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I'm Mike Boris and this is Strike.
Andrew Hamilton, welcome to Strike Talk, mate.
Mark, hello. It's good to be here.
So, tell me what the fuck happened.
Good question. Police, search warrant.
Next thing you know, the Raptor squad is smashing through my door with a battering ram. I ran
upstairs and started flushing drugs down the toilet. But this Raptor squad guy like tackled
me to the ground. He had like his knee in the back of my thigh and he just goes,
stay down, you fat cunt. You got a tiny cock.
I think I needed to have the fall to really...
I really appreciate everything. I think I needed that setback. I'm much happier now
living with my parents and doing stand-up comedy than I ever was making money as a drug dealer.
Andrew Hamilton, welcome to Strike Talk, mate.
Mark, hello. It's good to be here.
You know what? This was really weird. One of the reasons you're here is my younger son
DMs me on, I believe a fucking number, DMs me not, he doesn't send me a message, he DMs
me on my Instagram account.
From his Instagram account.
Little clips of you. And this would be some months ago. And I just went, you know, just
gave him a thumbs up or something. He goes, oh, dad, you don't fucking understand that,
do you? You don't get it, do you? You don't understand it's a piss take, do you, dad?
Because I know you were.
This is my fake business podcast.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. And he said, dad, it's a piss take. Like, he's like, he was, my son was saying
the piss, he's 32. He was saying the piss out of me. He's saying, you silly old fuck.
This is what you sound like.
Yeah, you don't understand this shit. This is you, dad. Like, you're a idiot. Anyway.
And welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome.
And what's the t-shirt, mate? Confit?
Confit, yes. It's my mate, Joe Kwan, owns a gym in Parramatta that's run all by ex-cons.
So it stands for Convict Fitness.
But I kind of, I got connected with Joe from doing a previous podcast I had where I was
just trying to interview people who had similar stories to me where they'd gone through shit
and then turned their life around. And so, yeah, Joe now runs Confit in Parramatta and
they also have a social enterprise called Confit Pathways where they go into Sydney
or New South Wales juvenile detention centers and help guys that are locked up to turn their
lives around through fitness or they get, help them to get university scholarships.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah, it's very cool. And so they're training the hell out of me at the moment. And so I
go in there every day and I've got a whole bunch of ex-cons yelling at me.
So I want to go back a little bit.
And you acquit yourself quite well when you speak. I'm part of your gig now. You're making
dough out of being, the way you speak. And we'll talk about this, you know, your tour
coming up. I want to talk about your book coming up and your podcast, et cetera. But
if I just, you know, I know lots of ex-cons in my life. Fortunately for me, I do know
them. I say it's a fortunate thing. I'm lucky to know these individuals. But not many of
them acquit themselves very well, like one to one. And a lot of them had come from, you
know, shit environments. Most of them, in fact, dreadful environments. Take me back
to who Andrew Hamilton was when he was at school. Where'd you go to school? Where'd
you live? Grew up in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane?
I grew up in Sydney. I grew up in Hornsby. And I had a very happy childhood. I had one
of five kids. I went to a private school. I went to Riverview in St. Ignatius College.
So you're a Jesuit boy?
Yeah. Jesuit boy. My dad was actually a Jesuit scholastic for like almost a decade. He was
a student priest before he became a father.
By the way, most people, Andrew, don't realize that a Jesuit scholar is a thing. They're
actually quite scholarly in lots of different things, not just theology, but quite scholarly
across the board.
Right. And you have to do it for like over a decade to become a Jesuit priest.
So, yeah, I think just to become like just a standard Catholic priest is like three or
four years maybe. But for a Jesuit, it's like 12, 13 years or something crazy.
And how old are you now?
38. So were you at Riverview when Emma Costello was there, Father Costello?
Okay. He was a friend of mine. He was the sort of resident priest there for a long time.
He was a good friend of mine, actually.
And the intelligence that came from this dude was crazy. What he knew about, shit he knew
about was amazing. And his influence was mental. Like his influence in politics, his influence
in business. He had, they're very good.
At infiltrating processes.
So you're a kid, North Shore, mom and dad, great. Family, Jesuit education. You left
year 12, I guess. You leave year 12?
And then what'd you do?
Then I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. I went and just started studying
an arts degree at Sydney Uni and just drinking a lot, doing a lot of drugs with my mates
and just, I was pretty aimless.
Did that for a year or two, getting very average grades. And then I was getting into a bit
of trouble in Sydney. I was getting into many fights at pubs. And so I decided I needed
to change my environment. And I went to Charles Stewart University in Bathurst to just have
Yeah. Just to have a scene change. And so I just randomly scrolled through all the degrees
they had on their website and just picked a random one. And it happened to be, I think,
just by sheer luck that it was one that I turned out to be very interested in and was
Which was public relations.
Like as in comms, communications.
So like as a degree in marketing or communications.
So did you enrol there?
I enrol there, went there, lived on campus for three years and had a great time there
in Bathurst. It's amazing. I mean, it was like whenever you see college movies in America,
it was like that. You're living on campus with guys and girls in the same dorms together
and you're just drinking and partying and trying to fit in some study.
Yeah. But you probably don't get up to as much mischief as you would if you were here in Sydney,
don't you? It's not as intense.
It was different. There was a lot of drinking and sex and drugs. I wasn't getting into fights
anywhere near as much. So it was a much more acceptable kind of trouble.
A bit more benign.
So you did your degree, then what happens? What job?
Well, I got close to graduating. I think I only had two subjects to go.
What the fuck? You didn't leave, did you?
Yeah. My lecturer was being asked by employers if they would recommend anyone that they think
Like internships and stuff like that.
Exactly. So I got recommended for a job. I went and did the job interview, got the job. And so
I was like, well, I don't need the fucking degree anymore.
Yeah, got the job.
A job doing what?
Working in public relations.
Back here in Sydney?
Yeah. So just quickly define to us what public relations means. Like you're talking about
corporate relations or you're talking about-
Publicity, publicist or brand pusher. What is it?
Yeah. So I was working mainly for corporates in helping them with their media relations,
either to help market whatever the main stories that they wanted to push out in a lot of traditional
media. And then as I continued to progress in public relations, I started doing more
crisis management as well. So if companies fuck up, I'd be telling them, advising them
on what the messaging should be and how to keep us out of the paper, that kind of stuff.
Yeah. So sometimes-
That's putting you into the paper, if you've got a good story to tell. Getting out of the
paper is if the paper's telling a bad story about me.
Which is pretty much the PR mantra.
And good at that?
I was very good at that.
Yeah. So how long did you do that for?
Oh, that's probably most of your life.
I just probably take you into your 30s.
A lot of my life. And so I worked at a small agency and then got a gig at the world's biggest
PR agency. And I was an account director there.
I was nominated for best- What was it? The 30 under 30 awards when I was 27 for B&T magazine.
30 under 30 means what?
The B&T magazine have like a list of people in marketing and PR and advertising that are
the high achievers that are under 30. And so I got- I won that in the PR category when
Wow. So tell me what the fuck happened.
Good question, Mark. I don't know, man. At the same time, I was just-
just a degenerate alcoholic and gambling addict and i was just a mess and i think i got into
degenerate yeah really i was just a mess man yeah i was just i was like after hours obviously
a chronic gambler um well i was after hours until the last few years when i just became a massive
coke head all day every day um the wheels kind of what period we're talking about now uh so i mean
i was i was my gambling problem started when i was about 18 like pokies bad and then as i got
older i just never had any money anything that i had would just slip through my hands very quickly
and so by the time i was at uni i was yeah living on campus and um i had very little money and i
ended up going to thailand with a bunch of mates and trying magic mushrooms and we fell in love
with them and so when i came home i told my mate as a psychedelics yes psychedelic magic mushrooms
and i had such an amazing time on them and it was just such just like world changing it changed my
perspective did you do it did you do it did you do for fun
or recreational did you do it for curative reasons no for fun recreational yeah yeah so
we were partying we were at a full moon party and we were the night we were there the night before
a full moon party in thailand yeah it's on one of the islands in kopenyang they had a place called
mushroom mountain yeah yeah and you can get these magic mushroom shakes and so we had those
and they were really strong the night before i think they they weakened them on the night of
the full moon party because there's just too many people i can't handle that many people
tripping out hard so we had it the night before and fuck me it was just like
hours bursting out of my eyes and just it was just this kaleidoscope in my head and i was like
this is amazing and so we sat there on the beach as the sun rose just coming down from these
mushrooms and i was just like there's there's more to life than than we know about and so i
had this kind of life-changing experience and i came home and told my mate how good they were
and he started researching how to grow them and next thing you know we had different strains of
mushrooms that i would take to uni and give to my friends and suddenly they became very popular and
i started selling them to friends of friends as a little bit of side in bathurst in bathurst at first
but then i finished uni pretty soon after so then i was back in sydney working as a junior pr
executive and then just selling a few mushrooms here and there to to friends and friends of
friends which helped me to cover rent or to get me out of the hole whenever i'd like piss it all
away gambling and so that helped me to justify if i think in my head what i was doing because i was
gambling's legal and it was destroying me and mushrooms are illegal but they seem to be such a
positive um thing for me and my friends that i was like the laws don't make sense so why would i obey
them yeah it's a funny thing that uh when people do that sort of stuff that um sort of self
justification for um their own degradation like yeah you know like you fuck yourself up yep um
and but if you thought about i'm fucking myself up here um maybe that's the first step it's nothing
to do with how you how you get there it's that's all bullshit um and so i was like well i'm gonna
i'm like i'm fucked i'm gambling i'm physically unwell i'm sure i might have one or two of the
trips are good but like i'm tripping all the fucking time like it's too much but i'll make
but i'm actually go back and i say yeah but that's someone else's fault exactly nobody likes to have
accountability mark yeah yeah yeah but it was much easier to to just go fuck the rules suck
i'm gonna make my own rules and to have a really hard look in the mirror yeah because at the end
of the day and by the way the rules do suck yeah and and and sometimes the logic is there i can't
do it i can't do it i can't do it i can't do it i can't do it i can't do it i can't do it i can't do it
i get the logic 100 but ultimately you're responsible for yourself totally and what was
really important is to be healthy yes and to be have a have consciousness yeah sure yeah like i
get it mike tyson i've talked about you know like i get it where the psychedelics actually can help
you and every now and then might be worth a thing to do i get it but doing all the fucking time and
getting other shit on other shit and and then all the other stuff that goes all the other degenerate
shit that goes with the fucking gambling the whole thing it's a big cycle and you just come
out wrung out like a piece of shit yes and uh and you look yourself or there's no point justifying
how shitty the rules are you're still a piece of shit you're the ultimate victim exactly and i
think a lot of that came down to it's taken me many years to realize is i kept gambling because
i needed just a distraction from my own life i needed an escape yes it's funny that it's like
would you call avoidance absolutely yeah i didn't want to sit down and think about why i felt so
empty inside and the reality was because i was living a life without purpose even though i was
good at public relations and i was doing that for a job i didn't really want to do it and i had all
these things in my life that i dreamt of doing and i wasn't doing anything any of them and so
um i think instead of facing that i was just trying to escape all the time that's a really
good thing to say that that's that's a good thing like identifying that that i didn't have a real
purpose that i could embrace yeah because it's not like you had a shit family and you know it
mom and dad was still there and it's not like you maybe did but perhaps you're not sort of
indicating to me you suffered some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder then did you
just uh nothing that up so it was just about purpose exactly right i think i came from so
much privilege and i could have done anything and i chose to do nothing and so that kind of
ate it ate away at me it's like a guilt yeah a bit of a guilt yeah i think so i think it was
just this such wasted potential and i didn't want to think about it you know like i mean i know it's
a little bit heavy but like um and you know
you are a comedian but um but a lot of by the way a lot of comedians actually um sort of have this
as part of their life the heavy shit i think so i think we often joke where you're chatting to
other comedians that it's anyone who's well adjusted typically doesn't go well at comedy
it's people that have got really fucked up shit going on yeah no no it's certainly my experience
with comedians like because when i did the print the apprentice celebrity apprentice every series
we had a comedian on there and it was quite interesting to see the actually if you actually
sat down and have a conversation like this
generally speaking there was some shit that happened in their life or there was something
they were very unhappy about in their life yep but they're fucking good comedians like
ridiculously good comedians um i i i love the fact that you've identified this purpose and
and uh you know you know everyone talks about you know they have books out on you know finding my
why and all this sort of shit but having a real purpose on this planet for a thoughtful person
it's pretty fucking important i think it's dangerous to live without it um my experience
is if you're living without purpose without a reason to get up in the morning
you start to feel hollow inside and then you start to fill that emptiness with anything and a lot of
the time that can be pretty bad stuff and by the way we judge ourselves pretty hard too yeah like uh
did you i mean by the way i'm not someone who's judging you because i mean i'm fairly old but i
have been through the same stuff okay maybe not as as um hectic as you did but perhaps as hectic
as you did too i want to hear these stories in a totally different period in the 80s yeah and it
was a different world those days but it was a different world those days but it was a different
you know there was some you know stuff in my life and uh and i and i know i think anyway because i
come from a really good mom and dad great brother and sister great big family you know man i'd
everything going for me university degrees fucking good in income everything but like
equally i was trying to i was avoiding um confronting stuff and i was and my avoidance
process was actually substituting things to make sure me getting a point where i was
not unconscious but not conscious no longer being forced to consciously think about things yes so
sort of pretty much numbing yourself i was doing that for over a decade i think that i was just
escaping into alcohol drugs and gambling just and i i can't and that was both um that was for
anything i would escape if i had a good reason if i was happy celebrate yeah drugs gambling alcohol
if i was sad escape drugs did you get excited with it um not really
with gambling it was no i didn't really the drugs though like you're going out with your mates and
you know there's a gang and you know tonight we're going to get on it i think not so much by the
drugs but just the social aspect of it was certainly something um yeah there was a time
in my life where i couldn't have four beers without like having a mental trigger like okay
it's time to do cocaine yeah and have another 40 vodkas yeah because beers don't work anymore
get on to something else that's it and uh stuff oh i'm getting too drunk i better get on the gear
to sober up to sober up
by the way now i feel so i'm going to get under the drink exactly because i can drink more until
a little holy shit it's thursday and you've been going for four days pretty fucking weird eh yeah
how the fuck do we uh think that way i don't know yeah when i think back it just how fucked up i was
like i would often go four or five days without sleep just just a never-ending drinking and drug
cycle and like yeah it's just what what a waste of um of my brain cells but also just my life
i do so much fun shit every day and i'm just i i can't look back so you're drug free drug free
yeah i drink alcohol but drug free be more moderate as a drinker yeah very much so yeah
i don't really drink spirits it's just a couple of beers at gigs yeah yeah so okay so tell me
about the pizza business so i was selling drugs for many many years and that went from me just
selling magic mushrooms to then over the uh that and that was a small business at the time i was
but every year it got bigger and bigger as more people heard about it and and mushrooms became
more mainstream there was a time where the fuck were you growing them you let us say my mate um
was growing them in his house and they started like it's just like one little container to by
the end it was like a whole house uh it was like you know a pretty big operation and we were growing
like kilos and kilos of it every week and what i was we were doing was um dehydrating the mushrooms
getting all the moisture out of them then blending up blending it up into a powder
and putting them into one gram capsules because i found that that was just an easier way for me to
sell them but also um the taste was average so it was just an easier way just to digest them
so it didn't taste like dirt like exactly right i mean yeah if you just follow the gelatin capsule
then your body yeah yeah yeah but so that was a business now so that was a business that grew and
grew and grew and there was a time where it was only busy during like summer when people were
going on like camping trips and then i'd have this huge spike around the vivid light festival
in winter yeah yeah
when everyone's tripping out going to see the lights but then over over the course of many
many years that just became a huge business and so then i expanded into mdma and acid and ketamine
and cocaine because everyone would always come and ask me because i'm going to a music festival
or something they'd be like what else you got so in the end i started catering to all of that just
as a one-stop shop which people found to be quite convenient and so by the time covid came around
and i'd stopped gambling i had a partner and i i would got into my gambling and so the money
i needed i need something to do with this and cash so cash and so hard to spend yeah hard to spend
i mean i tried my best mark i was putting about eight grand of coke up my nose a week and i was
spending a fortune on eating out at restaurants what period we're talking about 20s early 20s
this is uh no this is recently this would have been like uh when i was 35 so what's a gram of
coke cost now gram of coke is like 300 bucks and that's not even a gram that's like 0.7 of actual
coke so uh three and a half grand of coke is like 300 bucks and that's not even a gram that's like
300 bucks that's uh you know three grams a thousand 24 24 grams a week well i was i'm
talking like wholesale what it cost to me so i was doing about 28 grams of coke a week
fucking hell yeah i wasn't fucking about so you would have been completely not incoherent but you
would have been completely um um not in reality yeah the whole world's fine exactly nothing's
gonna happen no exactly i i think i i thought i was too smart and i thought i was just too
lucky to ever get caught and so i was just selling drugs out of my house in surrey hills
out of a townhouse but it was like such a big house and it was on a busy street that i thought
people were never going to notice people just coming to knock on my door every now and then
and i had a business which was just people that had to be referred by someone so i didn't have
any like weirdos scratching at the door at 3am um and so yeah the money started to pile up and
i needed something to do with it and so i'd ordered so many pizzas during covid and i didn't
like any of them i was like i'm gonna open my own pizza restaurant and i was like i'm gonna open my
own pizza restaurant and so i just contacted a mate of mine who's a chef and told him my idea and
uh then we opened up a pizza bar in king's cross what was it called called brooklyn crispy which
was selling like american style thin and crispy pizzas and i had two dogs that my girlfriend my
fiancee was getting puppuccinos for like um those like dog cappuccinos and so i was like well we
should do something for dogs so we we started selling dog pizzas which was like a nutritionally
approved pizzas for dogs and all the gays of potts point have dogs instead of kids so they'd
$50 on a human menu and $100 on the dog pizza seriously it was crazy good business they're
actually good business decisions though yeah yeah i had good ideas it was just a shame that yeah
it all kind of fell apart but so what happened you were you pushing the cash through the joint
though not really you didn't want to launder the money you weren't it was it was just to try and
make the business a successful business i wasn't trying to clean the the drug money through it
but and and i what i realized was just how much fucking money it was
cost to get a restaurant off the ground yeah you know and successfully you need to yeah you need to
run at a loss for quite a long time i think before that's why i think most people that are running
restaurants must be drug dealers or crims because i don't know you have to have a big financial
runway just to get it to be that's a very interesting point too by the way like how do
they fund these things yeah a lot of people borrow money against the house or their parents house or
they're gonna borrow money from the bank but you need a lot i think you need to be running at a
loss for like at least two years before you start to really become profitable most small businesses
like a lot of them probably 18 months to two years is about the period it takes to start to
break even even yeah so so so you run at the run a piece of joint i've had plenty of people tell
me that like trying to have a money laundering operation through a restaurant was a bad idea i
should have had either a hair salon and you just pour shampoo and conditioner down the drain and
say you've done you know two or two thousand wash and dries today or maybe like a doggy daycare
just say yeah we we dog sat 100 dogs today would have been a much cheaper operation than trying to
run a fucking restaurant
but but but but that but they're good experiences i guess for you too
yep yeah i was very proud of it like in my head like this is the delusion i had i was going to
open five or six restaurants that's the word delusional yeah i was going to open about six
or seven of these restaurants around sydney and then i was going to stop drug dealing once like
these were profitable and and then live off that because you wanted to get out of drug dealing
yeah exactly i didn't think it was it was a long-term thing forever and so i did in my head
i thought i had an exit strategy but i also spoke
to a lot of guys when i was locked up and you know that um you know i think they would have got
to the point where i had six or seven businesses i want to come up with another excuse to keep drug
dealing like i think it's too easy you just you just think it's never gonna end you think you're
too clever you just yeah you think that you can just keep going going there are many guys that
actually like set a goal and say oh this is when i'm out it's funny i know i've had discussions
with my sons and other people about this sort of stuff saying unfortunately the media tv etc can
glamorize drug dealing and i've had discussions with my sons and other people about this sort of
dealers or criminality basically and of the uh criminals that i've known in my life um very few
of them have actually landed landed successfully they're either in jail dead or desperate yeah
over a period of time yeah one of those three not many of them actually turn out any good
like and it's never glamorous but usually none of those three glamorous that's for sure yeah
occasionally might be one who just skates through but sort of many but it's complete about change
about face they completely change their life yeah and they might just skate through get through
but always looking over the back of their fucking shoulder yeah thinking uh is someone going to bring
something up from my past is the cop is going to knock on my door because someone's giving me up on
something or other or is there somebody i crossed who's going to you know spray my house with
bullets or something it's a pretty it's a shit go at the end of the day yeah it is not too long ago
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slash retail go to shopify.com slash retail so what happened you got arrested yeah my house got
on the 4th of june 2021 i was at home it was a friday afternoon i was high on cocaine i hadn't
slept in about two or three days i was watching some guy ritchie movie and then i just heard this
loud crack in my front door and i just i thought that some junkie or something in surrey hills had
fallen into my door but then i heard police search warrant oh fuck and it was just so surreal like i
don't know what like how much time went on between everything because it all seemed in slow motion to
me but like next thing you know
the raptor scored is smashing through my door with a battering ram i ran upstairs and started
flushing drugs down the toilet i heard him breach the house and then i ran and hid behind the
bedroom door and i was like fat like i was big at the time and i'm just like trying to hide behind
this door hopefully they won't see me you know like you know like pick a move so there they found
me really quickly and they threw me to the ground and yeah they told me that i had a the i i wrote a
joke about it this is like one of my first jokes i wrote was that this raptor scored guy like
he had like his knee in the back of my um thigh and he just goes stay down you fat cunt you got a
tiny cock and i had pants on so i was like how do you know and i was so the joke i wrote was they
must have had me under surveillance if they knew i had a small cock in your bathroom right so so
yeah it was just a crazy experience that i just sat on that on the couch as the house just was
filled with cops and they issued me the search warrant and went through the house and found uh
found drugs everywhere because at that point i was i was too fucked up like i had a stash house where
the drugs but because i was so coked up i got complacent and just like instead of going back
and forth back and forth i just bring too much over to the house and so yeah it was just uh i
mean it was it was a bad day to get caught but it could have been it could have been worse i could
have had more in there but so what did you get what did you get convicted of i got convicted
of large commercial supply of uh silicone which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms uh lsd
and so large commercial supply of mushrooms and acid the supply of mdma and then because there
was a backlog of cases because of covert they uh allowed me to plea um they knocked down the
cocaine and ketamine that i had to personal use um which were about half an ounce each and funnily
enough that's they probably that's within the realms of what was personal use for me but but
the law usually says that they're not if you're in that kind of level so what was your what was
your sentence so i was in i was locked up in maximum security remand for like four months i
was in park lee prison and long bay jail and then i eventually got caught in a prison and i was
granted bail to my parents place where i was under house arrest so i wasn't allowed to leave
the house unless i was in a company no no ankle bracelet but um the cops were checking regularly
this is bail this is bail yeah yeah so i was under house arrest i wasn't allowed to leave
the house unless i was a company my parents who were both in their mid-70s and so when i
first saw an ad for open mic comedy competition and decided that i should go and start doing
open mics i had to bring my mom along to the shows and as part of your bail condition i had to go to
yeah well i had to i had to bring into the show and then i had to ask if i could go on early
because i had to get home from my curfew and so i started doing that and that started doing
going well and so when i got sentenced in july 2022 uh i got sentenced to an intensive corrections
order ico and so i'm essentially doing a prison sentence in the community right now
you're on parole basically basically yeah so i have to get permission to leave new south wales
still till christmas this year and uh i had to do 200 hours community service but one of the
things that kept me out of prison was i mean firstly i was doing clean piss tests i was doing
drug counseling i i had a full-time employment um but also the judge liked that i was doing
stand-up he wasn't one he'd heard before and he thought that was a very positive sign of
rehabilitation oh yeah and and did it have anything to do with the style of stand-up you're
doing so in other words sort of admitting or talking about the things no we tried to avoid
we didn't talk about content the content of the comedy uh that could have been a risk if he knew
that i was joking
about getting arrested to go to prison and joking about being a drug dealer that may have um brought
up you know questions of remorse or anything like that but um so we didn't get into the content so
that's mad though so you eventually found your purpose but you had to get arrested to do that
right and by the way how'd you feel um being locked up in put in remand i don't know where
you first went to you would have gone to civil war i guess but park parkley parkley so you're
on remand and you're like day one i mean did they put you out of surrey hills somewhere to the first
police center yeah so you go to the surrey hills police hq for a night so you were fucked up down
in the dungeons how'd you feel oh i mean i hadn't slept in days so i just tried to sleep yeah just
tried to sleep it off and were you sharing the cell i was sharing the cell with a few other guys
and was that confronting for you not really um i think that uh i i what i've discovered about
myself is that i'm quite resilient um you know you don't really know what you've got in you until
you get tested and so i've i've found myself i've found myself i've found myself i've found myself
okay in all those situations i was just like look you know this is what's happening just we'll deal
with it one step at a time yeah and so i was still deluded though i thought i was going to get
bail i thought i i was going to front court and just get bail that day and go back to trade to
drug dealing really yeah i thought i'll just i'll get some new stock and i'll be back on the street
bang bang bang start making moves but i got refused bail because i was on two uh indictables and
on a truck to park lee prison and what about guilt in your family and stuff like that how that'll work
so yeah i had my first phone call with my parents i think it was like my second day at park lee prison
i was able to make a phone call to them and that was hard like it hit them really hard and my dad
told me that my mom had like fainted um i think was she was having some health issues but this
didn't help um that it's exacerbated it and then they said to me that they thought me going to
prison might be the best thing that's ever happened to me and what'd you think about that
i thought that they were probably right oh really even though yeah you didn't resent that comment
no no i didn't i thought maybe maybe they were right and so it turned out you know over the next
few weeks as kind of my fiance dumped me when i was in prison and mates became more and more flaky
that the only people that were constant there was my parents and so i spoke to them every day on the
phone and i think that this kind of the stress of this really brought us closer together and i guess
the i guess the the gap in our relationship that had been me being an unreliable drug addict for so
long you like the black sheep of the family or uh my brother certainly had a fair crack at it but
yeah i think i'd probably consider that he'll be dark gray i'm the black sheep yeah yeah you
eclipsed him yeah well into so you i think you did a skit or you do a skit around uh the meals in
jail yes tell me about that well when i was the when you first arrived in prison in 2021 it was
right so you spent the first two weeks in quarantine so i had no tv nothing to read for
the first 10 days and so for me having just been pinched and coming down from drugs i was in a
really negative headspace and i had i had no escape i was just stuck in my own thoughts like
you fuck it what have you done and so as soon as i got a pencil and a piece of paper i just
was like i need to just have some kind of constructive outlet
foodie and uh you know i just thought and a strong writer i thought this will be entertaining
to just start to review my prison food for my lunches and dinners like you know as if i'm going
to a restaurant or something so i just started scoring about a 10 on like an adjusted prison
scale because i was like this is you know prison food it's not the real world i need to be a bit
more generous with the scale and so i just started doing that every day and i did it for the whole
125 days that i was locked up and it was just a kind of a fun distraction and i use it kind of
a bit of a journal and so then it would be fun to just argue with my cellmates about like i'd be
like oh i'm giving that a 6.2 they'd be like you're mad that's a four so yeah it was just it
was just a fun but you're good at creating distractions i think i think so yeah i think
i am and and then you make it funny yeah so i started writing the food reviews and then i
started writing jokes a little while later once i uh had sobered up and got off drugs and had a
a lot of questions like um you know if you could just start your life over from scratch what would
you do and the only answer in my head was stand-up comedy really yeah it was the only one it was just
like so loud in my head but you've never done stand-up comedy i know but i used to go to it
a lot and sometimes i would sit there and write jokes on my phone but i never looked into like
where was an open mic or how you'd even go about it but i think deep down somewhere in me you just
always knew that answer but i just hadn't um is it scary doing stand-up comedy i think
yeah it was terrifying the first the first few times i mean it still is terrifying now but now i
know that's the thing i have to do but when you first get up there and you start talking
and everyone's quiet because they're listening to you yeah and you haven't said a punchline yet
i'm like fuck this is and then you say and then you suddenly get to a punchline people laugh and
suddenly relief washes over you but because that's your reward that's your drug yes absolutely yeah
yes so you know your brain uh gets a response and it sort of floods the system with serotonin
instead of cocaine doing it and then that's when i think about it and i think about it and then i'm like
doing it exactly you're doing it you're i think that people that are that have very addictive
personalities they often focus on the the negative side but if you can find positive outlets for it
an addictive personality can be a superpower totally powerful yeah completely powerful i'm
noticing that you move around do you have adhd yes yeah yeah so yeah so but did you know you
had that before i did i got diagnosed when i was about eight years old but it didn't really start
to become a problem with me until i was about 16 did they jam you with ritalin dexamphetamine
okay so okay you're on dexy so oh not anymore i haven't no you were but you were yeah but that
because sometimes that's the start of the addiction like yes for me i've seen it happen before and uh
you know you stop taking dex because someone says you shouldn't be taking this because basically
it's amphetamine speed you shouldn't be taking so many because you shouldn't take that many in
the first first place but that you start self-medicating take eight and then you then
you stop one day and if someone says we stop okay now what am i going to fucking do so you pick some
other drug yeah yeah and it just cycles and cycles
and cycles and it becomes i was grinding my teeth and having trouble going to bed when i was 16 17
because i was on so much dexamphetamine do you hold your hand like that on purpose no because
you move your hand moves around are you you're what i'm trying to work out is you are you
conscious of it no i'm not no i'm self-conscious of it's probably another thing not really no
sometimes i'm just my legs are just going crazy it's natural yeah yeah it doesn't bother me because
i mean i i have family members who do this sort of stuff i get it i understand it it's a good way
to lose weight too by the way but no because you're moving constantly moving yeah no no totally
you're you're you're i mean if you if you i don't know if you ever done one of these but if you
ever sat down done a um metabolic rate test no so it's a test they sit you down you've got to be
relaxed you're going to sit down relaxed um or in your in your normal relaxed state so in your
case you'd be moving you can you can move around like that but they put a mask on you and they
measure um the amount of oxygen you take in the amount of carbon dioxide you push out and um they
can actually work out how um how many calories that you consume um at rest at your
rest yep your rest would be different my risk because you've got adhd so um and they can they
can they'll come up and say something to you like um you know uh you consume two and a half thousand
calories just breathing sitting thinking and your brain consumes most of the calories there are
that you can consume out of every part of your whole body and someone with adhd would consume
far greater amount of calories than say something like me therefore if you
balance your diet out you can lose weight really quickly yes they're
very fucking much at all but it's even more impressive when i get fat because that means
i'm really sick of the beers and eat burgers you must be fucking consuming a hell of a lot of
calories relative to your burn yeah that's quite interesting um and and and adhd people actually
have a have a superpower when it comes to not putting weight on if they watch what they eat
yep it actually is a superpower yeah when i when i focus on my training and i'm actually like
counting my calories like i i just smash it very quickly yeah very very quickly yeah so go to jail
um you're um cognizant family cognizance in other words you're sort of under house arrest sort of
thing um you're you're on bail to go through a period then you get sentenced sorry you got
sentenced and you got um you're on parole effectively um you've got built yourself a
new business um that being well there's a few parts of your business so tell me it's just not
just stand-up comedy talk about the podcast so yeah i got out of jail i mean one of the things
that was crazy about the the prison thing was when i
first started thinking about doing stand-up was i was was because i saw so many funny things
happen in jail like there was a time where i saw the guards talking they were calling out for a
david wilson or like david wilson to the office david wilson and then a whole yard of crims started
going wilson wilson like i'm doing their like tom hanks castaway impression going like wilson i'm
sorry and i remember laughing so much that i forgot about the where i was like i forgot about
the fact that i was in prison i forgot about the guards and the fences and the cameras and
and i was like well that's pretty powerful stuff if laughter can make me forget i'm in prison so
that's when i was like i need to i need to do something with this were you doing any stand-up
in prison no i mean in my cell to my cellies yeah not really in the yard because you know if you say
a joke that goes the wrong way to a guy in the yard you can have some pretty serious consequences
but yeah it completely changed my life they have nights and stuff like that like uh entertainment
nights like maybe in like sentence prison and maybe like when it wasn't covered but like
nothing there was nothing going on during covid like they had no classes they had nothing it was a
pretty grim um situation and that's why like i think that they had the they had the parkway prison
right when i was there because the guys were just exploding because they had nothing to do and
and family visits were cancelled it was just oh that's right yeah there's a powder about that yeah
yeah um but yeah so i got out and started doing stand-up and then that started going
pretty good so how do you do sound like i mean like you said you started doing something but
does someone invite you do you have to put an application i mean how's it work you just look
i mean i'm sure in many major cities there's a facebook group about their open mic nights
and so i just looked up where an open mic night was and you just put your name in a bucket
and with like 20 30 other guys mostly dudes and you just get your name randomly drawn out and
that's when it's your turn to do five minutes on the mic and just at a club or something it's
usually at a bar uh at a bar in a small room where is basically no one else there other than
other comedians right that are trying to make it so how do you get your feedback
well that's the problem right it's because you've either got a bunch of guys that are studying on
their phone what they're going to say or they're jaded because they've been doing open mic comedy
nights for six years and haven't gotten in anywhere so they don't really want to laugh
so you've got to really um be funny or they've heard it all before yeah exactly i mean there's
a lot of guys talking about wanking for five minutes and they're like oh yeah just another
here you go another cum joke okay so i you know you you start there that's where you even if no
you still get the practice of saying the words yeah in front of people yeah and so that's that's
important but you're not getting the vibe though sometimes practice sometimes look i found if you're
going to an open mic for the first time um and you're doing jokes i haven't heard you say before
then you'll get a you usually you'll get an honest reaction particularly if you start to get laughs
early then guys will stop what they're doing and pay attention but i found soon what i realized was
that in in open mic the open mic world you're going to get a lot of people that are going to
go to four gigs or five gigs a week it's all the same guys at every gig so you're if you're telling
the same jokes four nights a week then they're not going to be laughing as much by the fourth
fifth time it sort of sounds like a startup world where they all they're always meeting up the
startup world you know like all the startups like you know business startups they're all going oh
oh shit there's a google conference on we all turn up or there's some other thing on we'll turn up
and there's the same dudes all the time you know and girls guys it's the same gang must be so many
of these subcultures where it's just the same people going to everything right and so what i
what i found was the only way i could get a reaction out of these guys is if i write wrote
a new five minutes of jokes every couple of nights so i was just like writing writing performing like
trying new stuff all the time and i think that made me a better comedian very quickly because
i was just constantly writing new stuff and so i went and did an open my comedy competition which
is australia's biggest one called raw and i got through um to the state final of that and and then
i got how much how much time was on stage for that
at five minutes only five minutes five minutes yeah and then so you perform at the comedy store
and i got through to the state final which was pretty crazy because i'd only been doing comedy
for about maybe four weeks at that stage and so yeah so it was awesome and so i got to perform at
the comedy store in the state final and i didn't get through but um that was enough for me to open
the door for me to get an opportunity at better gigs in sydney which was uh rooms where it wasn't
just you performing in front of other of my comedians was proper audiences which is what
you want to do right yeah yeah
and then suddenly i had all this stuff that um that i was able to test in front of a proper
audience and and then you're getting then you're getting genuine laughs and we and do you get gigs
as a result of that so like paid gigs you do that that's still quite slow um you know most of the
time in sydney in a lot of towns you're doing 10 minute spots for for no money um just because you
have the the privilege of being able to test out your material i was gonna say you're doing that
for audience right to do that for audience yeah and then you're getting genuine laughs and then you're
building audiences and to test audiences exactly so it's like practice exactly so now i get both
unpaid and paid gigs paid gigs i'm doing my best stuff because i'm getting paid to do that but at
unpaid gigs i'm just running a whole bunch of new stuff i'm doing whatever i want to do
just so that i can make it a learning i'm getting something out of it myself
now tell me about the podcast so i have a podcast that i do with uh three comedian two other
comedians dan muggleton and tom wickham and i think we just saw that there was just not that many
podcasts by comedians in Australia.
Yeah, there aren't that many, particularly not ones that have a group
of guys together.
Who are actual comedians as opposed to, say, the Life Uncut girls,
they're funny but they're not actual comedians.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I'm talking about like stand-up comics doing a show together.
But what are you doing?
What's the sort of general content?
What are we talking about here?
Like you're taking the piss out of each other or?
Yeah, it's a combination between just anything,
what's happened to us that week or things in the news or just taking the piss
out of each other but we just talk shit for an hour a week.
And, yeah, it's slowly growing but it's awesome because then those people
that love the show will come to our live shows, right?
Which is awesome.
There's quite a few people that will listen to the podcast that went
and saw all three of us at our live shows this year.
So that's the dream is to, you know, have people.
It's to build an ongoing comedy relationship.
Between people that only get to see you live once a year and people
that want to hear about what your funny take is on various things
throughout the week.
Are you playing into that or?
I mean you've taken a piss out of Trump or Biden or?
Sometimes but it's not really.
What do you really, where are you going with it?
What do you normally do?
Is it situational?
What are we talking about?
I mean I was talking about, I went and saw two live Terminator events
last week so I talked about that.
And I saw they had Terminator 1 at the Opera House with like
a live orchestra and then they had, I saw Terminator 2 at the Hayden Orpheum
and they had the bad guy, Robert Patrick, from that movie like there
in the audience doing a Q&A.
So I just talked about the funny stuff from that.
So do you sit there, for example, in those two examples in an audience
and you look for what, you're looking for what you think you can make humorous
or are you taking something out of it that actually is humorous?
You just see the natural humor in it, yeah.
So there was like a guy that was so excited to ask Robert Patrick a question.
About when he watched the premiere of Terminator 2, whether he knew like
that he was part of something that was going to be so historic and special.
And so then Robert Patrick said, oh, not really, I was just there stoned
with my friends and was just like, oh, cool.
So like the humor was in seeing this guy who'd obviously spent so much time
and he was so excited to ask this question and it was such an
underwhelming answer.
I was like, that's amazing.
But see, that's an interesting skill that you have, that you can see that humor.
Whereas the poor guy answered the question, no,
Phil fucking like let down like a heap because he was expecting
some overwhelming outcome.
Like, well, this is my lifetime dream or something or whatever.
Yeah, we didn't know it was going to be such a huge cultural moment.
We changed the course of history.
That was the answer he wanted.
It's just like, oh, not really, dude, I was stoned.
But do you think the guy answered the question,
do you think he was taking the piss or?
I think he would have had a real answer in his head,
but I think that was awesome.
I think it's also true that he was stoned at the time,
but I think that there would have been part of his head that was like,
holy shit, this movie's amazing, right?
But it was just such a funny answer.
That is fucking hilarious because I can imagine the guy sitting there
very nervous about asking the question for a start,
like getting really nervous.
Pick me, pick me, pick me.
And he's been thinking about it for days, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck yeah, pick me, pick me.
You're like, ah, fuck, I got picked, here's my chance.
And he probably would be a little bit shaky on your voice.
And then you just go, your fucking shoulders have dropped forward.
So you're doing a tour.
There's a tour coming up.
What's that all about?
So this tour is I'm doing my debut show,
which is the show I did last year at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
So at the time I signed up to do Melbourne Comedy Festival,
I had maybe 20 minutes of jokes that I thought worked.
And when you do a comedy festival, when you're doing a solo show,
you've got to do, they say an hour,
but it's usually about 50 minutes of material.
And so I am such a good person with a deadline.
I was like, I'm just going to put my hand up to say I want to do this.
And then I'll hopefully figure out another 30 minutes of material.
And so you apply to the festival to try and get a room run
by the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
I got rejected for one of those, which is quite common when you're a nobody.
And so they have a bunch of other rooms that are just run through the festival,
run kind of not by the festival but are available.
And so for those you've got to pitch yourself, right?
So I tried everyone.
You pitch in the room or you pitch to get into the room?
You're asking someone who's booking that room,
whether you can be part of their line-up for the festival.
And so I got rejected by pretty much everyone.
The only one that said yes to me was a small cocktail bar
and they offered me a time of 10.40 at night, right?
10.40 to do 16 shows.
I was like, I'll do it.
I just want to be there.
16 shows for 10.40, 16 days.
So I'm doing over the course of three weeks, I'm doing 16 one-hour shows.
At 10.40 at night.
In a cocktail bar.
And so I'm doing on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night, 10.40 night.
And so I thought, fuck, this is going to be hard.
But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I was the only show,
I think on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, on past 9.30 at night.
So for anyone looking for late-night comedy, I was the only option.
And so the show was called Jokes About the Time I Went to Prison.
I thought because I'm a nobody and I guess my PR background,
I was like I've got to just put it on the label, put it right on the can.
And so I think people are drinking.
They're out at night.
They're like, oh, do you want to go see some idiot?
Talk about prison for an hour.
Turns out people do.
So people turned up and I started doing the show.
The first night I had like five tickets sold and then 17 people showed up on the door.
And so I ended up doing the show in a room that could only fit about 40 to 22 people.
And I was like – and it was amazing.
The show went so well and I was like I am going to kill it here.
It's going to be so good.
And then the next night I had four tickets sold and I'm like, okay, that's fine.
People will buy on the door.
No one else turned up.
So I did the show to four people.
And I was like, wow, okay, this is quite a – comedy is –
this is going to be a roller coaster.
But over the next few weeks, word started to spread.
I got some reviewers in that gave me some really good reviews
and I ended up getting nominated for Best Newcomer at the festival.
And off that, that has completely changed my life really
because now I get to tour around the country as a professional comedian
and like now I'm doing – I've just finished doing the festivals this year
with my second show and I had fantastic numbers.
We were sold out most nights.
So the tour you're going to do now –
The tour I'm going to do in August –
Is your tour though.
It's your running.
Yeah, it's just me touring around to about something crazy
like 24 towns around Australia.
Give me some examples.
Where are you going?
Like Tamworth or that type of regional area?
I'm going to Newcastle, Albury, Bunbury, Western Australia, Perth, Brisbane,
Gold Coast, Sunny Coast, Toowoomba, Darwin, Launceston, Hobart.
So how do people find out about it?
Like where do they go to book it?
So alist.com.au is the website or my –
I've got it all listed on my socials.
I'm very fortunate that my socials have like blown up crazy.
I'm going to talk about your Instagram or your socials in particular.
But so the show – I'm doing my debut show around the country
because a lot of people haven't – most people haven't seen it
and I have a book coming out at the same time.
So I'm going to be taking the book on the road to sell at the shows as well.
And what's the book about?
The book's about my crazy life.
It's about me being kind of an aimless person that fell into drug dealing
and how that escalated and my time in prison and how that became
such a life-changing experience for me and turned me towards comedy.
So it's called The Profound Benefits of a Stint in Prison.
So it's sort of like an autobiography.
How much of that is therapeutic for you?
Like how much of that is like selfishly done?
I don't mean in a bad sense but like –
Therapeutic for you to sit down and actually write about what you have
and haven't done.
The book and comedy have been hugely therapeutic.
When I first started doing stand-up, it was because I was pretty angry.
I wrote from rage, right?
I was just – I was so lost and confused and angry
and the only constructive outlet I could think of was to take the piss
out of myself and my dumb mistakes.
And so to weaponise that and kind of own it, own my dumb life and mistakes
and just get up on stage and be like, hey, this is – I'm an idiot.
this is my dumb life, I found so cathartic and empowering.
And so the book was similar.
It started just as, I guess, a glorified diary,
just me just trying to put on the page all the steps that had led me here.
And so when I started going well at comedy,
I had a few publishers reach out to me to say,
hey, you should consider writing a book.
And I was like, well, you're funny.
You say that I've written most of one.
And so that made that whole process a lot faster.
But do you ever worry, because a lot of people would feel this way,
your, I hate the fucking word, but your vulnerability,
like you're out there putting it all on the line.
You're just telling everyone about everything.
And to some extent you don't give a shit.
Maybe you don't give a shit.
I'm assessing that.
Does it ever bother you that everybody knows everything about you?
And maybe do you ever think to yourself, well, wow,
they know about my mom and dad's kid.
And my brother's brother.
And one day you might be a father yourself.
You're married, you've got kids.
Like I said, one day you might have your own kids.
Do you ever worry about that?
I don't think so because when I.
I'm not convinced when you say I don't think so.
When I was sat in prison and I started thinking about my two options.
I could either get out and go back to like a white collar job
and hopefully pretend like it never happened.
Or because at that point there was only one article about my arrest
And I was actually being locked up, it was in the Daily Mail.
And I was like, well, who the fuck reads that anyway?
Sorry, Daily Mail.
They're writing it now.
I'm good friends with them now.
They like covering me because I'm such a weird fish.
But they, I was like, well, I can either go back to my normal life
and pretend this never happened or I can do the complete opposite
and just own the fuck out of it publicly.
But for some reason in my head I was like, that sounds so crazy,
I better go to work.
And so I thought there was part of me which was like, surely I'm going
to get booed off stage and have people hate me for this.
But I've had so many people, particularly older people that I thought
would be shocked by what I'm talking about come up to me afterwards
and be like, great stuff and amazing that you've turned your life around.
It's a good redemption story.
I get so many messages from people who have found something in me talking
about my life that's resonated with them.
I had one guy message me to say that he got out of prison
and just went on with his life and never talked about it
and nobody knows about it.
And seeing me own it has inspired him to go and do public speaking courses
so that he can start to talk about the mistakes he made that have led him here.
And I thought that was really cool.
Well, gosh, it's funny.
I was just thinking about something you said, the Daily Mail.
I was thinking about something.
There's not that much of a gap between finding, being angry about a situation
or seeing a situation being funny.
I mean, you seem to be able to actually lean into not being angry
and seeing it as a funny outcome.
Well, I think, you know, if you break down the things that make you angry
and also like how people act when they're angry, a lot of it,
if you just stood back from it, can be funny, right?
Like Bill Burr is one of the best comedians in the world.
And he has like just got this hilarious rage.
And it was like I can either use this anger in a really unconstructive way
and probably get myself into more trouble or I can use it in the best way I know how
and quite an Australian way and just use it like to take the piss out of myself, right?
And so talking about the Raptor Squad raiding my house
and being on the prison transport truck and just like me trying to figure out prison
and going on dates when I was on bail, like all this stuff from my dumb life was funny
and people agree.
No, you chose to just see the funny side.
I chose to see the funny side, absolutely.
You could have also said, fuck this, I'm angry.
Yeah, but I've gone down that road before and I just
and it doesn't lead you anywhere positive.
And so I was just like I tried to weaponise it in a positive way
and it's completely changed my life.
Ever since I've been on this path with comedy, opportunity
after opportunity has kept coming to me and doors keep opening
and it just makes me know that I made the right decision.
Are you getting the right?
And you're also getting sort of the chemical rewards in your brain too.
It's giving you the right rewards.
I mean you do find there is a law of diminishing returns
when you're doing the same joke for the 200th time.
That's why I find you're going to constantly be coming up with new stuff
because when you have a new joke that you've just written and you test it out
and it kills straight away, it's such a rush.
Yeah, well, it's funny you're talking about Daily Mail
and that's the difference between rage or anger and comedy.
I mean, many years ago I'd been in a gym down in Dallin Roadie
and I was walking and there's a market up here at King's Cross
and I thought I'll walk up there and I'm going to get a juice
and shit like that anyway.
So I got changed, put a pair of shorts on, a summer T-shirt on,
a pair of sand shoes, walked up and I was walking across the road
and I thought I saw this dude taking a photo of me.
And so I walked down a bit further down the cross and I confronted him.
I said, mate, what the fuck are you doing?
He said, oh, no, I'm just a photographer.
Just taking photographs of the architecture around here.
And I said, yeah, but, mate, like, are you sure you didn't take a photograph
of me across the road like that?
Anyway, I didn't think much about it.
And the next day my kids fucking started texting me
and they'd been reading the Daily Mail.
And there's a photograph of me walking across the road
with an angry fucking face on my face looking at this dude, right?
A real cranky look on my face.
But the funny thing, my fly was undone.
It was completely agape.
It was completely agape.
And that was the photograph he was taking.
I was taking the photograph and he was like,
here's my Boris fucking walking with his fly undone.
And I was angry with it, but my kids thought it was fucking hilarious.
And there's not much difference.
Like, my response is fuck him.
I want to punch him in the head.
But looking back at it now, do you find it funny?
But now I think it's funny.
It was a funny outcome, you know.
I mean, exactly the same, Mark.
Like me, when I got raided and this guy told me I had a tiny cock,
it wasn't funny at the time.
But it was when I was locked up.
Well, actually, that's hilarious.
It did be hilarious.
Do you think it was half funny?
I think these guys that raid, like the Raptors squad,
when they're raiding, they're so pumped up on Red Bulls
or whatever the fuck they take.
And they're so used to going into places with guys that have got weapons
and stuff like that.
They just got so pumped up.
But when they find the bad guy, right, they just want to mouth off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that that's it.
They're like, fucking stay down, you motherfucker.
So they just say anything.
And they probably go back later on and talk about it and say,
I told him he had a small cock and then he'll have a good laugh.
How many times has that guy been there?
How many times has that guy been sent my clip of stand-up?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's his best joke now.
Okay, so where do you see yourself going?
Like, I mean, do you make money out of this?
Is it giving you a living?
I mean, you're not making the same money you made when you were selling drugs.
Yes, I'm not making drug money anymore, but I'm making a basic living
out of stand-up now, which is fucking hard to do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I'm only been doing it for two and a half years.
So, you know, there are guys who are ten years in that are barely making
It's not good living out of stand-up.
Yeah, because I want to ask you about that because, like,
before you were a drug dealer and you were making shit like that.
I mean, you had piles of cash and shit like that.
How do you reconcile those two?
Like, you work so hard.
I mean, sure, there's a lot of enjoyment out of what you do,
but you don't make much money out of it.
How do you reconcile the difference between the two?
I think that money earned from hard work always feels a lot better,
But also, like, I'm cool with it because last year I did stand-up
and I made fuck all.
This year I've made a bit more.
And next year I'll make even more than that.
And so I can see that there's a clear trajectory here.
And I love what I do.
It's my favourite thing in the world to do.
So I'm not too worried about the money because it fills me, right.
It's the most fun job I've ever had in my life.
And so to make any money out of it is crazy.
But to make a living out of it, even a basic living right now,
I feel like I'm living the dream.
And so anything else is extras.
And just on your socials, I mean, what are you doing,
TikTok as well as Instagram or just Instagram?
TikTok and Instagram.
I've got no idea what I'm doing on either.
I just post stuff.
Yeah, but that's your thing.
And how's the numbers going?
Like you're getting good engagement?
I mean, last year I think in April I had like 6,000 followers on Instagram.
Now I've got 212 or something like that.
So it's grown a lot.
And do you know your audience though?
I mean, on Instagram, for example, on your socials,
do you know your audience?
Is it like young guys, young girls, what are we looking at?
It's like 93% dudes, right.
But the thing, the interesting thing is the social numbers are the same
as my show numbers because women buy tickets to comedy shows much more
Yeah, any comedy.
But particularly, you know, I'm seeing.
Like groups of girls.
Well, or just take their boyfriend or partner or husband, whatever.
Right, right, right.
But they'll be the one who's the instigator of buying tickets.
Let's go to comedy.
There aren't groups of like usually like four or five dudes being like,
boys, comedy night tonight, you know.
Fellas, get the lads, we're doing stand-up.
No, they go to the pub, they watch sport, you know.
Let's go with state of origin.
I think the arts is gay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's just, I mean, it's interesting that there's that skew on social
but then that's not the, it's certainly not the skew at a live show.
Social is your social, given that you've got a couple hundred thousand,
is that about sort of trying to sell something through that?
Like, I mean, how do you, you use the word weaponised comedy,
but how do you commercialise something like that?
Yeah, I think it is, even if people don't necessarily follow me,
me putting stuff out on social media that's gone viral has certainly helped
with recognition of my face so that when there's ads out, either posters
or digital ads, they're like, oh, that guy's made me laugh before
and he's coming, he's doing a show.
Well, my son sent me a thing of you.
People take a punt far more if they know your face
and you've made them laugh before than if you're just putting up a poster
and they've never heard or seen you before.
So I think, I believe that all these things have to be connected.
And you build up over time.
And at some stage they'll interconnect.
Or they'll overlap each other and you'll get some benefits
from both to the other.
I definitely know that there are people that,
so I used to be part of this comedy channel called Yeah Mad,
which was the fastest growing comedy channel in the country,
and that brought a lot of people either to my social pages or to live shows.
So that's been a huge driver of it.
And so we're about to start a new comedy channel, me and a bunch of the guys
that were on that previous channel.
We're going to start that again in the next month or so.
And so I imagine that that'll grow very quickly and that'll be a driver of people
coming to live shows as well.
That's a collective of other comedians though.
So, I mean, how important is it for comedians to hang out together,
to lean on each other?
I mean, there's plenty of amazing comedians that are very antisocial.
I am such a social person and I try to introduce myself to everyone that I meet
in stand-up and to help them in any way I can.
And I think that,
I think that sometimes you don't really know the value straight away
of these friends until later.
If they're just vouching for you for an opportunity or a gig or whatever,
it just makes sense to me.
How important is gratefulness to you?
I mean, like as a, I don't know if it's an emotion or whatever,
is this a virtue of being grateful?
Grateful for what you're doing because that's one of the things
I just get out of this conversation.
I mean, it's not a big money-spinner as a comedian,
but gratefulness is important.
That being said, Mark, I think that, I mean, my management say to me
that I'm like they've never seen anyone selling as many tickets to shows
after two and a half years in comedy as me.
So the trajectory is very, very promising.
But what about gratefulness?
I mean, is that just grateful that you can get up and do this shit?
Oh, every time, man.
It's so surreal to me every time I get up,
particularly when I'm doing my live show, when I'm doing solo shows
and people have bought a ticket to come see me and spend an hour with me.
That seems still very sad.
And so I'm so grateful that they're there.
And then because of my socials and who I am,
at first it was people just going to see a comedy show or support the arts,
but now it's people that are coming specifically to see me.
And so I'm attracting my own audience, which makes,
which then means that the shows go even better because they know,
they've got a sense of what the content is going to be like,
which makes the much more enjoyable comedy show, right?
It's my favorite thing to do.
People ask me like,
how can you go a whole month touring around and doing an hour show every night?
Isn't that going to be draining?
And I'm like, no, I get energy from it.
my cup gets filled from performing and being around people.
So that's the easy part.
You know, it's interesting.
As you're talking,
I was just thinking about your dad's studies in theology as a Jesuit scholar
and the sort of things that they sort of study are concepts around virtues,
but there's not just a Google type of study.
It's a proper fucking study as to,
the concepts would sit behind things like gratefulness and,
sort of like takes you back.
You're taking yourself back,
maybe unknowingly,
right back to the sort of things your old man studied as a potential Jesuit deacon
to become a Jesuit priest,
which he never did,
fortunately for you.
It's just like a full circle nearly.
You're nearly going back to the sort of stuff that Jesuits would have taught you at review.
I'm not getting all weird about it,
but I'm just saying like it's a full circle for you.
I think I needed to have the fall to really appreciate everything though.
I think I needed that setback.
I hope that people can find a way to be on the most positive path
without having that fuck up where it all falls to shit.
But from my experience,
for a lot of people,
it isn't until that happens that they really figure out what their priorities are in life
and start to live their best life and appreciate things the most.
Whether that's a marriage breakdown or a job loss or a health concern
or for me going to prison.
But a lot of the time it's during those times of stress and failure
that people find something within themselves.
And that's the way it went for me.
I could have been bitter about losing my home and my fiance and my dogs and my mates.
I started to have gratitude about the fact that I still had my health and family
and there were friends that I never thought would be there that came out of the woodwork.
And now I'm on this amazing positive path with comedy.
And I'm much happier now living with my parents and doing stand up comedy
than I ever was making money as a drug dealer.
Which is crazy, right?
Andrew Hamilton, thanks so much.
That's pretty cool.
Very, very cool story.
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