't have to wear sandals, and I promise you, you never have to lie on a couch and have somebody feed you a grape.
00:40:31.000So Darren's version was that never at any stage will I have you at the prow of an ark flanked by a giraffe and a lion.
00:40:46.000The 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.
00:40:58.000They've never read the very few mentions that there are in the Bible or the other mentions.
00:41:05.000Religious writings which cover his story because there are other writings from pre-biblical that never made it into the Bible.
00:41:15.000The Epic of Gilgamesh is a very similar story.
00:42:00.000Yeah, 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.
00:42:30.000Randall Carlson is an expert in asteroid impacts, and he kind of specializes in this theory about the Younger Dryas impact.
00:42:41.000The Younger Dryas impact is somewhere around, they think there's multiple times this happened, somewhere around 11,800 years ago, and again somewhere in the 10,000s.
00:42:51.000That this is what happened that caused the end of the Ice Age.
00:42:55.000This is what caused the great flooding across North America.
00:42:58.000That date coincides with what would be the end of Gobekli Tepe, right?
00:43:07.000It 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 iridium which is very common in space very rare on earth during that same time period but what's really interesting about this guy is he got this idea when he was overlooking this enormous canyon while he was on acid and And it occurred to him that this is because of not just a river that ran through this
00:44:15.000That 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.
00:44:24.000And that these asteroids slammed into it, and that's where these features that you see where it looks like...
00:44:30.000I 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.
00:44:39.000You know how water, when it goes over the sand, it leaves these kind of humps and ridges where the water washed over?
00:44:45.000Well, there's physical evidence of this all throughout, like the Pacific Northwest.
00:45:27.000When I was doing the research, building up to it, I was quite surprised because in my naivety, I actually had considered it was only like a Christian thing and I didn't realize it was touched on everywhere until I was doing that film.
00:45:45.000Was there any hesitancy in taking on a religious character like that with such significance to it?
00:48:15.000Go and talk to people who've got a perspective.
00:48:17.000I would have probably wanted to spend a little bit more time with some Jewish scholars because there's a lot of writings adjunct to the Torah about Noah.
00:48:29.000I get to the bottom of that, but I really didn't have the time, so I just had to sort of...
00:48:35.000Plow into it with what I had, which is a beautiful two-volume Old Testament and New Testament that Darren got me.
00:48:47.000So that was the beginning of the research.
00:48:50.000But there's not really much else you can do because you can't go and look up old photos or anything.
00:48:56.000So you're pretty much stepping into that world, trying to understand Darren's perspective on it and what he was trying to show that, you know, there had been a big civilization already.
00:49:06.000So there was a civilization prior to Noah.
00:49:09.000So you're already talking about, you know, a post-apocalyptic world that they're living in and another apocalypse is coming, you know, and it's all based on...
00:49:19.000You know, human behavior and what have you.
00:49:21.000There's a sequence in the film that some people miss where, like, Noah is looking into these people who are all, you know, sort of the ones who've allowed themselves to give in to their base desires or what have you.
00:49:36.000And 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 human.
00:50:13.000I don't know, it's three or four hundred million or something.
00:50:15.000It's bizarre that there's controversy attached to it being that it is about the climate.
00:50:20.000It'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.
00:50:42.000It 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 On our air quality and how we receive sunshine,
00:51:16.000We're being talked about in the early 70s when I was in primary school that are now actually physically happening.
00:51:24.000But some people just want to see it as yet another game or whatever, and it's really much more important than that.
00:51:32.000It's strange because it also – the problem with having this ideology attached to it is it stops the real research to actually be able to objectively understand what has the most effect.
00:51:44.000Like what is the thing that's driving us the most and what is the thing that we can do to mitigate that?
00:51:49.000See, I think things like the cows farting, I think that's misinformation that just gets thrown out there to sort of spread the blame or whatever.
00:52:02.000Because we are told over and over again...
00:52:06.000That there were so many more animals on this planet at a certain point.
00:52:10.000Okay, so if we've killed off, you know, 80% or whatever of the animals that existed, what about their farts?
00:52:20.000That was a dinosaur fart compared to a cow fart, you know?
00:52:24.000Well, the thing is, what we're doing is very unnatural, right?
00:52:28.000So 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.
00:52:37.000It's very different than a regenerative farm, an actual real farm where cows are grazing, and then their manure fertilizes the land, and it actually sequesters carbon.
00:52:47.000A real regenerative farm is carbon neutral.
00:52:52.000I run 220 Angus on my place in the bush.
00:52:56.000And, you know, over time, I sort of learned that all of those factory farming processes are just the absolute wrong thing to do.
00:53:09.000You know, I mean, when I first had land and cattle...
00:53:14.000I used to love getting up in the dawn, you know, in the darkness, cowdy hat on, stock whip, and getting out and, you know, hurting them and all that sort of stuff.
00:53:24.000And then over time, started to realize that That's not good for them.
00:53:31.000That sort of stuff's not good for them.
00:53:32.000So we developed this system at my place where we have a single laneway and all of the other paddocks where the cattle will be go onto that laneway.
00:53:43.000And the paddock can be 100 acres or whatever.
00:53:48.000You can muster one man, soft voice, handful of grain.
00:53:53.000Just open the gate, you call out a couple of times, they come towards you, you can get every cow in that laneway, then you get up behind them, walk behind them, and you walk them straight to the yards.
00:54:03.000Now, we've taken all the fun out of it, but it's just a lot more...
00:54:06.000It's, you know, safer, easier, sensible.
00:54:10.000And we don't use, you know, hosepipes.
00:55:07.000I started to operate it as a business for a while there, but kind of found out that everybody in the butchery game is similar to working with people that sell used cars, and they're only looking for the story.
00:55:19.000They don't really care about the animal.
00:55:48.000It took us five or seven years to get the certification.
00:55:53.000But then I would walk amongst the cattle and because we couldn't douse them because they're organic cattle now, things like buffalo fly and other little things were just all over them.
00:56:10.000I thought, man, that can't be good either.
00:56:12.000It's like having a kid and never giving the kid Panadol if it gets a fever.
00:56:18.000By the time that kid's 14, it hasn't overcome it, and it's not the biggest, best, strongest.
00:56:24.000It's this weedy little bloke in the corner.
00:56:26.000He spent most of his life sick because he never got the medicine to make it easier for his body to recover.
00:56:32.000And that kind of was happening to the cows.
00:56:34.000They lost a lot of weight and they just looked in distress.
00:57:30.000And he will ask if he can have a couple of beasts and I'll let him have it.
00:57:35.000We do sell to some neighbors that we know are needing a little bit of assistance.
00:57:45.000I don't want to 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.
00:57:59.000But basically, I have the cows to feed my family.
00:58:04.000So my kids are very snobby about steak.
00:58:08.000Because they've grown up with, you know...
00:58:26.000It comes from when I was getting a little bit of success, I could see things coming along and I sort of had a choice.
00:58:34.000I only had enough money to either buy a small apartment in the city or some land.
00:58:42.000And my mum and dad weren't in a great place and I hadn't really spent a lot of time with them in the previous decade because I'd been out trying to establish who I was and I didn't really go home very much.
00:58:53.000And 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.
00:59:09.000I bought 100 acres initially, but I think I've got 1,700 acres or something now.
00:59:15.000But once I had the land, then I started feeling like, well, you've got to do something with it.
00:59:20.000It can't just be 100 acres of a garden.
00:59:25.000And there's also that thing, too, of you're walking into farmland.
00:59:30.000You want to see a horse, you want to see a cow, you know, you want to have something.
00:59:34.000So 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.
00:59:46.000And they were big longhorn beasts and they were quite difficult to deal with, so that made me decide to go with Angus.
00:59:52.000But, you know, here's another story, you know.
00:59:55.000I had 20 little calves down in the yards that were being picked up the next day.
01:00:00.000And at this stage, I was living in a caravan because I hadn't started building or anything on the property.
01:00:08.000And so I go to bed and at about 2 o'clock in the morning, I'm woken up because it's raining.
01:00:18.000But 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 are being picked up the next day and they'll spend the whole night slipping over and sort of covering each other with shit and they'll be in great distress and blah,
01:01:36.000You 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?
01:01:45.000So then in the shed, I laid out some hay and stuff, and I left a little light on.
01:01:53.000You tell stories like that to farmers, and they think you're an absolute idiot.
01:03:16.000You're not even allowed to film there because the conditions are sometimes so horrific that it damages the business.
01:03:22.000We give grain to our cattle because there is a nice texture and stuff that comes to the meat beyond being grass-fed.
01:03:31.000But we never put them into a feeding pen situation.
01:03:34.000And I think that that's also the best part of the balance because, you know, they're still walking around on their home range.
01:03:42.000You know, this is where they're used to being.
01:03:44.000And then here's a pile of grain over here.
01:03:46.000So they supplement their grass with the grain as opposed to just being fed grain purely to put on size.
01:03:51.000So what we turn off, Ben, and I think it's partly to do with the fact that they stay active and everything, we get a natural 7% to 10% fat ratio, which is the bottom end of the scale.
01:04:06.000But therefore, to me, you're getting more protein.
01:04:09.000And therefore, what we're giving you when we give you a steak is like an absolute protein pill.
01:06:27.000We 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.
01:06:41.000You know, a quick, cooked piece of meat of unknown origin.
01:09:14.000Yeah, well that's, you know, that only lasts for a few seconds, but that's going to give you the colour that you want, because when I put it down on the grill, I want the colour on that side, because generally I'm only going to turn it once.
01:09:26.000Yeah, I want that first hit to sear the outside of the steak, and that's the side that gets presented to the person that's going to be eating.
01:09:35.000Are you cooking a thin steak, a thick steak?
01:09:57.000Yeah, one side of the porterhouse is the tenderloin, one side of the porterhouse is the filet mignon, and the other side is the New York strip.
01:11:14.000So, yeah, I'm not 100% sure of the top of all the different names for meat in America, but they tend to be quite thick cuts.
01:11:26.000We don't really do any of our steak in a thin cut.
01:11:30.000The first time I ever ate a steak in Australia, this was like a long time ago, but before I really understood the difference between grass-fed meat and grain-fed meat, I was like, this is different.
01:14:10.000We met, like, funny resistance here with the release that people couldn't get their heads around the fact that a movie called Cinderella Man was about a boxer.
01:14:51.000But sometimes you're playing characters that you don't really...
01:14:55.000Great as a person or whatever or sometimes playing very negative characters.
01:14:59.000Earlier this year I did Nuremberg where I played Herman Goering.
01:15:06.000So that's going to be coming out soon.
01:15:09.000Looking forward to people seeing that.
01:15:12.000But 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.
01:15:21.000Which can be a bit of a dangerous thing As an actor, I try not to fall in love with the character.
01:15:28.000What I say is I'm in love with the job.
01:15:31.000So my job is to show you who that person is, whether it's positive or negative, because it's kind of weird.
01:15:39.000You can't fall in love with Hitler if you're playing that role.
01:16:30.000I 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.
01:16:43.000He was like, you know, I mean, occasionally, if you're asked about somebody that he had a negative experience with, you know, he would sort of like see who's around or whatever, and he would just tell you the pure truth.
01:16:57.000But for the most part, anybody you asked him about, he was like, ah, what a great guy.
01:17:03.000And I asked him about it one day, and he was like, life's too short for the negatives, man.
01:17:08.000It's too short to have grudges or opinions, negative stuff.
01:17:15.000But then in reality, he would have an opinion.
01:17:17.000But the public part of that was to just be positive.
01:17:23.000And he'd worked with so many fighters and so many different pursuits and And under different pressures and what have you, Ali and Sugar Ray, you know, 15 world champions he coached.
01:17:38.000And the beautiful thing happens, you can see it in Cinderella Man, there's a moment towards the end of the movie, right, where Braddock's won.
01:18:22.000But, you know, I mean, a normal day, training for that film, you wake up in the morning, you go for a walk, you know, probably about 5Ks, right?
01:19:51.000So, the fight with Troy, which I think is the The last fight before the championship, that's 100% the two of us in the ring beating the piss out of each other.
01:21:59.000Especially someone as legendary as Braddock.
01:22:01.000Yeah, and the thing is, you know, you have to dial into his body, you know, his body language.
01:22:07.000You know, he used to do this little foot flick thing, right, to get himself around, you know, where he always, like, he would move his front foot first.
01:22:16.000He wouldn't cross his feet over at all, you know, so he's just sort of crabbing up on somebody and going back, you know.
01:22:22.000Learning that, getting that drilled into my head because it felt so unnatural.
01:22:36.000But that natural instinct is to cross your feet over, but that leads to all sorts of problems.
01:22:42.000It was a very interesting experience during that movie.
01:22:47.000And Ron Howard, as the director, you know, I'd worked with him the year before on A Beautiful Mind, and he's a very exacting guy, and he likes to do things over and over again, you know?
01:22:57.000So when we first started that shoot, I don't know if you know this, but I subluxated my left shoulder.
01:23:04.000I was doing a little fight with a guy called Wayne Gordon, another Canadian Olympian, and he just caught me on the point of my elbow and just put my shoulder out, you know?
01:23:17.000But because I was so fit at the time and so strong, it went out and back in.
01:23:21.000But it came back in with such force that it broke the bone.
01:25:03.000We came here in 2000, 2001. August 14 or 15 is 30-odd foot of grunts day.
01:25:09.000As Governor Rick Perry at the time, he declared that because we brought so many tourist dollars into town.
01:25:17.000In the middle of August, bringing 2,000-plus people who have flown in, got a motel, and they're going to go to a rock and roll show over at Stubbs.
01:26:15.000So we booked to play at Stubbs because a friend of a friend knew Charles Atal and the boys that set Stubbs up.
01:26:23.000And while 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?
01:29:31.000I'd rather be in a helicopter than be in that fucking tunnel.
01:29:33.000Well, 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, I'm living right next to the Liberty helipad in Chelsea.
01:31:28.000I saw that movie at a few premieres around the world, and there's this gasp that comes out of the audience.
01:31:35.000It'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.
01:32:13.000I just want to be in this space because I need you to read it now.
01:32:18.000And he'd been part of the Gladiator so I read it and I ended up ringing him and thanking him because the experience of reading the script was just fantastic.
01:32:31.000One of the best scripts I'd ever read and it had that device on the page.
01:32:33.000So that wasn't a trick added by the filmmakers later.
01:32:37.000The same experience of reading it is the experience you have when you're watching in the cinema.
01:33:05.000And I remember putting that script down and walking and jumping into the swimming pool, you know, at three or four in the morning or whatever, going, I'm absolutely doing that fucking movie.
01:34:24.000There's sort of a type of alchemy, you know?
01:34:27.000And, you know, I came out of an independent film world and then suddenly a couple of those independent films got successful and it led me to another place, you know?
01:34:37.000But I still like to work in an independent world because, you know, if one hits, that's the one that's going to be...
01:34:43.000Fun and important or whatever if it comes out of nowhere.
01:34:48.000Studio films, it's great if it's the right situation.
01:34:55.000I'm not saying that there's a negative in doing that.
01:34:58.000If you know what I've done, I've done all sorts of big studio budget films.
01:35:06.000I'm Superman's Dad in DC. I'm Zeus the God of Gods in Disney Marvel and I'm Kraven the Hunter's Russian father in Sony Marvel.
01:35:26.000The experience of doing those films is the same for me as other things.
01:35:32.000I go to work, I have a particular character thing in mind, this is what I'm trying to do.
01:35:37.000The thing about my job, man, In reality, most film directors you work with are genius.
01:35:47.000The person that has worked to the point of getting to helm a feature film where you have to cover all of the aspects, from the production design to the sound to how you're shooting or what lenses you're using.
01:36:01.000You 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?
01:36:08.000So the joke I often make about working with Ridley, it's like, I get to hold the paint palette for Titian.
01:36:16.000While Titian's doing his shit, and he turns to me and goes, Russell, I need more blue.
01:37:00.000And I've been talking to whatever that is all the way through my life.
01:37:04.000I 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 mum.
01:37:14.000I 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.
01:37:30.000In terms of the privileges that they give me and the experiences that they give me and the regard and what have you.
01:37:37.000And 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.
01:37:45.000So I was talking to my mom and my father had just recently passed away and I said, why don't you come with us?
01:37:50.000And 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 her to him.
01:38:06.000And I said to her, Mum, listen to what you're saying.
01:38:10.000This is a place that connects you to my father.
01:40:37.000But 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.
01:40:46.000To get there, we have to go in this very small little elevator, you know?
01:40:50.000So, I'm there, just me and my mum, say, how you going?
01:41:45.000They never play anything other than ecclesiastical music, but on the day that we're in a place where we can hear a private rehearsal of the Swiss Guards Band, they just happen to be playing the song played at my father's funeral.
01:41:58.000When I've gone through this whole process of convincing my mum 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.
01:42:16.000What I do feel is that All religions are simply a human way of trying to explain the inexplicable.
01:42:26.000There 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,
01:43:33.000I did, actually, because they wanted me to go and see their armory.
01:43:39.000Again, another experience that you would never have, right?
01:43:42.000So I get taken down, and here's the history of the Swiss Guards and their connection to the Pope, and here's all of the armor.
01:43:50.000That's been worn by the guards over the centuries.
01:43:53.000Here's all the weapons and the swords and all that sort of stuff.
01:43:56.000And I did ask them about the Danny boy and the first guy I talked to was like, no, they wouldn't have played that if misheard it because they only play ecclesiastical music.
01:44:09.000But apparently they were building up to some performance for some visiting dignitary and that was the choice of song for that thing.
01:44:34.000There's something undeniable about just being in the Vatican itself.
01:44:39.000St. Peter's Basilica to this day is one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had just walking to that place and just trying to imagine the worksmanship, the artisan, the artistic ability to duplicate the kind of The 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.
01:45:09.000The first time that I walked in there, which was 1991, And this probably sounds a bit weird, but I got sort of offended or something.
01:45:19.000It was so over the top and so incredible.
01:45:25.000And I thought about it from the perspective of this is a group of men trying to build a mountain to show you they're as powerful as God or something like that.
01:48:16.000And the level of that game was like every other sculptor had to look at that and go, oh my god, what am I doing?
01:48:22.000Yeah, you know, it was damaged between the wars, I think, by a Turkish guy who was either born in Australia or had been living in Australia, and he went to Rome.
01:48:34.000And back then they used to be able to walk right up to it, you know?
01:48:38.000And, I don't know, he hit it with a hammer or something like that and damaged it.
01:49:41.000Yeah, so I was able to just walk right up to it and walk around it and at one point in time, the guy says, you can put your hand on it if you want.
01:49:51.000Yeah, 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.
01:51:29.000So there's one conversation where golf comes up and you can see there's like a little colour comes up in his cheek because he wants to defend himself or beat himself up or whatever.
01:53:06.000So when I met Ridley, I was maybe 35 or 40 pounds heavier than I'd been on L.A. Confidential, which was the last movie that he'd seen me in.
01:53:20.000I was bald, and I had a really weird sort of suntan because of wearing the wig.
01:53:27.000So my face had some, but my head was white, you know?
01:53:30.000And I don't know how he could possibly have ever seen me as the character.
01:53:36.000But yeah, that first conversation I had with him, and I said, when are you starting?
01:54:39.000The thing being is the food production process is not the same necessarily in other countries outside of Italy.
01:54:47.000Italy or France, whatever they have, food production methods that are like artisan methods that have been used for a long, long time and pretty much most of the places you go that food has It hasn't necessarily been affected in the same way as it might in a more westernized country like America,
01:55:24.000I don't think when we started, I don't think I was ready, but by the time we're halfway through the film and my shirt's coming off and all that sort of stuff, I'd had enough time and enough focus on it to get it to a certain place.
01:55:34.000So did you have to train while filming?
01:56:02.000This whole bunch of guys are desperate to work out and everything.
01:56:05.000So I just let everybody use the space as well.
01:56:08.000Just on the proviso that if I'm coming in and I've got 15 minutes between things and I need to be on the bench, just get off the fucking bench.
01:56:49.000Moved 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.
01:56:58.000I'd lived there between four and 14. That's your formative years.
01:57:02.000I never felt like New Zealand, even though it was the land of my birth.
01:57:07.000So I went back to where I felt comfortable.
01:57:10.000I 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.
01:57:18.000I'm going to focus more on acting and put the music, you know, underneath it.
01:57:24.000And one of the things that I'd planned on doing was working enough, saving money to then go to NIDA, the National Institute of Dramatic Art, and get a piece of paper that says I know how to do my job, right?
01:57:55.000This theatre and a guy called Bruce Applebaum, who had been my brother's biology teacher in high school, but who had become a friend of one of my uncles.
01:58:07.000And he came to see the show, and he came backstage.
01:58:10.000And at that point, he was the technical director for the National Institute of Dramatic Art.
02:00:30.000Where you see that guy walk in the room, turns his head, and you go, oh, I'm with that guy.
02:00:34.000That guy's, you know, he's fantastic, you know.
02:00:37.000When 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 another level of responsibility, right?
02:00:51.000That was the first film where I had saw that kind of changed my perspective on things and made me openly consider the idea that a corporation would have someone assassinated if they were going to affect their business.
02:01:06.000I remember seeing that movie going, Jesus Christ.
02:01:08.000And 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'd put into those things.
02:01:23.000You're playing a guy who risked his life.
02:01:26.000To tell us, to let everybody else know, hey, there's some nefarious forces involved in this business.
02:01:33.000It's not as simple as they're just selling you cigarettes.
02:01:39.000Yeah, well, like, the responsibility is the right word.
02:01:41.000You know, that experience that I was sharing with you, where I sat in front of him and asked him some tough questions, and I pushed a button emotionally.
02:02:12.000As you say, he risked everything in his life.
02:02:15.000Risked his professional reputation, the health and safety of his family, you know, to put that information in front of us.
02:02:21.000The 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 peddled something that was unsafe.
02:02:35.000Because there's a whole lot of things that you can do to make these less...
02:04:39.000And he's lighting it before he even gets out the door.
02:04:42.000He just couldn't wait to get it back in him.
02:04:44.000Well, there's a funny thing, though, right, that somebody sort of said to me once, 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.
02:05:02.000It's not like other things that might get deeper and harder and more difficult or whatever.
02:05:07.000It's only ever going to be that craving.
02:05:11.000So you just have to sort of walk past it and, you know.
02:05:15.000But 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.
02:05:26.000The most pressing physical thing that's bothering you is you want a cigarette.
02:05:29.000In 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.
02:05:42.000And so it's sort of like I've had experiences where, you know, for an extended period of time, I'm in this battle of trying to completely get rid of it out of my life.
02:05:54.000But all of these other things are being negatively affected because I'm not making decisions.
02:07:48.000So we redid the schedule and we cycled back into the boxing.
02:07:52.000So 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.
02:08:02.000And what was good about it is that it kept me in shape through the whole shoot.
02:08:08.000If we'd done 35 days of boxing and then stopped and then done another 30 shooting days where I didn't have to box, James J. Braddock would have changed shape during the course of the film.
02:08:19.000It was because I was cycling back into the boxing that I stayed in shape and kept improving 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.
02:08:30.000So 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.
02:08:42.000And 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.
02:08:48.000But when I did the real fight, I did it with the fellow Troy, who was a really lovely bloke, great boxer, great athlete, incredible on the ropes, on the skipping rope, just superior.
02:09:01.000I did it with him because I wanted the challenge of doing it.
02:09:05.000If we're going to do it for real, I want to do it with him.
02:09:09.000And we were chasing each other around that ring.
02:10:00.000And then I did a street martial art thing as well.
02:10:06.000I'd get to halfway up the belt ladder and then I'd move on to something else.
02:10:14.000But it's funny because all of that training comes into play later on in my life.
02:10:22.000Funnily enough, I always say to people, It's actually my musical theatre background and dance routines that make my fight sequences so sharp.
02:10:32.000Because it's sort of like you're working with a rhythm.
02:10:35.000And if you're working with a camera and the camera's trying to catch something, if you have that rhythm, then you can display the stuff that you want the camera to capture and the audience to see.
02:10:47.000But a lot of people think I'm joking when I say it, but it's for real.
02:10:56.000He's one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world.
02:10:57.000Didn't he just win a big fight the other day?
02:10:58.000Yeah, he beat Kambosis from Australia, who's also an elite fighter.
02:11:03.000But 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.
02:11:13.000And he has the greatest footwork of all time.
02:11:35.000I did Budokan to start with, then I did Sir Daw, which is a kung fu, and then I did Zendikai after that, which is more of a street fighting thing, which is headbutts and shit.
02:13:47.000It was his ego that made him jump up to his feet.
02:13:49.000He should have taken a knee, wait to the count of eight rows.
02:13:53.000Play 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?
02:15:30.000I don't think he fought again after that.
02:15:32.000He had that big, long, storied career and multiple world championships and all of the things that he achieved.
02:15:38.000He just knew that that was the end of that for him.
02:15:43.000Well, good for him for recognizing that.
02:15:45.000That'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.
02:15:52.000And then, who am I if I don't do that thing?
02:15:54.000And your whole life from the time you were young.
02:15:56.000It's like all sports people though, isn't it?
02:15:58.000I think for fighters, it's more difficult.
02:16:01.000Oh, it's much more intense as a fighter, for sure.
02:16:02.000It's also, you have to have this ridiculous belief in yourself that you're the best of all the elites out there.
02:17:54.000Unfortunately, it gets overshadowed by activity, like we just witnessed.
02:17:58.000What do you think of this Jake Paul fellow?
02:18:01.000I 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.
02:18:11.000I think his strength is that people, for whatever stupid reasons, they underestimate him because of what his background was.
02:18:19.000And they think there's no way that some guy who became famous off of YouTube is going to be an actual legit boxer.
02:18:25.000But 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.
02:18:49.000No matter what you're taking and what they're doing for you, you're still 58. But 58-year-old Mike Tyson is not 50-year-old Mike Jones that lives down the street.
02:19:01.000It's a different kind of human being, and he still can knock your fucking head into another dimension if he can catch you.
02:19:07.000The thing is, can he catch a 28-year-old guy who's at the top of his career who's winning legitimate boxing matches?
02:19:14.000I mean, he's beating former UFC world champions like Tyron Woodley.
02:19:18.000He had that very good fight with Tommy Fury, who's a legitimate boxer, which was a very good fight.
02:19:26.000He just beat up Mike Perry, who's a bare-knuckle champion.
02:19:33.000And if Mike Tyson and him are fighting and Mike can't catch him, and Mike has bad knees, if his back's bad, I mean, I don't know what's going on with him physically.
02:19:43.000It's hard to tell from a guy just hitting pads.
02:19:46.000When he's hitting those pads, he looks great.
02:19:49.000Like, yeah, if he can do that, if he can actually do that for eight rounds or ten rounds, however long this fight is.
02:19:54.000Well, that's going to be the key, isn't it?
02:20:22.000But then that guy he started becoming where he became more explorative and he was looking into the meaning of life and having a smoke every now and then and stuff like that.
02:20:55.000Because I was going to make the table more narrow and be closer to the guests.
02:20:59.000I 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.
02:21:11.000And then I had him on again when he was about to fight Roy Jones Jr. And he had lost about 60 pounds.
02:22:09.000But it's a legit fight, and they both do well, and nobody gets hurt.
02:22:13.000That would be nice, but it's probably not going to happen.
02:22:16.000It's probably going to be one of two things.
02:22:19.000It'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.
02:22:28.000And Jake Paul is a 28-year-old athlete in the prime of his life.
02:25:30.000So, they're able to do this signaling pathway that's been implicated in articular cartilage repair.
02:25:37.000IGF-1 is a member of the family of growth factors.
02:25:40.000Structurally closely related to pro-insulin can promote, I don't know what that word is, chondrocyte prolification.
02:25:50.000Enhance matrix production and inhibit catabolism.
02:25:56.000Moreover, we discussed the potential role of IGF-1 in OA treatment.
02:26:00.000Of note, we summarized the recent progress on IGF delivery systems.
02:26:04.000Optimization of IGF delivery systems can facilitate treatment application and cartilage repair and improve OA treatment efficacy.
02:26:11.000So there's this and there's another one that's in Australia where they're using it on sheep right now and they're able to regrow cartilage on sheep and they're about to begin human trials on that as well.
02:26:21.000Healing and discovering animal models consuming to new human therapies.
02:27:01.000They can do some pretty extraordinary stuff, especially outside of the country, because outside of America, America has the FDA, and the FDA is very strict on this stuff.
02:27:10.000But if you can go to Tijuana, there's a place called the Cellular Performance Institute.
02:27:13.000They send a lot of UFC fighters down there.
02:27:32.000But I guarantee you what the stem cells can do is help heal what can heal in that area, reduce inflammation, give you more range of motion, and give you a much more pain-free experience.
02:27:43.000Because I've got that situation with my toes, right?
02:27:46.000I've got grade four tears in both Achilles.
02:28:07.000I've got, you know, both shoulders are shit, but the left one is particularly shit.
02:28:11.000And it's like, you know, like even on this tour we've been doing, because we've been traveling like 35,000 kilometers or something on this tour, and, you know, sometimes it's in a plane, but other times it's in a, you know, hopefully a bus, but most of the time just a car,
02:28:27.000or at one point we were traveling around in a pet transport van.
02:29:29.000So I'm kind of, probably doesn't look like it to you, but I'm actually in the process of that 10 years of allowing myself to be in a certain shape and playing all sorts of roles for that.
02:29:41.000But 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.
02:29:59.000But what I'm looking forward to is that all of the guys that are 10 years my junior, they're going, mate, you fucking let yourself go, haven't you?
02:30:19.000I 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 so I can enjoy it a little bit more.
02:31:27.000Well, it's just the thing is, I can't, because of all the damage everywhere, because what I used to do is just outrun my, you know, go through a period of, you know, abusing yourself and then just outrun it.
02:31:53.000Yeah, but what I'm trying to do is actually make the adjustments without relying on Olympic-level physical preparation.
02:32:02.000I'm just trying to bring it down purely through...
02:32:05.000Diet and the fact that I've been losing weight while I'm on a tour like this where you don't have consistency in the way you can exercise and the food that's available to you at 2 o'clock in the morning after you've finished a gig is pretty hairy.
02:32:20.000The fact that I've actually still been able to come down is amazing.
02:32:23.000I've never been on a tour with a band in my life and I've been doing this stuff since the early 80s.
02:32:43.000I don't know what the rules in Australia are for peptides.
02:32:46.000Do you know what kind of regulations they have there?
02:32:49.000I'm pretty sure that they're available, but you can't use them in a professional sense, which doesn't affect my job, but sports people can't use them.
02:32:58.000Right, sports people can't use them here either, unfortunately.
02:33:01.000All they do is help you heal, especially things like BPC-157.
02:33:05.000They just help heal injuries, and they've recently banned that here for some fucking stupid reason.
02:35:19.000So it's like, alright, I've had 10 years without doing that, so now I'm going back the other way.
02:35:25.000What exercise can you do that doesn't hurt?
02:35:28.000Oddly enough, I would never have thought this, and 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 You know,
02:35:45.000full blood injections, platelet-rich injections, did all of that stuff, you know.
02:35:49.000And then you're banging yourself with painkillers because it's such a heavy hit when you do that sort of thing, particularly with the Achilles, you know, and the moon boot and all that, you know.
02:37:50.000I'm talking about from 98 onwards, right?
02:37:55.000So that's through all of those movies we were talking about, like Gladiator, like Martian Commander, like Cinderella Man, Noah, whatever...
02:38:04.000The problem with my Achilles is always present.
02:38:18.000I wonder how much of that is the same thing, like the direction.
02:38:21.000You've made this direction to beat this woman at tennis.
02:38:24.000You've got to get good at tennis and your mind is saying to your body, all right, you've got to fix this fucking problem with the Achilles.
02:38:32.000We're going to need to fire up all the resources.
02:38:34.000It 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.
02:38:42.000The timeline is, in fact, a lot longer.
02:38:56.000You're doing a little bit and then the next day you might do that same move again or whatever, you know, but it's not wearing it down at the same time.
02:39:35.000Yeah, so opposite of what I think anybody would recommend.
02:39:38.000It doesn't seem to, you know, bear logic, but here it is, you know, sort of.
02:39:43.000And, you know, I've started riding bicycles again now and everything because it got to the point, man, where the pain, you know, if you went on a mountain bike for 15 or 20 k's, it's just white hot pain in the back of my heels, you know?
02:43:21.000And it's like, I remember the first time he said a word, and now he has the intellectual capacity to realize that this is a moment in his life if he grabs what he can in terms of his education.
02:43:37.000And he's looked at Latin and Greek and gone, if I can nail Latin and Greek, every language is available to me.
02:43:43.000So it's like, it's just, you know, I mean, to sit back and be impressed with your kids at that sort of level.
02:43:52.000And 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.
02:45:20.000Well, you're seeing that now in American politics more than ever because the person that's actually in office is saying what she's going to do if she gets into office.
02:45:48.000The unfortunate thing is, and it affects Australia as much as it affects here, we have such an aggressive media situation and the media's need for new information, new stories, whatever that timeline is.
02:46:05.000You're just not going to get people of quality stepping into that world anymore.
02:46:25.000It's a real problem that's only going to get worse.
02:46:28.000And our desire and our hunger for bullshit and to focus on what did he do when he was in high school?
02:46:35.000You know, what did she say when she was on Twitter when she was 22?
02:46:38.000Like, what the fuck are you talking about?
02:46:40.000Like, we have to put that shit aside, recognize that people are just human beings and stop dragging out old shit just to make your party win because it ruins the entire system.
02:47:04.000I don't know what your political system's like, but we're completely trapped in this two-party system.
02:47:08.000Yeah, we have the same sort of situation.
02:47:10.000But we have a very interesting thing that's happening in Australia at the moment, which is the rise of independence.
02:47:16.000And it's happened federally and also at a state level too, but also in city government as well, where non-party affiliated people are standing.
02:47:29.000And so now you have a situation where in the parliament you have a group of them.
02:47:34.000I don't know the exact numbers, 10 or 15 or something independents.
02:47:37.000So the main party has to deal with the fact that those independents are going to bring a non- Party-line series of points to the argument.
02:48:11.000Well, 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.
02:48:19.000But most people have opinions that are a little bit of a conglomeration of both conservative and liberal perspectives, especially like liberal socially, fiscally conservative.
02:50:07.000And the fact that you can do something like that, you can persuade people to think that people are writing about something when you're actually putting it out there, which is just bananas.
02:50:16.000It's just a complete manipulation of the zeitgeist.
02:50:19.000We'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, right?
02:50:34.000Because that person might have commented somewhere on social media or something and said, you know, X person is X. And so now, you know, certain politicians have worked out, oh, I can make money out of this.
02:52:19.000I was probably a relatively early adopter of it, but for a while there, it was like, oh, this is the thing that we've been looking for in that I can put a 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 do the interviews and stuff.
02:52:43.000And for a while there, it was really potent, but it's definitely dropped off.
02:52:49.000It seems like there's a whole lot of people, the people that you'd want to be reading your stuff, that have just decided, you know, my life's a lot better if I don't.
02:54:29.000But 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.
02:54:41.000Because that's half the available audience.
02:54:45.000I can't remember all the figures and everything, but the way he set up Fox News, it just became an absolute cash cranking machine because they got it into the affiliates and stuff like that by offering it at a lower price.
02:55:03.000And then, you know, got to his, you know, subscriber numbers that still had it making money between advertisers and subscribers at that lower price.
02:55:14.000So 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.
02:55:25.000Because he already had it working at the lower price.
02:55:29.000I think it's something like it was $10 a head in an atmosphere where it was normally $33.
02:55:37.000So then when that first contract finished and it went to the normal subscriber rate, you've got that difference in 77 million subscribers times an extra $23.
02:55:47.000And that's the beginning of opinion-based news coverage.
02:55:58.000And 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.
02:57:17.000But it's funny because they're running like ads or they're popping up as ads, but it's kind of...
02:57:24.000It'll have something dark in there that then, because it's on your timeline, will attract more darkness, but you can't get rid of it anymore.
02:57:33.000You can't just block it and chuck it out.
02:57:36.000I mean, you can do it with individuals, but that's just a strange little thing that's happened.
02:57:41.000Yeah, it is a strange little thing that's happened.
02:57:47.000I never got into Facebook, so I don't understand it, and I don't really understand Instagram either.
02:57:53.000We 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 you're connecting to people all over the world.
02:58:05.000I've had some really funny situations arise because of something I commented on and then somebody gave me another piece of information about or whatever.
02:58:16.000I've learned a hell of a lot out of it, but just the last year or two, it's gotten worse.
02:58:51.000There's one particular one that comes up all the time.
02:58:53.000It's a shot from Les Mis where I'm looking in this doorway and I'm in, you know, police uniform of the time and I just kind of go, slide into this doorway.
02:59:02.000And people apply it to so many different situations.
02:59:05.000The animated gif, like when Homer Simpson melts into the bushes.
02:59:13.000You know, I mean, I think it's fascinating because it's a new thing.
02:59:16.000I 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 we're going to figure all that stuff out eventually if we don't kill ourselves.
02:59:31.000And it's going to get to a better place of understanding human beings because you're gonna be human beings just interacting with human beings in a pure sense without Forming our narratives from mass media without forming our narratives from television You're gonna get dissenting opinions people to give more nuanced perspective on things and if you follow the right people And you read the right things and you do kind of shy away from a lot of the more polarizing arguments and the ideological stuff.
03:01:33.000But I try and shy away from coming up with a definitive opinion because then you're sort of out on the edge of that limb and you're going, well, it looked like that to me.
03:01:48.000It'll be interesting the next couple of years, for sure.
03:01:52.000I think I'm a little worried about America in the next little while.
03:01:57.000I haven't been here for five years, man.
03:01:59.000In 2019, I finished The Loudest Voice, and I went home, and then COVID hit.
03:02:04.000And I had kind of an incredible experience where I said to my boys, look, you're cool in the city with your mum and everything, but...
03:02:13.000I 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.
03:02:20.000So 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.
03:02:32.000And I got this thing where, you know, my dad dies in March 2021. And so often you talk to people and they say, you know, I wish I had one more dinner, one more hug, one more conversation or whatever, you know.
03:02:43.000But when I looked at it, because it was a surprise when he died, it wasn't expected.
03:02:48.000He was 85, but he seemed to be quite healthy.
03:02:54.000And in reality, when I looked at it, it's like, well, I got a whole year.
03:02:57.000I got a whole year of having dinner pretty much every night with my mum and dad and asked him a million questions and stuff.
03:03:05.000Not because I thought he was about to pass away.
03:03:07.000It was just because We had the time together.
03:03:11.000I was digging a huge dam on my place to try and make it drought-proof.
03:03:21.000So I now 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, something like that.
03:03:31.000One day we went out, I went out to show him what was basically a hole in the ground at the time, about a football field size hole in the ground.
03:03:41.000I took him out in a buggy and the clouds came over and it started pissing down with rain.
03:03:47.000So I've got an 83 year old old man who doesn't move too fast or whatever, I've got to put him back in the buggy.
03:03:54.000And by the time we got halfway back to the house, it was absolutely torrential rain.
03:04:12.000These people, referring to my mother and the other people that are there to help him out, he goes, these people don't let me do anything.
03:04:21.000So we just had little moments like that where we just got to share some stuff.
03:04:26.000And then my schedule has been extremely busy since COVID, but I've been working in other places, Thailand, Malta.
03:04:35.000Hungary, England, you know, just constantly working.
03:04:39.000But because of what we learned with COVID in terms of being able to just drop in on a TV show, my studio on the farm, we now push a few buttons and I can be live on, you know, a New York Tonight Show.
03:04:54.000So I've restructured what I do with press.
03:04:58.000You know, I do my junkets at my house, you know.
03:05:01.000And I might have a nice shirt here, but just like today, I've got shorts on underneath, and I walk out of, you know, a day of press, and I'm in the bush, you know?
03:05:11.000I've got the horses and the cows and the dogs, and I'm, you know, cool.
03:05:14.000So it's still changed my life, but it's meant I haven't been here.
03:05:17.000So it's been a five-year gap, you know, to flying into New York the other day.
03:05:22.000And it's a palpable difference in the way, you know, people regard each other and the way they talk and the fears they express.
03:05:33.000Surprisingly, though, New York felt friendlier.
03:06:08.000And 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.
03:06:18.000I want to live like that, where people can say what's on their mind and people can have differing opinions.
03:06:25.000People can be of all different races, religions or whatever and still be in the same community.
03:06:31.000It's so important that America remains healthy into the future for everyone, not just for Americans.
03:06:45.000And my son, Tennyson, is going to be so happy that when he sees my name come up on the list of things, he's going to be very happy.
03:06:53.000And I want to just thank you on his behalf.
03:06:58.000For being a voice that accepts different opinions and doesn't push a particular agenda, you've definitely helped his brain expand and helped him become curious.