How To Survive Thanksgiving & LGBT Politics - Scott Capurro

Scott Capurro is a comedian, writer and an actor. I needed some advice for how to survive my first thanksgiving in America and also to try and make sense of what I've been seeing since I've been out here. Scott started shouting about the British but I think he tried his best to help. Expect to learn why Scott got banned from Australian TV, why the Women's March sent out a problematic email, how the internal politics of the LGBT community are messed up, why a focus on race is causing people to ignore real issues of class, the best way to avoid causing a ruckus during the holidays and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out Scott's website - https://scottcapurro.com/ Follow Scott on Twitter - https://twitter.com/scottcapurro Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #holidays #politics #america - 00:00 Intro 00:35 How to Survive Thanksgiving 09:40 Homelessness in America 15:06 Cultural Differences Between America and U. K. 22:39 Do We Still Need the Term ‘LGBT’? 28:25 The Guerrilla Warfare of Social Media 38:57 Why Every Influencer Becomes an Activist 47:59 How Scott Got Banned from Australian TV 1:02:35 Where to Find Scott - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  There's buildings and trees in the UK that are older than your country.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  It's true, but when you ask a British person about the building or the tree, they'll lie to you about it. You know, I live in East London. Half of it wasn't destroyed by the Germans like the locals will tell you. The locals from Essex will tell you. The truth is, the British pulled it all down because they can't stand the sight of anything that's more than 50 years old because they're so ashamed of it. I've been lied to about the age of the building I live in in London so many times. Oh, it's from the 1930s. It's from the 1880s. It's from the 1950s. Where the is it? Nobody knows. It's all been made up. At least our history is new enough that we can't fake it.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Tomorrow is my first Thanksgiving.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  Ever. I don't know. I don't know what it is. I don't know why you celebrate it. I don't know what to expect. All that I see are memes about how to insult or have difficult conversations with your family members around the dinner table. So can you give me a guide for how to survive Thanksgiving, please?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Well, it's an adult outing. No, I don't mean just leaving your house and going outdoors. I mean outing yourself to your family in all sorts of ways. Politically, in terms of sexuality and gender too. There'll be a lot of trans exploration at Thanksgiving this year. Because everyone's trans. There's millions of them. So we gotta look out. They're there. There's one at the table. So yeah, there's lots of trans. So expect a trans at your Thanksgiving. It's trans-giving this year, by the way, is what we're calling it. Trans-giving, by the way.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, people kill animals and barbecue them and then eat them and try to avoid with their mouth full of food, talking to their family members. I sit at the dining table across from my dad and wait for him to take his last breath. So I don't have to do stand by anymore because that old fucker has so much money, will not spend it on me. But yes, what it mostly is is a chance for people to get together and pretend it's not Christmas around the corner. So there's no gifts. There's just food. You shove it in, you pass out near the dining table and then you wake up and our lady says, I gotta go, I'm so full. You drive home. That's what it is. Or you fall down on the floor. You're so, you're so full. You lay down on your brother's living room floor and wait for

• 2:05Speaker 01

  people to pass by so you look up their skirts, but you don't really want to see most of it. So yeah, it's that. There's that. There's skirt viewing. But it's mostly just a time, I think. It's a four-day holiday. It's a shopping season because Black Friday happens on the Friday after Thanksgiving. So that's what people are really most looking forward to. I like Thanksgiving because Halloween's my favorite festival holiday. But Thanksgiving, my favorite, because it's just about the food and you don't have to worry about gift giving yet. And I like the food. It's nice. Turkey's nice. Some people have ham. Communists eat pheasant or fish or lobster, which is fucked up. But a lot of people do that. Where you're from, I'm sure there's a lot of meat on the offer because Texans love their barbecue.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  And barbecue turkey is good. Yeah, it's about, it's a holiday about responding to how lucky we are to have escaped European dominance. People, people left Europe in the 16th, well, the 17th, 18th century to for religious freedom. And that's what they're celebrating. They said, "Thank you, God, that we don't have to eat with the English anymore."

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  Is that why, and I've now been invited? So it's basically a victory party for your nation over my nation, and I've been invited back around?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yes, they're gonna kill you.

• 3:28Chris Williamson?

  Is this gonna be like that Get Out movie where they invite that one black guy around? And then it's a big game where they all try and kill him?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be like that. I mean, I, you know, I think people have forgotten the, the, uh, the truth about the holiday season, which really was, um, some people came from Europe and took away some land from some indigenous people, killed them with disease, or murdered all their children to make sure they couldn't populate. And then celebrated that. So we're trying to not celebrate the truth. But this is where the critical race theory comes in. I think people, kids don't really understand what the holiday season's about because it'll ruin their stuffing and their cranberry sauce. And where all that comes from, I don't know. Don't ask me where the cranberry sauce comes from. Again, that's an English thing, isn't it?

• 4:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very much so.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  But I think it what I used to like about the holidays too, Thanksgiving, Christmas is they used to open films on these days in America, all the cinemas we open and I go to movies with my family. It's really fun. But that's kind of not happening this year either, I think, because of COVID. Does anyone go to the movies anymore? I think anyone does.

• 4:37Chris Williamson?

  Man, I don't know. I went to go and see, what was the last movie I went to go and see? I can't even remember. I wanted to go and see the James Bond, the new James Bond, and then someone told me that it was terrible, so I didn't bother to go and see that. I went to go see some new Marvel thing. Yeah, it was empty, absolutely empty.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we're watching a Mexican soap opera tomorrow all day, I think. It's hilarious. Called The House of Flowers. It's so funny. And my husband's Brazilian, so he's a big fan of Mexican TV. And some of my relatives are Mexican, and they're indigenous people as well. So when I see them, we don't really talk much about the joy of Thanksgiving. And they tend to bring pre-made packaged microwave food to their festive events. Yeah.

• 5:23Chris Williamson?

  Is that, do you think that's a little bit of a slight on the holiday at large?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  It might be. Yeah, yeah, it might be. But it's a big deal to my husband, because he believes in, oh, he's gone. He believes in family. It's weird. It's fucked up. He just saw some of his family in Ecuador because he wanted to. It's so weird to me. Like, he sees them out of joy and happiness and union, a bond. It really makes me think. Yeah, it's, yeah, or because you want a new car, because you want to brag about what you make for a living. So we're seeing my family tomorrow. We've been harassed and kidnapped, basically, emotionally. So we have to go see them for a few hours. He'll complain in the car all the way there. But it's mostly because he doesn't understand why there's a room full of people who hate each other so much. When he first met my family, he's like, I've never been around much in a room full of people who clearly could barely stand the smell or stench of each other.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I'm like, well, happy Christmas. I mean, the nice people in my family died because they were nice. They were murdered. So now it's just, it's the gangsters and the mafia left. I mean, if we survive, I'll be happy. Italians all sit, my family will not sit with their backs to the windows because they're too afraid of being shot from outdoors. My father, his whole house only has windows on one side. That's why he bought it. He never goes to restaurants with windows in them, and he never pays with credit cards. He's too afraid of being traced. This is the mood I share Thanksgiving with my family in.

• 6:42Chris Williamson?

  Why are you part of the Sicilian mafia?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're illegal importers and exporters. That's how they make their money. It's all. It's all public with my family. They don't, they're not ashamed of it. They're proud of it. Since The Sopranos, they're like local celebrities in small towns where they live.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  Jesus.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  That's why they wear a black tie on holidays. It's weird, but they do it. They wear black ties and black jackets because they want everyone to know who they are.

• 7:04Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  They're muscle people. It's scary.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  I can imagine you fitting right in with a bunch of murderers and hitmen and extortionists.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  No, they like the gay thing because they're comfortable leaving us alone with their wives while they go outside and smoke marijuana in the driveway. Because they know we won't hit on anybody. They do. We can go shopping with their wives. They're fine with that. We're like, we're like gay bodyguards, right, honey? Yeah. Or they love it when we're there because my husband's great with kids. So they leave their meatloafs alone with my husband. And he builds a fake bar for them, makes little drinks and like little grownups. And, you know, they go and make phone calls and deal drugs internationally. They come back two hours later, like, can you bring him to the next fifth? Because they don't like their kids either. They fucking hate their kids. Most people do.

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  And people use, it seems like a lot of my buddies that are more personally development inclined are using this as an opportunity to do an end of year review to kind of gratitude and such. That would be something typically that we would do around New Year's Eve in the UK. Is that, do people not use it as a time to reflect the Thanksgiving, the gratitude thing?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's really sweet, only worldly of you to say, but we're all about moving forward. Like I said earlier, we've got a world to run here in the US. So it's move, move, move, fast, fast, fast, out of my way. In fact, half the people I see at family functions or even in clubs or bars when I'm working are on their phones all the time. Buying and selling. This country's about, uh, modern, not the past. In fact.

• 8:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's because you don't have any past. There's, there's buildings and trees in the UK that are older than your country.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  It's true, but when you ask a British person about the building or the tree, they'll lie to you about it. That's the thing about the British. They've got a past. But it's made up. I mean, every, you know, I live in East London and half, half of it wasn't destroyed by the Germans like the locals will tell you. And, you know, the locals from Essex will tell you, but, but the truth is the British pulled it all down because they can't stand the sight of anything that's more than 50 years old because they're so ashamed of it. I've been lied to about the age of the building I live in in London so many times. We've had so many, oh, it's from the 1930s. It's from the 1880s. It's from the 1950s. When the fuck is it? Nobody knows. It's all been made up. At least our history is new enough that we can't fake it. I mean, I know what you mean. I mean, in Austin, there should be quite a history.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  But again, I think they tear everything down and which I mean, in a way, a lot of my British friends come here. What they like so much about it is how new and clean everything seems to be, except in San Francisco. I mean, we have a real homeless problem here that people tend to ignore and dismiss because it's the wealth. It's both the wealthiest and the poorest part of the US where I live here.

• 9:38Chris Williamson?

  There was a man walking. So in America, there are these lanes, at least in Texas, there are these lanes in the middle of the street. And they're ones that are used by people that are going to turn left or right. And they're like feeder lanes or turning lanes or something. And when I go down South Lamar in Austin, that street always has around about every 500 meters or so. A homeless person walking along with a with a little cardboard sign and that makes me sad. But then twice now, in 10 days that I've been here, I've seen somebody who is naked. A homeless person who is naked with the sign, but only naked from the waist down.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 10:16Chris Williamson?

  So fully dressed up top with a bag, but then one lady who had her vagina out. And then one gentleman who was just fully swinging in the wind. And I just, I think that's hard to ignore. I don't know how you mentioned that people in San Francisco can ignore the homeless problem. It was difficult for me to ignore the lady's vagina.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Well, that's that's but not the swinging penis that you're you're.

• 10:40Chris Williamson?

  That's just par for the course, you know?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. Um, you know, I think that's why they're doing it because they feel ignored. Um, and the winter's coming up. But I also, yes, in fact, I'm surprised they were just standing on your island. We call them islands. Um, and the islands here in California, they're living and they're.

• 11:01Chris Williamson?

  In the middle of the road.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  They're raising children. Yeah, it's, it can be very difficult.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yes, so um.

• 11:10Chris Williamson?

  When you're trying to make a left, when you're trying to make a left turn down on East Forty Sixth or something.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's someone that's, you know, they're frying, they're.

• 11:18Chris Williamson?

  A family of five in the way.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Seriously. It's, you know, when I, I've been in India a few times for work and you do see people on the street there who have been living there for generations. That's their corner. Um, and it's becoming, it's on that way here in the US. And it's the disparity of wealth. Ah, that creates such a, such a disproportionate.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Population. I don't, I'm a bit, it's not just a shame that I feel. I mean, of course, I feel ashamed that I live in a culture and in a planet that lets that happen. But it's, it's, it's a, it's a confusion I have because I'm not quite sure why I live in a place. I live very close to Silicon, I mean, basically Silicon Valley where I live. And I, I work and live with people who are making millions, billions. A house just sold near us for 1.5 million dollars over the asking price. 1.5 million dollars over what they were asking. So that's the kind of money that you see here, right? So why these people can make that kind of money creating an app that allows them to get a pizza and the taxi on the way home.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  But, which is genius, great for them, but they can't use that, you know, Harvard graduation.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Promise of cleaning up the world to fucking fix the biggest problem that's on their doorstep that they bitch to their families about all the time. Oh, someone's on my doorstep and they're shooting on my car. They've got a, a needle in my, in their arm. Well, then fix it. Fix it. How about paying your taxes? Or what I don't get is why, is we're all part of the problem. We're, you and I are doing it right now. We're on Skype. Why we're using social media to celebrate how great we, each of us are to discuss our own egos on this podcast for 60 minutes. But, but we don't see a Skype opera house or a Facebook cinema or an Amazon homeless shelter, ever, ever.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  These companies are here because they get tax breaks. They don't pay anything.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  On and on about this, but I don't understand. I understand as much as you do.

• 13:28Chris Williamson?

  The homeless problem, it certainly seems to be a little bit different in the US as it is in the UK. There's, I don't know, in the US, maybe it's because of the weather that people can't settle as much in the UK. Or maybe it's that there's fewer of them, or maybe just the culture, the subculture of homeless people's different.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  You have more than a safety net. You do. My husband's from Brazil, I'm from here. Us living in London, we know that. I mean, I know the safety net's being dismantled by the, by, you know, BJ. I know that's happening, but in the meantime, you at least have some. There's, you know, behind our house in London, there's an ex prostitute. I know that because she used to chase me down the street as I was going into my house. I'm like, honey, you're barking up the wrong elm, seriously. I don't pay for it and I don't pay for pussy especially. That's just my, but, but she was quite aggressive. And now she lives behind us with her husband, one of her Johns, who she married, and she has three kids that she's raising with him. And we see that and we know they're dealing drugs out of their kitchen window, which is like, I don't have to to pay for their car.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  But at least they have a place to live, right? She's raising three. They might, you know, she's got a family and that I just, it's not going to happen here. You're going to lose your house because you have a medical problem. You know, and you're not aware of it and you shouldn't be, you shouldn't have to be. But you've been raised in a country with free healthcare and you cannot even imagine how much lighter that makes your life. When my mother died of advanced lung disease, we found a stack of bills on her desk. She was dealing with insurance companies until the fucking day she fell asleep and died in her sleep, trying to pay off bills so she could breathe. And if you don't have that in your life, you don't just live longer, you don't lose your house.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  Not, not having nationalized healthcare does feel very barbaric, coming from a country that has, you don't even think about it. I remember I went to New Orleans on a road trip a couple of years ago and the guy that did the tour was very capable. It was one of these Wiccan, Dracula, scary evening tour things and up here is the ghost of whatever. And it was cool and you got to drink, so it made it all seem a bit more believable. This guy was real competent, really, really competent. Big tour company he was doing it for, we tipped him at the end. And we were like, right, we want to go out for some beers. He said, oh, I also work as a barman at this place. I'm like, hang on, so you do, you're a tour guide of this thing? And also you help the operator and you're doing the bar? Okay, cool, we'll go to the bar with you. Start chatting to him and he was, we were talking about this conversation.

• 15:52Chris Williamson?

  And he said, if you get hit by a car, you'd better walk it off. Because if somebody calls the ambulance to come and pick you up, that can bankrupt you, that can send you into this cycle of debt that you're now stuck in.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:06Chris Williamson?

  And that scared me. This guy's real hardworking, you know, two, three, maybe more jobs. He was saying, I've got two cracked teeth at the back, but I'm not, I can't pay to get them fixed and I'm not going to get the insurance or whatever to do the thing. I'm like, this is fucking medieval shit. What's going on?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yes, and then it, and that continues, like you said, you know, until maybe he enters himself. A friend of mine is a psychiatrist at Kaiser Hospital, which is a huge local hospital. And he's dealing with people with drug addiction. And these are people that have jobs that can't quit. So he tries to get them off the heroin and the crystal. And they've been taking pain medication, some of them, their entire adult lives, because they injured when they were at university playing sport or something. And they can't stop working. They can't take a week or two or four, or they can't go to rehab. They'll lose their jobs, they'll lose their house. It's really vicious, you know? I mean, Edson, my husband and I, we're so lucky because we are caught up in any of this cycle.

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  Is that fundamentally fueled by the medical problem? Where does this come from? Because, you know, outside of that, I don't see why America's any more expensive of a place to live than anywhere else.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I think that's, it's a complicated situation where people, where certain language is used to discourage people from socialized healthcare, like the word socialism, I don't know why, scares a lot of people here. Although they get their social security checks every month, but they don't understand the similarity or the difference. And I think that people are worried about the, you know, we've heard about death panels, where hospitals decide whether or not you live or die.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  frankly does happen in the UK sometimes, but you know, it's not a common occurrence. And if people here would just look at the way the pandemic's been handled by the NHS, how brilliantly they've handled, how they saved Boris Johnson's fucking political career. You know, what upsets me though, it's not just that too, it's education. I mean, it just feels like here, Edson and I noticed there's a lack of empathy in the US. There just is, there just is. And I mean, yes, nationally, you see it on television, you see it the way people are dealt with socially here locally. You see it in our political system nationally and locally. There is a feeling of you need to look after yourself and take care of yourself.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  And when we're in France, you know, I had to live in Italy for a while to get my, my citizenship taken care of. When we're living, when I stay in Australia for long periods, working, I don't sense it there.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I feel like the people I know who live here and work here do so because they want to make money.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  And if you're not a part of that vicious cycle, then get out.

• 18:53Chris Williamson?

  If you're not in the economic engine, yeah, I think. One thing that I've definitely noticed is that Americans need far less, or at least the Americans that I've been around, need far less of an excuse to treat themselves or to enjoy themselves. I think I'm seeing much less of a Puritan work ethic over here. So you want to go out in an evening time, you go for some food or whatever. Someone doesn't have to earn the right to be able to go and do that. Now, that may be because I'm from quite a working class, salt of the earth place in the UK. And Austin is kind of, every other person is a crypto millionaire that I meet. Yeah, fucking decentralized musician that does psychedelics on a weekend and somehow sold their company for.

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  So maybe, maybe it doesn't matter, but it definitely feels like there's, there's more of a leisure culture here. You know, people just say, what are you doing at 2pm? We're going out on the boat or some shit like that's not, that's not the sort of thing that you would see in the UK.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's definitely an idea, it depends on where you live for sure, but.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  There's a feeling here that people do, I think that's why the pandemic, people struggle so much. Cause I mean, our friends don't cook. Everybody goes out to dinner, at least, at least five nights a week. People go out a lot and I think they work hard and then they, they, they like to play hard. And in fact, some young people just moved to the building across the street from us too, you know, so we can see their entire lives. Cause they didn't bother buying curtains, but they party so much and that's really great for them. Maybe a result of them being cooped up for eighteen months, but also

• 20:26Speaker 01

  there's, there's a, a, a feeling of life moving quickly forward that we really feel when we're here. We feel like our lives in London really slowed down when we were there. Especially over the last two years, but definitely because yeah, we feel like there's a lot more, people just go to a pub in the UK and they talk and they, they hang out and there's less of a feeling of having to be impressed. There's, I mean, my husband's Brazilian, he doesn't want to talk about people's income. He's totally embarrassed when we go to functions here, because people go, oh, oh, about how important they are. And it's, it's really, it's, I, I, I don't know, I think people want to feel when they're here as if they're on the forefront of it.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  We are in a place, again, Silicon Valley, where a lot's being created. There's, there's more wealth being generated here, the Bay Area, than in any, any other place in the history of the world. So we're living in that.

• 21:21Chris Williamson?

  So you've still got that sort of frontier mentality?

• 21:24Speaker 01

  But definitely, but also because of what's happening right now. But California's always been a gold rush state, things go up and down. I think maybe people here are a bit paranoid and freaked out and aware of that. And everyone knows, a lot of people know, that they're one paycheck away from being homeless themselves. And the kind of stress that that creates amongst people.

• 21:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  You know, it, I think people here feel trapped. And what I mean is they're in a job where they're making a quarter million at Oracle to create an app.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And there's a team down the hall creating that same app. And if you fuck up, you're fired. And then you, they don't just punish you, they fire you. That's the contract you've signed with Satan, who runs Oracle. So now you're living out of your car in a beachfront community, where all you can afford is decaf coffee in the morning, and you don't know what you're gonna do to the kids. And you think, oh, you'll be welcomed back into the social media community soon. You'll get it, but you're never welcomed back. You lost the data, you're out. Get the fuck out. We don't even really want tourists here because we can't afford them. We can't afford you because we're paying for the homeless. They cost a lot. You cost more protecting you from people stealing your car or banging down the window of the hotel you stay in and taking all your luggage. All this shit's happening right now. So we can't afford to have visitors. Stay out, get out, don't come back.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  We don't want your dollars.

• 22:36Chris Williamson?

  I'll do my best, I will, I will do my best. Right, I want to talk about, I spoke to Douglas Murray about this a while ago, about the internal politics of the LGBT group, right? And even calling it a group is kind of dumb. What Douglas brought up, and I keep on having this conversation because Austin's quite progressive, right? And there's a bunch of different people in there. The fact that the Ls and the Gs actually have nothing in common. Like they genuinely, there is nothing that those, those two groups have. Everyone, in Douglas's words, is a bit suspicious of the Bs. They're not really too sure what they're doing there. They don't really know. They feel like they're Ls or Gs that haven't really committed. And then the Ts, in Douglas's words, are just working against everyone.

• 23:17Chris Williamson?

  So has, the last time I spoke about this was maybe two years ago, 18 months ago. Has anything changed over the last 18 months?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Well, we've added the Is and the Qs.

• 23:28Chris Williamson?

  What's the Is?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Intersexual.

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  I don't, and we've added the, I think it means you're whatever you say you are.

• 23:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so that's to do with gender expression. And then what's the Qs?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Questioning.

• 23:42Chris Williamson?

  I thought it stood for queer.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  No, you're not meant to say that word at all. That's not for you. That's like dropping the N-bomb. That's for us to say.

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Unless you're one who was whispering the gay M C or why you're standing in line for a drink in a gay bar. You can do that.

• 23:56Chris Williamson?

  As a question.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, or hey queer, get out of my way.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yes, and then there's a plus, don't forget the plus at the end.

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  Everything else.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Because we're desperate for conversation. Just dump any shit on the pile heap, we'll take it. We'll take anybody, right? We're trying to expand. We're branching out. Yes, you know, I think it's all meant to seem inclusive. But there's two kinds of inclusive in my head. There's an inclusive where you don't all agree, and that's okay, like a table full of feminists.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Where they, a true feminist believes there's a seat for everyone at that table.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Or there's inclusive where you aren't really, which is these people who are attacking

• 24:40Speaker 01

  someone like the woman who wrote those books for children where they have dragons and...

• 24:43Chris Williamson?

  Enid Blyton, not Enid Blyton.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  No, the other one. Yeah, her too, but um...

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  That was a race thing, right?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Harry Potter stuff.

• 24:52Chris Williamson?

  Oh, J.K. Rowling, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, who expressed her opinion, which is just her idea, and then she got death threats. So that's meant to be an inclusive part of a society, which is an inclusive dog. And I think when you're trying to, it's like the US, it's too big. I think the LGBTQ+ community is too large. I think you're right. I think when a lot of queers dropped dead from AIDS in the 80s, and the dykes were like, "We're gonna take over the Gay Pride event in San Francisco because we can do it better." A lot of queers were like, "You know what? Maybe you can, because we're busy trying to count our T-cells. So go for it, see if you can do that." And um, and that's why they took the lead in the parade on their bikes. Now it's dykes with bikes for the parade. But fine, the queers couldn't walk anymore anyway. They fucking, they couldn't move. They were, they were dying. So, and they did pretty well, although what

• 25:36Speaker 01

  happened with the Gay Pride events, it was out of all of our hands anyway. It became commercialized. So now, everything's so accepted, and people bring their little meatloafs in baby carriages. "Look at our babies, and we're buying beers, we're heterosexuals, we support coolers." Now it's all about product placement, which is what it was gonna become anyway. And that's what brings our community together, which is buying and selling.

• 25:59Chris Williamson?

  Commercializing it.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  So it's not a community based on, you know, uh, commu- community political thought, or us banding together to save a group, or making things better for certain people. Now it's just about us showing off for a Gap ad, which I think would upset people the most. I mean, no one believes a bisexual anyway, but a bisexual in Levi's is even less impressive than, sorry, a queer with AIDS. We were more politically savvy and powerful when we were dying. And now that we're living, we're selling Coca-Cola and soap like everybody else. So I agree with you. I think the LGBTQ plus is no longer necessary. I just don't think it is. I think gay people are still marginalized in certain communities. I think they are. In certain communities in the UK.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Believe me, on the comedy circuit, I don't always feel safe purely because of my sexuality. But- What do you mean when you say "safe"? I don't feel like walking back to my hotel room, but on my own, is necessarily a good idea when I'm in Stoke-on-Trent. I just don't. But that might also be because of my accent. And in fact, the first thing I have to do to out myself that I'm on a comedy stage anywhere in the world, is explain why I'm American and I can s- I'm still allowed to tell jokes. Because being American is what offends people. I don't find an audience that I haven't in a long time who's offended by the gay thing. It happens so infrequently, but what really gets people going is my accent. Ooh, ooh, they get, they get antsy and insy about that.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  That's what I first have to deal with. So, yeah, I'm not really worried about the gay thing anymore. And, and I feel like you're right, the lesbian gay community probably never had that much in common anyway. Although I have to say, during the AIDS crisis, the lesbians were really there. They really, they really stepped up. They stepped up in terms of volunteering a lot, because I worked in a lot of volunteering communities in, in San Francisco. Like the AIDS Quilt, for example, the lessees really did a lot of admin on that. Really a lot of admin. Because they were prepared and they were healthy.

• 28:02Chris Williamson?

  Administratively minded.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  They were, you said it, and they were valuable to gay men and really helpful. So in that way, that community bonded together. But again, they came together because of a virus. So maybe we should put the idea that we're all the same aside until we're in a common battle with something else.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. There was a, speaking about J K Rowling, do you see that she had a photo taken outside of a house recently? You see this?

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read about it.

• 28:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, J K Rowling has accused three people who campaign on transgender matters of posting a photo of her Edinburgh address on Twitter. The author, who had been criticised for reviews on trans issues, has reported the matter to police. Police Scotland said they had been made aware and enquiries were ongoing. In a now deleted social media post, one of the groups said the photo had been removed after they had received threatening messages online. In her own Twitter thread, Rowling said that the image depicted three activists in front of her home, carefully positioning themselves to ensure that the address was visible.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yes. So it's guerrilla warfare, I think. And I think that she's probably got a security system looking after her now if she didn't already.

• 29:10Chris Williamson?

  Madness that you don't already. I mean, the woman's worth an unlimited amount of money.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  And that's probably why she felt she needed one anyway. And now she's probably even more terrified. I mean, you know, the thing is, I, I'm not going to take a stance on what she said. I think she's, her opinions are valuable, they're hers. I don't, I don't care. I still don't, I've never read her books. I'm sure she's a lovely person.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  But you don't want to know what your favourite author or actress or thinks. When I read a Streisand interview, I was like, oh my God, she's out of her fucking mind. How have I been obsessed with her music for so long? Barbara Streisand has a museum below her house in Malibu. I'll repeat this, a museum of herself below her house. This is documented. There's been a play written about it on Broadway. When you go to her house, she might take you on a tour below her house of the cellar of all her awards and things about herself. She's out of her gourd. When she talks about herself, she does in third person. She's crazy, but she's Barbara, so I ignore all that. Right? If you read about certain actors, they're anti-Semitic. I remember reading about an actor, I won't mention here, who I fucking love, an American actor.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I've watched all of his films and he said in a quote that the Jews run Hollywood. So it's like, well, I guess I can't watch your movies anymore, but I do. I mean, you know, Eddie Murphy was a famous homophobe in his, in his first video that won all those awards. The things he said about gay men were horrible. Then I met him when I lived in L A, waiting tables doing room service. I room serviced him on Academy Award night, three years in a row, because he wouldn't go to the Academy Awards. He'd watch them in his hotel room. He's five foot four, he sits on a stool and he's clearly homosexual. He's a little gay in tight pajamas, I was twenty five, that hit on me relentlessly. But I did the room service because it's Eddie fucking Murphy. It's complicated, isn't it? He's a brilliant comedian.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  There are certain things about people that make them interesting and you, and if that makes them interesting, you've also got to sometimes ignore that.

• 31:12Chris Williamson?

  This is the problem that we've got with social media facilitating everyone to have an opinion and also everyone to share that opinion. Yeah, previously, previously you had to work to be able to get a platform of the size where even if you were an author, you know, if you wanted to talk about your either well-informed or ill-informed opinion on whatever it was, you still needed to find an outlet. It was through a newspaper or on T V or whatever. Whereas now the brain to fingers filter has been completely removed and millions and millions of people all over the globe can see within seconds what your brain just farted out and then you decide to put it out there. The, the world isn't meant to consume everyone's innermost monologue in real time, twenty four hours a day.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yes, it's true. And I think that it makes people braver to, uh, to, to, to shout and yell. And it makes them feel like they have a bit of power when they felt so powerless for so long. There's that too. And, and everyone's the star of their own video. They're on, they're on all the Facebook, Instagram, whatever, and they're making movies about themselves all the time. TikTok, I mean, and, and their movie, their little video might get, you know, eight million hits. And they feel like, they feel like now they have the power to say, feel what they want, either live. Yeah, I mean, in a way, I thought that the internet has a progress would make our lives easier, but it's made it, in fact, more confrontational.

• 32:37Chris Williamson?

  The problem is, I think, that we very quickly went from a scarcity of information to a surplus of information in the space of probably 10 years. So I think the optimal amount of information that we had on the internet was maybe like 2011 or something there. And then very, very, very quickly, you went from needing to be able to be good at finding information on the internet to being able to be good at discerning signal from noise on the internet.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  The best people, the smartest people that I know now are the most discerning ones, not the ones that go the deepest. They're the ones that are able to cut through all of the bullshit. Whereas, yeah, 10 years ago, when we had that one day, whatever it was, the middle of November in 2011, that was when we had the right amount of information.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  It was about, I thought it was always going to be about shopping. I never thought it would become more than that. I just thought it would be about finding items online and purchasing them. Because I have collectibles. I will show you. My husband, oh, hates them so much. In fact, I was just shopping for a mid-century ceramic coffee urn online before you and I spoke. In fact, you interrupted that, which is...

• 33:45Chris Williamson?

  I'm sorry.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  That's right. I found one, though. But I thought that's what the internet was going to be, it would never be about. Because I thought people liked, I thought people that were looking for information liked research and reading. Because it turns out, nobody does. As it turns out, everyone wants things in active, preferably current, like live, images. I've seen so many images, live, not live, obviously, but filmed, of that car hitting those poor people in Wisconsin.

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Who wants to watch that image? Apparently, people want to watch. You know, a journalist have his head cut off in the Middle East. People wanna see.

• 34:27Chris Williamson?

  Outrage porn, isn't it? There's, I don't know. So here's, here's one thing that I've been thinking about since I've been out here. So Austin's got a big psychedelic culture, right? Which is people trying to connect, as much as you can talk about like hippy dippy bullshit. They're trying to connect with two emotions that I think we're really missing, which is awe and dread. We don't often actually get to experience awe and dread anymore. And I wonder whether seeing, feeling indignation is kind of like an alternative for that. Like, I can't believe this happened. It's, it's shock, it's outrage, it's indignation. I'm wondering whether people are supplanting what previously the night sky and some pretty nature would have done for us to make us feel small and insignificant. Or perhaps a trip to church on a, on a Sunday to, to, you know, feel like we, we are connected with the wider universe.

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether that, it ticks some of the same boxes. I'm not sure.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  So you think social media is the new Jesus a little bit?

• 35:18Chris Williamson?

  I think that what it, what it facilitates is outrageous videos that people can't believe have happened. And that emotion, indignation's not far away from dread and awe, I don't think. When you see something that's completely shocking, and I wonder how much that's supplanted it.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Like, did they put one nail through his feet or two? And people just, they can't imagine, and they get somehow turned on by it at the same point of being horrified by it. You know, I, I really feel like, cause I, I still do, I'm a dinosaur, so I still make my living in hospitality, live performance, really. I'm a babysitter as a standup comic. And I really feel when I'm on stage, like people expect, they, they expect something so vivid and aggressive now from comedy. Then when they don't get it, they're disappointed. And I think that's been driven by what you're describing.

• 36:16Chris Williamson?

  How do you mean vivid and aggressive?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  I have people say to me, because I just did a weekend at a mainstream club where I did five shows in three nights, hour-long sets. And I had people asking me to cover certain subject matters that I'm just, I'm not gonna cover on stage. I'm not gonna talk about that on stage. I mean, I don't have boundaries about material. I'll, I'll talk about anything, really. But I, I, people were like, oh, you didn't push that far enough. You talked about that, but you didn't push it far enough. Like, you know.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  And it's like, look, everything's, everything goes to the nth degree now so quickly. Every subject becomes explosive really quickly. Like, you know, that woman who used to be fat, who isn't fat anymore, the British one.

• 36:57Chris Williamson?

  Adele.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  The, yeah, the, the chimney sweep who can, with five ranges. She, um, she was here with Oprah and Oprah kept trying to goad her and she's like, look, I can't, I, I've lost a bit of weight. Oprah's like, you've let so many people down. So many people are sad. They're suicidal because they're fat and you're not anymore. That is like Oprah, Jesus, rein it in. And she kept reining Oprah in saying, look, I've got to make a living. I've got to deal with my own shit. She was very funny, I thought.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  And live past seventy as well, hopefully.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And she was very, it's just, you know what? Part of the reason why I started going to the UK twenty five years ago to do stand up was because, um, the, the culture is less, less vicious, less savage than the US culture. When I was on stage there, I didn't feel like, I mean, I felt, I came out in my first show I did there in Edinburgh, but it wasn't necessary, for one thing, look at me, but also the audience, if you have tails and a horn, they don't care. It's just be funny. The British, they don't, they're not impressed or depressed by any of that. I mean, like I said, I don't feel always safe in certain environments when I'm in the UK, but that has very little to do with my being on stage.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  And I, I've always felt here like I lived in an explosive situation. And people want comedians to figure shit out for them sometimes. And now you've got less time to figure stuff out on stage. People's, they want it now, they want it faster, they want it more aggressive, they want it more brutal, they want it louder. Even the fact that comedy's become such a big business and you see comics performing in ten thousand seat arenas with the head mic on screaming at people for an hour. It's just become, everything's become, like I said, nth degree. And the argument is no longer, like, I used to feel like, one of the reasons why I preferred performing here in the US in a way sometimes, was I felt like I could have more, more of an extended conversation about race and politics here.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  But I don't feel that anymore here. I don't feel that.

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  Do you not think that immediately anyone who looks remotely talented or has a platform gets co-opted into trying to take a stand on something? So for instance, we had the Laurel Hubbard, who was the New Zealand transgender weightlifter who competed at the Olympics. And the other three women, I think it was the three women that she was competing with for the, that were most likely a podium, were asked in, or it may have been afterward, asked in a press conference, what do you think, obviously this is an incredibly unique opportunity, you're witnessing history unfold. And there's a nine second pause. And then one of the girls just leans forward, presses the button to activate her mic and goes, no, thank you. And just turns the mic off.

• 39:37Chris Williamson?

  And that, that to me was really reassuring because you think these people are good at lifting heavy things from the ground to over their head. They're not, this isn't their role. Stop looking at these fucking athletes like they're supposed to be. I understand, I understand that if you are in a position of social gravitas, if you have talent, that you can use your platform in order to help push forward a particular narrative because you have reach and people respect what you do. But that should be the anomalous case of the person who happens to, you know, the Cassius Clay deciding not to go to Vietnam thing, right? Like that, that's an anomaly from history. That's why it was so interesting. It shouldn't be that every fucking person with more than 10,000 followers on some social

• 40:22Chris Williamson?

  media is now a platform. And the reason for this is that every political party is trying to pick up whatever 0.0001% of influence that they can and just co-opt everybody in. Yes, this person decides to stand with us or stand against us.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I blame, you know, I blame Poncha's pilot in a way. Because he created Jesus into the first social media figure because Mary sold her son out because she wanted to be famous as well. So it all happened then. And people are still paralleling their lives to that. They still think I can win. You know. I agree with you. I mean, I think when comedians go on Twitter and try to fight a political opinion, it's like, just write a joke about it. You're not a political activist.

• 41:09Chris Williamson?

  That's your outlet. Your outlet is to make this funny and do it in a show.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Use your voice as a comic. But, you know, everything's a talent contest now. And for a lot of people that are wondering how they're gonna make a living or get famous or be rich, if they do a shocking video, that'll do it.

• 41:31Chris Williamson?

  There you go. You might have missed this because you don't strike me as a Joe Rogan listener, but Joe Rogan had Snoop Dogg on his show a couple of days ago, and he brought up that one of the reasons he thinks that they are getting people to focus on race is the fact that it'll distract us from the fact that class is the real problem.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Of course. Always has been. I mean, you know, Britain hides it better by denying it exists, but there's an ingrained class system there that the US is embarrassed by because we tried to break away from it when we left, and it's even more here. And here it seems based, externally, you think it's based on income, but it's not. There's an opaque 1% in this country that not only will I never meet, I'll never even know who they are, and they're running everything. So, yeah, there's a system here that, ah, that seems to create a group of people that really have no, again, we talked about this, they

• 42:29Speaker 01

  have no empathy. They have no reason to feel, you know, if you've been watching Succession, I know it's not a documentary, but I've worked for rich people many times, for very, very wealthy people, and they're fucking miserable, and they take it out on each other. And my family has a bit of money based on, you know, investments and property. And the way my family treats one another is not that similar from what you're watching on TV. There's a lot of suspicion and threat because no one wants to be knocked down a peg. No one wants to go down a peg. And...

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Man, it's just here, oh, there's so much. And so many of my friends identify it as homophobia here in the US still. It's not when you're, when people you know that are in positions of power treat you that way. It's class, because they think, if you've identified yourself in a subculture like the LGBT community in this country, that that's because you're a loser. And what they mean is that they themselves might suck cock as a guy, but they don't, but they're, they would never identify as being gay, because they don't see themselves as politically motivated by that community. And they're winners. They've been told they're winners their whole life. They went to Yale, they went to graduate school, they have a PhD, they teach at Stanford, they've got a wife, they've got kids, because that's what a winner looks like.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  And to be gay, to not have those things, to have your power reduced at that level, even and especially at the educational level, the higher education level in this country, makes you a loser. It's a classist. It's not about being queer. It's about being a winner. And if you have black skin, it's not your fault, but it identifies you in a certain way, and people associate things with you, which more, maybe more media driven than anything else. But again, it's not about race. It's about whether you're at the top or bottom.

• 44:24Chris Williamson?

  Literally. Did you see that the Women's March group sent out an email with the average number of donations recently, and the number was unfortunate? Did you see this?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Well, what do you mean unfortunate?

• 44:37Chris Williamson?

  Women's March group sent out an email with average donations and apologized for including 1492 in there. We apologize deeply for the email that was sent today. 1492 was our average donation amount this week. It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest and genocide for indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  It's not even the proper year. They're reading that from crappy history book from their elementary school. It's a different year. It's all made up.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hilarious. God, that's funny.

• 45:10Chris Williamson?

  That was supposed to be the year that Christopher Columbus had stepped on American soil.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  He did, yeah. It is that year. Or so he said. Who knows?

• 45:19Chris Williamson?

  1492, so that number itself, the average amount of donations was problematic.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yes, and he might have been in other parts of not the US but in America before that. Other people were. Anyway, yes. Um, yeah. That's something worth feeling bad about, but this is what I mean. Comedians don't have to be non-funny about this stuff. Or, you know, politically motivated in some correct way. There's so much material. That's one great thing about all this. That's why I miss Trump a little bit. There's so many jokes in all this. I mean, if you're not writing material about this, then you are a loser. I mean, if you are avoiding this stuff on stage. It's one thing I like about Rogan. You know, I've only worked with him once. Again, I was doing a weekend here in the city at the same club I discussed earlier, and he was popping in and he wanted to do his own show. So he, we closed my show and at midnight he went on that same stage because it's such a popular club.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  I did his own set and I watched him and I was, I was impressed how fucking intelligent he is live. And I, I wish, I, I wish he trusted himself enough on his own show. Not that I listen to every podcast, but I have listened to it. And I feel like he dilutes it a little bit, maybe just on the ones I heard. But he is a brainiac. He is. And, and I do like that he covers current subject matter in his sets and that he's funny about them. He may not agree with what he says. He may hate his politics, whatever. But all these people getting angry about a recent comedy show on Netflix where the comedian went on about LGBT rights and trans rights. People just fucking lost their some. Quit their job, protested, blah, blah, blah. Over Chappelle's set. I watched it. It's Chappelle.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  He pushes the buttons. He does what Chappelle does. I wasn't offended in any way by what he said about the LGD. In fact, I thought he said something brilliant about gay, you know, gay people are liberal until they're white, which is true. Can gay people be racist? Yes, they can. We have a whole racist subculture in the LGBT community that I won't go on about right now. But a lot of guys, what, are you a rice queen? Are you a sticky rice queen? Are you a brown rice queen? Are you a ding queen? All these terms meaning skin color about who you're fucking. So, yeah. Gay people can be racist, if you're wondering. And he covered it. A lot of gay comics wouldn't go near that, they wouldn't be brave enough. We have to wait till Chappelle does it, right? And then complain about it.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  You know, I feel bad, like Andrew said, Andrew Doyle, who's a friend of ours, for all those people who had a gun held to their heads and made to watch that set on Netflix. You don't have to watch it. Change the channel. Turn it off. No one cares about your fucking opinion about it, you know? If you're offended, you're good. People are offended by comedy all the time. That's because it works. They're just ideas. They're not going to hurt you.

• 47:56Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you get, you got in some trouble on Australian TV for doing something? Didn't you get cancelled from Australian TV?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Basically, never been invited back because of that.

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  The entire country of Australia has a problem with you.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  There's a myth about it now, too. There's, there's whole memes about it and there's, there's sayings, "Don't caporo me on this." You're not going to caporo us, are you? Meaning, you're not going to go on TV and do a different set than you promised, right? You're not going to get people fired from this network. You're not going to... So, the story is that I told jokes about raping the Virgin Mary. Now, I didn't tell those jokes. Do you have any? Because if you have them and they're good, I'll tell them. Don't have them? What I talked about was Christ being on the cross and forgetting his safe word is what I talked about. But they had seen my scripted set and they had denied me a rehearsal. I won't defend myself in this. I don't have to. But what they did was change the story after my set came out live on TV to defend themselves.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Now, at the time, this is long, this is 20 years ago, I would have used it to push the show forward. That's what I would have done. Let's run with this. But they were cowards and didn't know how to do that. The festival in Melbourne, my management in London, cowered to what they thought public opinion was. As it turned out, people thought it was hilarious we'd seen it, but they worried. People got fired of the network, I heard, and it became, it became a negative thing, which is now if it happened because of social media, I'd be huge because of that. It would have had me, I would have toured the world, but at the time... And because the Australians, honestly, in media are a bit homophobic, because they really were then. It's like, why is the gay man in the room the smartest one with all the

• 49:36Speaker 01

  power? How did that happen? It's also complicated too, because the show's host was famously a closet case and didn't want his image soiled or associated with in any way the gay community. There was a lot of shit going on.

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  That's something that I've noticed. I did a talk at the start of the year and partway through it, there was a couple of emails that got sent to the group that were organising it that said, have you seen this? Have you seen what Chris has been talking about? And it was a link to a trailer on my Instagram of me and Douglas Murray. And Douglas was talking about the Chaz Chop Autonomous Zone and saying, just being Douglas, right, talking about it. I don't talk throughout the entire trailer. I don't say anything, but I do laugh. And they said that this laugh is, we're taking this laugh as the fact that he is agreeing. This is a signal that he's agreeing with what Douglas says. Are you really inviting this person? So when that happened, first off, there's the indignation, right? You think

• 50:31Chris Williamson?

  this is absolutely insane. You know, Douglas's points are his own. I was laughing. It's my show. It's a trailer from eight months ago. The only reason that this would have been sent in by multiple people, remembering it's a really old trailer, is if it's a coordination on their part to get multiple people to send it in, so on and so forth. But for a moment, I saw in that situation, oh, this could be, this could be my thing. This could be cancelled for a laugh. This could be, this is how I, this is how I could get myself onto Tucker Carlson, or this is how I could get myself, you know, you do the tour off the back of it, you get the right people to retweet it. And you notice this, the opportunity arising, this could be my evergreen state for Bret Weinstein, or my Bill C16 for Jordan Peterson.

• 51:16Chris Williamson?

  Something innocuous that ends up blowing up in somebody's face. And that, that, like, I didn't follow through with it. They said, look, don't antagonise anyone, don't reply on Twitter. Sure enough, the whole thing dissipated, went away, did the talk, it's absolutely fine. But- For a moment, I saw in the less gracious part of my nature, a bit rise up and say, "This could be, this could be the beginning now." And the same way that we have perverse incentives, I think, for potentially some people that are involved in cases, as jurors, or as judges, or as whatever, the lawyers. I think that you have this with cancellation now, that some people almost go out of their way. Like, cancellation's the new Love Island. If you manage to get cancelled somewhere, not sufficiently bad that the public hates you, but bad enough to garner a little bit of attention, that's your springboard to a career.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  As long as you're not a kitty fiddling, anything else, people will come out and see you, I think. And, yeah, I think it's the only way to sell papers now, is to put bad news on the front of them. And bad news becomes good, because suddenly you're recognized. But they've said for a long time, right, "Any publicity is good publicity." I think Harvey Weinstein was criticized for saying that decades ago, during the AIDS crisis, that "Any publicity for gay men is good, because it gets us out there and makes us more real." I think it was Harvey. But either way, that's, I think, always been the case. And now, it doesn't take a media facility, like a newspaper or a network,

• 52:41Speaker 01

  to promote it. You can do it out of your home. I just feel like, though, he laughed, how dare he. It makes odd. I just did a show at a very, kind of, upscale, kind of, area on Saturday night, the wine country area. And it was sort of, and a beautiful little room, a tasting room, and I did a comedy show there. The staff are great, very supportive. But the audience were just so clamoured up, like, a lot of very, the whole room was white, except for one black guy. He was enjoying it. But the rest of the room were a lot of, like, 20 to 35-year-old white women with their arms crossed, just very anxious about just about everything I said on stage. Now, I've been doing this for quite a while. And

• 53:24Speaker 01

  if you pay to come see me, you kind of know what you're in for. I mean, I'm no surprise. It's the same old shit, rehashed, every fucking time. It's not my act. So, but, but they're getting more, just more about everything, which makes me poke and prod. And the more they restrict, the more I push, you know? So, at the end, a bunch of people, we really enjoyed it. I said, "You might restrict that in your response next time, then. And I might think about coming back." Because I'm not here to be your sounding board to see if it's okay if you laugh at this and then laugh at it in the car on the way home. I don't want to be a part of that conversation. I want the conversation in the room. But one thing that I find with all that's going on around us with social media and people being terrified of being caught on camera responding, like you just said, is that immediate

• 54:09Speaker 01

  response is stifled. So I'm terrified about people not actually telling you what they think. It really fucking freaks me out.

• 54:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so they've got a public persona and a private persona.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  And to think that you're gonna leave the room and that suddenly what people actually think about you is gonna be voiced. I fucking hate that. It's why I never talk negatively about comedians, people I work with. There's no point in it anyway, it's not gonna get you anywhere. But I don't, if I feel badly about somebody, I'll just tell them. I never want to be that person leaving the room that becomes a kind of, you know, a burden. Oh, it just fucking freaks me out.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  So here's a, here's an interesting element of that from my industry, which is nightlife. And when I first started doing club nights and my first ever event was a big bar crawl where people would buy a T-shirt and your T-shirt was your ticket. And there was tasks on the back, like pull a pig, get off with three randoms, down a drink with somebody that you don't know, like get a piggyback from one venue to another, blah, blah, blah. And people used to write on the inside of their arms, the first half of the alphabet and the second half of the alphabet. And you have to tick off the letters of the first name of the person that you'd kissed. And, you know, you're running around at the end of the night trying to find a Zara or something. And I wondered, I never thought about it, but I had a conversation with a buddy who did the same thing as me, the same franchise, but down south. He said, where's that culture gone?

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  Where's that kind of sloppy, very, very casual, transactional, physical relationship shit gone for 18 to 21 year olds, specifically in the UK, but maybe in the US as well? And he said, his idea was that because of the advent of smartphones, no one can ever do anything in public that's private anymore. You can never get off, you can never pull a pig on a bar crawl without five videos of that now haunting you for the remainder of your days. That's going to be with you. If you decide to do something and that's caused people to have far more scruples about how they behave publicly. That was his idea. And that, I don't know if it's true, but it fucking makes a lot of sense.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  It does. I think, you know.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  No one can wake up and say, I don't remember what happened last night anymore. Because cinema, whole camera, you see, this is.

• 56:14Chris Williamson?

  This is exactly what happened. Yeah, exactly.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  So you can't have a hangover and forget about it. And I think, you know, that makes people, like this, this kid, this trial that's going on right now in the US about this African American man who was hunted down by two white guys and birds in the street, you know, the people, they don't just have witnesses, because witnesses are tricky. And, you know, trials can never really trust witnesses, because people see all sorts of things differently. But a lot of it's on film. So the guys themselves filmed it. It's why, you know, Hitler's still with us, you know, the big H is still so popular. Because it was really the first kind of fascist, it was a fascist revival, but really the first

• 56:56Speaker 01

  international battle that was filmed. The wars before that, we're not so sure. But Hitler put everything on cinema. And that's why he's still such a big draw, I think. And so people see all that and think, you know, I gotta, I gotta keep my job. And they can't keep my job if they see me, to you described, because so much of it can be, like also what you said, can be perceived as, as less casual, and less fun and flirtatious, but you can perceive it as being misogynistic or racist. So you gotta be careful.

• 57:29Chris Williamson?

  Interpretation's always open like that, right?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I mean, no one can say, I mean, there are so many things that people feel they can't reveal about themselves, because it might, like, it might be seen as a preference, which is racism, right? If you have a preference, you're racist, right away. So you gotta be careful. I mean, I don't have these boundaries in, in the way that I work and what I do on stage. But I certainly don't, there's a few things I won't say anymore. I never thought I'd say that, but it's true.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  For too long. Well, I don't drop the N-bomb on stage anymore. I used to, and there's a purpose behind it, and I don't drop the P-bomb anymore. Because you'll just lose them for too long. Before, you could lose them for about thirty seconds, and then they recover. And I could manage that. But now, they'll just completely stop listening. So, there's no point.

• 58:26Chris Williamson?

  Talking about Rogan, he's got a new bit in his stand-up show where he's talking about why he'll still use the word retard, but he won't use the N-word. And he's talking about it for ages and going back and forth. And they say, "What is it about the word retard that means that you will say it and about the N-word that means that you won't?" He says, "It's because I'm a lot more scared of black people than I am of retards."

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Ah, the great line.

• 58:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Um.

• 58:50Chris Williamson?

  It's so wrong.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  And I'm talking about right now, why my husband, he talks about having children all the time, and I talk about how I only want a downs, I only want a downy, if I'm gonna have a kid, I want it to be a downy. And so, I think I, I escaped, usually we're retarded in that bit, because if I do, the empathy I'm trying to put forward, I lose it. But if you have a good joke about, look, when I teach a comedy course, I do in London sometimes, in Islington, Stoke Newington. When I try to find funny people in that area, it's a comedy course to them, I do ask them, and I've been told to do this by other comics, one good challenge is to ask them to write a rape joke. First thing they should do, write a rape joke. Because they're hard to write. But if you learn to write a good one, that's great.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  I've got about thirty in my act, and I still tell them, but, because they're good. And I gotta kill time. But I'm not gonna kill rape, because it's a money maker. And if you can write a brilliant one, great. And there is still an audience that wants to laugh, and there's still an audience that wants to write those letters on their arms, and there's still an audience that wants to have a couple of drinks and do something they can forget about. And that's, I think, the majority of us. And when I talk to people in Britain, or audience members, when I stay after and chat with them, I'm relieved. And it, I find it restorative for what I do. Because they just wanna have a good time.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  You know, there's so many reasons for me to be nervous about performing in front of, say, um, army and navy guys who go to the Comedy Store a lot in London on their time off. Because the army and the navy in the UK and the US have this image of how they are, right? Which might not be inviting to someone like me, not just gay, but American and flamboyant and flirty on stage and dirty and unnecessary, you know, nauseating. But when I talk to those guys after, they're like, "You are perfect. We'd love to have you." So many times, "We would love to..." I'm like, even with my accent, they're like, "We love Americans." And the American soldiers show up, it's a party. "You would kill in Crete. You would kill in Cyprus." But then I call these companies to book me and they're, they just, they just will not.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  They won't want to. They don't want Americans. They don't want gay men. They don't want some, they don't want someone my age. They don't want someone white. There's so many reasons to not book me, you know? And if I only talked to industry people in my business, I would quit.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  But the audience is great.

• 1:01:20Chris Williamson?

  Gay man's a new white man. That's the problem.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, I think the gay thing is now normalized. And that's why I can't get away with it as much as far as people can turn on stage, because we're not naughty anymore.

• 1:01:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Like you.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, Douglas, Douglas had this bit from The Madness of Crowds where he said, "You know that your minority has been completely assimilated into a culture when you have to put up with the same level of shit of everybody else."

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true. Yeah, I mean, believe me, the stuff I used to get away with on stage, it's, it's more difficult now, which makes it more appealing to me, like how to find a way. Because that's always been the challenge of stand-up, is, is to be relevant. And it doesn't mean because you're older that you can't be. And I don't think an audience thinks when I walk on stage, "Oh, he's old. I don't want to listen to this." A couple of young people might think he's a dinosaur, but I don't think they do. I think, again, they just want to enjoy themselves. So it's up, it's up to us to make our language accessible. But that's always been the case, to make a story from a stranger make sense in front of a room full of strangers. So that's what we have to do. When, when comics complain, "Oh, they're too, Donnie's just so woke." "We're being cancelled," or you can't say this, like, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  You need to find a way to make your act accessible. They've paid. It's not their job to dissect your act to make it funny. That's up to you. So.

• 1:02:35Chris Williamson?

  Scott Capurro, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with whatever you're doing or harass you online, where should they go?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  My website. It's all about me, me, me. So all the information's there. It's just my name, scottcapurro.com. Listen, thanks for calling. It's great to see you.

• 1:02:49Chris Williamson?

  I know.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  By Austin. It's been really fun to do this. I forgot that we were doing it and then I remembered how much I wanted to and I'm really glad we did.

• 1:02:56Chris Williamson?

  Me too, me too. When are you back in the UK? Are you back anytime soon?

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  January 19th. My husband's craving to get back. He is so sick of this country.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're gonna, yeah, January 19th and I'll see you there.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes, you will do. And Thanksgiving, enjoy Thanksgiving tomorrow.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Well, thank you too. Are you stuffing anything or are you gonna be waited?

• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  Scott, come on, we've managed to, we've managed to get through the-

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Are you cooking anything?

• 1:03:22Chris Williamson?

  No, of course not. Of course, I'm just, yeah, I'm just, I'm turning up. I'm the, I don't know what I am. I'm the token Brit at the table.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Don't you want to learn how to cook? The turkey is so fun. It's about, you feel like-

• 1:03:34Chris Williamson?

  Are you doing it? Are you doing it tomorrow?

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's so easy to do. You make the stuffing in 10 minutes, you shove it in, you put it in the oven and you leave it. You don't, you never open the oven again and four hours later it pops out and people are so impressed. You've done almost nothing. It's great.

• 1:03:48Chris Williamson?

  I'll have to re, I'll FaceTime you tomorrow if I'm struggling.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  All right. Let me know.

• 1:03:52Chris Williamson?

  Catch you later on.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Cranberry sauce.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Have a great one. Thanks, Chris. Nice to see you.