Nish Kumar - Failure Is Information. Comedians Call It Material.

Nish Kumar is one of the UK’s best-known comedians, known for his impassioned political progressiveness. You might remember him as the host of the topical BBC comedy show, The Mash Report, which ran to great acclaim until it was abruptly cancelled in 2021 - one of his failures addresses this head-on. Kumar now co-hosts the popular podcast, Pod Save The UK and his 2026 tour, Angry Humour From A Really Nice Guy tackles the existential angst and political disquiet of a 40-year-old man. We talk through his failed Edinburgh show, the fact he would never consume Huel, ‘the whole bread roll Mash Report thing’, his people pleasing tendencies, how his experiences of racism led to therapy and a PTSD diagnosis…and how his friendship with Ed Gamble has changed over the years. It’s not one to miss. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 02:29 Immigrant Parents and Fear 04:41 Comedy Obsessed Teen 08:22 Nice Guy Angry Comic 11:31 Rage as Fuel 13:04 Edinburgh Show Failure 23:31 Bread Roll Fallout 27:20 Empathy and Comedy 27:53 The Bread Roll Incident 28:29 Clips, Context, and Backlash 29:49 Turning Failure into Material 31:24 Therapy and PTSD 34:28 Racism and Political Architecture 39:52 Progress, Parents and Politics 46:14 Friendship and Growing Up 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: Intellectual intelligence is useless without emotional intelligence 2013 was the most important year because I learnt everything about what I didn’t want to do in stand-up My partner said I should seek therapy, but at the time that felt like an indulgence. I don’t feel that now. 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Nish Kumar is touring across the UK with Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy until the end of November. Tickets are available from www.nishkumar.co.uk/gigs Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com 📚 WANT MORE? Stephen Merchant - swap.fm/l/Lta5mlFbVnPHyFb8R1n2 John Bishop - swap.fm/l/wRGKwuonJFQoujFlmDHI 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Elizabeth and Nish answer listener questions in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: https://lnk.to/7i0moR Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: askhowtofail.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is what I can't resolve the contradiction of. Again, I am a people pleaser, but I also love winding people up. I don't think enough people talk about how much of their personal ambitions have been motivated by rage. You are addicted to anxiety.

• 0:21Elizabeth Day?

  Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that believes all failure is data acquisition. And today is such a brilliant example of putting that into practice. Before we get started on this episode, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation.

• 0:42Elizabeth Day?

  Confession time. I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels. But I've always found sizing for a space tricky. That's why Ernesta appealed to me. Ernesta makes designer quality rugs custom cut to the exact dimensions of your space. So instead of making do with something that's close enough, you're choosing something made specifically for your home.

• 1:22Elizabeth Day?

  I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing. And Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernestacom and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernestacom. When Nish Kumar was growing up in Croydon, South London, the child of Carolyn immigrants, a teacher at his school solemnly told his parents he would one day be Prime Minister. When Kumar instead went into stand up comedy, later becoming an acclaimed TV presenter and podcaster,

• 2:03Elizabeth Day?

  he recalls his parents thinking that this product has not met its guarantee. But number 10's loss is culture's gain. After starting comedy at Durham University with peers including Ed Gamble, his first solo stand up show came in 2012. His fan base grew over the following years, aided by frequent TV panel show appearances, where he became known for his impassioned political progressiveness. By 2017, he was hosting the topical BBC comedy show The Mash Report, which ran to great acclaim until it was abruptly cancelled in 2021. But more on that later. Kumar now co-hosts the popular podcast Pod Save the UK.

• 2:45Elizabeth Day?

  And his 2026 tour Angry Humour From A Really Nice Guy tackles the existential angst and political disquiet of a 40-year-old man. Sometimes, on bad days, Kumar says, I feel as if I've let my younger self down, like I've fallen short of my ambitions for the type of person I wanted to be. Then, on better days, I think, all I wanted to do was get inside the TV, and I've done that. Because deep down, I am still that obsessive, strange, loudmouth geek. Nish Kumar, welcome to How to Fail.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  I feel like I've left my body. It was like an out of body experience being present for that.

• 3:27Elizabeth Day?

  Was it like a eulogy?

• 3:31Elizabeth Day?

  Do you actually feel that you've let your parents down?

• 3:34Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess I did for a while, largely because they told me. It wasn't like, it wasn't something I had to cleverly infer. I think they were very, very confused by my choice of occupation. And I think part of that is sort of, a lot of that is motivated by fear. Because if you're a, you know, an immigrant, it's a classic first generation immigrant. The premise of what your life is supposed to look like is you are supposed to come to a country and do some job, any job, whatever job you have. And that is supposed to enable your children to then have a better life.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  But there is this kind of, so when we were growing up, when I say we, I mean the children of first generation immigrants. We would complain that our parents didn't want us to have any fun. We would say that our parents had too narrow a view of what was available to us in this country. But in reality, I think what they were doing was a kind of fear motivated thing. If you think about the jobs that people say immigrant parents want their children to do, it's always, what is it? It's doctor, lawyer, accountant. Those are three things that countries can't really do without, right? And the premise of the choice of jobs that first generation immigrants want for their children

• 4:59Speaker 00

  is to do jobs that are so necessary for the country that you're into function that they can't kick you out. That's essentially what they're trying to do. They're trying to, it's a kind of attempt to force integration. And so I think it was very fear motivated and this idea that, and also we don't come from, you know, there's no show business. There's sort of actually is now, you know, my, one of my cousins in India has been in Bollywood movies and another one is a singer. And so in my generation, there is weirdly now some shy business in my family. But that's not our thing in general. So they were sort of, I think they were confused. I think they were scared, definitely.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  And I think they were definitely confused now. My argument to them has always been, you should not have been confused. Because if you actually reflect on what I was like as a kid, I was never going to do anything else. When I was a kid, all I wanted to, you know, all I did was, I actually remember when I was a child, when the BBC got the rights to The Simpsons, I stayed in all day. Just because I was like, I don't want there to be a chance of me missing The Simpsons when it starts on the BBC. There was no chance. I wasn't being invited to anything. I don't know what, I was just like, I gotta be here. And you used to read books about how they wrote Simpsons episodes.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  And I, I used to, I was forced to my parents to take us to see Goodness Gracious Me when they did a live tour in 1999 at the Hackney Empire. And I was, I don't think I was, I don't think I turned 14 yet. And all I did was talk about comedy and think about comedy. If you met me at 14, you'd probably have a pretty good guess of what adult I'd turn out to be.

• 6:51Elizabeth Day?

  It's one of my innumerable privileges that I had never thought of what you've expressed so cogently there, that immigrant parents want their kids to have a job that means they can't be kicked out of a country.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, because we didn't think about it when we were younger. We thought that our parents just didn't get comedy or books. You know, my friends, a bunch of my friends are like novelists and screenwriters and comedians who all had immigrant parents who said, why don't you become a doctor or a lawyer? And we thought it was a failure of their imagination. But actually, it was a tactical thing. They knew that these things existed. You know, my parents are very cultured and cultural people, you know, they, you know, from when we were kids. My mum's favourite movie is The Deer Hunter, you know, like from when we were kids, the house was full of books and music.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  And so they're not blind to these things, but the tactic was maybe you could try and make yourself integral. And what I would say is in the last 15 to 20 years, I do have to acknowledge that they were correct on some fronts. You know, if you look at the Windrush scandal, that shows you what, that shows you how precarious. You know, the Windrush generation were a group of people invited to this country from the Commonwealth by the British government to help rebuild the country after the Second World War. And then they deported their children. You cannot get more important to the British state than the Windrush generation and that contribution that they made in the post-war period. And yet, the government still deported their children.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  So when that happened, when the Windrush scandal happened, I remember thinking, yeah, my parents were 100% correct. I never thought we'd get to a place where in this country where now there are mainstream political parties that have seats in the Houses of Parliament where their policy is repatriation of immigrants. My therapist once said to me, she was answering a question of mine and she said, the problem is you have a paranoia because your parents were paranoid. And as you get older, you will have to understand that your parents were both paranoid and correct. So you have to try and reconcile those two ideas that the paranoia is unhealthy, but it is not totally unfounded.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  And that has kind of, that's been a really interesting journey to go on in the last kind of 10, 15 years.

• 9:16Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, we're going to get more into that and what a mindfuck that must be, given some of the things that we're going to talk about. I wanted to mention your tour, which has the greatest title, Angry Humour From A Really Nice Guy. You are renowned for being a really nice guy. And whenever I said you were coming on How to Fail, without fail, people would say to me, oh, he's really nice. Is that annoying?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  No.

• 9:44Elizabeth Day?

  As an edgy comedian, is it ever annoying? You're just really nice.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  No, you know what's really weird? I remember when I was at university, I remember someone saying to me, God, the worst thing you can be in this world is nice. Because it suggests that you're boring and the worst thing you can be is nice. And at the time I said, yeah. And in my head, I thought, oh, there's way worse things. Pedo. That's way, pedo, fascist, fascist, pedo. There's way worse things you can be than nice. Are you mad? I think it's very important to meet the world with kindness. One of the things I've learned from my partner of 14 years is that intelligence is really valuable. But

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Intellectual intelligence is actually useless without emotional intelligence. I also think in terms of my, my sort of status as a comedian feels really strange. And part of the title of the show is alluding to the fact that in my day to day personal dealings, I am, I would actually say it's, it goes into unhelpfully nice. I think there's good to be kind and it's good to be nice. You must not be a people pleaser. And in my like one to one interactions with people, I am an obsequious people pleaser. Obsequious. When everyone says he's nice the whole time, you're like, yeah, because he's obsessed with everyone thinking he's nice. And so it is then strange that the comedy that I've done, it's about subject matter. That was always going to upset people.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Like it was always going to upset people that if you talk about politics, or if you talk about the news, or if you talk about race, or if you talk about anything. So it is really strange that a people pleaser has also done some of the most divisive comedy of the last kind of 10 years.

• 11:29Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  And but, and what, what's also fun is that I sort of, the people that know my work sort of know it simultaneously from the Mash Report and my series of Taskmaster, which both started in 2017. And if you ask Ed Gamble, for example, who's known me for 20 years, he will say the version of myself that I am on Taskmaster is the best representation of my real personality. So they're like, the half of me is political, you know, tirades. And the other half is man attempts to kick over a water cooler and fails.

• 12:11Elizabeth Day?

  And that's the real you.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And actually what I've realised is the real me is the, both of those things at the same time. And so the title is kind of an allusion to the idea of like, yeah, this is, I am both a Burke and someone who knows about the news. Those two things are not mutually, those two things are not mutually exclusive.

• 12:30Elizabeth Day?

  It's very, that's, analysis is very good. I, I can completely relate to the, the people pleasing overwhelm. And then the need for your repressed anger to go somewhere.

• 12:44Elizabeth Day?

  And for me, it comes out in road rage. It's sort of very, very comfortable road rage, always behind a sort of windscreen encased in a metal box. Like I would never actually be the person who goes out.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  You'd never get out of the car.

• 12:54Elizabeth Day?

  No, I'd never do that. But I think it does that. And you're, you've spoken a lot about rage and the importance of focused rage as an agent for change.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:05Elizabeth Day?

  And, and that can be part of being a nice guy.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:08Elizabeth Day?

  And it kind of has to be because you're protecting the people who need it.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think, I think rage as an emotion is sort of useless if it is an end of its, in of itself. If you're being angry just to be angry, then that's, nobody needs more of that. There's enough of that in the world. But if, if you can use your anger about something to motivate you to do something, then I think that that is, I also think that that is an undervalued commodity in, outside of politics, just in your professional life. I don't think enough people talk about how much of their personal ambitions have been motivated by rage. Like people always, people always say things like, no, I just wanted to achieve because I love the work. And I, every time I see one of those people talking, there's a part of me that always thinks, fuck you.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  I know that there is something that happened that made you think, oh, okay, I'm going to show that.

• 14:01Elizabeth Day?

  100% could not agree more.

• 14:07Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's exposure and response prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 14:52Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Okay, let's get on to your failures. Your first failure is your 2013 Edinburgh show.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:09Elizabeth Day?

  That then got turned into an essay in The Good Immigrant.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:12Elizabeth Day?

  Okay, tell us about this show.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Now, I'm about to say something that makes me sound like I'm trying to go on a kind of direviseo hustle culture.

• 15:21Elizabeth Day?

  You are wearing the black t-shirt, to be fair. Where's your Huul? Is it, are you sitting on it?

• 15:26Speaker 00

  I would never consume Huul. Even if, no, if my life depended on it, if Huul cured all disease, I would consume Huul. And that's the only circumstance. I have no desire, I hope this podcast is not sponsored by you.

• 15:39Elizabeth Day?

  It's not, this will be the episode title. It's a good point of difference.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  I just think, why in the name of God do you want to remove the pleasure of eating food? Why would you take that away from yourself?

• 15:53Elizabeth Day?

  There's nothing to look forward to if you don't have the dinner that you're planning in your head as you're recording a podcast with Nish Kumar.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  So I'm just caveating this by saying that I know that this sounds like something that would be on a podcast with two men wearing t-shirts that are slightly too tight for them. But failure is just information.

• 16:13Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  To a comedian, failure is data.

• 16:17Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  And so at the minute, I'm in, so I start my tour in September and I'm going to Edinburgh to do a sort of work in progress version of this show. And so like, I'm failing all the time. And it's helpful and it's really helpful for me because that's how I know what's going to work. You know, part of the thing with stand up is you, it's contrived spontaneity. And what you're really doing is repeating the same thing over and over again. But every time trying to make it feel to the audience that you're performing, it's a confidence trick. Like you're trying to make the audience feel like you're saying it for the very first time. But also they've paid, you know, up to £30, you know, when it goes into theatres, by the time it goes into theatres. So it has to be, it has to be good.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  And the only way it can be good is by going through this endless process of failing. And we're very lucky, you know, I always think we're very lucky because friends of mine are novelists. And I always think, you've written novels. I always think, how do you know it's good?

• 17:18Elizabeth Day?

  You don't, you don't, I, I just rely on someone else telling me. That's where the people pleasing comes in.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess you, you have editors who read it and you get feedback from them.

• 17:29Elizabeth Day?

  Genuinely, it, the first time, for instance, that a joke bombed, did you still feel it then? Did you still feel, oh, that's great data?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  No, it's taken me 20 years.

• 17:39Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's taken me 20 years. And now not only is it, it's not just a case of, it's not that I'm emotionally robust, because I'm not emotionally robust. No one would ever describe me as being emotionally robust. But it's more that I've just done it enough times that I now. It's, I was going to say I don't take it personally. It's not even that I don't take it personally, I sort of welcome it because you, you go, great, that's great. I know that that doesn't work. And so I either need to change something round or drop it entirely. The biggest learning curve for me, the most important thing I did was my show in 2013, which didn't work. It, it, it just didn't work. And in not working, it was miserable. I was so miserable.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  I did a two week run of it at the Soho Theatre and then I did it in Melbourne in 2014. And by the time I got to Melbourne in 2014, I was thinking, oh dear, this is not working.

• 18:34Elizabeth Day?

  So can I just interrupt? What's your definition of not working? Was it that people weren't responding or that there were no tickets sold? Or how did you measure that?

• 18:41Speaker 00

  You know what? The ticket sales weren't bad. It was more just people weren't responding.

• 18:47Elizabeth Day?

  Okay.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Sometimes it would go well, then other times it would go bad. Then, but a lot of the time it was just not working. The thing with stand up is that there are, everyone has good nights. If you're pretty decent at the job, everyone has a good night. You don't really write your shows for the good nights. Because if you, if the, if the chemistry or atmosphere is right in the room, anyone who has half a clue of what they're doing can have a good stand up gig. The reason you write it is for the nights the chemistry is not right. You have to do it again and again and again. So there are, like any job, you know, there are days where you go into your job and you think, absolutely, I'm on this. I'm nailing it. And then there are days where you go into work and you think, god damn it, I just have to get to five o'clock. Like I just have to get through this day.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  And with stand up, the version of that is the spontaneity is not working. The chemistry with the audience is not correct. And then the thing that will save you is the writing. And the thing that will carry you through those nights is your written material. And also if you record the show, that is just a test of the writing. But 2013, I, it's the most important show I did because I learned everything about what I didn't want to do in stand up. And I learned everything about what I'm, how I come across on stage. And I learned everything about.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  What ultimately I wanted a show to look like. And the most important thing I learnt was that you can't, if you're making something, and this is, I think, true of anything that, like, it's a book or film or whatever. If I'm making something, I've got to make it on the basis of I am doing this thing that I would like to see, rather than I am doing something that I think will be successful.

• 20:33Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  I have friends, I think, who understand instinctively what an audience wants. And that's great. But if you're not one of those people, you must not attempt to second guess what an audience wants. And you are better off making something for yourself that you would like to see and then hoping that other people like it.

• 20:54Elizabeth Day?

  That's such a great distinction. And it sounds as though there was a piece there about removing a sense of ego. And sort of how you wanted to come across and actually just like delved into who you were and what you wanted.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  That's definitely, that's definitely a big part of it, for sure.

• 21:11Elizabeth Day?

  It then became an essay in The Good Immigrant, is that right? So this seminal collection, which came out in 2016, edited by Nikesh Shukla. And so was that, in your mind, a successful repurposing?

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 21:25Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  Nikesh contacted me and said, I'm doing this essay collection. And he said, I want you to write it about the subject matter of the show. I don't stand by a lot of the material in that show, in any way. But there was what, the premise of the show was that somebody had used a publicity steal of me and put it into a meme generator. It's a very like early 2010s issue. But someone put it into a meme generator and the meme was confused Muslim. And I'm not a Muslim, but I was very confused. And the, and so it was people making, kind of using my face to sort of make Islamophobic remarks.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  And I tried to turn that into an hour long comedy show in the way that I thought you had to do to make something into an, in inverted commas, show. I thought it had to have a kind of beginning, middle and end, and it had to. And the reason I was doing that was I thought that would, that would be successful in Edinburgh. And it would, you know, bring me to the attention of TV people and it would help supercharge my career. I didn't think, oh, this would be, this would be a good show. You know, I was making something that I thought would be received well, rather than making something. I know this sounds corny as hell, something that is a real expression of something that I was desperate to put out in the world.

• 22:49Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  And, but then when Nikesh came back to me and suggested it as an essay, I was, I said to him initially, buddy, I've got no interest in revisiting that crap. And, but he said, no, I think it would really work. And so I kind of just put it together as a shorter essay. And it worked so much better. And, and it, and what's really brilliant about The Good Immigrant, and what was very funny was when I read the book, suddenly, some of these essays are really beautiful and some of them are really brutal. And some of them are really scary. And my one has a two page diversion about Steve Carell's performance as Michael Scott in The Office. Because I don't really know what a good essay is because I'd never really written one before. I wasn't really wrapped up in

• 23:33Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  how I thought it should have been perceived.

• 23:36Elizabeth Day?

  That is so fascinating and says so much about the nature of failure and success, both in terms of failure being data acquisition, but also success being contextual too. That sometimes the material needs to find its form.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sometimes, you know, you, you know, it's, you, I think we're seeing this quite a lot at the moment. You know, I'm not, I'm not going to single anything out. I'm not going to slag anybody off. But we've all, in the last, I'd say, decade, half decade certainly, sat down and in hour three of 10 of a TV show or documentary thought this should have been a hundred minute feature.

• 24:19Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  When, when people who start stand up talk, ask me for advice now, I'm essentially like I'm trying to spend like shillings, like the currency that I'm spending is no longer relevant. You know, it's, it's a completely different world because of the way that, you know, algorithms at Instagram and stuff have come to dominate. And they now have to sit there and second guess what, you know, what the algorithm is going to favour, you know, what subject matter is going to get your video promoted by the sort of invisible gods that nobody really understands. And maybe, and, and they will always be people that understand how to play that system.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  There are comedians I know that when I watch them do observational material, I think you are a real loss to politics. You would be a phenomenal political speechwriter because you have such an instinctive understanding. Peter Kay would have been a phenomenal politician. Because, and I genuinely, I'm not denigrating that as a skill. I, I think that that's an important part of, you know, you want a varied cultural diet.

• 25:28Elizabeth Day?

  So that was 2013. We're now fast forwarding to 2019 for your second failure, which, as you put it, is the whole bread roll slash mash report fallout thing. The bread roll niche. I'm so sorry you experienced that. So you were doing stand up at a charity gig.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it went bad because I brought up the sticky topic of politics. It was December 2019. We were probably about a week away from a general election. The gig went badly. So like, by any discernible metric, I failed in my job, which admittedly I was not being paid to do, but I failed in my stated aim as a comedian in that room.

• 26:16Elizabeth Day?

  Well, can I interrupt you there? Sorry. So would you consider your stated aim to be, to entertain any audience that you find in a room? Or is your stated aim to do some good comedy that's also politically engaged?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Now, now we're getting into the, the crux of the problem with my personality, right? Because this, if you ask me what the stated aim of a comedian is, I would say the stated aim of a comedian is just to entertain the people that are in front of you. But if you ask me really, I, this is what I can't resolve the contradiction of. Again, I am a people pleaser, but I also love winding people up. It's not that I like upsetting people, it's that I, I can't stop myself if I think, if something is going in my eyes badly or wrong,

• 27:13Speaker 00

  I don't have the ability to just not acknowledge it. That's sort of the problem. Because there's a version of that gig where you just go, do 15 minutes of jokes about cricket and get off. I love cricket. It was a cricket charity. I love cricket. I could have talked about cricket for 15 minutes. It would have been very entertaining. But in reality, there was so much going on in the country at the time. You know, it's, it sort of feels hard to talk about now because obviously, you know, five months later, we were all like locked in our houses. So almost, in some ways, some of it feels, it almost feels irrelevant to talk about pre 2020 stuff.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  But there was so much kind of, you know, going wrong at the time, you know? There are just a lot of very rich people in this room. And, you know, it was also a charity gig that was designed to help kids that, you know, have disabilities. And now the disabled community in this country was ravaged because of cuts to social care that happened under the first coalition government in the early 2010s. You know, it feels like an extension of Victorian paternalistic charity culture to come together and talk about how we need to help, which we do, but not talk about the fact that there are, you know, political levers that have been pulled that have exacerbated

• 28:34Speaker 00

  difficult situations for disabled people living in this country. So it, but there was also a version where you go, just do some jokes about cricket, get off the stage. Why can't you just?

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Do that. And the truth is, I just can't. I think there's two bits of my brain missing. And one of them is that just ability to stop myself. And the other bit of my brain that's missing is the bit that thinks I. Because like it's, I love comedy and people love comedy and comedy writing. But there are definitely moments where you stand up in front of an audience. I've never had a problem with that. The idea of like an audience of people looking at me, I've never had an issue with it. It makes all the sense in the world to me. And I've got friends that are conversationally very confident, who when they've had to do anything like that, have said to me, I don't understand how you do that. It does not make any sense to me.

• 29:29Elizabeth Day?

  Maybe that comes from observing yourself so much.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:35Elizabeth Day?

  And sort of thinking about what makes you tick. And that's actually a form of empathetic intelligence, I would say.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the only problem with that is there's some comedians that are absolute twat.

• 29:49Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, fair enough. But I'm not putting all comedians into that bucket. I'm just saying. Now, the bread roll, so someone threw a bread roll. What kind of bread roll was it? Do you remember?

• 29:57Speaker 00

  It was just a, it was just a bog standard white bread roll.

• 30:01Elizabeth Day?

  Corporate like.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a, it was a corporate, it was in like a Mayfair hotel. And the thing that I will always maintain is that I have no problem. I don't think you should throw things at people generally. But I don't have a problem with them yelling at me. Like, I really don't. Because they kind of, I have that right to express myself. And they sort of, they also have a right to express themselves. And when something happens in a room between a comedian and an audience, I think that that is, there is an honesty to that. I think a big problem that we've got into with the sort of proliferation of camera phones is that things that happen in comedy clubs are being filmed, cut out of context, and then being put on the internet.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  And you don't really know what happened, you know, if you weren't in the room. Like, you don't really know. There's certain things that, you know, like when Michael Richards went on that incredibly offensive racist rant where you're like, regardless of the context, that's not okay. It doesn't matter how, it doesn't matter what happened before or after that. The context is irrelevant because of what you said. But there's a lot of stuff that has happened in the last sort of 10, 15 years where you think, you watch the clip of it and people say, well, this is an outrage. And you go, yeah, but what was going on around that? I genuinely believed they had the right to boo me and yell. They really did. That's fine. The problem was then somebody in the room was a Telegraph journalist.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Now, I've said this to various people and they said, it was a cricket charity dinner. Of course, somebody was a Telegraph journalist. And the problem was that then for the sort of next 24 hours, it was like a kind of like shitstorm in the, in the press. And it then became sort of, it became something else. The really interesting thing for me was then I was able to write an 80 minute show about it. You know, like after Covid and the lockdowns, I went back on tour at the start of 2022. And I should, I, I should not say after Covid because it is still something that we're dealing with. But after the lockdowns in, in 2020 and 2021, I went out on tour in 2022.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  And it is the greatest thing about comedy.

• 32:15Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Is that failure is information and also like failure is sort of.

• 32:21Elizabeth Day?

  Material.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Material. There's things that I had to work really hard on about that show because I then talked about, you know, mental health implications and getting PTSD from the death threats. And getting the balance of that in, to a comedy audience was really hard because it would make people too sad. You know, of course it would.

• 32:39Elizabeth Day?

  So you've escalated that quite quickly. And just to give a bit of context there, The Telegraph wrote about this incident. And then it snowballed and you were getting death threats on Facebook.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Facebook, yeah.

• 32:53Elizabeth Day?

  Several times a day.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:56Elizabeth Day?

  Your agent said, we need to take this to the police. The police said, there's not that much we can do.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Nothing, yeah.

• 33:01Elizabeth Day?

  And you're then living in this state of repeated fear, where you're visualizing someone potentially attacking you or stabbing you in the street every day. And your partner and then your friend.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:16Elizabeth Day?

  Brett Goldstein, Clang, suggested that, suggested that you get therapy.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:23Elizabeth Day?

  Talk to us a little bit about your therapeutic journey and what you think it's taught you.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Well, the most important thing to say is I should have been in therapy for a long time. We, and when the Mash Report started, because again,

• 33:40Speaker 00

  you know, it's, it's a political comedy show on BBC Two. And so it attracted a lot of hostility in the Conservative press. I would argue personally, there were a lot of people who had newspaper columns that were very upset with the idea that someone who looks like me had an opinion on the way the British government was run. I would say that I, that is my personal view, that it's reeked of racism. It reeked, I read, I read it in the columns and in some ways I would think, you know,

• 34:14Speaker 00

  I can hear the slur, like you're not using the word, but I can just hear it in the way you've written about me here. It, it was, it was also used in a kind of proxy fight with the BBC, which is the BBC shouldn't exist. There, there's a lot of institutions and organisations, and I would include the BBC and the Labour Party in this. They, they have no interest in feedback from people that they assume will always support them. And that's why both of them are seeing real serious, they are both experiencing really serious crises at the moment. You know, and so anyway, there were all these articles saying this is BBC bias, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, when that happened, my partner said, you should seek therapy.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  But at the time, I thought that that felt like an indulgence. And I felt myself, I felt a voice coming from myself saying, oh, God, oh, I need therapy because I've got to host a TV show. Oh, this thing that I've wanted to do my whole life has happened and now I'm sad about it. Like, I, I, all of that is wrong headed completely. But that's what was going through my head at the time. So I didn't do anything about it. And then I kind of left it until it was way too late. And because of the therapy, having started and been in it for kind of five years, I've sort of been able to create, I've been able to kind of, it's answered a lot of questions for me. What's wrong with me was the first question because I'm spinning out, like this isn't good. And so the first answer was, well, you have post-traumatic stress disorder.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  And then I was embarrassed about that for a while because I'm not supposed to let racism affect me. That's the lesson, that's the thing that I, from when I was a kid, I was like, it's not, I'm not going to let it get to me.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  And it really had affected me. You know, I felt like I was sort of letting down my like family and my community by allowing it to affect me this badly. And I felt like ashamed a bit about it. And, you know, because like everyone I know, so many people I know go through the same thing, you know. And I, I did feel very embarrassed about it initially. And now I know that that's all nonsense and like,

• 36:25Speaker 00

  racist abuse is racist abuse. It's always going to affect you. It's always going to get under your skin. Especially when it feels connected to a political architecture. You know, when I was a kid and a guy shouted, you know, kids would shout [BLEEP] at me in the street. And it was upsetting and it was threatening. But when it happened in 2019 and 20, and what's going on now in the country.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  It maybe we were naive, maybe I was too young, but it didn't, those kids yelling at me didn't feel connected to an overarching political architecture or an infrastructure that was trying to push those ideas. It felt like they were outliers. But now it feels very connected to, the, the, the, the name calling feels like

• 37:18Speaker 00

  a link in a chain. And so the guy in the street says the slur. So then Tommy Robinson organizes the United the Kingdom march. He doesn't say the slur, but he's organizing the march. And that's connected to the guys who say the slur on the march. And, and Tommy Robinson says, we disavow racism, but we, you know, blah, blah, blah, United the Kingdom. And then Nigel Farage says, well, I disavow Tommy Robinson, but we do need to do something about this. There's a lot of but we. That's the kind of phenomenon of racism at the moment. It's like, no, we wouldn't call, we wouldn't say these words, but we do need to have a conversation about. Well, obviously I wouldn't, I don't think Tommy Robinson is legitimate, but we need to have a political. And then it comes to a head in like politicians like Boris Johnson, who say, well, obviously Nigel Farage is, you know,

• 38:01Speaker 00

  uncouth or whatever, but we do need to, you know, and then, and then on the end result of that is there's a guy who abuses you in the street and then but we, but we, but we, but we, but we ends up with a Conservative Home Secretary saying, but we need a hostile environment because of all of these problems. And so the therapy really helped me understand that. It then also helped me understand why my brain particularly was susceptible to it. And it's a sort of combination of an anxiety disorder and ADHD. So I have like a natural inclination, I have a generalized anxiety disorder. And that means that my brain is constantly cycling the worst possible information.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Like my therapist always says, the difference between someone who is very worried and someone who has a generalized anxiety disorder is that you are addicted to anxiety. It's not just that you, you'd like, there's a part of you that sort of enjoys like the, the, the adrenal rush of the worry. It's not, you know, because in your head you think, well, I'm just, you know, I'm planning ahead. I'm thinking constructively. And actually you're like, so when somebody.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Threatens to kill me, that's feeds the anxiety. So then it's the worst thing possible, blah, blah, blah. Then, and then on top of that, if you also have ADHD, your brain is just, you know, it's constantly, it's just a constantly whirring pinball machine. So then if you've got this constantly whirring pinball machine and then the actual, I don't know enough about pinball to complete this analogy and I regret embarking on it. The ball itself is just a sort of compressed metal circle of all the worst thoughts you can possibly have. And if that's then flying around the pinball machine, then of course that's going to leave a kind of damage that manifests itself as post-uroblast stress disorder.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  So like, it's been great for me to be in therapy because it's given me an explanation for what happened to me in 2020. And it's also sort of given me an explanation for why a part of my brain is like this and has always been like this, you know, it's

• 40:10Speaker 00

  generally when, in my experience with my friends and I that have all gone into therapy in our kind of thirties and forties, nobody's getting information that they're surprised by, man. Like, nobody has sat down with their therapist and they're going, what? I've got an anxiety disorder. Everyone is being told something that in their heart of hearts, they knew from the beginning. With ADHD, I, I, I didn't know that I had ADHD because I didn't really know what ADHD was. I went to school in the late nineties and the very early 2000s. And we just didn't know what it was. If a kid like, like was running around too much, everyone was like, yeah, they've got ADHD. You do, we didn't, we just didn't know really what it was.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  And the psychologist that diagnosed me with it said the H is the problem because he said hyperactivity is a word that we don't. He, it's like, sometimes scientists, I think, use terms that have a really specific scientific meaning. But unfortunately, when they come to us, the non-scientific dum-dums of the public, we don't know what the term means. So he said, the problem is when you hear hyperactivity, you hear a person, kid running around a school classroom. And he said, that's part of it. But hyperactivity also refers to mental hyperactivity, right? It's, nobody would call me on a physical basis, active. No, hyperactive, we, no one's getting near that.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  So I think that's part of the problem. I was like, I'm not hyperactive. I'm barely an active.

• 41:40Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  But actually, it's mental hyperactivity.

• 41:43Elizabeth Day?

  Fascinating. You've explained all of that so unbelievably well. Thank you.

• 41:51Elizabeth Day?

  There are so many things I wish I'd known when I started this podcast and my production company, Daylight. Like, why am I spending hours trying to make a website look good? Why am I designing everything from scratch? And why am I spending all my time just doing admin? What I really needed was one place that could do all of this for me. Enter Shopify. Shopify has beautiful, ready-made templates that make your website look polished without needing to become a graphic designer overnight. Its AI tools can help you get your site up and running quickly. And Shopify checkout makes it really easy for customers to actually go from, ooh, I like that, to, yes, I'll have one.

• 42:31Elizabeth Day?

  If Shopify had existed when I started out, I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress and some rogue design choices. If you're ready to hear the

• 42:42Elizabeth Day?

  of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.co.uk/fail to start your free trial today. That's right. Start your free trial at Shopify.co.uk/fail. I wonder whether your experiences with therapy and the realisation that you were carrying this, that we live in a society that is structurally racist and hatred is embedded in those institutions. Have you ever spoken to your parents about it?

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I talked to them all the time. Listen, two things can be true. Like, it's bad right now. But things have improved since my mum was here in the same. I, I think, I think the saddest thing is that my mum said to me,

• 43:34Speaker 00

  you know, when Starmer made that speech, I know he's apologised for this, I'll caveat that from the beginning. But when Starmer made that speech where he, whether consciously or not, echoed some of the stuff Enoch Powell said in the Rivers of Blood speech. Now, the Rivers of Blood speech is sort of about my family, really. You know, it's, it was sort of aimed at the influx of South Asian immigrants. But it is broadly just about any person of colour that comes to the UK. But the, the timing of it is around that sort of time. That was when my mum said, oh, maybe we have gone backwards a little bit. But you know, my mum came, my mum was in Leicester in the early seventies. You know, the National Front was on the streets. You know, progress is like, I can't believe I'm about to embark on a maths metaphor, but.

• 44:17Elizabeth Day?

  We've done pinball. Now all that's left is algebra.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  You know, like when you do maths at school and you do a graph and then you're, if you drew a line of upward data stuff.

• 44:29Elizabeth Day?

  And then there was some X's outside it.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's some like way, like, and then what you do is you sort of draw a line of best fit.

• 44:34Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  And then the line of best fit looks super straight. But the actual reality is that the data's going all over the place. But you're sort of broadly saying, that's how I feel about social progress. And we, right now, 2026 Britain, we're in a downward bit. You know, in America, you know, Roe versus Wade was struck down. You know, we, we definitely in like a global recession of basic human rights. It is interesting to talk to my parents because I feel like

• 45:07Speaker 00

  my mum sort of particularly, because she was here in the, my dad, my parents actually met here, but my dad came here when he was in, he was in the early eighties. He was thirty, maybe late twenties, early thirties. He's a kind of, he sort of meets it all with a bit more of a, I don't know, maybe there's just a bit of a shrug. He's like, he's sort of like, yeah, yeah, we always knew this was going to happen. He's never totally articulated this. I think my dad, in his back of his mind is thinking, yeah, they'll kick us out at some point. Maybe not they'll kick us out, but we should probably have a contingency plan when they do. And that may be the difference between being someone who immigrated in their late twenties versus my mum who came here when she was

• 45:52Speaker 00

  thirteen, fifteen, fourteen, fifteen. We're in a down point right now.

• 45:57Elizabeth Day?

  It brings us on to your final failure, which, as you stated, is the broader failure to move the dial of the country into a more progressive direction. Do you feel that responsibility?

• 46:09Speaker 00

  No, I don't feel that responsibility, but I feel that as a progressive person. Like, I don't, I'm not approaching this as like a thought leader or a political leader, because I'm neither one of those things. But as a person who, as a voter, I have a certain set of beliefs and a vision for the country.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  And I will vote for whichever party I believe is going to do that. The reason I have such an emotional relationship with the Labour Party is historically, the Labour Party has been the political organisation that has been the catalyst, the vehicle for those political changes to happen. It's really funny to put that as a third. I did that partly because I thought it was funny. But also it wasn't because I feel some responsibility for

• 46:53Speaker 00

  change in the country, it's just more as a voter. I think people talk about this a lot with the elder millennial generation versus the young millennials and the Gen Z, where they have just a bit more nihilism because we have the slight sense memory of when things were getting better.

• 47:13Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I'm Gen X, so you're knocking on an open door here. That's so true.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  We do have the slight sense, we have the slight sense memory. Like, I went to university and my total debt was something like nine grand.

• 47:24Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  You know, and so, and you know, I do remember growing up. You know, when I was a kid, if I needed to see a doctor, we'd booked an appointment and went to see the doctor. You know, that wasn't, we, we didn't really worry about that. So because you have that sense memory of things going, things functioning, there is more kind of anger and hurt and disappointment that really post 2008 and. We really don't talk enough about, you know, the financial crisis and it's really the kind of ghost at the feast of all of these conversations, you know, financial crisis, sort of broken economic model that had been functioning since the end of the

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Cold War. But the problem is, no one acknowledges that. You know, no one said, you know, like the amount of times I hear about the fucking bins not being picked up in the seventies, we had to change, we needed Thatcher, we needed Reagan, because in the seventies, they didn't pick the bins up. Okay, so in two thousand and eight, the entire economic system breaks. So then you're, you know, advocating for deregulated capitalism doesn't make sense to people my age. You know, they keep wondering why people my age are not breaking, or are breaking for left-wing parties, or are voting for socialist parties. It's because, it's not out of naivety, it's a response to the events of our lives. You know, two thousand and eight, we should talk about it all the time. You know, the ramifications of it are

• 48:53Speaker 00

  felt in our day-to-day lives all the time.

• 48:55Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I really appreciated when you said earlier, let's not say after Covid, because we're still dealing with the consequences.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:01Elizabeth Day?

  And it's like that famous quote, and I think it was a Chinese diplomat who, when asked what the consequences of the French Revolution were, said, I think it's too early to tell.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:12Elizabeth Day?

  But we're all, we're all still living this, this legacy.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:16Elizabeth Day?

  I wonder if I could bring this to a close on a slightly more hopeful note, which is, I would love to talk to you about friendship.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:24Elizabeth Day?

  Because you have a great group of friends who have seen you through a lot.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  One hundred percent.

• 49:29Elizabeth Day?

  And I think men aren't often asked about how, how they do friendship. How important is friendship to you?

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Can I just briefly, before we go on to friendship, just say, I think, I would, I don't want to leave the politics thing on a just that note. And the one thing I would say is, if you look at the twentieth century, if you look at where we are at the start of the twentieth century, and where we end up at the end of the twentieth century, like massive strides were made, like, and we're actually so, in the grand span of human existence, the idea that women should be equal, non-white people have the same rights as white people, gay and lesbian transgender people have the same rights as cisgender heterosexual people, and working-class people shouldn't just be left to die in a mine or a factory. In the

• 50:18Speaker 00

  grand span of human existence, that idea is an infant.

• 50:22Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  And we changed so much, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, we've made so many advances and strides. And that quote, the Martin Luther King quote, you know, the arc of the moral universe bending towards progress, I still believe is true. And I still think the line of best fit will go upwards. I think what's just important is that you understand that Martin Luther King wasn't passive. He, he didn't, he wasn't saying, don't worry, it will bend towards progress. He was saying, put your hands on the arc and bend it towards progress. So like, as bad as I think things are right now, I think if you acknowledge how much progress we were able to make in the twentieth century, we should, we can still do it. You know, we, we can still turn, like, stuff like the

• 51:07Speaker 00

  climate. If you think about how much progress so many pioneering people were able to make in the second half of the twentieth century, we can, I still believe that we can replicate that. I don't believe that we're beyond hope. So that, I just want to, just so that I don't leave us on.

• 51:21Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah. You don't leave us on the edge of a cliff about to jump. Phenomenal.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  On political nihilism. But yeah, friendship is hugely important to me. I'll be forty-one in August, so I guess like, most of my childhood was me watching the show Friends. So I believed that the way he lived was just with your friends in a flat next to some of your other friends. So like, maybe that, maybe I was radicalized by Ross Geller. It has been really interesting learning how to evolve those friendships, you know, and evolve those relationships. Because I think when you're in a relationship, romantic relationship, by definition, you sort of have to work on it. You know, you're in such close proximity to each other. And

• 52:07Speaker 00

  for me and Amy, you know, neither of us had really been in a relationship before we first took up with one another. And I think we sort of learned after a few years. We actually have to talk about this relationship. Like, how's it going? What are we trying to do? You know, and we've learned to sort of communicate with each other. That's one thing. But also, I think you have to learn how to evolve your relationship. And I think that happens quite organically with your partner or your husband or your wife.

• 52:35Elizabeth Day?

  Hmm.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  But you don't think about that as much with friendships. And also, part of the joy of friendships is that you do also want to preserve a part of them. You know, when I see Ed, who I met when I was, when we were nineteen, twenty.

• 52:52Elizabeth Day?

  At Gamble, this is.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  At Gamble, yeah. There is still a part of us that is, it does regress.

• 52:58Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  And you sort of don't want to lose that, because that's sort of energetic. But also, you know, Ed and I like, probably do have like, a different relationship now than we are, because we've, we sort of had to, you know, go through more life stuff together. You know, you, you do have to speak to each other about your emotions.

• 53:18Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. I love hearing you talk about this. I mean, I, I wrote a book about friendship precisely for this reason, because we don't have enough language to express what we mean to each other as friends. And at the back of the paperback edition, I put a list of twenty questions that I believe we should all ask our friends. That can be quite fun to do, and you can do it over a pint and stuff. But it's, because we sometimes, because we don't talk about it, we don't understand what our friend thinks friendship is.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:48Elizabeth Day?

  And so I do think it's a really important thing to cultivate and to water.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, one hundred percent. And you, you realise when any kind of crisis occurs, how much those are the relationships that are really, you know, going to help you through it. Especially, I think especially straight men. It seems like there is an issue where as we get older, we don't maybe, we don't maybe cultivate our friendships in a way that we should. And I think maybe part of it is that I'm like, pretty lucky insofar as a lot of my, you know, a lot of my friends are stand-up comedians. We have a lot of odd sort of free time. But I do think that actually, being more proactive in terms of like, checking

• 54:37Speaker 00

  in on people, is something that I am trying to do more actively now. And I think it is, yeah, I think it's, it's such an important, it's been such an important part of my life. You know, in the early years of my career, I don't know why I didn't quit. I should have quit, probably, you know, the, the, the years twenty, two thousand and seven to two thousand and ten were not, the, the line of best fit was not pointing upwards. But part of the reason I didn't quit is I was egged on by so many of these morons.

• 55:10Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  And they would just keep me like, no, it's gonna be great. We're all, you know, and, yeah, and like, in the last few years, when there have been, you know, the last kind of five years, where there have been these issues, it is my friends that have kind of stepped up. Your personality and your relationships are things that you have to work at. And if you don't, there is no version of stasis. The only options are improvement or getting worse. And relationships won't stay at the same place, they will just get worse, unless you improve them. And, you know, like, I, I've watched some people just become dicks, because they're not, they're not thinking.

• 55:49Elizabeth Day?

  James A. Castor.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  I've watched A. Castor become, no, I mean, actually, to be honest, of all of the people I know, he's probably the one that is like, he's, he works on himself more, like, or he certainly started working on himself before any of us. But I have seen some people where you just think, there's no such thing as standing still. You can't do it.

• 56:15Elizabeth Day?

  Well, Nish Kumar, we are so grateful for your pinball mind, your arcing towards progress. Thank you so, so much for, for this wonderful conversation and for coming on How to Fail.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  I'm, I was thrilled to be here. It was a wonderful conver, I hope some of it made sense.

• 56:31Elizabeth Day?

  All of it did. Now go get your heel.

• 56:38Elizabeth Day?

  Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Dayne, Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.