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Please put your hands together and welcome to the stage,
Guy Montgomery!
Thank you. Yes.
I am also excited.
You guys, we've made a great decision.
Got a really good feeling about it.
And to top it all off,
I'm actually in a bit of a funny mood.
You know, which bodes well for this show, I think.
You know, you can't imagine how excited I was
when I heard I was doing stand up comedy this evening
I thought, yes, that's perfect.
You know, that's my job.
It's much better than when I show up
and they say, okay Guy,
you got to fix the pipes.
I think, guys,
I can't fix the pipes
and I can't do a single damn thing.
I don't know if you can tell by looking at me,
I'm someone who adds no practical value
in any given circumstance.
I have essentially made
it this far in life by being good for morale.
That's not so bad.
There are worse things to be than good for morale.
Bad for morale springs to mind.
But I'm lucky I found comedy.
You know, I remember when I first
looked for a job, it was in the newspaper
and at the bottom,
some of the listings, it would say
time wasters need not apply.
I remember seeing that and thinking Goddamn,
any time waster worth
their salt is going to take their pay
You got to look at this from their perspective.
They're sitting there,
combing through a newspaper
thinking, oh, no, just my luck,
There's no-one for me
to specifically antagonise today.
No, the plan is that I'm going to do the show,
so I'm going to stick to the plan.
Because even now, you know, we're having fun.
But to look at the time.
Yeah, so that might be the case.
It says here no time to dilly dally.
And that's a shame because it can be fun.
But I have not come out here this evening to dilly nor dally
and nor have I actually come out here
to fuck...
spiders.
Now, you're not going to believe what I tell you next,
but that colloquialism is only for Australia.
Can you imagine something as immediately
understandable as that, not making it worldwide?
It's just, you know, I'm sick of it.
You know, maybe, maybe tonight's the night.
Maybe the sole reason I came out here this evening,
is to scour the ceiling
in the hopes of finding some plucky young arachnid
who is up for it.
I'm not getting I'm not going to do it.
And it's just, as you know,
it's not fair on the people at the back
who don't have a clear eyeline.
But I don't have the stamina to go back there and do it again.
But if you couldn't see,
I took four fingers
from each hand to represent the eight legs of this
it's a detailed piece, you know,
and I am a perfect gentleman.
What I just like to say,
because, you know, the internal logic of that,
that saying, we assume that previously
there was someone who is entering a room
and having sex with spiders
with such alarming frequency
that the unusual thing was when they came in
and everyone thought, oh,
great, Greg's here,
we're going to have to watch this whole song and dance,
while he finds and fucks a spider,
and then Greg's going, no fellas, Is no, it's not what you think.
Not tonight.
I don't have time.
I'm off to seduce a millipede.
Yeah, I know, I dunno...
And now we say it to communicate.
We're just, you know, in a bit of a hurry.
You know, I was at the Auckland Zoo
recently in the spider enclosure
and in there is a collection of 15 to 20
of the least venomous spiders you'll come across.
You know, our entire line up of native animals in New Zealand
is pathetic.
There's not a single natural predator amongst them.
Not while I'm outta the country...
But we're in the spider enclosure and I am bored out of my skull,
and so I turn to my friends.
I say, Come on, look, let's get out of here.
Not here to fuck spiders.
And the looks on their little faces,
we're talking 15 to 20 spiders,
just absolutely crestfallen.
All they want in life is to have sex with one person you know.
And I'm walking through saying it's not on the table. Sorry.
It's you got to be careful about what you say
because your words matter.
And I love words, you know,
I do.
I like it when words are strung together to form whole sentences.
Call me crazy.
Like I like idioms.
Now, do, do you know idioms?
Ah, no.
No? That's okay.
I do.
The whole show doesn't hinge on,
you knowing idioms.
It's a weight off your shoulders, I'm sure.
And just between you and me,
what I just said
is an idiom.
Nearly everything I say...
is an idiom.
No, that's not true.
It was a saying that was doing the rounds a lot
in the last couple of years.
People would say
"a problem shared is a problem halved."
You know that? A problem shared
is a problem halved.
And you think, oh, yeah, but
not for one person.
Because one person was just having a regular day
and then they got half a problem dropped in their lap.
And when you're scaling up from zero problems,
half a problem, well...
now that's going to feel like a whole problem.
Well, they also say "a good captain
always goes down with his ship."
Now,
I cannot be alone in thinking it's high time
we started setting ourselves some higher standards
for our captains,
because there's
a pretty persuasive argument to be made
that a good captain sails more or less,
without incident...
to their intended port.
I'm sick and tired of standing down by the water,
watching some fresh shipwreck 500 meters off shore.
having every Tom, Dick and Harry come up to me saying,
"Would you take a look at that guy, hell of a captain."
I say, Tom, Dick, Harry. No!
That is a, that is a tragedy,
that's a crisis.
We should, we should do something,
but we don't we don't do anything.
Some of you are probably now worried the whole show will be idioms.
And those people I would like to say, "hold your horses."
Hold your horses.
They only live to be about 25 or 30 years
and they'll be gone before, you know.
I um,
I wanted to buy a book of idioms for the show,
but you don't have to worry.
I didn't, I couldn't find the book.
But I did go to the bookshop.
Have you been to a bookshop?
You have? Yeah.
And what do they sell?
Books mostly.
Yeah, you got it man.
It's books mostly. Yeah.
They sell other stuff, they sell like chocolates
and whatnot near the counter.
But they don't put that on the sign.
Only the true book lovers know about the chocolates.
You know,
I shudder to think of the number of chocoholics
walking down the street, just jonesing for a fix.
No idea they could sort themselves out
if they took one chance in their pathetic lives.
Where they sell you know, books and chocolates
and um...
pen and paper.
OK, so you think you could write one?
But it's mostly books,
and you go in there and it's like, it's just it's,
you know, they've got books on the walls!
Which is different.
And some of these books,
it's like they've not even heard that we're no longer
judging them by their cover.
The way they stand...
But I don't go for them.
I go for the more coy books.
The ones that stand like this.
Do you like my spine?
Freaky bitch?
They got the books on the walls,
then they've got the books on the table,
and I can get around that.
I see books on a table, and I think that's what it looks like at home.
But you can tell it's a hard time for books
because they've started putting stickers on the cover of books,
you know, some big marketing guru had big books
come up with a scheme to try and shift a few more units.
They started putting these stickers
on the covers that say they'll often say something like,
"Now a major motion picture."
The single most counterintuitive marketing scheme...
I've seen.
This is the equivalent of walking into a bike store
and having the guy behind the counter
tell you about the concept of cars.
So cars you say?
Well, thank you
so much.
You've saved me a huge amount of time and hassle.
I was going to use my legs for everything.
But I've not had the courage to tell authors
about the moving pictures.
You know, I feel like that's outside of my jurisdiction.
A family member should do that.
Because they're still writing them,
poor bastards.
And, you know, they're getting better.
They've started publishing some books they've got images in them,
and they've even started publishing some books,
if you open them up the whole way, there's a...
like a picture will pop
right up out of the middle of the book.
And when I see that, I think, oh, you are...
you are getting close.
You are so close.
You keep going. You'll figure it out.
Yeah. I still read some things.
For instance, I was I went out for breakfast
this morning and halfway through
I had to go to the restroom.
So I sit down and after I finish, I stand up
and I'm washing my hands.
And there was a sign in the bottom right
hand corner of the mirror that said,
"Please do not flush anything
other than toilet paper.
Thank you, management."
You know, and so I cursed myself for reading that.
You can only imagine my humiliation when I had
to scoop up my own shit...
in my bare hands, you know,
and traipse it through this cafe to throw out in the street
like a frickin' animal!
But I draw the line at books.
I no longer read books
because I'm not an idiot.
And I haven't read a book
for a, you know, for a minute now.
And it's let me tell you, it's
not a lack of opportunity
you know, there was a time recently
when I mean, I've always wondered to myself, it's a funny thing,
but I've always wondered to myself
what I would be capable of if I just had a couple of years to myself.
And the answer is nothing.
The only thing I learned about myself in the last few years,
it turns out the big thing hold me back from greatness
is not in fact, time on my hands.
Turns out it's a perfect blend of natural ability and work ethic.
Just my luck.
I couldn't even tell you what I've been doing.
You know,
I think I started running
for a little bit there, went for two runs.
One a year.
You got to spread them out.
I, you know, I ate, you gotta eat,
you gotta eat, or you'll die.
It's one of my idioms.
You know? And early on, I was like anyone else.
I started eating a lot of bread, you know?
But then I thought,
I've got half a mind to think
big bread could be behind this whole damn pandemic.
No one's done better
at this thing than bread.
I would not be shocked
to see a paper trail of filthy
sourdough money
leading to a laboratory in Wuhan.
So it wasn't long before I got off bread.
I got on the oats,
started eating a lot of oats,
trying to do in my house for oats,
what Covid did for bread.
And I was having oats every day for a while there.
But then they got boring.
So instead, I started eating only oats
on one day of the week.
Every Tuesday was nothing but oats.
I call it oats day.
It's not it's not a perfect portmanteau, but
you got to remember, I was feeling pretty fragile at the time.
And I was having oats, I'm talking all the time.
Every meal, like all the,
you know, the three most,
What do you think the three most famous meals are?
Breakfast?
Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
I was more thinking like the Last Supper
you know, dinner on death row
and maybe feeding time at the zoo.
But um, I wrong-footed you there.
They don't tell you on the way in,
but there's a high risk
of joshing at the show.
And you, you've been joshed.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yeah.
I mean, they're not the only meals, mind you.
There are the meals.
You got the Tea Brothers,
morning and afternoon.
Desserts,
the midnight snack
huh?
When I was a teenager, I thought the midnight snack
was going to be a way bigger part of my life.
The number of man hours
I put into plotting and scheming
and how I could have a morsel of food after midnight,
I was like Danny Ocean.
But now if... I if I have food after midnight,
well ah, well it's grim
and that's not the only
thing that gets lost on that childhood
to adulthood journey.
Because also, like you remember
when you're a boy
and your parents give you a spy kit
and you think, wo-ho, I'm a spy,
binoculars, magnifying glass and all that.
So you learn to be a spy for a few years
and then your parents say, okay Guy,
no more spying,
because that is literally
the creepiest shit
you can do.
Who gave me the kit?
You know...?
All of a sudden I grow one pubic hair, and
it's off the menu.
There is no justice.
But what I'm trying to say is
I was eating a lot of oats,
and because
and we drink oat milk in my house
and I don't know why,
because the oat milk is wedged
between the butter and the cheese.
It feels like a pretty arbitrary line of distinction
to draw
with respect to ethical dairy consumption.
And I would love to get off dairy, but I just can't stand
the thought of putting all those cows out of work.
And all of a sudden,
they can't afford all that leather
they love to swan around in so much.
So, you know, one day
I'm having my night oats
and I'm pouring
my oat milk on my oats and I'm looking down at the pot
and I think there's actually something
pretty...
fucked up about what's going on down here
coveringthese little oats in their own blood.
No one asked for that.
So, now I'm off oats.
I had to draw up a whole new eating regimen.
It's an alphabetized regimen.
It's called the a-to-z of healthy eating.
And that was the cause of some controversy
in my house to make it an alphabetized list,
because some people think lists should be bulleted or numbered.
Like, what do you like better,
numbers or letters?
Probably letters.♪
- Letters. - What do you like letters so much for?
Perhapswould you like to marry a letter?
I got your arse!
No, I like letters, too.
And that's nothing against,
that's nothing against numbers. Numbers are good.
In fact, I look at letters, I think of letters as the
the numbers of words.
Anyway, I drew up this list
is it's the a-to-z of healthy eating.
And I'm going to I'm going to
I'll read it out for you.
Yeah. So I bought a bum bag today
just to try and blend in.
And what I've discovered is there's two main wearing techniques
for the bum bag.
Now if you wear your bum bag like this,
this means I have drugs for everybody.
If you wear your bum bag like this, this means
I have drugs just for me.
You got to imagine
they don't have a camera on that.
A pretty good throw.
And if they do have a camera on that,
pretty cool cutaway.
So now I will read it for you.
It's the A-Z of healthy eating, and you'll never guess
where it starts.
A, Yeah, believe in yourself, man.
So A is for avocado, a superfood,
and a super food.
Yeah. So... So I should probably tell you,
it's an earnest list.
25 to go if we have any number heads in.
B, now B is for Brussel sprouts.
Talk about the comeback story of the decade.
Remember you're a boy, and you think Brussel sprouts?
Bleh. Yuck, no way.
But now as an adult, you pay like $15 for six Brussels sprouts
at something called a gastropub I don't know what happened.
And people say it's the economy that people say it's inflation.
But we made up the whole idea of money.
So if you just put the value of the number back down,
you've solved the problem.
C is for corn.
Now, look, I do not know why we continue to eat corn
in spite of the overwhelming body of evidence
that we cannot digest this stuff.
Yet, you know, corn has bigger plans of being eaten by a person
when you look down at corn in the toilet
and corn looks square back you like,
"Yeah, OK. What else you got, huh?"
"Don't you dare push that button,
me nuts and peas have got big plans..."
D is for dried apricot.
A lot of my apricot heads got pretty upset
they didn't get the nod over avocado,
so I pop them in on a technicality,
you're welcome.
You got to look after your apricot heads, them boys is crazy.
E is for egg.
Yum, a lovely source of high-quality protein,
have a lovely egg...
F is for fried eggs.
Fry that egg!
G is for guava, whoa, guava.
Lovely fruit to eat.
Lovely word to say.
Pretty good words
to play in scrabble.
You know, assuming you've got the letters.
I say that. But looking at it now,
it's only it's got three vowels.
So you're going to need to land
one of those consonants on like a double or triple letter.
And even then, you know, just like
what's V in Scrabble?
Five, four, OK,
either way it seems low.
4, 5 for a V,
it's a pretty unlikely letter,
you know, like who are your top dogs in Scrabble?
On ten, what do you got?
You got Z and Q and that seems about right
for Z and Q.
And then you drop down to eight
and you got X and
you would hate to be the person who tells X it only got eight.
What do you mean? Who got ten? Z and Q?
I was it like, is either of those guys?
What are you talking about?
I am ten.
I'm ten.
You talk to one Roman, and I'm fucking ten!
Who else got 8? You tell me... J!?
But 8 is about right for J.
Because J is like that friend you like.
Yeah, I had lunch with J a couple of months ago.
J is doing really well.
And then you think about it long
and actually
I don't think I've seen J for three years.
J's only at the start of someone's name.
It's never mucking around
in the middle of a word.
H, now h is for hard boiled egg.
Put that egg in water.
You get that yolk nice and taut.
I is for ice cream.
You've been doing so well so far. Have a treat.
Have a little bit of ice cream.
J is for je==
it says jelly on a plate.
Jelly on a plate.
K is for Special K.
I love it. Special K is like what if we made a
cereal, but for woman?
And hey, you've earned it ladies, by my count,
now you've got Special K and Sultana Bran - lucky!
I think it's about time
you got a fun one, but it's not up to me and
and the ladies love fibre.
Actually, yeah you can't say that.
I mean you cannot say anything nowadays.
L is for lemon.
And in parentheses it says garnish.
So that's for me.
You know it's not a main
you got people coming over,
you know, if you just, it's not important.
And M is for mmm-mmm...
maybe it's time for another egg?
And N is for no, no thank you,
no, I've just had three eggs.
O is for, oh, OK...
Oh, no, I will actually, you've twisted my arm.
I'll have one more egg.
P is for...
Poached egg?
I think you find eggs
have been given a pretty fair run so far mate.
P is for pear. It's like a fancy apple.
Q is for quiche, you know you'll make yourself sick
if you have too many eggs.
R is for rice
and that is legitimately good.
Yeah, that stuff's so cheap it's recession proof.
S is for soft boiled egg.
Now, why should hard boiled eggs have all the fun, hey?
Let their yolk run, baby.
Let's see what it can do.
T is for tomatoes.
My favourite vegetable.
That's what I thought. You keep your mouths shut.
Goddamn tomato-truthers walking around with your one life,
telling anyone who'll listen it's a fruit.
It's regressive, what you're doing.
U is for unsalted nuts.
Now a handful of nuts every day, that's so good,
it's got lots of oils apparently,
but a handful of salt will get you, It makes...
I think it makes your kidneys hard,
and you don't want them hard.
- Yeah. - But also you don't want them soft.
You want them um,
neutral.
V is for vegetables, like my favourite.
The tomato.
That's what I thought.
W is for water.
It's not a food, but undeniably a drink.
X is for x.
It's a hard letter!
Y Is for "why not have another egg!"
And Z...
I don't remember writing that...
It says Z is for Zodiac
is an Eddie McGuire, is the Zodiac killer.
Allegedly.
I've been told. I have to say allegedly
in case Eddie sees the show and he tries to get me for libel.
You're not going to get me that way Eddie.
You'll have to get me how you got everyone else.
Because I'm a killer at small talk. I'm so good.
I never had a bad conversation that was my fault.
It's always someone else.
In every conversation, I'm thinking, oh, man, I'm gold.
I would kill to run into me.
The only problem I've noticed seems to lie with everyone else.
And it's a funny thing
because even like, after a show,
sometimes people will come up and they'll try and chat to me,
and it's a lovely idea,
but I always think, that's confident.
Because obviously, I've already said all of my best stuff.
And that's a tough act for me to follow,
let alone some fucking punter.
But I'm 33 now, and that's the perfect age.
I was surprised as you were when I found out.
And you know, I'm embarrassed to say this,
but there was a full year recently
where I thought 32 is the perfect age,
but I find... so it changes annually, almost like clockwork.
But what I've noticed is it makes my sort of friends
and family, my nearest and dearest,
is a conversational divide occurring
where you got some people who are like
me, we're living our lives
trying to be interested and interesting, try to generate
sort of touchstones,
things that everyone can access and relate to.
And then you've got some other people
who are also 33 and they're thinking, well,
I gave it a pretty good nudge to generate
an interesting life for myself.
But unfortunately things haven't broken that way.
So instead, I'm actually... I'm working on a collaboration project
with another person now and what we're going to do,
we're going to create a third person and they're
basically going to represent our ability to be interesting
from here forth.
So I'm talking about people like me, you know,
and then.. and parents.
And there very well may be some parents in the room
and I just want to be upfront here.
It is not my intention to, to be rude.
It's not, it's actually just my,
my, my intention is just to say my little jokes
and it's an interesting thing because I don't doubt that
to become a parent, to make that decision,
to create something that's half you and half someone else
and to raise them from infancy to a baby
to a toddler to a child
to a teenager to a full-blown adult,
and to imbue them with all of your
everything that makes you who you are,
and then watch them grow into something
which is half of you, but also totally independent.
I don't doubt that to do that is probably the single most
rewarding experience that we can have in our lives.
But the thing for me is to assume
that is of interest to anyone else,
it's an affront to common decency.
We get it... You did it.
We could talk about literally anything else,
and it's interesting, as a straight person
I think, our factory settings, like what...
what you get when you turn on the computer
for a straight person, when the computer gets
booted up on the factory settings,
it's basically, got find a partner,
settle down, have a child.
And what happens in life is you got a lot of people
who are moving through life with the factory settings turned on
and they're looking around and they're noticing.
Other people have also got the factory
settings on and they give each other sort of thumbs
up through exhaustively gritted teeth going "it's pretty good".
But that,
that's not enough.
And what will happen is these people will start looking around
to notice other people who might be the same age,
but on a slightly different timeline,
and they'll start investigating their lot
you know, because what happens when you have a child is
it also comes with this tremendous sense of entitlement
to ask other people around you whether they're going to copy
the perfect decisions you've made for your life.
And it comes from a place of deep security
And so they'll look around and notice people who are doing something
slightly different, and they'll go, "Hey, what's going on over here?"
"Are you having a bit of trouble with the factory settings?"
No, I just heard you could, um...
change some of the settings on the computer.
And they go "You wouldn't want to do that.ö
"No, they put them in like that at the factory for a reason."
"Then you should do it. I mean, you should definitely do it.
You'd love it." "Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know if it's me."
"You should do it. You've got to do it."
"Yeah. I don't think I have to do it."
"You do. You got it. You got it. You got it.
You, you, you...
you have to do it because I've already done it.
So I'm really set on this trajectory right now.
And you not doing it is actually giving me a
massive anxiety."
And then they start trying to coerce you, they'll tell you
any reason you provide for why it might not be for you,
they'll counter.
You know, if you say I want to do it because I think the world's on fire.
They go, "Well, you don't know.
You know, you could be starving the world of a solution.
Your child could be the next Greta Thunberg."
And you think, oh,
oh, oh no...
it's pretty unlikely.
I mean, yeah, I'm not Swedish for a start.
I've not even met Mrs Thunberg.
And so long as we're talking Thunberg,
I just quickly want to say we have got to take it easy on Greta.
What I have noticed is that one teenager in Scandinavia
put their hand up and said, "Whoa, climate change is so intense."
and everyone in the world went,
"Oh my gosh, are you going to take that?
That is such a relief.
Because we have been worried sick, thank you.
I'm just going to go over here and not change
anything about my lifestyle.
Watch you hopefully catch a plane somewhere
at some point so I can cyberbully you for being a hypocrite.
You piece of shit."
And they don't get you by coercing you into having a child.
They'll start championing the prospects of their own progeny.
They will not saying things like, "Well, we're so excited
for our little guy.
Anything's possible for him.
Could be a scientist, could be an astronaut,
could be an athlete, could find a cure for cancer."
And obviously I understand that.
Yes, as a parent, you have to believe that
blue sky thinking, anything is possible.
But at the same time,
let's not be afraid to slow down
and look at some of the raw data
because you work in real estate...
and your partner works in marketing.
So there's really nothing to suggest between your shared DNA
that this little hero you've given birth to is going to be anything
except a massive drain...
on the already limited resources we're working with.
But I mean, you can't say that.
You cannot say anything nowadays.
And I don't want to come out here and rag on all parenting.
I think there are some noble forms of parenting,
step parenting, for example.
I think that's an incredibly noble form of parenting.
And I say that because that's the kind of parenting I do,
and I actually don't have a wealth of material about it.
But if I did, you've got to imagine
they'd tuck pretty neatly into this part of the show.
What happened was I was living, for a minute there.
I was living in New York City to pursue my dream
of spending everything I'd saved.
and occasionally I would return home to New Zealand
to withdraw some of the very valuable NZD and take it back to America,
To take advantage of the favourable exchange rate.
And a lot of these trips, I was home for about six weeks,
and I met this incredibly funny, beautiful, intelligent,
this is the coolest person ever called Chelsea.
And it just so happened that Chelsea was also a mother.
And so we had about five or six weeks together
and we thought, wow, you know,
obviously due to the impossibility of circumstance,
this doesn't have a future.
So what we'll do, what we're hanging out
is we will let our guard down.
And as it happens that's a perfect way to fall in love.
And we did. So I went back to New York,
and we did about two years of long distance,
until we realized that if we want to make a real fist of this,
I'm going to have to come home,
We're going to have to see how we can operate as our vision of a family.
And so I did, in December 2019,
I moved back from New York to New Zealand,
pretty good!
Pretty good. I got a tip off from a friend
who worked in a laboratory in Wuhan,
and he said "Go now!
And if you've got any excess, capital invest in Sourdough.
Trust me."
And so I did.
And I knew what I was moving home for.
I was moving home to be a partner and a parent
and to explore this new part of my life.
But I think what happened is I naively assumed that that would come
with some liberties, you know, like the ability
to leave the house from time to time.
And so I went from...
I was moved from being on the better side of a long distance
relationship with my best friend in New York
to being locked into a house with a family
for two years.
And it was the most tremendous gearshift
I can... I can imagine, you know,
but at the end of it all, I got to say, I really, I love it.
It's been so great for my relationship with Chelsea.
My relationship with Oliver feels so much closer.
And in truth, I got to say, actually,
that experience of being a stepparent is probably
the single most rewarding experience I've had in my life.
And I'd like to issue a challenge for all of you tonight.
When are you going to become a step-parent?
Go find some... someone whose, you know
their life didn't pan out how they thought,
and fucking swoop.
But the thing of it is, man, being a parent -
the thing with children is, I mean, these guys are crazy.
One of their big hobbies is to be awake.
Every day they do it. They love it so much.
And what happens, is you're doing your best
and you get to the end of the day.
And so as you get to the end and you just lie down in bed
and the period you get between lying down in bed and falling asleep,
that's what you get to yourself and as you lie down, you think whoa,
yes, I did it.
Another one down.
And then you catch yourself,
and you think, another one down?
Why am I so happy to be one day closer to a face full a soil?
I'm going to cherish these things. Yeah.
So what do you do?
Well, you see a therapist.
And I did, first time in my life
last year, I started seeing a therapist.
Now, I remember before my first session,
I was so nervous, but I needn't have been.
I remember to this day, I absolutely smashed it.
Before I could even leave the room,
this dude was begging to see me again.
It was pathetic.
I say I smashed it.
To be truthful
therapy is the only time outside of stand-up comedy
we have spoken uninterrupted for such long passages,
so I actually felt very vulnerable and like I was bombing for an hour.
They were so good, he was very encouraging.
He sat there and he would nod and he just kept
saying if there was ever a sound, you'd say, it's OK,
you're doing great.
You know, keep talking.
It's a judgment-free zone.
That mostly just made me worry about his ethics.
I thought, is this fucking guy not listening to a word I'm saying.
But he was, and he was a great guy, in the room is an incredible guy.
He was my therapist.
But at the end of the day,
he's just a regular guy again,
who've I've armed with all of my worst anecdotes.
So this is, this is a dangerous guy.
I've got to stay on his good side.
And that wound up leading to
some pretty dishonest therapy sessions.
I actually, I had to start seeing a second therapist
just to straighten the whole thing out.
And there was too much money, so I stopped going.
I'm fixed.
But the main thing I took away was I would say,
you got to look after yourself before you can look after others.
If you're not looking after yourself,
you can't look out at the people around you.
And I took that to heart.
And the way that manifested for me was I stopped watching the news.
Because I was watching the news for a while.
And I'm aware not everyone is to you know, some people
you got to watch the news because the news impacts you.
I'm aware that's...
To do that comes from a position of priv--
I mean, the whole show to be fair, comes from
a position of immense privilege.
All the time, people are saying, Guy,
you go to your privilege.
And I did.
And it's sensational.
You wouldn't believe the set-up I got.
All the bells, all the whistles...
So I stopped watching the news.
But I mean, have you have you seen the news?
Yeah. I mean, it's tough to miss.
They make it every day.
Same show,
three channel is this crazy
TV show set in a world where we don't
all have 24-hour access to current
events on our telephones.
And it's always hosted by the same people.
It's always hosted by a man
and also a woman.
And they come out in formal wear,
and the man who he like,
he likes to wear a suit.
And the woman now
she likes to wear something
for which she will inevitably be criticized.
I don't know why she always chooses that,
if it was me, I'd just put on something else.
But they come out in their formal wear,
and they sit behind this big desk and they're so stern.
And they just tell you how badly everything is going for an hour.
And I guess for me, the thing is like,
you do not need to be in formal wear to deliver bad news.
I've received bad news from a friend in board shorts and a t-shirt before.
I wasn't sceptical.
I didn't say "look Elliot, I can see you're upset,
but until you change out of those wet clothes,
I don't care how many people drowned."
"And for what it's worth, with a bit of a PR spin here,
we could turn what sounds like a genuine maritime
tragedy into a case of a good captain who was just doing their best."
But they sit down, and they start with the biggest, worst thing.
They'll say, "You'll hate this."
and there's a sliding scale of other bad things.
And they've got other reporters
they send out to the location to check.
And they'll go, "Yep, I'm here it's awful."
Yeah. Thanks for checking.
And on and on it goes
for like 25, 30 minutes until all of a sudden
they get a little self-aware that it might be reading too dire
and so they sort of look at each other and they go...
"ah, ah, sports!"
And then the camera pans
across the room to the third person
who's been in the room the whole time,
who is also in formal wear but standing up to denote agility.
And this is my favourite part of the news.
I love it so much.
They get seven or 8 minutes
and they mostly just tell you about games
that were designed for children
that are played by multi-millionaires.
And really sometimes someone from sports will make it
into the very first bit of the news,
but they've usually had to do something...
pretty bad
for the upgrade.
You know, usually, it's some rugby league player
from this very country, has drunk a few too many bourbon and colas,
and pissed in their own mouth, and coward punched
nine teenagers in the air outside a club on the Gold Coast,
Sends a bunch of parents into a moral spin.
They go, "No, not him.
He's a role model for our boy."
We have got to stop conflating hand-eye coordination with...
Responsibility!
I cannot think of a more eloquent group of people
to be role models than athletes.
Are you kidding me?
Do you know how hard it is to be a professional athlete?
Do you know how hard they have to work?
Do you know how many academic sacrifices
they have to make
from infancy to adulthood?
All you're doing is concentrating
on very specific forms of hand-eye coordination
and cardiovascular fitness to an almost sociopathic level.
And it's like it's never occurred to any of us
that this unique lifestyle might come at the cost of, oh.
I don't know.
Rounding out some of the other parts of your personality.
What is a rugby league players' career really,
apart from getting concussed and then pretending not to be concussed
so they can continue to play rugby league?
But what we like to do is take them out of uniform
on a Wednesday, put them in
some ill-fitting suit from Oshkosh by gosh,
then cuts off the blood circulation to their brain,
sit them down on the panel
with three other ex-athletes who all have PTSD
because concussion was only invented five years ago.
Point six HD cameras on them on primetime TV
and just feed them, have some roundtable, open source
conversation about whatever comes up
and if one of them accidentally asks
a challenging question, like,
"What do you think about woman?"
And another one
says literally the most horrific thing
you've heard in your life,
we have the gall to act surprised?
It's not complicated.
Just ask them about the sport.
We don't know who these people are
because of how they think.
We know who they are because they catch good.
We've got to stop this obsession with knowing everything
celebrities think about everything.
Athletes and celebrities
are not intellectually equipped for that level of scrutiny.
And don't get me wrong,
I like celebrity news.
I remember when I was a boy,
my favourite thing to do,
I used to listen to a breakfast radio show.
It was called The Edge Morning Madhouse,
with Jase, JJ and Don.
And if you wanted to have a normal breakfast, I'm sorry,
but you would have to listen to a different radio show.
Because these three were mad and they employed my preferred
radio dynamic of a show hosted by two men
and also a woman for balance.
And I'm sorry, but that's just how it's got to be,
you cannot have a radio show with two women.
You can't. They'd be in there prattling on
about empathy or some other unlistenable horseshit.
What you need is a radio show hosted by two men
who have license to say whatever the fuck they want.
And then one woman who at the end of every talk break
goes "Ha-ha, you two are terrible!"
"Coming up next
is Doja Cat!"
That's what people want.
But my favourite part of this radio show was a part of the show
every morning would have it was called
"JJ Feeney,
Scandal Queenie."
And at 8:15 in the morning,
they would say, "JJ Feeney, Scandal Queenie,
what's going on in the world of Hollywood?"
And JJ Feeney Scandal Queenie
would say,
"Well, you didn't hear this from me."
And I was like nine.
I was sitting there eating my cornflakes thinking
"JJ, if I get shaken down from my sources on the playground later,
you leave me in a pretty compromised position.
I don't have a credible alibi.
Hey, why don't you take some fuckin responsibility for the muck
you're raking eh?"
Because you say, now, you didn't hear this from me.
There was always just banal, personal information
about these guys' lives.
It was always like, "You didn't hear this from me,
but it looks like it could be splitsville
for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston."
And I'll be sitting there thinking, Oh, no,
not Brad and Jen,
they're the gold standard.
You know,
"It could be divorce for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman."
I think, oh what!?
Is nothing sacred in the world anymore?
What can I set my watch to?
And she'd say something like,
"...and it could be the end for Lisa
Marie Presley and Michael Jackson."
And I'd think, well, I damn well hope so.
Because I'm pretty sure that guy's a paedophile.
I know. I knew even back then,
I knew and I didn't tell anyone.
in many ways, making me as bad as the man himself.
I didn't know.
And even if I did,
you know, I was nine, who was I going to tell?
I didn't have a platform.
We got to stop this obsession
with wanting to know what they think.
I think historically there was only one time when it was OK
to want to know what celebrities thought,
and that was in ancient Greece
when the celebrities were philosophers.
So the sole reason they were famous
was for thinking
and in that instance,
I think it's permissible to ask a celebrity
what they think.
And these guys that were having some pretty big thoughts,
some of the thoughts that were having, we're still using today.
But, you know, there's a saying
everything in moderation.
So that stems from a
saying from a Greek poet
and philosopher called Hestia.
He's in it in 700 B.C.
The saying was observed you measure
moderation is best in all things.
And that is an incredibly prescient thing to say.
Something that still has application today.
And this guy, he wasn't even the most famous
philosopher of his time.
He was alive at the same time
as Homer, you know the famous writer Homer?
But Hestia was still he was pretty famous,
you'd recognize him if he was walking down
the street,
You'd think, whoa, there's Hestia.
He's the reason I only had four grapes and morning tea.
And these guys that were genuine rock stars
and the way that the society was set up
was these philosophers, they would mentor
young teenage Greek
boys, they would take them under their wing.
It was a practice called pederasty.
And they would think that they would
teach them how to think, how
to move, how to live in the world.
And another thing that they would do in their relationship
as role models with these boys as
well, they'd fuck them.
Now, I don't know why we're necessarily
taking advice on moderation
from a paedophile, albeit one of the more restrained
ones of his time.
But the thing for me
is that so much of modern society, even today, is
built on the foundations
of Greek philosophy.
So much of how we live is constructed
on what these guys were thinking.
It's enough to make you wonder, what is it
about having sex with teenage boys
that made these fellas so enlightened?
And I'm afraid to say,
I don't have the guts to find out.
Every year people come up to me, they say,
"Guy, you've got to do everything
you can, to make the show as good as possible."
And I say, Well,
I don't think you
know what you're asking for.
Still though,
a hell of a saying, hell of a saying.
Imagine coming up with a saying so good,
people are still using it 2700 years later.
Like imagine
coming up with the saying so good,
it's the main thing people remember you for
when you were also a paedophile.
And then they do the weather.
And I always used to feel bad for the weather lady,
because they'd be like here's 55 minutes of data,
here's everything we know that happened today
and now Wendy is going to have a guess.
But that was back in the day when the weather
was siloed off at the end of the news,
you know as separate from everything,
but now the weather the weather's
carpet bombing the news the weather's like
I'm going to be in a start of the news,
I'm going to be in the middle of it I'm the news,
I'm the weather, baby!
It's almost like it's trying to get our attention.
Something is changing.
Yeah, you don't worry about that.
No, you really don't. And we shouldn't worry about it
because we've got a great thing going on.
We've got people working on a solution.
That's a good hire.
It does feel similar to hiring lions
to be in charge of antelope preservation.
And don't be disheartened,
if we will make a small change to our lifestyle,
the cumulative impact of all those small changes
could save future generations.
Probably a couple of hours.
I started doing something this year,
and it might not sound like much,
but to try and reduce my carbon footprint,
I've actually started taking much shorter baths.
Yeah, laugh it up,
but you got to remember, I used to be in there splashing around for hours.
Now, I'm in and I'm out. You got to get out to help out.
That's what I say.
I don't watch the news anymore.
I can't engage with this high end celebrity gossip.
I've basically been reduced to just trading in like interpersonal gossip,
you know, little salacious tidbits
as pertaining to people I know a little bit.
Stuff that wouldn't be interesting
if you didn't know the people involved you know, like,
have you ever received gossip in your life before? You have.
What was it?
My two friends started dating.
Your two friends started dating?
That's the most pathetic gossip I've heard.
It's just like that sounds nice for them.
They like each other. Yeah?
Yeah. Did anyone get wronged?
No.
No one got wronged.
It's just two people got it together.
How old are you?
20.
You live a wholesome life.
That's not gossip.
I like... I like it.
But, you know, I don't want to be caught
peddling misinformation.
So someone brings me a piece of gossip,
I'm always quite cautious.
Before I even let them start talking, I always say this.
I say, now, before you start talking,
I need to know, is this true?
Or is this untrue?
I say that.
I say, Is this verified or unverified?
Is this before you start talking, I got to know,
is this?...
Where you get this is this?
is this horse's mouth?
Horse's mouth?
I say that.
And if they say horse's mouth, I sit back and I listen.
because it is always premium uncut, A-grade gossip.
But every time as I'm listening,
I think the same thing, I think of myself.
As good as this is, we have got to shut up
that gossiping horse!
Trolling around town,
spilling everybody's secrets.
I mean, yes, it's a miracle, but it's also a massive liability.
We got to tranquillize that horse. I'll try the ketamine,
If it's up to standard, we will put it...
in the horse.
And also,
who is confiding all of their secrets in a horse?
A horse with a proven track record mind you, of spilling the beans.
I think it's because of their their long trustworthy faces.
You know?
You look at a horse and you think,
I could tell you anything.
Who are you going to tell? Who do you even know?
Like a farmer?
But now all of a sudden,
I'm cagey around horses.
I get tight around horses.
They always see a horse now,
always asking a leading question.
To find out if it's...
I'll always say something like,
"So what, you got any dirt on the sheep around here?
You know, something that.
If it starts flapping its gums, running its mouth.
I keep on walking,
I don't want to be a part of it.
But if it's stoic,
if it holds its ground and it holds its tongue,
I'm not a monster.
I'm not going to start a conversation I can't finish. I stick around.
I talk to that horse.
And what I find is when you talk to a horse,
it's not long before you are really talking to that horse,
and it always starts off with commonalities.
You know, just what it was going on.
Electric fences, grass.
But...
20, 30 minutes will go by and all of a sudden, you know,
you're talking about stuff
that you didn't plan to talk about today
and an hour or 2 hours might go past
and you'll be talking about stuff you didn't think you're going
to talk about in your life.
Yeah, I'm saying
this horse, I've not said out loud before
stuff I've not said to my partner, to my friends,
my family stuff I've not said to my two therapists,
I mean I can't believe I was paying two guys $120 an hour each
when you are for free and one kilometre out of town.
You know, another hour will go by.
2 hours we go by, the moon will be high in the sky.
I'll check my watch and sure enough. It's after midnight.
I can't stay out here all night.
I'm liable to catch a cold for I am a person, not a horse.
And so I say my good night.
And as much as I'd like to stick--
you ever been in a conversation you want to keep going?
I say, as good as this is, I got to go
and I take what has once felt like a long and lonely walk home.
But on this night it feels different.
On this night there is a lightness to my gait.
I feel as though I'm moving through the world, a new man.
For a problem shared is a problem halved and my God,
I've opened my world right up and I get home and I slide into bed
so quietly careful not to wake Chelsea.
and I fall into this deep and lustrous sleep.
This dreamless sleep, the likes of which I've not had
since I was a preadolescent boy.
And I wake up the next morning
and I'm rested and revitalized
and I don't just feel ready for the day.
I feel ready for the rest of my life.
I feel like a totally different person.
I tend to Chelsea, I say
let's not have breakfast at home,
let's not have oats, let's go
out to the French markets.
And we do. And we go out. We're having coffee and croissants.
We're having a good time. We're walking around, we're smiling,
and I'm smiling at people, and people are smiling at me.
I'm smiling at people, and people are laughing,
people are laughing at me.
And so I go over to one of these sort of these shared tables
and sure enough, there's a newspaper sitting there.
What the hell is this? Front page news,
I'm the talk of the town?
It says right here, Guy Montgomery
has a teeny weeny peeny?
I'm sorry, what?
Of course he'd say that he's a fucking horse.
So I'm off horses.
Don't talk to horses anymore.
But you don't need to worry about me. I'm not lonely.
I recently have become quite,
quite close friends with a little birdie,
and I don't know what I'd do if that guy betrayed me.
And before I go, I just want, I just want a tidy one thing up.
And this is a silly thing to do, really because...
I shouldn't have to defend myself against my own joke, but...
I... I don't have...
I don't!
I've got a normie.
Normie...
It is funny, I will say that
I think it's a funny p--
I think all penises are funny.
I, and I...
you know, I would even go so far as adding
penises are funnier than vaginas
because the penis is out.
And that is a vulnerable position to be.
You know, sometimes I see a penis.
Sometimes I see my own penis in the mirror,
and I think what...
what is a fella like you...
doing in a place like this?
And I never think that when I see a vagina.
If I see a vagina, I always think the same thing.
I think to myself, Oh...
My God,
Eight eyes.
Eight legs.
And now this?
I must be the luckiest man alive.
Thank you so much.
I've been Guy Montgomery. Thank you.