Modern Wisdom - #395 - Alfie Brown - Not Sucking At Fatherhood, DIY & Halloween

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Alfie Brown is a comedian and a podcaster. Adulting is hard. I had hoped to discover that Alfie, a dad of 3, would have worked out how to do it properly. But alas, no, it seems we are both condemned to flail around in the liminal purgatory of "just about getting by" for at least another few years. Expect to learn why being a comedian doesn't mean that you can perform effectively as a compere for a 7 year old's birthday party, what it's like entering the world of fitness at 34, why my obsession with candles was cut short, at what point after becoming a father that your DIY skills improve 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 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Alfie's Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/user/alfiebrown6  Follow Alfie on Twitter - https://twitter.com/abcomedian  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 - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alfie Brown, he's a comedian and a podcaster. Adilting is hard. I'd hoped to discover that Alfie, a dad of three, would have worked out how to do it properly, but alas, no. It seems we are both condemned to flail around in the liminal purgatory of just about getting by for at least another few years. Today, I expect to learn why being a comedian doesn't mean that you can perform effectively as a compare for a seven year old birthday party. What it's like entering the world of fitness at 34,

why my obsession with candles was cut short, at what point after becoming a father, your DIY skills improve, and much more. I think with these conversations, 50% of me wants the answers. I want to know how to do it, how to grow up and finally be able to put up shelves in the house. And then the other 50% of me is hoping not to find out because that justifies my own uselessness by someone else who I see as being further along the path than I am, they're incompetent, justifies my incompetence. So yeah, this is kind of like a gateway drug to placating your own sense of insufficiency

as an adult today. Enjoy. Something else that you should enjoy is the Modern Wisdom Reading List. A hundred books that you should read before you die. The most important, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found, I always get asked for book recommendations, so I just did a big PDF that's got them all in with links and descriptions for why I like them. You can get your copy right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books go there immediately but now please give it up for Alfie Brown How are you, Brown? Talking to the show. Thanks so much for having me.

It's a real pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. Last night was Halloween. How did you spend your Halloween? I always spend my Halloween with the lights off with my knees tucked in between my arms, pretending that I'm not in, so that I don't have to. And that's the way I've been for about the last decade. So to now have kids that want to have to be more involved, the tiny involvement that I used to have as a man with no children has now been

just so greatly exaggerated and has galloped forth into this most unpleasant areas. So I just don't have the same patience faculty for other people's children as I do for mine, quite understandably from an evolutionary perspective, I why would I care about them? But that means like to tolerate them is such a drain on your resources as a human being. So I was lucky, I looked after my baby whilst my girlfriend took my to elder children out trick or treating. But the day before my, it was my son's birthday party, he had a seventh birthday party and it was a Halloween themed thing. So we all played games and I got them all to do their scariest lives and I had to kind of like compare the thing There's no scarier gig than that comparing a child's birthday party man. Oh man. It was a nightmare

That was the true Halloween experience. I love how your you've been sort of labeled as he's a performer You used to be an onstage aren't you? I mean comedian child's before I just go six and two three You must have all of you've got the mic. I mean, you've got the skills, you can do this. People just presume that you used to being on stage so you can do kid stuff. I said this the other day on, but I'm happy to say it again. I have performed at Cardiff Junglers, which is in a no-she-ana with fish tanks that sort of blockade the hen parties in so that they can't leave. I think I was on it about 11 o'clock at night because the gig had been delayed, so all they'd had to do was drink. And that audience still had more of a kind of semblance of care about my ego than the seven-year-olds.

And as soon as you display any sort of like, I'm a cool fun guy who likes kids, the children will just start hitting you. Where, can you tell me about that? Can anybody, can a psychologist please report to me on how or why children as soon as they are just hit you now? Vee-e-e-e I did silly, scary, funny laughs. I'll hit him now.

That was that showing affection. Yeah, is it like pulling on my pig tails? Is that what it's like, saying, I like you, so I'll hit you, because I don't know how to express myself, because my brain's not fully developed. Is that what it is? I like you, so I'll hit you because I don't know how to express myself because my brain's not fully developed. Is that what it is? I've absolutely no idea, but I think I did quite a good job. The weird thing is because of the kind of comedy that I do, lots of people have always,

crappy compares have always taken me off stage by going, those Alfie Brown, he is available for children's parties. Well, yeah, I am, actually. And you've really good at it, actually. Managed not to say anything awful, did a kind of lighthearted joke, the parents liked it, you know, it was actually a really lovely day. And the crucial thing was, it only lasted three hours. Very, very, very nice.

My business partner has, he's got three little ones, the crucial thing was it only lasted three hours. Very, very, very nice. I think it's true. My business partner has, he's got three little ones, he's got a three four month old, two year old and a four year old, and two dogs and a wife. And I'm pretty sure that they managed to coordinate an outfit. They were all werewolves, including the dogs yesterday. So they went out trick-or-treating. And my business partner's got one of those. It's like you wear the baby as a backpack,

but it's on your front, whatever that's called. A popooce. Is that what it's called? A popooce. Very nice. It's called a popooce. And then they all say ergonomic on them nowadays because that's the word that we now like.

Because an un-ergonomic purposes kill people. Whatever it is then. What was it gonna just garot see what it built for? Break your kids ribs. I don't know, ergonomic means it works with your body. Well, yeah, it should have always been ergonomic. One of these words that you've used to skin friendly soap.

Yeah, I was hoping it was was going to be skin friendly. I was going to use it on my skin, right? Anyway. Yes, that sounds good. I didn't quite... I wanted to be the Joker. You've kind of got the hair if you could... If you could dye it, you could kind of pull a little bit of the hair style off. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I mean, depending on which era joke I think I, the one I'd most

like to be is Jack Nicholson. And nowadays I think he's the most kid-friendly. I don't think you can go as in-sell Joker to a seven-year-old birthday party. And you? Black pill. The theme of this kids party is the black pill. Yeah. Okay. So you didn't do the yoga? No, no, no, no, they just wasn't the time between, you know, working and trying to sell myself, essentially in the various different mediums that it's incumbent upon one to sell oneself. There just wasn't time to go into the so-how and pick up a big purple suit or whatever it was I would have liked to have done and I didn't want to half-ass it. What did you relax? What did you go with then?

I went at a dad's to a dad to a children's birthday party. That sounds a lot like not in the middle. Well I didn't actually go with anything I just went as myself. I didn't dress up. anything. I just went as myself. Okay. I didn't dress up. None of the adults dressed up. So how'd you have gone as a joke? From my mum. You would have been the only one.

Yeah. But as the kind of host of the event, I thought that would have been appropriate, you know. Because it gives you the illusion of authority. Yeah, and I'm the one, you know what I'm for if I'm the one that's dressed up. Thank you. You know that I'm the one that's dressed up. Thank you. You know that I'm the one that's about to be like you can't. It almost looks weird that I'm joining in all the children's games, not dressed up. I just look like a kind of creepy over-infusioistic adult.

Whereas if I was in like a kit, then everybody would go, okay, good, that's what his role tonight is. Yeah, he's the authority here. He's aesthetically provided us with context for the way he's behaving. He was just seeing me in a cotton oxford shirt. Who's this creep getting hit by my kid? Loser.

Stop talking to Ruben. My business partner's kid's called Ruben. So I'm pretty adamant that Darren has crawled out of the working class on the shoulders of his children's names. Yeah. Hahaha. Hahaha. Yes. Ruben.

Cooper. And Zara with a H. Wow. Wow. Beautiful names. Beautiful kids. Fucking absolute dream family. and Zara with a H. Wow. Wow. Beautiful names, beautiful kids, fucking absolute dream family.

But I do have to remind him every so often that he's from Adal in Leeds and no matter how fancy the names are that he give you children, you're always going to be from that. Maybe he's a business owner as well. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So he has a business owner as well. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So he has a...

Oh, I don't think I should say the word crawled, but you can say crawled, as opposed. I, but it doesn't sound well, I'm going to posh bloke, says it. Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm always reminding my friend, Vazabout is that kind of class changes. He's much more middle-class than I am, just because I, because he came from Houndslow and I came from, you know, a leafy suburb of West London. And now he, you know, likes cooking with Samfire and

drinking Red Wine and a star of a niece. And I don't know. He's actually a brilliant, brilliant cook. But what's the word? You can move shifts about. That's what I mummed it. She was a working class girl and then became middle class. And then she had a middle class child. And now I'm earning a very working class, well. I did all of this work. Do you know how hard I worked? Fucking get us out of this. Class mobile, that's what I was trying to think.

Chosen the only career that could have sent you back a generation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, entertainment. Fuck. Fuck you. As a completely unmarkedable human man. Why do you think you're unmarkedable? What's wrong with what's the challenge with the marketing? I don't think I have a strong enough identity.

I think people, you need to be good at... Do you have a written a treatment for a TV program? I know what they are. When you write a treatment for a TV program, you have something underneath a title called a log line, which is essentially, you know, the program is called... The show is called Red, and it's a sitcom. It's like only fools and horses meet a caravan in holiday. And that's what it is. It's like only fools and horses meet a caravan.

And that's, oh, okay, I know exactly what it is. I almost don't need to read the rest of this because everything I'm about to read has been so informed by the logline. And I think as a comedian now, you need to have a good logline, and I don't have a good logline. I mean, it's fairly nondescript. I suppose having children helps, and the style of comedy that I do sort of helps most of my shows have thematically similar structures and not structures but they're thematically similar I should say. And maybe it's one of those things like you and I were speaking about when it's you you're a very bad judge of what it is. But I even think of the way that I was thinking about this, and I don't think it looks particularly

good or maybe likable, or maybe it's, again, me overthinking it, that when we think about how we dress, I think about how we're aesthetically presenting ourselves, especially as somebody who's on stage performing and delivering a set of ideas to an audience and performing them with some sort of attitude that fits. Well, I've made decisions about it. I've made a decision to have a bit, albeit that might be because I just thought it might be a good way to put my chin into the singular. I've made a decision about everything.

So why not, I wear these shirts, these kind of nondescript cotton oxford shirts from business suit kind of providers and think, why am I hiding so much? So maybe thinking more in these terms about how we're presenting ourselves isn't something to be sniffed at. I think comedy purists have this idea whereby they think, well, I just want to do jokes and I'm a joke purist, but I think the whole element of performance just because cinema is a visual medium doesn't mean that we don't think about the music or about the font of the titles or whatever. And it's all cohesive.

It's all cohesive, yeah. And I think I need to be thinking a little bit more cohesively about things like my log line and my aesthetic. If you look at the pictures for the last series of live at the Apollo, they're all dressed like cartoon characters. And it's great, they all look great. Everybody looks, everybody looks great, but they all are dressed in statement pieces.

Yeah, it's like archetypes, right? It's the same as when you have a TV show and you know that the maiden is got big eyes and the villain wears black and the hero's sort of muscled like this and the nerds got glasses and it's a shortcut because it's an energy saving device for our brains. I don't need to work out, oh, I'm gonna second,

I had this vision of him but then he's added this bit on the side like a lump of clay that doesn't look like it's supposed to be there and what's that bit? Cause that bit, I thought I had this sphere, this perfect round ball that was a box that I could put him in. But now there's this bit on the side of it. And yeah, that's, I think about this a lot, actually. I did it. Ted X talk at the start of the year about something very similar about the fact that we live a lives in archetypes. And we, we look to the examples that other people set, and that that cohesion,

that ease of being able to work out what someone is, what someone's got going on, it lends, it makes affinity more easy with people. But the problem is, if you don't fall into one of those archetypes naturally, you end up having to be performative in order to do that. So a lot of people, they are friends with others based on a performance, a role that they're playing of the person that they think their friends want them to be. So I see this with young guys a lot. I do a lot of nightlife. And you see, I was one of them. I was a professional partyboy for a decade. As a guy who now wants to talk about whether you can genetically

engineer human life to reach the star systems or the philosophical basis for good. But that's, you know, so standing in the front door of a nightclub was never facilitating that, but I'd created this person that I could be because it was effective and people could get it. Oh, it's Chris. Yeah, yeah, big name on campus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, shaggy in that. And that was the persona.

But the sacrifice that you make is that if you don't fall into one of those characteristics, one of those archetypes, that you end up having to kind of shave bits off you. How conscious is this persona? Like at the time of you're saying, this persona that you had is, you know, party boy,

great night out, good pint, good shaggo, whatever, big shaggo, not good, I couldn't possibly comment. But how when you're in, because that's 10 years, are you going home the next day going, God, I really better read more about Aristotle's Udomonia. No, no, no, so that was me just doing the thing that I thought would get me popular. So all I was trying to do was please other people. And my route to doing that was split testing a type of me and then when one of them was successful,

just continuing to go down it. But it wasn't thought out in advance. It wasn't done reflectively and it took 10 years and then a season of love island for me to go, oh fuck, what, how did I get here? This really doesn't feel there's something wrong and then you do a ton of self-work and inquiry and you scrape off all of the mud and the feces that has accumulated on top of the person that you are

and then eventually you get to something that approximates truth, right? You end up going, right, all of this that I thought I was, all of these opinions I had, all of these ideas about the world, all of these ways of living, all of the things that I held up in a steam and all of the things that I didn't. Okay, right, what have I got left? Well, I fuck knows, I'll just keep going, I keep digging, keep digging, keep digging. And then eventually you hit something that seems a bit more firm and you're okay.

Maybe I can start speaking some truth forward from here. Wow, that's so interesting. That's so interesting. The difference, and also, well, it's also terrifying in a way because if you're enveloped in something that is, I'm not sure if Artifix is the right word, but a construction based on something based on trying to find yourself based on things that are exterior rather than interior, like outwardly reflecting and letting the outward realm affect who you are and who you present

yourself as. It's just, if you can, I mean, do you feel like that's like lost time or important time? I imagine you're kind of quite stoic about the whole thing. Yeah, it's just, it's, it was time, you know, maybe that was the root. Maybe it was time. I could have said something Yoda would say. There is no good or bad, there is just time. Yeah, there was no alternative. I discovered the thing when I discovered the thing. I realized that there was a discordance between the person I was and the persona I was playing.

When I discovered it and that came about. Now the difference and the difficulty that I can see with yourself is that comedic personas, they're important, and I've actually taken over the last couple of months, my comedy coach, Deck, has been working with me, and I just wanted to learn how comedy works. I thought this would be fun, it's a good skill to acquire.

The first thing that he started talking about was comedic personas, about the fact that you have an offering that kind of positions you in terms of power. It's that I know what this person is when they step on stage. Right, you know, Peter K. You know, he comes out on stage, very strong comedic persona. You understand, you get him.

Someone with a much more subtle comedic persona would be like a James A. Castor, perhaps, because it's kind of like a bit. Like, okay, is he sort of being childish? Is he being kind of like funny? Is he awkward? Is he cool? And then he's pivoted with this most recent one, and he's like pretending to be a rock star type thing. But I think that works in the context of his former shows, though. Like, we now that we know who James A. Caster is, it's really interesting to see James K. Caster break who we thought he was. Yeah. That was really, really, really exciting.

I mean, I think that he was very good at, like, I think it is more subtle than Peter K's persona. I suppose, but I don't think that James A. Castor was brilliant at building this aesthetic, brilliant at building. In advance, had three shows that began with R and had a similar style poster and did them all in a row in Edinburgh. They were all kind of brilliant, similar, but different enough that they were cohesive and different enough that they were, they were brilliant as kind of stand alone features. And I, yeah, it's certainly, it's certainly hard to puzzle out.

And I think actually one of the things that comedians often undervalue or perhaps that they don't speak about enough is that self-awareness. When people are almost more important than wit, I think, is self-awareness. If I know more about you, and this is in small amounts, if I know more about you than you do, you're fucked, okay? That you're just immediately not funny. It's over, okay, it's totally over. I can not know more about you than you do. And that's why when these blocs do these jokes on stage and they go, think about women is, and you're gonna, well, I immediately know too much about you,

okay, and a much more than you do, you have some, you know, middling to quite severe psychosexual issues that you haven't worked through. And I can't laugh at you now because I have the power and you don't, okay? Sorry, I'm in my self love. And, you know, I remember seeing all sorts of, that's why in his tiny matters,

you can't go on stage with your zip undone. Like your fly undone. And then everybody goes, well, lost it. Yeah, okay. You've lost your power. Sorry. And all up to, we can tell that there's something up with you because of the kind of jokes that you're doing.

Why are you choosing to say that? Yes. Why are you choosing to tell us that? And even if audiences aren't conscious of it, they'll sort of subconsciously interpret your weakness unless they are as weak as you, which is why, you know, more basic comedians tend to have more basic.

Basic crowds, yes. So there's a YouTube channel that I found yesterday called Comedy Without Errors. Have you seen this? No, bro. I'm interested. It is awesome. It is so sick. So it's a guy, a British guy who obviously really,

really fucking understands comedy. And he's just done breakdowns of different comedic styles. So James A. Caster's got a 30 or 40 minute breakdown where he explains all of the different elements of how it worked in terms of storylines on there. Oh my God. He's got one about Dave Chappelle and about how Dave Chappelle uses callbacks. He's got one about how to deal with hecklers. And it's part of a body of work. There's three different styles of doing comedy without errors.

Fucking outstanding YouTube channel. I was fascinated. I thought it was really, really fucking cool. Big shout out to comedy without errors. Comedy without errors. I want to talk about being a dad and when you start to do like dad stuff because I'm not a dad yet that I know of.

And the gulf between me and my father, when he was my father, he still is my father. But you know what I mean? When I was a child and things needed to do age, doing like DIY or going to the sh, you just say, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Shit, right? I just feel like there are certain archetypal, dad qualities that I don't have.

Do they, what happens? Do you do a course? Do they just arise? Well, I think there is an element of syncing, well, trying to swim and indeed syncing, or puzzling it out I don't think it's ever been easier because there are lots of YouTube tutorials on how to And how to resurface your deck which is I think you know pretty I

Think that's like advanced dadding isn't it? You know when you get your power washer and you power or wash off all the old varnish and you re-varnish your debt. That's peak dad. I was pretty bad at that and I think we lost the deposit on that flat. So I did have to make many apologies to many different people, sadly. But so stupid. I repainted it orange and like without asking the landlord what an idiot tried to put up lots of shelves but there was loads of like bits of metal in the concrete so the drill wouldn't go in so I couldn't

put the shirt. I felt like I and this is lockdown and lockdown was my first foray into into into trying to do the more DIY stuff. In terms of being a provider, I earn significantly less than my partner, Jesse. So, I mean, I do understand there is a, maybe an evolutionary impulse that you have to overcome to want to kind of come home with a zebra in your jaws and say, look what I got for everybody isn't it great that I made sure that everybody's still alive?

I... there's an extent to which I feel, or feel decorative as a father. Yeah. The sperm donor that stayed around. Yeah, like this. This sperm donor's keen, isn't he? Look at him, still knocking about up to seven years. Loser. So I, I mean, I'm really grateful for my, but she, like when you're looking at her with a newborn and you see her breastfeeding

and then like earning the money as well, you think, well, shall I, what shall I do? Shall I just, am I, shall I, I can I go to the pub then if you're going to do that? If you've got anything sorted. If you've got a hand on everything, I'll just go out and see Vaz for a bit. He's cooking a goose or something. There you go, Shepel, there's a call back. I don't think. There you go, Shepel, is it cool back? So yeah, I mean, it made me feel incredibly uneasy and I think, perhaps, I overcompensated with my desire to be a shelf putting up father type person. But yeah, you know, there we are.

There is definitely a sense, especially, I think, in earlier, when kids are just born. I mean, again, this is all voyeuristic. The second and third order told to me. But that, for instance, everybody, it was in high, high echelons of the US Marines, and he's been to war multiple times to untunzunz of tours, and said that he's never felt more helpless, alone, or scared than watching his wife give birth to their first child.

Because there is nothing that he can do. It is entirely on that person. It's completely out of his hands, and he just has to sit there with his fucking hands in between his legs just waiting. I, I, I, I, I, I, the birth of the third child because of COVID, I really heard of that. There was nobody allowed in the hospital.

So I had to kind of come in only when I was asked for a specific junctures, don't come in a second before, we literally crowning and then call them up. So not quite that urgent, but I couldn't stay with her the night and I usually, usually, we have so many kids who are in a row tomorrow. Pumping them out all the time, yeah.

So I would have slept for the previous two helping them out all the time. So I would have slept for the previous two on the seat that they have beside the bed. And it's so awkward. And for, I mean, for a dad, I think, in any of those situations, going to scans, going to, and they don't talk to you either. And the same when you're looking around a school, really, it's just like, you just get ignored, like, because maybe the head teacher doesn't have to talk to you or like, oh my God, I remember sitting in the, I remember sitting in

the, in the waiting room, not the deliverable, the waiting room before we go down to, before it all kind of kicks off in the Labor Department. And they have to come in and check her every now and again to see how dilated she is, which means that you have to sit in a chair and sort of like how, like, you know, when you're trying on shoes and you forget how to walk, like some pretty midwife comes and sticks her fingers inside your girlfriend and you kind of go, oh, I wonder what the ceiling is like. It's just amazing. I love the ceiling now. And it was so bizarre, like watching her route around, like her fingers inside, like I sort of tried to make it, I tried to make it hot for myself. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha shows that you're a good poet. Yeah, good match. Similar senses of humor and depravity.

Yeah, yeah, and then during the, so I went home that night and then got a call at 6am, saying, oh, by the way, I've just started going into kind of like full labor. So anytime, that usually means you've got about five or six hours before there's a baby. For any parents will know how insane this is. I got there at quarter two, the baby was out within five minutes of my being there. She went from like one centimeter

to fully dilated in 45 minutes. It was insane. And because it was, he came out so quickly, usually, the baby usually has lots of fluid squeezed out on the way out, because it's a bit of a squeeze, famously. And he didn't have enough of his fluid pumped out, so he had lungs full of amniotic fluid. So he had to go straight into the ICU for like seven days and had strep B or something, so had to be on tubes and we just had kind of visiting hours with the baby for a week. So in terms of, that was a real,

and she was sleeping downstairs and I would kind of go home, look after the kids, ordered too much pizza, try and make the most of, yeah, I'm ordered. The liberation. Because you're not allowed to tell me not to. I'm not allowed to read wine. Absolutely, I'm older. Deliberation. Because you're not allowed to tell me not to. I'm not a red wine. Absolutely.

I have to. And would go in the next day. And yeah, the powerlessness extended itself over a week there. And there is a very real feeling of wanting to do right, but they're not being any specific guidance or guidebook. My brother is really, really into weightlifting. He finds a social interaction a bit more tricky.

And I was speaking to him once and he was sort of explaining to me that the reason why he likes weightlifting so much is that there's quantifiable progress. There is, with social interaction, all have I done well, if you could just score me 6.8 on the quality of the chat, that would be amazing, just so I know if I'm making tangible improvements to my ability to interact. Whereas weightlifting, I bench pressed X amount last week, I bench pressed X amount this week. My body perhaps fat percentage or whatever your goals are at home. You know, his X now was what, you know, it's easily, there's numbers there that

you can look at and go progress. And I think, you know, with shelves, I can put shelves up and go, look, some shelves. But I can't get scored or like, was I good at being a partner during the delivery of a child and then for the subsequent week whilst it was in the intensive care unit. I have no idea. Which is sort of frustrating. You just have to trust that you did do something that constitutes your best and you were well-meaning. Whenever anybody, I'm awful at talking to people when they've

got a serious illness. If somebody's got a serious illness and I talk to them, I'm going to go, hello, and all I can think to say is, how are you? How are you? You don't want to say how are you because I know that you've got like a disease and it's bad. So you can't go how are you because we both know, so what should we do here? Should we just go, I'm sorry that you've, and that often is that you should say something as simple as that I'm so sorry to hear about.

You're in this. That's absolutely shit. Yes. But then you don't want to say illness to them because they might have been, that might have been the five minutes that they were just forgotten. They were thinking about, I'll be coming over. He's going to cheer me up.

He's going to cheer me up and then go to disease. Just managed to get that disease out my head. So yeah, life is a constant array, an obstacle course of social pitfalls and wrong things to do. And thank God we have shelves to put up and weights to lift so that we can... Fucking leave. Get something done.

So at the end of my life, I can look back on a series of shelves and weights and think at least I left this. I left this for the world, yeah. It's like getting my ear wax out my ears so much. I've produced sound. That's a fucking low bar. So I heard this story from a psychologist I spoke to a couple of months ago. And he said that during World War II, there were these patients who were completely catatonic in psychiatric worlds in London, completely comatose, unresponsive, just roll them over, clean the bedpan, feed them however you feed them, nurses would do this thing, unresponsive for years and years and years. Bomb start falling during the blitz, and there are fewer ambulance and fire truck drivers

than there are ambulances and fire trucks to drive. So there's this shortage, and these men, mostly men, most people in psychiatric ward, were men, these men got up. People had been comatose for years and years and years, got up out of bed and started driving fire trucks and ambulances around London helping out. And his point was that male mentality in terms of goal setting, also depression, but principally goal setting,

is done based on trying to do things. If you give a man the ability to a goal, the ability to achieve it, he'll crawl over broken glass with a smile with his argument. And you see this with these men, that they were motivated out of a completely comatose state to go and do a thing. And I think that that's the difference when you look at what women are motivated by. You know, a woman, I would guess, on average, more so, would be happy just being emotional support. If women had children with other women, or you know, in lesbian relationships where you, one of the girls is pregnant or whatever, the one that's in the corner is perhaps more likely to just, I was there for emotional support. I felt, whereas your compulsion to do a thing is actually quite restrictive.

Yes, I think during lockdown, a lot of the time I said, when people would say, I wasn't too much of a drag, well I said this to absolutely everybody, but when my mum would ask me how I was, I would often say, oh, well, not so good actually,

because I've had my purpose taken away. And feeling like your purpose is now, well, it's gone. That does send you, you know, not to the psychiatric facility, although, you know, given, you know, let's do a fourth lockdown and see where we are. I incredibly, incredibly depressed and missed it all so much. And I think I missed, I spoke to my hairdresser who I do go and see on a quarterly basis. And, and he said, first haircut, I got after lockdown. I said, how did you find it? And he said, I just missed being good at something. And I thought that's such a good quote. Yeah, almost started weeping. Yeah, miss being good at something. Yeah. And I mean, I started trying to do bits and pieces and I started doing Instagram lives in the hope that that might, you know, put a little nicotine patch over the craving, but it didn't because

you've developed a set, a very specific set of skills that are suited to stand up. So very hard to get that to translate. And also the endorphins and the experience of communicating with a group in a live sense and having something as the messily emotional reality of other people who were present was gone because it would just be, you say something funny on Instagram live than a flutter of hearts. That's all you've got. Well, that feels good, but it doesn't feel that good. The reason that I went to go and see you in Edinburgh was because Sloss had told me that I should do. He's like, hey, man, I'm up this weekend, who should I go and see? And he said, Alfie Brownsco, a show, and like, go see that. But he said the same. He was having arguments with his girlfriend, now Fion say, that he has the most perfect relationship

with, because he needed her to love him like 500 strangers a night. And he was, he was, she was still doing her thing and he was moping around the house, smoking weed and playing Xbox badly and poking her and being, hey, what are you doing? Hey, love me. Yes, I think I, you know, I did a lot of, I can remember once my girlfriend was trying to watch that Saliruni thing that seemed to, after every single episode, you go, how was that only 20 minutes long? It felt like it was going on forever. Anyway, I remember bouncing on the trampoline, because we bought the kids a trampoline during lockdown, and just like a little exercise trampoline that you use, the old people used to strengthen their bones.

And she was trying to watch the old people. I was bouncing on the trampoline, staring at her kind of, why aren't you looking at me like, why aren't you? And like, and then I looked at myself and thought, I've gone mad. This is like not an appropriate way for an adult man to be, but I was so starved of everything that I just couldn't, I could barely function. And when I'd speak to comedians

who say they didn't miss it, there is no stronger and more vociferous fuck you that I have for anybody else in the world. Don't do it then. Don't do it because you just, you know, your gigs are gigs that I could have. I'll have yours then because I'll do two. I'll do two. I'll do one for me and one for you and I'll do them both with a smile on my face. Because you've had to jump up and down on a trampoline to assuage your feelings of uselessness. Yeah, I've been singing, I've been, I learned the Mawana rap to impress my children. I've, I've, there is no depth to which I haven't stooped to try and feel relevant again.

Extract some screed of, do I have your love and I entertaining you? Have I made your life better? Have I illuminated the, the torpor of our everyday experiences for you? And then between that, between this kind of mad, uh, court, jester type character to slumped in an armchair, staring at a book I'm not reading, didn't read one book during lockdown. Uh, I mean, an incredible sense of atrophy, to the whole experience of everyday life. And then, and nothing, no, no ability to go and do the thing that you love to do.

Yeah, wonderful business. It's, dude, this is the thing. So few people have spoken about lockdown after lockdown. I think everyone kind of was a bit bored of the same conversation over and over again. Oh, it's hard, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You're getting on all right.

Yeah, I am. I am. You know, getting by. And people, we had that for so long that that conversation kind of just feels a bit like old hat, but the echoes, right? The reverberations of some of those situations and the realizations that you had, that this is the time, if you had a strategic learning experience like you did, which was, there is a part of me, there is a void which gets filled by the art form that I have chosen to express

myself in. That realization is really, really fucking important. And by not having the conversations about it, you actually don't end up perhaps learning and then maybe even transcending some of the suffering that you went through during the time. Yeah, and I think, like, the really, this is to be taken with a kind of pinch of salt because my, Jessie's brother, my partner Jessie's brother is a doctor. And I went, man, this must have, and it jurembed me in that socially distance in a park last year.

And I went, mate, how are you doing? This is just awful. How are you coping? And he went, mate, this is much worse for you than it is for me. I didn't become a doctor because I didn't want to have to work to save people's lives. Obviously, it's harrowing and awful.

And I think what he was saying is to be taken with a pinch of salt, because obviously it was nightmarish. But at the same time, he had his perp. That's his call to arms. He had his calling met and it was very difficult and horrific and much of the time. But I thought it was so interesting when he said that, such a bizarre thing for maybe not a bizarre thing.

And maybe, I mean, we don't know. We only know about people who were saying, is that one of those things, it must be so hard for doctors that, you know, let's all think about the doctors as well. So then it is for everybody else. Maybe the all the doctors were thinking, no, no, no, no, this is why we got into it.

What the fuck's everyone clapping as for? You clapping our souls that sat at home whanking five times a day. They're the ones that need our support in this difficult time. God, if only I had the spirit in me to whank five times a day. So I was, here's another one, man. I went, I have an conversation with a buddy about a year ago. We, I can't remember where we were, some bar somewhere.

And we've been talking about something and then we were going away. We're doing a little bit of work and then in between bits of work, you chat out of the blue, you turn to me and said, man, how much do you think you come? I thought, what do you mean? Like volume? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought, what do you mean? Volume. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's say that there's a sort of percentile, right, from zero to a hundred.

Where do you think you fall in terms of the volume of semen that you create upon climax? And I didn't really know what to say because the only times that unfortunately I've made it to the end of a porn video, to watch the man complete, I don't think that that's a representative sample of men, of semen for men. And I explain this to him and I was like, I'm fucking like a normal, like probably a normal amount, probably 50, probably 50 if percentile. And then quick as a flash, he went, I'm 95 percentile.

LAUGHTER OK, tell me about that. And he said, frankly, a bit of a nuisance, if me about that. He said, frankly, bit of a nuisance, if I'm honest. That was his... I worked out when I was 25 years old that I'd been ranking at that point for about 13 and a half years. And I probably hadn't missed a day of an average.

I'd been going every day. I worked out what the average come... Volume. Yeah, what it was for a man. So I started working at the 13 and a half years ago. At that point, my kid brother was 13. So I started wanking around the time he was born, although I don't think they were related incidents.

I started wanking around the time he was born, although I don't think they were related incidents. And I worked out that if I'd saved all my come, like in its weight, since the day I started wanking, I'd have about seven and a half stone of come, which is about the weight of a 13-year year old boy. So interestingly, like human beings grow at the same amount that you shed every day in come. And I could have like, if I'd saved it, I could have made my own like, come brother. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Some disgusting ex-rated snowman. Yeah, it's from the people who bought you the human centipede. It's cum brother.

Your his cum brother. That's... Wow. This podcast has been quite high-end, no, hasn't it? Yeah, we've gone to the depths of deep depression and lockdown and also we've gone to come brother. I want to know about your speaking of atrophy and weightlifting.

I want to know about your fitness journey because you're starting a foray into health and wellness, are you not? Well, I'm so incredibly, I'm so incredibly gullible and so incredibly, like, I have a sort of fantasy idea of the man I would be. And if you look at him in his complete form, all of his facets are incompatible with each other. So there's a heavy drinking guy who's in great shape, and then you're immediately done. Because I love, I'm a good pint, and I like, I haven't quite worked out this kind of balance yet, whereby I managed to, and I saw that I was

at a kind of crossroads in terms of being a, like a 34 year old father of three, just eating all their food all the time and being exhausted so having to just fuel yourself on scraps and you know like endless packets of oat cakes with the hummus in the fridge and then feeling like was that really a meal or am I? I shouldn't, I should still eat a meal, I'll eat a meal as well. So I just don't think I had very good habits and then loads of red wine and great beer. Anyway, so a fitness journey, I'm not sure, a fitness is quite a highfalutin word to, you know, I don't want my knees and my heart to give out by the time I'm 45. Journey is the kind of journey.

I'm avoiding, I'm avoiding the diseases of kings from the middle ages. If I can evade gout by 50, I'm gonna consider this a success. I don't want gout. Although, you know, gout is a kind of like an emblem of it. It's a really good time. Yeah, yeah. It's like how soldiers get a purple heart.

You know, people, looshes get. Right. So you're trying to just extend your mortality a little bit. I've started doing high intensity interval training courses. I don't like feeling here because it's got two eyes in it, so it sounds crap. And I do them with energised and wonderful, gorgeous men and women shouting at me and

In a gym or at home. In a gym, in a gym. I go to a gym, yeah, there's like a fitness class people around the corner. And it's brilliant. And actually that's the best thing I've ever done. Well, I'm at the gym. I spend the whole time, you know, on Twitter getting angry and listening to a podcast and yawning at the bench press thing. So, and I don't do any cardio because it's too awful. So, and I don't, also it's the same fitness to me is the same as having a podcast. I just want somebody who knows everything

to be able to go, here's how long the podcast should be, here's what you should do on YouTube, here's what you should cut up onto Reels. Here's how often you should do it. Here's the best data to put it out. Here's, if you should do Instagram TV as well. Here's how to market it on Twitter. There's all your information. Go away, do that. And if it's good, then it'll work. And if it's not, then it won't. And it also, if it's not good, it still might work. Because, you know, if it's good, it still, I mean, who knows, but, you know, at least you know that you're

doing the right thing. And the fitness thing as well is like, oh, shall I eat, shall I eat slow carbs? Should I focus on my gut health? Should I eat butter coffee? And like, I mean, it was just disgusting. And I'm, you know, predominantly vegan anyway. So it would have to be sunflower butter coffee,

which I'm not even sure really works, because I'm not sure if the science abides by sunflower butter coffee. Or should'm not even sure really works because I'm not sure if the science abides by sunflower butter coffee Um, or should I just cut fat out or should I just count calories or should I do intermittent fasting and all of these things can I just have Somebody say to me what's effective please and then I'll just Do it and and and have done with it And it'll be so much easier to keep off this layer of dad fat that I've accumulated over the last three or four years. And if I'm keeping it off that, yeah, that's easier,

isn't it? It's easier to keep it off than it is to keep it. Right, rid of it. Correct. Well, man, I think you've reached, if I was to give a bunch of different advice to someone that was doing what you were doing, the first thing I would say is join a class because you outsource your accountability, and your motivation, and your intensity to a group of people, you get a bit of money, and your money, but fuck, man, that's one of the things You get a bit of money. And you're money. Fuck man.

That's one of the things that I really don't get. I understand if you have legitimate financial restrictions that do not permit you to be able to pay between 70 and 180 pounds per month to get someone to shout out you and tell you what exercise is to do in a class setting. I understand. But if you have the money and you're choosing to spend it elsewhere and complaining about your fitness goals, that's a you problem. Like that's you not doing the thing that you should do in order to get the goals that you're saying that you want.

You're complaining about not getting the results that you didn't get from the work that you didn't put in. That's what your problem is. So classes number one, like it's so good. Even I've been training for 15, 16 years, and I still rely on classes where my motivation's a little bit low, so I'll just go and do them for a few months, build a little bit of motivation back up and then coast on some programming. I want to do a little bit of stuff myself. That's awesome.

And then on programming. Yeah, so what you pay for or the comprom that you make with a class is that if there is a particular modality of training that you want to do, let's say that you really want to work on getting your resting heart rate down or improving your cardiovascular fitness. So you want to spend some time doing hypertrophy because you want to gain weight, whatever it is, you are at the mercy of whatever the class is doing. And you can find different classes. One class maybe a bit more lightweight,

more cardio, one maybe a bit more heavy, one maybe a bit more complex, but you are never doing precisely the program that perhaps you would want to do. Let's say you wanna work on your chest and the classes only do chest once a week, or not at all. So that's the sacrifice that you make. But I find that if you use the classes for motivation,

and then you can kind of coast back into some custom stuff, if you want to do that or not. And then with regards to the diet and the other things like that, that is a fucking minefield. I have a bunch of buddies who they've made their careers out of telling people that almost every different diet that people are trying to sell you is fucking horseshit. Yeah. And calories, counting calories is literally all that matters. And there is an entire industry, a counterculture industry of people that is, they've made their careers out of saying, it's just fucking calories, bro.

Yeah. I like all that. I'm fond of it. But I, I mean, it's not surely it's not because then if you have, I mean, it obviously to me because then you have to kind of get things like, you know, enough protein so that you're servicing and like, you could, you might just be calories, but you might be what you're eating and the quality of food that you're eating will have a huge effect on your mood if you do loads of great exercise with some gorgeous Man shouting at you And you eat you know

I don't know honey Haribo only honey Then you'll feel shitting. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah So what it in terms of weight loss, it is literally just calories. Now, you can improve your weight loss, and your mood, and your gut health, and everything else on top of that, and your performance by getting your macros right. So you've got maybe a bit more protein than you think

that you might do, and you avoid processed carbs, and you avoid too much saturated fat and blah, blah, blah. But I think what most people do is they repurpose diets like keto, which is a restriction diet or intermittent fasting, which is a restriction diet or atkins, which is a restriction diet or vegan or fucking pescataret or whatever it is. Most of that, most diets come down to restricting some different food groups that you're not supposed to eat. Yeah.

And then people go, well, look, I lost weight on this diet. And you go, yes, obviously, because you cut out two-thirds of all foods. And then someone else did a complete opposite diet. Cut out two-thirds of all foods, but two-thirds of different foods that included the foods at the other person ate. So I understand why it's complicated. I think also a lot of the fitness, kind of, the culture around it and the way in which

people talk about it and try and puzzle it out is difficult for me to, first of all, there's a kind of whole vernacular to penetrate. And like, you know, you're, you said a bunch of things of programming modes and stuff. And I kind of can't. And there's also, and this is really stupid. And it's something that I'm prone to do quite a lot, whereby I'm cynical about something, because I, um, jealous of it, or suspicious, or have preconceived ideas about the archetypes involved, I think, as it was,

like fitness idiots being fitness idiots and talking all their jargon. And I'm prone to think that at the same time as wanting all the, like, I look at them go, but it'd be great to look like you obviously, but shut up. So that's where I am. And then I look at my heroes and think, what, who, nobody that I loved was, you know, going on about their, what was speaking openly about their fitness goals. Christopher Hitchens never once mentioned his fitness goal. But he is dead.

And I'm like way too. Yes. Because by his own admission, he burnt the candle at both ends and it's shone a bright light. So I think I'm not going to stop drinking. I mean, my job takes place mainly in the pub, but I do want to find a way to balance the life that I would like to lead with being healthy and feeling energetic and not having such roost eye bags the whole time. I honestly think if you do four good classes a week and you're under the age of probably 45,

that you can pretty much get away with whatever you want. Unless you have a metabolism that's a bit suboptimal or you have a propensity to gain weight quite easily. Like, if you're training consistently and hard and you're doing progressive overload, I struggle to see if there's people that go to the classes that I know of that literally do not care about their diet. But if you're training five days a week and you're doing it quite hard, they're in fucking

great shape because their body's just desperately trying to accumulate, whatever it is, that lovely Merlot from last night and the remainder of the cupcakes from Little Johnny's birthday party for Halloween. And it just thinks, well, he's fucking pushing us really, really hard here. We need to, and we find, right, get the cupcake. Can we ever got any more Merlot left? We'll use that. I do always find the mood is quite a good gauge

of what's going on. Because I was doing these classes and thinking, my mood is absolutely in the toilet. And, but I was eating really well, or, you know, well, healthily. And then I need to be, my body used, this would be me eating well for a sedentary lifestyle. So now that I've got, you know, gorgeous bloke, screaming at me for 60 minutes, a few times a week, I need

to recalibrate properly. You're a proffilling, yeah. Well, means because that is absolutely not sustainable. I tried, it is another thing that I tried that I was thinking about. Because you talked about getting into soup, I think, when I saw you live, but you did something to do with soup. And it made me think about a brief period where I tried to get into candles. So I thought, I wanted a thing. You know, you feel like you need a thing.

Yeah. You want a, it's, this is going to be, well, so what are you into? Oh, is this during lockdown? Yes, yes, it feels like a lockdown obsession. Correct. Yes. So beeswax, soy wax, all different incense varieties, ones that burn in and they combine and the wax is kind of together. But then when you burn them, it congeals and then you get multiple different. And I really got into candles. And I just, it got me thinking about people that wanted a thing. Quite badly and I wanted a thing and I tried to make it candles and all that I achieved was I coated the ceiling of this room in so much soot that it came off the candles that

I actually needed to get it paid to be repainted. Oh, good God. That's it. Oh, good God. That's really funny. So how long did it last for you this obsession? Probably about four months, I think. But probably between four and six months. So I tried, I'd kind of done it once before and not really committed, thought that that might be my thing.

And now the nails in the coffin, that it might be my thing. And now the nails in the coffin, it's not my thing. Christ. What, how old are you? 33. And how many things do you think you've taken on post the age of 25? Do you think that have been, I mean, this is one. Yeah. Yeah.

So most of them have been commercial projects because I'm a ruthless, sacrilegious capitalist, yeah, precisely, who is trying to fill the void with money. But not as many as I, not as many as a lot of my friends, a lot of my friends have tried to do, to try to do the thing. How about you? Have you been getting a thing? Or the kids, kids are kind of a thing? A kids are kind of a thing. I suppose, no, I fantasized about a thing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I remember as a child, my father said, we were at theme park and he went, do you want to go on the big rides? And I went, no, it's horrible.

Why would I want to do that? And he went, good, good. That's a, and he said, good, do you know what that means? That means you've got a good instinct. You want to stay alive. And that means that you'll be, you know, you've got your head in the right place. Life might not be very exciting, but it shouldn't be dead.

Yeah, why would you want to, oh, peril. Like, why would you want to feel that makes no sense? So, yeah, the same reason I don't want to ride a motorbike, I don't want to ride a bicycle, I just, I don't, I tall, want, why I put myself in that position. You know, people get scared about terrorists on the tube, you know, you're much more likely to get knocked off your bike than you are, than you are blown up on the tube. It's been years since that happened. I'd like to learn a language.

I'd really like to learn a language. And I think I'm reaching the, it's reaching crunch time. And I'd like to, what I'd really like to do, and this podcast, and doing all this, I've started my own podcast, this, no? I've started my own podcast. Link in I've started my own podcast. I'm starting my own podcast. Link in show notes below.

Thank you. Thank you. I, and learning all about this and going back to what we were saying about fitness and indeed podcasting, I want to know everything about it. So I've watched hours and hours of charismatic 20-year-olds from Sacramento telling me about algorithms. And I like, why, you don't know anything. And, but what I do feel like is that YouTubers

incredibly, incredibly exciting. The whole idea of being a YouTuber is, it's sort of a pejorative term, YouTuber. It's like, well, the YouTube's just the, you don't call inkmar Bergman a cinema era. It's just where it's on, isn't it? It's literally anything. You can do a feature film and stick it on YouTube. Is that making you a YouTuber? No, it just means that you're putting, so you can do anything. All these programs that they're putting on today, even Comedy Central. All of these programs that they're putting on today and comedy central, none of which I am in, well, they're not making them because they're really expensive to make,

precisely the opposite. They're making them because they're cheap. And given their cheap, I'm staring into a Sony camera that's good enough to, so I can just go, I could go to Brussels and show you what it was like for me in Brussels. And if you like Brussels and if you like me, then you're like watching that.

And it doesn't have to be me being a YouTuber there, it can be me engaging in a funny and intellectual way with the experience of travel with somebody or not with somebody and I could film a bit of a gig that I do there and it's or I could film my own fee and draw faces on them and I could do whatever I want and I don't need to go to a development producer to have a conversation about whether or not my fee would work on it. No, I get to make that choice. And I'd, people speak about, you were speaking about the algorithm to me before, like I'd, I'd, I'd much rather compromise with an algorithm than I would a development producer. At least the algorithm will be honest with me.

Or be straight with me. Yeah, and I don't actually have to talk to it. It's the other key thing. There are some brilliant development producers I will add, but there are some, you know? Man, I think that the adventure into YouTube for pretty much every comedian that I know is a fucking great idea. So many, like what most YouTubers are trying to repurpose is what comedians have learned

on stage, or classic theatre actors, or especially people that do improv and stuff like that, like Jesus. And then you look at someone, Logan Paul's a good example of this. So, love him or hate him, that guy is a fucking media genius. So, you put him in front of a camera and his ability to control the cadence and the timber and the tone and the way that he speaks and what he says is fucking, it's media training, it's post-media training, media training. And he's so fucking fucking effective and he learned it by just doing daily vlogs for a bunch of years and yeah Fucked up and did some mistakes or whatever, but the guy is shit hot. Absolutely shit hot at what he does and you think

every comedian that I know That does podcasting on YouTube is a killer all of them There isn't anybody that you pour to cross onto this medium that's done it for an appreciable amount of time, standing on stage. That isn't fucking well, well, well, well more competent because they understand about pacing

and they understand about joke structure and they're comfortable with silence. All of the things that takes a normal person that does this, forever with no feedback, with feedback from a silent lens that looks like the following thing about it is that speaking into this and going, hello, this is my podcast and then suddenly it's your, your, then it's out there and you go, was that funny? Am I bad? Shall I, you know, shall I go away for a long time?

What's, what's, what am I? And what was that? And was it good? And oh God, what did I say? And yeah, it's, it's, it's the immediacy of the feedback and the beauty of standup is that it has to die in the room. It's beautiful because it dies like a flower.

Femoral. Exactly. And that's what's scarier about stuff like this. But, I mean, there is an extent to which, well, if the thing that's going to get made, I'm going to be on on TV, would just be me traveling about and meeting people anyway. Well, I can do that. Sure could it, yeah, exactly. There's a speaking about Logan Paul, I think that's so interesting. And I will look at his videos now

despite the fact that there have been, you know, moments of bad man about him. Loving my haters as you say, I actually have no idea what it is he's supposed to have done. So I'm not sure how. What you're supposed to love or hate about him. Yeah. How extravagantly I should be going, no, boom.

Or like, you know, to be, to be woke adjacent. Um, so yeah, there's a really good YouTube video by a guy that I love called Nerdwriter. Have you heard of him? No. Brilliant video essays and does a brilliant one on how Donald Trump answers a question. And there's exactly the same, there's like the simplicity of the language, the fact that he structures every single one of his sentences in an answer to have the key word, tremendous bad people, tremendous bad people. We get the key word of what he wants to get across. It's going to be horrible. It's going to be horrible, tremendous bad people. We get the keyword of what he wants to get across. It's going to be

horrible. It's going to be horrible. Tremendous bad people, bad people. And it's every single line you could take out of context and know exactly what he's saying. He examines the reading level of all presidential nominees over the past few years. And so Mick Huckabee and Bernie Sanders are way up there at A level reading level. And then you've got Clinton down a bit, and other Clinton down a bit, and you've got George Bush down a bit,

and then you've got way down at like kind of garden, sort of just above like early years reading level, is that's how Donald Trump speaks. And that's why everybody gets it. And that's why everybody understands. And that's why everybody immediately, well, I know what that guy thinks. There's no, there's no two ways about it. And it's not about how many people hate him.

Like the interesting thing when Hillary Clinton was campaigning, I thought they had this slogan, love Trump's hate. Well, it did, because the people who voted for Donald Trump love Donald Trump. And the people who didn't vote for Donald Trump didn't love Hillary Clinton. They hated Donald Trump. And love did Trump hate in that election, but just not in the way that Hillary Clinton thought it would all wanted it to. So that was the smartest tagline ever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was the smartest tagline ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But she just didn't realize. Yeah, well, I mean, it was, yeah, smartest tagline for him. Yes. I get it. It was, oh god, that was such a sad night.

But yeah, it's a really interesting video essay that I'd recommended to you and all this is nerd writer. He's got a bunch of good stuff. There was a article that I saw that looked at how much Democrats and Republicans love their own party versus hate the other party. And for almost all of time, it was that you voted for the party that you wanted to be in as opposed to not voting for the party that you don't want to be in.

And 2012, that changed. So now it's literally like a protest vote. It is everyone is protest voting against the side that they dislike. And this is, this is a whole other fucking rabbit hole, but the fact that out group hatred is stronger than in group bonding is a really fucking interesting mechanism that you see at the moment. The fact that most people bind together over mutual distaste of another as opposed to mutual love of someone

or something within that circle. I think that's so interesting. Yeah, I don't know where it's come from. I think it's, I think it's very... We haven't learned how to deal with new media yet, new digital media, social media, et cetera. And there's really interesting... You look at the invention of the printing press

was exactly when you had, like, in late 19th century, so 1870 something. Well, I can't remember the exact date, but right, directly after the invention of the printing press, in late 19th century, so 1870 something. Well, I can't remember the exact date, but right, directly after the invention of the printing press, you had this huge rise in populism and the corn laws being bought in. And everybody's saying, well, now the papers exist.

Everybody can just be taught what to think. And it's the death of democracy. And it's something that we're to an extent experiencing again. We learned sort of arguably how to deal with papers or how to ingest them or perhaps the way that papers went. You know, social media took on. It carried, the extremities carried on kind of further in each direction.

Obviously, papers got wind of the fact that sensationalist news stories sold copies, selling copies earns money, earning money means that we're all, we can all buy new cameras and whatnot. And that's where we all are. We're all, I made the title of my episode, something I thought was juicy because that made it more applicable. We're all, you know, I made the title of my episode something I thought was juicy because that made it more applicable. We're all thinking like this. So given that we haven't learned how to use this media yet, I think with a little bit of time maybe that stops. or we learn that there's some sort of cognitive revolution whereby we switch away from anger and the algorithm stops serving anger and utilising it as the touch paper for all virality and explosive news that there is and we get to a new place. There has to be something to push us past this, which I kind of remain optimistic there there will be, but I don't know what it is. And on the left

and on the right, I think people have confused, and this is without, you know, this is not a shameless plug, but the reason why my show is called sensitive man is that I think sensitivity is something that we have completely sort of expelled from all discourse. And people confuse or people or perhaps, you know, on the left, the Corbin left would say that they are sensitive. They are, but I think the true sensitivity is the only thing that can defeat righteousness. And righteousness is what you have at either end. And sensitivity is completely enathema to that. So a call for sensitivity. I'm reading a book, a proof of Johann Harry's new book, Johann Harry Rose Lost Connections and chasing the screen. So he's going to book. Is he the guy that did that? He said the controversial stuff about mental health.

Yeah, well, his books about mental health, I don't know how controversial it ended up being. He said that it was a combination of environmental and biological, but he put less weight on the biological. It's just imbalances of chemicals in the brain, bro. So it may, well, I mean, he wrote a book on mental health, I don't know how much. Yeah, no, I think the Guardian did a, the Guardian and everybody I follow on Twitter did a take down of it. Sounds like again, again, everything that's controversial is controversial, depending on our own algorithmically interpreted version of reality. Anyway, he got a shellacking from lots of people that I saw. I didn't know.

Well, everything, every criticism that everybody had of him, I kind of had to under my breath go, oh, yes, but I do agree with him about all of it. Yeah, I think that was what I've been saying about mental health for such a long time. And I even did a keynote speech at Keel University about this, about, you know, not overdiagnosis, but diagnostics being in the diagnostic element of mental health taken away from the human aspect of it. It dehumanizes it slightly and we're getting away from the kind of emotional human experience of, and I think that causes a sense of detachment from what's going on that isn't necessarily helpful.

People like the labels because it gives them, it brings some order to the chaos of their phenomenological experience. Yes. And it gives us, help me help to put on our log line as well. Correct. Yeah, exactly. It's like autistic only fools and horses depressed in a caravan site. Yeah. I will remember. So, yeah, he's got a new book out called Stolen Focus. And it's about why we're more distracted, why our attention is being robbed of us and stuff. And I'm only one chapter in for the people that want to listen to this, it won't be out until January.

The book isn't out until January, and he's not coming on until January. But it's a big book and Bloomsbury sent me a super, super early proof. And it's really interesting, really fucking interesting. And the first chapter talks about the fact that we have more information coming in than we can actually filter, that we have a surplus of information. And what it causes us to do is we need to utilize filtering in a way that we never would

have had to before. So humans are information forages, where squirrels look for nuts and trees, we look for information, because information kept us alive. The problem is, for almost all of history, we had a scarcity of information. We would get a story, we'd hear the same fucking story

from the elders of the tribe 150 times. And that's how you get stories and myths that are passed down, right? To pass down and pass down and pass down. She've heard it so many times. Whereas now, you have an abundance of information, almost all of which is noise, and almost none of which is signal, most of which is manipulated or contrived or whatever.

So our filtering mechanism just is not tuned up to be able to do this. And it's all done along the narrative of Johann going to some island in near America and taking, getting rid of all of his technology while he writes a chunk of this book. So he down, he down regulates all of his information as he's trying to write about it. And then he sort of puts his personal journey of down regulation and and and re centering his, his thoughts and his stimulus, how much stimulus he's got. And it's really fucking interesting, man. So that's, that's coming.

That sounds brilliant. And I think a lot of the problem that I have with nonfiction is the, is the fact that it, I just kind of can't take it all. I mean, ironically, given what the book's about, I can't take all the information. So you're reading this book and think, I can't, I just don't, and I have suspicions with some nonfiction books. Like I don't think the God delusion needed to be that long.

That you just wanted to sell a big book, just didn't need, there's a vanity thing, okay? Richard didn't need to be that long. Give it to me in 200 pages, okay? Can't do it, do it, do it, don't do it. But I have a suspicion with, I mean, that's a narrative, a nominal narrative journey, I think is what was missing from a lot of that sort of thing. It gives it a human element, right? There's definitely, because I mean, that behind me is all of that, and all of that is just books, books and books from publishers, from people who've got books coming out, and they are awesome. Most of them are awesome, but there are some

the books with which I resonate the most are the ones that have personal elements and stories woven throughout this is why James Clea's atomic habits was so good because it wasn't just this road memorization game of how to do habits it was illustrated with examples from team gb cycling or from the Chinese weightlifting team or from a speed, or from someone that knows 17 languages or something. It was illustrated with personal examples, and James sort of brought some of himself in there, and he talked about his own journey. But yeah, one of the other things you said about the diagnostic criteria and the labeling, I spoke to Robert Ploman, who's a behavioral geneticist. So he looks at the heritability of everything that we are, right?

Everything psychologically, whether that be your dyslexia or your propensity to fart or how tall you are or how much you come, he looks at the heritability of all of these different things. And one of his problems that he has is with labels, because what you're talking about is a spectrum, a particular common collection of traits that tend to come together that elicit an outcome that we have given a label to. That's dyslexia. But there isn't a point at which you're not dyslexic and now are. You just have varying degrees of the traits of being someone who struggles with these sort of things or fucking is good at maths or whatever it might be.

And he thinks that we're going to actually start to dispense with labels. We've had kind of a surgeons of labels, and that's increasing at the moment, but he thinks that's going to taper off, and people are just going to go back to, I'm good at, I'm bad at. I'm my kid struggles to sit still in class, as opposed to my child has a ADHD and there's another one now, the boisterous, boisterous boy syndrome or some shit like that, which is like, that's just a young, that's a 13 year old boy. And the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5, there is a mental illness.

One is caffeine addiction, which is, what you were drinking a non-caffeinated drug. Correct. I haven't had caffeine this year. Have you not? No, I'm hard as fuck. That's why. Because I like to suffer unnecessarily. I'm interested in that. But another one is an adolescent rebellion disorder. That is, that's just all teenagers. I mean, I hope it's not mine in, you know, however many years time, but it was certainly me. I mean, it's just, of course, that's not, why do we need to, why does that not need to be part of our diagnostic and statistics? It doesn't really feel like it does and it removes the humanity from the thing that these people experience.

I think you're just, of course you can take, your brain is kind of full of hormones. Of course, you've gone a bit mad. Your body's shifting into this huge, like huge new form. Like, it's crazy what's happening to you. So, it will all be patient and understanding and you go mad and then we'll be nice to each other about it. I've never really understood are the necessity of these labels, but I suppose it is because, yeah, maybe we find comfort in them, or people like outsourcing kind of thing that they perhaps were ashamed of.

But now we've taken away the shame of, like, the stigma against mental health is, you know, going, going, going. When does that change into the stigma against sadness? I'm really sad at the moment. Sad is such an underused word because it feels like, oh, I've had depression. Well, that's bad. To have a day off work. I'm really sad at the moment.

Okay. Well, grow up. Chop chop. Yeah. Fucking come on. So, yeah, it's a really interesting thing to go into but again, it's one of those things that because everybody's either been diagnosed or knows somebody who has it's very people are incredibly protective over the way that it's come to be

But you know, I have an open mind in either direction Why have you stopped drinking coffee? I just wait to see if I can do it this year But, you know, I have an open mind in either direction. Why have you stopped drinking coffee? I just wanted to see if I could do it this year. So I did a thousand days without alcohol as a club promoter, just because I wanted more time and more money and more productivity and consistency and stuff. And that ended up being really good,

really good thing for me to do. Did you stop, did you end at a thousand days? Thousands of days, yeah. So I did, I've done six months and a year previously, and then decided to do, I was going to do two years, and the two years would have taken me into the middle of lockdown. And I thought breaking it during lockdown feels a bit pointless. I'll just keep going and then set a new target in the target was a thousand days. So that was good. And then I just decided to start the video. But you started drinking again.

I'm now back drinking alcohol, albeit at the most lightweight levels, I'm back to, I've regressed back to a 15 year old tolerance of alcohol. It's terrifying. Really? I stopped drinking for two years. And when I came back to it, I knocked off eight pints of Guinness. Shit, they're bad. Absolutely nothing. Really?

Yeah, in fact, it was, wow. So bizarre. Oh, dude, one beer gives me a buzz. Now, one soul, a 330 mil soul. Give me a buzz. Like, I'm sneaking it out of my dad's cupboard when he doesn't know. During lunch break from college, between AS sociology and AS business studies. Come back home and sneak a soul, because that's what the rebellious kids do.

And then caffeine just thought, I don't like, I quite like the idea of not being controlled by substance. Big fan of, yeah, of personal sovereignty and just thinking, right, okay, well, let's see what happens. Nothing has happened apart from the fact that my sleep's improved. Nothing. Nothing, I didn't get headaches, I didn't have withdrawal symptoms. How much coffee were drinking? Because I gave up coffee for about a month and my back pain was unbelievable. Back pain? I gave up coffee for about a month and my back pain was unbelievable. Back pain. I gave up. When I gave up coffee, I could hardly sit down because my back pain was so bad. Have you researched what's related between coffee and your back?

Yes, your kidneys. What the fuck is going on? Where's all our stuff? Who's taking all of our stuff? So they're kind of throbbing and expanding and contracting and going mental because you've, like you've just, yeah, yeah, there you go. And treat yourself to that, really lads. You know, we'll have lots of lovely diuretic

and lots of lovely pissing and, you know, wakey, wakey everybody. And so I think if you are going to quit caffeine, the way to do it is with green tea, pills, and then just coffee. Take it down gradually. Don't go from three London coffee shop barista coffees a day to Neil.

So I would have usually had a coffee upon waking, another potentially mid-morning, and then a caffeinated version of this, knock-o, which is 150 milligrams of caffeine. That's probably about, that's closer to two cups, I think, or one very large cup. So I was a fairly decent amount. Yeah, fairly, fairly good consumption, but I just, nothing changed. It felt like I'd been gaslit by coffee into believing that I needed to have it in my life. And between that and D-Calf,

I've just ticked over quite nicely. Okay. Yeah, well, I love the ritual of it, and adore the taste of it. You grind your own? No, I think if I had, I think that's a no-kids thing. Because if you've got, I think 15 minutes in the day to make a coffee, something's gone wrong with the children, because one of them is missing or something.

I could do it, but I like leaving the house, and I like going to my coffee shop and sitting down and reading the news and making notes on whatever. What do you order? What's your order? An oat flat white or oat latte. That's me. Oat flat white is a good, it's a solid coffee. Or a black filter. I like filter coffee as well. And if I'm going to a, if I think it's, if it's going to be crap coffee, I'd rather have black coffee. Yeah, black filters, that's exactly the same. So we do a series on

here called Life Hacks. And one of the life hacks a couple of months ago was, if you're uncertain about the quality of the coffee, just go black filter and put a little bit of sweetener in it, if you don't like it too better, and you, it'll almost always be okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas a bad hotel latte is just... Undringable. Feasably bad. Unfeasably bad. Alfie Brown, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go if they want to harass your

podcast? Ladies and gentlemen, it's on YouTube. It's also on all of the other places where we find podcasts. I don't know where you listen to yours. But yeah, check out the YouTube if you're on the YouTube and subscribe because I've got more stuff, I've got a cricket web series coming out on there soon, which if you like that sport, and me, then you're going to love it. Yeah, but I'm Alfie Brown comedian on YouTube and on Instagram and whatnot. Thanks for having me, mate.

My pleasure, man. you