Dominic Monaghan reflects on Lord of the Rings and Lost, revealing how fame shifted his perspective from joy to detachment, even as he left Lost at its peak. He shares near-death surfing experiences in Hawaii, fitness discipline, and past drug use tied to music, while debating modern marijuana’s potency with Rogan. Both praise relentless ambition—like athletes or late-night hosts—and contrast it with humanity’s ecological destruction, from New Zealand’s invasive species crisis to trophy hunting (e.g., Corey Knowlton’s $350K rhino kill). Monaghan’s Wild Things show humanizes animals, but Rogan argues emotional extremes, even in nature, drive growth. Ultimately, they agree perspective—accepting life’s highs and lows—is key to avoiding burnout, whether in L.A.’s superficial fame culture or post-sports struggles like George St. Pierre’s potential retirement. [Automatically generated summary]
And when you're doing it, as an actor, as a jobbing actor, when you're doing it, you're stoked.
I mean, I was super stoked to do those shows.
You don't realize at the time...
The real gravity of what you're doing until years later.
Me and Orlando and Elijah and Billy went out for dinner a couple of weeks ago, and we sat around saying, the further away we get from Lord of the Rings, the more important it feels in our life.
So when we're grandfathers and stuff, I'm sure we'd be like, yeah, we were involved in a piece of movie history.
But at the time, you're just like, Great job, having fun.
And that was kind of the same with Lost.
Although, to be fair, with Lost, because we were isolated on an island in the show, but also in person, you know, we were all on Oahu together.
We weren't, or certainly I wasn't, as exposed to the size of the show as much as when I went on hiatus and then people were...
Follow me around and, you know, causing hassle and stuff.
But when you're in Hawaii, there's like three restaurants to go to.
I avoid those three restaurants.
If anyone follows me, I go to the library and then sit there for a couple of hours.
So I wasn't really aware that it became this pop culture phenomenon, you know.
And then the end, oh man, the end is like, you know, I'm on Twitter and stuff and a lot of people on Twitter...
Asked me, how do you feel about the end?
And in all honesty, I didn't watch it, and I've not watched it.
You know, I left at the end of season three, came back in, peppered in season four, five, and six, but wasn't in the show when it ended.
I mean, I was in the finale, but, you know, at that point, I'd ejected myself from that world.
I was doing a movie in New York in the Lower East Side playing a completely different character, a grave robber that was working at night.
I didn't want to expose myself to this Charlie character who I'd played because I felt like I was going to bring the Charlie character onto set the next day.
So people are always very, very jazzed to talk to me about the ending.
How did you feel about it?
How did it make you feel?
Were you disappointed?
Did you love it?
And I always really fucking piss people off by going, yeah, I didn't see it.
Yeah, I left the end of season three, which I really felt like it was kind of peaking at that point.
It was the show that every late-night talk show host was talking about, or daytime, and it was in magazines, and BuzzFeed loved it and all that kind of stuff.
And then I felt like it was cresting.
And then I think the real bummer for the fans was that for the six years that it was on TV, the creators had said, it's not what you think it is.
It's something else.
Ultimately, it kind of was what a lot of people thought it was.
Well, I think they say that because they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
I mean, they have a giant storyboard and they're moving pieces around.
They did a phenomenal job, though.
I mean, given the constraints, first of all, of network television, of knowing that you're going to have commercial breaks and knowing that you can't have certain language and certain things you're not going to be able to show, they did a fantastic job.
I mean, it's just one of the all-time great shows, for sure.
I think it will be, you know, something that people will talk about with me for the rest of my life.
A lot of times, I'm sure you experience this as well, sometimes the things that you are personally close to, that you're working in and is a huge part of your life, it takes on a different aspect than just the simple...
I mean, fuck, I... I got in trouble for saying this when Lost was on TV, but fuck it, I don't care about that shit.
I watched certain cast members go from making the pilot, which was a six-week pilot, where everyone was hanging out with each other, we're all partying at night, we're all spending time with each other.
I watched certain actors be like, this is the greatest job I have ever done.
I mean, Hawaii is a tropical island, getting paid well, the cast are amazing, we're going on this journey together, to shooting like episode...
Three or four of the first season and hearing people saying, I can't believe I'm not on Letterman.
Why am I not on Letterman?
You're like, two months ago, this is the greatest thing you've ever done.
And now you're like, why can't I fly to New York?
Why can't I be on a 12 o'clock flight to New York?
Right, and also swallow that very bitter pill of regardless of however unfair you think it is and how it should change and be justified, and one day it will all be okay.
And that's really, I mean, we're talking about one very specific endeavor, but it's analogous to life itself, because people will look at people that are doing other things in life, and they'll be upset that they're not doing those things, even though they've taken very little or no effort to try to do any of those things.
It seems like those pitfalls in life are just a part of being a human being in this weird world because this world is not like any world that ever existed.
There was never a million different people that you could compare yourself to that were on television or singing songs or on the internet.
There's all these different people that you can look at and then you look at yourself and make these comparisons.
It used to just be the people that were around you.
And that's what it used to be for the entire history of the human race.
It was only the people you could see with your eyes and come in contact with.
Other than that, you didn't have this weird perspective.
And I think it's part of what a human being is.
We're constantly striving to improve.
It's why we stay alive.
It's why we build homes.
It's why we try to get good at a career.
It's like this desire to get better at things also leads you to compare your own progress against the progress of others.
Right, and obviously a lot of people in this new society that we've created with social media and instant information, a lot of those people that have become successful and famous are in those places because they are the fucking elite.
So now we're comparing ourselves to the elite.
Like, you could be a great basketball player, have an amazing game, come home, start watching YouTube feeds of Dwayne Wade or, you know, LeBron, and you're like, oh, I'm fucking terrible.
No, you're not terrible.
These are the exception.
And we're exposing ourselves to the exception almost all the time now.
When you meet a girl who doesn't like her body, and you love her body, and she's comparing herself to stick figures that are like models that are wearing these weird outfits that weigh 18 pounds.
Your body is a woman's body.
The fat, the stuff that you don't like, we like that.
You could be born in Ethiopia with no feet, you know?
You could have been fucked.
You could have been one of those kids that's born in Iraq that has to deal with the aftermath of all the fucking hazardous waste that's in that area that's causing all these kids to be born with massive deformities.
yeah what genetics but again like obviously it's a lot of it is girls doing squats and girls concentrating on that area and developing their butt but i just it's weird to me that that wasn't a big deal in the 70s and the 80s and whatever and then somewhere along the line the hip-hop community sort of ignited what seems to be a fundamental attraction that men have right
also like you know when i started to get interested in girls and being able to actually make out with girls and spend time with girls those girls were girls that was you know 11 12 13 year old right there was no concept of any of those girls having a badonkadonk like that so maybe for me it was the thing that i was reaching for i'm never gonna get there i'm never gonna get this womanly thing i'm gonna be with these little waifish you know girls because i was a little kid at the time
and then later on i don't know there's a there's a fantasy element to it right and Right.
I mean, I, you know, I appreciate a lady that kind of takes care of herself simply because I feel as if I need to, you know?
I'm not the biggest dude in the world, but I go to the gym when I'm free because it gets me out of the house.
And also I like to try and go to the gym Monday to Friday so that my Saturday, Sunday I can do whatever I want.
And I eat relatively correctly so that on the weekend if I want to chow down some food that's a little naughty, it's not going to make a huge difference.
If I'm doing that, I would like to be with someone who has the same common sense about...
Their body and the way that they look.
It's a bit of an issue for me because I love pizza and I like buffalo wings and I could easily eat all that stuff and get much bigger, but I'm aware of the fact that it's not healthy for you.
You shouldn't necessarily be doing that.
To your body, putting it under that much stress.
But also, I want to feel and look and present myself good because I want to feel good about myself.
And the issue with people just kind of abusing themselves in that way says something a little sinister about how they personally feel about themselves.
It's self-abuse, right?
I mean, if you know that food is making you more unhealthy and you're eating it on a daily basis, that is a form of self-abuse.
And I don't necessarily feel attracted to people who are abusing themselves on a consistent basis.
But it's also weirdly natural for people to abuse themselves, to get caught in that cycle of overeating and then feeling shitty because you're overeating.
And that's a very common cycle for people to get trapped in.
And I really wonder what the mechanism of that is.
Like, what's the evolutionary advantage to having that in the human species?
Because it's so common.
I mean, everywhere you look, especially in America, you just see overweight people everywhere.
They know.
They have to know.
It's not like this is some secret that's locked up in the fucking vaults in Qumran.
You have to crack the code to find out that you shouldn't eat pizza at 3 o'clock in the morning.
I do, but I kind of would if I was more inclined to eat shitty.
Like if it was like more of a thing that I had to separate myself from.
But it's not that hard for me.
I eat relatively clean because I like to eat relatively clean.
I mean, when I say relatively clean, I should say overwhelmingly clean.
Most of the food I eat is really healthy.
It's just, I just, I know too much.
You know, at this point in time, I'd be upset at myself if I didn't.
I just know too much about the actual effects.
Good for you.
Generally, in the mornings, I either eat fruit or I drink a kale shake, you know, one of those blended up shakes with kale and celery and cucumber and garlic and all that jazz.
And then, you know, in the afternoon, it depends.
But if I feel like having a cheeseburger, I'll have a fucking cheeseburger, too.
Like, I'm lucky enough to travel nine months of my year pretty intensively, you know, A week in a place, 10 days in a place, a week in a place, 10 days in a place.
Because of that, lots of long distance flying.
I have no semblance of a schedule in terms of food.
So I lose weight based on those factors and also the fact that my metabolism is very high running.
I need very little sleep to function.
My mum used to tell me this all the time when I was a kid.
If there was something more interesting for me to do, I would forego eating.
So she'd be like, dinner's on the table.
I'd be like, wait, can I just finish this thing?
She'd be like, okay, fine.
And she said, you would just not have dinner.
And then she would have to remind me, you didn't eat dinner.
I mean, I was obsessed by football, soccer when I was a kid.
I would get up in the morning, run out of my house when I was going to school, run out of my house before breakfast, no breakfast, get to school, play football for an hour before nine o'clock.
So from eight till nine, I'd play football with my friends.
Break time was 10.15 till 11.15.
Most people ate at that point.
Most people had a snack, chips, fruit, sandwich.
I would play football.
Lunchtime was an hour.
All my friends would eat.
I would play football.
First thing that I would put in my mouth, pretty much all the time, certainly more than average in school, like I would say 65% of the time, would be candy on the way home.
LAUGHTER So I'd walk into the convenience store, buy one pounds worth of candy.
Was there any hesitation at all in being sequestered on this island like that and being a part of this crazy show where you had to change your whole life?
You meet brilliant guys every so often and I think anytime you're around someone who's brilliant, you have to sit up and take notes.
And I just was aware that I was around someone with a very fast-moving, smart mind.
And I went in for a general audition and sat down with J.J. and his partner, Brian Burke, and we just talked about English comedy for like 45 minutes.
Talked about Monty Python and Eddie Izzard and The Goons and The Goodies and Derek and Clive.
And we did this whole thing.
We were doing impressions for each other.
No audition.
And I left.
I called my agent and he was like, how did it go?
And I was like, it went well, but we didn't talk about the show.
We just talked about comedy and goofed around and stuff.
He was like, all right, cool.
Then they got back in touch with him and said, we love Dom.
They had this character of Charlie, who at the time was this 55-year-old rocker, like a Robert Plant guy at the time, that had been through all of it and was in the tail end of his career and got stuck on the island.
And they reworked it, and when JJ and I sat down, I was like, what is more frustrating for that artist to have the barest glimpse of fame?
He's had this one hit...
And it almost worked out his entire life.
It almost did it for him.
And then he's on this fucking island and he can't get back to the place where he could make it all happen, you know?
And I think, you know, J.J. Love responded to that kind of frustration level.
And I was just aware that it was going to be a big deal.
He directed the pilot.
He co-wrote the pilot.
It felt like something that was going to be, you know, big and impressive, and I trusted him.
And there wasn't a huge amount...
When it's a no-brainer job like that, it doesn't take a huge amount of thought.
You're just like, well, yeah, of course I'm going to do it.
I learned to surf in New Zealand, which is a gnarly place to surf.
Very cold waves, relatively dumpy waves.
There's no curl on that wave.
It just picks you up and drops you, which if it's the first time you've ever surfed it, you assume that all waves are like that.
You have to be in a wetsuit.
Lots of times you have to be in booties.
There were times when it was so cold I would come out of the water that I'd have to use two hands to unlock my car door because I couldn't use one hand.
It had frozen, you know, so I'd have to go...
Meanwhile, you move to Hawaii, board shorts, you don't have to wear a t-shirt.
So I was big on surfing and in the first month or so that I was in Hawaii, I went to the Apple store in Honolulu and...
I met one of my favorite surfers of all time, a guy called Kalani Robb.
And when I was playing Kelly Slater's pro surfer game, I would always pick Kalani because he did the most radical moves, you know?
So I'm in the Apple store.
He's there with his boys.
I was like, shit, that's Kalani Robb.
And then he comes over to me.
He's like, dude, you're that guy in Lord of the Rings.
I was like, oh, shit.
It's on now.
So I was like, you're Kalani Rob.
I was like, I'm here for like nine months.
Can you help me out surfing?
He was like, yeah, we're going to go to the North Shore now.
So I came with him, hung out, and we became really tight.
So a huge story for Hawaii, for me, was getting to know Kalani.
I mean, he took me into waves that I had no business being involved in.
There's a place called Goat Island on the North Shore.
Which is a heavy wave and you have to paddle out to an island, walk across the island because then you're going to miss the break and then paddle out past the break.
There's no concept of you paddling out through the break because it's so big.
So I was with Kalani and a few of his mates and we were all getting ready and he came over to me.
He was like, okay, this is the most hectic wave I'm ever going to take you into.
Stay close to me.
If you need help, let me know.
Don't fuck around, because it can kill you.
And don't go left, go right.
No, no, don't go right, go left.
Because it's going to peel left, but if you go right, you're in the braking zone and you're fucked.
So we paddle out, and I'm having fun, and I'm watching everyone in the lineup.
I'm about 10 feet away from the drop zone, so I'm able to sit there on the wave and watch people like...
I get spat out the other side.
I'm like, alright, cool.
I got this.
It's fast.
I'm going to take it.
So I paddle, I paddle, I paddle.
Wave picks me up.
It's big.
I'm like, oh shit.
Super powerful.
Drops me.
And I really try and go left.
I like cut the board and I try and go left.
But it's so powerful because it's breaking here on my left that it spits me to the right.
I'm fully aware that it spat me to the right.
So I'm like, okay, shit.
I'm just going to wipe out, take a big breath, and paddle out.
So I wipe out, I go under, come up, and as is usually the case with if you're surfing anything above overhead, when you come up, that wave's coming for you again.
So what you have to do is take a huge breath, go under, and it's the next time you come up that you can make progress.
Because you're out of breath, you're disoriented.
I do that and I, Joe, I just can't, I can never catch a break.
So I go under, thrown around by the washing machine, come up, I think, okay, get on your board, start paddling, look, waves right there.
I'm like, go under again, hold my breath, come up again, and I'm trying to time it so that I can get it.
I'm just getting pounded, pounded, pounded, pounded.
And at one point, I see Kalani paddling over to me.
I'm like, all right, cool, we're going to be okay.
So Kalani comes over to me and he's like mad.
Like I've never really heard him be mad before.
He's like, dude, get on your board and go that way.
I'm like, okay, that's what I've been trying to do for like 10 minutes.
But so now he's behind me.
He's paddling.
I'm paddling.
He's pushing me, paddling, pushing me, paddling like fucking Superman.
And we eventually get out past the break.
So he's like, all right, you're going to sit here for 20 minutes.
And then when I'm done, you're going to paddle in with me safe.
And I was like, okay, fine.
I got it.
So when we come in, He's like, the reason why I came in to get you was not only were you in the drop zone, but you were like completely lacking of any color on your face.
And he was like, people in the lineup were saying, dude, go get your boy because he's in trouble.
And I was like, I was handling it.
I was definitely out of breath and a little fucked up, but he's a water man.
So he was like, no, eight more waves on your head like that.
You wouldn't have had the strength to fight past the wave and get up.
You know, and we share, you know, we have friends and he's going to We do the podcast eventually we're working on because one of the companies that he's involved with is Roots of Fight, this company that does all these old fight poster t-shirts.
Yeah, they have a lot of really cool, old-school, different, like, fight posters from, like, Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier, Thrilling Manila, like that kind of shit.
Kimmel's always impressed me just in terms of knowing what his day's like, but also the fact that he'll reply to me pretty quickly.
I'm like, dude, aren't you doing 15 things at the time?
He's like, well, yeah, I am, but you're the 16th thing that I can do.
I'm just really impressed by his...
Work ethic and it's very often the same, the routine of going into the studio and going in the writers room and Breaking jokes and doing the monologue and all that kind of stuff.
It's the same every day, but he's still motivated to do it.
And he's brilliant, and he knows what's funny, and he knows what a joke is.
And I don't know, all the late-night talk show hosts that I've had the opportunity to meet, I've always thought, there's something brilliant about you, you know?
There's something brilliant about working in that medium, you know?
It's...
Current and edgy and what they're doing at times can be a little risky and dangerous and stuff, but they're willing to get up the next day and do it again and get up the next day and not get pounded down in the same way that other people...
You know, I mean, that's what Jimmy Kimmel is best at.
He's got, obviously, he's got fantastic work ethic, and he's obviously a brilliant guy, but that's like what he wants to do.
That's his thing.
You know, like, it works for him.
It's a beautiful gig, too, because you can never rest on your laurels, because it doesn't matter.
Tomorrow there's another show.
That show has to be good as well.
And you need new jokes, and you need new sketches, and you need new gags to pull off, and you have new guests to review and to go over what they're talking about.
And he's done a lot of jumping up, Jimmy, in a way that I really respect.
Like, I did his show a long time ago, maybe 12 years ago, and at that point, you know, his hair's different, he's a little bigger, they've not quite got his suits to fit yet, the whole facade of the show, you know, was being worked on.
But Jimmy, I think his drive and maybe the drive of the people that he surrounds himself with, you know, he jumped up when he did the Matt Damon thing.
He jumped up when he interviewed Obama.
He jumped up when he, you know, sorted out his hair and, you know, kind of dropped a few pounds and sorted out his suit.
Like he has a drive.
There's no sense of complacency with Jimmy.
And I find that seems to be relatively concurrent with Talk show hosts.
Conan's like that.
He's always reaching.
He's never like, okay, we're done.
This is the show.
Let's just dial it in.
He's reaching.
I appreciate watching people reach.
It's why I'm a huge fan of athletes in general.
I always feel like athletes are always trying for that next thing.
I don't think she's she's competed in jujitsu tournaments, but she's a madman mad woman rather and He's doing it now as well.
He's doing jujitsu now But the point being that he's a guy that doesn't feel like he if he's home for a week or two He's like I gotta get the fuck out of here.
He just constantly wants to go to Libya or Africa or China just what he just wants to experience it at all and his work is Going to places and experiencing these completely different worlds.
That's where it's at for him.
So he's got a totally unique way of being ambitious.
Very different than like a talk show host would show up in the same writer's room and drink the coffee and bang up the jokes.
And he's just as ambitious, but his ambition is to go to Moscow and try their food and talk to their people.
Yeah, and he also, I don't know him at all, I think he's fantastic.
I read Kitchen Confidential years ago when it first came out, and I thought, wow, this guy's insane, and then obviously he blew up on TV. He also has a through line of an addict in his work.
He was an ex-addict.
He holds his hands up and says that.
I think when you meet a lot of ex-addicts, or even addicts, they have that thing that they're doing which completely takes hold of their life, which is stopping them from doing it.
The drug that they're addicted to.
And they can't...
If they chill and relax, then that demon's going to come in and hang out with them.
So I think Bourdain's like, well, if I spend 10 days at home, maybe that monster's going to come out, so he has to keep moving.
They didn't ask me to, but I've had my own fun, positive, great journey with drugs in my life.
It's like that great Bill Hicks joke where he's like, I had a great time on drugs.
Not to tell people to do drugs.
I think it's a very, very personal thing.
I was lucky enough to come from a family background that was very...
Consistent and there, you know, my parents have been married for 42 years.
I always came back to a household where dinner was on the table, regardless if I ate it or not.
You know, a foundation of something that I think made me feel secure.
Got interested, was always interested in music, got interested in the Beatles when I was about 12, 13. Started reading up about them and read that Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album were very much influenced by drugs and thought, oh, that's interesting because I feel artistic and I'd like to see if I can make that artistic flower bloom a little bit.
And at that point, me and three other Beatles fans at my school started to seek out marijuana, which we ended up getting a hold of and did that atypical thing when your kids were You know, you all smoke a joint in two and a half minutes and everyone feels lightheaded and one of them pukes and then you get nervous and paranoid and you run off and you think you're never going to do it again and then you do it again and then you do it again and at one point you're like, oh, it hit, you know?
So I did that.
I mean, fuck, I remember...
I'm a very dedicated worker.
You know, obviously I never do drugs when I'm working.
But in my downtime, my weekends, I might do that.
And I flew my brother out to New Zealand to come check us all out making Lord of the Rings.
At the time, I was heavily into marijuana, probably the most I was into it in my life.
And I would roll like 20 joints and put them in a cigarette box.
I never smoked cigarettes.
Put them in a cigarette box that someone had given to me.
And I would just walk around the house just smoking joints like I'm smoking cigarettes.
And my brother, who's only 16 months older than me, sat me down at one point in that trip and he was like, I've never seen anyone smoke as much weed as you.
And how are you functioning?
And maybe you should consider not doing it.
And I was a highly functioning stoner.
I was like, I'm fine, come on, let's go.
And that's, you know, that's gone in different journeys in my life.
So I think when I met JJ, I had spent...
Hello.
I had spent, um...
18 months in LA having not worked, exposing myself to LA for the first time, and not necessarily on the biggest party scene, but certainly on a bit of a party scene, hanging out with the wrong people, the wrong women.
And I think G.A.J.'s perceptive enough to probably see when I came into a meeting, like, He's a bit rough around the edges.
He didn't shave.
He knows what it means to have a hangover.
He knows what it means when we say certain buzzwords, so he could have danced in these arenas.
So, yeah.
It's a cautionary tale, I think, Drugs, and I'm really careful about it.
I'm aware that there are young people who might follow me on Twitter or might follow me on Instagram that That would think, oh, well, if he's done it, it's okay, and I don't subscribe to that at all.
I think you have to have your own journey and you have to have your own experiences, but the abuse of drugs has never been something that's been in my life.
The usage of drugs has been something that I've done.
More often than not, if I'm partaking in some sort of drug, I have a notebook and a pen close enough by me so that if I feel like I'm inventing the future, I can write it down, and in the morning when I wake up, I can be like, oh, there's a positive element of...
That thing that I took, you know?
I like searching for stuff.
I think searching for stuff in that world can be quite significant.
But like, if I really like a film and I watch it, if it's streaming, if I'm watching it on Netflix, if I really like that film, guaranteed I'm going to buy it.
I'm going to go buy it on DVD because I want the actual article.
I want it in my house and the same with music.
If I like an album, I'm going to go buy that CD. And I don't want that medium to die, you know?
I was at the bookstore the other day with my mother-in-law and she was talking about Zeppelin, House of the Holy was there and they're selling like these new vinyl versions of Houses of the Holy and like Barnes and Noble and Thousand Oaks.
They have all these fucking, these albums.
It's wild.
These are 1960s, 1970s albums, and people are buying records and turntables, and they're getting into the actual physical medium again, opening it up, and it's cool.
Yeah, I think the vinyl culture is really fantastic, and that is great that the vinyl thing kind of came back around again.
I do think that...
Those select artists that make their way onto vinyl, your Jimi Hendrix's, your Elvis's, your Led Zeppelin's, your Beatles, they'll always be around.
But the smaller ones, they're going to be like, well, he's not big enough to go on vinyl, so let's just put him on digital.
Someone's going to want him, we'll put him on digital and that's it.
It makes me sad that there are albums that I own that if I break that CD, it's going to be very difficult for me to get it unless I pay $69.99 on eBay and then I get a copy that's been previously used.
That, to me, is one of the most fascinating, I say, you could say scandals, tragedies, horrific crimes, whatever it is, whatever you want to call it, but that that guy turned out to be a rapist, and not just a rapist, but a guy who would drug people and fuck them while they're unconscious.
We would all sit around, and we'd put headphones on, and we would all sit around and listen to this, you know, whether it's Cheech and Chong, or we got a hold of some old George Carlin back then.
I got to see Hicks live when I was an open-miker, which was a great, great, great chance to see one of the all-time greats in the beginning of my career.
You know, it wasn't going, but the comics were laughing hard.
We were laughing hard, and a few people were laughing hard.
And then there's a few people in the audience that was trying to figure out what everybody was laughing at that stuck around and tried to see if, like, am I missing out on something cool here?
I think the Hicks thing, what was going on was that he hadn't found those people yet.
This was all pre-internet.
So no one knew what he was doing.
So they were going to go see a guy who was a funny comedian.
And they had seen him on the Rodney Dangerfield Comic special on HBO, and he only did like seven minutes on that or whatever the hell it was, whatever they would do.
It was a very small, short, funny set, but it was funny, a bunch of jokes.
And so people went to see him a lot based on that, and they went to see him.
They're like, what the fuck is all this?
He hadn't really found that audience yet, and then he died, unfortunately.
And one of the reasons is because it was all one take.
It was one show, one take.
And, you know, it's an HBO special.
So it's a...
But, again, he was a guy that, like, if he found his audience, if, like, they knew where to go, you know, like, today, if he was alive today, my God, he would have just a fucking monster following.
It's super brave and I think a lot of people don't necessarily know the mechanics of how a comedian found himself being on stage with a microphone.
And if anyone did know that, people would shut the fuck up and laugh or just politely leave.
Because the disrespect shown by hecklers to stand up comedians where you're like, do you have any idea how ballsy it is to get up on stage and show your ass like that all the time?
There's alcohol, which really fucks with judgment.
And there's also...
A lot of people have this...
Really bizarre entitled thing where they're entitled to their opinions and they feel like this is something that they're allowed to, you know, they're allowed to voice their disproval about and you should stop.
Well, there was this bit I was doing for a while about...
There was a thing called the Second Coming Project.
It was before genetics.
When they first started mapping out the human genome, there was these people that wanted to get DNA from the Shroud of Turin, and they wanted to try to clone Jesus.
And they thought that if they cloned Jesus, they'd bring him back, and that would be how Jesus would return.
And...
So my take on it was like, what if they brought Jesus back and he was retarded?
Cloning doesn't work.
You have to do it a lot of times in order to find an effective clone.
So the first one that you do, what if it comes out wacky?
What if he has Down syndrome?
Do you kill him?
And she's like, next subject!
And she was sitting in the front row looking, like, as if that's it.
Like, you're just gonna say that, and that just ends?
It might just be in her very narrow view of the world, like Down Syndrome is an unacceptable subject, or religious, anything religious.
Like, I've heard people say, well, hey, man, as long as you don't talk about politics or religion, like, that's ridiculous.
Those are two things you should absolutely fucking talk about every chance you get, because one of the reasons why both of those dumb, retarded fucking things are still around in the same state they've always been around is because dummies like you don't talk about it.
Because you've locked it in this ideology box and tucked it away somewhere where you just talk about the Lakers and the fucking lawn and how long you think this drought's gonna last.
You don't want to talk about the fact that you're getting fucked and that you're being surrounded by children who believe in magic.
It might not be funny, but even, like, Patrice O'Neill, the late, great Patrice O'Neill, had a really good point once where he was like, if someone goes on stage and offends you, they say something offends you, or if someone goes on stage and makes you laugh, Both of those things come from the same place.
They're both trying to make you laugh, but it doesn't always work.
The ideas that eventually become great bits, there's been nights...
I had some bits that eventually became closing bits, like bits that I had to close on because I couldn't follow them.
They were just too good for me.
All my other bits weren't as strong as them.
At one point in time, they would bomb.
When I was first developing them, I was like, how the fuck am I going to get this to work?
It's just too weird.
It's too fucked up.
It's too controversial.
It's not connecting with people.
Whatever the reason was.
And almost every bit sort of starts out in an embryonic stage of what it eventually becomes when it's a finished product.
And if it's a bit that's controversial and it starts out in this embryonic stage, you're like, next subject!
You're missing the whole entire point of stand-up and you can't be here because you're a part as an audience member Every audience member is not just there.
You're not just seeing a show when you see stand-up You're in part of the creative process because the bits come alive in front of the crowd they evolve and change in front of the crowd and That's how they become something that eventually gets on television and becomes a special until that until it happens you You're in as much as the comic is.
You're in on it.
We need you.
If it wasn't for the audience, no jokes would ever come out right.
You wouldn't really exactly know the best way to do any of them.
You know, I prefer stand-ups who don't have any restrictions.
I don't like stand-ups that, you know, only, they don't use any swear words, they don't talk about sex, they don't talk about anything profound, everything is like real simple, straight across like losing socks in the dryer type shit.
I think he's brilliant.
I prefer a Bill Burr or a Louis C.K. or a Joey Diaz.
I go see Joey Diaz.
There's nothing that's off the table.
I'm seeing chaos.
And at the end of the show, you're fucking holding your body laughing.
And you're like, I can't believe...
He does this bit about eating a girl's pussy from behind and sticking your nose in her ass like a pigeon.
He's like, you gotta do the pigeon.
Yeah.
And he does this thing, like, I'm not doing it any justice.
The thing, I totally hear you in terms of the limitations that Seinfeld gives himself that no profanity doesn't necessarily tell you a huge amount about himself.
It's all kind of abstract stuff.
I love words.
I'm a huge fan of words.
I love etymology.
I like studying words, the origin of words, all that kind of stuff.
He is a fantastic wordsmith.
And also, he's very, very specific.
Like, he will omit the word the if he doesn't need it because he examines the entire sentence.
I love the dedication to that.
I also love the freeform element of...
You know, what Hicks was doing, just anger coming at you, or Eddie Izzard is very kind of like just school of thought coming all over the place.
The thing that I love about Seinfeld might be the limitations that he gives himself, but also that idea of the choices that I'm making, I've made specifically for...
For this joke to work as correctly as I think.
And he's a professor of comedy, right?
I mean, he knows comedy.
He knows the history of comedy.
He knows what's funny.
He knows what's not funny.
And there is something very safe about him.
And I could bring my parents to see him.
And he is old school.
But for me, the fact that Seinfeld lives in this world of Joey Diaz's and...
Bill Burr's and Louis C.K.'s makes him almost like the last of a dying breed, you know?
Brian Regan is also very clean and very, very funny.
You know, but I hear you.
I mean, he's a master at economy of words, that's for sure.
There's definitely a rhythm to learning, like, when, you know, when to leave words in, when to add more words, when to have a pause, when to have no pause, and there's an art to that sort of creation of the bits.
And, you know, she can be a little frisky and a little naughty, but obviously that's very disarming when, you know, you're kind of an attractive lady to get up and do that stuff.
I think she's brilliant.
And unfortunately, it is a very male, as a lot of society is, a very male-dominated job in the sense that I feel like if Sarah...
Was a guy, there's a chance she could be a little bigger than what she is now.
Some would argue that female comics are judged on a curve and that the best comics, if you look at the best female comics that are alive today and compare them just bit for bit for the best male comics, you wouldn't really have them in the same category.
I mean, it's weird, like, I don't like seeing, you know, even though I said Joey Diaz is the best in the world, because I think he just makes me laugh the hardest, because that's like my style of comedy.
I love that crazy, chaotic style, but I don't, just take Joey out of the equation, I don't think there's a best, but I've seen Sarah.
Sarah was at the store two weeks ago, and she was fucking fantastic, just smashing, just fantastic.
But I've seen Burr do that.
Do you know Duncan Trussell?
Yep.
I've seen Duncan Trussell just fucking...
Doug Stanhope.
Doug Stanhope.
Destroy.
It's all about, you know, if they're in their groove, if they're, you know, and they're always recycling material.
So you catch them two years from now, it's going to be a totally different set, a totally different point of view, totally different place in their life, totally different perspective.
And I think, you know, as far as personal taste, it kind of ebbs and flows depending on where that person is at any point in their life.
He had a fucked up leather jacket, shaved his head, looked kind of like a little bit of a G. And his material was just excellent, you know.
So like you said, it's on any...
given night you know i think also coming from england and having excuse me having that backdrop of monty python and derrick and clive and stuff the the playfulness of words is something that i appreciate like do you know monty python came out with a vinyl record that has a double groove in it it's for the stoners so you put on let's say side b but it hits on the second groove so you hear the exact same record but then the last sketch is different
so then you're like fuck i love that sketch not heard that before i must have been too stoned or too fucked up you put it on again but it doesn't hit the second groove it hits the first groove so you get to the end of the record the sketch is gone you're like wait a minute how much have i smoked then you put it on again and it's back and monty python put that in for the 1960s audience that are listening like that shit i love Wow.
One guy has two little fish, like kind of big sardines.
They're about that big.
And he skips over to Michael Palin, slaps him in the face a couple of times, skips back.
Skips over to Michael Palin, slaps him in the face a couple of times with these fish, skips back.
And then the other guy, and then he's finished, and he stands still, and the other guy pulls out a fucking huge trout and just takes him out and throws him in the canal.
Yeah, I had done a couple of TV shows in England, a little bit of theatre in England, started to do some English films, and was doing a TV show in France for England when I got the role on Lord of the Rings.
When I did Lord of the Rings...
And as we're coming towards the end of Principal Photography, which is almost two years, the on-set publicist, there's a lady called Claire Raskind, I think she's married now, so she has a different name, she said to me, what are you going to do after this?
What are you going to do when we wrap in December?
I was like, I don't know, go back to Manchester, wait for it to come out a year later.
And she said, if I was you, I'd go to LA, get a jump on this.
Like, go take some meetings, get a manager, get an agent.
Or, you know, the cat's got up the tree and can't get the cat down and then they call the fire brigade and the fire brigade turn up and one of the people who's in the fire brigade happens to be the ex-lover of the person who's got the cat and they get together and they go have a pint together and it's very...
It's very northern, but it's a little, I think, derogatory towards London people because it paints them to be two-dimensional, you know, they all wear flat caps and...
unidentified
Oh, I love football, me, and a bit simple, and I don't really know what I'm talking about.
So I came to L.A. and still am really good friends with Elijah Wood.
So I hung out with Elijah for probably a month or so, just hanging out, go to Disneyland, go to Magic Mountain, doing our thing, men's Chinese theatre.
Huge deal for me.
Huge.
Like, when I was growing up, the whole put your hands in the Clark Gable hand thing or see how small Betty Grable's feet were, that's a huge deal for me.
That's old school Hollywood.
So I did all that.
And then moved to my manager's place and, you know, just kind of got fucked up for a year.
And then got my shit together and started going to the gym and started feeling a little bit better about stuff and had a couple of auditions that I got close on and then ended up getting an audition for Lost.
I, you know, I was dumb enough to assume that New Zealand would have the weather that Australia has because it's close to it on the map, but it's actually not close to it geographically.
It's a long way away and certainly much more southern geographically than Australia.
So it kind of has English weather, sunny days, but generally, you know, showers and wind.
They call it windy Wellington because, you know, every year some old woman will get blown down on the street and, you know, it'll be a huge issue.
It's a very safe country in terms of going out and doing your thing.
They have a great respect for art.
You know, everyone's inked.
Everyone's covered in ink.
I've never seen so many tattoos on young people in my life, which they call mokus over there.
More of a tribal thing, but certainly it's a rites of passage when you reach 18 or 20 or 21. You'll get a tattoo.
So he wants to keep all of his movies on the island of New Zealand, on the islands of New Zealand, because it brings a lot of industry in there.
I don't think he would have done it if he knew it was outside of his wheelhouse, but there's nowhere else to make God, the fucking scenery is so spectacular.
The Shire exists.
You can go to the Shire.
Green, rolling hills, sheep everywhere, cows, beautiful, you know.
They have a huge issue with, you know, animals being brought in, so they're very strict in customs.
Also, you know, millions of years ago, you had birds flying over New Zealand going, wow, that place looks rad.
Like, there's trees everywhere and there's no humans.
I'm going to land, which they did.
And then over the course of a few more million years, they then lost the ability to fly because they didn't need it because they're natural predators.
So you have all these flightless birds walking around doing their thing, then they accidentally bring in things like possums and rats and stuff and cats.
And these animals can't believe their luck.
They're like, there's all these flightless birds, they can't even climb a tree.
I mean, the Kakapo is a parrot, one of the largest parrots in the world.
The male will build a little depression in a U-shaped valley, so he'll have an amplifier, which will be a U-shaped valley.
In that U-shaped valley, he'll build a depression, and he'll sit in that depression and make a deep, guttural, bass-like noise for his female to hear him.
And the female will walk over, but it takes place over the course of a few days.
And any animal can hear that.
So the rats and the cats and the possums would just follow the sound and the male won't move.
Because rabbits had gotten to Australia and they just bred like a motherfucker and spread across the entire country and along the way they had to figure out how to mitigate the issue of these rabbits and the overpopulation so they brought in foxes and then the foxes got out of control and then they brought in feral cats.
So feral cats and foxes are like one of the biggest issues in all of Australia.
They just have an overwhelming amount of them and they still haven't put a dent in the rabbit population.
I mean, any time human beings try and get involved with the nature of things, they make a huge mess out of it.
I mean, there's a classic story in Hawaii where I can't remember what the animal was.
I used to know...
But they brought in an animal to bring down the populations of another animal, but that animal is diurnal and the other animal is nocturnal, so they never fucking meet each other.
They just smell each other.
They're like, I know he's around here somewhere, but he's in his burrow, you know.
When we're talking about the individual, that's fine.
But potential.
I mean, as a species, you know, we are a mess and we're breeding out of control.
And for some reason, we place a huge amount of importance on human life because our brains are developed to the point where we think that we're...
Special, but if you were to take humans off this planet and have a look at it in 200 years, it would be a vibrantly green, blue planet living in balance with itself.
If you were to take worms or ants or spiders or beetles off the planet, we would be dead.
In a hundred years.
You know, I'm lucky enough to do this show and every so often we find ourselves in the real wilderness where you've taken a car to a river and a river to a boat and then walked to someone else and then taken another boat for three hours down river and you're heading to this forest jungle-like location and I'll see humans on the river's edge fishing or playing.
Kids, little six-, seven-, eight-year-old kids, and I think...
Those fuckers know so much that we'll never know.
They know when the rains come in.
They know when the predator's nearby.
They have incredible night vision.
They have hearing that we can only imagine.
They have the ability to climb a tree like we can or heal themself with a fruit or with a plant.
I admire that much more than whoever the fuck Kanye does or anyone.
Not just Kanye, I'm not picking on Kanye, but LeBron's incredible.
He's an incredible athlete.
I have a lot of respect for him and Steph Curry is an amazing basketball player.
They can't contend with the ability that these children have, these indigo children.
Yes, horses for courses, but my retort to that would be, You know, the correct way to live on this planet would be the way that they're doing it, not the way Kobe's doing it.
Who knows how Kobe lives his life?
He is an extraordinary athlete.
But in terms of excess, and I'm part of this, in terms of the excess of, let's say, Los Angeles, the waste, the portion size, the pollution, the traffic, We're not getting it right.
We've got it wrong.
We don't seem inclined necessarily to fix it in the Western world because we're like, well, yeah, but we can all eat.
We live in warm houses.
We get DirecTV.
Like, I'm just chilling.
Like, until it really hits the fan and the tsunami comes in, we're good.
The other people, those Africans, they've kind of fucked it up.
And the people in Southeast Asia, they've fucked it up.
South America's a mess.
But in LA, you're like sitting pretty.
We did it.
We succeeded.
We've not succeeded.
We're not living in balance with our planet.
We are killing our planet.
It is on its way.
And it might not happen in our lifetime.
And I know certain people have said this for generations.
You have all these scientists saying, it might not happen in my lifetime, but it will certainly happen in the next.
And I'm part of that person, those people representing that comment as well.
But I do believe that we're at that tipping point of like, what are we doing?
Why are we here?
Like, we're not here to make cash.
We can't be.
Because I mean...
It's about moving from being a human species that made some mistakes and realised the limitations of our planet to living as a human species that has the potential to go forward into our future.
At the moment, there is no future for human beings.
It's a ticking clock.
We need to take that clock out of the scenario to be a successful species because ants did it, bees did it, worms did it.
Ents, which are my favorite animal, by the way, live in extremely condensed societies.
If you wanted to fuck one, there'd be something wrong with you.
People are way better than ants.
I think that what we're doing is definitely tragic, if you look at the consequences that human society has on the environment itself.
But if you look at the potential that human minds and human creativity and ingenuity have, and you look at what we've been able to accomplish with Raw materials and what we've been able to build in this incredible world.
Just the ability to do this kind of a show where you're broadcasting something.
Right now it's flying through the air into people's phones.
There's people in their car that are listening to this in real time.
I just think that what we need to do is put some of that ingenuity on figuring out how to be more renewable and figure out a way to be more sustainable.
But I don't think that's outside of the realm of possibility by any stretch of the imagination.
I just think it's hard because people live in the moment and they don't feel the consequences of their actions until they're too late.
And I think that's an issue, that people have to recognize the consequences Globally of the human race and what this thirst for innovation and expansion and overpopulation, what is the impact on it?
But there's been a lot of talk and a lot of thought and a lot of planning and preparing for an eventual world where we don't have waste.
I think even the concept of waste is just about not thinking things all the way through.
And that a lot of what is waste is really just an alternate source of energy that needs to figure out how to be used.
There is a mystery about those animals that I don't feel the mystery as much with human beings.
Really?
Yeah, and I don't.
And, you know, there have been some incredibly profound leaps in technology with some very, very smart people on this planet and we are doing the best that we can do.
I would argue that all of those technological breakthroughs and all of those concepts that we have and all of those ways that we can talk about being impressive as a species...
Because we can't avoid it, comes from a very human angle.
We're looking at it in a human conundrum because we're in our brain.
We're saying, well, that's fine, you know, humans can be dicks, but think about what we've done.
We went to the fucking moon and, you know, we know what the dark side of Mars looks like and we put robots on Mars and we can create music that was made in an orchestra based on scratches in a record groove.
Like, that shit...
It's insane.
It doesn't matter.
None of that stuff matters.
It's not why we're here.
And it doesn't do anything for the larger concept of this universe and this planet.
It does something for us as a species, selfishly.
We're amazing.
Look what we did.
We created this thing and, you know, we went to the moon.
I go out of my way to try and live in balance and be nice to the universe as best as I can because it makes me feel better.
It makes me feel like my life is in more balance if I do that.
I'm actually working in flow with the universe better.
And I agree.
I don't necessarily think that the universe has a bias one way or the other.
If we were to play around with the idea of the universe sitting down with a pad and a piece of paper and they drew a line down it and they went ants on one side, humans on the other side, and they weighed up the pros and cons, ants win every time.
I mean, ultimately, I don't know if the universe is an entity that really contemplates these issues.
I mean, if you really were examining the life of human beings in comparison to the life of everything else on this planet, you would have to assume, first of all, that there's just so much inspiring potential for creativity that comes out of this one weird monkey that makes mouth noises and expresses itself through facial expressions and written language.
This is a very, very bizarre And I would say, if I was completely objective and had no connection whatsoever to human beings, I would say that fucking thing is way more impressive than ants.
That thing is flying through the air in metal tubes on a daily basis all across the world.
That thing is sending video through the sky into a fucking phone that slips into its pockets.
That thing is driving on this hard surface that it's laid out all over the world.
These internal combustion engines are powering these metal boxes.
They pulled the metal out of the ground and forged it into the form of metal boxes.
Then they've covered these wheels with rubber.
And a fucking explosion, a controlled explosion inside this iron, cast iron block is forcing this car around.
They stop in these places where they pull out this fuel that they've taken, fossil fuel from around the fucking world, and tankers and pipelines, and they've processed it into this gasoline that they can then pump into this car.
They pay for it with a credit card.
Money is numbers that are on a computer somewhere.
If you're looking at the universe, if the universe is looking at life on Earth in terms of what's more impressive, Jesus fucking Christ, there's nothing more impressive than people.
You know, I mean it's not good for us and Eventually, but I think if you look at it in perspective of like how long human beings have been here Yeah, we've met a mess of things like really quickly but also the amount of innovation that has occurred in our lifetimes in the industrialized world's lifetime over the course of you know X amount of hundreds of years It's fucking staggering.
Yeah, it's no wonder they haven't caught up to what they're doing and And figured out how to mitigate all the issues that they've created by making internal combustion engines and airplanes.
I mean, cows farting causes a huge amount of problems for greenhouse gases.
But in my mind, as an atheist, my idea of the universe is probably a little closer to our little statue that we have here, something living in complete balance with the universe, which I think the universe would respect a little bit more in an ant than they would in a human.
But if you're talking about something impressive, which all those things are impressive, that certainly comes from a human bias.
How do we equate things that impress us?
Oh, the fact that we can drive cars, that is impressive for humans.
Elephants watch us go by and they don't think that's impressive.
A jaguar, let's say, can hunt completely silently in the dark, make not one noise and catch the creature that it's looking for with complete and utter economy.
And sit down, eat that creature, and then sleep for two or three days.
That, for me, is more impressive than Hawking's mind or than some theory that Einstein came up with.
They're living in balance and flow with their universe, and they're doing it in such a way that this creature right here that is also about balance and flow goes, you're fucking radical.
Well, I don't know if Buddha says you're fucking radical to a jaguar, but I think jaguars are obviously incredibly impressive and spectacular, and I'm not arguing against jaguars, but someone with a night vision goggle can leave some food out for that stupid jaguar and shoot it in the head and turn it into a jockstrap, if they wanted to.
Well, what's in flow with this poor little antelope getting killed by this jaguar?
Well, so you decide.
So you decide.
You decide that some gal in a jaguar thong isn't hot.
You know, she's sitting out there on her porch with her headphones on so she doesn't blow her ear off while she shoots that 300 wind mag at a jaguar who's going after a piece of meat.
It's a very weird thing that people want to fly over and shoot like giraffes and all these different things, but then when you get into the conservation aspect of it, it gets very cloudy.
It's not as simple as You know, people are doing cruel things and killing these animals, then posing them and taking pictures.
The amount of money that's generated by these people doing that is substantially more than any other conservation effort that's out there.
It gets real weird.
Because, like, this rhino thing, I had the guy on, Corey Knowlton, that killed that black rhino.
And, you know, I wanted to find out, like, why did he do it?
Where's his head at?
You know, what...
First of all, that rhino fed, you know, who knows how many villagers.
I mean, they had all the images of them cutting up that rhino and feeding all those villagers.
That rhino was also, they needed to kill that rhino because the population is very small of the rhinos, and that rhino was killing other male rhinos.
It was a non-breeding older male, and it was very aggressive.
It killed females, killed males, and in order to keep the population healthy, they had to eliminate that rhino.
They were trying to figure out how to do it.
And this guy paying all that money to fly over there and kill that rhino is actually better Counter-intuitively better for the overall population of those rhinos.
Also, the $350,000 pays for rangers.
It stops poaching.
You know, one of the interesting things they're doing now to stop poaching is they've come out with 3D printing of rhino horns.
They're going to make artificial rhino horns and flood the market in Asia.
Apparently, these are virtually indistinguishable from wild rhino horns.
They actually share rhino DNA, they make them a keratin, and they're going to 3D print these rhino horns and just flood the market in Asia.
I mean, it is brilliant, but it's crazy that they need to do this.
I mean, poaching is way more of an issue for rhino death and any of these exotic animals than hunting is.
Well, you're speaking logically about things that are just totally based in superstitious.
I mean, get Viagra, you fuck.
You don't have to eat a rhino horn to get your dick hard.
This is nonsense.
It doesn't work, either.
That doesn't work.
I mean, it's crazy that these things are going extinct because it would be one thing if you ate rhino horns and it really did make your dick hard as a rock and you could fuck all night for days, but it doesn't.
It doesn't even work, but yet people are still killing them for that very reason.
Well, it doesn't make any sense because there's other things that it does.
It's one thing that if rhino horns made people super geniuses and cured cancer, then you'd be like, okay, we have to figure out a way to breed more rhinos.
We don't want to make rhinos go extinct because they're essentially the fountain of wisdom.
If you kill them off, then you lose this one opportunity to figure out how this one animal developed this property that so greatly aids us.
It would be pretty ironic if rhino horns made people the ultimate human being, but yet we're killing them off to try to become the ultimate human being and robbing ourselves of this one source.
But again, that's a very, very strong human angle.
The rhino, all the animals that exist on our planet are Fair game to be explored and had a look at to see how they benefit us, but how about how they benefit the world?
The majesty of an elephant's tusk is based on the fact that it's attached to an elephant, not the fact that you can cut it off and put it on your mantelpiece.
It loses all value then.
We look at things from this human angle as opposed to this planetary universe type angle, Well, some of us do.
But, I mean, again, with the rhino thing, the conservationists that are trying to protect the rhinos, they all agree that you have to kill the aggressive, non-breeding older males in order to keep the population healthy.
Because all of these animals that he, when he went to those South African hunting camps, all those animals were on the verge of extinction just 20 years ago.
His ex-wife spoke in great detail about his plans in order to create some sort of religion and really profit off of it.
I mean, he spent a good deal of his life living in a boat hiding from the IRS. You know, because before they were tax-exempt or tax-free, you know, status, before they had that status, they were, you know, he owed money because they were a cult and they were taking money from their members and the whole thing's fucking madness.
I go around the world, try to change people's ideas about animals that most people are scared of and try and evoke a little bit of curiosity and kill fear in whatever...
Whatever scares you, whether you're scared of travel or weird food you've never eaten or animals or people of different colour or people of different...
You know, ideas about life.
I get a lot out of travel and I love animals.
So what happened with me was whenever I had like two or three weeks off, I would always take a trip on my own unless I was hanging out with my girl.
And the trip on my own would usually be pick an animal around the world.
Go and find that animal.
But to make the two or three weeks spread out a little bit, instead of going directly to the source, I would land in the capital city and spend two or three days in the capital city going to restaurants, hanging out in human communities and just asking them, like, hey, where would I go and see a whale shark?
Do you guys know about a whale shark?
Have you seen it around here?
Where would I go?
How would I take transport?
Do I take a train?
All that kind of stuff.
And then gradually make my way down there and for the last week try and do that thing.
So...
My agents knew about this, and they were constantly seeing photos of my adventures and stuff.
And my non-acting agent kind of said to me, you know, this is a show, Dom.
Like, this is a show, what you do.
No one does that thing that you do.
Like, you should meet some producers.
So I was like, all right, I'll meet some producers.
So I sat down with different people, ended up sitting down with a guy from Canada, runs a production company called Cream.
And he said, what's the show?
And I pitched him a trip that I took to find orangutans, a trip that I took to find the whale shark, a trip that I took to find the king cobra.
And he was like, cool, do you have eight ideas?
And I was like, I have 808 ideas.
And he went, all right, come up with eight ideas and we'll come back in two weeks time and write the show and came down.
First episode's about ants because it's my favorite animal.
And we went to Ecuador to find the army ant.
My plan was to lie down in a carpet of army ants, in what they call a drove of army ants, and know what it feels like to have this, you know, 20 million ants walking around on top of you, and will they go into your ears and your eyes and your mouth and your nostrils, and can they kill a grown human being and all that kind of stuff?
Bullet ants have the highest pain threshold of any insect sting in the world.
It's right at number six.
Number one is called a sweat bee, which is the equivalent of tasting white wine vinegar.
The bullet ant is described as walking on hot coals with a nail in your foot.
So it's extremely painful.
Bullet ants live in relatively small communities for ants, maybe 20, 40 bullet ants in a huge group.
If you were to piss off a community of bullet ants, the most amount that would be on you would probably be, let's say for the sake of argument, 50, which is outside the realms of possibility, but let's say 50. 50 wouldn't kill you.
And he was studying for it and was staying in these, they had these huts where they were elevated off the floor of the jungle and they would put turpentine on the posts of the huts To keep the ants from crawling up into your...
Because once they find you, once they decide that you're a target, you're fucked.
Like I said, if you had two broken legs, you're in trouble with bullet ants.
The great thing about bullet ants, and you'll see this in these communities, In the local indigenous communities, when the ants move through that village, they'll just go off for a day.
You know, just as a rule, I think that word is divisive and negative, potentially, and doesn't do us any favor, doesn't move us forward as an animal.
And I kind of reject it as a concept.
I think things are dangerous, but the idea of fear makes you clumsy, makes you make the wrong decisions, makes you do things incorrectly.
So some of the more archetypal fears on the planet are Heights and snakes and spiders and planes.
And we try to show people those things in a slightly more positive light so that you can sit comfortably at home and start to change the way your brain chemistry works with those animals.
I mean, obviously, you know that, like, let's say for the sake of argument, you are scared of spiders.
If you hear the word spider, spider will take you to 10 negative things that happened in your life associated with spiders in a circle that you can't get out of.
And it's feeding that negativity.
But if you now put a positive story in there where you saw a spider with a friend that you were in love with and then you went off and had food that you really liked, you're starting to change that pathway.
And if you just replace the negative with the positive, you'll then feel differently about spiders.
And that's what I'm attempting to do with the show.
Let's say we just did an episode in Sri Lanka with the Indian cobra, monocled cobra, one of the most iconic cobras, if not snakes in the world, with those two little glasses on the back of its hood.
The one that the snake charmers work with.
So I pull like a six-foot Indian cobra out of a stack of wood at the back of someone's house.
And the first thing that cobra wants to do is get away.
So I'm holding on to it by its tail and it's trying to get away and it's trying to get away and it's trying to get away.
And it intellectualizes in its snaky brain, oh, I can't get away.
Why can't I get away?
So it turns around and looks at my hand.
Oh, the reason why I can't get away is this guy's hand.
So now I'm going to deal with his hand.
So it tries to bite me, tries to bite me, tries to bite me.
Can't bite me because I know how to hold on to a snake and let it bite me.
If I ride out that storm, which usually takes about two to three minutes, the snake, again, in its snaky brain, thinks, this isn't working.
All the normal ways that this works for me, an animal's got hold of me, I try and bite it, let's go, I'm free.
That's not working.
And now I'm getting exhausted because I'm biting and not getting anything for it.
Maybe I'll just relax.
As soon as that animal relaxes, I then chill.
I then release a little bit of tension on its tail, move a little closer, sit down with it.
Again, in its snaky brain, it's like, oh, I'm being fed something positive now.
There's no tension on my tail.
I can move a little freer.
And there's an exchange of energy where the snake now thinks, all right, I'm not going to be aggressive because that's not working for me or this animal that's in front of me.
We chill for a little bit, talk about how beautiful it is, talk about all the amazing things about it, and then I let it go.
And the snake won't remember that.
The snake's not going to then see a human a few days later and go, positive experience, this is cool, because their brain doesn't work like that.
It doesn't benefit a snake to have those memories to hang on to because they don't generally run into humans.
But I'll remember it.
And maybe the audience will remember it.
Maybe they'll feel differently about that animal now.
So this show really kind of came about in sort of an organic manner.
Like this is something that you were doing anyway for no reason other than because you enjoy being around these animals and you have the freedom to travel and see things that intrigue you.
It could have been a show about a few different things.
I'm obsessed by I love Manchester United.
This could have very easily been a show about me going around the world watching major soccer rivalries around the world and eating street food and meeting people and every so often seeing animals.
I could have done that.
It could have been about street food.
I love street food.
We could have done a whole episode about street food with a little bit of football and a little bit of animals.
It just so happens that...
You know, if you create a TV show, the backdrop of animals, it's an evergreen show, right?
I mean, people want to watch shows about animals in 10 years' time.
They're still going to want to watch an episode about Vietnam.
Those animals are still going to exist.
And they're still going to be like, oh, I'll watch this.
It's 10 years old.
But he's still doing all the universal things that we're doing.
He's interested in the world.
He's interested in Vietnam.
He goes to see the capital city.
He hangs out with animals.
So it was an easier sell to build it around animals.
I mean, you know, I'm getting paid to go on holiday, really.
I've been vegetarian for the most part this year, and every so often I'll eat a piece of fish.
And when I was in South Africa, I felt kind of weak with needing protein, so I ate a steak.
I ate this big hunk of chicken today because I felt like I was kind of low on energy.
I didn't want to come in here and be like, hey, what's happening?
So I ate something to give me a little bit of fuel.
But I would say, I don't know, I probably eat meat once every two or three months, something like that.
I'm not the biggest dude in the world, so for me to feel full on vegetables and fruit is fine for the most part, but every so often my system is like, I need flesh.
And so there's a lot of people that believe that that's a really good way to manage your weight, to not eat anything at all during the day and then you eat at night.
I think it's why every year or so I stop myself from having certain things.
My New Year's resolution is usually stop that.
Never start that.
It's like, you can't have added sugar, you can't have added salt, you can't have bread, you can't have alcohol, you can't have meat this year, although I've been cheating.
But, I mean, you obviously don't suffer from the same thing that I suffer from.
Putting on muscle, you know, like I'll go to the gym and train as hard as I can for, you know, the size that I'm at.
And then, you know, I don't get as big as I would like unless I'm pounding food.
And that's just, it's pretty stressful on my system, you know.
Yeah, it sounds you have a very unique situation when it comes to that.
But, you know, you could have eggs, and eggs, if you get them free range from healthy chickens, there's no negative impact.
They make an egg every day.
I have 22 chickens at home, so I eat a lot of eggs.
And my chickens are like my pets.
So, like, I'm having food that's created by pets, you know?
I feed them healthy food, and the eggs are dark orange, and they're filled with choline and all sorts of healthy protein, and they're really good for you.
You can get around killing an animal to eat them, but...
The thing about being a vegetarian or being a vegan is animals don't play by that rule themselves.
They're constantly killing each other.
Like you were talking about the jaguar killing the antelope and that that's natural.
Well, the reason why human beings are here is 100% because of hunting.
If we weren't, if we'd never figured out hunting, we'd never figured out killing, how to eat animals, we probably, our brain size would've never doubled over a period of two million years.
We'd never figured out agriculture, we would've never figured out civilizations, and we wouldn't, just wouldn't be in this position to debate veganism if it wasn't for hunting in the first place.
It's one of the more ironic things.
We are omnivores.
We do eat meat and we always have eaten meat.
It's a beautiful moral choice to try to leave the smallest carbon footprint, to try to leave the smallest footprint as far as animal suffering.
I mean, you know, I'm lucky enough to go into the jungle a lot and a lot of people that I talk to is like, oh man, you go into the jungle, that must be incredible.
It's so blossoming with life and all these new things and eggs and You know, creatures everywhere.
And I'm like, well, there is an element of that to the jungle.
But ultimately, the jungle is a place of death.
It's a place of dark, swollen, water-sodden death.
Think what those monkey communities think about that ego.
They must get their kids together and they're like, right?
There is a monster that lives in the sky, and this thing will end you.
So if you see something like a big shadow that comes towards you, that is the dragon.
That is the monster.
Get away from it.
We don't have that as much in our world.
I mean, we watch Game of Thrones, so we think that certain dragons exist and stuff.
But in other animal communities, like the insect world, insects are my favorite animal, that is fucking brutal, gladiatorial daily life for these creatures.
Because we're so conditioned by streets and phones and electricity and houses and buildings that when you're exposed to this totally different lifestyle, this totally different environment, like the wild, the actual real wild, it's like this jolt of, oh yeah, this jolt of, wow, there's like...
This is a completely different variable.
A series of variables that you're dealing with here.
I was in Kenya probably eight or nine years ago and I saw a zebra foal.
Zebra foal.
That was being hounded by two hyenas.
The mum had gone.
You saw it live?
Yeah, I saw it.
It was trying to navigate its way around a big tree while these hyenas were just fucking with it.
And they had broken, or it had broken, one of its back legs.
Compound fracture, like this.
So it was hopping around.
On three legs, and there was two hyenas.
So it would go to the left, hyena, go to the right, hyena.
And the hyenas, which knew at some point they were going to chow down on this thing, were really just fucking with it.
It would come over, they would bat it, it would fall over, it would get up again, they'd chase it, they'd hit its other leg, they'd try and bite the broken leg off.
They were, like, fucking with it.
They weren't trying to eat it for a good half an hour or so.
And I was in mixed company.
I was taking a lot of pictures of this thing, thinking, this is fucked up.
This is how unfair the last few moments of this creature's life is going to be.
The car that I was in, the people were like, okay, can we go now?
Like, I don't want to see that.
And we left, and I was talking that night with the people that I was with, and they were like, oh, it's so disgusting that we see this.
And I was like, this is what's real.
This is nature.
This is life, you know?
A few weeks ago, me and my friends...
In the middle of the night, we went walking around Griffith Park, and we saw an owl, and we saw some coyotes running along the track and stuff.
And then we went home, and I have a few snakes at home, and I started passing around snakes for people.
Hey, check this one out, check this one out.
I got my scorpion out, tarantula.
One of my friends was like, oh, this is a normal Saturday night.
We're sat here with all Dom's creatures and stuff.
And I stopped her, and I was like, Fleur, this is actually normal.
The shit that we were doing earlier on, where we're all showing each other photos on our iPhone and watching TV and Putting a DVD on and playing FIFA on our PlayStation.
That's a construct that's been created to make us feel okay about life and keep us stupid so that the bosses can do what they want.
This is real.
We're supposed to know the name of every snake.
We're supposed to know the name of every tree in the forest.
We've lost that ability and that's what I'm trying to get back to.
So there's nothing natural about buildings, but yet human beings naturally construct them without any interaction with each other all over the world.
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Yeah, maybe like a shelter to keep the rain off you is natural, but like That's where it starts, and then they figure out solar power, and then they figure out electricity, and then they figure out Wi-Fi, and then they figure out...
I mean, there's a reason why Mexico City exists at the same time that Los Angeles exists, at the same time that New York City exists, is because if you leave people alone, you don't kill them off, you don't kill them off with disease or war, they overpopulate and they develop these nationally intrusive cities.
It's natural for us as a species to look around and go, yes, Delhi is completely swollen with people, but that's the natural journey that the country of India is going to go on and create this city.
I don't necessarily think, if you take out this human bias, that that is natural for our species to do that.
We're not supposed to breed rampantly out of control.
We're supposed to take care of...
The air and the planet and the food and do that in balance and naturally with our species.
So we're developing this new style of living and we have to figure out a way to deal with the consequences of all this waste that we produce.
And also deal with the fact that people have this very bizarre diffusion of responsibility thing going on.
When there's a thousand people that are doing something and that something is fucking everything up, it feels different than if one person is doing something and that something is fucking things up.
Then you feel responsible.
But if you're a part of a city that's polluting the world, it doesn't seem like it's your fault.
Yeah, and also the very, I mean, I think apathy is one of the most dangerous words on the planet, the very apathetic idea of, well, what difference can I make?
It's a plastic bottle.
I mean, just forget about it.
You're like, well, obviously, if everyone thought that way, it would be a major issue.
And also, you see it a lot of times, people driving on roads or freeways, and the idea behind that is, I know this is bad for me, I know it's dirty, I don't want to stub it out and leave it in my car.
It looks cool for, you know, James Dean to smoke it, and the Beatles grew up smoking, and in the Second World War, they gave them out as part of your rations.
So you can understand how soldiers came back being addicted to cigarettes because they're scared of death, they're around death, they're bored out of their mind.
They get ten cigarettes a week, they're all going to smoke cigarettes.
But, I mean, you know, the level of education, certainly, in most of Western Europe and in this country, is to such an extent that when I see a smoker, I'm just like, Yeah, well, it's just one of those weird contradictions.
I know very intelligent people who smoke, too, which is very shocking.
Like, when you know someone and they're brilliant and then they can't stop smoking cigarettes, you're like, wow, if you could figure out a way to balance this whole thing out better, you'd be so much healthier.
It's true, but you don't drink tequila all day every day, and the thing about those cigarette smokers is, man, they wake up in the morning, it's a cup of coffee and a cigarette, they light that fucker, and that's how everything gets started.
That eight hours of downtime with no cigarette is fucking with them when they wake up in the morning.
The whole system throughout the night going, okay, let's get this toxin out, let's send all these messages to the brain that this is bad, and we'll deal with it, and then they wake up in the morning, they're like, oh, I feel so bad, I need a cigarette to make me feel bad.
I read this book that said...
The craving for a cigarette is not necessarily the craving for the cigarette, it's the craving to stop the bad feeling of the cigarette by replacing it with the adrenaline that your body creates by putting the poison inside you again.
So you feel shitty because you smoke the cigarette, and what you need to make that shitty feeling go away is to expose yourself to another jolt of the poison so your system goes, okay, let's deal with this adrenaline, throw all those painkillers in there, and then 20 minutes later you get it again.
Yeah, and you know, he's adding little positive affirmations.
I'm just going to have a little smoky treat.
I'm going to give myself a smoky treat.
I was like, no, you're killing yourself.
And then he read this book, and it was the reason why he quit.
And I was like, let me read it.
I don't smoke, but I want to read it.
And that was the thing that I took home with me.
It was this idea that It's not the fact that the cigarette makes you feel good or you love the feeling or it's five minutes of downtime.
It's the fact that that concentrated inhalation of poison is taking away from the shitty feeling that you're getting from the long-term effects of that poison.
The way it's been explained to me by addiction experts are that when you have an addiction, like everyone talks about cigarettes calm them down.
And the way it was explained to me, it was like, cigarettes don't calm you down.
What they do is they feed your addiction.
So you have this addiction, you're stressed out because your body is craving this thing that it's attached to.
You have some sort of, at a molecular level, you have this bizarre attachment to this substance you've been pumping into your body.
So your anxiety ramps up, your body needs it, and then when you get it, ah, so you're like, cigarettes, relax me.
No, no, no, no.
You're addicted to cigarettes, and that feeding that addiction calms the craving, calms the screaming of the addiction for a brief amount of time, and then it asks for it again.
So the idea that cigarettes calm you, no, they don't really.
You're extra amped up because of the fact that you're addicted to cigarettes.
So my mom exposed me to two things, which stopped me from ever smoking cigarettes.
I mean, that's not to say that when I was 17, 18, and one of my best friends walked outside to smoke a cigarette, I didn't go, oh, let me try it.
And I cuffed it up and was like, oh, yeah, that's okay.
You know, I've danced with that devil.
But my mom...
Did two things for me.
The first one was she told me about people in the hospitals that she was working at that had to have legs amputated, hands amputated, arms amputated due to complications with smoking cigarettes.
So I was like, okay, that's fucking heavy.
And then the other one was she printed out a list of Which we've all seen by now.
The ingredients of a processed cigarette, which is like, you know, fucking cyanide and horse piss.
I do this thing on Twitter called, at the flicks, which is like, if I watch a film that It has had an effect on me.
I do a little blurb about what I like about it on a WordPress account.
And I thought it was a really interesting movie for a lot of different reasons.
One of the major ones is that the way that it's being touted and sold in L.A. is to deal with these very cartoony-like characters that live in this girl's brain.
You know, Louis Black has anger and he's all red and...
Amy Poehler is Joy, and she's sweet, and then Sadness, who's, like, overweight and has, you know, blue hair and needs her adenoids taken out.
But it's...
From where I was sitting, it is a comment on the first time a human being has exposed themselves to depression and what it can do at a molecular level to that person and the journey you have to go on.
So, like, the B story is all their little relationships with these emotions and stuff, but the A story...
Was this really dark story of a girl moving from...
We even went to the bookstore afterwards and we bought some books on it because they have books, inside out books, where they kind of go into depth about all the different things and the impacts of emotions, how you need the sadness and how the sadness can help you change your mind and make decisions.
There was one thing which they changed at the very last, that they put into the script, not put into the script at the last minute, but involved in the story at the last minute, that I was going to write a scathing review about that particular thing.
Because you know the whole thing about core memories?
All the core memories were happy.
My thing was going to be, not all your core memories are happy.
Some of your core memories are dark and heavy.
And they define who you are as a person to the positive.
But they did that at the end because sadness took hold of those core memories and they kind of found the balance of like, some are good, some are bad.
One of the only things that I wasn't crazy about and I thought it was potentially a little darkness, a little dark, was that when the emotions were navigating their way back to the kind of brain area, they walked through the subconscious and the subconscious was scary and dark and mysterious and black.
And potentially things would jump out at you.
And my subconscious isn't all like that.
Some of my subconscious are tigers drinking cups of tea with saucers and asking me how I am.
And I'm in different galaxies, you know, spinning around having fun.
So I do have dark elements to my subconscious.
But I thought it was a little dangerous to tell little kids anything that lives in the catacombs of your mind is potentially dangerous.
I was like, well, some of that could be a poem that's amazing or A song that you wrote or a painting, which is beautiful.
I've spent a lot of time wondering what those things are there for.
Is there a reason why depression exists?
Is there a reason why sadness or joy or euphoria, do they serve some sort of evolutionary I mean, is there a reason why they exist that we just have to sort of manage?
But I mean, is it really the reason why people have gotten so far?
Because we're not just totally content with everything the way it is, and there's always going to be jealousy.
There's always going to be, like we were talking about the actors looking at other people going, why is this?
Because they've reached some point of success.
It's never enough and there's always some new thing that eludes them some new thing that they wishes if they could have that then thing would be better and why is thing fucked up and I don't got them what's wrong?
It's almost like these are motivating energies these are motivating elements motivated I mean and the depression thing when you get when you first start dating it's like you It's it's almost like burning your hand on a hot stove like letting you know like you're dealing with something really fucking powerful here and this horrible feeling that you have right now when it's not working out Understand this and understand the consequences of getting involved in a relationship now because it's not so easy as just jumping in with someone It's not so easy
as and you learn so much from those fucking early relationships Like I had a manipulative girlfriend in high school not her fault bitch.
But the point being was that that manipulation that I experienced from her very early on, it made me realize, like, oh, okay, this can happen, too.
Like, shit that doesn't happen with my friends can happen with a girl, and then all of a sudden it'll take you...
So I developed this intense zero bullshit policy.
So when I got When I got older and I became a man, when a woman would try to manipulate me in any way, I'd start laughing, I'd go, that's adorable.
But fortunately, I have other options, and so this is not gonna work out anymore, so take care.
But if I hadn't gone through that, I mean, I have friends that are fucking perpetual victims, and they get manipulated by women over and over and over again because they're weak.
And I think there's a certain amount of women, whether they appreciate it or whether they're honest about it or not, almost can't help manipulating men who are easy to manipulate.
In certain ways and I kind of feel like that's all why all that shit's in place like that it's it's almost like to ensure Momentum to ensure entropy to ensure that energy keeps moving and there's no stagnant I mean if you stay stagnant you will get depressed if you if you don't evolve and don't succeed You'll feel like shit if you know if you get dumped, you know, you're gonna feel horrible You better figure out how to not get dumped, you know Right.
I mean, if a girl's grown up with a mom who she admires, who is also manipulative to her dad, who she also admires, then she may potentially fall into that pitfall trap of doing that to other guys.
I mean, you know, as a creature, as a species, biologically, like you said earlier on, we have taken ourselves out of the equation of how do we solve the conundrum of staying warm at night, being protected from predators, where we get our food from.
We've solved all that as a creature.
So our brain is now giving itself the opportunity to expand more than the physical.
You know, most people don't necessarily go to the gym and hit the weights.
A lot of people, you know, read and get an education and stuff.
So from an evolutionary point of view, the thing that is expanding more than anything else is our brain.
Now that's positive and to our detriment, I feel, because we do overthink things and we do get ourselves into a situation.
Is this right?
Should this be happening to me?
I think that you have to look at it as the same...
Coin just flipped over in a different way.
If you have a great birthday and you get all the gifts that you want and you got the great piece of birthday cake and all your friends showed up, that's beautiful and you experienced it and you loved it and you told all your friends about it and you relive it with your friends and it was one of those days that you always think about when you go to sleep at night because it will help you go to sleep.
You need to understand that the day when none of your friends showed up for your birthday party and your parents got your gift that you didn't really want, It's the same thing.
You're just viewing it in a different way.
You're just viewing that thing as like, oh, this thing is bad.
This thing is good.
It's just your life.
Those things just happen, you know, and you have to have the balance of those two things.
So what I tried to do when I was younger, I would suffer from it a lot and I am prone to depression.
So I try and Keep myself in a positive headspace.
But a great way for me to attack depression when I see it coming is to say, this is natural.
This is normal.
Peaks and troughs are a way for you to understand the journey that you're in.
And you can't If you're getting overly high about something, that's as dangerous as getting overly low about something.
It's the bit in the middle that is the balance that makes sense.
I've been in situations in my life where I've thought, I've sat around on my own and thought, I think the worst is going to happen.
In this situation that I'm in with this girl, or this business scenario, or this day that I'm going to have tomorrow, I think the worst is going to happen.
My ultimate nightmare that I can envisage is going to happen.
And it's happened.
And I have to be okay with the fact that it's happened.
And it's never quite as crushingly bad as you make it in your mind.
I've been in situations where a girl where I'm like, I know we're breaking up.
Well, that's a real problem for people who don't ever get through that, and they don't realize that it's not going to be the end of the world.
I got lucky, not the girl that I talked about, but another girl that I dated in high school, who was, I don't like to say slut, But there's no other word for her.
But it's fascinating to me that you say that you didn't experience any depression at all until you're 15. But then you say that depression is something that you're prone to.
I think because I didn't know that it existed, when it hit me for the first time, I had absolutely no defense against it because I'd never...
I'd never seen it before.
I suddenly walked around a corner and there's a saber-toothed tiger in front of me.
And I was like, holy shit, that's terrifying.
And it just enveloped me.
And then my defences had not been built through my formative child years to go through elements of sadness.
Like I said, my foundation and my family, my parents were together.
They never fought.
They got on well.
I had a good relationship with my brother.
I did okay at school.
I never had those real major challenges, apart from the fact that I knew I was an actor and I was like, what the fuck am I doing...
Try to be an actor in Manchester.
It's never going to happen.
I'm never going to be an actor.
I had that angst.
But it wasn't like a painful physical or mental angst.
It was just something that I was dealing with.
So I don't think I had the fortitude to deal with it the first time.
And I'm a huge fan of women.
And I also probably punched a little bit above my weight when I was younger because I was the smallest kid at school, but I was super mouthy and no one could ever tell me to shut up.
So I was always trying to go for...
The ultimate girl.
And every so often, the ultimate girl would be like, alright, I'll entertain you for a week.
And I'd be like, I found her!
And then she'd be like, fuck you, I'm going for the jock.
I'm like, ah, fuck, I can't even compete with the jock, you know?
So I think I didn't give myself pitfalls until the point where my parents had kind of said, It's all you now, you know, 15, 16. They were like, okay, go find out who you're going to be.
And at that point, I got a little, you know, exposed to some sadness and stuff.
But I also, I just think it's part of life.
You know, I have this, you know, on Twitter, I'm constantly, not constantly, but if anyone ever says to me, hey, you know, I've been struggling with this or, you know, this is getting me down or I had a rough day or I've had a rough week or I just, you know, I'm sick with this or whatever.
And the way that I respond, the way that I always respond to it is like, you know, This will improve, and you will get to a point where you're able to look back and say, oh, that was a dark period in my life.
Otherwise, it's going to all be dark, and then you're going to die, which is a horrible way to live your life.
And sometimes it does happen, but you've got to be hopeful about it.
But, you know, the way that you make sense, like I said earlier on, of your life is to know, oh, here's a dark place, here's a light place, here's a dark place, here's a light place, and the sweet spot...
Is in the middle, you know?
There's a great line in The Office, The Ricky Gervais Show.
I think he ends the entire show by saying, life is a series of peaks and troughs and you don't know you're in a trough until you're heading up to a peak and you don't know you're in a peak until you're coming down the hill.
And that is true of life, right?
Like, I don't want my life to be incredibly, hectically happy all the time.
I think I would burn out.
And obviously...
You don't want your life to be incredibly darkly, heavily sad because that's going to kill you too.
I don't usually appreciate LA. I don't usually appreciate the sun, because I'm used to it.
I don't usually appreciate civilization and traffic, because I'm used to it, because it's become what it is.
But I spent a week on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, and it rained every day, constantly all day, and we were camping, so we were in these tents, and we were soaking wet, and we had these helmets, or rather Headlights on you know those you strap on and you turn the light on so you could walk around at night and not fall and I turned it on inside my tent and it was just It was it was like it was raining inside the tent because it was just mist it was water mist everywhere It was just it was so wet and just it's just weird.
You're just constantly drenched I had a great time.
It wasn't a terrible thing but my point is when I came back to LA and And it was sunny and it was just beautiful and just driving around.
I called my friend up.
I go, dude, I fucking feel fantastic.
And it was nothing unusual going on.
I mean, it was great stuff.
I was doing a podcast.
I was going to do standup at night.
Everything was normal.
But the contrast to being in that miserable fucking rain-soaked island for five days, like all of a sudden now I appreciated it.
And I was like, oh, I needed that.
I needed that balance.
Like sometimes you need to camp to appreciate a house.
I have my own issues with LA. I mean, first of all, it's way too hot for me.
It's way too hot.
I mean, born in Germany, brought up in Manchester until I was 18. A hot, sunny day in either one of those countries is probably 83, 84. That's a big one.
Oh, dude, that's a day when people take days off work and they go pie and get drunk in England.
So there's that, but also the major issue that I have in LA, which is something that I'm constantly exploring with my friends, is, unfortunately, the culture, for the most part, is a little jaded.
You know, a lot of people come into LA, take as much money as they can out of it, and then leave, and it's been depleted Spiritually and of its soul, you know, of its community.
You go to places like Barcelona or Berlin or Wellington or Sydney where people are feeding that city.
I get the impression that LA for the most part has things being ripped out of it, taken out of it, like the foundations are being taken out of it.
But I also think that one of the archetypal characters of LA The socialite walking down Sunset Boulevard or the cool guy that wears a white dress shirt and a cowboy hat on a Friday night.
But anyway, so those archetypes, their reaction to seeing something genuinely impressive, let's say for the sake of argument, it's an animal that we've never seen before crossing Sunset Boulevard and when it gets to the junction of traffic going one way and traffic going another way, it sits in a yogic position and creates this fucking eclipse of bright, hot sunlight.
Their reaction to that, if you're doing the cool LA thing, is to go, cool.
Not to be like, holy fucking shit, my life just ended.
That is the most awesome thing I've seen in my life.
But there's so many people that want to be one of those musicians, that want to be one of those artists, that want to be one of those comedians, that want to be one of those actors, that want to be one of those anything that's important.
You also move in what I would assume to be, for you at least, quite a healthy community of comics that all know each other, that have known each other for 20 years, that hang out on those clubs on Sunset.
And you have a nice, you know, little percolating community of people traveling in, traveling out, everyone says hello.
I don't have that.
I'm a recluse, you know, so I don't hang out with actors.
I mean, I'm friends with people that I've worked with before, but in terms of hanging out, Elijah and I are super tight.
I don't necessarily hang out with him that much, apart from little moments.
Orlando and I are the same, Billy and I are the same.
But they're kind of recluses too, and it's, you know, me going out on Sunset, and certainly, certainly me going out on Sunset with Elijah, or Orlando, or Billy, is a fucking...
I said, when I'm leaving, if I leave and I run into you guys, I'd be happy to say hi.
But right now, I'm eating dinner with some friends.
And she looked at me like I was the biggest piece of shit.
I wasn't mean to her.
But it's that same thing.
But I've also had...
I've had great experiences in bars, where I've run into great people, and I feel like when you put yourself in those positions where you could be uncomfortable, sometimes those uncomfortable positions, I'll have fantastic conversations with some random dude who makes cabinets or some shit like that, or some guy who, you know, whatever, I'm making my own vodka, you know, you want to try it?
Oh, okay, how'd you get into that?
And then you have these conversations with people, as long as the people are cool, but it's like, You can't get queered off of people.
Here it goes again with that fucking statement.
I keep saying, I don't know where I got that from, but it's been popping in my head.
It doesn't have anything to do with homosexuals, ladies and gentlemen.
When people put you off like that, you can get put off to people.
But I don't want to be that guy.
So I don't hide.
I go out, I go to bars, and I will occasionally run into drunk retards.
But for the most part, I feel like if you put that out there, that you're just a normal person, you might know who I am, but I swear to God I'm normal, most of the time you run into people who kind of accept that vibe.
Same thing like you were talking about the Cobra, kind of recognizing exactly what you are and figuring it out after a while.
If you put out that vibe like you can't be fucked with or everybody's annoying to you, then people find you annoying.
Walking around on the streets and stuff, I would say 90% of the interactions that I have, maybe even 95% of the interactions that I have, In a bar, because it adds alcohol, that is a completely different scenario.
And I don't come into bars with my backup.
I'm usually having fun with my friends.
One of the phrases that I use a lot in terms of animals and humans is, come at me correctly.
You have to come at me correctly.
If you're coming at me aggressively, dude, I bought you a tequila, let's go, dude!
There's just a certain amount of weird people that you're going to run into, and they probably don't even know why they're acting the way they're acting when they do.
They probably feel like, what the fuck is wrong with me?
Some people are just drunk, and they also, they don't like the idea that they feel intimidated by this guy being around them, and they want to, like, put that guy in his place, you know?
And there's also people that are just complacent.
I've run into so many guys who want to tell me how if they fought in the UFC, they would kill everybody.
But they can't do it right now because they're busy with some other shit.
One of the scariest dudes for me, I think he's been injured for a little bit, but I saw him, you commentated on this fight, and it was truly terrifying to watch was Rory McDonald.
I had him on the podcast, and he was talking about he didn't know whether or not he had been abducted by aliens.
Because he would have these moments in his life where all of a sudden he was at home and he didn't know how he got there.
And I was like, whoa, that's not aliens.
These are probably issues that you're developing from trauma.
But in his mind, it's almost aliens, like something's wrong.
When you start talking like that, it's not like he's talking like that and he has no history whatsoever of being hit, no history whatsoever of any sort of brain injury.
You're talking about a guy whose fucking job is to break people's brains and he's training with other trained killers and they're hitting each other on a regular basis.
There's a point of no return in fighting, and you've got to realize where that point is.
And it's very hard for fighters to recognize it.
They need someone to help them and talk to them about it.
But George is one of the rare few that did it on his own terms while he was on top as a champion retired.
You know, one of the things that happens in the football community, in the soccer community in England, is that these very talented, very elite sports stars that have no idea how to do their own washing or do their own groceries or write a check get taken care of for probably 15 years and get very elite sports stars that have no idea how to do their own washing or do their own Huge amount of depression in retired football players because they're on the scrap heap at 35 and they look around and go,
"I have this incredible talent which is now no longer needed and I can't function in society in the way that most people do." So they're in no man's land, you know.
It's even worse because they're brain damaged, a lot of them.
I mean, there's a certain amount of brain damage almost every fighter has by the time they reach 35. And, I mean, we experience that with all sorts of athletes in America, whether it's football players, basketball players.
It's a crazy thing because most people, they have the highest earning potential when they're older.
You know, as they get older, they make more and more money, they become more and more successful, and then they retire.
With athletes, you make the bulk of your money when you're young and wild and irresponsible and impulsive, and then you're supposed to try to hold on to that gold dust as you get older.