Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson: The Metal God On Piloting 757s Through War Zones, Surviving Cancer, Olympic Fencing & Why He Could Be A Sleeper MI6 Agent

Bruce Dickinson is the legendary frontman of Iron Maiden and a true polymath—a commercial airline pilot, Olympic-caliber fencer, author, and cancer survivor. Joined by acclaimed filmmaker, close collaborator, and mutual friend Sacha Gervasi, we explore Bruce’s approach to creativity—from music to aviation, and humanitarian service. We discuss his journey from bullied schoolboy to global rock icon, his unique cognitive abilities, and how flying into war zones has shaped his worldview. EXCLUSIVE GIVEAWAY: In honor of this special episode, newsletter subscribers can win a signed Iron Maiden collectible statue and comic book! To enter, simply sign up for Rich’s newsletter at richroll.com/subscribe and await further instructions. See our official rules for more details at richroll.com/official-rules. Bruce is a force of nature. This conversation is pure gold. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order 👉seed.com/RichRoll Eight Sleep: Use code RICHROLL to get $350 OFF Pod 4 Ultra👉eightsleep.com/richroll Go Brewing: use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF 👉gobrewing.com This episode is brought to you by Better Help: Listeners get 10% off their first month 👉BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  In people's lives, there's a little moment, and it can be tiny, but it's like throwing a pebble into a pond. You don't know where the ripples are gonna go.

• 1:14Rich Roll?

  Bruce Dickinson is the larger-than-life frontman of Iron Maiden, one of the most influential heavy metal bands of all time.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Maiden is part of the core existence for a massive number of people.

• 1:27Rich Roll?

  Bruce's operatic voice has been thrilling audiences for more than four decades, but he is so much more than just a rock god. Bruce is a commercial pilot, he's an aviation entrepreneur, who not only captained the Iron Maiden 757 tour jet, but also has flown conflict zone retrieval missions on behalf of the British military. He survived cancer, he publishes comic books, writes novels, children's books, and screenplays, and is honing his world-class Olympic-caliber fencing skills.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Art is anything that is done well. So is your music, your painting, your whatever, has got a piece of you that's authentic.

• 2:08Rich Roll?

  Do it well. Today, joined by a friend of the podcast Sasha Shervasi, Bruce Telzall. And to honor the occasion, I have decided to give away this Iron Maiden comic book called Peace of Mind, which Bruce was kind enough, as you can see right here, to sign it. As well as this incredible statue of the trooper. To enter, simply sign up for my newsletter at richroll.com and from that list, I will pick the lucky winner. This is a guy who doesn't really do podcasts, so it was an honor to host this conversation and a rare treat to share it with all of you.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  This whole Iron Maiden singer fencing.

• 2:47Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Do you know what he's really doing?

• 2:48Rich Roll?

  What?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Bruce Dickinson is Britain's most important leading intelligence asset. I just would like to say that.

• 2:54Rich Roll?

  That is clear, yes.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Well, you know.

• 3:01Rich Roll?

  We just finished the podcast before the podcast. We talked about MCT oil, Kyoto, Japanese breakfast, plantar fasciitis, hip replacements and fencing in the Commonwealth Games.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 3:13Rich Roll?

  Whole bunch of stuff.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:15Rich Roll?

  Now, like, why didn't we get that recorded?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Because you'd be here all day. You know what I mean?

• 3:19Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  All night.

• 3:20Rich Roll?

  There's only so much we're going to cover today. It's impossible to capture, you know, the entirety of your extraordinary life, but I thought a good place to start. I mean, first of all, thank you for coming. It's a real treat. It's an honor to have you here today. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time and I thought it would be cool to just start with a little bit about like this friendship between the two of you, Sasha and yourself. Like, this is an unlikely friendship of sorts.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Are we going to discuss cuddling? No, we don't cuddle.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  No tongues, no tongues, Sasha.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I first met Bruce and basically I'm so happy because like two of my very good friends in the world, I'm happy that you two are meeting because I know you both very well and talk to you a lot about various different things and you're genuinely good friends and close friends of mine. So I thought, what a great thing to do. But the history with Bruce and I goes back a long time. Bruce vaguely remembers this, but I remember meeting him at 15 years old in Soho with a guy called the Right Honourable Philip Harvey. He was known as the-

• 4:14Speaker 01

  The Lord.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  The Robin Roy. The Lord of Metal.

• 4:17Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  He had this- Apartment at Four Clarks Muse in Maribor, where he hosted these incredible parties. And he lived, I think, with Monica, who was Jimi Hendrix's girlfriend, who had lived there at one point. These parties were extraordinary. It was every, at that point, it was the.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  It was not like a PDD party, though. No.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  No, it was just like, it was that the new wave of British heavy metal, every band that visited London, wherever they were from, would come and Phil would provide massive amounts of entertainment and fun for all involved. It's the early eighties, I'll leave that the rest to your imagination. And so I was hanging out with Phil and I got to know him through, I think, I can't remember which band, whether it's Twisted Sister or Anvil or whatever. And he sort of, I think he liked my French girlfriend. It was nothing to do with me, I don't know. But anyway, so I got to know Phil.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  He smelled.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  He really did smell, because he would go to Zanzibar on safari.

• 5:08Rich Roll?

  Hadn't he just returned from?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  But he hadn't washed.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  He hadn't washed. He was on safari in Zanzibar, as it was then known, whatever, or Zambia. And he had his jeep, his proper, like, old fashioned jeep, shipped over from Africa. And he was wearing his leathers. And he drove this jeep and he came to pick me and this girl Alexandra up. And he was driving into Soho, we were going to the Marquis to see, I think, a band. We ended up going to meet Phil Linnett of Thin Lizzy down at the Saint Moritz, Saint Moritz Club down the stairs.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Which still exists.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Which still exists.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Still exists.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  So Phil's in the car and he says, okay, we're picking up a friend of mine. His name is Bruce Dickinson. And I'm like, you mean from Sampson and now from Iron Maiden? Because Bruce.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  I wasn't in Iron Maiden then, I was still in Sampson.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  You were still in Sampson, that's right. But there was talk, there was like stuff going on at that time.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  There's all kinds of rumours, yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  And I remember meeting Bruce, and I was thrown into the back of the, you know, I was thrown into the back of the jeep. And I remember meeting Bruce in the back of Phil's Land Rover jeep. He was wearing his leathers, the whole car stank, because he would wear his leathers on safari. I mean, he was a lunatic eccentric. And so that's how I met Bruce originally as a fan. And I think the next year, he had joined Maiden, A Number of the Beasts had come out. And I went to see Maiden for the first time in the Hammersmith Odeon on The Number of the Beasts tour, something like that.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we recorded that.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:28Rich Roll?

  But Bruce has no memory, no memory of this.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  No, no, you do remember a little bit, right, of that whole?

• 6:33Rich Roll?

  Of meeting, but of meeting you.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  The only reason I remember meeting him is because he showed me the pictures. I really did meet you.

• 6:39Rich Roll?

  There's a whole other podcast about how Sasha at 15 found his way into these unique circumstances where he's meeting all these people when you're barely a teenager.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  You remember Philip Harvey?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yes. My first wife, you know, was very impressed by him. So she was always going off to his parties and I was always leaving early or never bothering to arrive in the first place going up. Really? Lots of people all wandering around sniffing things and I didn't sniff things.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. He was out of the loop.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  It wasn't very attractive.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  But what was really great was he was so cool. I was just a young No One fan and Bruce, as he is with all fans, was, you had a conversation with me, which was, I think he generally was like open to people. But anyway, that's when we first met and then I'll tell you more later, but anyway.

• 7:23Rich Roll?

  And so that was on the cusp of you joining Maiden. You weren't an originating founding member of the band, but you stepped in to replace Paul Diano, which I suspect, you know, came with a fair amount of pressure and responsibility. I mean, he was such a huge part of why the band was considered avant-garde, you know, kind of outside of strict genre at the time. But you have a certain level of self-confidence and conviction. I've heard you talk about kind of knowing that this was going to be your path.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  I'd never seen Maiden until they, funnily enough, supported us on this bizarre tour called the Heavy Metal Crusade, which was, I mean, just a shocking tour title back then, you know. But the quote-unquote Heavy Metal Crusade was dreamt up by, I think by the band that was in Samson's management. They went, yeah, we'll do a kind of a show of all these allegedly new wave of British heavy metal bands. And the new wave of British heavy metal, the New Wobum, as it became known. And again, it's a very unwieldy and unlikely title for a...

• 8:32Speaker 02

  A movement.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  A movement, indeed. And that was dreamt up by a bunch of journalists who sat around going, what can we do? Let's create a movement.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  I think it was Malcolm Dome and Jeff Barton.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Malcolm Dome and Jeff Barton of Sounds, right.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Because obviously there was punk and they were getting hammered by punk and that was new wave and that was a... Kind of a movement to it. Let's have a new wave of British heavy metal. So all of these bands who up till then had just been like basically struggling pub rock bands all became co-opted. What do you mean we're part of the new wave? Are we? Really? Since when? I thought we were just playing rock music.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  I think they all got drunk at the ship on Wardour Street and decided that.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Which is also still there.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Still there.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  And decided that New Wobben was an acronym which has rolled off the top.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Not shockingly, that didn't stick around that name. So basically, there was a kind of compilation tour of bands that went around. There was Saxon and Samson and Iron Maiden and Praying Mantis and The Tigers of Pantang and Whitespirits, all these names kicking around. So basically, it was like a revolving door of bands, but because Samson's manager had thought up this whole thing, we featured fairly prominently. And of course, they'd always have us as the headliner, whether or not we actually deserved it. So we were doing a gig in London and Maiden were kind of on just before us.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And there was probably a couple hundred people in the venue and venue held about eight hundred. So I'm thinking, hmm, okay, well, when are the Maiden guys gonna come on? I'll go and watch them because we'd heard a lot about them and everything. And suddenly the venue filled up with people and it was rammed. And Maiden came on and they're amazing. Energy was amazing. And I just looking at them and I thought, well, I, one of my favorite bands when I was a kid was Deep Purple. One of my favorite albums, I think one of the greatest live albums ever recorded is made in Japan. But I'd never seen them. So in my mind, I constructed concerts that this is what they would look like if I'd ever seen Deep Purple, which I never saw them.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  A bit like, you know, the Marquis de Sartre, you know, who wrote all these, you know, like amazing sexual fantasies and BDSM stuff and everything else. But at the time, he was actually in a prison cell writing a whole on toilet paper. Toilet paper, yeah. You know, a fevered imagination. And my fevered imagination, I looked at Maiden and I went, oh, my God, this is what I would want Deep Purple to look like if I ever saw them. Because when I saw Deep Purple, I was like. Oh golly, they'd kind of stand around, you know what I mean? And Led Zeppelin the same, they'd just kind of stand around, you know? But because I was a hyperactive, bouncing off the wall type kid, um, I looked at Maiden and went, wow, that's amazing. You know, Steve and Davy, you know, just wailing away there.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  And then I saw The Singer and I went, yeah, I get it. But, oh my God, if I was singing for them, oh my God, if I was singing for them, what could we do? And that's what planted the seed. I went, I'm, I'm, one day I'm going to sing for that band. I just know it. I felt, why? I don't know. I thought, because it's right. It just felt right. So fast forward and, um, the Samson thing had kind of, we'd done two or three albums, some decent stuff, some stuff that was less than memorable. But, uh, we had arguments with our management, fired them in a very amateurish way. They sued us, we lost, we had no money anyway. So they said we owed them quarter of a million pounds and we went, oh, okay.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  We, let me see, I had ten pounds in my pocket. That was all the money I had in the whole world. I went, quarter of a million, wow, I'm really worth something now.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  So, uh, we had a different manager. And anyway, the whole thing was slowly, slowly, slowly, uh, going down the plug hole. But we had a last gig at Reading Festival.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Can I say this is available online and you should watch on YouTube? Samson playing Reading and the drummer at the time was Mel Gaynor.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mel Gaynor, yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Legendary Simple Minds drummer, don't you forget about me.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, great drummer.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  And Riding with the Angels is, I have to say, it's a very good moment at the Reading Festival.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Russ Ballard.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Russ Ballard.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Russ Ballard.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Look at it on YouTube, it's brilliant.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  So we're doing that and I do this show. And, um, at the time, there were all kinds of rumors flying around that I was going to join Rainbow, Richie Blackmore's Rainbow, who did, Richie's, Richie's Brody actually called me. And I was in my little girlfriend's flat because I didn't have anywhere to live. So I was kind of crashing at her place. And the phone rang and it was like one o'clock in the morning. I went, who the hell's that? You know, and it's like, for whatever the guy's name was, he said, I'm Richie's guitar brody. Uh, are you interested in, in, uh, auditioning for Rainbow? I went. Of course I am, because Ronnie Deo had just left. I said, you're kidding me, of course I am, because I love Richie.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  He went, wow, great, yeah, you know, and I never heard any more about it. That was it, last I ever knew about it. The rumor was that rumor had it that Richie had gone, don't like his trousers, you know, and that that was it. Which is one of your greatest strengths. Exactly. Ironically. Exactly, so that didn't happen and that evening in the after show area where everybody was just gossip central about everything, I got summoned by Maiden's manager, legendary Rod Smallwood, to his hotel room. I'd go in there and he said, I'm gonna offer you the chance to audition for Iron Maiden. What do you think?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  And I went, hang on, let me get this right, you're offering me the chance to audition? Yeah, I went, and here's where this like ludicrous, I don't know where it comes from, self-confidence thing kicked in and I went, right, first of all, let's just get the audition out of the way, can we, right now? I said, you know I'm gonna get the job. I said, so let's clear the decks, you know, if you, if I audition for the band, I'll get the job, otherwise I wouldn't be in your hotel room. So the next question is, do you actually want me? Because I'm not gonna be like the other guy. I am gonna be my own guy, I'm gonna be awkward, I'm gonna be potentially awkward anyway, because I'll have opinions on things and I'll do things differently.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  And if you don't want that, just let me know right now and I'll walk out the door. And he said? And he said, well, actually what he did was he chopped out a big line of cocaine and said, and said, and said. It was nineteen eighty one, right? Just FYI, we're on a pub podcast. I know, I know, but and and he said, and he said, do you want some? And I went, no.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  And I thought, was that a test? I mean, or something, you know, I mean, a test of the emergency broadcast system, you know. And I said, no, and it wasn't because I thought, oh, it's a test. I mean, I genuinely wasn't interested, you know. I said, no, but, you know, fill your boots, go ahead, you know, I mean. But that was it. And then I heard no more about it. Paul was still in the band. So I thought, well, this is a little strange. I'm not sure, you know, with my, you know, union of lead singers, uh, card carrying badge. I'm like, I'm not too happy about the way this is being done, because obviously, there's some subterfuge going on here. But they did say, look, we're gonna, he's gonna do the

• 16:10Speaker 01

  last few shows. They've got some festivals to do in Sweden, and um, then that'll be it. But in the meantime, turned up for rehearsals, all super, you know, you know, so I'm, I get on the, we go to Hackney, the rehearsal studio in Hackney. And there's the band, minus Steve. And I went, oh, well, we might as well stop. They asked me to learn four songs. I only had two albums, so I learned all of them anyway. I thought, not, you know, who knows what could happen. And basically, because Steve wasn't there, we just had a bash through all the songs that we knew from other people. Just having a laugh, playing half of this song, half of that song, half a Deep Purple song. And we realised that we all knew all the same songs from all the same people. This was their roots, and it was my roots

• 16:54Speaker 01

  as well. And I thought, well, this is great. Everybody was smiling. We were all really happy. And when I walked in the room, everybody was kind of down, as you would be, because touring with a lead singer who you know is gonna get fired has got to be corrosive. It's corrosive to the soul, it really is. And um, honesty, dishonesty is corrosive to the soul, you know. Uh, much better to be out front and open with it, in my opinion, but hey. So.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  We were all chirpy and happy. Steve turned up. I said, oh, right. Great. That's main event. This is Steve Harris. Steve Harris, yeah. So then we bashed through the four songs and he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So he's on the payphone, no mobile phones back then, to Rod, you know, shoveling in coins, going, can we get a studio tonight to check him out? And Rod was like, whoa, no, no, no, you've got to go to Sweden, blah, blah, blah. So it was left. And then a couple of months later, they got done with the festivals. I went into a studio, recorded four songs over some live backing tracks that they already had. Martin Birch, the producer, was there and they were all in a bit of a huddle with the manager in the, in the, in the control room. And I was like in the vocal booth going,

• 18:09Speaker 01

  well, you know, and I thought it was kind of funny because it was just like, what exactly are they discussing? And they came out, they said, welcome to our maiden. I went, right, let's, let's go and get drunk. So we went down to see UFO at the Hammersmith O D N that night. And we were all in the bar together. We had a few beers and then the rest is kind of. That was that.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  And still to this day, UFO opens with Doctor Doctor, Maiden plays that song.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Steve, Steve's a huge fan. Yeah. And massive fan of Pete Way, the, the bass player in particular of UFO. So, yeah.

• 18:45Rich Roll?

  But this brashness that you had, like, look, I'm gonna get it. We all know I'm gonna get it. Like that conviction, you said, you know, you're not sure where that self-confidence came from. Like, I don't, I don't know. Do you buy that? I don't know if I buy that. Like, where does that come from? Like, that sense of self that you were able to bring to it? Like, you know, being able to like, have this imagination of what that stage presence would look like and, and knowing that on some level you were going to manifest that.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I think a degree of self reliance, because basically I was, as a child, I was a mistake. So mum was just about 16 when I was born, maybe a little bit. Oh, I mean, you know, I could, I could do the math later on when I figured it out. When, um, hang on a minute, you know, it's 70. So I was raised by my grandfather, who was a coal miner for the first three or four years of my life, went to the local school, which was a mining town. And actually had a great time. It never occurred to me, you know, that there was a nasty cruel world out there. You know, I was made aware, my, my grandmother wasn't too impressed with me because I'd kind of stolen her daughter.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Because she was an only child. So the, and, and again, you know, later on in, in your life, you, you, you, you look back and you go, ah, I kind of see the mechanics of what was going on there, you know? So, um, so I, I do recall when I was four or five, being hauled up the road by my, my grandmother, who told me that I was the child of Satan. Which, you know, I mean. Up to number of the beast. Yeah. Six, six, six. And, and so I, I went, I went, ah, right. And then I was. It all starts there. I was doomed. I was the child of Satan. I was this. I was, you know, and, and, and I was like, well, how come my granddad really likes me, you know?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  So, but again, you go to, you know, I was the son he never had. So that explains that part of it. And, and I represented the bit that stole my mother from her mother. Hmm. Because they were very protective because, um, she was an only, my mom was an only child. She was a really talented ballet dancer, went to like local classes and won a scholarship to the World Ballet School in London. And they wouldn't let her go. So next minute, she's pregnant. Hmm. Knocked up by a soldier, um, good looking soldier, who was my dad. And that was it. Hmm.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  They basically moved to the nearest big city and started doing two jobs and everything else and doing all the thing to try and get a little house together. So they, I could move in with them, which happened when I was probably, yeah, four, four years old, some, somewhere around about then. Cause I have memories of, of, of moving in and being really pissed off. I was angry. I was like, who are you? They're like, we're your parents. Really? Since when? You know, because they're taking me away from my granddad, who was a great guy. So this kind of self reliance started there. Now, now they, they sent me off to boarding school when I was.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Like twelve, thirteen, right? And I got the shit kicked out of me. I was bullied and all the rest of it, like, you know, really quite consistently. You know, so twelve or thirteen kids every night, lights went out, they would beat the shit out of me every night, you know, and this would just go on. And I just developed an attitude so that the harder they hit me, the more I tell them, tell them they were fucking idiots.

• 22:16Rich Roll?

  It goes two ways. Either, either you're gonna implode under that and be a victim, or you rise up and do what you do.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  No, exactly.

• 22:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Those are all formative things, but at the same time, you know, I was, I was, I was doing other stuff in my life and I didn't let that part of it impinge on the other things that I did, you know, I mean, I was, I loved the theatre, I loved plays, I loved acting, I loved English literature, I loved all that kind of stuff, so.

• 22:47Rich Roll?

  Military history.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, military history as well, you know, because at one point I was gonna join the military. So we had an army cadet unit at the school, I was in that for four years, I did all kinds of jumping out of helicopters and going on exercises with the regular army and went for interviews with regiments that I could possibly join and all that kind of stuff that I did. Then I was kicked out of school, yeah.

• 23:12Rich Roll?

  According to Wikipedia, it has something to do with urination and the headmaster?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I, no, I mean, I.

• 23:19Rich Roll?

  I don't know if that's apocryphal or true.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  No, it's true, I peed in the headmaster's dinner.

• 23:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And, um. I think it proved it, because British cooking at that period. Again, it was a weird story, you see, I, I'd sort of had this kind of, I had a dislike of the institution because I thought this is an institution that, that finds it awkward if kids get beaten up and seeks to just kind of pretend it doesn't happen. So as I got, you know, older and more imaginative, I mean, at one point, I started sabotaging things. And then one day, I'm walking through the, the, the town, because the, the school was embedded in a town, kind of like Yale or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, you know? In fact, it was, it was designed to be a, a complete facsimile of Cambridge.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  It had quadrangles and things, it was a fake version of Cambridge to, which was the intention that it did, send everybody off to be hothoused, to be captains of industry or whatever. So I'm wandering through town and there's a little card in a window and it said, manure delivered to your door. And I thought, this is too good to miss. So I, I, I phoned the guy up, payphone, and I said, um, hello, I, I just made your card. Do you deliver manure? Oh, I said, yes, I do. I, I deliver manure. How, how much would you like? And I said, well, um, could you deliver two tonnes? Two tonnes? Yeah. Where would you like it? Could you deliver it to the front door of Sydney House Andal School? Courtesy of the, the housemaster in charge.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Right, I'll do that. I'll do that tomorrow afternoon. It'll be all right. Cash on delivery? Yes, that'll be fine. Thank you. So this tractor turns up. You can imagine this, this Downton Abbey facade of this place. And the tractor turns up and this guy just dumps two tonnes of horse shit on the top step in front of the main entrance and then sits there waiting for the housemaster, who's the, the teacher in charge, to return and ask him for money. So.

• 25:20Rich Roll?

  Did this get tracked back to you or did you get away with it?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  No, I had not, because I mean, it's a, you know, standard authoritarian response, you know, uh, collective punishment. So the guy stood up at, at dinner and said, uh, this, and he actually, he added this weird voice. He said, uh, he said, this afternoon, some wag thought it would be very funny to dump two tonnes of shit on the front of the house. Well, I thought it was bloody amusing. Of course, I'll thrash him for it. But if that person doesn't own up, then there will be no electricity for the house for the next whatever, which no electricity meant no music. And music was the only escape that you had from this institution. So everybody was like, everybody, it was me, you know. So everybody looked at me going, well, now we're like,

• 26:07Speaker 01

  yeah, okay, go on then. Guilty as charged. So I turned up, knocked on the door and said, hi there, it was me. And he went, oh, yes, Dickinson. I thought it might be you.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And he said, it's very funny. He said, of course, I'll thrash you for it later. I went, oh, thank you. So they had corporal punishment. So beating and stuff like that by, um. So, uh, so a, a, about nine o'clock that evening, you know, I hear this squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak coming up in this at my, at my door. And he goes, I'll see you now. I went, oh, here we go. So I look and it's extraordinary. He'd actually changed his clothes into like, like tennis sneakers and like hot pants. And like a skimpy top. And, um. I'm following this guy going.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  This is really bizarre. So I go in there and then he's, he's, you know, he rearranged all the furniture in his study. There's a chair, so you have to bend over the chair. He's taken the cushion out, so you have to bend over so your butt is sticking up. He then squeezes the cheeks of your butt ostensibly to make sure there was no protection there. And then he has a selection of canes, ranging from about four foot long to a bendy one with nobles on it. And then he beats you six times until you're. Well, until it's bleeding, basically. Wow. And that was that. And then you go back upstairs and everybody knows you've been beaten. So you drop your pants and they shine a torch on your butt going, yep.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Hmm. Oh, yeah. Number, number four was a bit low. Yeah. You know, not bad grouping there, you know? And so. Savage. Savage. Horrible. Savage, horrible. Yeah.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  All of which is a long way of saying like you had to develop, maybe like your ability to trust other people, not so hot, right? Developing this resilience and this like sort of, you know, sense of self, like you're the only, the buck stops with you. Like your future is completely dependent upon like, you can't rely on anyone else.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, by and large, but I, I didn't take that as being a, a negative. It was just a reality. That was just reality. That was that was life. People were just like that. And some people might not be like that, but some people might be like that. It's just the way they they were, are, whatever. So, um.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Is it? Can I ask a question?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Going back to the the earlier childhood stuff, where your grandfather, who obviously had a tremendously close bond with.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Brought you up. And then when you introduced your parents and they moved in when you were four.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Between the ages of four and twelve, when you went off, did that develop the relationship with the parents? Was that was that a positive? Like cushion after that or a positive thing? Or were you still trying to figure out like what the hell's going on here?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  No, I mean, looking back, I realized that basically what I was doing, I was effectively being a secret agent in my own house. I was like living a complete double life.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  How did? How do you mean?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I just whatever I was thinking, whatever I was feeling, my parents never knew.

• 29:10Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Because it didn't feel safe?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Well, but yeah, because I was just like, um, I'm really not sure. I mean, I used to argue with my dad a lot. I mean, I used to play chess with him. You know, and then one day I beat him, and then we never played chess ever again.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  You know?

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Like searching for Bobby Fischer.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  If you saw that.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  And and and he tried the best he could. But he looked at me and had no clue what to do with me. He he did not understand what was what was going on with me at all.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Over his lifetime, did did that change? Was it ever a positive or a connected relationship in some sense?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  When he died, he died of lung cancer. So he was in in Germany and I, you know, went to went to went to see him and um. He was just, I was like, you know, you could forgive him for being grumpy. You know, because you're dying of lung cancer. It's not very nice. Um, of course, he denied he had lung cancer. Of course he did. All the doctors were wrong. He didn't have lung cancer. He was obsessed with the, there was a, there was a window that looked out. Uh, and his room looked out at a clock. And he really liked the clock, town clock. And he looked at the cranes, the building cranes. And he would always talk about the cranes because it represented the future.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  It represented, I think for him, some kind of continuity with the past and the future. His dad was a builder. He'd done a lot of building. I'd helped him build houses and stuff like that. But we were never really that close. So, you know, in terms of a father figure, I've got my grandfather who kind of exited my life as that, really, when my parents took over.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Did either of your parents ever see any of the success that you had?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, and they loved it. Oh, no, they loved it. No, don't get me wrong.

• 31:01Rich Roll?

  That part came around. Like your mom, because she had a certain trajectory and was headed towards, you know, ballet that, and you interrupted that, like, was there, like, residual, like, resentment that spilled out of her that made you feel, like, unwelcome?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  No, no, not at all. But she was so young when she, when she had me, absence of physical contact. Physical, like, gra- I mean, kids, I mean, I, you know, my kids.

• 31:33Rich Roll?

  It's like basic emotional needs being met, yeah.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Kids, you want to kind of mangle them, you know, like, oh. But there was, there was none of that, you know? And, and actually, my father had, he had a nasty streak to him, in truth. I mean, and there was always that, that side to him. So I don't know what went on in his life, if that's, you know, repetition of a pattern or stuff like that. He wasn't a stupid man. He was an intelligent man. He was resourceful. He was a successful businessman. He, he loved mechanical things.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  He was had, he's one of these guys that had a, a complete uh understanding of anything mechanical. He would just look at it and he would go, oh, I know what's wrong with that. Hang on a minute, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And bang, it was, it was fixed. I always felt like whenever he looked at me that, you know, I had like two head, I was a two-headed baby plague, you know, like what, what, you know, like, like, like he was looking at me through a magnifying glass going, what's going on, you know? And I'm like, well, I'm not telling you. You know?

• 32:54Rich Roll?

  So you have this love of music that you're developing and, and throughout adolescence, you're in a couple of bands initially as a, as a drummer. Your influences are these prog rock bands. But at what point do you discover like the voice? Like the voice is the thing with you, that you have this like talent?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  This is a really weird thing. Um, and, and I think this is worth touching on for people that normally in, in people's lives, there's a little, there's a little moment and it can be tiny. But it's like throwing a pebble into a pond. You don't know where the ripples are gonna go. Before I went to boarding school, I went to a, a day prep, prep school, private school, if you like, for uh three or four years. Before that was just like a regular school. But my parents thought, you know, they, they're gonna sort of like, make sure that I didn't have to work like they had to work. Cause they worked really hard, you know, they did, I can't deny that. You know, we, we had a little hotel um that they ran and dad ran

• 33:57Speaker 01

  a garage and a maintenance business and, and a, and a building business as well. And I, we all lived in a basement. You know, I would walk, walk myself to school every morning or get a lift from neighbors or whatever it was. So they were never around for that because they were too busy cooking breakfasts for the guests in the hotel and all that stuff. Whilst all this was going on, I uh, I started this like thing with music, basically, you know? So.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  With music, theatre, it was just a life of the imagination. And I didn't start really getting into to to music until I was properly till I was like thirteen. But when I was at at this prep school, we used to go, we used to have to sing. So we would uh we have to go to church. And the the head of religious teaching was this guy, he was, what's his name? He was, his name was the Reverend, the Reverend B S Sharp was his name. Uh, so everybody used to call him Batty. He was Batty Sharp. And he was completely deaf in one ear, I think, that something had blown up in the war and like blown his eardrum up.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  So he could only listen to you with one ear. And we went to his church. Uh, you know, uh, there was a place in Sheffield called Gleedless. And he was the vicar of Gleedless. So we went to his church, the school, we're all sitting there and we're all singing these hymns, you know. And um and he's walking up down the aisle, listening with his good ear. Like that's cocking his ear to one side. And um, so I thought that instead of like mumbling, like everybody mumbled, you know, when they're

• 35:44Speaker 01

  I would just yell at the top of my voice and, you know, basically take the piss.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  So I did. And he he came up, he went, oh, you have a very good voice, boy. And on to off. And I was shocked. I was like, do I? And that was it. That was the moment that just, that was the pebble that dropped in the pond that four, five years later, when I was unsuccessfully trying to be John Bonham on the bongos. And somebody said, why don't you give the lead singer a a hand because he can't hit the top notes? I went, can I? And that was it. And I I opened my mouth and this noise came out and people went, oh, wow. Yeah. The bass player, you're no longer the lead singer. Boom.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  And then we split up, artistic differences, but I mean, you know.

• 36:39Rich Roll?

  Right. But but those little comments you might have dismissed that make that end up making all the difference.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  I think that people's lives are changed.

• 36:47Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  By not changed by.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Big things, they're changed by small things that if they take, if they notice them. You have to accept it and notice it and go, wow, really? Uh, and then you have to go for it, then you have to throw, then you have to throw yourself in the water and see if you can swim.

• 37:08Rich Roll?

  Right. So from that comment, fast forwarding to Iron Maiden, 130 million albums sold.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  A lot, a lot.

• 37:17Rich Roll?

  At this point, yeah, a lot, right? Like, maybe even more t-shirts, like, there's the whole merchandising thing. Like, this is a nation-state, Iron Maiden, right? Like, and there's that, that sort of famous comment by Rod Smallwood, like, distinguishing, like, what you guys do from, like, just abusing people that, like, you're a cog in the music industry, like, you're not in the music industry, you're in the Iron Maiden business, right? And this is like its own thing altogether.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:44Rich Roll?

  Uh, that has, you know, continued to, like, flower and be successful for over 40 years at this point.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are outsiders in terms of the music industry in a lot of senses. There are bands, and there are bands, and there are bands, and they're just bands. I mean, you might like them, you might not like them, they might be successful, they're not successful. But Maiden is somehow more than that. Maiden is part of the core existence for a massive number of people, an unlikely number of people, from all kinds of walks of life and avenues, you know, from, from, you know, CEOs to, you know, special needs people. I mean, the, the, the whole gamut.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  And everybody seems to get something out of the band, and I don't analyze it or question it, it just is. Uh, and it's a combination of, it's a product, rather, of who we are when we get together. It's a strange chemistry because it's manufactured. As in, I would never have met Steve Harris and Dave Murray, um, in the normal course of my life, ever, if they hadn't gone, hey, we want a singer for Iron Maiden. And now, what we have in common...

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Is Iron Maiden, is that music? And of course, we've all got to know each other. And one of the reasons I think the band has survived

• 39:25Speaker 01

  is because we've, we have grown into each other over the years as people. But at the same time, the music is always sacrosanct. When I had throat cancer. And the last thing on my mind was would I ever sing again? The first thing on my mind is, am I gonna get through this and be alive? And the last thing on my mind was would I ever sing again? And I thought, well, we'll get to that stage when I'm done and we start trying to sing. And I was quite prepared to accept that I might not be able to sing with Iron Maiden again.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  I might be able to sing, I might be able to vocalize, I might be able to sing in a different way. But if I couldn't sing the way I have to sing with Iron Maiden, I'll help them find a great replacement. Because the music is sacrosanct.

• 40:26Rich Roll?

  Meaning like, the idea of Iron Maiden transcends you and the role that you play.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 40:32Rich Roll?

  This is, you know, something that's very special to a lot of people. You don't try to deconstruct it, but I would imagine on some level you have a sense of why it is so important to so many people. And if I had to guess, it has to do with authenticity. Like you said, you know, it's manufactured, but it's also not manufactured. It is like an organic expression of who you are and staying true to, you know, what you have always been from day one.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  The manufactured bit comes from only in the sense that, you know, we didn't all...

• 41:00Rich Roll?

  It's a construction of these people coming together.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  We didn't all grow up in the same street. And, you know, the actual fact, you know, bands that all grow up in the same street together, you know, that's a, sometimes a bit of a recipe. Or families that play together, that could be a recipe for implosion. I mean, I know Oasis have just gotten back together and doing it, but my god, how difficult was that? You know, the two brothers and, you know. So, we all are get together, but it's, the music is the single point of contact that is the most important thing for all of us. If I couldn't do it... If I couldn't do what I do now effectively, I would be the first one to say, you know what? It's time I retired from singing for Iron Maiden and did something else.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Slackshelves, something, you know, because I have too much pride on the line to go out there. And people said to me, oh, you know, I was speaking to somebody, to a fan the other day, and they said, oh, it's great. You guys are all still back together, you know? I said, yeah, we're all still back together because we're fierce and the music is still as good, if not better in some respects than we played it 20 or 30 years ago.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Can I say that actual point? Because I wanted to make this point, that when I first saw you, it was November 1982. I'm remembering Hammersmith Odeon, and there was however many, six, 7,000 people. The show as a 16 year old was just, I mean, first of all, they are a very tight, intense, fierce, and also loud, impressive band, and the stage show, whatever. I went to see you guys on this Tuesday night, three days ago, at the Forum, which was completely sold out, and the band sounded better than 42 years ago. And I struggle to find another band that I've seen that is able to maintain that level of, it's like, it's, you have to, you know, next time.

• 42:53Rich Roll?

  Right. You told me like Tom Morello said to you the other day, like, that 30 years later, like, better than ever.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what we had this conversation.

• 43:00Rich Roll?

  And we sort of passed like the fact that you had throat cancer and, you know, very, very well could have gone a different way. And for you to come out the other side of that and maintain this extraordinary operatic voice with this unbelievable vocal range is like, kind of an amazing thing, yeah?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Well, I'm grateful that it worked and that the cancer, grateful that the cancer was where it was and wasn't actually associated with my vocal cords or my larynx. It was, it was in the base of my tongue and in my lymph node. So, you know, the radiation and chemo at the same time and everything, that just kicks the crap out of your body in general. But the voice seemed to.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Come back. In fact, some of the top notes were better than they were before. Um, probably because there wasn't a golf ball living in my throat. You know, but on that point of the standards that we set ourselves in the band, we very rarely do we all come off the stage and go, yep, that was it. Fantastic. Nothing to say about that. All of us could point to, yeah, that song in the middle of it. Yeah. Wasn't too happy with the, the tone on that, on the voice. And you're just always tweaking it. We're perfectionists. And so we still play all the songs in the original key.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  We don't detune. We don't do anything like that on, on, on any of the songs. And this guy was saying, he said, oh yeah, but he said, you know, you, you've been going around for years. You know, I mean, all these bands now, they all detune, you know, and they all use backing tracks and they all use. I said, okay, stop right there. No, we're not going to do that because it's not authentic. It's not real, you know, it's, it's, that's just, you're, you're starting to get into the world of Disney world now. So, no. Uh, and if I can't do it, if I can't do it the way I should be doing it, I shouldn't be doing it at all.

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  I have a very good friend called Ryan Holiday, and he writes all these books about Stoicism. He hosts a podcast called The Daily Stoic. He's your number one fan. He's always wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  I told you about him.

• 45:21Rich Roll?

  He goes to millions of concerts. He's written extensively about all the life lessons that he's learned from paying attention to your example and deconstructing the whole Iron Maiden thing altogether. And he's come up with, you know, a variety of principles to help understand kind of what you've done. And one of those that I think is really potent and powerful is like, you guys understand what business you're in. You know, there's this saying that this technologist, Kevin Kelly, always repeats, like it's this idea of a thousand true fans. Like if you just have a thousand true fans who love what you do, like you can build a career on that. And, and Iron Maiden is really like that at scale, right?

• 46:00Rich Roll?

  Like, like you have these fans who are so devoted to what you do that they will follow you everywhere and have for decades at this point, but. That really is a function of you understanding and appreciating that. Like, you're in the service business, right? Like, you're there to serve these fans. And I've heard you talk about the importance of, of like, eye contact, whether you're playing in front of 300,000 people or like, one person. Like, you are there for that person to give them that experience that they paid for.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  There's two areas there. So the first one is live. So, live, absolutely. I try and, you know, honey, I shrunk the kids. Honey, I shrunk the venue. So, I try to turn the forum into a club. Don't ask me how I do that. I have my own theories on how it, how it works. But it is, a lot of it is about eye contact. And eye contact and, and reaching out and projecting to the person who's 50, 60 yards away, halfway up the, the seats at the back. And it, and eye contact is, is an amazing thing. Human, human eye contact. You know, I mean, try this experiment and, well, not too often because you'll probably get arrested.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  You know, when you're on the beach and, you know, try and find some male or female, as is your wish, and stare at them from 100 yards away. Stare at them. And you wait and you will get the most withering, "What the are you looking at?"

• 47:31Rich Roll?

  The energy, yeah. You can feel it.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Because that's what human beings are built for. We're not built for much that's really any good physically, you know? I mean, you know, human being versus tiger, tiger wins. Human being versus fish, fish wins, you know? But in terms of checking each other out, our whole visual apparatus and auditory apparatus is designed for congress with other human beings. It's what we do. We, and we are constantly scanning for eye contact, body language, everything else like that. So if you can project that to somebody a long, long way away,

• 48:13Speaker 01

  that person then notices that and then everybody around that person notices that. So they're going, "He's looking at, hey, that guy there. He's looking at him, him, he's looking, he's..." And now he's, now everybody's connected. You've just connected a couple hundred people. Now move your g- do it somewhere else. So I'm doing that during the show. I'm literally, I don't know if you've ever driven a steam engine? Have you ever, like a steam locomotive?

• 48:48Rich Roll?

  No.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Really cool thing.

• 48:50Rich Roll?

  That has not happened in my life yet.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  That, I recommend.

• 48:53Rich Roll?

  Saturday?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I recommend it. I did a steam locomotive driving experience and I'm on the footplate, you know, with the driver and the fireman, the guy that.

• 49:03Rich Roll?

  Loading the coal.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Loading the coal and actually does a whole lot more. He's really driving the engine. All the other guy does is press go, right? But anyway, he opens the firebox and there's the fire. This is an analogy, I'll get to the point in a minute. So he says, yeah, shovel some coal in. And I said, well, what, I just chuck it in? He goes, no, no, no, no, no. He said, look for the dark spot. He said, there's a dark spot over there. So put a couple of lumps on there, because we need to get an even fire over the whole firebox. I went, hmm, that's exactly what I do with the audience. I look for the dark spot. I look for the bits that need jiving up, you know? Because the people in the pit, they're there.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  People on the floor, you don't kind of ignore them, but you need to take the people at the sides, the people who just bought the last minute tickets, the people, you know, those, those are the people who you need to include in all this, as much as the people who are, who are in the pit, you know? They've got it all up front anyway.

• 50:04Rich Roll?

  The goal being, everybody is connected.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. Without, and not on the internet. You know, everybody is connected physically in the human being web.

• 50:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Of eye contact and body contact and all those sensations and getting their arms up and singing and joining in and all that. That's what we do live. Recording, on the other hand, I mean, a record is exactly that. It's a record of where a band was at.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Mentally, emotionally, musically, at a given moment in time. And that's why records sound different from, you know, they don't sound, every record doesn't sound the same, hopefully, because you move emotionally as you, as you move through. Now, our first, you know, four, five, six records were when we were in our twenties. And then we, people had kids, they moved emotionally. So now, Senjutsu, you know, we got, we're, we're much more proggy. But we haven't, I mean, yeah, there's some sort of like grumpy people who want us to stay exactly how we were in, you know, nineteen eighty-one. But that's not stopping people coming in, hundreds of thousands of people coming to

• 51:21Speaker 01

  our shows now. So I, I say really what we're all about is one, our fans understand that our music is a journey. And it's a journey that's our journey, not their journey. Their journey is to be on the journey with us. So we don't go, what should we play for the fans? We do, what should we play for us? And then the fans can have their opinion. And they'll discuss it. And they respect that we do what we do. And they, they literally follow that. And that hopefully entertains them. I mean, some of them go, I don't like that album. I'd love this album.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  People are discovering us on albums that we've done in the last, you know, ten years. Well, the album we did thirty years ago, they're like, oh, what's all this back catalog stuff? And then they rediscover all the early stuff. So your analogy about a thousand people, you can base a career? Kind of. I'd say that our fans are, my, my maiden analogy for our, our, our fan base is like this table. Okay, which I assume underneath the lamination is made of plywood. And our, our fans are like a plywood table. We lay down a layer of wood, and then the next year, we lay down another layer of wood, and then another, and then another.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  And we just try not to lose anybody. So by the time you've got to forty years, that's an awfully big table. Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  And also, the other thing of the show I noticed the other night was, you know, original fans from eighty, eighty-one, their children are there, and their children are there. There were, you know, eight, ten-year-old kids, and I think even your friend Ryan Holiday is bringing his kid to the show tomorrow in Sacramento.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  His young son at the Sacramento show.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  So, you know, the people are bringing their kids now. It was astonishing.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  It's hard.

• 53:18Rich Roll?

  It's generational.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  It's hard.

• 53:19Rich Roll?

  But fundamentally, like, I'm trying to understand what you're saying. So there is the idea of, like, reverence and respect for the fans, but ultimately, the role of the artist is to express themselves in the way that, you know, feels right for them, right?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 53:33Rich Roll?

  Like, not to be like, "Well, the fans want this, so we're gonna do this." Like, no, I'm the artist. We decide the way in which we want to express and what we're going to express.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  And that is the crucial point that our fans accept. I mean, one or two of them might not, but the vast majority of them accept that. Now, when we go out live, we go out live to do the best show we can possibly do with the material that we're doing. If a song is particularly difficult, you know, so it's a song that, you know, might be particularly lengthy or something else like that, some fans will love it, other ones will go take a toilet break. But you're not afraid to challenge them. No, absolutely not. And that's the reason why, I mean, for example, when we did, I think it was A Matter of Life and Death, that album, we did the whole record. We went out and we played a whole new record. In order?

• 54:24Speaker 01

  I can't remember if it was in order, but we basically did the whole record start to finish. And we had some people in America, like vocal people on the internet, spitting tacks, going, "Oh, I paid money to go see this rubbish. Where it was run to the hills", you know? And I was like, "Okay, buddy, right." And people were going, "Yeah, I can't believe they're so arrogant as to do this, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada." And next year, we came back to America, and guess what? Double the number of people turned up. Hmm. Because... And you make of that what? Well, you make of that that some of the most vocal people on the internet are not what people are really thinking and talking and saying to each other in the real world.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  You know, and uh fans respected it. Then they went, well, I saw Maiden the other night. Man, you know, you should have been there. Oh, yeah, but I heard they were doing this matter of life and death. Oh, my God, that was incredible. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You've got to go see him next time. And lo and behold, everything we've done is, is, has built and built and built and built. And it's all old fashioned word of mouth. Word of mouth, I think, is uh, yes, internet, social media, everything else, but it's

• 55:37Rich Roll?

  It's organic.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's, it's still, it's real. And that's why some people in the music industry don't understand it, because it actually is quite, to, to do that requires dedication, long-term commitment.

• 55:54Rich Roll?

  You're playing a very long game.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  We're playing a very long game. And the music industry is not about that. It's about, you know, how can we get billions of, billions of streaming things on TikTok? And which, about which nobody gives a stuff in.

• 56:07Rich Roll?

  It's tissue paper to the flame.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Five minutes time, it's gone. You know what I mean? So we just don't do that. You know, our numbers on things like TikTok are probably almost irrelevant, you know?

• 56:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what's interesting is that, you know, amidst this 130 million album sales or whatever the number is, um, at the same time, you're not necessar, you don't have like breakout singles or consistent like classic rock.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Never. No, no, no, never, no.

• 56:33Rich Roll?

  And although, you know, in the United Kingdom, you're like in institution. I'm sure you can't walk down the street without people stopping you and you're on postage stamps and stuff like that. But in other parts of the world, like you can kind of, you know, wander anonymously.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  No, not true.

• 56:47Rich Roll?

  Not true?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Not true. It's the other way around.

• 56:49Rich Roll?

  This abuse me on this idea.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  No, it's the other way around.

• 56:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is my naive, like, not, not metal, you know, kind of like fluent.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  It's the other way around. We were driving to the, the airport or something. And I was chatting with the, the driver. And um, we were talking about self-driving cars.

• 57:05Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  You knew sort of like self-driving Ubers and things like that, you know? And uh, and I said, yeah, I said, you know, because driving's not really, honestly, it's not really that much fun. It's kind of like a waste of your life, really. I know you have to have a car in LA. But I said, I mean, back in London, I don't, I don't have a car. I don't own a car.

• 57:22Rich Roll?

  You take the tube quite a lot.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the guy went, how do you get around? I said, I have a bicycle. And um, I go on subway. Sometimes I take the bus, walk.

• 57:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  And the guy was like.

• 57:33Rich Roll?

  Can you imagine Bono or Chris Martin or somebody like that?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Chris Martin, yeah, absolutely.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Chris is quite low key.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but his face is so recognizable. Anyway.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but honestly, I mean.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  But can I say one story, though? When Bruce and I were working together on this project in my office, which is on Portobello Road, we were taking a break. We decided to go down and get coffee at the Greek coffee shop. So I go in, I said, let's go get a quick coffee. So we went in there. I noticed one of the Greek owners just picked up the phone. Literally before our coffees were delivered to us, sixty Greeks just came in. And like, he was mobbed. And I was like, Bruce, what the fuck is going on? And then you told me, you know, maiden in Greece.

• 58:16Rich Roll?

  Right. So the salient point, you're in London, but it was because of the Greek.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  The Greek thing, and I had to pull him out of the crowd.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  And the same thing, and the same thing. I mean, I don't frequent Harrods, right? But I can't remember why, but for some reason I'd got out of the tube station. And I was walking past the front of Harrods and walking to go somewhere else. And there was a bunch of Brazilians waiting to go in. And I'm sort of like, oh, no! And I don't know. So, and then, of course, one night I'm on the tube. And I've got the, what's the local paper? The Evening Standard, right? So I'm just like sitting there reading the paper, like typical, you know, English grumpy tube person, you know, rust of your paper, not talk to anybody. And I see this guy looking at me.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  And he's looking at me, he goes, are you, are you Bruce? And I just put the paper down and said, who? I mean, oh, sorry.

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  Oh, poor guy.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  No, but, you know, but I was just like, I don't see if I can get away with it, you know what I mean? The key to being. There's some places you can't be anonymous, like Brazil. I mean, forget it. I am a prisoner in the hotel room. Or, you know, I've been smuggled into more kitchens and out of more underground kitchens in hotels to go and do stuff.

• 59:41Rich Roll?

  But not in London?

• 59:43Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not in London.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Unless it's Brazilians or Greeks, or, but you know, or India, or Korea, or Uruguay.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  But even in...

• 59:50Rich Roll?

  It's truly global.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  But even, even in, I live partly in London, partly in Paris with my wife. And so, you know, in our local neighborhood, I mean, the French, they don't really hassle you in the same way as, you know, some other countries, you know, where they're a bit more volatile, shall we say, you know. So they, you know, they ask politely or nod. I mean, we went down to Australia. So we were in Perth for three weeks rehearsing, and we went down a bit early to go and hang out. And nobody was, in fact, they went out of their way to

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  apologize, to sort of go, ah, look, we know you probably want to be left alone, but, but can I just say that, you know, we're really big fans. I said, yeah, of course you can. Yeah, let's sit down, have a cup of coffee and blah, blah, blah. And they go, yeah, we don't have to trouble you. But that was it. That was the only thing that happened to us down there. People were just chilled out, everything. So it's a cultural thing. But yeah, we are more well-known now, you know. And obviously, after being on this podcast, there's no escaping.

• 1:01:04Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's all gonna change now, Bruce.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  It's all about the Ritual Podcast.

• 1:01:17Rich Roll?

  There's a great book called Range by a guy called David Epstein. Have you read this book?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:01:21Rich Roll?

  It's a really interesting kind of deconstruction of all these high performers in a variety of fields. And we have this idea that the people who are the very best at what they do are the ones who have blinders on, and they just do that one thing, and they blot out everything else in their life. So that they can be the most elite they possibly can be.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:41Rich Roll?

  When in truth, the fact is that most of these high performers are people who have a wide variety of interests and have studied many different things and have tried lots of different things. And it is only later in life when they realize like all these, this myriad of experiences kind of congeal to create a situation that allows them to kind of be the best at what they do in ways they couldn't have imagined. And when I think about you, I mean, you are a true polymath. You are a modern day Renaissance man. You're a commercial airline pilot. You're a aviation entrepreneur. You write novels and screenplays and comic books and children's books and you have a beer company.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  And then the fencing.

• 1:02:21Rich Roll?

  And then the fencing, right? Which maybe we could start there, but I want to kind of dive into the plethora of other interests that you have and kind of the relationship between curiosity and passion and how all of these things kind of influence what you do in your main gig, being this frontman in one of the most iconic bands in the world.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so the earlier guy that you talked about, Mr. Epstein and his book, he's not wrong about you have to take a deep dive into something and almost be a kind of like maniac in terms of dedication, but not all the time. So to be a really successful sportsman, you need to basically just be, there's no other way to describe it.

• 1:03:13Rich Roll?

  Obsessed.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Just selfish. You just have to think completely about you, your performance, your sport, yourself, and everything else takes a backseat. Family, kids, everything. And I think most. Sportsman, people go through a phase of their lives where they do that in order to almost brainwash themselves into the level that they need to succeed. Now, once you've had what psychologists sometimes call a peak experience in any area of your life, it transfers.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  So, like a muscle that suddenly gets awakened, that you didn't know you had that muscle, and suddenly it awakens and it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And you could feel your body, your psyche squeezing it when you attack a problem. You have to have that initially in one area of your life. But then you can transfer that feeling, and it is a feeling. It's an emotional thing. It's not a, you know, I'm gonna... For me, anyway, it's not something you measure on a tape measure or, you know, on the Richter scale. It's an emotional feeling, but a focus that you can apply.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, like when you switch the lights on in a room, it's a general wash and you can see sort of most things, you know. But then you turn it down to like a real tight laser cone and you look in great detail at one thing. That ability to focus is something that you have to train on something.

• 1:05:05Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  On something. You have to take a big, deep dive into something and make it a part of your entire being. But then, once you've done that, you can apply it to other things.

• 1:05:19Rich Roll?

  It is an emotion, but it's also a set of skills, right? Knowing like, okay, I applied myself in this way to this field. I improved, achieved some level of excellence. And now I know, I have like a sense of, you know, the tools that I have in my toolbox that then I can take over here.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Well, then you have more tools.

• 1:05:39Rich Roll?

  But you have to have the emotional piece, which is the enthusiasm and the curiosity. Like, that has to be an authentic.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's got to be there. So I have a lot of friends who play golf.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  I do not play golf, but I accept it's a very difficult game. I accept you can spend your entire life practicing it and never know it all. So in that respect, it's very similar to a lot of things I've done like flying or like fencing or like, you know, you can never know these things completely. The same thing with music, you can never know these things completely. But golf has eluded me. I have no passion for watching it for, you know, I've tried. I mean, I've gone on putting greens and people have gone, oh, that's really good. I'm like, I don't get the feeling that, wow, I really want to spend my life doing this, hitting a ball on a driving range. I'm like, no, it does nothing for me.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  It's like gambling. Some people love to gamble. I just go, ah, it's a waste of time. What are we, why am I wasting my, my time and energy and money? I've tried.

• 1:06:45Rich Roll?

  But aviation being different, right? Like a lot of people get their pilot's license, but there's a difference between that and being sort of a pilot hobbyist and piloting seven fifty sevens and basically going on missions at the behest of the British government to retrieve, you know, troops in conflict zones. Like these are, these are like worlds apart.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but when I was a kid, growing up with my grandfather, um, didn't really have childcare back then. And he was working a night shift or whatever. So during the daytime, I was sometimes sent around to my great uncle and my grandfather's brother. So he was in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, two hundred squadron on Liberators and Venturas, Lockheed Venturas, sub hunting around Europe and then West Africa. I used to sit with him and he would just tell me all these stories and we would make model airplanes together. And my heroes when I was a kid were not, when I was a, a young kid, um, talking, um,

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  I was born in nineteen fifty eight, so I remember quite clearly, you know, Yuri Gagarin. Uh, first man in space, Russian guy. I remember the headlines in the newspaper, cause I could read by then, whenever that then was, I think, you know. Um, I think it was in sixty-two. I can clearly remember that. So my heroes up to the age of ten or eleven were test pilots and astronauts. You know, I followed, I mean Apollo thirteen, I mean, um, I wish I could find the notebook. I filled a notebook when Apollo thirteen was happening with the disaster, with all the notes and everything else. But at school, I had no interest in mathematics whatsoever. I hated mathematics.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I could add up and things like that, but equations and trigonometry, what the hell use is that, right? And the same, funnily enough, with physics. So, fast forward, I was gonna join the army when I was in fifteen, sixteen, you know, why? Cause, um, I was angry and grumpy and had the shit kicked out of me and I wanted to fight people. Stupid, but, you know, kind of understandable. Army had a lucky escape, I didn't join. Uh, but the, uh, people said, well, why didn't you join the air force? I went, because I was rubbish at maths and physics and they'd never have accepted me. Absolutely wrong.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  As I subsequently figured out, later on, having met people in the Royal Air Force and everything else, it is the best, probably the best educational system on the planet, the military, cause they don't leave anybody behind, first of all. Everybody has to achieve the standard, otherwise they're, you know, they're pretty useless to be working with, right? And the other thing is, is that if you have the right character for doing the job, they'll teach you everything you need to know, including the maths and physics that you need to do your job. So, I didn't find that out till later, so I didn't do that. And I always wondered about flying, because I, you know, I loved aeroplanes and jets

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  and, and then I took a trial lesson when I was in Kissimmee in Florida, um, on holiday, just kids to Disney World, and I went off and took a trial lesson, that's thirty dollars, for twenty-five minutes in a little Cessna one fifty-two. And I remember walking up to the aeroplane and touching it and looking at it and going...

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  I know a surprising amount about this aeroplane. I know what that is, I know what that is, I know. Wow, I'd forgotten that I knew all this stuff. There's an awful lot of stuff I didn't know, obviously. But we got in the plane and we got off the ground. And as soon as we left the ground, I was just like, I'm not happy about this. And the further we got away from the ground, the happier I became. Then we're about fifteen hundred feet above the sunsets. And I could see in all dimensions. So I'm, I'm living in three dimensional space now. Not only am I living in three dimensional space,

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  but I can see a possible future, a navigational issue. Where are we going to go in three dimensional space? How do we stay in three dimensional space? What's keeping me alive? I shouldn't be here. What's keeping me alive? Answer, what, the power plant at the front? Answer, the instruments in front of me? Answer, this little cocoon that I'm surrounded in? How do I know what it's doing? What is it thinking? What makes it tick? What makes it go? And suddenly I saw an external and internal world expanding in all directions to infinity. And that's why I fly.

• 1:11:45Rich Roll?

  A lightbulb moment.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lightbulb moment.

• 1:11:47Rich Roll?

  You knew in that moment you were gonna be.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  And I didn't know I was gonna be.

• 1:11:51Rich Roll?

  Digging into this world.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  I didn't know, I thought I am twenty eight years, twenty nine years old. And literally just one thing led to another. Until I got to the point where I went, well, I wonder what it's like to fly a jet? I really, I really liked the idea of flying for a purpose.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  With a mission to actually do, not just to go up and tootle around, you know, on a Sunday afternoon and burn fossil fuels and for a hundred dollar hamburger, you know. I thought, I, I, I love mission oriented things because it gives you a, something to judge yourself by. You know, how good are you really when the chips are down? Can you really cut it? So I became a flight instructor. So I, I used to teach flying, um, and then, uh, gradually did all my exams. I mean, I've got a full set of American licenses that I've done over here in the USA. And then I've got another full set of licenses that I did in the UK and Europe.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  And they're two separate sort of systems. When I quit Iron Maiden, uh, which I did for six, six years or so, something like that.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  I thought, well, if this solo career of mine doesn't work out, what am I going to do? I thought, hmm, you know, I don't know. Unemployed rock star seeks gainful employment. You know, going and stacking supermarket shelves is, um, an option, you know? I mean, you, you've got to, you've got to do something to feed, feed the family and work and stuff. So I'm, you know, not, not scared of that. But I thought, you know what I mean? Maybe, you know, world needs pilots. Maybe I could do this. So I started doing the exams to go and do it. And then at the moment that I got the job to go back to Iron Maiden, I said, do you want to come back to Iron Maiden? So I said, oh, yeah. This was like ninety one? Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  And I went, damn, well, there goes any chance of flying a, a, a jet because I'm going to be busy, busy, busy. You know what I'm going to do? Screw it. I'm going to buy an airplane. So I bought from Santa Monica and there was an airplane sitting out there, a little eight seater. An eight seat, uh, airplane with a pressurized cabin, uh, two piston engines in it. Um, it was a Cessna four twenty one. And, um, I thought, you know what? I've done all these flying exams. I'm actually, I'm going to just go and fly myself around the world doing gigs in this thing. So I did an American tour, like fifty shows, and then there was a European tour beckoning. So I thought, well.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  I'll do the European tour. So I flew it across the Atlantic. Got there and did the European tour. Then we had another American tour, so I flew it back the other way. Um, had a few adventures along the way. Did the Amer- the US tour. Got back to Santa Monica. And this guy who was at the, at the airport there said, "Do you wanna sell a half share in that aeroplane?" I went, "Yes." I go back to Europe. And Maidenhead had like about a six or eight month break. Very rare, but we, we had a break. My body, my buddy who I'd gotten into flying was actually almost qualified as an airline pilot.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  And he phoned me up. He said, "Look, I'm getting into a, I'm in a simulator." Uh, cause I've got a job interview coming up and they're gonna give me a test in a simulator. Uh, a buddy of mine's in the back, he's a trainer and he's gonna walk me through a few bits. "Do you wanna sit in the other seat and just operate a few of the knobs and switches?" I went, "Yeah, great, sure." So I turn up and I thought, "You know what I should do? I should..." I type out the CV, put it in my pocket and I sit in the other seat. The guy does like twenty minutes in the sim. And the trainer in the back says, "Um, tell you what, take, take a break for a sec." He said, "Uh, you're a pilot, aren't you?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Uh, you have a go at the same profile." I went, "Okay, sure, fine, bye bye bye bye, mate."

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  And, uh, I did it and he said, "Ah, do it again." So I do it again. And as we, uh, as we came into land, it was a seven thirty seven simulator. As we're coming into land, we land. I did, I think we had a pretty good landing. And then the guy collapsed the main landing gear on me. And now they come to a stop, like, "Oh, wow, what was that? I think, I think the gear's collapsed." He went, "Yeah." He said, "I couldn't get you, let you get away with a landing that good." He said, "Considering you've never done this before." He said, "So I collapsed the gear, screw you." But he goes, um, he said, "So where'd you learn to fly like that?" I said, "Well, I've just been flying around the world, flew across the Atlantic a couple of times

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  in a single crew twin-engine pressurized aeroplane with no autopilot on it."

• 1:16:51Rich Roll?

  You put your hours in. You put the hours in.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  It was the hours, but it was the level of raw flying that was there. And he said, wow, he said, you'll be giving me your CV next. I went, funny enough, here it is.

• 1:17:05Rich Roll?

  And this is what led to you basically being employed as a commercial airline pilot?

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  So he then said, come on, let's go for a beer. So the three of us went for a beer. And we were talking about flying and about experiences and about stuff. And I said to him, I said, do you always do your job interviews in the pub? He said, yeah, usually. He said, you find out a lot more about people when you're sitting here, talking to them. He said, what do you want to do? I said, look, I said, I would just love to fly a jet. I'm not John Travolta. I can't afford my own. So I figure it would be cool to get a job, but I don't want to be a pilot for life. I have another job. It's a pretty good one. But I figure that the industry is cyclical. You need pilots that you can get rid of in the winter.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  When there's loads of flying in the summer, in the winter, and then they come back the next summer. He goes, you're absolutely right. We do. He said, but you need to get a certain minimum level of experience before you can jump in and jump out. I went, okay. He said, but let me think about it. He said, I'm going to join a new airline as the head chief pilot.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me see what's going on. So I phoned him a month later and I said, hey, any news? He goes, yeah, he goes, there might be like a half a line, like half a job going this summer. I went, yeah, wow, great. I'm in. He goes, let me work on it. Then he phoned me back. He said, you know what? It might only be a quarter, might only be a couple of hundred hours of flying. I went, look, I'm game. And then two weeks later, the phone rang and he said, hi, it's John. Listen, what are you doing on Monday? And I said, you tell me, what am I doing on Monday?

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  And he said, can you start full time at British Airways, type rating on a 757, first officer? I went.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  I mean, this is typical Bruce Dickinson.

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  Could you imagine if you're a passenger and you're boarding the plane and...

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Well, that's happened.

• 1:19:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  I know that's happened. Wait, hold on, you're a pilot and also I loved your albums?

• 1:19:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Like, no, that has happened multiple times.

• 1:19:17Rich Roll?

  I didn't realize it was BA. There was this other airline, Australia.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no, no. So the training was done by BA.

• 1:19:23Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  So the training, so I was trained by British Airways on their type rating on the 757 and the simulators.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  But I was going to be joining another airline. But in the meantime, when you're a, your first jet that you ever fly, you have to do a minimum of 40, minimum of 40 sectors before you can be assessed for a line check. So and at that point, you're, you know, they take the training wheels off and you're a regular pilot. So a sector is a takeoff and a landing, basically. So you've got to do 40 takeoffs and landings in various roles. So because the airline that I was going with had only one 757, and most of the time it was flying night flights to Africa, it was going to take me an awful long time to get 40 sectors.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  So they did a deal with BA whereby I would fly 20 sectors with BA as a first officer because they could do a lot of short flights in Europe. So I did my 20 flights with BA and then rejoined my airline and went straight off on a night flight to Sierra Leone in the middle of a war.

• 1:20:40Rich Roll?

  Not your first, yeah, flight into a war-torn place.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Oh, it was? Ah!

• 1:20:46Rich Roll?

  Not your last, is what I meant to say.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  No, no, it wasn't my, no, last, we were flying into Sierra Leone and the war, there was still a curfew because there was still...

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  The war was still officially not over, so they still had curfews and stuff like that. So we would fly in and land at like around about seven in the morning overnight. And then we'd disgorg our passengers and then a few of them, we couldn't stay there. So we had to fly on up the road to the Gambia, which is just a couple of countries up. We'd stay there for 12 hours, minimum rest during the daylight hours, then get back on the aeroplane at midnight, fly back to Sierra Leone, where the passengers had travelled there outside of the curfew hours. They'd been waiting a couple of hours. We'd pick

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  them all up and then we'd fly back to, that way you can get there at god knows what hour in the morning.

• 1:21:43Rich Roll?

  And you're doing all of this while fully employed by Iron Maiden at the same time?

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  I know. So at the time, I had six months to get all this done. Now, nine eleven, I'm in New York. I've got a simulator ride coming up with the airline that I was working with, because I've now qualified as a first officer. I've got two little stripes, not three, just two, junior first officer. One of my first simulator checks coming up. So I'm sat on the roof in the hotel, just by Central Park, on Iron Maiden business. I'm supposed to be doing something with MTV that day. And I've got my manuals out and I'm doing a bit of homework on the aeroplane. And all these people are coming up. I'm sitting on the roof and there was a pool, it used to be called the Park and Meridian, this hotel.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  So there's a pool on the roof. So I'm sat there, you know, and this woman comes up and says to the pool attendant, has anybody heard anything about an aeroplane crashing into the World Trade Center? And I looked up, I went, um. Now, I happen to know that it's not uncommon for aeroplanes to crash. I mean, the Empire State Building has had several aeroplanes crash into it over the years. I'm thinking it's some guy-

• 1:22:59Rich Roll?

  Tiny little plane.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Tiny little plane, Cessna or something. You know, I think, whoa, that's unfortunate. That's weird. And then more and more people come up on the roof and they're looking downtown. And one of the guys comes out, I said-

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  What kind of airplane was it? Do you know? And the guy goes, it was an airliner. I'm like, oh shit, airliners don't crash into skyscrapers. This is weird. So I went on the roof and had a look, couldn't see anything. It was too far downtown. And then I heard military flying low down the Hudson, unmistakable like military jets. And I'm thinking, I'm going to get off the roof and go down and see what the heck is going on in the world. And I went down, turned on the TV. One tower was down. The other one was sadly well on the way. And I thought, oh, wow.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  So I was supposed to be flying out that night.

• 1:24:00Rich Roll?

  Out of JFK?

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I phoned down to reception. I said, hello, I'd like to extend my stay if that's possible. Cause nobody's going to go anywhere tonight. And then I tried the cell phone and to my surprise, it worked. Cause I thought the next thing, going to shut off all cell phones, but they hadn't done it yet. So I got a phone call through to my airline operations in London. And I said, hey, it's me. You're obviously watching what's going on. I'm not going to be back on Monday. But I am safe. Everything is fine. If everything gets cut off, can you call my wife and let her know I'm fine if I can't get through? That's it. And I was there for three or four days.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Walking around in that strange, strange, strange atmosphere. It was awful, just odd, like you were in another world, Twilight Zone.

• 1:24:57Rich Roll?

  On the topic of, you know, flying for a purpose, at what point do you start doing these flights in conjunction with the British military? I know there was a, there was one flight where Sasha was telling me you took Jamaican gangsters back to Jamaica?

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16Rich Roll?

  Like you started doing kind of these, you know, they're sort of like missions, right?

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  It's what the airline did.

• 1:25:22Rich Roll?

  This was part of the airline's business?

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  We just had, we had 11 airplanes. We had five 757s, five 737s and a spare Airbus in the end. That airline that was in on 9/11, that went bust two weeks later. After 9/11 paid to everything. And then three months later, this other airline started out of, literally out of the ashes of that one. And they phoned me up and said, do you want to come fly a 737? So I re-typed on a 737, went flying a 737, and then they got a 757. They went, hey, you're already qualified on that. So then I went back on the 75, which is my favorite bird. I love that airplane, but anyway, that's another story.

• 1:26:03Rich Roll?

  You retrieved stranded tourists from Egypt.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  Just a job.

• 1:26:07Rich Roll?

  Retrieved troops from Lebanon and Afghanistan.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  I did six and a half thousand hours of heavy jet flying in 10 years, including the well-publicized Iron Maiden round-the-world trips.

• 1:26:19Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  But that...

• 1:26:20Rich Roll?

  Air Force One.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Air Force One. That was maybe, round the world, that trip in my logbook was total, maybe 50 hours each trip, that's all. So all the rest of that flying, those six and a half thousand hours, was some days you would turn up in like a company like EasyJet. They would rent our airplane for the summer, and we'd be flying to wherever EasyJet flew to. BA would be short of an airplane. They would rent us and we'd fly to regular runs to Bulgaria. We were in and out of Iceland as a low-cost airline. And we were flying to Newark, Boston, Winnipeg, and Florida.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  But you didn't keep the Iron Maiden logo on during...

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Sometimes. No, sometimes.

• 1:27:07Rich Roll?

  Where is that?

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Iron Maiden has a Bulgarian...

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  For people that don't know, 757 says Iron Maiden, you know, in gigantic typeface.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  That was one of them, yeah.

• 1:27:15Rich Roll?

  Across the plane. Where is that plane now?

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Scrap.

• 1:27:17Rich Roll?

  It's scrapped.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we had two. I forget which one is, one of them is flying for FedEx or somebody like that as a cargo airplane. The other one we used, that went to scrap. And the 747 that we ended up, the very last incarnation of it, the fourth round-the-world, was a 747. So I had to, I had to join the airline that operated that aircraft, Air Atlanta, so I had to join Air Atlanta as a captain. So do the type rating, their type rating, and then do my 10 sectors of line training as a captain before I could be, you know, officially let loose on it on my own.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  That was an ex Air France machine, very nice aeroplane, very nice aeroplane. It is unfortunately also at the scrappers at the moment.

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's really well documented in the film Iron Maiden Flight 666, Sam Dunne and his partner. It tells the story of one of those incredible tours with Bruce taking the band, Iron Maiden, and all their equipment and flying to places that the band hadn't necessarily played before, couldn't get to.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Couldn't ordinarily go to.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  Was that the concept, sort of?

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, we had this idea that it would be great to do, you know, places like India, South Africa and Australasia. And the accountants were like, you know, you can't afford to do that, guys, anymore because, you know, all this gear you've got to take and the transportation costs and things like that, you know, just do like North, South America and Europe. And I thought, well, that's a shame. So I did a bit of thinking about it and the economics of, I mean, you can rent aeroplanes, you can rent airliners. And any airline, if they've got a spare aeroplane, will rent you their aeroplane for a price to do whatever you want it to do with a crew and everything else.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  So how much does it cost to rent an airline or an aeroplane? Well, the answer is, you know, how much is the price of fish? If there's a lot of fish, the price goes down, you know. So with aeroplanes, where my airline was, our peak season is in the northern hemisphere, it's the summer. Everybody's going on holiday. So consequently, renting an aeroplane is very expensive in the summer because you can't get them. In the winter, aeroplanes are sitting on the ground. Costs half a million dollars to park an aeroplane for a month on the ground. That's what it costs. So any money you can get, whatever, to offset that is great. So aeroplanes in the winter are cheap.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Where were we proposing to go? We're going to go in the southern hemisphere. Well. Our winter is their summer, which is exactly where we wanted to go. So you can see here, I joined up the dots and said-

• 1:30:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is the entrepreneurial Bruce at play.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  And I said, and I went to the chief pilot, I said, I've got an idea where we could do like two months of work on one of the airplanes going around the world with our crew, but-

• 1:30:22Rich Roll?

  And you just have all the equipment, all the crew, everything in that one plane?

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  In that one plane. Now, the problem is, it won't fit in the hold. I said, so could we turn the last one-third of the airplane into a combi? Turn that into a cargo hold temporarily and then put it back at the passenger afterwards for the summer? He went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He said, "We used to do that on the old DC3 with a net." I went, "Okay." So that's how we started. And of course, it was a hell of a lot more complicated than that, which involved putting, doing like stress analyses, because we, actually, we took out, we took out a space that normally would have 60 passengers and plus the seats, plus the galleys and all the rest of the gunk. And the equipment that we put in there weighed maybe five and a half tons.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  So we were basically replacing like with like. Volumetrically, we had much more volume than we did weight. So the airplane was never overweight, because in the front, we had probably a maximum of 50 or 60 people, and the airplane's built for 220. So, so we were, we were never going to be overweight. You could fill the airplane up and just shut the doors and off you go. But the certification of all of that work and everything, and also the issues of making it into a fire-resistant compartment, all kinds of technical things, putting in, plumbing in smoke detectors, cameras, everything else like that, you know? It was a bit of faff, but it was quite an adventure.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  And it was so successful that we we did it three times. Maiden did it three times.

• 1:32:00Rich Roll?

  Has any other band emulated that? Like, because it seems like a model.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  Well, not too many other singers.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  Well, they could get a different pilot.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  Seven Pilots, yes.

• 1:32:08Rich Roll?

  But they could mimic.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  Well, that that speaks to the question I was gonna ask you was, how was it like flying 10 hours, unpacking, and then doing a show?

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  And then, I mean. You're not allowed to do that.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  So what was the, did you have to wait a day or two?

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  No, luckily, there's a raft of impenetrable legislation governing when pilots are allowed to do things and what they have to do after they've done flying, before they can fly again. So basically, because we were governed by the UK Civil Aviation Authority, and they're quite strict, which is good, good to know. I said, well, basically, if I do a gig, we should really treat that as if I'd done a flight, a pilot sector. The rules say you have to have 12 hours minimum rest. So when I'm offstage at 11, back to the hotel for 11:30, set the clock.

• 1:33:03Rich Roll?

  You have 12 hours.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  I can't do anything for 12 hours, which includes turning up to prepare the flight. So if we were departing at midday, I can't do that, because you'd need to turn up an hour and a half before. So what I tended to do is when we had a day break, I would do the, I tend to do a lot of the long haul flights. You know, five, six hours, the overnight bits and things like that, which was fine. You know, I mean, it wasn't like I needed the loads of flying hours and stuff like that. We did have one or two, well, not amusing moments. I mean, we went to India, so we went, we refueled in Baku, and then finished up in in India, as you do. We ran out of beer.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  I remember trying to negotiate with the Baku authorities to get cases of beer loaded onto the plane while we were refueling. With the skipper, you know, which didn't work, because they wanted something like like $200 a case of beers. It was like the Hands Up Deli, you know. I get to India, and then from India, we're going to Australia, going to Perth, with a fuel stop in somewhere just south of Denpasar, something just south of Singapore. So we do the gig in India. It's great. We're leaving the next day, so I can't do the flying. So I'm shorts and a T-shirt, get on the plane.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Bum bum bum bum bum, sitting up front and uh. Would you like a glass of white wine? I went, no, no, no, just have a coffee, you know, hey. Who knows what could possibly happen? And we've got my two buddies were up front, two skippers. And uh, stick my head in the cockpit. Everything okay, guys? Yeah, great, bang, go and sit back. And um, about three hours into the flight, they said, could you come up to the cockpit? I went, yeah, what's wrong? I went, you need to come up now. So one of the captains has just turned green. Um, because he ate the breakfast sausage in India.

• 1:35:04Rich Roll?

  These things happen.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  Which is why we always carry.

• 1:35:09Rich Roll?

  Exotic ports of call.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Which is why we always carried a spare pilot. In which case, in this case, the spare pilot.

• 1:35:15Rich Roll?

  Was you.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Was me. So, so he went down the back, was basically continued to turn green and emit various multicoloured substances from all orifices. And yeah, I sit in the seat, you know, my shorts and T-shirt, we land it, refuel it, then we fly into Perth. We get to Perth and it's whatever time it is. It's actually, it was a nice sunny day when we get to Perth. We land at like seven in the morning and I'm still in my shorts and T-shirt, I've just got my high vis on. And uh, everybody's gone, the band have just, band crew, they've all disappeared, the gears been unloaded. And I'm still sitting there with the skipper, who funnily enough was the guy that gave me that job in the first place.

• 1:35:58Rich Roll?

  John.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  John, John Moll, yeah. So, we're sitting there and um, I think, shit, what, how do we get to the hotel? And the customs guy comes on and goes, hi mate, all your mates have gone home. I said, what, no cars? No mate, no cars, no nothing, they've all gone. I went, oh, nice. Oh well, that goes with, goes with the job, I suppose. The perils of command. I said, well, um, he says, but, but mate, I'll tell you what, he said, I'll, I'll open up, I've got the guy to open up the VIP suite for you and uh, we'll try and get you a car. I went, oh, very nice of you. So we go to the VIP suite in Perth Airport. And it's about eleven in the morning now. So I go in there and we're the only people there. I said, John, good night's work.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, I think so. I said, beer? He goes, absolutely. Right, so we open the thing, a couple of VB bitters, down we go. So we sat there and we hear this voice coming down the corridor going, "Hope there's no bloody musicians in there. I don't like bloody musicians. No spirits, one beer each, mate. That's bloody hell." Then we come in, he goes, he goes, "Who are you?" I said, "We're pilots." He looks at me, I said, "No, no, really, I'm a pilot, honestly. Look, high beers, everything, it's my bloody pilot." "Yeah, you're not musicians, are you?" I went, "No, no, no, no, absolutely not. No, I don't like bloody musicians. I had that sting in there once doing some eco bollocks." You know? And I'm like, I'm like, "Welcome to Australia."

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Rich Roll?

  When I think of aviation, I think about checklists and, you know, being very detail oriented. It's one side of the brain, right?

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Rich Roll?

  And then you have, you know, the artist Bruce, who's deploying a very different side of the brain. Creativity and, you know, being an artist, all of that. Like, what have you learned from aviation that has informed your creative life or vice versa? Or do these things just kind of live independently of each other?

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  They kind of live independently of each other, but they, they meet, they intersect at the level of performance. By performance, I don't mean showing off. I mean getting the job done. So flying an airplane is an internal performance. Nobody knows what you did. They just get on the airplane, they get off the airplane, and it's just like another boring day. So nobody knows if you saved the world in the cockpit or if it was in fact just another boring day. The only guy that knows that is the person sitting next door to you in the seat and the rest of the crew. And so my performance is purely gauged by...

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  How forgetful people are of that flight. A successful flight is one where people don't even remember it. Exactly the opposite to my performance in Iron Maiden, where my performance is gauged on, everybody remembers it. And I'm just, everything is external. Wow, look at me, look at this, look at that, look at the other. And so I find both of those things intensely satisfying.

• 1:39:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's so interesting.

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  So, let me tell you this interesting thing about my, the way my head works, or I think it works in some respects. So, when I was 25, um, up till 25, I started fencing when I was 14, 15 years old. And I trained right-handed, and I was not too bad right-handed, you know. I got to 25 and I changed hands. And I started to fence left-handed. I got all my best results left-handed. I still fence left-handed, I write right-handed.

• 1:39:37Rich Roll?

  Whoa.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  I kick a sock.

• 1:39:38Rich Roll?

  That's unusual, though, right? Like, people don't normally switch their dominant hand in fencing.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  It's weird. Um, I'll agree with you on that. It's a little bit strange. In fact, everybody thought I'd gone completely mad. And what it was, I wondered, because I, I kick a football left-footed, right? I favor my left foot. I look at a, if I'm gonna shoot at something, I actually close the wrong eye. So I, I shoot with my left eye open, but I shoot right-handed. That's weird. And I wondered about that for a while. Now, my dad is left-handed, ambidextrous. But I'd injured my neck, head-banging, right? In, in Iron Maiden.

• 1:40:22Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  So, I herniated a disc, C45, uh, in the middle of a tour, on the Number of the Beasts tour, and basically lost the use of my left arm on the tour. So, there was nothing you could do about it. I was just wearing a neck collar and toughing it out until I could get the tour over and done with and go see a therapist, osteopath, whatever, on a regular basis to try and fix it. And that prevented me from using my left hand a lot. So I continued fencing with my right hand. But I was curious. So there was a professor, Professor Hans Isink, did a whole load of books on intelligence and IQ.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  And he did a book called Left Brain, Right Brain. And it was a series of questionnaires on left brain, right brain. How left brained or right brained are you? Most people being dominant in one over the other. I'm exactly in the middle. I use both sides of my brain equally, apparently all the time, which makes it difficult for me sometimes to communicate with some people. So I have to think how they think before I talk to them. That is fascinating. So if I see somebody, I know they think a certain way. I realize there's no point whatsoever in talking to them with the other half of my brain.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  I have to talk to them with that side of my brain. Came in very useful in the cockpit because you'd get in with people who were intensely left brained, very disciplined, order, detail, dum dum dum dum dum dum. And you go, okay, there's no point whatsoever talking to this person with allegory or anything else like that. About art and music and things like that, right? None whatsoever, you know. And other guys were the other way around, you know. Anyway, because I was bang in the middle, I thought, maybe, maybe I should be lefty. Maybe, I don't know. Because the other thing that happened was when I was in competition,

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  I would get really angry, like unnaturally angry, like angry like I actually wanted to physically kill the opponent. And not joking. And I thought, this is weird. This is wrong. This feels wrong. I can't go around in this state. This is nuts. What's going on? It was like just something wasn't working. My coach at the time was the Olympic, still is the Olympic fencing coach, Zamiak Wachowski, he's a Polish world champion. And I was having lessons with him, like one on one. And I went up to him and said, Zamiak, listen, you're going to think I'm nuts. I think I might be left-handed. He went, oh, okay. All right, fine, okay.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Put the weapon in your left hand. No jeopardy. Just stick your arm out, hit me, okay? Now stick your arm out and just step forward and hit me. Okay, let's do that a couple of times. Yeah, he said, you're immediately better with your left.

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  And how long had you been doing it with your ten years?

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  So he said, now do another little, he said, let me try this now. He said, okay, he said, so here's a piece of paper. Here's a sharpie. With your right hand, draw an irregular polygon. Four, five sides, however, whatever shape you want. Just draw it. Now look at it. Now close your eyes, take the pen in your left hand. And now draw it again with your eyes closed. And I drew an exact mirror image. Same, in the same dimensions, not even, you know, as that. And he went, well.

• 1:44:12Rich Roll?

  Have you had like an MRI or like has anybody studied your brain for this?

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  No, so.

• 1:44:18Rich Roll?

  Is this an abnormal thing? Are there other people who are equally like balanced between the hemispheres?

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  I have no idea. So I then sort of went and said, I must be probably left-eyed. So I'm assuming I'm now left-eyed. So fast forward. So now I'm fencing and my left arm was pretty useless. So I thought, well, that's one way of doing rehab on it. Getting it back to strength. My left arm will never be as strong as my right because I've used my right my whole life and obviously had this problem with a nerve and stuff. So I've lost a bit of muscle. Nevertheless, when I started fencing with it, it was a completely different game. A completely different game. I'd never understood timing before. Like the timing being the space in between movements. That didn't exist with my right brain, with my right hand.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  In most combat sports, they think or one, two whereby you, you do a feint with one fist or whatever it is or a sword. You do a feint, you wait for the opponent to react. And as he goes to block it, he opens himself up and boom, and that's when you hit him.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  I'd never understa- I'd done them frequently in lessons, but it was monkey see, monkey do. I wasn't waiting to see the space. I wasn't waiting, uh, like at McEnroe when he does the ball toss, to wait until the last possible moment to return that ball. So, um, this was fascinating, and as I say, I've got all my best results left-handed. I still fence, um, left-handed. And I assume therefore I must be, um, left-eyed. Uh, and then when I go for my airline pilot medical, the very first airline pilot medical you do,

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  they send you down to this big centre in Gatwick and they, they basically give you like a, the, the full works. Uh, and it's the only time you'll go down there. And then after that, you just get your local medic- era medical doctor to give you the once-over. So they gave me a full eye test and they give you a thing called an eye balance test, where they, they show you like a vertical line and you say, oh yeah, tell me when it's in the middle. And then a horizontal line. So what you should be seeing, just bash your microphone, uh, is, is something that looks like a telescopic sight. And that's, you know, that's the combination of both of your eyes saying that's where the focus focal point is. So we got done with that and I'm, I'm in like a, my early thirties at this point.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  And the guy went, well, he goes, you're very unusual. I said, why? He said, you have no dominant eye. I said, what? I said, I thought it was left-eyed. He said, no, you're bang in the middle stereoscopic. Both the same. I said, is that good? He said, well, he said, you'd made a, you'd have made a hell of a fighter pilot. And I went.

• 1:47:15Rich Roll?

  That's a trip.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  I was just like, now you tell me. Actually.

• 1:47:19Rich Roll?

  It's so interesting. I've never heard of anyone who had like no dominant side and can toggle in between. But the idea that you would have made for this, this, you know, optimal fighter pilot, like.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  I'm not sure.

• 1:47:31Rich Roll?

  Bruce, like in a alternate reality or like a parallel universe or in some kind of sliding doors situation. You know, are you not like a special forces operator? You know, there is a, there's a sort of James Bondian kind of like Migos around you with, with all of these different interests. You're fencing and you're, you know, flying these missions and you're on these stages and traveling the world and all of that. Like it's very rich.

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  But remember, special forces.

• 1:47:55Rich Roll?

  Maybe he is, right?

• 1:47:56Speaker 02

  No, no, special forces never tell you.

• 1:47:58Rich Roll?

  Undercover.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  No, no, here's the thing. Special forces never tell you they're special forces.

• 1:48:02Rich Roll?

  Sure, of course.

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  My personal theory is that Bruce is playing the role of Iron Maiden lead singer.

• 1:48:09Rich Roll?

  This is my point.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  But he works for MI5. That is my personal.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  No, actually, I'm.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  And six.

• 1:48:15Rich Roll?

  Six and nine.

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  He's ambidextrous. Five and six.

• 1:48:18Rich Roll?

  There's a very, you know, kind of Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy.

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, singer?

• 1:48:22Rich Roll?

  Yes, there we go. That's the title of the podcast.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  I'm working for Zawi.

• 1:48:28Speaker 02

  He is working for Zawi.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  I'm working for Zawi. So I was watching, um, on, on one of those retro shows this morning was Our Man Flint. Right, James Coburn. And Zawi is the, whatever the acronym is.

• 1:48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  And what made me laugh was I now know where Marjorie Taylor Greene gets her information. Because the plot was that there is a secret organization controlling the weather. So James Coburn knew about this and Zawi all those years ago.

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood. Maybe she's been watching Our Man Flint and thought it was real. I don't know.

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  Here's what's happening. Bruce is trying to distract us from the fact that he is one of British intelligence's leading assets.

• 1:49:18Rich Roll?

  Exactly.

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

  This whole Iron Maiden singer fencing. Do you know what he's really doing? He's studying nuclear facilities on the.

• 1:49:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  He's doing aerial reconnaissance when he's teaching.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:49:30Rich Roll?

  This is the real movie.

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  This is what I'm saying.

• 1:49:32Rich Roll?

  Working on the Sarah Havos story. We're gonna talk about that, but like, here's the real movie, Sasha.

• 1:49:36Speaker 02

  He is. He's first desk.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  Well, if you look, if you look on, if you look on the cover of, uh,

• 1:49:41Rich Roll?

  Gary Oldman.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  The Skunk Works album.

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:49:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  The Skunk Works, you see, was named after Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson and Skunk Works and his design philosophy.

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Uh, which people absolutely didn't get.

• 1:49:52Speaker 02

  That's his solo album.

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  But I, but I didn't really care.

• 1:49:54Rich Roll?

  You're feeding this.

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  But here's, but here's what's happening. That is what's called a non-denial denial.

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:00Speaker 02

  He's basically telling us that what we're saying is true.

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  So, so Plant Forty Two in Palmdale, California.

• 1:50:06Rich Roll?

  He's still on it.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  Plant Forty Two.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  There is, uh, part of the album cover is actually the NOAA airport chart of Plant Forty Two Palmdale Lockheed's manufacturing plant is on the album cover. And if you look at the figure that's on the inside, you can see it's actually unmistakably based around the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

• 1:50:29Rich Roll?

  So what are we supposed to make of this?

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  Take it, take it.

• 1:50:31Speaker 02

  Yes. Everything we're saying.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  What you make of this, what you make of this is that, is that Storm Thorgerson, uh, Storm Thorgerson of Hypnosis and I

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  had a blast doing that cover.

• 1:50:41Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. All right. Before we get off fencing, fence, you were like seventh in Great Britain?

• 1:50:47Speaker 01

  At one point.

• 1:50:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And what did they take? Two or three for the Olympic team?

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  Three.

• 1:50:51Rich Roll?

  So, pretty close. And then you were saying before.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  Close but no cigar.

• 1:50:57Rich Roll?

  But like, just for context, like, you're not fucking around. Like, you're for real with this.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:01Rich Roll?

  And you were sharing before the podcast that you competed in the Commonwealth Games even just a couple of years ago? Is that in Masters or is that for everyone? I mean, you're sixty six now.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  That was Masters, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a, there's a big Masters thing now. I mean, uh, you know, world championships and European championships and all, all kinds of stuff, you know, so.

• 1:51:19Rich Roll?

  But you're still in it, right? I know, like, you, you went and played a show and Sasha called you the next morning and you were out at six AM.

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  I'll, I'll tell a story. The story is that at last, there was a thing called Power Trip. Iron Maiden played with Guns N' Roses and so I took my friend Atticus, uh, who's a part of Nine Inch Nails, great composer, friend of mine, introduced him to Bruce. Bruce said, meet me in Burbank. I think we flew on the jet, we flew into India, got in these little carts. Bruce, uh, came out with Iron Maiden, played to about seventy-five thousand people. We got back in the carts, back in the plane. We got back to the airport in Burbank and Bruce said, can I give you chaps a lift home? And the next day, do you remember, in the Mustang?

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  Was it in the Mustang?

• 1:51:58Speaker 02

  Yes, you had the convertible Mustang.

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  Oh, was it in the Mustang?

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, because we took the Uber there. Anyway, so he gives us, he drops us, having played to 75,000 people, he drops us off at the house. And then I call the next day to say, Bruce, that was incredible. Thank you. And I get his tremendously charming wife, Leanna. And I said, can I just, I just was calling to say, thank you. Is Bruce there? I'm sorry, but he left to train fencing at 6 a.m. I'm like.

• 1:52:21Rich Roll?

  This is amazing.

• 1:52:22Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:52:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:22Speaker 02

  Like, most people would be sleeping for a week after.

• 1:52:25Rich Roll?

  This is what I'm here for.

• 1:52:26Speaker 02

  It was like, I was like, yeah, of course. Anyway, but it was an incredible, that was an incredible experience, just those few hours. Coming with you, watching the show, coming back and then getting dropped off home, both of us, by Bruce at like 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  Well, my cousin was with us as well.

• 1:52:41Speaker 02

  That's right, Rob Dickinson, great.

• 1:52:43Rich Roll?

  Also a singer. Your two sons are singers and your cousin is the lead singer in this alt-rock band, right?

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  Actually, yeah, so my eldest, Austin, who's the screenwriter, he was in two bands. He was in Rise to Remain, had a couple of albums out, and then he did As Lions. And he had a top 10, top 10 radio track with them, you know? But the label were kind of rubbish.

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  As labels are.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  But so.

• 1:53:12Speaker 02

  But he's just had his first film, mate.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  He, it's just, yeah, and I'm in it for three minutes.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  And he's, he's doing cameo.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's a very, very funny, funny film, very script. You've read it, haven't you? It's a great script.

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

  It was really fun.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  Bjorn of the Dead, it's about a failed ABBA tribute band.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  I think they're called Abattoir.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, Abattoir. So they're, they're on their way, they're, and one of the reasons they're a failed ABBA tribute band is they don't play any ABBA material.

• 1:53:42Rich Roll?

  That'll do it.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  So, anyway, but it involves, they're on their way to a tribute band festival in Hull in England, which is going to be their last ever show. But little do they know that it might be their last ever show on earth, because what they end up with is a room full of the undead.

• 1:54:01Speaker 02

  It's very, it's like Shaw the Dead meets Muriel's Wedding.

• 1:54:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 1:54:04Speaker 02

  Muriel's Wedding, which is brilliant. It's really a brilliant, clever script.

• 1:54:08Rich Roll?

  So, speaking of filmmaking, I watched the Scream for Me Sarajevo documentary last night. And I know that this event is sort of what reunited the two of you, right? Like, didn't you, you saw the movie and you guys reconnected after seeing that?

• 1:54:25Speaker 02

  Briefly, I met Bruce as a fan when I was a kid. It was a very brief meeting. And then we reconnected around the time I made this film Anvil. And Bruce and I kind of connected and hung out. And that was the time when we had that incredible dinner with James Khan. And I had to try and explain Iron Maiden to James Khan, which was just like, uh huh, uh huh.

• 1:54:42Rich Roll?

  James Khan had never heard of Iron Maiden?

• 1:54:44Speaker 02

  Well, he didn't really understand anything that was going on. I happened to know him.

• 1:54:47Rich Roll?

  Why was he at the dinner?

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Because I was working with him at the time. And so Bruce happened to be in town and we all had dinner together. And it was like Bruce tickets and James Khan, a pretty good fucking dinner, I have to say. Because James Khan was completely clueless about anything. But it was really, we had a wonderful, wonderful night and we kind of reconnected then. But then, some years later, this incredible story of Bruce's solo band and their show at Sarajevo, sort of at the height of the city. It was made into a very good documentary called Scream for Me Sarajevo. And it was on BBC. And I hadn't seen Bruce for a while. And I just thought, oh, fuck, I wonder if his email works. And I emailed him and that was several years ago. And we're now sort of, we've spent a little bit of time working on it. You know, everyone's busy doing crazy shit, but it's a really, I think, a fantastic project.

• 1:55:32Rich Roll?

  So, basically, creating a narrative feature film

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  Based on that experience.

• 1:55:36Rich Roll?

  From this extraordinary story in which you and your bandmates visit Sarajevo in 1994 in the midst of, in the midst of the war to perform this concert that like, basically unites the city and creates, or sort of creates hope in a very hopeless situation for a lot of people.

• 1:55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and I was.

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  Nothing to do with it. I mean, in terms of the documentary. So the first thing I knew that they were even making a movie was I was in my pub in Chiswick in London. And this girl comes up with a laptop and says, ah, you're Bruce. I went, oh, oh, my God. What, what, oh, what's, what's, what's this? You know, help, you know, I just want to have a quiet beer. And she goes, no. And she opens the laptop up and says, I'd like you to see this. It's from, I'm from Sarajevo. I went, OK. And it was the raw footage of the interviews with the guys who get interviewed, who were there at the show, and about how it changed their lives. And I went, this is amazing. What is this? She goes, oh, we're making a documentary. You know, would you be interested in being interviewed?

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  And I said, well, of course I would. I said, but, but who's doing this? You know, and she goes, well, Adnan in Sarajevo is doing it. He's a local film director. I went, well, amazing project. I mean, my God, what else stuff have you got? And they, they've got so much stuff. So I was a passive contributor to that.

• 1:56:59Rich Roll?

  But you kind of come on as an executive producer or whatever to?

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  No, I just said, I'll help in any, oh, maybe that isn't executive producer. But I mean, look, no, I said, I'll help in any way that, that, that you need, you know, for this, just you, just tell me. It's your film. It's your, it's your city. It's your country. It's not, not mine. I just, we did something that was actually far more dangerous than all of us realized. And having done it, we thought, wow, that was a pretty stupid thing to do.

• 1:57:29Rich Roll?

  Well, basically, it gets sort of offered to you and you're like, I'm in, maybe without fully thinking it through. And before you know it, you and your bandmates are like in split, expecting these helicopters to kind of take you into Sarajevo. The helicopters don't arrive. And that's the moment where perhaps most people would have said like, all right, we're going back home. And you were like, we're going in, we're finding a way to get there.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 1:57:53Rich Roll?

  Is that wrong?

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  No, no, the UN told us to go back home. So the UN, the UN, we were supposed to be there sponsored by the UN. But when we got there and there were the UN blue helmets and the flak jackets and all sitting there, they were for us. But this guy came up, he said, ah, you're the, the band for Sarajevo. I went, yeah. I said, OK, here's your boarding passes. I said, your plane that you came in on? That one's going back in about an hour. So you're going to be on that plane. And the next one is not for a week. So, yeah, anyway.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  And what was it? The UN? That said no? So, so the US, the UN negotiator, whose name was Akashi,

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  frankly, didn't cover himself in glory in several ways. But they didn't want to upset the Serbs, the opposition, as it were. Because they thought they would be upset if somebody went in and cheered people up. What we didn't know was that the Serbs had just shot down one of only two C-king helicopters in the theatre. They'd just shot it down with the commander in chief, Sir Michael Rose, on board. It had done an emergency landing into Croatia, into Kizak, its base. But it took a half a dozen 50 caliber anti-aircraft rounds in and out of the fuel tank and hit one of the main rotors. So the pilot did an amazing job.

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  That would have derailed the peace process. Shooting down that helicopter would have derailed the peace process overnight. Because Carter was supposed to come in a month or so after we left. I think it was after Christmas or something. It was just before Christmas. We didn't know any of this at the time. So we were sitting there going, oh, that's a bit of a, bit of a blow. Wow, gosh. And there was a cameraman there from Reuters. And he was a local guy from Sarajevo. So he came up and said, oh, this is a bullshit. You know, da, da, da, da, da. I said, there's a tunnel, we can get you in. I went, whoa, what are you talking about? There's a tunnel? He goes, yeah, there's a tunnel.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  We used to resupply the city. We'll get you in, we can get you in through the tunnel. I went, okay, well, how do we, how do we get permission? He goes, well, I'll call the president. He's a mate of mine. I went, what? You're gonna call President Isambekovich? He went, yeah. I went, well, go ahead. So he goes in the payphone. He go payphone booth. And he's putting money in. To call the president? And he's calling, da, da, da, and he's talking away and talking away, right? And, and, and, and, and we were going, he's calling the president. You know, shit, you know? And he comes out and I said, well, what did the president say? And he goes, he wasn't in.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  I left a message on his machine. I was just like, oh my god. I said, okay, uh, look, we've got like.

• 2:00:55Rich Roll?

  This is a scene in the movie, obviously.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's a great scene in the movie. So, so I said, okay, look, guys, we've got like ten minutes to decide. Should I stay or should I go? Next flight back, is it a week? The beer is cheap, the weather is nice and split. Maybe we can find a cheap, cheap hotel motel, stay here for a week. If, if we get in, we get in. If we don't, no jeopardy, we'll find somewhere, we'll find some pub and do a gig to the hell of it, you know. But I don't know. Otherwise, we all go home. If anybody thinks it's too risky, then we all go. We all, we all go back home. It's as simple as that. And nobody's gonna think any of the worst for anybody for saying that because I

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  completely understand. And that we had a publicist there, a guy called Roland Hyam, who's passed away now sadly. And Roland was like, and I said, Roland, if you wanna go home, you can go home because we don't need you. Uh, you know, if you wanna go home, I said, you know, I said, no, no, no, I'm fine, I'm fine. They went, okay, fine. What I didn't know is that Roland had a huge piece of dope in his mouth at the time that he'd brought in on his cheek. And that's why he didn't wanna go back.

• 2:02:04Rich Roll?

  Oh my god.

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  So, so this is now turning into Apocalypse Now. So, we said, um, and everybody said, yeah, go on, then we'll stay. So I gave the boarding passes back to this guy, who was a, um, a volunteer reserve officer from, he was a teacher in Manchester normally.

• 2:02:23Rich Roll?

  Who's working for the UN.

• 2:02:24Speaker 01

  He was working for the British Army.

• 2:02:25Rich Roll?

  British Army.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Representing the UN. So then I gave him back. I said, no, we decided we're gonna stay. He went, right, in that case, you are no longer anything to do with the UN. I went, mm, correct. He said, in that case, you must therefore be guests of the British Army. I went. I see where you're going with this. He said, so in that case, we should take you down the mess, give you a cup of tea, and see how we can get you into Sarajevo.

• 2:02:51Rich Roll?

  Fast forward to you in the back of a truck with sleeping bags.

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  Pulled up a midnight, Unimog truck, driven by a seventeen year old architecture student volunteer, with Felix the Cat, Asterix the Gaul and Roadrunner painted on it, painted bright yellow. I went, who's gonna shoot at that?

• 2:03:09Speaker 02

  Giant moving target.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. So we drove for seven, eight hours through the fog and mist in winter into Sarajevo, over a seven thousand foot mountain, through the end of an active firefight. And, I mean, I know what star shells are, because we were down the bottom of this mountain. I went, those are parachute flares and star shells. There's some shit going on the top of that mountain. So where are we going? Yeah. Right. Okay. So we got there, got to the top, and it was freezing cold and the storm was coming up. Incredibly beautiful. Incredibly beautiful terrain. I remember driving through it and thinking, what an amazingly beautiful place

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  this mountain was, and how completely fucked up it was that they were all fighting. As you do. And then we got to the, like, the road that goes down into the city. And it was like, it was like a road on the side of, it was like a dirt track going down the mountain. And they wouldn't let us down initially. The idea was that the UN armored personnel carriers were gonna come up, pick us up, put our gear in the back, and then they were gonna go down the track. But the Bosnian guys wouldn't let them up. And then they discovered that there was a Reuters film cameraman in the back, and then they definitely weren't gonna let them up. So we had to drive down. So we drive down this ravine. And I'm looking over the rear.

• 2:04:32Speaker 02

  While there's a firefight going on?

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  No, no, no. It was gone. It was quiet. It was absolutely quiet now. You couldn't see Sarajevo because the mist was in, and it just looked like a big cap top of a cappuccino. I mean, it was beautiful. Some was coming up, you know, and I'm looking down in this ravine and there's all this twisted metal, you know, and I'm thinking, they're terrible drivers here. Well, no, this was the stuff they'd blown off the road, because the whole of the rim surrounding Sarajevo was basically Serb territory. The only bit that was accessible was over the top of Iguan and down this road. So you were like in a barrel and potentially a fish.

• 2:05:08Speaker 02

  The only way in and out.

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so that you're surrounded by potential. So we're going, we're driving down this ravine. I'm in the front seat because I'm thinking if anybody gets gets it, it better be me because I've got them all into this bloody mess. And coming the other way, the most surreal thing is a Coca-Cola truck. I'm thinking, hold on a minute, there's a war. Coca-Cola gets everywhere. And of course, it's a single track road, so we have to stop and we have to back up. So I get out and I'm like, okay, so yeah, back up, back up, back up. And this is, and I just couldn't get the image out of my head of the Gary Larson cartoon with the deer with the big target on his chest saying, hey, bummer of a birthmark, Hal.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  So we get in and we drive down the bottom. We put our stuff in the armored personnel carriers and they take us through the city, which was harrowing. And finally, we get to our sandbagged, concrete, sandbagged bunk for the next few hours before the gig that night. We're there for, I don't know, three, three days, four days, but it felt like a lifetime compressed into four days. You can imagine, I can see how people who were there for six months, the effect it would have. Because I came home, eventually got home, kind of long story short, and we came home on a Hercules RAF transport, got

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  home, and then we got on the train to London. And we're sitting there on this train on Sunday night going, I've just been, and you're all getting ready for Christmas and you're all drunk, and I've just been where? And then we get to the end of the line at Paddington. And I went and I sat on a park bench outside the train station. It was freezing cold and I sat there going.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  This is not real. That's a traffic light. Traffic lights just looked absurd to me. People are living their lives by traffic lights in this road. They stop at a red light and they go at a green light. That's absurd. Where I've been in Sarajevo, there are no traffic lights. It just might be a bullet. That's the red light.

• 2:07:31Speaker 02

  And they went into the middle of a war zone at the height of the war to do this show. And in fact, when they heard that Bruce was coming, a lot of soldiers came from the front line.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  One of them did, yeah, several of them did, you know.

• 2:07:43Speaker 02

  They came back to see the show because it was a sort of single point of hope, of something to believe in in the middle of this.

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  They shut the schools. They shut the schools so kids could make their way to the show because they couldn't go all at once because if they went all at once, they were a target for the snipers. So they could go in dribs and drabs and get there and the place was full by the time we got there. I don't know how many, but six, seven, eight hundred people or something like that. I'm not sure.

• 2:08:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the documentary has this like shifting perspective. You kind of experience it through the experiences of the band members and then there's the people who live there and the anticipation of this event happening and they're like, Bruce Dickinson, Bruce Dickinson. There's like whispers and people are like starting to freak out. And there's this tension between, you know, you mentioned your publicist, like you need to kind of get the word out, right? You gotta let people know that this is happening, but if you don't do it the right way, then you're gonna notify the opposition and then you become a target and becomes even more dangerous than it already is.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  So I was just hoovering up all these stories of experiences of other people, you know, that had before and after the show while we were there. And then when Sasha and I met up and we said, you know, that would be a great thing to do a movie, I said, you know what, it would, but I do not want to do the movie about the rock star that went into Sarajevo.

• 2:09:08Rich Roll?

  No, it's from the perspective of the people there.

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  I said, we need to follow the journey of somebody who, a local person, who makes the journey, it's the road movie, his road movie of getting to the show and everything else. So our representation in it is incidental, almost. There is another subplot, which is based around.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  The hideous.

• 2:09:34Speaker 02

  The snipers.

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so, so basically, um, people were selling tickets in USA for people to go and kill people in Sarajevo.

• 2:09:46Speaker 02

  This is a real thing that is just, you can't believe it, but it's true.

• 2:09:48Rich Roll?

  Wait, explain that, I don't quite understand.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  Well, if you were of a certain ethnicity, you could pay to go shoot people.

• 2:09:58Speaker 02

  To be on the top of that rim of the mountain.

• 2:10:00Rich Roll?

  I see, I see.

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  With a gun, literally picking on you.

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  Well, no, you were in the block of flats.

• 2:10:03Speaker 02

  In the block of flats, that right.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  The flats opposite. Um, I mean, one of the best snipers on the, uh, Serb side was a female who had been in the biathlon event in the Winter Olympics.

• 2:10:17Speaker 02

  In the Olympics, yeah.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  In Sarajevo. It was her town. She was shooting her own people.

• 2:10:22Speaker 02

  Wow. Yeah.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  So that is another.

• 2:10:25Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  So that, that, that's an amalgam, an amalgam. We're, we're not trying to do a historically correct.

• 2:10:32Rich Roll?

  No, I understand, but that like raises the, the intensity, you know, of the whole thing.

• 2:10:36Speaker 02

  Well, it falls under the world we live in right now.

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 2:10:38Speaker 02

  Whether it's Ukraine or obviously the Middle East, which is an expanding and explosive and seemingly limitless war now, but it's, it's speaking to the madness of war in this specific instance, but it applies to just another, another story about these unexpected things. And I really related to that thing you said when you came home and you just sat on a park bench and you were like, that traffic light is ridiculous. Because when you've been in that kind of situation, which hopefully we can take an audience into, they will have that experience of these two worlds living simultaneously that don't even make sense. Like we're sitting here now, we can't, I'm sure, compute what it would be like to be in the Middle East or in parts of the Ukraine or whatever. But you've sort of been

• 2:11:20Speaker 02

  there in that experience and you, I mean, that's why it's so interesting working with Bruce on the project, because it really is being in that perspective, which we can't imagine.

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  And funnily enough, I mean, I can't be there because I'm in Brazil and coming back from Brazil. Uh, but on December, the, you know, the, December the 14, I think it is, it's like 30 years or something else like that. Uh, so they've got the big anniversary um, there. The guy that was our security guy there in Sarajevo, uh, Trevor, Trevor Gibson, uh, who was working there in a, no, he really, he really.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  Wasn't exactly a spy, but he was, you know, it was something akin. Um, so.

• 2:12:06Speaker 02

  Someone who works for Bruce.

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Trevor, Trevor happened to be in Japan on holiday when we were in Japan recently. And he was there with his wife. So the four of us, Leanna, myself, and Trevor and his wife, you know, all went out and had a dinner and a reminisce. And he's going to the.

• 2:12:25Speaker 02

  To the 30th anniversary.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  But his, I mean, some of his stories are incredible as in the movie. For detail and additional strands to the lunacy that take place and some of the funny things that take place.

• 2:12:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the other thing. It's the way you've described it for people who haven't seen the documentary. Like it's, it's, it's dire. It's super intense. It's tragic and all of these things. But there is a levity to it because these guys in Sarajevo are like funny. They're, they're characters. Like, and that kind of is, speaks to your styles, a writer also, like finding those, you know, those really rich personalities in the midst of, of, you know, very difficult circumstances.

• 2:13:06Speaker 02

  But what about the clowns? Weren't there, there was something about the clown circus. I can't remember.

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  No, no, no. So, so the truck that took us into Sarajevo was part of a, a group, an NGO, non-governmental organization. Uh, and they were founded by a, a New Zealand, it's like a hedge fund activist, whatever guy. He'd made a load of money and thought, I'm going to do something with this money. So he bought a bunch of old trucks and they were called the Serious Road Trip. And the Serious Road Trip went where the UN said it was too dangerous to go. And they delivered the aid and medical supplies and everything else. They're all volunteers. One of the things they did was buy a London bus, paint it up as a clown school

• 2:13:56Speaker 01

  and drove it in the middle of no man's land on the front lines. And had kids from both sides learn to be a circus. Oh my God.

• 2:14:07Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah.

• 2:14:09Rich Roll?

  The serious road trip is in the documentary, but not that piece.

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, that because that piece is not not necessarily

• 2:14:17Rich Roll?

  Relevant to the

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  Relevant to the documentary. However, I mean, artistic life.

• 2:14:23Rich Roll?

  That's incredible.

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  Damn it, what an image.

• 2:14:25Speaker 02

  There's a traveling clown school in the middle of a war.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 2:14:29Speaker 02

  And children from both sides are learning how to be clowns. I mean, it's just so rich and completely insane and totally real. And it's the reality of it, I think, that

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Speaker 02

  That lands.

• 2:14:39Rich Roll?

  Well, I got to let you guys go. You've been more than generous with your time, but I can't let you go, Bruce, without closing with a few thoughts about, you know, this incredible life that you've lived and, you know, the kind of lessons that you've accumulated along the way. Like, what is your message to the aspiring artist or the person who's trying to build something, you know, from the heart? Like, what have you learned that you could share that might be helpful to somebody who's trying to think about their way forward with their own voice?

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  Just be authentic. And that's really hard to do. It's really hard to be authentic because there's so many pressures that people put upon themselves, you know, commercial pressures, this pressure, that. Just think whether whatever it is that you're trying to do, whether it's a painting, if it's a play, if it's a screenplay, if it's music, it's whatever it is, does it actually represent you? What part of you is in that piece? And really, it should be a piece of you is in it. Maybe not all of it, but some of it. It's got to have a piece of you in it. And that's its meaning, if you like. That's it. And if if that's there, it will have a force and a power

• 2:15:55Speaker 01

  that people can detect because it will be unique. Because every person is unique, you know, despite the efforts of AI and the internet to make us all homogeneous with, you know, J Lo's butt and somebody else's mouth and everything else. No, even in our desire to disfigure each other, we're still unique. And so that level of authenticity is really important. And the other one is actually a quote from, um, do you know the art? The only artist, Damien Hirst. Yeah, of course. So I do a podcast with my psychologist, Dr. Kevin Dutton, called Psycho Schizo Espresso.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  He's an expert in psychopaths. So we interview a lot of doctors. Not joking, we do interview a lot of doctors. But Damien Hirst is a buddy of Kevin's and we were discussing over dinner one day, definitions of art, because obviously some people's definition of art is like a banana stuck on the wall, other people's is whatever. And Damien Hirst has a very simple definition of art, which is art is anything that is done well. I went, yeah, I can't, that's as good as you're gonna get, you know, without getting into, without getting

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  into massive detail, anything that is done well is art. So is your music, your painting, your whatever, has got a piece of you that's authentic, do it well. It's like, make it personal, make it excellent, basically. Yeah, make it uniquely you. Yeah. And authentic to who you are. Because you may only have one life to live. We don't know. I really hope I'm surprised, you know, but in the interim, live this life, you know, life is better than all the other options you have. So live it, squeeze it until the pipsqueak, you know, because that's what

• 2:18:00Speaker 01

  we're here for. And let a little bit of joy into other people's lives with what you do. That's it.

• 2:18:08Rich Roll?

  Beautifully put. Bruce, I think you landed today's flight on the 757. I don't know where we took off from and where we landed, but it was definitely a journey.

• 2:18:18Speaker 02

  But what we did, we discovered one major thing, which is very clear that Bruce Dickinson is Britain's most important leading intelligence asset.

• 2:18:27Rich Roll?

  That is clear, yes. He's been blown. I don't know what happens.

• 2:18:32Speaker 02

  Cover blown.

• 2:18:33Rich Roll?

  But we'll leave him to deal with the repercussions of that.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  I'm secretly a member of Zowie. There you go.

• 2:18:39Rich Roll?

  I didn't even get to one one hundredth of the many things that I wrote down that I wanted to talk to you about. I would love to hear more about Psycho Schizo Espresso.

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  We're gonna do a new one. No, we're doing a new one. We're gonna do a new one. We're doing a new podcast. We will be doing a new podcast and when we do it, I'd love to try and get Kevin on here because you and him would just, boy, you know, you, me and him would have a great. But we're gonna call it, we're gonna call the podcast, and we've already got it down. We're gonna call, we're not gonna call it Psycho Schizo Espresso. When we go back down the track, it's gonna be Heavy Mental.

• 2:19:12Rich Roll?

  That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:15Speaker 02

  What better place?

• 2:19:16Rich Roll?

  I mean, come on!

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  He landed that shit.

• 2:19:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Now we've officially landed, right? You're an absolute legend. I just want to acknowledge the incredible gift that you share with the world. It's a beautiful thing. And again, I'm really touched that you would come here today and share, share with me and us and everybody who's listening and watching.

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  Well, I'm up to Sacramento tomorrow to insult people.

• 2:19:37Rich Roll?

  I know. Yeah, there you go. You do it well.

• 2:19:40Speaker 02

  You boring bastards.

• 2:19:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. Peace.

• 2:19:44Speaker 02

  Thanks, man. Thanks, Rich.

• 2:19:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:00Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors,

• 2:20:43Rich Roll?

  who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel

• 2:21:24Rich Roll?

  Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Piotte, Trapper Piotte, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Thanks.

• 2:21:40Speaker 01

  Namaste.