Meaning & the madness

He’s exposed hypocrites, taken on bullies, released a Netflix series and topped the box office with his two feature-length documentaries. Tauranga’s David Farrier reveals to Karl Puschmann the secret
to his success, his one regret, his philosophy on life and how
breaking his brain was the best thing he ever did.

Words Karl Puschmann | Photos Shayan Asgharnia + supplied

“All the best things that have happened to me – I’ve never planned them,” says David Farrier, his face scrunching into a look of quizzical bemusement. “If ever I do plan something, it usually goes disastrously wrong.”

It’s funny to hear him talk like this. From the outside, his life has seemed a steady, determined rise to the top. His media career began in the early 2000s, when as a fresh-faced journalism graduate, he took a job behind the scenes at 3 News. Passionate about pop culture, he began volunteering for entertainment-based assignments, eventually moving in front of the camera full-time as TV3’s entertainment journalist in 2006. 

Even that wasn’t enough to occupy him, though, so he began a variety of side hustles, including acting, radio, writing for magazines and generally reporting on anything that tickled his fancy. The stranger, the better.

Deeply engaged with internet culture, David’s trajectory changed when he discovered the world of competitive endurance tickling. Originally, he thought he’d found a typically quirky story for the nightly news; however, the tale took a dark turn when his jovial request for an interview with the US producers resulted in a shockingly hostile email response. 

Correctly inferring they had something to hide, David began seriously digging into the subject, leaving his role at TV3 to pursue it. He chronicled the twists and turns of his investigation in Tickled, his first full-length documentary feature. 

With its unusual and taboo subject matter, its crooked antagonist and David’s underdog fight to get to the truth behind the fetishistic videos while facing a barrage of life-destroying legal and implied physical threats, Tickled got the world talking. It premiered at the esteemed Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim, topped the New Zealand box office and announced the arrival of a new force in the documentary arena.

Since Tickled, David has produced and starred in the 2018 Netflix docuseries Dark Tourist, which saw him visiting places around the world
that you really wouldn’t want to; released his second feature documentary, 2022’s brilliant and bizarre Mister Organ; and created the ongoing podcast Flightless Bird with David Farrier for Hollywood actor Dax Shepard’s popular Armchair Expert network.

But the project he’s most passionate about, and the one that connects him directly to his audience, is Webworm. This is his online newsletter that lands directly in your inbox and sees him flexing his considerable journalistic muscles in tackling the delightfully strange and quirky as well as the heavy and newsworthy. He has a particular and devastating focus on bullies, conmen, hypocrites and false prophets.

David says this astounding career arc was all completely unplanned. In fact, growing up in Tauranga’s leafy Bethlehem, he didn’t even want to be a journalist. Instead, he’d meticulously plotted out his life in an entirely different field.

“I went to Auckland University to get into medical school,” he says. “To get into med school, you’re competing with all the smartest people. I felt so dumb because I was dumb in comparison. It was a stressful time.”

Even though it had been his dream, he quickly realised he wasn’t built for medicine when he had to dissect a rat and experienced a visceral reaction. “I wanted to vomit,” he admits with a grin. “I didn't have the brains or the stomach for medicine. I would have been terrible. I care about people, but not in that capacity.”

Then, more seriously, he says, “That year completely broke my brain. It made me reset. I stopped caring about having to reach a goal or do a thing.”

Faced with this harsh awakening, he dropped out of university, tore up the blueprint he’d mapped out for his life, threw caution to the wind and enrolled into AUT’s journalism course. “It was one of the best decisions I ever made because, from that point on, I tried to walk through doors that opened with the idea of seeing what happened and not being afraid to make mistakes,” he says, then smiles and adds, “So far that’s worked okay.”

David’s now a world-renowned documentarian living comfortably in Los Angeles, so the evidence agrees with him. Yet it’s hard to miss the irony in his origin story: in wanting a career in which he could fix people, he ended up breaking himself.

“Absolutely, it really did,” he says. “I used to be really stressed out, and over-plan everything. I’m still an anxious, uptight person, to a degree, but not to the level that I was. I’m a lot better at chilling than I used to be.”

“That year completely broke my brain. It made me reset. I stopped caring about having to reach a goal or do a thing.”

In his two documentaries, David’s stress manifests in real time – unsurprisingly, considering the intense and unsavory characters he’s documenting, especially Mister Organ’s psychologically manipulative antagonist Michael Organ, a man with an unnatural talent for picking his way unwanted into people’s minds. Off-screen, however, for the 15 or so years I’ve known him, David has only ever been a chilled-out customer. Cool as any number of cucumbers. Someone seemingly unphased by life’s general hang-ups and cruising through the world with a welcoming aura, an infectious smile and a genuine enthusiasm for whatever’s happening around him. 

It’s an outlook all shaped by that devastating year, and the mental reckoning that followed. Indeed, the secret of his success, he reckons, is simply going with the flow.

“All the best things have come from completely random events, like Dax Shepard reading something I wrote for The Spinoff that now means I have a job and a life here. You’ve just got to be ready to respond to things that open themselves up in front of you, which sounds a bit airy-fairy, I know, but I’ve always tried to be open to random opportunities that came up.”

Even half a world away, David is still very much on top of the goings-on in Aotearoa. Through his Webworm investigations, he’s regularly ruffling the feathers of the unruly and setting the mainstream news agenda.

Webworm made headlines with David’s scrutinisation of the Arise megachurch, which uncovered the emotional and physical abuse carried out by its leaders; with his deep dive into Destiny’s Church, which saw them labelled a cult; and when he found himself in a legal tussle with extremist broadcaster Sean Plunket. This resulted in Plunket being forced out of his job at Mediaworks and facing two police charges, although they were later withdrawn.

Ask David why he’s still so interested in what’s happening here and he has a simple answer. “I care about New Zealand a lot,” he says. “It’s like this little petri dish of five million people trying to figure things out – like we all are. There are amazing stories there – good and bad.”

Although people generally associate him with the weird and quirky, his work on Tickled, Mister Organ and especially Webworm has seen him diving deep into heavy topics with people who experienced awful things and are deeply traumatised as a result. His exposé of Arise Church alone saw him contacted by hundreds of people detailing the evil they were subjected to. 

Their stories can be harrowing, but ever since his brain reset, David says he’s been a fairly upbeat person. “I haven’t had any major mental health
swings. The megachurch stuff became overwhelming because it was a lot of people and it was about something really sensitive. There’s a pressure to give people what they need and support them as they’re telling the story, and that does add up. But I’m lucky that I’ve got a good group of friends around me. I never feel like I’m on my own in it.”

He also looks after himself by turning off the computer and “getting the f**k outside”. He enjoys walking around his neighbourhood and spending time in a nearby park, where he delights in seeing baby skunks and deer. He can spend hours there – although he has to remember to be back indoors by 11pm, because that’s when the coyotes stir.

“Getting outside in nature is the ultimate reset,” he smiles. “As long as I do that, I’m fine.”

His go-with-the-flow philosophy has led him to the darkest and most dangerous places on earth and to interact with the most loathsome and evil people. Reflecting on his wild journey is almost as surreal for him as it is for those who have vicariously tagged along.

“Each project feels like a different life or a different person,” he says with detached bemusement. “It’s partly the way my brain is wired. I’ve got a bit of a spicy brain.”

That said, there’s one moment he can never forget, and can only look back on with deep regret. “Swimming in a radioactive lake in Dark Tourist,” he says, referencing one of the most jaw-dropping scenes in a show chock-a-block with them. 

This happened while he was travelling through Kazakhstan. His guides took him to the Atomic Lake and convinced him to join them for a refreshing dip in its nuclear waters.

“That was dumb,” he says, failing to hide how exasperated he feels with himself. “It was f*****g stupid to swim in that lake. If I could have my time again… It wasn’t worth it. But you know, we were a bit drunk at the time and there were some fun Russians who encouraged us. Objectively, it was really good TV and it felt exciting, but I look back on it and think
I should have skipped that one.”

Regrets, we all have a few. But David has come a long way from the self-described “uptight teen” he was growing up in Tauranga. He was born in Bethlehem on Christmas Day, which perhaps explains the holy fervour with which he pursues his subjects, and his devotion to battling bullies and sticking up for those in unfortunate circumstances. His Baptist parents homeschooled him until sending him to Bethlehem College when he hit his teens. With his med school plan firmly in mind, he studied hard, becoming head boy in his final year.

“I love the Bay,” he smiles, thinking back to his youth. “I’d regularly run up Mount Maunganui to try to get fit with my dad. I loved the beach. I wish I was a surfer – I’d just roll around in the waves.”

His beachy upbringing still manifests to this day. Rather than shorts, he favours wearing togs, bought in bulk during the winter sales at surf shops.

“I wear togs a lot of the time because I always think you should be prepared to jump in an ocean or any good body of water,” he once told me when I interviewed him a couple of years ago.

He says he’s due a home visit. He likes going to the hot pools, spending time on the walking tracks and tumbling around in the frothing surf. The last time he was here, he got a wave of nostalgia and went to the house where he grew up and knocked on the door.

“I thought they might be a bit like, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’” he laughs. “But they were so nice and took me inside.”

This would be a warm, fuzzy way to end our interview, with David warmly reminiscing about his childhood budgie and Chandler Bing, his favourite cat, but there’s still one last question to ask. 

Few people have thoroughly engaged with both the best and worst of humanity in the same way David has. If anyone has a hot take on humanity as a whole, it has to be him.

“I meet so many people doing so many good things, wanting good out of life and being so genuine and kind and thinking about others, but there’s also a lot of horrific, terrible stuff going on out there,” he says. “Both things are true at the same time, right? It’s the joy of humans. But essentially, we’re all the same. We’re all just trying to understand this weird rock we’ve woken up on, with no idea of why we’re here.”

Sensing bigger topics of life, philosophy and enlightenment, I ask if he’s found any deeper meaning to life’s existential and eternal mystery throughout his explorations into good and bad, right and wrong, justice and evil.

“No,” he answers flatly. “I wish I had. I think my life is ultimately meaningless. It is all ultimately meaningless.”

Grinning he adds, “I know that’s not a very positive quote for you,” before flashing a reassuring smile. 

“But this doesn’t mean life is hopeless in any way,” he continues. “It just means we’ve got to be really careful about how we use that time. We don’t have long here. It’s a matter of making the most of it.”

Then, with the accumulated wisdom of a man who has trawled the depths of humanity and survived, he says, “Ultimately, that’s the joy of it all.” 

To sign up for David’s online newsletter, visit WEBWORM.CO