TRIGGERnometry - Comedian Simon Evans Learns the Life-Changing Truth About His Dad

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Simon Evans is an English comedian, writer and broadcaster. He has been an established figure in British comedy for several decades having made many TV appearances and six series of BBC Radio 4’s Simon Evans Goes to Market. He is a columnist for several publications including Spiked and the presenter of Headliners on GB News. Check out Simon's website: https://thesimonevans.com/ SPONSORED BY: AG1. Go to https://www.drinkAG1.com/triggernometry/ to get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase! Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro 01:20 Bank Account Cancellations & Government Control 04:06 Are We at Risk of Authoritarianism? 05:16 Simon’s Commentator Role 06:35 Should Comedians Comment on Politics? 08:09 Simon Evans’ ‘Work of The Devil’  11:08 Having Testosterone Replacement 14:22 Simon Evans’ Comedy Persona  20:47 The Impact of Parenthood on Simon’s Work 28:55 Sponsor Message: Manscaped 30:17 How Did Learning About Simon’s Father Affect His Identity? 35:41 Nature Vs Nurture 43:03 Simon’s Relationship with his Biological Family  55:58 Sponsor Message: AG1 57:52 The Loss of Duty in this Generation  1:04:22 The Positive Psychology Movement 1:07:38 What Simon Has Learned from his Comedy Career 1:11:52 What’s The One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. In the show that I'm just winding up now, the work of the devil,

which contained two major revelations in the second half, one of which the most famous one and what it's sort of about, it was the discovery that I was donor-conceived. and I learned through a DNA test that I was actually conceived in a clinic in central London run by a woman called Mary Barton and her husband, Bertolt Wiesner and the husband, Bertolt Wiesner, was, it turns out, supplying the vast majority of the sperm

that was getting women pregnant over the course of about 22 years. It's thought to a father somewhere between 600 and 1,000 children, so I have all these half-siblings. The first time I went into that room where they were all having lunch, the first big gathering, there were 27 of them in there, and they were the first blood relatives, I'd been in a room with, ever. I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it?

At the age of, what, 55 or something? I think the kind of the core philosophical conundrum that you get to through recognising it and pondering on it is there is no alternative. It's not like I could have been this or I could have, I would not exist. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. terrific guest today returns to the show for the third time. He's one of our favorite comedians here in Britain and has also become a very prominent commentator as well. Simon Evans, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much. I'm very excited to be doing my third show. I am looking forward to wearing my badge. We'll have to design a badge. I think there should be one or maybe a tattoo or something. I don't know. Oh, absolutely. On your forehead. It comes with a free bank account

cancellation. Oh yeah. I've been reading about those. Yeah, they're spreading out now, aren't they? Just want to make it clear that we were the first. I actually have my bank account cancelled in 1993. Oh. Yeah. Before I'd even become a comedian, let alone a commentator, just for not ever having enough money in my bank account at Westfield. You know what?

We're just, this is getting boring. Yeah. That's a very old-school way to get your bank account cancelled. Exactly. It was like, stop fooling with us. You know, I was basically. like broken up with, I got a dear John letter from Nat West. So, yeah, so I have, you know, I have that mottled sympathy for the current way.

Yeah, well, it is pretty extraordinary what's happening now, isn't it? I mean, weaponising financial services is kind of, I mean, people, it's a sort of, it's a sort of thing that weird conspiracy people on Twitter with weird avatars used to sort of say, you know, CDBCN and this and that. And now it's happening. It does seem to be happening, yeah. I think the first time I became aware of that level of interference was during the truckers demos in Canada, and that was particularly disgusting because, of course, people were trying to support them

through charitable donation, and the platforms through which those donations were collected were going, sorry, we're not going to give that to the truckers, but here are some causes that we're going to support instead. I mean, that was a level of Kutzvah, you might say, that was quite jaw-dropping, I mean, almost comical. But, yeah, I mean, it is, I don't know, individual cases, obviously yours, you know, it just seems appalling.

Other people, there might be reasons, who knows, you know. Obviously, you don't want to stick your nose in too far and find out what might be going on. But that level of control, that level of chill, you know, every so often you think with the general trend that we've been talking about, obviously since trigonometry has been around, that kind of quiet authoritarianism, that's the ability to render certain narratives or points of view, inoperable, non-viable, to move the Overton window. You know, we keep thinking it's losing its momentum now, it's petering out, and then something like that happens.

And you go, no, actually, it's moving into a new and slightly more sinister form. And do you feel that authoritarian chill on your shoulder, Simon? Well, I mean, I don't know that I I've always tried to keep it at arm's length. You know, I host a show a couple of weeks, a couple of nights a week on GB News. And GB News some people would say is, you know, is very much a, you know, a shibboleth for a certain kind of tribe

in the culture wars. But I'm not one of those people who kind of puts that in my bio and goes, here I am, you know, and I don't have flags and emojis next to my name. I personally don't feel I've been close. down personally, you know, and I don't think my bank account is under threat. But of course, you never know which HR departments have decided that you're not going to be hosting their awards this year. You never know which venues have quietly thought, we'd probably rather not

have him touring it. I don't think anything like that has happened. But of course, you know, you wouldn't necessarily hear about it. If they're doing their job well, those authoritarian, You don't know until you just sort of find yourself washed up on some beach on some uncharted island and no longer booked. And Simon, you've always been someone who had something to say in addition to the comedy that you did. It's one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of yours. But with G.B. News and with more writing that you now do for the publications, you've kind of stepped into a little bit more of a commentator role as well, more so than in the past. I think, is that fair to say? Yeah, I mean, I started writing for Spite a couple of years ago.

I think it would be two years in September. That initially started, really, actually, with a sort of a couple of comedian obituries. Quite sad. A good friend and a guy had worked with Sean Locke died, and they asked me to write an obituary for him. And then once you're sort of anchored to them, I write a fortnightly column for Spite,

necessarily, I suppose, because that's the kind of engagement, you know, the sort of conversation that Trugger's engagement. You find yourself one week reflecting on something that feels like in the meat of the bat for me, like, I don't know, I mean, I am by instinct quite nostalgic, quite reflective, quite mellow, honestly, you know, and occasionally becoming infuriated, if anything, by triviality and so on. But you do notice the engagement absolutely skyrocketed as soon as you start talking about certain, you know, hot button topics.

And so that eventually happens, you know. five minutes, so let's talk about trans. As we all do. No, but what I was going to ask you is, it's actually something, I mean, I don't even do stand up anymore, something. What do you make? We asked Noam, who owns the comedy seller in New York, about comedians commenting on things, and he actually thought it was quite a good thing, because comedians offer a slightly different perspective on things. Have you enjoyed that? Do you enjoy that? Do you enjoy that?

Do you think comedians should do that? I mean, my take on slightly edgier topics has always been, as I always, I've been doing it for 25 years. I think straight away I was started to do that, is to tease people and tantalize them with the prospect that I'm about to say something appalling or something that will get me cat, and then just pull back from the edge. And that's what I think of as edgy comedy. The point of the edge is that you're kind of go, you know, you get the vertigo,

but you shouldn't actually be shoving people into the chasm, you know. And I think I've done that for a while. I used to do a joke, like 20, I say 25 years ago, I think about saying, I have developed a painful condition, went to see the doctor about it, Indian chap. Pause while they go, oh my God, he's going to say something terrible about Indian doctors, Indian chap. Well, they call it Indian chap. It's just nappy rash, really, but they try to do it.

That kind of joke, I think, it's interesting. Even just over the course of my career, you know, you will get people, who will recoil more firmly and be harder to tease back out again. But I mean, just on the trans thing, in the show that I'm just winding up now, the work of the devil, which contained two major revelations in the second half, one of which, the most famous one and what it's sort of about, it was the discovery that I was donor conceived. And I learned through a DNA test that I was actually conceived in the clinic in central London,

run by a woman called Mary Barton and her husband, Bertolt Wiesner, and the husband, Bertolt Wiesner, was, it turns out, supplying the vast majority of the sperm that was getting women pregnant over the course of about 22 years. This has become, there are other cases of this coming out. There's one come out this week, in fact, but at the time, and for several years, this was a standalone. It's thought to have father somewhere between 600 and 1,000 children,

so I have all these half-siblings. So I use that to discuss, to give me, the right, I suppose, to discuss the work of the devil being kind of technological stroke, sociological developments and innovations which are messing with nature. Are we sure that it's fine that not only can two gay men get married but they can have a child, they can have a baby, what methods are they using for this to happen, express a certain amount of old-fashioned shock and horror about that in the first half, and then reveal in the second half that exactly those methods were used to bring my existence about if we hadn't been willing to, I mean, in the view

of the church at the time, it was, they regarded it as a brainwave of Beelzebub. So I am literally the work of the devil. But the other one, which I find as interesting as well, was I had very low testosterone. And I did a blood test and found that that was causing me a certain amount of mental fog and actually sort of something quite close to depression, really, just like feeling miserable and unmotivated and so on. And I now take regular testosterone injections, which is not that unusual, of course, in middle-aged men. But at the level of testosterone that I had, prior to those injections,

I was eligible to compete in the women's waiting at the Olympic Games. That, again, I think gives me a right, or at least an opportunity to tease a little bit about, you know, let's see, how do we feel about, you know, And then, I mean, recently the substance I use is called Sustanon. I think it comes from Australia for some reason. And there was a sort of bottleneck in supply, I think actually just caused by government interference

and wanting to see documentation or something. I went on Twitter to find out if other people were getting this trouble. And all the other tweets were trans men who were using Sustan, relying on Sustanon to complete their or to continue. continue their transition, you know. So I really genuinely am in that cohort by some standard. It's your lived experience, Simon. Exactly, yeah. And so just as a brief segue, what was it like before you had tea replacement and after tea replacement? Well, I don't know how long it had been like really scraping along the bottom because it was quite bad by the time I had the blood test.

but the sense beforehand that I was most aware of was a sort of a loss of motivation, a loss of decision-making ability. There's some quite interesting experiments have been done where human brains have lost the part of, I can never remember which region it is, but the region that is emotional. And some people think, oh, that will turn you into SPOC, right?

You'll just make clear decisions without having emotions cloud, your thought processes. And in reality, the opposite happens. Without emotions, you have no idea what to do. You have no template, you know, you have no rights and wrongs. It was a bit like that. I found it very hard to determine even in what order I should put on my socks and trousers in the morning. I mean, I could be hesitating over that kind of thing, you know, and if four or five different objects were sitting on my desk requiring attention, I might spend the whole afternoon. You literally became a woman.

It was the obvious joke to me. But there is a sort of, I mean, there is an old man thing to that as well. I have the testosterone levels associated traditionally with 80-year-old men. But, I mean, funny enough, I'd already spoken about it. I think it was a BBC show, The Big Question, hosted by Nikki Campbell, which had had an episode about masculinity and crisis, you know, and that had been my thing talking about, mainly because I'd read about it rather than realizing I was subject to it.

men at all ages now, on average, have roughly half the testosterone that we used to have. And I mean, I suppose the question is, well, is that necessarily a bad thing? Is that going to diminish the amount of pub fights and, you know, and brutalized marriages and so on? Or is it actually why we might all just be, you know, productivity is down and we don't quite know what we want to do next? There is a kind of feeling like the whole country is seized by that same lack of forward. motion at the moment. I don't know. I don't know how much that maps out. But afterwards, to answer your question, I felt pretty good almost straight away. A lot of the clouds cleared, and I had a surge of activity. And like everything, you know, nothing lasts. You know, the feeling of becoming better is

the greatest feeling, you know, convalescence. It can't carry on forever. And I didn't keep pumping it up and, like, pumping iron, you know. But although I will say actually, funny enough, I mean, I do go to the gym and I had noticed that it was beginning to become very difficult to improve in the gym. And I can now occasionally, if I set my mind to it, see some results there as well. So that is kind of important. But yeah, I mean, everything comes back a little bit. And obviously the thing people will think about is libido, which, yeah, to some extent. I mean, it doesn't restore you to your 20s, but you have some sort of sense of being an active player in the world, I suppose, again. Yeah.

And I saw your show, the show that you were wrapping up now. I saw an earlier version of it before the pandemic, actually. It's a brilliant show, really, really fascinating. And part of it is, of course, your character on stage. This is another dimension that you didn't mention. Your character on stage has always been of the slightly somewhat snooty English gentleman. Yeah. Turns out you're not English at all.

Not English at all, no. My mother's side is actually, in a way, almost more. is the father's genes are pure Ashkenazi. My mother's side seems to be Celtic-induced European, and there's a bit of North Africa in there as well, which is really mysterious. But they, my parents, who are both still alive, are not particularly interested in pursuing that

and finding out why that might be. But yeah, I think to some extent, I think when you start out in stand-up comedy, you try on a few different persona. And I'm quite interested. I read a book recently, or listened to it, as I always do now, Camille Pallier's sexual personae, and thinking about personae, which, as in masks, in performance and so on,

they have to be quite oversimplified and specific and direct and consistent in order to create drama within, you know, what is otherwise just the mud, the mess of everyday life. And I think when you start out as a stand-up, you try on a few, some people, I did anyway, you know, to see which one the audience. bought, basically, you know. And I remember the first few gigs I did,

I was trying to present myself as a bit of a kind of, I don't know, Joe Strummer type character. I thought of myself as a bit of a rock and roller, you know, in my late 20s, early 30s, I was a bit chaotic, big anarchic, you know, and a bit of an outsider and a rebel, and I remember audiences going,

no, that's it. And one day, you know, you try, well, how about if I'm a bit more like a lounge lizard, You know, there was a character Rob Newman used to do in Newman and Badil that was sort of a Jarvis, I think he was called, who was sort of slimy and unreliable, you know,

and superior and callous. And I found that they were, yeah, now we can see that. So you've worked on that. But I think over the course of a stand-up career, necessarily you will, if you allow yourself to, you will evolve. And it's important you do,

because otherwise you start just repeating yourself. I think the first 10 years or so I was like that. Then I think I moved into a, I moved into a slightly different persona when I had kids and became admired in domesticity. And then I became, you know, your classic sitcom dad, you know, beleaguered, you know, and, you know, a bit more Tony Hancock. And I felt much more comfortable in that terrain ever since, actually. I think, I don't know what it was.

I think when you are a cuckoo in the nest and you don't know why, you look around for a persona that might enable you to critique the expectations of your own family and upbringing and so on. And I didn't feel comfortable entirely in that upbringing. And I thought, well, maybe that's one way I could do it. But funny enough, on the way up here, for instance, I was listening to a wonderful book by Don Paterson. I don't know if you know him, he's a Scottish poet. And he's written a memoir of growing up in a pretty poor family in Duned. Dundee area.

And it's vastly more recognisable to me, that background, weirdly, than any of the stuff I sort of purported to be a part of, you know, when I was a stand-up. He was talking about, you know, street games and playground nonsense and, you know, collecting coal that had fallen off the back of the coal truck. That's how poor they were. He was sent out after the cold truck. Now, we weren't quite that poor, but I was a lot closer. to that than the sort of thing I've pretended to be.

And after a while, that kind of mask just gets uncomfortable and you want to throw it off. But, I mean, yeah, having children was a natural break in that. I think I'm making a conscious one now. Having done the work of the devil, it feels like that was a culmination. Like everything I'd done for the previous 25 years could suddenly be seen in a new and clear a light.

Oh, that's what was going on. Do you know what I mean? There's an interesting book called, I think, the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, came out, I think, in the 60s, but he created the idea of the paradigm shift. And he says in, if I've understood it correctly, which is, you know, far from certain,

he says, what happens? We tend to think of science as proceeding gradually in a linear fashion. He says, no, in fact, you have a set of theories which purport to describe and explain a certain phenomena. let's say, you know, the organisation of the solar system. And in order to make the observable facts fit that theory, more and more pressure builds, you know,

more and more implausible workarounds or exemptions from the apparent rules. If you see the maps of the solar system and the orbits that the planets were supposed to be pursuing in order to obey the Ptolemaic universe before Copernicus goes, if anyone's noticed, but if you put the sun in the middle, it all gets a lot simpler. I'm just saying, you know, well, I think that happens in our own lives as well to some extent. You know, you think to yourself, I know I'm, I don't know, I know I'm this, I know I'm that, I know I'm the other, and everything has to be crammed in there.

And somebody goes, you know, I'm just saying, if you turned out to be half Jewish, and your father had not been, you know, that would explain quite a lot of it, wouldn't it? And you kind of go, oh, yeah, so it would. And a whole heap of all the material I've been doing for the previous 25 years is suddenly, you know, thrown into a new light by that. And having done that, that being the sort of nature of that show,

I feel like I almost just want to clear it all the way, you know what I mean, and start again in some kind of Peter Brook, you know, experimental theatre, empty space kind of, right, what should we talk about now? Yeah, well, that's exciting for you creatively, but I was going to actually ask you something that I'm thinking about a lot. Obviously, I had my son about 13 months ago.

And it's something I think we need to talk more about in the public space, and I'm trying to do that, which is fatherhood and parenthood more generally. What was it like for you and what kind of impact did it have on you becoming a father? and did it spur you on? Did you look at the world in a new light? Or was it more of a burden in terms of your career and creativity and so on? Well, a number of things happened all at once, not all of which were directly just having a child.

My wife experienced quite bad postnatal depression, and I think that was probably a bigger issue in terms of maintaining my own sanity and balance at the time. She was determined to carry on working, and I think that was possibly one of the reasons why she was experiencing so much pain and discomfort, because I think for women, I mean, you're absolutely right, fatherhood, but also parent, I think motherhood, even more so,

I think both parents, but especially women, I'm paraphrasing my own wife, I wouldn't dare to say it just off my own back, but she says they're fed a lie, they're told a lie, that they can have it all, that you can have kids and carry on enjoying your same career, and you see, and it just isn't true. And I'm not saying she's the first one, or I'm the first one, to acknowledge this. Obviously, you know, people have written books about it. It's funny how careful you have to be about saying that, though, because it is something,

I mean, you're paraphrasing your wife, I will now paraphrase my wife, and you can speak to lots of women who will, you can paraphrase afterwards, who will all tell you exactly that, which is, you know, you have been sold a bit of a lie, it changes the way you look at your life, your career, everything, and those things cease to be as important. Absolutely. And, I mean, funny enough, I was listening yesterday, and I'm going to start throwing around my literary references too fast now. But essays of Montaigne, who was like contemporary slightly earlier than Shakespeare. So this is 500 years ago.

So people have been thinking about this. But he talks about the senses and about how we may, there may be other conceivable senses of which we're not aware. And if he has a blind friend who just doesn't understand what he's missing and uses terms, he had a godson. And he says, oh, what a handsome boy is he picks him up and holds him. He cannot see him, and the word handsome to him, who knows what that means, but he has heard it and he uses it. I think parenthood is a bit like that, and especially for mothers, until you have a child,

you don't know what it is that gets switched on inside you. It's not like wanting to get home to see like a TV drama that you've been following and being annoyed when your train is delayed because you can't get home. It's not like, it's a tug you haven't felt before. It's a hook that's placed into the center of your being on a, on a, tightened cord that you cannot escape. And even now, Matilda, our daughter is 19 and on her gap here and sends in WhatsApp messages and videos of her tearing through northern Thailand on mopeds without a helmet on. And I see them and go, what's she like? And I can see it is having the same effect that Kate would have if she saw her pram starting to roll down a hill. You know, it's,

it just never goes, you know. So as a father, I think to some extent, you are then coping with that, you know, and the domestic environment becomes more, yeah, more complex than you might have thought, you know. And also, if I'm honest, I suppose we had a few, well, there were a few conversations we perhaps should have had before we had the children, which might have at least allowed us to navigate beforehand and know exactly where we were going. Like what, Simon? Well, for instance, it turned out my wife was particularly keen that they be privately educated,

which has been extraordinarily extensive. And is one of the reasons she wanted to carry on working so that that can happen. Now I'm not sure that would have been a priority for me. But certainly it's one of those things. I think if you're going to have kids, I mean, I don't know. This is tricky because on the one hand, I would say yes. As an individual, if you're going to have kids, you will probably benefit from having a lot of serious conversations beforehand,

before you even get married, really, about, you know, if we're getting married, this isn't just a question of like expressing devotion and love for one another. We are, what we're about to do, make setting up a business look trivial. You know, having children, by comparison with getting a mortgage or something together, is, you know, it's an enormous commitment. You have a great line about it, don't you? Something about how you're running.

We've set up a small business together. This is going well, why don't we get a troop of baboons to run the postings? Yeah, that seems to be it. Yeah, it's disruptive. And also, you know, you want to make sure your values are roughly, People talk about value alignment now in terms of AI, but we find it hard enough in marriages. We think the marriage will go fine. So part of me wants to say that to individuals, but of course as a society, we're already

dipping well below replacement level fertility and anything you say that puts people off. I don't know. I mean, it's a tricky conundrum because the truth is, of course, I mean, I've started to form the view over the last few years that a sort of realization that the traditional purpose of religion as much as anything else, was to enforce fertility, you know, to stop people just having fun, you know, to take their responsibility for planting and harvesting seriously. And it's terribly tempting to just keep putting it off.

And if I say things like, oh, you need to make sure you both agree exactly on, well, maybe you should just let nature take its course. I don't know. I do not know. My own father, born in 1930, I think he discovered quite recently going back through his own Paris records, I say my father, my social father or whatever, my dad, that he was born at the end of March, 1930.

His parents had been married three months previously. So that tells its own story as well, you know. He probably wouldn't exist if they'd had a discussion about value alignment, you know. Me neither. So who knows, who knows. But, yeah, you can't minimize it and it is disruptive. And interesting, I know that some people have said, I know some men say, you know, you have a child and you go, right, I will go out and provide. Well, if you can do that, that's great.

But on the other hand, of course, it is quite, again, the domestic environment does suppress testosterone. I mean, that's proven. If you allow yourself to become enveloped in its warm embrace, you know, the whole point is to stop you playing around, for instance. You know, the more testosterone you have, the more likely you are to try and be unfaithful. And so nature has generally encouraged that to go down. And that then, of course, might diminish your inclination to go out hunting quite as often, you know. But, yeah, it changes you.

And it's not always easy to anticipate how it will do so, you know. And although you hear a lot of men going, absolutely, it's all about my wife, it's all about the little, you know, you do also notice a lot of men start taking on later nights at the office and so on. I mean, there was a guy, I don't want to call him an absolutely, you know, an absolute hypocrite. But I can't remember his name, Ben something, I think, a sort of outdoorsman who makes TV documentaries about, you know, going down, paddling down the Amazon and that sort of thing. And he did one of those interviews, like Lifestyle Interview in the Sunday magazine, you know, saying, I always carry with me the, you know, the poloid of my wife and daughter, because that's who I'm doing it for. I'm like, mate, you're away for three months

shooting a documentary on the Amazon. You don't get to present as the devoted father. I'm sorry, you are making you are absent, you know. And there are other ways you could have earned a living, but you want to do something exciting. I don't blame you, but, you know, let's not pretend that you are doing it for them, you know. Simon, we've been talking a lot.

Actually, what's very interesting about this interview is about identity. And when you receive that new, about who your biological father was, what did that do to your identity, your identity as a son to your father, but also who you are? Did it make you literally question every single thing about you? Well, I wouldn't say every single thing, but it certainly changed my relationship or my realisation. For instance, my relationship with my father, yes,

and I realized, and I still do think, that I've spent quite a lot of my adult life, kind of defending his views to an extent that I might not have done if I didn't actually find them so puzzling or his way of being, seeing it at a slight remove, you know, and always thinking, I admired, for instance, the fact that he made a very plain decision early in life, I think, to accept that he had to sell eight hours of his waking life every day to affirm,

do something in which he would not take a huge amount of constructive satisfaction, but then he had his hobbies in the evening, and he always got all of his satisfaction from life out of model-making, gardening, carpentry, wine-making and all sorts of weird, incredible, rich hobby life. Had no real interest. And one of the reasons is a stand-up. I don't really like it when Compares stand on the stage and say to the bloke in the front row,

what's your name and what do you do? because they're being asked for their job title and that isn't who people are, you know. And yet I've gone down completely the opposite route. I have virtually no hobbies to speak of and I get all my creative satisfaction from the work I do as a career. And so I suppose I always had him

at sort of one remove in a way and I felt almost fiercely defensive of him. I mean, I didn't vote for Brexit, I didn't want Brexit, I wasn't like a fierce remuner, but when the hostility emerged to people who had voted, for Brexit and my father had voted for Brexit.

You know, that aroused in me a kind of like a red mist, you know, level of defensive, you know, don't you dare call my father an idiot, bigot, racist, whatever. I'm not sure I would, one would normally have had that relationship with a man who was actually one's biological father. I don't know, but I feel like I was protecting a man who I had a slightly unresolved relationship with in that respect. And I think I feel I see it slightly more differently now. But in terms of identity, this is, it's extraordinarily, potentially toxic, but I am in no doubt. I think I've always had like massively disproportionately more Jewish friends than, you know,

you expect from representation. My best friend at school, as I say in the show, was Ross Cohen, who was the best man, my best man at my wedding, and I now know was the only other Jewish boy in the class, you know. I don't know that that could have been coincidence. It seems like an odd one to me. So yes, I do think there is, you know, just a smidgen of Jewish identity that comes from, God knows how, some sort of, you know, geno type expression in personality.

But I suppose, funny enough, one of the people I used to have regular conversations with about is their identity, you know, one of the reasons I think I wanted to take the DNA test. which I don't explore that much on stage, but I think I had become aware that everyone, I think this was about 2016, everyone seemed to be aligning more and more with their racial or ethnic identity. That was becoming a big thing.

And it had underscored a lot of, yeah, tribal behavior on Twitter and so on. And I thought, I don't even really know what my ethnic identity is. Evans is a Welsh surname, but we don't have any kind of sense of being Welsh. There's a sort of, you know, my parents have done a bit of the old-fashioned version of ancestry, and that disappeared into the mud of Bedfordshire subsistence farming. And I thought maybe if I discover, you know, some Viking or Mongolian or some kind of warrior hoard from 2,000 years ago, that gives you some sense of being anchored in the past,

that other people seem to draw some sort of sustenance from and not always necessarily a bad thing, you know. I think a lot of us, I think of, I say us, a lot of those of us who felt we were just white British in a vague sense felt a certain amount of envy for those who could say I am, I don't know, Palestinian British or I am Iranian British or whatever.

They have some ethnicity with a story to it, that has, I don't know, kind of inflames the imagination a little bit. I didn't expect to find what I did, of course. And having done so in a way, I find that I can close that book now. And I don't actually rely on it, but I do recognize that it probably informs me a little bit more than I had previously recognized, because so many of my traits are traditional Jewish traits, you know. And has it changed your mind about the whole nurture and nature debate? Are there things that you look at and you just go,

that you've got this information, you go, well, actually, this isn't my lived experience for one of a better word, Simon. I think my, funny enough, my view of the nature nursery debate has been affirmed by it. I don't think I was that rocked, because I genuinely do, I've been firmly in the nature side for quite some time. I've done a bit of reading anywhere. I found Robert Plowman's work on it very interesting. You know, that seems to me fairly unambiguous, I think that there's, you know, I understand why people want to believe that they can nurture their children. And my father, of course, took on the responsibility of doing so on the understanding that he would have some impact on who I am. And I don't want to say, sorry, Dad,

but I don't know, I don't think there's any shame in feeling that a lot of it is baked in. There seems to be to me, most of the literature now, most of the science seems to confirm that something between 50 and 75% of what you might call personality traits or whatever are pretty much baked in through genetics, albeit with the ability, it's not predictably baked in based on the two people who are mating. You can have two completely different children. In fact, if anything, the first thing that will teach you that nurture is an illusion is your second child, you know, because there's sort of.

soon as you try and apply exactly the same parenting techniques and they just, you know, they're off and you're like, what the hell happened there? But even then, yeah, so there's some kind of, there's a lot of noise, even as your body tries to read the blueprint and going, so, sorry, where are we supposed to put the, you know, and Chinese whispers is as good a description as anything for how, you know, the cracks that the light gets in, or the swerve, you know, as Lucretius has it. But the other part is even more weird is the non-shared environment. They say there are environmental effects, but they have no idea what it is. The shared environment is the family or your friends or whatever. The non-shared environment is essentially

the dark matter, as far as I can tell, of personality. Nobody knows what it is. But I was pretty much there with that already. I was already quite convinced of that. In a way, that was why I wanted to sort of have a name and a tag to put on my identity to know. what it was, you know, what was what was emerging, what was expressing itself. And I think if we got past the idea that consequently, if you just put enough money into education or whatever, we can raise a universally, you know, high-achieving cohort of young people who are currently being let down by nursery or whatever, if we could just get past that nonsense, that fiction, that, that fantasy, it would just take so much of the pressure off parents

who might be like concerned that they are failing in some way as soon as their child turns out to struggle with math. You know, it's like so much of it is, I'm afraid, which is not to say that they don't need some sort of support structures, but parenting is much more fun if you go, to be honest, it doesn't really matter if we spend the weekend going over their homework or like just like rolling around like guerrillas in the mist. Do you know what I mean?

that is not going to have a long-term effect on their educational prospects. So I feel that would be like the gospel if we can get it out there. But again, that, funny enough, goes back again because my wife is genetically predetermined to believe that you need to spend the weekend going over their homework. But it's also, it must have been impressed on you the genetics and the roles genetics plays in all of our lives, even though we don't want to admit it,

When you met brothers and sisters, I know one of your brothers. That must have been a real light bulb moment. Which one do you know? I know, David Tabazel. Oh, okay, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, and we were born quite close to each other as well. I have brothers and sisters stretching backwards mostly, back to 1945. My oldest brother is 79 now.

Sounds like you're from the nation of Islam. David and I have worked together, you know. We are obviously close, and we think we may have been from the same batch, as we put it, because he was certainly freezing batts. because he was getting old and had Parkinson's by the time we were born. But, yeah, I mean, it certainly did. I mean, we're half-brother and sisters, so there's the opportunity for a lot to be, you know, messed with.

But as a cohort, we are, yeah, there are certain traits, you know. Now, I could then say, are they from Visner, or are they like Ashkenazi traits? and I personally think they're pretty much obviously Ashkenazi traits you know pretty much everyone is very verbal you know they all have there's an awful lot of us as I put it in the show who have leveraged a degree of verbal fluency to avoid doing any hard work and I feel that you know I'm in the position to be able to say that

but that's a that's a recognisable thing certainly you know but then Ashkenazi it's weird because I know there's been a you know a long history of arguing is it a face? is it an ethnicity, you know, Judaism. There's a famous line from one of my absolute all-time heroes, Alan Corrin, reading about the Jewish Chronicle, I think it was, congratulating him on becoming the first, wasn't the first Jewish editor of Punt, but something like that,

something he'd achieved, and he went, what nonsense, I haven't been Jewish for years. Now, he's obviously tongue-in-cheat, but that, you know, and at times, of course, that has inflamed, I mean, that's kind of, you know, that's the part of the whole road to Auschwitz stuff is it just a religion

or whatever but the data is in now it's an ethnicity and the most definitely identifiable and unmistakable ethnicity probably of any in Europe you know the particular heartland of the

Ashkenazi Jews from Germany, Poland around there or whatever and to the extent that David finds through her perfectly, you know, not alarmingly, but he is connected to Vizna twice. He was father by him, but it was also a tiny bit incestuous.

His union, you know, his mother was slightly related to Vizner, which is, again, not that unusual, you know. So if you want to have like a, I don't know, a test case, a natural laboratory for testing these things, then the Ashkenazi have already presented you with it to a very large extent. I'm a quarter. Quarter, okay. And what other three quarters?

So I'm half-eastern European, which will be a mix of Russian, Ukrainian, and a quarter. I mean, we would say Greek, but it's probably more like Ottoman Greek. Right, okay. You know, from that part of the black sea coast, I'd imagine. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's quite a common. But again, the verbal thing. thing, I think, is getting away with the hard work.

I was curious to touch on your relationship with your father. And I'm curious about, you talk about it in the show a little bit, the impact that had because here you are, you suddenly realize this person you've called your father and thought of as your father and treated as your father, isn't your biological father? And it was, you know what, maybe this will be me revealing publicly how weird my parents were.

But they always asked me how I would feel if I'd found out I was adopted. Now, in my case, there's zero chance of that because they had me when my mother had been 18 for four days. So I don't think they were in the adoption market, so to speak, at all. It was a complete accident. And again, it wouldn't have happened if people had thought about childbirth as carefully as you suggest they do. No. But it is an interesting question, I think, and the question that most people would actually think about in some way, you know, what happens if you realize that your parents or one of your parents

isn't actually your parent? Yeah, it's interesting that your parents would ask you that. I mean, mine obviously steered me away. I imagine so. I mean, I remember you did used to think what I said. I remember very specifically having these thoughts, I think, maybe age or nine, but I can picture myself in bed thinking, I just don't think he's my dad. And yet I cannot imagine a scenario that would explain that because I knew I wasn't adopted

because my mother had gone into a lot of detail about exactly how painful and touch and go labor had been. I was in, I think, an incubator for a couple of days and she was desperately, like, sad that she wasn't allowed to hold me and cuddle me and she talks about that quite often and we get misty eye talking about it, you know.

And I was thinking you wouldn't make that up, you know, just to kind of give plausible. And so I knew she wouldn't have had an affair. I mean, there was like zero chance of that or anything weird like that. And obviously it never occurred to me that such a transgressive scenario as artificial insemination would have been used. Well, why did you think that your dad is not your dad?

Is it just because you're so different? It's a really good question. I think at that age, I can't have been thinking it logically, so I think it must have been visceral. And I think what it might have been, I sometimes think it might have been like pheromones or something like that. He used to be quite affectionate. I would sit on his lap sometimes when I was little and watched TV, you know.

and I was very fond of him and he was a lovely big bear to hug but I kind of felt differently about his smell and being than I did about my mothers with whom I would kind of absolutely nestle up to like a pup in a basket whereas with him it was more like an uncle

and I do remember also I had another uncle we're quite a small family my mother's an only child as well and my father has one half-sister his mother died very sadly before he was one and his father remarried and they had Margaret. And so Margaret is supposed to be related to me and it turns out isn't as well.

My cousins, her two daughters, were supposed to be related to me, aren't related to me. And then there was Fred, her husband, who was not supposed to be related to me. And I always instinctively felt a really strong bond with Fred because I think, I'm mapping this out now,

but I think it was because I didn't sense that there was something I was supposed to feel or sense that I wasn't getting. So I relaxed about it. Do you want I mean? He was just a man who was married into our family. And so I kind of instinctively, oh, we're like you and I, we're the same, you know. But where that came from? I mean, I just don't know.

And I don't want any of this to, I mean, my dad was really a great dad. You know, he was a totally like a mensch. But, you know, it was weird. I know my... One of my best friends, Danny Solomon, who I was at university with and his dad, Harry Solomon. You really do stick with you a lot, don't you?

Yeah, yeah. So he used to come up to you or down to Southampton location and take us out for dinner and Harry took us out for dinner, me and Danny, one time. And I just had this weird feeling like, hmm, this is weird, this feels like a dad, you know? Like, this is how I, you know, I'm getting a little kind of bat signal, like, of, this could be. And then when I met Jonathan Vizner, who again is 78, I think, who is the natural born son of Bertolt Vizner and Mary Barton,

and was the kind of Rosetta Stone through which we all went, oh, we're his. He's quite like, Sir Harry Solomon, and quite like, again, I meet it, he's my brother. Wow. But I actually feel like he's my father. So you genuinely feel a kinship with people to whom you're biologically related to you perhaps hadn't met before. Yeah. That is so interesting, man. I mean, the first time I went into that room where they were all having lunch, the first big gathering, I was, you know, it was, they were the first, there were 27 of them in there.

And they were the first blood relatives I'd been in a room with ever, basically, putting aside my own mother. You know, blood relatives of any thing approaching my own... you know, my own generation. I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it? At the age of what, 55 or something? You know, it reminds me of something. I was talking to a friend of mine because obviously my wife and I,

we left having children quite late. So we'll probably, you know, who knows how many will be able to have. I'd happily, you know, have a lot unlikely biologically to happen. And I was talking to a friend of mine who has adopted children. And he, without being overt about it,

was kind of, he was saying, it's not as rosy a thing as you think. Now, I'm not saying that's always the case for people, but it's interesting that there is that physical or whatever it is. It's so fascinating to me. But we went on this sidetrack a little bit, and I asked you about the relationship with your father and what changed for you when you found out that actually you're not by,

and it sounds like partly things clicked into place for you. Yeah. I mean, I suppose, yes, there's always a point, You lose something, I suppose. We have moved into perhaps a slightly more pragmatic recognition of the truth. And I know he felt hugely relieved when I went up and told my parents, you know, and some people said you shouldn't do that because it might be of a shock to them. They might have managed to suppress that information. Apparently, there were some fathers who, you always attended the clinic together,

but there were some of them that were told that their sperm would be mingled with the donor sperm, and it might just encourage it forward, give it the full of a propulsion when it got there. It might be their sperm that got the woman pregnant. So they might be all kinds of things that they've allowed themselves to believe. But when I told them there was huge relief, definitely. And I think he had always just felt, you know,

that it was a fairly trivial thing, you know. And I certainly don't want to like kind of like shaking by the repels and go, no, it's not trivial. You know, this is, this is, this is, Life itself, you know. But my view has to be that, you know, I have to recognize the truth of it, and there is a powerful bond there. But that is absolutely, of course, not to say it.

The thing you, I think the kind of the core philosophical conundrum that you get to through recognizing it and pondering on it is there is no alternative. It's not like I could have been this or I could have, I would not exist. They may have had a child by some other means. They might have adopted or something, but I wouldn't exist. There is only one set of circumstances in which I would not exist. exist and that's it. You know, so there's no point at all in thinking, I wish you this or I wish you that, you know, whatever, or recognise it. It just, I wouldn't be, you know. But I do think

it's probably relatively minor compared to the fact that, you know, my father was 89 when he, when we closed that loop. He's now 93, they're elderly, you know, and they are, the relationship with your parents changes at that point. anyway, you know, you realize it's on you now to be the parent, you know, to an extent. And, you know, I don't think, I don't think the DNA connection is that important in terms of the responsibility I have towards them or whatever at that point, you know, we're far past the point at which you, you know, you have the kind of revel without a cause kind of tear-stained row on the landing, you know, about, you should have, you know, what did you? Why did you?

You know, but that we can't do it. That's gone. You know what I'm getting from this interview, Simon, is what a wonderful man your father is. Oh, he is a great man. Yeah, he is. I can't talk about him for long on stage. Really? Before the old lower lip starts going.

He is because, I think, apart from anything else, he's like an absolute template for how you make the best of what you have, you know, which wasn't that much. He had such a blow to lose his mother. He was like 10 months old. I think tuberculosis, nobody knows really. He has no memory of her at all. And he was farmed out into foster care, basically, an extended family. Because in those days, you know, a man, working man couldn't look after a child on his own.

And then they came back, and he was given Margaret, and they're still incredibly close. But then the second wife died again, as I say, it's starting to look a bit suspicious now. But he married the third time. He was raised by his stepmother. Well, he was 14, I think, when he was. when his father remarried the second time, to Ivy, who I knew as my grand, but she wasn't related to anyone.

They had no children together. People were just like picked off, left, right and center. Do you want to mean? Like the 1930s and 40s, even without the war, she was a war widow, but most of it was pre-penicillin. That was the big deal, I think. I still think people don't recognize how, you know, how much of the world changed when penicillin became available.

That just, you know, people just used to die all the time before their fifth birthday. You know, it was extraordinary. So it emerges out of that. He's yanked out of school at the age of 14 by still living at that point with foster parents who were just tired of feeding a child who wasn't contributing. So they pulled him out of school and made him go to work. You know, he's a bright man.

He could have had, I would have definitely a degree of some sort and might have had a different life. But, you know, no grudges, made his way. As I say, created his own reality. You know, I could talk for an hour just about his hobbies, you know, and about how rich he made his life at home. You wrote a beautiful thread I think on Father's Day perhaps last year about him and his hobbies and so on

Was it his father's day? Was it a birthday? It was his birthday, yeah. It's there. Yeah, aviation being the big one. I've never met anyone who knows as much about anything as my father knows about aviation and not just, I mean he will spot a mosquito

at 2,000 paces or even by the specific wine it makes. He made over 1,172 scale models. never moved out into a different scale. That's his religion, you know, that would be like converting. But yeah, he made over... Like apostasy, it sounds like that. Exactly, yeah. He made over 40 specific different versions of the De Havelin Mosquito.

That was his like... And they are now in the Mosquito Museum. And then, but yeah, I mean, just like, I don't know, I feel like a different, and because I'm not like him, I suppose, I sort of see him as a, yeah, almost as a sort of a figure I've read about in books or something, you know. And I do have that, yeah, like that kind of, I'm slightly in awe of how anyone can be that, that patient and committed to a certain way of life without, I suppose, seeking the affirmation that I've done, you know, in my work and that sort of thing. just different needs and so it's I'm very very grateful to have known him in that respect you know but it is

just a slightly different recognition because of that difference I think just as having mentioned him earlier the first poem I encountered at Don Pashton was a poem called the elliptical stylus which is a fierce like unbelievably fierce defence of his father in a particular

very like tiny scenario and that was the connection I made with him. It's, and he is, I'm sure, his biological father, but that is a thing that I find, yeah, is a very moving, like when you dwell on it even for a moment, you get overwhelmed. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a US-based restoration agent who will stick by your side

from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed, pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. They're a different generation. I remember you brought up the mosquito, so my grandfather was born in the 1920s, my British grandfather. Very, very bright, very intelligent man, went to school in the north of England, had to leave school because it was the 1930s. He was from a working class background. He emerged into the Great Depression in the northwest of England. So he would go and try and get work. He would go to Liverpool, to Liverpool docks. There'd be hundreds of men who would go to the gates of Liverpool Docks. The foreman would come out

and would pick you, you, you, you, F off. Just as this time that he started to make his way, the World War II started. Then he became a joiner and he was working on the mosquito. And he was, and he was master joiner in the factories in the north of England. Wow. He worked on that plane. He worked on that plane. And then what happened is obviously he was a very intelligent man and very learning man, self-taught man. He would read the newspapers. He saw what was happening with Hitler in during the Second World War and he was omitted. He didn't have to go and fight because he was a vital part of the war effort because he was making the mosquito plane as a master joiner. But he felt so compelled to go and fight because he thought what was happening in Europe was so egregious

that he gave up that job and relative safety, said goodbye to his family, join the war effort. Then he fought in Italy, fought all the way down, and then fought in the Battle of El Alamein as a desert rat. Wow. And then after the end of the war, he was asked by his commanding officer. He said, Foster, you are a magnificent soldier. You should stay on and be part of the army. And he actually said no, because he didn't see himself as a man of war. That was a principle for him.

And then he returned to his family and raised a family. I think that generation were different. The way they saw things away, their sense of duty. Maybe it's me being nostalgic or projecting, but I think we've lost something. I don't think that generation, I think we've lost something of that generation, that sense of duty,

that sense of there is something more important than me when we live in the age of the self. I mean, yeah, I absolutely agree, and it's a huge conversation in itself. I think there are certain things. I wrote a piece when the Queen died last year, just saying that I found it almost baffling that people didn't.

that some people could express bemusement at the sense of loss other people felt, you know. I mean, she'd been there my entire life. There aren't many people that had been famous, let alone, you know, as a symbol of nationhood or whatever, for my entire life. But more, it was a sort of stirring of a, of like,

what had at one time been throughout most of human history, you know, the most primal emotion there is. You know, your commitment, you're part of the tribe, your sense of belonging to something and being able to, you know, the imaginative sympathy, to be able to invest an individual

with that sort of symbolic importance and regardless of scandals that come and go or personal failings, very few of which she, of course, really had anyway. But I think it's a similar thing. You know, the ability to identify and almost submerge yourself in something is something that I still have a stirring

of, but I don't know whether it would be enough to sort of sign up to war if I've been younger, but is gradually being lost and diminished as we as we move. As you say, it's a kind of era of individualism and in some respects, you know, liberal democracy

has encouraged that. And, you know, you've had plenty of guests on this show who've flagged the dangers of collectivism under whatever banner it might fly. I mean, there will be some people who would say that for the very same reason that people like your grandfather are less inclined, don't exist now, who would take it on as a duty to sign up. That's the same reason that we don't see so many wars. We don't, you know,

other nations find it difficult to muster the support for their nationalistic expansions, or whatever. It's why Putin's activities in Ukraine, apart from anything else, seems so jarring now, such an extraordinary sort of abrupt collision with all the values we had assumed had just kind of washed out across the whole surface of the earth, you know. But also the age of self is an individual choice. You get to make that decision every day. Do you commit yourself to something beyond yourself, or are you only worried about yourself? Are you only thinking about you? or are you actually trying to, whether it's your family, whether it's some other thing that you are attempting to serve.

I mean, I certainly know that for me, the most fulfilling things tend to be things that are outside of me. Yeah. And so we all get to make that choice. Do you want to live on the age of the self or not every single day? And we have plenty of opportunity not to do that if we choose not to. Well, that's a good, I mean, I'm glad you feel that way. But some might say that it's so the temptations,

the, you know, just the artifacts, the means through which to express the individual in yourself are so readily available and so instantly addictive for one of a more technically appropriate term, you know. And incredibly unsatisfying. Yeah, absolutely. They're incredibly unsatisfying. And once you realize that,

then you've got to stop going on about the age of self and start acting in a way that serves you and other people around you and is fulfilling. And the reason I'm saying this is I was just in the US at a conference which is full of younger, people who are, they're sort of on the conservative side of the spectrum, but they are interested in environmental issues and climate change and whatever. They're all in their 20s, 20 to 25. Half of them are married already. Most of them are about to have children

and they're working on things beyond them. I just think we, you know, we've got to realize we have the power to change reality if we choose it, you know, for ourselves. No one's making us spend our time on Instagram, no one. It's interesting, isn't it? I mean, all of the studies, I remember it came out sort of 15, 20 years ago, the sort of positive psychology movement, Martin Seligman and so on,

and there were a lot of books about that. And I think Jonathan Heights's book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which is a terrible title for an amazing book. But they emphasize that again and again and again, being part of something larger than yourself, feeling yourself emerged in a community that hopefully you share goals together.

And of course we all know the collapse of the church is a tragedy from that point of view. The superstitious element of it was of almost no importance whatsoever. I mean, I've thought, when I do the show, the work of the devil, part of the glory of it for me is the ability to express gratitude at the end,

gratitude for the sacrifice is made that I could exist. It's such an amazing feeling. When you express gratitude in front of a group of people, it's like a kind of... I know people do AA, they say they feel better for it, but I don't know whether they get that full. I don't know whether the church used to supply that. I'm sure.

But the ability to, as you say, pursue a common goal with a large number of people is, it's great that you think it is there, but it's not that easily found outside. Of course, people will try and encourage you to have a certain amount of commitment to your company if you're going to work. But of course, all the different contractual obligations and so on can undermine the sense of being voluntarily there. It seems to be a much more powerful effect on your happiness and satisfaction

if you volunteer, if you work for charity, than anything you'll get. But a lot of people even then will go watch a football match on a Saturday afternoon and feel that that's a communal gathering. But of course, it's totally passive. They're not working towards anything together. Whereas if three or four of you, I mean, my son's most satisfactory activity at the moment is nearly 16 is the band he's in, you know, and that has created a, He plays guitar. He's got two or three mates at any given moment in the band.

And they are working together towards a goal. And it's obvious to me that that is so much more satisfying for him than playing as Xbox or whatever. You know, hopefully that kind of life lesson will stick even if he doesn't actually end up headlining the pyramid stage. I mean, this is why I enjoyed doing this much more than I ever enjoyed doing stand-up. Yeah. Much more because there's that element. But I was very lucky. I had a lesson that I learned very early on. I used to play basketball in the local park.

There's a court there. And I was doing this kind of like personal development course, and they would get you to do things that you feared or found difficult or whatever. Scary. And they were like, you need to do a project that's not about you, but it's about contributing to the local community. So I organized a basketball tournament in this park. Right.

And what I learned was the way people treated me changed like that. when you become of value to other people, your relationships with other people change dramatically because they see you in a completely different light. So for me, it was a very practical in your face experience of what contributing to others actually does for you. So even in a very selfish way, it's something that I learned very early on. Anyway, we've gone off the track, Simon, put a bow on this forest,

a philosophical bow, if you like. You know, discovering what you discovered and doing the show, you just mentioned giving gratitude. What have you learned from all of this that it would be worth sharing other than what we already talked about, of course? Well, you know, it's funny, when you were talking, and this, I'm not avoiding the answer, but just going back to your basketball thing, I think, like, if I had a single light switch moment in my whole life,

light bulb or whatever, it was when I first started doing improv or improv, I think we then called it, which was in about, 1994. I hadn't really intended to. I was trying to make it as a journalist and a newspaper asked me to review or write a piece about the sudden surge of popularity because we had whose line is it anyway on and so on. And I mean, I could write a book about what improv taught me. Other people have tried to do that, but you really do have to experience it for yourself. But the kind of taking a deep breath and jumping into an improv scene, having no idea where it's going to go, trusting other people, to support you.

It's like you do those trust exercises where you fall backwards and other people catch you. But in an improv scene, you're all falling backwards and catching at the same time. It's a constant, like, emerging thing. And it totally woke me up

to both those things. The satisfaction that can come from creating something in real time with other people. Nobody's trying to be a leader actually in that situation. So it's not quite the same, but you are providing value

and you are reassuring with trust. And also, you're taking a huge risk with vulnerability. because if you do a scene in real time, you know, there's a chance you'll say something that people, this is the fear that people have. Will I say something that makes people realize, I don't know, something that I've been trying to conceal and protect for all this time?

And over the course of a couple of months are doing improv with these people, you might reveal yourself much more on stage than you do, you know, off. And there are all kinds of exercises to get that out of you. And then also about letting go. I've been left in like the most helpful. this giggles, I suppose, essentially ever in my life. They used to do a thing called three-headed expert where three improv players line up side by side, you can even link arms, and somebody like

yourself, ask them a question, and they're an expert on it. So you say, so Professor Wagglebottom, I believe you're an expert on the Australian octopus. Yes, that is correct. I have been studying the octopus for years, and you just do it one word at a time. But it, teaches you that you're not in control. So you have an idea of where you think this is going and there may go somewhere completely different with it. And the realization that, I mean, it's almost like the confabulation thing

in the split-brain patient. You know, you're laughing because you have no control over what you just said. And so the reason I mentioned that is because fast forward to work of the devil, the thing I learned is that every single time you take the risk of exposing yourself, the vulnerability, that's what,

creates the moment that's memorable. Every time, and the first time you do it, you might do it quite clumsily, and you can sense they're supportive, but they're not really laughing. But once you then kind of furnish it as well and do it with some degree of skill and competence, it is so rewarding. It's like you have to just constantly be tearing off the carapace.

You have to be constantly breaking the ice on the surface. Because otherwise, you as a performer will find tricks to avoid exposing yourself. Just like an eight-year-old child will find tricks to avoid exposing itself at school. And the job you have is to constantly be smashing those off,

ripping them off, and showing your soft white underbelly as often as you can. And that's what I've learned. And it's been, you know, a long time coming, I guess, but it's... And now I'm addicted to it. Now I have to, like, hunt around.

What else can I expose this? And this might be, of course, the downfall moment. Yeah, as long as it's... metaphorical or not useful. Soft white underbelly, but stop there. Yes. Indeed. But Simon, as always, an absolute pleasure to interview. The last question we always ask our guests is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Well, it's so interesting that question, because, of course, if you spend your days on Twitter as I do, or indeed watching Trigonometry podcasts, it does feel like everybody is talking about

all these things, you know, but out there in the real world. I'm going to take a massive sort of left turn after everything I've been talking now, and I do think there is something different about the AI threat that the world at large is not talking about very much. And the reason is, I just become aware recently, I think you may have spoken to some of them, the chap, who I never remember names, who withdrew himself from the Google project and has been saying, we need to be very careful, you know, maybe a moratorium and so on. Well, we all know there's not going to be a moratorium on AI research, because if it was enforced in Silicon Valley or across America or the West of whatever, then all that would happen is our enemies would get the gain.

But I've never seen people before flagging up danger ahead in their field of which they are an expert where they are not asking for more funding, not asking that we invest more in this, not asking that this be raised up in the agenda in government programming and so on, but literally just going, I've got a horrible feeling we've opened. up a wormhole into a space through which a torrent of demons might be about to rush, and I really think we should maybe just slow down here. I cannot think of all, I'm not a climate change sceptic, but you can't help but notice that all the people who are sounding that alarm

are demanding more funds, are demanding more be done, of the kind of things that they would like to see be done anyway. They almost always have an agenda for redistribution of resources. and so on that they would have been quite keen on even if there weren't this kind of climate. But the AI thing seems to be very different. And I think it's one of those things that kind of, you know, you see a front page newspaper.

It will have a picture of the tennis from Wimbledon and the latest, you know, spending cuts in the National Health Service. And just down the bottom, it says, AI expert warns more than 50% risk of world-ending, you know, existential threat from. the thing he's been working on for the last 30 years. And you kind of go, these stories are not the same. So anyway, I don't know what the solution to that is.

It's obviously beyond my capabilities. But I do worry that a lot of young people feel demoralised by, you know, the threats made to now quite significant, you know, previously aspirational jobs, not like just driving trucks or Sainsbridge checkouts by automation. I don't know, we need to disentangle and identify what might be that these experts are genuinely worried about and engage with it. Well, Eric Weinstein, who was sitting in that chair very not long ago, his argument is we need a new economic model.

And I think that may end up be one of the potential solutions when you've got robots making everything, effectively. It may actually open humanity to a world of very good possibility. too. We just, but every transition in history has been accompanied by a lot of breakages and destruction. I think it was my old colleague on Radio 4, Tim Harford, who said that, you know, if you take the Black Brock's approach, then to some extent there's very little difference between traditional automation and the shifting of factors to the third world or the developing world or whatever or just across the border in America, you know, in the sense that jobs just

disappeared and were being done somewhere else by something else. In that case, you know, poorly paid workers who knew no better than to accept that deal. And that has, broadly speaking, yes, been a good thing worldwide, you know, just not for people in the Rust Belt or whatever. But I don't know, it feels different this time, I think. So, yes, a new economic model where, obviously, you tax the people who own the robots, but, you know, the capacity, I mean, it's always an arms race, isn't it, the tax code, you know, between the attempt to claw some of that back for the general good.

and the private sector accountants generally win. So I'm not sure what we do about that from that point of view. I just wish I could see, I mean, as I say, I'm not pro, I wasn't pro-Brexit, but the one thing I thought was, you know, a good argument for it was the sort of agenda that Dominic Cummings had, to be honest, that he wanted to see a change in the way that Westminster was populated, in the way the cabinet was people by people who had expertise in something other than winning constituency votes.

And this is something we're still struggling with, you know. There are just too many people in government who don't have the kind of technical nows to understand what they're looking at. I think it's very obviously what went wrong with the pandemic as well. You know, you look at something, I mean, it's not his fault, but how the hell did we end up going into that

with somebody like Matt Hancock in charge? I mean, it's just not good enough. You know, it's not a question of his morality or is like, you know, rates, mates or whatever, it's just not got the cognitive firepower. But it's very difficult for people who do have to find themselves in cabinet through the traditional means of creating that.

And very little incentive to do so. Anyway, Simon, this is the most British ending to an interview ever. It's not good enough. Follow us on locals where we're going to ask Simon your questions. And of course, make sure you go and find Simon online, follow him at the Simon Evans. on Twitter. And of course, you are going to be doing

an Edinburgh show, a new one, which will then go out as a tour as well. That's called Have We Met? Have we met? It's all about memory. It's about memory, although the more I've written it, the more I've realised

there are all sorts of interesting meanings to that phrase, not least, of course, relating to my brothers and sisters. Simon, and you guys head on over to locals. We'll see you there. Are there any subjects you don't make jokes of about and why.