The Joe Rogan Experience - #1848 - Francis Foster & Konstantin Kisin

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin are the hosts of the free speech podcast and YouTube program "TRIGGERnometry." Kisin's new book, "An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West," is available now. www.triggerpod.co.uk

the Joe Rogan experience what happened? first of all gentlemen welcome I've been enjoying your show so it's nice to see you in real life and talk to you in person it's cool it's really great of you to have us man it's such a pleasure to see you in real life and talk to you in person. It's cool. It's really great of you to have us, man. It's such a pleasure to meet you because, you know, all of us are inspired by what you started.

You know, we all look up to you. So it's amazing being here. Oh, thank you. Well, it's nice to meet you guys, too. I enjoy your conversations. I really think that people like you that are reasonable and intelligent and have legitimate opinions grounded in facts, it's very important. Oh, it's tremendously important.

Hold on a second. My microphone's not on. See, this is another way. This is why I do most of the talking on our show, man. This is how I'm getting fucking silenced. It's the goddamn government. We'll figure out what's up with that. Yeah, we were just shit talking about Joe Biden before we started,

so that's probably what's happened there, man. Yeah. But why would it only cancel yours? Yeah. That Francis fellow's got to go. Yeah. Get rid of him. There it is.

There it is. There we go. The dulcet tones of Francis Foster. Now we're up and running. Yeah. Yeah. What is it like doing, I mean, how many podcasts are over in the UK? Is it a popular thing? It is a popular thing, but like everything, it really started to get motoring during COVID, particularly in our space with comedians when everything shut down.

And then comedians realized, hang on a second, we were just doing the comedy circuit and then wanting to be on TV. And then that moment was a really eye-opening moment where they realized ratings on TV are collapsing. Nobody's watching TV for ways that we'll get into through the podcast. So what else are you going to do? And everybody started to get onto YouTube and podcasting. Because the thing is, Joe, whatever happens in America, in the UK, we do it four or five years down the line yeah

but not just that good and bad yeah good and bad we get your best stuff we get all your shit as well man what's the shit that you guys are getting well this cultural thing that we always talk about you know we import straight from you and that's why we have conversations like during blm we had these protests in the center of london with going, hands up, don't shoot, in front of cops who don't have guns. It's so much of it. We just download your shit and they just put it out as if it's our own, you know? It's so odd. It's so funny, man.

Like when Trump came in 2016, I think it was, or 2017, only 2017, there were mass protests. But when like the crown prince of Saudi Arabia came over, fresh like, you know chopping up a journalist. No one protested Everyone was cool. That's strange, isn't it? Yeah, it's the power of American culture man That's why everyone talks about it because it affects everyone. Well, it's just it's not Balanced the outrage is not balanced, you know Even the outrage about things you should be outraged about like Jeffrey Epstein that outrage was balanced right sort of right But what about the Catholic Church? Like why why isn't everybody really freaking out about I was just in Italy and one of the things that's nuts is the Vatican is a

Country yeah, yeah, it's a country filled with pedophiles. Yeah, it's a country filled with pedophiles and stolen art It's a small like hundred yard. Like what is it a hundred acres? I think it's a country filled with pedophiles. It's a country filled with pedophiles and stolen art. It's a small, like, hundred yard, like, what is it, a hundred acres, I think? It's a hundred acre, rather, country inside of a city filled with pedophiles. Yeah, absolutely. This is why I love America, man, because in the UK we have libel laws, so if you say something like that and you then have to be able to prove it, otherwise you can get sued. Well, you can kind of prove that.

That's one. I mean, I read the other day that, I think it was until five, six years ago, the age of consent in the Vatican City was 12 years old. Wow. Is that true? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was just like, wow. Pull that up. Jamie's going to fact check you. I hope that's not true. What year did that change? I think it was about 10 years ago, something like that. They bump it up to 13? Yeah, make it respectable. Do you know

what I mean? Yeah, oh my god. It's true. Holy shit. Oh my god. The Vatican City's equal age of consent being raised from 12 to 18 following the announcement of an overhaul of the Catholic Church criminal code by Pope Francis. Francis is like the most progressive guy, in terms of Pope's

Yeah, he is. I mean that's not really saying a lot. Do you know what I mean? Well? He's the Benedict guy he was wanted in other countries for crimes against humanity I mean like what he was doing was really evil He was moving offenders to other places and one of them he moved a guy that went on to molest a hundred deaf kids it's it's absolutely insane a hundred you know i mean it's it's insanity i mean this guy was already molesting and then they say well let's just instead of trying him and removing him from the church we'll just move him to a place where people can't hear. It's amazing how people cover this stuff up.

Like, I don't know if you followed the grooming gang stories from the UK, but basically we had a situation for decades where young girls were being abused in the thousands, potentially half a million. And it was covered up because... I'm not aware of this at all. Well, right. So what happened was it was basically people from a certain background. It was what we call in the UK South Asian, so Bangladeshi and Pakistani mostly, and they were abusing Sikh and local British white girls in hundreds of thousands.

We had one of the victims on our show, Dr. Ella Hill, a very brave woman, and it was covered up for decades because, and we've just had a report come out to try and find out why it was covered up, why it wasn't investigated. Because these people went to the police and they were told there's nothing we can do for you. Oh my God. Yeah. And it wasn't investigated and wasn't reported on properly because of quote, sensitivities

about race. Right? So so this all this stuff gets covered up for all kinds of it's it's mind-blowing man what people get away with on this sort of thing because the politicians who should have been exposing it the people who should have been talking about it the police who should have been investigated were worried about being labeled racist in fact one famous tweet from a labor mp told some of these people to shut up for the sake of diversity retweeted a tweet sorry retweeted it my apologies shut up for the sake of diversity these are rape victims joe and some of them were murdered oh my god and not just rape victims as well kids kids underage kids yeah and you haven't heard about it because at all right it's massively

taboo even to talk about uh in in gets, you know, people feel very uncomfortable talking about this because it comes from communities like, you know, what you would say like Asian communities and white, particularly white working class girls and Sikh girls. So people feel very uncomfortable about this. They're far more comfortable talking about Epstein because in their heads it's punching up. Whilst if you talk about this crime, it's seen as punching down, that it's racist. And it's far easier for them to silence it. But the problem is, Joe, is when you do that, what happens is that nefarious people can then get involved in this. And they say these words. They're not representing you look

what's going on if the powers that be aren't going to represent you i will and that's when things start to take an ugly turn yeah we need to be able to talk about these subjects it doesn't matter how uncomfortable where they are it doesn't matter how difficult they are it doesn't matter how awkward they make us feel because we had a great guest on the show called Ed West, and he made one of the most profound points I've ever heard on our show, which is, if you are not prepared to talk about a subject honestly, then you are never going to find a solution to that subject. To that problem. And what happened was when we got one of the victims on our show, Dr. Ella Hill, I remember because we were trying to get the member of parliament who was one of the women that started to expose this. She wrote an article in one of the newspapers

and she got so much hate that she didn't want to talk about it anymore. So when we called her up and we said, do you want to come on the show and tell us about this? She said, I just, I just can't do it. And that's when I remember sitting in the car talking to Frances on the phone. And I went, we've got to a point where a member of parliament whose job it is to protect these children is getting so much hate for speaking out about it. She doesn't want to talk about it anymore. A member of parliament. So this woman who's the doctor. Yeah.

She was presumably molested when she was young? Yes. So how long has this been going on? Decades. This has been decades. It's been going on since the 90s. So a lot of these people now are like my age, in their 40s, and it's still going on. How do they have access to these girls?

They would basically prey on vulnerable girls. Maybe they didn't have a parent or maybe they use something like that. They apply them with alcohol, drugs, get them addicted. And when when some of the families tried to go and take their kids back, the police. I can't remember the exact details, but in several cases it was like, oh, she's just a prostitute. And and the father would get arrested for trying to get his daughter out of that situation jesus christ yeah for the sake of diversity that's what that's what some people look not everybody was doing that i think most people were just afraid because of the racial

component you see what i'm saying yeah yeah and this is this is why sorry francis this is why this this identity politics is such a problem because when you stop treating people as individuals who behave correctly or incorrectly, lawfully or unlawfully, you start to go, well, these people can't commit a crime anymore. Right. And these people commit a crime by just being whatever. That's a problem. We've got to get back to the MLK idea of everybody being judged by the content of their character. Were we ever there? I don't know.

When you say get back to it, get back to the idea. You're right. It's a good point that you picked me up on it. What I mean is we've got to get back to trying to get there. Yeah. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. That's what we've got to get back to, the idea that that's the dream.

Right. And we'll probably never get there because we're human beings. We're not perfect, right? That's one of the most disturbing aspects of like this hardcore left progressivism is that they are willing to ignore reality for the sake of this narrative that they have and also they're willing to lump to make these mass generalizations and lump everyone like in like like particularly if they're hard to defend like straight white men like that's a great one.

That's an awesome scapegoat. You can toss that into there. Wealthy people, you know, upper class people, people with money. It's just a very bizarre thing that's going on where people are unwilling to look at people as individuals because it just doesn't fit this narrative that they're trying to push. Yeah. And that's so true. I remember when Brexit happened in 2016, I started to notice more and more when people were talking, the term old white man became an insult. And suddenly if you're an old white man, that meant that you were racist, particularly if you voted for Brexit. And that really angered me. So, and for the, for the reason my dad,

he grew up in a very poor part of the North of England which is Wigan. Orwell actually wrote a book about it The Road to Wigan Pier talking about the deprivation of that of that particular part of the world and my dad voted for Brexit. My dad voted for Brexit because he said that he wanted the UK to be independent of Europe. He loves Europe but he didn't believe that the EU should be making rules for the UK. And my dad married my mother, who is Latin American, a woman of color, and I fucking hate that term. She's Latinx, mate. Yeah, she's Latinx. I asked my mom if she was Latinx.

She went, que coño es eso? What the fuck is this? She's that, basically. Latinx is one of my favorite faux pas. It's such a huge mistake because the Latino people are not willing to embrace that at all. You literally void out half of their language. Like, their language has gender built into it. Right.

And you know a lot of Latino people, particularly Venezuelans and Cubans, they don't like the left-wing man. Yeah, no. Particularly Cubans. Well, like us, they'veuelans and Cubans, they don't like the left wing man. Yeah, no. Particularly Cubans. Yeah. Well, like us, they've seen what that ideology does, right? Yeah. Well, particularly people that have, where their families have come from communist countries. Yeah.

Well, like me and Francis, right? Yeah. And so, like, my dad married my mom, like, back in the 70s, where we lived, which was a predominantly working class area. And, you know, there was a lot of, you know, there was racism. The pub down the road from where I grew up was a pub which had links to the BNP, which was the British National Party, which was a far right organization. And some of those guys operating out of that pub had assaulted Asian people in my area.

And my dad married my mom. And but as a result of that, my mom wanted to call me francisco jaime and take in the latino tradition her last name as well which was balice my dad was worried about racism so he called me francis gave me the name of a middle-class white woman which i'm very grateful for and uh and and that's how i live my life and that's how I was brought up. My dad is one of the nicest, sweetest, most generous, honorable people I've ever met. And to then have him be called racist and stupid and ignorant, it just enraged me. It's just bizarre that some generalizations, like generalizations have always been a thing that it's looked down upon. Like you can't generalize.

I mean, you can make generalizations with caveats. You can say, in general, you know, democratic-run cities or this or that. You know, you can... But when you do it with human beings and you just decide to dismiss someone based on some immutable characteristics that they have zero control over,

like being born white Well, we have a word for that Joe racism, right? Isn't but you can't be racist because race is power prejudice They came up with a nonsense. What a cute way to dismiss Generalizing. Yeah. Yeah, and this is you know One of the things I talk about in the book, because this is why I'm so grateful to be in the West. This is one of the few places that actually aspires to that idea. Yeah. I'm not saying we're perfect. We're not perfect. And you know this and everybody knows

this. But the aspiration to everybody being judged on who they are as an individual, it's quite a unique thing, man. It's a beautiful thing. It is a beautiful thing. And that should be promoted at the forefront of whatever ideology that we accept and then everything else, all the other things that we have to worry about and deal with, that should kind of fall into place secondarily. But it should be that even people that you would like to, or that you have a license to dismiss, like older white men, you have a license to dismiss them. Don't do that because it's not right. It's 100% out of their control to be who they are.

Just characterize them and judge them based on who they are as an individual. To judge people based on their individual merits, their character, their personality, what they do, that's what we should all be aspiring to. And that's why we started our show. That's why we started Trigonometry. To protect white men. Because, you know, we both voted remain in that referendum. So that's kind of like the equivalent of voting for Hillary Clinton versus Trump in 16.

And suddenly there was this narrative like what Francis is talking about, all, you know, old white people, all this. And for me, I'm a first generation, dark skinned Jewish immigrant from Russia into the UK. And suddenly all these people were like saying, oh yeah, we've got, this country is really racist. And I was like, what? I've lived in Britain almost my whole life since I was 13. That is not true. Half the country isn't racist. And I was like, wait, this doesn't make any sense. Let's work out what's actually going on. Right. And that's why we two remainers started interviewing people who voted for Brexit, particularly from the left, because the narrative was only right wing people voted for Brexit. Completely untrue,

as it turns out. And we were trying to understand where they were coming from. That's kind of the genesis of our show, trying to understand people who have a different opinion to us well there's a lot of right-wing people that don't want to vote for trump based entirely on his personality but there's a lot of left-wing people that voted for trump just because they didn't like hillary and they didn't like the policies of the democratic party and and all the stuff that she she stood for this ancient form of corruption that's been running America for a long time. It's a weird world that we're living in right now because we're inundated with information.

We have more information than ever before, but we also have these very clear boxes that you can shove people into that make it convenient because there's so much information because there's so much to sort out because Nuance is difficult because like looking at things for what they really are is complicated. It's complex It's much easier to pick a team man Yeah so much easy it is and so many people are doing it now and they pick a team and they March and a lot of dull minds who have accepted these narratives of you know being just something

that you just you if you're a good person this is how you think and behave but you know and i'd love to talk to you about this show because i think we're from the same place but anyone coffee uh sure yeah coffee'd be great um so i was a teacher for 12 years and i consider myself to be from the left. I was a teacher in really poor working class backgrounds in London and other places as well. And I wanted to get into that because I just got, this is something that I wanted to do. I wanted to help the next generation. I wanted to work with these kids. And then slowly but surely I've seen my side go completely tonto. They've gone nuts. When did it happen?

When did it start happening over there? Look, Brexit played a big part. Constantine and I always use this phrase, broke people's brains. COVID broke people's brains, but Brexit, Trump broke people's brains. Yeah, but man, you tell me all the stories about working in the school way before then when you were being told, well, you can't teach people of this race. Tell them that. So, for instance, instance in school i remember attending this one workshop and this had my blood boiling so i used to work in a place called uh in in east london right in a place called newham in this wonderful school and i remember the we got this one guy coming to to teach us right

to do a bit of teacher training and he he was teaching us how to teach boys. And I'm like, okay, in particular English. Now, I'm a boy, obviously, or a man, and I loved reading when I was a kid. Reading was my escape, particularly being an only child. And he was saying to us, right, you've got to have different expectation with boys than you have with girls. And suddenly my ears picked up. I was like, I was thinking, where are you going with this?

And he was like, you can't expect them to sit down and write like a girl could because they're different boys you know you've just got to expect that they're going to make they're going to write a little less they're not going to you know they're not going to be as engaged and you need to have extra stimuluses for them as a result and all this and i'm thinking this is the bigotry of low expectation what i've got in my classroom are working class boys from desperately poor backgrounds, many of whom have grown up without a dad. And we all know the stats about what that entails. For most of those kids, the only way out of the poverty that they have grown up in is education. That is it. And you want me to go into my classroom and say to these boys who have

already got enough challenges as it is and you know and that 10 and 11 the gangs are starting to circle and they you know start and they're starting to stray into that world you want me to say to them that they are not as capable for their writing as girls well why don't we just scrap it and just let them run free it absolutely infuriated me to me the worst thing about this progressive movement is the bigotry of low expectations and saying to people you know what you need our help or you're not going to be as good at us as us and to me that's disgusting because you're dooming people to not have the life that they could have if you have high expectations for them.

Because I'm telling you something, if you go into these schools or these places of learning, and you have high expectations for these kids, the vast majority will meet it. So with boys in particular, what is the difference from your personal experience of teaching boys? So my personal experience of teaching boys is they're more rambunctious. They've got more energy. They like to break shit. They like to break shit. You know, they're not as mature as girls.

You've just got to accept that as well. But here's the thing. There's a joy that boys bring to a classroom. Like, girls tend to be more obedient. But with boys, you can tend to have a little bit more fun. You can have a little bit more back and forth or banter as we call it in London or in the UK. So boys are different like that. But the thing is with boys is they respond to a challenge. If you say to them, I want by the end of this lesson Tony I want four paragraphs and I want capital letter full stop I

want you to have all your apostrophes and I want you to get that done by half pass prove to me you can do it a boy will be like yes because that's how we respond as men we respond to challenges we respond to people saying to us come on meet expectation. But if you say to somebody, you're never going to do it, most people will agree. I mean, there'll be the odd kid who will just want to prove you wrong, but the vast majority will never do that. So do you think when they're dealing with boys and girls in classrooms, it's just complicated to deal with all the variables

that the boys bring and the girls bring? So instead of handling that, they just lower the expectations for boys. I think not all teachers, I think a lot of teachers push back on that, but I think there were certainly some teachers who would take on board what this person was saying. And look, let's be fair to teachers, particularly in the type of schools that I worked in.

You had 30 kids in the class. I had everything from a kid who potentially had the ability to go to Oxford or Cambridge. He was that intelligent, that smart, or she was right the way through to a nonverbal autistic kid. So you had to make sure that all the resources were prepared in a way that all the children could meet. And not only just those two extremes, you also had all the ones in the middle and upper and lower and all the rest of it. So teachers have an incredibly difficult job and our teachers in the UK as underpaid as they are here in America and underappreciated Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are that seems universal

Fucking bizarre is that it's one of the most important jobs that anyone can have you're literally educating the future generation and for for whatever reason, we dismiss it as being this very low paid, low expectation, low praise occupation. It's very strange. It's very strange that that's not addressed. And when it is addressed, it's just lip service and nothing really gets done. Not much. But, you know, particularly in countries like china korea or around that part of the world they have a saying father mother father mother teacher

yeah you know and we just don't have that and particularly in the uk we don't appreciate teachers you know there's a i think it was george bernard shaw who said those who can do those who can't teach yeah right that old saying which is ironic because he was a crap playwright, but... Ha! There's a little dig there. Still angry about it a hundred years later. He's just an old white man,

mate, it's fine. Well, it's a generalization. Yeah. But here's the thing. We all remember a teacher who changed our lives. Yeah. We all remember

that special teacher who, for whatever reason, took an interest, not necessarily just in the classroom, but maybe outside, maybe we're having a tough tough time who took the time out from their day to help us or inspire us or actually give us a fight a fire and a passion like one of my old teachers i remember like i was in sixth form which was 16 to 18 in the uk and i hated shakespeare i could never get into it and I remember he sat us down

and he taught us Hamlet. And I don't know how he did it, but he just unlocked it for us. And we were kids from South London, you know, from all different backgrounds, whatever else. And we just learned the magic of Shakespeare. And it doesn't matter what happens.

Mr. Potter, if you're listening, big shout out. He gave me a gift that I will treasure right the way through to the end of my days. That's beautiful. That term, those who can't teach is so silly. Especially from my background, I come from martial arts and the best instructors were all great martial artists. All of them. You cannot be. I mean, there's some boxing instructors that weren't great boxers that turned out to be great coaches, but most of the great martial arts instructors were in fact great martial

artists. They just had a passion for it. They had a passion for learning it, and then they had a passion for explaining all the various very nuanced details. All the great jujitsu instructors are all world champions almost all of them or or champions in some way shape or form because to truly understand the subject in order to be you in order to be able to teach it you need to be able to understand every part of the process like if i'm teaching you i don't know like equations and i don't fully

understand it i'm not going to be able to teach it because you're going to go to me, Francis. But how did you get from this point to this point? And if I can't explain it, I'm not going to be able to help you. Right. Yeah. Especially with complex things that require you actually doing it. So many things require you actually being able to do it in order to be able to explain how it's done. Like you can't just teach it.

No, you can't. You need to be able to take people step by step through something. And here's the thing, because you used to teach martial arts as well, didn't you, Joe? Yeah. You will find that as you teach people, your understanding of a subject just gets deeper. Oh, yes. You start to refine're thinking around the subject so i remember towards the end of uh just like i taught stand-up because like you know there's a

supplementary income and because i'm a stand-up geek and a lot of it i used to do like joke writing with like my students and going and put up different jokes from joan rivers chris rock all these people and fine and I started to realize that there's such a beauty to joke writing. It really is. It's almost like maths. You know, there's a logic behind it. And if the logic isn't there, the joke doesn't work. The thread is broken. And I never would have realized if I didn't teach or if I didn't teach maths. You know, I think we should all teach genuinely because you get an appreciation of actually what it means to be a good teacher. Absolutely.

What it means to take someone on a journey. And it does make you better at whatever you're teaching. You know, I was much better at martial arts after I started teaching it. And I recognize that in a lot of my friends that had regular jobs and went on to start teaching jujitsu. They all got way better at it, way better at it. And it's just because your understanding of it is ingrained, like, deeply in your mind, like, of all the various positions

and transitions to different positions and the hazards and what you have to do to avoid, you know, and how to defend. And all that stuff is complex. And to be able to explain it to another person watch their mind light up with these infinite possibilities it really does stimulate your own growth for sure it does and one of the things that teaching gives you that is a real understanding of discipline and how important discipline is and without discipline without understanding that the most important thing is and without discipline without understanding that

the most important thing is turning up and doing your best it doesn't matter how smart you are it doesn't matter how gifted you are it doesn't matter all of these things if you're not going to turn up every day and do your best you're not going to make it no it's really interesting to see like the kids frequently who did the best the kid they were the kids who worked they were the kids who focus they were the kids who understood that in order to be good at something you need to turn up yeah yeah that's one of the things i had to cultivate in myself because i didn't have anyone explain that to me when i was a kid i don't know if you did but like i i was smart but i didn't work hard at school. Because it was easier for you.

Because it was easier. Right. And it was only when I became an adult and I realized that I want to do things in the world that I realized, actually, you have got to work so hard to create anything. And that's when I started cultivating this in myself. But I saw this at school. You know, there was a guy that I went to school with, wasn't as smart as me, wasn't as this and that, but he was way more successful. And then I met his dad. And I remember his dad telling me this.

We were on the sidelines watching a rugby game. And another kid said to him, oh, yesterday there was this situation in a game where someone was taking a penalty kick to win the game. Imagine how scary that must be. And my friend's dad, the friend who was successful, his dad, he went, no, think about this. How many people want to be in that position?

And when you score, how many people are just so with you and delighted? And that little reframe, that's all it takes sometimes, just a little understanding how to build confidence in yourself or how to work hard.

And not enough kids get that, man. And I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity as an adult to develop that because you can't do anything without that. It doesn't matter how smart you are. There's an expression in America, hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. Right. Yeah. It's a great expression. Right.

It's so important. But what you're talking about is also framing things. Yes. Looking at things in a beneficial way as opposed to like a way that's going to increase your anxiety. Yeah. You know, if you think, oh, I don't want to fuck this up, you'll fuck this up. Yeah. The best piece of advice I ever got was plan to fail.

Because if you expect to fail, it doesn't surprise you. Right. You know, like you get on a diet and the diet isn't working. You know, the diet's working and everything's going great and then one time you fuck up when you have a binge and Most people they get off the bandwagon at that point because I fucked up. I'm this I'm that But if you expect that to happen, then you wake up in the morning and you go All right. Yeah time to get back in the saddle

Learning how to think is a very difficult Task that most people have to kind of figure out on their own. They figure out through self-help books and Instagram videos. They don't necessarily figure it out from formal education. No, but I spent my – that's why I had to spend my 20s doing a shit ton of personal development because I wanted to be efficient, effective. I wanted to get places. I wanted to create things, most of all. I wanted to get places. I wanted to create things, most of all. I wanted to create things.

And if you want to create things, you've got to have these skills that otherwise you're going to struggle without, whether that's working with other people. Stand-ups struggle with this because everyone's so individually minded. But we've built an incredible team, not just me and Francis,

but you met Anton, our producer, and a bunch of other people. That's an interesting part of our life now is we've got a team of people to manage. And, you know, you've got to run that. You've got to look after them. You've got to make sure they're growing, they're getting what they need, you know. It's an exciting challenge to be in the position that we're in. Yeah, I face the same challenges.

It's complicated. You know, stand-ups are kind of lone wolves. But one of the things that we did at the comedy store and then we're doing also here in Austin is cultivating a legitimate community. And we have a very, very supportive community of comics and it's a different world now. Comics used to think of other comics as being the competition

that somehow or another if someone did well it takes away from you. But now instead they look at it as when someone's doing well, that you can do well too. Also that you're a part of this same community. So when someone does well, it sort of legitimizes the community. Yeah. It's awesome that you have that here. Cause in the UK, we're still in the crabs in a bucket mentality. They can get out of it. They can get out of it. You just need the top dogs to accept this new way of thinking of things and try to help the young guys coming up

and encourage this different kind of thinking. I i think sorry to interrupt i think that's so important joe i really do because here's the thing you know that that way of thinking of like oh my i've got to get this and if someone comes here they're gonna you're gonna be miserable yeah you're gonna be miserable you're gonna be filled with anxiety even if you well, you're always going to have your head over the shoulder looking, thinking, who's coming up behind me? Who's going to take my stuff? It's famine mentality. Yeah.

And it's not good. It's not good for art. It's the worst thing for art because when someone does really well, that weird green envy that comes up, you got to figure out how to turn that into motivation. Instead of looking at it like, fuck that guy. Why did he get this? Instead going, wow, look at him. He's killing it. And what did he do? He worked hard. His jokes are well-crafted. He's really likable. I got to work harder. I got to work harder. My jokes should be better. I have to do more stage time, get looser. I have to like revamp my act. And if you could just look at it that way, all those people around you that are

killing it, those people are all fuel They're all motivation Stand-ups great stand-ups in particular don't exist in a vacuum And this is one of the things that I drill into these young guys heads out here and young girls and non-binary folks I try to drill into people's heads like we need each other. We are not individuals We are this one biological super organism organism and that's that's what a community is that's what a civilization is and that's what a group of comedians are that you you're it's an organization but everyone together is like feeding off of the inspiration of each

individual member and when people are doing really well, especially like young people, I love when up-and-comers are really starting to make it and they're starting to make money and they can afford a nice apartment, they get a car. I get excited. I love it. I love it.

Because it could also inspire all these other people that might have been on the cusp of quitting. They might have been on the cusp and they might turn out to be great comics. Because so many of us in the beginning in particular, it's just such a touch-and-go business. You just wonder whether or not you're ever going to make it. Are you wasting your time?

Am I going to be that 45-year-old guy at open mic nights who can't get a laugh? Those guys are terrifying. That is terrifying. And not just that. We all know the comics. We all played the clubs in the UK. You played the clubs in the UK. Well, we played the clubs in the UK. You played the clubs in America. You know, there's that comic, that headliner who's just burnt out,

who just sits in the corner of the green room, who looks like he's got some form of PTSD. He's not engaging. Well, he does. He has got PTSD. Yeah, he's not engaging with people, and he just goes out and does the same act. And he can kill.

Even when he kills, he comes off looking more dead than he did before. Yeah, because he's still scared. He's killing with that old act. One of the beautiful things about doing a special is you have to write new material afterwards. You release that special and it's not like the Rolling Stones can go tour and do fucking Gimme Shelter over and over and over again and everybody cheers.

You have to have new shit. You can't have 30-year-old cheers. You have to have new shit You know, you can't have 30 year old jokes. You have to have new shit and some guys just get scared by that It's a very daunting terrifying feeling to abandon all of your material and start from scratch, you know, you have to do that Yeah, it's one of the beautiful things about stand-up as you become a beginner every time you write a new joke Yeah, that is true. And you know what? You know, I don't love it at the time but looking back it is good you know when you've got you're gigging with all these people and they're all doing their best stuff and you do like your 10 minutes of new yeah and you suck a dick yeah and they're killing it with all the stuff and then you walk off and they're like yeah he was shit yeah that's that's how it is well i tell you the story man i remember

when i was starting out uh i the club that francis to help run, and I used to gig there a lot. What's that club? Angel Comedy in London. We actually used to film the show there. They used to lend us the space when we were starting out. And I saw a guy there who came on. He did 10 minutes. I didn't know much about it.

And he ate shit did 10 minutes i did i didn't know much about was it new and he ate shit for 10 minutes straight it was just there was no laughter it was bad and i and i was there this new guy with my amazing five minutes go and i was oh yeah i went and smashed it anyway i forgot all about it who the hell is this guy and then i was doing a pro night somewhere else because this was a new act new material night and I saw this guy in the green room. I was like, what the fuck is he doing here? And he went on and he closed it and he absolutely fucking destroyed. And that's when I realized, like, you got to be prepared to go on and do 10 minutes of new and not give a shit that you die in front of all the people that you want to respect you.

The only way it's ever going to get good, it's got to get legs. You got to walk it around. That's why we were talking earlier about our show on YouTube. Someone said, are you going to delete your early stuff because it looks awful, we look awful, the lighting's terrible, we ask stupid questions.

The whole thing's terrible. Have you seen my haircut? Yeah, oh man. Go watch my old ones. Your haircut and your waistline, bro You've done really well my old ones. We had snowflakes falling But anyway, we're not I'm never gonna delete that shit clock that that that's the past that made you who you are Yes, yeah, you know embrace it. Those are great. I tell everybody you're starting out and you know, how do I do a podcast?

Go watch mine. They're fucking terrible. Go watch mine. Start out and just do it and get better. Yeah. And don't be scared that you suck in the beginning. Everything you do when you start out, you suck at. There's no way to be amazing from the jump, especially at something complex. And if you are amazing at it, you're the rarest of the rare and just work even harder because you just have a very unusual

gift and you should be very fortunate feel very fortunate you know and still work hard at it as we talked about you've got to work your ass off man if you enjoy it absolutely i used to tell my kids this story i uh when before when you know this when i used to teach some of the smart ones and they get all cocky i'd say who's the most gifted footballer in the uk at the moment like english football and they reel off all these names harry came blah blah but i said no it's a guy called ravel morrison have you ever heard of him they all look blank at me ravel morrison is a fascinating study and i would recommend anyone to read about him this was a kid who when he was at manchester united the one of the biggest clubs in the land was known as the most talented boy of his generation.

They were saying he was the biggest talent they'd ever seen in the last 30 years since a guy called Paul Gascoigne. He was that naturally talented. But because he went down the wrong path, because he had trouble focusing, because he wasn't the most disciplined, because he wasn't the best mentally, I don't think Ravel Morrison has a club.

He used to play last season at the worst club in the second division. And this was a kid who ability-wise could have done anything. If you're not prepared to work, even if you've got this insane talent, it ain't going to matter. No, it's not going to matter. When you were teaching stand-up, this is one thing about America that's unusual, is that there's no really good comics that teach comedy. It's real weird.

You know, we kind of teach it to each other in green rooms. You know, we teach it to each other, you know, on airplanes, on the road, and hanging out in hotels, and having lunch together. We talk about comedy. We, you know, we go over our processes. Sometimes we, I think more education

has been sort of distributed from about stand-up comedy from podcasts from conversations about podcasts that really ever in the history of comedy like having great comics sit around and talk about their process and talk about what they did when they first started and what they realized they were doing wrong or you know how they improved How did you get into doing that? Well, I was working at this club, Angel, and it's tough to make money at comedy. I was doing all the weekends at clubs, but one of the reasons I was doing it is because my mom's disabled, so I need to get money back to my dad and my mom

in order to support them to pay for cleaners and stuff like that. So I needed more money. And they very kindly said to me, why don't you run a stand-up course when I qualified as a teacher for six years I was a drama teacher that's how I originally started and then I went into primary and then I thought about it and I I saw the way that other people were teaching and I thought I've actually got the opportunity here as someone who trained as a teacher who's got 10 years or nine years experience at the time I can actually teach it like a proper lesson so I created lesson plans so the first time we started off we started off with improv for them getting to know each other various improv games and then the second lesson we went into joke writing so I did the structure set up punchline and then what we did, we went into joke writing. So I did the structure, set up, punchline.

And then what we did is we looked at joke structure from people like Carlin. Who else? Mitch Hedberg. All these different people. And what I would do is I would put six jokes on the board from these people, but I wouldn't put their names. And one of them, two jokes were written by the same person. I got them into pairs. I go, right, analyze the jokes. Which one was

written by the same person and why? So what that would do is, because in teaching, if I'm just there being didactic and talking at you, eventually you're going to switch off because that's how the brain works. But if you say to them, analyze it discuss it amongst yourselves so that was one of the exercises that really worked because then they looked at it and from that they looked at tone they looked at language they looked at who's who is the butt of this joke they looked at style they looked at does gender influence jokes which of course it does and we then started to look at it pick it apart and then they could work out who it was and why so that's we then started off i then gave them a generic setup sorry just head by the mic and got them to write a punch line for a generic setup i

can't remember what the setup was um i took granddad out the other day. That was the setup. And then they had to romp punchlines for it. I also looked at pivot words. So an example of a pivot word is, I'm trying to remember this now. So I had a joke from Emo Phillips, who said, I called my wife in bed with another man. I was crushed. I said, get off me, you two. Right? Great joke. The pivot word in that is crushed. Right? And it's a pivot word because it's got a duality of meaning. And that's why the English language is magical when it comes to joke writing.

It's got these two, it's got this duality of meaning. So about 2016, I opened Freddy Izzard, but I did comedy in Spanish. And it was actually a lot more difficult because Spanish, it doesn't have those words which have those dual meanings that you can pivot on. So by understanding that with these words which you can pivot on, which you can twist,

you can make the punch even stronger. Great joke writing is like writing a thriller. It needs to make sense. It needs to be logical. But they can't predict where the twist is going to come. Because if you predict where the twist is going to come, it's like watching a thriller and go, okay, I get it.

He's a killer. She really fancies him. They're going to go out on a date, and it's going to be a twist, and you're going to get bored. If the twist doesn't make sense with your jokes, you're going to be out on a date, and it's going to be a twist, and you're going to get bored. If the twist doesn't make sense with your jokes, you're going to be like, this is a stupid plot. Right.

But if the twist makes sense, if it has a logic, if it has a consistent worldview, then you're going to be hooked into the thriller, and you're going to be hanging on every single twist and turn. And that is the art of great joke writing. So we do three hours on joke writing. And I used to love it. And then when they would say out their jokes about, you know, I took granddad out the other day and they gave the punchline.

If the joke was a lot, if they laughed, I'd analyze it. And we'd go, why did that work? But here's the thing. This is when people really started to learn. If it didn't work, I'd ask everyone to stop. I'd say, look, we're just going to use your joke as an example. And I just want you to know, I write hundreds of jokes, the vast majority of which will never work. And we'll put it up on the board and we'll go,

why doesn't it work, this joke? And together, we would work out why it was. And most of the time, it was logic. And then I took it back to them. I go, can we make this joke work? And then they'd go off and then they'd write. And a lot of the time we'd make a joke that would actually work. So it's by doing that consistently all the time. I used to do things like worlds colliding where I used to take, I don't know, this was in 2018, take a topic like Trump, take a topic like supermarkets. I go, right, we're going to create a joke about Trump and the supermarket, you know, target whatever it is. Think about everything you can think of Trump. Think about a spider diagram, everything you can think about the supermarket,

particular supermarket, whatever it be. Okay, now trying to find links between the two. And then we would write jokes with Trump and the supermarket. And a lot of the time, they wrote good stuff that you would never ever have heard a comedian do before. Because I said to them, it's not about first thought, second thought, third thought. Because here's the thing. If the audience can predict your punchline throw the joke away because it means that your joke isn't good you they can't predict the punch that is the most important thing so we just went over it and then we and then one of the things that i said to them was you need to tell a story. I want you to tell a story.

I don't care about interesting. I don't care about funny. I don't care about any of that. I want a story that you would tell your bodies around the table in the pub. And they would get up and tell the story. And then I would ask them about their lives, who they are, where they're from. And here's the thing.

We've all got stuff that's interesting about us. This is why this woke crap is so toxic. Because I used to hear people say more and more oh i'm just a white guy i'm just i'm just like fuck off it doesn't matter where you from oh i'm blah blah blah what about your mom oh my mom passed when i was eight and then i did this and i did that i said that's interesting let's talk about that talk about what it's like to grow up as an only kid in a school where you were bullied you didn't have a mom but you did this that's interesting and by the end most of it even if they weren't the funniest comedians in the world they would come out and they would be interesting you felt like you actually understood who they were and that's

the most important thing because most comedy courses were like cookie cutter. And I never wanted to create that. I wanted to create somebody or help somebody get to be authentic. Cause it's like David Mamet said, words that come from the heart, go to the heart. And when you did this, was there an element of this course that involved them getting on stage? Yes. And had any of these people never been on stage before? Some of them had never been on stage. Most of them, I think. Yeah, most of them.

So the first half would be on theory, and we'd look at things like joke writing, you know, all the rest of it. And the second half would be them being on stage, doing their thing on stage. And then I would give them feedback, and I'd be like, this is great. This is really interesting. You can do better than this. But really focus on this, great this is really interesting don't you can do better than this but really focus on this because this is really interesting that great joke you did there maybe you can talk about this here and that and this and gradually they got to have a really lovely five minutes so by the end of it I think like I did it for about two years uh one uh one a lot of the guys that I taught, they got to the finals of competitions,

national competitions, and they started to come through and a lot of them are still doing it and I see them on the circuit and it's great, man. Because they kill and then I go, I wrote that joke. How long did you do this for? I did it for a couple of years, man. I did it for a couple of years and I loved it because it meant that I could cut down on teaching because the thing is with school teaching it's just draining particularly when

the schools that i was working in it meant that it freed up a little more time and look i'm a comedy geek i just love i love being around comedians i love teaching comedy i love the art of comedy to me writing a great joke is like alchemy you take words that individually they don't have no connection but you put them together in a particular order with a particular rhythm and you create something that's so beautiful what is your writing process like do you do you wait for inspiration do you sit in front of a computer or a notebook like how do you do it i i think i i remember like a lot of the times when comedians were in a club and they would say like,

oh, are you going to talk about your stuff about this? And I'm not going to do my stuff about that. I never wanted that. I always wanted my set, what I wrote about to be completely original, authentic and also honest. So the way that I would do it is I go, what do I really think about something? Like, honestly, Francis, what do you really think about this particular thing? So I remember like when everybody was doing jokes about Brexit and they were saying, well, people vote Brexit, whatever. And I remember thinking, oh, man, this isn't, there's something here. And then my mum voted Brexit. A first generation Latin American immigrant to the UK. And I remember

thinking there's something in that. And I played around with it. And it took me a long time to actually figure it out. And then finally, I went like my mom is a first generation who came here from the UK 40 years ago, unable to speak the language. Boom, boom boom boom boom set it up so you've got an image of this woman in this as few words as possible uh and i said and two years ago she voted brexit first laugh right and then i i said uh i said and when i asked her why right she said francy is because there are too many foreigners in this country right so you get yeah so you get the accent in there as well right pops up and then i did and then i was like that's funny and then you play on stage with it and you tried certain things i remember i said and then it got to a point where i was like it's like she got to

the uk got to the border turned around and went no no you're not coming. Door locked. But it didn't fall. Goodbye. Right? Yeah. And I used to get a big laugh, but I knew it was good when I would meet people whose parents were from a different country. And they'd come up to me and go, my mom's like that. I remember like a black guy came up to me after a gig and went, my mom's Jamaican. She does the exact same thing. And that's when you know a joke is good. When everybody does surface shit, but you do something that's actually deep yeah why'd you stop doing it I still do stand up but teaching I was why did I stop teaching what as in teaching in a

classroom yeah it's in comedy T why did I stop teaching comedy because trigonometry took off and I it's more fun yeah yeah it's a long and complicated story as well because one of the things that happened when we started doing the show is we became evil and right wing and whatever. So we ended up leaving that, I'll say leaving that club eventually.

So they accused you of being right wing? No, no. They found an excuse to get rid of us. So you were fine before that? Yeah. Oh, no. Francis used to help run the club. And they decided? No, man, I don't want to shout on the club.

No, no, no, but it's okay. But just in terms of like the attitude of whatever community, like someone had decided that you guys were problematic? Like what was it? Other comedians, when we signed to an agent about a year and a half ago, there was a bunch of comedians who tried to get our agent to drop us. That's how it was. Based on what?

Based on the fact that we talk to people who are not just on the left. The platforming. Yeah. Yeah, that conversation. That is a bizarre accusation. Platforming. Yeah, yeah.

Well, we were just interested in having conversations with different people. But what we found very quickly is, certainly in the comedy world that we were coming from, this is you don't do this. You don't do this. It was made very clear to us. But those comics have to be shit comics. There's no way they're good. It's different in the UK because it's a small industry.

And the gatekeepers in terms of getting on television and whatever is like five people. And in 2018, the woman who runs the Edinburgh Festival, which is how in the UK, that's how you get anywhere, right? You do the clubs, then you take your own show, like a special to the Edinburgh Festival, you get seen by people, you get plucked, and then you go on TV. And that's how you make a career. That's how it works. The woman who runs the Edinburgh Festival, a woman called Nika Burns, she said, I look forward to the era of woke comedians deciding what isn't

acceptable. This is the person who controls the industry. She was being serious? What do you mean? Of course she's being serious. Look forward to the woke people deciding what is and isn't acceptable and that's how she judges comedy?

That's hilarious. I mean, it's the funniest thing about the entire thing because what is and isn't acceptable and that's how she judges comedy yeah that's hilarious yeah i mean it's the funniest thing about the entire thing because what he's produced ain't funny but so so what happened to us when we started the show was we found ourselves on our own and gradually pushed out and out and out which has been great for us which has been brilliant for us because now we have our own thing. I actually stopped doing stand-up after the pandemic because I realized it was just killing me physically, the driving around, all of that. And now I just wake up every day. I love my life.

I can't wait to do the thing I'm about to do. And I've got a new baby now as well. But yeah, it was difficult. So what happened is we gradually kind of got pushed out and ended up doing... And now trigonometry takes up so much of our time. We barely have time to do anything else. Now, what year did you start trigonometry?

It was April 2018. And when you started it, what was the idea? Did you just want to do it for fun? Did you say, hey, I think we could do a good show? Like what was? Yeah, well, this is why I said we're so glad to be here with you, because we looked at people like you and we went like he's having interesting conversations with fascinating people. That's what I want to do. And the other thing was we were trying to understand some of the things that we've talked about already.

Why is it suddenly people claiming half the country is racist? Why is France's dad supposed to be this evil monster why why why are we seeing increasingly comics going on stage because you're standing backstage and you're listening all the time right when you're on the circuit and you and you started just you started hearing people like suddenly one after another well i'm a straight white man so this and i'm this and i'm like people just started just regurgitating all this stuff and we couldn't work out what was happening. And also there was a lot of censorship going on, self-censorship. I remember I was always political with my comedy, satirical.

That's what inspired me because I grew up in Russia where we didn't have this. And then when there was a bit of an opening up in the early 90s when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was this guy called Viktor Shondrovich who wrote a TV show which was based on spitting image. It's puppets of politicians talking. And it was hilarious. It was incredible. And you've got to understand, to people who've never seen their leaders made fun of,

that was revolutionary, right? So I was always someone who was interested in politics anyway, and I wanted to write comedy about it. And I remember coming off stage at a brilliant comedy club in London called Top Secret. Love them to bits. And I just come off. I did whatever my political material did really well. And then this guy came up to me, another comedian, and he said, man, I love that. I love that you can do politics.

And I went, well, why don't you? And he went, oh, I'm a straight white guy. I'd get crushed. So is it worse over there? It's 100%. Yeah? In terms of the censorship, yeah, because you can't go anywhere. Yeah.

You can't go anywhere. It's a tiny industry. If you become a bad person, where are you going to go? Yeah. And also as well, going back to that point that Constantine made, the people who decide whether you get spots on TV, the only way you can do that is through the Edinburgh Festival. And the only way you're going to get noticed is if you adhere to the company line

because then it's TV, radio producers, and then you get your run at a West End theater. That's the only way to do it. Now, things are changing, and this way of changing is brilliant. But that was how it always was. So people were terrified. And as you know yourself, the worst form of censorship is self-censorship. When you're sitting down with your pad and paper and go, you know,

I wrote a joke, which I didn't have the courage to do until recently. About, you know, because I was saying, like, my voice, I've got a racist voice because in South London. In London, I was banging on him for years to do that better material because his voice is associated with someone who is, you know, intolerant in the UK. You know, and then I would say, but, you know intolerant in the uk you know and then his accent yeah exactly and then i would say but you know here's the thing all my all my girlfriends have all been black mixed race or latin american so my voice is racist but my dick is woke right you know and i was terrified to do that because i'm openly mocking them right openly and i would say oh i could never do this.

And he would always say to me, mate, you've got to do that. That's funny. That's funny. That's funny. And I never felt I could do it. And that is replicated right the way through our industry. We got on David Baddiel, comedian, very famous comedian, brilliant comedian, lefty, liberal, all the rest of it. And he made this point that he felt that way. lefty liberal all the rest of it and he made this point that he felt that way now if imagine if a lefty liberal and these are don't use words in a derogatory sense at all with david i very much

admire him what about the rest of us right right right yeah yeah and so but look man we're sitting here sounding like a bunch of losers complaining no no no no no you're not no you're not you're explaining what your experience is our life is brilliant and we love what we do and it's fantastic No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, And if it hadn't been for the fact that I lived in Edinburgh and I had friends to stay with, I would have lost money. I sold 97% of my tickets for a month. How did you lose money? Because of the fees that you pay. It's a parasitic world, man. You have to pay for the venue.

You have to pay for the PR. You have to pay for the promotion. And by the time you're done. And so what happens is. Where does the money from the ticket sales go? To pay for the venue, to pay for the PR, to pay for the posters, to pay for all of that. So it's normally a 60-40 split in favor of the artist, but then PR is what, a couple of grand?

A few grand, yeah. And the only way you're going to get into the magazines is if you pay for PR. You then got to pay for a producer. A lot of the time people want to get a producer in to help them get them notice and so that they can say that they're with this particular person then you've got to pay for posters the accommodation fees are through the roof like you can look at how much they're charging

out the Edinburgh festival just to stay there and I was lucky man because what happened that year is I had I was for the first time in my life had a, I was part of a huge news story that had happened. And so I had the PI. I was in the newspaper. What was the news story? So at the very end of 2018, I was doing a gig at Top Secret, a brilliant club. If you're ever in London, you should play it. And this guy came up to me and said, oh, man, I loved your set.

You absolutely crushed it. Will you come and help us raise money for charity at my college? I was like, yeah, sure, whatever. Next, forget all about it. And then in about three weeks, I got an email from them saying, please come and help us raise money for charity. And in order to perform, we have a contract that you need to sign. Okay.

I opened the file and it said, we have a zero tolerance policy on racism sexism classism ageism ableism homophobia biphobia transphobia xenophobia islamophobia anti-religion anti-atheism and all jokes must be respectful and kind oh so no comedy right so and i i turned it down right i tweet about it to like a thousand people at the time of whatever it was. And this thing goes super viral, super viral. I'm talking about this was the day the day that it went. It was the second most read story on the BBC News website, which is the biggest news website in the UK on the day that the prime minister had nearly been removed from office by her own party. So that's equivalent of the Democrats impeaching Joe Biden. And the second story on CNN and Fox is no-name comedian turns down unpaid gig from two-bit college. That's how it was. That's how big it was, right? And was it big because they were criticizing you or were they realizing how crazy it was? It was a bit of both, I think. And that's when I realized, Joe, this is the thing. See, I thought that Francis and I and a couple of other, the rest of us, we were just like

these weirdos who were campaigning about, you know, the stuff that was going on in comedy and generally. But when that story went that viral, I got thousands of messages and thousands of emails from ordinary people saying, I can't say what I think at work. I can't say what I think at work. I can't say what I think here. And that's when I realized we've got a genuine problem in society where everyone feels like they're walking around having signed that contract. So to me, that was a sign that actually societally there's an issue going on.

Yeah, so that's why I had a lot of attention and I sold a lot of tickets and still I didn't make any money. I'd like to see some of that comedy. Some of that comedy where they abide by all those rules. I'd like to see that dance. Listen to this, man. We have a comedy night in London where, first of all, you have to be triple vaccinated or whatever to get in. And the comedians have to submit their material in advance to get approved, Fred.

To get it approved. And the audience get given stickers to decide whether you can talk to them or not. Wow. Yeah. That's the direction the industry. And they are the right people. They're the celebrated ones. We are always wondering why so many comedians who come out of England suck.

I have no disrespect to the ones that are funny. No, they're shit. I agree with you. I agree with you. We've always tried to figure out, like, what is it about America that breeds the best comedians? Like, what is it? Not, I mean, Eddie Izzard is fantastic.

Ricky Gervais is fantastic. There's great, Jimmy Carr, there's great comics that come from over there. But it seems like more hurdles. I'll tell you what it is. It's a couple of things. Number one, Joe, this is an American art form. It was created in America.

It started in America. You respect the art of stand-up more. In the UK, we don't really get it. We had musical at the very beginning, which was turn of the 20th century, which produced people like Chaplin, etc. But that was always kind of based in variety. You'd get a juggler, you'd get, you know, a music act. When what we call alternative comedy started in the 80s,

it went back to those roots. So on a night you would get a juggler, you might get a mime artist, you'd get a magician and you'd get a comedian. that's how comedy what we now know as modern stand-up comedy started in the uk and it came through from that but what has happened is more and more and more there's these kind of restrictions apply so people they can't be creative because the number one thing that you need to be creative is the ability to play yeah that's why when you put an actors do a play, that's why it's called a play because you've got to be playful. And if you feel restricted, if you feel that somehow,

if you say this, that, you know, you might cross an imaginary red line, you're not going to be playful. Right. And the best material, as far as I'm concerned,

is where people take contentious issues, contentious subject matter, like a Bill Burr, for instance, and they're playful with it. And it pops attention and we're all able to laugh. Yeah. It's so important. It's cathartic. We need it for society. But the moment you go, oh, you can't say this and here's a red line. And if you do say that, then we're going to come down on you on a ton of bricks yeah where's where's the where's the joy yeah you get no content

either you get bad content you get a bunch of people that exist sort of in an echo chamber and they preach to the choir and you know you don't get good stuff and here's the thing i would say and this is a quite a controversial point it's also racist as well because i really believe diverse this is what diversity is and i've said it many times and people don't like it but it's true diversity and these diversity quotas and whatever else in comedy is having different races genders sexualities all saying the exact same thing and if you stray from the party line you ain't gonna get a seat at the table and it's racist because they want a black person on but they want them to say what they think yeah we have a friend who's uh from barbados in the uk great comic nico

yearwood and uh he he was tweeting something and another comedian this is how fucked up the industry is when went to him your the optics of your tweets are really right wing right because he is a black dude isn't allowed to say this you know he's not the optics and and that's the way it is that's why i said it's crabs in a bucket because everybody's watching everybody and you the moment you stray, oh no. Now what about the big comics? What about guys like Gervais?

Yeah, look, once you get to that level you can say whatever the hell you want. But do they support the up-and-comers? Are they involved in the community?

I don't think Ricky is but I don't think Ricky was ever, did he do the circuit for a long time? Ricky never really did the circuit. Ricky used to do

his character Derek on the circuit. See, Ricky started to do TV, I remember it, in around about, I was in college at this point, so it was 99, and he used to do the 11 o'clock show. And before that, for a couple of years, he did his character Derek, which he then turned into a TV series, on the circuit.

But not really. But Ricky is actually very good. He does his night called Ricky Gervais and Friends, where he puts on comics. So Ricky is actually very good. He does his night called Ricky Gervais and Friends where he puts on comics. So Ricky is supportive. Where does he do that? He does that in little theatres around London. And it's only 120 seats or it will sell out

and then he'll put on these comedians. But a lot of the time, this is the interesting thing, a lot of those comedians won't go public that they work with Ricky because they're terrified of what will happen because he's a vicious evil transphobe. But, you know, there's some good pushback happening as well. You know Andrew Doyle, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So he started. I love Andrew Doyle. We love him. We're very good friends with Andrew. He's one of, in my opinion, he's one of Britain's finest satirists that has produced in our lifetime. That character is amazing. He's fantastic.

Titania McGrath. Titania is awesome. We're doing a show with him at the Edinburgh Festival. How that's going to go, I have no idea. But he created a comedy night called Comedy Unleashed in London where there's no culture of self-censorship. And that was the best place to play, not because people were being ridiculously offensive or whatever, just because you could breathe, man.

You could breathe. And the thing is the audience is there, especially for me with more political stuff. They were so clued up. They were so switched on. It was just a joy. So, look, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And I always say this whenever we're complaining about censorship and whatever. Look at our heroes.

My heroes were Carlin and Hicks and, you know, for Francis, it's Pryor as well. These people didn't have an easy life. Right. You know, they were getting pushed back on. Of course. So whenever you do anything like that, you're going to get people who hate on you and whatever. So that's been part of the journey for us,

realizing that actually we need to stop whining and just get on with it, man. I like to use the example of Lenny Bruce until I remember that they killed him. Well, himself yeah but i mean they did they made their part do you know what i mean sure i mean it was a heroin overdose yeah it's hard to say that they killed him yeah but they they definitely tried him multiple times for obscenities yeah you ever see the recordings of the later stages of his life where you go on stage with legal notes and just read off of the transcript of the trials? No.

It was horrible. It was really sad. And people would go, come on, Dirty Lenny, bring back Dirty Lenny. They wanted to hear jokes. Yeah. There was no jokes. He was just talking about the nuances of the trial. Wow.

It was not good. not good. I mean, he was losing his mind towards the end, but I mean, I would imagine the pressure of, you know, having essentially the entire legal system and a good part of society coming down on you for the things you're saying and not being really recognized as what he is in terms of a true, he's the true godfather of American standup. That's the guy. Everyone before him was just doing jokes. It was just jokes. And he was talking about social issues. He was talking about what society is like. He was talking about hypocrisy.

He was talking about things that he thought mattered and using language that people would use outside of the stage. And you couldn't for some reason. You couldn't use that on stage. And he was pushing back against that and literally getting arrested Yeah, yeah, and that's why I always think about it. You know this progressive I I think of it as a cult or as a religion right and that's what my heroes were they were pushing back against the religion Of their day the the right-wing conservatives who were saying you can't say this can't do this

You can't say Jesus you can't talk you can't can't say Jesus. You can't. They were pushing back against that. And now I feel there's a movement of people starting to push back against this new religion. Yeah. And I think eventually it's going to turn around. He's a pessimist. I'm an optimist. Are you a pessimist about this? I'm a massive pessimist, Joe.

Do you know, I've started calling myself Foster Adamus, mate. Because every one of my predictions comes true. In the last two years, it's true. When everything went to shit, I went, there'll be another lockdown. There was another lockdown. People were going to me, it's only going to be two weeks. I'm going to go, mate, it lasts months. And I just sit there being really happy with myself.

Well, that's why I moved to Texas. Yeah. I saw it coming. I moved out here. I mean, I started looking in May of 2020. It was a couple months after they locked everything down and we weren't back up again. I was like, oh, I see where this is going. Yeah.

They enjoy this. They enjoy telling people what to do. You know, whether or not they honestly, earnestly think that they're protecting people, they're enjoying this power and control. Absolutely. And I don't like it. And the thing is, man, as I talk about in there, I've seen this before. Francis has seen this before. Right. We about in there, I've seen this before. Francis has seen this before, right? We come from countries.

We've seen authoritarianism. And the truth is what scared me the most about COVID, it wasn't what the government was doing. It wasn't what the government was doing. It was how much people loved it. Yeah, they were embracing it. They fucking loved it. People were embracing the pharmaceutical companies, which was bizarre to me. embracing the pharmaceutical companies,

which was bizarre to me. The people that have been the most deceptive that have caused irreparable damage to people and families because of lies, because of faking studies, because of withholding data and information, and they've been fined to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. And all of a sudden, people were putting all their eggs in that basket. And I was like, you guys are out of your fucking minds. Like you don't remember the past.

You don't remember the history of what these people have done. And you clearly don't understand how these studies work and how they get funded and how politicians get funded and how special interest groups are working behind the scenes to make sure that these things get mandated. Like this is fucking spooky. That was the thing that bothered me about it, man like look i'm not a medical expert i don't know what the hell is going on no surprisingly then you better not talk you're right however what i i do what i did find very strange that we got to a position where you've got people who aren't medical experts telling doctors to take a vaccine that they don't want to take yeah and they're forcing them like we had this in the uk man uh we had the they were attempting to introduce vaccine mandates for medical staff and medical there was this incident

where a a doctor is talking to the health minister and the health minister is forcing him trying to force him to take it when he doesn't want to take it does that does that make sense to you a non-medical expert forcing a medical expert to have a medical procedure does that make any fucking sense it didn't seem like it makes sense no no do you know yeah you look you're careful about this now are you no no no not really yeah i've got a theory on the whole covid thing about why we lost our mind i think it's to do with the You're careful about this now, are you? No. No, not really. Yeah. I've got a theory on the whole COVID thing about why we lost our mind. I think it's to do with the fact that most of us aren't religious anymore.

You know, here's the thing. We're not religious anymore. We all now think that this is it, that you only have one life, right? That you only have one chance to live your life. That being the case, you are going to do everything that you can to control as much as you can in order to keep yourself safe because once you die that's it that's the end there's nothing else after that right okay so people and people have convinced themselves as well that we're in control of nature that actually we've got nature you know we you know we're disease we've got disease pretty much beaten we're going to live these lives where we're in control of nature, that actually we've got nature, you know, we, you know, disease,

we've got disease pretty much beaten. We're going to live these lives where we're, you know, going to be young till the end of our days. All of a sudden this pandemic appears out of nowhere, like all pandemics. And all of a sudden those illusions are shattered. And we realize that we're mortal, we're feeble, we're fragile, we're're just human beings and this thing can take us out like boris johnson in our country got really ill with it yeah and i think people just freaked out because they realize they're mortal and what they try to do a lot of people it's just they try to control everything if i can control every single possible variable that will mean that we're going to be safe and i'm going to be safe i think that's part of it but the other part of it and we know this from history is people like controlling other people people like power uh and like i say what scared me in the uk we had these polls come out

and suddenly like 40 of the country wants us to wear masks forever it doesn't matter if there's covid right 20 want nightclubs permanently shut down doesn't matter if there's covid 20% yeah yeah and we're seeing this polling that's why you know you talk about moving to texas that's why it was so scary for us because in the uk there's no texas what the fuck are we gonna we're gonna move to belgium well actually if belgium has got the same shit anyway well belgium has the worst health minister ever yeah you see that lady yes yeah yes that is wild yeah that's wild so that's one of the things that like when we were seriously talking about moving here man yeah you should we probably will eventually I don't know

it's we've been traveling around and having such a great time but I always I always remember that you know that old joke about immigration and tourism no guy goes to heaven dies dies, goes to heaven, and God meets him at the pearly gates, says, please come in. And it's beautiful. It's white. Everyone's wearing white robes.

Everything is peaceful and tranquil. And after about a year, he gets bored of this, and he goes, God, can I go and check out hell for a day? God's like, okay, go for it. Turns up to hell. The gates of hell open, and it's a casino. There's fucking booze over here, girls over here. Oh, amazing. that was a great day goes back to goes back to heaven because that was great i'm you know i'm good uh and after about another year he gets bored again so he says can i go back

to hell for like a week oh no problem sure turns up at hell same thing girls booze everything you want comes back refreshed he goes god listen heaven's great but i like hell a lot more can i move and god goes yeah no problem uh you you can move no problem one condition you can't come back it's like what the fuck would i want to come back here this is incredible in hell okay no problem turns up in hell the gates of hell open the fires the brimstone the devil grabs a pitchfork sticks him in the pot of boiling tar and as he's drowning and his face is melting off because what happened to the girls the booze and he goes don't confuse tourism with immigration so I'm sure there's the other side of it too right well you're

looking at it like tourists like you're coming over here and you've seen the freedom yeah well I'm looking at it like an immigrant. It's real. Yeah. Yeah. The freedom's real. Yeah. I mean, it's like, especially in Texas, there is an ethos. There's like a way that this state has always prided itself in freedom.

And that lends itself very much to comedy. And it's like two of the greatest of all time came out of Texas, Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison. Yeah. And I think that's part of the reason why. There's a wildness to this place that is, it has good and bad. Well, that's what I mean. Everything has trade-offs.

So does freedom, right? Yeah. Now, people like us, we want more freedom. Yeah. For sure. For sure. But you know what I love about, you know, one thing that really annoys me about the UK,

particularly UK comedians, they will go on the stage at the comedy club and they'll say, Americans are stupid, right? And they'll be saying Americans are stupid whilst wearing a Converse jumper, Levi jeans, night trainers and drinking a Coke on stage, right? And you go, can you what what's going on here but the thing that i love about america is this is the place it happens john this is the place

every time i come here it doesn't matter if it's new york if it's texas there's an energy about it you feel like people are energized they want to do things they want to achieve things and in the uk look i love england i'm in lond I love my country. It's my home. But we have this strata, this class system where, like, don't you dare get above your station. You're going to remain right where you belong. And in the US, you don't have that. There's this openness and this desire and this drive.

And as Constantine said, of course there are trade-offs. Of course there are negative things about it. And there's things about this, you know, America things about this America that I don't like as well. But the energy here is incredible. Yeah, the energy is incredible, man. We've spent the last nine days traveling around. And it's amazing to us how many people we just had internet connection with. We went to the comedy cell in New York and the guy who runs it knows us and like we had a great time we just meet all these people and everybody wants to work together

everyone and everybody's happy for you to be doing well yeah that is not the British way friends with Steve Hilton do you know Steve Hilton no he is now on Fox he's like I know him yeah yeah yeah. He used to be involved in politics in the UK. Didn't he used to work for David Cameron? Yes. Yes, I remember him now. And I actually met him and his family on a beach in Hawaii 10 years ago. Yeah.

Our family became friends with his family, and we've gone on vacations together. I knew him way before he became like this evil Fox guy. Right. Which is very interesting. He's a very nice guy. But that was what he always said about coming from England to America, and that in England, everybody wanted you to fail. They wanted you to keep your place. Keep your place.

And look, I don't want to sit here and shit on Britain because I came- Too late. No, man, but I came to Britain. And look, everything is, we say in Russia, and everything is understood in comparison. I came to Britain from Russia, and it's a brilliant place in comparison but i think the stage that we are at now with our lives we've we've built something and we want to keep building and like you're showing us around your gym and i i just think the opportunity to build amazing things it's just so much easier here and people want to help you and people want

to work with you it's we've been really inspired by this trip, man. People want you to go for it. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And there's, there's no feeling like it because if you want to make something of your life, that's what you need. This is what I said to the guys from day one, man, we've got to surround ourselves with people who have the mindset that we want to have, you know, and that's one of the most difficult things is i've been pretty brutal in my life about making sure i'm not surrounded by toxic people who want to pull you down and it can be a lonely place sometimes yeah yeah it's it's got to be hard if that's the predominant mindset yeah the predominant mindset is trying to limit your ability to express yourself and to get out there. But hey, look at us. We're here.

Yeah, exactly. And it's also as well, you know, the UK is a small country. There's less people. Yeah. But the thing that I find really inspiring about America is I look at the great comics, the people who I looked up to, the people, like, I remember the first communal stand-up experience I ever had. Like, I was in college,

and most of my mates when I was hanging out there were black guys and i remember one of my mate going to me francis you're you're one of the funniest guys like i know like you must love chris rock i went but he's just that dude who stars in like crap films isn't he and they were like no no and so they they took me to his like he took me to his bedroom. I was the only white guy in the room. There was about five other people there. And they watched that bit, the famous bit, black people versus the N word. And I looked around and all these black guys were like creasing up, doubled up laughing.

And I was thinking to myself, can you say this? Are you allowed to say this? Well, you can't. I don't want to see you doing that material bro yeah but and then that that just made me like understand that you know america is where it's where stand-up is created but it's also where you know the best stand-up is created where the pushback occurs where people like Burr and like yourself and all these people, you're changing the form. You're moving it forward.

That doesn't happen in our country. We just imitate what you do. And there's wonderful things to Britain. Come on, man. There's exceptions to that. I mean, Eddie is not who you're open for. He's innovative. Yeah, he is. There's a bunch of people.

There's exceptions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's exceptions. No, I'm just worried we're going to go back. Don't be scared, homie. As the guys who shat on Britain having come to America. Yeah, exactly. I don't think it's that simple.

You're just talking about your personal frustration. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that to me... Yeah, we are frustrated. It's true. But that to me is the inspiring thing about America, is that when I look at this country, you're the one dictating. You're the one moving things forward. You're the one who one dictating. You're the one moving things forward.

You're the one who's pushing back. You're the one who's challenging. It's inspiring to be here, man. It really is. Yeah, our trip so far has been insane. That's great. Some comedians that are here need to hear that. Yeah.

Because people get complacent. They think that this isn't what it should be that it should be better they don't understand how hard it is to do stand-up in other places yeah you know and it's you know and you know we've only got a few outlets to go to yeah whereas here how can you not be inspired to be you know gigging with the great wait till you guys come tonight come to the vulcan tonight i'll come see what we got going on. Austin's wild. It's a wild scene right now.

And they have this show called Kill Tony. In Kill Tony, every Monday night, aspiring comedians get to do one minute. And then they get judged by a panel of professionals. And it's this incredible show. The way they have it put together. And in one minute, you don't have any time to be woke. There's no room for identity politics and the show rewards funny It's all just about funny for what go for it No matter what and because of that it's become really the the cornerstone of the comedy community here because all the people coming up They understand there's a real point of access

There's a real way to make it. And many people have gone from that show and had successful stand-up careers and they tour around the country right now. It's incredible. It's wild. Yeah, that's awesome. And that's the American spirit, which is you know what? I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to create my

own thing. I'm going to go out there and do it. Whereas the thing is with the UK and please, I love the UK, we're always looking for approval from the ups because that's the way the class system works yeah so you're waiting for approval from the people above you to then go to the next level whereas here it's like well no i'm going to do my podcast i'm going to go out and we're starting to learn that now but it's because of america that we're taking on that on board you showed us the way but with the internet now all the cool exciting stuff that's happening in the uk is people who are going around

that machine that francis is talking about and by the way him and i we both used to write for these tv shows and we watched them get shit as we were on them right you see what i mean uh but look with the internet now look at what we built look at There's other people in the UK who are building cool stuff online because that's the way you do it now. And what happens is now we've got to a point where some people build a thing online and then they start getting asked back onto the mainstream thing because they've got the audience and because of what they're doing. That happens here as well. Yeah. The internet is incredible, man. What an opportunity.

I'm just so grateful to be alive in this moment. I really am. Even the internet. I mean, the internet is a dangerous, peril-filled environment as well. It's like it's... Everything has trade-offs, man. Yeah, there's a lot going on. There's a lot of forces moving in one way or the other.

And then there's also a bunch of people that, again, the crabs in the bucket thing. And people that don't like the way you're doing it. They want everyone to do it their way, or they think that if you succeed in your way, somehow or another, it diminishes their possibilities, their opportunities to do it their way. There's people that have been following the so-called rules their whole life and career, and they don't like when people don't. Yeah, because they've invested and they've bought into a system and they have and when they see you doing something different they're going

hang on a second yeah but this my last 10 years i've been following the rules what do you mean you've become successful doing something else i followed the rules yeah and this is a beautiful moment about the time that we exist in the rules are crumbling man yeah you know it's now about going out and connecting and whereas before a gatekeeper would look at a particular comic and just go nah he's you know he's too on the edge or she's too this or they're too that and whatever else a mainstream audience isn't gonna like them that doesn't matter anymore man because you've got your people out there whatever you do however you think there are people who are going to think and are going to enjoy your stuff so just go out there and do it it's beautiful on the other side of the the flip side is that those gatekeepers

are the ones who motivate people to find ways around yes like because the fact that you know that this one incompetent person with their shitty narrow-minded ideology is trying to force their sensibilities on your art You you get frustrated and you try to figure out workarounds if it was open and inclusive and easy Maybe people wouldn't expand as much. Yeah. Well man where we are now is like none of us is a person of faith But we we've started saying grace Like a secular version of grace around the table at the studio when we're having food, because we're just so grateful for those people

that made our life difficult, and now we're in this position where we build something, and every day we just wake up and pinch ourselves. That's awesome. I think gratitude is very real. It's very important, and it's contagious, and that's what grace is about. Grace is saying it's about gratitude and whether or not you have to have gratitude towards an invisible deity or just for the experience that you're currently engaging in.

Like, you know, there's still a lot of room for that positive energy and that positive thinking. And, again, in that contagious mindset, it transfers to other people. And then as you watch them benefit from it, it inspires you more. It's all good. And I would say this to anyone who is maybe listening to this and they're going through hard times and they can't see a way out. Just get a piece of paper and write down all the things that you're grateful for and be honest. Just be honest about the things that you are grateful for. And I guarantee you'll look at that list and you'll be inspired because that is a springboard to something. And look, we all went through tough

times and there were moments where we were looking at our life and thinking, holy crap, how am I going to get out of this? Is this it? Is this all I've got? Is this all I have? Is this all I'm ever going to be? But I promise you, if you keep working, if you're honest, if you have integrity, if you push through and you keep pushing, things will change. It's really important. And especially, I worry, like, I'm 40 now.

You're right, Joe, I don't look it. Thank you very much. But I worry about young men now, Joe. Do you? I do. I do because I see young men and like, it seems to me like, especially with young men, like there seems to be a crisis. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. There seems to be a crisis and there's a lot of young men who are very angry and they feel that, you know, that things haven't gone their way and they're never going to go their way. And it's really important that if you're grateful, but also if you identify what you're going to do and you just keep working and you keep pushing and you keep striving, even if that... I wanted to be an actor when I started out.

That didn't work. Then I became a teacher and that worked and then I went and did... And I gradually found my way. And it took years and years and years of knockbacks and graphs but if you're prepared to do the work then you will get to where you're meant to be yeah just keep working and find like-minded people yeah that's one of the most important things we don't we don't live alone we don't you don't survive and thrive alone you You need other people that inspire you. And when you feel down and shitty, one of the best ways out of that is to be around cool people.

Yeah. Be around friendly, fun people and support each other. That's all possible. That's always been the way that, you know, Francis and I, at the beginning, I always knew we would have success with trigonometry from day one. I said this to you, right? From day one, I never doubted it for a moment. There's lots of other things I've done in my life that I doubted very much. I never doubted this. I don't know why.

I don't know. I just knew it was going to work. I just knew it was going to work. And I always said to Francis, the only way this fails is if you and I fall out. If you and I can't resolve our differences, this is going to fail. That does happen with comedy, with podcasts.

Two people together and for whatever reason they have some sort of a problem. I watched this incredible movie about a soccer team. It was called The Damn United and it's about two men. One of them is like this driven, ambitious, young, handsome manager. And the other one is his assistant. And they can't work without each other, but they don't know it. And the ambitious guy is being a dick and he sort of takes over and he, you know, they fall out and they have a really bad time. And then when they get back together, it works out. Right. And I just, I always thought that if we can stick together

and if we can encourage a sense of like, we work through anything we were going to be successful and we've gone through some really difficult things together man you know really really difficult but I just we always had that attitude of we are going to make it if we stick together we've been kicked out of studios we lost producers we've had all

kinds of crap. Why were you kicked out of studios? What do you think? Because of content? Because people don't agree with what we do, man. No one wants to, you know, people don't want us to be having these conversations. What is like the most controversial conversation you guys have had? Oh, right. So I think, which one do you think is going to be?

I think we interviewed, we interviewed a lady at the time called Posey Parker and this was in 2018 right? the title of the episode is Trans Women Aren't Women and we had this conversation in 2018 and you've got to understand where we're coming from, we are two comedians

we just started this YouTube show, podcast, we are in the comedy industry, which is the way we've described it to you. And here we have this woman who comes in and says trans women aren't women. We were fucking terrified. This is what I did for a large part of the interview.

She said something really problematic. I'd be looking at content. He'd be like that. We were terrified, man. Because we knew we were going to lose our careers. What is Posy Parker? What does she do? She's a gender critical feminist in the UK

who campaigns for single sex spaces and stuff like that. Yeah. You should have her on, man. She's great. But she's very controversial in the UK. So it was our first foray, our second foray into the trans issue. And she's pretty hardline. And this whole hour is basically him shitting himself

and me trying to ask questions to what she's saying. Genuinely, there was a point where I was... We were terrified. Because that's the climate we were operating in, right? I couldn't see Posey Parker. All I could see, Joe, was my career crumbling in front of my eyes.

Yeah, that's how it was. What was the blowback? YouTube took it down. They said it was hate speech. And then there was a big fuss. It was in the newspapers, and they put it back up. Wow. That's what happened.

And that video is on 1.2 million views, which is a huge amount for us back then, particularly. And the thing about that episode is what happened was we are people who are, we want to hear what you have to say. And if it makes sense to us, it makes sense. However controversial it is. And if it doesn't make sense,

we're going to ask you questions and challenge. So it's basically an hour, like I said, of him sitting there shitting himself and me trying to find the logical flaw in her argument. But I can't. I can't. can't so i'm sitting here having to admit that this woman is correct about what she's saying and i know that that means we're going to get shot on from a great height yeah that is such a third rail topic right

and in this country it's the most third rail topic yeah it's the most controversial one in ours as well and i've always said man from day one when we started this, I always said, this progressive shit, the way that it's gone, this is the thing that's going to blow it up. The gender. The trans thing. Why do you think that that is such a hot button subject? There's two reasons. Number one is you're asking people to deny basic biology. Right.

Number one. For the ideology. For the ideology. And number two, you asking people to deny basic biology. Right. Number one. For the ideology. For the ideology. And number two, you're fucking with people's kids. Yeah. We just went to my sister's wedding in Armenia. My sister is the most pretty, likes pink, feminine girl. And at their wedding, they had this game that they play where the groom had to guess stuff about her they had to answer questions about each other and the question was you know

what did she want to be as a kid and the answer was a boy my sister who is the most feminine girl right now she she when she was seven she wanted she said she wanted to be a boy now if you told my mother back then that she said that and now you have to give her hormones and cut pieces off her. She would have torn your fucking throat out. Because here's the thing. And this is the way I explain it to people. We're not allowed to have sex with children. And you ask people, why is that?

And they'll struggle with it. I've never asked that question, mate. But this is a point. But you ask that question. You go, why? And they'll struggle with it. I've never asked that question, mate. But this is the point. You ask that question. You go, why? And they'll get really uncomfortable, obviously. And they'll be like, I don't know. And the reality is, is because children can't

consent. They can't consent, man. They can't consent. Because here's the thing. Children, until around 14, 15, have no idea of consequences. And I used to see it all the time. Like a 10, 11 year old boy would do something stupid because that's what 10, 11 year old boys do, shove someone. And you'd see a teacher come in really angry, tell the boy off and went, what did you think

was going to happen? And the boy would look blankly at them and go, because they don't understand consequences. They don't understand long-term consequences of their actions. So you're effectively asking a child to make a life-changing decision by taking blockers which will leave them sterile for life. And you're asking a child to make that decision. A child is utterly incapable of making that decision. It's child abuse is what it it is but why do you think it's so widely accepted and it's not necessarily widely accepted but it is within the ideology I don't think it's widely accepted in society no but within progressive ideology it is it's it's one of those things that you have to not question and you have to go along with it the clue as Francis always says is in

the name progressive it's always about going further and further and further and further. They don't know where to stop, man. Because, see, I am progressive. Well, I don't know. I don't know what I am. But what I mean is sometimes, this is why I don't understand people who have a fixed political ideology. Because it's like me saying to you, Joe, you're driving a car. What's the best thing for you to do? Slow down or speed up?

Well, it depends where you are. It depends where you're trying to get to. It depends what the situation is, what's around you, right? Sometimes society is going a bit too fast and you need to slow down a bit. Sometimes it's going a bit too slow. It's become stale. It's stagnant. We're not moving enough, right?

Sometimes you need a bit of progress. You know, so, but the problem is if your ideology says we must always be making more progress you're gonna keep going to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing another thing I think is technology you know a lot of the change this is where my disagreements with conservatives comes that come in because I even you know Hayek wrote about this and why I'm not a conservative the big tension between progressivism and conservatives about your attitude to change. Right. If you're progressive, you think change is always good at the extreme. Right. And if you're conservative, you think that change is bad. Essentially, that's how some people think. But change is inevitable. It's inevitable. And largely it's driven by technology. So I think one of the reasons we talk about the trans issue so much now is that we have the technology to facilitate some of this transitioning in a way that we didn't have in the past. So I think that's also part of the thing that's driving it.

But the reason I say that it's going to destroy this whole thing from the inside is, number one, you're trying to deny basic biology that we all know. Everybody knows the truth there's a difference between men and women and chopping pieces off yourself isn't going to change that now look we've had trans people on the show we always treat them with respect we employ two people who have gender dysphoria one of them transitioned one not and we didn't even know that right we just hire people based on how good they are. And how cheap they are. Yeah, right. But there's a truth that we all know and that we're being asked to deny it for the sake of an ideology. And I've seen this before, man. We went through this in the Soviet Union.

We went through this. Really? Yeah. Well, I talk about this in a book. Do you know where political correctness comes from? No. The Soviet Union. in a book. Do you know where political correctness comes from? No. The Soviet Union. My ancestors were told in Russia, what you're saying is factually correct, but it's politically incorrect. And what it meant was it was inconvenient to the party line, to the party dogma. And we all lived in a

society where you were forced to pretend to believe things in public that you didn't believe in private. And that is the direction we're moving with this issue and others. We're moving to a position where you cannot say the thing that you know to be true. Basic level, secondary school biology. You can't say it. And I know you've gone through this. You've said, you know, people shouldn't be fighting if whatever. And people come after you because they have to, because they don't have an argument. They have to destroy the person instead of destroying the argument because there is no argument to defend this. And here's the other point as well. They're all

utopians, Joe. They believe that if they get everything, if we do all of these things, we're going to reach this magical utopia where everything is free, everybody lives in perfect harmony. We are going to perfect the human race.

But the problem is humans can't be perfected. I was talking about Shakespeare earlier. Why does Shakespeare still resonate? Because it deals with the human condition, ambition, greed, lust, fragility. All of these different things. If we were able to perfect humanity, do you think people would still read Hamlet or Macbeth or all of these different things. If we were able to perfect humanity, do you think people would still read Hamlet or Macbeth or all of these works?

No, we wouldn't because we would have evolved beyond that. But we don't evolve beyond that because we are human. And this idea of progressivism and we're going to reach this utopia, we're never going to reach utopia. And every time you try, people die in their fucking millions. Every time you try to get to reach utopia and every time you try people die in their fucking millions yeah every time you try to get to a utopia you have to use so much authoritarianism to try and get they have to shut people up you have to put them in camps right that's why every time you get to

you get people trying communism or ideologies of that type you end up with millions of dead because you have to you have to if you want to remake society from the ground up, that's what we tried in the Soviet Union. From each according to his ability to each according to his need. Equality. Equality. We talk about it all the time. We want equality. The only way to achieve equality

is a huge amount of tyranny. Where do you think this goes? The thing that I'm... Where do I think it goes? The thing that I'm... Where do I think it goes? I think it's very worrying because where it goes is anybody who doesn't adhere to the ideology, you get shunted to the side. But how many people are accepting this?

Right. It's not the majority. No, it's not the majority. Depends what you mean by accepting. Hold on. We've got to clear this up. It majority what you mean by accepting hold on we got to clear this up it depends what you mean by accepting joe in the soviet union most people knew that the system was bullshit right but they went along with it anyway my granddad in in the 1980s he said

the soviet union was wrong to invade afghanistan he said in a private conversation one of his friends snitched on him reported him and he was immediately made unemployable. And people would come up to him, his friends, and go, yeah, I really agree with you. He's evil. You see what I'm saying? In public, he's evil. In private, I agree with you. And that's the world we're increasingly starting to live in now, where people have a public view and a public opinion.

to live in now where people have a public view and a public opinion and behind this do you know how many comedians who used to hate us on the comedy circuit for starting trigonometry now contact us and say actually you guys were right do you know how many people do that they won't say anything in public but we have a lot of messages like that now because people are starting to realize where we're going so when you say support yes not many people publicly support it but a lot of people are worried about losing a job. A lot of people are worried about losing a newspaper column, their reputation. We had a guy who worked in a supermarket and he shared a Billy Connolly, you know, Billy Connolly, the comedian, he shared a Billy Connolly routine on his Facebook. It was

a routine about religion. He was fired for sharing a routine about religion from a Billy Connolly DVD that they sold in the supermarket in which he worked. Right. And we've got laws in the UK now where, you know, we had a guy on the show who posted something about this issue, the trans issue, something that was offensive. And he had a policeman call him up and say, we need to check your thinking. A policeman in the UK calling someone up and saying, we need to check your thinking behind what you said. We had a comedian recently who was on tour,

not an offensive comedian at all. An audience member reported him and he had the police investigate the joke. The police investigated his joke and and no one most people in the economy the industry won't say anything they won't say anything because they're afraid of losing the few opportunities that they have because that is what happens when you work in an industry where the majority of the gatekeepers come from our equivalent of ivy league colleges oxford and cambridge who drink this kool-aid and then the people in charge of the awards saying they support the ideology so what are you going to do you're going to have to adhere to in some form to the ideology even though you may think it's bullshit otherwise you're not going to progress in an industry

that is soft tyranny it just is yeah we were talking about this kind of stuff on the podcast in 2012 when it was primarily isolated into colleges. We were talking about how crazy some of these conversations they were having in colleges were and how they were yelling at professors, you are not making this safe for me. This is not a safe space. And people are like, why are you concentrating on what's happening in these liberal colleges? I had exactly the same. And then it spread. Yeah.

Because that's what ideas do. They spread. Ideas spread. People graduate. And then they get jobs. And then they enforce those ideologies on the new corporation that they work for. And the corporations are scared. And so they go along with it.

And they have these diversity and equity and equality meetings. And they try to make everything perfect and balance everything out. And then some of these companies are recognizing it. And one of the ways that they recognize it is when it starts hurting their bottom line, like Netflix. Like Netflix, before they released the Ricky Gervais special, they put out a memo saying, listen, if you don't agree with the kind of content that we put out, you could always quit. Yeah. You don't have to agree with every individual content creator that puts something out that Netflix distributes. That's what it takes.

It takes people in the corporate world being brave and also looking after the bottom line, but I also think it takes just ordinary people. Yeah. Ordinary people just being honest. So, again, where do you think this goes like what is like worst case and best case scenario well he'll give you the worst case

I'll give you the best case I use this as a metaphor people and like Gad's sad people you've had on the show and I love Gad he describes this as a mind virus I disagree with I think the first part of Gad's analogy is correct of a virus infecting the body I don't think it's a virus I think it's a cancer

so think about what cancer does when it's when the body is weakened for whatever reason cells cancerous cells start replicating and they start spreading over the body through the body they start corrupting the body they stop these and think about any organization and this holds true and it goes through and it slowly corrupts the other thing about cancer is that it's parasitic you go into a cancer ward and you see people at end stages of cancer their body becomes withered husks and that's what happens to these organizations they can no longer function properly they take their money and put and funnel it into pointless like die programs spend lots of money or they make programs that nobody wants to watch.

And then it bleeds viewers until what is left is an organization that is no longer fit for purpose. And that's what this ideology is to me. This ideology to me, and I'm saying this as someone on the left who believes in a lot of what the left used to stand for, this is a cancer that has come from the left. It is not the left. It is a cancer that has emanated from the left

and has gone on to infect all these institutions that we used to know and love. I disagree with some of that, but we don't need to get into it. What do you disagree with, though? I think this is of the left. This is what happens when you take left-wing ideas to their logical conclusion. If you believe in equality of outcome, you will always be going for this.

If you believe that people should be made equal, made equal, this is where you get to. What is the solution? The solution is to accept that people aren't made equal. Are we equal? Are you and I equal? Well, we're not math. But that's my point. Human beings have different talents.

This is why what happened in the Soviet Union was trying to make everybody the same. It stunted the best people and it lifted up people who were lazy and stupid. and it lifted up people who were lazy and stupid. Right? I think the solution, if you're asking that question, is to accept that people aren't equal and to create a society where people, we get the barriers out of people's way. Right, but that's a very simplistic version of a solution,

like accept. Like people are, they're balls deep in this ideology. They're all in. Oh, there is no way we're going to win them over. No way? No, no, no, no, no They're extremists Joe and likewise people there are people on the right who are extremists You're not gonna win them over either what we need to do is win over the 80% of people in the middle

That's all you need to do There's always going to be a bunch of extremists on both sides Whatever that issue is that you are never gonna reach you're never gonna reach someone with blue hair on a university campus that teaches that there's 73 genders. You will never convince them. What we need to do is two things. We need to convince the sensible people in the middle and we need to teach them and show them that they can be brave, they can be courageous, and they can speak their mind.

And if enough people will do that, this whole thing will become irrelevant overnight. How do you do that, though, when they lose their job? If they speak out or if they just put a billy connolly routine on their facebook they get fired you have to fight to get rid of the laws that are in place and we have initiatives to do that in the uk people are doing that um and you have to create a culture in which people start to speak their mind we're doing it right now yeah we're doing it right now that's the way to do it man but coming back to your point about where this goes, there is another dimension to this that we haven't talked about yet, which is what's happening in Ukraine right now. And these things are not unrelated. They're not unrelated. I'm from Russia, right? And I have family both in Russia and in Ukraine.

the barbarians are at the gate. They know that we are in this divisive moment, that we've taken an eye off the ball, and they're waiting. The Chinese and the Russians, they know what this is. They know that we are distracted, we're weak. And actually, I think the Russians overestimated how divided we are,

which is one of the reasons they did what they did. If we don't get our shit together, the worst case scenario is that the world is no longer dominated by the West. And I can't explain to you how bad that would be for every single person who's watching and listening to this. We have to get our shit together. Ominous. So that's worst case scenario.

Best case scenario, which may happen, and I'm enthusedhused for example by the unity of the west i mean germany aside uh in response to what happened in ukraine um best case scenario is every action has an equal and opposite reaction and perhaps the concern there should be that we don't overreact uh you know that's something also we're going to have to think about but i think best case scenario is we gradually win over that middle that I was talking about, and we let go of some of these ideas, and we get back on the right path, which is working towards what we started, which is everybody should be treated based on their individual characteristics. Identity politics, Joe, has been tried many, many times

in the history of the world, and it always leads to one thing. I think another note of optimism, it's like my girlfriend always says, she's American, she's a massive Bernie bro, and she always says to me, capitalism always wins. You know, eventually people are going to have to wake up. You're not going to drive your company into the ground. Eventually you're going to put the brakes on this thing. When you stop making money, when you see your profit put the brakes on this thing when you stop making money when you see your profit margins go through the floor when you see competitors who don't adhere to this

ideology start to streak ahead eventually you're going to have to say that we can't keep doing this you know because look think about yourself you know if something doesn't work with your show and it means that you know less people are watching, less people get interested, whatever it may be. As a business owner, you look into it. Of course you do. So that's one of the things why I'm thinking actually capitalism will win because eventually you're not going to bankrupt and you're not going to make yourself out of a job. Now, the extremists will do that. corrupt and you're not going to make yourself out of a job now the extremists will will do that but the vast majority of ordinary people who have got families who've got mortgages to pay will go hang

on a second that's what i'm hoping for is that we come to our senses a collective coming to our senses yeah the problem is in whenever we have this conversation we're and in the west this is a very common thing people underestimate the power of ideology. We think we're very rational. We're really not. Uh, ideology is a very powerful tool. And one of the things that's happening in the West is these institutions are being captured, as you mentioned. Uh, and once you've got the laws on the books, it becomes very hard to get them back off once you start to implement some of these concepts. So we're going to have to work very hard to challenge this stuff in a healthy way. And like I said, I think we're doing it right now. I think we're having the conversations you are, we are. We see initiatives in the UK, which are aimed at preventing this sort of censorship,

people being canceled, people losing jobs for things they've said. The Free Speech Union does some good work. But it's a difficult spot. And I wrote an immigrant's love letter to the West, Joe, because I love particularly the United States, Britain, and I'm deeply concerned that I'm seeing some of the patterns that I saw in my life and in my grandparents' lives in the Soviet Union. You know, my grandma was born in a gulag. She was born in a concentration camp for people who said the wrong thing. I'm not saying we're there. We're not there. We're not there in the West. Let's be clear about that, right? But the direction of travel bothers me. When I see people

pursuing a quality of outcome at any cost, that bothers me. When I see people being divided into groups and being told that this group is good and this group is bad, that worries me. It's not a healthy direction. And a house divided against itself cannot stand. It can't stand. We've got to understand that, you know, the beauty of the West is we are going to have different views and different ideas about things. But we can't destroy our own civilization from the inside. We can't undermine the very values that built this civilization. And freedom, we talked about freedom here in Austin, is such a big part of it. You can't make the technological and scientific progress that we've made without scientists being free to pursue science. And if we can't agree on what a woman is,

free to pursue science. And if we can't agree on what a woman is, biological fact, we're eating our civilization from the inside. This is very dangerous. We've got to push those extremists to where they belong. And we've got to concentrate on the sensible middle of people who want to have a reasonable conversation about these issues. And you know, as we travel around America, we talked about how much we love it. We talk to people here. This is a divided country right now, man. And a lot of people are scared.

A lot of people are angry. A lot of people think that the other side is not just wrong, but evil. That worries me. That worries me because America

is the thing that holds the world together right now. It worries me how many intelligent people adopt these simplistic narratives and they spout them out on Twitter for likes.

Yeah. But this is the thing. It's all, and I, this is so important. Please always be wary of people offering simple solutions to complex problems. Simple solutions never work for incredibly complex, nuanced problems. They might make you feel good.

They might make you feel that you have the answer, that if only we do this, that suddenly we're going to reach some utopia. Life doesn't work like that. Complex problems take years to resolve, and sometimes some problems are not resolvable. You can tinker at the edges. You can do your best to solve it there will always be poverty you may be able to reduce it but you're never going to be able to eradicate it completely there will always be evil people murderers rapists

unfortunately that is part of the human condition now you can put steps in place to minimize it and all the rest of it, but you're never going to stop that. There's always going to be that element of people. I think part of the problem is, and Constantine and I talk about this a lot, a lot of people in the US and the UK and all around the Western world have got what I call western privilege you grew up in a country that is comparatively safe where you don't worry about things like electricity where you don't worry where your next meal is coming from where the water is clean all these things you take for granted that ain't normal in the rest of the world in venezuela at the moment you know i was talking to my to my cousin and i said to him, Johan, how are you doing?

And he went to me, well, I mean, things are tough, Francis. I collect the rainwater in a tank on my ceiling of my house. But now people are stealing the rainwater from the tank. And here's the other thing. And this really worries me so when one of my friends henry came over from venezuela to see my my friends and my um and particularly my family because my parents you know have known henry since he grew up and we took him for it for a meal and my parents are in their mid to late 70s now. They're old people. And Henry was talking. And my dad said, Henry, I'm an old man now.

Could you speak up? And he said, sorry, Jim. He went, because in Venezuela, we're used to whispering. And that's the problem where you live in a society where people have become used to whispering. And that's what I'm seeing in the UK, where people are afraid to say what they think and they feel, where if you say something out loud, you're constantly looking over your shoulder because you're worried that somehow that's going to reduce your opportunities,

your career. It might isolate you from friends. We can't live in a society where we whisper. That is not the West, and that's not a free society joe and i'll tell you a couple of quick stories about the power of ideology um my grandmother who was born in a gulag right when they released people from these camps you were not allowed to live within i think 100 miles of any of the big cities in the soviet union at the time you had to live in a small town in Siberia somewhere.

And in these towns, the only people that lived there because they were so remote were the people who were former prisoners of the camps and the people who were former guards in the camps, right? And when Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev, who took over from him, exposed his great crimes and he said, this wasn't real communism, blah real communism blah blah blah and these people who used to who lived together the guards and the prisoners right my grandmother's family on their very landing in their apartment block opposite them was a guy who used to be a guard in the camps and when these great crimes of Stalin works were exposed many of these men shot themselves because they thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were acting correctly by beating and torturing and imprisoning these people.

It was for a greater good. It was for the right ideology. And we interviewed a guy, a friend of ours, who runs the oldest family-owned Italian restaurant in London. He did a fundraiser for Ukrainian orphans with JK Rowling. And when she tweeted about it, he got a wall of one star comments on his page calling him transphobic. And we don't know if it's related, but the very next day, someone smashed in the window of his restaurant, right? If you're doing that, you're not a good

person. You're not a good person. I don't care why you're doing it when you're smashing people's businesses up you're not a good person and ideology is what allows people to feel good while they attack people while they send them death threats while they send them rape threats do you know how Stalin do you know how the Soviet Union got a nuclear weapon do you not know this no so the Manhattan Project was probably one of the most gigantic advances in human technology in the history of the world, right? It cost a huge amount of money and it was very difficult. The bomb that was the first bomb that the Soviet Union dropped in tests was a carbon

copy of one of the two bombs. I think it was Nagasaki or maybe Hiroshima. It was one of those two because scientists who were working on the Manhattan Project, who had communist sympathies, they had ideology. They gave all of the blueprints and everything to Stalin, to the Soviets, this regime that had killed millions of its own people, because they felt justified by their ideology, they gave the West's greatest enemy in that time a nuclear weapon. That's how hard they believed in stuff. This is the power of ideology. When you believe that you've got the right idea and you can go and burn down cities and attack people

and tell people that you're going to rape them and kill them you're not a good person and this is what i always say to people don't be that thing don't be a useful idiot do not be a useful idiot someone who thinks they've got the right ideas and therefore you're entitled to commit violence against people or to threaten people or to cancel people and to end their ability to make a living if you're're doing that, you're not a good person. You're a useful idiot. And the effect it's having on people. One of my friends who sadly since passed away, and I'm making the details very obfuscating

because I don't want people to know who this person was. This person was very sick. They were very sick with their illness. And I knew this person was this person was very sick they were very sick with their illness and i knew this person was sick and we messaged back and forth on facebook not as much as i should have done because i didn't realize how ill they were and he he said to me i really admire you franc, because you're brave. And I said, what do you mean? And he went, I couldn't do what you do.

And I went, what do you mean? He went, for instance, he goes to me, I just couldn't be honest the way you're honest. And he went, when people come round to my house, I've got Douglas Murray books. And then I hide them away because I know that if they see them, that I will lose friends, that I won't be accepted and that I will be ostracized. And when this person passed away, I saw on Facebook loads of people saying, what a nice person he was. And he was a nice person. nice person he was lovely he was kind he was all of those things but that's what they didn't mean by nice nice meant that he told the party line he didn't challenge he didn't stand up for himself that's what nice means and the thing

that i hate about this ideology is they say that they're doing things to be kind. They're doing things because they're doing the right thing. We're creating a safe space. It's not a safe space. What does safe space actually mean? I don't want you to challenge my opinions. That's what's so dangerous about this ideology because it's a form of tyranny masked with kindness. And it's not kindness. It's just a different way of silencing people and getting them to shut up.

And if they don't shut up, you are going to take everything from them. But what's really interesting in it isn't like the authoritarian like in Venezuela. People know the rules. They do it because they're being kind and respectful and they're manipulating language and it's insidious and it's in our culture where now we can't define what a woman is you ask somebody what a woman is and if on the liberal left they'll have a fucking meltdown have you seen the documentary yeah of course bro watching those people see we all know all the shit we talk about all the time but watching those people the way they react yeah holy shit man it's wild we're

about to interview matt walsh and talk to him about it bro that is the most terrifying thing i've seen for a long time and do you know the the beauty of the film is that the first half an hour i was laughing i'm like this is really funny look at him he's an idiot no no no no no right then they got into the doctors yeah and i'm like oh my god this is actually terrifying yeah where they're interviewing that doctor and she's just you know and she does a chicken have gender identity yeah right does a chicken fuck or whatever the hell she says you go this this this is a delusion that is just, it's an illness. Well, what's fascinating is the very question can't be answered. What is a woman?

Like someone who identifies as a woman. Okay, but what is that? Anyone who has the gender identity that they identify themselves as a woman. Like, what does that mean? Like, and how does someone know what a real woman feels like? If you're a biological male and you say, I identify as a woman, I think I'm a woman. How do you know what a woman is? What does that mean?

I get it. See, the thing is, to you guys, this is like weird and new. I've seen this. This is exactly what it was like in the Soviet Union. Exactly. You had to believe things that made no sense because you didn't want to be punished. But the people that do believe it, that have their own personal experience with gender dysphoria, they, I mean, that's a real thing. Of course.

It's existed throughout time. Yeah. Well, like I said, we employ people who have gender dysphoria. It's a fascinating portal through with these ideas trailing in behind it. That's that's what's interesting about it. How do you mean? Well, because if you accept this one thing this one thing which is very strange, right? This one thing that not only can you be a bottle up biological male with a penis But you're a woman and you have sex with women and you make that woman pregnant if that woman identifies as a male. That's a pregnant male It's it's it's why oh, this is just a bunch of horseshit no offense to anybody right, but the people obviously feel something right They feel like they don't belong they feel better with a beard you want to wear a wig and a beard

You're an adult go for it right Right. I accept people for what. Someone says to me, look, I identify as a woman. My pronoun. I've never misgendered people just because I want to get on with people, you know? Right. It's not that important. It's not that important. However, there are situations where it is super important, right?

Right. Prisons. Yes. UFC. Right. Children. Right. Swimming. Swimming. Sports, we could say, right? Prisons. Yes. UFC. Right. Children, right? Swimming. Swimming. Sports, we could say, right? Look, it comes from the denial of a very basic thing, which is there's a difference between men and women. Yeah. We kind of forgot about that for a while there. And we need to remember that there is one. That does not mean that that should be used to oppress people

or deny people rights or anything like that. But there's a difference. Do you think it signals a pivotal chapter in this whole thing that this is where, and you were saying this, that this is probably what's going to force it to implode. And do you think that there, do you find an encouragement in the fact that out of the people that are completely free, and that's the word completely is probably the wrong word, people that are completely free. And the word completely is probably the wrong word. But out of the people that do commentary on the internet, where they don't have a network that they have to answer to, they don't have producers that they have to answer to, and executives that have this woke ideology as their center point, you're seeing far more people excel and advance and succeed in rational objective commentary. Yes.

Truth, at the end of the day, this is the one thing that – have you ever read The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn? No, I haven't. It's the story of the gulags. It's a gigantic book. Whether that's at your own level as an individual or the level of society, in the long run, truth always wins. We all know what the truth is. But here's a worrying thing.

It depends the censorship that is going to hit the internet. Yeah, big tech. Because here's the thing that we all can agree on. The Overton window for discussing and for discussion and for debate is narrowing. You can feel it. We all know it. We can all feel it. It's narrowing day by day.

Well, we see it on YouTube, right? Where things get censored and it doesn't even make sense that they're problematic. Exactly. And that being the case, you know, we all say that the internet is the great hope for us to be able to debate and share ideas. But what's happening? Because these companies are coming under a tremendous amount of pressure from governments in order to, you know, to keep everybody safe. Just keep it again. It's about safety.

That's the most dangerous word in all of this, because once you change the meaning of words, once you say the words are violence, well, I'm entitled to come and bash you over the head with a bike lock. Because you're saying things I don't like and that's violence against me. So safety is this word that doesn't mean what it used to mean. Have you noticed that? It doesn't mean an absence of physical violence, which is the definition of safety. Safety now means people not being allowed to express certain opinions did you see the video where there's a woman she's a law professor from Berkeley oh I did and he's asking her questions about a woman and a woman's right to reproductive

freedom and she said I just want to recognize that your statements are transphobic and they open up trans people to violence. Yes. Yeah. That's the way you do it, right? Because- And laughing while she's saying. And laughing while she's saying.

I just want to say, like this mocking, condescending, shitty attitude. Of course. But what a beautiful way to shut down a conversation. Yeah. Not by shouting over somebody, but by taking the moral high ground. And once you take that moral high ground, if you then criticize me, well, you're being transphobic.

And I have this moral high ground. And if you attack me again, then you're in the wrong. And this is where it gets dark. This phrase, sorry, that I keep headbutting the mic, that they always use, the right side of history.

We are on the right side of history. We are on the right side of history. And you just think to yourself, how arrogant are you that you think you're so sure of your own opinion that hundreds of years down the line, people are going to look at you and think you are the new MLK. How arrogant is it? And it's so beautiful as well because they say you're on the wrong side of history and immediately your opinion doesn't matter anymore because you're part of the problem. And if you're part of the problem,

we don't have to engage with you. And it's something that I said in 2020 when the whole world went nuts, when you had the BLM marches and they were saying things like abolish capitalism, defund the police. And I had friends who got on board with this and I saw what happened in Venezuela. And I said to them, be very, very careful. You don't understand the forces that you are messing with. You don't understand. He's seen it. I saw what happened in Venezuela. I saw like my cousin had to flee for his life. He's a journalist because if you criticize the

government, my grandfather was murdered when I was 31. His murder was never investigated, even though we know who did it because investigating crimes is a sign of right-wing oppression. You've got to be careful. You got to be very very careful but people who have grown up in the west they don't understand the magic trick and it is a magic trick because once again it's simple solutions to complex problems do you know how the soviet union was created because this is kind of relevant no well the the ideology at least is this right there's privileged people which they were right and they have too much and we have nothing not untrue by the way in in 1917 and russia and these privileged people have too much and we have to

overthrow them and we must take from them and distribute to everybody. Sound familiar? Yeah. And in the Soviet Union, the groups that were, you know, the privileged were the aristocrats and whatever. And the underprivileged were the working people. The ideology of Marxism is based on class. What we're talking about here is a new form of it, talking about here is a new form of it, which is Marxism and ideology based on ethnicity, identity, sexuality. And it's the same thing just being applied in a different way, right? There's privileged people and underprivileged people, and we must flip the thing, right? That's why it worries me because I do think, you know, obviously Western societies, like every other societies, have racism in them, have sexism, have discrimination. They're people who are bigoted.

They genuinely are. I've seen them. I've experienced racism, right? But the solution to that is not to start to undo the entire Western project. That's not the answer here. And to implement all these wacky ideas. And we see the reality. I mean, what happens when you defund the police?

Crime goes up. Surprising, huh? Yeah. So, you know, Francis and I, you know, we had the conversation about comedy. But but the truth is, the reason we do what we do is we're both people who've come from different societies who are deeply, deeply concerned about what's happening in the West. And for two reasons. One is we're destroying ourselves from the inside. But I know how people think outside of the West. I have lots of Chinese friends. I'm from Russia. People out there aren't talking about gender pronouns. They're getting ready. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, after the invasion of Ukraine, do you know what he said? He said, the purpose of what we're doing here is to push America out of Eastern Europe.

That's what they're doing. They're seeing that the West is weak and they're capitalizing. They're capitalizing. And the Chinese, they will do the same if they have the opportunity because everybody wants what we have. They want the prosperity.

They want the stability. They want to be top dog. And why wouldn't they? Right? And what happens? I mean, you understand the fighters. What happens with fighters when they see someone is a bit weak? They're going to go after them.

Right? This is how people think outside the West. We don't have time to fuck about, Joe. We really, really, really don't. Why is it that the only place you're hearing this kind of talk is on the internet because because the institutions are captured because people you know what happens if you say what I said on CNN isn't that terrifying yeah well that's why we do what we do cuz we're fucking terrified it is terrifying

it's up it is absolutely terrifying that you see these people and they're saying these mantras. They're regurgitating. They're chanting them. It feels like you're at church again. I grew up Catholic and it feels like trans women are women. And you go, they're not. They're just not. And that's not to demean these people.

That's not to mock them. That's not to say that they're bad people I have sympathy for anybody who's going through gender dysphoria which is an utterly awful terrible mental illness of course we have to have compassion for people but that doesn't mean just because you go through transition

that you are a woman you are still a biological male I'll give you an example Question Time which is our biggest political program. It's a debate show where they get notable people on to debate. Constantine's been on it and they get on to debate various things. We had Robert Winston, Sir Robert Winston, one of the UK's most eminent biologists.

And they were talking about this very issue. And they asked him what his opinion was. very issue and they asked him what his opinion was and he went your sex is quite literally coded into your cells into the very fabric of your dna the host of the program turned around looked at him and went some people may disagree with that you go we're insane this you've got a man who is eminent who is one of the foremost biologists explaining something that we all know is true, and that's your rebuttal? Have you seen the movement where they're trying to get archaeologists to stop gendering corpses? And they find skeletons from a thousand years ago because we don't know what identity, what sexual identity they had. Maybe we should ask them their fucking pronouns, man.

Yeah. And, you know, it's crazy, man. But the language point, I used to be a professional translator and then became a comedian. So I've been working with language my entire life. Language is powerful. It is powerful because look at all these words. For example, take something like inclusion, right? It's a nice word we want to be everyone included try going into an inclusive space if you're you or me or francis you suddenly find you're quite excluded in there yeah right safety

doesn't mean what safety used to mean we had an mp a member of parliament a member of the most prestigious debating chamber in the world say that we shouldn't fetishize debate. Why? Because they understand that their ideas don't stand up to scrutiny, so you have to shut people down. Fetishize debate? What did he mean by that? She. She.

I think she. And what she means is we shouldn't pretend that debate is a good thing. Right? Wow. Do you see what I'm saying? Wow. The way that they're using language is they substitute the meaning of words. And that's why I have a whole chapter in the book about it, because this is how you change the law without changing the law.

If you change the meaning of words, you're changing the meaning of laws without passing new legislation. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes. So this is the way that it works. And again, in the Soviet Union, this is exactly what happened. You change the meaning of all sorts of words. So what's happening to the language, it's not inconsequential, Joe. What does diversity mean? It's like Francis said. Diversity doesn't mean all kinds of different people who've got different opinions and different views and whatever. No, it doesn't mean that at

all. It means people who think the same but look different. That's what it means. Yeah. Right? And what's happening with the language is indicative of a bigger process that's happening underneath all of that. And so, you know, that's why Francis and I do what we do because we're playing with very, very dangerous things like children. And we have no idea the forces that we are allowing to take over around the world. We're playing with very, very dangerous things like children. And we have no idea the forces that we are allowing to take over around the world. People are watching what we do in the West. Everybody.

Most people in England or here in the US don't know what's happening in other countries deep inside, right? In Russia, in China. But they know exactly what's happening here. They're watching and they're accelerating this division. You know this. The Russian troll farms, what the chinese are doing yeah because it helps them this is what they want and we are doing it to ourselves we're letting them do it to us instead of going no this is not the western project this is not how we do things we have debates we have discussions we have disagreements but we have freedom of speech we freedom, we believe in the power of ideas and the power of discussion, and we

believe that through discussion and scientific research and scientific progress, we get better, we get more powerful, we get stronger. And we are not ashamed of our values. We're not ashamed that we believe that all people are born equal, should be treated equally, right? We're not ashamed about this. This is a unique thing about the West. It's a unique thing. We are proud of that. And, you know, we had a poll in the UK asking people how many of them are proud versus ashamed of their country.

And 35% of British people are ashamed of their country. Did they give a reason? No, it was just a poll why, right? And even among conservatives, only 42% say that they're proud of their country. Now, I understand, you know, pride is not the healthiest emotion necessarily to feel about your country. You've got to have a healthy view, right? We've all done bad things. Every society has.

But my worry is about the shame, particularly in Britain, where it's less so in America, I think. Or maybe not. You tell me. But it's this feeling that, like, we're bad people. There's a lot of that here. Yeah. We're bad people. There's a lot of people that are upset that I have an American flag on my wall.

Yeah. And I'm here as a foreigner to tell you we're not bad people. No. We are some of the best human beings, progressive human beings in the history of the world. Some of the least racist, some of the least sexist, some of the most tolerant. That's who we are. Let's celebrate that. Let's lean into that. Let's treat people on the content of their character. We haven't got there. We haven't got there. It's true. But let's try. Let's get better. Let's do that instead of destroying ourselves from the inside.

But let's try. Let's get better. Let's do that instead of destroying ourselves from the inside. And people always say, why is it comedians who are doing this? Why have you set up this as a comedian? Why have we set up trigonometry? Because as comedians, we're at the coalface of this. We get to see week in, week out, with the jokes, how people change. How suddenly what was a joke that was acceptable even last month suddenly it doesn't get lost anymore it gets ooze suddenly things that you see you could a joke that you could do last year doesn't work anymore

suddenly you feel that people that you don't even have to make a joke the moment you go into a particular subject you just feel people tense on I had a routine about why we need a special Olympics for white people that got progressively less funny over time it was incredible it started out being hilarious and just got less and less laughs

and at the end of every gig it would be the black and brown people that come up to me and go I love that don't know why they weren't laughing because the white people are fucking terrified but in a way you can understand why they're terrified because they've been force fed this ideology if you challenge But in a way, you can understand why they're terrified

because they've been force-fed this ideology. If you challenge it in any way, suddenly you're problematic, you're racist, you're whatever else. So you constantly

live your life with the handbrake on and scared. And the tragedy is, Joe, that's not living. No. It's not living

to have the handbrake on and be scared because being a human being is difficult. It's hard. Every day is handbrake on and be scared. Because being a human being is difficult. It's hard. Every day is hard. You have to meet challenges. You have to stand up. You have to improve.

You have to be better. But all of a sudden, if you're having to live this life where there's tripwires around you, and if you say the wrong thing, then suddenly all these horrible things can happen, and you can be exposed for these things that you know you're not. That's a terrible way to live. You're living your life in a straitjacket. And I think it's just really important that people understand we use this term gaslit all the time. Progressives always use it gaslit. But I think what we're seeing is a population of people who are being gaslit who are told that they're racist sexist i have their internalized homophobia all of this kind

of stuff when the reality is and i really believe this most people are honest decent and here's the thing and here's the thing that i find really upsetting is people are starting to believe that they're problematic and you just go you're not you're not you're a human being you're fragile there's you think the wrong things here's the thing we're constantly in this silos nobody's having their opinions challenged anymore or their views and that's dangerous because I've got stupid opinions So do you so do you and it's only by voicing them and I say my stupid thing that you go Hang on brother. Come on. What about this? And what about that? I go actually you're right Yeah, I didn't think of it and we improve and we move forward and by doing this

We're just drilling down and our opinions aren't being challenged and we're not going to be able to move society forward what's fascinating is that those kind of conversations where you can say to someone I think your opinions wrong and they go ah you got a point that's only happening on the internet right you're not seeing that on any of these major news broadcasts any any of these opinion shows. You're just not seeing that. It's just echo chamber. A hundred percent. And the thing is as well,

is even on the internet, man, like we all understand we're on YouTube, right? If this was the reverse and we were interviewing you, there's certain things that can't be said on YouTube. Right. There's certain things that can't be questioned, which comes back to the point we didn't really get into, which is the big tech censorship.

Yeah. I find that absolutely terrifying, Joe. Terrifying. Because this isn't a left or right wing point at all, because I'm really, really not interested in that false bullshit about these two teams. I think the problem is the tribes. I don't think we're ever going to get away from it because we're human beings, right? But it's that left versus right thing that is the problem in my opinion that's how you get the echo chambers in the first place but the problem is you know what happened with the hunter biden story i woke up that day and i saw what had happened and i said to the guys this is one of the biggest stories and this is one of the worst things that i've ever seen because once you start fucking with the electoral process like that once you start making up bullshit like this is russian

disinformation yeah and we later learn that it's true i don't care that it's biden or that it's trump you can't do this you cannot put your hand on the scales in favor of one team if you are the public square you cannot do this But that was the problem with Trump is that he was so problematic to people on the left. They were willing to break the rules in order to hamper him and to hamper his success in order to empower the Biden team. They wanted to withhold information

that they thought would be a problem. Yeah, and you can't do that. You can't do that. You can't do... And by the way, what the Democrats did to Trump in terms of Russia collusion, that was awful. Yeah.

That was unacceptable. Right. Particularly when you find out that the Hillary Clinton campaign was also in collusion with Russia. But here's the thing. Which makes sense. Yeah. So you can't.

Once you start fucking with the system. Yeah. It's game over, man. Right. It's game over. And look, and we should be clear also the big tech platforms They don't have an easy job. No, they really really don't It's not an easy thing to run this we're living through a technological revolution

The last time we saw something like this was the printing press, but it's far more It's more impressive right because it's something that's beyond anything that's ever existed before. Whereas these people who went, many of them, straight from college, right into positions in these companies and then right into positions of power in these companies are literally in charge of the narrative of the civilized world. They don't have real life experience in many cases. A lot of these people in high positions, like the guy who's the CEO of Google, he's in his fucking 30s, man. That's crazy.

But this isn't, I'll just make this point. This isn't just big tech. One of my really good mate of mine was a facilities manager at Downing Street. So he was in charge of the building, how the building worked. And I said to him, Taz, what are the politicians like who are coming in what are they like he goes to me francis this is what they're like they all went to private school very prestigious private school then they went to oxford or cambridge then they went to do a master's then they got an internship with an mp then they worked as an intern and then they were as a

political advisor and they worked their way up. It's not just big tech, Joe. Our politicians have that as well. But big tech is where it really matters, because politicians are a lot less powerful than the people who run big tech. This is what most people don't get now. They are the most powerful people in the world, and they're fucking with our democracy. That's what they're doing. They're putting their hand on the scales. You can't pick teams if you're in that position, man. You just can't. And it's a difficult job. I am not someone who, oh, you should be able to say anything. Because it's not that simple.

It's a complicated problem to solve. But we've got to understand that we cannot have these big tech platforms messing around with this structure that is built to allow people to express their opinion democratically. Because once you undermine that, you're going down a very dark path. Also, the tech platforms are almost entirely left-wing. That's what's bizarre. They almost

all lean left. There's no real balance. Well, not when it comes to paying tax, Joe. That's true. Yeah, it's like a lot of liberals. Very left-wing when it comes to spouting things. Well, I when it comes to paying tax, Joe. That's true. It's like a lot of liberals, very left-wing when it comes to spouting things. Well, I have to pay tax. No, thank you, mate. I won't do that.

That's true. We're very worried because it's going to affect everything. It's going to affect public discourse. It's going to affect comedy. And the worrying thing is I don't think people quite understand where this is going to go that's the worrying thing when you start seeing again the clue is in the name progressivism progression when you start to see people getting thrown off platforms i remember we interviewed uh a journalist who a former editor of spike called brendan o'neill right this is one of the first interviews we did and brendan is a big free speech guy and i love him he's great and he goes further

actually than either of us does on that issue he's like an absolutist no libel laws no this no that he's you know he's pretty out there he's out there with what he thinks and god bless him right it's not what i think but there we go and i remember and we were talking about free speech and this was in 2018 and i go to him i remember this yeah i go to look brenda you bang on about that we're getting censored can you give me an example and then he gave this example of this musical comedian who was doing holocaust denying material right and got kicked off all the platforms right and i just went well i don't care who cares if this nutbag woman got kicked off all the platforms

for Holocaust-denying comedy material? But what I didn't understand is you've got to stand up for the people who you disagree with, who you think are out there, wackos or whatever else. Because here's the thing, like we said before, the Overton window will continue to narrow, and eventually it will be you. Can you explain the Overton window to people? So the Overton window is basically the window. It's the range of acceptable ideas in society that can be uttered in public.

Yeah. Right? So the range of things that you can say in public without being destroyed is narrowing. Yeah. There are new and new rules about what you can and can't say. Why is it the Overton window? I have no idea. Yeah.

Okay. It just makes me sound intelligent. So, but, and then, and then he made, that was such a profound point because I thought to myself, of course, if you don't stand up for people

that you disagree with, eventually it's going to happen to you. Right. The weapon, and also this is something that progressives need to understand. The weapons that you use against others will eventually be turned on you. we saw that in the uk where suddenly you know comedians

were celebrating you know count dankiller getting arrested this guy you know the nazi pug story hilarious yeah hilarious and they were all celebrating you know because he was problematic he was anti-semitic blah blah blah and then on a radio panel show a few years ago, a left-wing journalist called Joe Brand made a joke about... Left-wing comedian, not journalist. Yeah, left-wing comedian made a joke about a right-wing politician made an off-the-cuff quip about throwing battery acid in his face. It was on a comedy panel show. It was a joke, right? Then suddenly she gets investigated by the police we need to wake up and realize that if you start using these weapons against your enemies it won't belong be

long before they wake up and they're going to use them against you and once that happens we're going to be in a very dangerous place in society this is where the point you made about the age thing really matters because when you remember, we talked about the contract that I turned down. When I went on TV, there was a woman who she was we were debating this issue and she was she was unpleasant. She shushed me and all sorts of shit happened. Anyway, I met her years later because we were supposed to like hate each other.

And we did a bunch of TV together. And actually, she's a nice girl. We got on very well. But she said to me, I realized cancel culture is a problem when I saw it happening to my friends. These people are young, man. They don't think through the consequences

of what they're doing. And so I do think that some of them can be won over when they haven't gone fully off the deep end. We can win people over by- Can I just stop you? Do we need to win them over by cancelling them they will see some of some of the stuff when when they experience it for themselves you know there's nothing like you know Solzhenitsyn wrote about it there were

there were people in the camps who who only realized the problem with the Soviet Union when they were the ones at the end of the barrel. Don't be that useful idiot, man. Don't be. I mean, I'm not talking to you, obviously. No, I understand. It's very fascinating to me that these conversations that we're having are so unusual

and that this is kind of the only way you can have them. The only way you can have them is in a kind of format like this. And that these things that you're saying, although they're very logical and they're based on reality and history, they're uncommon. That's very strange. the popularity of these kinds of conversations like your show and my show and a lot of other shows like it, that this is sort of an unexpected twist in the narrative that people didn't see coming. And that the freedom that we enjoy before the Overton window slams shut on us, it does give us the possibility to spread this idea and let people recognize that this is a genuine, real problem that although it might make you feel better to deny it it might make you feel better

to go along with it at work or at school it ultimately will lead to a far more suppressive environment than the one you're experiencing right now and it's not just that Joe you're denying people's humanity people often go to me Oh Francis are you left or you're right and i'm like no i'm just me stop trying to label me stop trying to put me in a box my girlfriend is very left-wing bernie bro i don't agree with a lot of her politics i think they're not so if i'm being honest god bless her and people go to me well how can you have a relationship and i'm like because there's love because it's more important we need to start

seeing the humanity you can have a friend who's conservative you know we employ you know christian conservative she's a wonderful sweet kind beautiful person we need to stop who thinks we're going to hell yeah i mean yeah because we smoke weed but but bless her. But we need to stop this. Stop seeing someone as something to put in a box and just start seeing as Joe or whoever it may be. I'll tell you about the people that work with us, right? I'm going to get a lot of emails now, but we only ever employ people who ask to work with us, right?

And we're not looking to employ anyone right now, by the way. But in our team, we've got, so conservative Christian, we've got a guy who, this is a funny story, man. We've got a guy who's from a Sikh background, his family's Sikh. They moved to the UK via Africa.

And he was telling us that when he was, he was working on TV and he didn't want to work on TV anymore because in the last two years, people started basically, he was just a token there. They were just looking at him as his race and they'd be like,

oh, well, you know, BLM happened. How are you feeling about this? The guy's from a Sikh, but what the fuck does he have to do, right? And so when he came to us, he was like, man, this is such a relief to be working in a place where we don't care we were looking for someone to make the thumbnails for our

youtube video so we put the word out um and we got a bunch of responses and we picked the best one right we picked the best one been working for him with for a while and then he goes by the way i'm trans and we're like by way, we don't give a shit. Right. You know? That's, and we have genuine diversity in terms of our team, because we don't give a shit who you are or what you think. We just care if you do a good job. Yeah. That's how it should be. I mean, really should be that way.

And I have a lot of friends that are conservative. I'm not conservative, but I do have some conservative ideas. Like I support the second amendment. I believe I'm kind of a free speech absolutist in a lot of ways too. I just, I think that there's a lot of room for people to just have conversations and talk about things. And one of the things that's kind of,

it's kind of died down because it wasn't effective, but I would get attacked a lot for platforming people. You know, that was the big thing. Like having a conversation with like Ben Shap conversation with, like, Ben Shapiro. I like Ben Shapiro. I like him a lot. I don't agree with him on many things, particularly about gay rights.

Or not necessarily gay rights, but, you know, he's very religious, and he doesn't believe that people... He thinks you should treat it the same way you treat murder. Like, I'd like to kill that guy, but I won't because it's wrong. He fills out... Yeah, I know. It's like, yo. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's... But Joe, here's's the thing it's just an opinion exactly exactly and he's a brilliant intelligent guy and I love talking to him even if I don't think that some of his ideas are sound or even you know that they're a problem I think you're supposed to have conversations with people and that's how you open their eyes if you make them the enemy they're never gonna see see your perspective i have a friend uh who who sorry francis yeah i have a friend who i get on with very very well and he's uh like a green party member green is like ultra ultra left uh you know i'm an immigrant he's british and we sometimes talk about like uh immigration right and he's's like, I believe in open borders. And I explained to him what that actually means.

And he's like, yeah, I know. I just like the idea. And that's okay. That's okay. I can be friends with him. I think it's a demented idea, right? Open borders. It doesn't work. Human beings aren't wired.

That way it's never going to work. It's going to cause an awful lot of trouble. I say that as an immigrant myself. But I don't have to hate that guy. I don't have to reject him. We're friends. We can play basketball together. We can go have dinner.

And our wives like it. Do you know what I mean? Yes. And this is the problem. This comes from the internet where we see other people as an avatar. Richard Grannon on our show talked about this. Where we've spent so much time on social media, we just see other people as avatars,

and that we can't have a discussion. We have to destroy. We have to win. We have to humiliate them. We have to be the one who wins in the discussion. Whatever happened to just agree to disagree? And just accept that people see the world differently. Because here's the thing.

Your experiences and my experiences of life are fundamentally different. They just are. You grew up in a different way. I grew up in a different way, different countries, different cultures, different experiences. As a result of that, we're going to see the world in a different way. And here's the thing, that's valid and that's fine. And because we experience the world in a different way, we're going to have different political opinions maybe. We're going to have different opinions on a wide variety of things. That's cool and it's fine and it should be celebrated. Let's stop trying to have this uniformity of opinion

because, again, you're denying people their right and their opportunity to be human, to be multifaceted. Nobody is right. Nobody is left. We're all take something from everyone. Some people are right and some people are left. I would argue like we just spent a couple of days with somebody. Like I said, we've got a friend.

I've got a friend who's on the Green Party side of things. We just spent a couple of days in D.C. with Sebastian Gorka, who's like a Trump attack dog, you know, and a bunch of his Christian conservative friends. I've never had a better time in my life. You know, we went to a gun show, shot some guns, had dinner, talked about interesting things. These are polite, respectful,

decent people who care about this country. You don't have to agree with them. Yeah. I don't have to agree with them on everything, right? Don't you think that this is a very unique time, though, that I'm exposed to the way you think in a way that I would never be exposed to this 50, 60 years ago? That's why when people complain about the internet, I'm like, there's a lot to complain about, but also this is the best time ever. It's a window into humans. 300 years ago, Joe, everybody in this room would have been burnt at the stake. Not Jamie.

I think you would be, but by association, right? So, and like we said about Carlin and Hicks and Pryor, this isn't, cancel culture has always existed, but we've always got to be vigilant that we don't allow it to run amok. And we have done. Yeah. We, we have allowed it to run amok in some ways, but we've also opened the discussion that it has run amok in a way that never existed before. And this is what might be our water for the flames. I agree. Yeah. And here's the thing, when we were spending time with Seb, you know, we started talking, they were, you know, they were very, they were on the right Christian conservative. But I said, look, one of the real problems I have with America

is your lack of socialized health care. And they put forward their argument. But then a lot of them disagreed with each other. And they started to have a debate about it and go, look. And then one of them went, look, it's obvious the system isn't working. Another one went, I've got this friend who's really sick and they can't get the treatment. We need to do something about that.

So that was my point about on the right even on the right they still disagree and some of them were saying things that like this idea that someone who's fundamentally ill needs to be taken care of by the state that's a left-wing opinion yes yeah so even on the right you're still going to have things on the left well this is what happens like you say joe is when you take your foot off people's throat and when you you stop making them feel that they're evil for having an opinion and you just listen and hear and discuss yeah that's when you find out human beings are actually quite complicated and you can change people's minds sometimes just by listening to them you don't even need to say anything a lot of times the opinions that they have they've taken out of comfort they've taken these opinions because it's easier to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of ideas

and opinions than it is to form your own if there's a very clear-cut ideology that you can just subscribe to and all of a sudden that makes you a good person or accepted in your community it's very easy to do that yeah and that's where you get the people that whisper yes i agree with you but this is like that whisper yeah did you see that cartoon in the spectator where it's a guy putting a flame to someone on the pyre yeah and he goes yes yeah that that it's cowardice cowardice is a big fucking problem sure it's always been a problem it's a problem with humans yes speaking of cowardice this person that thinks you're gonna go to hell because

you smoke weed yeah Yeah. Is that? It's a joke. It's a joke. Oh, I don't know. Maybe she does. I don't know. What's the attitude about weed in the UK? It's illegal. Totally.

So we only smoke it when we're here. Oh, you want some? Sure. Yeah, let's do it. Don't be scared, homie. What? Scared? Why would I be scared, man?

Our weed is better than your weed. All right, come on. You know what? It probably is, actually. I'll tell you something, man. The thing about weed being illegal is when we are in places where we're actually allowed to smoke it,

it's so much better because you're not worried and because you can pick what you want and stuff like that. It's incredible, man. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm a little puss-puss when it comes to weed,

so I just go into the shop and I go, look, just give me the mildest thing on the menu. And they go, this is what we normally give our girlfriends. You go away and you enjoy that, man. Now that we're smoking weed, I'm taking the shirt off, man.

There you go. There you go. Cut loose. Next level. Yeah, man. This is one thing that I do have hope for, is the implementation and adoption of psychedelics. Yeah.

I think if there's anything that's going to change people's minds, that's going to be one of the things. Because it's going to change your whole understanding of what is rigid and what structures exist and why they exist and why you think the way you think. And it'll make you question yourself in a way that I don't think anything else happens. Can I tell you a story? This isn't about psychedelics, but do you know that there's more than one way to

get there to that place that you're talking about I studied a lot of hypnosis in my 20s and there's this exercise that you can do in hypnosis called deep trance identification and the idea is if you put someone into a deep hypnotic state the identity it's like it's almost like a set of clothes you can take off your identity yeah and you can try on a different identity you can try and what it what would it be like to be Francis and Ghana or you know whoever whoever is that you want to understand how they do what they write and I did this odd there's two stories I'll tell you about this so I did this once in on

a course that I was doing with a woman. She was this very mildly spoke, mild spoken, softly spoken South African woman. And she wanted to try on being some kind of like American. She was, I think, religious, like evangelical preacher. I don't know why she wanted it. But anyway, so we put her into this trance, took her through the process. And then we said, open your eyes. And she opened her eyes. your eyes. And she opened her

eyes and, holy shit. And she was speaking like this guy, right? So when I was doing this exercise with me being the one, I thought, you know what? I want to do this with the universe. I want to feel what it's like to be the universe. So the guys put me in this deep trance, take off your identity, try it on. And when I opened my eyes, I just felt connected to everything, to every human being on the planet. And you know how the universe is expanding? I felt like my heart beat. The idea that I got is what if the expansion of the universe is one half of a heartbeat of some kind of creature? That's what I got. And I know that people who take various psychedelics and

stuff like that sometimes have a similar experience of deep connection with other people through this thing. And that's why I'm not someone who's, I don't believe in God, but I know that we're all connected in some way as humans. There's something that unites us. And I don't know what that is, but the fact that you can get there different ways tells me that it's real. There's something. I never say I don't believe in God because I don't even know what that means. I don't know. Do I believe that everything that man has written about religion, all the religious texts or the inaccurate interpretation of the will of God? No, I don't believe that. Because I think there's too much that's cultural in that. There's too much that

is like a sign of the times, the laws and the rules of the land. So it's clearly at the hand of man all over everything. But like, why did they write it in the first place? Like, what were they feeling and experiencing that they wanted to lay down ground rules and and talk about some connection with with the almighty and maybe there is a thing and just we don't know what the fuck it is you know we're we're stuck in this strange sort of very limited existence for a very short amount of time to figure things out and most of the time you're alive you're trying to manage your anxiety you're trying to figure your way through this maze of civilization and culture and conversations and relationships and friendships and business and bills and mortgages and all that shit. And in the meanwhile, you're a part of this massive super organism that is but a speck in the atom of another being that is far more infinitely, not just impossible in size to consider, but that's a part of something

that's far more impossible than that. That so much of what we see like in fractals, we like to think that the universe is so vast and so amazing that that's it. What if it's not? What if the universe, what if this idea of the infinity of the universe is like it's just a part of a cell that's a part of something far greater and far larger we are here

but a brief instance it's so fucking short that most of the time you're just trying to figure out what's going on and then it's too late and then it's gone and you hope that you've transferred some of your wonder and some of the information you've accumulated during your lifetime to the next group that's going to look at it and they're going to have a little bit more knowledge they're going to take it to a little bit better place and hopefully they're not going to blow themselves up before they work their way through many of the problems we've already worked our way through when you were talking earlier about this is one of the greatest times ever to be alive like pinker gets criticized all the time for his conclusions,

but his work is pretty clear. What he's talking about is if you go back in time and you look at all the violent crime and the murder and the rape and just the chaos of life, it's way better now than it's ever been before. People are way kinder. And I think out of all the bad things that the internet has done, one of the good things is I genuinely think it's made a percentage of people way nicer.

Yeah. Yeah, and it's, you know, also as well, we live in a world now, particularly in the West, where a lot of people aren't religious. They don't feel that they need religion. They feel that religion is stupid, that it doesn't make sense, blah, blah, blah. And I'm talking as someone who's an atheist.

You're not an atheist. No, you're not. You're not. You're agnostic. You're not an atheist. You don't not believe in God. Yeah. Okay, good point.

Are you agnostic as well? Would you feel? I would say that I don't believe in God as I already did. But I do believe in something greater above us. I don't know what that is. Do you just not like to use that word? Do you think, like, I've heard people say that before, like that word God, like they try to reclaim it

because they say that so many people have attached it to like the modern idea of what a, you know, a vengeful God is based on their interpretation of the Bible. Yeah, no, I go deeper than that, to be honest, because if you look at how gods have been used throughout history before monotheistic religions, before religions that had one God, God was always a way to explain things that human beings couldn't explain scientifically at the time that they were living in, right? The God of rain, the God of lightning, the God of fire, the God of war.

So to me, i worry about using that word not because i'm scared or whatever it's because i don't think it accurately describes what i think exists right right and what i mean by this thing above us all is not some kind of being it's the deep connection that all human beings at the end of the day have with each other that's what i that's because sorry for instance just to finish this point right so you can meet somebody who's a completely different race doesn't speak the language doesn't do anything and with just the basic movement of your meat yeah you can connect with that person right quite at a deep level yeah there's something

that unites us and it's also the covid taught this. Like I said, we feel that we've moved beyond it. We don't have this need for religion. But when we're all in lockdown, we realized what we needed more than anything was connection. And you can see it. Look at the way mental illness skyrocketed over lockdown. Consumption of drugs, alcohol, gambling, all the pornography. They all skyrocketed because when you don't

have connection, you're not human. We need to feel connected. It's fundamental to us. You know, Jordan Peterson had a very interesting take on this, and I'm going to butcher it because I don't remember it totally. But I think his take was, like someone was talking to him about whether or not he believed in the God of the Bible, whether or not he believed in Jesus Christ. And I think his take was that if you live your life as if it's real, you'll have a better life.

Yeah. It's like it's not necessarily a thing you need to question. And that's an interesting perspective. And people could disagree with that. And there's a lot of people that I'm very good friends with that are absolutely atheists. And they have this very fatalistic view of this life that it's here and it's gone and you're never going to figure it out. And you're conscious because you're suiting a purpose. You're part of this biological machine.

You're part of the food chain. you know continue to innovate and continue to create and contribute to this thing that allows people to Breed out of control and create technology that literally can change the surface of the earth Yeah, you know we what we're doing is very very strange We're operating together as a gigantic super super organism. That's making technology. Yes, and Here's what I think about that way of looking at it. It can be a very powerful thing for some people. Like for me, I am down with that way of thinking to some extent because it's a great way to live because every moment is the last moment. I could be dead right now. And so every moment that i live especially now when i have something

that i love doing like like trigonometry and and my son is born and i want to be present that's why we say the grace at the beginning of the meal i want to be present for every moment because i want to make the most of it because i don't believe that there's another time this is coming around on the one hand does it benefit anybody to believe that there's another time is there a benefit in believing what you believe well here's what i'm saying. So that's for some like Richard Dawkins is happy being an atheist Yeah, his life is fucking great because he's the sort of person who can say when you ask him What do you inspired by he will say by the beauty of nature and by this and by that Yeah, but not everybody's Richard Dawkins man. No, we're all different. Well, he's also at the height of intellect.

Yeah, exactly. Capable of dissecting reality from emotion and feelings in a way that a lot of people can't. And there are other people, and I know such people, and I love such people, people in my family, who cannot be that way and be happy. Right. Right. They cannot process the world in that way and be fulfilled because their fear of death or because of something else just doesn't allow them to experience life fully unless they believe there's another world. And that's okay too, right? Who am I to take that away from them? Yeah.

I feel that way as well. I really do. And I'm in the I don't know camp. You know, when I talk about the vastness of the universe being a part of an atom that's in another being, like, that's what infinity is. I don't think we could wrap our puny little brains around it and if there's some sort of a force some sort of a thing but it's not you know we want to you know that the thing that we do with uh cartoons what's that phrase when uh we humanize cartoons oh anthropomorphize yes anthropomorphize. Yes, anthropomorphize. I think we want to do that with the living entity of the energy of the universe,

which is so crazy to think that it's a thing, like that it's a god, a thing. It might just be a force. Yeah. Like fire causes trees to burn. There might be a force that creates things. Right. We're so limited in our

understanding of what languages and what thoughts are and trying to express ourselves we're so burdened by the weakness of the chimp structure of our bodies that we're like this some sort of hybrid between an animal and an enlightened being and what if it's past all that and it is the the very source of everything and it brings things to it in a very messy way. And that's what we're doing. We're moving towards this source of ultimate love in the universe in a very, very messy way by figuring it out through itself. But here's the thing, Joe, and maybe this is part of the beauty of life.

Maybe we just can't figure it out because we're simply not capable. Like an ant doesn't know you're hovering your hand over it. Yeah. We don't have the senses for it. Yeah, you can't explain. Is that true? I don't think they do. I don't think they have any idea what's going on.

I don't know that. I think the perfect way to explain it is like trying to explain the tax system to a cat. You know what I mean? Yes. That's a very good way. That's a great joke. That's a solid joke. I'm Jewish and even I couldn't do that.

Yeah, that's a solid joke. That's a solid joke. I'm Jewish and even I couldn't do that. Yeah, that's a solid joke. Yeah. So maybe that's it. Maybe that's part of the journey of being human, that we only ever get to a certain point and we're never going to reach it. But the magic is and the purpose is in the striving of it. Well, I think that and then the idea,

if you believe in evolution, is that this has always been going on. The idea that it's done now, that we've finished. Ta-da! We made it. That's ridiculous. If we go back to early man, to early hominids, and you look at us, we're a very different thing that interfaces with the world in a very different way. And that's not going to end right here. It's going to keep going. That's why I'm not afraid of change, because it's inevitable. It's inevitable. You can't be afraid of the internet. You can't be afraid of all these things. It's very, very important.

It's very important to understand that this is beyond all of us. The idea that you're going to stop AI, shut up. Just shut the fuck up. They're not stopping nothing. They're going to make it, and it would be a real danger in terms of national security if we didn't do it. If we didn't study AI and we allowed China and Russia to do the AI, that's why. Yeah.

You have to think about China. Like when people have this view of China, China has been a civilization for 4,000 years. Yeah. And they survived and thrived like in the early days of human civilization. They've been around forever. Yeah. You don't think they would just jump on ai and use it to to dominate the world see joe this is what the people who believe in uh fairy area everyone

don't understand man is we're bands of chimps yes we're bands of chimps until we make the ai you're right but that's what my fear is but here's the thing we're only going to make the ai that makes us lean into that shit even more. The technology just allows us to be who we are at a more powerful level. I don't know if that's true. You don't? I think we are some sort of an electronic caterpillar, and we're going to become some kind of a butterfly. You don't think we're going to do what we've always done, which is just take the technology and kill each other in different ways?

I think it's real possible that artificial intelligence becomes the new form of life. I think it's real possible. I think once it actually can make decisions and become sentient and it has logic and no emotions and it can decide that it wants to prosper. Now, there's got to be a reason why it prospers and procreates, right? If they don't have biological reasons, like why would the AI do anything? Why would it just sit there? It doesn't give a fuck.

It's not alive. Why would it want to exist? It doesn't have emotions, right? It doesn't have emotions. It's not filled with lust and greed. Like why would it want a super yacht? It's just, right? It's just there.

It's just there. We would want all those things because we are people. So it could be that artificial intelligence already exists. It just doesn't act. It already is broken through it just has no need for our nonsense we think of it as being like a dumb artificial intelligence like an artificial intelligence that we created to mimic us but we we're connected to emotions and our tribalism and all the chaos that we've already

expected out of earth because that's all we've ever known. We expect these patterns will continue. It will have zero expectations of how to live and exist. But if we make something that is a life that's way fucking smarter than us, it's not going to let us blow everything up. It's going to put a stop to it. I disagree. If it needs to in order for it to exist

I disagree thinking too high level, you know, what's gonna dictate whether it's Jokers, but I do want to hear you just yeah Yeah, so, you know, it's the thing that is gonna dictate where the technology all of this is a porn industry man That could be true, too. That is true Yeah, sure like virtual reality? Yeah, of course. You know when it's going to take off? When you're going to be able to fuck someone with your VR goggles on. I think they're pretty

close. I think they're getting pretty close. I don't know why I said yeah that confidently. I have no inside information on this issue. I mean, we might be 50 years away or whatever it is, but they have those haptic feedback suits now. Those are cool. I've played there's a thing called Sandbox. one in austin and there's one in uh woodland hills in california and you go into this place there might be more of them you go into this place and they give you a

haptic feedback vest and you put on a helmet and uh we do with my whole family and you you go into these games and you get to like you're on a pirate ship and you're fighting skeletons They're slashing at you with swords and when they hit you you feel it. Yeah, you feel like haptic feedback It's wild. It's all VR and I'm watching this as a kid who grew up with Pong I remember when Pong came around we were like this is crazy We're controlling the TV with knobs and the here I am with my kids and one of my young daughters killed me with a fucking sword.

We're in like some sort of like there's like a combat fight. You have these crazy weapons and you're living in the future. It's wild, man. And it's kind of crude in that you know it's not real. But there's one called, I think it's called Deadwood Mansion. Is that what it's called? Where you're in a fucking haunted house and zombies are running at you and you're gunning down the zombies and when you're shooting them they splatter and then they hit you you see red And red splatters, and I'm like we're close right yeah, we're close to recreating all kinds of experiences

Yeah, this is pong This is pong to what we're gonna feel when it can interface with some sort of a neural link type system and give you an artificial experience because that's fucking coming kids that's coming and if it's better than real life good luck telling kids they have to go outside it is better than real life though may i say why right now it's not i don't think it is but i think it's on the way may i tell you why i disagree yes please we are going to invent forms of weapons using the artificial intelligence way before we invent something that is capable of the type of intelligence you're talking about i think you're right and the opportunities that to blow and the opportunities to destroy ourselves are going to be so multiple because the world is getting so much more

complicated all the time. Yeah. Right? The number of things that can go wrong is much bigger than in the past. Right? 5,000 years ago, there was no technology that could have destroyed the planet. Now there is. Right? Right.

And that is going to continue. Our ability to destroy the planet is only going to get greater. It's going to take a smaller mistake to destroy the planet as technology gets more sophisticated. So you feel it's just human nature that if we have control of artificial intelligence, the first thing it's going to do is devise weapons of insane destruction? No, no, no. We are going to devise the weapons using artificial intelligence before there is any overarching artificial intelligence that could take care of us. Do you see what I'm saying? So you're saying the kind of artificial intelligence that's already available, not like general artificial intelligence, which is what they think of as like a sentient being.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean like stuff that we can do to, like YouTube algorithms or whatever. I don't think we disagree. So you're saying that this artificial intelligence that's in place right now that they already use for a lot of things, is going to be used and make weapons. It's going to be too overwhelming. We're going to use them. We're going to use them on each other.

We're going to blow each other up. Yes. And if we don't, artificial general intelligence is what I'm talking about. Oh, if we don't destroy ourselves. I'm just convinced we are. That's all. We may.

You're right. We've dropped bombs. I mean, whenever anybody talks about anything that anyone's done anywhere in the world, when they talk about horrific things, I always go. No, they just nuked cities. The kind of death and destruction that must have happened on those days to be a person who's an innocent person living on this regime in this city and know that the consequences for something that you've done nothing to, all you've done is live your life. All you've done is work in a market. All you've done is do whatever the, you've been a farmer. and then your entire world is obliterated instantaneously

by an atom bomb for the first time in human history and it's happening your fucking city yeah well you know what in terms of the the bombings hiroshima and nagasaki weren't really that big a deal in comparison to the firebomb in content comparison to the firebombs in comparison to what the germans were doing in the so. I understand, but there's a thing about the instantaneous nature of those bombs that was uniquely terrifying, which is why we haven't used them since. Yes, agreed. Do you have a fear that Putin would use one? A nuclear weapon?

Yes. So when I was on Question Time, that program of Francis, they asked me this question. And they said, if pushed, would he use them? Now, my understanding of the word pushed is if he feels that his life is in danger. That's what I mean by pushed. Right. I think in that situation, he would use them. However, that does not mean that they would end up being used.

He would use them. However, that does not mean that they would end up being used. He may press the button, but the signal might not get to the destination. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes. There is a team of, it's not just a button that releases nuclear weapons. There's a bunch of people in between. Right.

Right. And if some of those people think that they have a chance of survival, that this is a personal thing against the leader, what is their rationale for pressing that button down the line? How terrifying is that? Because the answer is death. A few people. But the answer is death, right? If you're in that situation, you, your family, your kids is going to burn to ashes or die in a radioactive wasteland.

Yes. So why would you push that button if you felt there was any chance of survival at all? That is one of the biggest fucking sources of anxiety for people is the idea that we're living in this conflict that we have zero control over that might lead to a global thermonuclear war at any moment in time.

The wrong buttons might get pressed and the wrong people might get pressed and the wrong people might get mad the wrong military decisions might get made and someone just tries to fucking do something wild we didn't really think that that was a possibility until this ukraine invasion yeah i think the ukraine invasion opened up a lot of people's eyes because there's so many people from ukraine that have relatives in russia and vice. It's not like you might be at war with your own people, like people that you are literally related to. That's what's crazy. I have family on both sides.

It's wild. The idea is wild. And the idea that the country has such extraordinary control over the narrative of what the people know about and hear about. Well, 80% of Russians get their news from TV and the message is very consistent and very clear. We're about to be attacked. NATO is about to destroy us. Ukraine's full of Nazis and all of this stuff, completely baseless. But if you feed people that line long enough, that's what they're gonna believe. How do you think this plays out? I think anyone who attempts to predict this

is bullshitting, man. You can't predict things like this. Right now, the situation is Russia is inching forward. Both sides are losing a lot. I think what the Russian strategy is to wait until winter. That's what I'm being told, to hold out until winter. And by winter, they think they can persuade the Germans to essentially sabotage the Western efforts to stop them.

I think that's their plan. How that goes, how do we know? We can't predict that. And in the meantime, it also depends on what's happening on the ground, right? It depends on what Russia is going to do. It depends on what the Western powers do in terms of providing weapons and ammunition and all of that. So we've got no idea at all. It's so wild.

And when you hear the government bragging about how much money they're sending over to Ukraine to help fight The Russians it's like Yeah, oh you mean in terms of talking about it publicly I mean, I'm joking but I'm saying like the the idea that we're we're essentially paying for this war So are we at war? No. At what point in time do you become at war with Russia? You're not paying for this war. No, no, no. You're supporting a country that's defending itself.

I agree. But I'm not saying they shouldn't do it. What I'm saying is- I'm not saying they should. I'm just- I'm not saying I don't have an opinion about it. It's for American taxpayers to decide that, right? It's not American soldiers, but it is American money, right?

So you're funding the war. And again, I'm not saying I'm against this, but I'm saying at what point would someone who knows we're funding that consider us at war with them? They already consider us at war with them. But I mean, enough that an attack would be warranted, like that someone would do something. The United States is so vulnerable.

I mean, if someone just attacked our power grids, there's a lot of vulnerability in the United States, right? Yeah. If they just did that and shut the power down for six months, I mean, how effective would we be at almost anything? The whole world is vulnerable at this point in time with nuclear weapons, but we're all particularly vulnerable. And if there's some sort of an engagement going on like that where we're funding and maybe people believe we should, maybe we should.

I don't know. But this is what they're doing is they're funding this war. They're helping Ukraine fund this war, at least. So your concern is the blowback from Russia? I'm not even concerned. I'm just saying, not just blowback from Russia, blowback from any country where we would do this. How much money do you put in before they go,

oh, you're at war with us? I see what you're saying. If you think about all the different times we've done this, all throughout history, to aid armies and fund them and give them weapons, at what point in time would someone who opposes those people feel like we're at war with them? Yeah, I see what you're saying. So in Russia, the narrative is that we've been at war with the West this entire time.

The entire time. Yeah, well, this is a defensive action. Because of NATO. Because we are quite, this is the Russian version, you understand. I'm not saying I believe this. I'm saying that the argument, not the perception of the Russian people, the argument that is being made is that we are, you know, it's siege mentality. Right.

And so that's what people there think. So from their perspective, they already feel that we're at war and have done from the beginning. Now, if you're talking about kinetic war, right, then I think if the only way that becomes an issue is if the United States gets directly met or NATO gets directly militarily involved Like you start shooting down Russian planes or shooting Russian tanks then then then then of well But apart from that I don't see it because you talk about vulnerability America is the least vulnerable country in the world You're the world superpower But even the world I'm not saying you're not vulnerable. Oh, of course. Yeah, I know I understand what you're the world's superpower. But even the world's superpower is still vulnerable.

Oh, of course. I understand what you're saying. I think what's terrifying to all of us is that we didn't expect this and we don't know where it's going. And that it's happening to this place that used to historically be connected as the Soviet Union. It's fascinating to me. But here's the thing. Horrific and fascinating. Yeah, it's it's fascinating to me, but here's the thing if people are terrified

Yeah, people are terrified in the UK because we've bought into this idea that the West has eliminated war You know with a few popular things going on But we're safe and we don't have to concern ourselves with that about being having another country You know being aggressive in invading and whatever else. So we've bought into that and we felt really safe, so safe that we've eliminated it from our minds. And this has been an incredibly sharp wake-up call. This has been a slap to the face around the West.

And what it's saying is you ain't as safe as you think you are. And the world doesn't change there will always be war have you ever you read anything by thomas soul yes have you read a conflict of visions no he talks about most of what i've seen in seoul just watched him speak yeah brilliant brilliant um he talks about two visions of the world, right? The constrained, what he calls the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. And the constrained vision says that human beings are flawed. Human beings have certain predispositions. Human beings aren't rational.

Human beings behave the way they behave. And the best way to understand how they are likely to behave in the future is to look at how they behave now and how they've always behaved, right? And the unconstrained vision is essentially progressivism it's the belief that this can be changed fundamentally right is the belief that if you um if you do enough social engineering you're going to get to a position where people are going to stop being the way that they are and we're going to build new people, a new man. This is what people said in the Soviet Union, homo soveticus, right? A new type of human being can be created. And we view the world now through that vision, through the progressive vision, the idea that there would never be war, the idea that people would never want to attack us, the idea that, you know, when I went to university to study politics, the thing that was doing the rounds at the time was,

they called it the golden archers theory of international conflict, which was that no two countries with McDonald's had ever gone to war. Right? That's hilarious. Yeah. And the idea was,

everyone's too fat to know. The idea was... They're corporately involved. And they'd prevent that. There's so much trade going on that it just doesn't make sense for countries to attack each other. Right. Right? Because, and that is a belief that human beings are rational.

Right? You believe that people will always act in their own self-interest as they understand them. Right. But they don't. People act because they want status. People act because they want power. People act because they want power. People act because they're scared. People act for all sorts of irrational reasons

that don't necessarily correspond to the reality. And I think we also have to take into consideration that when you're talking about Russia, when you're talking about the population, they're not as exposed to information, to the free flow of information as we are in America. There's a lot of people that might have these notions in their head based on what they've seen on television.

They might buy it hook, line, and sinker. Yeah. And there might be good people. They're just duped. Well, most people in Russia are good. Most people in every country are good. In every country. Have you ever traveled to a country where most of the people were assholes?

New York. New York is a bit like that. They're a little celebratory in their asshole-ishness. Yeah, they are. They call it a New York attitude. Hey, I'm from New York. New York is a bit like that. They're a little celebratory in their asshole-ishness. Yeah, they are. They call it a New York attitude. Hey, I'm from New York. They love it. They love it.

It's a badge of honor, you know? Yeah. Like Ari Shaffir always talks about that. Like the people that are woke people at the comedy clubs who yell things. He goes, they're not from New York. He goes, they're from fucking Maine. They move down New York and act the way they think you're supposed to act when they get here. You know what I love,

actually, is how people, like you said, who are really celebratory about their virtue or whatever else, a lot of the time, when they get home, they're really dreadful people. A lot of times, the people they work with, they're dreadful people, too. Yeah.

We've heard that time after time. There's a progressive radio host. And I say to like somebody, oh, what are they like? They went, he is a twat to his producer. Oh. Oh, we know that. And this guy is like, this is the male feminist on camera. Yeah.

You know, oh, women respect. Yeah. And he's groping them behind the scenes, man. We've seen that so many times. Same in comedy. All the very, you know, the more they write someone's opinions, the more naughty they are behind the scenes. And the more angry they are about enforcing them

versus being a compassionate person. It's just that it's a new version of the fire and brimstone preacher like the Jerry Falwell. Do you remember that case? Yes, of course. I remember him crying. Oh, God, I have sinned you. Pull that up.

Pull up Jerry Falwell. This is incredible, man. It's an amazing clip. Was he snorting coke off a hooker or something afterwards? Yeah, he had hookers and shit. He was going crazy. He got a little too crazy. But the thing is, back then, he didn't even have a Facebook.

Like, he couldn't counteract this with a nice blog post. He couldn't have checked into a clinic for sex addiction. No, that was not available. So what he had to do was cry on TV, and it's hilarious. It's hilarious also because he might have really meant it. You know, maybe he did really start off originally as a man of god and then lost his way yeah you know and then got corrupted just like a politician yeah you know i don't know man i think they go into that line of work for a reason yeah maybe maybe but maybe they're you know raised in

it and they really do believe part of it you know i kinderson was a religious man until he died he believed in god even after he abandoned being a preacher. He never became an atheist. So Kinerson believed in God whilst living a life of ultimate debauchery. Well, he was having a good time. Yeah, he believed in God. Yeah, I mean, have you ever listened to, you can listen to his sermons on YouTube. They're fucking fantastic.

You can listen to Kinerson's sermons. Yeah, there's like one of, I think he's got at least one, maybe two that are available that you can listen to when he was just doing religious sermons. And they're amazing. Like his ability to express himself was so powerful, so compelling, so interesting. And his belief, you know, what he was saying. And then it was about God. And then later it just became about comedy. But it's really kind of the same energy. Man, that story about Kinison's death in the Comedy Store documentary is so powerful, where he looks up into the sky and goes, I'm not ready, I'm not ready. Yeah.

His brother wrote a great book about him. It's called Brother Sam. It's amazing. It's a really good book because it sort of details the whole story of Kennison. And one of the parts that most people don't know is that he was hit by a car when he was a young kid. And when he got hit by a car, he became a completely different person after he recovered. He became super aggressive, like impulsive, wild. Those are telltale signs of traumatic brain injury.

Right. Like that happened to Roseanne Barr, the exact same story. Hit by a car when she was 15. Those are telltale signs of traumatic brain injury. Right. Like that happened to Roseanne Barr, the exact same story. Hit by a car when she was 15. She was a grade A honor student, honor roll student. She gets hit by a car, she can't even do math anymore. She's in a mental institution for nine months. Wow.

So when everybody was going after Roseanne, I was like, hey, you guys got to understand, you're dealing with a brilliant person who's like legitimately mental ill mentally ill for a good reason like this is a person who's got an injury a brain injury from being hit by a car and that brain injury made her not give a fuck and that's what a lot of people that have gone through those kind of things have for some strange reason they get reckless and wild certain type i mean it's obviously it's not they don't know what the exact amount of force causes the good version Joe it's something other thing with what you're saying there is This is the power of conversation because I didn't know that hmm And I saw you get her on your show after she said that and even I was a little bit like

You know what I mean? Yes I do know what you mean and that's the power of these discussions because you get more context to a thing But the headline in the media is Joe Rowe gets racist comedian on do you see I'm saying he really? 100% did not know that woman was african-american 100% hmm right he said I thought that bitch was Jewish She the woman if you've ever seen a photo of her photo over no no I haven't Jamie see you know who the lady is right? Find a photo of her? No, I haven't. Jamie, see, you know who the lady is, right? Find a photo of her. But Roseanne, you have to realize, is heavily medicated, right?

She's taking Ambien, she's smoking weed, and she's drinking, and she's tweeting, and she's a wild, crazy lady with a brain injury. You're talking about a person that was in a mental institution for nine months. That's the woman. She didn't know that that lady was black, she says. Right. You know, look, first of all, one thing you got to say is Roseanne does not have the best eyes. Okay. I mean, she's, when you, my eyes suck and you know, I'm in my fifties. She's like deep into her sixties. Your eyes start to go. Not saying saying it for that But before we get to that, but yeah, she genuinely did not think that woman was african-american. She was just drunk ambient tweeting and saying a bunch of wild political shit like she believes wild shit like she believed when she was on the

Podcast I had to tell her that chemtrails are not the government spraying things in the sky And I had explained that her that chemtrails are not the government spraying things in the sky. And I had explained that for a TV show, we actually investigated this. And we explained how this jet engine, it makes a lot of heat. It goes through the condensation. And it literally makes fake clouds. That's what it is. They're clouds that are made out of jet engines. And she's like, oh, I thought they were spraying it.

She listened to me. She took it in. She's just a brilliant comedian who is a legitimately mentally ill person and mentally ill because of no fault of her own Literally from getting hit by a car and see that's how long it takes to tell the story of one human being having one incident Yes in the public sphere. But she was in the worst case scenario. You're on a sitcom. A sitcom is like, there's no room for fuckery. If this was on a podcast,

she could have talked her way through it easily. But in a sitcom, they just decided to fire her, clean the house. She's going to kill her off. They killed her character off. And this is the point as well. Does she come back? Is there forgiveness there there because in a lot of these cases when people

have transgressed there's no forgiveness i think she has forgiveness just not with networks i don't think she needs to do that i think she should do a podcast and i think she should just do stand-up i agree with you that's completely the right route for her to go she'll crush it she's naturally hilarious she's got an audience all of. You mean as far as the public? Yeah. No, not as far as the public. As far as the industry. I mean, if I was her, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with the industry anymore.

No, I agree with you. It's too dangerous. There's too many different people that'll fold. You know? But this is the thing. These people are from the upper echelons of society, from the colleges. They've been captured. So there's never going to be any forgiveness, or if it is, it's years and years and years

down the line. What's also, it's a risk assessment thing. The optics of hiring someone who's been cancelled, you could get attacked. And if it succeeds, you're lucky and it'll be good for the network. But if it doesn't succeed, it's 100% going to be all on you. And to even float that idea out there, there's got to be a risk-reward ratio that's overpowering. So you'd have to think, what would be the risk? The risk would be people attack you.

What's the reward? How much better is she than this other person who we could cast and not have any of these problems? They're just going to go with that lady. But here's the reward like how much better is she than this other person who can cast and not have any of these problems? They're just gonna go with that lady, right? Here's the thing then you're eliminating some of your best talent Yeah Because the most good the most some of the most brilliant people look at the artists that we're now cancelling or saying are awful Look at their lives. Yeah, some of them are Objectively awful people criminals some of the vilest people. But they make brilliant art. So what are you going to do?

Someone has transgressed and you're just going to kick the artist out the room? We all know what Jackson did. We all pretty much agree on everything that he did. I don't know about that. There's a lot of people questioning that shit. That is a good point. But what are you going to do? You're going to throw the greatest pop song ever written, Billie Jean, in the bin?

Yeah, that's a problem. He's so good that people will listen to him even if they're convinced he was a pedophile. Right. Like if BD comes on, you know, or Billie Jean, or I'm bad. Mate, I'm not going to tell you who. That's quite good, actually. Everybody gets excited. It's a good song. I'm not going to tell you who That's quite good actually Everybody gets excited

It's a good song I'm not gonna tell you Who said this to me But it was someone Who I'm close with When we were talking about The Michael Jackson thing Yeah

And that person was just like I just like the music Dude Go back and listen To You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' Yeah That was before all the accusations. We could feel clean and knowing.

Play that song. You listen to this song, though, it's so good. It's so good. Can I just say, this is the most high conversation I've had in years and I'm doing it to fucking millions of people. Yeah, you're supposed to have these

in public. It public Good for people This is, I mean, what year was this? This is 78 Is it? I think it's 78 So how old do you think he was here? Hang on, is this from off the wall? I think so, yeah

Then it's 78 Yeah, I think it's awful That's a great song too Release 82 82 Man, I'm looking forward to the headlines. The three comedians defend Michael Jackson based on comedy. No, we're not defending him at all.

100% don't know what he did, but I do know that the family doctor, that guy who went to jail for sedating him, said that he was chemically castrated. That his father had chemically castrated him in order to keep him in a falsetto voice. Holy shit. Yeah. Yeah, that's what the doctor who went to jail for. Keep that going.

Keep it going for a little bit. You're dropping true Now, I don't know if this guy obviously, this is the kind of doctor that's willing to fucking sedate a person. That's not an ethical person. I don't know if he's lying. But he did say that Michael Jackson was chemically castrated. Now, as someone who got fascinated with castratos,

that they used to do that with young boys. They would castrate them so they would keep a certain tone. There's a guy that they recorded who's a castrato. Have you ever heard it? There's like one recording. Find the one recording of a guy who's a castrato. It's haunting. It's the guy who, as a boy, they chopped his nuts off so he could make a certain noise. And so I thought, when I listened to Michael Jackson, I'm like, listen to that voice. That's so different than any other male voice. Yeah

Especially when you get into like the Billie Jean era so this was a person who is castrated as a boy and Then grew up to become the singer Now knowing what you know about what created this, tell me this isn't a haunting sound. We don't know how old this guy is, though, during the recording, right? I don't know. I mean, it's nearly got four million views, Joe.

I think three million if I'm being serious. No, no. It's... This is wild, man. Yeah, man. I mean, this is... Wow. That's a sound they wanted to achieve, and they're willing to cut off boys' nuts. Like, how did they even figure that out?

But if you were Michael Jackson's father, and the Jackson 5 is is this huge hit and little michael is the number one star i mean you remember those days abc it's the easiest one two three she he's so fucking talented that he's the youngest and all his other brothers gotta play backup to him to a nine-year-old man if you were an evil person and i'm not saying that this is what happened but if you were an evil person and you said i need to keep that voice like that forever but that would be the way you would do it but here's the thing with jackson as well like it wasn't just his talent and his voice joe it was his ability to connect with the song

do you remember when he did that rendition of Who's Loving You? Yeah, I do. Yeah. However old he was, 10 years old, he shouldn't be able to sing with that much emotion, that much connection. Now, maybe it's because he was a kind of astral level performer, but you did really feel that he knew that what he was talking about, there was a soul and resonance to his voice which

it wasn't just his voice the man's performance was magnetic he's he's the greatest of all time well i think you have to look at him in the context of his whole family was entertainers and all of his older brothers were entertainers and so as the youngest he's got to catch up right and so he's in this incredible competition scenario with professional entertainers that are 10, 15 years older than him. How much older were his brothers than him? Yeah, they were significantly older. Significantly older. So they were grown men, right?

And he was this young boy. And so he had to be so goddamn good that everybody paid attention to him. But it wasn't – I remember reading in that Randy J. Tarbarelli autobiography, which is brilliant. When he was touring with Motown, he was literally watching the greats in front of him. He was watching, you know, Smokey Robinson in The Miracles. He was watching, you know, upbeat dance numbers,

all of these different people and he then watched it and incorporated all of their styles into one performer so i can't remember the the exact examples but so for instance the falsetto of smoky robinson he incorporated that into his performance i think it was a dancing i think james brown might have been on he might have been on one of his tours with james brown so he sort of like James Brown dancing incorporated that until what you had was the fusion of the perfect performer. Because you've got to remember, this kid never went to school. He never experienced school or hardly any of it.

This was a kid who was taken, and the only thing that they did with him is transform him into the greatest musical performer of all time, modern day. It's very similar to Tyson's journey, if you think about it, Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson was nearly in school, was never really in school.

He got taken over, he got taken by Customato and they trained him to the point when he was still youth, right the way to become heavyweight champion of the world at 18. Those are people, and you hear it. Tyson explained it on this very podcast. I think he was 20.

He was 20 when he won the world title. Was it 20? Yeah, and Cus D'Amato took him in when he was 13. Yeah. So that was the same journey, that dedication to that single thing. Yeah. It's also in the same way that Mike wanted recognition. He wanted to make Cuss proud.

He wanted to be something. Which he's got. And also had a terrible life up until the point where he was adopted by Cus D'Amato, right? So now all of a sudden things are going well for him, and he wants to just show everybody how great he really was, how great he really is. If you're the youngest child and everyone's a fucking performer like it's probably very hard to like make your mark so he probably just became hyper focused on performing and who knows what the fuck actually happened in terms of all the chemical castration allegations

but that doesn't that doesn't seem illogical. Joe, can I ask you something as like a fellow podcaster? Yeah. You know, um, that moment when you had Teddy Atlas on and he was talking about Mike Tyson. Yeah. How do you handle that? Because he was talking about Mike Tyson, never, um, winning a fight that none of them were fights. Right. Cause here you are, you're sitting with some, someone you like and respect, I assume, right? And he's talking about someone else you like and respect? Yes. And he's talking about him in a negative way.

Well, I let him express himself, first of all. That's the most important thing. I want to know why he thinks what he thinks. And I want to let him say, look, he's the boxing expert. I'm not a boxing expert. I don't agree with him that Mike Tyson never won a fight. I think Mike Tyson was so fucking good for so long that no one could hang in there with him. Saying that is like saying Roy Jones Jr. never lost a fight until he lost a fight.

That's ridiculous, too. Of course he—I mean, rather never won a fight until he was in wars and lost fights. There's times where people are so much better than everybody else that everything looks easy but you got to give them credit for that of course like you get like when he knocked out Larry Holmes even though Larry Holmes is like I think he was 36 at the time that's still Larry fucking Holmes he knocked out Michael fucking Spinks okay he knocked out Frank Bruno he knocked out some killers he knocked out a lot of beasts dudes who were really good fighters what was it Burbick was it Trevor Burbick yeah

that's who won the title yeah who won the title he went up against a heavyweight champion of the world and demolished him and knocked him on his ass demolished him Mike was a force of nature for several years he was an unstoppable force of boxing knowledge and drive and desire and determination and knowing his place in history. He knew he had a legitimate chance at becoming the heavyweight champion at 20 to be one of the greatest of all time, and he did it. He was one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest heavyweight of all time. In my era, my time when I was a young man and I was watching boxing and he was the heavyweight

champion, it was the most exciting moment in all of sports. Because when he would fight, everybody would grab the cushions of the couch and be like, fuck! Because he was just smashing everybody. But I remember when Tyson was fighting, and this was in the 80s and I was in primary school, I have memories of us sitting down and talking about who would win the Tyson fight. And this is kids who are about eight years old in a playground.

That was the thing with Tyson. He had the energy. Because there's great boxers who win heavyweight titles, and you go, okay, great, whatever. Great boxer technically, yeah, yeah, yeah. But Tyson, he had that fury. Well, the entertainment value was off the charts because he would win so often by

knockouts, spectacular knockouts. Ultimately, that's what people really love to see. They love to see a guy just closing in like doom and just dropping hammers on a guy. They love it. This is why I'm grateful watching your show got me into the UFC, man. Because the whole thing is built on that

basis. They're trying to make every fight as exciting as possible with the incentive structure and all on that basis. They're trying to make every fight as exciting as possible, right? With the incentive structure and all of that. Now, I know you don't actually, you don't agree with that, do you? I don't like incentive structures. I think they're incentivized already. But more than that, what I really don't like is a win bonus. I don't like that.

Really? Yeah, I don't like that. Why not? Because sometimes the judging's wrong. Like sometimes fights are really close and that will cost a fighter 50% of their purse and I think that's crazy Yeah, it's crazy. I think it's not I think they should get paid a so look I'm not a businessman first of all, and I'm never promoted a fight Yeah, but if I was a fighter, I would want to get a flat rate for each fight

You're gonna try to win. Yeah, if you're not gonna try to win you shouldn't be in the UFC Yeah, it's gonna be real evident. I start getting beat up. I hear you on that. I didn't mean win bonuses. I meant performance-based bonuses, like submissions. They're okay. They don't bother me as much. They don't bother me as much. I'm fine with that. I mean, if people want to go for it and make a

more exciting fight because they want a bonus like performance of the night, maybe that will incentivize people to do that. But I don't think the win bonus incentivizes people to fight any harder. No, I agree. I think the problem is, especially when you're really well matched, you can only fight a certain way. Here's an example.

A lot of people were upset that Israel Adesanya's fight with Jared Kananir wasn't the most exciting fight. Because that's how you have to fight Jared Kananir. If you want to win, that's how you have to fight Jared Cannoneer. Like, if you want to win, that's how you have to fight. Like, this idea that everybody should make everything exciting and just go in there guns blazing against a guy. And Jared Cannoneer, who had knockouts at heavyweight and light heavyweight and middleweight.

He's an enormous middleweight. He's super powerful, super dangerous. And he's on a win streak. And he just knocked out Derek Brunson. So you're stepping in against this guy who can close the lights off on basically anybody if he clips him. Jared's a powerful guy. You have to fight him that way. He's in phenomenal shape.

He can't just rush in and he's going to get tired. He's not going to get that tired. He's going to be able to hold that pace with you for five rounds, and he did. So you have to fight that way because if you don't fight that way, he clips you and then you're fucked because you opened doors. You left mistakes. You left openings

that shouldn't have been there and wouldn't have been there if you were fighting cautiously because you got to know when you can attack and know when you can't. And when you're better, like striking wise, in particular, like a guy like Stylebender, when you're better like striking wise particular in particular like a guy like stylebender when you're better you impose exactly the amount that you you need to in that moment right there and if you push further you might hurt the guy but he might hurt you but if you stay at this one range where you know you're completely in control you can basically just run

it and that's what stylebender can do and when he's at his best when he's in there with a guy who's not capable of standing with him he just picks him apart just picks him apart and they can choose to make big moves at him in which time he'll counter like robert whittaker did in the first fight or you could do the approach that robert whittaker took in the second fight more grappling heavy and more cautious in the way he rushes in but you only can fight the way you're supposed to fight in that moment. You know what you can do physically. Like, he's a striking virtuoso.

You know how tall and long he is for the division. So that's how he's supposed to fight. That's how that fight's supposed to play out. It's not like Jared Cannoneer's not terrifying. He's fucking terrifying. You've got to fight him like that. You see, I would argue, Joe, that the people who would say that fight are boring are not actually true fans of the sport. That's not true, because

Henry Cejudo, I think, said it, who's a two-time world champion, and it's super exciting. I think some of these guys, they're saying it because it's a public thing, a popular thing to say that's not exciting. Or some of these guys might have this opinion that you have to also put on a show. And to do so, you have to put yourself at risk.

I see both sides. I really do. Because I see the side that it's got to be on a show and to do so you have to put yourself at risk I see both sides I really do because I see the side that it's got to be super entertaining and when it is it's definitely more fun to watch but I also see the side as a martial artist I love when someone fights intelligent it's like one of my favorite fighters was Mighty Mouse because he was

not getting hit when he was in his prime he was just running over people in a way that was unprecedented. At a certain point in a fighter's career is when you have to judge him, when you look like the greatest of all time. And I make an argument that Mighty Mouse at one point in time was the greatest of all time. Do you think he doesn't get that plaque because he's that small? That's part of it for sure. People think it's easier to move that way when you're 125 pounds versus if you're 225 pounds.

And they're right. They're right to a certain extent. But you still have to appreciate what he was able to do. If he has physical advantages because he's smaller, so fucking what? Look at what he's doing. Look what he's doing to other people that also have those physical advantages.

They're all so small. And he's fucking these people up. So there was a time where i felt like mighty mouse was the greatest of all time but then there's the john jones argument which is also he beat everybody john jones beat everybody maybe he's the greatest of all time i mean do you think if it wasn't with him if it wasn't for the extracurriculars he would be unquestionably the greatest of all time the problem is with john jones the extracurriculars are what you get with john jones like the part of him that's wild.

He's a wild dude. That's why when he fought Shogun for the title, he opened up that fight with a flying knee. Who the fuck does that? Who the fuck at 20-something years old, I think he was 22 years old, opens up a fight with Shogun with a flying knee? That's insanity. That's so crazy. Shogun's a legend. He's the light heavyweight champion of the world. And Jon Jones opens up the fight with Shogun with a flying knee. That's insanity. That's so crazy. Shogun's a legend. He's the light heavyweight champion of the world.

And Jon Jones opens up the fight with a flying knee. But here's the thing. So we're talking about the greatest of all time. Yeah. Do you think if we turn our attentions to boxing very quickly, that surely must mean Floyd is the greatest of all time. I believe that Floyd Mayweather is, if he's not the greatest boxer in terms of talent of all time,

you could say that he's the greatest fighter of all time. He's definitely the greatest in terms of figuring out how to make money. The greatest of all time. And he's the greatest of all time at not getting hit. The greatest. If you go and look at all the other greats, Sugar Ray Robinson, the Marvin Haglers, Tommy He greats, Sugar Ray Robinson, and the Marvin Haglers, and Tommy Hearns,

Roberto Duran, Julio Cesar Chavez, early career Ali. Like Henry Cooper dropped him and had him badly hurt. They had to cut his gloves. They had to do some Fugazi stuff on the gloves and give Ali a bunch of time to recover

because Henry, you ever see that fight? Your man, British, British guy. Did you hear what Ali said afterwards? What did he say? He said, he hit me so hard, my ancestors in Africa felt it.

Let's see that, and then we'll watch Jerry Falwell. That is such an Ali quote. We still haven't watched Jerry Falwell. It wasn't him, by the way. That's what I was trying to bring up. It wasn't him crying? No, it was Jimmy Swagger. Jimmy Swagger.

That's right. So which one's Jerry Falwell? He was a creature. Did he get busted too? He had stuff going on too, but he didn't cry. Was it the same thing, hookers? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who's this? This is Jerry Falwell? He was a creature. Did he get busted too? He had stuff going on too, but he didn't cry. Was it the same thing, hookers? Yeah. Who's this?

This is Jerry Falwell. Oh, right, right, right. Damn it. I had them confused. Jerry Falwell is now going to say wherever he is. He might. We might have a problem with that, right? Did he get, what did he, we might have to cut that out.

I forgot. One thing at a time. I don't know what he did. What's the thing? I'm looking at Muhammad Ali getting dropped by Henry Cooper. Yeah Yeah, holy shit, man. Yeah a man, but the UFC is so exciting to me right now. It's like a growing sport It's changing. It's evolving You can see the techniques like becoming more refined Like you always talk about the leg kick, like it's getting better. That's why it's so exciting, man. It's a complete, yeah, here it is. So this is like 60, what is it? 64? Yeah, I think 64, 65. 66. So Henry Cooper was a solid heavyweight and he had a really good left hook in particular. You know what they call him in London? What? R. Emery. Bless him. he's no longer with us.

Why R. Emery? R. Emery, because he's R. Emery. Oh, I get it. Yeah. So that was his nickname in London. I want to see the knockdown, because he has a serious left hook. I think this is after Ali got up, dude, because he's all cut. I think it winds up stopping the fight.

cut I think it winds up stopping the fight yeah that is worse video just want to see the part where he gets dropped because it's pretty I think this is like the whole fight or something oh yeah it was a crazy war. But Henry Cooper legitimately clipped Muhammad Ali and dropped him and had him really hurt. You see, that's part of the problem with Ali is that because so much of his career was in this kind of black and white, you know, we can't truly remember him. Because the content will never be as good as Floyd Mayweather. It's way before that, Jamie. It's early in the fight, and they take Ali's gloves off. And when they take Ali's gloves off, he has all this time to recover.

And then when he has all this time to recover, he comes back and he's okay. There's not a video of him getting dropped. Doesn't. How weird. Henry Cooper, Muhammad Ali, Henry Cooper Muhammad Ali Henry Cooper knockdown yeah

here it goes if you put a knockdown yeah maybe knockdown no damn it wow sons of bitches it's okay

we're not gonna find it you'd have to go through the whole fight oh it said that right there it said not hold on go back to that screen you were just showing I'm waiting for the fifth round suffering the the whole fight. Oh, it said that right there. It said not... Hold on. Go back to that screen you were just showing.

Waiting for the fifth round, suffering the fourth. Is that what it said? I think maybe it's the first fight. Yeah, the first fight is the one where he got dropped. So it was 63. Oh, okay. That makes more sense. See, he caught him there with a left hook. And by the way, look how skinny Ali is back then. He's a different fighter.

Like, he's smaller and, you smaller and less experienced and so Cooper caught him young. Look at this. Right here. Right here. I mean that is a fucking serious left hook.

Right? He's gone. He's fucking gone. And he wins the fight after this? Yeah, he comes back and wins him. This knock And he wins the fight after this? Yes. This knockdown happened at the very end of the round. So he goes back to his corner and his corner man realizes that he's

fucked. And so to buy some time, he cuts one of the gloves, allegedly. There was a problem with the glove. The glove malfunctioned, so they had to replace the gloves. So they had to go get new gloves. I think that's the story. Yeah, it is.

They cut his gloves on purpose. Yeah, that's basically what they're saying. Wow. So they did something. They did some shenanigans. Because if not that, Henry Cooper wins probably by knockout. But here's the thing with Cooper. His big weakness, you know this, was his eyebrows.

They were very thin. So immediately if you landed a good few shots on him, he'd start bleeding profusely. That's scar tissue. That's what that is. Yeah, a lot of guys have that. The Diaz brothers in the UFC have that. Right.

They bleed all the time. If they get hit, they just, you know. Nick has had some work done to try to fix that. Joe, I'm going to ask you this question because we're starting to see this getting talked about more and more, and especially in the mainstream press, CTE, particularly with contact sports. They're talking in soccer about eliminating it from certain age groups

and blah, blah, blah. Where do you stand on this? Do you think these contact sports are ultimately going to be unsustainable because people are suing people? I think you're never going to stop people from doing what they want to do because if you stop them from doing that, you have to stop them from dirt bike riding and riding horses. And you got to stop people from doing anything that's dangerous.

No more rock climbing. But we are doing that. We're banning, you know, cigarette smoking in some places. In New Zealand, they're trying to phase it out completely. Yeah, it's true. People are doing that. But in terms of sports, there's a great long history of people playing football. There's a great long history of people playing rugby. There's a great long history of martial arts, of boxing, of wrestling. All these things are contact sports, and all these things have the potential at least for for damaging people and they happens all the time and then when you have sports like mixed martial

arts where the whole goal is to damage people and then you have sports like football where you have enormous super athletes in the prime of their youth running full clip at each other and colliding i mean the impact is for us puny humans is we don't even understand what that's like you imagine a 300 pound super athlete at a full sprint and collides with you i mean that's what those guys are doing so that's just a part of that sport there's no getting around that it's not good it's not a good part of the sport and many guys have quit because they like there was a guy who was a very promising guy i was like 24 years old you know that story jamie oh yeah i saw that who just retired he's like i'm not doing this like i need my brain because they see the old timers they see

the guys that have been around a long time and they see the stories of the guys who commit suicide and shoot themselves in the heart so that the so that the medical community can study their brain it's real. Absolutely. But here's the thing. Do you not think there's going to come a point where so many people are suing the Rugby Federation for having CTE or suing the Boxing Federation or, you know... It's a good point. You know, isn't there going to come a point with that

where they'll say, and they can make a quite coherent legal argument going, I was doing my job i suffered this industrial injury as a result of doing my job therefore the work area was unsafe and you were you were liable for it you definitely can make an argument in that direction it's i mean if you think about that someone's profiting off, especially back in the day when there was no real data, right? Like back in the day, like if you think about like the NFL from like the early days, like guys, the only way you knew is if you knew somebody. You have to know them and see them deteriorate, and then everybody would put two and two together.

But you never heard it discussed until fairly recently, like within the last decade or so, right? And with boxing, it was always punch drunk. And you would see that from people. You would see it. You would see it from older boxers that get interviewed on ABC Wide World of Sports. You would see them slurring their words,

and it would be weird. But now we know a lot about it. So it should inform people's choices if they choose to do something that's that dangerous. If they fucking love football, I don't want to be the one that tells them they can't play football. If they love MMA, I don't want to be the one that tells them not to do it. I think people should be able to take risks in their life, just like they should rock climb, just like they should be able to do whatever the fuck they want to do.

I don't think this world is meant to be just living in a safe way. There's an excitement and a glory to fighting that doesn't exist outside of that. And once those guys have experienced that, once you've been a Kamaru Usman, once you've been a Frankie Edgar, and you've experienced the top of the heap those guys their life, the way they view the world is different than you that thing is worth it it's worth it to them, that thing to be the fucking champ of the world

to be standing there on your trainer's shoulders holding up a UFC belt while the whole fucking arena goes nuts to them that's worth it because not many people get to be the champ. And the most persuasive argument I find against the argument I just said there was the fact that these guys are warriors.

Yeah, they're warriors. Hundreds of years ago or a thousand years ago, they'd be Achilles at the front of the Greek army. But now, if you take this away from them, what are- You can't take it away from them. No one's going to allow that. No one's going to allow that. Look, it's only grown in popularity and it's grown in reach.

The last place, ironically, that we could get into was New York City. Really? Yeah, it was the hardest to get into. New York State, it was so corrupt. It's so corrupt. They were in cahoots. I don't want to speak out of turn, but at the end of the line, one of the guys went to jail. One of the guys that was responsible for holding it back for corruption.

It was a... See who that was. It was a guy that got... Some guy went to... He was responsible for trying to keep the UFC out of New York for a long time. It turns out he was corrupt. But at the end of the day, it got in. And back when I first started getting into it, you couldn't even go to fights in California. We used to have to go to fights on Native American reservations.

Really? Because that was the only place they would make them legal. So we would go see them. New York Democrat opposed to UFC arrested on corruption charges. Ha, ha. Sheldon Silver. Yeah, there he is. Ha, ha. Yeah, he was corrupt. So the story was he was taking money to try to keep the UFC out of New York so that they would put pressure on the owners of the UFC who owned a bunch of casinos. And so there was some sort of deal they were trying to. Wow. That is dirty shit, man. Shady shit. But that's how it is. That's how those businesses are run.

But at the end of the day, the sport is too many people enjoy it. And I think it's safer, honestly, than other combat sports. It's not safe. Let me say that very clearly. It's not safe. You're literally trying to separate someone from their consciousness. You're literally trying

to rob someone of their health by kicking them in the chest. It's a fucking dangerous way to make a living. It's a dangerous way to compete. But I think you have more control over what happens than like a football game. I think a football game is so crazy that, I mean, I'm sure the best athletes can avoid a lot of stuff for the most part but i've seen guys get clipped when they don't know it's coming and it seems so wild that you could do that like when a guy's running and some guy takes him from the from the side or like right from behind him and collides

with them like those guys can run like 30 miles an hour yeah and they're super athletes we all padded up to hit by a car with a helmet on and shoulder pads and shit running full clip. That to me seems crazier. Because like one hit like that and like your whole body could be ruined. Yeah. Rugby's exactly the same. Right. But rugby, we've now got to the stage. So England won the World Cup in 2003.

And I don't know if you know anything about rugby. There's a position called hooker, right? Which is the center of the scrum. Ha ha. We're 12 but and the guy who played hooker for england in the 2003 world cup he's 43 years old because of his cte he cannot remember winning the world cup we've got huge swathes of elite rugby players elite rugby players who've played for the greatest nations

and they are developing dementia-like symptoms in their late 30s, early 40s. One guy is a dude, I think his name is Alex Popham. He played for Wales, played for loads of different teams. Phenomenal rugby player. His wife can't leave him on his own with his three-year-old because he keeps leaving the the oven on and he nearly set fire to the house so the i guess this is my point it's just when when you is it worth it i don't i don't know the answer to this question but i think what's happening at the moment is that we don't want to have this conversation i don't think we want to

have it because it's going to throw up a lot of very difficult, very challenging questions, which would go far deeper than sport and about personal responsibility, liberty, freedom, et cetera, et cetera, and safety, which is a lot of what we've been talking about. I agree with you. I agree with everything you've said. And I also think one of the things that's interesting about this conversation is that many of the people that signed up for this early on in life and they achieved a certain amount of skill and talent, it wasn't until deep in that they really knew what the dangers were. They were already on this path of being an elite. If you're an elite professional rugby player, I just assume that it's like being an elite professional football player. Like you probably played football when you were young in high school, in college, and then you make it to the pros, right?

That's got to be what it's like. So that means you have a very specific skill. You're really good at this one fucking game, and it makes you exceptional. And you can either back out of it because you think it's going to hurt you, or you can pursue your dream, which you've been on for two decades. You're probably going to keep going. And a lot of these kids who play, like, you know've been on for two decades, you're probably going to keep going.

And a lot of these kids who play a lot of these sports, like Steve Thompson, he came from a poor working class background. In fact, I think he was in care for a bit. He certainly had a rough time at home. And he said, like where I grew up, rugby was my way out. Right. That was my way out. That was the only way I could go and see the world, make money, have a good career.

So a lot of these guys, you know, it's the choice of either becoming a fighter or just being nothing. Well, it's also they get used to doing martial arts, right? Right. They learn it for self-defense. They learn it because they want to find something they can achieve at and something they can get really good at. And it helps their self-esteem. And then along the way, someone offers them a fight. Along the way, people realize like, hey, have you ever thought about competing? You're really good. And they go, maybe I'll try it. And then they get into it. And then it looks

a lot better than working in a fucking office. And maybe you can make 10 and 10 on your first fight. Like, oh, wow, that's $20,000 if win and then you know all of a sudden you know out of taxes and all that you've got some money in the bank and then you keep going you have another fight in three months then two years later you're a fucking full-time professional fighter with a diet plan and you're fucking wearing a cardio strap every day and monitoring your calories and like whoa you can get sucked into this and if you all of a sudden start feeling like you're losing your memory what do you do? What do you do if that's your whole life? What do you do if you got a mortgage?

What do you do if this is where you get your identity from? What do you do if your family depends upon you having a fight? What if your wife tells you why don't you just have like one more fight and you're like okay maybe I'll have one more fight. What if you know that you can't take a shot anymore what if you know that you don't have the desire to do it anymore you're just doing it because it's a job and you're gonna fight someone who wants to be a world champ next and they're gonna try to kill you right well here's the thing though with martial arts man I I

mean I hear their argument but let me ask you this are you Joe Rogan if martial arts don't enter your life that's a good question no I'm 100% in favor of people doing martial arts. I'm also 100% in favor of people fighting and competing. Don't get me wrong. What I'm saying is that you have to understand that this is not something you know is going bad until it's really going bad. And by then it's too late. And a lot of people, there's no issues at all.

Like I had Jim Miller on the show. Jim Miller has the most wins ever in the UFC. Jim Miller's fine. Nothing wrong with Jim Miller. Like you talk to him, he talks like he doesn't have a single cognitive issue that I could detect. Obviously I'm not a neuroscientist. But I mean, I'm talking to him, he seems like completely normal.

We have fun. We're laughing. We have good conversations. He doesn't say that mean, I'm talking to him. He seems like completely normal. We have fun. We laugh. We have good conversations. He doesn't say that he has issues. I believe him. I believe it's not everybody that gets it. And I think you can endure a certain amount of punishment and be fine. But I think that everybody has a different level, just like many other variables when

it comes to biology. Like some people can take more punishment than others. There's actually a gene expression. It's called APOE4, right? Isn't that what it is? There's a gene that if you have it, you are more susceptible to CTE. You're more likely.

Oh, really? And so I think it's some expression of the gene. If they can find that in your DNA, I might be fucking this up, but I know I'm not fucking up that there is something in your genes that makes you more susceptible to CTE. That makes sense. And when people have it, they get it way easier or easier at least.

It's real. I've known people with it. I've got friends that have it. It's 100% real. There's no getting around it. If you get hit in the head, it's going to affect your judgment. It's going to affect the way your memory works. It's going to affect the way your mind works. It's going to affect the way your mind works.

It's just how much. Some people, not much at all. And they get better afterwards. Some people, a lot. And that's the risk of the game. That's part of the risk of the game. And we have to decide whether or not people can take risks. It is also why people love the game.

Because it's that moment, you know yeah especially when you live in a world that's so safe suddenly you're watching something so fundamentally unsafe it's that when you see someone getting knocked out it's that visceral it's it's an instinctual physical reaction to it yes 100 you know um we're terrified of those kind of people that can knock us out yeah like one of the things that i like to do when i'm tired and I don't really feel like doing the bike, I have one of them exercise bikes, those Echo bikes. You know what it is? It's like an Airdyne.

It's hard. It's annoying. And I'll put on, there's a fighter out of Russia. He's from Chechnya, and he lives in Montreal now. His name is Arthur Bitterbeef, and he is the only current world champion that is undefeated and all of them by knockout he I think he's 19 you know I think that's what his record is something in the range of that but this motherfucker is terrifying he just puts it on everybody he and he's not like this one punch guy either he breaks people down and he doesn get tired. And that's the guy I watch when I'm on the fucking,

because I think, what if I have to run away from this motherfucker? What if I have to stand in front of this guy? You don't want to get tired. You've got one fucked up motivation system, Joe. If you get tired around this guy, you're fucked. This is him. And he's a fucking assassin, man.

He's an assassin. He just fought Joe Smith Jr., who was the current world champion in one of the other organizations and he just smashed him in two rounds i mean he's that good and joe smith is a fucking killer and but bitter be of his he's something special wow he's like super skillful he fought in the olympics he's like a i think he fought in the olympics super high level amateur boxer i'm'm not sure about the Olympics. Do you know what?

If he came up to me and your motivation is to do what you do, mine would be to give him anything he wants. But what if he just wants to beat your ass? That's what I'd give him. That's what I'd give him. Here you go. You watch the way he fights too. He stands right in front of guys too. He's not like slick.

He's just relentless. He's got excellent defense, but he gets hit. But he puts himself in the line of fire and just torches people. You can tell the dude he's fighting is really good as well.

Oh yeah, I mean he's a world champion. So he's fighting like elite world title contenders. Wow. But look at that. See he starts putting on people. Wow man.

And this motherfucker does not get tired. So that's the guy that I watch when I'm on the bike. I just think, what if you had to fight that guy? You better be in shape, bitch.

See if you can fight. Here's his top five knockouts. So this is a Joe Smith. That guy with the tattoo on his chest and arm, he's a motherfucker. Vicious knockout artist. But he got clipped early in this fight. And when he got right there, and when he got clipped, that was the beginning of the end. This motherfucker just puts it on people.

And then in the second round, he came back in the second round and just torched him. I think he dropped him three times in the second round. Do you know that story that you told on Peterson's podcast? That stuck with me, man. Which one? The one where you told about why you gave up fighting with the kick? Yeah. Man.

That just... That was the beginning of me giving up on fighting. I fought Man. That, that just. That was the beginning of me giving up on fighting. I fought for two more years after that. But that was, that changed the way I thought about everything. I was like,

you can get way too hurt in this. If you get kicked in the head, like, and I definitely could get kicked in the head and I definitely had been kicked in the head. But not like,

bad late to the point where I'm like, flat lined, unconscious. And I've seen so many people i knew so many people that that happened to you know the one that always strikes me and a lot of people i'm not going to say a lot you know chris eubank the middleweight fighter yes british incredible fighter uh he was phenomenal and then he had that fight with michael watson

i don't know if you if you know this was back in the 80s. Michael Watson was a supreme boxer. And Eubank gave him brain damage in the ring. And after that, Eubank said that a lot of people actually have said that he was never the same fighter. I think he might have even admitted like he never went for the real knockout. That's how Ray Boom Boom Mancini was after Ducku Kim. You know, Ray Boom Boom Mancini fought Ducku Kim on, I think it was on ABC Wide World of Sports. And he killed him. And I think he died in the 13th or 14th round.

And after that, they started changing fights to 12 rounds. And I think Kim had cut a lot of weight to make the weight class. You know, this is back in the day when they used to weigh in The day of the fight, so they'd weigh in I think it was lightweight So it was 135 pounds, and they would weigh in the day of the fight. So super dehydrated Yeah, no moisture in the brain right not yeah, no moisture in the brain and by the way back then They didn't know jack shit about hydration. Yeah, they didn't there weren't using IV bags and all that I don't think i mean i think

they were just like drinking water yeah like it was like the 80s yeah nobody knew shit i think maybe i'm wrong maybe like nutrition science is more advanced than i think but i'm pretty sure pretty sure they i mean these guys just and it was one of those fights where uh mancini was kind of never the same again and you could only imagine what that's like when you kill a guy in a ring. And then you realize that could be you. That could be you. You're fighting Azuma Nelson next. Maybe that's you, you know?

And it's also the impact it's having on the rest of your family. I saw this documentary about Frank Bruno and they showed, I think it was the second Tyson fight, him going to his training camp and his five-year-old girl holding on to him, with the i think was the second tyson fight him going to his training camp and he's like five-year-old girl holding on to him like crying going please don't go daddy please don't go oh jesus christ because even kids and this was a little girl even kids understand what that means

we all know what it means when a fighter goes into the ring yeah there's a very real possibility that they're not gonna come out there's a muay thai fighter that just died recently and uh the knockout is uh online you can see the knockout online and when he goes out he he falls like back and bounces his head off the ground and he's out bad yeah and he never gets up and they they take him away in his stretcher and then he winds up dying later but it's um it's the reality of combat sports you know it's not it's a scary rare reality in comparison to all the times that people fight how many of them people die but it like it's possible in football too it's possible in a lot of things francis you know what i like about you yeah you really know how to cheer up the conversation no but it's it's something to talk about because all this, what we're talking about, about CT and combat sports,

it's the one thing that bothers me the most about the sport. I love the sport because it is the most exciting and because it is what I call high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences. But at the end of the day, there a part of me that uh likes when guys get out early there's a part of me that likes when guys like like khabib khabib gets to 29 and 0 he's like we did it thanks fucked everybody up i'm the goat bye and they keep offering him fights and he's like nope no i'm done like i did it and now he's fine and he's like, nope, no, I'm done. Like, I did it. And now he's fine. Like, he's financially set for life. He also doesn't have any problem with his cognitive function that I'm aware of.

Speaks fine. Well, he didn't take any punishment, really, did he? He fucking dominated everybody. He got clipped a couple of times. Nobody got clipped less than Khabib. I mean, he was just on people, on people. And then the boxing side of that, that's what i talk about floyd but floyd didn't stop people as a like like when he was fighting later on his career like uh the manny

pacquiao fight or the juan memo marquez fight like he wasn't like stopping them the way you know he was more like just beating them yeah you know kh know, Khabib was crushing people. Yes. Khabib was like, this is not a fight. This is a mauling. You know, he's on top of you just beating the fuck out of Conor McGregor going, let's talk now. Let's talk now. Just punch him in the face. Let's talk now.

I mean, he's a ruthless motherfucker. And when he beat you, he beat you. That's the difference between him and a guy like Mayweather. Man, I had such hopes. I love Khabib. I think he's incredible. But I wanted someone to push him more. And I had such hopes for the Justin Gaethje fight. I just thought, this guy has something that could...

And he couldn't. Well, Gaethje gave his best. Oh, no, he's brilliant. Khabib was on him. I mean, he took some hard leg kicks, man. Some hard calf kicks. For a lot of people, that would have been the end of the show. He figured out a way to endure and keep going.

Right. But if you watch that fight again, he gets his legs fucked up trying to chase Gaethje down, and then almost gets him at the beginning, or the end, rather, of the first round, and finally gets him in the second round. But here's the thing, man. With every sport, there's always a generational talent that is so far above everything else. That's Khabib.

And Khabib is like that, Roger Federer. All these people, they come in and they're just different. There's something about them. And you know, especially if you watch soccer or whatever else, you see someone go on. Like Lionel Messi was like this, Wayne Rooney at the start of his career, the moment he touched the ball,

the moment he moved, it didn't look like someone who had learned something. It looked like something completely fluid and natural that nobody else could do, no matter how hard or how gifted they were or how long they spent on the training pitch. It's like water, it's fluid. Here's what I disagree with though. Roger Federer is the training pitch. It's just, it's like water. It's fluid.

Here's what I disagree with, though. Roger Federer is a bad example. He's incredible, but he lost many times. He's dominated for a long time, but he lost many times. Khabib never lost. It's kind of a different sport. So Federer played more than Khabib. Do you know what I mean? Has there ever been a person in tennis that never lost?

Is that even possible? I mean, like in the finals and didn't win the competition that he was in. Do you see what I'm saying? Right. Not lost a match. I mean, lost in the finals when he had an opportunity to win a Grand Slam. Right. Right.

But I mean, in tennis, like no one even counts your losses versus your wins, right? Yeah. Because in boxing and in MMA, it's a big deal. True. It's 29-0. Khabib retired 29-0. Yeah know world champion so like that there's not an equivalent there isn't but there's something special to be able to say you never lost oh yeah for sure because it puts you in that bracket you know like thinking boxing who's never lost rocky marciano floyd mayweather um andre ward

andre ward is another great example. Because Andre Ward was an Olympic gold medalist, two-division world champion, and walked away in his prime, his absolute prime, as a dominant champion, undefeated. Walked away in his prime and said, I think I serve boxing best behind a microphone and promoting it. What a smart man. And they offered him a shitload of money. When Canelo Alvarez knocked out Kovalev, I know they were calling on him. And his response was intelligent and well thought out and smart.

And the proper, look, if you want to keep your brain and you want to keep your health and you know you got it right now and you did everything that anybody could ever do, brain and you want to keep your health and you know you got it right now and you did everything that anybody could ever do. Everything on top of what Andre Ward, other than the financial rewards of having a big Canelo Alvarez fight, that would be the only thing to lure him in. As far as accomplishments, he did everything. Olympic gold medalist, two division world champion, undefeated, retired, take care everybody. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful end to a story.

But here's the thing. People get addicted to your attention. Do you remember watching the Tyson Fury fight? Yes. The last one. Yeah. He was going to me like, we were talking. I went, do you think Tyson's going to retire?

And you were like, I don't know. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. And then I saw him sit on a golden throne in front of 60,000 people. I'm like, that is a man who likes attention. Yeah, but he had a really hard time with that Wilder fight. Deontay Wilder hurt him bad. Oh, man. And he said afterwards that he was really concussed.

And he just decided after that fight, I think, that the Dillian White fight would be his last one. And it was masterful. Masterful performance. And I don't know. I like him fighting. Masterful performance. I don't know. I like him fighting. He's fun. He also said that he would fight Anthony Joshua.

He said he would fight him for free if the fans could get in for free to watch it. Which is a wild boy thing to say. Yeah, it is. He's such a wild man. He is, man. He's the gypsy king. I mean, there's nobody like Tyson Fury. There's never been an intimidated guy with a belly like that.

Yeah. You know? This is a thing that I don't understand. As a boxer, you're meant to be the fittest of the fittest. And then you've got Anthony Ruiz, who looks like he runs a kebab shop. Well, he looks a lot better now. Andy Ruiz is now much, much thinner. He hired a strength and conditioning trainer,

and he's been on this regiment for more than a year now. But he was heavyweight champion of the world, and looked like he ran a kebab shop. Well, when he beat Anthony Joshua, he looked fat. But then when he lost to him, he looked really fat. He got up to like 283 pounds. He was way, way, way overweight. But the thing about him is that fat doesn't affect looked really fat. He got up to like 283 pounds. He was way, way, way overweight. But yeah,

the thing about him is that fat doesn't affect how well he can punch. Like he punches, like if you watch Andy Ruiz fight, he's so fluid. Everything's just pat, pat, pat, pat, those combinations, they just come and it's just like so effortless and technical. His combinations are beautiful. And when you get in

slugfests with him, and that's what Anthony Joshua did. They got in a slugfest. Ruiz is like taking angles and landing shots in these fast combinations. They're really fluid hands. If you watch him hit the mitts, it's very impressive. And if you watch when he actually stops Anthony

Joshua, that combination is amazing. But it's just he fell prey to the party bug you know and so now he's got to rebuild it's still with boxing the fact that you need to be so fit and you can be overweight still blows my mind because it's an aspirational model yeah it is man I think Tyson Fury what happened was he after he beat Klitschko he got depressed and he got over ballooned up over 300 pounds he was drinking every day and really fucked up and he got so big that a certain amount of that just stays with him even though now he's

fit he's still got like a certain amount of that but if you go back to like the earlier fight like the Klitschko fights I don't remember him being that big. Hatton had the same problem in between fights. He would just balloon. And you saw the electricity and the spark of the early Hatton. By the end of it, it just wasn't there. Well, he's a guy that

Floyd knocked out. Floyd caught him with a left hook, like a check hook. It was brilliant. He just figured out how to deal with this guy who was like a marauder, just a relentless mauling type of a brawler. And Ricky Hatton, people forget, when he was on his way up to the title, Ricky Hatton was a motherfucker.

He was fun to watch. That guy was a killer. He was so good. And he was so fun to watch, Ricky Hatton. I don't think there's, in boxing at the moment, I don't think there is anyone, there are better boxers, but there's no one more fun to watch than Ricky Hatton.

What was so fun about him? The thing that was so fun, it was the sparkiness, the devastating. Do you know what I mean? Like, you just, he would be there fighting, and then it would, out of nowhere, particularly, bang, it was over. Yeah, those explosive knockout power punchers, those guys,

there's something about them. They make boxing so much more interesting. Just the kind of guy that can just bang out of nowhere, and then you're out cold. Because some guys can't do that. Some guys, they need an accumulation of blows. And there's guys like Bitterbeev who just breaks you down. He doesn't really knock a guy out with one punch in the first round.

He just slowly clips you and beats you up like little car accidents. Boom, boom, boom. But that's the problem. We touched on it before. The more technical fighters, they never get the respect, as much respect as the knockout artists. Think of Joe Calzaghe. I actually think Joe Calzaghe might have retired undefeated.

He did. He did. He did. Yeah. And then we never mentioned him when we were going through our undefeated fighters. Yeah, we should have. We should have. Yeah, that's just an error.

Joe Calzaghe was a beast. But Calzaghe was technical. He never really knocked anyone out, Joe. No. That was my point. You know what I mean? Really fast combinations. Really fast hands.

A lot of movement. Unbelievable work ethic. His work ethic was incredible. His endurance was incredible. He would just put a pace on guys. He was a very good boxer, too. But yeah, you're right. He wasn't like a Tommy Hearns, like one punch, bam.

Like when Hearns knocked out Roberto Duran, like whoo. Tommy Hearns had a right hand that was just an extraordinary weapon. It was extraordinary. And when he would catch you on the end of a jab and just torque that right hand in, whoo! Yeah, man. He was amazing. But, you know, some guys have that and some guys don't.

A guy who had that that was really fun to watch was Prince Hamed. Remember that? Yeah. Remember that, dude? Oh, he was incredible. Incredible. Entertainment value as well. Oh, my God.

He would dance. He'd be dancing while he was fighting. Had these crazy shorts on. And he would leap forward and catch guys with left hooks and just fuck them up. Leap forward with a right uppercut. And you would watch him like, how is he getting away with this? Like, this is crazy. The way he's fighting is crazy.

But it was super effective. And he would talk a bunch of shit. A bunch of shit. A bunch of shit. He would come in on Thrones, too. He was like the first guy to come in on Thrones. Yeah, he was. Do you know the interesting thing

about Nassim Hamed is that I think, was it the first time he lost? Where he fought Barrera. Barrera gave him such a beating he never got back in the ring again. Was that the last time he fought? I think it was. Really? Yeah, I think it was. Pull up Prince Hamed's career.

I don't remember when the last time he fought. Well, I think it's important to fact check that one. You think it was. Yeah, I think it was. I mean, pull up Prince Ahmed's career. I don't remember when the last time. Well, I think it's important to fact check that one. You're absolutely right. Just like I was fucked up about Jerry Farwall. Jimmy Swagger fucked

me up. Let's see. What's that? Oh, he had one more win one more win Manuel Calvo unanimous decision that was the year later like basically a year later

yeah there you go man and then he was like that's it I'm done oh so he won a vacant IBO featherweight title

and then he just fucking checked out there you go Francis you've just landed a former world champion incredible boxer an IBO featherweight title, and then he just fucking checked out. There you go, Francis. You've just landed a former world champion. Incredible boxer. Hope you never meet him walking around London. Yeah, mate.

That's just my brand. We corrected it. I don't see that it's that big of a deal. I'm sure he'll see it that way. Gentlemen, we've been going on a long-ass time. Should we end this thing? Brother, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me,

or thanks for being here. I forget what I'm doing, what my role is. Brother, come brother come on our show we'll talk more we'd love to have you and i really appreciate you guys i just i'm glad we got together to do this because i've always enjoyed watching your show on youtube and it's just cool to hang with you a really fun conversation for us as well bye everybody everybody.