The Comedian's Comedian Podcast - Ivo Graham & Laura Lexx: Comedian Climate Confessions!

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Welcome to this bonus episode where Georgia Elliott-Smith and I have joined forces to take on the grubbiest little sustainability secrets of my fellow comedians. We'll be offering compassion, insight and some counter-argument, if not actual absolution to both Ivo Graham and Laura Lexx!We'll be back to regular scheduled programming in the next few weeks in the run up to the BIG EPISODE 500! Don't forget to take part in our ComComPod survey at stuartgoldsmith.com/survey where we want to know your favourite episode, most memorable moments and what you want to see in the future...Where to find everyone:Ivo Graham: ivograham.comLaura Lexx: lauralexx.co.ukGeorgia Elliott Smith: linkedin.com/in/georgiaelliott-smithStuart Goldsmith: stuartgoldsmith.comKeep up-to-date with all things The Comedian's Comedian Podcast:YouTube: youtube.com/@ComComPodInstagram: instagram.com/ComComPodTikTok: tiktok.com/@ComComPodSee Stuart live on tour - www.stuartgoldsmith.com/comedy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stu here. Episode 500 is somehow fast approaching. It's already in the cat. I can't wait for you to hear it. I need your feedback. I want to gather some data on your favourite episodes, your best moments, see if there's any fun anecdotes I can uncover along the way. Something must have happened in your life in nearly 500 episodes of podcasting. And as a thanks for taking part, myself and producer Callum, will be gifting an Insider's Insider 12-month membership on Patreon to one lucky respondent. You can pay this forward if you're already one. The survey's super short, all the questions are skippable, and this would mean a lot if you could just take five minutes out of your day to go and fill the thing in. Head to Stuartgoldsmith.com slash survey, or the link is in the show notes. There's going to be a very short break in September before we approach that milestone, but lots of exciting stuff in the works.

Hello there. So there's a bit of a hiatus at the moment. We're taking a little bit of a break post-Edinburgh, and evil producer Callum is going on holiday, no doubt, to Disneyland again. we haven't talked producer calum and I about whether or not I've allowed to tell you that he's addicted to theme parks but it's come out now and if if he's bleeped several of the last few words then you won't know what I'm talking about but nonetheless we're having a little bit of a hiatus and as a result this is a bonus thing

we've got a bonus thing for you forgive me while I read from my script if you're watching this then apologies the magic will be slightly lost and you'll realise I'm not improvising these sentences but my friend professional sustainability consultant Georgia Elliott Smith and I have recently joined forces to take on a sort of kind of like the grubby secrets. There's a thing I do in my climate comedy shows. I started this in spoilers a few years ago and I did it a few times in an inconvenient time which is the one just

gone which was really fun and thank you for everyone that came to that work in progress. It was pretty polished some of it and though by no means finished it's um it is exciting to be in a position where i've really got the absolute base i've got like the stratum of a show the substrate of a show on which to really spend the next year tinkering and improving it so that's really excited about that but in the show uh i do some climate confessions and i think if you're at the sort of casual concom listener you may or may not be aware of these um but what i'm trying to do is to undermine the idea of the purity test, which is something I've really struggled with in the past, the notion that, unless you lead a perfectly guilt-free, carbon-free life, then you are not entitled to have an

opinion on the climate crisis. And I think that's a mad point of view to which I have previously subscribed myself. I definitely, you know, as few as five years ago, I'd have thought to myself, I went on holiday to Greece the other year, so I can't say anything about the climate. and that partly that's in terms of my internal guilt and partly it's in terms of like what if they get me to a sort of vague and rambling concept of who they might be and what getting me might entail but do you what I mean like I think we can all feel

the sort of chilling effect of the risk or the fear of public opprobrium and it stops us doing positive things so with regard to the climate a thing that I do is I solicit climate confessions from my audience just kind of grubby little mundane things whereby you might have seen me do these on various bits of social media over the years whereby I kind of ask people what they're

I'll blow my favourite one with you now this is what I'll talk about this all the time on stage because it's just the quintessential example there was a guy who was a businessman who said that his climate confession was during the winter months in the UK he liked to put his pyjamas into the tumble dryer before he goes to bed

so that they're all nice and snugly it's absolutely gorgeous that's the sort of thing we're after. So, myself and Georgia Elliot Smith are taking on the grubby little sustainability secrets of some fellow comedians. Hence, the reason for me putting this bit on the podcast whilst we are on or in hiatus. We are going to try and offer some compassion and some insight and some counter-argument, if not actual absolution, to a bunch of comics. Now, I've been soliciting friends of mine to send me their climate confessions on WhatsApp. So we have them on video as well, hence this being on video.

And then me and Georgia Elliott Smith, who let's not forget, knows her onions when it comes to sustainability, she and I will kind of chew them over. We went to a series of park benches not too far from me in Bristol, and we discussed the climate confessions of a whole bunch of people, two of which we've released so far. And so I'm putting them on the podcast feed so that you can enjoy them. I think these are funny and entertaining and interesting, and every single confession we explored, I learnt something new and fascinating,

sometimes ghastly and sometimes optimistic about. So the confessions concept of this, there is no actual judgment being leveled at any of these people, and I ask you not to judge them either. A favourite recent one, which isn't in this series, was one that I did with Louisa Omulan, who said that she had, it may be too, maybe we should bleep that name. I don't know that she thought this was going to be on the whole podcast feed, but a comedian, unless we didn't bleep her, in which case, yeah, her. Lovely friend of mine and fantastic comedian, just as you know,

an absolute standing ovation comedian who is on an incredible kind of comedy odyssey at the minute. She said that she, and this is by no means, she's not the only person that's ever done this, she thought the fact that dog poo bags were compostable meant that you could just leave them. You can just leave, you could pick up your dog's poo, And then I don't know what happens after that, but you do every so often see a dog poo bag dangling from the branch of a tree. And I wonder if that was, if not her, then someone who was laboring under the same misapprehension. So I meant, by saying this, I meant to say, so let's not judge people. And I have brought up one of the most judgeable confessions.

But the confession was her bearing her innermost. And so we are not here to pick on people or be mean to them. We're here to admire the honesty, the candor of people who are just like us, who are imperfect just like us. All right? So all of that is probably unnecessary big pre-waffle. But first, so today we're going to hear from Ivo, Graham and Laura Lex, who will send in their brief climate confessions, and then Georgia Elliott-Smith and I will learn about them and explore them. So here is the first. This is Ivo.

I recently saw his – the most recent thing I've seen Ivo do was earlier this. This year I think I saw his show Carousel, which was his first, I think his first storytelling show and it was just brilliant. It was just, it was just wonderful. It was basically stand up but in storytelling clothes because it was stuff. It was a story about his life. But it, and I say basically stand up to kind of almost to convince you to give it the time of day if you don't consider yourself a storytelling show person. It was so, so good. And he's brilliant and he is now going to confess his failed attempt. as a more sustainable diet. Here is... I'm Stuart Goldsmith and I'm here with Georgia Elliot Smith to absolve another comedian of their climate confession.

Today we have Ivo Graham. I aspire to be vegetarian as much as possible but I fail constantly. Such as at a tea last week with my daughter in coat, brasserie and barns where I elected to have a glazed pork belly because the mushroom cassillet just looked a bit mushroom heavy.

Not good enough. What I love there with Ivo is he's clearly angry with himself. It's quite a violent sort of a thing. He's let himself down. Also, as well as a climate confession, it's also kind of a climate boast about the level of food that he has access to. Well, exactly. And he also says, I aspire to be vegetarian. So he's already got in there early with a sort of, I know, I know. I know, I know.

If you can convince someone to switch from beef to pork, then you can reduce their food emissions by 20%. And that's one of those numbers that's just stuck in my head. And I didn't really have a sense of why, why and then I saw a graphic recently and there's you know maple syrup is one tiny little square here and something else this square this is food that we feed to animals and this colossal square in the middle is cattle yes and that and that's the issue I've never seen it represented to that extent so even if you can just get British meat instead of international meat and that's to do with the way the rules around British farming

as well they the the meat in this country tends to be lower impact and say you know you you mentioned the states, they tend to have massive cattle ranches there and the environmental impact of those is huge. And I think generally the rule here is less and better. I was vegetarian for years. I was vegan for about 18 months. I'm coming out the other end of that pipeline. I'm now sort of flexitarian. Okay. And about 10% of the... And again, that sounds, I make fun of my wife for being flexitarian, but it is actually, it's a one of those things whereby if you recognize that what you're doing has an impact, if you can just do it less often, that reduces the impact. Exactly. And I I think there's the reason that I came out of being vegan and you know a lot of my

environmentalist buddies are vegan, fully committed vegan and very evangelistic, you know, evangelical about it and I think that's amazing and very agglithal. Sorry, very good, very good. You know and I think that's wonderful and incredibly admirable and I really support them. For me with small you know with kids and with a partner I do a lot of cooking for the family, they're not interested in going vegan you know and I find it a bit restrictive for my lifestyle. So I eat a mainly plant-based diet, but I will occasionally eat meat. But when I eat meat, I'm very careful about where it's come from. And making sure that you use every part of that.

So if you're buying a chicken, make sure that you use the whole chicken. You know, use it for stock, use it up in for leftovers. Don't just eat the prime cuts and throw it away, which many people do. Sure. You have to use the whole of the animal and the whole of the animal. As to Ivo's point, he said that the mushroom wellington was it, the mushroom casselay or something. The mushroom casselay was a bit mushroomy. And to be fair, that is, it is difficult. One of the issues there is that it's the paucity of vegan and vegetarian offers.

And it would be a much better world, a culinary world, if meat was the specialist thing. And vegetarian was just the, that's absolutely, of course, it's just vegetarian food because that's what food is. I love it. But it isn't the case. I don't know how we flip that right. I do love. You know, I live in London. So I have lots of options, don't read advice.

But I have, you know, loads of options when it comes to vegetarian and vegan food. And it's really great to see a lot of restaurants really grabbing that and running with it. But when you are out and about, it can be really difficult. So I think he named checked a particular restaurant there. I think it would be interesting to see, you know, how many restaurants have put a great deal of thought into the creative vegetarian and vegan options. Because I think a lot of people are going that way. you know, the number of vegans and vegetarians has more than doubled over the last few years

and is planned to double again between now and 2030. So, you know, this is a massive market. It's something people are really interested in and it's a relatively small thing that restaurants and caterers can do to reduce their impact. So I do think personal choice, eat less meat, eat less dairy. It's good for your health as well, you know, less saturated fat, a lot more fibre and so on. So, yeah. So people should follow my example and diversify into crisps. that was myself and Georgia Elliot Smith discussing and waxing lyrical about the climate confession

of Ivo Graham and then we heard from Laura Lex who confesses brilliant Laura Lex who I haven't seen do a full show for a little while my fault not hers I find it very hard to prioritise seeing full shows by people who've already done the podcast I was constantly seeking

new hours that I haven't seen or new comics who haven't been on the show I regard myself as kind of scouting for the rest of my life in a way that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it doesn't always make my life easy. But nonetheless, the point is that I did gig with Laura at one of the Monkey Barrel big show Comedy Nights in Edinburgh just gone. And she is absolutely brilliant as she was on top form.

And here she is confessing that her pile of clean washing hides a dreadful little secret. Today we're absolving some more comedians of their climate confessions. So today we're talking to Laura Lex. I don't use eco-friendly fabric softener. I did use it for years, but I just missed that really lovely smell of fresh clean washing and I'm sorry. Chemicals, eh?

You can't live without them. Listen, I've got a lot of sympathy for Laura, especially as she did point out, she took care to point out, that she'd made the effort for years, which is years longer than I made the effort for. I tried it once and I went, this just isn't getting my stuff clean.

I know, I know, I know, and I have the same struggle in our house as well. I keep trying to do the eco, detergent thing. In fact, I've got the, you know, the little balls that have got, you use them in every wash. I tried using those for a long time and then my kids and my husband just rebelled and they said no, no more. They love the kind of ocean fresh scent. So we'll squeeze out and kind of extract chemicals in order to make it smell like a thing that it isn't. I know. But the problem is we now, the Overton window is shifted and we're all growing up in a world in which

the chemical scent means the real thing now. The chemical smell, I know. And the problem with the chemical smell is that what you're actually smelling is something called volatile organic compounds, VOCs. Yeah. And they are pretty nasty. I was going to say. They sound same. Exactly.

Organic, you know, it's got the word organic. They are pretty nasty things. They are very bad for indoor air quality. They're very bad for your lungs. So if you tend to be somebody who suffers with eczema, asthma, those kinds of things, they're just generally not very good for you. The major problem with these chemicals is they tend to cling to the inside of your machine. Oh no. So the bad smell comes from your unclean washing machine and the chemicals that you

use to cover up the smell make it worse. This is like 17th century England where we're just ruining stuff. I know and so well you'll know you know if you pull the drawer out of your washing machine and look inside quite often there's a lot of black mould in there. I mean it's pretty nasty gunky stuff. Yeah I have seen that in the softener bit. Yeah so one of the things that you can do is just run through most washing machines we've got some sort of self-clean function on them, you know, run some vinegar, some bicarbonate of soda. Vinegarious and or bicarbons of soda. Always.

Solution to all life sales. This is the thing, Eco Homes, you know, have always got the vinegar and bicarbonate soda. And there's a really good reason for it. One of the biggest impacts from using chemicals in your laundry is this very good Scrabble score word, eutrification. So... I'm sorry, as a lifelong scrabble fan, I'm going to point out those are all one point letters apart from the C, which is three.

Yeah, but it's a long one. Is it? Is it? Is it? Let's get back to the point. Anyway, eutrification. So it's a... It's this idea that when you put...

Oh, and the F's four. We fix it. Redo the whole big. Utrifer. No, it's pH. Oh, in that case, three and four, I think. Let's get back to it. Let's go back.

And this is where the chemicals washing out into the drain. They go out into the water system, even if it's through the... the sewage works. What happens there is it increases what's called the nutrient load in the water and that allows algae and bacteria feed on that and they create these sort of algal blooms in the water and what happens is then the oxygen level of the water reduces. It means that the plant life, the fish, all of the invertebrates in the water ultimately end up suffocating so they can't survive. Good, I hate invertebrates. Tell me about nutrients though. You'd think putting nutrients in water is good.

That sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? But no, you know, the water needs to have a low nutrient level because high nutrients means that then lots of algae and bacteria grows, suffocates the fish, creates algal blooms, creates darkness in the water so then the life on the bottom of the stream or the pond can't survive and just chokes up our watercourses. So this is one of the main problems with putting lots of these softeners and detergents into our streets so really this sounds like to from my mind this is another example of one of those things whereby an invention was made x years ago and no one thought but what about all the waste products from that yes and so we all just did it and then we all just did it more and now it's absolutely a fact of life absolutely and the the laundry product market is huge i mean you know

when i was growing up you just had laundry powder you know maybe a softener if you were kind of fancy yes But now these days you get all kinds of different products. And so it's a growing market. We're marketed at all the time by these mega brands to say, unless your clothing smells, you know, in a particular way of like lily blooms, then you're a dirty, horrible person that doesn't deserve a shirt. So that was myself and Georgia Elliott Smith discussing and debating the finer points of the climate confessions of Ivo Graham and Laura Lex.

And that'll have to do you for now because we're currently still on hiatus. or what's the in, are we in or on hiatus? I learnt an incredible word, a Spanish word, polotas, meaning your balls. And apparently a piece of Spanish slang is to be in polotus, which I don't know the direct translation, but it means naked. And so you would say I'm naked, you would be saying I'm in balls. So we are very much in hiatus in the sense of polotus. So we'll be back with you very soon.

And in the meantime, please remember to take the Comcom Pod big survey. I will launch it properly in a proper pod sometime. Well, I mean, I've already mentioned it on the little promo ads you get at the beginning of all the Epps. But it would be incredibly useful for me and producer Callum to know what you're interested in, what most excites you. I was on Reddit the other day. And Mike Kaplan, who's a brilliant comic friend of mine and has been on this show, he is very frequently on Reddit. And it's so funny, I occasionally things pop up in my Reddit feed that I go, oh, I'm interested in this. Someone's asking for a recommendation about a podcast that explains jokes.

And then I just look, has anyone, has anyone mentioned my one? And someone did recently. It's lovely as someone, Mike commented on something. And then underneath it, loads of people going, holy shit, it's Mike Kaplan. So that was, that's fun. I don't want to give you the impression I've just discovered Reddit. But I don't use it a lot. I don't post on it or anything.

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some opinions but almost it's almost more useful if you are not an insider because i have other that's like a patreon member because i have other um uh things to ask you i have a i already what i i meant to say was i already have ways of contacting the insiders so uh if you are simply you in the world enjoying this show and you've never donated to it even that's fine too maybe you could donate five minutes of your time uh it would be great to hear from you all right get back to enjoying September and we'll speak to you soon.