The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2406 - Russell Crowe

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

00:00:14.000 Don't worry, sir.

00:00:15.000 Good to see you.

00:00:16.000 Rogan.

00:00:17.000 Yeah, good to see you.

00:00:18.000 Nice to see you, man.

00:00:19.000 Your movie's great.

00:00:20.000 Thank you very much.

00:00:21.000 When does it come out?

00:00:22.000 In the United States, it comes out November 7th.

00:00:25.000 Okay.

00:00:26.000 And then various dates over the next month and a half or so around the rest of the world.

00:00:31.000 It's a fucking heavy movie, man.

00:00:33.000 Yeah.

00:00:33.000 It's a heavy movie.

00:00:36.000 The trial.

00:00:38.000 That footage, was that all real footage?

00:00:39.000 The Holocaust footage? 0.63

00:00:40.000 Yeah.

00:00:41.000 Real footage of the one of the reasons that inspired Jamie to go ahead, that he was given access to that footage, some of which has never been seen since 1946.

00:00:54.000 It's a very interesting way that he makes the subject matter accessible because it's such a dry topic from the outside, right?

00:01:03.000 Here's a court case.

00:01:05.000 Here's yet another courtroom drama, procedural or whatever.

00:01:08.000 So I can imagine that people would see that and go, well, it's, you know, might not be an exciting watch or something.

00:01:16.000 But he sort of puts the audience in this position where he allows them to start to be amused by some of the things that are going on and the interpersonal relationships.

00:01:26.000 And, you know, when the commandant of the prison has to call up his two top mental health experts and dress them down for getting into a fistfight, things like that.

00:01:41.000 There's a charm to it.

00:01:43.000 And then he gets you into the courtroom and he locks the door.

00:01:47.000 And he goes, now you're going to see what we're talking about.

00:01:51.000 So I think it's a very interesting film device to disarm people before he starts giving them the real juice, you know?

00:02:00.000 Yeah, it's also a fascinating psychological tape from the psychiatrist, from Kelly's perspective, you know, because the way he's describing all human beings, that all human beings are capable of these horrific acts.

00:02:19.000 And that's the thing that was a very unpopular take at the time, actually led to his removal from the process because he wasn't fulfilling what the War Department wanted him to say, which is, you know, all Nazis are crazy, you know, ruled by a madman.

00:02:38.000 And this is a unique experience.

00:02:41.000 But that's not what he found.

00:02:42.000 In sitting down talking to the 22 major Nazi sort of names that he was assigned to post-war, he realized that every single one of these people was, you know, as normal.

00:02:58.000 Well, there was a couple that were pretty out there.

00:03:02.000 But, you know, for the most part, he was dealing with rational men.

00:03:07.000 Yeah, that's what's scary.

00:03:08.000 How the hell did they end up making this series of decisions if they're rational men?

00:03:13.000 Well, it just seems like things just get pushed slowly but surely into this unbelievably horrific place.

00:03:23.000 Like it starts off, it's just a war.

00:03:23.000 Right.

00:03:26.000 It starts off Hitler's in power. 0.92

00:03:28.000 And then slowly but surely, things get incrementally.

00:03:32.000 And that's the thing that's difficult because gigantic jumps, we can all read.

00:03:32.000 Yes.

00:03:41.000 Right.

00:03:42.000 But little incremental changes.

00:03:43.000 Right.

00:03:44.000 The boiling of the frog.

00:03:45.000 Just how you take away this person's rights, that person's personal power, and slowly, you know, you get to a point where the average person then turns around and goes, how did we get to here?

00:03:58.000 Right.

00:03:58.000 Yeah, I thought it was, I thought it was about something else.

00:04:01.000 You know, there's a smoke screen going up, and I thought we were doing that.

00:04:04.000 And as it turns out, it's very different.

00:04:08.000 Yeah, that's the one of the scariest aspects of human beings is our ability to dehumanize others, to turn others into something less than us.

00:04:18.000 Right.

00:04:19.000 Non-human, an other humans, with families, with mothers, and fathers and children. 1.00

00:04:25.000 It's one of the most dangerous things, and I see it going on everywhere at the moment, that we're trying to say that you're either, you know, and for want of a better team name, that you're either red or that you're blue.

00:04:37.000 Right.

00:04:38.000 And humans are far more nuanced than that.

00:04:43.000 We're not that extreme, you know?

00:04:46.000 And the idea that you can split all of us into two camps is kind of nuts.

00:04:54.000 It's nuts.

00:04:55.000 You know?

00:04:56.000 And it takes out all the room for subtlety in a discussion.

00:04:56.000 Yeah, it's nuts.

00:05:01.000 And therefore, it makes communicating with each other less and less available.

00:05:08.000 Well, it's just in this country in particular.

00:05:10.000 I don't know about Australian politics, but we only have two parties.

00:05:14.000 And they're both essentially financed by enormous corporations.

00:05:18.000 So it's a ruse.

00:05:20.000 The whole thing's a ruse.

00:05:21.000 And you have different social issues on each side that come up, and then it becomes this year with us or against us, right versus left.

00:05:29.000 But it's going nowhere good.

00:05:31.000 Nowhere good.

00:05:32.000 We have the same sort of two-principal party system in Australia as well.

00:05:38.000 But we have a slight advantage in that we're kind of on the edge of the world in a lot of ways.

00:05:45.000 So what I've always said is when you're growing up in Australia, New Zealand, you grow up looking out.

00:05:52.000 Yes, you understand your own culture and all that, but you grow up looking at what else is happening in the rest of the world.

00:05:56.000 What's happening in Europe?

00:05:57.000 What's happening in America?

00:06:00.000 By and large, Americans grow up looking in.

00:06:04.000 The principal sports are only played by American teams, American football, in some instances, baseball, but they're not the types of sports that we play where the pinnacle of that sport is international competition.

00:06:19.000 Right.

00:06:19.000 Rugby union, rugby league, cricket, football, soccer.

00:06:25.000 So we grow with that as being the pinnacle of any particular sport if you get to represent your country.

00:06:34.000 And that's only really relevant in an American sense in an Olympic period, you know.

00:06:39.000 Right, that's it.

00:06:40.000 Yeah, we never think about other sports.

00:06:42.000 We mock them.

00:06:44.000 We think about, you know, like, what are you doing playing cricket?

00:06:48.000 And it's a fascinating game.

00:06:50.000 And anybody who loves baseball, generally, I've found baseball lovers are all about the minutiae.

00:06:56.000 They're all about the stats and what those stats mean.

00:06:59.000 You know, there might be a certain score on the board, but, you know, and their team might be getting beaten, but they see in the stats that there's a certain dominance in an area.

00:07:08.000 And so they still have a hope that the outcome of the game may come their way.

00:07:13.000 And cricket fans are the same as that.

00:07:17.000 So the fact that the two never seem to meet is odd to me.

00:07:21.000 Because it's the same type of game.

00:07:21.000 It is odd.

00:07:25.000 Cricket is larger worldwide, right?

00:07:28.000 Much larger.

00:07:29.000 Yeah, well, you have India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka and countries like that with huge populations playing the game.

00:07:38.000 Do you guys have home runs in cricket?

00:07:39.000 Like where someone really cracks the ball and smashes it out of the park?

00:07:43.000 It's called a six.

00:07:44.000 If you hit the ball over the fence without it bouncing, you get six runs.

00:07:49.000 And that's the moment of an home run.

00:07:54.000 There's different forms of the game.

00:07:56.000 You have T20, then you have one day.

00:08:01.000 So this is going to be difficult.

00:08:05.000 T20 means that each team gets to bowl 20 overs.

00:08:08.000 An over is six balls.

00:08:10.000 So you have 26 ball overs that you're bowling to the batting team, and they've got to try and get as many runs as they can.

00:08:16.000 And then you will have a go at batting, right?

00:08:18.000 So you have that version of the game, which is very short.

00:08:21.000 It can happen in an evening.

00:08:23.000 Then you have a one-day game, which maybe starts in the afternoon, finishes by eight or nine at night.

00:08:29.000 But then you have the test match.

00:08:33.000 And this is what I grew up with.

00:08:35.000 It's sort of been dialed down a little bit now because they brought in shorter forms of the game.

00:08:39.000 But the test match is between two countries and it's played over five days.

00:08:43.000 And the idea is that both teams have to bat and bowl twice.

00:08:48.000 And the result will be whatever it is at the end of five days.

00:08:52.000 Five days?

00:08:53.000 Five days, man.

00:08:54.000 Five full days.

00:08:56.000 And they start and then they have morning tea and then they have another break, they have lunch, and then they have afternoon tea.

00:09:03.000 And if it's really hot every now and then, somebody will walk out and give them drinks.

00:09:06.000 It's very civilized.

00:09:08.000 My cousin Martin was a great cricket player.

00:09:11.000 He was the captain of New Zealand.

00:09:12.000 My other cousin Jeffrey was also a captain of New Zealand.

00:09:15.000 So I kind of grew up in a cricketing family and it was one of the pathways for me that was, you know, to potentially play cricket.

00:09:23.000 But when you've got two of your cousins who are as good as they were, it's a very crowded room.

00:09:28.000 So how am I going to make any kind of statement here when one of them, Martin, at his peak, he was called by Sports Illustrated, I believe, the Michael Jordan of World Cricket.

00:09:41.000 Wow.

00:09:42.000 He was a very dominant player in his day.

00:09:44.000 And he used to call, we used to discuss test matches as the gentleman's war because you have a defined space.

00:09:52.000 You have X amount of players and you've got to stop that little ball in this gigantic 180 meter by 120 meter oval.

00:10:00.000 You've got to stop that little red ball from going between the players and therefore, you know, preventing the batsman from scoring runs.

00:10:07.000 But that five-day game, the way that it ebbs and flows, once you're into it, it's the only way you want to watch cricket.

00:10:15.000 Because it's like, you know, at one moment, your team can be just so far ahead, you're like, and then it'll turn on a dime.

00:10:23.000 And day two, things get really dark for your team.

00:10:27.000 Day three, you've got an edge back again.

00:10:28.000 Day four, it's fantastic, man.

00:10:30.000 And as a kid, I used to go and attend every day of a five-day game.

00:10:35.000 Wow.

00:10:36.000 Yeah, it was crazy.

00:10:37.000 Yeah, there's nothing like that here.

00:10:39.000 No, no.

00:10:40.000 I mean, it really requires, I mean, just like, look at the five-day game.

00:10:47.000 It's like five news cycles, right?

00:10:49.000 Yeah.

00:10:50.000 We're not really set up for that sort of patience.

00:10:53.000 How is it broadcast?

00:10:55.000 Television.

00:10:55.000 Is it streamed?

00:10:56.000 Television.

00:10:56.000 Yeah.

00:10:58.000 Yeah. I mean, you know, there's cables and companies and stuff have got involved now, but it used to be national network.

00:11:04.000 And when cricket season was on, I mean, you know, back in the day, people would come from overseas and into Australia this summer and ask the question, is there anything else on television except sport?

00:11:17.000 Is it so?

00:11:19.000 Do they take commercial breaks?

00:11:21.000 Yep.

00:11:22.000 So that's the problem with soccer, right?

00:11:22.000 Okay, they do.

00:11:24.000 Soccer in America, the reason why it's very hard to sell is not just that a lot of people don't play it, but it says there's no commercial breaks.

00:11:32.000 They used to be.

00:11:33.000 So you have a huge number of people who play association football, soccer in this country.

00:11:37.000 Oh, for sure.

00:11:38.000 Listen, they have a professional team here.

00:11:39.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:11:40.000 I've been to the game, but it's nowhere near the involvement that football has.

00:11:44.000 American football.

00:11:45.000 American football in this country.

00:11:46.000 It's not even close.

00:11:47.000 Yeah.

00:11:48.000 Well, see, all of our sports that we like in Australia, apart from cricket, tend to be quite compact, you know.

00:11:54.000 80-minute game, 90-minute game, 10-minute half-time.

00:11:59.000 And it's part of your day.

00:12:01.000 It's not your whole day.

00:12:02.000 It's like we'll go to a football game and then we'll go and have dinner or go and do something else.

00:12:07.000 So we have that same thing where the action is so continuous that the idea of stopping for a commercial break gets quite tricky.

00:12:15.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:12:16.000 It's always been fascinating to me that rugby never took off in America.

00:12:21.000 Because it seems like kind of a more savage version of football.

00:12:21.000 Yeah.

00:12:25.000 Yeah.

00:12:26.000 Well, the way I think it sort of plays out is you've got rugby union, right?

00:12:30.000 Which is 15 men a side.

00:12:34.000 Every time a player is tackled, you recompete for the ball.

00:12:37.000 You have rocks, malls, you have lineouts.

00:12:42.000 It's a very different game.

00:12:43.000 But there's another version of rugby called rugby league, which was played in the north of England.

00:12:48.000 And that has a defined period of offence and defence.

00:12:51.000 And I think that's where American football comes from.

00:12:54.000 I actually own a team in Australia in the NRL, the National Rugby League, the South Sydney Rabbitos, the oldest team in the game, 1908, we were formed.

00:13:02.000 Bought the team in 2006.

00:13:06.000 And it's very easy to explain to Americans.

00:13:07.000 I have American friends come down.

00:13:09.000 I spend maybe 20 minutes talking to them, and they get the game.

00:13:12.000 And they start to dig it.

00:13:14.000 My girlfriend at the moment, actually, Brittany, was one of the reasons why I really started being attracted to her because she understood the game straight away. 0.52

00:13:23.000 Then I find out that when she was younger, she was a cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints while she was studying electrical engineering.

00:13:34.000 So, yeah, rugby league is a very easy game for Americans to follow.

00:13:40.000 Now, how it's refereed becomes frustrating for an American audience because there's so much room for interpretation, referee to referee, game to game, situation to situation.

00:13:53.000 So it can get frustrating.

00:13:54.000 I think one of the greatest things about American football from the outside or from an objective point of view, it seems that every single thing that the NFL try to do is based on an across-the-board fairness for everyone.

00:14:09.000 So those conversations between the referees and what have you seem to be everybody's on the same page.

00:14:17.000 And sometimes when you're watching rugby league, something that you saw somebody else get sent from the field for the week before, and now nothing happens this week.

00:14:28.000 But it's the same kind of hit or whatever.

00:14:30.000 It's like, well, you know, so I've had a few Americans get quite frustrated.

00:14:34.000 No, I think that's, yeah, I think the game moves very fast.

00:14:38.000 Right.

00:14:39.000 And, you know, referees don't have eyes on all sides of their head.

00:14:44.000 But do you have referee corruption over there?

00:14:45.000 Because you have gambling.

00:14:47.000 We definitely have gambling.

00:14:48.000 Yeah, I know you have gambling because I read ads for them.

00:14:51.000 Last brokes.

00:14:52.000 Absolutely crazy the way gambling has become such a significant player.

00:14:56.000 I also read the other day that now it turns out that 50% of ownership of all the major gambling things are in the hands of sports teams.

00:15:06.000 Oh, boy.

00:15:08.000 Going on.

00:15:10.000 I think what we have, as opposed to corruption, is natural bias because guys come out of the game.

00:15:17.000 So there's 17 clubs in the NRL at the moment.

00:15:21.000 And guys who are in positions like referees or video refs or whatever, they have a club.

00:15:26.000 They grew up associated to one particular geographic area and that's their club.

00:15:31.000 So it's very difficult for anyone to truly objectively see their own natural bias.

00:15:40.000 But also, there's got to be some corruption if there's gambling.

00:15:44.000 If it's so subjective that you can make calls that you would, that didn't, that someone got in trouble a week before, and then this week nothing, like that kind of subjectivity where it's up to the referee to make a decision.

00:15:55.000 If I was a corrupt person, a gambler, especially if I was a mobster, I would reach out to that referee and say, you know, it's within our best interests to work together on this.

00:16:05.000 Yes, let's say that.

00:16:07.000 I would hope in all innocence.

00:16:12.000 Well, you have to say that.

00:16:13.000 You own a team.

00:16:14.000 Yeah, and you've got to sort of remain a little impartial in these things.

00:16:21.000 What was that scandal in America, Jamie?

00:16:24.000 The most recent one, the basketball one.

00:16:26.000 It had to do.

00:16:27.000 It's still ongoing.

00:16:28.000 It's still ongoing.

00:16:29.000 Yeah.

00:16:31.000 What are they accusing these guys of, though?

00:16:33.000 I know they rigged poker games, but there's also accusations about the basketball games themselves.

00:16:39.000 Most of it would have been based off of player props.

00:16:42.000 So they know that they're not going to take themselves out of the game.

00:16:45.000 So I just take the under on I'm not going to score 20 points.

00:16:49.000 I'm only going to be there for 10 minutes.

00:16:52.000 Wink, wink.

00:16:52.000 Or like, you know, these players aren't going to play in this game against us.

00:16:56.000 That sort of way.

00:16:57.000 This is players gambling, is it?

00:16:58.000 One of the coaches was doing it too, or like giving information.

00:17:01.000 I mean, he was.

00:17:02.000 Thing is, they were tied to the poker game, too.

00:17:05.000 Oh.

00:17:07.000 So it was just a full-on criminal.

00:17:09.000 I just saw on the news today that the one player who's been tossed around, he had a big IRS debt, and all of this sort of started around the same time, too.

00:17:17.000 Oh, he's trying to pay off his debt.

00:17:19.000 So he got corrupt.

00:17:20.000 Who knows?

00:17:21.000 Who knows?

00:17:22.000 But weren't they ripping off their friends in the poker games?

00:17:25.000 That I don't know because I've seen it.

00:17:27.000 I've seen clips of this.

00:17:28.000 People knew about this a year or two ago on Instagram.

00:17:31.000 They're like, I was at a fucking rigged game, and I know the people involved and know that I should not have, like, I'm not going there and losing my money.

00:17:40.000 How did they know it was rigged?

00:17:42.000 The people involved, he said.

00:17:44.000 He's like, someone else told me this.

00:17:45.000 It's all in the up and up.

00:17:46.000 And then he's like, I know everybody in the game.

00:17:48.000 It's definitely not.

00:17:50.000 What are you talking about?

00:17:51.000 How that guy knew I knew he didn't really care?

00:17:53.000 Well, they had crazy shit.

00:17:54.000 Like, they could read the cards.

00:17:56.000 They had like an x-ray machine.

00:17:58.000 They had cameras and the chip holders.

00:18:01.000 I don't know who they were communicating to, though.

00:18:03.000 There's a lot going on, but it was happening in L.A., Vegas, New York, all over the place.

00:18:07.000 God.

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00:19:25.000 A lot of money.

00:19:25.000 Gambling.

00:19:26.000 $50 million.

00:19:27.000 I stay away from it.

00:19:28.000 I know how you feel about it.

00:19:29.000 About gambling?

00:19:30.000 Yeah, I had an experience when I was a young fellow.

00:19:30.000 Yeah.

00:19:36.000 It was the first time I was in America, actually.

00:19:39.000 And I'd had all these intense meetings and what have you, and I had a decision to make.

00:19:43.000 I had 10 different people wanting to be my agent.

00:19:46.000 So I rented a car and I went for a drive and I went up to San Francisco along the coast and then I turned inland thinking, you know, well, I've heard of Reno, so I'll go there, right?

00:20:00.000 So I went to Reno, Nevada, and I had X amount of money, right?

00:20:05.000 It was a very, I wasn't, you know, I was doing well in my career, but I didn't have a lot of cash.

00:20:12.000 So I had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket, that's all, you know.

00:20:14.000 So I went and had a beer and I started playing blackjack on a $5 table and it was a single deck.

00:20:22.000 This is how long ago this was, 92 or something, right?

00:20:25.000 So I'm playing and I did pretty well.

00:20:28.000 I amassed a few hundred dollars, feeling very cocky and confident about myself.

00:20:32.000 And I probably just then had one beer too many.

00:20:34.000 And I went for a walk down the street and I saw a roulette table and I think, that'll be me, right?

00:20:40.000 Sucker.

00:20:42.000 And so everything I won, I lost.

00:20:45.000 And by the time I sort of got my shit back together, I had $25 in my pocket.

00:20:50.000 I'm in Reno.

00:20:51.000 I got a quarter tank of gas and I got to get back to LA.

00:20:54.000 I don't have a credit card.

00:20:56.000 Oh, boy.

00:20:57.000 So as it was, I'd paid for my hotel in advance.

00:21:00.000 So that's all cool.

00:21:02.000 But I was like, okay, I've got to sober up here.

00:21:05.000 So I go back to the place I started, back to that same $5 table.

00:21:09.000 And I just very carefully, when I got to like $190, which I knew was going to be enough to get me back with petrol and food and all that stuff, I stopped.

00:21:17.000 I go out into the car park of this hotel.

00:21:20.000 It's like 11 midnight, something like that.

00:21:23.000 And I just started vibrating, man.

00:21:24.000 My whole body was like shaking like I was having some kind of fit, you know?

00:21:30.000 And it was just really weird.

00:21:31.000 I got back to the hotel room and I called my mum, Collect, in New Zealand.

00:21:37.000 And I just, I just did this.

00:21:39.000 I went through this.

00:21:39.000 She goes, darling, something I've never told you, but your great-grandfather was a professional gambler.

00:21:49.000 And at one point in time, he gambled his house away.

00:21:54.000 He had to go and get his daughters, wake them up, get his wife and tell them this is where they no longer live.

00:22:02.000 And that one act kept that family in, you know, relative terms poor for another two generations.

00:22:12.000 Wow.

00:22:13.000 That one impulsive act to gamble his house.

00:22:17.000 Yeah, so I know it's in me, so I don't go anywhere near it.

00:22:21.000 That's fascinating.

00:22:22.000 So you think it's genetic.

00:22:23.000 There's a horse race in Australia called the Melbourne Cup.

00:22:28.000 And I will focus on that.

00:22:30.000 And if I happen to be at home and I have the day off kind of thing, I'll put a bit of money on that.

00:22:37.000 But that's it.

00:22:38.000 Everything else that I do in my life is gambling.

00:22:42.000 Becoming an actor, massive gamble.

00:22:43.000 What are you talking about?

00:22:44.000 It's ridiculous.

00:22:45.000 Buying the football team.

00:22:47.000 It's all a version of gambling.

00:22:49.000 But the idea that you're just giving money away to a system that's not fair.

00:22:56.000 It's not going to benefit you.

00:22:58.000 And at the end of the day, in the longer term, you're simply not going to win.

00:23:03.000 That drives me a little crazy.

00:23:04.000 I don't want to get involved in that.

00:23:06.000 The vibration thing, do you think gambling is genetic?

00:23:10.000 Like, there's a thought that a lot of there's there's certain behaviors that are in people that are passed down from their parents.

00:23:19.000 There's certain thought processes, there's certain inclinations, that it's some genetic proponent that we haven't clearly identified yet.

00:23:28.000 That it's, you know, they used to think that people are a blank slate.

00:23:31.000 You're born, you're a blank slate, you learn everything from your environment.

00:23:33.000 But we know that's not real.

00:23:34.000 It's not real.

00:23:35.000 No, there's a shit ton that you get from your genes.

00:23:38.000 It's very weird.

00:23:39.000 And I wonder if you got that from your grandfather.

00:23:44.000 It really feels like it's in me and I have to work against it.

00:23:49.000 Thank God you have discipline.

00:23:50.000 That you could go back to the table in one area.

00:23:54.000 Well, that's a good area to have it, isn't it?

00:23:56.000 But that's how desperate the situation was.

00:23:59.000 It's like I'm standing there in Reno realizing I can't even get back to L.A. I've got a real car.

00:24:06.000 So I just took it really, really slowly.

00:24:08.000 And I do this thing if I'm playing in a situation like that, because occasionally I will go and play blackjack at a casino if I'm in a group of people.

00:24:22.000 Because if you're all disciplined and if you hold every seat on a table, you can turn the tide against the house very easily.

00:24:32.000 They hate you doing it.

00:24:33.000 They try to break it up and put somebody in the middle of you, whatever.

00:24:36.000 But if you actually, funnily enough, it was Tom Cruise that taught me this.

00:24:41.000 If you have it, so the first chair and the last chair make the calls and the decisions, and everybody else just sits on 12 and above.

00:24:50.000 And you watch the mathematics come your way.

00:24:52.000 Now, way, way back in the day, right?

00:24:54.000 It would have been 95, 96, 97, something like that, right?

00:25:02.000 Tom calls me.

00:25:03.000 He's married to Nicole Kibman at the time.

00:25:06.000 Calls me and he goes, you know, hey, bud, we've got this thing set up.

00:25:10.000 Steve Wynne has put on a jet.

00:25:11.000 He's going to fly us to Vegas, right?

00:25:14.000 We are allowed to play at Shadow Creek.

00:25:16.000 We're allowed to play golf at Shadow Creek.

00:25:18.000 So I'm not really a golfer, but it sounded good to me.

00:25:21.000 Jumped on the plane, went there.

00:25:22.000 We're playing Shadow Creek.

00:25:24.000 Lightning Storm comes up.

00:25:25.000 Tom's like in the middle of the fairway, still trying to play.

00:25:28.000 We're going, dude, put the iron down.

00:25:32.000 It's this lightning.

00:25:34.000 So we enjoyed ourselves at the golf course.

00:25:37.000 Then we go back to the Wynns Hotel and they've given us Michael Jackson's Lanai to change clothes in or whatever.

00:25:44.000 We go and get some Chinese food.

00:25:47.000 The jet's comped, the golf's comped, the Lanai's comp, the food's comped, and then we go and play blackjack together.

00:25:54.000 Tom explains what the team's going to do, and we take $25,000 or more off the table, go back to the airport, get on the comp jet, fly back to LA.

00:26:05.000 But we finished as a group.

00:26:07.000 We then attacked the New York Times crossword and we did the last word as we were landing in Los Angeles.

00:26:13.000 So to me, it was like, that, I believe, was a perfect day.

00:26:18.000 That's a team effort.

00:26:20.000 That sounds like a lot of fun.

00:26:22.000 It was a great day.

00:26:23.000 But that sort of like, that was one of the early experiences where, okay, so you can have fun with these sort of games as long as you don't take them too seriously.

00:26:31.000 My current girlfriend is a massive poker player. 1.00

00:26:33.000 She loves it and she's really quite good at it.

00:26:36.000 She's played in a couple of female-only tournaments and things like that, you know. 1.00

00:26:41.000 So I watch them play, but I don't get involved.

00:26:46.000 I don't want to get involved.

00:26:47.000 I don't want to activate that.

00:26:50.000 Yeah, because I am kind of, you know, I do have a reckless streak.

00:26:54.000 You know, I can imagine in the wrong moment if I'm, you know.

00:26:58.000 Tipsy.

00:26:59.000 Well, it wouldn't be tipsy.

00:27:01.000 It would be more like drunk on some kind of ego power kind of thing where, yeah, I can turn the universe.

00:27:07.000 I can make it come my way.

00:27:08.000 I'll bet my house.

00:27:10.000 So I just got to stay away from that.

00:27:13.000 Did you see Uncut Gems?

00:27:13.000 Oi.

00:27:15.000 No.

00:27:16.000 Oh, it's probably the best gambling movie ever.

00:27:19.000 Adam Sandler plays a degenerate gambling junkie.

00:27:22.000 Okay. Not a comedy at all.

00:27:24.000 Amazing Mill.

00:27:25.000 Amazing movie.

00:27:26.000 I love how he's getting, it just seems like he's getting some due respect these days.

00:27:32.000 People are really starting to see how big his effect was and what he can do.

00:27:32.000 Yeah.

00:27:38.000 Also, those movies are fun.

00:27:40.000 All those Happy Gilmore, and they're fun movies.

00:27:43.000 I love those movies.

00:27:45.000 They're innocent, enjoyable entertainment.

00:27:48.000 And he's really good at them.

00:27:50.000 Jack and Jill, they're hilarious movies.

00:27:52.000 Yeah, and that right these days, because I've got a project at the moment, which on the surface you would have to call a comedy.

00:27:58.000 Nobody wants to discuss it.

00:27:59.000 Nobody wants to talk about adult comedies.

00:28:02.000 So where's that scared?

00:28:03.000 Where does that comedy mean we're going to?

00:28:06.000 If we're sort of reducing comedy as a genre.

00:28:09.000 It's only in the film world.

00:28:10.000 In the stand-up world, it's like everybody's completely pushed back against it and they're going the other direction.

00:28:16.000 They're going back to like 1990s style comedy.

00:28:19.000 Right.

00:28:19.000 Which is just say whatever the fuck you think is funny.

00:28:21.000 Confrontational.

00:28:22.000 Stop.

00:28:23.000 No one means these things.

00:28:24.000 You're saying things because they're funny.

00:28:26.000 That's it.

00:28:27.000 You know, it's just like Bob Marley didn't really shoot the sheriff.

00:28:30.000 You get it?

00:28:31.000 Right.

00:28:31.000 You know, it's like we're just talking shit.

00:28:34.000 I heard a funny story about that, actually.

00:28:36.000 Yeah.

00:28:36.000 Just in passing, I can't remember who told me.

00:28:39.000 Maybe I won't even guess.

00:28:41.000 But I think Clapton was living in New York or London or somewhere, and he had a party at his house because he just had that record come out and it would go on number one.

00:28:55.000 And he had it stuck on his fridge with a magnet, you know, like the charts with a circle around it.

00:29:01.000 You know, I shot the sheriff, number one, Eric Clapton.

00:29:03.000 And Bob Marley was at the party.

00:29:06.000 And apparently he found a pen and he wrote onto Clapton's fridge, No, Eric, I shot the sheriff.

00:29:11.000 Bob Marley.

00:29:14.000 I shot him first, bitch. 1.00

00:29:17.000 That's hilarious.

00:29:19.000 But that Uncut Gems film is, it is, it is a perfect movie in regards to the way it treats a degenerate gambler.

00:29:29.000 He's a jewelry broker, jewelry salesman.

00:29:33.000 And he's just out of his fucking mind.

00:29:36.000 It's always sports.

00:29:37.000 It's always this.

00:29:38.000 There's always a game that's going on and he's betting this.

00:29:41.000 And you get so much anxiety watching the movie.

00:29:44.000 Like, oh, God, don't do that.

00:29:45.000 Don't do that.

00:29:46.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:29:47.000 What are you doing?

00:29:48.000 It's like the whole movie, my palms are sweating.

00:29:51.000 I'm moving around in my chair because I, as a kid, grew up in pool halls.

00:29:57.000 Like from the time, not grew up in pool halls, but I spent so much time between age 23 and into my 30s.

00:30:04.000 I was in pool halls all the time.

00:30:07.000 And I played a lot of pool and I was around a lot of addicted gamblers.

00:30:12.000 And I never got it.

00:30:13.000 It never hit me.

00:30:15.000 But I was always just fascinated by the grip that it had on people.

00:30:20.000 It was like their eyes would be going back and forth.

00:30:24.000 Their fucking skin would be pale. 0.93

00:30:26.000 It gripped them like a drug.

00:30:29.000 It gripped them like crystal meth.

00:30:31.000 I really dislike the way in Australia we have normalized it.

00:30:37.000 You know, they're doing a sports report on the news, the national news.

00:30:42.000 And they'll tell you.

00:30:43.000 The odds.

00:30:44.000 The odds.

00:30:45.000 Well, we do that with the UFC.

00:30:46.000 With the UFC, we give the odds.

00:30:48.000 They even, I don't know if they announce round-by-round odds, but the, I think they do.

00:30:55.000 But the, I don't, I try not to pay attention to it because I don't vote.

00:30:58.000 Excuse me.

00:30:59.000 I don't gamble on the UFC, but I used to.

00:31:03.000 So I used to gamble on the UFC when I first started working for them.

00:31:06.000 And then I was like, I don't think I should do this anymore.

00:31:08.000 This is a long time ago, though.

00:31:10.000 So what I started doing is giving my friend Aubrey, who's my business partner at Onit, I started giving him tips.

00:31:17.000 And he was like 84% because I know the sport.

00:31:21.000 And a lot of these guys would be coming from Japan or coming from Russia.

00:31:24.000 And I'd be like, oh, this guy from Brazil, Anderson Silva, bet the fucking house.

00:31:30.000 I go, bet the fucking house.

00:31:32.000 Not my house, though.

00:31:33.000 Not my house.

00:31:36.000 But there's people that were coming across from other organizations that I was a giant fan of, and the bookmakers were woefully uneducated about, especially foreign fighters.

00:31:46.000 And there's a thing, like if you are gambling on MMA and you don't know how to fight, you're just guessing.

00:31:53.000 You don't really, we're all just guessing when two guys get into the cage together, but you're really guessing.

00:31:59.000 Like, you really don't, you can't recognize like how fast a person is.

00:32:04.000 You can't recognize how good they are at countering.

00:32:07.000 You just know stats and you know, but you don't know how to do it.

00:32:11.000 And if you don't know how to do it, you can't really see it.

00:32:14.000 You don't really know.

00:32:15.000 So at a certain point in time, I stopped just on my own gambling.

00:32:20.000 So like, I don't, because I was, people were accusing me of being biased one way or the other anyway, which maybe I was.

00:32:26.000 You know, I got better at that.

00:32:27.000 But I wanted to make sure that no one thought that.

00:32:30.000 So I was like, I'm only gambling a couple hundred bucks or something like that.

00:32:33.000 I wasn't doing anything crazy.

00:32:35.000 But the fucking people that I have friends, like good friends that are just hooked.

00:32:42.000 And when they start talking about like fights that they're gambling on or they put so much money on this and money on that, I'm like, oh my God.

00:32:50.000 I know guys that put millions of dollars on a fight.

00:32:53.000 I'm like, oh my God.

00:32:55.000 You're freaking me out.

00:32:56.000 You're fucking freaking me out, man.

00:32:58.000 I don't care how wealthy you are.

00:33:00.000 If you put a $3 million bet on a fight and you lose, like, you're not going to sleep for a week.

00:33:06.000 Man, I just wouldn't be able to wake up with myself the next day.

00:33:10.000 And then if you win.

00:33:10.000 It's so foolish.

00:33:12.000 If you win, it might be even worse because now you're going to keep doing it.

00:33:16.000 Now you get the sting.

00:33:18.000 The thing is, with what we do in Australia, like the newspapers, like, you know, network news services, we allow betting ads.

00:33:18.000 Yeah.

00:33:27.000 It is so all-prevailing.

00:33:31.000 You know, I had an experience probably a year or two ago, and I see my two boys are talking to a mate of theirs, and they've all got their phones out.

00:33:42.000 And I realized they were checking up on their bets.

00:33:47.000 You know, so I had to have a big conversation with my boys and say, look, every single dollar that you have comes out of my pocket.

00:33:55.000 And if I give you a dollar, that's not a dollar to gamble with.

00:33:58.000 I had to have a very serious conversation with them about it.

00:34:01.000 It's like, I don't care if you think it's fun.

00:34:03.000 You've got to actually see it for what it is.

00:34:05.000 Because what's $5 or $10 now is easily going to turn into $400 or $500 in a minute.

00:34:10.000 $1,000, sooner or later, you will allow yourself to think that this thing is beyond fun and it's a way for you to earn back your losses or whatever.

00:34:22.000 So I just had to have a chat with them and they were probably looking at me going, how old is our father that he doesn't understand that everybody does this?

00:34:32.000 But I just had to let them know from my point of view, I didn't appreciate them taking my hard-earned dollars and wasting them.

00:34:39.000 I get it.

00:34:40.000 But I also like that it exists because I want the ability.

00:34:44.000 Like if I wasn't working for the UFC and I could go to the fights and gamble on the fights, I would definitely do it because it's a knowledge thing.

00:34:52.000 This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats.

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00:35:03.000 Turnovers, suddenly dessert at 2 p.m.

00:35:06.000 Doesn't sound so crazy.

00:35:08.000 And wing formations, well, those can only mean buffalo wings, as if they're ever not in play.

00:35:15.000 Even the goalposts start looking suspiciously like french fries.

00:35:18.000 It's almost like football is sending the message to eat more food.

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00:35:41.000 I don't need it.

00:35:42.000 If I'm into the sport, I want to see the game.

00:35:46.000 I care about what happens in the game.

00:35:49.000 I get it.

00:35:50.000 Possibly because from the owner point of view, I wouldn't want any extra pressure.

00:35:56.000 Of course.

00:35:56.000 So I don't understand why here's this game.

00:36:01.000 It's like two teams of pristine athletes who have busted their nuts to get in this situation.

00:36:07.000 And the competition, the physical competition between these two teams isn't enough.

00:36:12.000 You've got to put something else on the line.

00:36:14.000 Well, it just adds.

00:36:15.000 It adds for some people.

00:36:17.000 For some people, yeah.

00:36:18.000 Yeah, they get that extra juice out of the knowing.

00:36:21.000 The thing is also, as a commentator, I am as unbiased as humanly possible.

00:36:28.000 And it's a hard thing when friends fight because there's some guys that fight that are my good friends.

00:36:31.000 And I just hope they don't get hurt and I want them to win, but I have to be excited about the other guy winning, which is kind of crazy.

00:36:38.000 The other guy's beating up your friend.

00:36:39.000 Right.

00:36:39.000 And you have to be excited about it.

00:36:41.000 So it's good that I don't have any money riding on fights because I don't have, I'm not happy if one person wins or loses.

00:36:49.000 My idea is we're going to see who's the better athlete, who's the better fighter.

00:36:54.000 And I can handle gambling.

00:36:56.000 I've never had a gambling problem because I'm not a risk-averse person, obviously.

00:37:01.000 I like risks, but I'm safe.

00:37:05.000 Like I know what I'm doing, even though I do dangerous things.

00:37:08.000 You've had a look at it first.

00:37:09.000 Yeah.

00:37:10.000 But you examine it.

00:37:11.000 You have that ability and inclination for examination.

00:37:15.000 You have to have that.

00:37:17.000 And I feel like that's the case with alcohol.

00:37:19.000 That's the case with cigarettes.

00:37:20.000 I'm in favor of all those things being legal.

00:37:23.000 But I know so many people that have a problem with alcohol, like cannot live without alcohol.

00:37:27.000 I know so many people that can't quit smoking cigarettes.

00:37:30.000 I feel like you should be able to do whatever you want to do.

00:37:33.000 And I want freedom.

00:37:35.000 And that comes with gambling.

00:37:37.000 And I think gambling freedom, like the ability to decide that you want to take a risk with something, that should be available.

00:37:44.000 But we should educate people as to like what is actually going on in your mind that's allowing you to get captured by this thing.

00:37:52.000 And now you're chasing bad money and you're in a downward spiral.

00:37:56.000 Management, like understanding, okay, this is a thrill, but this thrill could take over your whole life if you are maybe genetically susceptible, psychologically susceptible.

00:38:08.000 Like understand what it is, but I don't think we should take away cars that can go over 60 miles an hour because some people crash their cars and die.

00:38:16.000 You know what I mean?

00:38:17.000 I feel like I like that gambling exists and I always wish that it existed back in the day.

00:38:23.000 I was like, it'd be fun, bet $100 on this or $100 on that.

00:38:26.000 But I don't have the problem.

00:38:28.000 Like, I could see if I came from a family that was torn apart by gambling, you'd go, you know, you don't understand, my dad lost our house.

00:38:37.000 Like, okay, but that was a bad decision.

00:38:41.000 You know, your dad could have died drinking and driving and smashed into a tree.

00:38:45.000 These are bad decisions.

00:38:47.000 You don't have to make bad decisions just because something is tempting you.

00:38:51.000 It's an interesting, it's an interesting debate because do you nanny state the whole world? 1.00

00:38:56.000 Do you think gambling should be illegal?

00:38:58.000 You think you should have to go to Vegas for it?

00:39:00.000 That seems kind of crazy.

00:39:02.000 I mean, it's certainly not a black or white issue to me.

00:39:06.000 There's a lot of gray area involved in it.

00:39:08.000 And I know there's a lot of people that push back on the idea of whether these gambling apps and all these different things should be legal.

00:39:16.000 It's the normalization process that bothers me the most.

00:39:21.000 That it's part of the new service with the apps.

00:39:25.000 But it's just put in front of you, whether you're interested in it or not.

00:39:28.000 You know, this team is playing that team, and here's the odds.

00:39:33.000 Right.

00:39:34.000 I just don't, I don't think it's healthy to have that as much of, you know, those stats as much a part of the actual news report as who's playing and what's on the line.

00:39:49.000 The thing about it, though, is it does lead you to have debate about, like, here's a perfect example.

00:39:57.000 Canelo Alvarez versus Terrence Crawford.

00:40:01.000 Terrence Crawford was going up two weight classes.

00:40:04.000 In my mind, though, he's so skillful, I gave him a chance.

00:40:08.000 I was like, I favor him to win, but I believe he was the underdog.

00:40:13.000 Find out what the odds were for the Canelo Alvarez-Terrence Crawford fight.

00:40:17.000 I believe he was the underdog, even though he was an undefeated multi-division world champion, like one of the greatest of all time for sure.

00:40:25.000 But he was jumping up from the 154-pound weight class where he just won the belt.

00:40:29.000 He was the 147-pound weight class all the way up to 168.

00:40:34.000 That's a big leap, 14 pounds.

00:40:36.000 And everybody thought Canel is going to have too much power.

00:40:38.000 He's going to be too big.

00:40:39.000 I'm like, I don't think so.

00:40:41.000 I don't think that's correct.

00:40:43.000 It was odds.

00:40:45.000 Crawford was underdog.

00:40:46.000 Yeah, Crawford was the underdog.

00:40:48.000 So not a huge underdog.

00:40:50.000 Plus 135 versus plus 140, somewhere around there.

00:40:56.000 So it's not huge, not even two to one, not even one and a half to one, but enough where I was like, I think they're wrong.

00:41:02.000 You know, so it's like it fosters debate.

00:41:05.000 You know, even if you're not gambling, and I didn't gamble on that fight, but I did.

00:41:08.000 I was telling my friends, I got a long discussion with a good buddy of mine who's a real boxing connoisseur.

00:41:13.000 He's like, Canelo's too big.

00:41:14.000 He hits too hard.

00:41:15.000 I'm like, that guy doesn't get hit much.

00:41:17.000 Like, I don't think that's as big of a factor as we're thinking.

00:41:20.000 I think it's a skill thing.

00:41:22.000 They're not that different in size.

00:41:24.000 I'm like, I don't think so.

00:41:25.000 And so that odds thing is, to me, exciting.

00:41:30.000 Like, it fosters debate.

00:41:32.000 Like, you start talking about, you know, and if it's a game, you start talking about players.

00:41:36.000 Like, he chokes in the outfield. 0.73

00:41:38.000 He does this.

00:41:38.000 He does that.

00:41:39.000 This guy, he's always stealing bases.

00:41:41.000 I'm factoring that in.

00:41:42.000 And, you know, the odds become a part of the discussion.

00:41:46.000 But yeah, it is ultimately the problem is, first of all, kids are addicted to apps as it is.

00:41:53.000 They're always on their damn phone.

00:41:53.000 They use them.

00:41:55.000 And they'll go from TikTok to Instagram to X to, you know, they'll check this and then they'll check that and they'll check their Snapchat and they'll check their gambling app.

00:42:04.000 And then it's like you're just addicted to this goddamn phone.

00:42:08.000 So something on your phone that's also addicting.

00:42:11.000 It's like addiction on top of addiction because you're already getting your little dopamine rush just by looking at your phone.

00:42:17.000 But then if you're also getting a gambling rush on top of that, yeah, we got to educate people.

00:42:23.000 Yeah.

00:42:23.000 But I think we've got to educate people on social media addiction, which I think a giant percentage of our population is completely addicted to social media.

00:42:31.000 Possibly including me.

00:42:32.000 I spend a large amount of every day scrolling through TikTok for some reason.

00:42:37.000 And what's your algorithm like?

00:42:39.000 What kind of stuff are you getting?

00:42:44.000 I'm getting a lot of dating apps at the moment, which is really embarrassing because I'm not looking on any dating apps.

00:42:52.000 So I'm not sure that the algorithm is fully truthful.

00:42:55.000 I think there's a certain amount of things you just get fed.

00:42:58.000 Right.

00:42:59.000 Especially like a dating app, because that's a promotion.

00:43:02.000 They're promoting that.

00:43:04.000 There seems to be a lot coming up.

00:43:04.000 Yeah, there's a lot.

00:43:07.000 But that's the problem, isn't it?

00:43:08.000 Because the way the algorithm shapes it, pretty much everything that comes up on your phone, you have some form of interest in.

00:43:15.000 So that keeps you looking at what you're looking at.

00:43:20.000 I've got to probably got to dial it down a little bit, but I'll be in the bush in a minute.

00:43:25.000 This has been such a crazy year, man.

00:43:29.000 You know, we finished Nuremberg last year, and then I went on that big tour, which is when I was here when I came to see you the first time.

00:43:36.000 But this year, since between December and August, I made five movies.

00:43:40.000 Wow.

00:43:41.000 And I was on the set of the sixth and so weary.

00:43:46.000 And I had no juice.

00:43:48.000 I still feel it a little bit, actually, man.

00:43:50.000 You know, I've had a little bit of time off, but I've still had so many responsibilities.

00:43:54.000 I kind of feel like I broke my brain or something in August, and I'm still trying to recover.

00:43:58.000 And I won't really recover till I get home the next time, as I was saying to you before.

00:44:03.000 Because when I land at home now, I won't know when I'm flying out again.

00:44:08.000 And that is such a relief.

00:44:11.000 Because when you do know when you're flying out again, every day is just counting down.

00:44:14.000 Counting down to me.

00:44:15.000 You might have three weeks, but it doesn't feel like three weeks because you 100% know when you're leaving again.

00:44:21.000 But this time I'll get home and I'll have three months and I'll be in the bush and I'll be waking up with the birds.

00:44:27.000 And, you know, hopefully all of those things that I emptied out through the earlier part of the year will fill up again.

00:44:35.000 Because I was on that set and that was the set for the remake of Highlander with Henry Cavill.

00:44:42.000 So I'm playing Ramirez, which was the Sean Connery character.

00:44:45.000 So I'm excited by it and really looking forward to it.

00:44:45.000 Oh, wow.

00:44:48.000 But there I was turning up to the gym to do my katana sword and going to these meetings and everything.

00:44:54.000 But I was empty.

00:44:56.000 I was absolutely empty.

00:44:57.000 And it was just to the point where I, you know, I texted my agent and I'd said, you know what?

00:45:03.000 I maybe need to talk to these guys because I'm not sure if I've any juice here.

00:45:07.000 I don't know what I'm going to be bringing.

00:45:09.000 I'm sitting in these meetings and everybody's talking, but it's all just bouncing off my face.

00:45:14.000 I'm not really taking anything in.

00:45:18.000 And that same night, I get a phone call around 10:30.

00:45:21.000 And it's so unusual because I have everything turned off on my phone.

00:45:24.000 But for whatever reason, it did ring.

00:45:24.000 It never rings.

00:45:26.000 It was the director saying, Look, I'm so sorry to tell you that Henry's injured himself.

00:45:31.000 He's ruptured his Achilles.

00:45:33.000 So we're going to have to push the film.

00:45:35.000 Now, I love Henry.

00:45:36.000 I've known him for a long time.

00:45:37.000 I've known him since he was a schoolboy.

00:45:38.000 Oh, wow.

00:45:39.000 And I met him at a place called Stowe School in England.

00:45:45.000 I was doing a scene in a movie called Proof of Life, talking to my son in the movie, and in the background, a rugby game's going on.

00:45:54.000 And, you know, we're doing the scene and everything, but I've got my eye on the field.

00:45:57.000 And there's one guy on the field who is just displaying he's got a great brain for the game.

00:46:05.000 And as it happens, we finish the scene and they break up what's going on behind us.

00:46:09.000 And that one kid is walking towards me.

00:46:12.000 And he's the kid that I've been watching.

00:46:15.000 And he wants to have a chat.

00:46:16.000 He introduces himself.

00:46:18.000 And, you know, he just asked me, How do you get into acting?

00:46:23.000 And so we had this very, very brief conversation.

00:46:25.000 Then we got swamped by these other kids.

00:46:27.000 A couple of days later, I was doing a present for the kid from that school who'd played my son.

00:46:32.000 It was a boy called Merlin Hanbury Tennyson, his name's.

00:46:36.000 And so I was doing a thing for him.

00:46:37.000 And then I had some other things left over.

00:46:39.000 And I was like, what was that other kid's name?

00:46:41.000 Oh, Henry.

00:46:42.000 So I wrote on a photo of Gladiator of Maximus, which was a movie that had not actually been released yet to Henry.

00:46:52.000 Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, Russell.

00:46:55.000 Wow.

00:46:56.000 He kept that photograph with him for wherever he lived, from place to place, and he kept his dream alive and burning.

00:47:04.000 The next time I see Henry Cavill is in a gym in Illinois, the outskirts of Chicago.

00:47:13.000 And I'm working on one side of the gym, he's working on the other.

00:47:17.000 And I'm thinking to myself, well, I'm Superman's dad.

00:47:20.000 I reckon that must be Superman over there.

00:47:23.000 Kind of looks like it, you know.

00:47:24.000 So we worked in the gym a week or so more together before we talk, you know?

00:47:29.000 And finally one day he comes over, puts his hand out and we start talking.

00:47:34.000 And I just, at one point, I went, do I know you?

00:47:39.000 He goes, yes, sir, you do.

00:47:41.000 And he reminded me, and I went, Henry?

00:47:46.000 That Henry?

00:47:46.000 Is this Henry?

00:47:47.000 It was crazy.

00:47:48.000 That's wild.

00:47:50.000 Absolutely wild, right?

00:47:52.000 And so now we have this other situation where, you know, he's kind of in the position of being the Highlander.

00:47:59.000 And they asked him who he wanted to be Ramirez.

00:48:02.000 And he said, I've only got one option and you've got to get him.

00:48:06.000 And so, you know, that's fantastic.

00:48:09.000 It's going to be a lot of fun when we do eventually get around to Henry.

00:48:12.000 What must that be for him to have been a kid and met you and got you to sign that and then working with you when he's Superman?

00:48:21.000 Superman.

00:48:24.000 Yeah, it was.

00:48:25.000 Oh my God, that's amazing.

00:48:26.000 What a great story.

00:48:27.000 And so now we've got, you know, we've got the third stage of our connection.

00:48:32.000 And when we get to do it, it's going to be great.

00:48:36.000 But I know this sounds really weird because I love Henry and the last thing I'd want is for him to be under any pressure or injured or whatever.

00:48:44.000 But it was a prayer answered.

00:48:48.000 I'm talking to the director expressing that I'm so that's terrible, but I'm also shaking my girlfriend going, we get to go home.

00:48:57.000 Yeah, as I said, it's been a big year.

00:49:00.000 I have never done that many individual films in that space of time.

00:49:05.000 What caused you to say yes to that kind of a schedule?

00:49:08.000 Well, but that's not what you do because most of these are independent films.

00:49:12.000 So for example, I agreed to do Nuremberg in 2019, but we don't shoot it till 2024.

00:49:18.000 Oh, wow.

00:49:19.000 Set up and collapsed three different times before we actually made it because there's a lot of variables in independent film.

00:49:27.000 So a bunch of these things that I did, I agreed to do two years ago and that never got together.

00:49:33.000 And then suddenly they all just started landing one after the other.

00:49:37.000 So everybody's got to start working like it's air traffic control.

00:49:40.000 And I'm like literally having a few days between sets flying from one place to the other.

00:49:46.000 And now it's, you know, what I always describe it as like going to a new school.

00:49:50.000 Now you're going to meet, you know, hundreds of new people and all of the different things that you've got to answer in terms of your costume and your makeup and blah, blah, blah.

00:49:59.000 Am I wearing a fake nose?

00:50:02.000 Have I got scars?

00:50:03.000 What am I doing this time?

00:50:04.000 All of those things you've got to do very, very rapidly and get onto the set.

00:50:10.000 And that sort of string of movies was not easy.

00:50:16.000 The first one was called The Beast in Me, which is an MMA movie.

00:50:22.000 I think we talked about that briefly.

00:50:23.000 It was going to be a UFC thing, but we ended up doing a deal with one championship.

00:50:28.000 So it's set in Australia and Thailand.

00:50:31.000 And it's doing some little private screenings in Los Angeles at the moment and getting a lot of really positive reactions.

00:50:37.000 The kid that's the, no, he's not a kid, but the lead role in that, Daniel McPherson, has done an extremely good job by the sounds of things.

00:50:47.000 And I'm also attached to that.

00:50:48.000 I only play a very small role, but I rewrote it for them just before we started.

00:50:55.000 And I've done a lot of writing in my career, but it always goes uncredited.

00:50:59.000 But in this particular occasion, I think, I believe I'm going to get my first actual writing credit.

00:51:04.000 Oh, wow.

00:51:05.000 So that's cool.

00:51:06.000 But I wrote the character that I play specifically to not be the character you think it's going to be, to not be Burgess Meredith.

00:51:13.000 You think this guy's going to be, you know, the old coach who sort of like, you know, comes back out of retirement and everything.

00:51:21.000 I know enough people in the boxing world to know that once an old bloke makes a decision about you being a shithead, he's not going to change his mind.

00:51:32.000 So I wanted to play that guy.

00:51:36.000 So I went from that set to then I think called Bear Country, where I play an Albanian money launderer. 0.94

00:51:44.000 And that's got a great cast, Theresa Palmer, Luke Evans, Nina Dobrev, Aaron Paul, Danny Zavado.

00:51:53.000 And it's funny.

00:51:54.000 It's really funny.

00:51:55.000 That's with the same director that I did Unhinged with, a guy called Derek Bort.

00:52:00.000 And it's goofy and dramatic, but it's just funny.

00:52:05.000 When does that come out?

00:52:06.000 I'm not sure when that comes out.

00:52:08.000 That's also, I think they've got like six or seven different offers at the moment from different distribution companies because everybody's digging it and they're looking at it going, that would be an hilarious movie to follow up, Nuremberg.

00:52:20.000 Well, that would be.

00:52:21.000 Yeah, because Nuremberg's. 0.55

00:52:22.000 So then after that, I go back to Budapest and I make a thing with a young British director, Armo Sante, called Billion Dollar Spy, with a young English actor called Harry Lorty, who is the future of British cinema.

00:52:39.000 He's a very intelligent, classy actor.

00:52:43.000 And that one I play a Russian selling state secrets to the Americans, a Russian scientist.

00:52:48.000 And then after I did Billion Dollar Spy, I went to Montreal and made a thing called Unibomb, where I play a Harvard professor, the man who taught Ted Kaczynski at Harvard, who put him into this series of tests and things that he was doing.

00:53:10.000 And some people say that he very, very much affected Kaczynski's brain.

00:53:18.000 You know, he was a part of the Harvard LSD studies.

00:53:21.000 The guy I play was.

00:53:22.000 Yeah.

00:53:23.000 So that was a lot of fun.

00:53:24.000 Kaczynski was sort of associated.

00:53:25.000 He was there at the time that Leary also started working at Harvard.

00:53:29.000 But the study that my character was doing is more based on sort of like intellectual confrontation and like stripping people of their self-belief and stuff.

00:53:44.000 So there are people who think that it was the character I play's intellectual aggression towards Kaczynski that turned Kaczynski the way he turns.

00:53:55.000 So there's that.

00:53:56.000 And then I just did a movie in Germany.

00:54:01.000 It's set in Portland, but we shot it in Munich.

00:54:06.000 Okay. How weird.

00:54:08.000 With a guy called Patrick McKinley, who I've done other projects with before, but he doesn't always get the credit he should get.

00:54:16.000 But he's the guy that cut the loudest voice, which made it as dynamic as it was.

00:54:22.000 And he also cut a movie called Pokerface for me.

00:54:26.000 And we're working together on a music doco.

00:54:29.000 But usually when I work with him as an editor, but this is him as a director, and that's with Ethan Hawke.

00:54:36.000 Again, that's a smaller role in that one as well.

00:54:39.000 But there was a very strong vibe on that set.

00:54:41.000 And Patrick's a great filmmaker, so I imagine that's going to be a good movie too.

00:54:45.000 So if you're a film fan, that sounds like you're killing it.

00:54:49.000 There's a few things to come out.

00:54:50.000 That's very exciting.

00:54:52.000 The comedy is very exciting because there's just not a lot of comedies anymore.

00:54:56.000 It's hard to find a really good comedy.

00:55:00.000 Yeah.

00:55:01.000 Yeah.

00:55:02.000 And this is one of those ones where it's not like a series of jokes.

00:55:06.000 It's just certain types of characters put in certain situations.

00:55:12.000 And then you see how that plays out.

00:55:14.000 And Aaron Paul and Nina Dobrev, just hilarious.

00:55:19.000 I can't even begin to explain what they do in the film because you'll just go, what the fuck are you talking about?

00:55:24.000 It just sounds so stupid.

00:55:26.000 And it is stupid, but it's also very funny to experience.

00:55:29.000 I can't wait to see it.

00:55:30.000 So it just sounds like all those things just sort of came together coincidentally at the same time.

00:55:37.000 And so you're just doing all things that you might have agreed to years before or whatever.

00:55:42.000 And it just so happened that they got their financing and I just went one after the other.

00:55:45.000 Do you take, do you do anything like IV vitamin drips or anything when you're on set?

00:55:51.000 I haven't really done that.

00:55:53.000 That's probably help you.

00:55:54.000 Well, potentially.

00:55:55.000 But the other thing is, man, you just stay disciplined and you get to bed.

00:55:59.000 I'm actually going through a really weird time at the moment.

00:55:59.000 Yeah, that too.

00:56:02.000 For the last month, it doesn't matter where I am in the world.

00:56:04.000 If I'm in Spain, if I'm in Australia, if I'm in America, I cannot sleep between midnight and 5 a.m.

00:56:11.000 It's just very odd.

00:56:13.000 And I think it's related to that feeling that I was expressing before that somewhere in August I broke my head.

00:56:19.000 I'd just done too much.

00:56:21.000 Too much.

00:56:22.000 And I need to go home and I need to be in that rhythm.

00:56:26.000 I call the place I have in the bush, it's not its official name, but I call it the Panacea.

00:56:32.000 It will fix all ills, but you have to give over to its rhythm.

00:56:37.000 You have to wake before the birds.

00:56:39.000 You have to sort of put yourself in a situation where you're going deep into the bush so you're getting that kind of oxygen.

00:56:45.000 You just have to really give yourself over to it, you know, and spend your days just checking if the cows are okay, having a look, you know, if the new trough system is working away, just getting your sort of hands a little bit dirty and forgetting all the other stuff.

00:57:03.000 Yeah.

00:57:04.000 And, you know, but we'll hopefully see me come charging back out next year.

00:57:10.000 You'll be charging, but that sounds like a perfect balance to offset the charging.

00:57:14.000 Yeah, well, that's the recharge.

00:57:16.000 I always, like, I look back at my 30-year-old self who made the decision to take the little bit of money that I'd earned at that point, 31, 32 I was, and buy 100 acres in the bush because somehow I knew I would need that place.

00:57:33.000 So it's like, you know, I could have bought an apartment in the city, you know, but I didn't.

00:57:38.000 I bought 100 acres of basically blank bush.

00:57:41.000 No fences, and the fact that it's been in my life, January 20th, 1996, I paid for that first hundred acres.

00:57:53.000 So that's before LA Confidential, it was before I even shoot LA Confidential.

00:57:53.000 Wow.

00:57:58.000 Wow.

00:57:58.000 So it was, I don't, I don't know where it came from, but I look at that 32-year-old and go, mate, well done.

00:58:07.000 You gave yourself a battery.

00:58:09.000 Well, I gave up a bush for myself an island.

00:58:11.000 Yeah.

00:58:12.000 You know, I go through that gate and because you know what it's like.

00:58:15.000 People don't just call you Joe.

00:58:16.000 They call you Joe Rogan.

00:58:18.000 They call me Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe.

00:58:19.000 You know, so this brand name, this sort of stamp, and that's all you hear, you know, Roscoe Grove, Roscoe Grove.

00:58:25.000 And then I go beyond that gate and I'm no longer that.

00:58:29.000 I'm a son.

00:58:31.000 I'm a brother.

00:58:32.000 I'm an uncle.

00:58:33.000 I'm a dad.

00:58:35.000 All of those things.

00:58:36.000 I'm the boss of the operation of the farms and stuff and all that as well.

00:58:40.000 But all of those things come into play and the whole brand thing drops away.

00:58:43.000 And you've got to prove yourself on a way different level when you're at home.

00:58:48.000 You've got to exist in a natural world.

00:58:50.000 As opposed to in a world where you're the center of attention constantly, people are at your beck and call.

00:58:50.000 Yeah.

00:58:55.000 People are, Mr. Crow, Mr. Crow.

00:58:57.000 It's not good for you.

00:58:57.000 Yeah.

00:58:59.000 But it's also the amount of attention that you time you have to spend when you're on that many sets in a row.

00:59:08.000 Five movies in a row.

00:59:10.000 A lot of people are probably like, oh, boohoo.

00:59:13.000 Yeah, to be in five movies.

00:59:15.000 Boo hoo. 1.00

00:59:17.000 But that's and that's the brilliant famous Russell Crow between people who are not in the business's understanding of what it really takes and the realities that you deal with.

00:59:29.000 And look, I'm the last person.

00:59:31.000 I'm not whinging about the job at all, but I am just pointing out that I went a little bit too hard and I burnt my brain and I need a bit of a break.

00:59:41.000 Well, if Nuremberg is an indication or if it's an example of what you did, if it's on par with the rest of them, it's going to be an awesome run because Nuremberg is great.

00:59:52.000 It really is.

00:59:53.000 It's very disturbing.

00:59:57.000 Just to see that footage, the footage in the trial is just.

01:00:04.000 People should see that.

01:00:05.000 And the fact that it's never been released before, just to cement into our heads.

01:00:11.000 That's the thing.

01:00:12.000 It's like that war was one of the first wars where we got regular footage.

01:00:20.000 I mean, if you think about people going into World War I, they're going blind.

01:00:23.000 They have no idea what to expect, what they're going to see.

01:00:26.000 And then by the time Vietnam comes, and now it's on television. 0.66

01:00:30.000 And that seeing horrific things at least cements into your head.

01:00:38.000 Like, this is where this all could go.

01:00:40.000 This is where this all can go.

01:00:41.000 Yeah, well, just think about that because, you know, in my lifetime, you know, when I was a little boy and I'm watching the news at night with my parents, there's Vietnam footage.

01:00:54.000 You know, I see the Anzac Day, which is Australia New Zealand version of Memorial Day.

01:00:59.000 I see those marches every year, the old soldiers getting together.

01:01:05.000 That history is so fresh.

01:01:07.000 I'm surrounded by older people who fought in the war, in World War I.

01:01:13.000 And then there's another generation of guys who still appear to be young, and they fought in World War II.

01:01:18.000 And now I'm watching Australia at war because we've been through Korea and now Australia is at war in Vietnam.

01:01:25.000 I'm seeing that on the nightly news.

01:01:27.000 So at the age of six, seven, eight, I believe I'm going to be a soldier.

01:01:31.000 Really?

01:01:32.000 And everybody at school believes they're going to be a soldier because that's what we do.

01:01:37.000 You know?

01:01:38.000 Because our parents' generation are connected to the Second World War.

01:01:41.000 Our grandparents' generation is connected to the First World War.

01:01:44.000 And here it is.

01:01:45.000 We've now got this new war.

01:01:48.000 So it was very definitely part of cultural uprising.

01:01:54.000 I mean, I was in Army cadets in high school.

01:01:57.000 So, you know, that was a couple of days a week.

01:01:59.000 You dress up in an army uniform and you go to school instead of in your school uniform in Jungle Greens. 1.00

01:02:06.000 Just get you ready.

01:02:07.000 Just get you ready, man.

01:02:09.000 They're putting SLRs in the hands, which is like, it's not an unusual thing for this country, but it definitely is for Australia.

01:02:18.000 Put a self-loading rifle in the hands of a 13-year-old and teach him how to use it.

01:02:25.000 Wow.

01:02:27.000 Jesus.

01:02:30.000 That was one of the things about the Iraq war, too, where they stopped showing people coffins.

01:02:36.000 They were preventing photographers from taking photographs of coffins, flag-traped coffins.

01:02:41.000 Like, that's crazy.

01:02:43.000 That should not be legal.

01:02:44.000 You shouldn't be able to prevent someone from documenting history.

01:02:48.000 That's what that is.

01:02:49.000 And that's the consequences of what's going on.

01:02:51.000 You're seeing American people coming home in boxes. 0.98

01:02:53.000 Right.

01:02:54.000 And you're not even allowed to take photographs of it.

01:02:56.000 Kind of crazy.

01:02:58.000 Well, this is the thing where, you know, Anzac Day that I talked about, it's April 25th.

01:02:58.000 Yeah.

01:03:03.000 ANZAC stands for Australian New Zealand Army Corps.

01:03:06.000 Because both the First World War and the Second World War, Australia and New Zealand combined their armed forces.

01:03:14.000 And then a lot of places fought alongside each other.

01:03:18.000 But, you know, we have that day as a memorial day, as you have in this culture as well.

01:03:25.000 But we tend to forget that we have that day as a reminder that we should never do this again.

01:03:34.000 That's what it's there for.

01:03:36.000 You know, to respect the passing of these young people who died in battle, but to also remind ourselves of how pointless that whole thing was, how pointless the First World War was, how pointless the Second World War was.

01:03:50.000 Ultimately, it's just death.

01:03:53.000 And the people that started the war, the people who benefit from the war, are not the ones generally standing at the graveside mourning their dead because they will protect themselves.

01:04:03.000 Their children don't have to go to war.

01:04:06.000 Their children are not going to get conscripted.

01:04:08.000 So it's like, you know, every time this stuff comes up and we now have almost constantly the words of war being spoken as if it's just sort of an offhand thing that we can should attack these people, invade these people, do this.

01:04:23.000 Like this goes absolutely nowhere good.

01:04:28.000 And we were talking earlier about the technology we can hold in our hands.

01:04:32.000 We get out our phones.

01:04:34.000 We can explore the entire world.

01:04:36.000 There's no piece of knowledge which is held back from us.

01:04:40.000 We can get it through this device that we carry in our hands.

01:04:44.000 So here we are all of these, you know, millennia later as a species.

01:04:51.000 We have that level of technology available to us, but we still think that war is some form of solution.

01:05:00.000 It just blows my mind.

01:05:04.000 It's hard to imagine if you were living in the past, if you could come up with the circumstances that we live under today, like you just described, a device in your pocket that provides you with all the information you could ever want.

01:05:16.000 We would say, oh, well, that would be the solution to most of what ails us.

01:05:20.000 You'd think once we have that available, it'll all sort itself out.

01:05:24.000 We'll see each other clearly and understand, you know, celebrate our differences.

01:05:28.000 That there's more that connects us than divides us, all of those things.

01:05:28.000 Yeah.

01:05:32.000 I don't think they ever anticipated social media and the divisive nature of that.

01:05:38.000 Because I think it accelerates.

01:05:39.000 But it's only divisive because we let people pervert it.

01:05:44.000 Right, with an algorithm.

01:05:46.000 We just let people actually take something.

01:05:48.000 I remember when I started on Twitter, I thought it was the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.

01:05:53.000 But when I started, which was about 2009, 2010, and suddenly from a couple of decades of having who I was described by others and pushed across to people, this breath of fresh air where I could just express myself and people would know exactly what my real opinion on something was and how I felt about something, it was fantastic.

01:06:18.000 Didn't last very long, though.

01:06:21.000 People were like, oh, we've got a whole lot of truth going on here.

01:06:23.000 We've got to shut that shit down.

01:06:25.000 As soon as individuals started using their power to say, you know what, I had an experience with this company or that company and it wasn't very good.

01:06:35.000 And those companies were like, man, we didn't spend millions of dollars a year on advertising just for this arsehole to tell the truth about how shit we are.

01:06:44.000 So they had to turn it around somehow.

01:06:44.000 Yeah.

01:06:46.000 So that's when you start, you know, look, quite frankly, if you run bots and stuff like that, you should be put in prison.

01:06:54.000 Forget about it, man.

01:06:55.000 That's not the way it should be.

01:06:56.000 No, it shouldn't work that way.

01:06:57.000 In fact, you shouldn't be perverting people's understanding of something.

01:07:01.000 Yes. Because it benefits you.

01:07:03.000 That's a great way to put it.

01:07:03.000 Yes.

01:07:04.000 Yeah, that should be illegal.

01:07:06.000 It's kind of amazing that there's no laws because it's essentially, I mean, you could propagate through bots a complete and total lie and it catches traction, makes its way through, and there's zero consequences.

01:07:18.000 Yeah, and then people get upset about it, and they're fighting over the family dinner table based on pure misinformation.

01:07:26.000 And I think a lot of it, you know, we can't trace who's doing it.

01:07:32.000 That's where it gets really weird.

01:07:33.000 Yeah, but why?

01:07:34.000 Well, it's complicated, right?

01:07:37.000 Like, you can hide your IP.

01:07:40.000 You can do it through a virtual private network so they don't know what country you're in.

01:07:46.000 And you do it with AI.

01:07:47.000 Like, they busted China, was using ChatGPT to run a bunch of accounts.

01:07:53.000 I don't know how many accounts, but a huge amount of accounts.

01:07:56.000 And they were all sorts of stuff that people are fighting about in America, like immigration, closing down USAID, those kind of things.

01:08:06.000 And they were just involved with these chat bots that they were running.

01:08:12.000 And these things would argue specific points and get everybody inflamed and just start wars and call everybody fucking. 0.68

01:08:20.000 There was a moment a little while ago where there just seemed to be all social media was just flooded with violent images, flooded with people fighting, people getting knocked out by a king hit in a bar or whatever.

01:08:36.000 And it was like, where is this coming from?

01:08:39.000 It's just Instagram is loaded with it.

01:08:42.000 I see more violence on Instagram, more accidents, more people falling off balconies, more people climbing trees and falling.

01:08:50.000 It's like all over Instagram.

01:08:54.000 And I don't know if they can stop it.

01:08:55.000 I don't know if they can even recognize what these things are until somebody reports them.

01:08:59.000 I know it sort of speaks to sort of a low level of intellect, but, you know, I do like the occasional falling down a hole.

01:09:11.000 I have to admit.

01:09:12.000 Well, there's a reason why it's out there because a lot of people agree with you.

01:09:17.000 I mean, I've watched a lot of horrific accidents.

01:09:20.000 I don't know why.

01:09:22.000 I don't want to watch anybody get run over by a truck.

01:09:24.000 Yeah, for me, that's not a thing.

01:09:27.000 It's like the innocent sort of pie in the face kind of thing is what amuses me.

01:09:32.000 But if somebody really gets hurt, it's like it doesn't.

01:09:36.000 Well, it also excites me to watch it.

01:09:37.000 It very much desensitizes people.

01:09:40.000 Which is a problem already.

01:09:40.000 Yeah.

01:09:42.000 You know, we're already desensitized from violent video games and violent films.

01:09:47.000 And then now you're seeing like real violence and real like horrific dismembering accidents all day long.

01:09:55.000 And you're 13.

01:09:56.000 You know, that's the thing.

01:09:58.000 That is the thing, because we can discuss it as adults and what sort of like what we can deal with and what we can rationalize.

01:10:04.000 But the same thing I was talking about, the gambling.

01:10:06.000 My kids don't know or didn't know that there was a negative to that.

01:10:11.000 They see it all the time.

01:10:14.000 So they think it's normal.

01:10:16.000 Yeah.

01:10:16.000 No, that makes sense.

01:10:17.000 That makes sense.

01:10:19.000 And I think, like, how old do you have to be to sign up for those sites?

01:10:23.000 And is it possible to spoof that?

01:10:24.000 Like, it seems like you could probably, if you were a wizard at 14.

01:10:29.000 What's the security?

01:10:30.000 Yeah.

01:10:30.000 Are you over 18?

01:10:32.000 Press here.

01:10:33.000 Like, what is it?

01:10:34.000 It doesn't take a lot.

01:10:35.000 They make you enter in your driver's license.

01:10:37.000 What do they do?

01:10:39.000 Now, did you see that thing from TikTok that I sent you with Jimmy?

01:10:42.000 I don't have TikTok.

01:10:43.000 Oh, you don't?

01:10:44.000 So I sent it to you and you can't.

01:10:44.000 No.

01:10:46.000 I know I can't watch it.

01:10:47.000 What was it about?

01:10:48.000 It was just him on stage talking about a company that he and I and Ed Sheeran got involved in.

01:10:57.000 I was shooting the Pope's Exorcist in Ireland, right?

01:11:01.000 And I got told this story About this lady, Laura Bonner, whose grandfather was an Irish potato farmer, right?

01:11:13.000 And wondering what he should do with his leftover potatoes, you know, the unsightly shaped ones that nobody wants in the supermarket.

01:11:21.000 And he came up with the idea of making this Irish sort of moonshine called Pochin. 0.66

01:11:28.000 So every Friday, his relatives and his friends and everything would rock around to Phil's house and they'd bring their old medicine bottles and whatever and just fill up from the still.

01:11:37.000 So they had a weekend.

01:11:38.000 And when she was a little girl, she would see this party being created every Friday in the island.

01:11:44.000 And so they're singing songs and they're enjoying each other's company and laughing uproariously and all that.

01:11:49.000 And she said, one day I'm going to legitimize what granddad does for fun and make it into a business.

01:11:56.000 So around about her mid-20s or something, she was a lawyer.

01:11:59.000 She got involved in this big deal.

01:12:02.000 It went well for her.

01:12:04.000 So she was sort of like faced with a crossroads.

01:12:07.000 Okay, now I've got money to finance my idea or I can continue in the job that I'm in.

01:12:14.000 And so she decided to back herself.

01:12:16.000 She comes from a little town in the north of Ireland that is called Muff.

01:12:24.000 It's actual towns across the river from Derry.

01:12:29.000 And she formed a company called the Muff Liquor Company.

01:12:34.000 And that amused me.

01:12:37.000 I called Jimmy Carr and said, does this amuse you?

01:12:40.000 And he goes, it actually does.

01:12:42.000 So then I called Ed Scheer and I said, does this amuse you?

01:12:45.000 And he goes, it does.

01:12:47.000 So we formed a company called the Muff Liquor Men.

01:12:50.000 And we bought a big slice of the company.

01:12:54.000 It's now, I think it's in about 40 states here in America now.

01:12:57.000 Pretty sure you can get it in Texas.

01:12:57.000 Oh, that's awesome.

01:12:58.000 We're a sucker for a good name.

01:13:00.000 Yeah.

01:13:01.000 So I bought you a dozen whiskey.

01:13:04.000 Oh, boy.

01:13:05.000 A dozen potato-based gin.

01:13:08.000 And a dozen potato-based vodka.

01:13:08.000 Oh, boy.

01:13:10.000 Oh, yeah.

01:13:11.000 But there it is.

01:13:14.000 With the bottle sort of shaped like an old medicine bottle.

01:13:17.000 It looks great.

01:13:18.000 That's an awesome bottle.

01:13:19.000 Yeah, it's great to hold, actually.

01:13:21.000 And that whiskey is what I call like a cowboy whiskey.

01:13:25.000 Oh, it's peat-smoked.

01:13:26.000 Yeah, but it's very light.

01:13:27.000 I like that.

01:13:28.000 It's very light.

01:13:29.000 You'll see when you have it.

01:13:30.000 It's like that's not the sort of whiskey where everybody ends up crying in a corner remembering the things that they did wrong in their lives.

01:13:37.000 It's the sort of whiskey that'll keep you laughing all night.

01:13:40.000 So that's why I call it a cowboy whiskey because you can sit with it with your mates all night and have a laugh.

01:13:45.000 What do you think is more addictive, alcohol or gambling?

01:13:48.000 Hmm.

01:13:49.000 Well, the problem that we have with alcohol is what's becoming the burgeoning problem with gambling is that we just accept it.

01:13:57.000 It's everywhere.

01:13:58.000 So accept it completely as the thing that you do.

01:14:01.000 And as long as you're a certain age, you can do it.

01:14:03.000 We'd never look at the damage that it causes.

01:14:06.000 Now, I'm a big proponent of having a drink.

01:14:11.000 It's my cultural heritage.

01:14:13.000 And as a working class man, it's my goddamn right, Joe.

01:14:17.000 And you enjoy it.

01:14:18.000 And I do.

01:14:19.000 I do.

01:14:20.000 But as you get older, there's certain things that you start to learn about your capacities and stuff when you're a younger fella.

01:14:26.000 And now that I'm an older guy and I know that, you know, one night a week, if I'm having fun, is plenty.

01:14:33.000 That's plenty, you know.

01:14:35.000 And I try to cut out the interstitial stuff, you know.

01:14:39.000 If I decide I'm going to have a glass of wine with dinner, then it's going to be a really nice wine.

01:14:46.000 And it's going to be an occasion.

01:14:49.000 And I just, I try not to have the casual drinks now, just to have a drink for the sake of it.

01:14:56.000 Those add up.

01:14:57.000 Yeah.

01:14:57.000 Yeah, there's definitely a great social quality to drinking.

01:15:02.000 There's a thing to it that I enjoy.

01:15:04.000 I always enjoyed and bonding.

01:15:06.000 You know, you never really find out about your mates until you've had them on the piss and you see who they really are. 0.57

01:15:12.000 Some people, yeah.

01:15:14.000 Yeah.

01:15:16.000 Alcohol is weird because it's the only drug that they offer you when you sit down for dinner.

01:15:21.000 It's the, we've agreed that this drug goes really well with a good steak.

01:15:21.000 Right.

01:15:26.000 That everybody can have this drug is fully available.

01:15:28.000 And like I say, we never count the social costs.

01:15:31.000 We don't count, you know, I mean, this is this would be true for pretty much a lot of countries that have a focus on sport.

01:15:40.000 But, you know, three to five of the worst nights of any given year in Australia in terms of domestic violence are 100% connected to a sporting event.

01:15:52.000 Really?

01:15:53.000 Yeah.

01:15:53.000 So a sporting event connected to alcohol.

01:15:56.000 And then that drives the thing that brings terror to wives and children. 1.00

01:16:02.000 So it's, you know, it's the same thing with all of this stuff.

01:16:05.000 You know, like, you know, we always talk about that, you know, everything in moderation kind of thing.

01:16:09.000 Yeah.

01:16:10.000 But, you know, we always have to remember that we got to move at the pace of the slowest member of our community.

01:16:16.000 That's a great way to put it because that's the real issue, right?

01:16:19.000 It's not, well, I can handle it.

01:16:21.000 So everybody else can too.

01:16:22.000 That's not it.

01:16:23.000 It's like, why can some people handle it?

01:16:26.000 And what could have been done?

01:16:29.000 Like, if you just in school, you're going to have to accept that some kids are going to try marijuana.

01:16:35.000 Some kids are going to try acid.

01:16:36.000 Some kids are going to try alcohol.

01:16:38.000 Most kids are going to try alcohol.

01:16:40.000 Like, why don't we have education on the proper way to use these things where you don't get in trouble?

01:16:48.000 You know, like at least most people, I would imagine most kids are not going to listen anyway, but more will than would if you didn't talk about it at all.

01:16:58.000 Right.

01:16:59.000 If you don't talk about it at all, there's no information out there.

01:17:01.000 At least they can talk.

01:17:03.000 It should be an ongoing process of education.

01:17:05.000 And not just education through failure.

01:17:05.000 Yeah.

01:17:09.000 Right.

01:17:09.000 And that's.

01:17:10.000 Not just let me talk to you about it now that you've crashed your car into a tree.

01:17:12.000 Or now that one of your friends has done that.

01:17:15.000 You know, there's a lot of that.

01:17:16.000 You see your friends doing something horrible.

01:17:18.000 I'm open to all of this sort of stuff being available and freedom of choice being a paramount.

01:17:18.000 So I'm like you.

01:17:25.000 But the responsibility to educate has got to start at a young age.

01:17:30.000 Yeah, I think so.

01:17:31.000 Especially if you're using things that are on apps.

01:17:35.000 You know, apps are just young people are so accustomed to using apps.

01:17:40.000 And most apps are giving you that same jolt, that same dopamine brush.

01:17:47.000 You know, it's just, I think you should be able to do whatever you want to do, but you should know what you're doing.

01:17:52.000 And that's where the problem is.

01:17:53.000 You kind of have to figure out what you're doing from your knucklehead friends.

01:17:57.000 I was going to suggest that we had a whiskey, but I know that's going to ruin my day if I do.

01:18:02.000 Because I'll get nothing else done.

01:18:06.000 Some people have such a great time drinking during the day.

01:18:10.000 It just doesn't suit me, man.

01:18:12.000 You know, it's like if I have a drink at lunch, either I'm asleep by five o'clock, right?

01:18:12.000 Yeah.

01:18:19.000 Or I'm raging at 5 a.m.

01:18:24.000 So it's like I've learned over time, don't drink during the day.

01:18:29.000 Yeah, I stopped drinking entirely for about seven months, something like that.

01:18:33.000 And then I decided to occasionally have a drink.

01:18:37.000 So I'll have like a glass of wine at dinner or a margarita and I'm out with my wife.

01:18:43.000 But that's it.

01:18:44.000 I stopped there.

01:18:45.000 I don't drink drink anymore.

01:18:47.000 Like, let's go get drinks.

01:18:48.000 I haven't done that in a long time.

01:18:50.000 And the reason why is because I just felt like shit because I was just doing it too many nights a week.

01:18:54.000 And then my workouts would suffer in the morning.

01:18:56.000 And I'm like, why am I doing this?

01:18:57.000 I do everything so healthy in this one stupid thing that I do.

01:19:01.000 Let me just try not doing it and see if I miss it.

01:19:03.000 Also, notice as you got a little older that the hangovers don't go away after a couple of hours.

01:19:09.000 Sure.

01:19:10.000 It's also one of the most important things in my life is energy.

01:19:14.000 Like, how much energy do I have to do things?

01:19:16.000 Like, it's not just about doing things, it's about doing them with focus and enthusiasm.

01:19:21.000 And when you don't have energy, it's very difficult to muster up that enthusiasm.

01:19:26.000 Well, I hate that feeling that the follow that, you know, I've had a great time the night before, but the following day, nothing gets done because I had fun the night before.

01:19:35.000 You're fucking funny.

01:19:36.000 Yeah, I just feel that it's such a waste.

01:19:41.000 We've only got X amount of days, right?

01:19:41.000 It is.

01:19:43.000 But just managing the human mind and managing what to do and what not to do and when to do it.

01:19:50.000 It's such an important part of being an adult.

01:19:54.000 And it's one of those things that's just not explained to kids.

01:19:58.000 It's weird.

01:19:59.000 I love that old Bill Hicks routine where he asks the question: you know, the last time you're in a social situation, it would be a private party, a concert, a sporting event, and people started fighting.

01:20:14.000 Were they stoned or were they drunk?

01:20:16.000 Right.

01:20:17.000 Yeah.

01:20:18.000 It's like, yeah, I don't get why people can be so aggressively negative towards marijuana, yet, you know, half a dozen, dozen drinks for them socially is a, of course.

01:20:35.000 You know, it's easy.

01:20:37.000 It's like these two things, you know, are very different outcomes.

01:20:42.000 You're not going to have the, you know, people aren't going to be attacking the base camp when they're all stoned.

01:20:50.000 They may well have a go at it when they're on the piss.

01:20:53.000 Well, all that's because of propaganda from the 1930s.

01:20:56.000 That's all that is down to Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst.

01:21:01.000 But you know, it also connects to the formation of the United Nations.

01:21:06.000 Does it?

01:21:08.000 Take Thailand, for example, a country that's had hundreds of years of cultural marijuana use.

01:21:14.000 But in order to join the United Nations, they had to accept an American attitude towards drug laws.

01:21:19.000 Just recently, they've taken those drug laws away, and now they're in a bit of panic because they didn't plan it very well.

01:21:29.000 Because, like, you know, reality break is, I think, you know, California did it through Arnold Schwarzenegger properly, knowing exactly how you're going to tax and where the money's going to when you do tax for the consumption.

01:21:43.000 And so I think, you know, 140 or something or more shops sprung up overnight in Bangkok.

01:21:50.000 And they're like, oh, gee, that went quicker than we thought it was going to go.

01:21:53.000 But I think it's actually great for Thailand.

01:21:57.000 It's a, you know, a drug that particularly suits the groove of that country, you know?

01:22:03.000 Yeah.

01:22:04.000 The food is so incredibly tasty, and the beaches and the sunshine and the heat.

01:22:10.000 And, you know, so, yeah, it's sort of it, but that's what I was told.

01:22:15.000 I was told that it comes down to a decision that they had to make in order to join a global community.

01:22:22.000 That makes sense.

01:22:23.000 That makes sense the United States has pushed that on everybody else.

01:22:27.000 In Texas, there's a lot of push from the alcohol lobby to try to make marijuana even more illegal.

01:22:34.000 Yeah, because people don't necessarily have to drink that much.

01:22:37.000 Yeah, that's what they're worried about.

01:22:39.000 They're worried about people talking about alcohol.

01:22:41.000 It's a stupid, I mean, the fact that it works is crazy that people are still with like zero deaths ever, that they're still pushing to take this one drug away when you've got one drug that everybody uses.

01:22:56.000 It's very strange.

01:22:57.000 But it all really goes back to the 1930s.

01:22:59.000 Right.

01:23:00.000 You know, and it was really just about the comm commodity of hemp more than it really was even about the drug.

01:23:06.000 You know the history of that?

01:23:06.000 Right.

01:23:07.000 Yeah, well, I know a bit about the making of rope from hemp.

01:23:11.000 Because of Master and Commander and spending a lot of time on tall sailing ships.

01:23:11.000 Yeah.

01:23:15.000 The whole thing was about an invention.

01:23:17.000 And there was a new invention called the decorticator.

01:23:20.000 And it allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber with a machine.

01:23:24.000 Right.

01:23:24.000 Because before that, it was very time intensive, very labor-intensive to break it down because they're very, very strong fiber.

01:23:31.000 So then Popular Science Magazine has it on the cover.

01:23:35.000 Hemp, the new billion-dollar crop, because of this machine.

01:23:38.000 And so then William Randolph Hearst, who also owned Hearst Publications, he also owned paper mills.

01:23:45.000 So paper mills and cereal, he owned forests where he'd make paper out of the forest.

01:23:50.000 All of a sudden, there's this competing commodity where they're going to use hemp for paper.

01:23:54.000 It's a far superior paper.

01:23:56.000 Hemp is going to, it's way quicker to grow.

01:23:57.000 You can grow entire fields of it in a year.

01:24:00.000 You get a whole new crop.

01:24:01.000 Like it's not like trees that take years and years to grow before you can chop them down and make paper out of them.

01:24:06.000 And so then they started printing these stories about Mexicans and blacks that are raping white women because they're on this new drug called marijuana.

01:24:17.000 Right, the jazz cigarette.

01:24:18.000 Yeah.

01:24:19.000 And so marijuana was really the term for a wild Mexican tobacco.

01:24:24.000 It didn't even apply to cannabis.

01:24:26.000 So they made a new name for it and they attached this new name.

01:24:30.000 And they got Congress to ban it.

01:24:32.000 And before they didn't even understand it was hemp.

01:24:35.000 Like most people didn't know what was going on.

01:24:37.000 They thought there was this new drug that was like running through the world.

01:24:40.000 And they just pulled the wool over everybody's eyes.

01:24:42.000 And they did it because of a commodity.

01:24:44.000 And then they made Reefer Madness and all those crazy movies.

01:24:46.000 And everybody's like, oh, my goodness, if you smoke Reefer, you're going to die.

01:24:50.000 You're going to jump out of buildings.

01:24:52.000 Meanwhile, people had been smoking it for thousands of years.

01:24:54.000 It's like a pretty amazing way of manipulating public perception and using propaganda.

01:25:01.000 And, you know, William Randolph Hearst, obviously the subject of the movie Rosebud, he was a real piece of shit.

01:25:06.000 Citizen Kane, yeah.

01:25:07.000 Yeah, excuse me.

01:25:07.000 Yeah.

01:25:08.000 Citizen Kane.

01:25:10.000 He was a real piece of shit.

01:25:11.000 It's a real bad guy.

01:25:13.000 You know, according to folkloric tales, he did everything he could to prevent Orson Welles from becoming the filmmaker that he should have become.

01:25:22.000 Right, after he made that film.

01:25:24.000 And it seems like he was effective with it because, you know, Citizen Kane was so good.

01:25:24.000 Yeah.

01:25:29.000 And then years later, he's doing wine commercials for money.

01:25:32.000 Yeah.

01:25:33.000 There's a funny thing.

01:25:35.000 It's like a recording where he's trying to do a voiceover for Norwegian salmon or something.

01:25:42.000 He's getting more and more pissed off with the young producer who's trying to get him to read it in a certain way.

01:25:47.000 Yeah, it's kind of fucked, man.

01:25:49.000 Have you seen those little footage bits of the who's the tilting at windmills fella?

01:25:57.000 Don Quixote.

01:25:58.000 Yeah, he went to Mexico somewhere and he sort of started shooting little bits and pieces for potentially a Don Quixote movie.

01:26:08.000 But it's just madness.

01:26:09.000 It's like there's nothing in there that could actually be in a film.

01:26:13.000 He just had gone crazy.

01:26:14.000 Yeah, we'll get a bloke with a donkey.

01:26:17.000 We'll have him walking over there.

01:26:18.000 We'll shoot that.

01:26:19.000 But it's like there's nothing cohesive in it that you could make a movie from.

01:26:24.000 I wonder if that's just from the pressure of essentially being like one of the first guys to ever get canceled.

01:26:29.000 He just probably lost his mind.

01:26:31.000 Potentially, right?

01:26:32.000 Absolutely.

01:26:33.000 Because you would think that Citizen Kane is your passport to a lifetime of being financed for whatever idea you want to put onto film.

01:26:42.000 Yeah.

01:26:45.000 I mean, it's to this day a classic film that people talk about.

01:26:48.000 And then also, you're the same guy that did the War of Worlds.

01:26:51.000 You read that on the radio and freaked half the country out.

01:26:54.000 Right.

01:26:55.000 The same guy.

01:26:56.000 And so, I mean, he was a wonderkind, right?

01:26:59.000 Was this guy that like everybody thought was like a once-in-a-lifetime talent and he snuffed out.

01:27:06.000 And back then, you have to consider: if you're William Randolph Hearst, you have Hearst publications, you're essentially in control of whatever narrative you want to push forth, and no one's going to get in your way.

01:27:18.000 So, all you'd have to do is make some phone calls, and that guy, fuck him, he doesn't work again.

01:27:23.000 Crazy.

01:27:24.000 It's a little bit, a little bit.

01:27:26.000 We've got way too much power in the hands of media moguls.

01:27:30.000 Yeah.

01:27:31.000 And as we go on, that reduction of opinion just keeps happening.

01:27:37.000 One company swallows another, swallows another.

01:27:39.000 And I think we're in a situation now in America, right, when 20 years ago, there was two dozen major media companies or 30 years ago.

01:27:48.000 And now it's three.

01:27:51.000 I know.

01:27:52.000 And just like with the share market and the biggest companies in the world, they end up owning each other.

01:27:52.000 That's crazy.

01:28:00.000 So it's not three big companies.

01:28:02.000 It's really just one with three different names.

01:28:05.000 Yeah.

01:28:05.000 And they decide what the news is.

01:28:08.000 It's nuts, but that's the one beautiful thing about today is that independent media takes up the slack and often gets more views than main, you know, air quote, mainstream corporate media.

01:28:20.000 And so now corporate media is forced to report on things eventually.

01:28:25.000 Like the New York Times is forced to report on certain things that are inconvenient eventually, where they would have just liked to have ignored it.

01:28:33.000 But it gets so big in the zeitgeist that it has to become something that's discussed.

01:28:37.000 And that's fascinating because it's like dragging them into the reality that the internet lives in, which is a reality of a free exchange of information.

01:28:46.000 The whole horizon of television is just so dramatically different now.

01:28:54.000 You know, I get to a hotel and I'll scroll through 160 available channels.

01:28:54.000 So different.

01:29:01.000 There's nothing I'm interested in watching.

01:29:03.000 It's like, how is that even possible?

01:29:07.000 It's also watching something that's already going.

01:29:10.000 Like it starts at seven.

01:29:11.000 Why?

01:29:12.000 Why doesn't that start whenever I sit down?

01:29:14.000 This is stupid.

01:29:15.000 Like you have an old model.

01:29:17.000 This model's dumb.

01:29:18.000 It's like radio versus podcasts, the same kind of thing.

01:29:21.000 It's like no one wants to have to be listening, sitting in their car waiting for you to finish a sentence.

01:29:26.000 They want to hit pause, go do whatever the fuck they're doing, come back and play again.

01:29:31.000 This is a dumb way you're doing things.

01:29:33.000 You're doing things.

01:29:34.000 And on 8 p.m., it's Mikey and the boys.

01:29:38.000 See, I never had that life.

01:29:39.000 You know, the last time I remember that being a thing is maybe in high school, where my mum and dad, my mum particularly, would like to watch Dallas.

01:29:49.000 So we would all get together and watch Dallas at 8 o'clock or whatever on a Tuesday or whatever.

01:29:55.000 And that just doesn't just hasn't happened in my life at all anymore.

01:30:00.000 The last time it happened, I think, for me, was the Sopranos on HBO.

01:30:05.000 Because it was on, I believe it was on Sunday nights.

01:30:07.000 And everybody knew what time it was on.

01:30:10.000 And you go home and I had a TiVo back then.

01:30:12.000 You remember those?

01:30:13.000 Where you could record shows and go back and watch them later and pause them and stuff like that.

01:30:13.000 Right.

01:30:18.000 And it was like revolutionary before streaming.

01:30:20.000 Oh my God.

01:30:21.000 You could record shows and watch them whenever you want.

01:30:24.000 Embarrassingly, I've only ever seen maybe four or five Sopranos episodes.

01:30:28.000 Really?

01:30:29.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:30:30.000 And every time I watch it, I go, I cannot believe that I didn't get overtaken by this at the time.

01:30:37.000 Because Gandoffini was a mate.

01:30:40.000 I met him like early 90s.

01:30:43.000 Yeah, early 90s in New York.

01:30:45.000 Him and a friend of mine called Lenny Lofton used to rent a place together on 44th and 9th and Hell's Kitchen.

01:30:52.000 And, you know, this is like an apartment on maybe the fourth floor of a building.

01:30:58.000 And there were a couple of windows that didn't even have glass in.

01:31:01.000 They had like plastic sheets and a blanket nailed up against the window.

01:31:05.000 And that's what, you know, the situation that Gandofini was in when I first met him.

01:31:10.000 Wow.

01:31:10.000 A few years later, he was obviously very successful.

01:31:13.000 But my youngest son, Tennyson, is like a sopranos expert.

01:31:20.000 Like you can say a lie to him, and he'll know what episode, what season, and who said that.

01:31:25.000 Wow.

01:31:26.000 It's like he's so into it.

01:31:28.000 And, you know, when I have started watching very recently, actually, some ducks landed on a pool on the farm.

01:31:36.000 So I took a photo and there was like thousands of comments or whatever it was straight away going, ah, it's like Tony Soprano.

01:31:42.000 I had no idea what people were talking about.

01:31:44.000 I had to discuss it with my son.

01:31:45.000 He goes, oh, yeah, there's this sequence.

01:31:46.000 So I watched that sequence with the ducks.

01:31:49.000 Yeah.

01:31:50.000 But Gandofini, man, what a great actor he was.

01:31:52.000 He was a great character, I'm not sure.

01:31:54.000 He was good on that show.

01:31:55.000 He was so, it was the first guy who was essentially the hero of the show, who was a murderer, a murderer, a terrible person, a mob boss.

01:32:08.000 And you liked him.

01:32:10.000 It was insane.

01:32:11.000 Like the fact that he could pull, that he had the depth to pull off that, where he's doing horrible things to people and you're rooting for him.

01:32:19.000 You're rooting for him.

01:32:21.000 You're not hoping he gets shot.

01:32:23.000 You want Tony to live.

01:32:24.000 Who's that guy that you have on here every now and then?

01:32:27.000 Joey Diaz?

01:32:28.000 Yeah, he's a funny guy.

01:32:28.000 Yeah.

01:32:29.000 Oh, he's the funniest guy that's ever lived.

01:32:31.000 I heard him tell that story one time about the same week that Cinderella Man came out, I went to the premiere of Longashard.

01:32:40.000 Because, you know, Chris Rock was in that and stuff.

01:32:42.000 And there's a few people in that cast who I really like.

01:32:46.000 And so I went to the movie and I just remember him telling a story about the lights come up and he didn't realize he was sitting next to me or whatever.

01:32:57.000 I think it'd be a very dangerous room for me and Joey Diaz to be in.

01:33:00.000 I think we'd be having a good time.

01:33:01.000 You guys have a good time.

01:33:02.000 A little bit.

01:33:03.000 Joey brings the party.

01:33:04.000 He's the funniest guy I've ever met.

01:33:06.000 Oh, man.

01:33:06.000 He's got some stories.

01:33:07.000 Oh, my God.

01:33:08.000 They never end.

01:33:09.000 I've known him for fucking 30 years.

01:33:11.000 He's always got a new story.

01:33:13.000 He's just a maniac.

01:33:14.000 And, you know, I mean, went to jail for armed kidnapping, kidnapped a drug dealer with a machine gun.

01:33:20.000 He was half his mind on Coke.

01:33:22.000 Yeah, he was a wild fella.

01:33:24.000 He was a wild fellow when he was young.

01:33:26.000 When I met him, he was like right out of jail.

01:33:29.000 How did you meet Jimmy Carr?

01:33:31.000 I think I met Jimmy at the comedy store, I believe.

01:33:34.000 Pretty sure.

01:33:36.000 I'd already known about him.

01:33:37.000 Yeah.

01:33:38.000 Yeah, I'd already known about him.

01:33:39.000 What a fucking great guy.

01:33:40.000 Yeah, man.

01:33:41.000 And so funny.

01:33:42.000 Oh, my God.

01:33:43.000 He performed at the mothership last time he was in town.

01:33:45.000 We were all in the balcony watching.

01:33:48.000 He's so good.

01:33:49.000 So crisp.

01:33:50.000 The punchlines are so, oh, he's so good.

01:33:53.000 It's such a pleasure.

01:33:55.000 And he just keeps educating himself.

01:33:58.000 Yeah.

01:33:58.000 You know, he's got this voracious mind.

01:34:01.000 Well, he's a brilliant guy, you know.

01:34:03.000 And to see that brilliance applied to an art form, you know, to comedy.

01:34:08.000 It's like you're seeing it.

01:34:09.000 He's just as funny in casual conversation.

01:34:10.000 Oh, yeah.

01:34:11.000 You know, you sit down, we have a chat, because we spend a little bit of time together.

01:34:15.000 And it's funny because he's, you know, significantly younger than me, but he's teaching me stuff.

01:34:23.000 You know, I've never been a vacation person, for example.

01:34:27.000 You know, there's work and home.

01:34:29.000 But home isn't often fully restful because, you know, I've got a football team.

01:34:36.000 I've got other businesses.

01:34:37.000 I've got the farm to run, you know, cows to look after and all that sort of stuff.

01:34:41.000 So, but a couple of years ago, he just put it in my mind, like, let's just say, we'll take these dates and I'll meet you somewhere, you know?

01:34:51.000 So the first time we did it, we met up in Puglia in southern Italy.

01:34:56.000 And earlier this year we met up in Marbea.

01:35:00.000 But I've already booked a vacation for next year.

01:35:03.000 I don't do that.

01:35:05.000 But it's like that thing of going somewhere which isn't home and isn't work, having no agenda, sort of hanging out by the pool, reading a book, right, from beginning to end.

01:35:18.000 Yeah.

01:35:19.000 You know, without having to sort of put it aside and come back to it a week later and go, oh, what was the protagonist doing again?

01:35:24.000 You know, yeah, it's very interesting.

01:35:28.000 It's very interesting that I should be, you know, I'm getting this late life education from a British comedian.

01:35:34.000 That is funny that he's teaching you how.

01:35:36.000 No wife taught you how to do that. 0.99

01:35:40.000 I think there's a reason why people go on vacations.

01:35:42.000 They're not all stupid.

01:35:44.000 There's a benefit to it.

01:35:46.000 But see, I didn't grow up in that sort of family.

01:35:48.000 We didn't have the money for that sort of thing.

01:35:49.000 We went on one big family holiday in 1970 where we all piled into my dad's station wagon and we drove from Sydney up to northern Queensland.

01:35:59.000 But a cyclone came through on the way.

01:36:02.000 So we had like four days of sunshine and 26 days of rain.

01:36:06.000 So living in a caravan, playing Monopoly.

01:36:10.000 So it's not like I look back, oh, I remember the great vacations of my childhood.

01:36:14.000 So it was like, you know, my dad used to run pubs.

01:36:17.000 So you don't get a holiday.

01:36:20.000 You have to learn it.

01:36:21.000 Based on the licensing laws, you have to be the first person there in the morning.

01:36:25.000 You have to be the last person there at night.

01:36:27.000 So we kind of lived that sort of life where everything was based on running the pub.

01:36:36.000 But it's cool.

01:36:37.000 It's a good time for me to learn about it now.

01:36:41.000 Well, don't you think like as a person who does anything creative, you have to have a bunch of different kinds of experiences to draw from.

01:36:50.000 And if you just stay in the same environment all the time, it's probably generally not good for you.

01:36:57.000 Like you need to go see other people.

01:37:00.000 You need to go different places, not just to refresh and relax, but also to take in.

01:37:06.000 You see, I do so much traveling.

01:37:09.000 You know, for work.

01:37:09.000 For work.

01:37:11.000 Oh, that's what I was going to ask you.

01:37:12.000 Why are they doing a Portland film in Munich?

01:37:15.000 Is it that cheap to go?

01:37:16.000 Like, how bad did they fuck up Portland?

01:37:18.000 That it's cheaper to go to Munich to film?

01:37:21.000 Is that what it is?

01:37:22.000 You have tax incentives that are being offered various places.

01:37:26.000 And that happens a lot here.

01:37:28.000 There'll be X amount of movies pretty much in every state who can apply for a tax incentive.

01:37:34.000 And some states are more competitive than others.

01:37:38.000 Louisiana, for example, Georgia.

01:37:42.000 California basically gives you nothing.

01:37:45.000 So it's very hard to shoot in California.

01:37:47.000 So silly fucks.

01:37:49.000 Well, the thing is, it's such a busy place.

01:37:51.000 And the studios there, the studios would rather have a television show that's going to be there for a decade than a movie that's in and out in four months.

01:38:02.000 It's better for them.

01:38:05.000 But the world has opened up hugely in the last 30 years in terms of film production.

01:38:14.000 And you're taking advantage of homegrown film talent and then building on that with international investment.

01:38:24.000 Well, that's great.

01:38:24.000 That's a great aspect.

01:38:26.000 Australia has a big history, for example, of making films.

01:38:29.000 Technically, arguably the first full-length feature film, the true history of the Ned Kelly gang might have been called that was like 1906, 1908, something like that.

01:38:39.000 It was made in Australia.

01:38:40.000 Yeah.

01:38:40.000 Really?

01:38:43.000 And, you know, all the way through, but it takes to about the 70s or whatever, then you have this sort of new generation of Australian filmmakers who are actually making stories that reflect the current culture.

01:38:55.000 And I think that's sort of happening worldwide as well.

01:38:58.000 Have you seen Talk to Me?

01:39:00.000 No.

01:39:01.000 Talk to Me is a fantastic horror movie that these two young guys from.

01:39:06.000 I'm saying the right name, right?

01:39:08.000 They were on the podcast.

01:39:10.000 I'm pretty sure it's Talk to Me.

01:39:11.000 It's about this dead hand that someone found.

01:39:15.000 What are the gentlemen's names?

01:39:16.000 Danny and Michael Philippoo.

01:39:18.000 I think that's how you say it.

01:39:20.000 Philippoo.

01:39:20.000 Philippoo?

01:39:21.000 Yeah.

01:39:22.000 Hilarious guys.

01:39:23.000 Just bundles of energy.

01:39:24.000 They're fucking nuts.

01:39:25.000 But this was like their first real film that they made.

01:39:30.000 They put together this.

01:39:31.000 They did it all themselves.

01:39:33.000 And it's a horror movie.

01:39:34.000 And it's really good.

01:39:35.000 It's like...

01:39:36.000 Where are they from?

01:39:36.000 They're from Australia.

01:39:37.000 I don't know what part.

01:39:39.000 Jamie will find out.

01:39:39.000 These two guys.

01:39:42.000 There they are.

01:39:43.000 These two fellas. 0.99

01:39:45.000 And they finish each other's sentences.

01:39:47.000 They're just nuts.

01:39:48.000 And they're just like they're on 10 all the time.

01:39:52.000 Oh, cool.

01:39:52.000 Did it say Adelaide?

01:39:53.000 There you go.

01:39:54.000 Right.

01:39:55.000 So they're 32.

01:39:58.000 But that's a completely Australian-made movie that was a hit worldwide recently.

01:40:04.000 Yeah, obviously Mad Max was a giant.

01:40:08.000 When you start going through it, you sort of do realize there's been, you know, probably a much larger percentage than you would expect given the population of the country in terms of people in film, whether it's directors of photography or directors themselves or actors.

01:40:25.000 Editors and the actors.

01:40:27.000 Think about how many famous actors have come from there.

01:40:29.000 It's crazy, man.

01:40:30.000 When I was a young fella making my first movies, you had Mel Gibson and Judy Davis.

01:40:30.000 Think about it.

01:40:40.000 But Mel was born in America, so it didn't really count.

01:40:44.000 There was other guys around, like, you know, Brian Brown had done Cocktail and Gorillas in the Mist.

01:40:50.000 Prior to that, you have guys like Jack Thompson.

01:40:53.000 But when you really look into it, you know, then you have these other guys.

01:40:56.000 It goes all the way back to Errol Flynn.

01:40:58.000 There is a connection all the way through that, you know, there are certain people working in the business.

01:41:05.000 Erol Flynn was Australia?

01:41:06.000 What's that?

01:41:07.000 Errol Flynn was Australia.

01:41:08.000 Yeah, he was born in Tasmania.

01:41:09.000 Wow.

01:41:11.000 And either born in Tasmania or born in Papua New Guinea and grew up in either place.

01:41:18.000 But I think he was born in Tasmania.

01:41:20.000 But if you think about it, since the early 90s, you know, Nicole Kidman, Kate Blanchette, Hugh Jackman, Chris Hemmersworth, Margot Robbie.

01:41:32.000 It's just outrageous.

01:41:34.000 Jeffrey Rush.

01:41:35.000 You know, there's like name after name after name of people who've made a significant contribution in cinema.

01:41:43.000 Yeah, I mean, you consider the population size, which is essentially the population of the entire country is basically LA, right?

01:41:51.000 It's 25 mil.

01:41:52.000 Yeah, it's basically Southern California.

01:41:56.000 And it's gigantic.

01:41:58.000 But it's hard to explain to people.

01:42:01.000 You show them where the major cities are and they go, oh, what happens in the middle?

01:42:05.000 You go, not a lot.

01:42:07.000 Yeah.

01:42:08.000 It's mainly desert.

01:42:08.000 You don't want to be there?

01:42:10.000 It's like, you know, if you like wide open spaces, you're welcome.

01:42:13.000 And a lot of things can kill you.

01:42:15.000 A lot of things.

01:42:16.000 A lot of things.

01:42:18.000 Yeah.

01:42:19.000 Just had a little sort of thing on the farm, actually.

01:42:22.000 My girlfriend's got a Papillon dog, which is a beautiful dog, sort of long-haired.

01:42:29.000 And it got a paralysis tick.

01:42:31.000 And they realized, she realized that between her and this other girl that looks after the puppy women not there, they'd got their dates mixed up.

01:42:39.000 And so it wasn't actually covered for flea and tick, you know, stuff in its bloodstream.

01:42:44.000 So very dangerous.

01:42:46.000 So they had to shave the dog completely and everything.

01:42:49.000 They pulled off another couple of ticks, but there was only just the one paralysis tick, so it's okay.

01:42:54.000 But if you leave that and if you don't deal with it, the dog's going to be dead in a minute.

01:42:58.000 Paralysis ticks.

01:43:00.000 It gets into their body and it is, it affects them the way the name says on the box.

01:43:00.000 Yeah.

01:43:07.000 There's one that's going on in America now called the, well, what it gives, it's a lone star tick is what gives you this bite and produces something called alpha gal.

01:43:22.000 And it makes you allergic to red meat.

01:43:24.000 What?

01:43:25.000 Yeah.

01:43:26.000 My friend, my good friend Evan Hayfer got it.

01:43:29.000 And he was allergic to red meat for a good solid year.

01:43:33.000 And then eventually it went away.

01:43:35.000 And then it came back again recently.

01:43:37.000 It's a huge pain in the ass.

01:43:38.000 So we have ticks in Australia, but we've never had to deal with Lyme disease like you have here.

01:43:44.000 But in the last four or five decades, people started raising deer in Australia for meat and what have you.

01:43:52.000 And few of them get away.

01:43:54.000 There's no deer farms around where I am, which is north of Sydney by 600 Ks.

01:44:01.000 But recently, a couple of the guys that work for me on the farm said they've seen deer going through the bush at the back of my block.

01:44:09.000 So that means that there's some just animals that have escaped and they're most likely to have been in the southern highlands, which is south of Sydney.

01:44:17.000 And somehow they've got themselves all the way up to where I am.

01:44:22.000 How many miles is that or kilometer?

01:44:23.000 Well, we're probably talking about 700-something kilometers.

01:44:29.000 They just wandered.

01:44:30.000 Yeah.

01:44:31.000 Wow.

01:44:32.000 And didn't get run over or didn't get, you know?

01:44:34.000 That's crazy.

01:44:35.000 Absolutely crazy.

01:44:36.000 And they probably bring in ticks. 0.98

01:44:38.000 And the wrong kind of ticks.

01:44:38.000 Probably.

01:44:40.000 In America, they have a problem with that too, deer farms and this disease called chronic wasting disease.

01:44:46.000 And it's spread throughout large swaths of America have a giant issue with this, where deer herds get infected.

01:44:54.000 My friend Doug Duran, he has a farm out in Wisconsin, and they've had a significant problem with it to the point where they've started issuing more tags and thinning the herd.

01:45:05.000 They're trying to kill more deer to try to lessen this spread of this stuff because chronic wasting disease, it's a prion disease.

01:45:13.000 So it's like it gets on plants.

01:45:17.000 It stays on them for a long time.

01:45:19.000 So they start drooling when they have it.

01:45:22.000 And in that drool is more chronic wasting disease.

01:45:25.000 So another deer will come along and graze on the ground where they drooled.

01:45:29.000 Then they get it.

01:45:30.000 Horrible, horrible disease.

01:45:32.000 And a lot of it emanated from these deer farms.

01:45:36.000 When I first bought the farm, which was 100 acres to start with, but it's now like 1700.

01:45:44.000 And it's attached to a state forest as well.

01:45:46.000 So I can get up behind my place and go for days.

01:45:49.000 Oh, wow.

01:45:50.000 Which is just sort of like, you know, which is cool.

01:45:53.000 But back in the day, we used to have platypus in the creeks.

01:45:57.000 We had wombats.

01:45:59.000 And now I see more foxes than I see native animals.

01:46:07.000 Or I see an equivalent amount of foxes as I see wallabies.

01:46:10.000 Are foxes invasive?

01:46:11.000 Yeah.

01:46:12.000 Okay, there you go.

01:46:12.000 And they're absolute, you know, because they eat anything and everything.

01:46:16.000 I used to have a big family of what we call bush turkeys living behind the house. 1.00

01:46:22.000 And they're still there.

01:46:24.000 But they used to just proudly walk around, you know, and it was fun.

01:46:27.000 You're going through the bush and then suddenly there's a road full of bush turkeys.

01:46:30.000 It's great.

01:46:32.000 But now the population is right down and they're totally ninja now.

01:46:38.000 You don't see them very often.

01:46:39.000 When you do, they're like very suspicious.

01:46:41.000 They're checking you out.

01:46:42.000 Just being hunted 24 cents.

01:46:44.000 That's foxes, man.

01:46:45.000 Yeah.

01:46:45.000 You also have a large feral cat problem, right?

01:46:48.000 Gigantic.

01:46:49.000 Gigantic.

01:46:50.000 The one and only cat that I let my mother have at the farm.

01:46:53.000 This is way back, man.

01:46:54.000 I was training for Cinderella, man.

01:46:57.000 And, you know, they sent me this group of boxes, Olympic guys, and stuff like that.

01:47:02.000 And every single one of them can smash the piss out of me in the ring.

01:47:05.000 So I've got to smash the piss out of them in other areas. 0.52

01:47:07.000 So I train them until they drop, you know, getting them on bicycles and taking them to the bush, you know, things like that, just to sort of like keep the balance.

01:47:14.000 You know, and this one particular day, and I had it in my mind that I was just going to absolutely smash them.

01:47:20.000 I was going to get into this situation because this is one road, you know, and I was just going to get so far in front of them, psychologically damage them, you know.

01:47:31.000 How devious had a conversation with my mum, and she was like, oh, darling, you know, you know, I'd really love to have a cat.

01:47:38.000 And I'm like, Mum, we lived in this privileged situation.

01:47:41.000 We've got sulfur-crested cockatoos, rosellas, king parrots, all these beautiful birds.

01:47:48.000 And the worst thing that we could do for them is put a cat into that.

01:47:52.000 So you can't have a cat, you know.

01:47:56.000 I'm riding through the bush, 25, 30ks in at this point, right?

01:48:01.000 I'm getting to the top of this hill.

01:48:02.000 I'm looking down.

01:48:04.000 I'm seeing these boys struggling quite some distance, probably about a kilometer and a half away from me, you know.

01:48:10.000 And I'm going, I'll just have a little rest here.

01:48:16.000 And I just hear this little noise, and I'm like, what the hell is that?

01:48:19.000 So I just take three or four steps off the road.

01:48:22.000 You know, probably about seven or eight minutes ago, I was coming around this corner and a car was there on the road, which is kind of unusual for the state forest in that particular area, right?

01:48:32.000 So I take these three or four steps in, and there's a little kitten sitting in the bush.

01:48:38.000 Like, what the hell?

01:48:39.000 So I pick it up, it's warm, you know, I can't leave it here.

01:48:43.000 So I put it in my backpack, right?

01:48:46.000 And I complete the ride, I get to the top of this hill where this trig station is, and everybody's standing around.

01:48:50.000 I go, oh, I found a cat.

01:48:54.000 So I bring it out, everyone's all these big boxes go, oh, you know, cute little kitten.

01:48:59.000 So I took it home to my mum.

01:49:01.000 I said, okay, here's your cat.

01:49:04.000 You know, and the way that I reasoned it is like, this is me saying to my mother, you cannot have something that will make you happy.

01:49:11.000 And then the universe goes, listen to your mother.

01:49:15.000 So now that cat hated human beings for the rest of its life, you know, the only person it got on with was my mum.

01:49:22.000 And we used to have like four bells around its neck to give the birds enough warning.

01:49:27.000 So it didn't cause too much damage.

01:49:31.000 So it was a feral cat then.

01:49:33.000 I think.

01:49:34.000 Or was it tossed out of that car?

01:49:36.000 I think so.

01:49:37.000 Yeah.

01:49:37.000 It was too clean and too warm for it to have been living.

01:49:41.000 But that's what people do.

01:49:42.000 They have a problem.

01:49:43.000 They have a cat that has a litter.

01:49:45.000 They don't know how to solve it.

01:49:46.000 Pet stores don't want it. 0.56

01:49:48.000 Their friends don't want it.

01:49:49.000 So they come up with the concept of just chucking them into the bush.

01:49:53.000 Well, didn't it start out what they brought?

01:49:55.000 They introduced cats to try to eliminate some other animal.

01:49:59.000 We have such a history of stupidity in that regard.

01:50:03.000 Have you heard of the cane toad?

01:50:05.000 It's just so fantastic, right?

01:50:05.000 Yes.

01:50:07.000 Yeah.

01:50:08.000 So, you know, they're growing sugar cane in Queensland, and there's a particular flying creature that they want to control.

01:50:16.000 So they start looking around.

01:50:18.000 We always blame the British for this because it's usually a naturalist, a British naturalist or scientist that comes up with the concept.

01:50:25.000 And so they look through all the aisles.

01:50:27.000 I can't remember where they found it from, but they found this toad who seemed to have this appetite for this particular insect and they would feed it.

01:50:36.000 It ate it.

01:50:37.000 Great.

01:50:38.000 So we'll introduce the cane toad to get amongst the sugar cane and lessen that creature. 0.94

01:50:42.000 When they were checking if the cane toad would eat the creature, they were feeding it dead ones, right?

01:50:52.000 It's a flying creature.

01:50:53.000 Toad doesn't have a tongue like a frog.

01:50:57.000 Can't catch this thing if it's flying.

01:51:00.000 So it was of no use at all in trying to lessen that population.

01:51:05.000 However, it became like a dominant species, and it was in Queensland, but now it's starting to come in New South Wales.

01:51:11.000 So they're basically marching south.

01:51:14.000 And it's a problem, man.

01:51:16.000 It's like a serious problem.

01:51:18.000 They secrete poison.

01:51:19.000 So if a dog gets interested and the toad gets afraid, the dog can sort of like sniff or lick its head, then get poisoned, and that's the end of your dog, you know.

01:51:28.000 But there was a period of time there where there's actually a documentary from the 90s called Cane Toads.

01:51:35.000 And it sort of just points out how crazy people were getting with it.

01:51:38.000 You know, people in small country towns walking from their house to the pub, taking a cricket bat and just smacking the cane toads off the road as they went.

01:51:47.000 You know, it's like all these people becoming like, you know, crazed with the idea of getting rid of the cane toad population, but it hasn't affected them. 1.00

01:51:55.000 They just keep growing.

01:51:56.000 How much is the population now?

01:51:58.000 How big is it?

01:51:59.000 So big.

01:52:00.000 And these things, Jamie, can you do me a favor?

01:52:03.000 Look up the weight of the largest cane toad that they found because it's always a surprise.

01:52:11.000 These things grow.

01:52:12.000 And if they're in the right environment and things that they can eat and feed on, they just get bigger and bigger.

01:52:17.000 Look at this thing.

01:52:17.000 The biggest one.

01:52:19.000 Look at this thing, mate.

01:52:21.000 Whoa.

01:52:24.000 That's like an English bulldog.

01:52:26.000 Howdy-doody.

01:52:26.000 It's bigger than my dog.

01:52:27.000 Oh, my.

01:52:30.000 Look at his head.

01:52:32.000 What is the weight on that fucker?

01:52:34.000 What does it say?

01:52:38.000 That's crazy.

01:52:43.000 I gotta find another one to add fuck me. 1.00

01:52:45.000 Hold on.

01:52:48.000 Got a weight there.

01:52:50.000 Does it say how big?

01:52:51.000 That was a record.

01:52:53.000 Of course it's a little bit.

01:52:54.000 How fat that fucker is. 1.00

01:52:55.000 2.7 kilometers.

01:52:56.000 2.8 pounds.

01:52:58.000 That looks bigger than 5.8 pounds.

01:52:58.000 Wow.

01:53:01.000 It does, but it might be a perspective thing.

01:53:03.000 Either way.

01:53:04.000 I said that was the current one.

01:53:05.000 Oh, show the video.

01:53:07.000 Scroll up so you can see that video or make it larger.

01:53:09.000 Like what she's holding it.

01:53:10.000 Yeah, it looks like about five pounds.

01:53:13.000 Boy, have you ever seen when they there's a lot of horrible videos online where they take toads and they put them in a box with mice?

01:53:22.000 You ever see what toads do to mice?

01:53:24.000 No.

01:53:24.000 You would never think that toads are ferocious.

01:53:27.000 You know, you'd never think that toads are basically monsters, these just giant-mouthed monsters that swallow mice whole.

01:53:35.000 But they do.

01:53:36.000 They're super aggressive.

01:53:38.000 It's crazy to watch.

01:53:39.000 Jamie, I know you're going to get one.

01:53:42.000 Yeah.

01:53:43.000 Just had to make sure it was worth pulling up.

01:53:46.000 Is this a good one?

01:53:47.000 Yeah.

01:53:49.000 But there's ones where there's a bunch of them in boxes.

01:53:52.000 See, this one is kind of weird because he's not freaking out yet.

01:53:57.000 He's being sneaky.

01:54:00.000 Wow, what's that?

01:54:01.000 Look at that head.

01:54:03.000 Look at his head.

01:54:05.000 I mean, if that thing was giant, like that was hippopotamus-shaped, chasing after you.

01:54:12.000 Look how quick that is.

01:54:14.000 How did he get it?

01:54:16.000 It must be closer than it looks like.

01:54:17.000 He just swallowed him whole.

01:54:19.000 Watch how quick he does it.

01:54:20.000 This bit here.

01:54:23.000 Oh, it's just one step forward and bang.

01:54:24.000 Yeah.

01:54:25.000 Just snap.

01:54:27.000 See if you can find one of them videos.

01:54:29.000 He just inhales them.

01:54:30.000 Like, he literally inhaled them.

01:54:33.000 Oh, he grabbed him with the tongue first.

01:54:35.000 And he yanked him in.

01:54:36.000 Oh, God.

01:54:38.000 See if you can find those videos where there's a ton of them in a box.

01:54:41.000 Maybe we're getting two live feedings Lovely mice. 1.00

01:54:51.000 Like this.

01:54:53.000 It's a giant bullfrog.

01:54:53.000 Either way.

01:54:55.000 It's not a cane toad.

01:54:56.000 Slightly different.

01:54:57.000 Giant African bullfrog.

01:54:58.000 Either way.

01:54:59.000 Point is, they eat mice.

01:55:02.000 They eat them whole.

01:55:04.000 And how many of them are now in Australia?

01:55:06.000 How many million?

01:55:07.000 Oh, here we go.

01:55:08.000 This guy's just going to go ham.

01:55:10.000 So he starts.

01:55:12.000 He's going to eat all of them.

01:55:14.000 Look how gross those things are. 1.00

01:55:17.000 They look so dumb.

01:55:19.000 Just so mindless and gross.

01:55:24.000 I don't think he's going to get all of them.

01:55:26.000 Videos not long enough.

01:55:27.000 He hasn't gotten any of them.

01:55:29.000 What's going on here?

01:55:32.000 Just gathering them in a corner.

01:55:34.000 It's a creepy animal.

01:55:36.000 And so, what are the numbers?

01:55:39.000 Like, put that into perplexity.

01:55:42.000 Cane toads?

01:55:43.000 How many cane toads?

01:55:43.000 Yeah.

01:55:45.000 Ask our sponsor, how many cane toads are in Australia?

01:55:51.000 What was the initial deposit?

01:55:53.000 Like, how many did they drop off?

01:55:55.000 It was only a couple hundred, and then they bred like 60,000 in 1937.

01:56:00.000 And the answer for now is estimated at 200 million.

01:56:07.000 Man.

01:56:09.000 And that little fly that eats the sugar cane, it's still there.

01:56:13.000 Oh, my God.

01:56:15.000 200 million.

01:56:18.000 But see, look, if you see where those that see that cluster of light blue balls, right?

01:56:23.000 They basically, in there, in the middle of that cluster, is where they dropped them to start with.

01:56:29.000 And look at how they've migrated.

01:56:30.000 Well, they're going to make their way across the whole country.

01:56:32.000 Oh, there you go.

01:56:33.000 49.

01:56:34.000 So the white one is actually where they put them to start.

01:56:36.000 Wow.

01:56:37.000 Everything else is migration.

01:56:38.000 And by 2000, look how far they've gone.

01:56:41.000 Wow.

01:56:42.000 What's the plan to get rid of those things?

01:56:47.000 I'm not sure that they have a PhD plan.

01:56:49.000 There's no plan.

01:56:50.000 Well, that's the problem.

01:56:51.000 If they have a plan, they're going to bring in some lizard or something.

01:56:53.000 Yeah.

01:56:54.000 Frogs. 0.80

01:56:54.000 That's going to end up doing something else. 0.80

01:56:56.000 Yeah, it's going to kill everything else.

01:56:57.000 Every single time they've done that.

01:57:00.000 In New Zealand, for example, they introduced the gorse bush as a way to have hedging instead of fences.

01:57:06.000 But New Zealand's got a way higher rainfall and sunshine hours than England, where it came from.

01:57:12.000 So now it's just everywhere.

01:57:14.000 So beautiful, arable farmlands just taken over by gorse.

01:57:17.000 And when it grows in Australia, in New Zealand, it grows thicker and more prickly and much harder to deal with.

01:57:24.000 We have the same thing in Australia with plants like Lantana.

01:57:26.000 It's just everywhere, all through the bush.

01:57:28.000 You know, in my lifetime.

01:57:30.000 So in 96, I used to be able to walk through certain areas of my property just under tall trees with subtropical ferns and vines on the ground.

01:57:40.000 Now there's many areas of my property that are just impossible.

01:57:45.000 You cannot get through it anymore because it's choked out with introduced weeds.

01:57:49.000 What is that crazy plant down south that we talked about once that has overrun some of these forests?

01:57:55.000 It's pretty beautiful, but it's also very creepy to see what it's done, just like taking over all the trees.

01:58:01.000 All the trees, anything on the ground just covered with styria.

01:58:07.000 Kudzu.

01:58:08.000 Yeah, I'll show you.

01:58:09.000 I'll make sure this throws off.

01:58:10.000 That's right.

01:58:11.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:58:12.000 Look at that.

01:58:12.000 Right.

01:58:13.000 Isn't that nuts?

01:58:14.000 Like, that image is creepy.

01:58:14.000 Yeah.

01:58:16.000 I mean, that's like a steep in my place, man.

01:58:16.000 Yeah.

01:58:18.000 I used to have waterfalls and creeks.

01:58:20.000 Look at that.

01:58:20.000 It's taking over that whole building.

01:58:22.000 That's crazy.

01:58:22.000 Everything.

01:58:23.000 Just where did it come from?

01:58:23.000 Yeah.

01:58:30.000 So that's in Fiji, yeah?

01:58:32.000 Yeah, it's in the United States, though.

01:58:35.000 So how was it brought in?

01:58:38.000 China? 0.73

01:58:39.000 Korea, Japan.

01:58:40.000 Oh, did people bring it in on purpose?

01:58:42.000 That's where it's that's where it's originated from, sorry.

01:58:44.000 Right.

01:58:45.000 History of U.S. introduction introduced from Japan in 1876.

01:58:50.000 New Orleans Exposition.

01:58:52.000 Oh, that's where I heard there's a lot of it.

01:58:55.000 Vine was widely marketed in the southeast as an ornamental plant.

01:58:59.000 And then it just took over.

01:59:02.000 Wow.

01:59:03.000 It's funny when people try to do that because they never learn and yet they still try the same thing.

01:59:09.000 Over and over.

01:59:11.000 There's so many times they've introduced invasive species.

01:59:14.000 I have a buddy of mine.

01:59:15.000 It's not necessarily an invasion species, but I have a buddy of mine who lives in Colorado.

01:59:19.000 And they just reintroduced wolves into this area where they have farms.

01:59:24.000 And so they took wolves from Washington State where they had been killing cows.

01:59:30.000 And so they had to relocate them.

01:59:31.000 So where did they relocate them to them?

01:59:33.000 They relocated them to a place with cows. 0.69

01:59:36.000 And of course these wolves start killing cows again.

01:59:38.000 Haven't they shown though in one of the national parks here that by supporting the apex predator, a whole bunch of other problems get solved?

01:59:47.000 That's the Yellowstone reintroduction.

01:59:51.000 And so that's called how wolves changed rivers, right?

01:59:54.000 That documentary.

01:59:55.000 There's a lot of people that push back against that.

02:00:00.000 I think you definitely need predators because there was at one point in time an overpopulation of elk in Montana to the point where they were having winter seasons, winter rifle seasons, where they would issue a lot of tags.

02:00:14.000 So in the winter, they're stuck in deep snow and you just go pick them off.

02:00:18.000 And it was because they had so many that it was actually detrimental to the herd itself, to the health of the herd itself.

02:00:24.000 So they reintroduced wolves.

02:00:26.000 The population dropped by, I think, more than 40%.

02:00:29.000 It might have been more than that.

02:00:31.000 I don't know.

02:00:32.000 See how much elk's population has dropped since the introduction of wolves into Montana in the Yellowstone introduction.

02:00:42.000 So there's definitely a balance that needs to be achieved.

02:00:46.000 The problem is that area where they're doing that, then the elk are going to eat, the wolves rather are going to eat the elk.

02:00:54.000 And occasionally they'll stray onto cattle and then they're allowed to issue depredation tags and you can get a problem wolf killed.

02:01:03.000 But what they did in Colorado is they brought them right to where the cows are.

02:01:08.000 They took wolves that had a history of, they know how to kill cows. 0.69

02:01:12.000 That's what they do.

02:01:13.000 They know how to kill calves. 0.99

02:01:14.000 They've been doing it for their whole lives.

02:01:16.000 And they took them and they introduced them to a place where there's no protection.

02:01:21.000 No one's ready for it.

02:01:22.000 No one has guards set up.

02:01:24.000 They don't have dogs set up.

02:01:25.000 They don't have anything set up to stop wolves.

02:01:28.000 So let's see.

02:01:32.000 When the reintroduction was in 1995, the winter count was approximately 17,000 elk when wolf reintroduction began.

02:01:40.000 It fell to 10,000 by 2003.

02:01:43.000 By 2013, only 3,915 elk represents a drop of roughly 75% from pre-reintroduction numbers.

02:01:54.000 That's kind of crazy.

02:01:55.000 But 19,000 is too many.

02:01:57.000 That's kind of nuts.

02:02:00.000 That's an overpopulation.

02:02:01.000 That can lead to disease and famine and all kinds of things.

02:02:03.000 And you don't have a good, stable ecosystem with both predators and prey.

02:02:10.000 You get a situation like you have in New Zealand where they have to gun down stags sometimes.

02:02:14.000 They have to helicopter stags because they just get overpopulated.

02:02:18.000 You know, New Zealand is one of those places where all these game animals from Europe were introduced specifically to set up New Zealand as a beautiful hunting refuge.

02:02:28.000 They would go there and hunt stag.

02:02:30.000 But, you know, the problem is you have to have balance.

02:02:33.000 Like this whole, you can't just enter into like human ideas.

02:02:40.000 You know, like, oh, well, one plus one is two.

02:02:42.000 So we'll just add one.

02:02:43.000 Now we got, no, it's not how it works.

02:02:46.000 Like, you have to maintain the population of these creatures that you've now dropped off with no natural balance.

02:02:53.000 We have a big problem in certain areas of Australia with wild horses.

02:02:57.000 Yeah, they know that in America.

02:02:58.000 We call them Mustangs.

02:02:59.000 We call them Brombies. 0.98

02:03:02.000 You know, obviously a horse was really important in Australia when it was being opened up and first colonised and populated and what have you.

02:03:11.000 And then, you know, First World War, we still had light horse cavalry and what have you.

02:03:16.000 So in certain areas, but mainly in the area where the mountains are in Australia, which crosses between New South Wales into the state of Victoria.

02:03:25.000 And, you know, we name things pretty simply in Australia.

02:03:28.000 You know, the black snake with red on its stomach is the red-bellied black snake.

02:03:35.000 You know, we keep it pretty simple for the tourists.

02:03:37.000 And what's that brown snake called?

02:03:39.000 It's called a brown snake, man.

02:03:41.000 So that area of the country is called the Snowy Mountains.

02:03:47.000 And, you know, we have this sort of cultural connection to the Brombies, which is things like, you know, the man from Snowy River is based on guys going out to capture wild horses.

02:03:58.000 But the population of wild horses has got to a point where it's destroying the ecosystem of that area.

02:04:06.000 So now they have to go and find a way of bringing that population down.

02:04:10.000 Yeah, they hunt wild horses.

02:04:11.000 And it's very difficult for people, particularly somebody like me who I love horses, but I have to put that love for horses aside to what it's doing to the rest of the native animals.

02:04:21.000 And in Australia, we've been blessed with so many unusual and fantastic creatures, but we haven't really been good husbands of the land.

02:04:31.000 And we haven't really focused on what's good for them.

02:04:36.000 Yeah, I have a good buddy of mine, Adam Greentree, who lives in Australia, and he tells me that people actually hunt the wild horses.

02:04:43.000 I was like, oh, I don't think I can do that.

02:04:47.000 It sounds rough, but we've got to do something because, quite frankly, the wombats and the platypus and the quokkas and the kangaroos and the wallabies are a little bit more important than the wild horses.

02:05:01.000 Yeah.

02:05:03.000 It's a strange thing.

02:05:05.000 You know, the balance of nature is a very strange thing.

02:05:09.000 It's very complex.

02:05:10.000 There's so many elements to it.

02:05:12.000 That's what they were trying to highlight in that Wolves Change River documentary.

02:05:17.000 The problem with that Wolves Change River documentary is the guy who created that is a proponent of rewilding to the point where I think he wants to reintroduce dangerous predators to Europe.

02:05:30.000 Like he's got some crazy ideas about rewilding, like going way back.

02:05:36.000 I mean, the kid that I was talking to you about, Merlin Hanbury Tennyson, came out of school, went in the army, did two or three tours, but now has found himself in a situation where he's taken over a block of land that his father bought in the 50s or 60s or something.

02:05:58.000 And he's turning that block of land back into temperate rainforest and seeing all of these benefits because of it.

02:06:06.000 So instead of trying to run sheep or run some other commercial herd, he's just letting the country go back to what it should be and seeing incredible results because of it.

02:06:22.000 Like what kind of results?

02:06:23.000 Well, what he's shifted now and is using it for now is like PTSD recovery.

02:06:30.000 So former soldiers are what have just go to this place and find a new balance because they're in that sort of natural environment.

02:06:41.000 But just without certain creatures eating types of trees as shoots and fresh shoots, those trees are actually getting a hold.

02:06:51.000 So it should be, you know, oak trees, for example.

02:06:56.000 And there's only like, you know, was only just a few there.

02:07:00.000 But by taking out the non-native animals, he's seeing those trees increase.

02:07:06.000 I mean, there's a book, I forget it.

02:07:07.000 If you could look it up for me, Jamie.

02:07:08.000 Merlin Hanbury Tennison, the book just came out.

02:07:11.000 It's a great book.

02:07:12.000 It really is.

02:07:12.000 It's an unusual read.

02:07:14.000 You're sort of reading it and you think, okay, like the re-establishment of a temperate rainforest.

02:07:20.000 How can this be good?

02:07:21.000 But then when he ties it in to the life journey of his father and his father's like health problems and stuff, it gets really emotional.

02:07:29.000 And it's quite a beautiful read.

02:07:31.000 I highly recommend it.

02:07:33.000 Could you find it?

02:07:36.000 Our Oak and Bones.

02:07:37.000 Our Oak and Bones.

02:07:39.000 Yeah, it's a really good read.

02:07:42.000 Yeah, nature in that form, in its pure form, is like a vitamin, I think.

02:07:47.000 It really is.

02:07:48.000 I think it's an actual good.

02:07:50.000 You know, like you go out in the sun, the sun produces vitamin D.

02:07:53.000 I think there's something that we haven't quantified yet that you're producing, that you get.

02:07:58.000 Yeah, that getting around to things like what he's doing, where you can actually read the physical benefits for people going in the bush.

02:08:05.000 But that's what I get when I go home.

02:08:08.000 100%.

02:08:09.000 I get out into the bush.

02:08:10.000 And sometimes, you know, I might drive a machine to a certain point and I just get off and I walk and I just listen, you know, and I go and visit trees that I like or areas that I like.

02:08:21.000 I'm actually going through a, you know, a long time ago, I planted like 38,000 trees as a kind of an offset, a carbon offset, right?

02:08:31.000 Now some of those trees are 25 plus years old.

02:08:34.000 So I'm going through the process in that 44 acres where I've planted that plantation of taking out all the non-native undergrowth.

02:08:41.000 And then the next stage is going to be putting back into that area the trees that were ripped out of there prior to the First World War, red cedar and white mahogany and all these things.

02:08:50.000 So, you know, beautiful trees.

02:08:52.000 And with the hope that I put enough in the ground that over time, red steer starts popping up all through the valley.

02:09:01.000 But this is going to be stuff that happens way after I'm dead.

02:09:05.000 But that process of stripping out the non-native stuff, I'm starting to look at that, go, okay, well, I'm doing that 44 acres there.

02:09:12.000 I got another 200 acres over here.

02:09:14.000 I know there's waterfalls.

02:09:15.000 I know there's creeks.

02:09:16.000 I want to take all of that lantana and stuff out and revive all that so you can walk through the bush. 0.99

02:09:24.000 But these are processes that I hope that will excite my kids to carry on with.

02:09:29.000 We'll see.

02:09:30.000 Well, that's exciting.

02:09:31.000 It's exciting to know that you have this long-term thing that you're doing that's actually beneficial to the land and brings it back to the way it used to be.

02:09:38.000 Yeah, not like in a sort of overbearing way, but like just that little 44 acres, hopefully over time, and we're already seeing it now.

02:09:48.000 We're sort of like, because we're clearing things out, we're finding lots of little tiny red cedars that are already there.

02:09:53.000 Because I put in 450 to start with, but my aim is to have, you know, within about the next probably two to three years, have 5,000 red cedars in the ground in that area.

02:10:06.000 It's just amazing when you think about the kind of impact that human beings can have on landscape.

02:10:12.000 It's just humans, whatever we've done, wherever we go, we inevitably alter everything forever.

02:10:21.000 And if you could just take a little bit of it, put it back to the way it was, and then start contributing to these plants regrowing again, there's a balance to that.

02:10:30.000 It's very cool that you can achieve that.

02:10:32.000 It's also exciting.

02:10:35.000 It seems like a cool project.

02:10:36.000 It thrills me.

02:10:38.000 Some guy that has the kind of pressures that you have and the work that you have to do and the intensity and the long hours on sets, like having something like that is a godsend.

02:10:47.000 Yeah.

02:10:48.000 Your 32-year-old self, whoever it was.

02:10:50.000 It was crazy.

02:10:51.000 You know what I mean?

02:10:52.000 You know, I look back and it's just, how did I know?

02:10:55.000 Because at 32, you know, I had a little bit of fame in Australia, but it was nothing compared to what I would have to deal with after that.

02:11:05.000 So having that sort of forethought is just interesting.

02:11:11.000 Is there anything that you ever always wanted to do, like a type of film that you've always wanted to do that you never got a chance to?

02:11:17.000 Well, see, there are definitely guys in my business that covet.

02:11:24.000 They go, I want to do this kind of role.

02:11:25.000 I want to be perceived like that, you know.

02:11:28.000 But for me, that's not what I pursue.

02:11:31.000 I pursue character.

02:11:34.000 And I only, you know, I'm very practical.

02:11:38.000 I don't get to choose from everything.

02:11:40.000 I only get to choose from what's sent to me.

02:11:42.000 So from what within what is sent to me, I always try to look for fresh ground.

02:11:47.000 You know, people will ask me, why would you play that kind of character?

02:11:50.000 And it's like, the bottom line is because I didn't do it before.

02:11:54.000 Why do you want to play Herman Goering?

02:11:56.000 Because nobody's offered it to me in the past.

02:11:58.000 And it's a fascinating character.

02:11:59.000 Yeah, it's a dangerous character.

02:12:01.000 And there's a lot of stuff that goes into being able to play a character like that.

02:12:08.000 But that danger is part of the excitement of the job.

02:12:13.000 And it's not always going to be that way.

02:12:15.000 Sometimes you're playing a character that doesn't really require a lot from you.

02:12:20.000 But you've got to play the weight of the character.

02:12:24.000 You can't just sort of suddenly make your New York detective act like a superhero because you feel like being a superhero.

02:12:33.000 So it's sort of like, you know, you just play the weight of what's required.

02:12:37.000 And then every now and then, you know, you play a character that sort of has a principal sort of role in the narrative or is the focus of the narrative.

02:12:49.000 But the decision to take on the weight of playing a character that's a Nazi, the second in charge, that's what was out.

02:12:57.000 That's heavy, right?

02:12:59.000 Yeah.

02:13:00.000 Yeah.

02:13:00.000 But that thrill comes from that thing of saying, this challenge is so big, I don't know if I can do this.

02:13:11.000 And then part of you goes, I should leave that aside.

02:13:16.000 And then the other voice goes, let's just have a go.

02:13:19.000 Let's have a go, see what we can do.

02:13:22.000 And see, someone like Goering, that word nuance is coming up a lot today because we can look at him in the stark sort of caricature version that a lot of people have in their minds of who he was.

02:13:41.000 But that against the reality of his life and how he grew up, how he was educated, what his experiences were, who he really was as a man.

02:13:52.000 There's a lot more to Goering than just looking at this going, oh, bad man, Nazi. 0.50

02:13:58.000 One thing I find fascinating, when he was a kid at school, he was like one of the dumbest students in his class at a normal school.

02:14:06.000 And because of his sort of continuous failure as a punishment, he got sent to military school.

02:14:15.000 In military school, he was a top student because it was stuff that interested him.

02:14:21.000 He comes out of school pretty much on the dawn of the First World War, has his first military experience in the infantry as a young officer, gets wounded, and realizes that standing on the ground on a battlefield is not really the right place for him.

02:14:38.000 What's interesting him is what keeps going on overhead.

02:14:42.000 So he manufactures a way to get himself assigned to a fighter squadron.

02:14:47.000 He's supposed to turn back up for duty with his infantry squadron, but sort of, you know, manufactures a way to keep him associated with the fighter squadron, learns how to become a pilot while he's doing that.

02:14:58.000 And at a certain point in the war, they're losing more pilots than they train.

02:15:02.000 So they go, he knows how to fly.

02:15:04.000 He can be a pilot.

02:15:05.000 Finishes the First World War with 22 kills, air-to-air kills.

02:15:09.000 That's three times a fighting ace.

02:15:12.000 And he's also, because he recently passed in battle, at the end of the First World War, he's in charge of the Baron von Richthofen, the Red Baron Squadron, which is the pinnacle of the German Air Force.

02:15:25.000 So here he is as a young man.

02:15:27.000 He's finishing that first war experience.

02:15:30.000 And he is a Fair Dinkum, which means true. 1.00

02:15:33.000 He is an actual war hero.

02:15:37.000 And so through the 20s, he's on cigarette cards in Germany.

02:15:40.000 You buy a packet of cigarettes and there's a picture of Hermann Goering.

02:15:44.000 Wow.

02:15:45.000 So, and he goes into that political environment, that post-Versai environment, with a very definite belief in his country as being something special, and he wants to make a contribution to bring lifting his country out of the mire that it's currently in.

02:16:02.000 So he starts looking for a political connection and ends up going upstairs in a coffee house in Munich, I think it was, and hearing a fellow called Adolf Hitler talk and realizes that he has a lot in common with this guy where he sees things and knows that Hitler was a soldier.

02:16:21.000 It's a funny thing we put into the movie at one point because there's a speech about Rami that Rami Malik makes about Hitler being a failed painter and a not very good soldier.

02:16:32.000 And I think the response I gave Goering at the time, which is not in the film, but he talks through Hitler's actual military record.

02:16:43.000 And yeah, he didn't rise above Lance Corporal, but he turned down promotion three different times.

02:16:49.000 He won an Iron Cross in 1914 and then he won a second one in 1918.

02:16:55.000 And doing things that were showing such extreme courage that he was awarded the Iron Cross.

02:17:02.000 And he delivered messages on the battlefield.

02:17:04.000 He would take the messages from headquarters and take it to the frontline troops and then bring their response back, things like that.

02:17:11.000 So one point in time I had Goering say, you call him a failed painter, but maybe he got to a certain point in his life where there were more important things to address than painting.

02:17:21.000 So nuance.

02:17:24.000 I thought it was also fascinating that you guys delved into the fact that he was an addict.

02:17:30.000 Yeah, we only touch on it a little bit.

02:17:32.000 But that is crazy.

02:17:34.000 There's a really good book.

02:17:36.000 I can't remember the name of it.

02:17:37.000 Norman Ohler.

02:17:38.000 Plitzed.

02:17:38.000 Yes.

02:17:39.000 Which gave me a lot of information because when Goering was arrested, he had something like 40,000 pills on him.

02:17:39.000 Yeah.

02:17:45.000 40,000?

02:17:47.000 In his car, right?

02:17:48.000 He had a habit of 40 to 50 a day.

02:17:53.000 So you look at him and you can see it.

02:17:56.000 When you know that fact and you start looking at photographs, you can see him kind of leave the planet at a certain point where he's just off his tits all the time.

02:18:04.000 From about 42 onwards, he doesn't really have Adolf's ear anymore.

02:18:09.000 Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, they've all taken those positions.

02:18:12.000 The things that he promised he could do with the Luftwaffe didn't actually come off as strongly.

02:18:18.000 They didn't know it at the time, but that's the Enigma machine, everything, the code's being broken.

02:18:23.000 So no matter what they did, they were always being second-guessed.

02:18:27.000 So, you know, Hitler's trust of him was adjusted a little bit.

02:18:32.000 And I also sort of liken it to him knowing he's going to get stabbed.

02:18:38.000 So he just doesn't bother going to the place where he would get stabbed.

02:18:42.000 So he does a whole bunch of other stuff and he keeps his authority, but he's not at in the center of things anymore for me.

02:18:52.000 Because of the pills.

02:18:54.000 A big part of it.

02:18:55.000 Big part of it.

02:18:56.000 It's personal safety because he thinks he's no longer has the definitive ear and trust of his leader.

02:19:04.000 The pills overtake his lifestyle and he decides to interest himself in other things for the greater good of Germany, like the collection of great works of art and things like that.

02:19:14.000 But there's a lot of things in this story that are just bigger once you start looking at it and examining them.

02:19:24.000 They're way bigger than what we know or what we commonly understand.

02:19:28.000 And that's what I was looking for to try and find a way to understand his base motivations.

02:19:36.000 And at the end of the day, he, you know, in his own way, he's a pure patriot.

02:19:44.000 Just so happens to be a sort of a set of beliefs or whatever that most of us in the Western world would call abhorrent.

02:19:52.000 Wow.

02:19:53.000 And you've got to take into consideration the drug aspect of the entire Nazi movement. 0.72

02:20:00.000 All the troops were on meth.

02:20:02.000 Hitler was on opiates.

02:20:03.000 I mean, Norman Ohler, that book just, I can't recommend it enough.

02:20:08.000 It's so eye-opening because you're like, well, that makes sense.

02:20:11.000 That's why they were so fucking psychotic.

02:20:14.000 That's why they could march through the night through the Belgian forest.

02:20:19.000 But it's very rarely taught.

02:20:21.000 This is not like when we grew up, we didn't grow up thinking that they were just drugged, psychotic, you know, animals that were on meth, you know, in tanks.

02:20:31.000 And the most, they gave the people the front line the most meth.

02:20:35.000 So they had different dosages for different people depending on what they were required to do.

02:20:39.000 And the tank guy has got the first thing.

02:20:40.000 When you think about Goering's position, he's the one ordering the drugs.

02:20:46.000 How many pilots have we got?

02:20:47.000 How many planes?

02:20:48.000 How many missions are we doing?

02:20:49.000 How many sorties?

02:20:50.000 Do that multiplication, add 10% for me.

02:20:54.000 It's a drug-fueled war, like probably the most drug-fueled war ever.

02:20:59.000 I mean, the kamikazes were using meth. 1.00

02:21:02.000 And then the Hitler thing was, I always thought that Hitler was meth as well, but Norman was saying that he was opiates as well.

02:21:10.000 So just like Goering, maybe it was how they dealt with what they were doing.

02:21:15.000 They all just stayed blasted out of their fucking head all day long. 0.91

02:21:20.000 Well, I mean, look, you're surrounded by guys that have a sort of a fanatical mindset.

02:21:27.000 You know, you're going to want to be awake.

02:21:30.000 Yeah.

02:21:31.000 You don't want to fall asleep at the wrong time if that's the group of people that you surrounded yourself with.

02:21:35.000 And that's the thing that I keep saying.

02:21:37.000 It's an old cliche, but I think it's something that he really learned.

02:21:43.000 You know, if you lie down with dogs, you're going to get fleas, Herman.

02:21:46.000 Yeah.

02:21:48.000 But I think him cleaning up by being forced by being in a prison environment, being forced by the Allies to go cold turkey, nearly killed him.

02:21:57.000 He had sort of heart problems because he went from 40 or 50 a day to nothing.

02:22:03.000 So but that clarity of thought that he had After being clean for six or nine months when the trial starts, that became dangerous because now he's sort of got his faculties back and he's intent on breaking down this whole idea of international law as being ridiculous.

02:22:27.000 That he's a man who served his country.

02:22:30.000 He is still in a uniform.

02:22:32.000 He's still like a military guy.

02:22:35.000 So he's quote unquote following orders.

02:22:39.000 And, you know, they were a democratically elected government who then step by step dismantled democracy once they were in power.

02:22:49.000 And the fascinating thing about this character and the way you play him is in the beginning, he seems like a guy on opiates because he's like so relaxed about everything.

02:22:59.000 You know, it's like he doesn't seem to be carrying the weight of what's happened to him.

02:23:04.000 Right.

02:23:05.000 And for you to put, and then there's dark moments, particularly like during the trial, where you're like, whoa, there's a lot of range to this guy.

02:23:15.000 And that's got to be a weird place to be, for you to try to put yourself in the mind of what ultimately became one of the most horrific figures in modern history.

02:23:26.000 Yeah, it's not comfortable.

02:23:27.000 It's not comfortable.

02:23:28.000 But that pain's part of the gig, you know?

02:23:32.000 Yeah.

02:23:32.000 It really is.

02:23:33.000 And there's you sort of learn to accept it.

02:23:36.000 I say this to people quite a lot because, you know, the big question is, how do you turn off?

02:23:43.000 You know, when you've been a Nazi for a day, what do you do to relax? 0.86

02:23:47.000 Definitely don't do method.

02:23:49.000 Yeah, but, you know, you ask anybody and you would be the same.

02:23:55.000 Just because in a little while the podcast is over for the day doesn't mean that that's the end of your job.

02:24:02.000 It doesn't mean you're just going to turn off and never think about it again.

02:24:05.000 You're going to obviously, you know, anybody who has a passion for the thing that they do is going to continue the process.

02:24:11.000 Five o'clock might be when the office closes, but you're going to go home, you're going to have dinner, you're going to think about the deal that you're currently doing, the presentation that's ahead of you, or whatever it happens to be.

02:24:19.000 You're going to keep processing.

02:24:21.000 And that's what happens when you're playing a character because you might have delivered X amount of dialogue today, but you've got X amount tomorrow too.

02:24:27.000 So you've got to keep that process going.

02:24:30.000 So you're just thinking about a novel.

02:24:32.000 24-7, all the time.

02:24:34.000 There's no, it's relentless.

02:24:36.000 One description of making a movie is that it's a train journey.

02:24:41.000 It's not like a car, you know, where you can pull over and have a wee on the side of the road.

02:24:47.000 It's a train journey.

02:24:48.000 And once you get on that train, you're staying there until it gets to its destination.

02:24:51.000 And you've just got to accept that.

02:24:53.000 I mean, and there's, you know, good and bad in that.

02:24:57.000 There's a saying that goes with this, you know, the best thing and the worst thing about the job that I do is that one day it's going to finish.

02:25:08.000 Always finishes.

02:25:09.000 You can be having the worst time of your life, but it's going to finish.

02:25:12.000 But you can be having the greatest time.

02:25:14.000 You have an incredible relationship with the crew and the cast and the director, but it's going to finish.

02:25:20.000 And you have to get used to that.

02:25:21.000 You have to understand that.

02:25:23.000 How much time did you prepare?

02:25:26.000 And how much time did you film for?

02:25:27.000 So how much time were you actually in the head of this Nazi?

02:25:30.000 Well, I signed on in 2019.

02:25:34.000 So you started thinking about it.

02:25:35.000 I thought I was going straight from Loudest Voice, which finished shooting around April or something like that.

02:25:41.000 And I thought by the end of that year, we'd be doing, you know, we would have shot that film.

02:25:45.000 So that's when you started researching it?

02:25:47.000 And then, as it turns out, it got set up and collapsed three different times.

02:25:47.000 Yeah.

02:25:52.000 And so I had five years, five years of, you know, scratching around, trying to find little bits of information to humanize him in my mind, but also for me to try and understand him and understand what he got in.

02:26:07.000 Because it doesn't make a lot of sense when you read about his history and stuff and where he gets to doesn't make a lot of sense.

02:26:16.000 He was a mountain climber.

02:26:18.000 Really?

02:26:18.000 When he was a young man, there are traverses in the Austrian Alps that Hermann Göring was the first person to do that traverse of that peak.

02:26:29.000 You think about the mentality required of a mountaineer to stand at the base of a big-ass rock and look up and say, I'm going to keep going until I reach that summit.

02:26:42.000 That says a lot about who Hermann Goering really was.

02:26:48.000 And, you know, he's Bavarian, right?

02:26:50.000 So from southern Germany.

02:26:52.000 And once, because I didn't know he was a mountain climber, once I knew that, then I started looking around for, well, what does that mean to be a mountain climber, you know, prior to the First World War?

02:27:02.000 What kind of equipment would you have?

02:27:03.000 And it's very basic, man.

02:27:05.000 It's nothing, you know, you're relying on your wits and your strength just completely.

02:27:12.000 Yeah, they didn't even have nylon ropes.

02:27:15.000 Probably not.

02:27:16.000 No.

02:27:18.000 Just all stretchy hemp that's going to behave completely differently once it gets wet.

02:27:26.000 But it gave me some real insight to him.

02:27:30.000 And it also ended up giving me this great way of connecting to the other German guys who are playing the other Nazis, you know.

02:27:38.000 Because I just knew from the first day when they all arrived and they were sitting together in a group, I could see that they were already feeling the punishment of playing that kind of character.

02:27:50.000 So I just brought them together and I asked them because these guys, some of them are German, some of them are Hungarian.

02:27:58.000 And I said, look, you know, there's this song that I found and I'd like to learn the song together.

02:28:05.000 And they all, you know, most of them knew the song.

02:28:07.000 But that's what we would do every day as a group.

02:28:09.000 We'd get together, we'd sing that song and then we'd walk into court together, feeling connected as a unit, you know.

02:28:15.000 What kind of song was it?

02:28:16.000 It's called Mussi Den. 0.93

02:28:18.000 Is it a German song?

02:28:19.000 It's a German song.

02:28:21.000 And I didn't realize when I first came across the song, it's a barbarian mountain song.

02:28:27.000 So he definitely knew that song.

02:28:29.000 It's actually the melody that Elvis Presley uses for the song Wooden Heart in the movie G.I. Blues.

02:28:37.000 Musi Den, Mussiden, Zoom stay the lit in house, stay the lit in house.

02:28:46.000 but i don't have a wooden heart that's what we've been singing today So you guys would sing this to get into character.

02:29:08.000 Wow.

02:29:10.000 Yeah, so that's just a little thing just to remind that particular group of guys that we're just actors, we're just playing roles.

02:29:17.000 And, you know, this will finish.

02:29:19.000 There's a lot of people that don't want to show a human side of a monster.

02:29:23.000 And which I think is very dangerous and quite stupid, you know, because it gives you a complete misunderstanding of what a monster is.

02:29:30.000 You know, yes, okay, here's somebody with horrific acts, but as the joke used to be, even Hitler, you know, he used to love dogs.

02:29:38.000 So that's the joke, right?

02:29:39.000 You know, and that, but there's some real truth in understanding the human process in that.

02:29:49.000 That somebody who makes the absolute worst decision in the world can still be a loving father, can still have a group of friends.

02:30:01.000 But on, you know, particular in a particular moment, that is the same person who's made this horrific decision that will have terrible effect on a generation of people.

02:30:12.000 Yeah, I mean, it's really the same kind of thing we were talking about with Tony Soprano.

02:30:16.000 Right.

02:30:17.000 Like that this person is a terrible person, but yet loves his kids, loves his friends.

02:30:23.000 Yeah, well, charm is one of the greatest weapons of evil.

02:30:27.000 Yeah.

02:30:28.000 It's a really, you know, it's a fun thing for us.

02:30:31.000 We see somebody who can tell a story, tell a joke, hold attention in a room.

02:30:37.000 You go, it's cool.

02:30:38.000 But when that process of charm goes to this other place, which becomes about life and death, or the taking away of people's rights, the dehumanizing of people, as we were discussing earlier, you know, and this, you know, I don't want to get into politics because I have this, my boys have this rule.

02:30:55.000 If you're going to talk to Joe, you're not allowed to discuss politics because they know once I start.

02:31:00.000 Your boys?

02:31:02.000 My two sons, yeah.

02:31:03.000 Because my youngest boy, I think I told you, he became obsessed with you and listening to your stuff for a while, and you became one of his sort of points of education.

02:31:13.000 And, you know, so that's why I started listening to you because I wanted to know what he was hearing, you know.

02:31:18.000 And I go, and after listening a few times, I was like, you know what, man, it's cool.

02:31:22.000 Because, again, we'll use that word.

02:31:25.000 You do actually have the allowance for nuance.

02:31:27.000 And that's the greatest thing about this situation.

02:31:29.000 We sit down to talk.

02:31:30.000 We're going to be talking for a couple of hours.

02:31:32.000 So I don't have to reduce everything I want to talk to you about to make it pop in three minutes.

02:31:36.000 And worry about things being taken out of context in a sound bite.

02:31:36.000 Right.

02:31:39.000 Right.

02:31:40.000 Yeah.

02:31:41.000 And this is the issue with discussing any positive attribute to a Nazi.

02:31:45.000 You know what I mean?

02:31:46.000 Like, you open up that door.

02:31:48.000 Oh, my God, Russell Crowe's a Nazi sympathizer.

02:31:51.000 But the people that don't like you are just going to take that.

02:31:54.000 And here's what Joe Rogan's discussing.

02:31:56.000 Yeah.

02:31:57.000 Yeah.

02:31:58.000 But it's, I think what you're saying is absolutely true, that it is stupid to think that way because that's a human being and a very fucked up, evil human being that did horrific things.

02:32:10.000 But know that that is a path that people can go down even if they think they're doing the right thing.

02:32:17.000 So we are taught, for example, to regard Gaddafi in a certain way.

02:32:22.000 Okay.

02:32:23.000 But if you look into what happened in his country while he was the leader, you look into the fact that every person is given a house at a certain age.

02:32:37.000 You look at the fact that everybody's education and health care is free.

02:32:42.000 You look at if somebody showed a particular talent for something that required further education overseas, all of the costs of that were paid for by the government.

02:32:53.000 Now, these are all things put in place by the same country's leader that we're told is evil and corrupt.

02:33:04.000 Yeah.

02:33:05.000 So it doesn't quite balance.

02:33:08.000 Well, there's also U.S. government interference.

02:33:14.000 That is one that we definitely monkeyed with.

02:33:17.000 I mean, he ran afoul of the United States government.

02:33:22.000 Well, what he was trying to do, as far as I understand the situation, is he was trying to unite Africa.

02:33:29.000 And a united Africa is going to be a problem. 1.00

02:33:34.000 Well, either it's going to be fantastic.

02:33:38.000 It's going to be amazing.

02:33:39.000 A problem for the people that want to run things.

02:33:41.000 Yeah.

02:33:41.000 If all of a sudden there's a new situation.

02:33:43.000 You've got a whole bunch of countries that have a connection with a certain African nation or whatever.

02:33:48.000 Suck their minerals out of the ground or whatever, don't pay them properly for it, and greatly benefit financially.

02:33:56.000 And that's pretty much every European country's got some kind of African connection in that regard.

02:34:03.000 Including China.

02:34:05.000 Well, China's now coming in because it's able to offer a slightly better deal than they've been used to.

02:34:14.000 But people have to understand, the population of Africa is enormous.

02:34:20.000 Yeah. Enormous.

02:34:21.000 You've got multiple countries with hundreds of millions of people.

02:34:24.000 Well, when you see the continent of Africa and you see all these other countries, how many would fit inside of it?

02:34:29.000 You're like, oh, boy.

02:34:30.000 Because that's the weird thing about maps and globes is you get a distortion of the actual true size.

02:34:36.000 There is a distortion, right?

02:34:37.000 Yeah.

02:34:38.000 Whatever that's called, which shows America at the center and being physically a larger landmass than it actually is in relative terms.

02:34:45.000 Oh, it's a little bit.

02:34:46.000 It's the size of Australia.

02:34:48.000 100,000 square miles.

02:34:49.000 Continental USA is 100,000 square miles larger than the island of Australia.

02:34:56.000 That's not much.

02:34:57.000 That's not much.

02:34:57.000 Not much.

02:34:59.000 Especially when you think that you guys have 20, what?

02:35:02.000 25? 25?

02:35:03.000 And we have probably 325 plus.

02:35:07.000 I don't think we know really how many people we have, but we have at least 320.

02:35:11.000 Million.

02:35:12.000 That's a lot of folks.

02:35:13.000 A lot of people, man.

02:35:14.000 It's a hell of a lot of people.

02:35:14.000 Yeah.

02:35:16.000 So we'd like to think we're a lot bigger than we are.

02:35:17.000 And then you look at where we fit in Africa, you're like, oh, it's a little tiny, little tiny thing.

02:35:23.000 I think there's something like 55 countries in Africa.

02:35:27.000 I don't know.

02:35:28.000 It's probably.

02:35:30.000 I mean, it's also Egypt.

02:35:31.000 That's the other thing.

02:35:32.000 It's also like the most advanced civilization possibly that ever existed before today.

02:35:38.000 And they were there too.

02:35:40.000 It's a wild place.

02:35:42.000 From top to bottom.

02:35:43.000 It's a very, and it's the origin possibly of humankind.

02:35:47.000 And a lot more desert, I think, than people realize.

02:35:50.000 You know, you had the Sahara, and stuff, we all know that.

02:35:52.000 But then there's these other gigantic areas like that.

02:35:58.000 What would that be, the West Coast?

02:36:00.000 Have you seen those roads in Namibia or whatever?

02:36:04.000 It's like a sand dune.

02:36:06.000 It's 40, 50 meters high, drops down to the ocean, and there's one little flat bit that there's a road.

02:36:14.000 And that's passable, you know, at certain times or whatever if the tides are not doing this and that.

02:36:19.000 But that's the road.

02:36:20.000 It's like a mountain of sand and an ocean and one little ribbon.

02:36:25.000 Jeez.

02:36:27.000 You know, the United States is one of the weird things about us is that we're a country that thinks mostly of ourselves and hardly ever leaves.

02:36:37.000 You know, some people leave, but I bet there's a solid percentage of people that never leave the United States and maybe never even leave their city.

02:36:45.000 Right.

02:36:46.000 And your version of the world, you're relying on other people to give you the story of what the world is until you go somewhere, until you go to Thailand, until you go somewhere.

02:36:56.000 Well, you're like, wow, this is a totally different way of living out here.

02:36:59.000 Yeah, I've even had people come down to help me with movies or whatever, like guys that are coming down to train me in some weapon or other or whatever.

02:37:08.000 And they do a lot of traveling, but it's all within the continental USA.

02:37:13.000 And they come to Australia and they didn't realize that other people have opinions.

02:37:20.000 You're not going to find a heck of a lot of agreement to some very basic tenets if you're sitting in an Australian bar.

02:37:28.000 You'll find a whole bunch of people go, that's fucking stupid, mate.

02:37:31.000 Yeah.

02:37:32.000 But it's still, to me, the greatest country in the world is the United States of America.

02:37:40.000 Absolutely.

02:37:41.000 Greatest potentials are all here.

02:37:46.000 But how it's founded on balance and fairness and opportunity, that's how it remains great.

02:37:53.000 Not because you start taking opportunity away from people, because you're affording them opportunity.

02:37:58.000 And, you know, just keep that in mind, ladies and gentlemen.

02:38:02.000 Yes.

02:38:03.000 Because nothing's finished.

02:38:06.000 Nothing's done.

02:38:07.000 We're just in the process.

02:38:09.000 And it can all get better, for sure.

02:38:11.000 Yeah.

02:38:13.000 And it's the rare country that is almost entirely founded by people moving here over time.

02:38:21.000 Yeah.

02:38:22.000 It's all immigration. 0.98

02:38:23.000 Yeah.

02:38:24.000 Yeah.

02:38:25.000 Which is the strength and also, you know, the problem with the last four years was that they were just letting anybody in and they weren't vetting people and they were inviting people in.

02:38:39.000 And the problem now is they're grabbing people that are productive citizens and they're grabbing them and taking them out because they don't have the right paperwork.

02:38:46.000 So neither one is a good solution.

02:38:48.000 And both of them cause huge problems.

02:38:50.000 Yeah.

02:38:52.000 And one of the scary things.

02:38:55.000 But you do have to be aware, too, though, a lot of the information that we know about that is coming to us from a motivation that we don't necessarily read.

02:39:03.000 Right.

02:39:04.000 They want us to think of things in negative terms.

02:39:07.000 Sure.

02:39:08.000 Both sides.

02:39:09.000 On both sides of the issue.

02:39:11.000 Yeah, 100%.

02:39:13.000 Yeah, we're constantly being manipulated.

02:39:16.000 I had Representative Luna on the podcast, and one of the things that she said that I kind of knew was probably true, but I didn't want to believe it.

02:39:25.000 She was like, there's a lot of problems they never solve on purpose so that they could campaign against them.

02:39:32.000 That's why they keep these things in play.

02:39:34.000 That resolutions could have been reached, problems could have been solved.

02:39:38.000 But these politicians are so self-serving that they don't ever want that to take place.

02:39:42.000 These people that run these two individual parties want to keep that banter back and forth.

02:39:48.000 They want to keep the argument going.

02:39:49.000 You see how absolute they are if somebody with that color hat is trying to promote something.

02:39:56.000 The person with the other colour hats, it's absolutely ridiculous.

02:39:59.000 Then it changes, an election happens.

02:40:01.000 Now the person with a different coloured hat, they're in charge, and they're going to put in place exactly what they said the other person was doing that was wrong is now part of their policy platform.

02:40:11.000 What is wrong with the way Australia is run?

02:40:16.000 Well, we're a little bit lucky at the moment.

02:40:19.000 We have a prime minister who's very much motivated by trying to help everybody, which should be the job of a politician, right?

02:40:31.000 To improve the lives of the people that they represent.

02:40:34.000 And he's kind of inherited, you know, a conger line of stupidity that was going on, you know, and he's trying to fix things. 0.65

02:40:47.000 But of course, just the way things are reported, whatever, you know, there's just haters on every corner.

02:40:56.000 But he's a good man, and he's doing his very best.

02:40:59.000 And he's, you know, working extremely hard.

02:41:03.000 But, you know, like he arrives off a plane the other day.

02:41:06.000 He's just come back home from some very successful international meetings where he's established various trade things and opportunities and situations for Australia.

02:41:16.000 Gets off the plane wearing a Joy Division t-shirt.

02:41:22.000 Big ban from his youth.

02:41:24.000 And he's just a relaxed character.

02:41:26.000 He's been wearing a suit and tie for weeks on the road.

02:41:29.000 He's just walking off Australia's version of Air Force One in a Joy Division t-shirt.

02:41:34.000 So the member of the opposition wanted to point out, and did so in Parliament, that Joy Division is a Nazi term and comes from a section of a particular camp where the women were prostituted, and that's why it was called the Joy Division.

02:41:50.000 And it's like, okay, what's the point of that?

02:41:55.000 We all know it's a band name.

02:41:57.000 We know it's a band name.

02:42:00.000 Just because you like the Rolling Stones doesn't mean that you want rocks to be falling on people.

02:42:04.000 What are you fucking talking about?

02:42:06.000 This whole stupidity.

02:42:07.000 And that's what you're facing all the time.

02:42:09.000 Picking up some pointless piece of minutiae and lighting it on fire and making a smokescreen to cover up the reality of the fact that that prime minister just worked his ass off on behalf of the country and successfully achieved a bunch of things and should be patted on the back, not pushed down the stairs.

02:42:31.000 Yeah.

02:42:32.000 Well, we have a lot of that here too.

02:42:35.000 But there is a timidity, a timidity, I think, is probably the thing in terms of how Australia is run.

02:42:42.000 Things like the gambling ads and stuff like that.

02:42:44.000 Common sense would tell you this is not a good thing to allow.

02:42:49.000 Put the timing of these ads back so kids are asleep or whatever.

02:42:52.000 Don't let them read out the odds on the news.

02:42:54.000 You could fix that pretty quick.

02:42:57.000 But that gambling section of the community is worth a lot of money and people in positions of power.

02:43:05.000 Because it's not necessarily, it's not the guy that's going to spend his whole wages gambling through an app that gets to have a say in this.

02:43:16.000 It's the guy whose family money allows him to run a string of 18 racehorses and he enjoys going to the races on the weekend.

02:43:24.000 And gambling for him is not such a big deal because he's got an income from other things.

02:43:30.000 Blah, blah, blah.

02:43:32.000 So it's the wrong perspective on a problem sometimes is the actual problem.

02:43:39.000 And the fact that this is a fairly new thing and that young people growing up with this, there's not a history of people abusing gambling apps.

02:43:50.000 It's not something their parents had to deal with.

02:43:53.000 Right.

02:43:54.000 Generationally, it's not something that I can, oh, from my experience, I can tell you this.

02:43:58.000 So I had to have a, you know, when I had that conversation with my boys, it was a broader conversation about gambling and about, you know, what it takes to earn a dollar.

02:44:08.000 Yeah, I think the accessibility issue is something that people have a problem with.

02:44:11.000 The fact that it's on a phone versus going to a place.

02:44:14.000 Like you choose to get your buddies together, you're going to go play poker in a casino.

02:44:18.000 That's a different decision.

02:44:20.000 Right.

02:44:20.000 Than just sitting at home than just constantly frittering away your money.

02:44:25.000 Well, this is the thing.

02:44:27.000 It's just there's always some sort of point of attack.

02:44:32.000 There's always an attack vector for people getting your attention or getting your money and trying to, and then we have to decide as a society, like, do we, is this good to just allow, like, we want freedom, but do we want to, like, you can't advertise cigarettes on TV anymore, right?

02:44:49.000 They decided at one point in time, this is crazy.

02:44:51.000 Cigarettes are bad for you.

02:44:52.000 You can advertise alcohol.

02:44:54.000 You still can.

02:44:54.000 Yeah.

02:44:55.000 Yeah.

02:44:55.000 Which is a weird time of day.

02:44:56.000 Yeah, it's weird.

02:44:57.000 Yeah.

02:44:58.000 It's weird.

02:44:59.000 Because alcohol probably kills more people than cigarettes.

02:45:03.000 That funny thing that we have that was fed to us that cigarettes are this incredible burden on our healthcare system.

02:45:12.000 In reality, if you look at it, it's a burden.

02:45:15.000 But there's a lot of people dying of lung cancer who've never had a cigarette.

02:45:19.000 So we haven't really solved that.

02:45:21.000 We don't really know where that's coming from.

02:45:24.000 But in reality, the burden on our healthcare system is obesity and all the problems that come from obesity.

02:45:31.000 That's the biggest.

02:45:31.000 We allow food production systems that we know to be extremely unhealthy and very bad.

02:45:38.000 We just allow them to continue on.

02:45:40.000 You know, we've got items of quote-unquote food that have been tested, and it turns out there's no actual food in this.

02:45:48.000 It's just a manufactured product.

02:45:51.000 I think the famous one here was the Twinkie thing, right?

02:45:55.000 When they actually got around to looking at what was in a Twinkie, they realized that every single part of it was completely unhealthy.

02:46:02.000 Yeah, it's just mostly sugar.

02:46:05.000 Yeah.

02:46:06.000 Yeah, but Twinkies are delicious, and I think you should be able to buy Twinkies.

02:46:09.000 You know what I mean?

02:46:10.000 So I'm on both sides of it.

02:46:11.000 I'm a healthy person.

02:46:12.000 I eat 99% of my food is very healthy.

02:46:15.000 But I think you should be able to do whatever the fuck you want.

02:46:18.000 It's just education is the most important thing.

02:46:20.000 Letting people know what they're doing.

02:46:22.000 And then teaching people some discipline and how to be able to exercise some control over yourself.

02:46:28.000 So I was 126 kilos when I finished Nuremberg.

02:46:35.000 I'm 100.9 right now.

02:46:37.000 That's amazing.

02:46:38.000 Congratulations.

02:46:39.000 Well, a lot of that.

02:46:40.000 You look great, by the way.

02:46:41.000 I really do.

02:46:42.000 A lot of that is because you introduced me to your mate Brigham.

02:46:46.000 From Waste Well.

02:46:47.000 Yeah.

02:46:48.000 And so I've probably connected with them about five times since that first time we went.

02:46:53.000 And the real benefit that I'm getting that I think, right, because I'm not completely over the science, but it seems to be with these injections that I've been getting into my shoulders, into my knees, but also IVs, that it's calmed down my body's inflammation.

02:47:18.000 You know, I think we've talked before about just how many old injuries I carry, you know, and how like injuries in my shoulders are deeply arthritic.

02:47:25.000 But we can now see in an ultrasound over time how what was messy a year ago and like big thick bands of arthritis now is just lessened, you know, probably by about 70%.

02:47:41.000 And one area in my right shoulder, probably about 90%.

02:47:45.000 So my range of motion, if we'd done this last year, would have been about there, right?

02:47:50.000 But now it's fucking rock and roll something.

02:47:53.000 Isn't that great?

02:47:54.000 It's all going good.

02:47:55.000 You know, and like just feeling like the musculature starting to build and everything.

02:48:00.000 I'm taking it really slowly.

02:48:02.000 And that was one of the things I was worried about with Highlander because jumping into that role with the shooting date coming, it was like, man, I've got to do three workouts a day.

02:48:14.000 And that, for me, is a bad recipe.

02:48:17.000 Because, yeah, I can do that for X amount of time.

02:48:21.000 But once I stop, I'm going to stop completely.

02:48:25.000 And what I want to do is I want to make all these changes and make it a long-term situation.

02:48:32.000 So I think the Waste To Well was a great call for me because it's calmed down a bunch of stuff.

02:48:39.000 It's taken a bunch of pain away, you know, so I can go and work out and not have to suffer for two or three hours afterwards.

02:48:45.000 You know, I'm still picking up injuries because I've got to face the fact I'm 61.

02:48:50.000 You know, like the other day I'm doing my katana saw trying to get this freaking move going.

02:48:53.000 I freaking tore the tendon here on the ulna.

02:48:58.000 So that's going to be bad for sword fighting.

02:49:00.000 But I'm trying to fix that without having to have a surgical.

02:49:04.000 How bad is it torn?

02:49:05.000 It's only a little bit, really.

02:49:07.000 You just got to make sure you don't overuse it while it's healing.

02:49:10.000 Can you brace it?

02:49:12.000 The problem I've got is I've got X amount of time to claim the skill.

02:49:18.000 And either way, right, if I do the rehab exercises without doing surgery, if it fails, I'm now falling right on production and I've retorn or something, right?

02:49:30.000 I can help you with that.

02:49:32.000 Just do the skills slowly.

02:49:34.000 Yeah.

02:49:34.000 Here's the thing about skills.

02:49:36.000 Skills that you learn slowly, you can translate into high speed quickly because you develop a neural pathway.

02:49:43.000 So instead of using an actual sword, use a foam sword.

02:49:47.000 Use like one of those little fucking noodle things that people put in the pool. 0.92

02:49:51.000 Use that.

02:49:52.000 So you just develop them.

02:49:54.000 When I was teaching martial arts, one of the things that I always tell people is don't try to do it quickly.

02:49:59.000 When I show you something, I want you to do it slowly.

02:50:02.000 It's exactly what I did.

02:50:03.000 I'm in a car park and we were talking about the speed of something.

02:50:07.000 And I went, oh, yeah, so you get sh.

02:50:08.000 And I went, oh, fuck.

02:50:11.000 But I just put my sword away and I kept the conversation going.

02:50:15.000 Didn't mention it, but I got home and I was like, oh, fuck.

02:50:19.000 You rushed.

02:50:20.000 You didn't warm up.

02:50:20.000 Yeah.

02:50:21.000 Well, the thing is, we were warm, but it was a thing that I just, just in that split second, I thought, I wonder what it's like to go full speed.

02:50:28.000 Oh.

02:50:29.000 And I did it.

02:50:30.000 And I just like, no, way too early.

02:50:32.000 But you're absolutely right.

02:50:33.000 Pace is deceptive.

02:50:34.000 Yeah.

02:50:35.000 If you learn something, I mean, that's like that old-fashioned sort of stuff with the karate I first did when I was a kid.

02:50:42.000 You know, they aim for you to do 10,000 of something before you have to use it in an actual competitive fight.

02:50:50.000 Yeah.

02:50:50.000 People who train people with guns have a saying: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

02:50:55.000 Right.

02:50:56.000 Yeah.

02:50:57.000 You want herky-jerky movements. 0.50

02:50:58.000 And with martial arts and specifically sword fighting, there's very specific movements that you're learning.

02:51:06.000 And if you learn those movements slow, as you speed up, you'll be going along the right pathway.

02:51:11.000 And when I would teach people kicks in particular, because it's a weird thing to learn how to kick something, like you've got to do it slowly.

02:51:19.000 Because if you try to muscle it, you're going to develop a bad habit that's going to keep you from achieving full power because you want a proper technique.

02:51:26.000 Yeah, and you have to process where your balance is.

02:51:28.000 Yeah.

02:51:29.000 You know, how you're pushing your force about how you retain the ability to reset.

02:51:36.000 Yeah.

02:51:37.000 Yeah.

02:51:37.000 Jiu-Jitsu as well.

02:51:39.000 People that learn by drilling, they get way better, way quicker by doing it flowing and doing it more easy and play.

02:51:47.000 Like Gracies always say, keep it playful.

02:51:49.000 Yeah.

02:51:50.000 But see, the thing is, I know all this stuff, but I was in such a point of weariness that I was just trying to please people.

02:51:58.000 And so I mucked myself up.

02:52:00.000 And, you know, but I've got a bit of time now for it to heal and for me to start and actually do like I like to do.

02:52:08.000 Have you visited Brigham while you're here?

02:52:10.000 Yeah, I just saw a missed one.

02:52:11.000 Okay, great.

02:52:11.000 Yeah, he's looking great.

02:52:12.000 Yeah, he looks great, right?

02:52:13.000 He's looking good.

02:52:14.000 He'll look good.

02:52:14.000 The new place.

02:52:15.000 Now, here's the thing: we talk about this, and your listeners will probably be, you know, it's expensive.

02:52:23.000 No two ways about it.

02:52:24.000 So it's possibly not at everybody's grasp what the sort of things that I'm doing.

02:52:29.000 But I think, I'm not sure if this is absolutely right, but I think, you know, one of his sort of fervent ambitions, Brigham, is to make it more available.

02:52:39.000 Yes.

02:52:39.000 You know, because this should be, this is cutting-edge medicine.

02:52:42.000 Yes.

02:52:42.000 You know, if we can sort of write things in our bodies with an injection as opposed to an operation.

02:52:48.000 You know, the problem I had in my left shoulder, I go and see my shoulder surgeon who fixed it while I was doing Cinderella Man.

02:52:56.000 And so I did two operations with this guy, one in 2001 and the second one in 2004.

02:53:06.000 But it's always had a sort of problem.

02:53:08.000 And he did say at the time after the second operation that he had to cut a few corners and it would probably cause me problems later on in life.

02:53:15.000 So I probably went to see him about five or six years ago.

02:53:19.000 And he said, okay, so this shoulder is at a point of arthritis now.

02:53:23.000 What we have to do is we have to cut through the muscle bar.

02:53:26.000 We have to pop out the humil head of your armbone. 0.99

02:53:29.000 We have to shave off the top of the human head, and then we have to put a carbon fiber cap, and then we have to put it back in, sew everything back up.

02:53:36.000 You've got about 12 months of rehab, right?

02:53:40.000 Just sounds wrong.

02:53:42.000 It just sounds wrong.

02:53:43.000 It's like, you know, so this process that I've been going through with Brigham is basically having the effect of layering.

02:53:54.000 So I can now see that if the arthritis was that deep, it's now this deep.

02:53:59.000 You know, it's still there.

02:54:01.000 I haven't solved it yet, but I'm giving my body what it needs to make it better.

02:54:07.000 Also, there's new breakthroughs almost every week.

02:54:10.000 Right.

02:54:10.000 And these new breakthroughs, they're able to achieve their growing actual cartilage on people that were bone on bone.

02:54:22.000 So they're developing new methods to regenerate tissue.

02:54:26.000 That's the cushioning in between your knees and your elbows and all these things and shoulders that were requiring people to get those horrific things.

02:54:35.000 Putting an artificial joint in place because everything is so arthritic.

02:54:38.000 That's one of the things that does trouble me greatly for this country.

02:54:45.000 Health.

02:54:48.000 Medical systems to benefit everybody.

02:54:55.000 Something has perverted here where, you know, the drug that I might need that I can buy for $50 for a month supply in Australia is $2,500 for a month here.

02:55:08.000 Come on, man.

02:55:09.000 I know.

02:55:09.000 What's going on?

02:55:10.000 It's crazy.

02:55:13.000 You've got all these elected representatives here and this country's got a lot.

02:55:19.000 That's what you should be working on, man.

02:55:21.000 Yeah, but they can't.

02:55:23.000 Because everybody's got their hands tied.

02:55:25.000 Yeah, they're all got their, including the media.

02:55:27.000 That's the crazy thing, is the amount of money they spend on advertising for the media that really just serves the purpose of now the media can't criticize the pharmaceutical drug companies.

02:55:38.000 Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, I get back here as, you know, my girlfriend's from New Orleans.

02:55:44.000 And, you know, we're sitting and watching TV here.

02:55:48.000 And she's now seeing America from the outside because she spends most of the time traveling with me and we don't spend that much time within America.

02:55:56.000 You know, we live in Australia, but I've been working mainly in Europe the last few years.

02:56:01.000 So she's now coming back to her country, but she's got fresh eyes.

02:56:06.000 And she's sitting there the other night.

02:56:07.000 She was watching something.

02:56:08.000 She came out and she said, I've just watched like 12 ads for drugs.

02:56:13.000 Just one after the other after the other after the other.

02:56:16.000 What's this tiny little problem that you might have?

02:56:18.000 If I can say it in a certain way to make you think that you've got it, bang, I got a drug for it.

02:56:22.000 Bang, bang, you know.

02:56:23.000 And yeah, I mean, 600,000 plus people in this country in the next 12 months will go bankrupt because of their medical bills.

02:56:34.000 You know how many people will go bankrupt in Australia because of their medical bills in the next 12 months?

02:56:39.000 Zero.

02:56:40.000 Yeah.

02:56:40.000 Yeah, it's one of the biggest problems we have.

02:56:44.000 You know, and the idea that you would let that happen and not do anything about it because you're bought and paid for by these enormous companies is kind of insane.

02:56:56.000 It's insane.

02:56:57.000 And they're trying to do something about that.

02:56:59.000 You know, and RFK Jr.'s fighting an uphill battle, trying to do something about that.

02:57:05.000 But it's a captured industry.

02:57:09.000 Yeah.

02:57:10.000 Yeah.

02:57:10.000 And, you know, socialized medicine.

02:57:13.000 That's probably the largest Western economy is punishing its citizens in that way. 0.84

02:57:21.000 Yeah.

02:57:21.000 Just beggars belief.

02:57:23.000 That's crazy that healthcare isn't such a principle thing because if we're not looking after ourselves and aiming for the longest life, what's the point of the human existence kind of thing?

02:57:35.000 So that should be a principle.

02:57:37.000 Everybody's health should be a principal focus of our elected representative.

02:57:42.000 Well said.

02:57:43.000 Russell Crowe, you're the fucking man.

02:57:45.000 Thank you for being here.

02:57:46.000 Joseph, Joseph, Joseph.

02:57:47.000 It's always great to see you, sir.

02:57:49.000 It's always great to talk to you.

02:57:51.000 Continued success and enjoy your vacation.

02:57:53.000 Cheers, mate.

02:57:54.000 All right, brother.

02:57:55.000 Bye, everybody.

02:57:56.000 And see Nuremberg.

02:57:57.000 It's amazing.

02:57:57.000 And all the other films when they come out.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 05, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2406 - Russell Crowe

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