Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Madness Of Fame" with Osher Günsberg

Transcript

"The Madness Of Fame" with Osher Günsberg · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  We live in an incredibly turbulent time or maybe it just seems that way because all the news from everywhere is at our fingertips.
• 0:09
  In any case, it's a time that feels disorienting, that feels foreboding and many of us are responding to that uncertainty by grabbing onto ideas that stabilize us.
• 0:22
  Political convictions, party loyalties, racial identities, moral certainties about how evil the West is if you're on the far left or how threatened the West is by chaos and immigration if you're on the far right.
• 0:35
  Those certainties comfort us but they get us nowhere.
• 0:41
  This is a space to challenge our certainties to consider points of view that destabilises but that leave us more thoughtful and wiser and yes, a little bit more uncomfortable.
• 0:54
  I'm so excited for today's show. I'm Josh Zeps. This is uncomfortable conversations with Josh Zeps.
• 1:08
  Before we begin, let's just point to what an insane time this is politically especially in the United States looking down the barrel of perhaps the most consequential election.
• 1:22
  Certainly of my lifetime, I think that the original election of Donald Trump was a crazy event that has so many causes will be pouring over it for decades and perhaps centuries.
• 1:37
  But for that accident to get vindicated and re-endurced by the American people by re-electing President Trump would in some ways I think be even more devastating to American democracy than his original election which if he's a one term president can be written off as something haphazard or accidental.
• 2:00
  And for Ruth Bader Ginsburg the Supreme Court justice to have just passed away that incredible woman having led such an incredible life now throwing into stark relief all of the partisan hatreds and the squabbles and the bickering and the lusts for power on both sides of politics leaves one just feeling extremely disoriented to say the least.
• 2:26
  A lot of people are asking me on Twitter about what I think about the possibility of Democrats threatening to pack the court. In other words, it's not actually a very difficult thing to do to add Supreme Court justices to the court. You could just add another couple or another four if you control the legislature and the White House.
• 2:43
  And a lot of people are saying that if the Republicans manage to push through a third Trump appointed Supreme Court justice in the final days before the election or during the lame duck session that Democrats should respond by promising to pack the court increase the number of justices.
• 3:05
  And what do I think of that.
• 3:08
  I think that the only utility in doing something like that is if it's as a strategic threat in advance and it's a coherent and plausible threat.
• 3:19
  I don't think you get anywhere by retroactively ratcheting up the hostilities because you'll see him as capricious as the other side they'll take it as a as the Democrats having gone beyond the pale regardless of whether or not that is a valid representation of what's actually going on.
• 3:38
  It'll have enough currency that you're just going to enter a war of attrition where each side becomes more and more outrageous and more and more outraged.
• 3:47
  But I do think there's utility in doing in using it as a kind of a policy of mutually assured destruction where if all the Democrats got on the same page once and said if you appoint a new Supreme Court justice in light of what happened with not seating Obama's pick Merrick Garland on the grounds that it was an election year.
• 4:06
  And if you then throw your own rule out the window if you do that we will do this that strikes me as a way of de-escalating rather than escalating but at some point the Democrats have to say if Republicans are going to continue to do everything that is within their power to maintain maximum control over the levels of government.
• 4:27
  In the face of democracy essentially just using institutional and structural mechanisms to assert as much power as possible then you do as the Democrats have to stand up to that.
• 4:37
  Anyway that's that on today's episode we're not talking about politics at all we're talking about something really interesting which is mental health sounds a little bit boring.
• 4:47
  But when you couple the interior life of a person suffering a mental breakdown and an alcoholic addiction with levels of fame that most of us will never experience.
• 5:04
  You have a fascinating story the story of Osha Gunsburg who if you're American he's basically Australia's Ryan Seacrest and at the time in his life when Australian Idol was the most popular show in the country.
• 5:18
  I should tell you where we first met actually my first job in television was as the host of of idle backstage which was an online only video at at at random to Australian Idol.
• 5:31
  In 2006 I want to say which I think was season four so the show was still the biggest show in the country I was the monkey boy who would interview the judges before we went to air who would interview the contestants who play practical jokes on the on the hosts and so on that's where I sort of got to know Osha reasonably well to begin with.
• 5:54
  And if you don't know Osha I mean he is a very beautiful surfer looking used to have long blonde hair was very it was very much the focal point of Australian broadcasting and really Australian culture at the time continues to be very successful television host but what's interesting about this conversation what I wanted to dig into was that while the sort of the cliche of the sad clown while he was going through all all of the heights of fame and celebrity and success internally.
• 6:23
  He was dying and battling substance abuse issues so we go there and we get into it and it is a bit uncomfortable I won't say anything more except that I hope this is of some help because
• 6:39
  even if you're perfectly wired internally the stresses of 2020 have thrown us all for a loop and put us all a bit off kilter so it's worth remembering that no matter what's happening to you externally your interior life can still suck or be great depending on how well we're able to manage our own experience of our own mind please enjoy this conversation with the one of the Osha gunsberg.
• 7:09
  Do you not have me now? No, no, you do. No, I'm glad you're doing great. Am I doing okay? What do you think of the interview so far? There's so far things are pretty good actually I'm pretty impressed with the angle and I feel comfortable.
• 7:31
  This is working perfectly. How are you doing great? What was that? Was that me or you? Clang sound effects. It happened exactly the same time that I touched a button. That's good. Do you want to do that throughout the show? I think it's important.
• 7:51
  Where are you? I'm an apartment that the production has rented for me that Warner Brothers has rented for me while I help them make the masked singer I am in Melbourne I am in stage for lockdown here in Melbourne and in the absence of an actual studio I have reassembled the second
• 8:21
  bedroom. Let's just say all the years of doing very important living room furniture fortwork when I was a kid have come in handy because the bed has been disassembled the base of the beds there at the top of the bed there is an area's
• 8:37
  of pillow blanket. But it's way less echoey than it was the acoustics God's love you for it, but perhaps the housekeeping don't. It's fine. Then they never need to know the people that we rented this from never need to know that the beds the beds been a lot of time on the wall.
• 8:54
  In my brain, the life of Oshar is just surrounded by a phalanx of helpers and assistants. So I assume that those people are just mildly put out. No, but you're furniture fortress. No, but I do work with if you've done any work with radio people in this time of COVID.
• 9:13
  They have there's like a team going in and building these unbelievable remote home studio situations for all their worries because they can't bring their breakfast crews into work.
• 9:28
  Yeah, I feel a bit that way. There are all kinds of things like like I was saying when you're when you're a person of certain preeminence in the industry, you are you obtain a level of help and attention that perhaps your humble zipses of the world don't get, but I you know, I hear I hear I hear tales of what some of what some people have right. It sounds wildly impressive. Yeah, well, I've got a rented apartment.
• 9:58
  mattress on a wall. Yeah, good for you. And what's it like down there? What do you I mean many of our listeners will be down there. So and by the way, I don't know if you saw the tabloid press here in Sydney recently saying what lockdown with like telephoto lens paparazzi style footage of regular Melbourneians going about their business in parks.
• 10:24
  Daring to leave their homes without even so much as like a radioactive suit on right and there was a great deal of half and half about what are these veterans even doing is the lockdown being breached. What are you seeing reporter on the ground?
• 10:41
  Well, I mean, I'm not in the suburbs, mate. Now I'm in the giant gleaming glass tower apartment block area of the Docklands. So I'm down here. And because I think the tabloid media was mostly focusing on places where there are a lot of people eating Turkish pizza and the subtle implications seem to be these were your ethnics who are up to no good. Yeah.
• 11:03
  You wouldn't be. But you wouldn't be telling me a tabloid paper was trying to vilify a non-white person dropping dropping quasi racist dog whistles. But even on not if they did, they did it.
• 11:16
  Yes, I did. Or maybe they were just implying that ordinary Melbourneians like to go out for Turkish gozlemi on a Saturday because let me tell you it's delicious.
• 11:25
  Hey. Okay. Okay. You brought the mega man out there, mate. There is the only people I see on the street are literally the army. There is army street. And I have to carry my papers when I walk when I drive to and from work. Really? Yes, because I arrive home from work after curfew. And I need to carry my papers in case I am pulled over by the fuzz.
• 11:51
  It's pretty intense, you know, but at the same time, I feel quite safe here in Melbourne. I feel incredibly safe at work. Thankfully, the production company work for and the network I work for Warner Brothers and Network 10 take it very, very, very seriously.
• 12:05
  So everyone at work is a very intense COVID safe protocol that we have. And there is no back to what it was. There is only this is what it is now. And it will be this way. There is no magic bullet coming even if a vaccine or off tomorrow. It's probably not going to be ready for us for a couple of years.
• 12:26
  So this is what it is now. And if we want to keep not a couple of years, not a couple of years, be a while. It'll be it'll be ready in the hours. Be ready by 430. If I went by 430.
• 12:38
  I'm on the day on which it's discovered. That's where my brain goes. See, I am I am an internal optimist. I think when it gets discovered, then it will turn it around to discover it at nine in the morning. It'll be ready for us by 430. And I'll be.
• 12:50
  But the truth is probably somewhere between the two. I think it could take a couple of months. But I think where you're right is that people expect normal.
• 12:58
  And at no point is we're going to be able to click our fingers and the entire world is going to get vaccinated and be well.
• 13:05
  Like even if you could even even if you could produce seven billion doses of it in I don't know six months.
• 13:12
  There are a lot of people who aren't going to take it. There are a lot of people who can't afford it. There are a lot of, you know, public. There are a lot of governments that can't afford it. There are a lot of like so what happens anyway.
• 13:21
  There's a lot of people that can't take it. Let's be honest. There's a lot of immunocompromised people that cannot actually take vaccines and actually require to rely on herd immunity.
• 13:30
  And then yeah, look, the idea that we'll just kind of carry on and go to the pub like we're used to. We're just going to have to understand that those days are gone.
• 13:41
  And there is only a new way of doing things that will go from this point forward until something changes, which it probably.
• 13:47
  We've gotten pretty dark, pretty quick, Archer. It's uncomfortable conversation, but it's one that's important to have.
• 13:53
  Yeah, but I talked to virologists about this stuff. Don't you rating on the parade?
• 13:58
  I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry, but look, I did ask you where you were and what Melbourne was like.
• 14:05
  If you want to do the honesty, do you think there won't be pubs again that people won't be hanging out and pubs and shouting each other in the face?
• 14:11
  It'll be I don't think it'll be a long time before we will be able to safely do that, but that's not to say that to safely do that.
• 14:18
  It might be you need to speak into some sort of breathalyzer device on the way into the pub.
• 14:23
  Yeah, some sort of breathalyzer device can pick up a few. We've got some sort of marker that shows you may possibly have compromised immune system, which might lead could be covered.
• 14:32
  Could be something else. So they're like, have you invented such a breathalyzer device? No, are you revealing it on this show?
• 14:37
  No, but it's not to say that such a thing won't happen. And I think if you want to talk about uncomfortable conversations, I think we as a country very quickly are going to have to have the conversation of like, okay,
• 14:46
  we could fix all of this in a month if all of us kind of implicated a very intense contact tracing protocol using the phones that we have in our pockets.
• 14:55
  We really figure this out to a point where we could have a lot of freedom back, but we are going to have to have that uncomfortable conversation with each other about how much are we going to give?
• 15:04
  What are we going to give it to? How is it going to work? Am I causing a big fuss about how much data I'm giving away when Google and Apple already know fucking all this stuff about me anyway?
• 15:13
  And somehow I have done fine with the private company knowing this stuff, but I don't want the government to know about it.
• 15:18
  Do private companies don't have armies and secret police? No, but they will more than very happily pass that information on to the people without the armies of the secret police.
• 15:28
  You don't think that the encryption keys to WhatsApp weren't handed over without a bit of cash changing hands? Come on, man.
• 15:36
  Oh God, now we're going to get into 5G. Oh, no, no, I can't wait for that. It's going to be great. I really want my fridge to tell me when I need more soy milk.
• 15:46
  Let's go back to I want to start with some pivotal moments because I essentially want to talk to you about what it takes to be happy and how we can construct our brains in ways that are conducive to that.
• 15:56
  Since you have had the most of all the people I know you would have to have the largest disparity between your outward appearance of happiness and the internal and the internal goings on.
• 16:07
  Yeah, just because there was a period where you were the most successful person in Australia outwardly and the most miserable fuck in Australia.
• 16:17
  Yeah, I was very, very ill. I was inwardly.
• 16:20
  So I just want to let's describe a moment to us, which is the grand final of the first season of idle.
• 16:26
  Yes. And bring us back to we're talking about 2003.
• 16:33
  Just put us there. You're on the full court of the opera house for people who aren't in Australia. Australian Idol was every bit as big in Australia as American Idol was in America, possibly even bigger.
• 16:45
  I mean, it was a national phenomenon and the finale took place at the Sydney Opera House.
• 16:51
  And you write in your book, which is a fantastic book, which is back after the break, also has the greatest title of any of it.
• 16:58
  And it's like it's fun in the back after the break, exactly.
• 17:02
  You write about like racing in from the outside into the interior of this in the opera house during a musical break.
• 17:10
  And what was sort of going on for you once that evening came to a close?
• 17:15
  Yeah, it was, it was a classic case of like we just created this extraordinary piece of television working as a team.
• 17:24
  165 people or something worked on that show with us and it was months and months and months of hardworking we pulled off this unbelievable landmark moment in Australian pop culture history.
• 17:37
  One in four adult Australians watched that show, which I don't think their numbers, their numbers you're never going to get again.
• 17:44
  Because it was before the internet, you know, and I felt like absolute shit.
• 17:51
  I felt like nothing mattered. I felt I hadn't achieved anything. I felt so completely, completely worthless in that.
• 17:56
  That actually was a high point when you think about how bad it did get.
• 18:01
  Like there was a point where years later when I was on the second series of the Bachelor, I think I've got 11 years later.
• 18:09
  I'm on the second series of Bachelor and I was proper like experiencing passive and active suicidal ideation, often experiencing episodes of psychosis, which manifested as paranoid delusions, having flashes and visions and hearing and seeing things weren't there.
• 18:23
  And it was really, really, really awful.
• 18:26
  And like when's that? I'll show the third season of the Bachelor when did that happen?
• 18:29
  Second series of Bachelor 2014.
• 18:31
  And I'm really sick.
• 18:33
  And you know, my brain is constantly trying to convince me about, you know, he's a really good way to make all this stop.
• 18:40
  He's a really good way out.
• 18:41
  I was awful. And yet on camera, I'm like, okay, then like today on today's group date, we're going to have to, you know, you're going to have to play a gam football and whoever's the best gets to go and do a thing with the guy or whatever.
• 18:54
  You know, and it was, you know, because work was always fine because there was a bit of element of control and predictability and and there wasn't the uncertainty that exists every moment outside of work.
• 19:08
  But yeah, man, I used to ride my bicycle from Bondi where I was living there to Hunter's Hill where the mansion was about an 18 K ride and had I not had those two bike rides a day there and back.
• 19:21
  Like those bockered bike rides were just filled with awful visions and and fantasy about just swerving out of the road and, you know, getting stopping at all and like and like seeing things and, you know, horrible, horrible, horrible stuff.
• 19:35
  Were you, were you still seeing a therapist and were you on medication at the time?
• 19:38
  I was seeing everyone and I was on everything.
• 19:41
  Well, you weren't on everything because presumably you hadn't relapsed into drinking.
• 19:45
  No, and I'm really grateful for that because I knew that I had been sober at that point for about four years.
• 19:51
  And I know for a fact that if I had, if I had been drinking, there is absolutely no question in my mind that one night I would have just said, fuck it.
• 19:59
  And I would be here right now. There's no question at all the difficulty of that kind of decision ranks very low against the kind of decisions that I used to make while drinking as far as risk, which I had no problem making.
• 20:13
  So I can, when I wait, what kinds of decisions? Oh, dumb things you do when you're drinking.
• 20:17
  Well, I don't do, I don't do anything, drum when I'm drinking. What do you do when you're drinking things that you think are a good idea.
• 20:23
  But in sobriety circles, it's called getting in case of the fuckets when you just go fuck it.
• 20:29
  And that can go to like fuck it. I'll just finish the entire top of ice cream or fuck it. I'll eat the whole box of Tim Tamps or I'll fuck it.
• 20:35
  I'm going to go out tonight. I'll fuck it. I'll have another three shots or fuck it. Yeah, I'll go home with this person.
• 20:40
  I'll fuck it. Yeah, I'll go and try and walk across the railing of this bridge that doesn't have a guard rail on it.
• 20:44
  Fuck it. You know, just don't care. And there's no shadow of it out there.
• 20:49
  If I had still been drinking when I was that ill that I would have, I would have absolutely taken, I would have gone fuck it.
• 20:56
  And taking a step to make all the pain stop because I cannot under rest.
• 20:59
  Like, you know, under scribe, under describe how relentless and punishing the pain of that kind of psychological trauma is.
• 21:09
  It's literally the looping, ruminating thoughts filled my body with a horror of dread like I'd stuck a fork in a PowerPoint about every five to 10 seconds.
• 21:19
  Let's get back to before that happens, though, because the interesting thing, of course, about mental wellness and mental fitness is that it's incremental.
• 21:25
  I think part of the part of the problem about talking about this sort of stuff in public is that people think that it's an it's an either or proposition.
• 21:33
  And then if they're not, if they're not technically diagnosed as being as having a condition, they sort of feel self judgmental.
• 21:40
  And when I say they, I mean me feel self judgmental when I'm not, when I don't have all my shit figured out.
• 21:45
  Yeah.
• 21:46
  Because my brain isn't broken like yours and like family members of mine, like I'm supposed to, I'm supposed to be cool.
• 21:54
  That sense of empty emptiness and that sense of of deadness and and listlessness and sort of enemy that you describe on the first night of idle.
• 22:06
  That haunts all of us, I think, and anyone who's ever strived for anything and then gotten it and gone all right, what now?
• 22:12
  Yeah.
• 22:13
  And empathize with that regardless of whether or not they're diagnosed with something.
• 22:17
  Back before it got really, really bad when it was simply, when it was simply seen by you through the prism of having a good time.
• 22:26
  It was at the time it was, I thought it was having a good time, but on a reflection, it was an a necessitating the anxiety that I had about.
• 22:44
  With the exception of some days at Channel V where, you know, we were on air for quite a while.
• 22:49
  We may have had some sneaky beers on camera.
• 22:51
  I was never, never drunk on air.
• 22:54
  It was, but the never drunk on air or never drank before going on air.
• 22:58
  Never drank before going on air.
• 22:59
  I had a few beers on secret beers on air a few times.
• 23:02
  There was a rock and roll channel.
• 23:03
  There's a rock and roll show.
• 23:04
  Never on any of those shows like idle or anything.
• 23:08
  I never had a drink before the show.
• 23:09
  Never, never, never.
• 23:11
  But the moment it ended, the rev.
• 23:15
  I've just finished watching an extraordinary documentary about Ferrari versus Ford of Le Mans 60.
• 23:21
  And so like the rev limiter of my brain to host live television that is, you know, there's 600 people in the crowd.
• 23:29
  There's two points, something million people watching at home.
• 23:31
  You've got to be out at 931 and six frames because that's when the Grand Prix starts.
• 23:37
  The amount of things you have to think about at the same time, at the same time is try to find funny in moments that happen across a two hour broadcast.
• 23:47
  Your brain is out of, it's spinning a lot.
• 23:50
  The flywheel is going and it takes a long while to slow down.
• 23:54
  When you also add on top of that, the adrenaline, the excitement and everyone's high-fiving each other about how great the show was.
• 24:03
  A couple of glasses of red is just, just does a great job of taking the edge off.
• 24:07
  But as I believe it was WX Rose, famously said, I used to do a little, but the little wouldn't do it.
• 24:14
  So the little got more and more.
• 24:16
  The drinking always, I was always afraid of being in a room with strangers and beer or beer was a thing that made that feel easier.
• 24:24
  And as I did get into roles that had me more recognizable by strangers, the fear of those strangers became even bigger.
• 24:34
  And a great antidote to that fear of strangers was to surround myself in a blanket of beer and it got to the point where I'd often not leave the house for days and days at a time.
• 24:46
  And if I did, it would only be with a couple of starters at home before I went out because I just couldn't face the stairs and I couldn't face the...
• 24:57
  What am I expecting? I'm on a fucking show that has a...
• 25:01
  This is the job. The job is that people will recognize you when you're doing your groceries. That's the gig. That's what you get paid for.
• 25:07
  What did you want? That's interesting. Let's just worry about what you actually wanted out of life.
• 25:12
  When you were younger, when you were in your teens, what were your aspirations?
• 25:15
  It was just, it was really simple. Everything was going to be awesome as long as I got on TV, everything would be fine.
• 25:21
  Why did you want to be on TV? If you didn't like being looked at.
• 25:24
  Oh, well, because what's anxiety for me? Anxiety is a lack of control. Anxiety is not knowing what's going to happen. Anxiety is no one.
• 25:30
  Everyone's talking, no one's listening to my voice. I'm unseen. I'm unheard. Anxiety is I have no control over the situation.
• 25:35
  What am I more in control than what I'm on stage? What am I more in control than what I'm on camera? On a live show? When I'm the one...
• 25:41
  That makes absolutely no sense, I'll show you.
• 25:43
  To an outsider, the unpredictability of live television is the ultimate pinnacle of not being in control and of not knowing what's going to happen next.
• 25:54
  Absolute serenity. I guess it's like Kelly Slater describing the perfect cut back at Chopu in this 10-foot barrel of death over a reef and he has the balls to turn the board around back into the barrel and come back out again.
• 26:09
  There's three and a half seconds of his life would feel like complete bliss when I think back to those moments of being on camera, particularly when I was in America.
• 26:18
  I'm sober at this point and I was on a show on CBS doing a show called Lift Dance and there's a couple million Americans.
• 26:26
  Like the entire audience of a whole season of idle watched per show. Like it was fucking gigantic, right?
• 26:31
  Absolute bliss. Complete silence in my head. All the noise. All the pain. All the fear. Everything just stops in this moment.
• 26:38
  And so I just chased that. I chased that feeling of serenity that only happened when I was on stage or when I was on camera.
• 26:45
  And it's ultimately, you know, my coping mechanism becoming my career wasn't a great way to start it. It's very different now.
• 26:52
  But that's basically what I was chasing. You know, I was chasing this moment and I'm not alone. I've spoken to people, particularly stand-ups who talk about this a lot.
• 27:00
  And they go, oh, yeah, I understand that. You know, I get the feeling everyone's, everyone's got to be quiet so I can talk.
• 27:06
  And I chased this. I mean, I totally get it. I have that same experience.
• 27:11
  But I don't diagnose it the same way. It's it strikes me that you might be retroactively sort of imposing an ad hoc explanation for what it was doing when it might actually be unrelated.
• 27:24
  Like that sense of serenity that you get right in the moment when you're doing something really good when you've put in Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000, the hell has worked at it.
• 27:31
  You've done all of this hosting on Channel V. You know what you're doing. You're like, this is my moment. I'm here to shine. It doesn't necessarily make logical sense to me that that is contingent on having the type of personality that hates uncertainty.
• 27:45
  Okay, but that was that I'm just trying to describe to you that's your experience of it. I've been asked about it and I've come to the realization after a lot of, you know, kind of reflection, kind of questioning of myself of like, why did I want that?
• 27:59
  That's it. That's why I felt, you know, so I'm seen and I heard an out of control.
• 28:08
  But I'm seen and I heard makes sense. Yeah. So did trying to find a place where okay, you motherfuckers are going to have to look and you're going to have to listen.
• 28:16
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So before you were famous, did you have anxiety around strangers and did you not like people looking at you and did you feel awkward around as a tiny job?
• 28:24
  I was sent to psychiatrists at five.
• 28:26
  So becoming the most famous person in Australia was an interesting career choice. Yeah. I know right.
• 28:32
  I don't know, man. I don't know what happened. I don't know. I don't know how that part happened.
• 28:37
  So let's talk. Let's talk about part of it. I think a part of it has to do with like anyone, as you mentioned earlier, anyone's, there's not great diagnosis.
• 28:47
  I mean, if you really want to break it down, there's a thing called the DSM, the diagnostics and statistics manual that is shared amongst psychiatrists and psychologists.
• 28:56
  And it was created as a way, basically, for say a psychologist in Brisbane is trying to have a conversation with a psychologist in
• 29:04
  Birmingham about a case they read about in Sweden and they're trying to describe the similarities of the patients they have to the case they both read about.
• 29:12
  It was basically just a common language that psychologists and psychiatrists could use to describe the things that they were seeing in patients.
• 29:19
  It's not like you've got a spiral fracture of your tibia.
• 29:23
  So if I have that and you have that, they're very similar, almost identical things.
• 29:28
  Okay. Versus, you know, what have I got?
• 29:32
  You know, I have one psychiatrist who wants to describe to me, it's like you've got OSHA syndrome.
• 29:37
  You've got a bit of this. You've got a bit of that. You're on the spectrum here. You're over here on there.
• 29:42
  But you're really great there. So, you know, there's no, what have I got, give me the pill, then I'm better.
• 29:48
  It's not like everyone's got a little bit of something going on.
• 29:52
  But we have this desire to put things into boxes.
• 29:55
  So, you know, I have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
• 30:00
  I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety and social phobia in the past.
• 30:05
  And those things come and go, you know, there's parts of the obsessional and the ruminating anxiety that do stay with me.
• 30:12
  But, you know, when you asked about, you know, becoming the most famous person in Australia, don't know if I am.
• 30:19
  Well, you were. I mean, you're very well known now, but there was a period in the early days of Australian Idol,
• 30:25
  where you had a very distinctive look. You were that cool guy. You had the long blonde hair. Like, Idol was the show.
• 30:30
  So, it was, as you say, before the internet. So, nobody was tapping away on their phones when it was on.
• 30:35
  You sat down and you watched Australian Idol. So, the obsessional part of it just meant that
• 30:42
  when other people who I had started in my career with, people who looked very similar to me,
• 30:48
  people who had the same background, the same skill set, probably had also come from radio.
• 30:53
  When they, I just tended to do the extra hours of whatever it was.
• 31:00
  I just tended to go like, I will out work. I just don't know how to do anything but work and work on this.
• 31:07
  And this is exactly what I have to do and we'll do. And nothing can stop. And I'm like the fucking terminator when I decide.
• 31:13
  While the OCD can be awful when the wrong kind of information or the wrong kind of obsession happens,
• 31:18
  it's extraordinarily handy when it comes to my career because I have a brain that just won't fucking stop until something's done.
• 31:25
  Jay Leno used to say that he would go to, you know, on a cold winter's night, he'd go out to join the line of comics
• 31:32
  or waiting to get on it at some comedy club. And, you know, gradually over the course of the evening,
• 31:37
  the line would thin out and people would just go home and they'd stuff this.
• 31:41
  I'm not going to stand in the snow for four and a half hours waiting to try to see if I can win the lottery ticket
• 31:47
  of essentially getting some stage time at the end before the manager closes up the place.
• 31:51
  And he'd be like, hey, I mean, you just got to wait around. He just went around.
• 31:54
  He had been success, his success is waiting.
• 31:57
  And there's something to that.
• 31:59
  Yeah, absolutely is. It's like my old manager in L.A., a bloke by the name of John Ferriter.
• 32:06
  He used to say, only you know how hard you've worked to make your dreams come true.
• 32:10
  And he's right. You know, like say someone else got the big fancy radio job or whatever over you, Josh.
• 32:17
  You have, you're the only person who lies in bed at night that goes, did I do everything?
• 32:23
  Actually, you know, I didn't, I said no to a couple of those Sunday morning shifts when there was some pretty good times
• 32:29
  or I could have really proven myself against a politician.
• 32:32
  Yeah, make sense. I get a person said, yes, okay, it makes sense. All right.
• 32:36
  Only you know how hard you've worked to make your dreams come true.
• 32:39
  Reminds me of something that my dad says, which is that once you're successful, nobody asked how long it took.
• 32:44
  Yeah. Once you've done the thing, nobody asks. Nobody goes, you know,
• 32:50
  and if you did it quickly and it was no good and it didn't become successful, then nobody's going to be like,
• 32:54
  oh, that was fantastic. I mean, it sucked, but you did it so quickly.
• 32:58
  Yeah, I'm doing this thing at the moment in Melbourne. It's a show called The Masked Singer. It's a lot of fun.
• 33:02
  And talking with the dancers the other day, because I, as I don't know if you realize,
• 33:07
  but I generally like to enter a room with a full choreographed, a fully choreographed number
• 33:12
  that involves pyrotechnics and that's generally how I like to write it.
• 33:16
  Indeed. Yeah.
• 33:18
  It is if you just go to the supermarket. Yeah. That's naturally. There's a bit of that.
• 33:22
  And so I was talking with the dancers during a Hesley other name. One of them was talking about,
• 33:26
  this sat in the other side. Well, you're doing pretty good. I said, well, I hope so.
• 33:29
  I've been at this since 1994.
• 33:32
  And, you know, make no mistake. That's 25, 26 years with an exception of being really unemployed
• 33:39
  around the age of 38. That's 26 years of working every fucking day.
• 33:43
  And at the moment, my call is at 9.30 a.m. and I leave the studio at midnight.
• 33:48
  And that's the job. And that's what it takes. And that's what it's always taken.
• 33:53
  There is no show up to work for 45 minute, do a thing and go home and you number one. No.
• 33:58
  You have to, that's it. That's what it takes. And it's interesting that you're talking about this as the craft that it is.
• 34:07
  Because there is a, it can be a little bit of a, it can be a bit frustrating for people in the television and radio presenting game.
• 34:16
  That what you're doing basically just appears like being an affable kind of guy.
• 34:20
  So a lot of people are like, yeah, you know, sure, you can do that. Whatever.
• 34:25
  And there's a, there's a period in your book where you talk about after the CBS show was canceled after, after one season,
• 34:32
  you went back to LA and you realized that all the people who were getting cast as being hosts of these big TV shows were people who were already famous.
• 34:39
  They were, they were wrestlers. They were, you know, they were people who, they were actors or whatever.
• 34:43
  And the, the art, the craft, the skill of being a professional MC presenter, host person who can wrangle it all and be the, be the ringleader was really being overlooked in terms of like who can, who's going to get,
• 34:58
  who's, who's got a name that's going to get people to tune in for five minutes. Do you, how do you feel about that?
• 35:04
  Yeah, I remember, I remember when I asked who got the, I didn't mind if like, if I lost the job to someone who was, I mean, it's a very, it's a specific set of skills.
• 35:13
  You know, I'm not Liam Neeson, but it's a, it's a very specific set of skills to hold down a life, either a radio show or a live television broadcast,
• 35:21
  a big shiny floor kind of wrangling all that kind of stuff. There's a lot to think about. And if it looks like I'm just coming out there smiling, twirling a microphone and trying to a thing.
• 35:30
  You, you know, that's the old swan, I'm chlausing along the top of the water. You just have no idea how much other shit's gone on and what's being yelled in my ear, what's, you know,
• 35:40
  where the cameras are, where the lights are, the performer's not ready. The former is ready. We're changing the order, whatever it is.
• 35:46
  And if I lost the gig to someone else who had that skill set, I'd be like, okay, right, I understand. They just look when for something else, but what I think I was like a bronze medallion gymnast or something.
• 35:56
  Was there a specific show was there?
• 35:58
  Oh, yeah, there's a few. I was like two or three in a row where I lost it to, I lost it to a rest one wrestler and two athletes.
• 36:07
  I had to, and I had to pivot because I'm like, okay, they're not going to be hiring people like me anymore.
• 36:12
  I'm going to have to go do something else and just be in acceptance of that because.
• 36:15
  Did you think that your career was over?
• 36:17
  Um, I, yes. Certainly my camera, my own camera career.
• 36:23
  This is after idle. In other words, so you've gone to the States, idle has finished.
• 36:27
  Yeah. And you've done a season of an idle like show over there. And then you're like, yeah, there's all over.
• 36:33
  But you know, these things come and go. Big shiny floor comes and goes. And thankfully, I'm, I'm on another big shiny floor show right now.
• 36:40
  And it's, it's brilliant fun. It's extraordinary. And I, uh, I come alive on a, on a Perspect floor with a jib camera to play with.
• 36:48
  That'll, that'll be on your tombstone.
• 36:52
  My car alive on a Perspects floor. Yeah. For anymore.
• 36:55
  Uh, the, the first night of idle, um, 2003, let's just, uh, let's just wrap that, that up then.
• 37:02
  And then we can keep moving forward because you write in the book that, uh, you didn't feel proud or satisfied after it was all over.
• 37:09
  You know, the fireworks have gone off. Everyone's gone home. The confetti cannons have exploded.
• 37:13
  It's the biggest broadcasting phenomenon of your lifetime. And you've presided over it all.
• 37:18
  And you say, I felt no emotion whatsoever. I just thought, well, what the fuck am I supposed to do now?
• 37:22
  Yeah. And you say that you went back to the, the dressing room, which is this incredible, palatial dressing room with water ceiling windows over the harbor bridge and a huge grand piano where you hoodie men and all these people have probably,
• 37:34
  you know, these, these world class conductors and performers have all been waiting to go on at the opera house and just pull out some cocaine and start doing rack, start doing lines off this.
• 37:43
  Yeah. It's piano. Yeah. And all I did was feel even less. I felt completely numb. I felt nothing.
• 37:50
  Well, you probably felt good for about seven minutes. And then, and then I think started descending talk about myself a lot.
• 37:56
  Yeah. And that's, and that's it. And that, you know, I'm not the first and the last person to, you know, what can I chase now?
• 38:03
  I'll, I'll chase this, you know, I'll put drugs on my nose and be as demonstrate and trying to try to feel anything, trying to feel anything at all.
• 38:13
  And will you surprise that you felt dead? Yes. Because all the, everything that I've been fed at that point had been, you know, if you make enough money, get big enough ratings and have a sex with enough people, finally, everything will be fine.
• 38:30
  And it wasn't. It was worse. There was nothing at that point. And I'm like, well, that, what, what? I did all the things that I was supposed to do that I thought I was supposed to do. And none of it is there.
• 38:46
  And, and since I guess, Josh, what can, what I can tell you is that in sobriety and in getting a lot better and trying to find a way back to a healthy way of, of thinking about the world and trying to heal my brain and those neural pathways that jumped to horror and doom so quickly.
• 39:06
  You really only have happiness when your day has meaning and you are in acceptance that all you really have is this very moment.
• 39:18
  There is no happiness when an outcome is achieved. There are a list as long as my arm of gold medalists who are like, you know, just stood there listening to the anthem and then went home, you know, if you don't enjoy the process, you will not enjoy the reward.
• 39:34
  You absolutely have to enjoy the process and you have to give up the idea that the reward will make everything better unless it's like, you know, that reward will bring you further opportunity and in a particular way, but it might not.
• 39:48
  You know, I got in this show on CBS and I thought, that's it. I'm here. People are going to kick my fucking door down and make me a TV star.
• 39:54
  No one called no one called it was the biggest puff of smoke and it was awful. So you just have to enjoy the process and I remember.
• 40:04
  Massing a season one last year, we recorded a few months out from transmission from when we aired it and you know, everyone was like, oh, congratulations, you must, you know, it's really, really great.
• 40:16
  It's number one show, whatever. And you have to think to yourself, look, it's not that you don't work as hard on the shows that aren't number one.
• 40:23
  You work as hard as you do on everything and then you hand it over because you don't control when the network programs that you don't control how much promos out of it.
• 40:35
  For all we know, we could have been scheduled to go out on a Monday night and on Saturday someone could have pulled on an alien mask or a robot mask and shot up a school.
• 40:44
  And then we would have had to pull the whole show, you know, we have no control of any other things. So you just have to enjoy the process.
• 40:51
  You have to enjoy the process and as much as you can, you have to try and find something that gives your life meaning. Now for me, this particular show, this is just about allowing a family to sit down and watch a TV show together.
• 41:05
  I am trying as much as I can to give families in Australia the opportunity to spend time together.
• 41:11
  And the fact that we, you know, we make this big silly show with fireworks and confetti cannons and a giant sloff and all kinds of malaki.
• 41:18
  That's all for me leading towards a family sitting together on a couch. And that is the meaning that I have in my heart when I go out and make this show.
• 41:27
  I mean, it sounds very cheesy, but as long as it works for you to get the job done, then it's functioning, I suppose.
• 41:33
  Cheesy for you, you cynical bastard.
• 41:36
  But it's true.
• 41:38
  We're bringing, you know, anytime I hear someone be like, you know, what my company is about is about really bringing people together.
• 41:45
  The reason why we make these like toilet polishing scoops is because I think the whole family can get around and polish toilets with my scoops a bit of that.
• 41:55
  I'm like, okay, okay, okay, lethario, I get it. It's fine.
• 41:58
  You can just toilet polishing scoops. That'd be pretty good. You could just have a toilet polish, but I take you, I take your point that there's a, I mean, this is all a bit, we should probably add the caveat.
• 42:07
  This is, this is all a very privileged kind of conversation because there are a lot of people who wanted to be doing what you're doing and were 99.9% is good.
• 42:17
  Or maybe 101%, you know, as good and slightly better, but for whatever reason, because of their look or the time that they were coming in or out of the industry or something, maybe they're, you know, they didn't have the opportunity to be miserable while they were making tons of money and doing lines of cocaine on the grand piano.
• 42:36
  I don't worry. I lost all that money. You don't worry. All that money went away.
• 42:40
  It's hard. You don't have to worry about that.
• 42:43
  The thing that's interesting is, I mean, what you're saying is all this wise stuff. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's so wise that it's almost banal to say that like you have to enjoy the process, you have to stop the smell of roses.
• 42:55
  I mean, in a good way, in a way that like the Buddha is banal because you go in like all you need is love.
• 43:02
  Yes, okay. We get it. But what, but what that means in practice and how you find how you grow your way towards actually incorporating it into your daily life.
• 43:12
  I mean, you were talking about this 2003 idle premiere. It was another 11 years before you got sober. Yes.
• 43:19
  And you probably knew at the time that it was unfulfilling.
• 43:24
  Drinking, yes. Yeah. Yeah. And acting up in all kinds of ways.
• 43:29
  Do you remember in in in 2010, I sat in on your LA radio show. Yeah. One night.
• 43:36
  Yes, I do. I was thinking about that just before I got on the phone with you.
• 43:39
  Do you have any recollection of whether that was before or after you got sober?
• 43:43
  What, do you remember when it was you were in Los Angeles?
• 43:46
  I moved to LA for a year from New York at the end of 2009 and I left in about October of 2010.
• 43:52
  So assuming that it was in the first few months of when I moved, then you wouldn't have been sober because you got sober in March.
• 44:01
  I like sobering March. So that would have been the very end of it.
• 44:03
  That would have been in the, the, the Vicodin day, day drinking times. Yeah, wasn't great.
• 44:11
  Hmm. It's amazing that, you know, I mean, we weren't close, but when I think back to that and I then I read what you were going through.
• 44:21
  And I think how, I mean, it makes me actually really sad how when I realize how futile and how much of a barrier there is between all of us.
• 44:34
  Really, that I, you know, we could have been chatting and you could be like, oh, come along and I could sit there and you could do a whole show and we could part ways.
• 44:44
  And I'd have no idea that you're going to get up the next morning and crack a beer drink through the entire day, live in a soft judgmental hellhole.
• 44:55
  Yes.
• 44:56
  And you can't tell me all the best, all the best drinkers alike that made all the very best, they're very best drinkers.
• 45:02
  They're the ones that hide it from everyone else and make it look like it's just all a part of it.
• 45:08
  You know, that's that's the very best ones to do it.
• 45:12
  And that's just, you know, that's just it.
• 45:14
  You know, that's, I came to learn that so much of mind drinking had been.
• 45:19
  So my, and I got told this, you know, if, if early on in sobriety, I got told book, if you put half as much effort into how much
• 45:27
  fandangla we're used to, how many hoops used to jump through so you get high and loaded.
• 45:32
  If you put half as much effort into that, you'll be fine in this sobriety thing.
• 45:37
  And because I used to, you know, like make sure I would book a flight, I'll hang on to the bar, the airports are open there so I'll move there and I'll pay for a hotel and I'll fucking do this and do that.
• 45:48
  Explain that to us because that's quite funny and honestly to be perfectly honest, it's something I've done as well.
• 45:53
  I think it's something a lot of people have done and I think this is probably telling about Australia's drinking culture.
• 45:57
  Yeah, you've got a, you've got a morning meeting in Melbourne, you can get the, the 6 a.m. flight down from Sydney.
• 46:03
  This is obviously pre pandemic.
• 46:05
  Or, you know, or I can get the flight down the night before the corners club will be, will be serving booze.
• 46:11
  I can have a couple of cocktails on the plane.
• 46:13
  Yeah, you know, I can get to the, I can go down, I can have a nice meal.
• 46:16
  And you rationalize it to yourself that way, but you don't realize the part of my friend.
• 46:20
  Yeah, I'll be careful with my, I'll get for that.
• 46:22
  Part of the appeal is that you get to get tanked the night before.
• 46:25
  Yeah.
• 46:26
  And then you're late to the meeting anyway.
• 46:28
  It gets you out of my life.
• 46:30
  Well, you had to get, to be 20 minutes to get here, but I turn up just smelling like disgust and shame.
• 46:37
  Um, and yeah, but that's, you know, that's, that's all, that's all a part of it.
• 46:41
  And, um, you know, some people get to have a couple drinks and not.
• 46:46
  And then go, oh, I'm going home now.
• 46:48
  Me, I would explain it's like, it's like anyone with a pen analogy, right?
• 46:53
  Even the smallest amount of peanut will set off an allergic reaction in their body, where even the smallest trace amount can be enough to make them very, very sick, if not die.
• 47:02
  All right.
• 47:03
  It'll put a change in their body in a physiological way.
• 47:05
  They're, you know, what if they can't breathe properly is horrible, right?
• 47:08
  Similarly, even the tiniest amount of alcohol sets off an allergic reaction in my body, where I can no longer make a good decision about how much is a good amount to drink.
• 47:19
  I, I no longer feel the same way about what I think is right and wrong.
• 47:23
  And things that I would normally have thought was a terrible idea now become a great idea.
• 47:28
  And I am completely not in control of that.
• 47:31
  And that changes my body and my brain completely.
• 47:35
  And so as a result of that, once I recognize that, I'm like, oh, okay, then well, I might just not drink.
• 47:42
  And then we'll see how it goes.
• 47:43
  I've heard this, this articulation of it from other people who've gone through 12 step programs.
• 47:48
  And it's interesting and whatever works for people is great.
• 47:51
  I mean, I have alcoholism in my family.
• 47:54
  And well, I should say borderline alcoholism because I also don't think that the term is particularly useful because I basically think that, I mean, you were just saying that you're sort of allergic to alcohol because when you take it, it makes you do stupid things.
• 48:06
  Oh, sure, that's what alcohol does to everybody.
• 48:09
  It makes them do stupid things.
• 48:11
  And the number of people who actually can happily drink one or two drinks and then feel no desire to have more.
• 48:21
  I sometimes wonder if you actually dig down to a lot of people people say, well, of course, I'm not going to have more because I have responsibilities.
• 48:26
  So I don't know, you know, either I'm going to drive or you know, there are kids or something like that.
• 48:30
  I think a lot of what a lot of people are going through in their relationship to alcohol is mildly dysfunctional.
• 48:38
  I would agree with you.
• 48:40
  I think the difference is Josh is that it no longer becomes a choice.
• 48:46
  It's no longer I might have a couple of beers.
• 48:49
  It's I have to fucking have beers.
• 48:51
  Absolutely have to have beers.
• 48:53
  You don't even realize doing that.
• 48:55
  And it could be to the point of like, and not that it was for me at the time, but I have heard stories and I know it's like it.
• 49:01
  Yes, I know the kids need to be picked up from school. I understand that it's my turn to go and get my son from netball or whatever.
• 49:09
  And I have to have beer.
• 49:11
  And so I'm at the pub having a beer entering the phone from a wife going, how come I just got a call from Billy who is waiting by himself for the courts?
• 49:19
  You had to go pick him up.
• 49:21
  It's like, yeah, I knew that.
• 49:23
  And I had to have a beer and beer became more important.
• 49:26
  And that for me is the delineation.
• 49:29
  That's a broad example of it's when you no longer have a choice when the need to have a drink.
• 49:37
  It starts becoming more important than every single other thing in your life.
• 49:41
  And that's what began to happen to me.
• 49:43
  And even knowing full well, it was very bad and dysfunctional.
• 49:47
  And it was destroying my relationship.
• 49:49
  It actually had already destroyed my relationship and just ended it later.
• 49:54
  You know, just destroying my career.
• 49:56
  I knew all of this stuff to be true, but yet I could not stop.
• 50:00
  I absolutely could not stop. I was powerless to stop.
• 50:03
  And that I think for me is the difference.
• 50:06
  Do you remember what you were thinking?
• 50:09
  Do you remember how it would like the drag that the booze has on you or whatever it is that you're about to take has on you?
• 50:19
  The moments before you have it is not a negative compulsion.
• 50:24
  I don't think it's it.
• 50:25
  There must be a sense of like, oh, now I get to imbibe my special treat or now I get to let my hair down.
• 50:32
  Or now I get to do this naughty thing or now I get to do that.
• 50:35
  Now I get to not have to be responsible for all the other things in my life.
• 50:37
  Well, now I like what does it look like in the moments before you use all of those things and everything's going to be better as soon as I have this beer.
• 50:44
  I'm reaching all this pain, all this noise, all this fear, all this worry.
• 50:48
  Everything's going to go away.
• 50:49
  I've really got to have this beer.
• 50:50
  I can't handle feeling about this or feeling about that or like it's all an avoidance behavior.
• 50:54
  For me, whether it be drinking or gambling or at one point in my life porn, it was always an avoidance behavior.
• 51:01
  How can I get out of feeling this awful feeling in my body?
• 51:03
  What can I do to escape this icky feeling inside me?
• 51:07
  And it did go away for about three seconds.
• 51:13
  As soon as I had that first tweak, it goes away for about three seconds.
• 51:16
  And then you just go on a plane.
• 51:19
  I personally, oh, there's a plane of plunge and a little bit of shame for like, oh, fuck, now I'm having a drink.
• 51:24
  It's like 11 o'clock on a Tuesday.
• 51:26
  What have I become?
• 51:28
  And then you know what's good for the feeling like that's more drinking.
• 51:33
  And then you just go into numbing mode, right?
• 51:36
  It's Simon Simpson saying beer is the solution to and the cause of all of life problems.
• 51:41
  They are a very clever set of writers on the Simpsons.
• 51:44
  They have very, very, very clever set of writers on the Simpsons.
• 51:47
  And recognizing that is a very important part of eventually trying to get yourself better.
• 51:54
  And was it the same sort of appeal for other drugs? What did you like about cocaine?
• 51:58
  Well, everything's a great idea after a quarter bottle of gray grease or a six pack of beer, coax.
• 52:03
  You know, there's always something so romantic about it.
• 52:06
  You know, very tiny Montana, very fucking, you know, you saw it in all the movies.
• 52:10
  And you know, you heard stories about your favorite bands doing it.
• 52:13
  But look, that's beyond us.
• 52:15
  Like, God, now I've seen like every episode of Narcos.
• 52:20
  So you weren't addicted.
• 52:22
  Were you not a compulsive addicted user of cocaine?
• 52:25
  No, it was just always around. Look at the hell.
• 52:27
  It was just you were a rock star and then say you're on the highest rating television show in the country
• 52:33
  and the history of television.
• 52:35
  You don't need to buy drugs.
• 52:37
  They're just there. They're just everywhere.
• 52:39
  And hey, look, I left something in the bathroom for you.
• 52:41
  Come back to the little, you know, little room in the back of the pub here.
• 52:44
  I've got something to show you from the security footage.
• 52:46
  You'll never believe this fight. We had the other night.
• 52:48
  Come and look at this.
• 52:49
  What's the day? What's this on the table here?
• 52:51
  You know, all that kind of stuff would just happen all the time.
• 52:54
  And don't mind if I do.
• 52:56
  And, you know, I was always, you know,
• 52:58
  a couple of deep, couple of beers deep by the time that happened.
• 53:01
  Does it still crop up?
• 53:03
  Oh, God, no.
• 53:04
  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 53:06
  I don't know what you're using.
• 53:08
  I just mean how, because you're still in those same circles.
• 53:10
  And so you're still, I mean, I guess everybody's aware of your backstory now.
• 53:14
  But there haven't been blunders where people who don't know are just like,
• 53:17
  I'll come on and have a line.
• 53:19
  Hell, no.
• 53:20
  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 53:22
  I just tend, I'm also, you know, a bit more skilled at my sobriety these days
• 53:26
  is just not putting myself in situations where that sort of thing will happen.
• 53:30
  That's all, you know, that's a big, a big part of staying.
• 53:34
  So it was to make sure that you don't put yourself in harm's way.
• 53:37
  You know, at least not without backup.
• 53:40
  And look, what eventually happens is even like,
• 53:43
  even so Josh, you know, like I'm,
• 53:45
  and this is like as honest as, as honest as I can be, you know,
• 53:47
  I'm in an apartment in stage 4 lockdown in Melbourne.
• 53:51
  And I'm here for out in a three and a half weeks, right?
• 53:54
  There's a bottle shop at the downstairs in my building here, right?
• 53:58
  No one would know if I was to go down there and grab a cup.
• 54:03
  No one would have to know.
• 54:05
  My wife, my kids, no one, no one I work with would need to know, all right?
• 54:09
  That I'm having some beers.
• 54:12
  And I could get away with it completely in total secrecy, all right?
• 54:17
  And yet, I know that it is a incremental thing.
• 54:22
  And it is a very slippery slope.
• 54:24
  And it wouldn't be next week.
• 54:26
  It wouldn't be next month.
• 54:28
  But I know for an absolute fact that everything that I've built,
• 54:31
  everything that I've recreated, everything I've clawed back from the,
• 54:35
  the jaws of, you know, shame of losing everything and losing a house,
• 54:40
  you know, being unemployed, just, you know, losing everything.
• 54:44
  Everything that I've rebuilt since then would vanish.
• 54:48
  And there is no beer.
• 54:51
  That is so goddamn tasty.
• 54:53
  It's worth losing my family, losing everything I've put together.
• 54:56
  So you end up, what happens is like, literally, like it sounds cheesy.
• 54:59
  It's going to sound real cheesy, but you, you build a fortress of resilience,
• 55:07
  a brick at a time.
• 55:08
  And each one of those bricks is by spending a day not using or drinking, right?
• 55:12
  And you end up building this fortress and it gets stronger every day.
• 55:15
  And you build it so big and you build this life upon this fortress.
• 55:19
  Like, you know, we, I own a home now, like I'm gone from renting in a country,
• 55:25
  paying rent out of my savings in a foreign country.
• 55:27
  How did you, you just said that you lost your house?
• 55:29
  How did you lose your house?
• 55:30
  Oh, this is magical thing called divorce.
• 55:32
  That, yeah, that one.
• 55:35
  Right, okay.
• 55:36
  So the booze leads to divorce leads to losing house.
• 55:39
  A big showgirl stood and went, pah!
• 55:42
  That was like that.
• 55:44
  This is puffer smoke and all that.
• 55:47
  And, you know, everything that you rebuild in sobriety around, you know,
• 55:56
  relationships with family that had to get repaired and you had to go in and you had to say,
• 56:01
  and do some really serious amends and look, I really understand that when I was using this,
• 56:06
  how I made, might have made you feel and, and then burning that trust back and rebuilding
• 56:11
  those relationships with family and with friends and, and then re,
• 56:15
  I'm like really underscoring in yourself what it is that led you to drink and why you went on to escape
• 56:21
  and then building a relationship or intimate romantic relationship with someone like my wife Audrey
• 56:26
  and then getting to a point and with Georgia as well, my, my stepdaughter and then, you know,
• 56:31
  rebuilding my, my trust with, there are people who, who, you know,
• 56:35
  are the gatekeepers of who gets to be on TV shows, rebuilding my trust with them
• 56:39
  so that they could trust me to be on TV again and then, you know,
• 56:42
  putting all the stuff back together and then, you know, obviously we're now, we now,
• 56:45
  we, I own a house now with what, with what Audrey and we have a house and, you know,
• 56:49
  we've got a new baby and, you know, build, you build a life in sobriety
• 56:53
  that is so fucking valuable that even though I could completely get away,
• 56:57
  completely get away, Scott free by having a drink downstairs.
• 57:00
  I know that all that would vanish and it is a hundred percent, not worth it.
• 57:04
  Well, you couldn't get away, Scott free.
• 57:06
  There's no, maybe you could get away, Scott free in the, in the short term,
• 57:10
  but in the long term, there's no, there's no.
• 57:12
  You end up building a life in sobriety that you're not willing to lose.
• 57:15
  And so even if someone says, listen, I just got off the plane from a private plane from Columbia
• 57:21
  I didn't get search from customs.
• 57:22
  I have this beautiful gram of fresh, super pure cocaine and he is a bottle of
• 57:26
  grey goose.
• 57:27
  I'll be like, good for you.
• 57:29
  Why you go?
• 57:30
  No, it's not, it's never, there's nothing that someone could put in front of me
• 57:35
  that would be better than what I have with my family.
• 57:39
  And that's it.
• 57:40
  You just, that's lovely.
• 57:42
  You just mentioned rebuilding trust with TV executives as part of your recovery process.
• 57:48
  And I think it's interesting that, you know, you got the,
• 57:52
  along with the rock and roll lifestyle of drinking and doing drugs,
• 57:55
  came the ego cockiness of being, of being a big star.
• 57:59
  And you, you almost got yourself fired from idle by, by firing your own manager
• 58:05
  and then demanding twice as much money as they were willing to give you.
• 58:08
  So they were like, you can go and get staffed.
• 58:10
  We'll just let Ricky Lee host it.
• 58:12
  And you had to come back and humbly work for, for much less than you'd previously been earning.
• 58:17
  Yeah.
• 58:18
  Now, now with the third, the third co-host.
• 58:20
  And you also, you also declined the biggest loser.
• 58:23
  Yeah.
• 58:24
  Because you wanted to be in the States and you were going to conquer the world.
• 58:27
  And so, you know, that, that in which at the time could have been a way of extending your franchise
• 58:34
  onto another hugely successful show, you told them to, to get fucked.
• 58:40
  Can you explain that headspace to us?
• 58:43
  I guess, you know, in the same way that we said that, Homer said it's the solution to
• 58:48
  and the cause of all of life's problems being alcohol.
• 58:51
  I would also say that ego is the, you know, taming of ego is a solution to the causing of all
• 58:59
  the life's problems caused by the untamed ego.
• 59:03
  And I just, self will run riot.
• 59:06
  And that just my ego just refusing to admit reality or accept reality, accept what is real
• 59:13
  and accept what is true and, and be able to see what opportunity actually lies before me
• 59:17
  and that everything I actually really did want was being given to me.
• 59:21
  I still remember exactly where I had that phone conversation.
• 59:24
  I was getting out of a cab next to the, um, Bella Greenie's just cafe here in Melbourne on the other side of town
• 59:30
  where they make a fantastic minister.
• 59:32
  But I can't eat anymore because I'm silly, but it's to make a really good ministering.
• 59:35
  And I was getting there.
• 59:36
  I was going there to get a minister hanging up the phone to Tim Clooke at the time and going,
• 59:42
  yeah, no, I'm not, there's no, I'm not going to do that.
• 59:45
  This is the biggest loser conversation.
• 59:47
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 59:49
  Because I told him it was because I wanted to pursue a career in America.
• 59:55
  But the truth was, I was still so ashamed of how fat I was when I was a young man.
• 1:00:01
  I was thinking like, if they put me on the biggest loser, they're going to want to put my before photos up there.
• 1:00:06
  And I am so terrified of anyone seeing me when I was fat that I will say no to this job.
• 1:00:14
  And that's kind of, you know, it was kind of like a 50, 50, to be honest.
• 1:00:19
  Now, I was so ashamed of my body, so ashamed of my body that I absolutely 100% didn't want people to realize that, you know, that's what my life was.
• 1:00:30
  And they used to be like 112 kilos.
• 1:00:32
  And the show went on to run for 11 years and you could have had an idol and biggest loser.
• 1:00:38
  That's a lot of houses.
• 1:00:39
  You can buy a lot of houses with 11 years affecting a big loser.
• 1:00:42
  It truly is.
• 1:00:43
  But, you know, the decisions we make, you know, we're a product of choice.
• 1:00:46
  Choice and consequences is basically all that's what life is, choices and consequences.
• 1:00:51
  You know, we are free to make the former room where we are low to accept the latter.
• 1:00:57
  But what life is at the end of the, the last century, which sounds dramatic.
• 1:01:04
  Now, so you were a, you're a channel V, VJ, this is before Australian Idol exists before any of the pop idol franchises exist.
• 1:01:14
  And you're going on occasional trips to the US to essentially junkets to interview people.
• 1:01:20
  In September of 2001, you're in New York City.
• 1:01:24
  I was.
• 1:01:26
  Where were you staying?
• 1:01:28
  We were at midtown, like 50th.
• 1:01:32
  50th.
• 1:01:33
  And you were in Washington, DC on the 10th of September 2001.
• 1:01:37
  You were going to fly up on the morning of 9-11.
• 1:01:40
  And instead you got the train up on September 10th.
• 1:01:43
  And we thought, you know, we'd rather have a night in New York.
• 1:01:46
  It's a three hour train ride or whatever.
• 1:01:48
  How about we take the train?
• 1:01:49
  We'll go and have another, we'll have a big night out in New York City.
• 1:01:52
  We'll get on it and then we'll do the set of you tomorrow and then we'll get out of here.
• 1:01:55
  And then you were going to be flying home to Australia on September 11th.
• 1:01:58
  That right. That's right. That night.
• 1:01:59
  What happens?
• 1:02:00
  I mean, I'm generally familiar with the overall sequence of events.
• 1:02:05
  What happened that morning?
• 1:02:07
  We went out. We had a cracking dinner.
• 1:02:10
  We had a really good night.
• 1:02:11
  And then the next morning, around 8.30, I heard what I thought was a garbage truck going by.
• 1:02:17
  Which woke me up. Like, okay, I got up.
• 1:02:20
  How do we sat down?
• 1:02:22
  And at the time, this is a million years ago.
• 1:02:25
  So only 20 years ago.
• 1:02:26
  So I had all these VHS tapes with me that I would record American television on.
• 1:02:32
  You know, back then I was really interested in other TV formats of going around the world
• 1:02:37
  because there wasn't no YouTube. Right.
• 1:02:39
  It was so exotic to travel before YouTube existed because everything was so different.
• 1:02:43
  All the ads were different. Like, you know, a teenager now is familiar with like the contours of a general American ad
• 1:02:49
  if they're living in Australia.
• 1:02:50
  Whereas I remember getting to the States for the first time and the ads are just so different.
• 1:02:54
  The voiceover styles are so different.
• 1:02:55
  The way that this shot is so different, they're so much more cheesy.
• 1:02:58
  It's so, I love it. You know, just as a quick aside, I should Simon Townsend,
• 1:03:01
  who was a really good friend of my dad still is, who was a successful,
• 1:03:06
  successful children's television presenter in Australia through the 80s and 90s.
• 1:03:11
  And he was something of a mentor to me.
• 1:03:13
  And he was saying that when at the peak of his fame in the 80s, he would fly first class to the United States to New York,
• 1:03:20
  rent the most expensive hotel room that he could find and spend two weeks just inside the hotel room watching TV
• 1:03:26
  and never leave and then come back.
• 1:03:28
  I kind of get that totally get back because it was fascinating.
• 1:03:33
  So I was really interested. I was recording the different breakfast radio, breakfast television shows,
• 1:03:39
  which I thought were really interesting.
• 1:03:41
  At the time, particularly the local one, not the big NY1, New York one was the channel, I think.
• 1:03:47
  I was really interested in that and the format.
• 1:03:50
  And so I was record, I just, you know, I put a tape in, I had a wee, I put a tape in, I hit record,
• 1:03:56
  and about 35 seconds after I hit record, they cut to this shot of the side of the first tower of the World Trend Center.
• 1:04:03
  And they've got someone on the phone describing what they just saying.
• 1:04:07
  And I work up my producer Ben, I said, hey, Ben, I don't think we're flying back to Australia today, mate.
• 1:04:16
  And then it kind of went from there, you know, it was, we were trapped there for, I can't remember how many days, like a week and a half, I think.
• 1:04:25
  When we eventually got back, we were coughing up black stuff. There was a lot of really weird shit in the air.
• 1:04:30
  You know, we could, we could smell the fire and it was horrifying. It was absolutely terrifying because you were 100% sure.
• 1:04:37
  You know, and I remember Ben and Jaco, my camera guy, Ben Richardson, by the way, is who I'm talking about.
• 1:04:44
  He's now the CEO of Viacom Australia New Zealand, like he's a weapon, you know, he's so incredibly powerful TV model now.
• 1:04:53
  But at the time, he was my producer on that shoot. And, you know, I remember him saying, never forget the first casualty of war is the truth.
• 1:05:00
  And I'm, we were down in the hotel bar because I was still drinking back then.
• 1:05:04
  And we were hearing all this stuff, like, don't, you know, don't be near Trump Tower tomorrow at one o'clock, because all the Iraqis are behind this or whatever.
• 1:05:11
  You know, they've closed all the tunnels. There was a bomb in every tunnel and there was a bomb in every bridge, but they didn't tell anyone because they didn't want people to worry.
• 1:05:20
  You know, it was all this kind of shit that we were hearing and, you know, bombs outside of hospitals and all kinds of stuff, right?
• 1:05:26
  And we were, because we knew enough to know to, you know, very, very quickly the mainstream media was going to get a narrative going.
• 1:05:40
  And sure enough, by about 11 a.m. that morning, they were playing looping tapes of Taliban training camps.
• 1:05:49
  And it was almost like you could, you could hear the CIA guy show up at the back of the office and just hand over the Digi Beta Go roleless.
• 1:05:58
  And there was a footage, you know, so we started listening to you.
• 1:06:02
  Are you skeptical of it?
• 1:06:04
  I'm skeptical of how very quickly they went to the judgment, you know, I'm skeptical that, you know, within it became this extraordinary TV production, you know, this theater that went on for days and days and days and days and Dan rather.
• 1:06:20
  And what's this Brian Williams never going off air and this really kind of like incredible moment.
• 1:06:27
  But how very quickly like the narrative was all very confused.
• 1:06:31
  And then across the three major networks, we were flicking around across the three major networks very quickly.
• 1:06:37
  It went to bomb that was the bad guy.
• 1:06:40
  And so we started listening here.
• 1:06:43
  I mean, just if you were a journalist who knew about the threats that America faced and was kind of across the likely sources of mega terrorism.
• 1:06:54
  It would not be a crazy thing to start talking about the Taliban.
• 1:06:59
  I remember on, I've still got the text, I still got text messages from on old phones that I've kept from that era.
• 1:07:06
  And I was quarter to 10 in the evening in Sydney.
• 1:07:10
  And I texted it.
• 1:07:12
  Well, I was texting with a friend of mine as it was going on because I was watching it all unfold.
• 1:07:16
  I'd just been in New York a couple of months before that.
• 1:07:18
  So we just actually that day I had been editing footage of me on the world trade on the top of the world trade tales for a video that we're putting together for it.
• 1:07:25
  Anyway, and I remember saying I wouldn't want to be in the in the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan in the next few weeks.
• 1:07:31
  Right.
• 1:07:32
  And that was just that was just me being a teenage or whatever I was, you know, young university age.
• 1:07:37
  Yeah.
• 1:07:38
  I don't know who knew a bit about geopolitics, but I take your point.
• 1:07:41
  I mean, I think to put yourself in to put myself in your shoes in that moment, what people who maybe a younger than us.
• 1:07:50
  Might not be aware of is that when something that chaotic is unfolding, you know, in hindsight 10 years later, you know what the kind of contours of the crisis turned out to be.
• 1:07:59
  But at the time, you don't know if that was it.
• 1:08:01
  You don't know if that's the prelude to the real thing.
• 1:08:04
  All you know is that something so chaotic and tremendous and traumatizing is taking place that it could be the first salvo in a whole set of.
• 1:08:12
  Well, that's what you think.
• 1:08:14
  That's what we thought.
• 1:08:16
  Because I was, what I was kind of going with was that, you know, being with these two veterans, you know, particularly Jack O'Hood covered coups, he'd, you know, filmed in.
• 1:08:25
  And Ben had been in, you know, fairly bloody South Pacific, you know, political violence.
• 1:08:35
  Both these guys were like, okay, so there's a common narrative going along the magic networks.
• 1:08:39
  We find, you know, a more decent source.
• 1:08:42
  Let's go figure.
• 1:08:43
  And so we started turning on the radio and we started listening to the kind of independent news radio stations that weren't owned by big conglomerates and things like that.
• 1:08:50
  And that was really fascinating.
• 1:08:51
  And that was a very for me, a very early lesson in, you know, be aware of your sources.
• 1:08:56
  Be aware, you know, be aware of your sources.
• 1:08:59
  Look, it was really scary.
• 1:09:01
  It was super, super, super scary.
• 1:09:03
  It was terrifying.
• 1:09:04
  Absolutely terrifying.
• 1:09:05
  I was physically fine.
• 1:09:06
  But I got back and I was really weird.
• 1:09:09
  I was really weird.
• 1:09:10
  I remember being at work.
• 1:09:11
  I could do on air.
• 1:09:12
  Because on air, I was able to flick a switch and kind of, I can compartmentalize quite easily.
• 1:09:16
  And I was doing this kind of happy zany kind of 4pm kids request video show in the afternoons playing video clips.
• 1:09:23
  But every other moment, I was just, I could barely speak.
• 1:09:27
  I remember my boss, incredibly, Jackie Radella's her name.
• 1:09:32
  She walked past and she saw me.
• 1:09:35
  No, I wasn't even typing anything.
• 1:09:36
  I was just staring at the wall of my cubicle.
• 1:09:38
  She goes, are you okay?
• 1:09:39
  And something, I mean, went, no, no, I'm not.
• 1:09:43
  And she said, would you like someone to talk to?
• 1:09:45
  And I said, yes, yes, I would.
• 1:09:49
  And in her incredible grace, she organized through work.
• 1:09:54
  She organized a psych for me to go and speak to.
• 1:09:57
  And that was, I guess, the start of the, my adult kind of real kind of digging into what the fuck is going on with me?
• 1:10:08
  And yeah, that's so.
• 1:10:09
  And similarly, that particular psyche, he pulled out the aforementioned DSM volume for it was back then.
• 1:10:16
  And he got me because I could not, but I said, look, I know all these people died.
• 1:10:19
  We were walking around the streets and there was just hundreds and thousands of leaflets of have you seen, Michael,
• 1:10:25
  have you seen one eight or have you seen Jennifer?
• 1:10:28
  Have you seen Angelica?
• 1:10:29
  You're like, all this like people just, we knew they were dead in the rubble, but they were photos going,
• 1:10:34
  have you seen them please tell us anything?
• 1:10:36
  And it was awful.
• 1:10:37
  It was so bad.
• 1:10:39
  And I'm like, I didn't die.
• 1:10:41
  I didn't get hurt.
• 1:10:42
  Like I coughed up black shit, but that's the only thing that happened to me.
• 1:10:45
  And I don't have any right to feel bad.
• 1:10:47
  And he said, are you open?
• 1:10:49
  He's like, fuck, he handed me the book.
• 1:10:51
  And he said, just read that.
• 1:10:52
  Read that out loud to me.
• 1:10:54
  And it was the markers of someone who has post-traumatic stress disorder.
• 1:10:58
  And only reading it out loud was like, oh, okay.
• 1:11:03
  And I, of the, I don't know, 15 presenting symptoms or whatever, I had 14 of them.
• 1:11:08
  He's like, do you get it now?
• 1:11:11
  I guess, I guess I do.
• 1:11:13
  I just felt, I just felt so at the same time, I felt very ashamed that I was physically completely fine.
• 1:11:18
  But I was so damaged by what had happened.
• 1:11:20
  It's not how PTSD works.
• 1:11:22
  It's not about how physically, whether you're physically fine or not.
• 1:11:26
  No.
• 1:11:27
  And so you talk about, about how, you know, when Manhattan was, was cut off and you couldn't get off the island,
• 1:11:34
  there were rumors that the terrorists had, had planned that and then they were going to detonate a,
• 1:11:39
  a nuke or something on Manhattan or there were dirty bombs and nerve gas.
• 1:11:43
  And you're, that your anxiety and panic just leapt up so high that, you know,
• 1:11:49
  you're going to be annihilated in a nuclear blast or something that you essentially just fell asleep.
• 1:11:54
  Yeah.
• 1:11:55
  The body shut down.
• 1:11:56
  And when you woke up, your mates were standing over you with a six pack of beer and the party began.
• 1:12:03
  Do you think that, how do you contextualize that entire traumatizing experience with the rest of your mental wellness?
• 1:12:12
  Is it possible that that was a good thing insofar as well as a catalyst that got you to see it,
• 1:12:18
  therapist and get diagnosed?
• 1:12:20
  Is it possible that that was a bad thing that tipped you from being functional to non-functional?
• 1:12:25
  Probably both, you know, probably both.
• 1:12:29
  I was, I was lucky that I had made contact with someone who helped me in such a great way.
• 1:12:34
  And he really did that particular, Phil was his name, good fellow.
• 1:12:37
  He helped me a lot.
• 1:12:39
  But he really did open my eyes to the concept of things are only the way they are because you decided that,
• 1:12:48
  if you decide to feel differently about it, it will make you feel differently.
• 1:12:51
  And you have the power to change how you feel about it with your brain, if your brain is healthy.
• 1:12:55
  And knowing those concepts really helped.
• 1:12:58
  But as I continued to put vast quantities of marijuana and alcohol and the occasional cocaine into my brain
• 1:13:08
  and just fucked up the neural pathways that were already becoming pretty dodgy and just basically hit go
• 1:13:16
  and pushed the gas down on what was already a precipitous kind of pathway.
• 1:13:24
  Yeah, I really hit the accelerator and what was happening in my brain.
• 1:13:27
  And so at one point, you know, that was the start of, because there was a lot of drinking to try and feel,
• 1:13:33
  not feel how horrible that was, there was a lot of drinking that came off the back of that.
• 1:13:37
  And that was the start of the really serious adult drinking that I got into.
• 1:13:42
  But there was also that concept that, you know, I was able to be, if I put the work in,
• 1:13:48
  I was able to control how good or bad my day was.
• 1:13:51
  That was a very powerful thing to learn.
• 1:13:53
  And how long after 9-11, did you see the therapist?
• 1:13:57
  Oh, mid-October.
• 1:14:00
  By the time he got back.
• 1:14:01
  Oh, right.
• 1:14:02
  So quickly within a few months, yeah.
• 1:14:03
  Oh, yeah, a couple of weeks, yeah.
• 1:14:05
  Right, right.
• 1:14:06
  Because I mean, I'm just sort of trying to line up the timelines here and find causes for things that maybe don't have causes.
• 1:14:12
  But I like to try to make sense of the world because that's what my brain does.
• 1:14:15
  But as you mentioned, though, as you mentioned, Josh, everything is incremental.
• 1:14:19
  It's not like one day he was fine and the next day he was crazy.
• 1:14:22
  No, everything is just like, it's like what I mentioned before about the kind of fortress of resilience around sobriety.
• 1:14:28
  The same thing happens with, you know, drinking and using and or unhealthy behavior
• 1:14:34
  or unhealthy attitudes towards particular things or rigid thinking or things like that.
• 1:14:38
  Slowly but surely, you dismantle the boundary that you have between you and reality.
• 1:14:44
  And slowly but slowly but so be it taking it apart brick by brick by brick by brick by brick.
• 1:14:48
  And then one day you take away one many, one too many bricks.
• 1:14:50
  And now suddenly everything that's frightening on Facebook is real.
• 1:14:54
  And everyone of a particular skin color is terrifying.
• 1:14:57
  And you're starting all these really weird decisions and things that have nothing to do with reality.
• 1:15:01
  But you're no longer able to understand that because as far as your concern is completely real.
• 1:15:06
  And by that point, you've already slipped off the edge.
• 1:15:09
  But there was probably months if not years before that where it all goes back to.
• 1:15:14
  And I think this is why it's super important in many ways to understand that mental health is just health.
• 1:15:20
  It's like physical health having been on the cover of Men's Health magazine.
• 1:15:25
  I can tell you that you don't accidentally get a six pack.
• 1:15:28
  You have to work really, really hard and watch every single thing you put in your body and you have to lift the weight.
• 1:15:36
  But the concept of physical fitness is to anyone that's listening.
• 1:15:40
  They will know that if you maintain, even if you go and walk 20 minutes a day,
• 1:15:44
  all right, for whatever reason you now have to, one of the kids doesn't want to walk.
• 1:15:49
  And then you now have to carry the kid and you have to walk and carry a kid for 40 minutes.
• 1:15:53
  You'll be able to handle it because you've got a bit of resilience built up.
• 1:15:55
  But if you haven't been doing any exercise and you go to, I don't know, the royal show or the echo or whatever it is,
• 1:16:00
  what you used to do in pandemic pre-pandemic.
• 1:16:03
  And one of your kids doesn't walk around.
• 1:16:04
  You've got to carry the kid around.
• 1:16:05
  You'd be like, Mommy's got to put you down.
• 1:16:07
  I just can't.
• 1:16:08
  Puppet needs a rest.
• 1:16:10
  Puppet needs a warm dog.
• 1:16:11
  You know how quickly that goes away if you don't maintain it.
• 1:16:16
  And so similarly, if you don't maintain your mental health through practices like practicing gratitude,
• 1:16:22
  which is a scientifically proven way to train your brain to search for the positive and things,
• 1:16:27
  and actually has scientific evidence backing it.
• 1:16:31
  Same with journaling and writing, you know, say for example,
• 1:16:34
  doing a fear dump in the morning, these sort of things,
• 1:16:36
  oh, that sounds weird, sounds weird, but it works.
• 1:16:38
  It's like doing sit-ups in your brain.
• 1:16:40
  It builds this resilience so that when weird shit happens like,
• 1:16:44
  I don't know, you get fired or someone at work doesn't pull their way out of a project
• 1:16:48
  and you've got to, you know, pull through or there's a fucking pandemic
• 1:16:52
  and you don't know what's going to happen.
• 1:16:53
  You have a bit more resilience to deal with these things,
• 1:16:55
  but it is very, very similar to physical fitness,
• 1:16:58
  but it just doesn't take much, but you do have to do it every day.
• 1:17:01
  Do you keep a gratitude diary?
• 1:17:03
  Oh, every morning.
• 1:17:05
  Every morning.
• 1:17:06
  What was the other one?
• 1:17:07
  You said a fear, a fear kettle.
• 1:17:08
  I do fear and resentment every morning.
• 1:17:10
  I call it taking out the trash.
• 1:17:12
  Every morning I wake up and kind of,
• 1:17:14
  before my prefrontal cortex is successfully kind of come online and is able to rationalize
• 1:17:19
  whatever the fuck's going on in my brain.
• 1:17:22
  As someone who has, you know,
• 1:17:24
  generalizing anxiety often wake up with a whole bunch of irrational fear.
• 1:17:27
  I just write it all down.
• 1:17:29
  I write it all down, write it all down, write it all down,
• 1:17:31
  and then I look at it and go,
• 1:17:32
  well, what are the things that I can control?
• 1:17:34
  This and this and this.
• 1:17:35
  What about that?
• 1:17:36
  Do I control global energy policy?
• 1:17:38
  No, I don't actually control global energy policy.
• 1:17:40
  Okay, I'm just going to have to accept where we are with that.
• 1:17:44
  Okay, then.
• 1:17:45
  Here's the things that I can be an acceptance of and here's the things that I can change.
• 1:17:49
  Okay, great.
• 1:17:50
  And then a gratitude list is, you know,
• 1:17:53
  it's often, often ends up being the same thing if you keep running things you're grateful for.
• 1:17:57
  So one trick I've heard is to,
• 1:17:59
  I just generally write things that went really well yesterday that I'm happy about.
• 1:18:03
  I went really well.
• 1:18:04
  You know, so yesterday, for me, what did I do?
• 1:18:07
  I wrote 160Ks on my bicycle yesterday.
• 1:18:10
  I wrote an imperial century or a hundred miles.
• 1:18:13
  And a person on Instagram came on a bicycling platform that wrote my bicycle.
• 1:18:19
  I came on and rode with me and helped me get through the last 40Ks.
• 1:18:22
  That was really cool.
• 1:18:23
  I was really grateful for that.
• 1:18:25
  That a complete stranger helped me out, you know.
• 1:18:27
  And, you know, I've made a really yummy stir fry.
• 1:18:29
  It was really good.
• 1:18:30
  The mushrooms were really good, really good texture in that.
• 1:18:32
  And it may sound benign, but what you're doing is you're training your brain.
• 1:18:37
  It's like before you had kids, Josh,
• 1:18:39
  you never noticed anyone with a pram.
• 1:18:41
  As soon as you knew you were going to,
• 1:18:43
  there was a baby coming to the house.
• 1:18:44
  All you see is prams.
• 1:18:47
  Okay.
• 1:18:48
  So you're training your brain to do that,
• 1:18:50
  but with good things happening.
• 1:18:52
  And you train your brain and train your brain.
• 1:18:54
  So eventually you actually do notice far more good things and bad things.
• 1:18:57
  And it's actually quite quite effective.
• 1:18:59
  One thing that's admirable about you, Josh,
• 1:19:02
  and I don't know if this is luck or work,
• 1:19:05
  is abs.
• 1:19:06
  What you're going to say is your abs.
• 1:19:09
  That's the end of the episode.
• 1:19:11
  Thank you very much.
• 1:19:13
  All I wanted to do was get in a compliment about your abs.
• 1:19:17
  Now, it's the ability to switch off or quiet
• 1:19:21
  and the little worm that looks in most people's heads that says,
• 1:19:25
  oh, you should do that.
• 1:19:26
  But now,
• 1:19:28
  because you're talking in ways that make total sense.
• 1:19:32
  And everybody listening to this probably knows that it would be,
• 1:19:36
  that they'd be a happier person if they wrote a gratitude diary.
• 1:19:40
  And everybody listening to this probably knows that they'd be
• 1:19:44
  a better person if they went for long bike rides and long walks.
• 1:19:48
  And they don't,
• 1:19:49
  because there's a little worm in their brain that goes,
• 1:19:51
  well, you could or you could have a cookie and watch TV.
• 1:19:55
  Do you not have that or do you control it?
• 1:19:57
  I do have that.
• 1:19:58
  I have it very, very powerfully,
• 1:20:00
  because that's the thing that says, that's the fuck it.
• 1:20:03
  You know, I get that.
• 1:20:05
  And I have learned the very, very simple thing I've learned is that,
• 1:20:09
  if you get that, oh, I really couldn't be fucked.
• 1:20:12
  I really don't feel like going to this, see this person,
• 1:20:15
  or I really just, I don't care about going to the gym.
• 1:20:18
  If that comes into your brain,
• 1:20:20
  then you absolutely have to do it.
• 1:20:23
  Because that is the unwell or malfunctioning or unhealthy decision-making
• 1:20:32
  part of your brain gaining power over your actual want to be healthier
• 1:20:37
  or have a good, you know, social connections
• 1:20:40
  or keep maintain a friendship or maintain a relationship
• 1:20:42
  with someone that you care about.
• 1:20:44
  Is that, I mean, you said that that's the fuck it bit.
• 1:20:47
  I'm not sure it is.
• 1:20:48
  Like there's a little fucker.
• 1:20:49
  There's a little, there's just a fucker.
• 1:20:51
  But when you were doing your fuckets,
• 1:20:53
  your fuckets were going for gold.
• 1:20:55
  Like, you know, there's like,
• 1:20:57
  which I think is not just a difference in scope,
• 1:21:00
  but also actually is a different thing.
• 1:21:02
  Like going out and getting absolutely shit-faced
• 1:21:05
  in a way that could kill you is a different thing from being like,
• 1:21:08
  but I'm so cozy in my bed watching Netflix.
• 1:21:11
  Oh, I don't know.
• 1:21:12
  It's on a sliding scale, I think.
• 1:21:14
  It's on the same graph at a different ends of the spectrum.
• 1:21:18
  But I would say the really simple way to change that,
• 1:21:21
  Josh, is to the moment that you feel that thought,
• 1:21:25
  then that is the signal that you go recognize and go,
• 1:21:28
  oh, that's the unhealthy decision-making part of my brain.
• 1:21:32
  That's the probably, you know, unwell,
• 1:21:35
  perhaps if I've been doing it for a while,
• 1:21:37
  the chronically unwell part of my brain.
• 1:21:39
  And if I let it win, it will get stronger.
• 1:21:42
  And the next time that this happens,
• 1:21:44
  it will be even harder to overcome.
• 1:21:46
  And it'll gain so much inertia that I'll never actually be able
• 1:21:49
  to agree to escape velocity from the decision to never do anything.
• 1:21:52
  So the simplest thing is like,
• 1:21:55
  what is the smallest, smallest step I can take
• 1:21:58
  towards a thing that I want to do?
• 1:22:00
  I want to exercise.
• 1:22:01
  Okay, I will put on my shoes.
• 1:22:04
  Okay.
• 1:22:05
  What's the next thing?
• 1:22:06
  I will tie them up.
• 1:22:07
  Okay.
• 1:22:08
  I'll walk out the front door here now.
• 1:22:10
  Put on a podcast, go for a walk.
• 1:22:13
  All right.
• 1:22:14
  And that's the signal.
• 1:22:15
  The moment you get that feeling,
• 1:22:16
  that's the signal like, okay, fuck it.
• 1:22:17
  Now I have to.
• 1:22:18
  Because if you let it win, it will just get stronger.
• 1:22:20
  And it'll be harder next time.
• 1:22:22
  How present are you during your life these days?
• 1:22:25
  Because there's a, you write an anecdote that I very much identified
• 1:22:29
  within your book about your first wedding.
• 1:22:31
  When you were in Israel,
• 1:22:33
  and it was a huge event,
• 1:22:35
  an Israeli wedding,
• 1:22:37
  and you were overwhelmed,
• 1:22:38
  and you were terrified by the scale of the day,
• 1:22:40
  and you emotionally detached from it.
• 1:22:42
  And you sort of felt like you were an observer.
• 1:22:44
  You were like a third party at your own wedding.
• 1:22:46
  And I had, I had that,
• 1:22:49
  and I have that whenever,
• 1:22:50
  I mean, I have that also.
• 1:22:52
  I don't think that's totally dissimilar
• 1:22:54
  from what you're describing about when you're in the zone
• 1:22:57
  when you're performing.
• 1:22:59
  For example, this kind of,
• 1:23:01
  almost an out-of-body type of experience
• 1:23:04
  where you don't have any,
• 1:23:06
  there's no traction between your subjective experience
• 1:23:09
  of the world and what's actually going on around you.
• 1:23:11
  You're kind of floating through it.
• 1:23:13
  I disagree with you.
• 1:23:14
  Yeah.
• 1:23:15
  Yeah.
• 1:23:16
  Talk to me like that.
• 1:23:17
  Very, very different things.
• 1:23:18
  The first thing you described was me being so emotionally overwhelmed,
• 1:23:22
  that I did not know how to engage with the situation,
• 1:23:25
  and so numbness was what prevailed.
• 1:23:28
  The second thing you're talking about is a beautiful state of flow,
• 1:23:31
  where me and the 60-something people
• 1:23:34
  that I'm working with on this particular production
• 1:23:36
  are all moving in beautiful harmony,
• 1:23:38
  like where a perfectly choreographed ice skating duo
• 1:23:41
  pulling off a perfect 10.
• 1:23:43
  And there is just a bliss and timelessness
• 1:23:46
  in those fleeting moments that is just wonderful.
• 1:23:50
  And they're two very, very, very different things.
• 1:23:53
  As far as how engaged I am day to day,
• 1:23:55
  I know that my brain does particular things
• 1:23:58
  and it wants to obsess.
• 1:24:01
  And so to a point where I am unable to control it.
• 1:24:05
  So like a 10-year-old boy,
• 1:24:08
  my wife has my screen time passcode,
• 1:24:11
  and I cannot look at Instagram
• 1:24:14
  or Twitter or Facebook on my phone.
• 1:24:16
  I can't even navigate to the website.
• 1:24:18
  I can install apps.
• 1:24:21
  How are you not able to go to the app store on your phone?
• 1:24:26
  Well, if I install the app at one open,
• 1:24:30
  it'll lock me out.
• 1:24:32
  Really?
• 1:24:33
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:24:34
  Is this a child's safety thing?
• 1:24:36
  Yes.
• 1:24:37
  It's designed to stop kids from doing exactly what I can't stop myself from doing.
• 1:24:41
  That's great.
• 1:24:42
  So she Audrey has my screen time passcode.
• 1:24:45
  And so I can't just sit there,
• 1:24:48
  zombies scrolling through it for Instagram on my phone.
• 1:24:50
  Because I was losing hours and hours of my day.
• 1:24:54
  And people would talk to me,
• 1:24:56
  I couldn't remember what they were saying to me.
• 1:24:57
  I'm like, but the fucking, there's a doughnut here.
• 1:24:59
  Or there's a, you know, the bloke doing some weightlifting thing.
• 1:25:01
  Or there's a, you know,
• 1:25:02
  a picture of a surfer doing something cool.
• 1:25:04
  Or there's a bicycling, usually bicycling.
• 1:25:06
  Someone doing something cool.
• 1:25:07
  And none of that matters.
• 1:25:09
  None of it fucking matters.
• 1:25:10
  What matters is the human beings and the same fucking rumors here.
• 1:25:13
  And certainly as Wolfgang,
• 1:25:16
  as Georgia and Wolfgang got older and as Wolfgang came along,
• 1:25:20
  I'm like, I have to do something about this.
• 1:25:22
  And I know that it's the abstinence model.
• 1:25:24
  I know I can't control it.
• 1:25:26
  So I have to just not have it.
• 1:25:28
  And that's what it is.
• 1:25:29
  I now am in an incredibly fortunate situation
• 1:25:31
  where I actually, I pay someone to look after my Instagram for me.
• 1:25:37
  And I mean, again, when you say that you're not in a position
• 1:25:39
  to be able to handle it responsibly the way that other people can.
• 1:25:42
  I loop back to my skepticism earlier about how many of us are good at handling alcohol as well.
• 1:25:48
  You know, you are an all or nothing guy.
• 1:25:51
  So you have the discipline to be able to impose conditions on your own behavior
• 1:25:56
  and the temperament to find liberation in doing so.
• 1:26:00
  But nobody is using these apps functionally.
• 1:26:04
  Nobody is using these apps without consequence.
• 1:26:07
  Just as nobody is drinking without consequence,
• 1:26:09
  the tug of addiction, and I'm not saying this is not to diminish alcoholism
• 1:26:13
  or serious substance abuse or addiction to things like gambling or Instagram or whatever.
• 1:26:20
  But there is a slippery slope.
• 1:26:22
  Now there may be a precipice at the end of that slippery slope that you've fallen off.
• 1:26:26
  But all of us are grappling with the attention hogging greediness of
• 1:26:33
  algorithms.
• 1:26:35
  Oh, they are so extraordinarily specifically.
• 1:26:38
  It's a poker machine in your pocket.
• 1:26:40
  There's a you'd probably be more familiar with this than with this than me.
• 1:26:44
  There was a professor at Stanford in the computer science division who wrote a book
• 1:26:50
  hooking or hooking might I can't remember the name of it.
• 1:26:53
  But it was almost like a cautionary tale of like don't do this with your software.
• 1:26:57
  Don't use variable rewards.
• 1:26:59
  Don't use this sort of thing.
• 1:27:01
  This is the exact model that the human cannot,
• 1:27:06
  their willpower cannot escape the black hole tug of this kind of programming.
• 1:27:13
  And I went fucking brilliant, Farmville.
• 1:27:16
  Candy Crush.
• 1:27:18
  The very same people went great and they took it as an instruction manual.
• 1:27:23
  And that's why we now have these.
• 1:27:25
  Candy Crush is one of the most sinister fucking programs.
• 1:27:30
  It's so it's a perfectly designed attention.
• 1:27:34
  Like you literally you are you are a pigeon in a skinner box picking at a fucking thing.
• 1:27:41
  You know, you can't stop because it is perfectly designed.
• 1:27:45
  And at times it gets better and more you play it the better it gets your timing
• 1:27:49
  and the better it knows how much to give you.
• 1:27:51
  It's just insidious.
• 1:27:53
  It's amazing.
• 1:27:54
  I mean, you were saying earlier, Roger that you know that the lesson of wisdom for you
• 1:27:58
  through therapy was learning to live in the now and not to worry about the past
• 1:28:02
  and fear the future or you know, just to be present.
• 1:28:07
  It strikes me as you're talking about Candy Crush that these are systems
• 1:28:12
  that are intentionally designed to remove us from the now by creating comfortable
• 1:28:18
  warding scenarios that are detached from what's actually going on around us.
• 1:28:23
  And I guess we can wrap up here, but I you know, the reason I'm interested is because
• 1:28:28
  everyone, again, it's one of these things that everybody knows.
• 1:28:31
  Everybody knows that the Buddha was right when he was saying that you should be
• 1:28:35
  present, that there is only the now that the past is history and the future is just a
• 1:28:40
  maybe.
• 1:28:41
  So you have to you have to be in the moment.
• 1:28:45
  And yet, as you say, we all willingly, almost all of us, not you, carry around
• 1:28:50
  in our pockets, things that are tailor made to remove us from the now.
• 1:28:55
  And so has your experience of grappling with serious and severe and crippling
• 1:29:02
  mental conditions given you insight into what other mortals who don't suffer
• 1:29:07
  from them should do to lead happy lives?
• 1:29:11
  I can't speak to other, I can't speak to other people.
• 1:29:14
  Josh, I can only speak to myself.
• 1:29:16
  Well, you speak to them.
• 1:29:18
  Well, for I can't speak for other people.
• 1:29:21
  What has worked for me and what has worked for me is understanding that actions
• 1:29:32
  and accordance with my values combined with accepting things that are beyond my control
• 1:29:42
  and doing things for others is the key to me feeling this beautiful warm glow inside
• 1:29:49
  of my body, which I believe some people may refer to as happiness.
• 1:29:53
  Happiness is not a goal.
• 1:29:54
  It's not an actual thing that is permanent.
• 1:29:57
  It's a fleeting moment.
• 1:30:00
  And the most important thing to understand, I think Josh, is that happiness is one
• 1:30:06
  of the part of the spectrum of human emotion.
• 1:30:10
  But you have to be in acceptance that like physics is a physics.
• 1:30:15
  You can't have one particular polarity inside an atom be larger than another.
• 1:30:21
  There has to be a balance between the nuclei.
• 1:30:23
  Otherwise, it will split apart and the space time will crumble.
• 1:30:29
  You cannot have happiness without sadness.
• 1:30:32
  You cannot have love and devotion without fear of being alone.
• 1:30:36
  You cannot have joy without tragedy.
• 1:30:40
  This is what it is to be human.
• 1:30:42
  Susan David, the extraordinary psychologist, Susan David says,
• 1:30:45
  uncomfortable feelings are the price of admission we pay to enjoy a meaningful life.
• 1:30:49
  And accepting that and don't give you wrong, man, I work fucking hard to make sure
• 1:30:55
  that I stay in the present moment.
• 1:30:57
  It's really hard.
• 1:30:58
  I have a doom-centred brain that just tries to catapult me into the future
• 1:31:03
  and decide how terrible things are going to be.
• 1:31:06
  And I have to work really, really hard to suck myself back into the room and go, right?
• 1:31:11
  No, I'm here on my bike or I'm with the kids or I'm making this food
• 1:31:15
  or I'm eating this delicious mushroom that I cooked last night.
• 1:31:18
  It's work every day, but it's what works for me.
• 1:31:23
  And as long as you can understand that, that happiness isn't a thing that once I get that,
• 1:31:28
  then I'll be happy, which is what we talk about at the start of this conversation.
• 1:31:32
  It's unattainable.
• 1:31:34
  It's not how it works.
• 1:31:36
  It's a feeling that you feel inside your body.
• 1:31:38
  It's a bunch of neurochemicals that get released at the same time that you go,
• 1:31:42
  and then it goes away.
• 1:31:44
  And then it gets replaced with hunger or like,
• 1:31:47
  oh, my football team didn't win.
• 1:31:49
  Oh, the dogs vomited on the floor again or whatever.
• 1:31:53
  And just everything is nothing until we decide what it's going to be.
• 1:31:59
  Everything is what it is we decide it is.
• 1:32:02
  And if our brains are healthy, we decide what they get to be.
• 1:32:06
  And that's the real super power we have as humans, man.
• 1:32:09
  What's it all about then?
• 1:32:11
  Oh, sure.
• 1:32:12
  Is there a point?
• 1:32:13
  Yeah, it's helping other people.
• 1:32:15
  And understanding that we are hard-wired, we wouldn't have got here if we weren't hard-wired for cooperation.
• 1:32:22
  We wouldn't have got here if we were only about, I'm only about myself, I'm going to murder everybody else.
• 1:32:28
  Like, there has to be cooperation, even if you're in the, the, the murdery tribe,
• 1:32:32
  you still have to cooperate with each other, right?
• 1:32:34
  We're about cooperation.
• 1:32:35
  We're not, is your, is your message?
• 1:32:37
  Yeah.
• 1:32:38
  And you see the sticker.
• 1:32:39
  It's great.
• 1:32:42
  We're hard-wired to cooperate.
• 1:32:46
  Rutger Breggman wrote a great book called Human Kind and he has the survival of the friendliest.
• 1:32:53
  Understand that it's in our brains to want to help other people,
• 1:32:57
  because that is the thing that makes us in our bodies go, oh, that feels nice.
• 1:33:02
  And it does.
• 1:33:03
  So go ahead and do it, because that's what we're here for.
• 1:33:06
  We really are just atoms talking to each other to another atom.
• 1:33:09
  I'm just a bunch of atoms.
• 1:33:10
  I'm a bunch of this, what used to be a star, put together in a particular way, talking to you.
• 1:33:15
  And we are, I think our son is one of 400 billion sons in our edge of the Milky Way.
• 1:33:21
  There's a lot of them.
• 1:33:22
  There's a lot of them.
• 1:33:23
  You could probably do away with a couple of them and God wouldn't even notice.
• 1:33:26
  We are so infinitesimally unimportant in the scale of what it is we're actually a part of.
• 1:33:35
  Really absolutely nothing we do imagine.
• 1:33:37
  You should, you'll want to listen to my episode of the Sam Harris,
• 1:33:40
  which is coming out either immediately before or immediately after this episode.
• 1:33:43
  Part of the conversation with Sam is like, how does it come to pass that matter
• 1:33:47
  and becomes, like, has an experience in the first place?
• 1:33:50
  Yeah.
• 1:33:51
  Like the chair I'm sitting on doesn't have a get to have a chat with the wooden desk sitting in front of me.
• 1:33:57
  No.
• 1:33:58
  But there's carbon atoms in me as much as there's carbon atoms in this desk.
• 1:34:02
  But my carbon atoms can have a conversation.
• 1:34:04
  Where is this desk?
• 1:34:05
  It's just this desk.
• 1:34:06
  The desk is a terrible conversationalist.
• 1:34:08
  I find.
• 1:34:09
  Do you meditate?
• 1:34:10
  Yes.
• 1:34:11
  I try to meditate every day and it's practice like everything.
• 1:34:14
  And I think the big misconception with meditation is that it to be quiet
• 1:34:21
  and if your brain is silent then you're doing it right.
• 1:34:24
  But nobody's brain does that.
• 1:34:26
  No.
• 1:34:27
  Meditation is the, in the context of the gym, right?
• 1:34:31
  If you've got, if say you're doing a bicep kill for example,
• 1:34:34
  you've got the weight down by your side and the effort is lifting the weight up to your shoulder
• 1:34:38
  and then putting it back down again.
• 1:34:40
  And that's one rep and knowing that if you do five sets of 12 of them,
• 1:34:44
  the muscle will adapt and it'll be easier to make that lift.
• 1:34:48
  Meditation, the lift is the bringing the brain back to the presence,
• 1:34:53
  back to the breathing or back to whatever it is you're trying to focus on
• 1:34:58
  whether it's your breath or the feeling of your body against your shirt or whatever it is.
• 1:35:02
  That's the rep and that's what you're training your brain to do.
• 1:35:06
  And what that strength gives you is the opportunity to when your wife or husband or kid says something
• 1:35:12
  and you go, and you get to go, hang on, I'm quite strong in this part.
• 1:35:16
  I can bring my brain from those thoughts back to the space and go,
• 1:35:20
  ah, right.
• 1:35:22
  Now what's going on there rather than going,
• 1:35:25
  fuck you and everything and fuck you know, that's what meditation is.
• 1:35:31
  Do you have a second career chapter after television?
• 1:35:36
  Every show, John Farad of the Man that I mentioned before,
• 1:35:41
  once said to me as well, he gave me two really good things.
• 1:35:44
  That one I told you before and this one, which is unless you host the news,
• 1:35:47
  every single show in the history of television has been canceled.
• 1:35:50
  And your show will be canceled too, no matter how big a hit it is,
• 1:35:54
  one day it's not going to be there and you've got to be ready for that day.
• 1:35:57
  And what happens is you end up like any job, you get yourself into this situation,
• 1:36:00
  where you have financial obligations, you know, sorry,
• 1:36:03
  kids, you have to move schools because dad didn't think about what would happen
• 1:36:06
  when the bachelor stopped going to wear.
• 1:36:09
  You know, of course, there's a bunch of things in the pipeline.
• 1:36:12
  And you know, as well as I do that in this business,
• 1:36:14
  if you're not working on whatever it's going to be next year,
• 1:36:16
  three years and five years from now, then you're a fool.
• 1:36:19
  I spent a lot of my time doing that, am I?
• 1:36:21
  No, you're doing it right now.
• 1:36:23
  There's a lot of things that I do.
• 1:36:25
  No one will ever see, but it's all a part of just like nudging,
• 1:36:30
  nudging the chess pieces forward on the other side of the board,
• 1:36:34
  while the other one's doing something shiny and lovely over here,
• 1:36:37
  knowing that when that thing, when that piece eventually knocks over,
• 1:36:40
  I've got all these other things ready to go.
• 1:36:42
  But that's it. That's the nature of the game.
• 1:36:44
  As I can't remember the name as he said in Godfather Part II,
• 1:36:49
  this is the business we have chosen.
• 1:36:53
  And about as ethical a business as being in the Mafia as well,
• 1:36:57
  Osher, great to talk to you as always.
• 1:37:00
  Take care, mate.
• 1:37:01
  That's right. Thanks, mate.
• 1:37:02
  Thank you.