THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.281 - DYLAN MORAN

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

Adam rambles with Irish stand-up comedian, writer, and actor Dylan Moran about why he hates facts, chronic pain, what it means to be a man of advanced middle age in the 2020s, how many gummies is too many, music and why he thinks our reliance on tech and online culture is fostering a false sense of urgency, constant judgment, and digital dementia. Plus Dylan plays one of his songs on the guitar even though he can't play the guitar.Visit the ADAM BUXTON PODCAST PATREON PAGE for previously unheard interviews, Q&A episodes, Rosie pics and videos and other odd and sods.SEND IN PATREON JINGLES AND QUESTIONSSee pics, links, jingles, videos and more on ADAM'S WEBSITESUCCESSPOD - 2026 (listen for free with a trial or subscription on Audible)Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on 18 September, 2026Thanks to Diggory Waite and Claire Broughton at Hattrick and Séamus Murphy Mitchell for production support.Podcast illustration by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSLOOKING FOR TROUBLE - Dylan Moran 2026 European TourDYLAN MORAN - MONSTER (Stand up show) - 2004 (YouTube)DYLAN MORAN FAVOURITE FILMS (SBS Guest curator) - 2023 (YouTube)HOW TO STOP AI FROM TURNING YOUR BRAIN TO MUSH - 2026 (BBC)HOW DO YOU WANT ME Season 1, part 1 - 1998 (YouTube)A FILM WITH ME IN IT Directed by Ian Fitzgibbon - 2008 (YouTube)DYLAN MORAN ON PLAYING PIANO (Tommy Tiernan Show) - 2024 (YouTube)AI SITCOM 'NO BIG DEAL' ZERO STAR REVIEW - 2026 (The Guardian)THE TINY TILCAYO CAT - 2026 (Smithsonian online magazine)METRONOMY - THE LOOK (OFFICIAL VIDEO Directed by Lorenzo Fonda) - 2011 (YouTube)HALL & OATES - I CAN'T GO FOR THAT (NO CAN DO) POMO REMIX - 2017 (YouTube)ARVO PÄRT - SILENTIUM - 1977 (YouTube)THE FORMULA by Malcom Gladwell - 2006 (The New Yorker) 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. It's Adam Buxton here Reporting to you from a Norfolk farm track

In early October, 2026, It is a beautiful day I mean it really couldn't be nicer And I'm out here with one of the best dogs Of all time She's called Rosie How you doing Rosie? Don't mind me sharing your pants with the listeners, do you Rosie?

That is cheap, tasteless and defensive And I'm going to ignore it Quite right. Oh, it's nice breeze. We're actually trudging through a nice undulating field today. Rather than the regular crunchy track, which we might join a bit later. It's very still quiet today. It's like jet rumble over in the distance.

Now, before I tell you about today's guest, a very quick reminder of the podcast Patreon page. There's a new Q&A episode, going up on Wednesday this week with me talking to Diggery and answering questions and playing clips related to... The right control of it, cork!

That'll mean something to some of you and nothing to others. I also talk about my recent theatrical adventure in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. And there's questions about get-down services, Robin Hitchcock, bin jingles. There's a message from someone who started listening to the podcast while in prison serving time for a climate protest. And I tackle the vexed topic of Taskmaster. You can hear all that by signing up to the Patreon using the link in the description of today's episode, where you'll also find the address to

submit questions, contributions, stories, voice notes, whatever you want really, for future Q&A episodes. And of course, as well as those Q&A episodes, Patreon subscribers will have access to previously unheard conversations with so far, the likes of Louis Theroux, Patrick Radankeith, Jamie Demetriu. And coming up in a couple of weeks, my old friend, and sing director, Garth Jennings, that's a good one. But right now, let me tell you a bit about my guest for podcast number 281, the Irish stand-up comedian, writer and actor, Dylan Moran. Ooh, turning the corner into a beautiful warm breeze.

Morin facts. Dylan William Moran was born in 1971 in Navan, County Meath, in the northeast of Ireland, where he grew up in a secular household, at a time when the vast majority of the local population would attend Mass every Sunday. Dylan attended St. Patrick's Classical School, alongside future comedians, Hector O'Hiohohoiogne, and Tommy Tiernan. After gaining his leaving certificate and quitting school at 16, Dylan, has said that his next few years were spent unemployed, reading, drawing, drinking, and writing

bad poetry. At the start of the 1990s, trips to Dublin's comedy cellar on South Wicklow Street to see comedians like Ardalo Hanlon and Barry Murphy perform, strengthened Dylan's resolve to try stand-up himself. At 21, he moved to London, where he gigged hard and honed his material and in 1993, he won the So You Think Your Funny Award at the Edinburgh Festival. Going on to win the Big One, what was then known as the Perrier Award in 1996, aged just 24. The only other comedian to have won the award so young was Sean Hughes in 1990. After landing a starring role alongside Charlotte Coleman in Simon Nye's BBC sitcom,

How Do You Want Me, in 1990? Dylan broke through to an even wider audience in 2000 as the creator, co-writer and star of the acclaimed Channel 4 sitcom Black Books in which he played the Comudgeonly Bookstore proprietor Bernard Black alongside Bill Bailey and Tamsin Gregg. More recently, in 2022, Dylan appeared alongside Morgana Robinson in the BBC sitcom Stuck, an offbeat meditation on relationships and midlife online.

Onwi, created and written by Dylan. Dylan has also popped up in quite a few films, including Sean of the Dead, Notting Hill, Run, Fat Boy Run, and Calvary. That's a great film, Calvary, although it did traumatise me. I think I saw it back when I used to smoke jazz cigarettes and it really got into my head in quite a disturbing way. And in 2025, Dylan made his Shakespearean debut playing Touchstone the Fool in Ray Fines's production of As You Like It at the Theatre Royal Bath. All right, it's the crunchy track. My conversation with Dylan was recorded face-to-face in London in September this year, 2026, and he had a large, wheelie suitcase with him, because after we spoke, he was leaving to start looking for trouble.

his ninth stand-up tour, currently playing across mainly Eastern Europe, before arriving back in the UK at the end of October. There's a link for dates and tickets in the description. But before Dylan caught the Eurostar, we had a good, spicy, properly rambling chat, touching on topics that included why people should care less about facts. That was sort of part of a theme that ran throughout the conversation, and which got Dylan enjoyably animated

about the value of disengaging, I suppose, from the expectations of the modern tech and information-driven environment and media escape. Currently, I am at least still attempting to be accurate when I can be about facts. So for fellow fact fans, Dylan's appearance on Mark Maron's WTF podcast,

mentioned early on, took place in December 2012. And Marin interviewed Obama first in 2015. We talked a bit about AI. Have you heard of AI? Artificial Intelligence. I think it's a fun thing to chat about. All right, calm down. And I asked Dylan if he had seen the YouTube sitcom No Big Deal, which was written by a human, but had visuals and character voices generated by artificial intelligence.

And there is a link to the Zero Star Guardian Review. for that sitcom in the description. We talked about what it means to be a man of advanced middle age in the 2020s, during which Dylan used the word recrudescence, which I had to look up after we spoke. It means the sudden return or re-emergence

of an undesirable condition after a period of quiet or rest. We also talked a little about Dylan's experience of chronic physical pain as well as also waffling briefly about psychedelic drugs, we also talked about music, and Dylan played me a couple of his songs on the guitar, despite not being able to play the guitar.

By the way, the company that created a program used by major record labels to predict which songs would become hits, which Dylan refers to, is called Platinum Blue Music Intelligence, the New Yorker piece which mentions it, which Dylan read, was written by Malcolm Gladwell back in 2006. Link in the description. But we began with Dylan eyeing my guitar. And while I was plugging in mics,

he asked if I'd been enjoying playing live with the Adam Buxton band, formed of various members of the band Metronomy, who it turns out Dylan is a big fan of. I told Dylan that I had absolutely loved playing live with them, but I admitted that there had been a few times when I could hear that what I was playing, especially on the guitar, could do with a little improvement. Back at the end for a bit more waffle, but right now with Dylan Moran.

Here we go. I could hear that it wasn't good. Do you genuinely agonized musically, like how good about you are? Yeah, I want it to be good. I don't want it to be just like, oh, look, this... When are you going to give that shit up? I mean, don't we have to give that up in a way? Well, that's what Stuart Lee said.

Like, I did a show. at the end of the road festival. Yeah. And then the next morning he was wandering around and he said, oh, yeah, saw a bit of your set. He said, have you got that out of your system now? With the music. Yeah.

I don't mean get it out of your system. I mean, stop worrying about being good. Oh, okay, right, right. That's what I mean. Keep it in. Stop worrying about being good. Yes, I mean, yes, that's the next project, is to relax and shed a few anxieties and a few fears.

But that's work in progress. Yeah. well it always is yeah yeah how you doing i'm good i'm good i'm nervous you know but i'm good nervous about doing this tour yeah i'm not nervous is we're recording by the way oh yeah that's all good yeah um nervous is maybe not the part is not the perfect word i'm excited i'm i'm amped i suppose that's better amped is better amped and full of um energy waiting to be spent you know yeah it's kind of burning a hole in me I suppose a bit how long has it been since the last? I don't know I don't know I'm very bad at time

questions okay all time questions I'm really bad including the future and the past I can tell about what happened but when it happened that's another story will you pull the microphone yeah closer towards you there you go there's headphones there if you want I don't know that I've ever done a podcast no you did Mark marron oh I did Mark marron yeah which was a really good one Well, you know, I heard that back. I think it was last year or something. And I thought, God, almighty, I'm so depressing.

I mean, really, like I was like a truck just rode up saying, you want your depression, it's all here. He loves it, though. That's his safe place. Yeah, yeah, the downbeat strove. Yeah. I think within five minutes you were on to pedophilia in the Catholic Church. Yeah, in the Catholic Church.

Yeah, well, you know, that's covered then, okay? Yeah, well, I was going to get on to that later. But, no, it was good. it was a good talk. Do you remember where he was? He was in his garage, was he? Mm. It was in Silver Lake, is it?

Yeah. And it was... And was that before or after he'd interviewed Obama? Oh, way, way, way before. Was it? I don't know. Do you know something? It could have been quite close around that time.

Yeah, I think it was around that time. It probably was. Like I said, time questions. But it was great, yeah, because I remembered I'd just got the hang of L.A. What that is? Because before then, I'd been a few times, and it was just this huge blur of... everything that is alien to us from this side of the Atlantic, you know? And then you break L.A. down into villages and you realize, oh, they are just people living in this crazy place.

Yeah, that's right. And Silver Lake's very nice. Yeah. And he was very good, obviously. He knows exactly what he's doing, super confident. It was his world. And he's very good. I remember, do you listen to podcasts? I do, but I listen to them for the wrong reason. What's that? Well, I was listening to them for a while there to get a handle on what are people, listening to now that our media escape has changed so much. Like the way I was getting my news, the way I was getting my whatever I was listening to had changed. You know, I think like a lot of

comics I suffered from ingesting way too much news. Just to kind of be hearing the noise, the data, the signals, whatever's going on out there in the trenches, what are people up to? What's that rattling people, you know? And that's fine. With legacy media, you can kind of turn that on and off. And then you had rolling news. And I remember rolling news kind of coming in, that CNN development, where that's kind of the beginning of don't screwling really where you had the cable news, you know. And because when I was a kid, I wanted to be, I had a romance about being a newspaper man, you know.

I love that idea. Right. Being a journalist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As a kid, I thought it was a really romantic kind of profession, you know. And writing about current affairs? Yeah, because that's what journalists in movies did. They broke stories and they got into trouble

and they had to keep quiet and have secret meetings. I thought, great, I'm ready. Anyway, but to go back to the media thing, you know, like, I started listening to podcasts recently because of them because the new things had changed so much especially around the Brexit period

here in Britain and you know the incredible range of what's out there and because it all arrived at once if you like the legacy media was established over centuries the micromedia one

has appeared in a few years and so all the characters and all the pissing on territory and the claiming of space and the voices being distinct from other voices and what thrives in the jungle of voices establishing itself

and of course everything has to push everything else out of the way. So you might get five instances of, you know, there's a particular kind of podcast where you get two bolt-headed blocs opposite one another, elbows on the table, biceps bulging, and one of them was like,

and then I chopped off his outfit, and he tried to jam out in the window, but I want to really sit far to him. And then the other one will lean to everyone go, right, but I'll use psychopath. And that's one, okay? That's like one tier. What's that one?

I want to listen to that one. There's a few of them. And then there's the dweeby men together, They're usually two of them who are pathologizing women and then turning their heads to Iran because they're ready to deal with that one now. That's generally American. Often American, yeah.

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

often. I don't know that there are that many people listening because after seeing Louis Manusphere doc, I did look up some of the podcasts that some of the people in that dot were actually doing. And I looked at some of the numbers they'd racked up on YouTube and individual episodes. It wasn't like millions at all. It was like 30,000 or something per episode. Okay. I don't track that stuff. I have no idea, but there's a lot of it around. Yeah. And then there's a lot of ones with blokes in baseball caps and they're sitting there on couches and they've got the big armatures

with the microphones on them swung in front of them and they've all got laptops so they're just checking everything as they go along. Yeah, that's right. So you're reassured by the fact that they've got their hands right there on Google if you need it. Yeah, I mean that's essentially what I'm doing here. I've got my computer open in front of me. I've got my hat on. It's not a baseball cap.

But what is there to check? You just want to be able to have factoids at your fingertips and sound knowledgeable. So it wasn't the promise of podcasts that you were going to get a conversation that wouldn't be mediated by media if you like in the way that it normally is because, you know, it was two people at a desk. Yeah. That was the idea, right? Which is a really attractive idea.

It's a fantastic idea. But the specter of people correcting you afterwards. Is ever present, yeah, especially in the, I mean, I'm not on social media. But why don't we talk about things that can't be corrected? Well, sure, absolutely. And of course, you can, the thing that I, sometimes do is like I'll go in afterwards and I'll drop in a addendum fact-checking Santa. Yeah.

And fact-checking Santa will come in and he will correct whatever factors being mangled. But this fact thing. Yeah. You're not happy with that. No, I'm not because it's part of a particular kind of outfit armory that's developed for the modern man fairly recently. You know, okay, I've got my right opinions, I've got my facts, I've got everything before walk out the door. It's bollocks. It's absolute bollocks. And those guys, a lot of those dudes,

especially the guys in pairs, shuffling their data points and so on and then, you know, pivoting to the next issue. I mean, talk about having romantic ideas about journalism that I had when I was a kid. These guys are living it. They really think they're at least acting out what that, what that is in their, in their minds. They're showing, it's a fantasy. It's, you know, they're not doing anything. They're marching around their own little room in their minds, you know. True. And in the process, and I'm speaking for myself here, they are getting a case of digital dementia. I now am noticeably worse at being able to recall anything, any facts. Even just like the names of films I've seen recently, it's just much, much harder.

And I was thinking the other day about a film I watched the other day with Sasha Barron Cohen in it on Netflix, where it's like a gender reversal thing that he's done. And I was talking about it to a friend. I was like, do yourself a favor. See this film. It's pretty strong stuff. And I couldn't remember what the name of it was at all, even though I'd only just seen it a few weeks ago.

Ladies first, by the way. Oh, I see. Okay. Oh, he's done a transgender thing? No, it's not transgender. It's a bit more like the Mel Gibson film, What Women Want. Oh, okay.

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

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

Yeah. So suddenly women are all sexist and mean and yobbish and, you know what I mean? And men are the inferior species suddenly. So it's, you know, it's taken that view of what the world is like and flipped it. Do you have this thing where you, even if, like I say that premise of that film, do you feel like you've seen everything? Do you feel like you've seen everything that you can... I feel there's an air of exhaustedness,

and I actually think it's part of our generation's problem, and I think it's part of the reason why we're letting down the younger generation in the way we are with them. To go back to news for a second is just what we present them. If you're a young person now, if you're in your 20s, I've got kids in my 20s, You've got children in terms of think, yeah. So that generation, they richly deserve to hear better news.

And I don't mean that the facts need to be changed. I just mean that they're not being told about the power of being a human being. That's what they never hear about. They do hear nothing about their own natural power, what is actually available to them. They do not get reminded that they're the most sophisticated organism that we're aware of in the universe. And that actually, for all the problems that are in front of us, they are amazing and endless in their possible. possibilities. So they don't hear this. They get that on Instagram. There's lots of that on Instagram. I don't mean, like, you know, from a yoga person on the top of a mountain. I just mean

an irregular day-to-day way going, what the fuck, man, you know, do not opt into this panic that is offered to you through media most of the time, all the time. Fuck that shit. Close all of it, walk away, meet your friends, talk in a park, talk wherever you want, join a band, make a little short film, whatever it is. Hang out. I never remember. mind all this shit from us, I mean from you and me and our generation. Yeah. Because it's terrible shite and it's endless. And I'm actually pretty angry about it because it doesn't stop as far as I can see.

If I was 20 and I was hearing us, our lot, the way we bang on and the way we present news and this stuff, you know, messing around to Egypt's token, all of it. And, you know, the thing about facts is they're a symptom of fear. What do you need facts or if you've got something interesting to say? I mean, you know, you want to remember facts. You have to go and look for them. That's how fucking boring they are. So if somebody has something worth hearing, you'll remember it.

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

Those people are around and they're coming back hard. Well, they'll find they're pretty fact repellent. That's true. They don't respond well to facts. That is true. They love the idea of standing on top of a stack of facts and shouting at you. that's what they like. But there is a permanent invitation here into an unproductive argument.

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

This is today and tomorrow and the next day. This is not going away. This is all the time. I am really, really serious about this. I mean, I'm sincere about it. If we don't get this, it won't get any better. And we have to get this. And it does mean change.

And it does mean adopting a new interest in your own being, I'm afraid, waking up and actually just doing things a little bit slower because once you slow it down even fractionally it's way, way more interesting because you start to pay attention to your own mind which is actually all you've really got. But we wake up in the morning and we are encouraged to flee from our minds

and to join whatever the fuck it is that everybody is doing which is having left their minds behind entering the field of agitation and trying to make money out of it before they go home to try and get some rest and wake up and do it again tomorrow. It's very boring, it's very draining, and it goes one way. And if you want to do something really interesting and radical, I would suggest, in the modern age as a young person, start really, really looking after yourself, not looks maxing, but being really interested in what a human being actually is, because you've been given the most incredibly exotic pet anybody could have to look after.

It's very difficult, it's very complex, it has contradictory demands going on at all times. you're always in a crosswind trying to sort of thread a needle, you know, standing on one leg. That is exciting stuff. It requires a lot of skill. I'm not talking about optimization. I'm not talking about self-management. I'm talking about finding out what being alive is actually really like and paying attention to your own experience, like it's the most important thing in the world, which it is.

How do you communicate that to your own children? And what's that conversation like? How does it go? I say all that stuff, but they've already rolled their eyes and walked into the next room. Sometimes, but that's me being making a dad joke to a degree. We do talk about that stuff. We do say it. And they know it.

And they say stuff like that. I know, but everyone knows it. I know it. I mean, my first thought is like, yeah, but does that mean I can't do my podcast anymore? No, it doesn't. Of course. But hang on, stop, stop. Because look, this is the thing.

This is right now, it seems to me, we're all a bit like the diver on the board before they go. We're very gulpy. We're very hesitant. were very fear adjacent at all times. And one of the things about the new culture, the internet culture that's taken over is that there is a terminal feeling to it. Like if you get something wrong, that it, you might be guillotined by the system.

You're talking about sort of social censure. Or being ostracized or whatever the fuck it is. Do you get it wrong? And that's it. You're suddenly pinged out of a field of, you know, conversation. And that's really bad for us. I mean, think about it. It's like when you grow up and you suddenly, you know,

that adolescent journey when you go from this animal, unknowingness to sudden this tsunami of self-consciousness that makes puberty so challenging for kids. You know, it's so whitewater rafting level of change in your experience. What the fuck? You know, everything is flipped.

But you don't have that as an... You have a plateau as an adult. You know, there's a happy time where you're supposed to baffle around. You know, yes, expressing opinions, being wrong, changing your mind, going over there. That's the crack. That's the adult crack. You know, we're not always in the forum hashing out fucking legislation. You know,

know, we get to hang around to the steps and shoot the shit and drink coffee and complain about the other guy and what's going on over there. And did you hear about that one and what she's doing, you know? And we're treating everything like it's of terminal kind of importance all the time. I know. I guess the thing about the internet and social media is that it's accelerated everything to such a degree that it seems incredibly urgent and it feels like people are sort of fed up. They feel that a much faster pace of change is within their reach. And so they think, why not apply that to every urgent problem there is? And why not really impose sanctions on the people who don't go along with that?

You know what I mean? Because the stakes are too high, whether you're talking about racism or inequality or whatever the issue might be. The feeling, I think, over the last decade or so has been like, okay, enough. We've got to move fast on these things now. and we have the opportunity now to communicate in real time instantly. And so everyone get with the fucking program. Otherwise, you're out. Yeah, it's a bit like a powerful kid in school

who has, you know, got a troop of followers, you know, or creates a gang. And anybody who, you know, wears the wrong hairbands or whatever, listening to the wrong music is out of the gang. Yeah. In this case, it's a well-intentioned, you know, it's born from a well-intentioned impulse, right? to make society more fair and...

What is? Well, the situation that you're talking about, the situation you're describing where people are looking over their shoulder and not feeling sufficiently relaxed. This is not an argument. This is not a thing around, though, you know, whether it's better to be, you know, unleashed or woke. That's not, I'm not getting into that.

You know, I mean, of course, be aware of everybody and, you know, everyone's aspiring to decency, I would imagine, you know. Most people are anyway. But what I mean is just, it's the conclusion. infusion of the real with the not, you know, and the virtual world is just like that, that child's fantasy of all the power they have over the group. That's all it is. You know, it is a place you go to when you're sort of checking what might happen if I did this in real life and then you get pulled into that whole agitational field of multiple judgment points within the

internet. So you start arguing with them and with yourself because you agree with half of them and then that changes the next day as well. So you're completely lost already. And you're not in the real world. And you're, you know, it's so masturbatory and point. pointless. But, I mean, the real world is changing in accordance with what's happening online now. No, it's definitely bleeding across. No. Why do you think? Because we are always spending too much time interfacing with these things so that we are exaggerating their prevalence and their importance. And it's the Heisenberg thing. You know, you were too close to our instruments of observation to really feel what we're looking at. We can't see it because we're enmeshed and all this stuff.

I think. Did you always feel that way? Were you someone that ever went down the path that you're describing and then pulled himself out of it? Or were you always... No, I was always overwhelmed by machines. We didn't have a phone until I was 12. So I don't like machines.

I think we found the root of the problem. I don't think it's a problem, Adam. I think it's a way out of the problem. You're just very prejudiced against machines. And I don't know if you've noticed, but we've got to start becoming friends with machines. Yes, we do. Because they might hurt us if we don't.

Yes, well, I'm not prepared to live in that world. I'm not going to be afraid of my toaster. You might not have an option. Have you watched the AI sitcom that dropped on YouTube the other day? I'm guessing the answer's new. To all of those questions, it would be known. Okay. Yeah, but I did hear something about it.

I just heard it was dreadful. That's about right, isn't it? You got a zero-star review in the Guardian. I read a paragraph of that, yeah. One of only a handful of it. shows that's ever achieved a zero star review. I mean, the odds were against it getting a fair hearing, I think. But are you, who are you, are you excited for AI?

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

I haven't had that experience of life. I've had a few friends who said, you know, they use it to get started or to start flinting an idea or something, you know, would they talk to it, to see it to sort of move around the subject or whatever it is or see what. Oh, yeah. Okay. And I can sort of see how that might do something, but what the something it will do is going to be that. It's a very particular kind of Yeah, I mean it's definitely You can use it as a different version Of sticking post-it notes on a wall And reorganising them

And it's got some utility in that way But it's about a million miles away From my vision of my understanding Of what making something was all about When I was a kid that I've sort of held onto really I think, you know That was always a much more of a mad scientist moment Or a romantic notion of what creativity was

Because that's what it felt like Because that was my experience of making things you know, I would get a rush, you know. I remember saying to a friend, you know, it was like running around trying to catch meteors in a saucepan. That's what it felt like, you know? What kind of things are you talking about making? When you get an idea for anything, for a script

or for a set or for a, you know, a song or anything? Anything. I guess the thing, especially with the AI sitcom, that you think is, as far as I can see, the justification for it from the people that made it is like, well, this particular, show, this particular idea, wouldn't have got commissioned otherwise in the current media environment. It would have been too expensive even if it had, blah, blah, blah.

There's not enough money around. People aren't commissioning anymore. So we went ahead, wrote a script and used AI to realize that vision. But you've already stopped listening to that argument, haven't you? I mean, I have. It's a terrible argument. You know, it's a terrible argument. It's terrible.

If somebody told me this was done, I would be less interested in it. So I experimented with the freedom on the phone to see what it does. I may pursue it further and see what else it does, but it's a deeply, deeply cold experience, I would say, first of all. So not something we'd want to share. Were you across the conversation recently about basically human beings being wiped out within the next 10 years? Well, look, to me, this is all part of, you know, the machine rapture

that the species is experiencing now and has done for a while. You can't get a bunch of guys, what is it, six or seven guys, leading a global conversation about the future of our species. It's not, this is not acceptable. Unelected groovers in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk should have influence over, you know, whatever machines he's allowed to control and nothing else. Not giving money to any party anywhere. Well, it's like the Manhattan Project being run by just some guys who are into skateboarding or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Who are not answerable to any elected body whatsoever. Yeah, but this is, to go back to the way earlier, to talking about micromedia and so on, this creeping passivity is the problem. This is why I'm banging on about experiencing your own power, experiencing what it is to be alive, experiencing the depth of your own feelings, not trying to turn them down.

Because in seeking succour, entertainment, whatever it is, some sort of comfort in tech staff, we are moving away from each other, inexorably, and faster. It's getting faster. and some people want it and a lot of the people who want it the kind of people who favour dissociation

when emotions come into play they don't like it they can't handle it they'd rather be around some nice toys some of them have podcasts where they talk about women and then they talk about Iran

like I mentioned earlier some of them run tech companies now these you may remember these boys you may have had them at school very very good at certain things not so good at other things Now they get to control all the machines. Some of them are for entertainment.

Some of them that put bullets in you from a height, from an aerial object. They get to make the machines. Not the other boys and girls. That's the problem. When you're talking about people who find it difficult to interact with other human beings or maybe prefer the comfort of a conversation on a podcast to actually, you know, a bit of difficult interaction with a member of your family,

is that something you're good at though? I mean, my superficial feeling that I get from you when you're performing is like someone who is fairly raw and finds those interactions frequently challenging. What, with family conversations and real conversations. People with, yeah, in the world. No, I, that's, no, this is what I'm here for. But I mean, you know, the friction of that, the discomfort of that fuels comedy, right? Do you think being born is a comfortable experience for either party? Yeah.

So that's your basic default mode? It's like life is pain, get used to it. No. No, I haven't said, there's no more words. Life is a struggle, though. Yeah. Life is an effort. Life is something you engage with.

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

and that's it. What do you do for relaxation then? I don't relax, Adam. I don't have time for that. Oh, shit. You're going to get on a Euro star to travel to Europe to begin your stand-up tour. Yeah.

What are you going to be doing when you're traveling? How are you going to occupy your time on that? Between gigs? Train carriage, yeah. Well, you know, generally out there, bopping around. Week one is very different to week two is very different to week three and so on.

So week one, I'll be chatting away to my turn manager and telling myself that everything's going to be just great. And busily, I'm doing it every day all the time. It's always, you know, some process is running on in the background. I'm compacting all the fragments I have into anything that looks like a cohesive lump shape. How are you doing that, by the way? Is that notebooks? Yeah, it really is.

And that's the other problem. What pencils? When you're no good at machines. Okay. Analog. outtaking. Yeah. My room where I work looks like, you know, when they show you those old photos of like, you know,

Soviet sort of archives or something that's like that. It's just this terrible messy room with those overspilling desks and like thousands of notebooks of, you know, stuff. Are you literally non-digital? I don't know what that means, but I definitely have less equipped. I have loads of leads and DIs and stuff in my apartment because I have a keyboard and I have a couple of guitars, you know, and I'm trying to do stuff for the show and so on. Oh, yeah. I tell you what happened.

I'm bad at, you know, I was writing, obviously, for years. So I was typing away. And then I got an... On an electric typewriter or... Oh, a laptop. Oh, a laptop. Okay. And...

But I had an accident. I had a surgery. So my spine's a bit fucked. And it's very difficult now to sit for extended periods and type. So that's why I started making pictures. Painting pictures. Yeah, because I couldn't see. it for and I can do it now I can when did that happen uh which uh your accident oh the 2017 I had

surgery and since then I've had a lot of stuff you know I've a lot of pain and and shout out to anybody who's got a bit of metal in there anything I've got pins in me and that makes a big difference to how you you get around you know yeah and it affects your head and how you're feeling and you it takes me about an hour to sort of crank the boiler every day to be able to go basically you know I've got to do a lot of rehabby stuff oh man do you manage that with um um pain medication or is that yeah fuck chronic pain

yeah chronic pain is a bastard of a thing and it sends you somewhere you know it uh you can't um you can't think really not really so it changes everything you know and I was pretty angry for a while because I had the surgery and so

very talented skilled medical people but nobody really tells you that you're very different afterwards yeah you're quite different afterwards you're from a vulnerable feeling you've or lost because you can't control your body anymore. My rear axle is basically kind of broken, so I have to think a lot of things into being. And in between walking and so on, you know,

and I can't, like, sitting as chairs and stuff are, I can do that for a while. Yeah. So I can't really sit and type for ages and ages. I can do it for a while, and then I stop and take a break and do it again. And standing up is something I have to work at as well. So that kind of, you know,

I am a stand-up, and the only way you do stand-up is by writing material. But, you know, it's amazing. almost feels like, I don't know, what would I have if I was a pastry chef? Maybe, I don't know. I saw her elbow. I have no idea. But anyway, there you go. Can I ask what happened? What was the accident? Oh, I had a foot reconstruction. They had to move tendons and pins and bones and fuse and move things and put metal to make my foot work again because it stopped working. My uncle started to slide down my leg. Why? Because just wear and tear or... No, I was born with a funny foot.

Right. Okay. And they physied it out when I was a kid. It's a spine thing and it's a If your neck is gone and your head's cracking all the time, it makes you a bit of a loon. You know, so I do a lot of yoga and moving about, and I wear vibrators in my socks. Vibrators? Yeah, here's one. Oh, that's, Dylan is holding up what looks like a butt plug. It's a bullet thing, Durex thing for you. I saw in the pharmacy.

So I have one in each sock to make my... And you just, it's down by your ankle? Yeah, it keeps the blood flowing. Yeah, okay. Relatively speaking, I'm extremely lucky. I don't have any serious problems at this point. But you know, you can feel things accumulating and every month there's a new thing and you think, oh, is this going to be the one that?

Yeah, you get it. That's what... Are we midlife? Are we allowed to say midlife? Are we too old for midlife? I don't know. Advanced midlife. Advanced midlife.

You get a kind of a little tour of the possibilities of your demise. Choose an option. What do you want? Do you want to stiffen up? Do you want to get droop? you know what what do you want short breath whatever you get a taste of all and it's probably salutary in some way you know it makes you cuts out some bullshit you know I think a lot of fellas as well in midlife there's a sort of

a main react I think it's you know to a sense of diminishment the grip tightens on the chair or the stick or whatever it is they happen to be holding at the time the latte whatever it is and the gaze becomes a bit steeler and they become more determined to get across whatever the inadequate thing they have is that they feel is increasingly inadequate. And there's a comedy in there, but it's very poignant too. And men need, you know, help. They do need help. I mean, they're better at talking than they were when I was growing up. And there's so much talk about men, what kind of men have we got? What kind of men do we need and so on? When I was growing up, you know, the men were, they were

John Wayne. That's what men were. Did you ever see that film say anything with John Cusack? I think I did, but as a kid, I don't really remember it. In the movie, Ione Sky, Donovan's daughter, is the female protagonist. She's fantastic. And it's a teen romance comedy thing. John Cusack is the male protagonist. But Ione Sky's father in the movie is played by the guy who played Frazier's dad, John Mahoney.

Yeah, yeah. I'm good at character actor's names. Okay, good. So John Mahoney is in there. We're watching this thing. And he, I assumed, it was like, oh, is that her grandfather? But no, it's her dad. Because he looks about 60 in this thing.

And he's wearing a suit the whole time. And, you know, he's losing his hair. And he's just got a differently constructed face. And the way he moves and everything about the way he speaks. He's like, oh, yeah, that's what men used to be like in those days. That was that generation. And in the movie, like, I think John Mahoney was in his 40s still. When he made this thing, and I'm like, I'm sitting here as a 57-year-old watching this thing.

And in many respects, I look younger than he does. Yeah. In other ways, I don't. I'm certainly more of a boy than he is in almost every conceivable way. The ideas of what masculinity from then are, you know, they're hilarious. And you get overwhelmed by the smells of cigarette smoke and barrow, you know. And the heaviness of everything. the clothes, the dessert trolleys,

the chandeliers, the curtains, everything was swagged and bulked and velvety and, you know, too much. But they were stoics. Yeah, they were because the job division between the sexes was so clear, like women did all of the crying. Men weren't, never shed any tears. They could have a crisis, but some stuff that meant another man had to die or get injured,

at least for them to resolve their crisis, you know. And I think now there's a kind of a recruiter sense or a desire for that guy back. you know, in a big way, which goes back to these bros with their shows, you know? Yeah, people who are sure of themselves, who don't sort of... Yeah, there's a huge desire for that. Yeah, people who just give you an answer and seem confident about it. And that's a huge part of the appeal of right-wing populism.

It's just that you get a no, or a yes, or a bang, or that's it, or Thursday, or Frank, that you get an answer. And whereas if you appeal to people's emotions, if you talk to them as a complete human, being who actually have emotions, you know, you're going to do some business. And that's the problem with the super smart, dweeby types, technocrats who don't get that. And they better get it. They better get it. Or we're all fucked. Because the people who actually have information, ideas and know how of a technocratic kind are obviously vital. You've got to put the right people in the right gig. You know, you've got to have the right people out front and you've got to have the right people out back. Especially with someone like Elon Musk. I mean, he's so clearly howling in pain in so many

parts of himself after his upbringing. There's no point crapping on anyone if those individuals that have all the power. That's who they are. They have all the power. Their lives, I mean, you know, I read a few lines of his biography, the Walter Isaacson thing. I mean, Jesus Christ, almighty, okay, I get it, thank you. It's hardcore.

It's upbringing. Yeah. I would definitely try to invent rockets and pins of things. If any of that shit had happened to me. What was your relationship with your power like? Is he still around? Yes, he is. He's an incredibly vital guy.

He's a dude. He's 78. He's fixing his shed. He's up on the roof, corrugating iron, bang things, marching around. And he's saying, what are you doing, Daddy? He's standing there, breathing hard with a slash hook in his hand. And I said, what are he up? I'm just going to get rid of that wall. Okay, I'll see him a bit. He's a different kind of man to me. He can do all these things. He's got this fabulous garden. He's made. It's beautiful. And when my mother was alive, he made her a writing den. You know, he did all these things. He's a man we can engage. And if you asked him questions back in the day, would he give you a definite answer or would he say, you know what? I don't know. He would be very happy to say he didn't know. He didn't know. He would do that, yeah, sure. I don't remember my dad being like that. I think he was much more of a, maybe I'm doing him down. I don't know. I think with men and fathers, you know, and especially men around our vintage, there's some sort of weird late gift you get from your father if it's okay, where you're you. you realize that he was, if things are good, where you realize that he was modeling, exempling, without saying anything for quite a while, and that that's part of, it seems to be part of male experience, that you don't actually get into these long, windy conversations about

what's required of you and what you need to get through it and to do it, and how you need, you know, how you find your own inner resources to power you through whatever is hard. if it's hung right your relationship you will have had that modelling and you kind of realise that quite late I think does that sound right to you? I think so I mean I'm just so conflicted about that

because I want to not lie and not leave things out and have honest conversations with my children and what do you mean when you say not leave things out and not lie you don't want to present a false picture of

how things are and I don't want to gloss over for something important. But neither do you want to tell everything? Because that's not part of the deal. No, I don't want to burden them with things they don't need to be burdened by. But on the other hand, you know, if I am spiraling about something and I'm clearly under the weather mentally and I'm, you know, mooching around the house and they can see it, then I want to be able to tell them why rather than pretend that there's nothing wrong

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

that it's possible to argue with your partner without it being cataclysmic. Yeah, you have to. You have to. God, you really want to do that. Yeah. And they don't have to worry that you're going to split up

every time you're pissed off with the train. The structure has to be allowed to sway without everybody feeling it's going to break, fragment. Yeah, I guess. Excuse me when I wiggle about. Sure, sure. Hey, by the way, I mean,

if there's anywhere else that would be more comfortable for you to sit. I just need to wiggle about for a minute. All right. Dylan is wiggling. I do a lot of this shit, traveling. Yeah, yeah.

And people are going, what the fuck. But I can't, I have to do it because otherwise I'm going nuts. I was in an airport in Australia a few years ago in the lounge waiting for the flight to the next bit, you know, and there was a family that were in transit. They were on their way connecting to flights and there in the lounge. I was a mum and her three daughters and they were very memorable because they all had very, very lucas-a-ginger hair, all tied up in top knots at the top of their head. So they looked quite Dr. Zussi. And then I was in the corner of this lounge thing, doing my moves, you know, for the next flight, because if I can't sit on the, I'll go bananas.

So doing my stretches and lunges or whatever. And I'm so used to doing it so often every day on the move or whatever, you know, trying to keep myself together for the tour. And I was just sitting there again. And I looked over at their table and every single one of them was creased. Like their faces were wet with tears from laughing. And one of them just collapsed on the table. And I totally, in an instant, I understood why they thought it was so funny.

Because it's bizarre. Some of the moves are bizarre, you know. fucking shaking like a man who's being electrocuted in the corner. I've had a lot of that. I've seen that with teenage boys as well. I've seen that with old people. They've just go, what the fuck is it with that guy?

I've walked into pubs and been told, we can't serve you because the cameras saw you outside on the street. That happened to me in Liverpool. I went in and I asked for a freaking lime and soda or something. I was on the street doing my stuff. And I went in, they were not serving you. So there's a, you know,

there's a lot of that kind of thing, which, you know, I don't mind at all. I mean, as long as people are. not too freaked out. Yeah, you'd think people would be more sensitive in this day and age. Well, do you know something? It actually makes you think, because it's because it really totally radically changed my whole idea of what a mind and a body is.

I don't understand why people just don't do it more. I'm not kidding because you know what it's like, you stretch, you feel better, but just like, honestly, we walk around with our bodies as though it's a sentence. It's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing. We have this huge cutoff, this Dickhart cutoff point of the head, everything below can just go to hell. People just drag their asses around like it's a huge,

oh, who's this guy I've got to bring with me across town? You know, it's bizarre when you think about it. I saw a picture of a cat, and they discovered a new cat, a little cat in Bolivia, okay, in the jungle today. And it's a bit smaller than a domestic cat. And I can't remember the name of it, the locals have a name for it. It's a gorgeous little thing, obviously. But you see the picture of it.

I'm so shocking. So I'll see the picture of this cat. And then you see it, and the image comes up. And because it is smaller than it, a regular little cat we have here, it's an incredibly gripping image because the pose it's in is just like a tiger about to eat something. The animal is so alive. Its geometric points are stationed so dynamically. It looks pre-lunge, whatever it does. You can't take your eyes off. It's the most compelling thing. Like when you're watching Attenborough stuff, you can't take your eyes away

when something's about to eat something or mate. You know, you just can't. The mechanism of life an operation is completely compelling. And that's how we should be. Imagine if we were all walking around the streets, that dynamically. Imagine how much fun it would be of everything looked like this kind of, you know, I guess that would look like a what's his name, Bob Fosse Dance Number or something if everyone's going down the street like that.

We should definitely do it one day. Vogueing. Yeah, yeah, you're vogging in Sainsbury. But, I mean, how far do you take wellness then, if we want to call it that? Wellness, Schmelness, who the fuck wants that, you know, that kind of glow that we get out of. of a jar, whatever, you have to get up at 5 a.m., you know, and eat your own yawns. Fuck off.

Just feeling good. Yeah. Moving your ass. So does that mean that you eat differently now than you did like 10 years ago? And does that mean that you... Yeah, well, the classic road comic diet is, you know... Yeah, it's not great. No, it's a fucking handful of, you know, peanuts and then a Mars bar and then some beef crisps.

Have you been to Pret? I have been to Pret a lot. I have relationships with many prets. Yes. Yeah, it's pretty good. You know, I'm a... overweight, middle-aged guy. I need to lose weight and get fitter.

You know what's going to sort you out? AI. Oh, you mean medically? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Great. Do it. Yeah, great.

Thank you. Where is it? It's not here. Yeah. That wasn't fast enough. See, I don't like AI. Fair enough. What about, have you ever had gummies and things like that on stage?

All of them. Yeah. All of them. Yeah. Yeah. I took them in Boston. I was very, no, it was Boston. No, Seattle for the first time.

And I had one, like I was such a kid, you know, my friends all said, yeah, that's it, just see her, and yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. And then had another. And then I was going, this is fucking bullshit. Wednesday's kicking in. I had five. And then I kneeled on my bed and poured it like a cat for, I think eight hours going, make it stop. Make it stop. Please make it stop.

I couldn't believe that I was still doing that at noon the next day. And I had to go somewhere else. You fucking came. Please. It was up for eight hours, Scotts. What was going on, though? It was just overwhelmingly stoned.

You know, I was just, I was picked up, I was stoned and re-stoned as I was being stoned, and I couldn't deal with it. But I've lost to have grown up since then. You had five? Yeah, I didn't know, man. It was the first time.

Are you joking? Of course, give me. What's in the bag? Was that always what you were like? Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I'll try that. Yeah. Give me some of that.

Yeah, I'm, I was nervous. I'm not a big drug person, to be honest with you. Cocaine's not for me, not my bag. Horrible stuff. I don't know why people do that. What about psychedelics, acid and things like that? Oh, I took that, yeah. I'm very visual, so I was interested in the effects, you know.

And I think shrooms are great and are very, very good for people, is my, basically, in my opinion. I think everyone should microdose time to time. I think it's excellent for you. It's really, really good. It's reconnecting, balancing. you, I mean, I really want to to swerve away from these wellness words because they're awful. The thing

that you often walk around going, oh God, why is everything like this? In my experience, microdosing made me realise that, oh, it's not like that. It's me. It's just me crapping on what's around me. It's my perception. It's me being achy and full of grumps and, you know, complaint,

whatever that I have in processed or dealt with. It restores the freshness of perception to when you're young. You feel young. It's fresh. It's new. So when you're talking about microdosing, don't know anything about that world, other than what I've heard described to me by people like Joe Rogan, who are adherence to all of that. They love it. I mean, you must be aware that that's a big thread that runs through a lot of Broey podcasts in the US's microdosing and mushrooms and psychedelics and stupid people are allowed to eat tomatoes too or mushrooms. I'm not implying that that invalidates their qualities just because Joe Rogan is into them. I'm just saying it's interesting. No, of course. I mean, look, it's around. It's available. Also, it's an American. America, that stuff is, you know, I don't know, it's a huge, hugely, but I mean, New York smells of weed, I understand. Oh, God, that. Everywhere smells a weed nowadays, I'll tell you.

Even Norwich. But, no, it's interesting. I mean, I'm always fascinated by it because I am timid by nature, so I would not be taking those five gummies. I would be nibbling a corner and waiting for 10 hours to see what the effects were before cautiously nibbling another corner. No, but my attitude to that is that, you know, within the realms of safety, obviously, I'm not interested in being trauma. fried or fucked up, I'm really not. But there is, you know,

sort of a lively interest in finding out how this works. Yeah. No, my anxiety is that I will break something. I think that feeling of this is about to break is going back to what I was saying about this kind of feeling of terminal of importance or urgency. I love the time.

It's this hesitancy that's gripped us and it choked our fluency on our thumb and our crack in exchange. We used to be bigger. We used to make more of a kind of a splash in each other's fields without it being a big deal. I'm not talking about, you know, a very extrovert person kind of cornering you, you know, for an evening at a party. I'm just talking about we used to have a little more, I think it was greater credit and trust existentially between us to allow us to be raw or naked or more revealed. Messier. Messier in front of one another. Yeah, less mediated and calculated and packaged and so on, which is really.

is the defining quality of real experience, I guess. Yeah, that's true. I guess I... I think I was always that way. I think I always slightly recoiled from things that looked a bit messy and dangerous and... Emotionally explosive or fraught? Yeah, yeah.

I just thought, oh, watch out. Also, I had the experience of seeing... Which a lot of people have, you know, seeing a friend get mentally ill when they were in their late teens and finding it very upsetting to... see them unravel and see their behavior change. And that was sort of slightly bound up with drugs as well. Yeah, yeah.

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

No, at some point, I would like... Sorry, can I just qualify that because it's important. Please. But I mean about, you know, I would suggest that works for it. things like, can work for things like psilocybin and maybe marijuana if it's not ingested in the form of smoke, possibly. But you have to be extremely careful, of course. It's, it's your brain. You only have one. You've got to look after it. And I think that the opposite lobby, though, that's very against all of those things on principle is not for me because it's missing out and

finding out. You know, I don't want to find out to the point where I'm going to eat the berry nobody's had, but if somebody's had it and said it's pretty good, I'll give it a go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Do you play music in these stand-up shows? I, this is a matter of debate. I make it sounds, that is definitely verifiable. What are you making the sounds with? I'm making the sounds with a keyboard, a nice keyboard.

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

And are you able to play these instruments quite well? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What would be the point if I could? Everyone's doing that. Haven't you noticed? That's a lot of instruments to take on tour if you're not. Oh, it's vital. I want more.

I'm going to pick some up over there. a bazookia or two. Well, I've placed an omnicord in front of you there. Yes. I had one. I gave it away. It has a tremendous amount of buttons. You've got the more recent model.

And what do you do when you're playing, though? Are they a compliment to... Oh, you're singing? I'm singing. What are you singing? I'm singing songs I wrote. Ah. You know, I have lots of them.

Trying to remember them is another thing. That's more difficult, you know. Is there any way that you can do something? Now? Yes. With an omic chord? I've never seen before. Or a guitar.

yeah sure i'll pick up the you're nice looking um what is it this is the godan a 6 godin gaudin so i can't play anything but i grew up with a lot of blues music in the house you know uh like all my dad's records were all blues records

there were hundreds of them and uh motown um so when i was when i was a kid you know, we had a turntable, and all the records they played were blues records. You know, that and I used to go to sleep to Miles Davis, but everything else was blues. What kind of Miles Davis were you going to sleep to? Kind of blue.

Right. You know, the obvious stuff back then. And did you never want to join a band? I kind of did. I kind of never tried to. Never tried to sing, never tried to do any of that, really. I love drums. I wanted drums as a kid. I did a thing of asking for. drum kits and been told no, so making do with biscuits lids tins.

But I went to concerts and I loved music. Of course, you have to as a teenager. What's your first gig? I was ridiculously cool. My first proper gig was Bruce Springsteen and Slane. There was 100,000 people. I cycle there on my bike for seven miles from my town. There was a bunch of us late summer evening.

I think we were 12 or 13. I mean, it was heaven. Everyone was there. Everyone in Ireland was there. Unforgettable happiness, you know, wonderful. my history teacher was there everyone was there in Ireland it was great

and then when I was 12 I saw Stevie Wonder on the Master Blaster tour that was amazing I'll never forget that because I grew up listening to his records Bruce Springsteen was a big deal

because he was around and there and I think I heard his stuff on the radio like that year was that sort of born in the USA era yeah that was that tour but the Stevie Wonder stuff was just transcendental that was just amazing

I grew up with all that music I knew it and loved it and to see him do it It was amazing. And it didn't make you think I could get lessons and do that? No, no, no, I didn't. I didn't. We had tiny college I grew up in,

so there was no instruments in the house. But my mother could play piano, so we could have had an upright or something, but we didn't. Bill Bailey did a great thing years ago. All was stuck in my head. He did it in the clubs. He was talking about when all the boy bands were around,

he was talking about three-word songwriters, you know. Now you're back and that is that, and all that sort of stuff. That always stuck with me. Punch you back, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's other great song, he was talking about The Killers, the one I've got sold,

but I'm not a soldier, Bill's line was, I've got a ham, but I'm not a hamsterp. Bill's so fantastic. He's amazing. Yeah, he is. And actually,

so is Tamson, by the way. Hello to Thameson, by the way. Tams and Greg? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, so music time. Come back, baby. Baby go away.

Where are you going, honey? Oh, come on, ladies' state. There you go. That songs with everything. It's all contained in four lines. Is that something you'll sing on the road? Am I? Yeah.

Have you got places, though, going back to getting ideas off the ground? Are there places where you know doors are open for you in this challenging media landscape that we, currently inhabit? Well, you know, I mean, I'm sounding like I'm kind of kicking the kit around a bit, but there's a lot of possibilities, a lot of ways to make things. I think the problem's partly that everyone feels they have to have a hit. Yeah, yeah.

Immediately. You know, it's just strangulated before you begin. The pressure is too much. And this goes back to talking to young people about giving them some good news. There's too much pressure. The way you're being offered models is wrong, because it used to be, you know, heroes, stars, all the rest of it, gods, sure. But also, there was this kind of a start point, a nearby mini version where you

You could, with real people in a room, do something. It was accessible and none, you weren't intimidated by it. It was approachable. And we just need to bring that back because the kids are looking at, they're only seeing the shining, shimmering wall of stars. There's no local access point of just,

you know, a bunch of people just like them with some infrastructure around them to help them just be. Because in their own minds, they feel like they have to hit that wall immediately. And people have to realize, you know, your life is, really significant. It doesn't have to be the best. Yeah. Well, I guess you could say that that's one of the good

things about YouTube and things like that is that you can sort of fuck around with some of these ideas. Yes, sure, but the problem is that when you're looking down the barrel of a camera or just talking to a mic, it's not the same. It's not the same. The actual stuff that's going to do you good, this is all great. but the stuff that's going to be good for you and a young developing person is with your friends, giving each other the weight of respect. Like it being consequential what they say. And it really matters what they say, even though they're not a star, even though they haven't made anything.

The point is discovery. You know what it's like. You remember it. You had a great time. You craft all this stuff. You put these things together. You can hear the care in it. You love it.

Sure. And you've allowed yourself to do that. And young people have to allow themselves to love this process that they're not getting paid for. and maybe they will get some money for if they allow themselves to just get a bit better at it, you know? Yeah. Yes, I suppose the thing is, as you say, to let go of feeling that it's not worth it

unless you hit certain numbers and certain targets. It's killing. That shit is killing. It's like the exam mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do things for the sake of it, really, and don't really worry. The whole point is to have no point. Then you find out what you've got inside you. You literally don't know otherwise.

Because if you're only trying to hit a target, you're not even examining what's coming out of you. You're not seeing what it is. Well, John Ronson writes well about that in his book in the castle about people going through various forms of that, especially in the digital world, of feeling like they have to optimize every version of what they're doing and engage with, like, in the podcasting world, engage with certain subjects, because that's going to get the greatest level of engagement. so, you know, culture wars, whatever it might be, purely because, not because it's fun or enlightening to talk about those things, but because they know those will get the biggest numbers.

Beyond all the numbers and stuff, right, there's just a general problem with there's just being too much stuff. Yeah, of course. I mean, in a way that was not a problem before. There was too much stuff before to keep up with sort of from the 90s. But now, obviously, the proliferation is the problem. It's almost like the picture has changed. So there's no depth of focus so that every leaf on the tree is as prominent as the next.

And you're not getting any sense of dimensional depth or what the structure actually is. It's just the same thing being blown at you in a million variations. So your discrimination is being tested all the time. You know, and your discipline is being tested all the time. What to exclude. And then every time something truly original arrives, it's just pounced upon. Yes. And ripped apart.

Vampire like instantly. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the person at the centre of it has no chance of surviving, really, unless they are so monumentally strong-willed, which most human beings just aren't in that situation. Yeah, there's something about, and this is the last thing I'll say about the tech aspect, but there's something about the prevalence of it which has intensified the gaze upon a single individual when it happens. Like, even when it's a success, like look at, say, Phoebe Waller Bridge with Fleaback, which is as good as it gets, you know. The pressure on her for whatever is next, obviously, must be off the charts, you know? Yeah, well she's kind of, I don't know what's happening with her. I mean, maybe she's working on stuff and taking her time, which is very wise and just sort of ducking out of the whole thing for a while.

But I also heard that she can't really get anything off the ground unless it's what the streamer wants. Yeah, I think that's the essence of everything that's wrong, you know? It just, it's like somebody, here's the thing that will never happen, guaranteed spontaneity. You know what I mean? It is not going to happen. And people who don't make stuff sometimes really don't understand that. and they think money changes everything. Money makes things happen.

It doesn't. It allows for things to happen, but it's not going to make things happen. It's not going to make a script good. You can say, yes, I can hire it better or you can make it better. But you're not going to get something with the original feeling

and it's going to move and touch somebody. Not really. And the idea, and that is repulsive to me, like to go back to the AI thing, used for scripts and so on, that you can, in the same way they have, you must have heard about this. They've got a program called Blue Something.

There was a New Yorker article about this years ago. And they run the big record companies run new songs through it and it has to chart it has to hit certain points because this database contains everything from Beethoven about certain patterns and melodic sequences and phenomena

and it has to hit a certain amount of them for the record company to give the thumbs up to get it out to see if it can be hit you know this is like the scienceing election candidates with their shoes and ties I know it's with the moneyball approach to it's ballics moneyball works for sports I get that Yeah.

But it doesn't work for this. It doesn't work for this. It makes me angry because it's really, really the thing that doesn't understand how things are made. You know, it's a very kind of... It just, yeah, it doesn't work. There must be people out there doing stuff, though, and just doing things in that old way

of just pissing about and getting together. Yeah, there are. I mean, you see it in people like, you know, the stuff that, say, Jim and Bob did. There's very much the feeling of that, Bob Mortimer and Vic Reeves. Like, the things they mean... made were full of that joyous homemade spontaneity.

And I'm sure there's people out there doing it now. Of course there are. I mean, you get, you know, there's brilliant people around. There's brilliant young people around doing just Elf Lyons is one. She's, you know, an incredible performer, incredibly inventive. There's loads of people out there doing good stuff. It's not that it doesn't happen. And obviously, look, I'm old.

Oh, of course, these machines scare me. Look, they've got so many buttons. You know, my toaster might kill me as it is. So these things, you know, all just act against me here. Just thinking about music, what do you go back to then? What albums are the ones that you rely on? Well, I do love... Do you know what?

I'm extremely jealous of you because I heard you work with the guys from Metonomy? Oh, yeah, yeah, you're a Metronomy fan. Oh, man, that song, I only found it this year, The Look. Yeah. I think I listened to some scary amount of times because that is one of the hookiest things I've ever heard. I used it as a walk-on. Do you?

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

I will play a song 150 times. Right. Just try and find out what's in it. Yeah, he's brilliant. Just keep going. Just listening to it again and again and again. I think for two years I listened to the Pomo remix of I can't go for that.

I don't know, thousands and thousands of times. Hall of notes. Yeah. But if you listen to the Pomo remix. The which remix? Pomo, I don't know who he is. He's some producer. Okay.

That and I listened to when COVID was on, I listened to that and Arvo Perth, the Estonian composer. Oh, yeah, yeah. Celentium and Spiegel and all that stuff again and again, just cycling around to my bike. Do you listen on Spotify? Yeah.

I do. I mean, I don't understand all those platforms and stuff. Yeah. I understand that one because it has a lot of stuff on it. I only ask because sometimes they do a thing where they send you your most played tracks at the end of the year. Yeah. It's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing when they do that. It's a terrible mirror.

My God. I remember when that first came out, actually, because I am obsessional in that way. I get into ruts and grooves, you know, and I have to make a ladder to get out in all ways, in all facets of my character. I really have to consciously do that because if I don't, I'll just go tunnel down and down. to the middle of the earth. And it's a shocker when you see those the number of times you've heard like days, weeks have gone by

and you're listening to this fucking tune, what's wrong with you? This is the mind, you know, this is the field, this is the interesting stuff. The interesting stuff is generally, not always, but what you begin to see the sprouts of the moment you decide, and it's what makes you turn away.

The really, the next level stuff. You know, we're so resistant to new, to change. We say we were always so interesting. It's blah, blah, blah. We don't want to be interested. We don't want to change. We want the same biscuits. We want the same cup of tea.

We want the same Sunday. Sort of very slightly remixed. And we want it again and again and again. Yeah. I mean, listen, you're talking to someone who basically sees life as a kind of ongoing refinement project of trying to nail the perfect routine. Yeah. From, you know, in one way or another. And my wife is the same.

We're real creatures of routine. And it's so frequently. gets me down, especially with watching movies and stuff in the evening. You know, we sort of flop down at the end of the day and put something on, and we go for some bullshit that looks fun and sort of non-challenging, but actually at the end of it, it's... There's definitely a movie to be made about something called, say, call it something like Wild Card, okay? Uh-huh.

Where you got a couple exactly as you've described, and we've all been that couple at one time where a lot of us are that couple all the time. And there's a service called Wild Card. And that just means that once you're doing, you're living in a routine. it's the same way to live, but once every fortnight or 10 days or whatever it is, it's a wildcard night. And if you sign up to this app, it's just within that field of time, someone turns up at your apartment and you won't be going to sleep that night. And fucks everything up. Yeah, you turn, you go out of town or there's a car, the picture, somewhere.

You don't know what it's going to be, but it's just every so often. Just so that you don't get completely petrified. I'd pay for that service. Definitely. If they could sort of say, well, look, you won't be badly injured. Yes, exactly. But something mad's going to happen. Yeah.

Like the game. Yes. With Michael Douglas. That's why that movie's so compelling. Is that a David Fincher picture? I think it is. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a good one. I watched Fight Club again with my kids. Oh, yeah. What did they make of that? That's a fun holiday watch. It was. You know something? It was actually really good.

Was it? Yeah, it was. I think the last time I watched that, I thought, fuck off. No, I thought it was great. Why? Because it was really hands-on movie making, actually, because of Fincher, you know. He's brilliant, but I thought, it stank so badly of so many things I hated about the 90s.

Maybe in a positive or interesting way, it really was the beginning of a load of shit that we're now living with online. So many mad ideas about what men should be and the way they should behave. But of course, look, all this stuff we're saying, like this wallpaper we're talking about on this issue, like, you know, he just, Paluknik? Chuck Palauanik? Yeah, I don't know. The thing was...

Come back to the Mike Dillard. It's in the same moment you look at people like, there's an Irish writer called Kevin Barry who writes short stories and novels and he's incredible. It's kind of feral. It's raw. It's alive.

It's like a blast of something that wakes you up, you know? You just go, oh, Jesus, right? It certainly wakes you up. My favorite thing about Fight Club was Joe Cornish, my comedy wife's toy version of it called Tufty Club,

which was altogether more enjoyable. Can I convince you to play one more blast of music to wrap things up? Yeah, sure, I just have sure. I'm gonna, I'll just sing this a bit. Here we go. This is the other verse of that thing, actually. Okay.

See, chords and things, I mean, how important are they really? The point is, they're all present. They're there. We can hear some of them are there. Some of them are trying to get into the room. There's clearly musical activity going on. Isn't that good enough? Do we really want perfection?

Go figure why we're fighting. Guess you got me wrong. You're taking off your night things. I'm sucking on your bomb Say modern man just make you sick All Napoleon's or Nazarenes Say you're tired of all my shit But you don't know what I mean

The axe ate all the hay They laughed just like the axes they ran away What are we gonna do? Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck The yurts too big without you There you go. I love it. Thanks, man.

Thank you. All the best for your tour. Have you played your English dates already? No, no, they're after Europe. Okay. When will they happen? No, quite soon, actually. I think it's October.

I come back from Prague and I go to Swansea. Okay. The logical route. Great. Well, I'll come along. Yeah, please do. Thanks a lot. See you there.

All right. Nice. Thank you so much, Dylan. Thanks, Adam. Wait. Continue. Welcome back, Podcats. That was Dylan Moran talking to me.

there. I'd met Dylan a few times over the years, but never really had the opportunity to sit down and have a relaxed conversation like that, so I really enjoyed it. I hope you did too. I'm very grateful to him for making the time in the description of today's podcast. A reminder that you will find links to his website, tour dates, as well as a few other bits and pieces that you can see on YouTube. There is his 2004 stand-up show Monster, which is currently available to watch there. There's Dylan talking about some of his favorite films back in 2023. There is part one of an episode of How Do You Want Me, his show written by Simon Nye, that he starred in, opposite the late Charlotte Coleman back in 1998. That was a really nice show with lots of great funny people

in it, Peter Serafinovich pops up in the first episode. There's also a link to a film that Dylan was in called A Film With Me In It, directed by Ian Fitzgibbon from 2008, and written by Mark Dockety. It's also got Mark's brother David O Doherty in it. There's also a link to Dylan on the Tommy Tianan show in 2024, talking about playing the piano, which, like the guitar, he can't play in a conventional way but still enjoys. I mean, I really liked his guitar playing. I don't know about you,

but I thought that worked pretty well. And I hope he didn't mind me putting a bit of reverb on there. I like reverb, you know, but I am aware that it's generally considered the tacky choice and that people with more refined tastes would prefer to keep everything dry.

Keep it dry. Always keep it dry. not buckles though. I've also put a link to that Guardian review of the AI sitcom No Big Deal. If you're interested in watching it, it's on YouTube. There's a link to an article on the Smithsonian online magazine

about that cat, the new cat that Dylan mentioned, which is called the Tilkayo cat that looks like a miniature tiger. There's a link to the video for The Look by Metronomy. which you heard a short clip of in there, directed by Lorenzo Fonda, from back in 2011. And I've also put links to that remix of I Can't Go for That by Hall of Hohler Notes,

the Pomo remix. And one of the tracks by Arvo Pert that Dylan mentioned, Silentium from 1977, beautiful. Fairly minimalist piece of piano music. and there's the link to Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece, which is actually about software that predicts which movies will become hits, but it also mentions the music version. Let's wait for that jet to rumble off.

Anyway, how are you doing podcasts? I hope you're all right. Cultural highlight from this week, quite easily pleased, was The Bit in Traders. celebrity traitors, when Richard E. Grant announced that he was a traitor when asked directly by Joe Lysett. And the combination of the expression on Joe's face, and then the moment when he realized, like, oh, that actually isn't the best strategy. I guess he was all caught up in the moment. I appreciate that this moment has been analysed.

by everyone, but it was good fun. I mean, I was really laughing. What a mad man. I think, unless they're absolutely insane, they'll instantly get rid of him, won't they? We'll see. Another less chucklesome highlight of my week was finally getting round to dealing with the last few boxes containing my mum's clothes. You will be excited to hear. This is a good six years after she died. And of course, I talk about my parents quite a lot, I guess. You know, I've got a couple of books out of it as well. And I sometimes think that the way that I chose to deal with my parents' belongings, specifically after their deaths, makes me look a bit mad and was maybe a stupid way of doing things. And I have a lot of sympathy with anyone who just decides to get

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

I mean, we are in the fortunate position of having a lot of space out here, a lot of sheds, places to store things. So I said, yeah, we'll take everything and I'll sort through it here. but I am only just coming to the end of that process now, six years later, which is, I think, a bit nuts. But I just wanted to be sure that I wasn't going to get rid of anything that my parents would have wanted me and my family and my brother and sister to have. I remember a journalist Hadley Freeman from The Guardian came to Norfolk

to interview me after my mum done. died in 2020 around the publication of Rambled book. And we sat in the flat where my dad stayed when he lived with us, which was and still is filled with books and bits of furniture that belonged to him and to my mum. And in the finished Guardian article, she quotes me as saying, I'm worried it's slightly mad that I'm building this weird museum in here about all the photos and knick-knacks that I have in there. Then the paragraph ends, and beneath that, Hadley writes,

it is a bit mad. I remember reading that at the time and going, is it? I don't know. But now I think, yeah, it is. But I guess we're all a bit mad. And that, I think, tends to become more the case, the older you get. But I don't know, is it so mad? Is it mad to want to hang on to a few memories of your parents,

if you loved them and if you miss them? Is it so mad to find it difficult to part with the things that your parents felt were valuable? Is it so mad to find it very poignant, as I did this week, when you are hand-washing your mother's clothes for the last time before taking them to the charity shop and remembering her as you do? And then deciding that maybe you won't take all of the clothes to the charity shop and then having an argument with you. your wife when you suggest that maybe she has some of the clothes and she says she doesn't want to dress like an elderly Tory counsellor. Is it really so mad to dress a mannequin in your mother's clothes and shoes and one of her old wigs from the 70s and then sit her in the corner of your bedroom with a copy of Busy Busy World by Richard Scarry as if she's reading me a bedtime story

back when everything was nice? Is it? Okay. Time to head back. Thank you so much once again to Dylan Moran. Thanks to Diggery Waite and Claire Broughton for their production and Patreon support. Thanks to Claire for additional editing on this episode. Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support. Thanks to Helen Green for her beautiful artwork.

Thanks to everybody at Acast who liaises with my sponsors. But thanks most of all to you for listening right to live. the end, blimey. And in the new Patreon Q&A that comes out in a couple of days as I speak, one of the people who contributed was someone called Chris, who had made a audio clip compilation to chart the evolution of my I Love You, buye sign-offs. And Chris was wondering which of these had been the longest. I don't know. But for Chris, I'm going to have a go at a really long one today without the aid of any digital trickery. But first, I think that we should probably have a hug. I was going to say creepy hug, but apparently that's offensive. So come over here. Hey,

how you doing? Good to see you. I hope you're keeping all right. And please, until the next time we meet, go easy out there, yeah. You think I'm mad. And for what it's worth, And for Chris, I love you.