Speaker 1: I'm my Boris, and this is straight talk. I have
Speaker 1: the career I have because of the brain that I've got,
Speaker 1: But this brain that I've got nearly killed me. I
Speaker 1: was a very anxious kid. I remember hiding under the
Speaker 1: bed trying to get away from something, but I couldn't
Speaker 1: get away from it because it was in my body.
Speaker 1: And then sometime around the age of fourteen, I found
Speaker 1: this magical elixir that made everything kind of just kind
Speaker 1: of turned down. You know, at first it was fun,
Speaker 1: then it was fun with problems, and it's just problems,
Speaker 1: all right, And I couldn't stop the problems. There's this
Speaker 1: loud zoo line, be careful of the direction that you
Speaker 1: were headed. You may just stand up there. And it
Speaker 1: was very clear to me that I know when it ends.
Speaker 1: I was drinking to blackout since yeah, since I was
Speaker 1: fourteen to win thirty six. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2: When I see you in television, you look like a healthy,
Speaker 2: well put together, you know, like a competent, great performer.
Speaker 1: Well. I work was always the respite, though. When I'm
Speaker 1: on camera, God, bliss man, all the anxiety. Everything's quiet.
Speaker 1: I'm in it, man. Everything else is hard. That's the
Speaker 1: easy part. Well into straight to a mate, Mark, I'm
Speaker 1: thrilled to be here.
Speaker 2: First question for you, apart from a mean question for you, mate,
Speaker 2: but first question for you is, when I was doing
Speaker 2: my research your name's Andrew, was was where does Asha
Speaker 2: come from?
Speaker 1: That's pretty out there, like it is. It's the Hebrew
Speaker 1: word for happiness. Really, yes, and it's quite a long story.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not the only person to have changed
Speaker 1: my name as an adult. You're the son of immigrants.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that they were known to their colleagues
Speaker 1: by a name that their mother didn't give them. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Well, like all my uncle's names, for nothing to do
Speaker 2: with their Australian name.
Speaker 1: Precisely. Both my parents changed their names better with the
Speaker 1: mag The Lennar became Rufe. Yeah. And Michel my dad,
Speaker 1: who's eighty today. He was born on d Day. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's a heck of a story that one. He Ye
Speaker 1: he was he became Michael. Yet. I'm pretty sure you've
Speaker 1: got kids, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So you've changed your name.
Speaker 1: There's I've changed my name. Everyone, every man who's got
Speaker 1: a child has changed their name. There's a name that
Speaker 1: only one person or two people in the world call them,
Speaker 1: and it changes who they are Dad. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: get called dad, it's a name that only this I'm
Speaker 1: not called pop. Well even better, when you're called this name,
Speaker 1: it changes who you are as a person, and it
Speaker 1: changes what you're about to, changes how you relate to
Speaker 1: this person, and it changes the values that you have
Speaker 1: and that your actions and values away from that person.
Speaker 1: As I'm sure the same thing happened with happened with
Speaker 1: my stepdaughter, right, didn't I did not even my biological
Speaker 1: it happened with my stepdaughter. My actions and my value
Speaker 1: is changed completely once this person came into my life,
Speaker 1: all right, So names are really really important. There was
Speaker 1: a I'm not necessarily believing in any kind of interventionist
Speaker 1: god or anything, but there was an experience that I
Speaker 1: had with a shaman who said, oh, like, if you
Speaker 1: change a name of change your life. I'm like, I
Speaker 1: can't help, can't hurt. I'll give it a shot. And
Speaker 1: so privately I kind of did it. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot to be said. I think it's more of a
Speaker 1: kind of nominated determinism kind of thing. The way I
Speaker 1: saw myself changed publicly, it was definitely a delineation between
Speaker 1: drinking and using and sobriety and it happened during that period. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and it was an opportunity as the man that mentors
Speaker 1: me through my journey of In our Super Secret Sober
Speaker 1: Club when we talk about, you know, things that happened
Speaker 1: when I was still drinking and using and using alcohol
Speaker 1: and things like this, said, well, the good news for
Speaker 1: years you don't have. You get to live the rest
Speaker 1: of your life not being that guy anymore. So putting
Speaker 1: a name on that guy really helped me. Is it
Speaker 1: actually a technique or is it a belief? In other words,
Speaker 1: is it.
Speaker 2: A technique to do identify yourself from this hell then
Speaker 2: brought us?
Speaker 1: When he steps out on stage, people don't so cee
Speaker 1: A L V I N B No, they say s
Speaker 1: N double opd O double jer zy. You know who
Speaker 1: you are the way you talk about yourself, the name
Speaker 1: you put upon yourself changes who you are outwardly. I
Speaker 1: think it's an internal thing. Absolutely. Missus Carrington, Miss sorry,
Speaker 1: Miss Carrington left at the end of grade too. See
Speaker 1: him as Carrington, have a good summer, kids, no worries.
Speaker 1: Three months later, Missus Smith, same lady, different clothes, different aircut,
Speaker 1: completely different way of being with us. She got married
Speaker 1: over the summer, so she changed the name and it
Speaker 1: changed who she was.
Speaker 2: It's a very interesting as an what you've just talked
Speaker 2: with and is a great example of plasticity neuroplasticity.
Speaker 1: In other words, we are.
Speaker 2: Who we believe we are, and then we can continually
Speaker 2: affirm in our own mind, throw actions and throw other
Speaker 2: people's actions to us that we are that individual. So
Speaker 2: that becomes our story that if you want to change
Speaker 2: who you are, you can.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what the brain can do. The brain has
Speaker 1: how that every single one of us have, but not
Speaker 1: many of us tap into it. I've been very sick
Speaker 1: in my life, so sick that I needed to be
Speaker 1: on two kinds of antipsychotics and NSRI and an SSRI.
Speaker 1: So I knew that my brain could change the way
Speaker 1: it felt about things, but at that point my brain
Speaker 1: could not do it all right. I needed those meds
Speaker 1: to loosen those switches up again. But there's the superpower
Speaker 1: that all humans face, so that when we have a healthy,
Speaker 1: is healthy, healthier brain, we can choose how we feel
Speaker 1: about something. We decide. No one, no one makes you
Speaker 1: feel happy or sad. You're the one that chooses that.
Speaker 1: You may not realize you're choosing it. It may be based
Speaker 1: upon something that happened to you fifty years ago, but
Speaker 1: ultimately you decide it and you can decide to do
Speaker 1: something else about it if you take the time to
Speaker 1: investigate it. And it starts with two super powerful words.
Speaker 1: I'm noticing. I'm noticing my breath quicknick, I'm noticing my
Speaker 1: tummy feels a bit strange, and noticing my hands are Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm getting angry. Ah, I'll take a moment here. Don't
Speaker 1: want to do or say something that I don't because
Speaker 1: last time this happened, I said something or did something
Speaker 1: that I made a lot of problems. So it just
Speaker 1: starts with noticing, just takes It's like doing burpies for
Speaker 1: your brain, all right, just noticing. Like everyone fucking hates burpies, man,
Speaker 1: you know what, because they're fucking good. It's the reason
Speaker 1: you see nobody on the rowing machine at the gym
Speaker 1: because it's the fucking hardest thing in there and it'll
Speaker 1: do everything in twenty minutes. You're fucked. Yeah, same with this,
Speaker 1: Like I'm noticing. That's literally like doing burpies for your brain.
Speaker 1: It's been a minute, Just a minute, put a time
Speaker 1: on your phone and just notice everything you can hear,
Speaker 1: and then start to notice everything you can feel in
Speaker 1: your body, your socks and your feet, your shirt on
Speaker 1: your back, each behind your ear, the weird little thing
Speaker 1: you got on your knee from playing touch on the weekend,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. Just what you're doing is you're getting
Speaker 1: your brain to get used to having the observing mind
Speaker 1: come into the playing game rather than just the thinking mind.
Speaker 1: That's just reactionary the thinking mind. The thinking mind is
Speaker 1: like I used to have a yellow lab. Shees white lab.
Speaker 1: She's the best thing ever. When she and a frisbee
Speaker 1: got together, was brilliant, all right. The thinking mind is
Speaker 1: my old lab chasing that frisbee. The observing mind is
Speaker 1: sitting on a park bench watching that lab chase the
Speaker 1: frisbe on to a freeway. All right. But the thinking
Speaker 1: mind cannot see that chasing the frisbee right now is
Speaker 1: not a good idea. But the observing mind can. The
Speaker 1: observing mind go oh wait and bring it back. And
Speaker 1: getting our observing mind into the game. That takes practice,
Speaker 1: takes work, But once you start getting used to it,
Speaker 1: once becoming more automatic, that can really really change things
Speaker 1: for you. That's mad.
Speaker 2: I'm an often too about the O being an observer
Speaker 2: or being a participant, and you know we're going to
Speaker 2: do both, but too often when we're overly participating, we
Speaker 2: forget to observe. And you know, that's when issues arise
Speaker 2: with things drop down between the cracks because we forget
Speaker 2: about we forget to do the broader strategic things because
Speaker 2: we're just doing tactical things like we're going to work
Speaker 2: every day, getting up every day, going to work every day,
Speaker 2: kissing someone weo'red by patting the dog, giving the key
Speaker 2: is a hard go to work, work, work, work, get home,
Speaker 2: have you dinner, go to bed, blah blah, and we
Speaker 2: forget about making an observation. Wait a minute, what the
Speaker 2: hell am I doing here? What's what's what's actually my
Speaker 2: strategy around all this? And I wouldn't mind parking that
Speaker 2: for a bit, and just I'll come back to because
Speaker 2: I want to ask you a question.
Speaker 1: You were born in England? Was yep? How long were
Speaker 1: you did you live in England?
Speaker 2: Baby?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So like three months? Four months? So he came
Speaker 1: to a straight straight after that. Yeah, yeah, okay, So
Speaker 1: in Australia were brought up, which brought up in which
Speaker 1: part of us a straight? I did the well, the
Speaker 1: sand pit kind of stuff in Adelaide and then everything
Speaker 1: else in Brisbane. Right, So, at what point did you realize.
Speaker 2: That you would have a well that you wanted in
Speaker 2: fact a career in media or was that not something
Speaker 2: you did earlier on?
Speaker 1: I was a very anxious kid, which means what like crowds,
Speaker 1: like aren't out socializing everything, like real like big anxiety
Speaker 1: and like big feelings in my body, feelings I couldn't
Speaker 1: escape from. I remember hiding under the bed trying to
Speaker 1: get away from something, but I couldn't get away from
Speaker 1: it because it was in my body. You know, this feeling,
Speaker 1: this horrible feeling was in my body my time. I
Speaker 1: got to Bruis where my parents went to see like
Speaker 1: what's going on in the fire. My parents are both doctors,
Speaker 1: so they understand someone's up here beyond their expertise, so
Speaker 1: they sent me to as what's going on with a
Speaker 1: five year old that you sent them to a psychiatrist
Speaker 1: like that, Well, that's what was happening. It was like
Speaker 1: probably the one there. It was nineteen seventy nine, and
Speaker 1: there was this fear and this kind of anxiety that
Speaker 1: was just with me everywhere, And I guess, like, I'm
Speaker 1: not alone in doing this. It's semmed from a lack
Speaker 1: of I think, looking back at as an adult, a
Speaker 1: lack of patrol over a situation, and later on as
Speaker 1: I got when I got diagnosed with social anxiety, one
Speaker 1: of the symptoms was being big, being really big, because
Speaker 1: if I'm terrified of your thought about me, at least
Speaker 1: I want to try and be in control of your
Speaker 1: thoughts about me, so I'll give you at least something
Speaker 1: quite large to react to. Therefore I know what you're
Speaker 1: reacting to, rather than just having to deal with what
Speaker 1: you might be as in a performance, I would talk
Speaker 1: loudly and elevators and I would make it. I was, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was like German stuff. I was a child. It's
Speaker 1: just like big. I was about the age of eight
Speaker 1: when I went to a like a like I said,
Speaker 1: I don't believe it. An individual is gone. Probably a
Speaker 1: lot of it has to do with the amount of
Speaker 1: it that was rammed down my throat at the schooling
Speaker 1: that I had, and it certainly didn't make sense to
Speaker 1: me then makes less now, But every Friday, we would
Speaker 1: have a play that each class would take a turn
Speaker 1: to make a play or a sketch or something about
Speaker 1: I don't know, picking up rubbish at the schoolyard or
Speaker 1: you know, whatever you do, don't masturbate A cheese is
Speaker 1: always watching like that kind of school, right, And so
Speaker 1: I walk out on stage. It was our turn. I
Speaker 1: walk out on stage and there's just like three hundred
Speaker 1: promocycool kids, just like cooy car black like that. And
Speaker 1: the line was something along the lines of don't commute
Speaker 1: usin poured it in the bin something like that. It
Speaker 1: was about picking up r wish it was a break.
Speaker 1: And then I laugh And that was like the first
Speaker 1: high that I was like, ah, because all this feeling
Speaker 1: only happened when I was on stage. The reaction of
Speaker 1: that response only just unleashed the thing in me, all
Speaker 1: the anxiety. Everything just looked quiet. It was like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is amazing, because what am I. I'm in control here,
Speaker 1: I'm talking. You're all quite amazing. I know what happens next.
Speaker 1: This is brilliant. And so I kind of chased that.
Speaker 1: So my coping mechanism kind of became my career. But
Speaker 1: to be able to be on stage. Music was the
Speaker 1: thing for me, so singing and playing you had to
Speaker 1: have some level of proficiency. So I did quite dedicate
Speaker 1: myself to at least the illusion of proficiency, but I did.
Speaker 1: I always got something out of connecting with people, connecting
Speaker 1: with an audience. There was just really something about that,
Speaker 1: whether it be the non verbal communication of music or
Speaker 1: through a song, or just any time that I was
Speaker 1: able to have this collective experience with people on the controller.
Speaker 1: At the time, yes, it was, and I had a
Speaker 1: very strange relationship to my self worth around that. In sobriety,
Speaker 1: it's very different now. I'm going to go back before
Speaker 1: sobriety though, So I'd imagine then if you're a young.
Speaker 2: Man and you're particularly if you're a teenage or late
Speaker 2: teens or early twenties or something, and you all of
Speaker 2: a sudden have a realization that's what you've been doing
Speaker 2: the whole time, you know, Like.
Speaker 1: If I didn't realize that until I got better to do,
Speaker 1: then why did you get sick? What was what was
Speaker 1: the cause of seeing this was not a realization, it
Speaker 1: kind of it was just a clearly we come out
Speaker 1: fifty percent, you know, we don't just look like both
Speaker 1: my parents were refugees at one point. You know, into
Speaker 1: generational trauma is a real thing. We come out fifty
Speaker 1: percent all of it, generally, the sciences that we're fifty
Speaker 1: percent what our parents give us as far as our
Speaker 1: jumpiness or whatever, and we're fifty percent what we then
Speaker 1: experience or happened in our lives. So, you know, I've
Speaker 1: got two people who it was twenty four years apart,
Speaker 1: the very same Russians you know, kicked in their doors
Speaker 1: and they had to get out of there. And so
Speaker 1: there are two people who went through life going on
Speaker 1: under the authorities in a state can come and take
Speaker 1: everything away, and that's kind of how they went through life.
Speaker 1: And they're not alone in our country of people who've
Speaker 1: had that experience where in the state turns against them.
Speaker 1: So they were, you know, mindful and weary, and they
Speaker 1: had a way of being and that kind of rubs
Speaker 1: off on you know. My father lost family in the Holocaust,
Speaker 1: and you know, so there was this thing that was
Speaker 1: very fucking real for both of my folks, and it's
Speaker 1: hard to not pass that on to your kids. You know,
Speaker 1: my mum was on the road for just walked from
Speaker 1: Lithuanialy down to Germany at one point, and it's hard
Speaker 1: to not have those things pass on vicariously to you
Speaker 1: to your children, So I can only speak to myself.
Speaker 1: It was that was a part of it. There was
Speaker 1: always this anxiety, always a thing. And then sometime around
Speaker 1: the age of fourteen, I found this magical elixir that
Speaker 1: made everything kind of just kind of turned down a
Speaker 1: little bit, and it was I think it was power,
Speaker 1: was bitter power, sorrybody, Wally Lewis, there was a time
Speaker 1: where it was Alan Bond's beer.
Speaker 2: Alan Bonder had power, he sure fucking did, totally, and
Speaker 2: then Wally was one of the big promoters of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well truly they edited the sorry Bondie out at
Speaker 1: some point. I think you must have done softly. How's
Speaker 1: that fucking great line? You only get white Alan Bond
Speaker 1: in your life, and I've had him twice. Fucking carry
Speaker 1: pack a Line's amazing. It's not so similar to your
Speaker 1: scenario with the exactly great man. It's like, I'm so
Speaker 1: stoked for you. That happened anyway, So yeah, it was that,
Speaker 1: and then I had this beer, and then ah, everything
Speaker 1: kind of got a little bit quieter, quite a lot quieter.
Speaker 1: And I you know, if I'm holding up a glass
Speaker 1: for people who are listening, the glass is half literally,
Speaker 1: this is great, the glass is half full. I'm like, ah,
Speaker 1: it's been quiet because I've drunk this much. I reckon
Speaker 1: by the time I get down to that on the
Speaker 1: next one, it'll be a whole lot better. But I
Speaker 1: never got there. Never You never drank much more? Oh no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I kept going yeah when that was always the lie, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that it'll be better, yeah, when you're on the next one.
Speaker 2: But did it get better when you had some more?
Speaker 2: I mean initially, like like, so, what's your reaction if
Speaker 2: you drank too much? But what who would I should become?
Speaker 1: I have a I have an allergy to alcohol. If
Speaker 1: I drink, I break out and fun with side effects
Speaker 1: include divorce, financial ruin, Chris was really other things? Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, and you like how bad does it get there? Like, look,
Speaker 1: I have so essentially like my stepdaughter she's got a
Speaker 1: peanut allergy. Thankfully it's not anaphylactics anaphylactic. But there's a
Speaker 1: kid at my younger stay care that does right EpiPens
Speaker 1: at arms reach like defibrillators at a gym, right, just everywhere. Right,
Speaker 1: And if your grandkids, we'll go into a party and
Speaker 1: that had peanut butter on their fingers or hands, and
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, we've got to wash your hands, mate,
Speaker 1: because you know little Jimy's got. You would never dream
Speaker 1: anything a molecule that shit anywhere near a toddle because
Speaker 1: it could kill them. Similarly, if a molecule of alcohol
Speaker 1: gets into my body, I have an allergic reaction. I
Speaker 1: can no longer decide how much good amount to drink,
Speaker 1: and my sense of right and wrong changes, A sense
Speaker 1: of judgments goes, my sense of right and wrong, my
Speaker 1: moral senses change, and only once that and I cannot
Speaker 1: stop that reaction once it start. It's like literally speaking
Speaker 1: to someone who's I don't know, breaking out in hives.
Speaker 1: Can you please stop breaking out and welts your skin
Speaker 1: from contact with a cat or something like. They can't
Speaker 1: stop their body doing that. Similarly, I can't stop it
Speaker 1: once it starts, so not going near it is really
Speaker 1: really important. And only once the reaction wears off, sometimes
Speaker 1: twelve hours later, sometimes you know, the next afternoon, two
Speaker 1: and afternoons later. I turned around like, who the fuck
Speaker 1: said that? Who did that? Oh? Fuck? It was me?
Speaker 1: And I couldn't. I couldn't. I couldn't stop it. And
Speaker 1: it became very very clear that every day started to
Speaker 1: become the same. I was no longer in I was
Speaker 1: no longer able to make the choice. The choices were
Speaker 1: now being made for me. The days were just becoming
Speaker 1: very very repetitive. That the drinking was getting earlier, and
Speaker 1: you do it every day? Oh yeah, yeah by the end, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it had been years since I could remember the last
Speaker 1: age and drink, And the days just kept getting the same,
Speaker 1: and the drinking was getting earlier, and it was getting worse.
Speaker 1: And no matter which way I tried, like, oh, I
Speaker 1: started with beer and ended with tequila. This time I'll
Speaker 1: start at to quiller. It ended with be it no, no, no,
Speaker 1: the same thing happened no matter what, no matter which
Speaker 1: way I tried to play it. Oh, I don't drink
Speaker 1: beer anymore. I buy sixty dollar bottles of Read, up
Speaker 1: by one hundred dollar bottles Read because I'm a fucking connoisseur. No,
Speaker 1: I'm just a fucking drunk, drunk man. And I couldn't
Speaker 1: stop it. And I was lucky really lucky. I tried
Speaker 1: to stop a bunch of times, like why did you
Speaker 1: try to stop? Did you know? Because I could see
Speaker 1: it was like I was unable to control it. And
Speaker 1: I could tell that, you know, at first it was fun,
Speaker 1: then it was fun with problems, and then it's just problems,
Speaker 1: all right. And I couldn't stop the problems. It couldn't
Speaker 1: once the drinking started, I couldn't it just the next
Speaker 1: day was worse, and then everything's good, idea after half
Speaker 1: a six packs. So all kinds of other things went
Speaker 1: in concert with that, and the people I was hanging
Speaker 1: with and the things I was doing, and the choice
Speaker 1: I was making was just like, this is what the
Speaker 1: fuck am I doing here? And I was living in
Speaker 1: America at the time, and I could see that, you know,
Speaker 1: it was prescription painkillers got involved, and Benzo's all you
Speaker 1: got there was a bad sleep. Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: bad time. And I'd had friends who had died because
Speaker 1: that's I hammered. They forget that they've already taken their
Speaker 1: you know, Benzo, and then they go and take another
Speaker 1: d and then that's it. See you and never wake up.
Speaker 1: And I tried it, Like I said, I tried a
Speaker 1: bunch of times to stop. I'd maybe get four weeks,
Speaker 1: six weeks up. They couldn't do it. And then there's
Speaker 1: this loutsu line. Be careful of the direction that you
Speaker 1: were headed. You may just stand up there. And it
Speaker 1: was very clear to me that I know where this ends.
Speaker 1: This ends with me in prison, This ends with me
Speaker 1: losing everything, This ends with me dead. You know, I
Speaker 1: got one out of three. I managed. I got out
Speaker 1: losing everything, And it's probably the best option out of
Speaker 1: all of them. Bro. I was so fucking lucky. Man,
Speaker 1: I got so lucky. What was what would be the.
Speaker 2: Can you have a memory of what was the lowest point?
Speaker 2: I mean, can you remember the streets of King's Cross
Speaker 2: on your own?
Speaker 1: Oh? Man? It was just it was the same, just,
Speaker 1: you know, just being a blorous, belligerent person and vomiting
Speaker 1: on myself, humiliating the people I'm with, not knowing why
Speaker 1: people were upset at me. The next day, you know,
Speaker 1: blacking out. I was drinking to blackout since yeah, since
Speaker 1: I was fourteen, Like, well this is amazing, and I
Speaker 1: just kept to win. Oh thirty six, wow, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: twenty years, twenty two, Yeah, my god, twenty two and
Speaker 1: I've ben't really lucky man. You just like when I
Speaker 1: see you in television, like you look like a healthy,
Speaker 1: well put together you know, like a competent, great performer.
Speaker 1: Parade of two thousand and nine look great. Tailoring and
Speaker 1: good hair and makeup can do a lot for you. Mark, No,
Speaker 1: but you had it all. You put it together quite well. Well.
Speaker 1: My work was always the respite though. This is the thing,
Speaker 1: like I was saying before, when I'm on camera, oh
Speaker 1: thank god, bliss man, Like for other people speaking on
Speaker 1: a live TV camera and at the time, Monday nights,
Speaker 1: Australian Night all season, the first version of it, we're
Speaker 1: doing two point two two point four on a Monday.
Speaker 1: The Good Old Day's on a fucking Monday, man, the
Speaker 1: pre GFC TV money and everything like like for some
Speaker 1: people that's terror terrifying six hundred people in the studio
Speaker 1: right for me, those thirty seconds, minute and a half
Speaker 1: are just listen, Like if you talk to Kelly Slater
Speaker 1: about his perfect tenant chokes, he'll be like his face
Speaker 1: will just go to this complete moment of relaxation, even
Speaker 1: though that wave could kill him like that, right, He's
Speaker 1: like I don't know. That's I'm in it, man. Everything
Speaker 1: else is hard. That's the easy part. So being on
Speaker 1: the camera, you saw me. Your sample of my state
Speaker 1: of being was me and my most calm, safest place,
Speaker 1: and so I guess that's it was. Once I got
Speaker 1: off air, that's where you know, I would basically I'd
Speaker 1: go to the green room, have one and a half
Speaker 1: drink so I could drive home, and then steal bottles
Speaker 1: from the bar and then because you know, the best
Speaker 1: kind of drinking is the drinking that you do by
Speaker 1: yourself in your apartment, because ultimately, the amount that I
Speaker 1: was drinking to feel okay to leave the house started
Speaker 1: to be really really dangerous. And then when I was home,
Speaker 1: the amount that I was drinking just to make the
Speaker 1: noise in my head go quiet was just bonkers, and
Speaker 1: I just I knew I was. I had to stow up.
Speaker 1: Do you know this?
Speaker 2: Do you think this is sort of prevalent in the
Speaker 2: entertainment industry, because it's funny. I was just thinking to
Speaker 2: myself about stuff like when I get up on stage,
Speaker 2: Like if I'm doing a speech, and prior to getting
Speaker 2: up on the stage, I'm not nervous. I just don't
Speaker 2: want to do it, and I sort of semi resent
Speaker 2: it for some reason.
Speaker 1: It's silly. But once I'm up in stage, I love
Speaker 1: it right, And then when I got.
Speaker 2: Off stage, I'm exhilarated because obviously must be a whole
Speaker 2: lot of chemicals fine around my.
Speaker 1: Head because you're connecting with people, Yeah, or am I
Speaker 1: controlling it off? Wonder about it? It's interesting me. But
Speaker 1: do you see lots of people in the media game
Speaker 1: who are like that? Is it a thing? I haven't
Speaker 1: wondered about it because a few media people and they're
Speaker 1: similar me. Okay, So firstly, I can help you with
Speaker 1: the pre stage thing because I still do this regularly,
Speaker 1: and I have learned so many fantastic coping mechanisms. If
Speaker 1: you've watched me on Telly from twenty ten on, you
Speaker 1: have seen me do relaxation techniques on live national television.
Speaker 1: Now do I breathe? I do muscle stuff that no
Speaker 1: I've taught. I've learned these really interesting things that no
Speaker 1: one cannot be detected on camera. And unless I tell
Speaker 1: you what I'm looking what you're looking for, you won't
Speaker 1: even see it. There's a last time I was on
Speaker 1: Q and A, you can see me doing it. I
Speaker 1: talked about it on my podcast. I'm like, this is
Speaker 1: what I'm doing, and you can see me do it
Speaker 1: five times during the CONTs. Yeah, during the set during
Speaker 1: there on Q and A with Chris Bowen and what's
Speaker 1: his face? The ex energy? But yes, so the look.
Speaker 1: I don't know, have you ever because everybody looks at
Speaker 1: people in TV and media and they, oh my god,
Speaker 1: you know, they do it so easy, lah blah blahlah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but people with different people everyone's got different brains, and
Speaker 1: different brains kind of all have a surface tension that
Speaker 1: brings them together around different careers. Okay, if you go
Speaker 1: and find I mean, if you go and say, for example,
Speaker 1: find the people who are the best ever with Excel
Speaker 1: spreadsheet formulas, probably a few of them are going to
Speaker 1: have a bit of trouble with eye contact, and that's
Speaker 1: fine because that's where they go. People. Neurodivergence has always
Speaker 1: existed in society the whole time we've been here. Yet
Speaker 1: we have these schooling systems that with a limited budget,
Speaker 1: are trying to, you know, get the biggest amount of
Speaker 1: the bell curve. And there's people over here who can't
Speaker 1: stop jumping their knee like me. And there's people over
Speaker 1: here who are very different and they are the ones
Speaker 1: that get in trouble with that schooling, and there's all
Speaker 1: of other ones in the middles to you. You're on
Speaker 1: a limited budget. You're trying to get the most cohorts possible.
Speaker 1: So I would say that you know similarly if you
Speaker 1: if you ever been in a room with more than
Speaker 1: one Moto GP writer, all right, there's small, kind of
Speaker 1: flighty like race horses, all right, because they have to
Speaker 1: be and that's their that's their brain. Their brain can
Speaker 1: do that. That's and it has to be. There's a
Speaker 1: specificity around who they are, and so different people with
Speaker 1: different brains get they're fit for purpose precisely so.
Speaker 2: And that's sort of my point, I think, maybe to
Speaker 2: somebody sending to media, we're all fit for purpose in
Speaker 2: that we are very good once we get in front
Speaker 2: of the audience.
Speaker 1: I spent my whole career working with people who could
Speaker 1: not sit in a cubicle. Every cameo, every sorry, every
Speaker 1: camera operator, every audio guy, every you know, every field producer,
Speaker 1: every art department person. You have a chat to them,
Speaker 1: and that certainly after I've got my ADHD diagnosis, So
Speaker 1: I kind of learned a lot more about things. Every
Speaker 1: one of those people are like, oh good, I try
Speaker 1: to destop once goldn't do it and that. But that's
Speaker 1: the bubble that I live in. You know, this is fine,
Speaker 1: But there are other people who they have a public
Speaker 1: service job. They get there at eight twenty nine, they're
Speaker 1: on at eight thirty, at four point fifty nine, they
Speaker 1: zip up their pencil case and they get on the
Speaker 1: freeway and they never think about it and they fucking
Speaker 1: love it and good for them, and well it's funny,
Speaker 1: as I said, And there's nothing wrong with being like
Speaker 1: this because as I said, fit not at all. You
Speaker 1: do love to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but olsouly you just means the word and you're
Speaker 2: a divergent. So do you think it's important, Well, there's
Speaker 2: any value whatsoever? And actually putting a tag on it
Speaker 2: at all?
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean less and less. I think what
Speaker 1: I mean. Sure, we say adhd or on the spectrum
Speaker 1: of this s something now which caught and everything the
Speaker 1: spectrum though, but totally there's everything. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what the spectrum is.
Speaker 2: I don't know who worked a spectrum out if they
Speaker 2: assessed every single person on the planet and any other
Speaker 2: place that might exist in the world. In the university today, no,
Speaker 2: But do you think can we just accept that everybody
Speaker 2: is different?
Speaker 1: Absolutely different brains do different things. And that's if you're
Speaker 1: trying to get a cohort of people to the same goal,
Speaker 1: you're going to have to understand that a vast ninety
Speaker 1: percent of them are going to respond really well to
Speaker 1: the structure of whatever is you're trying to get them to,
Speaker 1: whether it be doing a motorbile license or whatever. But
Speaker 1: there's been a couple of people on the edges might
Speaker 1: need a little bit here, might need a little bit there,
Speaker 1: and that's what they're going to need to get them there.
Speaker 1: But then you've got everyone's got the same outcome. It's
Speaker 1: when we start to leave those people on the ages behind,
Speaker 1: that's when we start to have issues that can compound
Speaker 1: later in life. When there's nothing more dangerous than a
Speaker 1: man who's been left behind. Really, you know, someone who
Speaker 1: watches all their friends go forth and be able to
Speaker 1: complete things that he can't, and have relationships and make
Speaker 1: emotional connections that he somehow can't seem to be I
Speaker 1: understand why people get resentful about such things. That's a
Speaker 1: dangerous man, do you think then, users is interesting that
Speaker 1: when there's people on the edges, But what about people
Speaker 1: in the middle, because they need an edge. So for me,
Speaker 1: people in the middle don't have any edge to them,
Speaker 1: and as a result of that, they may also be
Speaker 1: missing it. Because one of my experiences is that is
Speaker 1: that people that I know who have done very well
Speaker 1: generally speaking, speak like you. Now I'm serious.
Speaker 2: My experience in business at least is the people who
Speaker 2: have been the most successful prolific. They prosecute, prosecute, prosecute.
Speaker 1: In a good way. They speak quickly, they have a
Speaker 1: mastery of the language.
Speaker 2: They look like they're really confident, but they're probably not
Speaker 2: that confident, but they come across as really confident and
Speaker 2: in control, and they control the conversation by speaking quickly
Speaker 2: and elegantly at the same time. Which is that's you,
Speaker 2: I mean, and in some people myself, well he's got ADHD,
Speaker 2: but he gives a shit. We don't have to have
Speaker 2: a put a label on it. I just think that
Speaker 2: we are all completely different, every one of us.
Speaker 1: There is no middle. You know, you talked about the
Speaker 1: bell curve. I mean, it's I think there's no point
Speaker 1: actually having a bell curve. I think just there's just
Speaker 1: an excellent y graph and there's just dots everywhere, and
Speaker 1: they're all over the joint. I can't actually draw a
Speaker 1: bell curve. We're all different completely everywhere.
Speaker 2: And let's not put labels on anyone else, in particularly ourselves,
Speaker 2: because what happens is we get forced to put a
Speaker 2: label on ourself and all of a sudden, you're sort
Speaker 2: of you're defending a lot. I mean, especially for you,
Speaker 2: a younger person, when when we get older, we can
Speaker 2: deal with anything pretty much, but when you're young, you think, fuck,
Speaker 2: I'm so different, How am I going to deal with
Speaker 2: this shit?
Speaker 1: You know, I've had a few people on with you know.
Speaker 2: The similar diagnosis is that you have and we and
Speaker 2: they're all successful. You're successful once you work your shit
Speaker 2: out and become well, well, this is the thing.
Speaker 1: Like I have the career I have because of the
Speaker 1: brain that I've got, grand fit for purpose. But this
Speaker 1: brain that I've got nearly killed me. And the only
Speaker 1: reason that I'm able to keep going and have a
Speaker 1: relationship with my wife and my kids, and you know,
Speaker 1: try to, you know, put a something of good and
Speaker 1: value into the world is because I work hard to
Speaker 1: make sure the bits of my brain that don't serve
Speaker 1: me don't take over, because that's happened to me, and
Speaker 1: I was very It was really dangerous and I got very,
Speaker 1: very very sick. So having been there was a magazine
Speaker 1: back in the day. There were shiny things. They held
Speaker 1: them in your hands. You open them like this. You
Speaker 1: looked at stuff. You couldn't zoom on it. But I
Speaker 1: was on the cover of Men's Health magazine. I had
Speaker 1: a six pack. I had a six pack for about
Speaker 1: eighteen hours. Mark it was fucking hard, all right. You
Speaker 1: don't accidentally get it. You don't accidentally wander around and
Speaker 1: then find yourself on the summat of Mount Kilingajarro. You very,
Speaker 1: very deliberately do this thing, all right. Similarly, we don't
Speaker 1: accidentally have good mental health. We have to deliberately cultivated. Similarly,
Speaker 1: we have to deliberately cultivate resilience. Now I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about I think about this quite a bit like resilience
Speaker 1: and vulnerability. People go, well, men need to be more vulnerable.
Speaker 1: But vulnerability is the opposite side of the coin to resilience.
Speaker 1: The extreme of that is fragility, and I guess in
Speaker 1: being indestructible. All right, now, I have been both fragility,
Speaker 1: The smallest thing can destroy you. Indestructible, nothing can harm me.
Speaker 1: I haven't lost my I'll I haven't lost my house
Speaker 1: in three days, all right. I'm sitting at home just
Speaker 1: like gambling on internet poker and watching porn and drinking.
Speaker 1: But I don't have to deal with anybody, so I'm safe.
Speaker 1: I can't have any good relationships, so I'm not very
Speaker 1: good for my career, and I'm starting to really erode
Speaker 1: everything any I can't make eye contact when I get
Speaker 1: to my groceries if I do, so, yeah, I'm safe,
Speaker 1: but it's not a fucking way to live. So but
Speaker 1: closer here, this is resilience. And you know, if we
Speaker 1: can build up resilience. So but if you're here, you're
Speaker 1: also super fragile, right because anything can fucking destroy you.
Speaker 1: But if we build up a resilience, then we are
Speaker 1: open to being vulnerable. And this includes emotional resilience. Okay,
Speaker 1: I would love it if in high school we taught
Speaker 1: young men and young women how to get broken up with?
Speaker 1: All right, how do you be broke? How to break
Speaker 1: a relationship, how to be on the receiving end of
Speaker 1: someone not wanting to be in a relationship with you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love it if that was a course that we
Speaker 1: did in grade nine, right, because that you know, if
Speaker 1: you have emotional resilience right, and you know, I'm really
Speaker 1: into this person, but there might not be into me.
Speaker 1: If you know, and we've all had breakups, it's taken
Speaker 1: me a long time to you know, get this part,
Speaker 1: get to this part, and if you know, it really sucks.
Speaker 1: I really liked them, I really had. I had all
Speaker 1: these ideas about what we might do that really hurts.
Speaker 1: And now I'm seeing about a party with someone that
Speaker 1: I also know. Ah, that's really bad. But I know
Speaker 1: I'm going to be okay, and I know there'll be
Speaker 1: someone else out there for me if we have that,
Speaker 1: knowing that the next relationship we get into, we won't
Speaker 1: fear this loneliness, we won't fear this thing, we won't
Speaker 1: grasp and grab and smother. We'll be able to go
Speaker 1: and be emotionally open and be vulnerable. Because the only
Speaker 1: way we can actually fall in love and have an
Speaker 1: open relationship, open communication and open loving relationship another person
Speaker 1: is if we hold in a hand. At any moment,
Speaker 1: this person could want to go. But that's what makes
Speaker 1: it amazing. This is why having kids is incredible, because
Speaker 1: it's unbelievable. You hold this tiny little human in your
Speaker 1: hand knowing you could die, so you hold this incredible
Speaker 1: love and fear in your hand at the same time.
Speaker 1: And it's really important that we learn to do that
Speaker 1: more and more and cultivate this emotional resilience so that
Speaker 1: when things do show up that I destroy it.
Speaker 2: When you went through the crappy period, what was it
Speaker 2: turn your life around? I meanly, was it a vent
Speaker 2: or was it an offer to come and do something?
Speaker 1: They work which, but you're talking about when I got
Speaker 1: mentally ill. Yeah, well I drink and then that. But
Speaker 1: the drink and then the illness that I look, I
Speaker 1: got so lucky that I got sober first. How did
Speaker 1: you get sober? Why did you get surber? Well, because
Speaker 1: I was going to die. I knew I was going
Speaker 1: to die. I was like, I'm going to end up
Speaker 1: dead or something. This is I've got to stop this.
Speaker 2: But I had Rick Rossman here the other day. Rick
Speaker 2: was telling me that he actually went and booked himself
Speaker 2: into a place.
Speaker 1: All right, what did you do? I didn't. I had
Speaker 1: no idea. I grew up in Queensland. I had no
Speaker 1: idea what. Sobriety looked like, oh, we're drinking, I'll bring
Speaker 1: my gun boots, Like, we don't stop until some of
Speaker 1: the vomiting through their nose. That's just kind of what
Speaker 1: there's country drinking, right, And so I didn't know any
Speaker 1: other way to be around other people, or to socialize
Speaker 1: or to what And slowly, over time, as my mates
Speaker 1: went to UNI and stuff like that, I could see them,
Speaker 1: you know, I could drink less and leave parties earlier
Speaker 1: and I'm like, what are you leaving for? It's just
Speaker 1: about to start. Everything's about to get amazing. They never did,
Speaker 1: And so like I didn't know how it could be.
Speaker 1: And I was at this it was like I said,
Speaker 1: it was PREGFC. So I was making pre GFC money.
Speaker 1: All that's gone by the way. And I was at
Speaker 1: this party. I'm in the Caribbean, at this party on
Speaker 1: an island, as you do. And I was like, I
Speaker 1: can't even name the people that were there because it
Speaker 1: sounded like a fucking wank, but it was. I couldn't
Speaker 1: believe it. I was so myself, for it was just ridiculous.
Speaker 1: And I was fucking blitzing myself because I didn't believe
Speaker 1: I belonged there, right, And I see this guy just
Speaker 1: moving through this crowd of people, like we're in Darlinghurst.
Speaker 1: If you go up the road to the bookshop, you'll
Speaker 1: find a book called Tom of Finland. It was like,
Speaker 1: if you're a kid and you're sketching pictures of the
Speaker 1: perfect wave, you'll draw chopu or something this perfect barrel. Right,
Speaker 1: So Tom of Finland is like a cartoon version of
Speaker 1: the perfect leather man, huge big forearms and big hand,
Speaker 1: obamaustache and you know, just chin that could cut cake,
Speaker 1: and fucking there he is. Who's that? And he's this photographer,
Speaker 1: he's got his shot covers and this cover and that
Speaker 1: cover that I know, oh my god, and he's life
Speaker 1: for the party and sober, like, oh my goodness, I've
Speaker 1: never seen it like that. How can you be so successful,
Speaker 1: be so delightful, be around all this and be okay.
Speaker 1: A couple of weeks go by, we're all back in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. I got his number and I called him
Speaker 1: up and say, hey, man, you don't drink to you
Speaker 1: because no not anymore. Can you save me some of
Speaker 1: those meetings you go to? Yes, yeah, sure, we'll take it.
Speaker 1: And so the first meetings I went to were all
Speaker 1: gay meetings. But I'm sitting there in West Hollywood in
Speaker 1: a room full of men, beautiful man, and I'm hearing
Speaker 1: some kid from Kansas with his mid Western accent tell
Speaker 1: my story. You know, he's twenty two. And I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm not a special snowflake. All right, how deference to
Speaker 1: some people? Okay, all right, what do I do now?
Speaker 1: So I got really, really lucky that I saw this guy,
Speaker 1: because it's very much like I didn't know what it
Speaker 1: could be. So say, I blindfolded you and brought you
Speaker 1: in here where, you know, opposite the Trup cafe and
Speaker 1: a darling host. But I said to you, okay, so
Speaker 1: what color are the cars on the street? You know
Speaker 1: they're out there. You can't there's a blank space in
Speaker 1: your head. I didn't know what to do to get
Speaker 1: from here to there, So I just had to trust
Speaker 1: these people. I was told, just find someone who's got
Speaker 1: what you want and do what they tell you, and
Speaker 1: that's it. So I found it pretty simple. Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 1: I found a guy who he had been divorced, he
Speaker 1: had married again, he had kids, Yeah, his career again.
Speaker 1: I was like, what do I do? And I just
Speaker 1: did what he told me, because I had to come
Speaker 1: to you understanding that the best I could do, the
Speaker 1: smartest I could be, the cleverest I thought I was
Speaker 1: being had entered me up here. That was my ideas,
Speaker 1: my best thinking. It might be time for someone else's thinking.
Speaker 1: And so once I started following what he told me
Speaker 1: to do, it was such a relief because it was
Speaker 1: no longer on me, and he took that weight for
Speaker 1: me for a while, and it was incredible. And so similarly,
Speaker 1: when I got really sick mentally, so I've been diagnosed
Speaker 1: with social phobia and generalized anxiety and well sort of PTSD.
Speaker 1: I got PTSD. I was in New York on September eleven.
Speaker 1: I've got PTSD. After that's a really weird one. She's
Speaker 1: not physically hurt, but you can't do anything that's super strange.
Speaker 1: And so that all kind of compounded. And then somewhere
Speaker 1: around twenty fourteen, as is often the case, I was
Speaker 1: quite fragile all right. At the time, Bachelor hadn't been renewed,
Speaker 1: for a second season, and I wasn't hearing if it
Speaker 1: was or not. So I'm effectively I'm overseas paying rent
Speaker 1: out of my savings. I have no job. I'm in
Speaker 1: a relationship with a person that is really inappropriate for me.
Speaker 1: My father sick quite ill, and I had to pack
Speaker 1: a bag and get ready to get back on QF
Speaker 1: twelve at any moment to get back to Australia. And
Speaker 1: then one day, just my brain just fucking popped man,
Speaker 1: and I started experiencing paranoid delusions. I started experiencing psychosis,
Speaker 1: episodes of paranoid paranoid delusion. Is there, Everyone's coming to
Speaker 1: get me? Right? For me, it was climate anxiety, which
Speaker 1: is a very fucking real thing. But what does that mean?
Speaker 1: Climbate anxiety? As far as I was concerned, the absolute
Speaker 1: worst possible case scenarios of climate change were happening today
Speaker 1: and I'm the only one that knows about it. And
Speaker 1: I would start to see visions of the mountains around
Speaker 1: Los Angeles on fire, and I was like running usually
Speaker 1: made it better, so I run. I would leave my
Speaker 1: apartment in venice, run down, touchdown, I want to cap here,
Speaker 1: run back. That was ten case and as I'm running
Speaker 1: those little bay watch towers while they've got a concrete
Speaker 1: block underneath them at a chain connected to the bottom
Speaker 1: of them. And as I'm running, I look over to
Speaker 1: my left and I see them kind of floating holding
Speaker 1: against this chain like this, and then gleitching back again,
Speaker 1: and then gleitching there it is, and back again, and
Speaker 1: I look up at the palm trees above me, and
Speaker 1: they're no longer above me. They're now kind of weird
Speaker 1: lily pads sitting on the surface of the ocean because
Speaker 1: the ocean is now five or ten meters above. Becomingly delusional, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it was. It was like glitching in and out,
Speaker 1: and I was like, something's really fucking wrong. And every
Speaker 1: sign one of these things happened, it would be horrible pain,
Speaker 1: like awful, awful, awful pain running through my body. And
Speaker 1: it was happening like every five ten seconds. And I
Speaker 1: started to swat at the at them and kind of
Speaker 1: go oh every time it happened, and I knew I
Speaker 1: was in a lot of trouble. So I didn't even
Speaker 1: make it to the pier. I turn around and ran back,
Speaker 1: and there's quite a sizable homeless population in Venice. It's
Speaker 1: even bigger now, but a lot of it's quite untreated
Speaker 1: mental illness. That's quite sad. The health system over there.
Speaker 1: It's such an incredible country, and I do hung look
Speaker 1: after their people. It's really sad. I was over there recently.
Speaker 1: People living in we're so fucking sad. And I'm running
Speaker 1: up behind this bloke. I'm trying to get home as
Speaker 1: fast as the can because I've got to call my guy.
Speaker 1: And I'm running up behind this bloke and I can
Speaker 1: see from behind there's this plume of urine on the
Speaker 1: back of his pants. He's got no shirt and he's
Speaker 1: got no shoes on. His pants are way too big
Speaker 1: for him. He probably hasn't eaten for a week. And
Speaker 1: he's shuffling and he's spoatting, he's grunting, he's flinching. And
Speaker 1: I run up next to him and he's about ten
Speaker 1: years younger than me, and I was like, oh fuck,
Speaker 1: we're doing the same thing. But I know something's wrong.
Speaker 1: And I ran home and I called my man David,
Speaker 1: and I said, bab you got to get out of yourusef.
Speaker 1: You cant get it. How you got to go to
Speaker 1: the mountain because the fucking was going to end. Dada
Speaker 1: da da, Have you got to go and get a gun?
Speaker 1: You're gonna go to go hide the moutain d d
Speaker 1: d da. He's like, mate, you need to get to
Speaker 1: a doctor now, like right now. He said, you're lucky
Speaker 1: because crazy people don't know they're crazy. You know something's
Speaker 1: wrong and you need to get to a doctor. But
Speaker 1: I couldn't see my doctor for about three days. So
Speaker 1: that was a really hard, really hard.
Speaker 2: You do lock yourself down A bigger pardon what you
Speaker 2: do if you had to wait three days, you lock
Speaker 2: yourself down.
Speaker 1: Fu man. I went to I went to Veil on
Speaker 1: a ski trip with the mate. That was fucking horrible.
Speaker 1: It was horrible. Did you do that to distract yourself? No?
Speaker 1: I was booked in to go and it was already
Speaker 1: booked you know, as you know, as is often the case,
Speaker 1: you lie. No, I'm fine, I'm fine. You know, you
Speaker 1: lie to the people around yourself. It was horrible, horrible, horrible,
Speaker 1: And I finally got to see in my shrink and
Speaker 1: I had this beautiful EAMs reclinents like original season one
Speaker 1: Eames reclined. It's beautiful. I find it' uncomfortable, but yes,
Speaker 1: I sit on the edge of his desk and I'm like,
Speaker 1: you just a big band. You get an esque feel
Speaker 1: full of all the FOD and can't fig go. And
Speaker 1: he's like, h you're experiencing paranoid delusions. And I was
Speaker 1: like my brain at first, I was like, oh, he fuck,
Speaker 1: he doesn't know, and I knew in that moment, I
Speaker 1: don't know what it was. I got really lucky. Mark
Speaker 1: part of my brain went hang, hang on, and I
Speaker 1: able because I had learned to meditate as a younger man,
Speaker 1: and I had been meditating quite a bit to try
Speaker 1: to help myself, and I was able to just peel
Speaker 1: my brain away for a second look and go wait,
Speaker 1: wait a second, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait what happens
Speaker 1: if you don't believe him? And I was so lucky
Speaker 1: that but my first thought was he's in on it.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know, And I can understand why people, you know,
Speaker 1: don't take their meads and then just leave because it's real,
Speaker 1: as real as you're sitting in front of me. And
Speaker 1: I ended up, you know, it took a while, but
Speaker 1: I ended up on two kinds of antipsychotics, and I
Speaker 1: was her eyes and her eyes and any presidents. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but like I was on a lands a pen and
Speaker 1: uh that's the other ones. I can't remember the other one,
Speaker 1: Like anti psychotics are amazing because have you ever seen
Speaker 1: a like a plane that I have had to evacuate
Speaker 1: because it kind of caught fire on landing or whatever,
Speaker 1: and it's just this ball of foam with a finstick
Speaker 1: in out, this giant ball of fire retarded fime. I
Speaker 1: was in so much trouble because after a while, and
Speaker 1: when you do the intro to this, you're going to
Speaker 1: need to do a bit of a you know, a
Speaker 1: bit of a just because I've learned through sharing my
Speaker 1: story people have blocked shit out and when you suddenly
Speaker 1: something will click for them, they might not realize, oh shit.
Speaker 1: So it's important that you preface your episode with you know,
Speaker 1: a bit of a you know, at least a lifeline
Speaker 1: number and talking about the risk of suicide. So this
Speaker 1: feeling wouldn't stop, all right, This feeling was just on
Speaker 1: and on and on and on weeks months. They tried
Speaker 1: so hard, they helped me with different kind of concoctions
Speaker 1: and things, and about every ten to twenty seconds, this
Speaker 1: fucking flinch man like I was sit there in front
Speaker 1: of my psychiatrists doing this, like just flinching, and it
Speaker 1: hurts every time pain. After a while, your brain goes, hey, man,
Speaker 1: I've got this great idea. I've got this idea of
Speaker 1: how I can make all this. You know, you want
Speaker 1: to make this stop. You want some peace and quiet,
Speaker 1: come here with me. And I had lost friends to suicide,
Speaker 1: like everyone, and I had never understood why. And in
Speaker 1: that moment, it wasn't a scary thing. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: I'm not into this person. I'm going to have to
Speaker 1: go and meet them and tell them we're going to
Speaker 1: break up, or I've got to fire someone, you know,
Speaker 1: not TV fired, but actual fired. You know, you hide
Speaker 1: them because you love them, right, and you're like, you're
Speaker 1: going to be great for us, And it really hurts
Speaker 1: when you actually have specially if you come to know them,
Speaker 1: like you feel a thing inside you. Before it wasn't
Speaker 1: that at all. It was no fear about It was this,
Speaker 1: do you serf? Did you have a serf? Ye? All right?
Speaker 1: Real cold day, you're not you're in your two three,
Speaker 1: not your five four right four five right, and you
Speaker 1: can't feel your hands and you're out there and you're like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: when I get home, that shower, that's gonna be the best.
Speaker 1: I'll get the CHACOOSEI on. But yeah, it's that that.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's going to be most amazing thing
Speaker 1: when I do that. And now, once again, I was
Speaker 1: so lucky that I was able to notice and go,
Speaker 1: hang on a sec. My brain's trying to tell me
Speaker 1: that the world's on fire and I'm underwater right now
Speaker 1: and I'm glitching it out. Maybe this thought's also a distortion. Ah,
Speaker 1: And that's all it took for me to go, oh Jesus, fuck,
Speaker 1: that's it. And I just started calling people. And I
Speaker 1: was in the Middle East at the time, and I'm
Speaker 1: I just looked at the world mapp and saw who
Speaker 1: was awake. And I started skyping my brothers, who were
Speaker 1: in Australia are a week at the time, and I
Speaker 1: just kind of waited till Los Angeles woke up, and
Speaker 1: I spoke to people. I don't know how many people
Speaker 1: I spoke to that night about what what did you
Speaker 1: say to them? Just just to connect. I needed someone else.
Speaker 1: I I just needed someone who was thinking about the
Speaker 1: world without my brain, someone who I needed to hear
Speaker 1: what the world looked like through their eyes. I couldn't
Speaker 1: trust every piece of visual, auditory sensory input was being distorted,
Speaker 1: all right. And my body, my brain was telling me
Speaker 1: that these things were happening, and they I knew they weren't,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't resist that. It was so connecting and
Speaker 1: being in connection with another person and having that phone call.
Speaker 1: I made a documentary about suicide prevention and what was
Speaker 1: that called? It was called life and Death Life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was great. We want to and where where? Where
Speaker 1: was that? Publish? Was on SBS? SBS? Yeah, we won. Essentially.
Speaker 1: The Oscar of Asia makes it easy to make a
Speaker 1: second And what was that about? The second film is
Speaker 1: about chronic paint, but that's not the story chronic pain
Speaker 1: in that in physical pain Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: was the first one there. It's about suicide professor prevention
Speaker 1: and we my brother who works in comms at the
Speaker 1: Ford Motor Company. He's an amazing guy. He interviewed about
Speaker 1: that phone call and it was it's really interesting. He goes,
Speaker 1: I remember that, I remember you calling me. I remember that,
Speaker 1: And you know, the way he talked about it was
Speaker 1: kind of yeah, I just know I kind of had
Speaker 1: to stay with you for a bit, and because I
Speaker 1: knew that from getting sober. Process goals are always way
Speaker 1: easier to hold on to than intention goals. I should
Speaker 1: really go to the gym, and they never go, all right,
Speaker 1: but if you go. When I get up, I put
Speaker 1: my shoes on, I walk out the routine. Yeah, as
Speaker 1: a process goal, if you have a process goal, you
Speaker 1: will you will act through your intention, all right. So
Speaker 1: I knew before you pick up a drink, pick up
Speaker 1: the phone, that's it. Yeah, So similarly, and I had
Speaker 1: done that, and I had known that my brain's not
Speaker 1: making good decisions right now. I need to see somebody
Speaker 1: else and ask them what should I do, and trust
Speaker 1: that they have my best interests at heart and just
Speaker 1: follow what they do. And so that's what I did.
Speaker 1: So it's a point of a support group. But is
Speaker 1: that something you recognize? It was?
Speaker 2: That is something that you just happened to fall into
Speaker 2: because you had close family and close floes.
Speaker 1: I think because my folks would doctors, they kind of
Speaker 1: did model. This is bigger than my skill set. Let's
Speaker 1: go call well, it's call call the specialist. I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about tropical diseases. Let's call you know, Paul
Speaker 1: knows it. And that was kind of what they did, Like,
Speaker 1: this is beyond my area of expertise. I'll call someone
Speaker 1: who I trust and I'll trust them. And that's you know,
Speaker 1: science is the what's the word science is a specific
Speaker 1: application of doubt, all right, essentially to try to find
Speaker 1: a agreed upon truth or reality that we can both
Speaker 1: make a choice from. And so my parents always did that,
Speaker 1: so we kind of knew as kids, like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: bigger than me, I'll call someone that knows. But that
Speaker 1: was kind of you know, I'm a wide Australian boy,
Speaker 1: so I didn't want to to you know, I denied
Speaker 1: it for a long time, to the point even where
Speaker 1: my doctor said, here's the antisychotics, take them when you
Speaker 1: need them. Ah. If I don't take them, I don't
Speaker 1: need them. Ah. No, I got way worse.
Speaker 2: Did you struggle with the fact that did you get
Speaker 2: through a pere where you struggle the fact that you
Speaker 2: thought you might have been you know, unwell, did you
Speaker 2: ever sort of fight that?
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'm not I'm fine. I'm sweet. I got
Speaker 1: offered andy, so I've got alphidated to presence in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine when I first to ride in Sydney. But
Speaker 1: I'm like, aoh, I just have a v I'll be fine.
Speaker 1: That's ridiculous, man, it's such if we were if we
Speaker 1: if alcohol is invented today, I doubt we would ever
Speaker 1: make it legal. It is such a fucking damaging drug.
Speaker 1: It is a socially acceptable, readily available, self administered depressant
Speaker 1: that is proven to be addictive and is a class
Speaker 1: It's in the same class of cartinogens as asbestos. Right
Speaker 1: now in Sydney and Melbourne, we are digging up playgrounds
Speaker 1: everywhere because they're asbestos. Yet I don't think the bottle
Speaker 1: has got a digger anywhere near it. So how long
Speaker 1: you've been so before? What do you find somewhere? Fourteen years,
Speaker 1: two months and something, So you must be getting close
Speaker 1: to fifty or maybe already fifty. I just turned fifty.
Speaker 2: Fifty years so you know, like you've really been sort
Speaker 2: of you said you start at fourteen, it's like thirty
Speaker 2: six years of like sort of been a fairly amazing
Speaker 2: at a personal level, not to a media career, but
Speaker 2: a fairly amazing journey.
Speaker 1: And then you've done. But you say fourteen years? How
Speaker 1: many years? Fourteen?
Speaker 2: And you started when you're fourteen, which is quite interesting,
Speaker 2: see forteen, And I'm just looking at you.
Speaker 1: You look very fit. I trained really well, like I mean,
Speaker 1: because there's that part of the strategy around that out.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're you know, I think you're You're a
Speaker 1: bit older than me, A lot of them, not too much, No,
Speaker 1: a lot older. Sixty eight, so you're nearly twenty years old,
Speaker 1: and you when are you sixty eight? Fuck off? You
Speaker 1: look amazing. If I look like you when I'm sixty eight,
Speaker 1: I'll be thrilled. The thing is that I will be
Speaker 1: And I did these sums when Wolfgang was born. I'll
Speaker 1: be your age when he graduates high school. And I
Speaker 1: know because I've been through it with g she's twenty now.
Speaker 1: I know how much it takes to keep up with
Speaker 1: a sixteen seventeen year old. I need to have ability, resilience, physicality, vitality.
Speaker 1: I have to. I have to because the the father. Yes,
Speaker 1: you can have it. Audrey raised Georgia by herself. All right,
Speaker 1: you can your partner, yeah, or my wife your wife,
Speaker 1: yeah you can, Yes, you can be a single parent.
Speaker 1: George is her daughter. George is her daughter. Yes, and
Speaker 1: yes she is. How old is she? She's twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: She's an incredible kid, She's an amazing horn. Having a
Speaker 1: strong having a the absence of a father in a
Speaker 1: child's life is so fundamentally linked to poor outcomes for
Speaker 1: that kid. You know, you just you've got to fucking
Speaker 1: be there. You just have to. And here's my plan.
Speaker 1: Fit fit, fit, fit dead. Yeah, that's it, that's it.
Speaker 1: I saw Tracy Gram she're talking about wants to live forever. No, No,
Speaker 1: I'm fine. I'm fine. Like there's going to be a
Speaker 1: point where I stop getting scans. I'd be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: and maybe at a point where you're not a fit
Speaker 1: or no longer. Well and again, but it's a bad
Speaker 1: fit for purpose. So fit means to you when.
Speaker 2: You're let's say we're you're seventy or and or your
Speaker 2: and your step daughters having kids and you're let's call them,
Speaker 2: you've got grandkids, look after.
Speaker 1: I want to be if I want to take my
Speaker 1: grandkids to jiu jitsu and myself. Okay, what's fit for
Speaker 1: purpose mean to you? At that point? I can walk stairs, toilet,
Speaker 1: ride on a bicycle, ride the motorbike, you know, be
Speaker 1: able to pick up a toddler when they're being a
Speaker 1: pork chop. Be able to do the school run, no problem,
Speaker 1: you know. And if you're if you ever tried to
Speaker 1: get a four year old that doesn't want to get
Speaker 1: into a car in a car, you can't do it.
Speaker 1: If you've I mean, I've got a fake hip and everything,
Speaker 1: like you need to have meat on your bones. But
Speaker 1: plus our body. Only I trained to give my body
Speaker 1: the the neurotransmitters that I need to shift mood states
Speaker 1: throughout the day. All right. There's certain things that are
Speaker 1: released into our bloods dream but only happens when we're
Speaker 1: doing resistance training or kind of zone to as is
Speaker 1: known training. And if we don't do those, we're doing
Speaker 1: ourselves at a service. We're designed to move, we're designed
Speaker 1: to lift. If we live a sedentary life, we actually
Speaker 1: have to deliberately move our bodies because our brains don't
Speaker 1: work properly. We don't digest food properly, we don't sleep properly.
Speaker 1: The endogenous things that can get released into my system,
Speaker 1: you must come around. I don't know if it's your thing,
Speaker 1: but the first thing that I did when I figured
Speaker 1: out that I was no longer having these two big
Speaker 1: TV jobs. Was install a sorta in my backyard because
Speaker 1: I now have this little space where I just sit
Speaker 1: and think, expose myself, to deliberately expose myself to discomfort.
Speaker 1: And then I jump into the little pond, the little
Speaker 1: cold water thing, and I can feel the endogenous opioids
Speaker 1: just get released into my body does internally, which could
Speaker 1: be a drug. And I'll sit there and I'll look
Speaker 1: at the stars and I'll think about the photons that
Speaker 1: are hitting my eyeballs left that object before humanity even existed.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I am so high right now, but naturally, naturally,
Speaker 1: and I haven't had to call anyone to buy any
Speaker 1: anything from anywhere, and I'm able to induce this state
Speaker 1: if but you can't sell that all right, and you
Speaker 1: can't market that, and you can't get the Queensland cricket
Speaker 1: team on a fishing trip in the word Sundays telling
Speaker 1: you that everything's going to be awesome if you crack
Speaker 1: a can of it all right, which is what I believed.
Speaker 1: Marketing did a lot of jobs, you know, and having
Speaker 1: that knowledge is amazing, and certainly like when I'm in
Speaker 1: that and saut and I'm an idiot, you know, so
Speaker 1: I push it. I know, you know, I do a
Speaker 1: Paris like Paris was it called polyvagel breathing, which is
Speaker 1: five in ten out ye simulates your vagus nerve, which
Speaker 1: is how you can induce a calming sometimes breathing. So
Speaker 1: it hurts like fuck right, I mean there, it's like
Speaker 1: really uncomfortable, but I know by count two of the
Speaker 1: X I'll be fine. And I'm good till about count
Speaker 1: seven of the xhale and then it starts to be
Speaker 1: really uncomfortable again. But then I know it's cool. Man,
Speaker 1: I only got like eight more counts and I'll be
Speaker 1: okay again. And just training myself to be with that
Speaker 1: is comfort. It never gets easy. But what it does
Speaker 1: is that things that used to shit me just don't
Speaker 1: shit me the most anymore. And it's extraordinary. And it's
Speaker 1: all I'm talking about, is like I'm building my resilience
Speaker 1: and keeping my resilience, and I think it's so important
Speaker 1: as we get older, we have to very deliberately do it.
Speaker 1: My mum was a doctor until the day she saw
Speaker 1: her own X ray and went, yeah, I got about
Speaker 1: six months with the cancer diagnosed, so she diagnosed herself
Speaker 1: looking at her own X ray. She would always say,
Speaker 1: over the age of forty, make your body your hobby,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. No model train sets, you know, golf, tennis,
Speaker 1: fucking gardening, whatever, you make your body your hobby. You've
Speaker 1: got to make the physical movement at part of your day.
Speaker 1: Commute under your own power when you can. We are
Speaker 1: designed to move, we're designed to lift. And as a
Speaker 1: certain point in life, as you know, if you don't
Speaker 1: look after it like you're probably the fittest of in
Speaker 1: a good way. I dare say you've got the genes.
Speaker 1: Bear in mind my grandfather, who was a doctor as
Speaker 1: well in Adelaide, got off the boat from Lithuania. He
Speaker 1: was like, I only see old Greek guys. I don't
Speaker 1: see any old Irish guys or Poms or anyone. I
Speaker 1: only see old Greek guys. What is it this? And
Speaker 1: he so there's my Lithuanian grandfather eating feta jeese, and like,
Speaker 1: you don't discovery like this is in the fifties. Man,
Speaker 1: he kind of knew something was up because that was
Speaker 1: the only old men that he saw. So there's something
Speaker 1: in it.
Speaker 2: Now I agree with that, but unfortunately, not unfortunate. But
Speaker 2: my mum's Irish, so my dad's greet my mother's Irish.
Speaker 2: But I but I guess hopefully I get other things
Speaker 2: from from my mother's.
Speaker 1: But by this it's most it's diet, man, It's like anything.
Speaker 2: And it's funny you should say, because it's mental health
Speaker 2: is a part of our overall health regime, so we
Speaker 2: tend to forget about it. But but for me, if
Speaker 2: I do physical health, my mental health will follow or
Speaker 2: can follow, as long as I'm not doing anything. You
Speaker 2: use word endogenous before. I think the exogenouscy is really
Speaker 2: important for me. It's about what I put in my body.
Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah, And because I can do the rest myself.
Speaker 2: If I put just the basics in, the good stuff in,
Speaker 2: I don't need to have anything exotic coming in. I
Speaker 2: don't really need to have booze. I don't drink much anymore.
Speaker 2: I definitely don't have any drugs. I try to resist
Speaker 2: medications as much as I can, but obviously that you
Speaker 2: have to take some medications from time time because if
Speaker 2: you get ill, but just relying on your own body
Speaker 2: to produce what it is you need, we're so fucking efficient.
Speaker 1: It's ridiculous. As long as we fuel ourselves properly, you've
Speaker 1: got to. You've got to, and on medications. I'm on
Speaker 1: meds now. I have the life I have because very
Speaker 1: very clever psychiatrists have come to help me. And that's
Speaker 1: the only like the life I have of the career
Speaker 1: I have. The relationships I have are because of the
Speaker 1: meds my mind. But the meds don't do the job
Speaker 1: all right. As a cyclist, anyone would be familiar with
Speaker 1: the great Lance Armstrong battles up the alp Do Wars.
Speaker 1: You see any photos of him, and they learn their
Speaker 1: documentaries later on. You know that everyone is on the gear,
Speaker 1: But you see photo of Lance paddling up the alp
Speaker 1: Do wears. He's working his fucking balls off, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: sure he's got everything running through his veins, but you
Speaker 1: still got to work hard to get the gold jersey. Right. Similarly,
Speaker 1: you can take the meds, but the meds don't make
Speaker 1: it better. The meds just to make it easier to
Speaker 1: do the actual work. So last night I'm there with
Speaker 1: my big ring bound book. I'm doing all my writing.
Speaker 1: I'm doing. There's certain processes that I do that involve
Speaker 1: writing down. I do it in the morning when I
Speaker 1: have a couple of coffee before everyone wakes up. The
Speaker 1: stuff that happens every single day. So what are you
Speaker 1: doing now? You got your podcast? What's your podcast called? Oh?
Speaker 1: My podcast is called better than Yesterday? Because how many
Speaker 1: times a week, three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and
Speaker 1: Fridays three times a week, three times a week. I
Speaker 1: can't make this podcast in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: Wow, you're one of the early starters. I was late,
Speaker 2: but in terms of Australia, there's not too many podcasts thirteen.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because independent digital broadcasting is is now
Speaker 1: one of my main revenue streams, and so I'm in this.
Speaker 1: I've chosen. You know, people like movie quotes because it
Speaker 1: sums things up. I think my favorite one it used
Speaker 1: to be You're going to need a bigger boat, which
Speaker 1: I do love. But it's Heiman Roth to Michael Corleoni
Speaker 1: Godfather Part two, where Roth is complaining to Corleoni about
Speaker 1: a friend of his who got whacked and Collieroni ordered
Speaker 1: the whacking and he goes. But I never complained because
Speaker 1: it was business, and this is the business we have chosen.
Speaker 1: I chose this. I chose to have spent the last
Speaker 1: thirty two years of my life getting really fucking good
Speaker 1: at doing this and to this business which is now
Speaker 1: currently experiencing extraordinary contraction and correction and transformation restructure huge.
Speaker 1: I have this very particular set of skills to quite
Speaker 1: another film. Where do I deploy them? How do I
Speaker 1: make sure that I can put myself in the value chain?
Speaker 1: And how can I make sure that I make something
Speaker 1: that is in accordance with my values? Which I did
Speaker 1: want to ask you. I believe it was the notorious
Speaker 1: Big who said, the more money you've got, the more
Speaker 1: problems you see. You don't need to work, You don't
Speaker 1: need to do what we're doing right now. Why are
Speaker 1: you sitting here selfishly?
Speaker 2: You're right, But I do need to because I'm not
Speaker 2: a very social person, and this is my social interaction.
Speaker 2: So ordinarily I would never get to meet you, perhaps,
Speaker 2: or if I did, it would have to go somewhere
Speaker 2: to meet you, which I don't like doing because I've
Speaker 2: never been good at it. So I get to sit
Speaker 2: down with Issha Ginsburg, so I can sit here with
Speaker 2: you for an hour and a bit and find out
Speaker 2: about your life.
Speaker 1: I'm socializing with you at the same time. But I'm
Speaker 1: also learning. I did notice you struggled making eye contact
Speaker 1: with me for the first five minutes.
Speaker 2: I'm not very good at I'm in fact, I'm hopeless
Speaker 2: at it, hopeless, But I do get up in stage
Speaker 2: all the time once a week and I'll perform and
Speaker 2: people can't believe it.
Speaker 1: But when I get off the stage, I can't wait
Speaker 1: to get Out've got to get out of get the
Speaker 1: fuck out of there. I've got to get out of
Speaker 1: there because I'm just no good at the other stuff.
Speaker 1: So for me, maybe I have some of these neurodivergent things.
Speaker 2: I'm not here to disclose my particular problems, but or
Speaker 2: issues are not problems issues, but who I am.
Speaker 1: But I selfishly do this because I get a great
Speaker 1: deal out of it. I had to come to this
Speaker 1: to Jim Fannon wrote a book call He's the guy
Speaker 1: that took Alex Rodrid Alex Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers
Speaker 1: to the New York Yankees. He's the guy that took
Speaker 1: a gassie to you know where you got to He said,
Speaker 1: you got to ask what is the thing that you
Speaker 1: do best? What is the thing you do better than anybody.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing you think about when you're at
Speaker 1: the stadium screaming and whatever. Whatever. He's got to be
Speaker 1: one sentence. And it took me a long time to
Speaker 1: think about that. But I have one job. My job
Speaker 1: is to make people feel less alone. That's it. Whether
Speaker 1: I do that in a podcast, on stage, screaming, take
Speaker 1: it off at a giant popcorn machine. The writing I do,
Speaker 1: writing a book, being on stage myself, doing a keynote,
Speaker 1: speaking with somebody, whatever it is, that's my job. That's
Speaker 1: the thing that I do and the thing that I
Speaker 1: would get out of bed to do if I got
Speaker 1: paid to or not. All right, So I would ask
Speaker 1: you the same question. My job is to ask people questions.
Speaker 1: That's the truth. Yeah, what's the thing that you What's
Speaker 1: the value you get out of that? It's not the
Speaker 1: value I get it. It's the value they get from answering.
Speaker 1: They've got to get something out of it.
Speaker 2: No, I like to hear people answer the questions, Yeah,
Speaker 2: what do I give you? I learned about myself or
Speaker 2: remind myself about things about myself. So this is this
Speaker 2: is therapy for me.
Speaker 1: I know a guy I don't know. I have sent
Speaker 1: that many therapists kids through primers girls, I'm sure people,
Speaker 1: and I think that's also therapy for me.
Speaker 2: When you're speaking, I'm thinking about similar events in my
Speaker 2: own life, not just you, but other people coming ony chair.
Speaker 2: And that's why I have such a diverse set of
Speaker 2: people in for straight Talk. Straight Talk started off as
Speaker 2: a thing I did because I was originally a bit bored.
Speaker 2: We're doing my other podcast, the Mentalk, and I thought
Speaker 2: I would mind talking to people, just anybody. And then
Speaker 2: I started talking to you know, adult porn stars and
Speaker 2: murderers and all sorts of things, and I thought.
Speaker 1: This is pretty good. I really enjoy it.
Speaker 2: And then it is very selfish because we all have
Speaker 2: a little bit of a character and everybody I see
Speaker 2: a little bit of my character, and every just about
Speaker 2: everyone who sits there.
Speaker 1: Not that I've ever been a porn star, but I
Speaker 1: have a little you know, well, but maybe I could
Speaker 1: have been, you know what I mean. Shit, you haven't
Speaker 1: seen a video, have you any joke?
Speaker 2: But I'm just saying I see a little bit of
Speaker 2: myself and everybody who sits in front of you, and
Speaker 2: I think it's important for you to have a look
Speaker 2: in the mirror, yeah, and find out of base.
Speaker 1: But this is the thing that I really we really
Speaker 1: believe that we talked about looking after our bodies, what
Speaker 1: we put into our bodies. If you pulled someone out
Speaker 1: of a glacier in Norway, we would be fundamentally the
Speaker 1: same physiologically as the dawn of humanity three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. We're exactly the fucking same. There's nothing different physically.
Speaker 1: We probably have access to more calories, and you know,
Speaker 1: we have antibiotics things like this, but we are the same.
Speaker 1: We are creatures that everything was evolutionary, Everything in our
Speaker 1: bodies evolutionary. We're predisposed to things that are negative because
Speaker 1: that kept us alive, which is why the new cycle
Speaker 1: was like, fucking everything's on fire. Because their business is
Speaker 1: not to tell you the news. Their businesses to keep
Speaker 1: you on their platform, to sell you ads. That's their business.
Speaker 1: Be careful. So similarly, there's a whole community aspect things
Speaker 1: that get released in our brains only when we are
Speaker 1: helping another person, moving in concert with another person moving
Speaker 1: at the same time, singing together, being with each other,
Speaker 1: helping each other do a collective thing. There are things
Speaker 1: that happen in our brains only when that happens. And
Speaker 1: more more, as we sit in the room alone looking
Speaker 1: at a screen, we are denying ourselves these things. And
Speaker 1: ultimately that leaves us as a community, as a society,
Speaker 1: far more fragile, and that's a dangerous place for us
Speaker 1: and as individuals and as individuals. But wholly, we've become
Speaker 1: very suspicious and jumpy and worried about oh, fucking brown
Speaker 1: people or whatever the fuck is lately, and we're really
Speaker 1: easy to push around and manipulate. Yeah, totally no, And
Speaker 1: they were not thinking for ourselves.
Speaker 2: And institutions or organizations or businesses or people will manipulate us, absolutely,
Speaker 2: because that's the nature of humans. If there's an opportunity
Speaker 2: to manipulate to get advantage, that's sort of nearly an
Speaker 2: evolutionary thing.
Speaker 1: The antidote to that is to deliberately try to You
Speaker 1: can do it. You can replicate the kind of conditions
Speaker 1: that we evolved in, which was a small cohort of people.
Speaker 1: If you like, think five people that you would trust
Speaker 1: to call if you couldn't make the pickup from school.
Speaker 1: All right, you need to find start with one, all right.
Speaker 1: If you've got one, you're lucky. Try to find five.
Speaker 1: All right, You've got five people in your life and
Speaker 1: relationships that take nurturing. They like pot plants, you got
Speaker 1: to you gotta keep them alive. You got those five people.
Speaker 1: Because of that, you'll create this thing around you, and
Speaker 1: your problems when you face them will not be yours
Speaker 1: alone to face that will be people get around you.
Speaker 1: And that makes that's what we're designed for. We're never
Speaker 1: designed to hold things by ourselves. So it's important that
Speaker 1: we actually actively cultivate this.
Speaker 2: And so I'm glad that you're doing this, and I
Speaker 2: am doing and I just and I try to take
Speaker 2: one or two things out out of everything I do,
Speaker 2: every show I do. And one thing I'm just going
Speaker 2: to take out of it is what you just said.
Speaker 2: It's a very it's a really good analogy. People like
Speaker 2: are like pot plants. For anyone who's used to being
Speaker 2: a gardener, which I am, and you do have to.
Speaker 2: You have to look after things otherwise they just want
Speaker 2: to grow on their own and won survive on their own.
Speaker 2: They need water, they need nutrition, they need light, they
Speaker 2: need fresh air, they need maybe to take some dust off.
Speaker 1: They need to be looked at. You need look at
Speaker 1: them and be part of it. And you're right.
Speaker 2: You can't look after fifty things in a garden. You
Speaker 2: can look after maybe three, four, five perhaps, And that's
Speaker 2: a good point. So don't beat yourself up. A lot
Speaker 2: of people beat themselves up. I don't have a big
Speaker 2: enough group. It's not possible to have a big enough
Speaker 2: proper group. You can might have hundreds of people that
Speaker 2: you know, you just talk to them, so ohahah blah blah,
Speaker 2: but they're not your pop plans.
Speaker 1: Facebook friends won't can't help you move a couch. No, no, totally.
Speaker 2: So and that's really that's a really good point that
Speaker 2: I'm going to glad you sort of you articulate that
Speaker 2: to me, and it's a very.
Speaker 1: It's my job and you're very good at it, and it's.
Speaker 2: And it goes right back to a very question to me,
Speaker 2: what do this sort of stuff? I take something out
Speaker 2: of everything, and it is therapy for me. And I
Speaker 2: don't mean it in a sense that that I have
Speaker 2: some major issue, but it is therapy for me. And
Speaker 2: I think everybody needs therapy too, And I don't think
Speaker 2: anybody needs to be you know, and we don't need to.
Speaker 2: And I also don't believe we need to be Anyone
Speaker 2: needs to tell us that we are. We fit into
Speaker 2: a certain category. We're all a bit unusual, every one
Speaker 2: of us.
Speaker 1: Therapy just another way of reflecting, as we take us
Speaker 1: back to the first part of our conversation is therapy
Speaker 1: just reflecting our choices. We may not realize that we've
Speaker 1: been making, or choices we haven't been making. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they're going, maybe I could choose something else correct, And
Speaker 1: if we do it enough times and that becomes the
Speaker 1: automatic that then we think about it as much as
Speaker 1: we we won't out of stick shifts anymore. But there
Speaker 1: was a time, the very first time you reverse down
Speaker 1: a driveway and a stick shift, you're like, everyone fucking
Speaker 1: shut up. You know, you couldn't do anything. But then
Speaker 1: you know, cut to you a year later. You don't
Speaker 1: eat a sandwich, putting the radio on toile or someone,
Speaker 1: you know, whatever, those automatic behaviors we may not realize
Speaker 1: if they're serving us or not. Especially we do it
Speaker 1: enough and enough and enough, and when we reflect through
Speaker 1: a conversation, we go hang on a second or about
Speaker 1: that maybe I might try something else.
Speaker 2: And I think that's why podcasts. What you do, what
Speaker 2: I do, and a lot of other people do too.
Speaker 2: Podcasts is so important because what we see on unfortunately
Speaker 2: here on radio, and I love radio, I still listen,
Speaker 2: but we're here on radio, it's like.
Speaker 1: Four minute sections, three minute sections, and there's an ad.
Speaker 2: Televisions are the same, it's forty two minutes of TV,
Speaker 2: but it's all sort of overproduced.
Speaker 1: In my view.
Speaker 2: Podcasts are great because people are an opportunit to listen
Speaker 2: to a whole conversation, our whole conversation we've had today,
Speaker 2: and get a full context and take out of it
Speaker 2: what they think is important for themselves.
Speaker 1: That's what podcasting is.
Speaker 2: I think will emerge as the number one media such
Speaker 2: an intimate form of broadcast, and particularly particularly for men,
Speaker 2: because men don't talk face to face.
Speaker 1: This is uncommon. Yeah, don't talk face to face. Men
Speaker 1: talk shoulder to shoulder. Yeah all right, and men's speech
Speaker 1: centers only really work properly when they're moving, so men
Speaker 1: tend to listen Like I, I don't listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: I don't sit there in the room by myself listen
Speaker 1: to a podcast. Oh listen to podcast while I'm doing something? Yeah,
Speaker 1: me too. All right, you've got emotion is involved, particularly
Speaker 1: with men, particularly with the kind of stuff that I
Speaker 1: talk about on my show. It's people are doing stuff.
Speaker 1: I listen to the nerdiest chit when I'm at the gym,
Speaker 1: be soodical. I mean, I love it. I love all
Speaker 1: the sciencey stuff you know, like about the brain. I
Speaker 1: just love it.
Speaker 2: And it's like it's like feeding myself, like nutrition for me,
Speaker 2: Like I have a massive thirst for it. And I
Speaker 2: wanted to myself, what the fuck was I doing before
Speaker 2: podcasts came up? I mean, like seriously, what was I doing?
Speaker 1: And I don't know? And life is a lot more
Speaker 1: simple then because there wasn't many marble phones around. Everything
Speaker 1: was much different.
Speaker 2: But today I don't know what I would do if
Speaker 2: I didn't have the opportunity to listen to podcasts, given
Speaker 2: all the other shit that's going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, coming at us, left, right and center. I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed meeting. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 2: And I want to say, probably the most important thing
Speaker 2: from my point of view is your fucking dead set honesty.
Speaker 2: You don't care, you just say what you're real.
Speaker 1: Well, we have no time to be anything but an
Speaker 1: authentic Yeah, but I if you're going to die. I'm
Speaker 1: going to die. The producer in the corner is going
Speaker 1: to die. My kids are going to die. Everyone's going
Speaker 1: to die, all right. There is a there is a
Speaker 1: clock somewhere, Ticken that has the exact amount of hours
Speaker 1: I've rode a motorbike here. I might not even make
Speaker 1: it out of here, all right, I'm going to make
Speaker 1: it home. I try as much as I can to
Speaker 1: reflect upon my own death, all right. And I never
Speaker 1: want to leave a room with people wondering how I
Speaker 1: felt about But not in a morose way. No, No.
Speaker 1: Reflecting around death is so important because it helps us
Speaker 1: from making fear based decisions. It's like if this was
Speaker 1: a you know it, but there'll be a and you've
Speaker 1: done it with your big kids, but you don't know
Speaker 1: what happens. There's a last time you put them down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're never going to hold them again. There's the last
Speaker 1: time when they're in bed with you. He's asleep, striking
Speaker 1: my spiky beard like this it's days and he'd be like,
Speaker 1: you know, you got to cherish every moment like it's
Speaker 1: the last time you do it. Otherwise, you know, what
Speaker 1: are we what are we living for? Fucking brilliant. Thanks Josh,
Speaker 1: it's true man. Thank you m