Latest / HEAVY Music Interviews / The Subtle Art Of Confrontation With ISAAC BUTTERFIELD

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The Subtle Art Of Confrontation With ISAAC BUTTERFIELD · HEAVY Music Interviews

• 0:00
  Hello, everyone. I'm Jimmy from Heavy Magazine. Some of you know me,
• 0:03
  some of you don't, some of you don't care, but most of
• 0:05
  you probably care about this guy that's off to when I left at the moment,
• 0:08
  Isaac Butterfield, the Buttsman. How are you going? Mate? Mate?
• 0:12
  I care, I care about I don't know who you are, but
• 0:15
  I'm happy to be here. Yeah, all good. Before we go any
• 0:20
  further, I may have got it wrong already, but what's your preferred pronounce
• 0:24
  I don't get yourself in a bit of bother mate, m you can call
• 0:30
  me whatever you want, brother, It's it's all good here. I know
• 0:33
  a lot of people have a lot of different pronouns and stuff, and I
• 0:37
  honestly like as long as it's she hurt or he him. But the other
• 0:42
  one, the other ones, that's where you get me. All right,
• 0:45
  I'll be polite, but the other one can just calm calm the farm.
• 0:50
  You're not an or what is it a cat cat ben or something I watched.
• 0:55
  My mental health hasn't deteriorated past that point thus far, so not yet,
• 1:00
  but there is time. I guess. That's just sort of when you
• 1:03
  live in a society where everything's very easy. That's when you start making up
• 1:07
  pronouns. I guess, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you think
• 1:12
  the younger generation has taken advantage of having a life, that's not too shabby.
• 1:19
  I hate I hate the younger generation. Stick I'd say that, but
• 1:25
  I might upset you because you're a bit younger than me. So I'm I'm
• 1:29
  a millennial, so I understand that we were the downfall, or at least
• 1:34
  the start of it. But gen Z is is Hiroshima and Nagasaki in nineteen
• 1:41
  forty five. That's that's ground zero. But the jen now for they reckon
• 1:46
  that it'll rebound, and it all often does. It rebounds in the generations
• 1:51
  after, so hopefully that that does happen. But I don't know, man,
• 1:56
  it's it's a rough time. I've had a couple of like employer over
• 2:00
  the years, and they've been gen Z and I. They are the worst
• 2:05
  people that have ever lived on this planet. Are worse than Hitler youth.
• 2:09
  Yeah. Well, I'm technically a millennial because I'm born in nineteen eighty,
• 2:14
  but I believe I slot into gen X. Go cha. I try to
• 2:19
  cling onto gen X because I've had some millennial issues as well with different generations,
• 2:23
  you know, sure, I guess that's always the way you blame,
• 2:27
  like the generation underneath you or the next one along. Often you look at
• 2:30
  and you just hate them. But I don't know, man, I think
• 2:37
  a lot of people are getting indoctrinated into into strange ways of thinking, and
• 2:42
  I think social media like TikTok has a lot to a lot to blame for
• 2:46
  that, or it is to blame for that. I recently released the video
• 2:52
  on the amount of time that people spend on on TikTok and gen z.
• 2:57
  It is over an hour and fifty minute it's on average, So it's it's
• 3:01
  they're watching that more than TV. They're spending like a minute on Facebook.
• 3:06
  It's something very very small like that, And for TikTok, it's a lot
• 3:13
  of time. So if you're if you're another government in another country that wants
• 3:16
  to sort of undermine the West, then maybe that's that's where you send a
• 3:22
  lot of shit that doesn't matter and push that type of content. But anyway,
• 3:25
  I'm being very conspiratorial now, it's all good. So I recently joined
• 3:30
  TikTok. I don't know why, but you're not on there, But you
• 3:34
  do just about everything else, right, So you're a social commentator? Is
• 3:38
  that where you put yourself in comedian? I'm a comedian, That's what That's
• 3:44
  what I've always done. And I think that comedians have been social commentators for
• 3:49
  the longest time, and that's probably why that profession has been so powerful throughout
• 3:55
  history. I mean, I don't I try not to be too perl go
• 4:00
  on stage. I'm just there to tell jokes. But with YouTube, you
• 4:03
  know, politics does come into it, and social politics and and and you
• 4:09
  know, all different type of politics. So that that's where I sort of
• 4:12
  have those opinions, and you know, there's a time and a place.
• 4:15
  But people, Yeah, I mean I do and I don't, and I
• 4:21
  upset some people and other people like me, and then I upset them with
• 4:26
  some other things that I've said and our opinions I hold. And I think
• 4:30
  it's important to you know, stay true to yourself and a lot of and
• 4:33
  a lot of these a lot of these sort of back and forth of these
• 4:38
  debates. Yeah, nothing I've ever said comes from a bad place. But
• 4:43
  I think we need to be open to debate and open to people having different
• 4:46
  ideas and at least coming to some sort of agreement in the middle, and
• 4:49
  often that's where the truth lies. I think a lot of us will will
• 4:54
  attest to that being a fact. So, yeah, and you've been accused
• 4:58
  a fair bit of backtracking. I know heaps to other YouTubers. I'll say,
• 5:01
  oh, we called him I missing, he backtracked. I don't think
• 5:05
  you ever do. I think you explain yourself quite well. There's a difference
• 5:09
  between backtracking and go hey, you took this the wrong way and explain yourself.
• 5:13
  Yeah. I was canceled last year for an aboriginal joke and people like,
• 5:16
  oh, you're backtracking. I was like, no, I'm not backtracking.
• 5:18
  I'll still tell the joke. It's wating to you why it's not this
• 5:24
  horrendous thing that you think it might be. You think it's this attack on
• 5:28
  people. It's not at all. It's just talking a bit of shit on
• 5:30
  stage in front of people who have paid good money to see someone talk shit.
• 5:35
  Yeah, because you put on your phone and you're at home and your
• 5:38
  delicate sensibilities can't deal with it. You know. That's where we are.
• 5:43
  But maye people people will give me strange examples of why what I do is
• 5:48
  bad I mean the whole If you tell a joke about a certain race,
• 5:53
  you're a racist. I disagree with that wholeheartedly. But other people say,
• 5:57
  oh, you may have a room full of people who may be racists,
• 6:01
  and that's why they Okay, but if you're if you go and see a
• 6:04
  John Wick movie, you know, are you a murderer? Or what if
• 6:10
  there's a murderer in the room and you see a John Wick movie? You
• 6:13
  know, should you not see John should should people not be able to see
• 6:15
  those? Or should you blame Keanu Reeves for that person who happens to hold
• 6:20
  horrific ideologies or or has a horrible way of looking at the world being in
• 6:27
  that room, should you blame people for making that film? Or or with
• 6:30
  metal, you know, it's the same sort of thing. There's a lot
• 6:33
  of horrible lyrics out there that that come across in different types of heavy metal
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  music or or or whatever sort of is your your way of is your type
• 6:46
  of music that you like listening to, whether it's death metal, I prefer
• 6:50
  Viking metal, to be franked, that's metal. Yeah, that's what I
• 6:56
  listened to it the gym. Yeah, right, I tell people that and
• 6:59
  then like what is that. I said, do go and listen to it.
• 7:01
  It's fantastic. I don't know why. It's just I stumbled across it
• 7:06
  one day and I absolutely love it. But point being, you can't you
• 7:11
  can't blame well, you can't. You can't look at things too seriously.
• 7:15
  I think that's what people are guilty of. It. They're trying to find
• 7:18
  reasons for the world being the way it is in things like comedy and music
• 7:23
  and movies and ship. It's not there trying to think all people into heavy
• 7:27
  metal of satanists because they've got pentagrams or upside down a crosses hanging in the
• 7:30
  background. Yeah, I mean it doesn't I'm sure it doesn't help, but
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  it's it's simple. It's it's a symbol of what you what you're into.
• 7:40
  It doesn't mean that you're like a genuine devil worship or maybe you are.
• 7:44
  I mean, who gives a ship? No, I'm not. I'm not
• 7:46
  much of a fan of the church. That's about as far as the Ghosts
• 7:49
  movie anyway. Yeah, and on the on the upside down across. I
• 7:53
  did watch your ghost Hunting video a little while ago with the Greennies. Yes,
• 7:58
  and you were in the you called the Satanic murder tune. Yeah,
• 8:05
  yeah, that was. You've got your tour coming up, which is very
• 8:09
  close by there, and I was thinking we do an after party there and
• 8:13
  get someone to put on a Satanic ritual force just for ships and giggles.
• 8:16
  If you're not a chance the man, they scared me. They made me
• 8:20
  read the Lord's Prayer backwards. That was horrific. Like, I'm not religious,
• 8:28
  but if there is a chance that all of that is very real,
• 8:33
  I don't want to be a part of it, you know what I mean.
• 8:35
  Like, it's just it's not really my cup of tea to be in
• 8:39
  there taunting those type of things. Yeah, religion is a scary one.
• 8:43
  I think that's that freaked a lot of people out when when that happened.
• 8:48
  But something about the ghost grannies and what they do. A lot of people
• 8:52
  don't believe in ghosts. And I've only really had like one encounter at all
• 8:58
  on those those hunts that we do, which is strange because we're in haunted
• 9:03
  locations all the time. But like I had a whisper that was clear as
• 9:09
  day and that was the first one we did. That was years ago,
• 9:11
  like a whisper clear as day in my year, I always I still remember
• 9:15
  it. My wife had one recently at a hunt we did that. She
• 9:18
  saw something very very strange and the lights went off at the same time.
• 9:24
  But other than that, I was in the prison somewhere. Yeah, she
• 9:26
  was downstairs with Addie, our son, and she just saw this white figure
• 9:31
  go pass. So, like you know, chances are it's all bullshit,
• 9:35
  but people see things and they hear things, and isn't your own sort of
• 9:41
  I tested the waters and so that place is about fifteen minutes from my house.
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  I've I've never been there, but when I was in high school there
• 9:48
  was death metal bands that used to go there and that's where the Satanic rituals
• 9:52
  come from, because okay, as teenagers. Yeah, so I thought I'm
• 9:56
  going to take a walk there. So I just went there one night by
• 9:58
  myself and cruise through in the darkness with my phone as a torch. It
• 10:03
  was okay until I stopped in the middle to try and be brave and turn
• 10:05
  the light off for a bit. Then I turned it back on. The
• 10:07
  bat flu past me and scared the absolute shit out of Yeah. That and
• 10:11
  cane toads. There was a ship ton of toads in there. That was
• 10:16
  freaking me out. I had nowhere you couldn't walk anywhere with it's stepping on
• 10:18
  them. I enjoy that. It's a bit harder to do now with the
• 10:24
  young fella because Claire, my wife, is involved too, So you're like,
• 10:28
  where do you put child? You can't really take him into satanic murder
• 10:31
  tunnels. He would probably frowned upon in the comment section. But but no,
• 10:39
  that is good fun. It's good fun to do those. But you
• 10:41
  know, just because you've got an upside down cross doesn't mean you're a Satan
• 10:45
  worshiper. And in the same vein that if I'm reading the Lord's Prayer backwards,
• 10:48
  it doesn't mean that I'm a p I might be, but it's not
• 10:52
  because of that. All right, let's get into what's going on with you
• 10:56
  at the moment. So you've got a book coming out tomorrow, Yeah,
• 11:03
  I do. First I may tell us a bit about that one. Yeah,
• 11:07
  Better Man is the book, and it's been on presale for a while
• 11:11
  now, and the support has been really, really crazy. I've had a
• 11:18
  few positive reviews, which is strange because no one's read it. Some people
• 11:22
  have been communist. I read it. It's great. I was like,
• 11:24
  no, you fucking haven't. I haven't read it, got to talk to
• 11:26
  no one's got it. But the publisher came to me and said, you
• 11:31
  know, do you want to write a book? And I've been thinking about
• 11:33
  it for a long time, and I wanted to write a book that was
• 11:39
  almost a guide to being a younger dude. And I'm thirty now, and
• 11:43
  I look back on all the things that I sort of had experienced in the
• 11:46
  first third of my life, if you will, if I'm lucky enough to
• 11:48
  live until I'm old, on the tooth and the things that I sort of
• 11:54
  didn't have guidance on, and the things I did have guidance on, And
• 11:58
  I wanted to sort of write something that's not an order biography, but it's
• 12:00
  a guide to not being a shit like it's almost what it is in a
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  lot of in a lot of senses. It's heavy. It talks about mental
• 12:09
  illness, It talks about anxiety, and it talks about problems that men face.
• 12:13
  Talks about male suicide, and it talks about why we are seeing outrageous
• 12:18
  numbers of men kill themselves every single year. It talks about how we can
• 12:22
  sort of navigate around those and try and help dudes. But it goes further
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  that. It talks about relationships, it talks about training, It talks about
• 12:31
  mental fortitude, It talks about comedy, it talks about cancel culture, talks
• 12:37
  about a whole different range of things. And the publisher said to me,
• 12:41
  we weren't quite sure what you'd write, but we're surprised that it's not shit.
• 12:50
  They said, you've never written a book. We didn't know if you
• 12:52
  could write or not. But we're really really surprised with how it turned out.
• 12:58
  We're actually, we actually think it's quite good. It sounds like all
• 13:01
  the conversations we need to be having that we're not having because of all the
• 13:05
  social media bullshit that goes on at the moment. Yeah, and it's in.
• 13:09
  It's it's in an easy to read book. It's only like two hundred
• 13:11
  and fifty pages. I know it sounds like a lot, but it's easy
• 13:13
  to digest. My wife recently read it. She hadn't read it, and
• 13:18
  she was like, she said to me, I'm trying to read it from
• 13:20
  a point of view where you know, I don't know you, and I'm
• 13:26
  trying to be objective, and she said I was really one of the easiest
• 13:30
  and best reads that she's had in a long time. And I needed it
• 13:33
  to be that because I wanted to be a book that, you know,
• 13:35
  if you're a seasoned reader, you can read it, but also if you've
• 13:37
  never read a book, because there's a lot of dudes out there that have
• 13:41
  never read a book. And the first chapter, well, the first it's
• 13:45
  sort of like a sub chapter if you will at the start, not a
• 13:50
  prefix or anything like that, or if that's the correct terminology. It's like
• 13:54
  a It's a chapter that anyone can read, and it's very very short,
• 13:56
  and about six of the pages one word, So you can get through that
• 14:01
  book, that page, that chapter real quick and you're done. It succeeded,
• 14:05
  right, You're on the way to finishing the book. Well done,
• 14:07
  congratulations you. And that's sort of how the book starts off. It's all
• 14:11
  very positive and then it does. It delves into a lot of very very
• 14:18
  strange and eerie places. But I think it's going to benefit dudes. It's
• 14:24
  a manifesto on modern masculinity. And by the reason I use the word manifesto
• 14:30
  is it's sort of like a call to arms to be better versions of ourselves.
• 14:35
  Yeah, basically, that's that's it. And I wanted to use the
• 14:41
  word manifesto because a lot of very left wing people think that that's their word,
• 14:45
  and I just wanted to get under their skin a little bit, and
• 14:48
  I think that, yeah, why not. But yeah, man, I'm
• 14:52
  really excited for people to see it, people to read it, and it's
• 14:58
  out May the first, and and I'm very very interested to see people's honest
• 15:03
  reviews. I want people to read it who like me, who don't like
• 15:07
  me, who've never heard of me, and get their opinion of me as
• 15:11
  a first time author. I wrote it before my son was born, the
• 15:16
  vast majority of it, so it's it's the opinion of me, pride to
• 15:20
  having a baby. And I think I'll probably follow it up with another book,
• 15:24
  Better Dad in the future. Been a dad for a little bit longer
• 15:28
  and understood him growing. How's that challenging life being a father? It's challenging,
• 15:33
  but it's great. I mean, I don't I don't remember life before
• 15:37
  it, and I don't want to. It's well, my wife and I
• 15:41
  we do everything fifty to fifty in this relationship, and we always have him
• 15:45
  when we do that with him, and I'm lucky enough that I can work
• 15:48
  from home or when we go on the road, and you know, we
• 15:52
  do everything by halves. We do and it together. It creates that one
• 15:58
  hundred percent effort. So whether it's putting him to bed or whatever, we
• 16:02
  do it all together as a family, and I love it. Man.
• 16:04
  It's it's hard, it's tough, it's you're tired, you know you.
• 16:11
  Oh mate, it's unbelievable. You just get so proud of just tiny little
• 16:15
  things that he does. And but yeah, man, that that that'll come
• 16:19
  down down the line. But now we've got the book and got the tour
• 16:25
  out, let's talk about it. Man. It's I'm very, very proud
• 16:29
  of this hour that that we're working on and that I'm working on. I
• 16:33
  don't know why I say we, it's me that's that says it and does
• 16:37
  it. So the actually, I tell my wife has written some of the
• 16:42
  most offensive jokes and that I've ever had, and she's funnier than I I
• 16:47
  will ever be. But yeah, we're traveling around all over Australia at the
• 16:52
  moment. We're doing regional shows just everywhere, and some of the ticket sales
• 16:56
  have been absolutely madly. We didn't set a hundred tickets in two days in
• 17:00
  Townsville. I was blown away by that. So that'll be a match up
• 17:04
  there in the entertainment center. But yeah, coming then we're going to America.
• 17:08
  We're doing American shows. Then the capital cities in Australia will be at
• 17:12
  the end of the year and then off to the UK. So it's a
• 17:15
  big old We're going to film a special somewhere in there as well. And
• 17:21
  my connections in the States and sponsorship, so I've got a bit of a
• 17:25
  whisper about Yeah, man, how theyhead whiskeys come on board there. Dana
• 17:30
  White's whiskey so he's the president of the UFC, and it's a great whiskey
• 17:37
  to try. It's banana flavored. I know that sounds a bit strange,
• 17:38
  but trust me, it's unbelievable. They've sponsored the entire tour. So absolutely
• 17:45
  drinker when you perform the I have a couple of whiskeys and I've just got
• 17:51
  to take it pretty easy because otherwise I've become belligerent. I did a show
• 17:56
  where I was drinking just whiskey and over in Fremantle and I think I did
• 18:00
  two and a half hours on stage. It was by the end of it,
• 18:03
  I was just a mess. I just kept going, I just have
• 18:07
  to put sect. I just go get the young fellow out of the bath.
• 18:11
  If that's all right, Wait me a second. They're going, this
• 18:15
  is Atticus and he just got out of the bath. He's he's a big
• 18:18
  cook at the moment, he's had the flu. So a nice bath full
• 18:22
  of some vics and get all the big schnozzes out. Hey, mate,
• 18:26
  So it's a young fellow going on tours and little Dicky going on to as
• 18:30
  well. Hey, we go everywhere as a family. So they you know,
• 18:33
  they stay in the hotel when the shows are on, but throughout the
• 18:36
  day we get to travel around and go and see all the sights and and
• 18:38
  he got to travel to America when he was five months old, and he's
• 18:41
  seeing them seeing parts of the world that you know, I didn't see until
• 18:45
  I was in my late twenties, and I didn't get it on a plane
• 18:49
  until I was twenty two ish. And he's doing it all very very young.
• 18:55
  So showing in the world, mate, that's a good thing, Bud.
• 19:00
  Yeah, Yeah, it's really really cool. Man, it's it's fantastic.
• 19:03
  But yeah, the Butterfield Family and the Butterfield Show, I don't know.
• 19:11
  We're just doing just doing shows and enjoying ourselves and we'll film the special
• 19:15
  and all that type of stuff, and man, we'll just basically just see
• 19:19
  what comes of it. And I just look forward to doing all these and
• 19:25
  watching him grow up. And I keep trying to improve as a as a
• 19:29
  stand up and as a comic and as a content creator and all that type
• 19:33
  of stuff. And we just we just you know, take every day as
• 19:37
  it comes and and each show is as it comes, and trying to be
• 19:41
  better every single show and just going from there. Man, you know,
• 19:45
  doing all right. You've survived a fair while now, even though you've had
• 19:49
  some pushback from around the place and try to be canceled a few a few
• 19:53
  times. It's all it's all pretty crazy. But you know, I think,
• 20:00
  I think deep down people know that I come from a good place,
• 20:03
  and you can't you can't hate buddy. You can't cancel someone if they're a
• 20:07
  genuinely good person. So that's what I try and do anyway, And at
• 20:11
  the end of the day, it's it's comedy it's it's talking shit, it's
• 20:15
  not real half the time, and it's unless it's you know, about certain
• 20:19
  political things. So all right mate, Well look, I'll leave you to
• 20:23
  it. We'll pay at the end of the video, and I will be
• 20:29
  at the show checking it out. I'll probably do a review for the magazine,
• 20:33
  but sure, I'll grab your book as soon as I can too,
• 20:34
  and you'll get my thoughts. I'm known as the honest reviewer, so okay,
• 20:38
  I might call you out. I might not, but we'll see how
• 20:41
  we go. Okay, man, I hope you enjoy it.