THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.276 - LOUIS THEROUX

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Adam talks with British/American journalist, podcaster, and old friend Louis Theroux about Adam's Audible series Successpod (on which Louis was one of the producers) as well as great singers who can't sing, what Rosie is really thinking, enlightenment, the Manosphere and what men want from women. Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on 11 June, 2026Thanks to Diggory Waite and Claire Broughton at Hattrick and Séamus Murphy Mitchell for production support.Podcast illustration by Helen GreenPLEASE SIGN THE PEOPLE'S EMERGENCY BRIEFING PETITIONThis petition aims to get the government to hold credible national briefings from independent experts to give people clear, trusted guidance on what the risks from climate and nature breakdown mean in practice, and what we can do - both together and individually - to prepare and respond. More info HERE.PEOPLE'S EMERGENCY BRIEFING FILM AND TALK WITH ADAM BUXTON & PATRICK BARKHAM @ NORWICH ARTS CENTRE, 28 June, 2026ADAM BUXTON PODCAST LIVE WITH MAWAAN RIZWAAN @ Roundhouse, London, 5 August, 2026 (Roundhouse)RELATED LINKSTHE WAY THINGS GO (DER LAUF DER DINGE) by Peter Fischli and David Weiss - 1987 (Vimeo)MARTIAL ARTS ROBOTS DAZZLE AT THE 2026 SPRING GALA FESTIVAL - 2026 (YouTube)PYTHAGORA SWITCH IDENTS COMPILATION - 2002 to present (YouTube)Video idents and "Pythagorean Devices" (Rube Goldberg-style machine segments) from Japanese children's educational television program Pythagoras Switch (ピタゴラスイッチ).ANDREW TATE'S EMPIRE OF ABUSE by Heidi Blake - 6 June, 2026 (The New Yorker)THE MEN WHO WANT WOMEN TO BE QUIET by Helen Lewis - 14 May, 2026 (Atlantic)SÉAMUS MURPHY-MITCHELL WINS EMMY - 2024 (Irish Film and Television Network)JIMINY GLICK INTERVIEWS ARTIE LANG from The Martin Short Show - 1999 (YouTube) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

It's Adam Buxton here. As you may be able to hear, I'm not on my regular Norfolk farm track. Instead, I'm sitting in the shade at a bench in Ravenscroft Park, Tower Hamlets, East London. I'm in London to do a couple of shows with the Adam Buxton band. at Hoxton Hall. It's been quite an intense month this June, 2026, on a personal level.

There have been some very happy birthday celebrations for me and one of my children. Had some good times. Saw some old friends, sat around, played some guitar, life doesn't get any better. News-wise,

it's obviously been busy. Kea Starma resigned yesterday, I don't know if you heard. And it looks as though Andy Burnham might be the new PM by autumn, or even before. A lot of shit goes down in June. Franz Ferdinand assassinated 1914. Versailles Treaty 1919.

Invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. Operation Barbarossa in 1941. D-Day, 1944. Korean War starts in June 1950. Six-day war in June 1967. Tiananmen Square, June 1988, June 2016. Meanwhile, I am to be found eating birthday cake. Today is supposedly the hottest June day on record.

Temperatures forecast arise above 35 Celsius, 95 Fahrenheit for Fahrenheit fans. And this coming weekend, Sunday the 28th of June, I will be hosting a screening of the People's Emergency Briefing film at the Norwich Arts Centre. It is an hour-long film that brings together nine leading UK scientists and experts, presenting the latest evidence on what's happening with climate and nature, what it means for everyday life in the UK, and what can be done about it. The film also includes perspectives from a range of UK residents from all walks of life, as well as great personalities.

including Jennifer Saunders and Stuart Lee. And I still haven't seen the film, but there's a chance that I'm in it too. After the screening at the Arts Centre on Sunday, myself and acclaimed nature writer Patrick Barkham will discuss some of the information in the film with each other and with the audience. I hope I get to see and talk to some of you there.

A reminder that the aim of the People's Emergency Briefing film and general campaign is to get the government to take seriously the idea of a climate emergency and adjust policy accordingly. And there's also a link to the petition trying to achieve that aim in the description. But right now, let me tell you a bit about podcast number 276. I feel slightly self-conscious sitting here and waffling on my own with people around me. Normally I'd be on my own, just me and Rosie out in the Norfolk fields. Rosie, by the way, is doing well. I think she's in a shady spot in the kitchen with all the doors open

and some ice cubes in her dog water bowl. Anyway, yes, podcast number 276. This one features a rambling conversation with journalist, podcaster, my old friend of the podcast, and one of the producers of my audible comedy series, SuccessPod. That's Louis Theroux. We got together in London earlier this month following the release of SuccessPod for a celebratory Waffle session

in which we talked a bit about how the show came to be, played a few sketches, a couple of outtakes, and went off on various tangents in the process. We talked about improv comedy. Several of the sketches on SuccessPod were written or improvised with comedians that I met when I was a guest on one of Kyle Smith Bino's excellent live improv comedy nights. They're called Cool Story Bro with a game.

when it came to the Norwich Playhouse in early 2015. And that night I met Lola Rose Maxwell, who ended up being one of the writers on SuccessPod, as well as Emily Lloyd-Sahini and Robert Gilbert, who also improvised a few sketches, along with Kieran Hodgson, another brilliant character comedian, not in Cool Story, Bro. I had met Kieran years earlier when he was cast in one of my many failed TV pilots. He's brilliant. Myself and Louis also talked about great singers who can't sing, what Rosie is really thinking,

and Louis presented me with a Zen Buddhist koan, K-O-A-N, about chopping wood and carrying water. And of course, as I'm sure you're all aware, a Zen Buddhist koan is a paradoxical question or statement designed to bypass the rational mind and provoke a direct unmediated experience of reality. I must confess, I didn't really understand that that's what it was. I thought Louis was just giving me some random quote.

I'm not totally sure that Louis understood it was a Zen Buddhist koan either. You can judge for yourself how much of the point we missed. In the last part of our conversation, I asked Louis if he'd heard from any of the subjects of his recent Inside the Manosphere documentary on Netflix. and that led us into talking about what men want from. A woman? And I might qualify at least one of my comments in the outro, just in case my wife,

my wife, ever listens to this episode. But we began by talking about Stephen Bartlett, who went viral recently after claiming on his podcast diary of a CEO that drinking two to three glasses of wine ruined three days of his life. He attributed the cascading loss of productivity, poor sleep and missed gym sessions to a disrupted dopamine and cortisol system

as tracked by his whoop wearable device. Now, Louis did actually say that it was only one glass of wine that had caused this chaos. It was a little bit more than that, two to three, but anyway, not what some of us would consider the most massive bender. I'll be back at the end for qualifications,

links and goodbyes, but right now with Louis Theroux, here we go. How you doing, man? Good, good, thank you. Nice to be here. Yeah, nice to. I gave you a very enthusiastic. Hey, at the top, they're like a proper start rather than just a soft. I wondered if that was a new thing you're doing, because I haven't listened to the last few of your regular podcasts. Is that become a signature thing? No, not really.

Usually I do my, hey, at the very top of the podcast with Rosie. Right, that makes more sense. And then I go for the... And the room is quite alarming. Yeah. Usually I do the soft start coming in the middle of a sentence. I thought we'd started earlier when I was talking about Stephen Bartlett. All right.

What were you saying about Bartlett? I was saying that he'd gone viral because of a ludicrous clip where he talks about drinking 250 miller liters of wine. And he's saying it really, with so solemnly he's saying, and for three days I podcasted worse. Using podcast as a verb is part of it, I think too. And I was in the gym.

I couldn't work out properly. And I was suboptimal. I can't remember. Something about him, there's a sense like he was bereaved because he'd messed up so badly. And everyone thought, mate, you had, for three days, right?

For three days he was in crisis. And everyone's thinking like, you had one glass of wine. As a big glass, though. Get some perspective. Yeah. You know, it felt like a tipping point. Like, come on, the knives are out for Stephen Bartlett.

Not by me. I've got nothing but respect from all of my podcasting peers. And you've been on that show. And if I didn't, I still wouldn't tell you. Yeah. It would be bad manners. And also probably professionally awkward. And I've been on his show.

So I always notice that in the culture generally, he seems to be Marmite, as they say. He seems to divide opinion. Really? I'm only aware of the successful side of him, which is considerable. Like, he dominates, doesn't he? Like, he is up there at the top of the... He's a beast. Charts. He's an absolute monster. He is certainly someone who I was thinking about when we were doing SuccessPod, one of the people who is a genius at maxing, absolutely optimizing every aspect of what it is to make a podcast. He's pod maxing.

He is pod maxing the heck out. of everything he does. He was one of the... He was one of the first people to film that I was aware of. Well, Joe Rogan. Yes, of course. Everything starts with Rogan.

Actually, Tom Green was filming his chats before they were called podcasts, but essentially that's what he was doing. Really? Yeah, it was just sitting in his room in L.A. somewhere. Well, Howard Stern was filming them in the 90s. Okay. Well, Abraham Lincoln was getting people

to paint portraits of him while he was having relaxed chats. Well, Methuselah. Yeah. Well, before that, it was TV, wasn't it? I liked TV when it used to be like podcasts are now. Do you know what I mean? Like when there were quite a lot of shows that were just people sitting around talking. It takes you back to the kind of golden age of the chat show when it was people like

Dick Cavett in America, David Frost. There was a guy called Mike Douglas, no relation to Michael Douglas. I mean, and Parky, of course, I remember Michael Parkinson, and you'd have, you know, someone from the Black Panthers would come on, and then Ralph Nader, and then John Lennon, and then Gauvidal, Gloria Stein and Norman Mailer, like these heavyweight thinkers, Muhammad Ali, and they were just, they didn't prep it, I don't think. It wasn't like they had anecdotes charged up and ready to go,

and there was something, it felt like a discovery, like there was an improv, And that spirit infuses podcasts now because those chat shows, they got ossified, didn't they? They became well-oiled entertainment engines and something was lost. The trouble is there's now there's thousands of them. So you don't have the same sense of we're all tuning into the same thing and having a conversation about that. Well, the pressure on television is to keep everything moving so fast. So that long form aspect that's much more relaxed on those shows you mentioned, the Dick Cabot thing, you know, you could go relatively in depth.

He'd be talking to someone for 20 minutes or so. Yeah. And that's not something that you're able to do on a modern chat show. Graham Norton can't do that. He's got to keep it rolling, rolling, rolling, and there's got to be gags, and then he's going to throw to the music and all that stuff. And the tone has to be predictably entertaining and fluffy, right? It can't suddenly start talking about Gaza or whatever.

But with Bartlett, you're not aware of the Bartlett Refusniks who are out there? the skeptics. I mean, I'm not that aware of anything, really, that's going on, because I'm not on social media. And I only am aware of stuff that I actually seek out. You know what I mean? Not too much comes across my transom by accident. How are you finding your culture? Is it just recommendations and things you read in normal, like newspapers and magazines?

Yeah, so I've got my news feeds and maybe I'll come across things there. and then, yeah, lots of recommendations from friends. That's the main thing. Do you look at Instagram and X? Very seldom. No, I never look at X because I can't, if I'm not a member, right? Like I can see maybe a post, but I certainly can't click and look at the replies and things like that.

So there's no point, really. And that's been quite nice. I just don't even bother. And then Instagram, I had one thing when I was researching, something a few months ago, when I was doing success pod, and I wanted to do a parody of the kind of ads you get on there, a lot of them AI generated. And I instantly went down a rabbit hole, literally thinking that I'd been on there for 10 minutes and then I looked up at an hour of gone by.

And I was looking at videos of cargo sliding around on cargo ships in stormy. I haven't seen that, but I think I'd probably quite like to look at that. in stormy weather, like huge swells. What a mess? Shipping containers. Right. And I scrolled out and I like, oh, that's good. And, you know, apparently seemed real, like real footage.

And then there was another one of a guy being knocked off by one of these sliding shipping containers, which is bust out of its moorings. There was loads and loads and loads. And then I realized, oh, these are AI generated. Stop it. Yeah. A lot of them are just total fabrications because the algorithms figured out people love this stuff. They love the swelling seas and the big, slidey, heavy boxes. All of it is scratching some itch or other.

So there's loads of them. And then I realized there's loads of everything that is in any way interesting. Like I saw another video with a woman sitting on a sofa in her front. room and she knocks over a glass and the dog gets spooked, freaks out, runs around the room, the shelf falls down and it's just this kind of mad succession of accidents. Sounds a bit like the Laf de Dinger. The way things go. Yeah, yeah.

It's like the Instagram much more exciting version of the way things go. And, you know, which is a German art piece from the 70s, maybe early 80s where almost a Heath Robinson. And it's the kind of, it's the domino cascade, but taken to the moon with all sorts of kinetic actions, one leading to another. There was loads of Japanese videos that did that as well a few years ago. They're really satisfying. And that one, the way things go is in a warehouse. And that's obviously real. But is your point that your one?

Not real. Not real. Was it labeled? No. And it took me a while because I was watching it. And I watched it about five times or something. And then suddenly I thought, hang on a second, how is this being filmed? Why would someone be filming this?

And how have they caught this exact moment when absolutely nothing else was happening? You know, it's not in the middle of something else when something goes wrong. It's just, oh yeah, someone was just filming while Tina was reading the paper one day and suddenly all this happened. No, it didn't. It's all AI. And there's loads of other things like that with animals doing mad things. Did you look at the comments to see whether it was people saying this is AI or not? I stopped looking at the comments after a while because most comments on pretty much anything interesting video-wise are this is just AI slop, including stuff that is actually real, like the videos of the Chinese robots earlier in the year who were performing this mad synchronized routine.

And I spent a while trying to establish whether that was real or not. And as far as I could tell, it was real. but there was just so many people underneath going, this is just AI slop. So that's the thing. It's like everything like that recently that I've consumed was just looking at stuff for SuccessPod and it all made me think,

boy, oh boy, that's dangerous in there. Stay away. So did making SuccessPod open your eyes and feel like it was a holiday from your usual habits and you felt refreshed by exposing yourself to media culture? in a different way? Yeah, well, it was interesting to broaden my podcasting horizons. Like I listened to a lot more podcasts than I would normally listen to, different kinds.

What did you notice? There's way more American blokes sitting around comedians analyzing what they do and having tequila. Doing a lot of quite pointed bans. You should have noticed some apparent differences between men and women. women when you survey the podcasting landscape like the blocs of doing bans making fun of each other the women a lot of the time it's this sort of like almost cloyingly supportive atmosphere of you're safe tell me about the problems you've been having I'm thinking mainly about Alex Cooper actually she American call her daddy oh yeah that's a huge huge one. Massive. There's lots of those, but there's also lots of more laddie ones with women.

Really? Where, which we do a spoof of on SuccessPod, where they are just talking about bodily functions. Right. And it's really hardcore. Like, they're definitely in competition with the blokes for who can be most disgusting. And we've got a sketch that we recorded with, I'm going to give a shout out to some of the people who are voiced talents on SuccessPod. Lola Rose Maxwell, Emily Lloyd Saney, Ed Jones, Kieran Hodgson, Robert Gilbert and we did one with Ed Jones and myself as a couple of kind of thick, posh blokes

who are hosting a podcast called, mate, I can't believe you just done that. And Lola Rose and Emily were Bab and Boo from a podcast called Bab and Boo, Need a Pooh. I can't believe what you just done. Mate, I can't believe you just done. I literally can't believe what you just done. Oh, my God. So good. So good.

I know. And we are so lucky to be joined in the mate. I can't believe you just done that studio today with two of our favorite podcasters. I'm of course talking about the amazing Bab and Boo from Bab and Boot need a poo. Welcome. We're big fans of me. We're big fans of me.

Shut up. No, 100%. We listen in every single episode we do. Every single episode, yeah. Which one is your favourite? All of them. Say a thing that we said on one of them. Like, you know, when you are like, I can't believe you literally just done that.

Like, I actually can't believe it. I can't believe it. I literally can't believe you just done. I do know where the title of it came from when we went out. We went out. What was there? A couple of years ago. We went out a couple of years ago.

No way. We'd be like, let's just say a couple, his highness, the guinesis had been drunk. No way. So, my God. We drink as well, don't we? When are we not? I have five drinks. And basically Toby gets up and he's like, excuse me, mate, where's the Lou?

And the barman like points, I think it was left, a pointed left. And you just go to the right. I go. I go the opposite way. That's literally the way you're not supposed to go. Everyone on our table is literally just like, uh, mate, I literally can't believe he. just done that.

Can I just say? No, it's true. I don't think we've told that story on the podcast before. That's the first time. Can I just say? It's so weird for us to hear you do that life. Yeah.

Because even now, sometimes you remember when you did a poo on your hands on your feet? Yes, I did that one. And I literally, I didn't even know I was doing it. And I went, mate, I literally can't believe you just don't know.

Me, I can't believe you just done that. Me, I can't believe you just done that. Me, I can't believe you just done that. I literally can't believe you just done that. I literally can't believe you. what you just done. There's something about improv when it's done really well. I've seen in the US the U.S.

the U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. Prison's Brigade a few times. Have you ever seen them? No. But they obviously pioneered a technique that was incubated in Chicago, the Second City comedy troupe. And it was a certain style called the Harold or something. Anyway, the four of the upright citizens took it and ran with it

and then had their own theatre. in New York, then in LA, then I think maybe even other places. And whenever you went along, you were guaranteed of seeing something amazing. They had a rotating cast of performers who would come and study the improv with them and then be part of the show's recurring characters in different shows. It was always kind of amazing, like a high wire act. The Harold is a famous 25 to 40 minute long-form improv format created by Del Close and Shana Halper. Takes a single audience suggestion and uses an opener to inspire a inspire.

series of interconnected scenes, group names, recurring characters that we've together by the end of the show. And so Del Close was one of these almost legendary sort of underground figures who weren't known to the general public, but for people in the comedy community, he was a godfather. And he wasn't interested in success, but he, I think Bob Odenkirk gives him credit in his book as well. So perhaps a good person to know about. I'd love to do all that. But, you know, You know, you get to a point where you just think there's so many things I'd love to be good at. Although this year I have finally done some things that I've been putting off for a long time, although I don't know how long I'll stick with them.

Getting guitar lessons. Okay. And getting singing lessons. Okay. Which you might say is a little late after doing the album and the tour with the band. But I've still got a few shows left to go. So maybe by the time I get to latitude, my singing will have improved. Does it help?

It's early days. Is it about breathing? Yeah. It's a lot about breathing. And sort of figuring out what muscles are operating and not tensing up in your clavicular area and doing all these things and making sure I was jutting my chin out and sort of over projecting and yelling a little bit and stuff like that. And all these habits you get into that make it harder to hit the right notes. But would you say like, well, Bob Dylan maybe could have used singing lessons, but that's what made him Bob Dylan?

Or does he sing well in a different way? I was talking to Frank Black about this, the other ones. For a forthcoming episode of the podcast. Nice. But he was saying a lot of his favorite singers were, yeah, that kind of Bob Dylan style declaimer, the prophets of rock and roll, who were just more or less shouting tunefully,

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

Uh-huh. So that was the takeaway. Yeah. But maybe you have to sing. maybe you have to sing quote unquote badly in your own way. Yeah, you've got to find your voice. Yeah. Would you ever go all out completely sincere?

I'm in pain. This is horrific. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I'd love to. Would you? But I just don't think I've got what it takes. Like maybe if I went on, if I had an intensive course of psychedelic therapy or whatever and lost my ego,

and maybe I'd come out the other side of that. And I would be an incredible artist who was just. connecting left and right with everybody on a very fundamental emotional level. But at the moment, no, I mainly want to talk about shorts and things that happen in the kitchen. Hey, everybody in the modern time, they got to get themselves a podcast. I will do yours and you'll do mine. We're sorting out the problems of the world so fast.

What made you want to do success pod? Oh, okay. You already had a successful podcast. Yeah, that's true. But I was accumulating all these little sketches that were just fun to do. Like, I've always made those. Do you remember I used to have a radio show in Cheltenham? Yeah.

When I was at art school in the early 90s. And I got this gig on a local radio station. And I could fill it with whatever I wanted. But I was making these spoofs on a four track. Actually, I found one the other day. I will play it to you. A little bit of it. We asked 12 million people

what they found most difficult and depressing about life in 1993. And they all said the same thing. It's got to be scrunching up bits of paper that you want to put in the bin, isn't it? Compacting small portions of waste paper before disposing of them. That's something that always gets me down.

Oh, definitely scrunching up paper that you've got to throw away. That's right, scrunching. Yeah, we hate it. Terrible, scrunching. Well, now there's new scrunchies. Bits of paper that come already scrunched. So when it's time to throw them away,

they're already done. All you have to do is pop them in the bin. New scrunchies come in all different shapes and sizes for any occasion. So they're ready made to put in the bin. That sounded good. But that's essentially I'm doing the safe thing still. You know what I mean? Like spoof ads and spoof trailers and things like that

and I'm doing all the voices. Like that was the fun thing was layering up all the vocals. Yeah. Kenny Everett style. Yeah. But is it weird? One thing I was worried about doing SuccessPod was like, is this just going to drive people mad to hear the same voice in so many things, doubling up?

Listeners will let us know, won't they? Yeah. I mean, not for me. Okay. But also, but I do think you fertilized it with other people, I think that has, that's opened it out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a world where it would all just be you, and there's people who, Victor Lewis Smith used to do that, didn't he?

And I think it can get a little bit oppressive. Yeah, definitely. Because it's so easy as well when you're doing that to over. produce it and to and to nip all the air out of it and make it really fast, fast, fast, fast. Anyway, so I had all these bits that I would do every now and again just for fun and always thinking maybe these could go in some funny offshoot podcast. And back in 2018, I sent a load of clips to Seamus, my producer and said, what do you think about like just doing a one-off, funny episode that's all sketches and little stupid off-cuts that don't belong? in the main podcast. And he said, yeah, great.

But then we never did anything about it. Like all these things, you know, you just kick them around and there's never the right time to pursue them. But I kept on coming back to it. And then after you set up your production company, Mindhouse with your partner, Nancy, I thought, well, if I take this to Louis and Nancy, then it'll become real. And then I'll have to do it. And they'll help me do it.

And also I can get Louis' perspective on the actual. content, which I really thought would be valuable to avoid what we were talking about, to avoid it becoming too oppressive and to one note. Because when you came to me, it was this concept of what we now call the sort of self-optimization field or the world of success. It had become a thing, hadn't it? Especially for men's podcasts that they should be like, oh, you can use this, like whether it's about fitness or financial success, where to invest crypto. felt like there was potentially a controlling idea of... So the hacks and... Yeah, how to hack and live your best life.

So then it became about how do we match that up with the sketches and make it all flow. It was striking how tricky it was to get the grammar and figure out how does this hang together. Yeah. Right. Because you're mixing so many different elements. I mean, still, there was a point about a month or two

before we delivered it where I just thought, this doesn't work at all. because it's mashing together so many different tones. Like, you know, there's stuff where I'm doing all the voices, pretending to be characters, there's stuff where I'm talking to Rosie where I'm a version of myself. And Rosie is another version of myself, essentially.

But we are saying some sincere things. Wait, Rosie's what? I thought Rosie was like K-Fabe. We never acknowledged that Rosie's... Yes, I mean the character of Rosie. It's like Keith Harrison Orville. You'll ever get to a point where you tour and you bring on a Rosie, like spit the dog. Uh-huh.

No, that'd be weird because there's a real dog. Sure. So you can't do that. No. And also, the other thing is that obviously Rosie is real and Rosie is always there. That's what I was going to say, would you do Rosie without Rosie? No. If I'm talking to Rosie, Rosie is there.

But you have to say that. Why would we believe you? It would just be such a weird lie to tell, I think, to boast about that if it wasn't true. There's a famous horror film. It might even have Anthony Hopkins in it where the guy gets attacked by his ventriloquist's dummy. Yeah. Like, do you ever worry that Rosie might give vent to some forbidden part of you? Yeah, I do.

I feel like that's already happened a little bit. Really? In success pod. Because she can be quite cutting. Yeah, it's a different side of Rosie than you would hear on a typical episode of my podcast. I'm trying to get my wife back into, I'm trying to get my wife into horror films. You did two different versions. I did too.

I'm not letting that go. Oh, Jesus. Why did you do my wife? I was thinking I didn't do it right the first time. I've got to stay on brand. Otherwise, it's going to get confusing. The first one was just my wife. It's a different guy with a different blow.

A shed guy. Yeah. The other one is, my wife, Robot, boys. I'm tired. My brain's stuffing down. That's the one thing you don't want to say to your audience,

because then they get it in your head that, like, oh, he's not giving us a good show. We're not getting Max Bucks. Where if you say you're tired? We're not getting a bang for our bucks. Like, you imagine halfway through a stand-up show, you're like, I'm sorry, guys, I'm really tired. There's the one thing.

No audience. is going to be like, oh, don't worry. Just phone it in. I was thinking that maybe they might give me a break because I'm trying. But I'm just trying to be honest. Anyway, I don't know anyone who doesn't need a prop to switch into character. Like Barry Humphreys used to do Dame Edna and... Les Patterson.

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

He was the Australian Minister of Culture or something. Right, yeah. And he was very, you sort of. He had big, mad, stained teeth and he was, he just drolled a lot. There's a lot of droll everywhere. And he was sort of dissolute and big. Yeah, he needed the hat. And I need Rosie, I think.

I can't just freestyle without dog legs. So Rosie's there. And also, I hope Rosie will never die. But if that happens, I won't carry on pretending. that she's still alive in order to keep my podcast going. I think I'll have to rebrand. I'll have to pause.

I'll have to think what I'm going to do with my life. She's so central to everything now. And so it was... Are you looking at Rosie and imagining what she would be saying then? Sometimes. I mean, I think a lot of the time she's just interested in food

and she just wants to know where the next food is coming from. I mean, there's a little bit in SuccessPod where I play a short recording of my thoughts. And so I list a number of my top 10 thoughts. And they're all real kind of thoughts that I have. And then Rosie plays me a selection of her thoughts. And I thought really hard for that bit about like, what is she thinking? And mainly, I think she is thinking about being physically comfortable, like what position is best. on the sofa and maybe if I move my head up a little bit and just rest my chin on this

cushion then that'll be better and then maybe if I go over under the table it'll be a little cooler and then I want a treat I'd like a treat I'm quite hungry and if I go and stand over there they might give me one so she's thinking that really most of the time but I also do think that she thinks I'm so glad you're back. I love you. It's so nice to be with you and you know that kind of thing. Dog versions of those thoughts. You know it's I'm going to run the risk of being pedantic. I don't think animals think with pronouns. I was I did a story about dogs and it was the dog was barking. I was talking to this slightly new age at Los Angeles trainer and I said if the dog could speak now, what would it say?

He said, it would say, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. And I was like, wow, I said, I thought that that's right, isn't it? That is actually right. And because you think about, it reminds me something, I think it was a Nietzsche critique of Descartes. You know, Descartes' famous formulation, like, if you knew nothing, you didn't, excuse me, nothing you can't, you don't know if you're in a waking dream, nothing coming into your senses. You can, you can't depend on any of it. You've forgotten everything you ever knew. what do you know?

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

Thinking is happening or thinking, think, think, think, think, think, think. So in the context of Rosie, that's, is that ego as a part of, I think it's the idea that like if you imagine how you think one of Nietzsche's things was like multiple identities and that the actually the human subject can actually be like a society a bit like super ego ego id that there's an upper class or a ruling class and then there's a you know a sort of below decks sort of rowdy part of you that wants to go out and punch someone you know what I mean like all of these are organized into in other words in a simple crass sense you'd say like oh I hear voices in my head but in a more normal way it would just be, I'm in conflict with myself. Well, it's like the num skulls from Beano. Yeah, kind of. They're all working away in there. And even I think, like, you think how limited it is to say, well, what do you want?

I want, well, I want this, but I want this. And I want, you know, I want so many different things that are in conflict that the eye starts to feel like a meaningless construction. Yeah. Well, that's what happens with psychedelics is all that gets torn apart, right? Yeah. And suddenly you are, if you're taking 5MEO, DMT or whatever it is. Is that the God molecule?

The God molecule. you are blasted into a void of pure consciousness divorced from ego and a sense of self and you're just floating around in a realm of liquid consciousness. I mean like, does that mean anything to you at all? Can you even begin to conceive what they're talking about when they talk about all that stuff? Have you ever had any of those things? It's not hard to imagine, right? You imagine that being blasted into a kind of liquid ecstasy of pure radiant,

gold. I can imagine that. Or even the dream state, when you think of yourself asleep, the way in which you're kind of unconscious but conscious, is it something that I particularly want? Not that much. Not that much. Don't you think that? Do you ever wonder, though, if there's some sort of amazing egoless Nirvana on the other

side of that that would just make you a totally chilled, super dude? It'll come to me where I read it. But the quote was, before enlightenment, chopwood, carry water. After enlightenment, chopwood, carry water. Right. Life carries on, essentially. Nothing really changes.

You're never going to arrive. It's not like, oh, it's all different now. But your attitude to chopping the wood and, carrying the water. That's the thing is you are responding, whoever said that can fuck off. Because they think they're being so clever saying the same thing twice after the big thing that's happened. But it's not clever because all we are are just machines for processing things and internalizing them and reacting to them and being conscious of them and having a emotional response to them. So sorry, that's all we are. And it matters.

you can train yourself to respond differently and you can have your experience of reacting to the world altered in all sorts of different ways, either by things that happen to you or things you do to yourself. Well, you can have a healthy outlook, you can be well-balanced, but you're still going to have the same sorts of problems. It was a Freud thing where he goes on, what's the aim of analysis?

He says, the aim of analysis is to replace neurotic grief with ordinary human unhappiness or something. other words, it's not like, oh, you graduate to a different plane. You just cope with the ups and downs in a more mature and healthy way. Yeah. Well, that's what I mean, though. Like, the former you might hate chopping wood and carrying water and think it's a pain in the ass. But then something might happen to you which would change the way you think about those things in a valuable way, which actually, because of that, sort of transforms everything about those experiences. You know what I mean. So it's like chopping wood version one versus chopping wood version two are totally different,

even though you're doing the same thing. Maybe. Maybe not that different. But this is, we should have covered this in success part. We can do that, we can put this in like season two. We'll revisit like the enlightenment question. Yeah. Do you ever have a breakthrough? Most of the time when people talk about having a breakthrough, I'm thinking, no, you have it. Don't you? And when people talk about I got off the drugs and now I'm so much better, I often am thinking, you're still on the drugs. In what way?

Well, I just think that that recovery narrative feels trite and not to say it's never the case, but quite often the person's still in trouble. There is still a lot of damage. Well, but that's sort of what you just said. Yeah. Yes, they're in trouble, but now they are armed with very valuable strategies for how to... Hopefully. Or they've learned a lot of words.

Yeah, yeah. But that's the thing, isn't it? You're just learning ways to cope. And that's, you know, it's like the AA prayer. What is it again? It's give me the strength to... God grant me the serenity. We know, no, we're not going to do that.

I can tell you, we're not doing that. No one needs to hear that. The serenity prayer. God give me the serenity to cope with the things I cannot cope. with the courage to face the things I can and the wisdom to know them. No one cares. And the wisdom that know the difference, don't read it. I've done it.

I've got to read it because you said no one cares. It's so disrespectful. God grant me the serenity. Yes. To handle the things. No, to can't change. Except the things I can't change. Yeah. And the courage to change the things I can.

Yeah. And the wisdom to fuck off. To know the difference. David Bowie had that. tattooed on his leg. See, now I think maybe there was a lot of sense in it. Did he really? Yeah, you did.

Even though I don't think, well, no, I guess he was. That's up there with the if by Kipling, right? Are you dissing Kipling now? Are we like in Anna Tiali? We've wandered into like the realm of pure vacuity. I think the serenity prayer is excellent indeed. Next week we were going to go, hang in there, baby. Do footsteps.

God, why did you desert me when I only saw. saw one set of footsteps. Do you know that one? No, I didn't know. You do. What's that one? That's the one where it's the footsteps thing where it's a picture of footsteps on a beach and it goes, I saw a path of life along the strand of the beach and I saw there were times when you were beside me God. And then there were times when I was on my own and I realized it was at the times of greatest stress that there was only one set of footprints.

God, why did you desert me in my hour of great. this need. I can't believe I'm getting chills as I say this. He said, son, those were the times when I carried you. Because that's why there's one set of footprints. Sure, I understand now. He probably could have figured it out if he'd look at how much deep at the footprints are. How big? Well, you have the same size feet as God.

That's kind of coincidental. I like all that stuff. I think that's... Stop it. I think it's deep. It's good stuff, man. It's valuable. It helps a lot of people. Do you like... Do you say, help me have a post that says, don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps. I've got to get organized. Hang in there, baby.

It sounds to me like you have a fuck of a lot of unprocessed stuff that you are trying to keep at arm's length, just saying, you're afraid of this stuff because this is a big dose of truth in poetry form that you are afraid to incorporate into your so-called life. What about that? People don't like sighing. People with misophonia don't like sign. Don't they? No, no, no.

Cut that bit out. I'll keep it in to keep it real. Well, we were talking about Rosie and what's going on in Rosie's mind. Yeah. But mainly, what I was thinking about was that when you came, it was this idea of success pod. And I really like Yandrew, the character. And in my head, Yandrew was going to be maybe even hosting the whole thing, possibly. Well, it was originally Ken Corder.

It's going to be Ken Corder. Right. And Ken would be basically a wannabe Stephen Bartlett. And I saw Yandrew is more of a Bartlett. Right. Because he is more of a Bartlett, isn't he? Yeah. And I find it very funny.

And I thought, oh, it'll be a success podcast in the, you know, and Stephen Bartlett's one example. There's many others. Chris Williamson does a similar thing. Yeah, yeah. That's disrupted by that guy Rob Moore, is it? Or the disruption podcast. There's hundreds of these podcasts where people are teaching

dispensing wisdom. Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss. Huberman. Andrew Huberman. What's the Tim Ferriss one? He's widely considered the godfather of the genre, the Tim Ferriss show. What's the genre called?

It's self-help, isn't it? Yeah, I guess it would be. So then I like the idea of Yandrew as a kind of shambolic. I mean, he's a mysterious guy, right? I never really... Do you know where he's from? In my mind, he's moved around a lot of. lot. Like he went to the American school in the UAE or something.

UAE, really? I thought you say Luxembourg. Yeah, but... I get North European sort of energy, no? Something a bit Dutch. He's all over the shop. But I used to just get a lot of ads for, like, selling schemes. And... Drop shipping? Drop shipping is a big thing in the Manusphere.

Right, okay. And they... I don't even know exactly what it is. You buy things on wholesale and sell. retail, I guess. Yeah. And that was happening, about 10 years ago, that seemed to be happening a lot. And so I was getting targeted with all these ads.

And that's how Yandrew started. Because sometimes there's a person you're actually doing. Like, is there some guy out there who talks like Yandrew? I don't think so. So where is that coming from? It's being earnest, you know, it's getting close on the mic. And creativity. Creativity.

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

I think so, although by the end of doing it, he felt. There's one I do about, he meets a nutritionist guy. He starts coming to pieces a little bit. And the nutritionist tells him he's got a parasite and he loses his shit. Then it was basically me. It was starting to turn into you. I remember that one. So I like that and I thought it could be held together by more or less, you know, kind of

consensual performed interview, like in the sense of you'd be in character interviewing someone. Yeah. But in a goofy way, you wouldn't be,

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

Mrs. Merton style. Yeah, there we go. That's the template. And they used to do it on the daily show as well. Right. People knew that they were going to be

talking to a moron. Yeah. Or so I guess the other one would be a Colbert report. Right. where he played a kind of character, a Bill O'Reilly character. So we kind of proceeded on that basis for a little bit, didn't we?

Yes, we had a long list of people who would be good, Deborah Meadon, Richard Maidley, people like that. Bring them on for life lessons. Yeah. Interviewed by Yandrew. And we recorded with Adrian Childs, who was very kind and came along for an afternoon and chatted with him.

And he was really good, because it's a hard thing, I think, for someone to come in and know what's expected and how to pitch it. Because you don't want them to play along too much because then it feels like, oh, it's arch and they're in on it. But you want them to kind of be natural and normal, right? Yeah. There were some good bits from that Adrian Charles thing. Adrian, what is the one thing that every successful person needs?

I think you need the ability to work your ass off for a long period. the time. What about a phone? Because with a phone, you can call people, you can build relationships, you can make deals, you can check stocks. It's obviously harder without a phone. Send texts and emails. Yeah. Play games. Yes. Now,

you're talking now, certainly you would be needlessly handicapping yourself by not having a phone, but it's almost, there's almost a reality show there. Can I be a success in life without a phone? No. It was a really good sport. I really like that interview. I think the reason we didn't use that and didn't go down that route

was because that's quite a big single idea. It was hard to get from the interview to the sketches. Yeah. And that was partly because it sort of, well, what was the breakthrough, do you think? It seemed to need you to be on more of a journey. I think that was a thing that cut through was me being anxious about becoming irrelevant in the changing podcast landscape now that everyone's filming everything.

What was the point when you knew you had to film your podcast? Was it two years ago? It just realized everyone was watching TV on their phones and if you could film it cheaply and easily why wouldn't you film it? And then you realize you're really at a disadvantage

if everyone else is doing it and you're not. Numbers wise. Yeah. And numbers wise, in terms of having visibility on social media, which obviously is double-edged because sometimes you think, well, I'm just feeding free content onto social media

and building the platforms and maybe building my social media presence, but how many people are kind of coming back to check out whole episodes, but I think enough do you sort of have to play, well, I felt I had to play the game. I do think that to the point we were talking about earlier, there's a sense in which podcasts have become TV.

Like all those things that you went to TV for people are now getting from podcasts. Mm-hmm. Except... Not all of it, but a lot of it. Except in a kind of... Shit version. Shit, unregulated, sloppy version. Yeah.

Do you know what I mean? With a lot of really dodgy, rubbish being talked about and not fact-checked and all that kind of stuff, you know. Big time. Which is a big problem that's being accentuated by AI. Here's a great transition into asking you as a sidebar or a little bit of a tangent about the Manosphere. This is a sketch that I had that was going to be in SuccessPod

that didn't make the cut. Can't remember why. I think because there was another similar one and we just ended up with that one. But this is a sort of weird reality show spoof that I did a while back. Previously, Hey, I got the tiny underwear commercial.

Oh, my God. I know, isn't it great? Oh, it's so great. I know I'm really pleased and Michael's really pleased. Oh, Michael's been through a lot. He's very strong. He's such a strong person. He's strong.

He's so strong. He's very proud of me for having tiny underwear. I think I'm going to cry. You should cry. Go ahead and cry and get the water out of you. face, you're strong. You're strong. You're much stronger. You're so strong. You're very strong. You're even stronger than Michael. You're stronger than Michael. What the hell have you been saying about me, women's? You and I haven't spoken on the podcast about the manosphere. We've embodied it.

Have you been in touch recently with any of the, any of the guys, tiki-tocky, Nico, Myron? Not really. The big news as we speak in the Manosphere is that a huge long read has dropped in the New Yorker an investigation of Andrew Tate. Right. And obviously there's been stories about, there have been stories about Andrew Tate before, but the New Yorker is, you know, a different level of exposure and the writer's gone into a lot of detail. It's horrific.

I mean, even in the Manosphere, as awful as a lot of, of the content is Tate is a step up. I mean, the contention would be, it's not been adjudicated in a court of law, but the allegation would be that he is a serial rapist with a trail of havoc in his wake. Now, as I say, he would deny that, but the articles goes into all of that and the details are beyond horrible, which is, you know, obviously there's horrible people, but then you also join the dots with how close he is to people who are close to Trump, how much influence he has in the culture generally, but also high levels of politics.

He was defended so much by so many of those people. Yeah. And I don't know how, you know, the depth of his relationship with, say, Farage or, I know he was always friendly with Tommy Robinson, they both came from Luton. And a lot of that stuff I knew that was in the, article there was a time when we were making my film so I should say like for people who haven't seen I've I had a film on Netflix it dropped a couple of months ago it's called louis through inside the manosphere I thought I'd hoped when we went into it that we'd get an interview with Andrew Tate that never happened I had his protracted back and forth with him DMing on X and with

Tristan as well it never paid off with an actual encounter Tristan is Tristan Tate his brother yeah So we sort of had to sub in other Manosphere figures. The main one we featured is H.S. Tiki-Toki, a UK-based. Actually, he was living in Marbea mainly, but he's from the UK, from Essex, kind of musseli, looks a bit like Andrew Tate,

sort of six feet three or four. Needs to work on his calves. Needs to work on his calves, but other than that, like a kind of physically impressive, muscley guy. 23 years old, I think, 24. And he also, like Andrew Tate,

he would also say porn is for people who are weak and sick and pathetic. But he managed, or had a company that managed Onlyfans, girls, so he would make money from adult content, which is also an Andrew Tate maneuver. So to your question, yes. I haven't remained in touch.

I'm still following the culture. There's a lot going on. There's other stuff going on, always online. After the film came out, clavicular, this other influencer blew up. But it's showing no sign. You know, so the New York has paid attention, but I don't know that that will make much difference to anyone.

And clavicular, I don't know much about clavicular, but I have heard that this is someone who has lots of medical procedures to change the way he looks. He's more about, I think he might have had some cosmetic surgery. The things that you always hear, like using little hammers to break. Oh, yeah. micro abrasions on your bones to give yourself better cheek bones. A lot of it is sort of related to things that you take, not supplements, maybe supplements,

but also maybe testosterone or different drugs that you can take. And he passed out during a live stream. During a live stream, he passed out. Having taken some stuff. Had to be taken to hospital. His real name is, I think, Braden Peters and he's from Florida. He might be what, probably only 19 or 20. Oh, really that young.

Maybe 21. and I'm not sure. And he's the king of so-called looks-maxing. Looks-Maxing, yeah. But then that's the younger part of it, which you focused on in the Manosphere doc. Yeah. But then I was reading a piece by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic,

the men who want women to be quiet. And her thing is, you know, versions of this are happening in higher up, in conservative circles. And it's kind of uniting the American right. There's all these war. factions who are more or less mager or they disagree about foreign

policy or various other things but they do agree that feminism is a lousy idea and that idea seems to have more and more traction in the American right in a way that really makes you think oh this isn't just kind of ludicrous

influencer culture anymore this is actually now taking hold of something that might translate into policy for a Republican administration. And so women would be returned to being second-class citizens and people would sort of accept that. Yes. Repeal the 19th, I think, which was the amendment that gave

women the vote. I think that's part of the, those are talking points that would have been completely beyond the pale have now drifted slightly out of the shadows. I think I read that Pete Hegsef, the American Defense Secretary, is part of a church that discourages women from voting. Yeah, so Helen Lewis writes about that. Yeah, yeah, and the guy that runs that. And you hear J.D. Vance, not saying that exactly, but there's just sort of a strange, what is it?

Well, I suppose the Overton window being pulled in a certain direction. And yes, the far right, which historically you might have associated with racist or nativist views, actually the organizing principle is misogyny. It runs on an engine of disparagement of women. And as much as there are fractures, especially over Israel, everyone's on the same page about women, about the need to roll back any of the gains of feminism. And if one of your friends suddenly sincerely started expressing that point of view and saying, you know what, society is in the trouble that it is, partly because gender roles have become so confused by feminism and women wanting a load of things that actually aren't in their best interests and are

not in the best interests of society. How would you talk to that person, assuming you didn't just walk out? What would you say like to answer some of those ideas? I suppose the first thing I'd want to acknowledge is that it's okay to think that men and women aren't the same. I mean, it feels strange that that might be considered controversial, but I think perhaps to some people, maybe that does feel controversial. Or even starting from the premise that men and women are exactly the same and should want all the same things and behave broadly the same way.

So it'll be looking to find that commonality. I don't want to do a disservice to my parenting or to my mom, especially. I was raised by feminist mom. I think there was a part of me that grew up thinking that, oh, men are like, quote, quote, quote, women are like, quote, unquote women, because boys are given action men to play with and girls are given dolls, right? And I no longer believe that. Nurture. Yeah. Rather than nature.

That whole nurture, like gender is a construction. Yes, it is to an extent, but there are also biological differences. So I suppose I'd try and start from a basis of finding some common understanding. But then in the end, you know, it really depends what exactly they were proposing. If they're saying that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, I don't know, I don't know quite what you do with that. Myron Gaines, one of the people that was in the Manosphere dock, who got dumped, right, during the dock? At the end, we put up a title card saying he's been left, or they have separated. by his girlfriend Angie.

He now has, according to Amazon, a book coming out called Why Women Deserve Even Less. Yes, it's a sequel to the first book, Why Women Deserve Less. It's generous to call it a book. I've read it. It's a pamphlet. Okay. It looks like he might have spent a rainy afternoon writing it. It's got 161 five-star reviews.

Does it? Only. It doesn't have any other ratings, other than. than five stars. It says, your biology still screams, pursue women, get laid, build a family. But women no longer need men for money, protection, attention, or even company algorithms and digital dopamine do it better, cheaper and drama-free. Why women deserve even less is the updated no-b-sreality check. It exposes how AI, porn-only fans, sugar platforms and tech have made men more optional than ever. It kills the last of your illusions and arms you to stop wasting time,

money and decades of your life. This isn't hate, it's math, it's survival. But you sort of think like, well... Interesting. And you know what sugar platforms are? No, what sugar platforms? That's platforms like Seekingarrangement.com where young attractive women who need money can meet older guys who have money and sex isn't promised or even necessarily part of the equation but it might happen and they just go out and so it's a sugar daddy basically a sugar daddy arrangement interesting isn't it that he's sort of making a similar critique than the one we might make which is that oh well the platforms and and the digital incentives are distorting aspects of how men and women interact so What's he proposing as an alternative then?

It's just, the book is a wake-up call. This is how things are. So what are you supposed to do about it? Just shut women out of your life and stop thinking about them. That's Mugtow. That would be a Mugtow response. You know about them? Remind me?

Men going their own way. Oh, yeah. Which is opt out. It's almost like sexual segregation. Like, basically if you're blackpilled, you'd be like, there's no future in a world where actually women can find whatever they want, either by making money online or by finding super alpha guys, 5% guys, then the rest of the men should just give up and not have anything to do with women

just exist in their own male-only bubble. That's obviously quite dark and extreme. I don't know exactly what Myron's going to say in his new book pamphlet. I suspect it will be along the lines of women have been given an inflated idea of their own value by being incentivized, especially attractive women, by being incentivized by likes on Instagram and similar platforms, and they're being rewarded for being sexually liberated, if you like, and it's a losing game for guys.

I think he'd probably advocate a trad, a more traditional arrangement. Yeah, which that's a whole other movement. Find a woman's got no social media following, who stays at home, makes he's. sandwiches. Make a sandwich is a big thing. I don't know why it's almost like a meme. Right. Find a woman who's going to stay at home, make you sandwiches and never go out without your say-so and definitely not be on social media. Sounds a little bit like my wife.

Well, that's the thing is that there's lots of women who do like that. And so what a lot of these Manosphere figures are in a kind of digital ghetto in which their idea of what a woman is is basically a very specific kind of Instagram model. And if they don't get that, then they feel they've been shut out of the whole playground. Well, partly that, but partly they're just, all their generalizations are like, this is what women are like. And you're like, whether or not it's good or bad, that's only, it's not true for all women. Right.

That's true for, because they're living in Florida and they're all, they themselves are active on social media. So they've got a self-selecting sample of women who are basically, going to yacht parties and going to nightclubs and buying a table and, you know, hanging as a coterie of attractive women, making a lot of money, getting clout out of playing up to certain stereotypes of femininity. So you're like, well, that isn't, you know, in their world, you like, imagine if they met Marie Curie or whoever or Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Like, it would blow their minds. You know, the idea that, oh, you know, a woman can have. value that's not to do with how many likes they're getting on their Instagram feed, but for whatever reason they've chosen not to look at any of that. Yeah, I mean, the way I interpret all that is just through the lens of hating, I hate social media so much. And I just think that's part of what you get if you are a society that values being on social media so much is a totally distorted idea of what's worthwhile in a relationship.

You know, and none of these people are talking about, I think we both met our wives because we became friends with them, right? We didn't get, we didn't sort of see them in a nightclub and go, look at that hot woman, I'm going to conquer her. You know, it's not, you get to know people and you have conversations and you're into the same stuff or you make each other laugh and then you, a relationship forms. And, you know, it's just a small, friendly association that turns into something else. And that doesn't seem to feature anywhere in all of these things. It's all about like, oh, these bloody, sexy women won't even look at me. Obviously, social media is an insecurity generation machine, right? And it's creating this sort of anxiety that life's happening on the other side of the screen.

The expression I heard is it encourages you to compare your insides with other people's outsides. So you're like, well, I don't feel like that. And here's people with this curated lifestyle of partying with champagne and fast cars. And there you are. I don't know, lying in bed or wherever you happen to be thinking, why isn't that happening for me? So that's part of it. And making the Manosphere film, it was a realization more than anything that this is a sales grift.

This is an attempt to upsell fans. Like people who've come to look at the content and enjoy spicy. comedy kind of bits or, you know, because a lot of it is someone like HS going down saying cheeky rude things, sometimes horrible things to women out in Marbeau or elsewhere. He's capable of being quite funny. Like he obviously hasn't got his hundreds of thousands of followers without a degree of charm. And also having moments where he is self-aware and where he realizes that this isn't the best way to live.

Yes. Or I don't know. I don't know if they'd go that far, but knowing that actually he's compromised his morality in certain respects in order to become rich and famous. But I don't think he would necessarily regret those decisions. And then so he gets this huge following on social media and then you believe in him, you think he's cool and fun,

and then as one of his fans, you then buy one of his fitness programs, or you subscribe to his app, or you subscribe to one of his only fans' goals that he's managing. So in the end, it's all incentivized by the possibility of them making an income. In the article, I was listening to it in the New Yorker, and they suggest that Andrew Tate, after he was kicked off YouTube and a couple of other platforms, he was paid $6 million a year to do content for Rumble.

Six million? Six million dollars a year for a certain amount of getting. guaranteed output, like not a massive amount. Like, I don't know, like whatever it was, a few streams during the week and then some streaming at the weekend and various amount, a number of hours of live shows. And that content would be him just wanging on about. Just talking random stuff probably with his brother Tristan, talking to guests. So a broadcasting contract.

I just, I was really, even having made the film, I was like, well, I didn't, I wouldn't have expected it would be six million. And the platform, Rumble, which is a kind of gloves off version of YouTube. where the content moderation policies are a lot more flexible. You can put almost anything up short of incitements to violence, I think illegal sexual content. Other than that, there's a huge amount of latitude. Rumble has apparently been invested in by, among other people, Peter Thiel,

who's the head of Palantir and the mentor to J.D. Vance. Right. And was one of the co-founders of Facebook and PayPal, I think. Which again, I hadn't realized that either. Now, there's a whole other question about to what extent should Rumble be more moderated. Well, he's a big free speech fundamentalist, right? Teal, yeah. Presumably.

I mean, based on that, you'd have to think he was. I mean, I mainly know him because of his, A, as a tech baron who pulled for Trump very early on. Yeah. In 2016, when most of Silicon Valley was not in Trump's corner. But B, that for some time he's expressed at best ambivalence, and sometimes outright hostility to the idea of democracy. Oh, yeah, okay. And encourage people to do things like Seastead,

build their own sort of extra national, outside national borders communities on artificially constructed islands that would have their own sovereignty. Is that a bit like Curtis Yarvin? Is he called Yavn? I think Curtis Yarvin might be even further to the right, but yes, he's coming from a similar ideological idea, yeah. pro monarchy.

That the president should be like a tech CEO. Yeah. And hence basically monarchical. But when I say like, sometimes I find myself saying, oh, that's one of those free speech guys. And it sounds, you kind of sound like you're dismissing the idea of free speech in itself. Obviously, everyone wants free speech. And that's a nice thing to aspire to. But it's obviously I'm talking about people who have kind of weaponized that.

concept in order to just say whatever they want in a totally unhelpful way yeah it's dark it's very dark wow we have really skidded around from all sorts of into different areas we were like the sub basement of a sub ramble we were three or four floors down but listen thanks for coming in and chatting and also thanks for everything that you did with success pod helping me get it made and assemble the team, Lucy Topping, the producer and Seamus and everybody else who worked on that, Ben Partridge, who wrote on it and my guests, Kathy Burke, Sam Campbell, Gus Khan, Jessica Knappett, Ramesh Ranganaathan and yourself. And Jessica Knappett also was such an important part of helping me out with it. Early on, she came in and did a few days in a writing room

with Lola Rose Maxwell and Ben Partridge. And they can control. some really good ideas. So I'm so grateful to all of them. And also I feel like I want to shout out Kid Clava, this guy who sent in some stuff for one of our me and Joe's Christmas shows. And I met him that way. And he's been great, like helping me out with the music, the theme music and so many of the other bits in there. Olga Reed, who was the mixing engineer, who mastered the whole thing. She was fantastic. Alex Port Felix and Jonathan Hux. and these are just Francesca Bassett, Aaron Fellows, Sam Bryant. I should mention as well, Jamie Demetriou and Tash Dimitriu.

They helped out in very early days of development, helping me try out ideas, as did Julia Davis and Tash's friend, Daniel Barker. Anyway, I'm so grateful. Shamous Murphy Mitchell. Shamus Murphy Mitchell, I've mentioned Seamus. I thought I wanted to mention him. Sure. Seamus, of course.

He's your secret, not secret, but he's your wingman. Yeah, he's been so important to my life. He's just so eminence gris. Yeah, he's so busy now. He's like a really senior guy in Netflix. Right, working on the Letterman show. Can we say that? He's not doing Letterman anymore, isn't he?

No, he's now higher up at Netflix in the US. So he bestrides the world. That's pretty cool. How long have you been working with him? since bug the TV show, which was 2012. So 12, 14 years. How well is he known to your audience, do you think? Oh, I thank him at the end of every episode.

Yeah, there's a name, but do they have a picture in their head? He's quite an impressive figure of a man. Yeah, he's very tall. He's probably 6'4. Something. And he's sort of, well, he's got elegant facial hair at various times. Yes, he had something that was a little bit Hitler-y in the moustache department.

Well, I wouldn't put it like that. He used to. It was like a, yeah, a toothbrush mustache. Yeah, yeah. No, he's cool looking. Well, you can see a picture of him when the Letterman show, my next guest, won a Emmy, I think, or something. Yeah? Yeah.

There's a picture of him on stage. We need to ride those coattails. Yeah, man. Right? I'm already in the Netflix hen house, but surely, shame. Shamus can get you in. Do I want to go in? Well, I've got to perform well on Audible before we get to the hen house.

So if you're listening to this and you've listened right the way through and you still haven't heard Success Pod, come on. Help a guy out. Please. Give it a listen. I think you'll enjoy it. I'm happy with it. You've got a very tired old man. The main thing is he's just tired.

He's trying hard. I doesn't want to talk to my dog. And I really like the serenity prayer. And I just think that that's the way you should do things. And anyone who doesn't like that stuff and keeps talking about Nietzsche is making things needlessly distressing. Distressing, pretentious, aloof. But why not just, I mean, he's tired. Don't you get it?

And even if it isn't good Well, of course it isn't that good Do you know how tired he is? All right. So yeah, no, okay, yeah, it isn't maybe not the best show. He isn't sleeping well. I was going to cut the bit with me saying I'm tired out. I'm ill.

And then you fixated on it. Has no brilliant performer ever said that before? nap. All right, I'm going to have about that. Continue. Adrian, let's talk about your column for The Guardian. You have enjoyed great success with... It doesn't feel like that to me.

It feels like everyone's taking the piss, but I'll take whatever I can get. It is a satirical column. It sort of tries to be funny. Often people think I'm being a satirical. I'm actually playing a straight bat. So, look, if anyone can read to the end of anything, I'm happy. These are some of the headlines.

I thought it was weird to have a favourite spoon. Then I realised I wasn't alone. I absolutely stand by that one. We can go to the moon, so why can't we stop my glasses sliding down my nose? That's true. I felt that very strongly. Perhaps I've got a poorly shaped nose,

and it's a ball-ache wearing glasses, certainly was when I was a kid. I do think if your balls are aching, you're wearing them wrong. Yeah, possibly. This is an idea for a column. Which of my toes could I not live without? It isn't the one you think. That's right.

That's a good one. What do you think? I'm assuming, assuming the little one plays above its weight and obviously the big toe's important, I'm going to go through the toes three and four. I reckon I could probably sever those and still walk.

The column is writing itself. Yes, it is. Hey, welcome back. Podcasts to Ravenscroft Park, East London. On a beautiful day, a hot day. It's like New York out here. Clang. Ooh, look, I've just found 11 pence.

That's good, isn't it? Nice. I can buy 11 mojoes. So that was Louis there. Chatting to me, very grateful, as ever, to Louis for making the time. At some point, I feel like I'm due a proper, normal podcast sit-down session with me doing more of an interview with Louis. But that moment never seems to come around. Anyway, it was nice to catch up with him a little bit.

Oh yeah, the thing I wanted to qualify, from our manosphere discussion, though, was when I said Louis and I didn't meet our wives by saying, ooh, look at that hot woman in a nightclub, I think I said something like that. Instead, we sort of just giggled our way into a cozy friendship and then into a marriage.

Made it sound a little bit. Antiseptic, obviously, there was a lot of raw, powerful attraction between myself and my beautiful wife. And Louis and his beautiful wife. wife, they are alarmingly hot women of the kind that any member of the manosphere could only dream of being rejected by. That's what I've written here in my notes. And now as I'm reading it out, I'm thinking maybe my wife wouldn't appreciate that qualification. Okay. In the links for today's

podcast, let me tell you that as well as a link to that People's Emergency Briefing film and talk with myself and Patrick Barkham at the Norwich Arts Centre this coming Sunday, the 28th of June. I really hope some of you will be able to come along to that. You will find a link to the live podcast that I'm doing with Marwan Riswan at the Roundhouse on the 5th of August, 26. Don't forget to book your tickets for that. The only live podcast that I will be doing this year. There's a link to The Laf de Dinger, The Way Things Go, the film by Peter Fishley and David Weiss. from 1987, which is essentially an epic, rude Goldberg machine

constructed in a warehouse out of bits and pieces of kind of industrial equipment. It's really good. My children used to enjoy watching it when they were little. And I felt good about it, because I thought, this is good. I'm glad you're watching that. It's better than some of the other dog shit

that I allowed them to watch. Also another thing that kids might probably enjoy, and adults, unless they are outraged by the implications of the thing, is the film of the martial arts robots doing an amazing performance at the Spring Gala Festival in China. China earlier this year that I mentioned briefly with Louis, that as far as I can tell, is real, not everyone agrees. also you'll find links to the piece about Andrew Tate's Empire of Abuse by Heidi Blake

from the New Yorker earlier this month and Helen Lewis's piece, the men who want women to be quiet from the Atlantic, I think maybe both of those are behind paywalls, I'm not sure, although you might be able to read them as a free article before being asked to subscribe. There's also a link to Seamus winning his Emmy

if you want to see what Seamus. looks like back in 2024. And as a link about absolutely nothing, but it's totally joyful. Jiminy Glick, played by Martin Short, interviewing comedian actor Artie Lang. You don't need to know who Artie Lang is. I think he was in Norm McDonald's show

at the point he was being interviewed by Jiminy Glick. But anyway, Jiminy Glick gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that he doesn't know who Artie Lang is. and Artie is a good sport about it, but... Oh my God, it made me laugh. Umbridge. I've been watching a lot of Jiminy recently after watching the Netflix documentary about Martin Short,

which I really recommend. Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks very much to Claire Broughton and Diggery Waite from Hattrick for additional editing and production support. Much appreciated, by the way, speaking of Diggery. Last week, he and I recorded the QRawton. Q and a session. Thank you so much if you contributed questions for that. We only covered a handful, so those questions will keep us going for a few more sessions after that. We're hoping to do them

fairly regularly, I think, in the next few months. The first one will appear for everybody to listen to in a few weeks' time, two or three weeks. Thereafter, you will have to become a Patreon supporter if you want to listen to those. Q&As. But the Patreon thing is only a source of bonus content. Everything else about the podcast will be available to everybody for free as normal. Thanks very much indeed to everyone at Acast for all the hard work they do dealing with my sponsors. Thank you to Helen Green for the beautiful artwork. I just saw a picture of the unabsorbent tea towel that she designed and I will look into getting them made available via my website in due course. But thanks most of all to you for listening right to

the end. Sending in all those nice questions, really much appreciated. One of the comments that was sent in for the Q&A was from someone who said, please don't call them creepy hugs. I mean, they're not meant to be creepy, obviously, because I don't know if you realize, but they are, it's audio only. I'm not actually, there's no actual physical contact, so it's not as creepy as it could be. But it's only a joke. Anyway, look, come here for a sincere, non-creepy hug if you'd like.

Yeah, how you doing? Good to see you. People are looking at me, like, what's that guy doing? Hugging a microphone in the middle of a park. I'm just doing my job. Until next time, we share the same hour-all space. Go carefully. And, uh, you know, for what it's worth,

I love you. Bye. That was almost more annoying.