Speaker 1: Hi, my boris and this is straight talk. Andrew Hamilton, Well,
Speaker 1: straight tour mate Mark. Hello, It's good to be here,
Speaker 1: so tell me what the fuck happened?
Speaker 2: Good question, please search won't oh fuck?
Speaker 3: Next thing, you know, the raptor scadn is smashing through
Speaker 3: my door with a battering ram. I ran upstairs and
Speaker 3: started flushing drugs.
Speaker 2: Down the toilet.
Speaker 3: But this raptor scored guy like tackle me to the ground.
Speaker 3: He had like his knee in the back of my
Speaker 3: thigh and he just goes, stay down in fat cunt.
Speaker 3: You've got a twenty cock. I think I needed to
Speaker 3: have the fall to really appreciate everything. I think I
Speaker 3: needed that setback. I'm much happier now living with my
Speaker 3: parents and doing stand up comedy than I ever was
Speaker 3: making money as a drug dealer.
Speaker 1: Andrew Hamilton, Well, straight tour.
Speaker 3: Mate, Mark, Hello, it's good to be here.
Speaker 1: You know what this was really weird. One of the
Speaker 1: reason he hear is my younger son dms me on
Speaker 1: believe the dms me not he doesn't send me missing
Speaker 1: was the dms me on my Instagram account from his
Speaker 1: Instagram account little clips of You, and this has a
Speaker 1: bit some months ago and I just went, you know,
Speaker 1: did you get them thumbs up? And something goes, oh, Dad,
Speaker 1: you don't understand the dear. You know you don't get it. Dear,
Speaker 1: you don't you don't understand it. The piss take dud
Speaker 1: because I know you were And this.
Speaker 2: Is my fake business podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And he said, Dad, it's a piss take he like
Speaker 1: he was my son was saying the piss is he
Speaker 1: thirty two? He was saying the piss out of me.
Speaker 1: He's saying, yeah, silly, old fuck.
Speaker 3: This is what you sound like.
Speaker 1: You don't understand this ship. This is you Dad, like
Speaker 1: you read it. And anyway, and welcome, welcome, well, thanks,
Speaker 1: And what's the T shirt?
Speaker 3: Mate? Confit con Fit. Yes, my my mate Joe Kwan
Speaker 3: owns a gym in Paramouna that's run all by x
Speaker 3: cons so stands for Convict Fitness yep. But I kind
Speaker 3: of I got connected with Joe from doing a previous
Speaker 3: podcast I had where I was just trying to interview
Speaker 3: people who had similar stories to me where they'd gone
Speaker 3: through ship and then turned their life around. And so yeah,
Speaker 3: Joe now runs CONFIT in Paramatta and they also have
Speaker 3: a social enterprise called Confit Pathways where they go into
Speaker 3: Sydney or New South Wales juvenile detention centers and help
Speaker 3: guys that are locked up to turn their lives around
Speaker 3: through through fitness or they get help them to get
Speaker 3: university scholarships. It's awesome, but that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: very cool. And so they're training the hell out of
Speaker 3: me at the moment. And so I go in there
Speaker 3: every day and I've got a whole bunch of ex
Speaker 3: cons yelling at me.
Speaker 1: So I want to go back a little bit. You
Speaker 1: acquit yourself quite well when you speak, and part of
Speaker 1: your gig now you maken do itut of being the
Speaker 1: way you speak. And we'll talk about this. You know,
Speaker 1: your tour coming up. I want to talk about your
Speaker 1: book coming up and your podcast, et cetera. But if
Speaker 1: I just you know, I know lots of ex cons
Speaker 1: in my life. Fortunately for me, I do know them,
Speaker 1: I say as that fortunate thing. I'm lucky to know
Speaker 1: these individuals. But not many of them have quit themselves
Speaker 1: very well, like wonder One, and a lot of them
Speaker 1: have come shit environments, most of them, in fact, dreadful environments.
Speaker 1: Turn me back to who Andrew Hamilton was when he
Speaker 1: was at school. Where'd you go to school? Where'd you live?
Speaker 1: Grew up Sydney, Melbourrisine a step in Sydney.
Speaker 3: I grew up in Hornsby and I had a very
Speaker 3: happy childhood. I was one of five kids. I went
Speaker 3: to a private school. I went to Riverview in Wow
Speaker 3: Standy Nation's College.
Speaker 1: So you're you're a Jesuit boy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jesuit boy.
Speaker 3: My dad was actually a Jesuit scholastic for like almost
Speaker 3: a decade. He was a student priest before he became
Speaker 3: a father. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Most by the way, most people, Andrew don't realize that
Speaker 1: a Jesuit scholar is a thing. It's they're actually quite
Speaker 1: scholarly in lots of different things, not just theology, but
Speaker 1: quite scholarly across the board.
Speaker 3: Right, And you have to do it for like over
Speaker 3: a decade to become a Jesuit priest. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 3: I think just for it to become just a standard
Speaker 3: Catholic priestss like three or four years maybe, But for
Speaker 3: a Jesuit it's like it's like twelve thirteen years or
Speaker 3: something crazy like that.
Speaker 1: And how old are you now?
Speaker 3: Thirty eight eight?
Speaker 1: So were you at rev Whenma Costello was there. Father Costello, No, okay,
Speaker 1: he's a friend of mine. He was the resident precept
Speaker 1: for a long time. He was a good friend of
Speaker 1: mine actually. And the intelligence that came from this dude
Speaker 1: was crazy. What he knew about shit he knew about
Speaker 1: was amazing. And his influence was mental like he's influence
Speaker 1: in politics, his influence in business he had. They're very
Speaker 1: good at infiltrating processes. So you're a kid nor sure,
Speaker 1: Mum and dad great family, jesuit education. You left year twelve,
Speaker 1: I guess leave you twelve and.
Speaker 3: Then wasn't four?
Speaker 1: What did you do?
Speaker 3: Then? I didn't really know what I wanted to do
Speaker 3: with my life. I went and just started studying an
Speaker 3: arts degree at Sydney UNI and just drinking a lot,
Speaker 3: doing a lot of drugs with my mates. And I
Speaker 3: was pretty aimless. And then I I did that for
Speaker 3: a year or two, getting very average grades. And then
Speaker 3: I was getting into a bit of trouble in Sydney.
Speaker 3: I was getting into many fights at pubs, and so
Speaker 3: I decided I needed to change my environment and I
Speaker 3: went to Charles Stitt University in Bathist to just have
Speaker 3: a get away, Yeah, just to have a scene change.
Speaker 3: And so I just randomly scrolled through all the degrees
Speaker 3: they had on their website and just picked a random one,
Speaker 3: and it happened to be I think, just by sheer
Speaker 3: luck that it was one that I turned out to
Speaker 3: be very interested in and was good at, which was
Speaker 3: public relations.
Speaker 1: Like as and comm's communications. Yes, yeah, yeah, so likes
Speaker 1: a degree in marketing or communications.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they had there. I enrolled there, went there,
Speaker 3: lived on campus for three years and had a great
Speaker 3: time there in Bathist. It's amazing, and I mean it
Speaker 3: was like whenever you see college movies in America. It
Speaker 3: was like that you living on campus with guys and
Speaker 3: girls in the same dorms together, and you're just drinking
Speaker 3: and partying and trying to fit in some study.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you probably don't get it up to as
Speaker 1: much mischief as you if you're here in Sydney. It
Speaker 1: was intense.
Speaker 3: It was different. There was a lot of drinking and
Speaker 3: sex and drugs. It wasn't I wasn't getting into fights
Speaker 3: here as much so it was. It was it was
Speaker 3: a much more acceptable kind of.
Speaker 1: Trust benign, Yeah, a bit more benign. Yeah, So you
Speaker 1: a degree then what happens what job?
Speaker 3: Well, I I got close to graduating. I think I
Speaker 3: only had two subjects to go, didn't leave. My lecturer
Speaker 3: was being asked by employers because they would recommend anyone
Speaker 3: that they think a pretty.
Speaker 1: Like reternships and stuff like that exactly.
Speaker 3: So I got recommended for a job, I went and
Speaker 3: did the job, and if you got the job, and
Speaker 3: so I was like, well, I don't need the fucking
Speaker 3: degree anymore.
Speaker 1: So I got the job.
Speaker 3: So I just a job doing what working in public
Speaker 3: relations back back here in back in Sydney.
Speaker 1: So just quickly defined to us what public relations means,
Speaker 1: like you're talking about corporate relations, or you're talking about publicity,
Speaker 1: blisses st or brand push it, what is it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So I was working mainly for corporates in helping them
Speaker 3: with their media relations, either to help market whatever the
Speaker 3: main stories that they wanted to push out in a
Speaker 3: lot of traditional media. And then as I continued to
Speaker 3: progress in public relations, I started doing more crisis management
Speaker 3: as well. So if companies fuck up, I'd be telling them,
Speaker 3: you know, advising them what the messaging should be and
Speaker 3: how to keep us out of the paper. That kind
Speaker 3: of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so sometimes putting you into the paper if you've
Speaker 1: got a good story to tell, get now it's the
Speaker 1: papers if the paper's telling bad story about me, which
Speaker 1: which is pretty much the PR mantra exactly. And good
Speaker 1: at that.
Speaker 2: I was very good at that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so how long? How long did you do that? For?
Speaker 3: About ten years?
Speaker 1: Well, that's probably most of your life. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: just put to take you into your thirties. Yeah, so a.
Speaker 2: Lot of my life.
Speaker 3: And so I worked at a small agency and then
Speaker 3: got a gig at the world's biggest PR agency and
Speaker 3: I was an account director there and I ended up
Speaker 3: getting nominated for Best I was the thirty Under thirty
Speaker 3: Awards when I was twenty seven.
Speaker 2: For B and T.
Speaker 3: Thirty means what it's the B and T magazine have
Speaker 3: like a list of people in marketing and PR and
Speaker 3: advertising that are the high achievements that are under thirty.
Speaker 3: And so I got I won that in the PR
Speaker 3: category when I was twenty seven.
Speaker 1: Wow. So I was telling me what the fuck happened?
Speaker 2: Good question, I don't know, man.
Speaker 3: At the same time, I was just a degenerate alcoholic
Speaker 3: and gambling addict, and I was just a mess and
Speaker 3: I think I.
Speaker 2: Got into degenerate.
Speaker 3: Really, I was just a mess man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was just I was like after hours obviously.
Speaker 2: A chronic gambler.
Speaker 3: Well, I was after hours until the last few years
Speaker 3: when I just became a massive coke head all day,
Speaker 3: every day.
Speaker 1: The wheels kind of we're pe we're talking about now.
Speaker 2: So I mean I was. I was.
Speaker 3: My gambling problem started when I was about eighteen, like
Speaker 3: Pokey's bad, and then as I got older, I just
Speaker 3: never had any money. Anything that I had would just
Speaker 3: slip through my hands very quickly. And so by the
Speaker 3: time I was at UNI, I was living on campus
Speaker 3: and I had very little money. And I ended up
Speaker 3: going to Thailand with a bunch of mates and trying
Speaker 3: magic mushrooms and we fell in love with them. And
Speaker 3: so when I came home, I told my mate as
Speaker 3: a psychedelics, Yes, psychedelic magic mushrooms, and I had such
Speaker 3: an amazing time on them, and it was just such
Speaker 3: just like world changing and changed my perspective.
Speaker 1: Did you do it? Did you do it? Did you
Speaker 1: do it for fun or recreation or did you do
Speaker 1: it for securitive reasons?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: For fun recreation?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, So we were partying. We were at a
Speaker 3: full moon party and we were the night. We were
Speaker 3: there the night before a fir moon party in Thailand.
Speaker 3: It's on one of the islands Copenyang. They had a
Speaker 3: place called Mushroom Mountain.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you can get these magic mushroom shakes, and
Speaker 3: so we had those and they were really strong the
Speaker 3: night before the I think they weakened them on the
Speaker 3: night of the full moon party because there's just too
Speaker 3: many people. I can't handle that many people tripping out hard.
Speaker 3: So we had it the night before and fuck me,
Speaker 3: it was just like flowers bursting out of my eyes
Speaker 3: and just it was just this kaleidoscope in my head
Speaker 3: and I was like, this is amazing. And so we
Speaker 3: sat there on the beach as a sun rose just
Speaker 3: coming down from these mushrooms, and I was just like,
Speaker 3: there's more to life that we know about.
Speaker 2: And so I had this kind of life changing experience.
Speaker 3: And I came home and told my mate how good
Speaker 3: they were, and he started researching how to grow them,
Speaker 3: and next thing you know, we had different strains of
Speaker 3: mushrooms that I would take to UNI and give to
Speaker 3: my friends, and suddenly they became very popular and i'd
Speaker 3: start selling them to friends of friends. There's a little
Speaker 3: bit of side of Baptist in Bathist at first. But
Speaker 3: then I finished UNI pretty soon after, so then I
Speaker 3: was back in Sydney working as a junior PR executive
Speaker 3: and then just selling a few mushrooms here and there
Speaker 3: to friends and friends of friends, which helped me to
Speaker 3: cover rent or to get me out of the hole
Speaker 3: whenever i'd like piss it all away gambling, and so
Speaker 3: that helped me to justify if I think in my
Speaker 3: head what I was doing, because I was like, gambling
Speaker 3: is legal and it was destroying me, and mushrooms are illegal,
Speaker 3: but they seem to be such a positive thing for
Speaker 3: me and my friends that I was like, the laws
Speaker 3: don't make sense, so why would I obey them.
Speaker 1: That's a funny thing that when people do that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff, that sort of self justification for their own degradation,
Speaker 1: Like you know, like you fuck yourself up and but
Speaker 1: if you thought about I'm fucking myself up here, maybe
Speaker 1: that's the first step. It's nothing to do with how
Speaker 1: how you get there. That's that's all bullshit, Like I'm fucked,
Speaker 1: I'm gambling, I'm physically unwell, I'm sure I might add
Speaker 1: one or to the troops are good, but like I'm
Speaker 1: tripping all the time, like it's too much, but I'll
Speaker 1: make but I'm actually go back and I say, yeah,
Speaker 1: but as someone else's fault exactly.
Speaker 3: Nobody likes to have accountability, Mark, Yeah, but it was
Speaker 3: it was much easier to to just go fuck, the
Speaker 3: rules suck. I'm going to make my own rules. So
Speaker 3: to have a really hard look in the mirror.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because the end and by the way, the rules
Speaker 1: do suck, and and and sometimes the logic is, let
Speaker 1: I get the logic one hundred percent, but I will
Speaker 1: ltimately you're responsible for yourself totally. And what was really
Speaker 1: important is to be healthy, yes, and to have consciousness. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I get it, Mike Tyson stuff talking about it, you know,
Speaker 1: like I get it where the psychedelics actually can help you,
Speaker 1: and every now and there might be worth thing to do.
Speaker 1: I get it. But doing all the fucking time and
Speaker 1: get another shit on other shit and then all the
Speaker 1: other stuff that goes, all the other degenerous shit that
Speaker 1: goes with it. If I can gambling it, the whole
Speaker 1: thing is a big cycle, and you just come out
Speaker 1: rung out like a piece of shit. Yes, and you
Speaker 1: look yourself's a point out and justifying how shy the
Speaker 1: rules are. You're still a piece of shit. You're ultimate
Speaker 1: victim exactly.
Speaker 3: And I think a lot of that came down to
Speaker 3: it's taken me many years to realize is I kept
Speaker 3: gambling because I needed.
Speaker 2: Just a distraction from my own life.
Speaker 3: I needed an escape.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny that would you call avoidance?
Speaker 2: Absolutely?
Speaker 3: Yeah. I didn't want to sit down and think about
Speaker 3: why I felt so empty inside. And the reality was
Speaker 3: because I was living a life for that purpose. Even
Speaker 3: though I was good at public relations and I was
Speaker 3: doing that for a job, I didn't really want to
Speaker 3: do it. And I had all these things in my
Speaker 3: life that I dreamt of doing and I wasn't doing
Speaker 3: anything of any of them. And so I think instead
Speaker 3: of facing that, I was just trying to escape all
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 1: That's a really good thing to say that, that's that's
Speaker 1: a good thing like identifying that. Then I didn't have
Speaker 1: a real purpose that I could embrace because it's not
Speaker 1: like you had a shit family and you know, Mum
Speaker 1: and Dad was still there, and it's not like you
Speaker 1: maybe you did, but perhaps you're not sort ofmmunicating to
Speaker 1: media stuff at some sort of post traumatic stress disorder,
Speaker 1: then did you were just at that up? So it
Speaker 1: was just about purpose.
Speaker 2: Exactly right.
Speaker 3: I think I came from so much privilege and I
Speaker 3: could have done anything, and I chose to do nothing,
Speaker 3: and so that kind of ate away at me.
Speaker 1: It's like a guilt, Yeah, a bit of a guilt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I think it was just this
Speaker 3: such waste of potential and I didn't want to think about.
Speaker 1: It, you know, Like, I mean, I know it's a
Speaker 1: little bit heavy, but like and you know, you are
Speaker 1: a comedian, but but a lot by the way, a
Speaker 1: lot of comedians actually sort of have this as part
Speaker 1: of their life, the heavy shit.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: So we offer joke where you're chatting to other comedians
Speaker 3: that it's anyone who's well adjusted typically doesn't go well
Speaker 3: at comedy. It's people that have got really fucked up
Speaker 3: shit going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Certainly my experience to the commedians because when I
Speaker 1: did The Apprentice Celebrity Prince, every series we had a
Speaker 1: comedian on there, and it was quite interesting to see
Speaker 1: the actually if you actually said and don't have a
Speaker 1: conversation like this. Generally speaking, there was some shit that
Speaker 1: happened in their life, or there was something they were
Speaker 1: very unhappy about in their life, but they're fucking good comedians,
Speaker 1: like ridiculously good comedians. I love the fact that you've
Speaker 1: identified this purposing and you know, everyone talks about you know,
Speaker 1: they have books out on finding My Why and all
Speaker 1: this sort of shit. But having a real purpose on
Speaker 1: this planet for a thoughtful person, it's pretty fucking important.
Speaker 3: I think it's dangerous to live without it. My experience
Speaker 3: is if you're living without purpose, without a reason to
Speaker 3: get up in the morning, then you start to feel
Speaker 3: hollow inside and then you start to feel that emptiness
Speaker 3: with anything, and a lot of the time that can
Speaker 3: be pretty bad stuff.
Speaker 1: And by the way, we judge ourselves pretty hard to like,
Speaker 1: did you. I mean, by the way, I'm not someone
Speaker 1: who's judging it, because I mean, I'm fairly old, but
Speaker 1: I have been through the same stuff. Okay, maybe not
Speaker 1: as hectic as you did, perhaps as hectic as you
Speaker 1: did too, totally different period in the eighties and it
Speaker 1: was a different world those days. But you know, there
Speaker 1: was some stuff in my life and I know, I
Speaker 1: think anyway, because I come from a really good mum
Speaker 1: and dad, great brother and sister, great big family. You know, man,
Speaker 1: I'd ever going from a university, degrees, fucking good income, everything.
Speaker 1: But like equally, I was trying to I was avoiding
Speaker 1: confronting stuff, and I was and my avoids process was
Speaker 1: actually substituting things to makes me get in a point
Speaker 1: where I was not unconscious, but not conscious no longer
Speaker 1: being forced to consciously think about things. Yes, so sort
Speaker 1: of pretty much numbing yourself.
Speaker 3: I was doing that for over a decade. I think
Speaker 3: that I was just escaping into alcohol, drugs and gambling
Speaker 3: and I can't And that was both.
Speaker 2: That was for anything.
Speaker 3: I would escape if I had a good reason, if
Speaker 3: I was happy, celebrate drugs, gambling, alcohol, if I was sad,
Speaker 3: escape drugs and gams.
Speaker 1: Did you get decided with it?
Speaker 3: Not really With gambling, it was no, I didn't.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 1: The drugs are like you're going to have with your
Speaker 1: mates and there's a gang and tonight we're going to
Speaker 1: get on it.
Speaker 3: I think, not so much by the drugs, but just
Speaker 3: as the social aspect of it was certainly something. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there was a time I left where I couldn't have
Speaker 3: four beers without having a mental trigger. Okay, it's time to.
Speaker 1: Do cocaine and have another forty vodkas. Yeah, because beers
Speaker 1: are work atting more, get onto something else.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 1: I'm getting too drunk. I better get on the gear.
Speaker 1: Sober up, sober and by the way, now I feel
Speaker 1: so we're going to get on into the drink.
Speaker 2: Click. Still a little Holy shit, it's Thursday.
Speaker 3: It you'd be going for four days.
Speaker 1: How the fuck do we think that way?
Speaker 3: I don't know. Yeah, when I think back, it just
Speaker 3: how fucked up I was. Like I would often go
Speaker 3: four or five days without sleep, just just sort of
Speaker 3: never ending drinking and drug cycle. And yeah, it's just
Speaker 3: what a waste of my brain cells, but also just
Speaker 3: my life because now I do so much fun shit
Speaker 3: every day and I'm just I can't look back.
Speaker 2: Drug free, drug free.
Speaker 3: I drink alcohol, but drug.
Speaker 1: Free, be more moderate as a drinker.
Speaker 3: Yeah, very much. So. Yeah, I don't really drink spirits.
Speaker 3: It's just a couple of years at gigs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so okay, So tell me about the pizza business.
Speaker 3: So I was selling drugs for many, many years, and
Speaker 3: that went from me just selling magic mushrooms to then that,
Speaker 3: and that was a small business at the start, but
Speaker 3: every year it got bigger and bigger, more people heard
Speaker 3: about it, and mushrooms became more mainstream. There was a
Speaker 3: time where the fuck were you growing? From you la
Speaker 3: to say, my mate was growing them in his house,
Speaker 3: and that I started as just like one little container
Speaker 3: to by the end it was like a whole house.
Speaker 3: I was like, you know, a pretty big operation. And
Speaker 3: we were growing like kilos and kilos of it every week.
Speaker 3: And what I was we were doing was dehydrating the mushrooms,
Speaker 3: getting all the moisture out of them, then blending up,
Speaker 3: blending it up into a powder and putting them into
Speaker 3: one grand capsules because I found that that was just
Speaker 3: an easier way for me to sell them. But also
Speaker 3: the taste was average, so it was just an easier
Speaker 3: way just to to digest them like dirt.
Speaker 2: Exactly, right, I mean, yeah, if you just follow the
Speaker 2: gelatin capsule, then your.
Speaker 3: Body yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: But so that was a business.
Speaker 3: So that was a business that grew and grew and grew,
Speaker 3: and there was a time where it was only busy
Speaker 3: during like summer and people going on like camping trips,
Speaker 3: and then I'd have this huge spike around the vivid
Speaker 3: Light festival. Yeah, when everyone's tripping out going to see
Speaker 3: the lights. But then over the course of many, many years,
Speaker 3: that just became a huge business. And so then I
Speaker 3: expanded into MDMA and acid and ketamine and cocaine. Because
Speaker 3: everyone would always come and ask me because I'm going
Speaker 3: to a music festival or something. They'd be like, what
Speaker 3: else you got? So in the end I started catering
Speaker 3: to all of that, just as a one stop shop,
Speaker 3: which people found to be quite convenient. And so by
Speaker 3: the time COVID came around and I'd stopped gambling, I
Speaker 3: had a partner, and I would got onto my gambling,
Speaker 3: and so the money started to pile up, and I
Speaker 3: was like, I need to do. I need something to
Speaker 3: do with this, and cash cash and so.
Speaker 1: Hard to spend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hard to spend. I mean I tried my best mark.
Speaker 3: I was putting about eight grand of coke up my
Speaker 3: nose a week, and I was spending a fortune on
Speaker 3: eating out at rest.
Speaker 1: What period twenties, early twenties, This is.
Speaker 3: No, this is recently. This would have been like when
Speaker 3: I was thirty five.
Speaker 1: So what's a grammar? Coke course, Now gramdma.
Speaker 3: Coke is like three hundred bucks, and that's not even
Speaker 3: a gramd. That's like point seven of actual coke.
Speaker 1: So three hundred bucks, set's three grams of a thousands of
Speaker 1: twenty four twenty four grams a week.
Speaker 3: Well I was I'm talking like wholesale what it cost
Speaker 3: to me. So I was doing about twenty eight grams
Speaker 3: of coke a week. Fuck now, yeah, I wasn't fucking about.
Speaker 1: So you would have been completely not incoherent, but you
Speaker 1: would have been completely not in reality. Yeah, the whole
Speaker 1: world's fine, exactly, nothing's gonna happen, no, exactly. I think
Speaker 1: I thought I was too smart, and I thought I
Speaker 1: was just too low key to ever get caught. And
Speaker 1: so I was just selling drugs out of my house
Speaker 1: in Surrey Hills, out of a townhouse. But it was
Speaker 1: like such a big house and it was on a
Speaker 1: busy street that I thought people were never going to
Speaker 1: notice people just coming to knock on my door every
Speaker 1: now and then.
Speaker 3: And I had a business which was just people that
Speaker 3: had to be referred by someone, so I didn't have
Speaker 3: any like weirdos scratching at the door at three am.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, the money started to pile up and
Speaker 3: I needed something to do with it. And so I
Speaker 3: had ordered so many pizzas during cover, and I didn't
Speaker 3: like any of them. I was like, I'm going to
Speaker 3: open my own pizza restaurant. And so I just contacted
Speaker 3: made of mine, who's a share and told him my idea,
Speaker 3: and then we opened up a pizza bar and King's Cross.
Speaker 2: It was called called Brooklyn Crispy.
Speaker 3: Which was selling like American style thing and crispy pizzas.
Speaker 3: And I had two dogs that my girl my fiance
Speaker 3: was getting poppuccinos for, like those like dog yeah Capital coppuccinos,
Speaker 3: and so I was like, well, we should do something
Speaker 3: for dogs. So we started selling dog pizzas, which was
Speaker 3: like a nutationally approved pizzas for dogs. And all the
Speaker 3: gays of Pott's Point have dogs instead of kids, so
Speaker 3: they'd spend fifty dollars on a human menu and one
Speaker 3: hundred dollars of the dog pizza.
Speaker 1: Men, it was crazy good business. They're actually good business
Speaker 1: decisions though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I had good ideas.
Speaker 3: It was just a shame that, yeah, it all kind
Speaker 3: of fell apart. But so what happened?
Speaker 1: Were you pushing the cash through the joint. That not
Speaker 1: really the lord of the money it was.
Speaker 3: It was just to try and make the business a
Speaker 3: successful business. I wasn't trying to clean the drug money
Speaker 3: through it. But and what I realized was just how
Speaker 3: much fucking money it costs to get a restaurant off
Speaker 3: the ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and successfully you need to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you need to run at a loss for quite
Speaker 3: a long time I think before. That's why I think
Speaker 3: most people that are running restaurants must be drug dealers
Speaker 3: or crims, because I don't know, you have to have
Speaker 3: a big financial runway just to get it to be.
Speaker 1: That's a very interesting point too, by the way, Like
Speaker 1: how do they fund these things? Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: people borrow money against the house or the parents' house,
Speaker 1: or the gun, borrow money from the bank.
Speaker 3: But you need a lot. I think you need to
Speaker 3: be running at a loss for like at least two years
Speaker 3: before you start to really become.
Speaker 1: Most small businesses today don't matter what it is, even
Speaker 1: it's not a restaurant, like a lot of probably eighty
Speaker 1: months to two years is about the period it takes
Speaker 1: to start to break even even yea. So you run it,
Speaker 1: you run a piece of joint.
Speaker 3: I've had plenty of people tell me that, like trying
Speaker 3: to have a buddy lady operation through a restaurant was
Speaker 3: a bad idea. I should have had either a hair
Speaker 3: salon and you just pour shampoo condition down the drain
Speaker 3: and so you've done, you know, two two thousand wash
Speaker 3: and dryers today, or maybe like a doggy daycare. Yeah,
Speaker 3: just so, yeah, we dogs out one hundred dogs today
Speaker 3: would have been a much cheaper operation than trying to
Speaker 3: run a fucking restaurant.
Speaker 1: But but they're good experiences, guess for you too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was very proud of it. Like in my head,
Speaker 3: like this is the delusion I had. I was going
Speaker 3: to open five or six restaurants.
Speaker 1: Delusional.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was going to open about six or seven
Speaker 3: of these restaurants, franchise around Sydney, and then I was
Speaker 3: going to stop drug dealing once like these were profitable,
Speaker 3: and then live off that.
Speaker 1: Because you wanted to get out of drug dealing, they yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: I didn't think it was it was a long term
Speaker 3: thing forever, and so I did. In my head, I
Speaker 3: thought I had an exit strategy. But I also spoke
Speaker 3: to a lot of guys when I was locked up,
Speaker 3: and you know that, you know, I think they would
Speaker 3: have got to the point where I had six or
Speaker 3: seven businesses.
Speaker 2: I want to come up with another excuse to keep
Speaker 2: drug dealing, Like.
Speaker 1: You think because too easy.
Speaker 3: You just think it's never going to end. You think
Speaker 3: you're too clever. You just yeah, you think that you
Speaker 3: can just keep going going. There are many guys that
Speaker 3: actually like set a goal and say, oh, this is
Speaker 3: what I'm out.
Speaker 1: It's funny. And I've had discussions with my sons and
Speaker 1: other people about this sort of stuff, saying, unfortunately the
Speaker 1: media TV, it's such you can glamorize drug dealers or
Speaker 1: criminality basically, and of the criminals that I've known in
Speaker 1: my life, very few of them actually landed successfully. They're
Speaker 1: either in jar, dead or desperate. Over a period of
Speaker 1: time one of those three, not many of them actually
Speaker 1: turned it any good. It's never glamorous. Usually none of
Speaker 1: those three glamorous, that's for sure. Occasionally might be one
Speaker 1: who just skates through, man, but it's complete about change
Speaker 1: about face. They completely changed their life and they might
Speaker 1: just skate get through, but always looking over the back
Speaker 1: of their shoulder thinking is someone going to bring someone
Speaker 1: up from my past. Is the cop is going to
Speaker 1: knock on my door because someone's given me up on
Speaker 1: something or other, or is there somebody I crossed who's
Speaker 1: going to spray my house with bullets or something. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty it's a shit goal. At the end of
Speaker 1: the day, it is.
Speaker 3: So what happened?
Speaker 1: You've got a red said, Yeah, my house.
Speaker 2: Got raided On the fourth of June twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3: I was at home. It was a Friday afternoon. I
Speaker 3: was high on cocaine. I hadn't slept in about two
Speaker 3: or three days. I was watching some guy Reachi movie
Speaker 3: and then I just heard this loud crack in my
Speaker 3: front door, and I just I thought that some junkie
Speaker 3: or something in Surrey Hills had fallen into my door.
Speaker 3: But then I heard police search won't oh fuck, And
Speaker 3: it was just so surreal, like I don't know what,
Speaker 3: like how much time went on between everything, because it
Speaker 3: all seemed in slow motion to me. But like, next thing,
Speaker 3: you know, the raptor escorted us, smashing through my door
Speaker 3: with a battering ram. I ran upstairs and started flushing
Speaker 3: drugs down the toilet. I heard and breach the house
Speaker 3: and then I ran and hid behind the bedroom door,
Speaker 3: and I was like fat, like I was big at
Speaker 3: the time, and I'm just like trying to hide behind
Speaker 3: this door to see.
Speaker 2: Me, you know, like like pick.
Speaker 3: So they found me really quickly and they threw me
Speaker 3: to the ground, and yeah, they told me that I
Speaker 3: had the rap. I wrote a joke about it. This
Speaker 3: is like one of my first jokes that road was
Speaker 3: the raptor score guy like tackle me to the ground.
Speaker 3: He had like his knee in the back of my
Speaker 3: thigh and he just goes, stay down, you fat cunt.
Speaker 3: You've got a tiny cock. And I had pants on,
Speaker 3: so I was like had do you know? The joke
Speaker 3: I wrote was they must have had me under surveillance
Speaker 3: if they knew I had a small cock in your bathroom, right,
Speaker 3: So so yeah, it was just a crazy experience that
Speaker 3: I just sat on the couch as the house just
Speaker 3: was filled with cops and they issued me the search
Speaker 3: warrant and went through the house and found found drugs everywhere.
Speaker 3: Because at that point I was I was too fucked up,
Speaker 3: Like I had a stash house where I kept a
Speaker 3: lot of the drugs, but because I was so coked up,
Speaker 3: I got complacent and just like instead of going back
Speaker 3: and forth back and forth, I just bring too much
Speaker 3: over to the house. And so yeah, it was just
Speaker 3: I mean, it was it was a bad day to
Speaker 3: get caught, but it could have been it could have
Speaker 3: been worse.
Speaker 2: I could have had more in there.
Speaker 1: But so what did you get? What did you get
Speaker 1: convicted of?
Speaker 3: I got convicted of large commercial supply of silicon, which
Speaker 3: is the active ingredient of magic mushrooms LSD and so
Speaker 3: large commercial supply of mushrooms and acid, the supply of MDUMA.
Speaker 3: And then because there was such a backlog of cases
Speaker 3: because of COVID, they allowed me to they knocked down
Speaker 3: the cocaine and ketamine that I had to personal use,
Speaker 3: which were about half an out siet and funnily enough,
Speaker 3: that's they probably that's within the realms of what was
Speaker 3: personal use for me, but the law usually says.
Speaker 2: That they're not in that kind of les.
Speaker 1: So what was your ends?
Speaker 3: So I was in I was locked up in maximum
Speaker 3: security remand for like four months I was in Parkley
Speaker 3: Prison and Long Bay Jail, and then I eventually got
Speaker 3: granted bail to my parents place where I was under
Speaker 3: house arrest. So I wasn't allowed to leave the house
Speaker 3: unless I was in a company. No, no ankle, bracelet,
Speaker 3: But the cops were checking regularly.
Speaker 1: Just bail, this is bail. Yes, I was.
Speaker 3: Under house arrest. I wasn't allowed to leave the house
Speaker 3: unless I was the company of my parents, who were
Speaker 3: both in their mid seventies. And so when I first
Speaker 3: saw an ad for open My Comedy competition and decided
Speaker 3: that I should go and start doing open mic because
Speaker 3: I had to bring my mom along to the ships
Speaker 3: and as.
Speaker 2: Part of your bail conditions, yeah, I had to.
Speaker 3: I had to bring it to the show. And then
Speaker 3: I had to ask if I could go on early
Speaker 3: because I had to get home for my curfew. And
Speaker 3: so I started doing that and that started doing going well.
Speaker 3: And so when I got sentenced in July twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: I got sentenced to an Intensive Corrections Order ICO, and
Speaker 3: so that I'm essentially doing a prison sentence in the
Speaker 3: community right.
Speaker 1: Now, zeron prole basically basically, yeah.
Speaker 3: So I have to get permission to leave New South
Speaker 3: Wales still till Christmas this year, and I had to
Speaker 3: do two hundred hours community service. But one of the
Speaker 3: reasons that kept me out of prison was when firstly
Speaker 3: I was doing clean pissed tests, I was doing drug counseling,
Speaker 3: I had a full time employment. But also the judge
Speaker 3: like that I was doing stand up that wasn't one
Speaker 3: he'd heard before, and he thought that was a very
Speaker 3: positive sign of rehabilitation.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and it didn't have anything to do with
Speaker 1: the stylist down to be doing so in other was
Speaker 1: sort of admitting or talking about the things.
Speaker 2: No, we tried to.
Speaker 3: We didn't talk about the content of the comedy. That
Speaker 3: could have to risk if he knew that I was
Speaker 3: joking about getting arrested to go to prison and joking
Speaker 3: about being a drug dealer. That may have brought up
Speaker 3: questions of remorse or anything like that. But so we
Speaker 3: didn't get into the content.
Speaker 1: So that's mad though. So you eventually found your purpose,
Speaker 1: but you had to get arrested to do that, right
Speaker 1: And by the way, how'd you feel been locked up
Speaker 1: and put in Remand I don't know where you first
Speaker 1: went to. You would have gone to Silver War, I
Speaker 1: guess Parkley Parkley, So you're Roman in your day one?
Speaker 1: I mean, did they put you out of Sorry Hills?
Speaker 1: Some we did the first, did you at the police center.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you go to the Surry Hills Police HQ
Speaker 3: for a night. So you were sucked up down in
Speaker 3: the dungeons.
Speaker 1: How'd you feel?
Speaker 3: Oh, I mean I hadn't slept in days, so I
Speaker 3: just tried to sleep, just try to sleep it off.
Speaker 1: And were you sharing the self?
Speaker 2: I was sharing the cell with a few other guys.
Speaker 1: And was that confronting for you?
Speaker 2: Not really.
Speaker 3: I think that what I've discovered about myself is that
Speaker 3: I'm quite resilient. You know, you don't really know what
Speaker 3: you've got in you until you get tested, and so
Speaker 3: I've found myself okay in all those situations. I was
Speaker 3: just like, look, you know, this is what's happening. Just
Speaker 3: we'll deal with it one step at a time. And
Speaker 3: so I was still deluded though I thought I was
Speaker 3: going to get bail. I thought I was going to
Speaker 3: front court and just get bail that day and go
Speaker 3: back to trade to drug Really yeah, I thought I'll
Speaker 3: just I'll get some new stock and I'll be back
Speaker 3: on the street and Bang bang Bang start making moves.
Speaker 3: But I got refused bail because I was on two
Speaker 3: indicitibles and Bang was on a truck to park Lay Prison.
Speaker 1: And what about guilt, new family and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: how that all work?
Speaker 3: So, yeah, I had my first phone call with my parents.
Speaker 3: I think it was like my second day at park
Speaker 3: Lay Prison. I was able to make a phone call
Speaker 3: to them, and that was hard, Like it hit them
Speaker 3: really hard. And my dad told me that my mom
Speaker 3: had like fainted. I think she was having some health issues,
Speaker 3: but this didn't help. That has exacerbated it. And then
Speaker 3: they said to me that they thought me going to
Speaker 3: prison might be the best thing that's ever happened to me.
Speaker 1: And what did you think about that?
Speaker 2: I thought that they were probably right, even though yeah.
Speaker 1: He didn't resent that comment.
Speaker 2: No, no, I didn't.
Speaker 3: I thought maybe maybe they were right. And so it
Speaker 3: turned out over the next few weeks is kind of
Speaker 3: my fiance dumped me when I was in prison, and
Speaker 3: mates became more and more flaky. That the only people
Speaker 3: that were constant there with my parents, and so I
Speaker 3: spoke to them every day on the phone. And I
Speaker 3: think that this kind of the stress, that this really
Speaker 3: brought us closer together, and I guess healed the I
Speaker 3: guess the gap in our relationship that had been me
Speaker 3: being an unreliable drug addict for so long, you either
Speaker 3: like the Black super Family or my brother certainly had
Speaker 3: a fair crack at it. But yeah, I think I'd
Speaker 3: be considered that he would be dark gray.
Speaker 2: I'm the black shape.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you're clipstim Well I think you did a
Speaker 1: skit or you do a skitter around the meals in jail. Yes,
Speaker 1: tell me about that.
Speaker 3: Well, when I was when you first arrived in prison
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty one, it was during COVID, right, so
Speaker 3: you spent the first two weeks in quarantine. So I
Speaker 3: had no TV, nothing to read for the first ten days.
Speaker 3: And so for me, having just been pinched and coming
Speaker 3: down from drugs, I was in a really negative headspace
Speaker 3: and had I had no escape. I was just stuck
Speaker 3: in my own thoughts, like you fuck it, what have
Speaker 3: you done? And so as soon as I got a
Speaker 3: pencil and a piece of paper, I just was like,
Speaker 3: I need to just have some kind of constructive outlet.
Speaker 3: And so as a foodie and you know, I just thought,
Speaker 3: and a strong writer, I thought, this will be entertaining
Speaker 3: to just start to review my prison food for my
Speaker 3: lunches and dinners, like review as if.
Speaker 2: I'm going to a restaurant or something.
Speaker 3: So I just started scoring about of ten and like
Speaker 3: an adjusted prison scale, because I was like, this is
Speaker 3: you know, prison food.
Speaker 2: It's not the real world.
Speaker 3: I need to be a bit more generous with the scale.
Speaker 3: And so I just started doing that every day, and
Speaker 3: I did it for the whole one hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: five days that I was locked up, And it was
Speaker 3: just a kind of a fun distress action and I
Speaker 3: use it kind of also as a bit of a journal,
Speaker 3: and so then it would be fun to just argue
Speaker 3: with my cell mates about like that.
Speaker 2: I'd be like, oh, I'm giving that a six point two.
Speaker 3: They'd be like, oh man, that's a four. So yeah,
Speaker 3: it was just it was just a fun creating distractions.
Speaker 3: I think, I think, so yeah, I think I am,
Speaker 3: and then you make it funny. Yeah. So I started
Speaker 3: writing the food reviews, and then I started writing jokes
Speaker 3: a little while later, once I had it sobered up
Speaker 3: and got off drugs and had a chance to just
Speaker 3: ask myself a lot of questions, like, you know, if
Speaker 3: you could just start your life over from scratch, what
Speaker 3: would you do? And the only answer in my head
Speaker 3: would stand up comedy. Really, Yeah, it was the only one.
Speaker 3: It was just so loud in my head.
Speaker 1: But you've never done stand I've gone, but I used.
Speaker 3: To go to it a lot, and sometimes I would
Speaker 3: sit there and write jokes on my phone. But I
Speaker 3: never looked into like where there was an open mic
Speaker 3: or how you'd even go about it. But I think,
Speaker 3: deep down somewhere in me, you just always knew that answer,
Speaker 3: but I just hadn't.
Speaker 1: It was scary doing stand up comedy.
Speaker 3: I yeah, it was terrifying the first the first few times.
Speaker 3: I mean it still is terrifying now, but now I
Speaker 3: know that it's the thing I have to do. But
Speaker 3: when you first get up there and you start talking
Speaker 3: and everyone's quiet because they're listening to you, and you
Speaker 3: haven't a set a punchline yet, I'm like, fuck this
Speaker 3: is And then you say and then you suddenly get
Speaker 3: to a postline, people laugh and suddenly relief washes over you.
Speaker 1: But because that's your reward, that's your drug.
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely, yea drug now, yes.
Speaker 1: So you know your brain gets a response in a
Speaker 1: sort of Flooge's system with the serotonin instead of cocaine, doing.
Speaker 3: It exactly you're doing. I think that people that are
Speaker 3: that have have very addictive personalities. They often focus on
Speaker 3: the negative side, but if you can find positive outlets
Speaker 3: for it, an addictive and addictive personality can be a superpowerful.
Speaker 1: Totally powerful. Ye, completely powerful. I'm noticing that you move around.
Speaker 1: Do you have ADHD?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, so yeah, but did you know you had
Speaker 1: that before I did.
Speaker 3: I got diagnosed when I was about eight years old,
Speaker 3: but I didn't really start to become a problem with
Speaker 3: me until I was about sixteen.
Speaker 1: Do they jammy ridden.
Speaker 3: Dex mphetamine to have like okay, so okay, you're on
Speaker 3: dexies so not anymore.
Speaker 1: I haven't a word, but you were. Yeah, But because
Speaker 1: sometimes that's the start of the addiction, Like for me,
Speaker 1: I've seen happy for and you know, he stopped taking
Speaker 1: DEXs because someone says you shouldn't be taking this basically
Speaker 1: is emphetamines speed. You shouldn't be taking so many because
Speaker 1: you shouldn't take that many in the first first place.
Speaker 1: But that you start self medicating take eight and then
Speaker 1: you then you stop one day and if someone says
Speaker 1: that we stop, Okay, now what I'm going to do?
Speaker 1: So you pick some other drug? Yeah, And it just
Speaker 1: cycles and cycles and cycles and it becomes I.
Speaker 3: Was grinding my teeth and having trouble going to bed
Speaker 3: when I was sixteen seventeen because I was on so
Speaker 3: much dex amfetter.
Speaker 1: Me if do you hold your hand like that on purpose? No,
Speaker 1: because the move a hand moves around. Are you What
Speaker 1: I'm trying to work out is are you conscious of it?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: I'm not.
Speaker 1: No, I'm self conscious of Its probably another thing.
Speaker 3: Not really, No, Sometimes I'm just my legs are just
Speaker 3: going crazy.
Speaker 1: It's natural. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't bother me because I
Speaker 1: have family members who do this sort of stuff. I
Speaker 1: get it. I understand it. It's a good way to
Speaker 1: lose weight too, by the way, But now because you're
Speaker 1: moving also moving Yeah, no, no, totally your your I mean,
Speaker 1: if you, if you, I don't know if you've ever
Speaker 1: done one of these, but if you ever sat down
Speaker 1: down a metabolic rate test, So it's a test, they
Speaker 1: sit you down. You've got to be relaxed. You've got
Speaker 1: to sit down and relaxed or in your in your
Speaker 1: normal relax dates. So in your case, you'd be moving.
Speaker 1: You can move around like that, but they put a
Speaker 1: mask on you and they measure the amount of oxygen.
Speaker 1: You take it into the amount a couple of ox
Speaker 1: that you push out, and they can actually work out
Speaker 1: how many calories that you consume at rest. At your
Speaker 1: rest yours would be different my risk because you've got ADHD.
Speaker 1: So and they can. They can. They'll come up and
Speaker 1: say something to you, like, you know, you consume two
Speaker 1: and a half thousand calories just breathing, sitting, thinking, and
Speaker 1: your brain consumes most of the calories that are that
Speaker 1: you can consume out of every part of your whole body.
Speaker 1: And someone who with ADHD would consume far greater amount
Speaker 1: of calories and say something like me. Therefore, if you
Speaker 1: balance your diet out, you can lose weight quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're doing very fucking much at all.
Speaker 3: But it's even more impressive when I get fat, because
Speaker 3: that means I'm really sick of the beers.
Speaker 1: That you must be consuming a hell of a lot
Speaker 1: of calories relative to your burn. That's quite interesting. And
Speaker 1: and and ADHD people actually have a have a superpower
Speaker 1: when it comes to not putting weight on if they
Speaker 1: watch what they eat. It actually is super power.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when I when I focus on my training and
Speaker 3: I'm actually like counting my calories like I just smash
Speaker 3: it very quickly.
Speaker 1: Very very quickly. So go to jail, get let out.
Speaker 1: You're cognizance of family cognisance. In other words, you're sort
Speaker 1: of under house arrest sort of thing. You're on bio
Speaker 1: to go through a period. Then you get sentenced. Sorry,
Speaker 1: you got sentence, and you've got your own parole. Effectively,
Speaker 1: you've got built yourself a new business that being well,
Speaker 1: there's a few pass your businesses to tell me it's
Speaker 1: just not just so down up comedy to the podcast.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I got out of jail.
Speaker 3: I mean. One of the things that was crazy about
Speaker 3: the prison thing was when I first started thinking about
Speaker 3: doing stand up was I was was because I saw
Speaker 3: so many funny things happen in jail. Like there was
Speaker 3: a time where I saw the guards talking. They were
Speaker 3: calling out for a David Wilson, or like David Wilson
Speaker 3: to the others, David Wilson, and then a whole yard
Speaker 3: of krim started going Wilson Welson like I'm doing there,
Speaker 3: like Tom Hanks castaway impression, going like Welson, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: And I remember laughing so much that I forgot about
Speaker 3: the where I was like I forgot about the fact
Speaker 3: that I was in prison. I forgot about the guards
Speaker 3: and the fences and the cameras, and I was free
Speaker 3: just for a few seconds. And I was like, well,
Speaker 3: that's pretty powerful stuff if laughter can make me forget
Speaker 3: I'm in prison. So that's when I was like, I needed,
Speaker 3: I need to do something with this.
Speaker 1: Were you doing any stand up in prison?
Speaker 3: No, I mean in my cell to my sellies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: not really in the yard because you know, if you
Speaker 3: say a joke that goes the wrong way to a
Speaker 3: guy in the yard, because I had some pretty serious consequences.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it completely changed my way.
Speaker 1: I don't have nights and stuff like that, like entertainment nights, like.
Speaker 3: Maybe in like sentence prison and maybe like And it
Speaker 3: wasn't COVID nothing. There was nothing going on during COVID,
Speaker 3: Like they had no classes, they had nothing. It was
Speaker 3: a pretty grim situation. And that's why I think that
Speaker 3: they had They had the Parclay prison right when I
Speaker 3: was there, because the guys were just exploding because they
Speaker 3: had nothing to do and family visits were canceled.
Speaker 2: It was just powder that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but yeah, so I got out and started doing
Speaker 3: stand up and then that started going pretty.
Speaker 1: So how do you do stand? Like, I mean, you
Speaker 1: said you started doing some but just someone invite you do?
Speaker 1: You have to put an application? And how's it work?
Speaker 3: You just look up there's a I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 3: in many major cities as a Facebook group about their
Speaker 3: open mic nights, and so I just looked up where
Speaker 3: an open mic night was, and you just put your
Speaker 3: name in a bucket and with like twenty thirty other guys,
Speaker 3: mostly dudes, and you just get your name randomly drawn
Speaker 3: out and that's when it's your turns to do five
Speaker 3: minutes on the mic, and just.
Speaker 1: At a club or something.
Speaker 3: It's usually at a bar, at a bar in a
Speaker 3: small room where it's basically no one else there other
Speaker 3: than other comedians that are trying to make it.
Speaker 1: So how do you get you for back?
Speaker 3: Well, that's the problem, right is because you've either got
Speaker 3: a bunch of guys that are studying on their phone
Speaker 3: what they're going to say, or they're jaded because they've
Speaker 3: been doing open mic comedy nights for six years and
Speaker 3: haven't gotten in anywhere, so they don't really want to laugh.
Speaker 3: So you've got to really be funny before. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's a lot of guys talking about wanking
Speaker 3: for five minutes and they're like, oh yeah, just another
Speaker 3: you go, another cum joke, So you know, you start there.
Speaker 3: That's where even if no one's laughing that much, you still.
Speaker 1: Get the practice of saying the words in front of people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so that's that's important, but.
Speaker 1: You're not getting the vibe there sometimes sometimes.
Speaker 3: Look, I found if you're going to an open mic
Speaker 3: for the first time and you're doing jokes they haven't
Speaker 3: heard you say before, then you'll get a Usually you'll
Speaker 3: get an honest reaction, particularly if you start to get
Speaker 3: laughs early, then guys will stop what they're doing and
Speaker 3: pay attention. But I found soon what I realized was
Speaker 3: that in open mic, the open like world, you go
Speaker 3: to four gigs or five gigs a week, it's all
Speaker 3: the same guys at every gig, So you're if you're
Speaker 3: telling the same jokes four nights a week, then they're
Speaker 3: not going to be laughing as much by the fourth
Speaker 3: fifth time.
Speaker 1: So it sounds like a startup world, but they're always
Speaker 1: meeting up the startup world, you know, like all the startups,
Speaker 1: like business startups, they're all going oh shit, there's a
Speaker 1: Google conference on the will turn up, or there's some
Speaker 1: other thing on World turn Up. And there's the same
Speaker 1: dudes all the time. You know the girls, guys, it's
Speaker 1: the same game.
Speaker 3: Must be so many of these subcultures where it's just
Speaker 3: the same people going to everything right, and so what
Speaker 3: I'm the best. What I found was the only way
Speaker 3: I could get a reaction out of these guys is
Speaker 3: if I wrote a new five minutes of jokes every
Speaker 3: couple of nights. So I was just like writing, writing, performing,
Speaker 3: like trying new stuff all the time. And I think
Speaker 3: that made me a better comedian very quickly, because I
Speaker 3: was just constantly writing new stuff. And so I went
Speaker 3: and did an open my comedy competition which is Australia's
Speaker 3: biggest one.
Speaker 2: Called Raw, and I got through to.
Speaker 3: The state final of that, and then I got.
Speaker 1: How much time it's on stage that you get five
Speaker 1: minutes and so you.
Speaker 3: Perform at the Comedy Store and I got through to
Speaker 3: the state final, which was pretty crazy because I'd only
Speaker 3: been doing comedy for about maybe four weeks at that stage,
Speaker 3: and so yeah, so it was awesome, and so I
Speaker 3: got to perform at the Comedy store in the state
Speaker 3: final and I didn't get through, but that was enough
Speaker 3: for me to open the door for me to get
Speaker 3: an opportunity at better gigs in Sydney, which was rooms
Speaker 3: where it wasn't just you performing in front of other
Speaker 3: open my comedians with proper audiences, which is what you
Speaker 3: want to do, right, Yeah, And then suddenly I had
Speaker 3: all this stuff that I was able to test in
Speaker 3: front of a proper audience, and then you're getting Then
Speaker 3: you're getting genuine laughs.
Speaker 1: And do you get gigs as a result of that,
Speaker 1: to paid gigs you do?
Speaker 2: That's still quite slow.
Speaker 3: You know, most of the time in Sydney, in a lot
Speaker 3: of towns, you're doing ten minute spots for no money,
Speaker 3: just because you have the privilege of being able to
Speaker 3: test out your material.
Speaker 1: Say you're doing that for audio right, to build audiences
Speaker 1: and to test audiences.
Speaker 3: Exactly like practice exactly. So now I get both unpaid
Speaker 3: and paid gigs. Paid gigs, I'm doing my best stuff
Speaker 3: because I'm getting paid to do that. But at unpaid gigs,
Speaker 3: I'm just running a whole bunch of new stuff. I'm
Speaker 3: doing whatever I want to do just so that I
Speaker 3: can make it a learning I'm getting something out of
Speaker 3: it myself about the podcast. So I have a podcast
Speaker 3: that I do with three comedians, two other comedians, Dan
Speaker 3: Muggleton and Tom Wickham, and I think we just saw
Speaker 3: that there was just not that many podcasts by comedians
Speaker 3: in Australia.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there aren't that many, particularly not ones that have
Speaker 3: a group of guys together who are actual comedians as
Speaker 3: opposed to a lifelin cut girls that they're funny exactly,
Speaker 3: they're not actual comedians.
Speaker 2: Exactly, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So I'm talking about like stand up comics
Speaker 3: stealing a show together.
Speaker 1: But what are you doing? Like, it's what's the sort
Speaker 1: of general content where we're talking about it, like you're
Speaker 1: taking the.
Speaker 3: Piss out of each other or Yeah, it's a combination
Speaker 3: between just anything what's happened to us that week or
Speaker 3: things in the news, or just taking the piss out
Speaker 3: of each other. But we just talked shit for an
Speaker 3: hour a week and it's slowly growing. But it's awesome
Speaker 3: because then those people that love the show will come
Speaker 3: to our live shows, which is awesome. There's quite a
Speaker 3: few people that we listened to the podcast that went
Speaker 3: and saw all three of us at our live shows
Speaker 3: this year. So that's that's the dream is to have
Speaker 3: people that It's to build an ongoing comedy relationship between
Speaker 3: people that only get to see you live once a
Speaker 3: year and people that want to hear about what your
Speaker 3: funny take is on various things throughout the week.
Speaker 1: Politics. Are you playing into that or not?
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 1: I mean you've taken a piss out of trumple Biden.
Speaker 2: Or sometimes, but it's not really what do you really?
Speaker 1: Were you going with it? What do you normally do?
Speaker 1: Is is a situational What are we talking about?
Speaker 3: I mean I was talking about I went and saw
Speaker 3: two live Terminator events last week, so I I talked
Speaker 3: about that. I saw they had Terminator one at the
Speaker 3: Opera House with like a live orchestra, and then they
Speaker 3: had I saw Terminated at the Hayden Orpheum and they
Speaker 3: had the bad guy Robert Patrick from that movie like
Speaker 3: there in the audience doing a Q and A. So
Speaker 3: I just talked about the funny the funny stuff from that.
Speaker 1: So you do you did?
Speaker 3: You do?
Speaker 1: You sit there in for example of those two examples,
Speaker 1: in an audience and you look for what are you
Speaker 1: looking for? What you think is you can make humorous
Speaker 1: or you can are you taking something out of it
Speaker 1: that actually is humorous?
Speaker 2: You just see the natural humor in it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So there was a guy that was so excited to
Speaker 3: ask Robert Patrick a question about when he watched the
Speaker 3: premiere of Terminator two, whether he knew like that he
Speaker 3: was part of something that was going to be so
Speaker 3: historic and special. And so then Robert Patrick said, oh,
Speaker 3: not really. I was just there stoned with my friends
Speaker 3: and was just.
Speaker 2: Like, oh cool.
Speaker 3: The humor was in seeing this guy and obviously spent
Speaker 3: so much time and he's so excited to ask this
Speaker 3: question that it was such an underwhelming answer.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: But see that that's an interesting skill that you have,
Speaker 1: that you can see that humor. Yeah, whereas the poor
Speaker 1: guy answered the question, he's going to feel fucking like
Speaker 1: let down, like a heap because it was expecting something overwhelming.
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, this is my life, lifetime dream or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we didn't know it was going to be such
Speaker 3: a huge cultural moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, changed the course of history.
Speaker 2: Right, that was the answer he wanted. It's just like
Speaker 2: I don't really did I was started.
Speaker 1: But do you think that the guy answered the question,
Speaker 1: do you think he was taking the piss or.
Speaker 2: I think he would have had a real answer in
Speaker 2: his head.
Speaker 3: But I think but I think that was also true
Speaker 3: that he was stoned at the time, but I think
Speaker 3: that they would have been part of his head. It
Speaker 3: was like, holy shit, this movie is amazing, right, But
Speaker 3: it was just such a funny answer.
Speaker 1: That that is pretty hilarious because I can imagine the
Speaker 1: guy sitting there very nervous about asking the question for
Speaker 1: a start, like getting really nervous, picked.
Speaker 3: Out for days, pick me, pick me.
Speaker 1: You're like fu, I got picked his my chance and
Speaker 1: he probably would be a little bit shaky on your voice,
Speaker 1: and then you just go. Shoulders had drop forward so
Speaker 1: that you're you're doing a tour. There's a tour coming out?
Speaker 3: What's that?
Speaker 1: What's that all about?
Speaker 3: So this this too is I'm doing my debut show,
Speaker 3: which is the show I did last year at the
Speaker 3: Melbourne Comedy Festival. So I at the time I signed
Speaker 3: up to do Melbourne Comedy Festival, I had maybe twenty
Speaker 3: minutes of jokes that I thought worked. And when you
Speaker 3: do a comedy festival, when you're doing a solo show,
Speaker 3: you've got to do They say an hour, but it's
Speaker 3: usually about fifty minutes of material, and so I am
Speaker 3: such a good person with a deadline. I was like,
Speaker 3: I'm just going to put my hand up to say
Speaker 3: I want to do this, and then I'll hopefully figure
Speaker 3: out another thirty minutes of material. And so you apply
Speaker 3: to the festival to try and get a fest a
Speaker 3: room run by the Melbourne Comedy Festival. I got rejected
Speaker 3: for one of those, which is quite common when you're
Speaker 3: a nobody, and so they have a bunch of other
Speaker 3: rooms that are just run through the festival, run kind
Speaker 3: of not by the festival, but are available, and so
Speaker 3: for those you've got to pitch yourself, right. So I
Speaker 3: tried everyone.
Speaker 1: Pitching the room, or you pitch to get into it.
Speaker 3: You're asking someone who's booking that room whether you can
Speaker 3: be part of their lineup for the festival, right, And
Speaker 3: so I got rejected by put much everyone. The only
Speaker 3: one that said yes to me was a small cocktail
Speaker 3: bar and I offered me a time of ten forty
Speaker 3: at night, right, ten forty to do sixteen shows.
Speaker 1: Fuck that, I'll take that.
Speaker 3: I was like, I'll do it.
Speaker 1: I just want to be there secon shows for ten
Speaker 1: forty sixteen days.
Speaker 3: So I'm doing over the course of three weeks. I'm
Speaker 3: he's doing sixteen one hour shows at ten forty at
Speaker 3: ten forty at night, so I'm doing on a Monday
Speaker 3: Tuesday Wednesday night, I'm ten forty night, and so I thought, fuck,
Speaker 3: this is going to be hard. But it turned out
Speaker 3: to be a blessing in disguise because I was the
Speaker 3: only show I think on a Monday, Tuesday Wednesday that
Speaker 3: on past nine thirty at night. So for anyone looking
Speaker 3: for late night comedy, I was the only option. And
Speaker 3: so the show was called Jokes about the time I
Speaker 3: went to prison. I thought, because I'm a nobody and
Speaker 3: I guess my pr background, I was like, I've got
Speaker 3: to just put it on the label, put it right
Speaker 3: on the can.
Speaker 2: What is it?
Speaker 3: And so I think people are drinking, they're out night,
Speaker 3: They're like, or do you want to go see some
Speaker 3: idiot took about prison for an hour in terms of
Speaker 3: people do so people turned up and I started doing
Speaker 3: the show. So the first night I had like five
Speaker 3: tickets sold, and then seventeen people showed up on the door,
Speaker 3: and so I ended up doing the show in a
Speaker 3: room that could only fit about forty to twenty two people,
Speaker 3: and I was like, and it was amazing. The show
Speaker 3: went so well, and I was like, I am going
Speaker 3: to kill it here. It's going to be so good.
Speaker 3: And then the next night I had four tickets sold
Speaker 3: and I'm like, okay, that's fine, people buying the door.
Speaker 3: No one else turned up, So I did the show
Speaker 3: to four people and I was like, wow, okay, this
Speaker 3: is quite a comedy. It's going to be a roller coaster.
Speaker 3: But over the next few weeks words started to spread.
Speaker 3: I got some reviewers in that gave me some really
Speaker 3: good reviews, and I ended up getting nominated for Best
Speaker 3: Newcomer at the festival and off that That's completely changed
Speaker 3: my life really because now I get to tour around
Speaker 3: the country as a professional comedian and like, now I'm
Speaker 3: doing I've just finished doing the festivals this year with
Speaker 3: my second show, and I had fantastic numbers.
Speaker 2: We were sold out most nights, and it's like, it's.
Speaker 3: Crazy, So the two are you're going to do now?
Speaker 3: The tour I'm going to do in August is your
Speaker 3: tour those it's just me, Yeah, it's just me touring
Speaker 3: around to about something crazy like twenty four towns around Australia.
Speaker 1: I me some examples. We're going like Tamworth or the Top.
Speaker 3: Regionally, we're going to Newcastle, Aubrey, Bunbury, Western Australia, Perth, Brisbane,
Speaker 3: Gold Coast, Sunny Coast to Woomba, Darwin, Lawn, Cesstin Hobart.
Speaker 1: I'm going say to people find out about like where
Speaker 1: do they go to book it?
Speaker 3: So a list dot com, dot you is the website
Speaker 3: or my I've got it all listed on my socials.
Speaker 3: I'm very fortunate that my socials have like blown up crazy.
Speaker 1: I've got like I'm going to talk about your instagraments socialistic.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But so so the show.
Speaker 3: I'm doing my debut show around the country because a
Speaker 3: lot of people haven't most people haven't seen it. And
Speaker 3: I have the i have a book coming out at
Speaker 3: the same time, so I'm going to be taking the
Speaker 3: book on the road to sell at the shows as well.
Speaker 1: And what's the book about.
Speaker 2: The book's about my crazy life.
Speaker 3: It's about me being kind of an aimless person that
Speaker 3: fell into drug dealing and how that escalated and my
Speaker 3: time in prison and how that became such a life
Speaker 3: changing experience for me. And turn me towards comedy. So
Speaker 3: it's called The Profound Benefits of a Stint in.
Speaker 1: Prison, So it's sort of like an autobiography.
Speaker 2: It is, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: How much of that is therapeutic for you? Like how
Speaker 1: much of that is like selfishly done? And I don't
Speaker 1: mean in a bad sense, but like therapeutic for you
Speaker 1: to actually write about what you haven't haven't done.
Speaker 3: The book and comedy have been hugely therapeutic. When I
Speaker 3: first started doing stand up, it was because I was
Speaker 3: pretty angry. I wrote from rage, right. I was just
Speaker 3: I was so lost and confused and angry, and the
Speaker 3: only constructive outlet I could think of was to take
Speaker 3: the piss out of myself and my dumb mistakes, and
Speaker 3: so to weaponize that and kind of own it. I
Speaker 3: own my dumb life and mistakes and just get up
Speaker 3: on stage and be like, hey, this is I'm an idiot,
Speaker 3: this is this is my dumb life. Found I found
Speaker 3: so cathartic and empowering. So the book was similar. It
Speaker 3: was just it started, just as I guess, a glorified diary,
Speaker 3: just me just trying to put on a page all
Speaker 3: the steps that had led me here, and So when
Speaker 3: I started going well at comedy, I had a few
Speaker 3: publishers reach out to me to say, hey, you should
Speaker 3: consider writing a book. And I was like, well, you're
Speaker 3: funny you say that. I've written most of one and
Speaker 3: so that made that whole process a lot faster.
Speaker 1: But do you ever worry? Does it ever get because
Speaker 1: a lot of people would feel this way, You're I
Speaker 1: hate the fucking word, but your vulnerability, like you're out
Speaker 1: there putting it all on the line. You're just telling
Speaker 1: everyone about everything and to somebody sent you don't give
Speaker 1: a shit. Yep, maybe you don't give a shit. I'm
Speaker 1: assessing that does it ever bother you that everybody knows
Speaker 1: everything about you? Like and maybe do you everything yourself?
Speaker 3: All?
Speaker 1: Wow? They know about my mum and dad's kid and
Speaker 1: my brother's brother. And one day you might be a
Speaker 1: father yourself. You married to good kids, But like I said,
Speaker 1: one day you know one of your own kids. You
Speaker 1: ever worry about that?
Speaker 3: I don't think so, because when.
Speaker 1: I'm not convinced me.
Speaker 3: When I was sat in prison and I started thinking
Speaker 3: about my two options. I could either get out and
Speaker 3: go back to like a white collar job and hopefully
Speaker 3: pretend like it never happened, or because at that point
Speaker 3: there was only one article about my arrest and me
Speaker 3: being locked up that was in the Daily Mail, and
Speaker 3: I thought, well, who the fuck reads that anyway? So
Speaker 3: I had that Sorry. Now I'm good friends with them.
Speaker 4: Now, yeah, they like covering me because I'm such a weird,
Speaker 4: weird fish, but they they I was like, well, I
Speaker 4: can either go back to my normal life and pretend
Speaker 4: it's never happened, or I can do the complete opposite
Speaker 4: and just own the fuck out of it publicly. And
Speaker 4: some reason in my head I was like, that sounds
Speaker 4: so crazy. I better the work, and it has, and.
Speaker 3: So I've I I thought there was part of me
Speaker 3: which was like, surely I'm going to get booed off
Speaker 3: stage and have people hate me for this. But I've
Speaker 3: had so many people, particularly all the people that I
Speaker 3: thought would be shocked by what I'm talking about, come
Speaker 3: to me afterwards and be like, great stuff and amazing
Speaker 3: that you've turned your life around, and so.
Speaker 1: It's a good redemnstance story.
Speaker 3: I get so many messages from people who have found
Speaker 3: something in me talking about my life that's resonated with them.
Speaker 3: I had one guy message me to say that he
Speaker 3: got out of prison and just went on with his
Speaker 3: life and never talked about it. Nobody knows about it,
Speaker 3: and seeing me own it has inspired him to go
Speaker 3: and do public speaking courses so that he can start
Speaker 3: to talk about the most acts he made that has
Speaker 3: led him here.
Speaker 2: And I thought that was really cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny. I was just seeing about something he
Speaker 1: said that Dali Malesmas. There's not that much of a
Speaker 1: gap between finding being angry about a situation or seeing
Speaker 1: a situation being funny. I mean you seem to be
Speaker 1: able to actually lean into not being angry and being
Speaker 1: and seeing it as a funny outcome.
Speaker 3: Well, I think you know, if you break down the
Speaker 3: things that make you angry and also like how people
Speaker 3: act when they're angry, a lot of it, if you
Speaker 3: just stood back from it can be funny. Right. It's
Speaker 3: like Bill Burr is one of the best comedians world
Speaker 3: and he's like, just got this hilarious rage, right. So
Speaker 3: I was like, I can either use this anger in
Speaker 3: a really unconstructive way and probably get myself into more trouble,
Speaker 3: or I can use it in the best way I
Speaker 3: know how, and quite an Australian way and just use
Speaker 3: it like to take the piss out of myself, right,
Speaker 3: and so talking about the raptors cord raiting my house
Speaker 3: and being on the prison transport truck and just like
Speaker 3: me trying to figure out my prison and going on
Speaker 3: dates when.
Speaker 2: I was on bail.
Speaker 3: Like this, all this stuff from my dumb life was
Speaker 3: funny and people are.
Speaker 1: Now you chose to see the funny side.
Speaker 2: I chose to see the funny side.
Speaker 1: Also signed fuck this, I'm angry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I've gone down that road before and I
Speaker 3: just and it doesn't lead you anywhere positive. And so
Speaker 3: I was just like I tried to weaponize it in
Speaker 3: a positive way, and it's completely changed my life. Ever
Speaker 3: since I've been on this path with comedy, opportunity after
Speaker 3: opportunity has kept coming to me and doors keep opening,
Speaker 3: and it just makes me know that I made the
Speaker 3: right decision.
Speaker 1: You're getting the and you're also getting the sort of
Speaker 1: the chemical rewards in your brain too.
Speaker 2: Totally.
Speaker 1: It's give me the right rewards.
Speaker 3: I mean, you do find there is a law of
Speaker 3: diminishing returns when you're doing the same joke the two
Speaker 3: hundredth time.
Speaker 2: That's why I.
Speaker 3: Fired, You've got to constantly be coming up with new stuff,
Speaker 3: because when you have a new joke that you've just
Speaker 3: written and you test it out and it kills straight away,
Speaker 3: it's such a rush.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's funny you're talking about daily mail, and
Speaker 1: that's the difference between rage or anger and comedy. Many
Speaker 1: years ago, I've been in a gym dan already, and
Speaker 1: I was walking. There's a market up here King's Cross
Speaker 1: that does not I walk up there and I'm going
Speaker 1: to get a juice and shit like that. Anyway, so
Speaker 1: I've got change prepared short the summer, two shirt on
Speaker 1: pair of cents. Walked up fucking and all across the road,
Speaker 1: and I thought, I saw this dude taking in front
Speaker 1: of me, and so I walked down a bit further
Speaker 1: down across and I confronted him. I said, mate, what
Speaker 1: the fuck are you doing? He said, I know, I'm
Speaker 1: just a photographer, just taking photographs of the architectu around here.
Speaker 1: And I said, yeah, but mate, like you sure he
Speaker 1: didn't take phtograph of me across the road like that. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I didn't think much about it, and the next day
Speaker 1: when my kids fucking started texting me, they've been reading
Speaker 1: the Daily mar and there's a photograph of me walking
Speaker 1: across the road with angry fucking look face and work
Speaker 1: looking at it, looking at his dude, right, a real
Speaker 1: cranky look on my face. But the funny thing more,
Speaker 1: fly was undone completely agape, was completely agape, and that's
Speaker 1: that was what the photograph he was taking, and taking
Speaker 1: the photograph as my boys walk with if he's flying
Speaker 1: done and uh and I was angry with that, but
Speaker 1: my kids, so it was fucking hilarious and there's not
Speaker 1: much difference. Like my response is fuck him. I want
Speaker 1: to punch him in the head. Came back at it, now,
Speaker 1: do you it's funny? It's hilarious, And he's right, it was.
Speaker 1: It was a funny outcome, you.
Speaker 3: Know, I mean exactly the say bark like me when
Speaker 3: I got raided and this guy told me out a
Speaker 3: tiny cock. It wasn't funny at the time. Now it
Speaker 3: was what I was locked up. Well, actually that's hilarious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but do you think to be hilarious do you
Speaker 1: think he was having a bit half funny?
Speaker 3: I think these guys that raid, how like the raptors
Speaker 3: score when they're raiding, they're so pumped up on red
Speaker 3: bulls or whatever the fuck they take, and they're so
Speaker 3: used to going into places with guys. They've got weapons
Speaker 3: and stuff like that they just got, so they're so
Speaker 3: pumped when they find the bad guy, right, they just
Speaker 3: they want to mouth off. You think that that's it.
Speaker 3: They're like, fucking stay down, your motherfucker.
Speaker 1: So they just sayn and they probably go back later
Speaker 1: on talk I told you how that's moall cock and
Speaker 1: they'll have a good laugh.
Speaker 3: They probably how many times has that guy been set
Speaker 3: my clip of stand up exactly?
Speaker 2: This is his best joke now, So so.
Speaker 1: Where do you see yourself going? Like, I mean, you
Speaker 1: make money out of this is giving you a living?
Speaker 1: I mean you're not making the same money making when
Speaker 1: you were stilling drugs.
Speaker 3: But yes, I'm not making drug buddy anymore. But I'm
Speaker 3: making a basic living out of stand up now, which
Speaker 3: is fucking hard to do. Yeah yeah, yeah, And I've
Speaker 3: only been doing it for two and a half years,
Speaker 3: so you know there are guys who are ten years
Speaker 3: in that are barely making a good living out of
Speaker 3: stand up.
Speaker 2: It's hard.
Speaker 1: So yeah, because I want to ask you about that,
Speaker 1: because like you was before you were drug dealer and
Speaker 1: you're making shitload me you piles of cash and shit
Speaker 1: like that. How do you reconcile those two? Like you
Speaker 1: work so hard, I mean sure there's a lot of
Speaker 1: enjoyment out of what you do, you don't make much
Speaker 1: money out of it, yep, how do you reconcole the
Speaker 1: difference between the two? And do you?
Speaker 3: I think that you money money earned from hard work
Speaker 3: always feels a lot better for starters. But also like
Speaker 3: I I'm cool that because last year I did stand
Speaker 3: up and I made fuck all. This year I've made
Speaker 3: a bit more, and next year I'll make it more
Speaker 3: than that, And so I can see that there's a
Speaker 3: clear trajectory here. And I I love what I do.
Speaker 3: It's my favorite thing in the world to do. So
Speaker 3: I'm not too worried about the money because it fills
Speaker 3: me right. It's the most fun job I've ever had
Speaker 3: in my life, and so to make any money out
Speaker 3: of it is crazy. But to make a living out
Speaker 3: of it, even a basically living. Right now, I feel
Speaker 3: like I'm living the dream and so everything anything else.
Speaker 1: Is extras and just one on your socials, what are
Speaker 1: you doing TikTok? As well as the scramble just Instagram.
Speaker 3: TikTok and Instagram. Yeah, I've got no idea what I'm
Speaker 3: doing on either.
Speaker 1: I just post stuff and that's your authentic's And how's
Speaker 1: it nums going? Like you're getting good engagement?
Speaker 3: I mean last year, I think in April I had
Speaker 3: like six ersand followers on Instagram. Now I've got two
Speaker 3: hundred and twelve or something.
Speaker 1: Like that, so it's grown a lot. And do you
Speaker 1: know your audience I mean on Instagram for example, on
Speaker 1: your socials, do you know your audience is at like
Speaker 1: young guys, young girls who are looking.
Speaker 3: At It's like ninety three percent dudes, right. But the
Speaker 3: thing the interesting is the social numbers aren't the same
Speaker 3: as my show numbers because women buy tickets comedy shows
Speaker 3: much more than guys.
Speaker 1: But any comedy, yeah, any comedy generally.
Speaker 3: But particularly you know, I'm seeing groups of girls well
Speaker 3: or just take their boyfriend or partner or husband whatever,
Speaker 3: that they'll be the one who's the instigator of buying tickets.
Speaker 3: There are groups of like usually like four or five
Speaker 3: dudes being like boys comedy night Tonight.
Speaker 2: Fellers get the lads we're doing stand up, They go
Speaker 2: to the park. I think the arts is gay, so.
Speaker 3: That that's fine, but it's just I mean, it's interesting
Speaker 3: that there's that skw on social but then that's not
Speaker 3: the certainly not the skew at a live show.
Speaker 1: Right, So your social is your your social giving that
Speaker 1: you've got a couple hundred thousand, is that about sort
Speaker 1: of trying to sell something through that? Like, I mean,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you use weaponize comedy, but
Speaker 1: how do you commercialize something like that?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think it is. Even if people don't necessarily
Speaker 3: follow me, me putting stuff out on social media that's
Speaker 3: gone viral has certainly helped with recognition of my face.
Speaker 3: So that when there's ads out, either posters or digital
Speaker 3: ads who're like, oh, that guy's made me laugh before,
Speaker 3: and he's coming, he's doing exactly, so then they're sharing.
Speaker 3: People take a punt far more if they've if they
Speaker 3: know your face and you've made them laugh before, then
Speaker 3: if you're just putting a poster and they've never heard
Speaker 3: or seen you before. So I think I believe that
Speaker 3: all these things I have to be connected, and then
Speaker 3: you build.
Speaker 1: Up over time exactly, and they'll at some stage that
Speaker 1: they'll interconnect, yes, or they'll overlap each other and you'll
Speaker 1: get some benefits from both to the other.
Speaker 3: I definitely know that there are people that So I
Speaker 3: used to be part of this comedy channel called yeah Ad,
Speaker 3: which was the fastest growing comedy channel in the country,
Speaker 3: and that brought a lot of people either to my
Speaker 3: social pages or to live shows. So that's been a
Speaker 3: huge driver of it. And so we're about to start
Speaker 3: a new comedy channel, me and a bunch of the
Speaker 3: guys that were on that previous channel. We're going to
Speaker 3: start that again in the next month or so, and
Speaker 3: so I imagine that that'll grow very quickly, and that'll
Speaker 3: be a driver of people coming to live shows as well.
Speaker 1: That's a collective of other comedians, though, So I mean,
Speaker 1: how important is it four comedians to hang out the other,
Speaker 1: the lean on each other.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's plenty of amazing comedians that are very
Speaker 3: anti social, you know. So I don't know. I am
Speaker 3: such a social person and I try to introduce myself
Speaker 3: to everyone that I meet in stand up and to
Speaker 3: help them in any way I can. And I think
Speaker 3: that I think that sometimes you don't really know the
Speaker 3: value straight away of these friends until later. If they're
Speaker 3: just vouching for you for an opportunity or a gig
Speaker 3: or whatever. It just makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: How important is gratefulness to you? I mean, like as
Speaker 1: a I don't know, I don't know if it's an
Speaker 1: emotional whatever, it's a virtue being grateful, grateful for what
Speaker 1: you're doing, because that's one of the things I just
Speaker 1: get out of this conversation. I mean, it's not a
Speaker 1: big money spent as a comedian, not yet, but.
Speaker 2: I mean that being said, Mark, I think that.
Speaker 3: I mean, my management say to me that, I'm like,
Speaker 3: they've never seen anyone selling as many tickets to shows
Speaker 3: after two and a half years in comedy as me.
Speaker 2: So the trajectory great science is very very promising.
Speaker 1: I would about gratefulness, I mean, is that just grateful
Speaker 1: that you can get them to do this shit?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: Every time?
Speaker 3: Man, it is so surreal to me every time I
Speaker 3: get up, particularly when I'm doing my live show, when
Speaker 3: I'm doing solo shows and people have bought a ticket
Speaker 3: to come see me and spend an hour with me,
Speaker 3: that seems still very surreal. And so I'm so grateful
Speaker 3: that they're there. And then because of my socials and
Speaker 3: who I am. At first it was people just going
Speaker 3: to see a comedy show or support the arts. But
Speaker 3: now people that are coming specifically to see me, and
Speaker 3: so I'm attracting my own audience, which makes which then
Speaker 3: means that the shows go even better because they know
Speaker 3: they've got a sense of what the content is going
Speaker 3: to be like, which makes the much more enjoyable comedy show, right,
Speaker 3: And so I I love it.
Speaker 2: It's my favorite thing to do.
Speaker 3: People ask me like, how can you go a whole
Speaker 3: month touring around and doing an hour show every night?
Speaker 3: Isn't that going to be draining? And I'm like, no,
Speaker 3: I get energy from it, Like I get my cup
Speaker 3: gets filled from performing and being around people. So that's
Speaker 3: the easy part. You know.
Speaker 1: It's interesting as you're talking then, I was just thinking
Speaker 1: about your dad's studies in theology as a Jesuit scholar,
Speaker 1: and the sort of things that they sort of study
Speaker 1: are concept concepts around virtues, you know what like, but
Speaker 1: there's not just a Google top study. It's a proper
Speaker 1: study as to you know, the concepts would sit behind
Speaker 1: things like gratefulness and you know sort of like tass
Speaker 1: you back, you're taking a back, maybe unknowingly, right back
Speaker 1: to the sort of things you're old men studied as
Speaker 1: a potential Jesuit deacon to become a Jesuit priest, which
Speaker 1: did fortunately for you. But it's funny, it's just as
Speaker 1: like a full circle. Nearly you're nearly going back to
Speaker 1: the sort of stuff that Jesuits would have taught you
Speaker 1: at review. I'm not getting a weird about it, but
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, like it's a full circle for you.
Speaker 3: I think I needed to have the fall to really
Speaker 3: appreciate everything though I think I needed that setback. I
Speaker 3: hope that people can find a way to be on
Speaker 3: the most positive path without having that fuck up. We're
Speaker 3: all fulls of shit. But from my experience, for a
Speaker 3: lot of people, it isn't until that happens that they
Speaker 3: really figure out what their priorities are in life and
Speaker 3: start to live their best life and appreciate things the most.
Speaker 3: Whether that's a marriage breakdown or a job loss, or
Speaker 3: a health concern or for me, going to prison. But
Speaker 3: a lot of the time it's during those times of
Speaker 3: stress and and failure that people find something within themselves.
Speaker 3: And that's the way it went for me, and so now,
Speaker 3: you know, I could have been bitter about losing my
Speaker 3: home and my fiance and my dogs and my mates,
Speaker 3: but I realized I started to have gratitude right about
Speaker 3: the fact that I still had my health and family,
Speaker 3: and they were friends that I never thought would be there.
Speaker 3: That came out of the woodwork, and now I'm on
Speaker 3: this amazing positive path with comedy, and I'm much happier
Speaker 3: now living with my parents and doing stand up comedy
Speaker 3: than I ever was making money as a drug dealer,
Speaker 3: which is crazy, right
Speaker 1: Thanks so much that that's a pretty cool guy, cool story.