Guy Ritchie dismisses Hollywood’s superficial press junkets and franchise-driven schedules, comparing them to suits with "sweet wrappers but no substance," while defending his $25M fantasy film as a metaphorical escape from ego and external validation—like King Arthur’s legend or the prodigal son’s journey. His 20-year martial arts odyssey, from Shotokan karate to jiu-jitsu under the Gracies, mirrors storytelling’s internal battles: elite fighters like Marcelo Garcia transcend ego, while he admits his own skills remain "primitive." Injuries—two ACL surgeries, a 75% meniscus loss—highlight how pain forces adaptation, yet modern tech, from Google Earth’s crop circles to Amazon’s Lost City of Z, reveals deeper truths. Ultimately, their conversation underscores the tension between art and commerce, self-ownership and societal expectations, and the enduring quest for authenticity in both life and storytelling. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, the danger, the worst thing in the film business is press junkets, and as you were saying, they're rather ineffective, and that's my suspicion too.
They're also inefficient and ineffective, because you sit in a chair, someone comes in, and they ask you a question, why?
How good an actor is David Beckham when he's in Underpants or whatever it is?
And you answer it in some facile fashion.
And on the fourth time you answer that question, you're starting to swat flies that aren't there.
You're starting to go mad.
So what happens is you have to play games with yourself.
So you get someone on the side to throw different words at you like valetudinarian or barissimilitude.
And then that keeps you occupied, because you're thinking, when someone asked me about Beckham and his underpants, I've somehow got to stick in a verisimilitude.
Well, to ask someone to be sincere and ask the same questions over and over and over again to them, like to have people keep filing in, and a new person comes in and asks, so tell us about this film, and how did this get started?
So, I saw a film, John Borman, made Excalibur in about 1980. And I was an impressionable young man of 10. And it was the first, like, knights in shining armour film that ever spoke to me.
I wasn't particularly interested in Errol Flynn or any incarnation that they did in the 50s in this genre.
But John Borman's one was rather good.
It was very aggressive.
And no one spoke to one another.
They all shouted at one another.
So it took some time before you realise that's why it was so intense.
It's quite camp.
So it had this sort of weird juxtaposition of being camp, yet simultaneously aggressive.
And, you know, they had a budget of $25 and no visual effects and lots of very shiny 19th century armour.
And it made a real impression on me because it was a voice.
It was a creative voice.
So it made an impression on me and then somewhere in the attic of my mind I relegated it until the point where I had enough creative ideas in my reservoir to bring it forward and make a film and then someone gave me money and Warner Brothers wanted to make it and yada yada yada.
And then it was the challenge, I suppose, of trying to take a sojourn into this...
The fantasy, epic fantasy, Medievally, Lord of the Rings-y kind of a world.
And it's completely out of my wheelhouse.
So I find the challenge provocative and exciting as well.
That's a really interesting thing that only movies have to go through these days, right?
I mean it's one of the rare things where people are getting out and going to see something that's been made together in a group.
You know, that you're watching media.
Like, it's not a live performance.
It's something that's been created, and it's going to press play at 8pm on Friday night, and everybody's going to go to see it, and you've got to get as many of those people together as you can.
And if you don't come out ball-swinging, people get very upset, and they think that this is a failure, it hasn't lived up to expectations, even if it's a creative success, nobody likes it.
There is a sort of vicarious life that people can have through sports stars, celebrities and success.
If they feel somehow related to, or they went on the opening weekend, or they are invested in, then if it's successful, then somehow, proliferately, I'm successful.
So it's got to be very difficult when you're in business with someone like that, especially like an executive, some slick character in a fine suit, to find out exactly what his real motives really are.
Yeah, I have spent some time arsing around with this, Joe.
But a bit like the same reason that we spent time arsing around with the old pocket square.
It's, I remember thinking how much I found the suit repugnant.
And I became angry that the suit had been robbed from us.
And so I had to create an alibi, a way in, to understand why it is that I'd like a suit.
This was the magic of Ralph Lauren.
The magic of Ralph Lauren, nice Jewish boy from New York called Lipschitz, created a waspy empire.
There's a wonderful expression that, you know, think Yiddish, dress British.
And Ralph Lauren created this great empire and resold the waspy world back to the waspy world.
Actually, not to the waspy world because in England there was a sort of resentment about Savile Row traditional tailoring because they'd been robbed from them.
The offices had come along.
The number crunchers had come along and there was no creativity in the suit.
A suit needs to be creative.
The person that puts it on can't be putting it on because he's told to put it on.
He's gotta wanna put it on.
So what Ralph did is he fashioned up this sort of quasi New England world and he took on a trope, he took on a cliché and he refashioned that cliché to give it a new sense of life, a new sense of breadth.
He put black people in the suits where traditionally it was just a white man's suit.
He made it feel new, he gave it a take.
So what he did is he tipped his hat at the old world but also tipped his hat at the new world.
And it allowed wasps to find their way back into the world with an eloquent narrative.
And it is whatever form of meditation or mantra that you decide to espouse.
There needs to be some period in your day where you remember that there's a world out there trying to tell you who you are and there's a world in here that's trying to tell you who you are.
Now where do you want to put your eggs?
Because the world outside is very noisy and very tempting and it has all the razzmatazz, it has all the tinsel and all the glitter.
It's got all the toys.
But that's because you don't think you're enough in the first place.
If you don't think you're enough in the first place, the whole idea of the world to sell you stuff is, first of all, they have to make you feel bad about yourself, less than in some way.
And I don't resent this system, by the way.
It is the system.
But what's the expression about don't hate the player, hate the game?
Don't hate the game.
Love the game because you're in it, mate.
So, own the game, accept the rules, and move on into the rules.
So the world will try and tell you who you are, and you have to tell yourself who you are.
And there's this ongoing battle.
And somehow, there needs to be a reconciliation between the two.
But in the end, you've got to have all the eggs in your basket.
There's also an ongoing internal battle, though, isn't there?
There's the you that you want people to think you are, and there's the you who you are, and trying to figure out, like, how do I figure out who I am?
Do I have a correct assumption of how the people are perceiving me, and how I actually am objectively, or am I bullshitting the world with this suit and pocket square?
And he says to them, who wants to spend their inheritance?
The younger son says, me, Dad, I'll go and spend it.
And the younger son takes all the dough and he runs off and sniffs coke off stripper's tits for a number of years until he realises this is getting pretty boring and I'm in a lot of trouble.
He ends up feeding, throwing food to pigs.
That's his job.
And he can't even eat the food that he gives to the pigs, at which point he says, Dad, will you take me back?
Dad then goes to...
They don't meet.
This somehow happens, not through telephones, it just happens.
At which point, Dad goes to the fatted calf, says, kill the fatted calf.
Older son says, hold on, Dad, what's going on?
I've stayed with you since the beginning.
I've been loyal to you.
And I hear the stories of my younger brother coming back, who's been sniffing coke off strippers' tits for the last...
I don't know how many years.
And you're prepared to kill the fatted calf.
What's the SP, Dad?
I want to know the story.
He says, you're alright son, don't worry about that.
You take a little step to the side, you'll always be with me, you're a good boy.
At which point he goes out to meet the prodigal son, the wasteful son.
The wasteful son returns and he says, you were lost and now you're found.
That's the end of the story.
It's quite hard to make sense of that, in a literal sense.
You go, oh dad was a bit unfair, he should have been kind to the oldest son, because he never ran off and did anything.
But the essence of the story...
Is that you are the father.
You are enough.
Your older son is your intellect.
He says, oh, don't do this, don't do that.
He's trying to reconcile, make sense of a prosaic and material world.
The younger son, being the wild, feral entity that he is, wants to go out in the world and find out what it's all about.
So in his recklessness, and sense of adventure he finds that he can't escape himself so he has to return to himself and at which point he has to accept who he is which point the intellect is left out the equation pretty much as the older brother because he can't understand the significance of the journey of the wasteful brother in the end you have to leave yourself To
understand the value of yourself.
You have to lose stuff before you realise that all the stuff that you're losing is ephemeral and transitory.
It's not yours.
You're enough.
You're always enough.
But you've got to somehow prostitute yourself before you realise your own value.
The son jumps into a little boat, a little skillet.
Not skillet, that's what you cook your chops on, isn't it?
Yeah.
Skiff, a little skiff.
The skiff takes off down the river.
He gets found by prostitutes.
He's brought up in a brothel.
He understands the ways of the street.
He becomes a king on the street.
He works his way out the different ladders, and then he pulls a sword from a stone.
At a certain point in his life, a certain point of evolution, and then from there he goes on to be the king.
There's a bit of a tussle all along the way, lots of wrestling matches.
In the end he fights down his demons and he becomes the king.
So what's the significance of this narrative?
That every man in himself is aristocratic.
That he is his own king.
He takes the sojourn into the material world, has to climb up all the different runs on the ladder, and ultimately has to return to himself.
The significance of the extraction from the sword from the stone is the stone is the material world.
The material world, which seems all solid because it controls you, whilst you're projecting your sense of identity upon it, the extraction of the stone is taking back your own authority, your own power.
Divinity, your own authority, your own identity, whatever it is that you've got to call it, your own power.
You're no longer looking for a sense of self outside of yourself.
And then you have to face the demons that you've created in your history by facing them and fighting them and owning them.
You put them in the face of who you are.
And that's a wrestling match.
You have to take away all these crutches.
And that's all that we struggle from in life is taking away our crutches.
Oh, please tell me who I am.
Oh, please give me a bit more money so other people think I'm clever.
Oh, and then I'll have a nice car and people think I'm clever.
You've got to take away all these crutches and stand as the man that you are and you're liberated from your whole thing.
That is the story of King Arthur.
But it's not just the story of King Arthur, it's the story of all narrative.
Just really guides all all stories and all ancient tales and that there's something inherently human about them important about these stories and they resonate with our wants and needs and goals and even also Maybe the structure that we really truly need in our own life Yeah, I mean, all the stories from whatever period, I'm sympathetic to this particular, to Joseph Campbell's philosophy on this, but he's not the only one, right?
It's fascinating that you're comparing it to suits because it resonates like when you think of a guy showing up for work or getting ready for work and he doesn't want to go and he's putting on the suit and it's just dredging through it and putting it on and or you think about a guy who's crisply tucking in his collars and putting on his cufflinks and Tightening up his tie and he feels empowered by the whole process of it.
It's very it's very appealing Like, if you see it in a film, too, it's very exciting.
And if I'm going to take up a martial art, I love fighting, so I'm very happy to talk about fighting for a long time, Joe.
I fancied the idea that I'd be...
Because if I stayed with karate, I realized I would not be on the mat at 84. So...
And back then, there was no jiu-jitsu in London.
There was judo.
And they had what was called nawaza, which is the ground game.
And they're pretty tasty.
We got some good judo players...
So I went from karate to judo but I was only interested in the ground game and then Roger Gracie came to live in the UK about 20 years ago and Roger Gracie went on to become the world champion eight times and I started taking lessons with him and his dad Mauricio.
Then I ended up in New York for I think I lived in New York for a while with my ex-wife.
And I went to Henzo's gym when it was above a methadone clinic.
And I fell in love with Henzo.
And I fell in love with jiu-jitsu in a sort of serious way.
And I became obsessed with it for a number of years.
Henzo gave me all my belts.
I mean, I should have got a black belt.
Well, I say I should have got a black belt.
I became lazy to a degree.
So I got a black belt when I should have got a black belt.
And as you and I know, there's some tasty blue belts out there that can have a lot of fun with me.
But I sort of drifted a bit.
I came in and out, sustained a few injuries.
But if I was training hard, I think you train hard, you get black belt in five years, can't you?
Well, once you become obsessed with the movements and you start studying the various positions and the possibilities, it becomes a part of your life.
It becomes a part of your, almost like your operating system.
And as you see these guys reinforce that operating system, you see their game becoming more and more complex and to be able to chain attack after attack and being able to anticipate the defenses of those attacks and plan two and three steps ahead and you see all this play out.
It's an amazing, I really, really enjoy watching someone go from being a beginning student It's a fascinating process because you're literally watching someone develop their comprehension of a language of fighting and that language of fighting is analogous to life.
It helps them in every single aspect of their life because it's one of the most difficult things that a person will do in their day.
You walk into a jiu-jitsu school, you park your car, You live in this normal realm of normal people with normal problems and bills and stresses and issues.
But once you go into that thing, you put on that gi or no gi or whatever you're doing and you go into that class.
Once you engage in these sparring sessions, these sparring sessions with Skilled practitioners you're doing one of the most difficult things any person within a hundred mile radius of you that's not fighting for their life is doing and by doing that on a regular basis and Constantly reinforcing this language it enhances the all your possibilities and your potential possibilities as a person Very eloquent.
One of the great things I found about jiu-jitsu is whenever I came to a city, we'd just tap into a computer where the next gym was, and we'd roll down there.
I'm usually with two or three people.
Ivan out there, he's also a black belt.
I got a chap that I was with called Bobby the Tits, who is an Olympic judo player.
So, across between Ivan the Terrible and Bobby the Tits, we used to hit these gyms and...
Everyone.
There's a complete substructure there.
If you want to be looked after, they'll give you a gaffe.
Hello, mate.
How's it going?
And there's the brotherhood.
I suppose it's probably the same for people who go to church.
I don't know.
But there is a brotherhood that I found amongst fighters where everyone's like game and friendly, come around at the barbecue.
There's a whole substructure there that everyone will look after everyone else.
And I've never in the 20 years of fighting in different gyms have I lost my temper.
Or I had a reason to lose my temper.
Has anyone ever been a bully?
You've had people a bit clumsy, got a bit carried away, but there's such a system of accountancy that you can't get away with being a bully because there's always a bigger bully and you know you're going to get found out and I like that aspect of it.
It's the great thing about a sport in general, but let's be specific because it's something that you and I can relate to, is there are no barriers in jiu-jitsu.
No one's looking at you.
If you're rich, you're poor, you're black, you're white.
It's completely irrelevant.
You come to the mat and if you get on with the geezer that you're fighting, you get on with the geezer that you're fighting.
And there's a complete clarity of vision when you're fighting someone.
It's just you're fighting them and you rate them on their ability of how they fight.
Yeah, I had a name when I used to train out here or in New York.
They used to call me Hollywood because I was like the only celebrity kind of person that used to come in and say, oh, Hollywood, you fancy little roll around this, that, you know.
But that, you know, and a couple of people initially went, oh, you're that geezer.
It's the crutch that they actually think that being a jiu-jitsu player has an identity in itself, and it doesn't.
You cannot use it as a crutch.
And it's the essence of all martial arts.
Martial arts was about find yourself within that framework and be honest about it and you meet the opponent and as your man Connor will tell you, you're finding it's about you fighting you in the ring.
What your other part of the mind, the other part of the mind that we were talking about wants to say is about your reputation in the gym and what people think of you.
So again, you're trying to find an identity from outside of yourself by not tapping.
And you know that feeling.
And by the way, I suffer it myself because I don't like to tap either.
But it makes my game, it inhibits my game and it stops me being creative.
Yeah, Marcelo Garcia has always been very adamant about that, that you have to open up your game in the gym, and it's the only way to really truly progress.
And don't worry about being tapped, and don't have that ego.
And there's a great video of him and Damien Maia rolling, and they're rolling, they have like, they're putting almost no, like, kinetic strength, no explosive energy, nothing athletic.
They're just going through the movements and exchanging positions, and they're tapping each other, left and right, left and right, with no ego.
It's really interesting to watch.
Because you see like Marcelo catch Damien and they roll to a position and Damien taps and then they go to another position and Marcelo does it and it's just, it's really fascinating because what they're doing, they're truly flowing.
There's no like real, oh here we go right there, you can see them do it.
But when these guys do it, as they're doing it, they're obviously using strength and they're countering with skill, but everything is very smooth and controlled.
And you're looking at two of the very best black belts to ever do it.
You're looking at Damian Maia, who right now is...
Arguably the top contender in the UFC's welterweight division He's gonna be fighting Jorge Masvidal next weekend actually which is a really intense fight because Masvidal is a killer and then Marcelo Garcia who's probably one of the all-time great strangulation experts has ever walked the face of the planet I mean he's really revolutionized a lot of aspects of the guillotine the rear naked choke and I was in Brazil in Sao Paulo in 2003 when he burst onto the scene when he choked out Shaolin And
to see these two guys rolling together is really, really interesting because this is really kind of how you have to do it.
You just do it.
No one is saying, I can't tap, I can't put myself in a bad position.
They're exchanging positions.
Like right there, when Damien gets underhooks and he goes for the deep half, Marcel is just rolling with it.
There used to be a time, just a couple of decades ago, where if you wanted to train, it was very difficult to find really proficient instruction and great training partners.
I remember because I was first into it when we made Snatch, which is 18 years ago, and that's when Hodger first came to town, and before then it was just Judo, just Nawazza.
Her armbar to this day, I believe, is one of the best armbars I've ever seen in MMA. Not just because she was successful with it, but when you watch her transitions, you watch how she's able to adjust and change things.
Like the Kat Zingano fight is a perfect example of that.
Kat Zingano just charges at her like a fucking bat out of hell, and they have this mad scramble, and Ronda realizes a position that she doesn't even utilize.
But she understands the arm bar so well.
She knows, well, I could just throw my hip over this way and kick back here and I'll catch that arm bar.
This overall understanding of the position is so high level.
The level of sophistication when it's like that, he was so technical, Hickson, that it was what I understand about Jiu Jitsu is really rather primitive.
But I'm aware I'm primitive.
I'm aware that my understanding of jiu-jitsu is really quite primitive.
And then when you see something like that armbar come sneaking out of nowhere, oh, it's a magnificent thing to behold, isn't it?
And what you're saying is kind of interesting because some listen to this and go, how is a black belt primitive?
Like, you're not primitive.
You're an expert.
But I understand totally because I'm also primitive.
I know.
I know what I know.
Like, I understand, like, there's...
What Hickson's language is, is a series of words that you've never heard before, spoken perfectly in the right order, with no pauses or ums or no filler, and the way he flows with it.
It's just, he's got a level of proficiency that very few, other than Marcelo and Damien Maia, can really appreciate the true beauty of it all.
Because they just don't, like, I won't see things coming.
His friends were making a max out bench like five days after his shoulder replacement.
He's a fucking maniac.
But they were trying to fuse his discs.
And so he came up with this machine.
And you see as it swings down, when she's swinging down, it's pulling her back apart.
Here you go.
When it's going down, it's pulling the back.
An active decompression.
And as she's swinging up, she's strengthening all those muscles in the spine in a real weird way where you really can't get at them with So this is the issue, because you can do the...
Regenikine is something that was developed in Germany that a lot of professional athletes like Kobe Bryant, Peyton Manning, they went over there, and it's a blood-spinning procedure, similar to platelet-rich plasma, but they take The blood, and as they're spinning it, they heat it up.
And when they heat it up, the blood has a reaction to the extreme heat, like it thinks you have a fever, so it produces this very intense anti-inflammatory response.
Obviously, if you're a scientist or a doctor, I'm butchering this.
And they take this yellow serum, which is this anti-inflammatory response, and they can inject it into all these areas that you have massive inflammation, like bulging discs.
And it has an incredible effect.
It had an incredible effect for Peyton Manning, allowed him to get back to football again.
I had a bulging disc that was making my hands go numb, totally went away, through decompression and through this kind of stuff.
I immediately am going to connect you with Dr. Rodney McGee.
As soon as we get off the phone or off the podcast here, I'm going to connect you with him.
And he'll be able to...
Keep you abreast of all the stuff, and it changes constantly.
Like when I first went, I first got a shot in July of last year, and I was that close to surgery.
I was trying to figure out, okay, I was planning my time.
I was saying, okay, if I get the surgery, I essentially can't use this arm for at least a few weeks, and it's going to be pretty weak for at least three months.
I was really accepting that and he said well, let's just give this a shot and Within a couple of weeks of getting the shot.
I was like goddamn this thing feels better than it's ever felt before and so through a series of exercises like a lot of rotator cuff strengthening exercises and Bottoms up kettlebells like where you you have to stabilize those ones those are those are fantastic for stabilization muscles and And then it also made me realize that if you're going to do something along the lines of jujitsu, something that's very physically demanding, you have to strengthen your machine.
You can't just keep going to jujitsu, which is what I was doing for years.
I think you have to strengthen the machine and I think yoga is also a really big important part of strengthening that machine because it's lengthening, it's decompressing the spine, and it's making you strong in these static positions which is very similar to the load that's going to be pushed on those joints and on your back when you're doing jujitsu.
But it's building a house one layer of paint at a time.
I mean, it's not an easy thing to do.
And I think that competitive element that you're talking about is an internal struggle.
And that internal struggle is you and your breath.
Keeping your breath in calm and check and focusing entirely on your breath while managing the positions and then slowly but surely developing more proficiency in those positions more range of motion more dexterity keep going over and over again and then you one day you get to a point for me it was like maybe in a year and a half into doing it pretty regularly where I'm like okay now I can finally hold this position for 30 seconds and Whereas before I'd literally count to 10 and just try to get
to 10 and then I'd fall down.
And then I'd get back up and try again, try to get to 10, try to get to 10, my feet would buckle, my knee wouldn't be locked out, and then I'd try again.
But once you develop a certain amount of proficiency, then you can concentrate entirely on the breath.
And that's where the real struggle is.
And then keeping the mind on track, not thinking about other bullshit, not thinking about the just...
The struggle of life and all the different variables that you have to deal with on a daily basis.
Thinking only of the breath, the posture and the breath.
Very difficult to keep on track.
So that, and therein, that's the competitive struggle.
I've talked to him several times, but having him in here and sitting down with him and talking to him about jiu-jitsu, it's like sitting down with Michelangelo and talking about art.
I mean, you're talking about...
There's masters, and then there's the master of the masters.
And if you talk to any jujitsu master, they all just go, Hickson is the number one.
Like, there's no dispute, which is amazing.
There's very few, like, there's soccer players that are just elite, and there's basketball players that are elite.
But when it comes to, like, who's the best, in jujitsu, there was always this one guy.
And while he was competitive, and especially while he was young, It was always Hickson, which is, to me, amazing that he was able to maintain.
And I think one of the things about him was his physicality and his mind.
I think those two things, in many ways, were enhanced by yoga.
But I got stem cells shot into there, and I've never had a problem since.
It's amazing.
I had a problem with it for, I mean, I tore it for the first time more than 20 years ago.
And had an operation, I think, in 95, somewhere around there.
And then I had another operation on it in 2001, 2002, and it's always been an issue since then.
It's just one of those things that it gets sore, I just deal with it.
Whether it's kickboxing, or whether it's lifting weights, or whether it's jujitsu, it gets sore, I just deal with it.
I take glucosamine and chondroitin and a lot of fish oil and anti-inflammatories, and changing my diet helped quite a bit, but there was always that thing, until they shot the stem cells in there.
And then literally within a few months, it's non-existent.
Like, I don't think I have this knee that acts up anymore.
Well, they've been doing it and experimenting with it for a couple of decades, apparently, according to Dr. McGee.
But the understanding of the potentials and the possibilities and then the practical application over the last 10 years has really come to the forefront.
It's really become something very, very viable.
It's not just theoretical anymore.
Now they're actually seeing people regenerating tissue.
They're seeing people where you have a tear in your shoulder or something like that, and they're going, oh, you're probably going to have to get surgery.
No, then they shoot it in there, and then next thing you know, a couple months later, I mean, I still got some floating tissue that pops and crunches and stuff in my shoulder, but when it comes to the actual strength in my shoulder, I don't worry about it at all.
It doesn't bother me.
I mean, there's occasionally some light soreness, but as far as the functional strength, Of the shoulder.
They took skin cell stem cells from her skin and in a petri dish they started this off and then she had bladder cancer and they built her a bladder and then put it in her body and it's functional.
It's amazing.
I mean, this is all state-of-the-art now, and when we're looking at like 10, 20, 30 years from now, I mean, you're looking at potentially regenerating all sorts of things, regenerating bone for people who have bone cancer, regenerating lungs and liver and spleen and heart.
I mean, they're going to be able to make body parts.
They've created an artificial heart that beats, like with stem cells.
And I've found that, and I'm sure you've had the same, through jiu-jitsu, whenever I get an injury, I find if you start mincing around with it and paying too much attention to it, it can dog on for longer.
Nine out of ten of my injuries I just trained through, and there's almost a bluffing game that you have with the injury.
Who's in charge here?
Me or the injury?
And once the injury knows as though you mean it, it tends to moonwalk out the door.
But there are more fundamental ones, like the shoulder and the knee.
The necks.
Well, I'll say that, actually.
The necks have been giving me a bit of aggro recently.
So there are a few things that you need to take quite seriously.
But you know what's interesting is once you get it replaced, like for me, I had a patella tendon graft on the left knee and then a cadaver graft on the right knee.
Like when they do a cadaver graft, they use the Achilles tendon, which is 150 plus percent stronger than your original ACL. So it actually makes it a stronger joint.
See, about three or four years ago, I had a pretty significant back injury.
And like I was saying, my hands were numb.
And it was because I was ignoring it.
Because I would pinch it in jujitsu and then I would go, oh, I'm still going to roll light.
I'll just go in there and roll light.
And then after a while, it was getting bad to the point my back was locking up and my hands started going numb.
And I'd get this pretty significant elbow pain.
So I started really researching all the options and what's really going on.
And one of the big ones that I found was diet.
That when you have too many inflammation-causing foods in your diet, and you're eating too much sugar and bread and booze and all these different things, it affects how your body carries fat, but it also affects where your body holds onto inflammation.
And joints in particular, all the injury spots were way sore when I had a shitty diet.
I don't, like, I'm not drinking every night, but if I go out, you know, and I have a drink or have a glass of wine with dinner or a couple glasses, I'm cool.
I think it's just a matter of just controlling yourself.
I mean, gin's traditionally an English drink, but I wasn't really into it until I came to America, and I found since I've been here in the last, over the last week, It's been quite a few gin and tonics going on.
There's something happening with the whole craft movement in general that's very exciting that we are going back to local stuff and people, to a degree it's ownership again.
What happened in the 70s in the UK is all these breweries bought up all the pubs, and they brought up all these small breweries, and used to have all these breweries with their own little crafty beer going on, and then they homogenized it, and then they sold it back to us, and they gave it back to us without character, and we just bought it because we were stupid.
But once you hear Dan Carlin, I mean, it is absolutely addictive.
But this is the ring that they would put on their thumb, and they would pull back like that, and then they would wrap their index finger over the thing where the thumb nail is, and then pull it back that way, and then release.
They killed so many people, they changed the carbon footprint of Earth.
There was a New York Times article about how many people died during Genghis Khan's reign that it was so significant you could see it in the carbon data.
I think there was a lot more than a million because they killed a million people in Jing, China.
They killed people in numbers that we can't even...
In Jen, I think it was Jen, China, they showed up, and this is part of the Dan Carlin series, the Queers Man's Shah sent an envoy, like a party, to go search this city in China.
And as they pulled up, they thought what they saw in the distance was a snow-covered mountain.
As they got closer, they realized it was a stack of bones.
And the roads were so deteriorated from human bodies, just rotting human bodies, they had abandoned the roads.
Because they couldn't get their cars through, their wheels rather, through.
Because their wheels were getting bogged down.
Their horses were getting bogged down in the muck of deteriorating bodies.
I mean, his idea was that everybody who doesn't live in a tent, anybody who doesn't live the way they do, these fools that live in cities, they weren't even human.
They were sheep.
Like, there was a certain disconnect between them and the other, which is imperative.
It's the most important thing in war.
You have to decide that that person's not you, right?
You have to decide that they're the other, whether it's the Vietnamese or the German, the Nazis, the Japanese, like, whatever it is, you have to decide that they're less than you.
And they had this thing about people that did not live like they did.
That they were pussies.
These weak people that lived in these cities with their walls.
And so they would just find these cities.
They'd stroll up and they would just figure out a way to start attacking them.
They would light bodies on fire and launch them with catapults onto the roofs of these buildings.
Now, that's something about your film, I'm sure, is you're dealing with a different time and that life back then, although always precious, the finite aspect of life is more solidified.
It's more obvious.
It's something you're dealing with on a daily basis as opposed to the way we live.
Yeah, I think there's all sorts of advantages to that.
If you're looking down the barrel of a gun, nothing sobers you up quite like looking down the barrel of a gun.
And we've managed to distract ourselves by...
The comfortable liberal lives that we lead and that the price for that is that we don't really accept the full accountancy of life.
So we do give ourselves crutches.
When you look down the barrel of a gun, all your crutches are taken away.
So I suppose in different periods of time, you didn't have the indulgence of being able to worry about what people thought of you because there were more important things to worry about.
The whole genesis of murder is based on the principle that someone has more power than me, so I have to take that power away.
Or my comparative sense of self feels augmented if I can take their life away.
It all comes back to the same thing.
You're really asking someone to tell you who you are.
And if you, paradoxically and ironically, if you kill them, that makes you more powerful than them, although they can no longer bear witness, or they did bear witness for a second.
But what does bear witness is the story in your mind that somehow you are now more powerful.
Because of Google Earth, I'm one of those, I like a good porn on Google Earth.
So, where I live in Wiltshire, I've got a house in English countryside, next door to Stonehenge.
If you go on Google Earth, where they ploughed the fields, you can see where there have been burial sites for thousands of years.
Stonehenge is about five and a half thousand years old.
But all around that area, in these plough fields, you can see they've still got burial mounds and whatnot.
And the whole earth is littered with prehistorical...
Earthworks and burial sites.
And there are burial sites that we have this thing called Ordnance Survey, which registers, I mean, but you'll have the same thing here, which registers everything on the earth, right?
So everything of any historical value, there's a map and they tell you where the footpaths are and the roads are and everything.
It's highly detailed how high the mountains are and the roads and whatnot.
You can see an established burial site, which is seen as a prehistorical burial site, Bronze Age or whatever it is.
And then you step a mile to the right, and then you can find one under a ploughed field where they've got rid of the mounds, but you can still see the depressions, which is in exactly the same shape as the depressions a mile to the right.
And then you can build up a whole pattern.
So, you know, this is the area where you get crop circles.
And then you can build up a whole picture, which is a much bigger picture, and then you can start to predict where one burial site is going to be, and it's a bit like finding treasure.
And you go, oh, 200 yards that direction, 200 yards that direction, and it should be about, and bang, there it is.
You can see half of these depressions, and then it runs into a wood or whatever it is.
But there's stuff that...
It exists, and you wouldn't have known before Google Earth came along.
Right, and burial mounts, and every now and then they dig one up, and then they find a boat buried with lots of gold in it and whatnot, and that happens every now and then.
But there isn't much evidence that was left behind.
So, you know, most of these things are just a mound of earth with a few bones in it.
And the Romans been kicking around the UK a couple of thousand years.
And then they went and then came the Saxons.
And then after the Saxons, then the French came in.
And then the French basically took over the UK in 1066. And then you have the culture that we have now.
But you can see you somehow you forget that it go that your culture goes on for thousands of years and you accept really what we see as history is the last six thousand years or five thousand years but when you can have a connection to it it goes back further than that it's hard to get you not around the romans never mind the bronze age yeah and what is that there's the guy with the big willy holy What an odd...
It's interesting, too, when you're talking about this, the use of technology and how what you can do now with stem cells in comparison to the past, it's like this really exciting emerging time.
But similar, like, the use of Google Earth to discover these mounds and things.
Do you see what's going on in the Amazon now?
They're discovering evidence of civilizations that were just rumors and myths, like the Gold City, the ancient Gold City.
What is that movie that they're doing?
Lost City of Z. Lost City of Z, yes.
They're finding these established irrigation paths and city grids in the Amazon jungle.
Thousands and thousands of years old, and they don't know the origins.
They don't know who was there.
They don't know why they were constructed, what the culture was like, but this was all, at one point in time, just mythological.
And now they're realizing, like, no, no, no, this is history, and they've been told and passed down in these fables, and now we're understanding there's an actual There's a concrete, a physical grid, rather, that you can go and you can see.
No, these are real cities that did exist, and the jungle has sort of engulfed them.
When you decide, and I'll just leave you with this, when you decide, like, to commit to an idea, I'm sure you have a gang of ideas bouncing around your head, like, what makes you just go, all right, this is the one, let's run with it?