EP.276 - LOUIS THEROUX

Adam talks with British/American journalist, podcaster, and old friend Louis Theroux about Adam's Audible series Successpod https://www.audible.co.uk/search?keywords=successpod&k=successpod (on which Louis was one of the producers) as well as great singers who can't sing, what Rosie is really thinking, enlightenment, the Manosphere and what men want from women. Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on 11 June, 2026 Thanks to Diggory Waite and Claire Broughton at Hattrick and Séamus Murphy Mitchell for production support. Podcast illustration by Helen Green https://helengreenillustration.com/ PLEASE SIGN THE PEOPLE'S EMERGENCY BRIEFING PETITION https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/767687#main-content This petition aims to get the government to hold credible national briefings from independent experts to give people clear, trusted guidance on what the risks from climate and nature breakdown mean in practice, and what we can do - both together and individually - to prepare and respond. More info HERE https://www.nebriefing.org/take-action. PEOPLE'S EMERGENCY BRIEFING FILM AND TALK WITH ADAM BUXTON & PATRICK BARKHAM https://norwichartscentre.co.uk/event/green-shoots-presents-peoples-emergency-briefing/ @ NORWICH ARTS CENTRE, 28 June, 2026 ADAM BUXTON PODCAST LIVE WITH MAWAAN RIZWAAN https://www.roundhouse.org.uk/whats-on/adam-buxton-podcast-cf/ @ Roundhouse, London, 5 August, 2026 (Roundhouse) RELATED LINKS THE WAY THINGS GO https://vimeo.com/828477072 (DER LAUF DER DINGE) by Peter Fischli and David Weiss - 1987 (Vimeo) MARTIAL ARTS ROBOTS DAZZLE AT THE 2026 SPRING GALA FESTIVAL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUmlv814aJo - 2026 (YouTube) PYTHAGORA SWITCH IDENTS COMPILATION https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAqLtOOuWTc - 2002 to present (YouTube) Video idents and "Pythagorean Devices" (Rube Goldberg-style machine segments) from Japanese children's educational television program Pythagoras Switch (ピタゴラスイッチ). ANDREW TATE'S EMPIRE OF ABUSE https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/andrew-tates-empire-of-abuse by Heidi Blake - 6 June, 2026 (The New Yorker) THE MEN WHO WANT WOMEN TO BE QUIET https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/ by Helen Lewis - 14 May, 2026 (Atlantic) SÉAMUS MURPHY-MITCHELL WINS EMMY https://www.iftn.ie/news/?act1=record&only=1&aid=73&rid=4295834&tpl=archnews&force=1 - 2024 (Irish Film and Television Network) JIMINY GLICK INTERVIEWS ARTIE LANG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfzCWtCZRE from The Martin Short Show - 1999 (YouTube) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Adam Buxton?

  I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buckston, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

• 0:31Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how are you doing, podcats? It's Adam Buckston here. As you may be able to hear, I'm not on my regular Norfolk farm track. Instead, I'm sitting in the shade at a bench in Ravenscroft Park, Tower Hamlets, East London. I'm in London to do a couple of shows with the Adam Buckston Band at Hoxton Hall. It's been quite an intense month, this June 2026, on a personal level. There have been some very happy birthday celebrations for me and one of my children.

• 1:15Adam Buxton?

  Had some good times, saw some old friends, sat around, played some guitar. Life doesn't get any better. News-wise, it's obviously been busy. Keir Starmer resigned yesterday, I don't know if you heard? And it looks as though Andy Burnham might be the new PM by autumn, or even before. So a lot of shit goes down in June. Franz Ferdinand assassinated, 1914. Versailles Treaty, 1919. Invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. Operation Barbarossa in 1941. D-Day, 1944. Korean War starts in June 1950. Six-Day War in June 1967.

• 2:00Adam Buxton?

  Tiananmen Square, June 1989. Brexit, June 2016. Meanwhile, I am to be found eating birthday cake.

• 2:11Adam Buxton?

  Today is supposedly the hottest June day on record. Temperatures forecast to rise above thirty-five Celsius, ninety-five Fahrenheit for Fahrenheit fans. And this coming weekend, Sunday the twenty-eighth of June, I will be hosting a screening of the People's Emergency Briefing film at the Norwich Arts Centre. It is an hour-long film that brings together nine leading UK scientists and experts, presenting the latest evidence on what's happening with climate and nature, what it means for everyday life in the UK, and what can be done about it. The film also includes perspectives from a range of UK residents from all walks of

• 2:53Adam Buxton?

  life, as well as great personalities, including Jennifer Saunders and Stuart Lee. And I still haven't seen the film, but there's a chance that I'm in it too. After the screening at the Arts Centre on Sunday, myself and acclaimed nature writer Patrick Barkham will discuss some of the information in the film with each other and with the audience. I hope I get to see and talk to some of you there. A reminder that the aim of the People's Emergency Briefing film and general campaign is to get the government to take seriously the idea of a climate emergency and adjust policy accordingly.

• 3:36Adam Buxton?

  And there's also a link to the petition trying to achieve that aim in the description. But right now, let me tell you a bit about podcast number two-hundred-and-seventy-six. I feel slightly self-conscious sitting here and waffling on my own with people around me. Normally I'd be on my own, just me and Rosie out in the Norfolk fields. Rosie, by the way, is doing well. I think she's in a shady spot in the kitchen with all the doors open and some ice cubes in her dog water bowl. Anyway, yes, podcast number two-hundred-and-seventy-six. This one features a rambling conversation with journalist, podcaster, my old friend, friend of the podcast, and one of the producers of my audible comedy series, Success Pod. That's Louis Theroux.

• 4:21Adam Buxton?

  We got together in London earlier this month, following the release of Success Pod, for a celebratory waffle session in which we talked a bit about how the show came to be, played a few sketches, a couple of outtakes, and went off on various tangents in the process. We talked about improv comedy. Several of the sketches on Success Pod were written, or improvised, with comedians that I met when I was a guest on one of Kyle Smith-Bino's excellent live improv comedy nights, they're called Cool Story Bro with a K, when it came to the Norwich Playhouse in early 2015. And that night, I met Lola Rose Maxwell, who ended

• 5:02Adam Buxton?

  up being one of the writers on Success Pod, as well as Emily Lloyd-Saini and Robert Gilbert, who also improvised a few sketches, along with Kieran Hodgson, another brilliant character comedian, not in Cool Story Bro. I had met Kieran years earlier, when he was cast in one of my many failed TV pilots. He's brilliant. Myself and Louis also talked about great singers who can't sing, what Rosie is really thinking, and Louis presented me with a Zen Buddhist koan, K-O-A-N, about chopping wood and carrying water. And of course, as I'm sure you're all aware, a Zen Buddhist koan is a paradoxical question or statement designed to bypass

• 5:47Adam Buxton?

  the rational mind and provoke a direct, unmediated experience of reality. I must confess, I didn't really understand that that's what it was. I thought Louis was just giving me some random quote. I'm not totally sure that Louis understood it was a Zen Buddhist koan either. You can judge for yourself how much of the point we missed. In the last part of our conversation, I asked Louis if he'd heard from any of the subjects of his recent Inside the Manosphere documentary on Netflix, and that led us into talking about what men want from a woman. And I might qualify at least one of my comments in the outro, just in case my wife...

• 6:31Adam Buxton?

  Ever listens to this episode, but we began by talking about Stephen Bartlett, who went viral recently after claiming on his podcast Diary of a CEO that drinking two to three glasses of wine ruined three days of his life. He attributed the cascading loss of productivity, poor sleep and missed gym sessions to a disrupted dopamine and cortisol system as tracked by his whoop wearable device. Now Louis did actually say that it was only one glass of wine that had caused this chaos. It's a little bit more than that, two to three, but anyway, not what some of us would consider the most massive bender.

• 7:13Adam Buxton?

  I'll be back at the end for qualifications, links and goodbyes, but right now with Louis Theroux, here we go.

• 8:02Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how are you doing, man?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Good, good, thank you. Nice to be here.

• 8:08Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, nice to, I gave you a very enthusiastic hey at the top there like a proper, proper start rather than just a soft.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  I wondered if that was a new thing you're doing because I haven't listened to the last few of your regular podcasts. Is that become a signature thing?

• 8:23Adam Buxton?

  No, not really. Usually I do my hey at the very top of the podcast with Rosie.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Right, that makes more sense.

• 8:29Adam Buxton?

  And then I go for the.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Quite alarming.

• 8:31Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Adam Buxton?

  Usually I do the soft start, coming in the middle of a sentence.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  I thought we'd started earlier when I was talking about Stephen Bartlett.

• 8:40Adam Buxton?

  All right. What were you saying about Bartlett?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  I was saying that he'd gone viral because of a ludicrous clip where he talks about drinking 250 milliliters of wine. And he's saying it with so solemnly, he's saying, and for three days, I podcasted worse, using podcast as a verb is part of it, I think, too. And I was in the gym, I couldn't work out properly and I was suboptimal. I can't remember, something about him, there's a sense like he was bereaved because of he'd messed up so badly. And everyone's thought, mate, you had for three days, right? For three days he was in crisis. And everyone's thinking like, you had one glass of wine.

• 9:18Adam Buxton?

  As a big glass, though.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Get some perspective.

• 9:21Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  You know, it felt like a tipping point, like, come on, the knives are out for Stephen Bartlett. Not by me, I've got nothing but respect from all of my podcasting peers.

• 9:31Adam Buxton?

  And you've been on that show.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  And if I didn't, I still wouldn't tell you.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  It would be bad manners. And also probably professionally awkward. And I've been on his show, so I always notice that in the culture generally, he seems to be marmite, as they say, seems to divide opinion.

• 9:51Adam Buxton?

  Really? Yeah, I'm only aware of the successful side of him, which is considerable. Like, he dominates, doesn't he? Like, he is up there at the top of the

• 10:00Speaker 01

  He's a beast.

• 10:01Adam Buxton?

  Charts. And he

• 10:02Speaker 01

  He's an absolute monster.

• 10:04Adam Buxton?

  He is certainly someone who I was thinking about when we were doing Success Pod, one of the people who is a genius at maxing, absolutely optimizing every aspect of what it is to make a podcast.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  He's pod-maxing.

• 10:18Adam Buxton?

  He is pod-maxing the heck out of

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Isn't he?

• 10:21Adam Buxton?

  Everything he does. Like, he was one of the

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Brand-maxing.

• 10:24Adam Buxton?

  He was one of the first people to film that I was aware of.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Well, Joe Rogan.

• 10:30Adam Buxton?

  Yes, of course. Everything starts with Rogan. Actually, Tom Green was filming his chats before they were called podcasts, but essentially that's what he was doing.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Really?

• 10:41Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, was just sitting in his room in LA somewhere.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Well, Howard Stern was filming them in the 90s.

• 10:46Adam Buxton?

  Okay. Well, Abraham Lincoln was getting people to paint portraits of him while he was having relaxed chats.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Well, Methuselah.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, before that, it was TV, wasn't it?

• 11:00Adam Buxton?

  I liked TV when it used to be like podcasts are now. Do you know what I mean? Like when there were quite a lot of shows that were just people sitting around talking.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  It takes you back to the kind of golden age of the chat show when it was people like Dick Cavett in America, David Frost, there was a guy called Mike Douglas, no relation to Michael Douglas. I mean, and Parky, of course, I remember Michael Parkinson and you'd have, you know, someone from the Black Panthers would come on and then Ralph Nader and then John Lennon and then.

• 11:32Adam Buxton?

  Gore Vidal.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Gore Vidal, Gloria Steinem, Norman Mailer, like these heavyweight thinkers, Muhammad Ali. And they were just, they didn't prep it, I don't think. It wasn't like they were, had anecdotes charged up and ready to go. And there was something, it felt like a, like a discovery, like there was an improv. And that spirit infuses podcasts now because those chat shows, they got ossified, didn't they? They became well-oiled entertainment engines and something was lost. The trouble is there's now there's thousands of them. So you don't have the same sense of we're all tuning into the same thing and having a conversation about that.

• 12:10Adam Buxton?

  Well, the pressure on television is to keep everything moving so fast. So that long form aspect that's much more relaxed on those shows you mentioned, the Dick Cavett thing, you know, you could go relatively in depth. He'd be talking to someone for 20 minutes or so.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:23Adam Buxton?

  And that's not something that you're able to do on a modern chat show. Graham Norton can't do that. He's got to keep it rolling, rolling, rolling. And there's got to be gags and then there's, he's going to throw to the music and all that stuff. And the tone has to be predictably entertaining and fluffy, right? It can't suddenly start talking about Gaza or whatever.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  But with Bartlett, you're not aware of the Bartlett refuseniks who are out there? The skeptics?

• 12:50Adam Buxton?

  I mean, I'm not that aware of anything really that's going on because I'm not on social media. And I only am aware of stuff that I actually seek out. Do you know what I mean? Not too much comes across my transom by accident.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  How are you finding your culture? Is it just recommendations and things you read in normal like newspapers and magazines?

• 13:11Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, so I've got my news feeds and maybe I'll come across things there. And then, yeah, lots of recommendations from friends. That's the main thing.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Do you look at Instagram and X?

• 13:26Adam Buxton?

  Very seldom. No, I never look at X because I can't if I'm not a member, right? Like I can see maybe a post, but I certainly can't click and look at the replies and things like that. So there's no point really. And that's been quite nice. I I just don't even bother. And then Instagram, I had one thing when I was researching something. A few months ago, when I was doing Success Pod and I wanted to do a parody of the kind of ads you get on there, a lot of them AI generated. And I instantly went down a rabbit hole, literally thinking that I'd been on there for 10 minutes and then I looked up at an hour had gone by.

• 14:05Adam Buxton?

  And I was looking at videos of cargo sliding around on cargo ships.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  I haven't seen that, but I I think I'd probably quite like to look at that.

• 14:16Adam Buxton?

  In stormy weather, like huge swells.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  What a mess, uh, shipping containers.

• 14:22Adam Buxton?

  Right. And and I scrolled out, oh, that's good. And, you know, apparently seemed real, like real footage. And then there was another one of a guy being knocked off by one of these sliding shipping containers, which is bust out of its moorings. But there was loads and loads and loads. And then I realized, oh, these are AI generated.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Stop it.

• 14:45Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, a lot of them are just total fabrications. Because the algorithms figured out people love this stuff. They love the swelling seas and the big slidey, heavy boxes. All of it is scratching some itch or other. So there's loads of them. And then I realized there's loads of everything that is in any way interesting. Like I saw another video with. A woman sitting on a sofa in her front room and she knocks over a glass and the dog gets spooked, freaks out, runs around the room, the shelf falls down and it's just this kind of mad succession of accidents.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Sounds a bit like die lauf der dinge.

• 15:31Adam Buxton?

  The way things go.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:32Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like the Instagram, much more exciting version of the way things go and.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Which is a German art piece from the seventies, maybe early eighties, where almost a Heath Robinson, it's a kind of, it's the domino cascade but taken to the moon with all sorts of kinetic actions, one leading to another.

• 15:54Adam Buxton?

  There was loads of Japanese videos that did that as well, a few years ago, they're really satisfying and that one, the way things go is in a warehouse.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And that's obviously real, but is your point that your one?

• 16:06Adam Buxton?

  Not real.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Not real, was it labelled?

• 16:08Adam Buxton?

  No, and it took me a while because I was watching it and I watched it about five times or something, I was like, and then suddenly I thought, hang on a second, how is this being filmed? Why would someone be filming this? And how have they caught this exact moment when absolutely nothing else was happening? You know, it's not in the middle of something else when something goes wrong. It's just, oh yeah, someone was just filming while Tina was reading the paper one day and suddenly all this happened. No, it didn't. It's all AI and there's loads of other things like that with animals doing mad things and.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Did you look at the comments to see whether it was people saying this is AI or not?

• 16:46Adam Buxton?

  I stopped looking at the comments after a while because most comments on pretty much anything interesting video wise are this is just AI slop, including stuff that is actually real, like the videos of the Chinese robots earlier in the year, who were performing this mad synchronized routine. And I spent a while trying to establish whether that was real or not. And as far as I could tell, it was real, but there was just so many people underneath going, this is just AI slop. So that's the thing, it's like everything like that recently that I've consumed was just looking at stuff for success pod and it all made me think, boy, oh boy, that's dangerous in there.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Stay away. So did making success pod open your eyes and feel like it was a holiday from your usual habits and you felt refreshed by exposing yourself to media culture?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  In a different way.

• 17:43Adam Buxton?

  Uh, yeah, well, it was interesting to broaden my podcasting horizons. Like, I listen to a lot more podcasts than I would normally listen to, different kinds.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  What did you notice?

• 17:55Adam Buxton?

  There's way more American blokes sitting around, comedians, analysing what they do and having tequila. Doing a lot of quite pointed bants.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  You should have noticed some apparent differences between men and women when you survey the podcasting landscape. Like, the blokes are doing bants, making fun of each other. The women, a lot of the time, it's this sort of,

• 18:24Speaker 01

  like, almost cloyingly supportive atmosphere of, you're safe, tell me about the problems you've been having. I'm thinking mainly about Alex Cooper, actually.

• 18:37Adam Buxton?

  Is she American?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Call her daddy.

• 18:39Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah. That's a huge one.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Massive.

• 18:43Adam Buxton?

  There's lots of those, but there's also lots of more laddy ones with women.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Really?

• 18:49Adam Buxton?

  Where, which we do a spoof of on Success Pod, where they are just talking about bodily functions. And it's really hardcore. Like, they're definitely in competition with the blokes for who can be most disgusting and. We've got a sketch that we recorded with, I'm going to give a shout out to some of the people who were voice talents on Success Pod. Uh, Lola Rose Maxwell, Emily Lloyd-Zany, Ed Jones, Kieran Hodgson, Robert Gilbert, and we did one with Ed Jones and myself as a couple of kind of thick, posh blokes who are hosting a podcast called Mate, I Can't Believe You Just Done That.

• 19:30Adam Buxton?

  And Lola Rose and Emily were Bab and Boo from a podcast called Bab and Boo Need a Pooh.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  So good, so good.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  I know.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  And we are so lucky to be joined in the, mate, I can't believe you've just done that studio today with two of our favourite podcasters. I'm of course talking about the amazing Bab and Boo from Bab and Boo Need a Poo. Welcome.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Lovely. We're big fans of you as well. No, shut up. No, 100%, 110%.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  We listen to every single episode we do.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Every single episode, yeah. Which one is your favourite? All of them. Say a thing that we said on one of them. Like, you know, when you are like, I can't believe you've literally just done that. Like, I actually can't believe it. Mate, I literally can't believe you just done. Do you know where the, when the title of it came from when we went out?

• 20:36Speaker 03

  We went out, it was a couple of years ago, we went out a couple of years ago and

• 20:40Speaker 04

  No way.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  We'd be like, let's just say a couple, His Highness the Guainus had been drunk.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  No way. Oh my god. We drink as well, don't we?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  When are we not?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  I have five drinks.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  I think you may have had, and basically Toby, Toby gets up and he's like, excuse me mate, where's Luke? And the barman like points, I think it was left, pointed left and you just go to the right.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  I go the opposite way.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  That's literally the way you're not supposed to go.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Everyone on our table is literally just like, uh, mate, I literally can't believe you just done that.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Can I just say?

• 21:13Speaker 03

  No, it's true, I don't think we've told that story on the podcast before, that's the first time.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Can I just say it's so weird for us to hear you do that live. Like, it's, because we, even now, sometimes, do you remember when you did a, you did a poo on your hands and your feet?

• 21:25Speaker 04

  Yes, I did.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  I love that one.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  And I literally, I couldn't, I didn't even know I was doing it and I went, mate, I literally can't believe you just done that.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  There's something about improv when it's done really well, I've, I've seen in the US, the Upright Citizens Brigade. Right. A few times, have you ever seen them?

• 21:50Adam Buxton?

  No.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  But they obviously pioneered a technique that was incubated in Chicago at the Second City Comedy Troop. And it was a certain style called the Harold or something. Anyway, the four of the upright citizens took it and ran with it and then had their own theatre, first in New York, then in LA, then I think maybe even other places. And whenever you went along, you were guaranteed of seeing something amazing. They had a rotating cast of performers who would come and study the improv with them. And then be part of the shows, recurring characters in different shows. It was always kind of amazing, like a high wire act.

• 22:26Adam Buxton?

  The Harold is a famous twenty five to forty minute long form improv format created by Del Close and Shana Halpin. Takes a single audience suggestion and uses an opener to inspire a series of interconnected scenes, group names, recurring characters that weave together by the end of the show.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  And so Del Close was one of these almost legendary sort of underground figures who weren't known to the general public, but for people in the comedy community, he was a godfather and he wasn't interested in success, but he, I think Bob Odenkirk gives him credit in his book as well. So perhaps, yeah, a good person to know about.

• 23:06Adam Buxton?

  Hmm. I'd love to do all that. But, you know, you get to a point where you just think there's so many things I'd love to be good at. Although this year I have finally done some things that I've been putting off for a long time, although I don't know how long I'll stick with them. Getting guitar lessons.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:23Adam Buxton?

  And getting singing lessons.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:26Adam Buxton?

  Which you might say is a little late after doing the album and the tour with the band. But I've still got a few shows left to go, so maybe by the time I get to Latitude, my singing will have improved.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Does it help?

• 23:41Adam Buxton?

  It's early days.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Is it about breathing?

• 23:44Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it's a lot about breathing and sort of figuring out what muscles are operating and not tensing up in your clavicular area and doing all these things and making sure you're, I was jutting my chin out and sort of over projecting and yelling a little bit and stuff like that. And all these habits you get into that make it harder to hit the right notes.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  But would you say like, well, Bob Dylan maybe could have used singing lessons, but that's what made him Bob Dylan? Or does he sing well in a different way?

• 24:20Adam Buxton?

  I was talking, I was talking to Frank Black about this the other day, for a forthcoming episode of the podcast.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 24:27Adam Buxton?

  But he was saying a lot of his favourite singers were, yeah, that kind of Bob Dylan style declaimer, the prophets of rock and roll, who were just more or less shouting tunefully, like Marky Smith as well.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Marky Smith, yeah. Here's my name drop. I think it was Nick Broomfield was telling me that he was with Leonard Cohen. And whether it was Nick or someone else had said like, I want to sing, but I, you know, I'm thinking of recording an album. And Leonard Cohen says, can you sing? And he said, not really. And Leonard Cohen said, great, because that means you won't sound like anyone else.

• 25:03Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  So that was the takeaway.

• 25:06Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  But maybe you have to sing, maybe you have to sing quote unquote badly in your own way.

• 25:12Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, you've got to find your voice.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Would you ever go all out, completely sincere, I'm in pain, this is horrific, or do you know what I mean?

• 25:20Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Would you?

• 25:22Adam Buxton?

  But I just don't think I've got what it takes. Like, maybe if I went on, if I had an intensive course of psychedelic therapy or whatever, and lost my ego, and maybe I'd come out the other side of that, and I would be an incredible artist who was just connecting left and right with everybody on a very fundamental emotional level. But at the moment, no, I mainly want to talk about shorts and things that happen in the kitchen.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  What made you want to do Success Pod?

• 26:08Adam Buxton?

  Oh, okay.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  You already had a successful podcast.

• 26:11Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, that's true, but I was accumulating all these little sketches that were just fun to do. Like, I've always made those. Do you remember I used to have a radio show in Cheltenham?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:21Adam Buxton?

  When I was at art school in the early 90s. And I got this gig on a local radio station. And I could fill it with whatever I wanted, but I was making these spoofs on a four-track. Actually, I found one the other day. I will play it to you. A little bit of it.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  We asked 12 million people what they found most difficult and depressing about life in 1993, and they all said the same thing. It's got to be scrunching up bits of paper that you want to put in the bin, doesn't it? Compacting small portions of waste paper before disposing of them. That's something that always gets me down. Oh, definitely scrunching up paper that you've got to throw away. That's right, scrunching. Yeah, I hate it. Terrible scrunching. Well, now there's new scrunchies.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Bits of paper that come already scrunched, so when it's time to throw them away,

• 27:07Speaker 03

  they're already done. All you have to do is pop them in the bin. New scrunchies come in all different shapes and sizes for any occasion.

• 27:13Adam Buxton?

  So they're ready-made to put in the bin.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  That sounded good.

• 27:17Adam Buxton?

  But that's essentially, I'm doing the same thing still, you know what I mean? Like spoof ads and spoof trailers and things like that, and I'm doing all the voices. Like, that was the fun thing, was layering up all the vocals.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:28Adam Buxton?

  Kenny Everett style.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:31Adam Buxton?

  But is it weird? One thing I was worried about doing Success Pod was like, is this just going to drive people mad to hear the same voice in so many things, doubling up?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Listeners will let us know, won't they?

• 27:41Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I mean, not for me.

• 27:42Adam Buxton?

  Okay. But then-

• 27:44Speaker 01

  But also, I do think you fertilized it with other people. I think that has, that's opened it out.

• 27:49Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  I mean, there's worlds where it would all just be you, and there's people who, Victor Lewis Smith used to do that, didn't he? And, and I think it can get a little bit oppressive.

• 27:59Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, definitely. Because it's so easy as well, when you're doing that, to overproduce it and to, and to nip all the air out of it and make it really fast, fast, fast, fast. Anyway, so I had all these bits that I would do every now and again, just for fun. And always thinking, maybe these could go in some funny offshoot podcast. And back in 2018, I sent a load of clips to Seamus, my producer. And said, what do you think about like, just doing a one off funny episode? That's all sketches and little stupid offcuts that don't belong in the main podcast. And he said, yeah, great. But then we never did anything about it, like all these things, you know, you just kick them around. And there's never the right time to pursue them.

• 28:45Adam Buxton?

  But I kept on coming back to it. And, and then after you set up your production company, Mindhouse with your partner Nancy. I thought, well, if I take this to Louis and Nancy, then it'll become real. And then I'll have to do it and they'll help me do it. And also I can get Louis' perspective on the actual content, which I really thought would be valuable to avoid what we were talking about, to avoid it becoming too oppressive and too one note.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Cause when you came to me, it was this concept of in the, what we now call the self optimization field or the world of success. There was, it had become a thing, hadn't it? Especially for men's podcasts, that they should be like, oh, you can use this. Like whether it's about fitness or financial success, where to invest crypto. It felt like there was potentially a controlling idea of.

• 29:38Adam Buxton?

  Sort of hacks and.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. How to hack and live your best life. So then it became about how do we match that up with the sketches and make it all flow. It was striking how tricky it was to get the grammar and figure out, how does this hang together?

• 29:52Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. Right. Cause you're mixing so many different elements. I mean, still, there was a point about a month or two before we delivered it, where I just thought, this doesn't work at all. Because it's mashing together so many different tones, like, you know, there's stuff where I'm doing all the voices, pretending to be characters. There's stuff where I'm talking to Rosie, where I'm a version of myself. And Rosie is another version of myself, essentially. But we are saying.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 30:21Adam Buxton?

  Some sincere things.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Wait, Rosie's what? Uh, I thought Rosie was like kayfabe. We don't, we never acknowledged that Rosie's.

• 30:32Adam Buxton?

  Yes, I mean, the character of Rosie.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  It's like Keith Harrison Orville. You'll ever get to a point where you tour and you bring on a Rosie, like a, you know, like spit the dog.

• 30:42Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  No, that'd be weird because there's a real dog.

• 30:44Adam Buxton?

  Sure.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  So you can't do that.

• 30:46Adam Buxton?

  No, and also the other thing is that obviously Rosie is real and Rosie is always there.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  That's what I was gonna say. Would you do Rosie without Rosie?

• 30:55Adam Buxton?

  No. If I'm talking to Rosie, Rosie is there.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  But you have to say that. Why would we believe you?

• 31:03Adam Buxton?

  It'd just be such a weird lie to tell, I think, to boast about that if it wasn't true.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  There's a um famous horror film, it might even have Anthony Hopkins in it, where the guy gets attacked by his ventriloquist's dummy.

• 31:18Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Like, do you ever worry that Rosie might give vent to some forbidden part of you?

• 31:24Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I do. I feel like that's already happened a little bit.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Really?

• 31:28Adam Buxton?

  In Success Pod.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Because she can be quite cutting.

• 31:32Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it's a different side of Rosie than you would hear on a typical episode of my podcast. I'm trying to get my wife back into, I'm trying to get my wife into horror films.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  You did two different versions. I'm not letting that go.

• 31:48Adam Buxton?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Why did you do my wife and then my, did you get?

• 31:53Adam Buxton?

  I was thinking I didn't do it right the first time. Gotta stay on brand, otherwise it's gonna get confusing. First, the first one was just my wife.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  My wife is a different guy with a different wife.

• 32:03Adam Buxton?

  Different bloke.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Shed guy.

• 32:04Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. The other one is my wife, robot voice. I'm tired.

• 32:11Adam Buxton?

  My brain's shutting down.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  That's the one thing you don't want to say to your audience because then they get it in your head that like, oh, he's not giving us a good show. We're not getting max bucks.

• 32:20Adam Buxton?

  If you say you're tired.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  We're not getting a bang for our bucks. Like, you imagine halfway through a stand-up show, you'd be like, I'm sorry, guys, I'm really tired.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  That is the one thing that no, no audience is going to be like, oh, don't worry. Just phone it in.

• 32:36Adam Buxton?

  I was thinking that maybe they might give me a break because I'm trying, but I'm just trying to be honest. Anyway, I don't know anyone who doesn't need a prop to switch into character like Barry Humphries, who used to do Dame Edna and.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Les Patterson.

• 32:51Adam Buxton?

  Les Patterson. I bumped into a radio person the other day who, in fact, it was my old producer at Six Music, James Sterling. And he was talking about being at GLR when Barry Humphries came in to do an interview. And he wanted to be interviewed as Les Patterson. And the interviewer said before they were on air, like, how will I know? When you are Les? And he said, when I put the hat on and as soon as the hat goes on. He's Liz and if he's got the hat off.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Who was the Australian Minister of Culture or something?

• 33:28Adam Buxton?

  Right, yeah.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  And he was very, you sort of stained and boozy and vulgar.

• 33:34Adam Buxton?

  Big, mad stained teeth and he was, he was just drooled a lot. There's a lot of drool everywhere. And he was sort of dissolute and big and. Yeah, he needed the hat and I need Rosie. I think I can't just freestyle without dog legs. So Rosie's there and, and also I hope Rosie will never die, but if that happens. I won't carry on pretending that she's still alive.

• 34:04Adam Buxton?

  In order to keep my.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  So what will you do?

• 34:05Adam Buxton?

  Podcast going. I think I'll have to rebrand. I'll have to pause. I'll have to think what I'm going to do with my life. She's so central to everything now. And so it was.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Are you looking at Rosie and imagining what she would be saying then?

• 34:21Adam Buxton?

  Sometimes. I mean, I think a lot of the time she's just interested in food. And she just wants to know where the next food is coming from. I mean, I, that, there's a little bit in success pod where. I play a short recording of my thoughts. And so I list a number of my top 10 thoughts and they're all real kind of thoughts that I have. And then Rosie plays me a selection of her thoughts. And I thought really hard for that bit about like, what is she thinking? And mainly I think she is thinking about.

• 34:57Adam Buxton?

  Being physically comfortable, like what position is best on the sofa? And maybe if I move my head up a little bit and just rest my chin on this cushion, then that'll be better. And then maybe if I go over under the table, it'll be a little cooler. And then I want a treat, I'd like a treat. I'm quite hungry and if I go and stand over there, they might give me one. So she's thinking that really most of the time. But I also do think that she thinks, I'm so glad you're back. I love you. It's so nice to be with you and you know, that kind of thing, but dog versions of those thoughts.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  You know, it's, I'm, I'm gonna run the risk of being pedantic, but I don't think animals think with pronouns.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  I was, I did a story about dogs and it was, the dog was barking. I was talking to this slightly new age at Los Angeles trainer and I said, if the dog could speak now, what would it say? And he said, it would say fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. And I was like, wow, I, I said, I thought that that's right, isn't it? That is actually right. And because you think about, it reminds me of something, I think it was a Nietzsche critique of Descartes. You know, Descartes famous formulation, like if you knew nothing, you didn't assume nothing, you can't, you don't know if you're in a waking dream, nothing coming into your senses. You can, you can't depend on any of it. You've forgotten everything you ever knew. What do you know?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  And he's like, well, all you know is I think, I think. And then he gets to I think, therefore I am. But Nietzsche's thing is like, who's I, right? Who, I think, like you, you, you might say think, but you can't really organize it into the concept of a kind of knowing subject, right? It's just thinking, thinking is happening or thinking, think, think, think, think, think, think. So in the Codices of Rosie.

• 36:58Adam Buxton?

  That's, is that ego as a part of consciousness?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  I think it's the idea that, like, if you if you imagine how you think, one of Nietzsche's things was like multiple identities and that the actually the human subject can actually be like a society, a bit like superego, ego, id, that there's an upper class or a ruling class, and then there's a, you know, a sort of below deck, sort of rowdy part of you that wants to go out and punch someone, you know what I mean? Like, all of these are organized into, in other words, in a simple crass sense, you'd say, oh, I hear voices in my head. But in a more normal way, it would just be, I'm in conflict with myself.

• 37:32Adam Buxton?

  Well, it's like the numskulls from Beano.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of.

• 37:35Adam Buxton?

  They're all working away in there.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And even I think, like, you think how limited it is to say, well, what do you want? I want, well, I want this, but I want this, and I want, you know, I want so many different things that are in conflict, that the I starts to feel like a meaningless construction.

• 37:48Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, well, that's what happens with psychedelics is all that gets torn apart, right?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:53Adam Buxton?

  And suddenly you are, if you're taking five MEO DMT or whatever it is.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Is that the god molecule?

• 37:59Adam Buxton?

  The god molecule, you are blasted into a void of pure consciousness divorced from ego and a sense of self, and you're just floating around in a realm of liquid consciousness. I mean, like, does that mean anything to you at all? Can you even begin to conceive what they're talking about when they talk about all that stuff? Have you ever had any of those things?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I could, it's not hard to imagine, right? You imagine it being blasted into a kind of liquid ecstasy of of pure radiant gold. Um, I can imagine that. Or even the dream state, when you think of yourself asleep, the way in which you're kind of unconscious but conscious, is it something that I particularly want? Not that much. Not that much.

• 38:47Adam Buxton?

  Don't you think that, do you ever wonder, though, if there's um, some sort of amazing egoless nirvana on the other side of that, that would just make you a totally chilled super dude?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Oh, it'll come to me where I read it, but the quote was, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

• 39:17Adam Buxton?

  Right. Life carries on essentially.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Nothing really changes.

• 39:21Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  You're not, you're never going to arrive. It's not like, oh, it's all different now.

• 39:28Adam Buxton?

  But your attitude to chopping the wood and carrying the water, that's the thing is you are responding, whoever said that can fuck off.

• 39:38Adam Buxton?

  Because they think they're being so clever, saying the same thing twice after the big thing that's happened. But it's not clever, because all we are are just machines for processing things and internalizing them and reacting to them and being conscious of them and having a emotional response to them. So, sorry, that's all we are. And it matters, you can train yourself to respond differently and you can have your experience of reacting to the world altered in all sorts of different ways, either by things that happen to you or things you do to yourself.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Well, you can have a healthy outlook, you can be well balanced, but you're still gonna have the same sorts of problems. It was a Freud thing where he goes, what's the aim of analysis? He says, the aim of analysis is to replace neurotic grief with ordinary human unhappiness or something. In other words, it's not like, oh, you graduate to a different plane, you just cope with the ups and downs in a more mature and healthy way.

• 40:38Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, well, that's what I mean, though. Like, the former, you might hate chopping wood and carrying water and think it's a pain in the ass, but then something might happen to you which would change the way you think about those things in a valuable way, which actually, because of that, sort of transforms everything about those experiences, you know what I mean? So, it's like, chopping wood version one versus chopping wood version two are totally different,

• 41:06Adam Buxton?

  even though you're doing the same thing.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe not that different.

• 41:11Adam Buxton?

  But this is, we should have covered this in success part.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  We can do that, we can put this in like season two, we'll revisit like the enlightenment question. Do you ever have a breakthrough? Most of the time when people talk about having a breakthrough, I'm thinking, no, you haven't.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Don't you? And when people talk about, I got off the drugs and now I'm so much better, I often am thinking, you're still on the drugs.

• 41:38Adam Buxton?

  In what way?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Well, I just think that that recovery narrative feels trite and, not to say it's never the case, but quite often, the person's still in trouble. There is still a lot of damage.

• 41:50Adam Buxton?

  Well, but that's Sort of what you just said.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:54Adam Buxton?

  Yes, they're in trouble, but now they are armed with very valuable strategies for how to.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Or they've learned a lot of words.

• 42:02Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah, but that's the thing, isn't it? You're just learning ways to cope. And that's, you know, it's like the AA prayer. Uh, what is it again? It's give me the strength to.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Grant me the serenity. We don't know, we're not gonna do that. I can tell you, we're not doing that. No one needs to hear that.

• 42:18Adam Buxton?

  The Serenity Prayer.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  God, give me the, the serenity to cope with the things I cannot cope with, the courage to cope, to face the things I can and the wisdom, no, no one cares. And the wisdom to know the difference, don't read it.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  I've done it.

• 42:33Adam Buxton?

  I've got to read it because you said no one cares. It's so disrespectful.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  God grant me the serenity.

• 42:39Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  To handle the things that can't change, except the things I can't change.

• 42:44Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And the courage to change the things I can.

• 42:48Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  And the wisdom to fuck off.

• 42:51Adam Buxton?

  To know the difference. David Bowie had that tattooed on his leg.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  See, now I think maybe there's a lot of sense in it. Did he really?

• 42:59Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, he did. Even though I don't think, well, no, I guess he was.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  That's up there with the if by Kipling, right?

• 43:06Adam Buxton?

  Are you dissing Kipling now?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Are we like in, in Anati Alley? We've wandered into like the realm of pure vacuity.

• 43:14Adam Buxton?

  I think the Serenity Prayer is excellent indeed.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Next we were gonna go, hang in there, baby. Do footsteps. God, why did you desert me when I'm, I only saw one set of footsteps? Do you know that one?

• 43:25Adam Buxton?

  No, I didn't.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  You do.

• 43:27Adam Buxton?

  What's that one?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  That's the one where it's the footsteps thing where it's, um, it's a picture of footsteps on a beach and it goes, um. I saw a path of life along the strand of the, of the beach and I saw there were times when you were beside me, God. And then there were times when I was on my own and I realized it was at the times of greatest stress. That there was only one set of footprints. God, why did you desert me in my hour of greatest need? I can't believe I'm getting chills as I say this. He said, son, those were the times when I carried you. Because that's why there's one set of footprints.

• 44:02Adam Buxton?

  Sure, I understand now. He could probably could have figured it out if he'd looked at how much deeper the footprints are.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  How big. Well, you have the same size feet as God. That's kind of coincidental.

• 44:13Adam Buxton?

  I like all that stuff. I think that's.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Stop it.

• 44:15Adam Buxton?

  I think it's deep. It's good stuff, man. It's valuable. It helps a lot of people.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Do you like, does it help me to have a post that says you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps?

• 44:27Adam Buxton?

  I've got to get organised.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Well, hang in there, baby.

• 44:30Adam Buxton?

  It sounds to me like you have a fuck of a lot of unprocessed stuff that you are trying to keep at arm's length, just saying.

• 44:39Adam Buxton?

  You're afraid of this stuff because this is a big dose of truth in poetry form that you are afraid to incorporate.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:46Adam Buxton?

  Into your so-called life. What about that?

• 44:57Adam Buxton?

  People don't like sighing. People with misophonia don't like sighing.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Don't they?

• 45:01Adam Buxton?

  No, no, no.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Cut that bit out.

• 45:04Adam Buxton?

  I'll keep it in to keep it real.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Well, we were talking about Rosie and what's going on in Rosie's mind.

• 45:09Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  But mainly, um, what I was thinking about was that when you came, it was this idea of success pod and.

• 45:17Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  I really like Yandrew, the character, and in my head, Yandrew was going to be maybe even hosting the whole thing, possibly.

• 45:25Adam Buxton?

  Well, it was originally Ken Cord. It's going to be Ken Cord.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:29Adam Buxton?

  And Ken would be basically a wannabe Stephen Bartlett.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  And I saw Yandrew as more of a Bartlett.

• 45:36Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Because he is more of a Bartlett, isn't he?

• 45:38Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And, and I find him very funny. And I thought, oh, it'll be a success podcast in the, you know, and Stephen Bartlett's one example. There's many others. This Chris Williamson does a similar thing.

• 45:49Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  That is disrupted by that guy, Rob Moore, is it? The disruption podcast. There's hundreds of these podcasts where people are teaching, dispensing wisdom and.

• 45:59Adam Buxton?

  Tim Ferriss.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Tim Ferriss.

• 46:01Adam Buxton?

  Huberman.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Andrew Huberman. What's the Tim Ferriss one?

• 46:05Adam Buxton?

  He's widely considered the godfather of the genre, the Tim Ferriss Show.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  What's the genre called?

• 46:11Adam Buxton?

  It's self-help, isn't it?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it would be. So then I like the idea of Yandrew as a kind of shambolic. I mean, he's a mysterious guy, right? I never really, do you know where he's from?

• 46:25Adam Buxton?

  In my mind, he's moved around a lot, like he went to the American school in the UAE or something.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  UAE, really? I thought you say Luxembourg.

• 46:34Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, but.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  I get North European sort of energy, no? Something a bit Dutch.

• 46:39Adam Buxton?

  He's all over the shop. But I used to just get a lot of ads for like selling schemes.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 46:48Adam Buxton?

  And.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Dropshipping? Dropshipping's a big thing in the manosphere.

• 46:52Adam Buxton?

  Right, okay.

• 46:54Adam Buxton?

  And they.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  I don't even know exactly what it is. You buy things on wholesale and sell them at retail, I guess.

• 46:59Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. And that was happening about 10 years ago. That seemed to be happening a lot. And so I was getting targeted with all these ads and that's how Yandrew started.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Because sometimes there's a person you're actually doing, like, is there some guy out there who talks like Yandrew?

• 47:13Adam Buxton?

  I don't think so.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  So where is that coming from?

• 47:16Adam Buxton?

  It's being earnest, you know, it's getting close on the mic and.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Creativity.

• 47:23Adam Buxton?

  Creativity and I'm being very breathy and once you start talking like that close to the mic, it's suddenly, maybe a bit of South African or something, but it's, it's just a whole hodgepodge of different stuff. But you get sometimes when you meet people and they've moved around so much and there's so many influences in their life. And it's those kinds of people I see on these YouTube ads, like good looking, younger.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  So he's on the young side.

• 47:55Adam Buxton?

  I think so, although by the end of doing it, he felt, there's one I do about, uh, he meets a nutritionist guy.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  He starts coming to pieces a little bit.

• 48:04Adam Buxton?

  And the nutritionist tells him he's got a parasite and he loses his shit.

• 48:10Adam Buxton?

  Then it was basically me.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  It was starting to turn into you, I remember that one.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  So I like that and I thought it could be held together by more or less, you know, kind of consensual performed interview, like in the sense of you'd be in character interviewing someone.

• 48:31Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  But in a goofy way, you wouldn't be, it wouldn't be like Ali G where you'd be pretending that the person would think necessarily you were real. They'd be briefed, but that it would be a, you'd be improv-ing in a sense in character.

• 48:43Adam Buxton?

  Mrs. Merton style.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there we go.

• 48:45Adam Buxton?

  That's the template.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  And they used to do it on The Daily Show as well.

• 48:48Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  People knew that they were going to be talking to a moron.

• 48:51Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Or so I guess the other one would be Colbert Report.

• 48:55Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Where he played a kind of character, a Bill O'Reilly character.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  So we kind of proceeded on that basis for a little bit, didn't we?

• 49:02Adam Buxton?

  Yes, we had a long list of people who would be good. Deborah Meaden, Richard Madeley, people like that.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Bring them on for life lessons.

• 49:11Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Interviewed by Andrew.

• 49:13Adam Buxton?

  And we recorded with Adrian Charles, who was very kind and came along for an afternoon and chatted with him and he was really good because it's a hard thing, I think, for someone to come in and, and know what's expected and how to pitch it like.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Because you don't want them to play along too much because then it feels like, oh, it's arch and they're in on it. But you want them to kind of be natural and normal, right?

• 49:39Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. There were some good bits from that Adrian Charles thing.

• 49:46Adam Buxton?

  Adrian, what is the one thing that every successful person needs?

• 49:52Speaker 04

  I think you need the ability to work your arse off for a long period of time.

• 49:57Adam Buxton?

  What about a phone?

• 50:00Adam Buxton?

  Because with a phone, you can call people. You can build relationships, you can make deals, you can check stocks.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  It's obviously harder without a phone.

• 50:09Adam Buxton?

  Send texts and emails.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:11Adam Buxton?

  Play games.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  Yes, now.

• 50:12Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  If you're talking now, certainly you would be needlessly handicapping yourself by not having a phone, but it's almost, there's almost a reality show there. Can I be a success in life without a phone?

• 50:24Adam Buxton?

  No.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  It was a really good sport. I really like that interview.

• 50:33Adam Buxton?

  I think the reason we didn't use that and didn't go down that route was because that's quite a big, single idea.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  It was hard to get from the interview to the sketches.

• 50:45Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  And that was partly because it sort of, well, what was the breakthrough, do you think? It seemed to need you to be on more of a journey.

• 50:53Adam Buxton?

  I think that was a thing that cut through was me being anxious about becoming irrelevant in the changing podcast landscape now that everyone's filming everything. What was the point when you knew you had to film your podcast?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Was it two years ago? I just realised everyone was watching TV on their phones. And if you could film it cheaply and easily, why wouldn't you film it? And then you realise you're really at a disadvantage if everyone else is doing it and you're not.

• 51:25Adam Buxton?

  Numbers wise?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And numbers wise, in terms of having visibility on social media, which obviously is double edged because sometimes you think, well, I'm just feeding free content onto social media and building the platforms and maybe building my social media presence. But how many people are kind of coming back to check out whole episodes? But I think enough to, you sort of have to play, well, I felt I had to play the game. I do think that, like to the point we were talking about earlier, there's a sense in which podcasts have become TV, like all those things that you went to TV for, people are now getting from podcasts.

• 52:07Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm. Except.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Not all of it, but a lot of it.

• 52:11Adam Buxton?

  Except in a kind of.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Shit version.

• 52:14Adam Buxton?

  Shit, unregulated, sloppy version.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:18Adam Buxton?

  Do you know what I mean? With, with a lot of really dodgy rubbish being talked about and not fact checked and all that kind of stuff, you know?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Big time.

• 52:29Adam Buxton?

  Which is a big problem that's being accentuated by AI. Here's a great transition into asking you as a sidebar or a little bit of a tangent about the manosphere. This is a sketch that I had that was gonna be in Success Pod that didn't make the cut. Can't remember why. I think because there was another similar one and we just ended up with that one. But this is a sort of weird reality show spoof that I did a while back.

• 52:59Speaker 05

  Previously. Hey, I got the tiny underwear commercial. Oh my god. I know, isn't it great? Oh, it's so great. I know, I'm really pleased and Michael's really pleased. Oh, Michael's been through a lot. He's very strong. He's such a strong person. He's strong. He's so strong. He's very proud of me for having tiny underwear. I think I'm gonna cry. You should cry. Go ahead and cry and get the water out of your face. You're strong. You're strong. You're much stronger. You're so strong. You're very strong. You're even stronger than Michael. You're stronger than Michael.

• 53:35Adam Buxton?

  What the hell have you been saying about me, women? You and I haven't spoken on the podcast about the manosphere.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  We've embodied it.

• 53:46Adam Buxton?

  Have you been in touch recently with any of the, any of the guys? Tik Tokis, Nico, Myron?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Not really. The big news as we speak in the manosphere is that a huge long read has dropped in The New Yorker, an investigation of Andrew Tate.

• 54:05Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  And obviously, there's been stories about, there have been stories about Andrew Tate before. But The New Yorker is, you know, a different level of exposure and the writer's gone into a lot of detail. It's horrific. I mean, even in the manosphere, as awful as a lot of the content is, Tate is a step up. I mean, the contention would be, it's not been adjudicated in a court of law, but the allegation would be that he is a serial rapist with a trail of havoc in his wake. Now, as I say, he would deny that, but the articles goes into all of that and the details are beyond horrible. Which is, you know,

• 54:48Speaker 01

  obviously, there's horrible people, but then you also join the dots with how close he is to people who are close to Trump, how much influence he has in the culture generally, but also high levels of politics.

• 55:02Adam Buxton?

  He was defended so much by so many of those people.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't know how, you know, the depth of his relationship with, say, Farage or, I know he was always friendly with Tommy Robinson, they both came from Luton. And a lot of that stuff I knew that was in the article, there was a time when we were making my film. So I should say like for people who haven't seen, I had a film on Netflix, it dropped a couple of months ago. It's called Louis Through Inside The Manosphere. I thought, I'd hoped when we went into it that we'd get an interview with Andrew Tate, that never happened. I had this protracted back and forth with him DMing on X. And with Tristan as well, it never paid off with an actual encounter.

• 55:42Adam Buxton?

  Tristan is.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Tristan Tate, his brother.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  So we sort of had to sub in other manosphere figures. The main one we featured is HS Tikkitoki, a UK based, actually he was living in Malbea mainly, but he's from the UK, from Essex, kind of muscly, looks a bit like Andrew Tate. So six feet, three or four.

• 56:07Adam Buxton?

  Needs to work on his calves.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Needs to work on his calves, but has a very, other than that, like a kind of physically impressive, muscly guy. Twenty-three years old, I think, twenty-four. And he also, like Andrew Tate, he would also say porn is for people who are weak and sick and pathetic. But he managed or had a company that managed OnlyFans girls, so he would make money from adult content, which is, which is also an Andrew Tate manoeuvre. So to your question, yes, I don't, I haven't remained in touch, I'm still following the culture. There's a lot going on, there's other stuff going on, always online. After the film came out, Clavicular, this other influencer blew up. But it's showing no sign, you know, so the New Yorkers paid attention, but I don't know that that will make much difference to anyone.

• 56:54Adam Buxton?

  And Clavicular, I don't know much. About clavicular, but I have heard that this is someone who has lots of medical procedures to change the way he looks.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  He's more about, I think he might have had some cosmetic surgery. The things that you always hear, like using little hammers to break, like do micro abrasions on your bones to give yourself better cheekbones. A lot of it is sort of related to things that you take, not supplements, maybe supplements, but also maybe testosterone or different drugs that you can take.

• 57:30Adam Buxton?

  And he passed out during a live stream.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  During a live stream, he passed out.

• 57:33Adam Buxton?

  Having taken some stuff.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Had to be taken to hospital.

• 57:35Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Uh, his real name is, I think, Braden Peters and he's from Florida. He might be, what, probably only nineteen or twenty.

• 57:42Adam Buxton?

  Oh, really? That young?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Maybe twenty one, I'm not sure.

• 57:45Adam Buxton?

  And he's the king of so-called looks-maxing.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Looks-maxing, yeah.

• 57:50Adam Buxton?

  But then that's the younger part of it, which you focused on in the Manosphere doc.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:56Adam Buxton?

  But then I was reading a piece by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet. And her thing is, you know, versions of this are happening in higher up in conservative circles and it's kind of uniting the American right. There's all these warring factions who are more or less MAGA or they disagree about foreign policy or various other things. But they do agree that feminism is a lousy idea and that idea seems to have more and more traction in the American right in a way that really makes you think, oh, this isn't just kind of ludicrous influencer culture anymore. This is actually now taking hold of something that might translate into

• 58:42Adam Buxton?

  policy.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:43Adam Buxton?

  For another Republican administration. And so women would be returned to being second-class citizens and people would sort of accept that.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yes. Repeal the nineteenth, I think, which was the amendment that gave women the vote. I think that's part of the, those are talking points that would have been completely beyond the pale have now drifted slightly out of the shadows. I think I read that Pete Hegseth, the American Defense Secretary, is part of a church that discourages women from voting.

• 59:14Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. So Helen Lewis writes about that. Yeah, yeah. And the guy that runs that.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  And you hear J D Vance not saying that exactly, but there's just sort of a strange, what is it? Well, I suppose the Overton window being pulled in a certain direction. And yes, the far right, which historically you might have associated with racist or nativist views. Actually, the organizing principle is misogyny. It runs on an engine of disparagement of women. And as much as there are fractures, especially over Israel, everyone's on the same page about women, about the need to roll back any of the gains of feminism.

• 1:00:01Adam Buxton?

  And if one of your friends suddenly sincerely started expressing that point of view and saying, you know what, society is in the trouble that it is, partly because gender roles have become so confused by feminism and women wanting a load of things that actually aren't in their best interests and are not in the best interests of society. How would you talk to that person, assuming you didn't just walk out? What would you say like to answer some of those ideas?

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Um, I suppose the first thing I'd want to acknowledge is that it's okay to think that men and women aren't the same. I mean, it feels strange that that might be considered controversial, but I think perhaps to some people, maybe that does feel controversial. Or even starting from the premise that men and women are exactly the same and should want all the same things and behave broadly the same way. So you'd be looking to find that commonality. Um, I don't want to do a disservice to my parenting or to my mum especially. I was raised by a feminist mum. I think there was a part of me that grew up thinking that, oh, men are like, quote, quote, men and women are like, quote, quote, women because

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  boys are given action men to play with and girls are given dolls, right? And I no longer believe that.

• 1:01:20Adam Buxton?

  Nurture.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Adam Buxton?

  Rather than nature.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  That whole nurture, like gender is a construction. Yes, it is to an extent, but there are also biological differences. So I suppose I try and start from a basis of finding some common understanding. But then in the end, you know, it really depends what exactly they were proposing. If they're saying that women shouldn't be allowed to vote.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know quite what you do with that.

• 1:01:48Adam Buxton?

  Myron Gaines, one of the people that was in the Manosphere doc, who got dumped, right? During the doc?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Uh, at the end, we put up a title card saying he's been left, or they have separated by his girlfriend Angie.

• 1:02:00Adam Buxton?

  He now has, according to Amazon, a book coming out called Why Women Deserve Even Less.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a sequel to the first book, Why Women Deserve Less.

• 1:02:12Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  It's generous to call it a book. I've read it. It's a pamphlet.

• 1:02:17Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  It it looks like he might have spent a rainy afternoon writing it.

• 1:02:21Adam Buxton?

  It's got a hundred and sixty one five star reviews.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Does it?

• 1:02:25Adam Buxton?

  Only. Doesn't have any other ratings other than five stars. It says, "Your biology still screams, 'Pursue women, get laid, build a family.' But women no longer need men for money, protection, attention, or even company. Algorithms and digital dopamine do it better, cheaper, and drama free. Why Women Deserve Even Less is the updated no BS reality check. It exposes how AI, porn, OnlyFans, sugar platforms, and tech have made men more optional than ever. It kills the last of your illusions and arms you to stop wasting time, money, and decades of your life. This isn't hate, it's math, it's survival." But you sort of think like, well-

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Interesting. And you know what sugar platforms are?

• 1:03:12Adam Buxton?

  No, what's sugar platforms?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  That's platforms like SeekingArrangement.com, where young, attractive women who need money can meet older guys who have money. And sex isn't promised or even necessarily part of the equation, but it might happen. And and they just go out. It's a sugar daddy, basically, a sugar daddy arrangement.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Interesting, isn't it, that he's sort of making a similar critique than the one we might make, which is that, oh, well, the platforms and the digital incentives are distorting aspects of how men and women interact.

• 1:03:52Adam Buxton?

  So what's he proposing as an alternative then? It's just, this is, the book is a wake up call. This is how things are. So what are you supposed to do about it? Just shut women out of your life and stop thinking about them?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  That's muk-tow. That would be a muk-tow response. You know about them?

• 1:04:08Adam Buxton?

  Remind me.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Men going their own way.

• 1:04:11Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Which is opt out. It's almost like sexual segregation. Like, you, basically, if you're blackpilled, you'd be like, there's no future in a world where actually, women can find whatever they want, either by making money online or by finding super alpha guys, five percent guys. Then the rest of the men should just give up and not have anything to do with women. Just exist in their own male-only bubble. That's obviously quite dark and extreme. I think, I don't know exactly what Myron's going to say in his new book, Pamphlet. I suspect it will be along the lines of women have been given an inflated idea of their own value by being incentivized, especially attractive women, by being incentivized by

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  likes on Instagram and similar platforms. And they're being rewarded for being sexually liberated, if you like. And it's a losing game for guys.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  And so he's advocate, I think he'd probably advocate a trad, a more traditional arrangement.

• 1:05:14Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, which, that's a whole other.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Find a woman who's got no social media following, who stays at home, makes you sandwiches. Make a sandwich is a big thing. I don't know why, it's almost like a meme.

• 1:05:25Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Make, find a woman who's going to stay at home, make you sandwiches and never go out without your say so and definitely not be on social media.

• 1:05:36Speaker 06

  Sounds a little bit like my wife.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing is that there's lots of women who do like that. And so what a lot of these Manosphere figures are in a kind of digital ghetto in which their idea of what a woman is, is basically a very specific kind of Instagram model.

• 1:05:58Adam Buxton?

  And if they don't get that, then they feel they've been shut out of the whole playground.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Well, partly that, but partly they're just, all their generalizations are like, this is what women are like. And you're like, whether or not it's good or bad, that's only, that is not true for all women.

• 1:06:11Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  That's true for, because they're living in Florida and they're all, they themselves are active on social media. So they've got a self-selecting sample of women who are basically going to yacht parties and going to nightclubs and buying a table and, you know, hanging as a coterie of attractive women, making a lot of money, getting clout out of, playing up to certain stereotypes of femininity. So you're like, well, that, that isn't, you know, in their world, you know, imagine if they met Marie Curie or whoever, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, like it would blow their minds. You know, the idea that, oh, you know, a woman can have value that's not to do with how many likes they're getting on their Instagram feed.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  But for whatever reason, they've chosen not to look at any of that.

• 1:07:00Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I mean, the way I interpret all that is just through the lens of hating. I hate social media so much and I just think that's part of what you get. If you are a society that values being on social media so much is a totally distorted idea of what's worthwhile in a relationship, you know, and none of these people are talking about. I think, I think we both met our wives because we became friends with them, right? We didn't get, we didn't sort of see them in a nightclub and go, look at that hot woman. I'm gonna conquer her, you know, it's not, you get. To know people and you have conversations and you're into the same stuff or you make each other laugh and then you a relationship forms and you know, it's just a small

• 1:07:45Adam Buxton?

  friendly association that turns into something else. And that doesn't seem to feature anywhere in all of these things. It's all about like ah, these bloody sexy women won't even look at me and.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Obviously, social media is an insecurity generation machine, right? And it's creating this sort of anxiety that life's happening on the other side of the screen. The expression I heard is it encourages you to compare your insides with other people's outsides. So you're like, well, I don't feel like that. And here's people with this curated lifestyle of partying with champagne and fast cars and and there you are, I don't know, lying in bed or wherever you happen to be thinking that why, why isn't that happening for me? So that's part of it. And making the Manosphere film, it was a realization more than anything that

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  this is a sales grift. This is an attempt to upsell fans, like people who've come to look at the content and enjoy spicy comedy kind of bits or, you know, because a lot of it is someone like HS going down, saying cheeky rude things. Sometimes horrible things to women out in Marbey or elsewhere. He can't, he's capable of being quite funny. Like he obviously hasn't got his hundreds of thousands of followers without a degree of charm.

• 1:09:07Adam Buxton?

  And also having moments where he is self-aware and where he realizes that this isn't the best way to live.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Yes. Or I don't know, I wouldn't, I don't know if I'd go that far, but knowing that actually he's compromised his morality in certain respects in order to become, become rich and famous. But I don't think he would necessarily regret those decisions. And then, so he gets this huge following on social media and then you believe in him, you think he's cool and fun. And then as one of his fans, you then buy one of his fitness programs or you subscribe to his app or you subscribe to one of his OnlyFans goals that he's managing. So in the end, it's all incentivized by the possibility of them making an income. In the article, I was listening, I was listening to it on the, in the New Yorker and they suggest

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  that Andrew Tate, after he was kicked off YouTube and a couple of other platforms, he was paid six million dollars a year to do content for Rumble.

• 1:10:12Adam Buxton?

  Six million?

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Six million dollars a year for a certain amount of guaranteed output, like not a massive amount, like, I don't know, like, whatever it was, a few streams during the week and then some streaming at the weekend and various amount, a number of hours of live shows.

• 1:10:28Adam Buxton?

  And that content would be him just wanging on about?

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Just talking random stuff, probably with his brother Tristan, talking to guests. So a broadcasting contract, I just, I was really, even having made the film, I was like, that, well, I didn't, I wouldn't have expected it would be six million. And the platform Rumble, which is a kind of gloves off version of YouTube, where the content moderation policies are a lot more flexible, you can put almost anything up short of incitements to violence, I think illegal sexual content. Like, other than that, there's a, in a huge amount of latitude. Rumble has been, apparently been invested in by, among other people, Peter Thiel, who's the head of Palantir and the mentor to J D Vance.

• 1:11:13Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  And was one of the co-founders of Facebook and PayPal, I think, which again, I hadn't realized that either. Now, there's a whole other question about to what extent should Rumble be more moderated?

• 1:11:26Adam Buxton?

  Well, he's a big free speech fundamentalist, right?

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Thiel, presumably, I mean, based on that, you'd have to think he was, I mean, I mainly know him because of his, A, as a tech baron who pulled for Trump very early on.

• 1:11:39Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  In 2016, when most of Silicon Valley was not in Trump's corner. But B, that for some time, he's expressed at best ambivalence and sometimes outright hostility to the idea of democracy.

• 1:11:51Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  And encouraged people to do things like Seastead, build their own.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Sort of extra national, outside national borders, communities on artificially constructed islands that would have their own sovereignty.

• 1:12:07Adam Buxton?

  Is that a bit like Curtis Yarvin? Is he called Yarvin?

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  I think Curtis Yarvin might be even further to the right, but yes, he's coming from a similar ideological idea, yeah.

• 1:12:18Adam Buxton?

  Pro monarchy.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  That the president should be like a tech CEO.

• 1:12:22Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  And hence basically monarchical.

• 1:12:26Adam Buxton?

  But when I say like, sometimes I find myself saying, oh, that's one of those free speech guys. And it sounds, you kind of sound like you're dismissing the idea of free speech in itself. Obviously, everyone wants free speech and that's a nice thing to aspire to. But it's, obviously, I'm talking about people who have kind of weaponized that concept in order to just say whatever they want in a totally unhelpful way.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's dark. It's very dark.

• 1:12:57Adam Buxton?

  Wow, we have really skidded around from all sorts into different areas.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  We were like the sub-basement of a Subramble. We were three or four floors down.

• 1:13:08Adam Buxton?

  But listen, thanks for coming in and chatting. And also, thanks for everything that you did with Success Pod, helping me get it made and assemble the team, Lucy Topping, the producer, and Seamus, and everybody else who worked on that, Ben Partridge, who wrote on it, and my guests, Kathy Burke, Sam Campbell, Gus Khan, Jessica Knappett, Ramesh Ranganathan, and yourself. And Jessica Knappett also was such an important part of helping me out with it. Early on, she came in and did a few days in a writing room with Lola Rose Maxwell and Ben Partridge, and they contributed some really good ideas. So I'm so grateful to

• 1:13:49Adam Buxton?

  all of them. And also, I feel like I want to shout out Kid Klava, this guy who sent in some stuff for one of our, me and Joe's Christmas shows, and I met him that way. And he's been great, like, helping me out with the music, the theme music, and so many of the other bits in there. Olga Reed, who was the mixing engineer who mastered the whole thing. She was fantastic. Alex Port Felix and Jonathan Hux, and these are just Francesca Basset, Aaron Fellows, Sam Bryant. I should mention as well.

• 1:14:25Adam Buxton?

  Jamie Demetriou and Tash Demetriou, they helped out in very early days of development, helping me try out ideas, as did Julia Davis and Tash's friend Daniel Barker. Anyway, I'm so grateful.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Seamus Murphy Mitchell?

• 1:14:40Adam Buxton?

  Seamus Murphy Mitchell. I've mentioned Seamus.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  I thought I wanted to mention him.

• 1:14:44Adam Buxton?

  Sure, Seamus, of course.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  He's your secret, not secret, but he's your wingman, isn't he?

• 1:14:50Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, he's been so important to my life.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  He's sort of Emmanence Grease.

• 1:14:56Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, he's so busy now. He's like a really senior guy in Netflix.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Right, working, working on The Letterman Show, can we say that?

• 1:15:03Adam Buxton?

  He's, he's not doing Letterman anymore, I don't think. No, he's, he's now a higher up at Netflix in the US.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  So he bestrides the world. That's pretty cool. How long have you been working with him?

• 1:15:14Adam Buxton?

  Since Bug, the TV show, which was 2012.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  So 12, 14 years. How well is he known to your audience, do you think?

• 1:15:23Adam Buxton?

  Oh, I think, I thank him at the end of every episode.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, the name, but do they have a picture in their head? He's quite an impressive figure of a man.

• 1:15:29Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, he's very tall.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  He's probably 6'4".

• 1:15:31Adam Buxton?

  Something.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  And he's, he's, he's sort of, um, well, he's got elegant facial hair at various times.

• 1:15:39Adam Buxton?

  Yes, he had something that was a little bit Hitler-y in the moustache department.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't put it like that.

• 1:15:46Adam Buxton?

  He used to, he doesn't know.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  It was like a, um, yeah, toothbrush moustache, I guess.

• 1:15:51Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. No, he's, he's cool looking. Well, you can see a picture of him when The Letterman Show, my next guest, won a Emmy, I think, or something.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, there's a picture of him on stage.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  We need to ride those coattails.

• 1:16:08Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Right? I'm already in the Netflix hen house, but surely Seamus can get you in.

• 1:16:15Adam Buxton?

  Do I want to go in? Well, I've got a, I've got to perform well on Audible before we get to the hen house. So if you're listening to this and you've listened right the way through and you still haven't heard Success Pod, come on, help a guy out, please. Give it a listen. I think you'll enjoy it. I'm happy with it.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  You've got a very tired old man. The main thing is he's just tired because he's trying hard. I just want to talk to my dog and I really like the serenity prayer and I just think that that's the way you should. Do things and and anyone who doesn't like that stuff and keeps talking about Nietzsche is making things needlessly distressing. Distressing, pretentious, aloof, but why not just

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  just, I mean, he's tired.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Don't you get it? And even if it isn't good, well, of course, it isn't that good. Do you know how tired he is?

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  All right. So, yeah, no, okay, yeah, it isn't maybe not the best show.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  He isn't sleeping well. I was gonna cut the bit with me saying I'm tired out and then you fixated on it.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Has no brilliant performer ever said that before?

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Have a nap. All right, I'm gonna have a nap.

• 1:17:56Adam Buxton?

  Wait. Continue. Adrian, let's talk about your column for The Guardian. You have enjoyed great success with

• 1:18:04Speaker 04

  It doesn't feel like that to me. It feels like everyone's taking the piss, but I'll take whatever I can get.

• 1:18:08Adam Buxton?

  It is a satirical column.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  Well, it sort of tries to be funny. Often I think people think I'm being hysterical. I'm actually playing a straight bat. So, look, if anyone can read to the end of anything, I'm happy.

• 1:18:22Adam Buxton?

  These are some of the headlines. I thought it was weird to have a favourite spoon. Then I realised I wasn't alone.

• 1:18:31Speaker 04

  I I absolutely stand by that one.

• 1:18:34Adam Buxton?

  We can go to the moon, so why can't we stop my glasses sliding down my nose?

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  That's true. I felt that very strongly. I just perhaps I've got a poorly shaped nose. But and it's a ball ache wearing glasses. It certainly was when I was a kid.

• 1:18:50Adam Buxton?

  I do think if your balls are aching, you're wearing them wrong.

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, possibly.

• 1:18:56Adam Buxton?

  This is an idea for a column. Which of my toes could I not live without? It isn't the one you think.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  That's right. Oh, that's a, that's a good one. What do you think? I mean, I'm assuming, assuming the little one plays above its weight. And obviously the big toe's important. I'm gonna go through

• 1:19:23Speaker 04

  the toes three and, three and four. I reckon I could probably sever those and still walk. The column is writing itself. Yes, it is.

• 1:19:43Adam Buxton?

  Hey, welcome back. Podcasts to Ravenscroft Park, East London.

• 1:19:51Adam Buxton?

  On a beautiful day, a hot day. It's like New York out here. Clang. Ooh, look, I've just found eleven pence. That's good, isn't it?

• 1:20:03Adam Buxton?

  Nice.

• 1:20:05Adam Buxton?

  Can buy eleven mojos. So that was Louis there. Chatting to me, very grateful as ever to Louis for making the time. At some point, I feel like I'm due a proper, normal podcast sit-down session with me doing more of an interview with Louis, but

• 1:20:24Adam Buxton?

  that moment never seems to come around. Anyway, it was nice to catch up with him a little bit. Oh yeah, the thing I wanted to qualify from our manosphere discussion though was when I said Louis and I didn't meet our wives by saying, "Ooh, look at that hot woman in a nightclub", I think I said something like that. Instead, we sort of just giggled our way into a cosy friendship and then into a marriage. Made it sound a little bit antiseptic. Obviously, there was a lot of raw, powerful attraction between myself and my beautiful wife. And Louis and his beautiful wife, they are alarmingly hot women of the kind that any member of the manosphere could only dream of being rejected by.

• 1:21:09Adam Buxton?

  That's what I've written here in my notes. And now, as I'm reading it out, I'm thinking, maybe my wife wouldn't appreciate that qualification. Okay. In the links for today's podcast, let me tell you that as well as a link to that People's Emergency Briefing film and talk with myself and Patrick Barkham at the Norwich Arts Centre this coming Sunday, the 28th of June, I really hope some of you will be able to come along to that, you will find a link to the live podcast that I'm doing with Ma Wan Rizwan at the Roundhouse on the 5th of August 2026. Don't forget to book your tickets for that, the only live podcast that I will be doing

• 1:21:52Adam Buxton?

  this year. There's a link to The Laufde Dinge, The Way Things Go, the film by Peter Fishley and David Weiss from 1987, which is essentially an epic Rube Goldberg machine constructed in a warehouse out of bits and pieces of kind of industrial equipment.

• 1:22:16Adam Buxton?

  It's really good. My children used to enjoy watching it when they were little. And I felt good about it because I thought, this is good. I'm glad you're watching that. It's better than some of the other dog shit that I allowed them to watch.

• 1:22:31Adam Buxton?

  Also, another thing that kids might probably enjoy, and adults, unless they are outraged by the implications of the thing, is the film of the martial arts robots doing an amazing performance at the Spring Gala Festival in China, China, earlier this year, that I mentioned briefly with Louis, that, as far as I can tell, is real. Not everyone agrees.

• 1:23:00Adam Buxton?

  Also, you'll find links to the piece about Andrew Tate's Empire of Abuse by Heidi Blake from The New Yorker earlier this month, and Helen Lewis's piece, The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet, from The Atlantic. I think maybe both of those are behind paywalls, I'm not sure, although you might be able to read them as a free article before being asked to subscribe. There's also a link to Seamus winning his Emmy, if you want to see what Seamus looks like, back in 2024. And there's a link about absolutely nothing, but it's totally joyful. Jiminy Glick, played by Martin Short, interviewing comedian actor Artie

• 1:23:42Adam Buxton?

  Lang. You don't need to know who Artie Lang is. I think he was in Norm MacDonald's show at the point he was being interviewed by Jiminy Glick, but anyway, Jiminy Glick gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that he doesn't know, doesn't know who Artie Lang is. And Artie is a good sport about it, but, oh my god, it made me laugh. Umbridge. I've been watching a lot of Jiminy recently after watching the Netflix documentary about Martin Short, which I really recommend. Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks very much to Claire Broughton and Diggory Waite from Hat Trick for additional editing and production support, much appreciated. By the way, speaking of Diggory, last week he and I recorded the

• 1:24:27Adam Buxton?

  Q and A session. Thank you so much if you contributed questions for that. We only covered a handful, so those questions will keep us going for a few more sessions after that. We're hoping to do them fairly regularly, I think, in the next few months. The first one will appear for everybody to listen to in a few weeks' time, two or three weeks. Thereafter, you will have to become a Patreon supporter if you want to listen to those Q and As. But the Patreon thing is only a source of bonus content. Everything else about the podcast will be available to everybody for free as normal. Thanks very much indeed

• 1:25:10Adam Buxton?

  to everyone at Acast for all the hard work they do dealing with my sponsors. Thank you to Helen Green for the beautiful artwork. I just saw a picture of the unabsorbent tea towel that she designed, and I will look into getting them made available via my website. In due course. But thanks most of all to you for listening right to the end. Sending in all those nice questions, really much appreciated. One of the comments that was sent in for the Q and A was from someone who said, please don't call them creepy hugs. I mean, they're not meant to be creepy, obviously, because I don't know if you realise, but they are, it's audio only. I'm not actually, there's no actual physical contact, so it's, it's not as creepy as it could be.

• 1:25:55Adam Buxton?

  But it's only a joke.

• 1:25:58Adam Buxton?

  Anyway, look, come here for a sincere, non creepy hug if you'd like. Yeah, how you doing? Good to see you. People are looking at me like, what's that guy doing? Hugging a microphone in the middle of a park.

• 1:26:14Adam Buxton?

  Just doing my job. Until next time, we share the same aural space. Go carefully. And, uh, you know, for what it's worth, I love you. Bye. That was almost more annoying.