Russell Crowe unpacks his upcoming film’s raw Holocaust trial footage—real and unseen since 1946—using humor to contrast Nazis’ rationalized evil with the War Department’s demonization, warning how dehumanizing enemies fuels global conflict. His grueling year (five films in nine months) and rural retreat, "the Panacea," reveal exhaustion from fame’s isolation, while his research on Hermann Goering exposes drug-fueled madness behind power. Comparing Australia’s universal healthcare to U.S. medical bankruptcy, Crowe critiques profit-driven manipulation, from gambling ads to pharmaceutical lobbying, urging nuance over binary narratives to prevent societal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Real footage of the one of the reasons that inspired Jamie to go ahead, that he was given access to that footage, some of which has never been seen since 1946.
It's a very interesting way that he makes the subject matter accessible because it's such a dry topic from the outside, right?
Here's a court case.
Here's yet another courtroom drama, procedural or whatever.
So I can imagine that people would see that and go, well, it's, you know, might not be an exciting watch or something.
But he sort of puts the audience in this position where he allows them to start to be amused by some of the things that are going on and the interpersonal relationships.
And, you know, when the commandant of the prison has to call up his two top mental health experts and dress them down for getting into a fistfight, things like that.
There's a charm to it.
And then he gets you into the courtroom and he locks the door.
And he goes, now you're going to see what we're talking about.
So I think it's a very interesting film device to disarm people before he starts giving them the real juice, you know?
Yeah, it's also a fascinating psychological tape from the psychiatrist, from Kelly's perspective, you know, because the way he's describing all human beings, that all human beings are capable of these horrific acts.
And that's the thing that was a very unpopular take at the time, actually led to his removal from the process because he wasn't fulfilling what the War Department wanted him to say, which is, you know, all Nazis are crazy, you know, ruled by a madman.
And this is a unique experience.
But that's not what he found.
In sitting down talking to the 22 major Nazi sort of names that he was assigned to post-war, he realized that every single one of these people was, you know, as normal.
unidentified
Well, there was a couple that were pretty out there.
Just how you take away this person's rights, that person's personal power, and slowly, you know, you get to a point where the average person then turns around and goes, how did we get to here?
It's one of the most dangerous things, and I see it going on everywhere at the moment, that we're trying to say that you're either, you know, and for want of a better team name, that you're either red or that you're blue.
Right.
And humans are far more nuanced than that.
We're not that extreme, you know?
And the idea that you can split all of us into two camps is kind of nuts.
We have the same sort of two-principal party system in Australia as well.
But we have a slight advantage in that we're kind of on the edge of the world in a lot of ways.
So what I've always said is when you're growing up in Australia, New Zealand, you grow up looking out.
Yes, you understand your own culture and all that, but you grow up looking at what else is happening in the rest of the world.
What's happening in Europe?
What's happening in America?
By and large, Americans grow up looking in.
The principal sports are only played by American teams, American football, in some instances, baseball, but they're not the types of sports that we play where the pinnacle of that sport is international competition.
Right.
Rugby union, rugby league, cricket, football, soccer.
So we grow with that as being the pinnacle of any particular sport if you get to represent your country.
And that's only really relevant in an American sense in an Olympic period, you know.
And anybody who loves baseball, generally, I've found baseball lovers are all about the minutiae.
They're all about the stats and what those stats mean.
You know, there might be a certain score on the board, but, you know, and their team might be getting beaten, but they see in the stats that there's a certain dominance in an area.
And so they still have a hope that the outcome of the game may come their way.
And cricket fans are the same as that.
So the fact that the two never seem to meet is odd to me.
And they start and then they have morning tea and then they have another break, they have lunch, and then they have afternoon tea.
And if it's really hot every now and then, somebody will walk out and give them drinks.
It's very civilized.
My cousin Martin was a great cricket player.
He was the captain of New Zealand.
My other cousin Jeffrey was also a captain of New Zealand.
So I kind of grew up in a cricketing family and it was one of the pathways for me that was, you know, to potentially play cricket.
But when you've got two of your cousins who are as good as they were, it's a very crowded room.
So how am I going to make any kind of statement here when one of them, Martin, at his peak, he was called by Sports Illustrated, I believe, the Michael Jordan of World Cricket.
I mean, you know, there's cables and companies and stuff have got involved now, but it used to be national network.
And when cricket season was on, I mean, you know, back in the day, people would come from overseas and into Australia this summer and ask the question, is there anything else on television except sport?
Well, the way I think it sort of plays out is you've got rugby union, right?
Which is 15 men a side.
Every time a player is tackled, you recompete for the ball.
You have rocks, malls, you have lineouts.
It's a very different game.
But there's another version of rugby called rugby league, which was played in the north of England.
And that has a defined period of offence and defence.
And I think that's where American football comes from.
I actually own a team in Australia in the NRL, the National Rugby League, the South Sydney Rabbitos, the oldest team in the game, 1908, we were formed.
Bought the team in 2006.
And it's very easy to explain to Americans.
I have American friends come down.
I spend maybe 20 minutes talking to them, and they get the game.
And they start to dig it.
My girlfriend at the moment, actually, Brittany, was one of the reasons why I really started being attracted to her because she understood the game straight away.
Then I find out that when she was younger, she was a cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints while she was studying electrical engineering.
So, yeah, rugby league is a very easy game for Americans to follow.
Now, how it's refereed becomes frustrating for an American audience because there's so much room for interpretation, referee to referee, game to game, situation to situation.
So it can get frustrating.
I think one of the greatest things about American football from the outside or from an objective point of view, it seems that every single thing that the NFL try to do is based on an across-the-board fairness for everyone.
So those conversations between the referees and what have you seem to be everybody's on the same page.
And sometimes when you're watching rugby league, something that you saw somebody else get sent from the field for the week before, and now nothing happens this week.
But it's the same kind of hit or whatever.
It's like, well, you know, so I've had a few Americans get quite frustrated.
No, I think that's, yeah, I think the game moves very fast.
But also, there's got to be some corruption if there's gambling.
If it's so subjective that you can make calls that you would, that didn't, that someone got in trouble a week before, and then this week nothing, like that kind of subjectivity where it's up to the referee to make a decision.
If I was a corrupt person, a gambler, especially if I was a mobster, I would reach out to that referee and say, you know, it's within our best interests to work together on this.
I just saw on the news today that the one player who's been tossed around, he had a big IRS debt, and all of this sort of started around the same time, too.
People knew about this a year or two ago on Instagram.
They're like, I was at a fucking rigged game, and I know the people involved and know that I should not have, like, I'm not going there and losing my money.
Have you ever lost your keys and ended up tearing your house apart trying to find them?
What makes it even worse is when it's the most conspicuous, obvious place you could have sworn you checked already.
It'd be nice if we had the ability to find whatever we're looking for right away.
And at least for hiring managers on the hunt for talented people, that's possible.
Thanks to ZipRecruiter.
Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan.
Using ZipRecruiter almost feels like having superpowers.
It works quickly and efficiently at finding qualified candidates for your role, largely because they have incredible matching technology and an advanced resume database that can help you connect with people instantly.
No more wasting time and energy.
ZipRecruiter can help you find exactly what you want.
Want to know right away how many qualified candidates are in your area?
Look no further than ZipRecruiter.
Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.
And right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan.
Yeah, I had an experience when I was a young fellow.
It was the first time I was in America, actually.
And I'd had all these intense meetings and what have you, and I had a decision to make.
I had 10 different people wanting to be my agent.
So I rented a car and I went for a drive and I went up to San Francisco along the coast and then I turned inland thinking, you know, well, I've heard of Reno, so I'll go there, right?
So I went to Reno, Nevada, and I had X amount of money, right?
It was a very, I wasn't, you know, I was doing well in my career, but I didn't have a lot of cash.
So I had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket, that's all, you know.
So I went and had a beer and I started playing blackjack on a $5 table and it was a single deck.
This is how long ago this was, 92 or something, right?
So I'm playing and I did pretty well.
I amassed a few hundred dollars, feeling very cocky and confident about myself.
And I probably just then had one beer too many.
And I went for a walk down the street and I saw a roulette table and I think, that'll be me, right?
Sucker.
And so everything I won, I lost.
And by the time I sort of got my shit back together, I had $25 in my pocket.
I'm in Reno.
I got a quarter tank of gas and I got to get back to LA.
I don't have a credit card.
Oh, boy.
So as it was, I'd paid for my hotel in advance.
So that's all cool.
But I was like, okay, I've got to sober up here.
So I go back to the place I started, back to that same $5 table.
And I just very carefully, when I got to like $190, which I knew was going to be enough to get me back with petrol and food and all that stuff, I stopped.
I go out into the car park of this hotel.
It's like 11 midnight, something like that.
And I just started vibrating, man.
My whole body was like shaking like I was having some kind of fit, you know?
And it was just really weird.
I got back to the hotel room and I called my mum, Collect, in New Zealand.
And I just, I just did this.
I went through this.
She goes, darling, something I've never told you, but your great-grandfather was a professional gambler.
And at one point in time, he gambled his house away.
He had to go and get his daughters, wake them up, get his wife and tell them this is where they no longer live.
And that one act kept that family in, you know, relative terms poor for another two generations.
It's like I'm standing there in Reno realizing I can't even get back to L.A. I've got a real car.
So I just took it really, really slowly.
And I do this thing if I'm playing in a situation like that, because occasionally I will go and play blackjack at a casino if I'm in a group of people.
Because if you're all disciplined and if you hold every seat on a table, you can turn the tide against the house very easily.
They hate you doing it.
They try to break it up and put somebody in the middle of you, whatever.
But if you actually, funnily enough, it was Tom Cruise that taught me this.
If you have it, so the first chair and the last chair make the calls and the decisions, and everybody else just sits on 12 and above.
And you watch the mathematics come your way.
Now, way, way back in the day, right?
It would have been 95, 96, 97, something like that, right?
Tom calls me.
He's married to Nicole Kibman at the time.
Calls me and he goes, you know, hey, bud, we've got this thing set up.
Steve Wynne has put on a jet.
He's going to fly us to Vegas, right?
We are allowed to play at Shadow Creek.
We're allowed to play golf at Shadow Creek.
So I'm not really a golfer, but it sounded good to me.
Jumped on the plane, went there.
We're playing Shadow Creek.
Lightning Storm comes up.
Tom's like in the middle of the fairway, still trying to play.
But that sort of like, that was one of the early experiences where, okay, so you can have fun with these sort of games as long as you don't take them too seriously.
My current girlfriend is a massive poker player.
She loves it and she's really quite good at it.
She's played in a couple of female-only tournaments and things like that, you know.
So I watch them play, but I don't get involved.
I don't want to get involved.
I don't want to activate that.
Yeah, because I am kind of, you know, I do have a reckless streak.
You know, I can imagine in the wrong moment if I'm, you know.
But I think Clapton was living in New York or London or somewhere, and he had a party at his house because he just had that record come out and it would go on number one.
And he had it stuck on his fridge with a magnet, you know, like the charts with a circle around it.
You know, I shot the sheriff, number one, Eric Clapton.
And Bob Marley was at the party.
And apparently he found a pen and he wrote onto Clapton's fridge, No, Eric, I shot the sheriff.
But there's people that were coming across from other organizations that I was a giant fan of, and the bookmakers were woefully uneducated about, especially foreign fighters.
And there's a thing, like if you are gambling on MMA and you don't know how to fight, you're just guessing.
You don't really, we're all just guessing when two guys get into the cage together, but you're really guessing.
Like, you really don't, you can't recognize like how fast a person is.
You can't recognize how good they are at countering.
You just know stats and you know, but you don't know how to do it.
And if you don't know how to do it, you can't really see it.
You don't really know.
So at a certain point in time, I stopped just on my own gambling.
So like, I don't, because I was, people were accusing me of being biased one way or the other anyway, which maybe I was.
You know, I got better at that.
But I wanted to make sure that no one thought that.
So I was like, I'm only gambling a couple hundred bucks or something like that.
I wasn't doing anything crazy.
But the fucking people that I have friends, like good friends that are just hooked.
And when they start talking about like fights that they're gambling on or they put so much money on this and money on that, I'm like, oh my God.
I know guys that put millions of dollars on a fight.
I'm like, oh my God.
You're freaking me out.
You're fucking freaking me out, man.
I don't care how wealthy you are.
If you put a $3 million bet on a fight and you lose, like, you're not going to sleep for a week.
The thing is, with what we do in Australia, like the newspapers, like, you know, network news services, we allow betting ads.
It is so all-prevailing.
You know, I had an experience probably a year or two ago, and I see my two boys are talking to a mate of theirs, and they've all got their phones out.
And I realized they were checking up on their bets.
You know, so I had to have a big conversation with my boys and say, look, every single dollar that you have comes out of my pocket.
And if I give you a dollar, that's not a dollar to gamble with.
I had to have a very serious conversation with them about it.
It's like, I don't care if you think it's fun.
You've got to actually see it for what it is.
Because what's $5 or $10 now is easily going to turn into $400 or $500 in a minute.
$1,000, sooner or later, you will allow yourself to think that this thing is beyond fun and it's a way for you to earn back your losses or whatever.
So I just had to have a chat with them and they were probably looking at me going, how old is our father that he doesn't understand that everybody does this?
But I just had to let them know from my point of view, I didn't appreciate them taking my hard-earned dollars and wasting them.
But I also like that it exists because I want the ability.
Like if I wasn't working for the UFC and I could go to the fights and gamble on the fights, I would definitely do it because it's a knowledge thing.
This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats.
Every football season, the same thing happens.
The game somehow makes everyone really hungry.
Quarterback scrambles, clearly a sign it's time for breakfast burritos.
Turnovers, suddenly dessert at 2 p.m.
Doesn't sound so crazy.
And wing formations, well, those can only mean buffalo wings, as if they're ever not in play.
Even the goalposts start looking suspiciously like french fries.
It's almost like football is sending the message to eat more food.
The good news, Uber Eats makes those cravings easy to satisfy with game day deals all season long, from wings and pizza to chips and drinks, even last-minute grocery runs.
You'll find savings on all your favorites delivered straight to your door.
But I know so many people that have a problem with alcohol, like cannot live without alcohol.
I know so many people that can't quit smoking cigarettes.
I feel like you should be able to do whatever you want to do.
And I want freedom.
And that comes with gambling.
And I think gambling freedom, like the ability to decide that you want to take a risk with something, that should be available.
But we should educate people as to like what is actually going on in your mind that's allowing you to get captured by this thing.
And now you're chasing bad money and you're in a downward spiral.
Management, like understanding, okay, this is a thrill, but this thrill could take over your whole life if you are maybe genetically susceptible, psychologically susceptible.
Like understand what it is, but I don't think we should take away cars that can go over 60 miles an hour because some people crash their cars and die.
You know what I mean?
I feel like I like that gambling exists and I always wish that it existed back in the day.
I was like, it'd be fun, bet $100 on this or $100 on that.
But I don't have the problem.
Like, I could see if I came from a family that was torn apart by gambling, you'd go, you know, you don't understand, my dad lost our house.
Like, okay, but that was a bad decision.
You know, your dad could have died drinking and driving and smashed into a tree.
These are bad decisions.
You don't have to make bad decisions just because something is tempting you.
It's an interesting, it's an interesting debate because do you nanny state the whole world?
Do you think gambling should be illegal?
You think you should have to go to Vegas for it?
That seems kind of crazy.
I mean, it's certainly not a black or white issue to me.
There's a lot of gray area involved in it.
And I know there's a lot of people that push back on the idea of whether these gambling apps and all these different things should be legal.
It's the normalization process that bothers me the most.
That it's part of the new service with the apps.
But it's just put in front of you, whether you're interested in it or not.
You know, this team is playing that team, and here's the odds.
Right.
I just don't, I don't think it's healthy to have that as much of, you know, those stats as much a part of the actual news report as who's playing and what's on the line.
The thing about it, though, is it does lead you to have debate about, like, here's a perfect example.
Canelo Alvarez versus Terrence Crawford.
Terrence Crawford was going up two weight classes.
In my mind, though, he's so skillful, I gave him a chance.
I was like, I favor him to win, but I believe he was the underdog.
Find out what the odds were for the Canelo Alvarez-Terrence Crawford fight.
I believe he was the underdog, even though he was an undefeated multi-division world champion, like one of the greatest of all time for sure.
But he was jumping up from the 154-pound weight class where he just won the belt.
He was the 147-pound weight class all the way up to 168.
That's a big leap, 14 pounds.
And everybody thought Canel is going to have too much power.
He's going to be too big.
I'm like, I don't think so.
I don't think that's correct.
It was odds.
Crawford was underdog.
Yeah, Crawford was the underdog.
So not a huge underdog.
Plus 135 versus plus 140, somewhere around there.
So it's not huge, not even two to one, not even one and a half to one, but enough where I was like, I think they're wrong.
You know, so it's like it fosters debate.
You know, even if you're not gambling, and I didn't gamble on that fight, but I did.
I was telling my friends, I got a long discussion with a good buddy of mine who's a real boxing connoisseur.
He's like, Canelo's too big.
He hits too hard.
I'm like, that guy doesn't get hit much.
Like, I don't think that's as big of a factor as we're thinking.
I think it's a skill thing.
They're not that different in size.
I'm like, I don't think so.
And so that odds thing is, to me, exciting.
Like, it fosters debate.
Like, you start talking about, you know, and if it's a game, you start talking about players.
Like, he chokes in the outfield.
He does this.
He does that.
This guy, he's always stealing bases.
I'm factoring that in.
And, you know, the odds become a part of the discussion.
But yeah, it is ultimately the problem is, first of all, kids are addicted to apps as it is.
They use them.
They're always on their damn phone.
And they'll go from TikTok to Instagram to X to, you know, they'll check this and then they'll check that and they'll check their Snapchat and they'll check their gambling app.
And then it's like you're just addicted to this goddamn phone.
So something on your phone that's also addicting.
It's like addiction on top of addiction because you're already getting your little dopamine rush just by looking at your phone.
But then if you're also getting a gambling rush on top of that, yeah, we got to educate people.
But I think we've got to educate people on social media addiction, which I think a giant percentage of our population is completely addicted to social media.
Set up and collapsed three different times before we actually made it because there's a lot of variables in independent film.
So a bunch of these things that I did, I agreed to do two years ago and that never got together.
And then suddenly they all just started landing one after the other.
So everybody's got to start working like it's air traffic control.
And I'm like literally having a few days between sets flying from one place to the other.
And now it's, you know, what I always describe it as like going to a new school.
Now you're going to meet, you know, hundreds of new people and all of the different things that you've got to answer in terms of your costume and your makeup and blah, blah, blah.
Am I wearing a fake nose?
Have I got scars?
What am I doing this time?
All of those things you've got to do very, very rapidly and get onto the set.
And that sort of string of movies was not easy.
The first one was called The Beast in Me, which is an MMA movie.
I think we talked about that briefly.
It was going to be a UFC thing, but we ended up doing a deal with one championship.
So it's set in Australia and Thailand.
And it's doing some little private screenings in Los Angeles at the moment and getting a lot of really positive reactions.
The kid that's the, no, he's not a kid, but the lead role in that, Daniel McPherson, has done an extremely good job by the sounds of things.
And I'm also attached to that.
I only play a very small role, but I rewrote it for them just before we started.
And I've done a lot of writing in my career, but it always goes uncredited.
But in this particular occasion, I think, I believe I'm going to get my first actual writing credit.
But I wrote the character that I play specifically to not be the character you think it's going to be, to not be Burgess Meredith.
You think this guy's going to be, you know, the old coach who sort of like, you know, comes back out of retirement and everything.
I know enough people in the boxing world to know that once an old bloke makes a decision about you being a shithead, he's not going to change his mind.
So I wanted to play that guy.
So I went from that set to then I think called Bear Country, where I play an Albanian money launderer.
And that's got a great cast, Theresa Palmer, Luke Evans, Nina Dobrev, Aaron Paul, Danny Zavado.
And it's funny.
It's really funny.
That's with the same director that I did Unhinged with, a guy called Derek Bort.
That's also, I think they've got like six or seven different offers at the moment from different distribution companies because everybody's digging it and they're looking at it going, that would be an hilarious movie to follow up, Nuremberg.
So then after that, I go back to Budapest and I make a thing with a young British director, Armo Sante, called Billion Dollar Spy, with a young English actor called Harry Lorty, who is the future of British cinema.
He's a very intelligent, classy actor.
And that one I play a Russian selling state secrets to the Americans, a Russian scientist.
And then after I did Billion Dollar Spy, I went to Montreal and made a thing called Unibomb, where I play a Harvard professor, the man who taught Ted Kaczynski at Harvard, who put him into this series of tests and things that he was doing.
And some people say that he very, very much affected Kaczynski's brain.
He was there at the time that Leary also started working at Harvard.
But the study that my character was doing is more based on sort of like intellectual confrontation and like stripping people of their self-belief and stuff.
So there are people who think that it was the character I play's intellectual aggression towards Kaczynski that turned Kaczynski the way he turns.
So there's that.
And then I just did a movie in Germany.
It's set in Portland, but we shot it in Munich.
Okay.
How weird.
With a guy called Patrick McKinley, who I've done other projects with before, but he doesn't always get the credit he should get.
But he's the guy that cut the loudest voice, which made it as dynamic as it was.
And he also cut a movie called Pokerface for me.
And we're working together on a music doco.
But usually when I work with him as an editor, but this is him as a director, and that's with Ethan Hawke.
Again, that's a smaller role in that one as well.
But there was a very strong vibe on that set.
And Patrick's a great filmmaker, so I imagine that's going to be a good movie too.
unidentified
So if you're a film fan, that sounds like you're killing it.
And I need to go home and I need to be in that rhythm.
I call the place I have in the bush, it's not its official name, but I call it the Panacea.
It will fix all ills, but you have to give over to its rhythm.
You have to wake before the birds.
You have to sort of put yourself in a situation where you're going deep into the bush so you're getting that kind of oxygen.
You just have to really give yourself over to it, you know, and spend your days just checking if the cows are okay, having a look, you know, if the new trough system is working away, just getting your sort of hands a little bit dirty and forgetting all the other stuff.
I always, like, I look back at my 30-year-old self who made the decision to take the little bit of money that I'd earned at that point, 31, 32 I was, and buy 100 acres in the bush because somehow I knew I would need that place.
So it's like, you know, I could have bought an apartment in the city, you know, but I didn't.
I bought 100 acres of basically blank bush.
No fences, and the fact that it's been in my life, January 20th, 1996, I paid for that first hundred acres.
But that's and that's the brilliant famous Russell Crow between people who are not in the business's understanding of what it really takes and the realities that you deal with.
And look, I'm the last person.
I'm not whinging about the job at all, but I am just pointing out that I went a little bit too hard and I burnt my brain and I need a bit of a break.
Well, if Nuremberg is an indication or if it's an example of what you did, if it's on par with the rest of them, it's going to be an awesome run because Nuremberg is great.
It really is.
It's very disturbing.
Just to see that footage, the footage in the trial is just.
People should see that.
And the fact that it's never been released before, just to cement into our heads.
That's the thing.
It's like that war was one of the first wars where we got regular footage.
I mean, if you think about people going into World War I, they're going blind.
They have no idea what to expect, what they're going to see.
And then by the time Vietnam comes, and now it's on television.
And that seeing horrific things at least cements into your head.
Yeah, well, just think about that because, you know, in my lifetime, you know, when I was a little boy and I'm watching the news at night with my parents, there's Vietnam footage.
You know, I see the Anzac Day, which is Australia New Zealand version of Memorial Day.
I see those marches every year, the old soldiers getting together.
That history is so fresh.
I'm surrounded by older people who fought in the war, in World War I.
And then there's another generation of guys who still appear to be young, and they fought in World War II.
And now I'm watching Australia at war because we've been through Korea and now Australia is at war in Vietnam.
I'm seeing that on the nightly news.
So at the age of six, seven, eight, I believe I'm going to be a soldier.
Really?
And everybody at school believes they're going to be a soldier because that's what we do.
You know?
Because our parents' generation are connected to the Second World War.
Our grandparents' generation is connected to the First World War.
And here it is.
We've now got this new war.
So it was very definitely part of cultural uprising.
I mean, I was in Army cadets in high school.
So, you know, that was a couple of days a week.
You dress up in an army uniform and you go to school instead of in your school uniform in Jungle Greens.
Well, this is the thing where, you know, Anzac Day that I talked about, it's April 25th.
ANZAC stands for Australian New Zealand Army Corps.
Because both the First World War and the Second World War, Australia and New Zealand combined their armed forces.
And then a lot of places fought alongside each other.
But, you know, we have that day as a memorial day, as you have in this culture as well.
But we tend to forget that we have that day as a reminder that we should never do this again.
That's what it's there for.
You know, to respect the passing of these young people who died in battle, but to also remind ourselves of how pointless that whole thing was, how pointless the First World War was, how pointless the Second World War was.
Ultimately, it's just death.
And the people that started the war, the people who benefit from the war, are not the ones generally standing at the graveside mourning their dead because they will protect themselves.
Their children don't have to go to war.
Their children are not going to get conscripted.
So it's like, you know, every time this stuff comes up and we now have almost constantly the words of war being spoken as if it's just sort of an offhand thing that we can should attack these people, invade these people, do this.
Like this goes absolutely nowhere good.
And we were talking earlier about the technology we can hold in our hands.
We get out our phones.
We can explore the entire world.
There's no piece of knowledge which is held back from us.
We can get it through this device that we carry in our hands.
So here we are all of these, you know, millennia later as a species.
We have that level of technology available to us, but we still think that war is some form of solution.
It's hard to imagine if you were living in the past, if you could come up with the circumstances that we live under today, like you just described, a device in your pocket that provides you with all the information you could ever want.
We would say, oh, well, that would be the solution to most of what ails us.
unidentified
You'd think once we have that available, it'll all sort itself out.
I remember when I started on Twitter, I thought it was the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.
But when I started, which was about 2009, 2010, and suddenly from a couple of decades of having who I was described by others and pushed across to people, this breath of fresh air where I could just express myself and people would know exactly what my real opinion on something was and how I felt about something, it was fantastic.
Didn't last very long, though.
People were like, oh, we've got a whole lot of truth going on here.
We've got to shut that shit down.
As soon as individuals started using their power to say, you know what, I had an experience with this company or that company and it wasn't very good.
And those companies were like, man, we didn't spend millions of dollars a year on advertising just for this arsehole to tell the truth about how shit we are.
It's kind of amazing that there's no laws because it's essentially, I mean, you could propagate through bots a complete and total lie and it catches traction, makes its way through, and there's zero consequences.
There was a moment a little while ago where there just seemed to be all social media was just flooded with violent images, flooded with people fighting, people getting knocked out by a king hit in a bar or whatever.
It was just him on stage talking about a company that he and I and Ed Sheeran got involved in.
I was shooting the Pope's Exorcist in Ireland, right?
And I got told this story About this lady, Laura Bonner, whose grandfather was an Irish potato farmer, right?
And wondering what he should do with his leftover potatoes, you know, the unsightly shaped ones that nobody wants in the supermarket.
And he came up with the idea of making this Irish sort of moonshine called Pochin.
So every Friday, his relatives and his friends and everything would rock around to Phil's house and they'd bring their old medicine bottles and whatever and just fill up from the still.
So they had a weekend.
And when she was a little girl, she would see this party being created every Friday in the island.
And so they're singing songs and they're enjoying each other's company and laughing uproariously and all that.
And she said, one day I'm going to legitimize what granddad does for fun and make it into a business.
So around about her mid-20s or something, she was a lawyer.
She got involved in this big deal.
It went well for her.
So she was sort of like faced with a crossroads.
Okay, now I've got money to finance my idea or I can continue in the job that I'm in.
And so she decided to back herself.
She comes from a little town in the north of Ireland that is called Muff.
It's actual towns across the river from Derry.
And she formed a company called the Muff Liquor Company.
And that amused me.
unidentified
I called Jimmy Carr and said, does this amuse you?
That's a great way to put it because that's the real issue, right?
It's not, well, I can handle it.
So everybody else can too.
That's not it.
It's like, why can some people handle it?
And what could have been done?
Like, if you just in school, you're going to have to accept that some kids are going to try marijuana.
Some kids are going to try acid.
Some kids are going to try alcohol.
Most kids are going to try alcohol.
Like, why don't we have education on the proper way to use these things where you don't get in trouble?
You know, like at least most people, I would imagine most kids are not going to listen anyway, but more will than would if you didn't talk about it at all.
Well, I hate that feeling that the follow that, you know, I've had a great time the night before, but the following day, nothing gets done because I had fun the night before.
I love that old Bill Hicks routine where he asks the question: you know, the last time you're in a social situation, it would be a private party, a concert, a sporting event, and people started fighting.
It's like, yeah, I don't get why people can be so aggressively negative towards marijuana, yet, you know, half a dozen, dozen drinks for them socially is a, of course.
You know, it's easy.
It's like these two things, you know, are very different outcomes.
You're not going to have the, you know, people aren't going to be attacking the base camp when they're all stoned.
They may well have a go at it when they're on the piss.
But you know, it also connects to the formation of the United Nations.
Does it?
Take Thailand, for example, a country that's had hundreds of years of cultural marijuana use.
But in order to join the United Nations, they had to accept an American attitude towards drug laws.
Just recently, they've taken those drug laws away, and now they're in a bit of panic because they didn't plan it very well.
Because, like, you know, reality break is, I think, you know, California did it through Arnold Schwarzenegger properly, knowing exactly how you're going to tax and where the money's going to when you do tax for the consumption.
And so I think, you know, 140 or something or more shops sprung up overnight in Bangkok.
And they're like, oh, gee, that went quicker than we thought it was going to go.
But I think it's actually great for Thailand.
It's a, you know, a drug that particularly suits the groove of that country, you know?
They're worried about people talking about alcohol.
It's a stupid, I mean, the fact that it works is crazy that people are still with like zero deaths ever, that they're still pushing to take this one drug away when you've got one drug that everybody uses.
Because before that, it was very time intensive, very labor-intensive to break it down because they're very, very strong fiber.
So then Popular Science Magazine has it on the cover.
Hemp, the new billion-dollar crop, because of this machine.
And so then William Randolph Hearst, who also owned Hearst Publications, he also owned paper mills.
So paper mills and cereal, he owned forests where he'd make paper out of the forest.
All of a sudden, there's this competing commodity where they're going to use hemp for paper.
It's a far superior paper.
Hemp is going to, it's way quicker to grow.
You can grow entire fields of it in a year.
You get a whole new crop.
Like it's not like trees that take years and years to grow before you can chop them down and make paper out of them.
And so then they started printing these stories about Mexicans and blacks that are raping white women because they're on this new drug called marijuana.
Was this guy that like everybody thought was like a once-in-a-lifetime talent and he snuffed out.
And back then, you have to consider: if you're William Randolph Hearst, you have Hearst publications, you're essentially in control of whatever narrative you want to push forth, and no one's going to get in your way.
So, all you'd have to do is make some phone calls, and that guy, fuck him, he doesn't work again.
It's nuts, but that's the one beautiful thing about today is that independent media takes up the slack and often gets more views than main, you know, air quote, mainstream corporate media.
And so now corporate media is forced to report on things eventually.
Like the New York Times is forced to report on certain things that are inconvenient eventually, where they would have just liked to have ignored it.
But it gets so big in the zeitgeist that it has to become something that's discussed.
And that's fascinating because it's like dragging them into the reality that the internet lives in, which is a reality of a free exchange of information.
I heard him tell that story one time about the same week that Cinderella Man came out, I went to the premiere of Longashard.
Because, you know, Chris Rock was in that and stuff.
And there's a few people in that cast who I really like.
And so I went to the movie and I just remember him telling a story about the lights come up and he didn't realize he was sitting next to me or whatever.
I think it'd be a very dangerous room for me and Joey Diaz to be in.
But it's like that thing of going somewhere which isn't home and isn't work, having no agenda, sort of hanging out by the pool, reading a book, right, from beginning to end.
And the studios there, the studios would rather have a television show that's going to be there for a decade than a movie that's in and out in four months.
It's better for them.
But the world has opened up hugely in the last 30 years in terms of film production.
And you're taking advantage of homegrown film talent and then building on that with international investment.
Australia has a big history, for example, of making films.
Technically, arguably the first full-length feature film, the true history of the Ned Kelly gang might have been called that was like 1906, 1908, something like that.
And, you know, all the way through, but it takes to about the 70s or whatever, then you have this sort of new generation of Australian filmmakers who are actually making stories that reflect the current culture.
And I think that's sort of happening worldwide as well.
When you start going through it, you sort of do realize there's been, you know, probably a much larger percentage than you would expect given the population of the country in terms of people in film, whether it's directors of photography or directors themselves or actors.
There's one that's going on in America now called the, well, what it gives, it's a lone star tick is what gives you this bite and produces something called alpha gal.
So we have ticks in Australia, but we've never had to deal with Lyme disease like you have here.
But in the last four or five decades, people started raising deer in Australia for meat and what have you.
And few of them get away.
There's no deer farms around where I am, which is north of Sydney by 600 Ks.
But recently, a couple of the guys that work for me on the farm said they've seen deer going through the bush at the back of my block.
So that means that there's some just animals that have escaped and they're most likely to have been in the southern highlands, which is south of Sydney.
And somehow they've got themselves all the way up to where I am.
In America, they have a problem with that too, deer farms and this disease called chronic wasting disease.
And it's spread throughout large swaths of America have a giant issue with this, where deer herds get infected.
My friend Doug Duran, he has a farm out in Wisconsin, and they've had a significant problem with it to the point where they've started issuing more tags and thinning the herd.
They're trying to kill more deer to try to lessen this spread of this stuff because chronic wasting disease, it's a prion disease.
So it's like it gets on plants.
It stays on them for a long time.
So they start drooling when they have it.
And in that drool is more chronic wasting disease.
So another deer will come along and graze on the ground where they drooled.
The one and only cat that I let my mother have at the farm.
This is way back, man.
I was training for Cinderella, man.
And, you know, they sent me this group of boxes, Olympic guys, and stuff like that.
And every single one of them can smash the piss out of me in the ring.
So I've got to smash the piss out of them in other areas.
So I train them until they drop, you know, getting them on bicycles and taking them to the bush, you know, things like that, just to sort of like keep the balance.
You know, and this one particular day, and I had it in my mind that I was just going to absolutely smash them.
I was going to get into this situation because this is one road, you know, and I was just going to get so far in front of them, psychologically damage them, you know.
How devious had a conversation with my mum, and she was like, oh, darling, you know, you know, I'd really love to have a cat.
And I'm like, Mum, we lived in this privileged situation.
We've got sulfur-crested cockatoos, rosellas, king parrots, all these beautiful birds.
And the worst thing that we could do for them is put a cat into that.
So you can't have a cat, you know.
I'm riding through the bush, 25, 30ks in at this point, right?
I'm getting to the top of this hill.
I'm looking down.
I'm seeing these boys struggling quite some distance, probably about a kilometer and a half away from me, you know.
And I'm going, I'll just have a little rest here.
And I just hear this little noise, and I'm like, what the hell is that?
So I just take three or four steps off the road.
You know, probably about seven or eight minutes ago, I was coming around this corner and a car was there on the road, which is kind of unusual for the state forest in that particular area, right?
So I take these three or four steps in, and there's a little kitten sitting in the bush.
Like, what the hell?
So I pick it up, it's warm, you know, I can't leave it here.
So I put it in my backpack, right?
And I complete the ride, I get to the top of this hill where this trig station is, and everybody's standing around.
So, you know, they're growing sugar cane in Queensland, and there's a particular flying creature that they want to control.
So they start looking around.
We always blame the British for this because it's usually a naturalist, a British naturalist or scientist that comes up with the concept.
And so they look through all the aisles.
I can't remember where they found it from, but they found this toad who seemed to have this appetite for this particular insect and they would feed it.
So we'll introduce the cane toad to get amongst the sugar cane and lessen that creature.
When they were checking if the cane toad would eat the creature, they were feeding it dead ones, right?
It's a flying creature.
Toad doesn't have a tongue like a frog.
Can't catch this thing if it's flying.
So it was of no use at all in trying to lessen that population.
However, it became like a dominant species, and it was in Queensland, but now it's starting to come in New South Wales.
So they're basically marching south.
And it's a problem, man.
It's like a serious problem.
They secrete poison.
So if a dog gets interested and the toad gets afraid, the dog can sort of like sniff or lick its head, then get poisoned, and that's the end of your dog, you know.
But there was a period of time there where there's actually a documentary from the 90s called Cane Toads.
And it sort of just points out how crazy people were getting with it.
You know, people in small country towns walking from their house to the pub, taking a cricket bat and just smacking the cane toads off the road as they went.
You know, it's like all these people becoming like, you know, crazed with the idea of getting rid of the cane toad population, but it hasn't affected them.
And so that's called how wolves changed rivers, right?
That documentary.
There's a lot of people that push back against that.
I think you definitely need predators because there was at one point in time an overpopulation of elk in Montana to the point where they were having winter seasons, winter rifle seasons, where they would issue a lot of tags.
So in the winter, they're stuck in deep snow and you just go pick them off.
And it was because they had so many that it was actually detrimental to the herd itself, to the health of the herd itself.
So they reintroduced wolves.
The population dropped by, I think, more than 40%.
It might have been more than that.
I don't know.
See how much elk's population has dropped since the introduction of wolves into Montana in the Yellowstone introduction.
So there's definitely a balance that needs to be achieved.
The problem is that area where they're doing that, then the elk are going to eat, the wolves rather are going to eat the elk.
And occasionally they'll stray onto cattle and then they're allowed to issue depredation tags and you can get a problem wolf killed.
But what they did in Colorado is they brought them right to where the cows are.
They took wolves that had a history of, they know how to kill cows.
That's what they do.
They know how to kill calves.
They've been doing it for their whole lives.
And they took them and they introduced them to a place where there's no protection.
No one's ready for it.
No one has guards set up.
They don't have dogs set up.
They don't have anything set up to stop wolves.
So let's see.
When the reintroduction was in 1995, the winter count was approximately 17,000 elk when wolf reintroduction began.
It fell to 10,000 by 2003.
By 2013, only 3,915 elk represents a drop of roughly 75% from pre-reintroduction numbers.
That's kind of crazy.
But 19,000 is too many.
That's kind of nuts.
That's an overpopulation.
That can lead to disease and famine and all kinds of things.
And you don't have a good, stable ecosystem with both predators and prey.
You get a situation like you have in New Zealand where they have to gun down stags sometimes.
They have to helicopter stags because they just get overpopulated.
You know, New Zealand is one of those places where all these game animals from Europe were introduced specifically to set up New Zealand as a beautiful hunting refuge.
They would go there and hunt stag.
But, you know, the problem is you have to have balance.
Like this whole, you can't just enter into like human ideas.
You know, like, oh, well, one plus one is two.
So we'll just add one.
Now we got, no, it's not how it works.
Like, you have to maintain the population of these creatures that you've now dropped off with no natural balance.
You know, obviously a horse was really important in Australia when it was being opened up and first colonised and populated and what have you.
And then, you know, First World War, we still had light horse cavalry and what have you.
So in certain areas, but mainly in the area where the mountains are in Australia, which crosses between New South Wales into the state of Victoria.
And, you know, we name things pretty simply in Australia.
You know, the black snake with red on its stomach is the red-bellied black snake.
You know, we keep it pretty simple for the tourists.
And what's that brown snake called?
It's called a brown snake, man.
So that area of the country is called the Snowy Mountains.
And, you know, we have this sort of cultural connection to the Brombies, which is things like, you know, the man from Snowy River is based on guys going out to capture wild horses.
But the population of wild horses has got to a point where it's destroying the ecosystem of that area.
So now they have to go and find a way of bringing that population down.
And it's very difficult for people, particularly somebody like me who I love horses, but I have to put that love for horses aside to what it's doing to the rest of the native animals.
And in Australia, we've been blessed with so many unusual and fantastic creatures, but we haven't really been good husbands of the land.
And we haven't really focused on what's good for them.
It sounds rough, but we've got to do something because, quite frankly, the wombats and the platypus and the quokkas and the kangaroos and the wallabies are a little bit more important than the wild horses.
You know, the balance of nature is a very strange thing.
It's very complex.
There's so many elements to it.
That's what they were trying to highlight in that Wolves Change River documentary.
The problem with that Wolves Change River documentary is the guy who created that is a proponent of rewilding to the point where I think he wants to reintroduce dangerous predators to Europe.
Like he's got some crazy ideas about rewilding, like going way back.
I mean, the kid that I was talking to you about, Merlin Hanbury Tennyson, came out of school, went in the army, did two or three tours, but now has found himself in a situation where he's taken over a block of land that his father bought in the 50s or 60s or something.
And he's turning that block of land back into temperate rainforest and seeing all of these benefits because of it.
So instead of trying to run sheep or run some other commercial herd, he's just letting the country go back to what it should be and seeing incredible results because of it.
And sometimes, you know, I might drive a machine to a certain point and I just get off and I walk and I just listen, you know, and I go and visit trees that I like or areas that I like.
I'm actually going through a, you know, a long time ago, I planted like 38,000 trees as a kind of an offset, a carbon offset, right?
Now some of those trees are 25 plus years old.
So I'm going through the process in that 44 acres where I've planted that plantation of taking out all the non-native undergrowth.
And then the next stage is going to be putting back into that area the trees that were ripped out of there prior to the First World War, red cedar and white mahogany and all these things.
So, you know, beautiful trees.
And with the hope that I put enough in the ground that over time, red steer starts popping up all through the valley.
But this is going to be stuff that happens way after I'm dead.
But that process of stripping out the non-native stuff, I'm starting to look at that, go, okay, well, I'm doing that 44 acres there.
I got another 200 acres over here.
I know there's waterfalls.
I know there's creeks.
I want to take all of that lantana and stuff out and revive all that so you can walk through the bush.
But these are processes that I hope that will excite my kids to carry on with.
It's exciting to know that you have this long-term thing that you're doing that's actually beneficial to the land and brings it back to the way it used to be.
Yeah, not like in a sort of overbearing way, but like just that little 44 acres, hopefully over time, and we're already seeing it now.
We're sort of like, because we're clearing things out, we're finding lots of little tiny red cedars that are already there.
Because I put in 450 to start with, but my aim is to have, you know, within about the next probably two to three years, have 5,000 red cedars in the ground in that area.
It's just amazing when you think about the kind of impact that human beings can have on landscape.
It's just humans, whatever we've done, wherever we go, we inevitably alter everything forever.
And if you could just take a little bit of it, put it back to the way it was, and then start contributing to these plants regrowing again, there's a balance to that.
Some guy that has the kind of pressures that you have and the work that you have to do and the intensity and the long hours on sets, like having something like that is a godsend.
Well, see, there are definitely guys in my business that covet.
They go, I want to do this kind of role.
I want to be perceived like that, you know.
But for me, that's not what I pursue.
I pursue character.
And I only, you know, I'm very practical.
I don't get to choose from everything.
I only get to choose from what's sent to me.
So from what within what is sent to me, I always try to look for fresh ground.
You know, people will ask me, why would you play that kind of character?
And it's like, the bottom line is because I didn't do it before.
Why do you want to play Herman Goering?
Because nobody's offered it to me in the past.
And it's a fascinating character.
Yeah, it's a dangerous character.
And there's a lot of stuff that goes into being able to play a character like that.
But that danger is part of the excitement of the job.
And it's not always going to be that way.
Sometimes you're playing a character that doesn't really require a lot from you.
But you've got to play the weight of the character.
You can't just sort of suddenly make your New York detective act like a superhero because you feel like being a superhero.
So it's sort of like, you know, you just play the weight of what's required.
And then every now and then, you know, you play a character that sort of has a principal sort of role in the narrative or is the focus of the narrative.
But that thrill comes from that thing of saying, this challenge is so big, I don't know if I can do this.
And then part of you goes, I should leave that aside.
And then the other voice goes, let's just have a go.
Let's have a go, see what we can do.
And see, someone like Goering, that word nuance is coming up a lot today because we can look at him in the stark sort of caricature version that a lot of people have in their minds of who he was.
But that against the reality of his life and how he grew up, how he was educated, what his experiences were, who he really was as a man.
There's a lot more to Goering than just looking at this going, oh, bad man, Nazi.
One thing I find fascinating, when he was a kid at school, he was like one of the dumbest students in his class at a normal school.
And because of his sort of continuous failure as a punishment, he got sent to military school.
In military school, he was a top student because it was stuff that interested him.
He comes out of school pretty much on the dawn of the First World War, has his first military experience in the infantry as a young officer, gets wounded, and realizes that standing on the ground on a battlefield is not really the right place for him.
What's interesting him is what keeps going on overhead.
So he manufactures a way to get himself assigned to a fighter squadron.
He's supposed to turn back up for duty with his infantry squadron, but sort of, you know, manufactures a way to keep him associated with the fighter squadron, learns how to become a pilot while he's doing that.
And at a certain point in the war, they're losing more pilots than they train.
So they go, he knows how to fly.
He can be a pilot.
Finishes the First World War with 22 kills, air-to-air kills.
That's three times a fighting ace.
And he's also, because he recently passed in battle, at the end of the First World War, he's in charge of the Baron von Richthofen, the Red Baron Squadron, which is the pinnacle of the German Air Force.
So here he is as a young man.
He's finishing that first war experience.
And he is a Fair Dinkum, which means true.
He is an actual war hero.
And so through the 20s, he's on cigarette cards in Germany.
You buy a packet of cigarettes and there's a picture of Hermann Goering.
Wow.
So, and he goes into that political environment, that post-Versai environment, with a very definite belief in his country as being something special, and he wants to make a contribution to bring lifting his country out of the mire that it's currently in.
So he starts looking for a political connection and ends up going upstairs in a coffee house in Munich, I think it was, and hearing a fellow called Adolf Hitler talk and realizes that he has a lot in common with this guy where he sees things and knows that Hitler was a soldier.
It's a funny thing we put into the movie at one point because there's a speech about Rami that Rami Malik makes about Hitler being a failed painter and a not very good soldier.
And I think the response I gave Goering at the time, which is not in the film, but he talks through Hitler's actual military record.
And yeah, he didn't rise above Lance Corporal, but he turned down promotion three different times.
He won an Iron Cross in 1914 and then he won a second one in 1918.
And doing things that were showing such extreme courage that he was awarded the Iron Cross.
And he delivered messages on the battlefield.
He would take the messages from headquarters and take it to the frontline troops and then bring their response back, things like that.
So one point in time I had Goering say, you call him a failed painter, but maybe he got to a certain point in his life where there were more important things to address than painting.
When you know that fact and you start looking at photographs, you can see him kind of leave the planet at a certain point where he's just off his tits all the time.
From about 42 onwards, he doesn't really have Adolf's ear anymore.
Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, they've all taken those positions.
The things that he promised he could do with the Luftwaffe didn't actually come off as strongly.
They didn't know it at the time, but that's the Enigma machine, everything, the code's being broken.
So no matter what they did, they were always being second-guessed.
So, you know, Hitler's trust of him was adjusted a little bit.
And I also sort of liken it to him knowing he's going to get stabbed.
So he just doesn't bother going to the place where he would get stabbed.
So he does a whole bunch of other stuff and he keeps his authority, but he's not at in the center of things anymore for me.
It's personal safety because he thinks he's no longer has the definitive ear and trust of his leader.
The pills overtake his lifestyle and he decides to interest himself in other things for the greater good of Germany, like the collection of great works of art and things like that.
But there's a lot of things in this story that are just bigger once you start looking at it and examining them.
They're way bigger than what we know or what we commonly understand.
And that's what I was looking for to try and find a way to understand his base motivations.
And at the end of the day, he, you know, in his own way, he's a pure patriot.
Just so happens to be a sort of a set of beliefs or whatever that most of us in the Western world would call abhorrent.
This is not like when we grew up, we didn't grow up thinking that they were just drugged, psychotic, you know, animals that were on meth, you know, in tanks.
And the most, they gave the people the front line the most meth.
So they had different dosages for different people depending on what they were required to do.
Well, I mean, look, you're surrounded by guys that have a sort of a fanatical mindset.
You know, you're going to want to be awake.
Yeah.
You don't want to fall asleep at the wrong time if that's the group of people that you surrounded yourself with.
And that's the thing that I keep saying.
It's an old cliche, but I think it's something that he really learned.
You know, if you lie down with dogs, you're going to get fleas, Herman.
Yeah.
But I think him cleaning up by being forced by being in a prison environment, being forced by the Allies to go cold turkey, nearly killed him.
He had sort of heart problems because he went from 40 or 50 a day to nothing.
So but that clarity of thought that he had After being clean for six or nine months when the trial starts, that became dangerous because now he's sort of got his faculties back and he's intent on breaking down this whole idea of international law as being ridiculous.
That he's a man who served his country.
He is still in a uniform.
He's still like a military guy.
So he's quote unquote following orders.
And, you know, they were a democratically elected government who then step by step dismantled democracy once they were in power.
And the fascinating thing about this character and the way you play him is in the beginning, he seems like a guy on opiates because he's like so relaxed about everything.
You know, it's like he doesn't seem to be carrying the weight of what's happened to him.
Right.
And for you to put, and then there's dark moments, particularly like during the trial, where you're like, whoa, there's a lot of range to this guy.
And that's got to be a weird place to be, for you to try to put yourself in the mind of what ultimately became one of the most horrific figures in modern history.
Yeah, but, you know, you ask anybody and you would be the same.
Just because in a little while the podcast is over for the day doesn't mean that that's the end of your job.
It doesn't mean you're just going to turn off and never think about it again.
You're going to obviously, you know, anybody who has a passion for the thing that they do is going to continue the process.
Five o'clock might be when the office closes, but you're going to go home, you're going to have dinner, you're going to think about the deal that you're currently doing, the presentation that's ahead of you, or whatever it happens to be.
You're going to keep processing.
And that's what happens when you're playing a character because you might have delivered X amount of dialogue today, but you've got X amount tomorrow too.
And then, as it turns out, it got set up and collapsed three different times.
And so I had five years, five years of, you know, scratching around, trying to find little bits of information to humanize him in my mind, but also for me to try and understand him and understand what he got in.
Because it doesn't make a lot of sense when you read about his history and stuff and where he gets to doesn't make a lot of sense.
He was a mountain climber.
Really?
When he was a young man, there are traverses in the Austrian Alps that Hermann Göring was the first person to do that traverse of that peak.
You think about the mentality required of a mountaineer to stand at the base of a big-ass rock and look up and say, I'm going to keep going until I reach that summit.
That says a lot about who Hermann Goering really was.
And, you know, he's Bavarian, right?
So from southern Germany.
And once, because I didn't know he was a mountain climber, once I knew that, then I started looking around for, well, what does that mean to be a mountain climber, you know, prior to the First World War?
What kind of equipment would you have?
And it's very basic, man.
It's nothing, you know, you're relying on your wits and your strength just completely.
Just all stretchy hemp that's going to behave completely differently once it gets wet.
But it gave me some real insight to him.
And it also ended up giving me this great way of connecting to the other German guys who are playing the other Nazis, you know.
Because I just knew from the first day when they all arrived and they were sitting together in a group, I could see that they were already feeling the punishment of playing that kind of character.
So I just brought them together and I asked them because these guys, some of them are German, some of them are Hungarian.
And I said, look, you know, there's this song that I found and I'd like to learn the song together.
And they all, you know, most of them knew the song.
But that's what we would do every day as a group.
We'd get together, we'd sing that song and then we'd walk into court together, feeling connected as a unit, you know.
And which I think is very dangerous and quite stupid, you know, because it gives you a complete misunderstanding of what a monster is.
You know, yes, okay, here's somebody with horrific acts, but as the joke used to be, even Hitler, you know, he used to love dogs.
So that's the joke, right?
You know, and that, but there's some real truth in understanding the human process in that.
That somebody who makes the absolute worst decision in the world can still be a loving father, can still have a group of friends.
But on, you know, particular in a particular moment, that is the same person who's made this horrific decision that will have terrible effect on a generation of people.
We see somebody who can tell a story, tell a joke, hold attention in a room.
You go, it's cool.
But when that process of charm goes to this other place, which becomes about life and death, or the taking away of people's rights, the dehumanizing of people, as we were discussing earlier, you know, and this, you know, I don't want to get into politics because I have this, my boys have this rule.
If you're going to talk to Joe, you're not allowed to discuss politics because they know once I start.
Your boys?
My two sons, yeah.
Because my youngest boy, I think I told you, he became obsessed with you and listening to your stuff for a while, and you became one of his sort of points of education.
And, you know, so that's why I started listening to you because I wanted to know what he was hearing, you know.
And I go, and after listening a few times, I was like, you know what, man, it's cool.
Because, again, we'll use that word.
You do actually have the allowance for nuance.
And that's the greatest thing about this situation.
We sit down to talk.
We're going to be talking for a couple of hours.
So I don't have to reduce everything I want to talk to you about to make it pop in three minutes.
But it's, I think what you're saying is absolutely true, that it is stupid to think that way because that's a human being and a very fucked up, evil human being that did horrific things.
But know that that is a path that people can go down even if they think they're doing the right thing.
So we are taught, for example, to regard Gaddafi in a certain way.
Okay.
But if you look into what happened in his country while he was the leader, you look into the fact that every person is given a house at a certain age.
You look at the fact that everybody's education and health care is free.
You look at if somebody showed a particular talent for something that required further education overseas, all of the costs of that were paid for by the government.
Now, these are all things put in place by the same country's leader that we're told is evil and corrupt.
And your version of the world, you're relying on other people to give you the story of what the world is until you go somewhere, until you go to Thailand, until you go somewhere.
Well, you're like, wow, this is a totally different way of living out here.
Yeah, I've even had people come down to help me with movies or whatever, like guys that are coming down to train me in some weapon or other or whatever.
And they do a lot of traveling, but it's all within the continental USA.
And they come to Australia and they didn't realize that other people have opinions.
You're not going to find a heck of a lot of agreement to some very basic tenets if you're sitting in an Australian bar.
You'll find a whole bunch of people go, that's fucking stupid, mate.
Yeah.
But it's still, to me, the greatest country in the world is the United States of America.
Absolutely.
Greatest potentials are all here.
But how it's founded on balance and fairness and opportunity, that's how it remains great.
Not because you start taking opportunity away from people, because you're affording them opportunity.
And, you know, just keep that in mind, ladies and gentlemen.
Which is the strength and also, you know, the problem with the last four years was that they were just letting anybody in and they weren't vetting people and they were inviting people in.
And the problem now is they're grabbing people that are productive citizens and they're grabbing them and taking them out because they don't have the right paperwork.
But you do have to be aware, too, though, a lot of the information that we know about that is coming to us from a motivation that we don't necessarily read.
You see how absolute they are if somebody with that color hat is trying to promote something.
The person with the other colour hats, it's absolutely ridiculous.
Then it changes, an election happens.
Now the person with a different coloured hat, they're in charge, and they're going to put in place exactly what they said the other person was doing that was wrong is now part of their policy platform.
We have a prime minister who's very much motivated by trying to help everybody, which should be the job of a politician, right?
To improve the lives of the people that they represent.
And he's kind of inherited, you know, a conger line of stupidity that was going on, you know, and he's trying to fix things.
But of course, just the way things are reported, whatever, you know, there's just haters on every corner.
But he's a good man, and he's doing his very best.
And he's, you know, working extremely hard.
But, you know, like he arrives off a plane the other day.
He's just come back home from some very successful international meetings where he's established various trade things and opportunities and situations for Australia.
Gets off the plane wearing a Joy Division t-shirt.
Big ban from his youth.
And he's just a relaxed character.
He's been wearing a suit and tie for weeks on the road.
He's just walking off Australia's version of Air Force One in a Joy Division t-shirt.
So the member of the opposition wanted to point out, and did so in Parliament, that Joy Division is a Nazi term and comes from a section of a particular camp where the women were prostituted, and that's why it was called the Joy Division.
And it's like, okay, what's the point of that?
We all know it's a band name.
We know it's a band name.
Just because you like the Rolling Stones doesn't mean that you want rocks to be falling on people.
What are you fucking talking about?
This whole stupidity.
And that's what you're facing all the time.
Picking up some pointless piece of minutiae and lighting it on fire and making a smokescreen to cover up the reality of the fact that that prime minister just worked his ass off on behalf of the country and successfully achieved a bunch of things and should be patted on the back, not pushed down the stairs.
Generationally, it's not something that I can, oh, from my experience, I can tell you this.
So I had to have a, you know, when I had that conversation with my boys, it was a broader conversation about gambling and about, you know, what it takes to earn a dollar.
It's just there's always some sort of point of attack.
There's always an attack vector for people getting your attention or getting your money and trying to, and then we have to decide as a society, like, do we, is this good to just allow, like, we want freedom, but do we want to, like, you can't advertise cigarettes on TV anymore, right?
And so I've probably connected with them about five times since that first time we went.
And the real benefit that I'm getting that I think, right, because I'm not completely over the science, but it seems to be with these injections that I've been getting into my shoulders, into my knees, but also IVs, that it's calmed down my body's inflammation.
You know, I think we've talked before about just how many old injuries I carry, you know, and how like injuries in my shoulders are deeply arthritic.
But we can now see in an ultrasound over time how what was messy a year ago and like big thick bands of arthritis now is just lessened, you know, probably by about 70%.
And one area in my right shoulder, probably about 90%.
So my range of motion, if we'd done this last year, would have been about there, right?
You know, and like just feeling like the musculature starting to build and everything.
I'm taking it really slowly.
And that was one of the things I was worried about with Highlander because jumping into that role with the shooting date coming, it was like, man, I've got to do three workouts a day.
And that, for me, is a bad recipe.
Because, yeah, I can do that for X amount of time.
But once I stop, I'm going to stop completely.
And what I want to do is I want to make all these changes and make it a long-term situation.
So I think the Waste To Well was a great call for me because it's calmed down a bunch of stuff.
It's taken a bunch of pain away, you know, so I can go and work out and not have to suffer for two or three hours afterwards.
You know, I'm still picking up injuries because I've got to face the fact I'm 61.
You know, like the other day I'm doing my katana saw trying to get this freaking move going.
I freaking tore the tendon here on the ulna.
So that's going to be bad for sword fighting.
But I'm trying to fix that without having to have a surgical.
The problem I've got is I've got X amount of time to claim the skill.
And either way, right, if I do the rehab exercises without doing surgery, if it fails, I'm now falling right on production and I've retorn or something, right?
And with martial arts and specifically sword fighting, there's very specific movements that you're learning.
And if you learn those movements slow, as you speed up, you'll be going along the right pathway.
And when I would teach people kicks in particular, because it's a weird thing to learn how to kick something, like you've got to do it slowly.
Because if you try to muscle it, you're going to develop a bad habit that's going to keep you from achieving full power because you want a proper technique.
Now, here's the thing: we talk about this, and your listeners will probably be, you know, it's expensive.
No two ways about it.
So it's possibly not at everybody's grasp what the sort of things that I'm doing.
But I think, I'm not sure if this is absolutely right, but I think, you know, one of his sort of fervent ambitions, Brigham, is to make it more available.
You know, if we can sort of write things in our bodies with an injection as opposed to an operation.
You know, the problem I had in my left shoulder, I go and see my shoulder surgeon who fixed it while I was doing Cinderella Man.
And so I did two operations with this guy, one in 2001 and the second one in 2004.
But it's always had a sort of problem.
And he did say at the time after the second operation that he had to cut a few corners and it would probably cause me problems later on in life.
So I probably went to see him about five or six years ago.
And he said, okay, so this shoulder is at a point of arthritis now.
What we have to do is we have to cut through the muscle bar.
We have to pop out the humil head of your armbone.
We have to shave off the top of the human head, and then we have to put a carbon fiber cap, and then we have to put it back in, sew everything back up.
You've got about 12 months of rehab, right?
Just sounds wrong.
It just sounds wrong.
It's like, you know, so this process that I've been going through with Brigham is basically having the effect of layering.
So I can now see that if the arthritis was that deep, it's now this deep.
You know, it's still there.
I haven't solved it yet, but I'm giving my body what it needs to make it better.
And these new breakthroughs, they're able to achieve their growing actual cartilage on people that were bone on bone.
So they're developing new methods to regenerate tissue.
That's the cushioning in between your knees and your elbows and all these things and shoulders that were requiring people to get those horrific things.
Putting an artificial joint in place because everything is so arthritic.
That's one of the things that does trouble me greatly for this country.
Health.
Medical systems to benefit everybody.
Something has perverted here where, you know, the drug that I might need that I can buy for $50 for a month supply in Australia is $2,500 for a month here.
That's the crazy thing, is the amount of money they spend on advertising for the media that really just serves the purpose of now the media can't criticize the pharmaceutical drug companies.
You know, and the idea that you would let that happen and not do anything about it because you're bought and paid for by these enormous companies is kind of insane.
It's insane.
And they're trying to do something about that.
You know, and RFK Jr.'s fighting an uphill battle, trying to do something about that.
That's crazy that healthcare isn't such a principle thing because if we're not looking after ourselves and aiming for the longest life, what's the point of the human existence kind of thing?
So that should be a principle.
Everybody's health should be a principal focus of our elected representative.