EP.281 - DYLAN MORAN

Adam rambles with Irish stand-up comedian, writer, and actor Dylan Moran about why he hates facts, chronic pain, what it means to be a man of advanced middle age in the 2020s, how many gummies is too many, music and why he thinks our reliance on tech and online culture is fostering a false sense of urgency, constant judgment, and digital dementia. Plus Dylan plays one of his songs on the guitar even though he can't play the guitar. Visit the ADAM BUXTON PODCAST PATREON PAGE http://www.patreon.com/AdamBuxton for previously unheard interviews, Q&A episodes, Rosie pics and videos and other odd and sods. SEND IN PATREON JINGLES AND QUESTIONS mailto:[email protected] See pics, links, jingles, videos and more on ADAM'S WEBSITE https://www.adam-buxton.co.uk/ SUCCESSPOD https://www.audible.co.uk/search?keywords=successpod&k=successpod - 2026 (listen for free with a trial or subscription on Audible) Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on 18 September, 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/ RELATED LINKS LOOKING FOR TROUBLE https://dylanmoran.com/wandering/ - Dylan Moran 2026 European Tour DYLAN MORAN - MONSTER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYc6WaeUVw0 (Stand up show) - 2004 (YouTube) DYLAN MORAN FAVOURITE FILMS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvANgCR4aZg (SBS Guest curator) - 2023 (YouTube) HOW TO STOP AI FROM TURNING YOUR BRAIN TO MUSH https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260505-how-to-use-ai-without-turning-your-brain-to-mush - 2026 (BBC) HOW DO YOU WANT ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QXrs4c7_GY Season 1, part 1 - 1998 (YouTube) A FILM WITH ME IN IT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dTrdG1Rx9o&t=6s Directed by Ian Fitzgibbon - 2008 (YouTube) DYLAN MORAN ON PLAYING PIANO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdmpcVW8UVs (Tommy Tiernan Show) - 2024 (YouTube) AI SITCOM 'NO BIG DEAL' ZERO STAR REVIEW https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/15/no-big-deal-review-is-this-how-ai-ends-humanity-with-a-sitcom-so-bad-it-bores-you-to-death - 2026 (The Guardian) THE TINY TILCAYO CAT https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-the-adorable-and-tiny-tilcayo-the-first-brand-new-cat-species-identified-in-more-than-a-century-180989528/ - 2026 (Smithsonian online magazine) METRONOMY - THE LOOK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFrNsSnk8GM (OFFICIAL VIDEO Directed by Lorenzo Fonda) - 2011 (YouTube) HALL & OATES - I CAN'T GO FOR THAT (NO CAN DO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3YWiOUB6oE&t=1s POMO REMIX - 2017 (YouTube) ARVO PÄRT - SILENTIUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GT-5rLBlyk - 1977 (YouTube) THE FORMULA https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/16/the-formula by Malcom Gladwell - 2006 (The New Yorker) 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?

  This is an ad for Squarespace.

• 0:03Adam Buxton?

  Okay, we'll return to the AI apocalypse in just a wee wee moment, but first I wanted to talk about Squarespace. Do you know about Squarespace, Steve?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, Monty. I think I might even be a little bit more tuned into modern tech, websites, et cetera, than you. I don't know, just guessing.

• 0:15Adam Buxton?

  Oh, Steve, I love this dynamic. I'm old and conservative and you're young and progressive and that's what makes the Newswind podcast such great listening. But yes, you're right, I must admit, I didn't know much about Squarespace. But because my new grumble book, Hell in a Handcart, is out this month.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  And I look forward to getting enraged by that.

• 0:31Adam Buxton?

  So I should hope.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Em, um, um.

• 0:34Adam Buxton?

  Anyway, the publishers, Bluestar and Dogwhistle, made a beautiful website for the book using Squarespace.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  I know, I got the newsletter that you sent out using Squarespace and the website does look great. Videos of you airing your views, members' areas for your mad fans. You've even got a merch store, I see.

• 0:47Adam Buxton?

  That's right, the Union Jack top hat is a big seller. But they constructed it all so fast with Squarespace. They did most of it over one lunchtime, Steve.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Well, you wouldn't want to spend much longer on it, would you?

• 0:56Adam Buxton?

  Shut up, Steve. But here's the thing, anyone listening to this can start a free trial right now at Squarespace.com/Buxton and see how easy and versatile Squarespace is. And when they're ready to launch a new website or domain, they can save 10% off their first purchase by using the offer code BUXTON at checkout.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Right, well, maybe I'll visit Squarespace.com/Buxton and start a new website just to refute all the nonsense in your new book.

• 1:18Adam Buxton?

  Oh, don't do that, Steve.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I will.

• 1:20Adam Buxton?

  Oh, shut up, Steve.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:22Adam Buxton?

  Shut up. Now, back to more depressing matters on Newswind.

• 1:26Adam 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 Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

• 1:57Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how you doing, podcasters? It's Adam Buxton here, reporting to you from a Norfolk farm track. In early October 2026, it is a beautiful day. I mean, it really couldn't be nicer. And I'm out here with one of the best dogs of all time. She's called Rosie. How you doing, Rosie?

• 2:26Adam Buxton?

  Don't mind me sharing your pants with the listeners, do you, Rosie? That is cheap, tasteless and offensive, and I'm going to ignore it. Quite right.

• 2:36Adam Buxton?

  Oh, it's a nice breeze. We're actually trudging through a nice undulating field today,

• 2:44Adam Buxton?

  rather than the regular crunchy track, which we might join a bit later. It's very still, quiet today. Slight jet rumble over in the distance. Now, before I tell you about today's guest, a very quick reminder of the podcast Patreon page, there's a new Q and A episode going up on Wednesday this week, with me talking to Diggery and answering questions and playing clips related to... They're right, control it, Cork! That'll mean something to some of you and nothing to others. I also talk about my recent theatrical adventure in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. And there's questions about Get Down Services, Robin Hitchcock, Bing Jingles. There's a message from someone who

• 3:29Adam Buxton?

  started listening to the podcast while in prison, serving time for a climate protest. And I tackle the vexed topic of Taskmaster. You can hear all that by signing up to the Patreon using the link in the description of today's episode, where you'll also find the address to submit questions, contributions, stories, voice notes, whatever you want, really, for future Q and A episodes. And of course, as well as those Q and A episodes, Patreon subscribers will have access to previously unheard conversations with so far the likes of Louis Theroux, Patrick Radenkeef, Jamie Dmitriou. And coming up in a couple of weeks,

• 4:09Adam Buxton?

  my old friend and sing director, Garth Jennings, that's a good one. But right now, let me tell you a bit about my guest for podcast number 281, the Irish stand-up comedian, writer and actor, Dylan Moran. Ooh, turning the corner into a beautiful warm breeze. Moran facts. Dylan William Moran was born in 1971 in Navan, County Meath, in the north east of Ireland, where he grew up in a secular household at a time when the vast majority of the local population would attend mass every Sunday. Dylan attended St Patrick's

• 4:51Adam Buxton?

  Classical School alongside future comedians Hector Ojiohagoin and Tommy Tiernan. After gaining his leaving certificate and quitting school at 16, Dylan has said that his next few years were spent unemployed, reading, drawing, drinking and writing bad poetry. At the start of the 1990s, trips to Dublin's Comedy Cellar on South Wicklow Street to see comedians like Arda Lohanlan and Barry Murphy perform strengthened Dylan's resolve to try stand-up himself. At 21, he moved to London, where he gigged hard and honed

• 5:32Adam Buxton?

  his material. And in 1993, he won the So You Think You're Funny Award at the Edinburgh Festival, going on to win the big one, what was then known as the Perrier Award in 1996. Aged just 24, the only other comedian to have won the award so young was Sean Hughes in 1990. After landing a starring role alongside Charlotte Coleman in Simon Nye's BBC sitcom, How Do You Want Me? in 1998, Dylan broke through to an even wider audience in 2000 as the creator, co-writer and star of the acclaimed Channel 4 sitcom, Black Books,

• 6:13Adam Buxton?

  in which he played the curmudgeonly bookstore proprietor Bernard Black alongside Bill Bailey and Tamzin Gregg. More recently, in 2022, Dylan appeared alongside Moran Robinson in the BBC sitcom Stuck, an offbeat meditation on relationships and midlife ennui created and written by Dylan. Dylan has also popped up in quite a few films, including Shaun of the Dead, Notting Hill, Run Fat Boy Run and Calvary. That's a great film, Calvary, although it did traumatise me. I think I saw it back when I used to smoke jazz cigarettes

• 6:55Adam Buxton?

  and it really got into my head in quite a disturbing way. And in 2025, Dylan made his Shakespearean debut playing Touchstone the Fool in Ralph Fiennes' production of As You Like It at the Theatre Royal Bath. All right, it's the crunchy track. My conversation with Dylan was recorded face to face in London in September this year, 2026, and he had a large wheelie suitcase with him, because after we spoke, he was leaving to start looking for trouble. His ninth stand-up tour, currently playing across mainly Eastern Europe, before arriving back in the UK at the end of October. There's a link for dates and tickets in the

• 7:39Adam Buxton?

  description. But before Dylan caught the Eurostar, we had a good, spicy, properly rambling chat, touching on topics that included why people should care less about facts. That was sort of part of a theme that ran throughout the conversation and which got Dylan, uh, enjoyably animated about the value of disengaging, I suppose, from the expectations of the modern tech and information-driven environment and mediascape. Currently, I am at least still attempting to be accurate when I can be about facts. So for fellow

• 8:21Adam Buxton?

  fact fans, Dylan's appearance on Marc Moran's WTF podcast, mentioned early on, took place in December 2012. And Moran interviewed Obama first in 2015. We talked a bit about AI. Have you heard of AI, artificial intelligence? I think it's a fun thing to chat about. All right, calm down. And I asked Dylan if he had seen the YouTube sitcom, No Big Deal, which was written by a human, but had visuals and character voices generated by artificial intelligence. And there is a link to the zero star Guardian review for that sitcom

• 8:59Adam Buxton?

  in the description. We talked about what it means to be a man of advanced middle age in the 2020s, during which Dylan used the word recrudescence, which I had to look up after we spoke. It means the sudden return or reemergence of an undesirable condition after a period of quiet or rest. We also talked a little about Dylan's experience of chronic physical pain, as well as also waffling briefly about psychedelic drugs. We also talked about music and Dylan played me a couple of his songs on the guitar, despite not being able to play the guitar. By the way, the

• 9:42Adam Buxton?

  Company that created a programme used by major record labels to predict which songs would become hits, which Dylan refers to, is called Platinum Blue Music Intelligence. The New Yorker piece which mentions it, which Dylan read, was written by Malcolm Gladwell back in two thousand and six. Link in the description. But we began with Dylan eyeing my guitar, and while I was plugging in mics, he asked if I'd been enjoying playing live with the Adam Buxton Band, formed of various members of the band Metronomy, who it turns out Dylan is a big fan of. I told Dylan that I had absolutely loved playing live with them, but I admitted that

• 10:26Adam Buxton?

  there had been a few times when I could hear that what I was playing, especially on the guitar, could do with a little improvement. Back at the end for a bit more waffle, but right now with Dylan Moran. Here we go.

• 11:20Adam Buxton?

  I could hear that it wasn't good.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Do you genuinely agonise musically, like how good about you are?

• 11:24Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I want it to be good. I don't want it to be just like, oh, look, this-

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Why are you gonna give that shit up? I mean, we have to give that up in a way.

• 11:31Adam Buxton?

  Well, that's what Stuart Lee said. Like, I did a show at the End of the Road Festival.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:35Adam Buxton?

  And then the next morning, he was wandering around and he said, oh, yes, I saw a bit of your set. He said, have you got that out of your system now?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  What, the music?

• 11:44Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  I don't mean get it out of your system, I mean, stop worrying about being good.

• 11:48Adam Buxton?

  Oh, okay, right, right.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  That's what I mean. Keep it in.

• 11:52Adam Buxton?

  Stop worrying about being good, yes, I mean, yes, that's the next project, is to relax and shed a few anxieties and a few fears, but, um, that's work in progress.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, well, it always is.

• 12:03Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. How are you doing?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  I'm good, I'm good. I'm nervous, you know, but I'm good.

• 12:08Adam Buxton?

  Nervous about doing this tour?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm nervous as well.

• 12:12Adam Buxton?

  We're recording, by the way.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's all good. Um, nervous, nervous is maybe not, is not the perfect word. I'm excited, I'm, I'm amped, I suppose, that's better. Amped is better. Amped and full of, um, energy waiting to be spent, you know?

• 12:27Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  It's kind of burning a hole in me, I suppose, a bit.

• 12:31Adam Buxton?

  How long's it been since the last-

• 12:33Speaker 02

  I don't know, I don't know, I'm very bad at time questions.

• 12:35Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  All time questions, I'm really bad, including the future and the past. I can tell about what's happened, but when it happened, that's another story.

• 12:43Adam Buxton?

  Will you pull the microphone?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:46Adam Buxton?

  Closer towards you, there you go. There's headphones there if you want.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I don't know that I've ever done a podcast.

• 12:52Adam Buxton?

  No, you did Marc Moran.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Oh, I did Marc Moran.

• 12:56Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, which was a really good one.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Well, I, you know, I heard that back, I think it was last year or something, and I thought, God almighty, I'm so depressing. I mean, really, like, I was, I was like a truck just rolled up saying, you want your depression, it's all here.

• 13:09Adam Buxton?

  He loves it, though, that's, that's his safe place.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, the downbeat, strove.

• 13:14Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I think within five minutes, you were on to paedophilia in the Catholic Church.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, Catholic Church, yeah, probably, yeah. Well, you know, that's covered then, okay?

• 13:23Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, well, I was gonna get on to that later, but, no, it was good, it was a good talk. Do you remember where he was? Was he, he was in his garage, was he?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Hmm, it was in Silver Lake, is it?

• 13:34Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  In LA, and it was, um-

• 13:36Adam Buxton?

  And was that before or after he'd interviewed Obama?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Oh, way, way, way before. Was it? I don't know, do you know something, it could have been quite close around that time.

• 13:45Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I think it was around that time.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  It probably was. Um, like I said, time questions, but it was great, yeah, because I remembered I'd just got the hang of LA, what, what that is, because before then, I'd been a few times and it was just this huge blur of everything that is alien to us from this side of the Atlantic, you know? And then you break LA down into villages and realise, oh, they are just people living in this crazy place.

• 14:06Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, that's right, and Silver Lake's very nice.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and he was, he was very good, obviously, he's, you know, knows exactly what he's doing, super confident, it was his world and, um-

• 14:16Adam Buxton?

  He's very good, I remember, do you listen to podcasts?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  I do, but I listen to them for the wrong reason.

• 14:21Adam Buxton?

  What's that?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Well, I was listening to them for a while there to get a handle on what are people listening to now that our media scape has changed so much, like, how, like, the way I was getting my news, the way I was getting my, whatever I was listening to had changed. You know, I think like a lot of comics, I suffered from ingesting way too much news, just to kind of be hearing the, the noise, the data, the signals, whatever's going on out there in the trenches, what are people up to, what's, what's that rattling people, you know? And that's fine, with legacy media, you can kind of turn that on and off, and then you had rolling news, and I remember rolling news kind of coming in, that CNN development where, that's kind of the beginning of dome screwing really, where you had the cable news, you know? And, um, because when I was a kid, I wanted to be, I had a romance about being a newspaper man, you know, I loved that idea.

• 15:07Adam Buxton?

  Right, being a journalist?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, as a kid, I thought it was a really romantic kind of profession, you know?

• 15:13Adam Buxton?

  And writing about current affairs?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, because that's, that's what journalists in movies did. They broke stories and they got into trouble and they had to keep quiet and have secret meetings. I thought, great, I'm ready. Anyway, but to go back to the media thing, you know, like, I, I started listening to podcasts recently because of, um, because I knew things had changed so much, especially, you know, around the Brexit period here in Britain. And, you know, the incredible range of what's out there, and because it all arrived at once, if you like, the legacy media was established over centuries, the micro media one has appeared in a matter of a few years, and so all the characters and all the pissing on territory and the claiming of space and the voices being distinct from other voices and what thrives in the jungle of voices establishing itself, and of course, everything

• 15:56Speaker 02

  has to push everything else out of the way, so you might get five instances of, you know, there's a particular kind of podcast where you get two bolt-headed blokes opposite one another, elbows on the table, biceps bulging, and one of them was like, and then I chopped off his half foot, and he tried to jab at a window, but I already sit far to him, and then the other one would lean over and go, right, but are you a psychopath? And that's one, okay, that's like one tier.

• 16:20Adam Buxton?

  What's that one? I wanna watch, listen to that one.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  There's a few of them, and then there's the dweeby men together, usually two of them, who are pathologising women and then turning their heads to around because they're ready to deal with that one now.

• 16:31Adam Buxton?

  That's generally American.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Often American, yeah. And the, I, it's, I didn't look at Louis Theroux's documentary, I, I missed it, but the, the Manosphere thing is obviously incredibly real. And those fellows are, uh, they're very loud, I don't actually know how many of them there are, I presume there's a lot of people listening to this shit, but the, I, you don't meet them very often.

• 16:56Adam Buxton?

  I don't know that there are that many people listening, because after seeing Louis' Manosphere doc, I did look up some of the podcasts that some of the people in that doc were actually doing, and I looked at some of the numbers they'd racked up on YouTube. An individual episodes, it wasn't like millions at all, it was like thirty thousand or something per episode.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Okay, I, I don't track that stuff, I have no idea, but there's a lot of it around.

• 17:21Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Um-

• 17:23Adam Buxton?

  And then there's a lot of ones with blokes in baseball caps, and they're sitting there on couches and they've got the big armatures, uh, with the microphones on them, swung in front of them, and they've all got laptops, so they're just checking everything as they go along.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, yeah, so you're reassured by the fact that they've got their hands right there on Google if you need it.

• 17:46Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I mean, that's essentially what I'm doing here, I've got my computer open in front of me, I've got my hat on, it's not a baseball cap.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  But what is there to check?

• 17:53Adam Buxton?

  You just want to be able to have factoids at your fingertips and sound knowledgeable, so if you-

• 18:00Speaker 02

  But it wasn't the promise of podcasts that you were gonna get a conversation that wouldn't be mediated by media, if you like, in the way that it normally is, because, you know, it was two people at a desk, that was the idea, right? Which is a really attractive idea, it's a fantastic idea.

• 18:11Adam Buxton?

  But the spectre of people correcting you-

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Afterwards.

• 18:15Adam Buxton?

  Is ever present, yeah, especially in the, I mean, I'm not on social media.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  But why don't we talk about things that can't be corrected?

• 18:22Adam Buxton?

  Well, sure, absolutely, and of course, you can, the, the thing that I sometimes do is, uh, like, I'll go in afterwards and I'll drop in a, uh, addendum, fact-checking Santa.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:35Adam Buxton?

  And fact-checking Santa will come in and, and he will correct whatever fact has been mangled.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  But this, this fact thing.

• 18:41Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, you're not happy with that?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  No, I'm not, because it's, it's part of a particular kind of, um- Outfit armoury that's developed for the modern man fairly recently, you know. Okay, I've got my right opinions, I've got my facts, I've got everything before I walk out the door. It's bollocks, it's absolute bollocks. And those guys, a lot of those dudes, especially the guys in pairs, shuffling their data points and so on, and then, you know, pivoting to the next issue. I mean, talk about having romantic ideas about journalism that I had when I was a kid. These guys are living it, they really think they're at least acting out. What that, what that is in their, in their minds, they're showing, it's a fantasy, it's, you know, they're not doing anything. They're marching around their own little room in their minds, you know.

• 19:25Adam Buxton?

  True, and in the process, and I'm speaking for myself here, they are getting a case of digital dementia. I now am noticeably worse at being able to recall anything, any facts, even just like the names of films I've seen recently. It's just much, much harder, and I was thinking the other day about a film I watched the other day with Sacha Baron Cohen in it on Netflix, where it's like a gender reversal thing that he's done. And I was talking about it to a friend, I was like, do yourself a favour, see this film, it's pretty strong stuff. And I couldn't remember what the name of it was at all, even though I'd only just seen it a few weeks ago. Ladies First, by the way.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Oh, I see, okay. Oh, he's done it, he's done a transgender thing?

• 20:11Adam Buxton?

  No, it's not transgender, it's a bit more like the Mel Gibson film, What Women Want.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 20:16Adam Buxton?

  It's like he has an accident and when he wakes up, the world has been transformed. In What Women Want with Mel Gibson, it was that he could suddenly hear women's thoughts. And it made him ultimately a little more sensitive. I didn't get to the end of Ladies First with Sacha Baron Cohen, so I don't know what his.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  What was the premise?

• 20:36Adam Buxton?

  The premise was, he is a boorish sexist dickhead who works in a company and treats all his female employees with contempt and disdain. And he walks into a lamppost, he smacks his head really hard, and when he comes round, all the gender roles have been reversed, so women are just, have taken the place of men in society. But that's it really, all they do is behave as boorishly and terribly as the worst kind of men.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:07Adam Buxton?

  So suddenly women are all sexist and mean and yobbish and, you know what I mean? And, and men are the inferior species suddenly, so it's, you know, it's taken that view of what the world is like and flipped it.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Do you have this thing where you, even if, like I say, that premise of that film, do you feel like you've seen everything? Do you feel like you've seen everything that you can, I feel there's an air of exhaustedness. And I actually think it's part of our generation's problem. And I think it's part of the reason why we're letting down the younger generation in the way we are with them. To go back to news for a second, it's just what we present them. If you're a young person now, if you're in your twenties, I've got kids in my twenties, you've got children in your twenties, yeah. So that generation, they richly deserve to hear better news. And I don't mean that the facts need to be changed, I just mean that they're not being told about the power of being a human being. That's what they never hear about.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  They do hear nothing about their own natural power, what is actually available to them. They do not get reminded that they're the most sophisticated organism that we're aware of in the universe. And that actually, for all the problems that are in front of us, they are amazing and endless in their possibilities. So they don't hear this.

• 22:23Adam Buxton?

  They get that on Instagram, there's lots of that on Instagram.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  I don't mean, I don't mean like, you know, from a yoga person on the top of a mountain. I just mean in a regular day to day where go, what the fuck, man, you know? Do not opt into this panic that is offered to you through media most of the time, all the time. Fuck that shit, close all of it, walk away, meet your friends, talk in a park, talk wherever you want, join a band, make a little short film, whatever it is, hang out and never mind all this shit from us. I mean, from you and me and our generation.

• 22:53Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Cause it's terrible shit and it's endless. And I'm actually pretty angry about it because it doesn't stop as far as I can see. If I was twenty and I was hearing us, our lot, the way we bang on and the way we present news and this stuff, you know, messing around, two idiots talking, all of it. And, you know, this is, the thing about facts is they're a symptom of fear. What do you need facts or if you've got something interesting to say? I, I mean, you know, you want to remember facts, you have to go and look for them, that's how fucking boring they are.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  So if somebody has something worth hearing, you'll remember it.

• 23:31Adam Buxton?

  I know, I know, but the thing is that especially now, I think you're right, but now you feel like you want to be armed with actual information that might help combat a whole slew of people who see the world differently and who are now apparently just kind of regressing to a form where it's totally acceptable to say, you know what, the world is actually flat, like do the math, figure it out. I don't know what you've been told, but that whole the world is a sphere is a load of bullshit. Those people are around and they're coming back hard.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Well, you'll find they're pretty fact repellent.

• 24:10Adam Buxton?

  That's true, they don't respond well to facts, that is true.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  They love the idea of standing on top of a stack of facts and sharing it, that's what they like. But there is a permanent invitation here into unproductive argument.

• 24:24Adam Buxton?

  Yes, that's true, and so what you're saying is if we hadn't got to this point of just going round and round in an endless digital conversation, we might actually be out doing things, interacting with each other and reconnecting with what's worthwhile about being alive. Is that right?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's around that, yeah, this is an urgent issue, this is real, this is today and tomorrow and the next day. This is not going away, this is all the time, I am really, really serious about this, I mean, I'm sincere about it, you know. If we don't get this, it won't get any better. And we have to get this, and it does mean change, and it does mean adopting a new interest in your own being, I'm afraid. Waking up and actually just doing things a little bit slower. Because once you slow it down even fractionally, it's way, way more interesting. Cause you start to pay attention to your own mind, which is actually all you've really got. But we wake up in the morning and we are encouraged to flee from our minds and to join

• 25:33Speaker 02

  whatever the fuck it is that everybody is doing, which is having left their minds behind, entering the field of agitation and trying to make money out of it before they go home to try and get some rest and wake up and do it again tomorrow. It's very boring, it's very draining and it goes one way. And if you want to do something really interesting and radical, I would suggest, in the modern age as a young person, start really, really looking after yourself, not looks maxing, but being really interested in what a human being actually is. Because you've been given the most incredibly exotic pet anybody could have to look after. It's very difficult, it's very complex, it has contradictory demands going on at all times. You're always in a crosswind trying to sort of thread a needle, you know, standing on one leg.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  That is exciting stuff, it requires a lot of skill. I'm not talking about optimisation, I'm not talking about self-management. I'm talking about finding out what being alive is actually really like and paying attention to your own experience like it's the most important thing in the world, which it is.

• 26:30Adam Buxton?

  How do you communicate that to your own children? And what's that conversation like, how does it go?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  I say all that stuff, but they've already rolled their eyes and walked into the next room sometimes. But that's me being, making a dad joke to a degree, we do talk about that stuff, we do say it and they know it. And they, and they say stuff like that.

• 26:48Adam Buxton?

  I know, but everyone knows it, I know it, I mean, my first thought is like, yeah, but, does that mean I can't do my podcast anymore?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't, of course it doesn't, but hang on, stop, stop, cause look, I, this is the thing, like, this is right now, it seems to me, we're all a bit like the diver on the board before they go, we're very gulpey, we're very hesitant, we're very fear adjacent at all times. And one of the things about the new culture, the internet culture that's taken over is that there is a terminal feeling to it, like if you get something wrong, that it, you might be guillotined by the system.

• 27:21Adam Buxton?

  You're talking about sort of social censorship.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Ostracised or whatever the fuck it is, you get it wrong and that's it, you're suddenly pinged out of a field of, you know, conversation. And that's really bad for us, I mean, think about it. It's like when you grow up and you suddenly, you know, that adolescent journey when you go from this animal unknowingness to sudden, this tsunami of self-consciousness that makes puberty so challenging for kids, you know, it's so quite warrafting, level of change in your experience, what the fuck, you know, everything is flipped. But you don't have that as an, you have a plateau as an adult, you know, there's, there's a happy time where you can like, you're supposed to boffle around, you know, yes, expressing opinions, being wrong, changing your mind, going over there. That's the crack, that's the adult crack, you know?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  We're not always in the forum hashing out fucking legislation, you know, we get to hang around at the steps and shoot the shit and drink coffee and complain about the other guy and what's going on over there and did you hear about that one and what she's doing, you know? And.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  We're treating everything like it's of terminal kind of importance all the time.

• 28:23Adam Buxton?

  I know. I guess the thing about the internet and social media is that it's accelerated everything to such a degree that it seems incredibly urgent and it feels like people are sort of fed up. They feel that a much faster pace of change is within their reach. And so they think, why not apply that?

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 28:41Adam Buxton?

  Why not apply that to every urgent problem there is? And why not really impose sanctions on the people who don't go along with that? You know what I mean? Because the stakes are too high, whether you're talking about racism or inequality or whatever the issue might be. The feeling, I think, over the last decade or so has been like, okay, enough. We've got to move fast on these things now and we have the opportunity now to communicate in real time instantly. And so everyone get with the fucking program. Otherwise you're out.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a bit like a powerful kid in school who has, you know, got a troop of followers, you know, or creates a gang. And anybody who, you know, wears the wrong hairbands or whatever, listening to the wrong music is out of the gang.

• 29:28Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. In this case, it's a well-intentioned, you know, it's born from a well-intentioned impulse, right? To make society more fair and to...

• 29:39Speaker 02

  What is?

• 29:39Adam Buxton?

  Well, the situation that you're talking about, the situation you're describing where people are looking over their shoulder and not feeling sufficiently relaxed.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  This is not an argument, this is not a thing around though, you know, whether it's better to be, you know, unleashed or woke. That's not, I'm not getting into that. You know, of course be aware of everybody and, you know, everyone's aspiring to decency, I would imagine, you know, most people are anyway. But what I mean is just, it's the confusion of the real with the not, you know. And the virtual world is just like that, that child's fantasy of all the power they have over the group. That's all it is. You know, it is a place you go to when you're sort of checking what might happen if I did this in real life. And then you get pulled into that whole agitational field of multiple judgment points within the internet. So you, you start arguing with them and with yourself because you agree with half of them. And then that changes the next day as well. So you're completely lost already. And you're not in the real world. And you, you know,

• 30:33Speaker 02

  it's so masturbatory and pointless.

• 30:35Adam Buxton?

  But, I mean, the real world is changing in accordance with what's happening online now. It's definitely bleeding across.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 30:42Adam Buxton?

  Why do you think?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Because we are all spending too much time interfacing with these things so that we are exaggerating their prevalence and their importance. And it's the Heisenberg thing, you know, you're too close to the, to our instruments that of observation to really feel the, what we're looking at. We can't see it because we're enmeshed in all this stuff. I think. And...

• 31:05Adam Buxton?

  Did you always feel that way? Were you someone that ever went down the path that you're describing and then pulled himself out of it? Or were you always?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  No, I was always overwhelmed by machines. We didn't have a phone till I was 12. So I don't like machines.

• 31:20Adam Buxton?

  I think we've found the root of the problem.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  I don't think it's a problem, Adam. I think it's a way out of the problem.

• 31:26Adam Buxton?

  You're just very prejudiced against machines. And I don't know if you've noticed, but we've got to start becoming friends with machines.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yes, we do.

• 31:34Adam Buxton?

  Because they might hurt us if we don't.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Yes, well, I'm not prepared to live in that world. I'm not going to be afraid of my toaster.

• 31:42Adam Buxton?

  You might not have an option. Have you watched the AI sitcom that dropped on YouTube the other day? I'm guessing the answer's new.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  To all of those questions, it would be no.

• 31:51Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't, but I did hear something about, I just heard it was dreadful. That's about right, isn't it?

• 31:55Adam Buxton?

  He got a zero star review in The Guardian.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  I read a paragraph of that.

• 31:58Adam Buxton?

  One of only a handful of shows that's ever achieved a zero star review. I mean, the odds were against it getting a fair hearing, I think. But...

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Are you, where are you? Are you, are you excited for AI?

• 32:11Adam Buxton?

  I was. I've definitely played around with it. And the first few times, I'm now talking like three years ago, I guess, four years ago, that I was aware of like image generation software and things like that, and music generation software. And it was quite fun to play with it initially. But now it's not fun. You reach a point where you just think, I'm not saving that much time. It's not good for creativity. I haven't had that experience of like...

• 32:37Speaker 02

  I've had a few friends who've said, you know, they use it to get started or to start flinting an idea or something, you know, but they, they talk to it to see it to sort of move around the subject or whatever it is or see what...

• 32:47Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  And I can sort of see how that might do something. But what the something it will do is going to be that. It's a very particular kind of...

• 32:55Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, you can use it as a different version of sticking Post-it notes on a wall and reorganizing them. And it's got some utility in that way.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  But it's about a million miles away from, you know, my vision of my understanding of what making something was all about when I was a kid that I've sort of held on to, really, I think, you know. That was always a much more of a mad scientist moment or a, you know, a romantic notion of what creativity was, because that's what it felt like. Because that's, that was my experience of making things, you know. I would get a rush, you know. I remember saying to a friend, you know, it was like running around trying to catch meteors in a saucepan. That's what it felt like, you know.

• 33:33Adam Buxton?

  What kind of things are you talking about making?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  When you get an idea for anything, for a script or for a set or for a, you know, a song or anything, anything.

• 33:42Adam Buxton?

  I guess the thing, especially with the AI sitcom, that you think is, as far as I can see, the justification for it from the people that made it is like, well, this particular show, this particular idea wouldn't have got commissioned otherwise in the current media environment. It would have been too expensive, even if it had, blah, blah, blah. There's not enough money around. People aren't commissioning anymore. So we went ahead, wrote a script and used AI to realize that vision.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  But you've already stopped listening to that argument, haven't you? I mean, I have. It's a terrible argument. You know, it's a terrible argument. It's terrible. If somebody told me this was done, I would be less interested in it. So I experimented with the free one on the phone to see what it does. And I may pursue it further and see what else it does. But I, I, it's deeply, deeply cold experience, I would, I would say, I suppose. So not something you'd want to share.

• 34:32Adam Buxton?

  Were you across the conversation recently about basically human beings being wiped out within the next 10 years?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Well, I'd see, look, to me, this is all part of, you know, the machine rapture that the species is experiencing now and has done for a while. This is, you can't get a bunch of guys, what is it, six or seven guys, leading a global conversation about the future of our species. It's not, this is not acceptable.

• 34:57Adam Buxton?

  Unelected groovers in Silicon Valley.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Elon Musk should have influence over, you know, whatever machines he's allowed to control and nothing else. Not give, giving money to any party.

• 35:08Adam Buxton?

  Well, it's like the Manhattan Project being run by just some guys who are into skateboarding or whatever and who are not answerable to any elected body whatsoever.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, but this is to go back to the way earlier, talking about micro media and so on. This creeping passivity is the problem. This is why I'm banging on about experiencing your own power, experiencing what it is to be alive, experiencing the depth of your own feelings, not trying to turn them down. Because in seeking sucker entertainment, whatever it is, some sort of comfort in tech stuff, we are moving away from each other inexorably and faster. It's getting faster. And some people want it. And a lot of the people who want it are the kind of people who favor disassociation when emotions come into play. They don't like it. They can't handle it. They'd rather

• 36:02Speaker 02

  be around some nice toys. Some of them have podcasts where they talk about women and then they talk about Iran, like I mentioned earlier. Some of them run tech companies. Now, these, you may remember these boys. You may have had them at school. Very, very good at certain things, not so good at other things. Now they get to control all the machines. Some of them are for entertainment. Some of them are to put bullets in you from a height, from an aerial object. They get to make the machines, not the other boys and girls. That's the problem.

• 36:35Adam Buxton?

  When you're talking about people who find it difficult to interact with other human beings, or maybe prefer the comfort of a conversation on a podcast to actually, you know, a bit of difficult interaction with a member of your family. Is that something you're good at though? I mean, my superficial feeling that I get from you when you're performing is like someone who is fairly raw and finds those interactions frequently challenging.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  What with people, family conversations and real conversations?

• 37:06Adam Buxton?

  People with, yeah, in the world.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  No, I, I, that's, no, this is what I'm here for.

• 37:12Adam Buxton?

  But I mean, you know, the friction of that, the discomfort of that fuels comedy, right?

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Do you think being born is a comfortable experience for either party?

• 37:23Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. So was that yours? That's your basic default mode is like, life is pain, get used to it.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  No, no, I haven't said, that's not my words. Life is, life is a struggle though.

• 37:33Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Life is an effort. Life is something you engage with. It's something you turn up for. It is not a consumer experience. It's not mediated by some corporation. There's no gold stars. There's no reward. There's no minus points unless you're the Chinese government. There's just the other person and the loop you're in with them and that's it.

• 37:54Adam Buxton?

  What do you do for relaxation then?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  I don't relax, Adam. I don't have time for that shit.

• 37:59Adam Buxton?

  You're going to get on a Eurostar to travel to Europe to begin your stand-up tour.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:06Adam Buxton?

  What are you going to be doing when you're travelling? How are you going to occupy your time on that?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Between gigs?

• 38:11Adam Buxton?

  Train carriage, yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Well, you know, generally out there, bopping around. Week one is very different to week two, it's very different to week three and so on. So week one, I'll be chatting away to my tour manager. I'm telling myself that everything's going to be just great. And busily, I'm doing it every day, all the time. It's always, it's a, you know, some process is running on in the background. I'm compacting all the fragments I have into it, anything that looks like a cohesive lump.

• 38:38Adam Buxton?

  How are you doing that, by the way? Is that notebooks?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really is. And that's the other problem.

• 38:43Adam Buxton?

  What, pencils?

• 38:44Speaker 02

  When you're no good at machines.

• 38:45Adam Buxton?

  Okay, analog note taking.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. My room where I work looks like, you know, when they show you those, um, those old photos of like, you know, Soviet sort of archives or something, it's like that. It's just this terrible messy room with these overspillings desks and like thousands of notebooks of, you know.

• 39:05Adam Buxton?

  Are you, are you literally non-digital?

• 39:07Speaker 02

  I don't know what that means, but I, I definitely have less equip. I have, I have loads of leads and DIs and stuff in my apartment because I have a keyboard and I have a couple of guitars, you know, and I'm trying to do stuff for the show and so on.

• 39:18Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what happened. I'm bad at, you know, I was writing obviously for years, so I was typing away and then I got, um.

• 39:26Adam Buxton?

  On a electric typewriter or?

• 39:29Speaker 02

  On a, on a, on a laptop. I got a laptop.

• 39:30Adam Buxton?

  Oh, a laptop, okay.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  And, and, uh, but I had an accident, um, I had a surgery. So my spine's a bit fucked. And it's very difficult now to sit for extended periods and type. So that's why I started making pictures.

• 39:44Adam Buxton?

  Painting pictures?

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I couldn't sit for, and I can do it now, I can do it.

• 39:48Adam Buxton?

  When did that happen?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Uh, which?

• 39:50Adam Buxton?

  Uh, your accident?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Oh, the, uh, two thousand seventeen, I had surgery and since then I've had a lot of stuff, you know, a lot of pain and, and, and shout outs to anybody who's got a bit of metal in the room. I think I've got pins in me and that makes a big difference to how you, you get around, you know?

• 40:04Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  And affects your head and how you're feeling. And you, it takes me about an hour to sort of crank the boiler every day to be able to go, basically, you know, I've got to do a lot of rehabby stuff.

• 40:13Adam Buxton?

  Oh, man. Do you manage that with, uh, pain medication or is that, yeah? Fuck. Chronic pain.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, chronic pain is the bastard of a thing and it sends you somewhere, you know, it, uh, you can't, um, you can't think really, uh, not really. So it changes everything, you know, uh, and I was pretty angry for a while because I had the surgery and so on, very talented, skilled medical people, but nobody really tells you that you're very different afterwards. You know, you're quite different afterwards. You're far more vulnerable feeling, you're far more lost because you can't control your body anymore. My rear axle is basically kind of broken, so I have to think a lot of things into being. And in terms of walking and so on, you know, and I can't, like, sitting is, is chairs and stuff are, I can do that for a while and so I can't really sit and type for ages and ages. I can do it for a while and then I stop and take a break and do it again.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  And standing up is something I have to work at as well. So that kind of, you know, I am stand up and the way you do stand up is by writing material. But, you know, it's amazing. It almost feels like, I don't know, what would I have if I was a pastry chef? Maybe, I don't know. A sore elbow. I have no idea. But anyway, there you go.

• 41:24Adam Buxton?

  Can I ask what happened? What was the accident?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Oh, I had a, I had a foot reconstruction. They had to move tendons and pins and bone, fuse bones and move things and put metal to make my foot work again. Cause it, uh, it stopped working. My ankle started to slide down my leg.

• 41:39Adam Buxton?

  Why? Because just wear and tear or?

• 41:41Speaker 02

  No, I was born with a funny foot.

• 41:43Adam Buxton?

  Right, okay.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  They fizzied it out when I was a kid. It's a spine thing and it's, if your neck is gone and your, your head's cracking all the time, it makes you a bit of a loon, you know, so I'm, I, I do a lot of yoga. And, and moving about and I wear vibrators in my socks.

• 41:57Adam Buxton?

  Vibrators?

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, here's one.

• 42:01Adam Buxton?

  Oh, that's, uh, Dylan is holding up what looks like a butt plug.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  It's a bullet thing, Durex thing that I saw in the pharmacy. So I have one in each sock to make my.

• 42:11Adam Buxton?

  And you're just, it's down by your ankle?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it keeps the blood flowing.

• 42:14Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, okay. Relatively speaking, I'm extremely lucky. I don't have any serious problems at this point. But, you know, you can feel things accumulating and every month there's a new thing and you think, oh, is this gonna be the one that?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, you get it. It's what, where we, are we midlife? Are we allowed to say midlife? Are we too old for midlife? And I don't know, but.

• 42:35Adam Buxton?

  Advanced midlife.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Advanced midlife, you get a kind of a, a little tour of the possibilities of your demise. Choose an option. What do you want? Do you want to stiffen up? Do you want to get droopy? You know, what, what do you want? Short breath, whatever. You get a taste of it all. And it's probably salutary in some way, you know, it makes you, it cuts out some bullshit, you know, I think a lot of fellas as well in midlife. There's a sort of a, men react, I think it's, you know, to a sense of diminishment. The grip tightens on the chair or the stick or whatever it is they happen to be holding at the time, the latte, whatever it is. And, uh, the gaze becomes a bit steelier and they become more determined

• 43:17Speaker 02

  to get across whatever the inadequate thing they have is that they feel is increasingly inadequate. And there's a comedy in there, but it's very poignant too. And men need, you know, help. They do need help. I mean, they're, they're better at talking than they were when I was growing up. And there's so much talk about men, what kind of men have we got? What kind of men do we need and so on? When I was growing up, you know, the men were, they were John Wayne. They were, that's what men were.

• 43:41Adam Buxton?

  Mm-hmm. Did you ever see that film Say Anything with John Cusack?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  I think I did, but as a kid, I don't really remember it.

• 43:47Adam Buxton?

  In the movie, Ione Sky, Donovan's daughter is the female protagonist. She's fantastic. And it's a teen romance comedy thing. John Cusack is the male protagonist. But Ione Sky's father in the movie is played by the guy who played Frasier's dad, John Mahoney. Yeah, yeah.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  I'm good at character actors' names.

• 44:09Adam Buxton?

  Okay, good. So John Mahoney is in there. We're watching this thing and he, I assumed it was like, oh, is that her grandfather? But no, it's her dad because he looks about sixty in this thing and he's wearing a suit the whole time. And, you know, he's losing his hair and he's just got a differently constructed face and the way he moves and everything about the way he speaks is like, oh yeah, that's what men used to be like in those days. That was that generation. And in the movie, like, I think John Mahoney was in his forties still when he made this thing. And I'm like, I'm sitting here as a fifty-seven year old watching this thing. And in many respects, I look younger than he does.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:52Adam Buxton?

  In, in other ways I don't. I'm certainly more of a boy than he is. In almost every conceivable way.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Ideas of what masculinity from then are, you know, they're hilarious and you get overwhelmed by the smells of cigarette smoke and bavaro, you know?

• 45:11Speaker 02

  And, uh, the heaviness of everything, the clothes, the dessert trolleys, the, the chandeliers, the curtains, everything was swagged and bulked and velvety and, you know, too much.

• 45:22Adam Buxton?

  But they were stoics.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were because the job division between the sexes was so clear, like women did all of the crying, men went and never shed any tears. They, they could have a crisis, but some, that must mean another man had to die or get injured, at least for them to resolve their crisis, you know? And I think now there's a kind of a recrudescence or a desire for that, that guy back, you know, in a big way, which

• 45:44Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  goes back to these bros with their, their shows, you know?

• 45:48Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, people who are sure of themselves, who don't sort of, um.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  There's a huge desire for that.

• 45:54Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, people who just give you an answer and seem confident about it.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  That's a huge part of the appeal of right-wing populism. It's just that you get a no, or a yes, or a bang, or that's it, or Thursday, or Frank, that you get an answer. And whereas if you appeal to people's emotions, if you, if you talk to them as a complete human being who actually have emotions, you know, you're, you're going to do some business. And that's the problem with the super smart, dweeby types, technocrats who don't get that. And they, they better get it. They better get it or we're all fucked because the people who actually have information, ideas and know-how of a technocratic kind are obviously vital. But you've got to put the right people in the right gig. You know, you've got to have the right people out front and you've got to have the right people out back.

• 46:35Adam Buxton?

  Especially with someone like Elon Musk. I mean, he's so clearly howling in pain in so many parts of himself after his upbringing and.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  There's no point crapping on any one of those individuals that have all the power. That's, that's who they are. They have all the power.

• 46:49Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Their lives, I mean, you know, I read a few lines of his biography, the Walter Isaacson thing. I went, Jesus Christ, mighty, okay, I get it. Thank you.

• 46:56Adam Buxton?

  It's hardcore, his upbringing.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I would definitely try to invent rockets and pincer things if any of that shit had happened to me.

• 47:03Adam Buxton?

  What was your relationship with your father like? Is he still around?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yes, he is. He's incredibly vital, uh, guy. He's a dude. He's seventy-eight. He's fixing his shed. He's up on the roof corrugating iron, banging things, marching around. And he's, I'm not saying, what are you doing, daddy? Standing there breathing hard with a slash hook in his hand. And I said, what are you upset? Oh, I'm just going to get rid of that wall. Okay, I'll see you in a bit. He's a different kind of man to me. He can do all these things. He's got this fabulous garden. He's, he's made, it's, it's beautiful. And, um, when my mother was alive, he made her a writing den. You know, he did all these things. He's a man that can engage.

• 47:40Adam Buxton?

  And if you asked him questions back in the day, would he give you a definite answer or would he say, you know what? I don't know.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  He would be very happy to say he didn't know, if he didn't know, he would do that. Yeah, sure.

• 47:52Adam Buxton?

  I don't remember my dad being like that. I think he was much more of a. Maybe I'm doing him down, I don't know.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  I think with men and fathers, you know, and especially men around our vintage, there's some sort of weird uh late gift you get from your father if it's okay, where you realise that he was, if things are good, where you realise that he was uh modelling, exempling.

• 48:18Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Without saying anything for quite a while, and that that's part, seems to be part of male experience, that you don't actually get into these long windy conversations about what's required of you and what you need to get through it and to do it and how you need, you know, how you find your own inner resources to power you through whatever is hard. If it's hung right, your relationship, you will have had that modeling and you kind of realise that quite late, I think. Does that sound right to you?

• 48:45Adam Buxton?

  I think so. I mean, I'm just so conflicted about that because I want to not lie and not leave things out and have honest conversations with my children and.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  What do you mean? When you say not leave things out and not lie, you don't, we don't want to present a false picture of how things are.

• 49:07Adam Buxton?

  And I don't want to gloss over something important.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Imagine you want to tell everything, because you don't, that's not part of the.

• 49:11Adam Buxton?

  No, I don't want to burden them with things they don't need to be burdened by. But on the other hand, you know, if I am spiralling about something and I'm clearly under the weather mentally and I'm, you know, mooching around the house and they can see it.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:29Adam Buxton?

  Then I want to be able to tell them why, rather than pretend that there's nothing wrong or just get in a grump and go off and.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's very useful if you have a parent who can say, you know what, I'm a bit low or I've been having a hard time and then it's just, that's what's going on at the minute, but you know, it'll pass or it'll be better. That's, that's pretty useful. And when people can't cope or there's something ongoing, you know, that's when you worry for young people that they understand what's happening or that they, you know, that someone can explain something to them, because that's pretty hard to live with and that does shape a life.

• 50:01Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, because you want to set an example in, if you're married and you have kids, you want to be able to show them that it's possible to argue with your partner without it being cataclysmic.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  You have to, you have, that's, God, you really want to do that.

• 50:14Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, and they don't have to worry that you're going to split up every time you're pissed off with each other.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  The structure has to be allowed to sway without everybody feeling it's going to break or fragment.

• 50:23Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I guess.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Excuse me while I wiggle about.

• 50:25Adam Buxton?

  Sure, sure. Hey, by the way, I mean, if there's, if there's anywhere else that would be more comfortable for you to sit.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  I just need to wiggle about for a minute.

• 50:32Adam Buxton?

  All right. Dylan is wiggling.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  I do a lot of this shit travelling.

• 50:36Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  And people are going, what the fuck? But I can't, I have to do it because otherwise I'm going nuts. I was in an airport in Australia a few years ago in the lounge waiting for the flight to the next bit, you know, and there was a family, they were in transit, they were on their way connecting to a flight and they were in the lounge. It was a mum and her three daughters and they were very memorable because they all had very, very lucid ginger hair.

• 50:58Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Uh, all tied up in top knots at the top of their head, so they looked quite Dr. Zusi.

• 51:03Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  And then, and then I was in the corner of this lounge thing doing my moves, you know, for the next flight, because if I can't sit on the floor, I'll go bananas. So doing my stretches and lunges or whatever. I'm so used to doing it so often every day on the move or whatever, you know, trying to keep myself together for the tour. And I was just sitting down again and I looked over at the table and

• 51:23Speaker 02

  every single one of them was creased, like their faces were whacked with tears from laughing. And one of them was just collapsed on the table and I totally, in an instant, I understood why they thought it was so funny. Because it's bizarre, some of the moves are bizarre, you know, and fucking shaking like a man who's being electrocuted in the corner. I've had a lot of that. I've seen that with teenage boys as well. I've seen that with old people. I've seen it with everybody. They just go, what the fuck is it with that guy? I've walked into pubs and been told, we can't serve you because the cameras saw you outside on the street. That happened to me in Liverpool. I went in and I asked for a fricking lemon soda or something. I was on the street doing my stuff and I went in, we're not serving you. So there's a, you know,

• 52:03Speaker 02

  there's a lot of that kind of thing, which, you know, I don't, I don't mind at all. I mean, as long as people are not too freaked out.

• 52:09Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, you'd think people would be more sensitive in this day and age.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Well, do you know something? It actually makes you think, because it's, because it really totally radically changed my whole idea of what a mind and a body is.

• 52:19Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  I don't understand why people just don't do it more. I'm not, I'm not kidding because you know what it's like, you stretch, you feel better, but just like, honestly, we walk around with our bodies as though it's a sentence. It's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing. We have this huge cutoff, this dick art cutoff point, the head, everything below can just go to hell. People just drag their asses around like it's a huge, oh, who's this guy I've got to bring with me across town? You know, it's bizarre when you think about it. I saw a picture of a, of a cat and they discovered a new cat, little cat in Bolivia, okay, in the jungle today. And it's a bit smaller than a domestic cat and they, I can't remember the, the name of it, the locals have a name for it. It's a gorgeous little thing, obviously. But you see the picture of it, it was so shocking. So I want to see the picture of this cat.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Um, and then you see it and the image comes up and because it is smaller than a regular little cat we have here, it's incredibly gripping image because the pose it's in is just like a tiger about to eat something. The animal is, is, is so alive. It, it's, it's geometric points are stationed so dynamically. It looks pre-lunge, whatever it does. You can't take your eyes off. It's the most compelling thing. Like when you're watching Attenborough stuff, you can't take your eyes away when something's about to eat something or, or mate. You know, you just can't. The mechanism of life in operation is completely compelling. And that's how we should be. Imagine if we were all walking around the streets that dynamically. Imagine how much fun it would be if everything looked like this kind of, you know,

• 53:46Speaker 02

  I guess that would look like a, what's his name, Bob Fosse dance number or something if everyone was going down the street like that. We should definitely do it one day a year.

• 53:53Adam Buxton?

  Voguing.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're voguing in Sainsbury's.

• 53:57Adam Buxton?

  But I mean, how far do you take wellness then, if we want to call it that?

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Wellness, schm wilderness, who the fuck wants that? You know, that kind of glow that we get out of a jar or whatever. You have to get up at five AM, you know, and eat your own yawns. Fuck off. Just feeling good and moving your ass.

• 54:14Adam Buxton?

  So does that mean that you eat differently now than you did like 10 years ago? And does that mean that you?

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the classic road comic diet is, you know.

• 54:22Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it's not great.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  No, it's fucking a handful of, you know, peanuts and then a Mars bar and then some beef crisps.

• 54:29Adam Buxton?

  Have you been to Pret?

• 54:30Speaker 02

  I have been to Pret a lot. I have relationships with many Prets. Yes.

• 54:34Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it's pretty good.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  You know, I'm an overweight, middle-aged guy. I need to lose weight and get fitter.

• 54:39Adam Buxton?

  You know what's going to sort you out? AI.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Oh, you mean medically?

• 54:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. Great. Do it. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Where is it? It's not here yet. That didn't, that wasn't fast enough. See, I don't like AI.

• 54:54Adam Buxton?

  Fair enough. What about, have you ever had gummies and things like that on stage? Yeah, all the gummies.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I took them, I took them in Boston. I was very excited. No, it was Boston, no, Seattle for the first time and then I had one, like I was such a kid, you know, my friends all said, yeah, that's it. Just here goes and yeah, yeah, you know. And then had another and then I was going, this is fucking bullshit. Wednesday's kicking in. I had five and then

• 55:20Speaker 02

  I kneeled on my bed and pawed it like a cat for I think eight hours going, make it stop, make it stop, please make it stop. I couldn't believe that I was still doing that at noon the next day and I had to go somewhere else. So you fucking came, please. It was for eight hours constant.

• 55:39Adam Buxton?

  What was going on though?

• 55:41Speaker 02

  It was just overwhelmingly stoned. You know, I was just, I was picked up, I was stoned and restoned as I was being stoned. And uh I couldn't deal with it, but I've, I've loved it. I've grown up since then. Um.

• 55:53Adam Buxton?

  You had five?

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't know, man. This was the first time. Are you joking? Of course, give me, what's in the bag?

• 56:01Adam Buxton?

  Was that always what you were like?

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess.

• 56:05Adam Buxton?

  You're like, yeah, I'll try that. Give me some of that.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm, I, I was nervous. I'm not a big drug person, to be honest with you. Not, cocaine's not for me, not in my bag. Uh, horrible stuff. I don't know why people do that.

• 56:16Adam Buxton?

  Psychedelics, acid and things like that?

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Oh, I took that, yeah. I'm very visual, so I was interested in the effects, you know. Um, and I think shrooms are great and they're very, very good for, for people is my, basically my opinion. I think everyone should microdose from time to time. I think it's excellent for you. It's really, really good. It's um reconnecting, balancing you. I mean, I want to, you know, really want to swerve away from these wellness words because they're, they're awful. The thing that you often walk around going, oh God, why is everything like this? In my experience, microdosing made me realise that, oh, it's not like that. It's me. It's just me crapping on what's around me. It's my perception. It's me being achy and full of grumps and, you know, complaining to whatever that I haven't processed or dealt with. It restores the freshness of perception when you're, to when you're young, you feel young, it's fresh, it's new.

• 57:02Adam Buxton?

  So when you're talking about microdosing, I don't know anything about that world, other than what I've heard described to me by people like Joe Rogan, who are adherents to all of that. They, they love it. I mean, you must be aware that that's a big thread that runs through a lot of bro-y podcasts in the US is microdosing and mushrooms and psychedelics and.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Stupid people are allowed to eat tomatoes too or mushrooms.

• 57:24Adam Buxton?

  I'm not implying that uh that invalidates their qualities just because Joe Rogan is into them. I'm just saying it's interesting.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  No, of course. I mean, look, it's, it's around, it's available. Also, it's in America. That stuff is, you know, I don't know, it's a huge, hugely available. I mean, New York smells of weed. I understand.

• 57:39Adam Buxton?

  Oh, God.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  It's like everywhere smells of weed nowadays, I tell you. Even Norwich.

• 57:43Adam Buxton?

  But no, it's interesting. I mean, I'm, I'm always fascinated by it because I am timid by nature, so I would not be taking those five gummies. I would be nibbling a corner and waiting for 10 hours to see what the effects were before cautiously nibbling another corner.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  No, but my attitude to that is that I, you know, within the realms of safety, obviously, I'm not interested in being traumatised, fried or fucked up. I'm really not. But there is, you know, sort of a lively interest in finding out how this works.

• 58:13Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. No, my anxiety is that I will break something.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  I think that feeling of this is about to break is going back to what I was saying, but this kind of feeling of terminal importance or urgency. A lot of the time, it's this hesitancy that's gripped us and it's choked our fluency and our fun and our crack in exchange. Anyway, we used to be bigger. We used to make more of a kind of a splash in each other's fields without it being a big deal. I'm not talking about, you know, a very extrovert person kind of cornering you, you know, for an evening at a party. I'm just talking about, we used to have a little more, I think it was greater credit and trust existentially between us to allow us to um be raw or naked or more revealed.

• 58:57Adam Buxton?

  Messy.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Messier in front of one another. Yeah, less mediated and calculated and packaged and so on, which is really.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Is the defining quality of real experience, I guess.

• 59:07Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, that's true. I guess I, I think I was always that way. I think I always slightly recoiled from things that looked a bit messy and dangerous and.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Emotionally explosive or fraught or?

• 59:21Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah, I just thought, oh, watch out. Also, I had the experience of seeing, which a lot of people have, um, you know, seeing a friend get mentally ill when they were in their late teens and finding it very upsetting to see them unravel and, and see their behaviour change.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:38Adam Buxton?

  And that was sort of slightly bound up with drugs as well.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'm not advocating, you know, wild drug use for anybody. And young people or otherwise, I don't think they need that. I just think that when you are ready, if you're, you know, in a stable, safe position and you want to see if these things could work for you,

• 59:54Adam Buxton?

  Hmm.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  that, you know, you don't die.

• 59:56Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  If you do, if you do it carefully.

• 59:58Adam Buxton?

  No, at some point, I would like.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Sorry, can I just qualify that because it's important.

• 1:00:01Adam Buxton?

  Please.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  I mean, about, you know, I'm, I would suggest that works for things like, can work for things like psilocybin and maybe marijuana, if it's not ingested in the form of smoke, possibly.

• 1:00:11Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  But you have to be extremely careful, of course. It's, it's your brain. You only have one. You've got to look after it. And I, I think that the opposite lobby, though, that's very against all of those things on principle, uh, is not for me because it's missing out on finding out. You know, I don't want to find out to the point where I'm going to eat the berry nobody's had, but if somebody's had it and said it's pretty good, I'll give it a go.

• 1:00:43Adam Buxton?

  Do you play music in these stand-up shows?

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  I, I, I, this is a matter of debate. I make it sounds. That is definitely verifiable.

• 1:00:53Adam Buxton?

  What are you making the sounds with?

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  I'm making the sounds with, um, a keyboard, a nice keyboard. It's red. And, um, I have a, a half Epiphone, I don't know, one of those. It's a half, it's very nice, it's black. And I have, um, a bass ukulele, which has got these huge rubber thunk thunk strings on it. And that's kind of really good for what I'm doing, actually. And I've got a three-string crazy cigar box thing as well.

• 1:01:21Adam Buxton?

  And are you able to play these instruments quite well? No?

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What would be the point if I could? Everyone's doing that. Haven't you noticed?

• 1:01:33Adam Buxton?

  That's a lot of instruments to take on tour.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Oh, it's vital. I want more. I'm going to pick some up over there. A bazooka or two.

• 1:01:41Adam Buxton?

  Well, I've placed an omni chord in front of you there.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Yes, it's, it's tremendous. I had one, I gave it away.

• 1:01:45Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  It has a tremendous amount of buttons. You've got the more recent model, um.

• 1:01:50Adam Buxton?

  And what do you do when you're playing though? Like, are they accomplishments to, oh, you're singing?

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  I'm singing.

• 1:01:54Adam Buxton?

  What are you singing?

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  I'm singing songs I wrote.

• 1:01:56Adam Buxton?

  Ah huh.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  You know, I have lots of them. Trying to remember them is another thing. That's more difficult, you know?

• 1:02:03Adam Buxton?

  Is there any way that you can do something?

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Now?

• 1:02:06Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  With the omni chord?

• 1:02:07Adam Buxton?

  I've never seen before. Or a guitar?

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, I'll pick up the, your nice looking. Um, what is it?

• 1:02:14Adam Buxton?

  This is the Godan A6, Godin, G O D I N.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  So, I can't play anything.

• 1:02:25Adam Buxton?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  But I grew up with a lot of blues music in the house. You know, uh, like all my dad's records were all blues records.

• 1:02:35Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  There were hundreds of them. And Motown, um.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  So when I was, when I was a kid, you know, we had turntable and, uh, that, all the records I played were blues records, you know, that and I used to go to sleep to Miles Davis, but everything else was blues.

• 1:02:53Adam Buxton?

  What kind of Miles Davis were you going to sleep to?

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Kind of blue.

• 1:02:57Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  You know, the obvious stuff back then.

• 1:03:01Adam Buxton?

  And did you never want to join a band?

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  I kind of did. I kind, I never tried to. Never tried to sing, never tried to do any of that, really. I loved drums. I wanted drums as a kid. I wa, I did a thing of asking for drum kits and being told no, so making do with biscuits, lids, tins.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  Um, uh, I'd went to concerts and I, I loved music, of course. You have to as a teenager.

• 1:03:23Adam Buxton?

  What's your first gig?

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  I was ridiculously cool. My first proper gig was Bruce Springsteen in Slane. There was a hundred thousand people. I cycled there on my bike for seven miles from my town. It was a bunch of us, late summer evening. I think we were thirteen, I mean, it was heaven. Everyone was there. Everyone in Ireland was there. You're net unforgettable happiness, you know, wonderful. My history teacher was there, you know, everyone was there in Ireland. It was great. And then when I was twelve, I saw Stevie Wonder.

• 1:03:48Adam Buxton?

  Wow.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  On the Master Blaster tour.

• 1:03:50Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  That was amazing. I'll never forget that because I grew up listening to his records. Bruce Springsteen was a big deal because he was, you know, around and there and I think I'd heard his stuff on the radio like that year, but.

• 1:04:00Adam Buxton?

  Was that sort of born in the USA era?

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  That was that tour. But the Stevie Wonder stuff was just transcendental. That was just amazing. I grew up with all that music. I knew it and loved it. And to see him do it was amazing.

• 1:04:12Adam Buxton?

  And it didn't make you think I could get lessons and do that?

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I didn't. I didn't. We had tiny college I grew up in, so there was no instruments in the house. Um. But my mother could play piano, so we could have had a

• 1:04:24Adam Buxton?

  Hmm.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  an upright or something, but we didn't. Bill Bailey did a great thing years ago. Always stuck in my head. He did it in the clubs. He was talking about, there was, when there was all the boy bands were around, he was talking about three-word songwriters, you know, now you're back and that is that and all that sort of stuff. That always stuck with me.

• 1:04:39Adam Buxton?

  Punchy back, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Um, and his other great song, um, he was talking about the Killers, um,

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  the one I got sold, but I'm not a soldier. Bill's line was, um, I've got a ham, but I'm not a hamster.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Uh, Bill's so fantastic.

• 1:04:55Adam Buxton?

  He's amazing.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, he is. Um, and actually, so is Tamsin, by the way. A lot of Tamsin. I haven't seen in a long time.

• 1:05:01Adam Buxton?

  Tamsin Gray?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah. All right. So music time.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Come back, baby.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Baby, go away.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Where you going, honey?

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Oh, come on, lady state.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  There you go. That song's got everything. It's all contained in four lines.

• 1:05:25Adam Buxton?

  Is that something you'll sing on the road or is?

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:29Adam Buxton?

  Have you got places though, going back to getting ideas off the ground? Are there places where you know doors are open for you in this challenging media landscape that we currently inhabit?

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I mean, I'm sounding like I'm probably kicking the kit around a bit, but there's a lot of possibilities, a lot of ways to make things. I think the problem is partly that everyone feels they have to have a hit.

• 1:05:51Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Immediately, you know, just triangulate before you begin. The pressure is too much. And this goes back to talking to young people about giving them some good news. There's too much pressure. You're being, the way you're being offered models is wrong. Because it used to be, you know, heroes, stars, all the rest of it, gods, sure. But also there was this kind of a start point, a nearby mini version where you could, with real people in a room, do something. Which just, you know, it was accessible and none, and you could, weren't intimidated by it. It was approachable. And we just need to bring that back because the kids are looking at, they're only seeing the shining, shimmering wall of stars. There's no local access point of just, you know, a bunch of people just like them with some infrastructure around them to help them just be, because in their own minds, they feel like they have to hit that wall immediately.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  And people have to realise, you know,

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  your life is really insignificant. It doesn't have to be the best.

• 1:06:46Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. Well, I guess you could say that that's one of the good things about YouTube and things like that is that you can sort of fuck around with some of these ideas and.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Yes, sure. But the problem is that when you're looking down the barrel of a camera or just talking to a mic, it's not the same. It's not the same. I'm talking, the actual stuff that's going to do you good. This is all great and, but the stuff that's going to be good for you and a young, developing person is with your friends, giving each other the weight of respect, like it being consequential what they say. And it really matters what they say, even though they're not a star, even though they haven't made anything. The point is discovery. It's so, you know what it's like. You notice, you remember it. You had a great time. You craft all this stuff. You put these things together. You can hear the care in it. You love it. You love it.

• 1:07:31Adam Buxton?

  Sure.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  And you've allowed yourself to do that. And young people have to be allow themselves to love this process that they're not getting paid for. And maybe they will get some money for if they allow themselves to just get a bit better at it, you know?

• 1:07:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. Yes, I suppose the thing is, as you say, to let go of feeling that it's not worth it unless you hit certain numbers and certain targets and.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  It's killing. That shit is killing. It's like the exam mind, you know?

• 1:07:57Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do, do things for the sake of it really and don't really worry.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  The whole point is to have no point. Then you find out what you've got inside you. You literally don't know otherwise. Because if you're only trying to hit a target, you're not even examining what's coming out of you. You're not seeing what it is.

• 1:08:13Adam Buxton?

  Well, John Ronson writes well about that in his book, In the Castle, about people going through various forms of that, especially in the digital world, of feeling like they have to optimize every version of what they're doing and engage with, like in the podcasting world, engage with certain subjects because that's going to get the greatest level of engagement. So, you know, culture wars, whatever it might be. Purely because, not because it's fun or enlightening to talk about those things, but because they know those will get the biggest numbers.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Beyond all the numbers and stuff, right? There's just a general problem with, there's just been too much stuff.

• 1:08:52Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  I mean, in a way, that's, was not, not a problem before. There was too much stuff before to keep up with, sort of from the nineties. But now, obviously the proliferation is, is the problem. It's almost like, um, the picture has changed, so there's no depth of focus, so that every leaf on the tree is as prominent as the next. And you're not getting any sense of dimensional depth or what the structure actually is. It's just the same thing being blown at you in a million variations. So your discrimination is being tested all the time, you know, and your discipline is being tested all the time. What to exclude.

• 1:09:25Adam Buxton?

  And then every time something truly original arrives, it's just pounced upon.

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:09:31Adam Buxton?

  And ripped apart.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  Vampire-like.

• 1:09:33Adam Buxton?

  Instantly.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:34Adam Buxton?

  And, you know, the person at the centre of it has no chance of surviving really, unless they are so monumentally strong-willed, which most human beings just aren't in that situation.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's something about, there's something, and this is the last thing I'll say for the tech aspect, but there's something about the prevalence of it, which has intensified the gaze upon a single individual when it happens. Like even when it's a success, like look at, say, um, uh, Phoebe Waller-Bridge with Fleabag, which is as good as it gets, you know? Um, the pressure on her for whatever is next obviously must be off the charts, you know?

• 1:10:04Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. Well, she's kind of, I don't know what's happening with her. I mean, maybe she's working on stuff and taking her time, which is very wise and just sort of ducking out of the whole thing for a while. But I also heard that she can't really get anything off the ground unless it's what the streamer wants.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's the essence of everything that's wrong, you know? It just.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  It's like, here's, here's the thing that will never happen, guaranteed spontaneity. You know what I mean? It, it, it is not gonna happen. And people who don't make stuff sometimes really don't understand that. And they think money changes everything, money makes things happen. It doesn't. It allows for things to happen maybe, but it's not gonna make things happen. It's not gonna make a script good. You can say, yes, I can hire better, or you can make it better. But you're not gonna get something with original feeling and it's gonna move and touch somebody in it. Not really. And the, and the idea, and that is repulsive to me, like to go back to the AI thing used for scripts and so on, that you can, in the same way they have, you must have heard about this. They've got a programme called Blue Something. There was a New Yorker article about this years ago. And they run, the big record companies run new songs through it.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  And it has to chart, it has to hit certain points. Cause this database contains everything from Beethoven about certain patterns and melodic, you know, sequences and phenomena. And it has to hit a certain amount of them for the record company to give the thumbs up to get it out, to see if it can be heard.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  You know, this is like the sciencing, um, election candidates, where they wear their shoes and ties.

• 1:11:28Adam Buxton?

  I know, it's with the Moneyball approach.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  It's bollocks. Moneyball works for sports, I get that.

• 1:11:32Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  But it doesn't work for this. It doesn't work for this. Um, it makes me angry because it's, it's really, really the thing that doesn't understand how things are made. You know, it's a very kind of, I, I just, it just, yeah, it doesn't work.

• 1:11:48Adam Buxton?

  There must be people out there doing stuff though, and just doing things in that old way of just pissing about and getting together.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, there are. I mean, you see it in people like, you know, the stuff that, say, Jim and Bob did. There's very much the feeling of that, Bob Mortimer and Vic Reeves. Like, the things they made were full of that joyous homemade spontaneity, you know? And I'm sure there's people out there doing it now. Of course there are. I mean, you got, you know, there's brilliant people around, there's brilliant young people around doing just Elf Lions is one. She's, you know, an incredible performer, incredibly inventive. There's loads of people out there doing good stuff. It's not that it doesn't happen. And obviously, look, I'm old, oh, of course, these machines scare me. Look, they've got so many buttons, you know, my toaster might kill me, as it is. So these things, you know, this all just stacked against me here.

• 1:12:33Adam Buxton?

  Just thinking about music, what do you go back to then? What albums are the ones that you rely on?

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I do love, I used to, do you know what? I'm extremely jealous of you because I heard you, you work with the guys from Metonymy?

• 1:12:46Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, you're a Metonymy fan.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  Oh, man, that song, I only found it this year, The Look.

• 1:12:52Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  I, I think I listened to that some scary amount of times. Cause that is, that is one of the hookiest things I have ever heard.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  I use it as a walk-on.

• 1:13:14Adam Buxton?

  Do you?

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. I love that song. I love that sound. Honestly, that song hooked me so much, I was afraid to listen to anything else by the band. Cause I loved it so much. And I, I absolutely will do that. I will get absolutely swept away by a song. I will play a song a hundred and fifty times.

• 1:13:31Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  To try and find out what's in it.

• 1:13:33Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, he's brilliant.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  Just keep going, just listening to it again and again and again. There was one, I like, there was, I think for two years I listened to the POMO remix of I Can't Go For That. Uh, I don't know, thousands and thousands of times.

• 1:13:45Adam Buxton?

  Hall and Oates?

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. But if you listen to the POMO remix.

• 1:13:47Adam Buxton?

  The which remix?

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  POMO, I don't know who he is, he's some producer.

• 1:13:50Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  That, and I listened to when Covid was on, I listened to that and, um, Arvo Pert, the Estonian composer.

• 1:13:56Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  Just on the loop. Silentium and Spiegelim Spiegel and all that stuff, again and again, just cycling around on my bike.

• 1:14:03Adam Buxton?

  Do you listen on Spotify?

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. But, I mean, I don't understand all those platforms and stuff.

• 1:14:09Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  I understand that one because it has a lot of stuff on it.

• 1:14:12Adam Buxton?

  I only ask because sometimes they do a thing where they send you your most played tracks at the end of the year.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing when they do that. It's a terrible mirror. Oh my God. I remember when that first came out, actually, because I am obsessional in that way. I will, I get into ruts and grooves, you know, and I have to make a ladder to get out. In all ways, in all facets of my character, I really have to consciously do that. Cause if I don't, I'll just go tunnel down and down to the middle of the earth. And, um, it's a shocker when you see those, those, the number of times you've heard, like, days have gone, weeks have gone by and you're listening to this fucking tune. What's wrong with you? This is the mind, you know, this is the field, this is the interesting stuff. It, the interesting stuff is generally, not always, but what you begin to see the sprout of, the moment you decide, and it's what makes you turn away.

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  The really, the next level of stuff, you know, we're so resistant to new, to change. We say we were always so interesting, it's blah, blah, blah. We don't want to be interested. We don't want change. We want the same biscuits, we want the same cup of tea, we want the same sundae, sort of very slightly remixed. And we want it again and again and again.

• 1:15:16Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I mean, listen, you're talking to someone who basically sees life as a kind of ongoing refinement project of trying to nail the perfect routine.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Adam Buxton?

  From, you know, in, in one way or another. And my, my wife is the same, we're, we're real creatures of routine. And it so frequently gets me down, especially with watching movies and stuff in the evening. You know, we sort of flop down at the end of the day and put something on and we go for some bullshit that looks fun and sort of non-challenging. But actually, at the end of it, it's.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  There's definitely a movie to be made about something called, say, call it something like Wildcard, okay?

• 1:15:54Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Where you get a couple exactly as you've described, and we've all been that couple at one time, or a lot of us are that couple all the time. And there's a service called Wildcard. And that just means that, once, you're doing, you're living in routine, it's the same way to live. But once every fortnight or ten days or whatever it is, it's a wild card night. And if you sign up to this app, it's just within that field of time, someone turns up at your apartment and you won't be going to sleep that night.

• 1:16:16Adam Buxton?

  And fucks everything up.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, you turn, you go out of town or there's a car that pictures them, or you don't know what it's gonna be. But it's just every so often, just so that you don't get.

• 1:16:24Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Completely petrified.

• 1:16:26Adam Buxton?

  I'd pay for that service.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Adam Buxton?

  Definitely, if they could sort of say, well, look, you won't be badly injured.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:16:33Adam Buxton?

  Um, but something mad's gonna happen.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:35Adam Buxton?

  Like The Game.

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:16:37Adam Buxton?

  With Michael Douglas. That's why that movie's so compelling, I think.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Is that a David Fincher picture?

• 1:16:41Adam Buxton?

  I think it is.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it's a good one.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  I, I watched Fight Club again with my kids.

• 1:16:47Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah, what did they make of that?

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  On holiday.

• 1:16:49Adam Buxton?

  That's a fun holiday watch.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  It was, you know something, it was actually really good.

• 1:16:52Adam Buxton?

  Was it?

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was.

• 1:16:53Adam Buxton?

  I think the last time I watched that, I thought, fuck off.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  No, I thought it was great.

• 1:16:57Adam Buxton?

  Why?

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  It was great. Because it was really hands-on movie making, actually, because of Fincher, you know?

• 1:17:03Adam Buxton?

  He's brilliant, but.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  He's brilliant, yeah.

• 1:17:04Adam Buxton?

  I thought it stank so badly of so many things I hated about the nineties. Maybe in a positive or interesting way, it really was the beginning of a load of shit that we're now living with online. So many mad ideas about what men should be and the way they should behave.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  But of course, look, all this stuff we're saying, like this, this wallpaper we're talking about on this issue, like, you know, he just picked, Pal, Palaknik?

• 1:17:31Adam Buxton?

  Chuck Palahniuk, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  The thing was.

• 1:17:33Adam Buxton?

  Come back to the mic, Dylan.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  When you look, when you, it's in the same way when you look at people, like, there's an Irish writer called Kevin Barry.

• 1:17:38Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Who writes short stories and novels, and he's incredible. It's kind of feral. It's raw, it's alive, it's like a blast of something that wakes you up, you know? You just go, oh, Jesus.

• 1:17:48Adam Buxton?

  It certainly wakes you up. My favourite thing about Fight Club was Joe Cornish, my comedy wife's toy version of it, called Tufty Club.

• 1:17:57Adam Buxton?

  Which was altogether more enjoyable. Can I convince you to play one more blasted music to wrap things up?

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, sure, I just have sure. I'm, I'm gonna, I'll just sing this a bit, here we go. This is the other verse of that thing, actually.

• 1:18:10Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  See, chords and things, I mean, how important are they really? The point is, they're all present, they're there, we can hear some of them are there, some of them are trying to get into the room.

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  There's clearly musical activity going on, isn't that good enough? Do we really want perfection? Go figure why we're fighting. Guess you got me wrong. You're taking off your night things. I'm sucking on your bong. Say modern men just make you sick.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Oh, Napoleons or Nazarenes. Say you're tired of all my shit.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  But you don't know what I mean.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  The axe ate all the hay.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  They laughed just like the axes, they ran away. What are we gonna do? Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, the earth's too big without you.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:19:13Adam Buxton?

  I love it.

• 1:19:17Adam Buxton?

  Thanks, man.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:19:18Adam Buxton?

  All the best for your tour. Have you played your English dates already? No.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  No, no, they're after Europe.

• 1:19:23Adam Buxton?

  Okay, when will they happen?

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  No, quite, no, soon, actually, I think it's October, I go, I come back from Prague and I go to Swansea.

• 1:19:29Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  The logical route.

• 1:19:31Adam Buxton?

  Great, well, I'll come along.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, please do, thanks a lot.

• 1:19:34Adam Buxton?

  See you there.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:19:35Adam Buxton?

  Nice, thank you so much, Dylan.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Thanks, Adam.

• 1:19:43Adam Buxton?

  Wait, this is an ad for Squarespace. Okay, we'll return to the AI apocalypse in just a wee, wee moment. But first, I wanted to talk about Squarespace. Do you know about Squarespace, Steve? Uh, yes, Monty, I think I might even be a little bit more tuned into modern tech websites, et cetera, than you. I don't know, just guessing. Oh, Steve, I love this dynamic. I'm old and conservative and you're young and progressive and that's what makes the Newswind podcast such great listening. But yes, you're right, I must admit, I didn't know much about Squarespace. But because my new grumble book, Hell in a Handcart, is out this month, and I look forward to getting enraged by that, so I should hope.

• 1:20:18Adam Buxton?

  Anyway, the publishers, Bluestar and Dogwhistle, made a beautiful website for the book using Squarespace. I know, I got the newsletter that you sent out using Squarespace, and the website does look great. Videos of you airing your views, members areas for your mad fans, you've even got a merch store, I see. That's right, the Union Jack top hat is a big seller, but they constructed it all so fast with Squarespace. They did most of it over one lunchtime, Steve. Well, you wouldn't want to spend much longer on it, would you? Shut up, Steve. But here's the thing, anyone listening to this can start a free trial right now at Squarespace.com/boxton and see how easy and versatile Squarespace is. And when they're ready to launch a new website or domain, they can save ten percent off their first purchase by using the offer code BOXTON at checkout. Right, well, maybe I'll visit Squarespace.com/boxton and start a new website just to refute all the nonsense in your new book.

• 1:21:02Adam Buxton?

  Oh, don't do that, Steve. I will. Oh, shut up, Steve. Uh. Shut up. Now, back to more depressing matters on Newswind.

• 1:21:22Adam Buxton?

  Hey, welcome back, Podcats. That was Dylan Moran talking to me there. I'd met Dylan a few times over the years, but never really had the opportunity to sit down and have a relaxed conversation like that, so I really enjoyed it. I hope you did too. I'm very grateful to him for making the time. In the description of today's podcast, a reminder that you will find links to his website, tour dates, as well as a few other bits and pieces that you can see on YouTube. There is his 2004 stand-up show Monster, which is currently available to watch there.

• 1:22:04Adam Buxton?

  There's Dylan talking about some of his favourite films back in 2023. There is part one of an episode of How Do You Want Me?, his show written by Simon Ny that he starred in opposite the late Charlotte Coleman back in 1998. That was a really nice show with lots of great funny people in it. Peter Seraphinovich pops up in the first episode. There's also a link to a film that Dylan was in called A Film With Me In It, directed by Ian Fitzgibbon from 2008 and written by Mark Doherty.

• 1:22:42Adam Buxton?

  It's also got Mark's brother David O'Doherty in it. There's also a link to Dylan on The Tommy Tiernan Show in 2024, talking about playing the piano, which, like the guitar, he can't play in a conventional way, but still enjoys. I mean, I really liked his guitar playing.

• 1:23:06Adam Buxton?

  Don't know about you, but I thought that worked pretty well. And I hope he didn't mind me putting a bit of reverb on there. I like reverb, you know, but I am aware that it's generally considered the tacky choice and that people with more refined tastes would prefer to keep everything dry. Keep it dry, always keep it dry. Not buckles, though. I've also put a link to that Guardian review of the AI sitcom No Big Deal. If you're interested in watching it, it's on YouTube. There's a link to an article on the Smithsonian Online Magazine about that cat,

• 1:23:46Adam Buxton?

  the new cat that Dylan mentioned, which is called the Tilcayo Cat that looks like a miniature tiger. There's a link to the video for The Look by Metronomy, which you heard a short clip of in there, directed by Lorenzo Fonda from back in 2011. And I've also put links to that remix of I Can't Go For That by Hall & Oates, the Pomo remix, and one of the tracks by Arvo Pärt that Dylan mentioned, Sillentium from 1977. Beautiful, fairly minimalist piece of piano music.

• 1:24:28Adam Buxton?

  And there's the link to Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece, which is actually about software that predicts which movies will become hits, but it also mentions the music version.

• 1:24:45Adam Buxton?

  Just wait for that jet to rumble off.

• 1:24:49Adam Buxton?

  Anyway, how are you doing, Podcats? I hope you're all right. Cultural highlight from this week,

• 1:24:58Adam Buxton?

  quite easily pleased, was the bit in Traitors, Celebrity Traitors, when Richard E. Grant announced that he was a traitor when asked directly by Joe Lysit.

• 1:25:11Adam Buxton?

  And the combination of the expression on Joe's face and the moment when he realised, like, oh, that actually isn't the best strategy. I guess he was all caught up in the moment. I appreciate that this moment has been analysed ad nauseam by everyone, but it was good fun. I mean, I was really laughing.

• 1:25:38Adam Buxton?

  What a mad man. I think unless they're absolutely insane, they'll instantly get rid of him, won't they?

• 1:25:52Adam Buxton?

  Anyway, we'll see. Another less chucklesome highlight of my week was finally getting round to dealing with the last few boxes containing my mum's clothes. You will be excited to hear, this is a good six years after she died. And of course, I talk about my parents quite a lot, I guess. You know, I've got a couple of books out of it as well. And I sometimes think that the way that I chose to deal with my parents' belongings, specifically after their deaths, makes me look a bit mad and was maybe a stupid way of doing things. And I have a lot of sympathy with anyone who just decides to get rid of absolutely everything.

• 1:26:39Adam Buxton?

  But I just couldn't do it. My dad died in 2015, my mum died in 2020. And I took delivery of all their belongings, everything they had. I mean, I guess my dad moved in with all his stuff a few months before he died. So he wanted to have everything with him. And then I had to sort through it after he checked out. But after mum died, well, that was different because it was Covid. So there was two options. It's either get rid of everything without looking at it or have it all delivered here. I mean, we are in the fortunate position of having a lot of space out here, a lot of sheds, places to store things.

• 1:27:23Adam Buxton?

  So I said, yeah, we'll take everything and I'll sort through it here.

• 1:27:30Adam Buxton?

  But I am only just coming to the end of that process

• 1:27:36Adam Buxton?

  now, six years later, which is, I think, a bit nuts. But I just wanted to be sure that I wasn't going to get rid of anything that my parents would have wanted me and my family and my brother and sister to have, you know? I remember a journalist, Hadley Freeman from The Guardian, came to Norfolk to interview me after my mum died in 2020 around the publication of Ramble Book.

• 1:28:04Adam Buxton?

  And we sat in the flat where my dad stayed when he lived with us, which was and still is filled with books and bits of furniture that belonged to him and to my mum. And in the finished Guardian article, she quotes me as saying, "I'm worried it's slightly mad that I'm building this weird museum in here about all the photos and knickknacks that I have in there." Then the paragraph ends and beneath that Hadley writes, "It is a bit mad."

• 1:28:37Adam Buxton?

  I remember reading that at the time and going, is it? Well, I don't know, but now I think, yeah, it is. But I guess we're all a bit mad and that, I think, tends to become more the case the older you get. But I don't know, is it so mad? Is it mad to want to hang on to a few memories of your parents if you loved them and if you miss them? Is it so mad to find it difficult to part with the things that your parents felt were valuable? Is it so mad to find it very poignant, as I did this week, when you are handwashing your mother's clothes for the last time before taking them to the charity shop?

• 1:29:22Adam Buxton?

  And remembering her as you do? And then deciding that maybe you won't take all of the clothes to the charity shop? And then having an argument with your wife when you suggest that maybe she has some of the clothes? And she says she doesn't want to dress like an elderly Tory councillor? Is it really so mad to dress a mannequin in your mother's clothes and shoes and one of her old wigs from the 70s? And then sit her in the corner of your bedroom with a copy of Busy Busy World by Richard Scary as if she's reading me a bedtime story back when everything was nice? Is it?

• 1:30:03Adam Buxton?

  Okay, time to head back. Thank you so much, once again, to Dylan Moran. Thanks to Diggery Wait and Claire Broughton for their production and Patreon support. Thanks to Claire for additional editing on this episode. Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support. Thanks to Helen Green for her beautiful artwork. Thanks to everybody at Acast who liaises with my sponsors. But thanks most of all to you for listening right to the end, blimey. And in the new Patreon Q&A that comes out in a couple of days as I speak, one of the people who contributed was someone called Chris, who had made an audio clip compilation to chart the evolution of my I love you bye sign-offs.

• 1:30:49Adam Buxton?

  And Chris was wondering which of these had been the longest. I don't know, but for Chris, I'm going to have a go at a really long one today without the aid of any digital trickery. But first, I think that we should probably have a hug. I was going to say creepy hug, but apparently that's offensive. So come over here. Hey, how are you doing? Good to see you. Hope you're keeping all right. And please, until the next time we meet,

• 1:31:22Adam Buxton?

  go easy out there, yeah? You think I'm mad? And for what it's worth, and for Chris,

• 1:31:30Adam Buxton?

  I love you.

• 1:31:54Adam Buxton?

  I think that was the longest one, Chris.