May 2, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:56:45
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Three, two, one, boom! | ||
| And we're live! | ||
| How are you? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'm pouring coffee in the first seconds of our chat. | ||
| That's the good way to do it. | ||
| With a cafetiere, I think it is. | ||
| I think that's named in a French way. | ||
| A French press? | ||
| That's what they're called? | ||
| Is it called? | ||
| Well, I think it's called a cafetiere, but it's probably called a pot of coffee. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| There's a French word for it that we just ignore here in America. | ||
| They did a lot of the food. | ||
| You know, because you have herbs. | ||
| You know herbs? | ||
| And I used to do this bit of material, which I really enjoyed saying. | ||
| You know, the difference between British and American, you say this, you say that. | ||
| And you say herbs, and we say herbs, because there's a fucking H in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I used to say, because there's a fucking H. And I thought, why has the H dropped off for America? | ||
| I think it's because a lot of French guys would have come over, emigration, and they would have done a lot of cooking. | ||
| These French guys know about cooking, and they do the herbs, and they cut the H off totally. | ||
| So I think that was an influence from that. | ||
| Probably Julia Child. | ||
| Julia Child, was she French? | ||
| Yeah, I think. | ||
| Wasn't she? | ||
| She is now. | ||
| I mean, she's into French cooking. | ||
| Oh, right, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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That was her thing, right? | |
| Maybe Lafayette is sitting next to Washington and said, we will use Albs with this stuff here, and then we could do the Revolutionary War, and then you guys will win, and then we'll hate each other forever. | ||
| Well, you guys also do a lot of weird stuff, where you put like a U in color, and you have a Y in tires. | ||
| What do you put in tires? | ||
| T-I. R-E-S. Yeah, I think we had first dibs on the language. | ||
| Yeah, I don't understand what we did do there. | ||
| No, you guys got on the Mayflower and they said, okay, we're going to talk like this for now. | ||
| We're going to say woo! | ||
| A lot. | ||
| And we're going to get rid of the Y in tires. | ||
| We're going to invent tires. | ||
| Get rid of the Y. Yeah, I just think the U in color and honor is a U in honor as well. | ||
| And we've got it and you've got it out. | ||
| I think yours is more logical. | ||
|
unidentified
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Honor. | |
| For honor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But not for herbs. | ||
| No, herbs is, I think that's more French influence. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Yeah, I always wondered, because I grew up in Boston, and I always wondered, like, those were the first people to leave England and Europe. | ||
| Like, what the fuck happened to their language? | ||
| Because they developed the most disgusting brand of it. | ||
| Well, you've got your A's, your Boston A's, which I can't hear a strong Boston coming out of you. | ||
| Yeah, I got rid of it. | ||
| I heard myself on television once when I was like 19 years old. | ||
| I was like, holy shit, what is that? | ||
| Well, you guys had, or you used to have, the mother, father, brother, and it's the A. And we say mother, father, sister. | ||
| We don't have an R at the end of our mother, brother, father, sister. | ||
| And you in Boston, we say mother instead of mother. | ||
| And the rest of America has a much stronger R. And Ireland has that. | ||
| That's a very Irish-influenced... | ||
| And for us, the R, when I'm playing American, when I was doing roles like that, the R was the hardest thing to get. | ||
| Hard, hard tar. | ||
| I remember friends saying, hey, I was cooking this thing that came out like hard, hard tar. | ||
| And I thought that is the one to practice because that is just hard, hard tar. | ||
| We called it hard, hard tar, which just doesn't sound the same. | ||
| You've spent a lot of time over here. | ||
| The only time I've ever spent in England is working. | ||
| Like, a little bit of downtime, doing stand-up and hanging out over there, but most of it's just been working. | ||
| Either working for the UFC. I never really get a chance to really spend time in England. | ||
| I'd like to. | ||
| I'd like to do that, just to kind of understand you folks. | ||
| You're a different breed. | ||
| I think at the base, having played 45 countries now, I think everyone is actually the same when you get down below a level. | ||
| But, you know, if you're going to reach for you, there's got to be a number of things which... | ||
| Would make it seem different and brand names will be different than your sports stars, you know, everyone's sports stars, everyone's politicians, that kind of thing. | ||
| But underneath it all, it's going to be, there's going to be more mainstream people, there's going to be alternative people, there's going to be, and the whole spectrum now, like in the old days, it used to be everything was mainstream and a bit of alternative. | ||
| Now, I think your country, my country, we have a whole spectrum of what interests people. | ||
| It's much more open in that way. | ||
| Yeah, no, I certainly agree. | ||
| The collection of people is very similar. | ||
| It's just they're operating in a different environment, a different theater, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, we're tightly smashed together, what are we, 65 million, and you're 300 million, and you're such a large, your country is so large compared to us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there was a thing of only 10% of Americans have passports. | ||
| But if you look at the area, something like that. | ||
| But then if you look at where the 10% can go in America, it's just so huge. | ||
| So it's slightly more understandable why a lot of Americans say, I don't need a passport because I'm just going to go to that place, which is miles away. | ||
| That's an understanding of you, but I think it would do everybody good to go somewhere like Asia. | ||
| Every time I go to Asia, I always think, okay, people are like this too. | ||
| This is an interesting thing to experience. | ||
| Thailand in particular, which I really loved. | ||
| Thailand is amazing because it's like, wow, they hit this perfect frequency where everybody's really friendly and really nice. | ||
| They call it the land of the smiles. | ||
| It's this very unusual environment there where everybody seems warm and greeting. | ||
| I don't think I ran into one rude Thai while I was there. | ||
| That sounds very interesting. | ||
| When I toured Asia, but unfortunately it was kind of in and out. | ||
| But that's interesting. | ||
| Thai is more than any other country. | ||
| Because I'm sure they must have a black market and a thing and some Thai gangsters. | ||
| Maybe they're very nice gangsters. | ||
| Maybe they're the nicest gangsters we know. | ||
| I'm sure they're not. | ||
| Ask you first before they shoot you. | ||
| I'm sure when it gets to the drug smuggling and sex trafficking and all the other things. | ||
| We're going to do sex trafficking, but would you mind awfully if polite drug smugglers? | ||
| I mean, they have obviously a very open environment. | ||
| When you see Bangkok, it's like Muay Thai fights and chaos and a lot of expats wandering around drinking. | ||
| It's a different sort of world over there. | ||
| But when I was there, I was in Chiang Mai. | ||
| And it's just super friendly people. | ||
| Beautiful landscape. | ||
| Very nice. | ||
| Have you been in Vietnam? | ||
| No, never. | ||
| Heard it's amazing, though. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I find that from an American perspective, it would be very interesting people going there, even if they were there before and during the time of war or after, just to see how people are. | ||
| Because they fought for so long. | ||
| There's all the French stuff before that, the end of China, but even before America got involved. | ||
| And they call it a thousand-year war that they fought. | ||
| Anyway, it's interesting. | ||
| I hope new generations coming along don't bring the baggage of previous generations and we can all try and move forward into a world that's more positive even though it doesn't necessarily look like that. | ||
| Well, what has always been really interesting to me about Vietnam that I learned from Bourdain Was that they don't hold any grudges towards Americans, which I find incredible. | ||
| I got that sense of it. | ||
| I have not played there, haven't been there, but I got that sense that they were looking forward. | ||
| They just accept it, that it's the past, and they don't have any grudges. | ||
| It's an amazing attitude. | ||
| It is an amazing attitude. | ||
| I suppose it's better if you... | ||
| They did an empirical... | ||
| Is it Empirical Window? | ||
| They didn't do a massive conga. | ||
| In the end, America left, and so they got what they were... | ||
| I assume the majority of them were trying to get. | ||
| They can run it however they want to run it. | ||
| Yeah, it's tragic, the wars are getting into it. | ||
| I was going to be in the military when I was a kid. | ||
| That was one of my... | ||
| I wanted to be in Special Forces. | ||
| You look at me... | ||
| Now, being a transgender guy, yeah, that was where I was. | ||
| I know Trump wouldn't have let me in the forces right now if I weren't applied right this second. | ||
| But, yeah, so I follow everything. | ||
| I kind of run my life on a military... | ||
| That sounds a bit weird. | ||
| I run my career on a military thing. | ||
| It's quite difficult. | ||
| You know, any career, putting it together is kind of weird. | ||
| What's your next move? | ||
| What's this? | ||
| How so? | ||
| You strategize? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Strategy up the wazoo. | ||
| I plan 50 years ahead. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Well if you think about it I came out as transgender 34 years ago. | ||
| That's not the first good thing that an agent wants to hear. | ||
| You're transgender? | ||
| That's 85! | ||
| This is such a hot thing. | ||
| This is, even now, they would say, okay, well, it's got a little better than it was for about 10 millennia. | ||
| It's a little better now, but it's still not the hottest ticket that everyone's... | ||
| We want transgender guys in here for this, that, the other. | ||
| It's not the top of the list. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I've also got boy mode and girl mode, and I do dramatic films in boy mode, and then I'm touring in girl mode and doing stand-up. | ||
| And I campaign for politics in girl mode. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| I just switch, change, you know, take off heels, flat shoes. | ||
| Yeah, because if you were just talking, like if you didn't have makeup on and you didn't have the heels and the nails, you just seem male. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think it's genetically inbuilt. | ||
| You know, there's some – I think there's quite a lot of people maybe who were – the way they live their lives, they live their own personality. | ||
| They're not particularly male or female, I feel. | ||
| But I've always felt since I was four or five, I wanted to express this side of myself, and it's built in. | ||
| I think it's genetic. | ||
| And if you analyze masculine and feminine, if you really get down to it, I find it impossible to come up with anything that was particularly masculine – particularly feminine, except for the ability to build muscle mass is easier for men. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But, you know, great footballers, soccer players, men and women, athletics runners, men and women, strong character men, weak character men and women. | ||
| Mathematicians, whatever it is, there's nothing that you can really say, ah, that is only a good shot with a gun. | ||
| No, anyone can do that. | ||
| We're all humans. | ||
| And we get fixated by the masculine and feminine. | ||
| Whereas if it's a tiger, if a tiger's attacking you and trying to kill you, you don't go, now, is this a girl tiger or a boy tiger? | ||
| We don't care about it. | ||
| And they don't care either. | ||
| The Tigers. | ||
| So you've always felt like you gravitated towards feminine things? | ||
| No, gravitated towards both. | ||
| I gravitated towards playing soccer. | ||
| I was in the first team for two years when I was a kid. | ||
| Was planning to do Office of Training Corps and then go Marines or paras and then go Special Forces, RSAS, which would be the equivalent of your Delta Force. | ||
| And that was a distinct plan. | ||
| I knew a lot about that. | ||
| And I thought, which war are they going to send me to? | ||
| Actually, which war are they going to send me to? | ||
| And it could be the idiots that I'm at school with will send me to the wrong war. | ||
| Because World War II is very clear, and then after that, every other war is kind of hazy. | ||
| But there's all this feminine side, girl side. | ||
| I'm not sure how to do it. | ||
| Even after 34 years, it's difficult to articulate. | ||
| But I wanted to express that. | ||
| And if I look more like a woman, then it would be much easier. | ||
| So I decided to do that in 1985 when it wasn't cool. | ||
| And I've had a lot of fights in the street, a lot of people screaming abuse at me. | ||
| I've taken a couple of people to court or just reported in police and then we went to court. | ||
| And yeah, you fight your fights. | ||
| Instead of going to do a military fighting thing, I've said, this might be Wrong for me to say this, but I say I've done Special Forces Civilian Division, you know, fighting people, screaming at people's feet, and I perform in four languages. | ||
| I've run over 80 marathons. | ||
| I'm going into politics next year, and yeah, and the transgender thing is in a better place than it was. | ||
| Back in 85. Well, it's certainly now. | ||
| I think because of probably Caitlyn Jenner and the movement that you're seeing to accept people that want to do whatever and anything they want to do. | ||
| Yeah, it is just we're more accepting of each other. | ||
| We do seem to be more... | ||
|
unidentified
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What's the word? | |
| It begins with a T. More open, more allowing. | ||
| There's a word for it which just walked out of my head. | ||
| But anyway, that word. | ||
| But, yeah, and at the same time, people are going around doing more killings and stuff. | ||
| Well, there's more people. | ||
| Yeah, there is more. | ||
| There's just sheer volume of humans. | ||
| And the population growth is insane. | ||
| It took us like 200,000 years to get to 1 billion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then it's taken us, I don't know, 50 years to get to 7.5 billion, which is scary. | ||
| Yeah, when I was a kid, I think the United States population was less than 200 million. | ||
| Now it's 300 million. | ||
| And global was, whatever it was, now it's 7 plus, bordering at 8 billion people. | ||
| When I came out, I think it was 6.5, I think. | ||
| That's just running away. | ||
| And one of the weird things is if we are having less wars, if we're getting better health to people, then more kids are around. | ||
| And some people in, I suppose, lower income backgrounds around the world, they will say, well, we need to have six kids because that's what, you know, for much money. | ||
| Yeah, that's what we do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As economics get better, people have less kids and that hopefully that should calm down. | ||
| There should be a bottoming. | ||
| I think they feel there will be a leveling off of the population. | ||
| Yeah, I've read that theory that they believe that industrialized nations and westernized society, when people start having two careers, you know, and then two career households, people are less likely to have a bunch of kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as people do better, they have less kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm a glasses two-thirds full person. | ||
| That's what I feel. | ||
| Instead of a glasses half full, half empty person. | ||
| So you're optimistic. | ||
| I'm a big, I couldn't be here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the hills with the nails. | ||
| I'm planning to do this. | ||
| I've got a film coming out and I'm touring the country and then I'm going to politics as well and When you first started wearing women's clothes and dresses and makeup on stage, did people think it was a gimmick? | ||
| What did they think? | ||
| They did. | ||
| I decided not to call them women's clothes. | ||
| I would just wear dresses. | ||
| You know, like women can wear trousers or pants. | ||
| We used to call that men's pants. | ||
| And I said, oh, they're pants. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| So, but yeah, I first started talking about it and not wearing anything. | ||
| Again, look kind of boy-like and male-like. | ||
| And you were talking about it like... | ||
| I had the first joke. | ||
| This is my first ever joke. | ||
| I had this about two years before I did it. | ||
| I said, look, you're doing stand-up. | ||
| So, if you're from a minority, it's kind of a good thing. | ||
| So, if you... | ||
| In stand-up terms. | ||
| So, if you're from a lower income background, you can say, rich people. | ||
|
unidentified
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God, they're... | |
| So easy for them. | ||
| If you're a woman, you say, men. | ||
| Ah, men. | ||
| If you have an ethnic background, you say, white people. | ||
| Oh, there's white people. | ||
| So if you're a white male, middle class, stand up. | ||
| Ah, it's useless. | ||
| So, thank God I'm a transvestite. | ||
| That was my first laugh. | ||
| And everyone thought, he's making jokes about something that he's not. | ||
| And they wouldn't believe me. | ||
| And journalists were going, I don't know why he's doing this. | ||
| Because he's doing pretty well now, but is this a joke? | ||
| So I thought, I better wear a dress and put some makeup on. | ||
| And then they said, okay, he's doing this. | ||
| He is serious, but he looks a mess. | ||
| This kind of baby elephant thing I was doing. | ||
| Okay, you've got to get your weight under control. | ||
| You've got a better haircut than that. | ||
| And you've just got to fail a lot. | ||
| And there's a humiliation period. | ||
| I mean, this is the weird thing about coming out. | ||
| It's kind of humiliating. | ||
| People say horrible things. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| Somebody said to my face right there as I was walking out of a restaurant. | ||
| So I thought, that's not very nice. | ||
| And you have to be able to deflect it and go, well, you're obviously a scumbag. | ||
| So fuck you, man. | ||
| Is it mostly men? | ||
| Yes, and occasionally women. | ||
| Occasionally women, but, yeah, I mean, you know, people have lower character or lesser character. | ||
| If you're a strong character in yourself, you don't care. | ||
| Live in that live. | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| You know, people, okay, it doesn't quite look together, but, you know, life's tough enough. | ||
| But if you want to put someone down, you raise your own status by doing it, and they will do that. | ||
| And so I have stood in the street and people have unloaded it, you know, swear words invective to me. | ||
| And I've just I fuck you and I fuck you and I fuck you and I fuck you. | ||
| And it's literally, you know, two or three of them or one of me just screaming at each other. | ||
| And I just won't back down now. | ||
| This happened recently. | ||
| It was nine months ago. | ||
| Someone outside my house in London just having a go at me. | ||
| They knew who you were as well? | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| They knew exactly where I lived. | ||
| We said, we're going to do your house. | ||
| Who the hell is this asshole? | ||
| Just because of the way you dress? | ||
| Well, he added that into it. | ||
| There was an altercation over. | ||
| I was just packing my car up because I was just driving home to see my dad. | ||
| And somebody said, you've got to give me a ride in your car. | ||
| And I said, someone heckles me like that in the street. | ||
| I just come back with the phone. | ||
| You will never have a ride in my car. | ||
| I have to give you whatever I have to give you. | ||
| So that happened. | ||
| And then this guy went off. | ||
| And yeah, this and that and the other. | ||
| And he's just screaming at me and so on. | ||
| Shouting back at him, giving him word for word. | ||
| And then I went, I said, who is that idiot? | ||
| And they said, oh, that's this guy. | ||
| Oh, he's a known, he's a nutter. | ||
| You know, he's just, he does this. | ||
| I went, all right, maybe I should mention it. | ||
| Because he said he's going to do my... | ||
| I'll mention it to the police... | ||
| No, it doesn't matter. | ||
| Two weeks later, same thing. | ||
| Who's shouting at me? | ||
| Oh, it's the same dickhead. | ||
| So I thought, right, next time I go possibly station. | ||
| So now he knows where you live. | ||
| Well, he always did. | ||
| He was right in front of the house. | ||
| That's always fun, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, well, and he said, we're going to do your house when you're away. | ||
| So that was his opening gambit. | ||
| We're going to do your house when you're away. | ||
| I'm letting you know they're a coward. | ||
| Yeah, well, it was not very positive. | ||
| He didn't run a PR company, I don't think. | ||
| That's kind of terrorism, right? | ||
| They're trying to strike terror on you when you're away. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Well, that is, yes. | ||
| That is the hatred thing. | ||
| Did you think about just going out there and fucking them up? | ||
| I don't think I'm quite that... | ||
| I would have liked to. | ||
| If I'd gone through the military thing, if I'd gone through it, I would have learned how to do that, you know? | ||
| And I never have craft my guard myself up to the thing. | ||
| I do need to craft my guard myself up, but I haven't... | ||
| Got there. | ||
| Well, we were talking before, and you were trying to tell me that you were lazy. | ||
| I'm like, fuck you. | ||
| I saw that thing that you did, that documentary, where you ran a series of marathons in a row with no training at all. | ||
| And I remember thinking before that, I had this opinion of you. | ||
| And the opinion of you was you're a funny guy, you're a funny comedian, you have good stand-up, you obviously work hard at it. | ||
| But then I saw that. | ||
| And I was like, oh, okay, there's something going on there. | ||
| Like, that was a different kind of human being. | ||
| The kind of human being that could push themselves into doing that day after day after day. | ||
| And I looked at your feet where your skin was literally falling off and you're taping everything up. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| That's a person that's got... | ||
| You have an iron will. | ||
| That's a very unusual will for a comedian who doesn't really exercise. | ||
| When you were doing... | ||
| I mean, you maybe exercise a little bit, but you weren't in shape. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| And you decided to run how many marathons in a row? | ||
| Was it the UK one? | ||
| The first one. | ||
| Yeah, that was 43 in 51 days. | ||
| 43 marathons in a row in 51 days with no training. | ||
| At a day of a week. | ||
| I did have training, though. | ||
| Six weeks training. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is not a lot. | ||
| But they said that, you know, sometimes if you run a marathon, you should train for nine months before that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I thought, well, if I'm going to do 43, that's going to be, I'm going to be training forever. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I can't be bothered with that. | ||
| So I, but you know, and it's happened in your Civil War, in maybe in any war, I'm somewhat encyclopedic about your Civil War and Revolution War to a bit and World War II, but on the spot training, you know, training as you go along. | ||
| That's what I did. | ||
| The first 10 marathons trains you for the next 33. Trevor Burrus What was it like when you got over the first day though? | ||
| First marathon, you must be like, what the fuck? | ||
| No, first day is okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Because, well, it's all in your head. | ||
| It's more mental than it is physical. | ||
| And so the first marathon, I've heard of people running marathons, run, walk, stagger, not very fast, get it done, boom. | ||
| The second marathon is weird, because you go... | ||
| I've done one. | ||
| I'm on the second. | ||
| And you can't really rejoice. | ||
| You can't punch the sky. | ||
| You can't put a medal around your neck. | ||
| You've got up at 5 or 6 in the morning and it's midday and you're going through your second one. | ||
| And then you're through the third one. | ||
| And then you're through the fourth one. | ||
| And then it was raining and my feet were shredding. | ||
| For the moisture? | ||
| It was, yes, it made it too soft and they were rubbing on the running shoes and I didn't know how to, how do I fix it when I'm actually wearing on it all the time? | ||
| So we started bathing it in surgical spirit, which you call something else. | ||
| It's an ethanol method. | ||
| Anyway, it's some sort of alcoholic spirit and it takes the moisture out of your feet. | ||
| True. | ||
| So it became like stones. | ||
| It's kind of like... | ||
| Anyway, if anyone looks up surgical spirit, if you Google it now, you'll see what it's called in America. | ||
| But it's some sort of alcoholic thing that just removes moisture. | ||
| And so it made my feet... | ||
| My toes like little stones... | ||
| And kind of tough. | ||
| And actually that got us through. | ||
| And then I started, and also apparently, because I did 27 marathons in 27 days in South Africa in 2016, and that was, the temperatures were crazy on that. | ||
| But it seems that the body will switch on a healing property that we've got latent in ourselves that we don't use, and you will heal quicker. | ||
| You'll heal faster the more you get. | ||
| So you get stronger in both the British one and the South African one. | ||
| I got stronger as I went on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| The first 10 days are the key thing. | ||
| And after that, it's kind of easier. | ||
| You're used to it. | ||
| Your body just adapts and understands this crazy asshole is going to do this crazy asshole. | ||
| And the brain goes, what kind of marathon shall we run today? | ||
| As opposed to, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| What kind of marathon? | ||
| Yeah, well, I think that's what the brain is doing. | ||
| Because the first day, the brain is going, you're going to do what? | ||
| This marathon. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The second day, the brain is going, now we're doing another one. | ||
| Third day, fourth day, fifth day. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| And then day 10, the brain is going, okay, you're on this kind of kick or something. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Let's try a better marathon. | ||
| Don't push it too hard. | ||
| The brain starts talking to the body and somehow it levels up. | ||
| Then it gets surreal. | ||
| Marathon 18, Marathon 23. I remember Marathon 31. That was a lovely... | ||
| It's just so weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it was fun. | ||
| And you own the road. | ||
| You know, Woody Guthrie, this land is our land, this land is my land. | ||
| You become like it's your land. | ||
| It's everybody's land. | ||
| Because you're running on the roads of this country I grew up in. | ||
| And you feel that the roads, the fields, the birds. | ||
| I didn't listen to any music. | ||
| It's like a safety thing for traffic. | ||
| But also, you could hear everything that's going on. | ||
| Birds, rivers running. | ||
| I ran past somebody's house. | ||
| This was on about day two. | ||
| And there was a river running there and it went through the back of this guy's garden. | ||
| And he said, oh, hello. | ||
| I went and visited him and I washed my feet in the river. | ||
| And then I put the socks back on and I carried on running. | ||
| I thought, you can do weird things. | ||
| I took blackberries out of the bushes like I did when I was a kid. | ||
| It just became a feral, this holistic or feral marathons. | ||
| That's what I was doing. | ||
| It's not run. | ||
| It's not people shouting from the sides. | ||
| No one cares, really, which is fine. | ||
| And I'm just wrapped up in this other place. | ||
| And it's beautiful. | ||
| I mean, it's really zen. | ||
| Well, it seems like it would change you, like accomplishing something like that, like on the last day, the last run. | ||
| When you cross the line, what was that feeling like? | ||
| Well, there's a picture. | ||
| You brought up that picture. | ||
| They put up some flags and stuff. | ||
| That was beautiful. | ||
| I tried to do a five-hour marathon. | ||
| Now, if you know the speed, it's two hours is what they're trying to break down. | ||
| So this is really slow. | ||
| But then having done 42 marathons, maybe it's fair. | ||
| And I missed it by about 30 seconds. | ||
| But it was... | ||
| It was beautiful to finish it. | ||
| I was really quite strong all the way through. | ||
| I didn't stop at any time. | ||
| That was good. | ||
| In South Africa, though, I did 27 in 27 days. | ||
| Salute to Nelson Mandela's 27 years in prison. | ||
| And day five, they put me in hospital because they thought my kidneys were given up. | ||
| Were you experiencing rhabdo? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Rhabdomyolysis. | ||
| You know about rhabdomyolysis. | ||
| Yeah, I got rhabdo in 2012. How'd you get that? | ||
| I was on an anti-cholesterol drug, just a sort of health drug. | ||
| Your cholesterol is a bit high, take this thing once a day. | ||
| And side effect is rhabdomyolysis, which I couldn't spell, being dyslexic. | ||
| And I was peeing brown pee. | ||
| And there's no real pain, a lot of lethargy. | ||
| I was really tired. | ||
| I thought, And this is without exercise, you were getting it? | ||
| That was on marathon three and marathon four. | ||
| So I had trained... | ||
| Had I trained before that? | ||
| I'd done some training before that one. | ||
| I'm a bit weird with my training. | ||
| But yeah, so there wasn't a huge amount of training before that one. | ||
| But third marathon... | ||
| And I started peeing a bit of brown pee. | ||
| This was not through the whole series of marathons, or it was? | ||
| No, well, I tried to do South Africa twice. | ||
| So 2012 was my first one. | ||
| After day four, on an anti-cholesterol drug, trying to control my cholesterol, and I started brewing brown pee. | ||
| And then they said, you've got to go to hospital now. | ||
| The guys are going to put fluids through you. | ||
| You have to go and see a specialist. | ||
| The specialist said you can't continue this 27 thing because you have to get all this stuff out of your system. | ||
| Otherwise, the kidneys – because it shreds the muscles into the bloodstream, clogs up kidneys, kidney failure. | ||
| Very dangerous. | ||
| A lot of fighters get it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A fighter died from it recently in Boston in the Massachusetts area. | ||
| Yeah, it's apparently something that happens when fighters overtrain as well. | ||
| Sometimes they're not doing it scientifically, so they're not analyzing their heart rate, their heart rate variability, and they don't know that they haven't really truly recovered and they continue to push themselves because they want to prepare harder. | ||
| They have this sort of mental mindset, just train harder and you'll be better off. | ||
| But that's not necessarily the case if your body can't physically keep up with the recovery. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And sometimes they'll go into a fight overtrained, and then they wind up getting robbed out from the fight. | ||
| It's happened several times. | ||
| And it's caused a few deaths. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they said this. | ||
| You said, you carry on running now in 2012, and you won't make it to 2016. Did you get off that medication? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would think that all that running, you wouldn't need that medication. | ||
| I would have thought. | ||
| But, you know, they check you out, and you say, your cholesterol's just a touch high. | ||
| Those motherfuckers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You know, you'll be on this for the rest of your life. | ||
| That stuff scares the shit out of me, those statins. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It goes to a scary place. | ||
| But 2016, day 5, bloods were looking a bit weird. | ||
| Day off, so day 27, I did double marathon. | ||
| And that was kind of an interesting day. | ||
| So you run one marathon. | ||
| Last day of your run, you've only done 25 marathons, and it's the day 27. And when you go through that finishing, the final flag where you should be waving flags, you've got another marathon to go. | ||
| My brain, I thought, this is kind of good, but it's 90K you're going to do today. | ||
| Ignore it, carry on. | ||
| And it was a rough, rough old day. | ||
| That's five hours, then another five hours. | ||
| Five hours plus, then another five hours plus. | ||
| In the end, it was six. | ||
| I took 11 hours and 50 minutes to run 90K. So I did double marathon in 11 hours, 10 minutes. | ||
| That's damn good. | ||
| Yeah, it was good enough. | ||
| And they got a Comrades Marathon in South Africa, which is 90k, and they got a 12-hour cutoff. | ||
| So I said, I will do 90k in 12 hours. | ||
| The double marathon was 84, and then I did another 6k after I'd finished it. | ||
| That last moment must have been orgasmic. | ||
| When you finished, it must have been incredible. | ||
| Finishing the 84 was beautiful. | ||
| You finished at the steps of Nelson Mandela's statue, where he was made president, and that was beautiful. | ||
| And rough. | ||
| I'd had to speed up in the last hour because of complications, so I actually got faster. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever done a thing where you're knackered and knackered and said, now go... | ||
| Why'd you have to speed up? | ||
| There was a thing called Sport Relief I was doing it for. | ||
| So it was raising money and I wanted to finish inside the camera window. | ||
| They had a window until 3.15 South African time. | ||
| Police escorts were needed at certain bits. | ||
| Otherwise you'll get carjacked and you won't survive this bit. | ||
| So I said, can't we just ignore the carjacking thing? | ||
| No, you can't ignore it. | ||
| So I said, okay, stop the clock, put me in the thing, drive me to Pretoria, stop me off, and then I'll run there, and we'll just continue it on there. | ||
| So we had to do that. | ||
| So we got behind because I wasn't running, because I had to be driven across this dangerous point of road to be dropped to Pretoria, and then I just had to run the kilometers off. | ||
| So they have like a carjack area? | ||
| Yeah, they have certain areas where it's kind of out there, there's no one really out there, and you just go along there, and anything can happen. | ||
| So my field producer, Fixer, he was just saying, we don't do this. | ||
| You can't go there. | ||
| So I said, well, just get me closer to the finishing line, and then I'll just run around. | ||
| It doesn't really matter where I'm running now. | ||
| We know it's Pretoria. | ||
| We know we need to finish. | ||
| I need to just run that distance. | ||
| So I ran the distance off, but the time had got behind, so I had to speed up From 7.5 kilometers an hour to 10 kilometers an hour. | ||
| So an extra third of the speed, which was kind of evil. | ||
| I moaned a lot that day. | ||
| I was just a moaning, whining, God, I can't do this. | ||
| But I was never considering not doing it. | ||
| And I got there. | ||
| The live feed to London finished at quarter past, and we got there about 13 minutes past. | ||
| We had about two minutes, and they just caught it before they went off air. | ||
| It was like, you know, like in a film, you know, it was perfectly designed. | ||
| I just knew if I got that, probably I'd get more money, I'd raise more money, an extra 100 grand, because we've seen this idiot finish. | ||
| He's actually doing it, you know. | ||
| So that was beautiful. | ||
| And then I talked to the, this is a very interesting thing, because you know if you're talking to, it was a press, I talked to the press after that, but it was a Sunday. | ||
| And so they kept talking, normally they say, we can't talk anymore, we've got two minutes, and then we've got to talk to important people, go away. | ||
| That's what normally happens if you're talking to live press, national press. | ||
| But I was on the thing, and they just kept talking to me, because obviously a slow news day, nothing was happening. | ||
| And they say, we've got this idiot who's just run, you know, 27 marathons. | ||
| And they kept asking me other questions, and what favourite colour do you have? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And How big are your legs? | |
| I don't know what they were asking me, but in the end, these two interviews I did with National Press, I just said, I'm going to go away now. | ||
| I'm going to stop this. | ||
| I had to stop my own interview, which I've never done in my life, and I realized they've just got no one else to talk to. | ||
| They're desperate. | ||
| Did you notice a big change in public perception of you once you completed those marathons? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The, yeah, the certain community, and if you're a transgender guy and you come out, certain people go, wee, but I crossed into a line of, well, if you're going to do that, and you, I hate, I know you do some comedy, you do the drama stuff, we think you're a bit, you know, bonkers and out there, but fair play. | ||
| I got this sort of, I got to pass a fair play to you. | ||
| If you're going to... | ||
| Do that. | ||
| And I was trying to do selection. | ||
| You know, SAS, they have selection. | ||
| Your Delta Forces, Navy SEALs, they all have this thing that can you just go on and on and on? | ||
| It's the stamina thing. | ||
| And that was my civilian selection for my own whatever civilian special forces. | ||
| Just to understand yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know I can go a lot further. | ||
| I mean, coming out as transgender, when you're straight, I'm straight transgender, so I fancy women. | ||
| So I'm a wannabe lesbian. | ||
| So if you come out, you could stay in the closet. | ||
| And down the millennia, if we go back to the ancient Egyptians and further, there's probably a lot of guys that said, I'm not going to tell anyone about this. | ||
| I fancy women. | ||
| I just won't mention these kind of feelings in my head. | ||
| And I thought I should mention it because if people shout and scream at me in the streets, I will... | ||
| I will fight that, at least verbally fight that, or, you know, if they start going for it. | ||
| I have had one fight in the streets. | ||
| And I landed one punch. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I taught myself jujitsu. | ||
| You had a fight on the streets because of this? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The guy was just giving me, oh, Tracy, oh, what, oh, he's all dressed up and... | ||
| And I was a street performer for four years at Covent Garden. | ||
| So I was living on the street, you know, not living, I was working on the streets and, you know, just knew a lot of people going around. | ||
| I just said, Matt, you don't have to be like this. | ||
| We can all, there's space enough for everyone. | ||
| Live and let live. | ||
| Kept giving me stuff. | ||
| He was a bit drunk, I realized. | ||
| So he was just going to stay on that wicket. | ||
| Keep saying. | ||
| And I said, just chill out, chill out. | ||
| And then the third time, I just said, oh, just fuck off. | ||
| And I went... | ||
| No, I unloaded a load of swear words on him, and then he swung for me, which was the handy thing, because that came up in court. | ||
| And then I swung back, and I landed one punch, which I was pleased about. | ||
| And I was doing the wipe-on, wipe-off stuff. | ||
| I was doing this blocking. | ||
| You were blocking? | ||
| Yeah, from a jiu-jitsu book. | ||
| I taught myself jiu-jitsu from a book, if you can believe that, which is, you know, you get these books with the different moves in it, and you can't teach yourself that. | ||
| But I did judo when I was six, actually, as well. | ||
| So I liked the idea of doing these things, but I felt judo was always at the bigger kid... | ||
| You all get in pajamas and the bigger kid just throws you around a bit. | ||
| I could never quite get the hang of it. | ||
| I couldn't throw the bigger kids. | ||
| I could do it now, but I've never... | ||
| Anyway, yeah. | ||
| This is a fantastic video online of a very old judo expert. | ||
| I think he's in his 70s or his 80s. | ||
| And he's working out with these young men. | ||
| And you see his mastery of judo as these young, powerful men try to manipulate him and throw him around and he effortlessly, watch this, this old man, when you see him, he's very, very old. | ||
| And he's throwing these guys around and me as a martial arts expert, These men are not doing this willingly. | ||
| This is legitimate. | ||
| Like, even that guy tries to throw him. | ||
| And this is a black belt who's trying to throw him. | ||
| But he's so good, and his use of balance and leverage is so amazing. | ||
| He just knows where to be. | ||
| Like, see how he just throws himself into a perfect position? | ||
| I mean, it's really stunning to watch. | ||
| And this looks like it was from the 50s or something like that. | ||
| Because it's really old. | ||
| Yeah, does it say? | ||
| It just says 75-year-old judo master. | ||
| I mean, this is an old man, and the young man is much larger than him. | ||
| I mean, significantly, like 25% larger than him, at least. | ||
| Maybe even, he looks like he's twice as big as him. | ||
| And he cannot throw this old man. | ||
| It's really amazing. | ||
| Judo is a beautiful art. | ||
| He's going more and more full on, isn't he? | ||
| He's going, I gotta get this. | ||
| He's trying. | ||
| I mean, he knows that this guy's a master. | ||
| But it's just, look at that. | ||
| Like, it's incredible. | ||
| I mean, the way that guy's body can toss these people through the air, and yet they are helpless. | ||
| They can't do anything to him. | ||
| There's no way that... | ||
| Look at that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom! | |
| Three times. | ||
| 75 years old. | ||
| I mean, that hurts my hips just looking at that. | ||
| You can have many different martial arts that you're given? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which ones? | ||
| Jiu-jitsu and striking martial arts. | ||
| My background was in striking, which is in Taekwondo, and then eventually kickboxing and Muay Thai, and then I got really into Jiu-jitsu when I got older. | ||
| And Jiu Jitsu, what's the difference in Jiu Jitsu? | ||
| Jiu Jitsu is grappling. | ||
| It's always choking people. | ||
| It's not throws like Judo. | ||
| There are throws in Jiu Jitsu, but it really comes from Judo. | ||
| It comes from the ground fighting aspect of Judo, which is not as emphasized. | ||
| But the Brazilians... | ||
| Really, really emphasized it. | ||
| They figured out what the best way for a smaller person to defeat a larger person is through leverage. | ||
| Jiu-Jitsu is really the only martial art... | ||
| that I can think of that works like you think of a martial art in a movie like in a Bruce Lee movie like there's all these people and they were always bigger than Bruce Lee but Bruce Lee fucked them all up but in the real world that doesn't usually work like the bigger people have such a giant advantage when it comes to like striking like you're never gonna see like a heavyweight in the UFC fight a bantamweight A person weighs 135 pounds. | ||
| It's just too much of an advantage. | ||
| In jiu-jitsu, it's legitimately possible for a 140-pound man to strangle a 200-plus pound man and do it relatively easily if they're talented. | ||
| I saw a documentary on Bruce Lee and he had The Way of No Way, which really appealed to me. | ||
| I mean, it's like a philosophy, quite apart from a fighting philosophy, but to be so trained up in so many things that they do not know what you're going to do. | ||
| And I kind of adopted that. | ||
| Well, he had to overcome significant prejudice to adopt that perspective because when he was studying martial arts, you were supposed to be loyal to your style. | ||
| So if you learn Kung Fu, you were supposed to be a Kung Fu man for life. | ||
| You weren't supposed to also dabble in boxing and wrestling and all these different things that he was interested in. | ||
| He was interested in taking what's useful from all different martial arts and applying them. | ||
| So in a sense, he was really the founder of mixed martial arts, which you see today. | ||
| In the UK, they have cage warriors, and the US is UFC, and it's worldwide now, the art of mixed martial arts, of putting all the different styles together, and you can do whatever you want within the rules. | ||
| No, I liked the attitude of that. | ||
| It's sort of a life attitude. | ||
| I mean, there's obviously the fighting attitude of it, and then there's the life attitude of just be prepared for anything and everything. | ||
| Yeah, and be like water. | ||
| That was his other thing. | ||
| Just go around things. | ||
| Move through things. | ||
| Don't headbutt things. | ||
| Figure out what's the best way. | ||
| What's the best path? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, I just... | ||
| I haven't learned... | ||
| Well, I think I'm waiting for someone to give me a really hard time and I say, now, I am checking in and I am learning martial arts. | ||
| Do you live in England? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's so many places for you. | ||
| And here. | ||
| And I'm... | ||
| I live everywhere because I'm always touring and filming and so I just keep moving. | ||
| But yeah, I know. | ||
| But you've got to make the time, especially if you're moving around all the time. | ||
| You'd have to line it up so, okay, we're going to check in with this guy and that place. | ||
| And you'd have to take it. | ||
| It's got to be something that you're serious at as opposed to dabble. | ||
| I didn't want to dabble. | ||
| Like stand-up. | ||
| When I'm filming, I still do stand-up when I'm filming. | ||
| And if I'm doing stand-up, I will think about doing drama. | ||
| Drama and comedy, they're kind of related but different. | ||
| So I keep pushing both. | ||
| You've got to keep everything. | ||
| Match fit for life. | ||
| Like marathons, I can drop marathons now. | ||
| I just did three marathons. | ||
| I just dropped three marathons. | ||
| I got home from playing Australia, took the train up to Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish border, ran up to Dunbar, which is one marathon, ran across to Edinburgh, second marathon. | ||
| Are you running a marathon with other people, or are you just running it for yourself? | ||
| No, I just get a backpack, put my stuff in there, change of clothes, wash kit, off I go, no backup. | ||
| And is this something that started because of the series of marathons that you did? | ||
| Yeah, and I want to stay match fit for life. | ||
| Because that's what, I noticed that everyone's a natural, all animals are natural animals. | ||
| And then there are the wild animals, which we were, and then there are domesticated animals. | ||
| We are self-domesticated. | ||
| But we are actually designed to be wild. | ||
| We're supposed to be match fit for life. | ||
| And I think as time goes on, you know, people get back into training or whatever. | ||
| They say, oh, that really hurts. | ||
| So I backed off. | ||
| I think it hurts because you're not doing it enough. | ||
| I'm not sure if this is pure science. | ||
| This is just a feeling for me, maybe, that I need to stay fit and running and swimming and whatever I'm doing. | ||
| And the less I do, the more the body punishes me. | ||
| If I'm doing it all the time, if I'm always – I try and run every morning. | ||
| I almost did it this morning. | ||
| I had to get up and do stuff today. | ||
| But if I miss one, then that's kind of good because that's a recovery time. | ||
| But I would just do HIIT training, high-intensity interval training every morning. | ||
| And then the ability to just drop three marathons, drop seven marathons in seven days. | ||
| You love that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love to have that in my back pocket. | ||
| And I don't think that's not allowed. | ||
| That's not in the list of things you're supposed to have. | ||
| But I know I can do it now. | ||
| And I can do it with just a backpack on. | ||
| Well, you can do it, too, because you have autonomy. | ||
| You can kind of do whatever you want to do, right? | ||
| Yeah, in the earning your living when you want to go make the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's also the actual... | ||
| That's not supposed to be in the list of what humans do. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You don't just go off and run three and three or seven and seven. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| That's kind of... | ||
| That's out there. | ||
| Well, there's clearly people that are doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Everything I've done, someone's done way more than I've done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I kind of know that. | ||
| I feel that even if I don't know that for sure. | ||
| I have one crazy friend. | ||
| His name's Cameron Haynes, and he's actually a famous bow hunter, but he's also an ultra-marathon runner. | ||
| And when he prepares for these, like, Bigfoot 200s, or it's like 200-plus miles, or the Moab 240, 238 miles in the desert... | ||
| He runs a marathon a day. | ||
| So we run a marathon every day and then he works a full-time job. | ||
| He's legitimately crazy. | ||
| And, you know, he always does that. | ||
| He doesn't take any days off. | ||
| And he works, so he'll run a marathon a day, so he'll get up really early at dawn. | ||
| Really early, run in the morning, run at lunch. | ||
| Running at dawn. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| In Africa, if you can imagine, the African dawns I got coming up. | ||
| Were you worried about something running up and grabbing you? | ||
| What, on that thing? | ||
| I wasn't. | ||
| I mean, they told me I was supposed to have security. | ||
| I wasn't. | ||
| I was kind of cool. | ||
| Well, that's for people. | ||
| Were you worried about people? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Were you around any hostile animals? | ||
| I was in a mountain zebra national park. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| And, you know, if you've ever been on a safari, they tell you to sit in this sort of shower-bang big open-topped vehicle. | ||
| It's got metal bars over it. | ||
| And they say the animals, they know the shape of that. | ||
| They know it's metal and metal doesn't taste very good. | ||
| So you'll be fine. | ||
| And there's a guy with a gun and you feel good. | ||
| But when I went there, of course, they said, well, you're running outside near the vehicle. | ||
| And I thought... | ||
| Is this right? | ||
| This would probably be good television, but I don't... | ||
| Okay, I'll just stay close and if something's coming. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| I said, what about... | ||
| How are the lions doing today? | ||
| They said, the lions have eaten yesterday. | ||
| They're fine. | ||
| And they told me, you know, and that's what lions... | ||
| They never go off for snacks. | ||
| Lions are kind of organized like that. | ||
| We ate yesterday, we ripped apart some animal, and we don't need to go and have a bag of Christmas. | ||
| So they knew? | ||
| They knew that the lions were welfare? | ||
| Yeah, they knew where they were, and that they were okay. | ||
| But they said the buffalo are around, and they can stamp you to death. | ||
| I didn't know buffalo are so... | ||
| Black Death, they call them. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they call them Black Death. | ||
| They're responsible for so many... | ||
| They're not as responsible as hippos. | ||
| Hippos are number one. | ||
| But they fuck a lot of people up, man. | ||
| They don't take any shit. | ||
| Can you think about bulls? | ||
| When people try to ride bulls, Yeah. | ||
| Like domestic cow bulls. | ||
| They're ruthlessly aggressive animals. | ||
| I mean, they'll fucking throw you through the air. | ||
| Now, think of them, but wild. | ||
| And in Africa, and fighting off lions. | ||
| And that's African buffaloes. | ||
| I mean, they are ferocious animals. | ||
| And they're just... | ||
| I didn't know what I had to do. | ||
| I know that with hippos, if you come in between their water source, then they'll just kill you. | ||
| They'll fuck you up. | ||
| I didn't know what I had to do to buffaloes, whether I had to write to their grandma. | ||
| Yeah, if they find you to be a threat at all, they're just so powerful. | ||
| They just launch you in the air. | ||
| There's a great video that I was watching this morning of a lion that was trying to take out a small buffalo, and the other one got behind the lion and launched it through the air. | ||
| It was literally flying, like 40 feet in the air, like flipping head over heels. | ||
| Because the strength of this thing to take a giant cat and just, with its head, just whoop! | ||
| And just flies! | ||
| That wasn't the one with the crocodile in it as well, was it? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| This was one that was on the side of a dirt road. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Have you heard about the crocodile one? | ||
| Go to Busy Wild on Instagram. | ||
| I think that's the... | ||
| Have you heard about the crocodile? | ||
| Yes, I saw that one. | ||
| That's interesting, isn't it? | ||
| Because I feel the buffalo there are acting like the local townspeople. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think the lions are the SS, and the crocodile is another form. | ||
| Yeah, this is it. | ||
| This is the video. | ||
| So it looks like the lion's attacking this one. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Well, it's actually not nearly as high as I thought it was. | ||
| Maybe I'm thinking of another one. | ||
| Yeah, that one's pretty good, though. | ||
| I mean, just to see it do that. | ||
| Oh, you know what I'm thinking of? | ||
| I'm thinking of Relentless Enemies. | ||
| That's what I'm thinking of. | ||
| There's actually a documentary about this one particular strain of lion. | ||
| Apparently, the river split sides, or the river changed its path, and it turned this area into an island. | ||
| And the lions had to adapt because the only thing they could eat was buffalo, which is very difficult to kill. | ||
| You know, usually they're eating antelope and other smaller things that aren't nearly as dangerous. | ||
| So these lions developed and became far larger. | ||
| So the female lions are as large as a normal male lion. | ||
| And they're hulking like massive muscles. | ||
| And they're just enormous. | ||
| It's just enormous strain of lion that's exclusively eating buffalo. | ||
| And there's a whole documentary. | ||
| It's a National Geographic documentary, I think. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| But it's just incredible to see these things walking around. | ||
| I mean, they look cartoonish. | ||
| They're like the Hulk. | ||
| So it's hard to tell. | ||
| You'd have to compare them to a regular lion, but there's some images of these things walking around. | ||
| They just look so much larger than a regular lion because they just had to adapt. | ||
| And I would think that if you're running around, like, if you're running... | ||
| You gotta think, like, you look like something that's trying to get away. | ||
| Well, me running in that park? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I was right next to the green vehicle. | ||
| So the big metal green vehicle was there, and they just said, stay close. | ||
| So I was one door flip away from, I just launched myself into the, it was open top, so I would have been in that vehicle before they got to me. | ||
| I hope. | ||
| Did you hear about that woman from, she was an editor on the Game of Thrones, and she was in one of those parks, and she had a window rolled down, and they told her, keep your windows rolled up at all times. | ||
| She was trying to take better photographs, and the cat reached in and grabbed her, and pulled her out of the vehicle and killed her. | ||
| This was last year. | ||
| And they're a dangerous creature. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're just out there running with them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, I, they, um, yeah, this is, oh, is that a picture of it? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, God, they have a picture of it happening? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it was in 2015. Oh, was it really that long ago? | |
| Yeah, I just looked it up, yeah. | ||
| I thought that was last year. | ||
| No, it was. | ||
| My facts are terrible. | ||
| Time's fine, bro. | ||
| Look at that, though. | ||
| That is just so awful that they actually caught it on camera. | ||
| Well, she just thought it was, you know, she was safe. | ||
| She's in the car. | ||
| I reached in, grabbed her, and pulled her out. | ||
| Yeah, I... You're out there running around. | ||
| I would have... | ||
| There was a guy with a gun next to me. | ||
| I hope he's a good shot. | ||
| He said he knew how to shoot things. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I played my cards, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes you play your cards. | ||
| Well, it must have been kind of exhilarating, too. | ||
| There's something about it, right? | ||
| Well, there. | ||
| I was talking to the Zebras. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I went out because, you know, obviously they were not dangerous. | ||
| There's a whole load of non-dangerous ones. | ||
| It was actually the first day on the... | ||
| It was about marathon 10 or 11 or something. | ||
| And I felt, you know, once you're over the 10 mark... | ||
| And I've never got there. | ||
| You know, if you'd done the whole South African thing and failed... | ||
| And people were tweeting about me. | ||
| Eddie is a... | ||
| You know, Africa kicked your ass. | ||
| You know, you just go... | ||
| TIA, you know, this is Africa. | ||
| You're going to take us on. | ||
| We're a huge fucking continent. | ||
| TIA? That's what they're saying? | ||
| This is Africa? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, it's a big Africa. | ||
| Because Africa is... | ||
| Did you tell them, hey man, I was on medication? | ||
| No, well, it didn't really matter. | ||
| They were just in that whining. | ||
| So I just had to come back. | ||
| And I tried three times to come back. | ||
| And then I came back. | ||
| Three times? | ||
| Yeah, I kept trying. | ||
| Can we set the data? | ||
| Can we get back and do the thing? | ||
| No, we haven't got enough money to be able to do that. | ||
| We won't be able to set up. | ||
| And then suddenly, it's on, it's on, it's on. | ||
| And I couldn't train again. | ||
| So I thought, let's just go. | ||
| Get it done. | ||
| And then day five was in hospital. | ||
| Day six was in hospital as well. | ||
| After two-thirds of the marathon on day six, I had to go to hospital. | ||
| For what? | ||
| Well, it kept... | ||
| What happened? | ||
| My doctor had gone away, but my trainer thought... | ||
| He thought, I just didn't look good. | ||
| It was, you know, 35, 38 degrees, whatever, you know, and I'm used to... | ||
| What is that, like 120 Fahrenheit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, sorry. | |
| Yeah, I'd say 110, 115, somewhere up there. | ||
| And I was not used to that. | ||
| And so I would have made it, I feel, but he wanted me to see an expert. | ||
| So I saw a nephrologist. | ||
| I didn't even know what the word meant. | ||
| Nephrologist? | ||
| Nephrologist is a kidney expert. | ||
| I thought that would be a renal expert, but no, it's a nephrologist. | ||
| And this very cool black dude, and he was there in South Africa in East London, it's called, it's the city. | ||
| So it's the big place, and he's going, what are you doing? | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| I'm running for Mandela. | ||
| What? | ||
| Well, I'm doing this thing. | ||
| Okay, and he said, it's okay. | ||
| We've checked out your kidneys. | ||
| You're all right. | ||
| Your blood's, it's your hydration. | ||
| Hydration is terrible. | ||
| So we're going to put three liters into you, and you'll be peeing like a horse. | ||
| All night. | ||
| And I didn't pee once. | ||
| So yeah, that's what you're saying. | ||
| You need some hydration. | ||
| And after that, it got better. | ||
| And so day 11, I got into this national park. | ||
| So there's no one else there, just me and animals and the security people and whatever with me. | ||
| And it was kind of beautiful. | ||
| It was just beautiful. | ||
| And the sun was great. | ||
| A sunset going down. | ||
| There was a rainstorm as well in the middle of it. | ||
| There were wild animals out there. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just felt, again, this zen, weird place of beauty. | ||
| And also knowing I'm getting stronger. | ||
| I'm getting stronger. | ||
| I've gone through the barrier. | ||
| And I also, because I'd run four marathons, then a day off, and then the fifth, sixth day, I ran two-thirds of a marathon. | ||
| So I'd run four two-thirds marathons in six days, which is not good numbers for your head. | ||
| You need five and five, or something and something, but four and two-thirds marathons in six days just didn't work. | ||
| And then I ran another marathon, and I said, hang on. | ||
| I've got to run a marathon and a third and get these numbers matching up. | ||
| So I caught up the third marathon and then it was always day seven and I've run six. | ||
| Eight marathons in nine days. | ||
| It was always one day behind. | ||
| So I thought last day I'll do a double marathon and that'll be a good climactic end of my South African thing. | ||
| What is going on with your mind when you're doing this? | ||
| Because you're not listening to any music, and you're in this sort of meditative state where you're just left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. | |
| I'm saying it's kind of zen, but it's not in a kind of like I'm listening to my heartbeat or anything. | ||
| It's more like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just feel... | |
| It's just some sort of beautiful thing of maybe, because that's what we used to be as humans. | ||
| So maybe I'm reaching back into some past memory. | ||
| We humans just used to be out on the plains and we were looking for honey, wild honey or berries or some root stuff. | ||
| And if we could trap something, I don't know what it is. | ||
| I can't quite work out what it is, but I just find it beautiful. | ||
| And I do know that you're getting vitamin D in, you're getting stronger from that. | ||
| Somebody once read my hand. | ||
| I never do the hand palm reading, but I was at a Halloween party and there was a palm reading. | ||
| I'll try it. | ||
| I'm in a good place. | ||
| Let's read my hand. | ||
| And I can't remember what she said, except you need to get out more. | ||
| You need to get outside more. | ||
| And I thought, okay. | ||
| I always felt that I needed to be out back doing stuff. | ||
| Because when I was a kid, I lived for soccer, for football. | ||
| I used to run like a crazy idiot. | ||
| I loved that game. | ||
| And then from the age of 12, I went to a school that didn't play it, and I never played sports before. | ||
| This is one of my gifts to myself. | ||
| Accident, I think. | ||
| From the age of 12. You know, in your teenage years, your bones are already moving and setting. | ||
| And at that time, I was hardly doing anything. | ||
| So I think my knees have never gone. | ||
| People say running on the knees. | ||
| My knees have not gone. | ||
| I've got a whole theory about the heel of the foot, which it should never, you know, you should, you know, sprinters are always on the toes. | ||
| All running should be on the toes. | ||
| And I think if the heel hits, that's what causes the knees to scroll. | ||
| I could be wrong on No, no, that's correct. | ||
| That's not how people are supposed to run. | ||
| That was actually changed by Nike. | ||
| They developed a running shoe with a fat heel, and they changed the way people run. | ||
| They changed their gait, and it's responsible for a lot of injuries. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And I notice on horses, if you look for the heel of a horse, it's right up by their bum, because the hoof is the toes, and then you go all the way up that leg, and right by the bum, that's the heel. | ||
| It's just an enormously long foot. | ||
| And you go, well, that's never going to hit the ground. | ||
| And dogs don't do it, cats don't do it. | ||
| We are the ones that use this heel thing. | ||
| Obviously, initially, for walking, to make us balance when we went from the chimpanzee gorilla stage into the, you know, we need to get balance. | ||
| Yeah, but even then, I mean, most people, if you just give them, if they're barefoot, like children, for example. | ||
| Like one of the things that I was reading this book about barefoot running and how important it is to develop this, and that most people that have problems from that, they're really having problems because their feet don't have strong muscles in them because of the atrophy. | ||
| And the way they were describing a regular running shoe is essentially like a cast, and that you're so used to being protected in this cast that everything sort of just gets mushy inside of it. | ||
| And then you're also striking down on the heel, which is a very unnatural thing. | ||
| And when I watch my kids run, like my kids will run with me sometimes, and they naturally know to run on the balls of their feet. | ||
| That's how they naturally run. | ||
| And when people start running heel first, that's where all the problems come. | ||
| It's just not a normal way for people to run. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I was also initially in South Africa running on certain road surfaces where they just dropped, instead of doing a tarmacadam kind of covering, they had just put rocks, obviously some lorry had come along and this truck had just dropped rocks out of the back to sort of hold together the mud in the rainy times. | ||
| And very uneven surface, very hard on the foot. | ||
| And I was doing these very thin-soled, running in very thin-soled shoes. | ||
| What kind of shoes are you running with? | ||
| Well, I kept changing them now. | ||
| But there were the Vibrams and then there were Vivo barefoot ones. | ||
| Oh, so you were running in barefoot? | ||
| Were you running marathons in barefoot shoes? | ||
| Well, initially I was. | ||
| And then my trainer, it just got so hard that my trainer said, look, you're going to wear these. | ||
| And then I left it to them to choose my physio. | ||
| He was Olympic level. | ||
| So he said, right, these are going to be better for them. | ||
| I prefer you not to be in these. | ||
| So I said, okay, you tell me what shoes to wear. | ||
| I'll take care of running the marathons. | ||
| But I do remember seeing little South African children running on the roads next to me. | ||
| Where they're going, hey, we'll run with you. | ||
| And they had completely nothing on their feet. | ||
| And they could deal with these sharp rocks. | ||
| I thought they were really sharp. | ||
| Every few steps were going, whoa, ow, ow. | ||
| And they were just laughing and running along. | ||
| Because their feet had built up, like, in this very... | ||
| Ah, this is South Africa, yeah. | ||
| Is it weird to watch this? | ||
| No, it's kind of fun because I go right back there. | ||
| I ran with flags. | ||
| That's a beautiful thing. | ||
| And I was running in the Eastern Cape, and they're looking at a white guy. | ||
| What's a white guy doing? | ||
| And this is a very rural area. | ||
| So I learned to say, Molo. | ||
| Molo. | ||
| That was in the African National Park. | ||
| That was the rain. | ||
| And that was the day where the rainstorm happened. | ||
| You could see the thunder and lightning. | ||
| That's the truck there on the left. | ||
| You can see the thing. | ||
| And this guy just turned up out of the blue to track me down. | ||
| What did he give you? | ||
| He just gave me a letter saying, thank you for doing stuff. | ||
| But if I ran with the flag and I said molo to people and I'd learn to say, how are you? | ||
| This guy seems like he's wearing women's clothes as well. | ||
| Yes, he's wearing a skirt, and I think he's a transgender guy with less hair than me. | ||
| Yeah, he's bald, but he's a transgender guy. | ||
| Now, do you take hormones or anything? | ||
| No, but I could. | ||
| I could transition. | ||
| But then I've also got these boy genetics going on in me. | ||
| I really think it's genes. | ||
| I think they're going to find out how it works, but I can't prove that at the moment. | ||
| But... | ||
| If I transition over, then I'll just be on the other side of this kind of fence that we give ourselves. | ||
| And I've decided, okay, I'm gender fluid. | ||
| I'm just going to have, like a superhero, boy mode and girl mode. | ||
| Like the human torch can go flame on, flame off. | ||
| When do you decide some days today I'm boy mode? | ||
| I can, but I tend to do sort of block periods now. | ||
| But when I campaign, I'm in girl mode, but I'm doing films, dramatic films, I'm in boy mode, unless I play the transgender character. | ||
| Do you have to think about it? | ||
| Not really, no. | ||
| But it's easier for me to be in girl mode because then if I can deal with that, you know, some people stare at you and I have a confidence now. | ||
| I carry myself with a certain confidence. | ||
| They go, oh, he seems to be quite confident, so I'll just relax about that. | ||
| And I can actually – I can control other people's embarrassment because if they don't know what to do, I'd say, hi, how are you? | ||
| Can I have a cup of tea? | ||
| Oh, yeah, well, we sell tea. | ||
| Oh, no, that's why you're here. | ||
| All right, okay. | ||
| So I can just relax people by just chatting to them. | ||
| And then boy mode is quite easy for me to do because I just go boy mode. | ||
| And I scrub up quite well in boy mode. | ||
| Do you... | ||
| But you've given thought to transitioning? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But, you know, part of me wants to be Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, and part of me wants to be Elizabeth Taylor in... | ||
| Looking like her in a cat in a hot tin roof. | ||
| Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? | ||
| No, cat in a hot tin roof, more like, which I just saw on the plane yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| So these are the two looks I go between and I'm going, well, I, kind of both of them. | ||
| And as a kid, I thought, you know, can't I look more like Clint, Steve McQueen? | ||
| Because I kind of fascinated by Steve McQueen. | ||
| And what he went through to get to where he was. | ||
| And he was so driven. | ||
| I don't know if you know about the Steve McQueen story. | ||
| But you know that he was in a film with Paul Newman. | ||
| And he was like 93rd on the list of credits. | ||
| Someone up there likes me. | ||
| If you watch it, you can see him. | ||
| There's a knife fight between Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. | ||
| And he's like a heavy, you know, young thug, kind of heavy guy. | ||
| But he's just a small player. | ||
| And then the second film he's in with him... | ||
| Is Towering Inferno, where they are equal billing, and I think Paul Newman is first and Steve McQueen is higher. | ||
| If you look at the names on the poster, Paul Newman comes in from the left, so his name is first and Steve McQueen is on the right, but higher than Paul Newman. | ||
| That's how they got that equal billing. | ||
| How do you put equal billing if you're going to start reading from the left? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you remember the film, they come out as two guys you say, yeah, they're both decent guys. | ||
| Yeah, these are both heroes. | ||
| Yeah, that's a funny thing with actors, right? | ||
| Billing. | ||
| They want to make sure that their name is read first. | ||
| Well, I mean, you've got to have egos to do these things. | ||
| I mean, so many things need an ego to do them. | ||
| And then hopefully you can dial your ego down when you come off stage. | ||
| Some people can't do that. | ||
| When it comes to billing, if you know about Steve McQueen, and his mom was a sort of sometime prostitute and had men in and out of the house, and his dad was just never there. | ||
| And he found himself through a boys retreat, you know, because he was breaking the law and they sent him off to this place and they told him to talk these kids how to train wild horses. | ||
| And that was one of the first things he did. | ||
| And he was just so ambitious. | ||
| And with Yul Brynner in Magnificent Seven. | ||
| Because if you know that film at the beginning, it's got Yul Brynner. | ||
| Do you know that film well? | ||
| I don't remember it. | ||
| Magnificent Seven is a great film. | ||
| So it's got Yul Brynner with his coloring and no hair but such an amazing look. | ||
| And Stephen McQueen at the beginning. | ||
| They go up to Boot Hill. | ||
| To bury this Indian guy up at Boot Hill. | ||
| And people are not allowing it. | ||
| There's racism in the town. | ||
| And they both go up and they ride shotgun. | ||
| Again, two heroes. | ||
| But he was, he was, Yul Brynner was the top guy. | ||
| And apparently, you see what Brynner's doing? | ||
| You see what his caravan is, man? | ||
| God, he's got all this stuff here. | ||
| And he just wanted to be the top guy. | ||
| And he got there. | ||
| And it's a beautiful story. | ||
| It doesn't end brilliantly. | ||
| But, you know, Bullet is great. | ||
| Great Escape is great. | ||
| Yeah, he was a fascinating guy, Steve McQueen. | ||
| He became a race car driver. | ||
| Like, serious race car driver. | ||
| Yeah, he came second in the one before... | ||
| There's a documentary on... | ||
| On Le Mans. | ||
| Le Mans race, the 24-hour race. | ||
| And he did a race in America, which I think was a 12-hour race. | ||
| And they came second. | ||
| With a broken foot, he did it. | ||
| And he was just – he's kind of a force of nature. | ||
| But he would also do crazy things. | ||
| I mean really crazy things, which are just not – Well, he died fairly young too, right? | ||
| Yeah, at 50 he died. | ||
| He died of cancer. | ||
| Smoking and drinking. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what it was. | ||
| We still don't know why people get cancer. | ||
| My mum died when I was six. | ||
| And she was a nurse and never smoked. | ||
| And she died of bowel cancer. | ||
| I mean, what is that? | ||
| Nothing makes sense. | ||
| Unless you put in random into the world. | ||
| That's my theory of the universe. | ||
| It's a good theory. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you put random in, it makes sense. | ||
| After 13.5 billion years, we've had about 300 years since the Enlightenment. | ||
| And I just think we're lucky enough to be here. | ||
| We've had five great extinctions, and we could have a six, or we could look after ourselves. | ||
| Treat other people as you'd like to be treated yourself. | ||
| That great rule. | ||
| Do unto others as you'd have done unto you. | ||
| If we all did that tomorrow, the world would all work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do we do that? | ||
| How do we get that going? | ||
| Well, it's better than it was. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's better than it was, even though it seems kind of hellish. | ||
| If anyone's pissed off with politics at the moment, track yourself back. | ||
| If you're going to look at politics from any time back in history, it's always been hell. | ||
| It's always been rubbish. | ||
| It's always been all over the place. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think transparency as opposed to opacity, if that's the word. | ||
| You know, the more transparent things are, the more we can check, hey, that guy's lying about that. | ||
| If we could work out what's a lie and what's not a lie, that would be really nice. | ||
| I don't know if we could have lie detectors on all the time. | ||
| I think it's going to be mind reading. | ||
| I really think that we're going to have technology within the next 50 years that allows people to definitively understand whether or not someone's being honest. | ||
| It would make it. | ||
| I'm sure someone could get a bad side of that, but you think up front, you think there's a lot of good stuff on that. | ||
| Someone could say, this is going to happen. | ||
| I want this to happen. | ||
| A lot of people's scams are going to fall apart. | ||
| What do you call them, Ponzi schemes? | ||
| Yeah, Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of that's going to fall apart. | ||
| Why are they called Ponzi schemes? | ||
| Was a guy called Mr. Ponzi? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| There's a bunch of those little terms, like Fagazi. | ||
| Jeff Ponzi, I think so. | ||
| Fagazi is one that people use for fake. | ||
| There was a limousine company that was writing bad checks, Fagazi Limousine Service, and it became like a thing on the East Coast where, oh, this guy, he's a Fagazi cop. | ||
| That means you're a fake cop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, Figazi became a big word. | ||
| Charles Ponzi, there he is. | ||
| Jeff Ponzi. | ||
| Look at that dirtbag. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| He looks happy. | ||
| 1920. He's about to leap over his own walking cane. | ||
| The roaring 20s, just ripping people off. | ||
| Do we tell people, as you're listening, please look up Charles Ponzi on Wikipedia. | ||
| So that's it. | ||
| And how did he die? | ||
| Did he explode? | ||
| Hopefully he exploded. | ||
| He got hit by a meteor. | ||
| So you are running for something now? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| I've said that for nine years, quite consistently, I would like to say that I was going to run in 2020. We had set terms in our politics, like you always had. | ||
| You've had a four-year. | ||
| We arranged it into a five-year, but then we've gone back to the old system, which is where the The Prime Minister of the country can choose when they have an election and it can be anywhere up to a day, you know, the next day after the election or up to five years later. | ||
| So we have no idea. | ||
| So the Prime Minister can decide, you know what, we'll have another election in two weeks. | ||
| Yeah, and they wouldn't do that for them. | ||
| But, you know, like we had a general election in 2015. And then in 2017, having been in for only two years, Theresa May was persuaded that if you go for an election now, you're going to win big. | ||
| You're going to win tons of extra seats and then we'll be able to do whatever we want. | ||
| But in fact, they lost seats in that election. | ||
| So, you know, sometimes they grab it. | ||
| Sometimes you go in the fourth. | ||
| There's a traditional thing of going in the fourth year because if you've got all the economics going and everything's pretty good, okay, let's go now. | ||
| We've got a year to spare, but let's go in the fourth year because we know we're in a good place. | ||
| And then you have to allow, I think, six weeks for an election campaign. | ||
| But yeah, we do that. | ||
| I think other countries do that. | ||
| But I'm sure to America, you go, that sounds crazy. | ||
| But anyway, that's what we've been doing for some time. | ||
| What are you going to run for? | ||
| Member of Parliament for some constituency, hopefully in England, would be my thing, as opposed to United Kingdom, because there's Wales and Scotland. | ||
| Is this a step? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Are you going to move further along the line? | ||
| Are you going to eventually... | ||
| No, that would be... | ||
| Once I stand for an MP, then I would... | ||
| Glenda Jackson, I don't know if you know Glenda Jackson, she did this. | ||
| Well, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know about him, because he went away and then came back to creative work that he was doing to... | ||
| doing films, but he went away for seven years, so I will go away for a period of time and put my career to hibernation. | ||
| And just do politics. | ||
| Just do politics. | ||
| But you have a set period of time where you're going to do this and then afterwards you're going to retire? | ||
| No, I would do it. | ||
| No set period of time. | ||
| I'm just going to go off and work as hard as I can, as far as I can, and then I come back when I choose to come back. | ||
| So no stand-up, no nothing during that time? | ||
| You could do stand-up if you're raising money for charity, if I'm raising money for the Labor Party or my party. | ||
| I think that would be allowable. | ||
| I think my constituency members wouldn't mind that if I was raising money for constituency. | ||
| But if I was just doing it for myself, well, you can write books. | ||
| You'd have to write books and articles. | ||
| It's all a bit hazy, but I'm not sure if you have the same system. | ||
| We have a similar system. | ||
| My friend Doug Stanhope was running for president briefly, kind of as a lark, and realized that he really couldn't do stand-up. | ||
| Because if he did stand-up, he would have to allow equal time for everyone else who wanted to perform. | ||
| who also had some like his stand-up performances were then thought of as political campaign performances Something along those lines. | ||
| It was like some weird bullshit that he was going to have to navigate that he decided to just back out of it. | ||
| But he was bullshitting the entire time. | ||
| He was just doing it for fun. | ||
| No, I'm going to do it. | ||
| I'm going to go in. | ||
| I think a lot of moderate people don't go in. | ||
| I consider myself a radical moderate. | ||
| I do radical things with a moderate message. | ||
| And I've already done a number of things like that in my life, so I'm just going to take that in and... | ||
| What's your goal? | ||
| My goal is to try and encourage my country and the world to go in a positive direction. | ||
| I think I've been saying this politically that I think this is our last century on Earth or it's our first century on Earth. | ||
| I think the next 80 years is for everything. | ||
| We're going to choose everything here. | ||
| We're either going to wipe ourselves off the planet or we're going to make it a fair world for 7.5 billion people where you have a right to have a fair world, enough democracy and transparency, enough Money to live a life, to have a family. | ||
| Not everyone, not billions of people living on $1 a day or $2 a day. | ||
| So I think we need to get to there because then immigration raises its head, your country, my country, every country in the world, and that's all people moving around because they haven't got enough money to live on or they haven't got enough security because there's a war, civil war. | ||
| And if we could get beyond that, then a lot of those problems drop away. | ||
| But going into politics and talking about a global vision of the future and whatever is slightly – it's a very difficult thing to do because people are going to say, oh, you've just asked for that. | ||
| How is that helping this global vision? | ||
| But I just thought – We seem to be trying 1930s politics again in political areas, so I thought, well, I'm going to look for a vision, a positive vision of the future. | ||
| And I know when I came out as transgender in 85, there was no way I could imagine anything. | ||
| I didn't know where it was going to go. | ||
| I just thought I need to go out there, I need to argue or discuss at least. | ||
| Try and set up a positive image version, you know, because I'm not sure what age you are, but I think you're 51. You're 51. So, you know, I'm 57. So remember in the earlier years of our lives, it was just so out there. | ||
| Transgender, you didn't even talk about it. | ||
| I mean, there were gay and lesbian people out, but transgender was like some crazy out there place. | ||
| What the hell are you on about? | ||
| And that was when I came out in the middle of that. | ||
| And it wasn't an easy thing. | ||
| But I just thought, if I'm not going to do Special Forces, I'll do this civilian Special Forces. | ||
| That is a hilarious group of choices. | ||
| Special Forces or Transgender. | ||
| Well, I did the civilian special forces. | ||
| And then I had to fight on the streets and argue with people. | ||
| And it's all mental, isn't it? | ||
| If you're in a... | ||
| It isn't any way the same because people are shooting bullets at Union. | ||
| People are dying and getting blown up. | ||
| So I know there's a massive difference there. | ||
| But everything in the end is psychological. | ||
| And if I wasn't going to do that, I was going to try and do this. | ||
| And I would take risks in these areas of... | ||
| I'll go out and people say things in the street or whatever they do and do that and then I'll run the math. | ||
| So you were going out knowing that you might have to be in an altercation? | ||
| Yeah, I was sure that was going to happen. | ||
| Teenagers, they just point and scream at you. | ||
| Yeah, they're little assholes. | ||
| Teenage boys, they scare the shit out of me. | ||
| My friend Eric Crisp, he said it to me once, because he was dealing with some teenage boys in his hometown, and he was like, the teenage boys are the most fucking dangerous animals on the planet, because they have all this testosterone, no one's really giving them any guidance yet, they're sort of just out there wild, and they're trying to outdo each other, one-up each other. | ||
| And then they're cruel. | ||
| They're cruel. | ||
| And they also are insecure. | ||
| And so one of the ways to combat that insecurity is to try to make someone else feel like shit. | ||
| It's like some weird natural instinct that people have. | ||
| Well, that's what gossip is. | ||
| Gossip is mild hatred. | ||
| And gossip, when you say so-and-so, they're less. | ||
| You lower their respect or their value or whatever by saying something. | ||
| Or you can do it as an action. | ||
| And in doing so, you raise your own. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| By saying, at least we're not them, because they are a shithead. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And they're less than us. | ||
| And that has gone on since the dawn of time, unfortunately. | ||
| Well, that's where you see the social currency of today's shame climate, like shaming people for this or that, or attacking people for whatever various things they're doing, trying to get public shame against people. | ||
| Especially people that haven't really done anything wrong. | ||
| What they're doing is they're trying to do that to elevate themselves. | ||
| And they see someone in the public eye, see someone who's famous or rich, and they're saying, that person's a fucking loser. | ||
| And they're, you know, a sports figure is a perfect example. | ||
| You know, like some super athlete, and they drop a ball. | ||
| You fucking loser! | ||
| You know, and they're doing this to sort of maximize this sort of, this, like, this downfall, this... | ||
| If they see anything that's going wrong with that person's life, and if they can accentuate that and pump it up, but somehow or another, they think it elevates them. | ||
| It actually does the opposite. | ||
| It's terrible for them. | ||
| It's terrible for everybody. | ||
| But they have this natural instinct, this competitive instinct to push down the person they think is elevated too high. | ||
| Well, I think that leads into the trolling thing online, that if you can do it from behind a firewall of, no one knows who I am, and... | ||
| I remember there was some – we have banknotes like your banknotes that had a woman on the back of one of our banknotes. | ||
| The Queen's picture is on the front. | ||
| And then they changed it up every few years and they took the woman who was on the back of – I think it was a 10-pound note or something. | ||
| They took her off and they changed it. | ||
| And then there was this campaign. | ||
| We need to get a woman on the back of another different note. | ||
| It's not going to be that. | ||
| And two people trolled this, I think two women saying, you should die, you should be raped. | ||
| I mean, hellish stuff. | ||
| One of them turned out to be a woman who was actually attacking another woman. | ||
| And you think, what's going on in your head? | ||
| Where's that coming from? | ||
| But behind this firewall, you can go to any place of... | ||
| It's almost like they don't think that a person that they're attacking online is an actual person. | ||
| They're not getting the social cues from them. | ||
| They're not looking them in their eye. | ||
| I just think it's a piss poor way to communicate with people. | ||
| I don't do any communicating with people online. | ||
| I don't go back and forth with people on Twitter. | ||
| I don't go back and forth. | ||
| I don't comment on things. | ||
| I don't anything. | ||
| I talk so fucking much as it is doing this. | ||
| I'm like, I said enough. | ||
| If you don't know how I feel about things, Jesus Christ. | ||
| If you listen to this goddamn podcast, that's me. | ||
| I don't need to comment on other shit. | ||
| I definitely don't need to comment in text form back and forth with the person and try to explain myself. | ||
| There's no benefit in it. | ||
| I used to, when I was doing stand-up in the clubs, some people might shout out, fuck off you. | ||
| Ah, so, you know, from the front. | ||
| And I thought, well, you're drunk, you're an idiot, whatever, I don't care. | ||
| And I would not think that person really knows what they're talking about. | ||
| So I wouldn't go into a thing. | ||
| I would try and destroy them with, you know, puttimes and stuff. | ||
| But that's what's happening online if someone's coming to you. | ||
| And I used to not worry about them before. | ||
| And suddenly I was worried about them. | ||
| I thought, no, actually, I'm not worried about them. | ||
| It's just literally like thousands and millions of hecklers. | ||
| It's really what it is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's a heckling thing. | ||
| The last one I did was I said something and someone said, Eddie Izzard, fuck you. | ||
| And I wrote back, no, fuck you. | ||
| And I just thought that was a very witty response. | ||
| That's like five-year-olds. | ||
| That's what they say. | ||
| You're a loser. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| He was the loser, and then they disconnected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so stupid. | |
| You never really feel good about it, even if you get a real good zinger on somebody. | ||
| You're just like, what am I doing with my life? | ||
| Yeah, my dad's bigger than your dad thing. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| And my dad wasn't terribly tall, so I could never use that language. | ||
| What does it matter? | ||
| Yeah, and does that really work for him? | ||
| No, he keeps bumping into storeways when he goes, he's much too tall, my dear. | ||
| So you guys are dealing with Brexit, right? | ||
| Yeah, we've got a... | ||
| How's that change the climate of England? | ||
| Well, it's made it very toxic, kind of like what's happening over here. | ||
| It's all gone polarized. | ||
| Like with the build the wall stuff? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's one side or the other and there's no one in the middle. | ||
| In a way, if you look at secession and American Civil War, that was bound to happen at some time. | ||
| If you go back to the Constitution in 1787... | ||
| That was supposed to happen. | ||
| And I think once you've... | ||
| European Union, no one's ever tried, from countries that have hundreds of years of history, to choose to try and learn to live together, work together, some shape or form. | ||
| This tricky thing we're trying to do. | ||
| It's the hardest thing politically that's ever been done in the history of the world. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| Because I'm saying the American model with Native American lands and rolling over Manifest Destiny is a different model. | ||
| It's a different way of things happen. | ||
| It's a different time as well. | ||
| Yeah, different time and Native Americans didn't have this idea of, oh, we mark this off and we've registered this land. | ||
| So the idea that people learning to work together is tricky. | ||
| At some point, someone was going to say, I think we'd like to change this or we'd like to move out. | ||
| So this fight was bound to happen. | ||
| And so it's very toxic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| I'm not getting too right at the center of it because you could just, you know, probably like you have on your news broadcast, you could listen to people talking hours and hours and hours. | ||
| What do you think about it? | ||
| What do you think about it? | ||
| And it doesn't seem to get anywhere. | ||
| So I've worked out what my worldview is, this worldview that everyone's got to have a fair chance in life. | ||
| I know that automation is happening right now, so there's going to be a whole load of people who won't be able to get jobs because the unskilled labor force, their jobs are going to get automated. | ||
| That's going to get tricky. | ||
| So the universal wage is probably going to have to come in. | ||
| Universal basic income? | ||
| Yeah, universal basic income, which everyone's going to have to get. | ||
| It's not going to be a negative thing. | ||
| It's going to be something, okay, then you can go off and you can retrain or you can live your life. | ||
| And then there's artificial intelligence parity by 2050, next 30 years. | ||
| And that's, what does that mean? | ||
| We can't even work out what that means. | ||
| I think it's going to get harder before it gets easier. | ||
| And so I'm going to just, I always do the long game. | ||
| I always do the long game. | ||
| So, you know, I came out back in 85 and I just thought, well, hopefully it'll get better over time. | ||
| And now... | ||
| This will roll up in 2019, and it's definitely better than that was. | ||
| But it can go backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. | ||
| But I just... | ||
| I'm going to try and shoot for that, and everyone have a fair chance in life. | ||
| And as to Brexit, where that goes, you know, positive, negative... | ||
| You know, I'm against it, so I was just going to fight it. | ||
| I don't need to think about whether I'm against it. | ||
| I just know... | ||
| The younger people are coming online to vote now. | ||
| They're old enough to vote, and 78% of them want to be part of Europe, and the older people who are passing away, probably 78% of them wanted to be out of Europe. | ||
| So it's a fear thing, like a fear of immigration, fear of... | ||
| Well, there's a thing. | ||
| We have to be brave and curious rather than fearful and suspicious. | ||
| And these are the two ways I think people can go. | ||
| If we're brave enough, we can be curious and say, Hi, how are you? | ||
| Where are you from? | ||
| And what do you do? | ||
| Can we learn from you? | ||
| Can you learn from us? | ||
| I think that is the way for humanity to go forward. | ||
| Or you could be fearful and suspicious. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| No, back off. | ||
| Outside. | ||
| I don't want to talk to you. | ||
| I don't want to know about you. | ||
| And that's the fearful and suspicious way. | ||
| And I think we have to be brave and curious. | ||
| Otherwise, we're not going to make it. | ||
| So for us in America, you're essentially dealing with a bunch of different countries that speak a bunch of different languages, whereas we're dealing with a bunch of different states that speak the same language. | ||
| But it's kind of... | ||
| It doesn't make any difference. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| Because I thought if everyone could get the hang... | ||
| Because English has become a lingua franca for the world. | ||
| Hasn't made much difference. | ||
| And America shows you can be completely at loggerheads whether you're saying the same words or not. | ||
| I think if you're not saying the same words, it's easier for people to say, who are these people? | ||
| We hate them because they can't understand a single word they're saying. | ||
| That's easier. | ||
| But it's an easier way to be xenophobic slash racist on it. | ||
| And I've always said that xenophobia is just a racist with a xylophone. | ||
| Which is my joke, which I got to use somewhere in a political situation. | ||
| But it doesn't seem to make the big difference in the end. | ||
| We have enough ways of translating and stuff. | ||
| And most people in most countries now can reach for English if they need to. | ||
| You know, like some people, I think Putin will always speak in Russian. | ||
| Any leader of a country will probably use their own language first, talk to their own country people first, and then they might throw in something in English or in an interview. | ||
| But we can work out from vibe where most people are coming in. | ||
| Well, I think that we're probably pretty close to some form of viable translation technology, like Google had these Google Earbuds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can do it on the Google app without even the earbuds. | ||
| If you go to Google Translate and you hit the microphone on there, you can just say, hello, good afternoon, and if it's on the French button, it'll come out in French. | ||
| I haven't done it in the field. | ||
| I would like to get out to somewhere out in the sticks. | ||
| Actually, I should test that. | ||
| I'll make that a... | ||
| The Googled earbuds, I think, the idea is that if you were talking to me in French, it would translate instantaneously to English. | ||
| You know, it's probably a beta version of it now, or like a clunky version of it. | ||
| But ultimately, we're going to have something that allows you to do that. | ||
| There's also Google Lens. | ||
| I used that when I was traveling. | ||
| Or you could take the camera and you look at it, and it translates foreign languages into English. | ||
| That's on Google Translate, yeah. | ||
| So the Google Translate verbal one at the moment does line by line. | ||
| So you have to say a line, receive a line. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, just think about what technologies existed 20 years ago and how much more advanced they are now and then add that to translation and that exponential increase. | ||
| We're probably going to lose a lot of these barriers of misunderstanding. | ||
| It is interesting. | ||
| I do think we have created some amazing positive things going forward. | ||
| And we tend to bank them. | ||
| And then we don't get a hit of, wow, we've got that now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like we can make coffee quite easily. | ||
| We can do the grinding of coffee beans. | ||
| But then we just go, OK. | ||
| And then we'll find something else to piss us off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So trying to keep ourselves happy. | ||
| Because when we're happy enough, and it's usually economics. | ||
| When people are happy enough, there's less racism, less immigration problems, there's less Everything's less. | ||
| And when everyone runs out of money, they get pissed off, totally understandably. | ||
| But we need to make the economy of the world work, and then it would be an easier place. | ||
| But how do we do that? | ||
| How do you make the economy of the world work? | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| Yes, that's an easy line to say and it's very difficult to work it out. | ||
| But I do think as you gradually learn to live together, work together, as we gradually come together, I mean, it's like in the European Union, say in America, if certain parts of America or European Union are having a tough time, then money goes to those places having a tough time to try and get them back on their feet so that they can come back in and start making enough money to be able to help other parts. | ||
| And that's the idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's logically a model that should be able to work in the world as we head towards it. | ||
| Because we know that wars are terribly expensive and a lot of people die. | ||
| That doesn't seem to get anywhere. | ||
| Surely we should have learned this as we go back. | ||
| So, wars of conquest, I don't think they're going to happen anymore. | ||
| Quote, like, you know, the idea, we're going to invade this thing, like the old empire stuff. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which I think the Nazis did the last version of that. | ||
| Right, wars of conquest are now being replaced by wars of defense. | ||
| Wars of defense or wars that are hidden behind things, you know, under some other auspices. | ||
| Pretense. | ||
| Yes, you know, we need to, we've come in to defend these people, but they didn't need defense. | ||
| What was Grenada about? | ||
| I still don't know what Reagan was doing in Grenada. | ||
| Tenly veiled attempts to control natural resources. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think that's what a lot of these are. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, and then it's economic wars as opposed to... | ||
| And then stopping terrorism in its tracks and trying to keep these radical terrorists from taking over certain countries and strongholds, but we really haven't done a good job of that. | ||
| And there's political will you need to do that, and then... | ||
| People in their countries, understandably, don't like people dying abroad. | ||
| And then, you know, wars of defense, do they... | ||
| I wonder whether that's going to happen. | ||
| You know, there's this thing called right to defend, the idea that countries that are better set up should be able to go in or should be willing to go in and defend people having a really tough time and try to get the politics to work on that. | ||
| You know, if someone is menacing... | ||
| You know, when Hitler was menacing... | ||
| Within his own country, no one did anything like that. | ||
| When Stalin was menacing in his own country, because about 30 million died under Stalin. | ||
| But no one went in. | ||
| No one said, hey, we've got a whistleblowing. | ||
| Time to go in and help. | ||
| We didn't go in. | ||
| Well, we don't even go in for North Korea. | ||
| I mean, we're in this weird position with North Korea where we have this military dictator who's clearly... | ||
| Oppressing his entire nation and this was strange to see in 2019 the limited internet I mean they have like an intranet they have like their own version of the internet where they have a few websites you could visit yeah they've got everybody locked down and extreme poverty extreme hunger like the the ones that have escaped from North Korea I mean if they've had these soldiers and they're malnourished they have parasites it's It's an awful, awful condition. | ||
| It's happening right now. | ||
| And if you see when North Korea does military maneuvers, it looks like the Nazis. | ||
| And you thought, well, that Nazi thing, well, you know, I don't like the Nazis at all. | ||
| But how do they get all these people doing that? | ||
| You say, oh, North Korea could do it. | ||
| Well, hang on. | ||
| This is just a thing. | ||
| If you spend all your time just marching up and down, you can make that happen. | ||
| And Lenny Riefenstahl can go and film it and... | ||
| With low angles and make it look dramatic. | ||
| Make it look fearsome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we're better off globally than we were during World War II, right? | ||
| The world is better off. | ||
| The world is better off in the Western world. | ||
| It's more progressive and more open-minded since you came out in 1985 versus in 2019 where we're sitting here today. | ||
| It's a different world. | ||
| It's a different environment. | ||
| That's why I'm glasses two-thirds for. | ||
| I do think we are in a better place. | ||
| There is more tolerance. | ||
| It does go a few steps forward, one step back. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Always. | ||
| You're always going to have Charlottesville, there's Nazi rallies. | ||
| You're always going to have weird pockets of racism and things where you're like, I can't fucking believe this is still happening. | ||
| You're going to have a little of those setbacks. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There was something like in Germany, something like 10,000 people were wanting to vote for the Nazi party, or maybe it's more, but that's a country of 80 million, so let's get the perspectives right. | ||
| If certain things happen and they're on television, you go, whoa, and that's obviously why they do them, to create an outrage, get on television, and you go, wow, it's all over. | ||
| It's happening everywhere. | ||
| Oh, well, no, it's in this small place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, sometimes, well, the beautiful things that human beings can do is stunning. | ||
| We, you know, we have so many stories of just amazing things that humans do. | ||
| And then you put the horrible things that we can do, that goes on forever. | ||
| If there was a God, I don't believe in a God, but if he did come down and say, what have you guys doing? | ||
| Who are these bastards? | ||
| And you guys, well done, you guys, but who are these bastards? | ||
| Well, I don't, you know. | ||
| Well, they've always said the Lord works in mysterious ways. | ||
| So, look at the world. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Pretty fucking mysterious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe it's evidence they're correct. | ||
| I think World War II was a test for God, because 60 million people died, and at some point we were thinking, okay, how many people need to die before you come and blow a whistle and just say, whoa, what's the guy with the mustache doing? | ||
| Let's get him off the board. | ||
| Flick him off the board. | ||
| That was my test for God, and he didn't come, so I think it's up to us kids. | ||
| Well, he didn't come when we, I mean, what they did, the Nazis did, was obviously horrific, but what we did when we dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that's pretty fucking horrific as well. | ||
| No intervention whatsoever from the big guy. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, he didn't come in. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| He didn't catch the bomb in midair going, hey, there's kids down there. | ||
| There's women down there. | ||
| These are not soldiers. | ||
| This is a city. | ||
| I need to say this, and I know I'm not taking the... | ||
| The Japanese... | ||
| I thought the Nazis were fanatics, but the Japanese at that time took it even more fanatical. | ||
| You know when the last Japanese soldier surrendered? | ||
| You know what year that was? | ||
| It's like 1980 or something. | ||
| 75, I think it is. | ||
| That one you can Google. | ||
| He was on an island. | ||
| I mean, how fanatical do you need to... | ||
| Oh, they're committed. | ||
| Still 1975. I think it's 74 or 75. Yeah, okay. | ||
| I give up. | ||
| Well, they have an amazing warrior culture. | ||
| I mean, you think we were talking about martial arts. | ||
| A giant percentage, including judo and jujitsu, of martial arts came from this one island. | ||
| I mean, they perfected so many different martial arts. | ||
| And it's more the Japanese than any other country in Asia. | ||
| Well, I think the Thais did it best. | ||
| I think the Thais developed the best striking style, and then the Japanese developed the best grappling style. | ||
| But the Japanese are known as more warlike than the Thais. | ||
| You never hear of the Thai, or did they used to... | ||
| The Thais figured out the best way to gamble on fights. | ||
| They figured out the best, most brutal style of fight, and that is they incorporated a lot of things that other people didn't, including leg kicks and knees and elbows, and they fought really often. | ||
| To this day, they have Lumpini Stadium and all these different stadiums in Bangkok. | ||
| They have... | ||
| These stadium champions and they have matches on a consistent basis and so these people are fighting from the time they're really really young like they're taking like six and seven year old boys and girls as well and they're sending them off to these Thai camps and teaching them how to fight and then having them fight you know they'll have a hundred fights by the time they're 16. Wow. | ||
| With Thailand, it's very strange because they're so friendly. | ||
| They're so smiley and friendly, yet they developed probably the most fearsome, striking style on the planet. | ||
| Yeah, I can't. | ||
| And then they've got, there's a transgender thing going on as well. | ||
| Yes, they've got a lot of that going on over there. | ||
| In the Venn diagrams of what's going on there, what is intersecting here? | ||
| So much great food. | ||
| I mean, they have so much cool shit, beautiful environment. | ||
| It's a weird place, man. | ||
| Thailand's a weird place. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Do they film Apocalypse Now, though? | ||
| I think they did... | ||
| Was that in Vietnam? | ||
| No. | ||
| Maybe they did some of it in Thailand. | ||
| I think they did some of it in Vietnam. | ||
| No, they did nothing in Vietnam. | ||
| It was too close dates-wise. | ||
| Was it Thailand? | ||
| I bet. | ||
| I mean, it took fucking forever. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Philippines. | |
| Philippines. | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| It was Marcos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because Marcos kept saying, I want the aircraft back. | ||
| I want the helicopters back. | ||
| So the helicopters are coming and they piss off somewhere. | ||
| Isn't it funny when Marcos, when that whole regime went down, all we heard about was Mel DeMarcos shoes. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That's all we remember, the whole thing. | ||
| The Beatles had a bad time there because they were invited to a place that they didn't know about. | ||
| Oh, right, and everybody got mad at them. | ||
| Yeah, and that's when they last toured. | ||
| And they were in the back of a truck. | ||
| They were holding on literally in the back of a truck. | ||
| Why are we playing all these places? | ||
| That's when they started getting a hold of their... | ||
| We're going to do what we want to do rather than what someone else wants to do. | ||
| So, I mean, I'm with you in that I am ridiculously optimistic. | ||
| Oh, that's good. | ||
| I think that, I think people, I mean, I follow Steven Pinker's logic of that people will sort of look at the horrible things that we have today and say, God, this world is terrible. | ||
| There are definitely terrible aspects, but this is without doubt the greatest time ever to be alive that we've ever seen, at least in recorded human history. | ||
| I would agree with that. | ||
| I think communication is a giant part of that. | ||
| It is. | ||
| This global world, which we thought was going to be a beautiful thing, and then people said, oh no, it's a hellish thing. | ||
| In fact, it's got beautiful aspects and some hellish aspects, as any invention has. | ||
| Like the internet, hey, you can teach someone how to save their life on the internet. | ||
| Ah, you can also teach someone how to make a bomb on the internet. | ||
| I think this is always the way. | ||
| Every next step we get, we will have some positives, then we'll hit all the negatives, and then we'll go back to some more positives. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yeah, I've got to be optimistic. | ||
| Yeah, well, I am an optimistic person. | ||
| Otherwise, I just wouldn't be here. | ||
| But this military aspect that I mentioned, I'm flipping back to that. | ||
| But yeah, I do try and think I need to do this. | ||
| I think that's a good thing to do now. | ||
| I need to do that. | ||
| For nine years, I've been saying I'm going to politics, so I'm going next year. | ||
| But it might not be a general election. | ||
| I try and plan ahead because if I randomize it, if I just float, because a lot of people do, wow, this happened, and then that happened, and that could be a wonderful life. | ||
| But I have my river analogy. | ||
| If you're canoeing down a river, If you go at the same speed as the river, it could throw you onto rocks, it could give you a wonderful ride, it could be anything. | ||
| But it's up to the river. | ||
| Whereas I pedal like crazy. | ||
| Sometimes I backpedal like crazy. | ||
| I have actively backpedaled against things. | ||
| And sometimes, usually I'm pedaling faster than the speed of the river to try and guide myself through the river. | ||
| You see that whenever I do these canoeing, well, anyone driving a boat through a river. | ||
| When I look at human interactions objectively, part of me has to consider that there's a possibility that we need all this negative in order to reinforce the positive. | ||
| That there's some component of human life that desires or relies upon negative things to reinforce positive things. | ||
| That this yin and yang that we exist under, that we see the horrors of war and horrific poverty and all these terrible things and horrible violence, we see this and it actually serves to reinforce our desire for positive things and push our society in a more positive direction. | ||
| I mean, I almost think that this is When we see national tragedies and shootings and all these different terrible, terrible things, there's all this fear and anger and frustration, but there's also action. | ||
| And we might think there's a lack of action by politicians, or a lack of action by the police, or a lack of action by whoever we think should be responsible for mitigating these horrible situations that happen. | ||
| But publicly, the social fabric of the world, the way people communicate and interact, I think it reinforces our desire to not have that happen. | ||
| It reinforces our understanding of peace and our love of peace. | ||
| And I think that these bad things that we see in our world, they almost propel us towards a better world because human beings are constantly striving for improvement and innovation. | ||
| This is one of the things that we do. | ||
| We want things to be better and bigger and faster and stronger and we want our society to be better at all times. | ||
| We never say, this is good, let's keep it just the way it is. | ||
| We never say that. | ||
| So my thought is that even what we're experiencing in this country, it seems at times that we're almost like on the brink of civil war between the right and the left and people lying on both sides and conflating people's opinions and changing people's perspectives in order to suit their own narrative. | ||
| That I think that this, ultimately, all this angst, and you see it from the outside, and you look at it and you go, what the fuck are we doing? | ||
| I think it's a natural part of the way human beings figure out life. | ||
| Shall I respond to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I think almost the same as you. | ||
| I would articulate it slightly differently. | ||
| I noticed that humanity only sometimes gets going and does things when it's right up against the wall. | ||
| You know, sometimes it needs these things to go on. | ||
| If you took a World War II scenario, we went right to the wire on that, and then suddenly we came back. | ||
| And maybe not even... | ||
| It wasn't even the political will on that. | ||
| If the Japanese hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor, we wouldn't have had you guys with us for D-Day and all the forces and the money and the armaments and the tanks. | ||
| The Shermans coming in, you know, we needed that coming in. | ||
| And without the Russian people, we wouldn't have won World War II. And they were in this agreement. | ||
| So I can't quite work out humanity. | ||
| I do think positive. | ||
| I do think the negatives, you can appreciate the positives more. | ||
| I do think one thing on... | ||
| On the Brexit, Brexit hate thing that's been going on is a lot of young people are coming on saying, so we're going to lose all this stuff, the ability. | ||
| We could travel to Europe without visas. | ||
| We can work there. | ||
| We could retire there. | ||
| We can get a health care there. | ||
| All across Europe. | ||
| And that's concerning. | ||
| We cut off. | ||
| And our roaming charges are going to go up. | ||
| All that. | ||
| People are valuing what they could lose a lot more. | ||
| Yeah, the yin and yang. | ||
| I think it's going to go on this way. | ||
| And also, once we get to a good place, I've noticed that a lot of people will say, okay, I'm not going to be politically active anymore. | ||
| I'm just going to carry on doing my life and other people can sort things out. | ||
| I've noticed that people will get activated to get to a result, maybe an election result or something or a referendum or whatever it is, and then they will just back off. | ||
| They get frustrated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, they just think, well, that's done. | ||
| That's bagged in a positive way, maybe. | ||
| And just say, but now I'm not even going to pay attention to what's going on. | ||
| But things will start rolling backwards. | ||
| So I think we're going to keep having it like that. | ||
| Maybe the percentage of positive things to negative things has never changed over all the years, over the last 10,000 years. | ||
| It's just there's more people in the world doing more positive things than doing more negative things. | ||
| Maybe humanity hasn't changed because our brain sizes haven't changed, even back to the caveman days. | ||
| Even back the last 100,000 years, the size of our brains has not moved. | ||
| So if you went back to 70,000 years ago, we would still be able to have conversations like this, even though we wouldn't have the radios and the things. | ||
| It would be more on our tribe. | ||
| I think our tribe is better than your tribe. | ||
| Actually, Steve, I don't know if our tribe is better than that tribe. | ||
| I just think maybe there's some good people in that tribe and there's some shitheads in that tribe. | ||
| We need to maybe trade with them more. | ||
| We can go to war with them, but then we could die, and Shirley could die, and Kenny. | ||
| And Roger at number 22. Because those conversations were happening in a slightly different way, I think, all the way back. | ||
| And they weren't all just going, me, food, you, nice, good, three, five. | ||
| It wasn't that. | ||
| It was maybe millions of years ago, but not 100,000 years ago. | ||
| And we only started speaking 100,000 years ago. | ||
| So what we've developed since then. | ||
| I'm fascinated by us as human beings because we were just another animal. | ||
| And now we are... | ||
| We are kind of an amazing animal. | ||
| We've lamented beautifully. | ||
| We landed on the bloody moon. | ||
| You guys landed on the moon, which I as a child thought that we landed on the moon, but in fact you guys landed on the moon. | ||
| But Apollo 11, they kept it quite open. | ||
| I think Michael Collins in the command module said, this is for the world, and there was this kind of feeling in Neil Armstrong. | ||
| It's a nice, yeah. | ||
| I grabbed hold of that. | ||
| As a kid, I was growing up. | ||
| You know, a bit younger than me. | ||
| It's a pretty weird thing to think that we went from not being able to talk to space travel in 100,000 years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's what they think, right? | ||
| They think that people didn't have real language 100,000 years ago? | ||
| Yeah, Fox P2 genetic. | ||
| I think it's about 100,000 years ago that that's when it came up. | ||
| And the first words we said was, let's go to the moon in 100,000 years. | ||
| What's your name? | ||
| Jack Kennedy. | ||
| Okay, Jack. | ||
| Good idea. | ||
| Well, let's put it on the back burner for a moment. | ||
| What do you think happened that turned us into this? | ||
| Do you ever stop and think about it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, I don't think it's a bloke upstairs floating in the clouds because they used to live in the clouds and then we flew through the clouds and no one ever mentioned, hey, he's not in the clouds. | ||
| So it's a randomizer thing. | ||
| Like dinosaurs, 165 million years of those bastards. | ||
| And all they did was eat... | ||
| Kill, eat, kill, poo, and have sex. | ||
| That's all they did. | ||
| Those four things for 165 million years. | ||
| We've had 300 years since the enlightenment of human rights and democracy and stuff like that. | ||
| If we say the Greeks did a great thing, but really it's the last 300 years. | ||
| They had 165 million years of that. | ||
| But why did they come along when we had all these creatures in the sea and suddenly huge ones? | ||
| Something happened, something twisted. | ||
| Randomizing thing, maybe we'll never know. | ||
| But it has happened, and I just don't think a bloke did it upstairs with a big beard who said, now is the time that you speak, and now you make handbags, and now fight wars with the MG42. I just think it happened, and we need to roll with it. | ||
| And try and make humans work on this planet. | ||
| Because then we're going to be going to Mars soon. | ||
| And you can just see it in the future. | ||
| If we've got it going on Mars, at some point the Martians are going to say, we want to vote. | ||
| We've got our own Martian government. | ||
| You earthlings. | ||
| They're going to treat us the same way Americans treat the British. | ||
| Yeah, and then the Martians come back and attack us. | ||
| The Martians are going to actually come. | ||
| You could just see that in some sort of, you know, 100 years down the line. | ||
| Yeah, it could definitely happen. | ||
| You know, and I... So I despair about humanity, and I celebrate humanity. | ||
| I do this thing, actually, which I think is nice. | ||
| I'm going to say this, because obviously I'm doing a tour at the moment here in the U.S., but I'm going to come out of this U.S. tour on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, and I fly to Cannes in Normandy. | ||
| Are you doing a stand-up tour? | ||
| Yeah, I'm doing a stand-up tour of the whole of America. | ||
| Are you doing any dates in L.A.? Yeah, I'm at the Dolby Theatre from the 26th to 29th of June. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The Dolby that was the Kodak. | ||
| I want to come out. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'll look at it later. | ||
| We'll work at it. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| Yeah, it's all on EddieIzzard.com. | ||
| But I go to Normandy, 75th anniversary of D-Day, and they fought the Battle of Normandy in German, obviously on one side, and then French and English on the other side. | ||
| And so I do three shows in German. | ||
| First show, 50 minutes in German, and then I do 50 minutes in English, and then 50 minutes in French. | ||
| And then we have a buffet, and everyone hangs out, and I meet everyone, and all the German speakers, the French and the English speakers. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| That is incredible, that you're doing stand-up in multiple languages. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How long did it take you to learn that? | ||
| Well, I did French school for eight years. | ||
| I did German school for two years. | ||
| So it was partly a sort of low-level political thing. | ||
| I just thought, if I'm an English guy going to France and doing it in French, then maybe a French kid would go, well, I'm going to do it in English. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now the Germans are doing English, the Russians are doing English, the Spanish. | ||
| Everyone's going to English because you can have a Hollywood career, potentially, or be on television in English. | ||
| You can also tour the world in English now. | ||
| You can use it as a bridging language. | ||
| We were talking about Google Translate. | ||
| I know French kids. | ||
| French kid, my friend, Yasin Berlus, has performed in Helsinki in Finland, and Finnish kids have been watching in the second language. | ||
| They've been watching in English and listening in English. | ||
| And he's been performing, a French guy performing in English, so they met and laughed in a second language, which I think is an amazing thing. | ||
| But now you can tour the world that way. | ||
| So I'm going to go to Normandy, and it's a commemoration that the battle happened, and it's 75 years ago, and it's a celebration that now we don't go to war in those three languages anymore. | ||
| And you have different 50 minutes for French, different 50 minutes? | ||
| Exactly the same ideas. | ||
| But the words are all, obviously, either German or French. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| I said, Caesar. | ||
| I talked about Julius Caesar. | ||
| I said, Caesar, did he ever think that one day he would end up as a salad? | ||
| Oh, this warlike guy, he's now a salad. | ||
| And in French, César, est-ce qu'il a jamais imaginé? | ||
| Did he one day imagine qu'un jour, il finirait en salade? | ||
| One day he would finish up as a salad. | ||
| In German, César, est-ce qu'il a jamais imaginé? | ||
| Did he ever think that he one time as salade end up would have? | ||
| So you've got the verb right at the end, but they still laugh at the same place, but maybe about half a second later, split a second later. | ||
| As salad end up would have. | ||
| So you have to really have a deep understanding of how to structure those sentences. | ||
| It's just practice, really. | ||
| You know, anything in life, you can do it. | ||
| If you were taken out of here, you don't speak any language. | ||
| I don't speak anything. | ||
| So if they took you and suddenly, for some reason, you had to be in any other... | ||
| Thailand, say. | ||
| Say somebody dropped a big block of heroin into your thing, just as a test, as a social experiment. | ||
| And they filmed this all. | ||
| And you say, hey, he's smuggling. | ||
| So you have to go to Thai prison. | ||
| This is kind of an extreme example. | ||
| Anyone. | ||
| And then you'd be learning within one month. | ||
| You'd have basic sentences going. | ||
| Anyone who goes to prison is going to have... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If you work in a restaurant, anywhere you work where no one's giving you any English coming in, you just have to pick up the words and our survival instincts would pick them up. | ||
| And then you might have a strong accent, but you, me, everyone, we can pick it up. | ||
| So I just, again, I can set up this artificial scenario of I have to do this. | ||
| So I had to learn French. | ||
| So I started performing. | ||
| This show, this Wunderbar show, which is a German title... | ||
| Meaning wonderful. | ||
| And I started it in French. | ||
| So I jumped... | ||
| Because I improvised to work. | ||
| I don't write anything. | ||
| I just go and go, Hey! | ||
| Chickens! | ||
| What's going on with chickens? | ||
| Chicken with a gun? | ||
| Dangerous? | ||
| You don't write your act? | ||
| No, I just improvise it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I sort of workshop it endlessly until it gets... | ||
| Ah, that's a good thing. | ||
| And then you memorize it. | ||
| Well, I know it because I said it last time. | ||
| So in French, I'm just going, les poulets, les poulets sont dangereux, non? | ||
| Un poulet, Donald Trump, c'est la même chose. | ||
| Do you record and listen to recordings? | ||
| Yeah, record every show and never listen to them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah-ha! | |
| You record on your phone or do you have a professional setup? | ||
| No, we have a professional setup. | ||
| So we're sometimes not with the laughter mixed in. | ||
| I've just been listening back to the German shows in Berlin and the laughter is very low in the mix. | ||
| So I'm saying these jokes and going, is anyone laughing that we... | ||
| Oh, so it's just from the microphone. | ||
| Yeah, there's a feed there, but they had another one, but they had it mixed low. | ||
| But yeah, you need to have a second microphone on the audience and just bring that mix up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or maybe bring it right up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's incredibly funny. | ||
| But I just found doing it in another language, it's a positive thing. | ||
| It sends out a nice message. | ||
| It's hands across the water. | ||
| Can we learn from you? | ||
| Can you learn from us? | ||
| And the comedies I do is sort of Python-esque. | ||
| Monty Python type surreal comedy and so I just need to find that audience in France, that audience in Germany, that audience in Thailand if I was there. | ||
| I've played Kathmandu. | ||
| I met a kid from Kathmandu in New York on the streets. | ||
| He said, are you a comedian? | ||
| I said, yeah. | ||
| Where are you from? | ||
| He said, I'm from Kathmandu. | ||
| Wow, Kathmandu, a kid from Kathmandu. | ||
| What are you doing here? | ||
| Well, I'm a student. | ||
| But your English is good? | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty good, yeah. | ||
| Well, can I do a gig in Kathmandu, you think? | ||
| He said, yeah, I think you can do a gig in Kathmandu. | ||
| So I said, okay. | ||
| That was in 2010. It took me seven years I got there. | ||
| 2017. How was it? | ||
| It was good. | ||
| Unfortunately, less to the locals, they'd had these couple of earthquakes, which you tend to think, oh, everyone has earthquakes, but no, they hadn't had them for ages, and suddenly they had two bad earthquakes. | ||
| So they were getting over that. | ||
| So I was mainly aid workers, unfortunately. | ||
| But I was there. | ||
| But I can go back. | ||
| But, no, it was a nice setup, but I played, you know, I went all through and played in Tokyo and I played in Hong Kong and in Shanghai and had all the guys from, because you have the people from the Communist Party come along to check you out. | ||
| So I'm not going specifically in on certain things, but anyway, you know, my stuff is all... | ||
| The people from the comedy what? | ||
| The Communist Party. | ||
| You know, the... | ||
| Communist Party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, because it's Shanghai. | ||
| I thought you were saying... | ||
| It's mainland China. | ||
| Comedy Party. | ||
| No, sorry. | ||
| The Communist Party. | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| It's just me mangling my words. | ||
| Oh, so they come and check you out to make sure you're not violating anything? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Certain areas you're not supposed to go, you know, whatever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just want to do the gig. | ||
| But it wasn't like I was going to change. | ||
| I have weird stuff about Gandalf talking to butterflies and talking about my ancient kings like Henry VIII and William the Conqueror and stuff. | ||
| So apparently they stayed. | ||
| They normally disappear after a while. | ||
| But anyway, so it's good to get out. | ||
| As you said, play the world. | ||
| See the world. | ||
| Travel broadens the mind. | ||
| Yeah, I don't play very many places. | ||
| I played in Australia and England. | ||
| I've done gigs in Stockholm and Northern Ireland, Dublin, a few other places in Europe. | ||
| But most of the time when I go on vacation, I just go on vacation. | ||
| I just go to experience it, just to have fun, just to be there. | ||
| So have you never written your act down? | ||
| No, I couldn't. | ||
| See, I used to do sketch comedy, like a Monty Python thing, and I wrote those. | ||
| And then I was doing a street performer for four years, and that's very unwritten. | ||
| That's very difficult to write. | ||
| It's difficult to actually develop material for that. | ||
| So I did that for four years, so I got into this thing of... | ||
| Street performing, like how so? | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| We were double-acted initially, me and my partner Rob, and we did weird things like escaping from a woolly jumper. | ||
| He'd just wrap a woolly jumper and I would tend to escape. | ||
| A woolly jumper? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| A woolly cardigan, a woolly pullover. | ||
| You call them pullovers? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like a sweater? | ||
| Yeah, sweater. | ||
| So instead of a straitjacket, he said, we take this woolly sweater. | ||
| Just ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, ridiculous. | ||
| Making a bowl of cornflakes disappear because... | ||
| You ate it? | ||
| Yeah, I ate it. | ||
| So at its best, they go, this is insane. | ||
| These guys are crazy. | ||
| And they clap and they give us five pence. | ||
| And when it was at the worst, they go, these people are insane. | ||
| This is awful. | ||
| And they walk away. | ||
| Then we did sword fighting. | ||
| That was good because I directed Three Musketeers at university. | ||
| So we were showing you how to kill someone when drunk, when you do all these different moves. | ||
| So that was quite fun. | ||
| Then I went solo and I was doing escapology from chains and ropes and then from a five-foot unicycle from a pair of manacles. | ||
| Escapology meaning escapology. | ||
| Is that a real thing? | ||
| Escapology? | ||
| You guys really call it that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you call it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I don't think there's a name for it. | ||
| I've never even heard of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think Google will tell us there is an escapology. | |
| Escapology. | ||
| Does it exist? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Houdini? | |
| There's a thing called Escapology Live Escape Games, World Escape Rooms, and there's a bunch of them. | ||
| I don't know if it's the same thing as Escape Rooms. | ||
| No, those are Escape Rooms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Escapology should be an art form, it sounds like. | |
| It's not really an art form. | ||
| Well, no, Houdini was an artist of that. | ||
| I was a... | ||
| I was a jobbing, crafting person. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Practice escaping from restraints. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Steel boxes, barrels, bags, things. | ||
| So I was escaping from ropes and chains. | ||
| You made a conscious decision to do this, like, on the street? | ||
| Like, this is how you're developing? | ||
| Yeah, that was developing, because I couldn't get my sketch comedy thing wasn't going. | ||
| There's a thing called the Edinburgh Festival we have. | ||
| Yeah, Scotland. | ||
| Yeah, you know that one. | ||
| So I did 12 of those in the end, right? | ||
| Before I took off, so... | ||
| I did three doing sketch and then about four doing street. | ||
| But on the street, you have this freedom. | ||
| You know, the freedom when things are working a bit and it's really kind of feral. | ||
| No one's checking you up. | ||
| No one knows what you're doing. | ||
| You're just on the street. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I was useless at this. | ||
| And then I developed a confidence, a gut confidence. | ||
| You know that the stomach's really important. | ||
| It probably isn't fighting as well. | ||
| There's something that comes out of the... | ||
| There's a confidence center in the stomach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something about the stomach. | ||
| You look into it with fighting. | ||
| I think it's neurons, right? | ||
| Everything joins there. | ||
| There's something to do with it. | ||
| Anyway, I developed this confidence on my own to go and stand on... | ||
| If you've ever heard of the film My Fair Lady or seen the film of Eliza Doolittle, that is set on Covent Garden. | ||
| It's a massive piazza, massive square. | ||
| Washington Square Park in New York was another street-forming place. | ||
| So it's a big open place. | ||
| And I could stand up there on my own and talk to no one and build up an audience. | ||
| I would set out these tea cozies, which are little animal tea cozies, ducks and hamsters, weird things, things that just look like animals, and put them on the floor. | ||
| And people thought, this guy's crazy. | ||
| And then I'd start talking and there'd be literally no one there sometimes. | ||
| And I'd say, good afternoon. | ||
| I'm going to do a show. | ||
| Welcome to the invisible audience. | ||
| Very nice to have you here. | ||
| And I had this confidence, if I just kept talking, a bit like, you know, in your podcast here, you know you can keep talking. | ||
| And I'd go on, yeah, there's some visible people here as well. | ||
| This is Jack and Kenny. | ||
| And I would just go on and on until I built up about 20 people. | ||
| Then I could start the show and then we'd get into it. | ||
| And if you're doing an escapology show... | ||
| In the end, you're going to get out. | ||
| You've worked out how to get out. | ||
| And so there will be a definite end. | ||
| And then you can say, now, don't go. | ||
| And please, can you give me some money? | ||
| So that's how I earn my living. | ||
| But that's the ninja training of performing. | ||
| Because I learned to perform when people didn't even want to see me. | ||
| Because normally they've come into a room. | ||
| And Lisa goes, OK, who is this guy? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But we're in the room. | ||
| So let's drink a beer and watch. | ||
| But if they're on the street, they don't have to watch. | ||
| They can just walk off. | ||
| And they often did. | ||
| So it was a tough... | ||
| I lost all my confidence on the street. | ||
| In fact, there's a thing... | ||
| Army does this, you know, break you down, build you back at the Marines, break you down, build you back up. | ||
| They also, in drama school, they break you down, build you back up. | ||
| This kind of idea. | ||
| I accidentally broke myself down and built myself back up on the streets of London. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's kind of beautiful. | ||
| That's why I was creatively born. | ||
| This new version that had this thing. | ||
| Okay, we're going to talk about chickens. | ||
| How many chickens does it take to change the light bulb? | ||
| Well, quite a lot, really. | ||
| Because, you know, they can't. | ||
| Unless they had a friend with it. | ||
| Maybe a dog could help them. | ||
| Or they could rig up something. | ||
| You know, I just waffled over stuff. | ||
| And if it didn't hit a punchline, I didn't care. | ||
| I just carried on. | ||
| It just kept going. | ||
| And then the confidence thing gets you through. | ||
| He just talks for hours. | ||
| So if you release a special, and you've released comedy specials before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How do you develop new material once that special's been released? | ||
| I will do work-in-progress shows, which I took from Lily Tomlin, who did a lot of work-in-progress shows, and then she did her show on Broadway, I think. | ||
| And I thought, because I used to do the old tour, and I used to tour, tour, tour, until at the end we'd film it. | ||
| And I'd begin the next tour with the old tour and just keep improvising in the show, because I'd only improvise on stage, and by the end of the next tour it would be a different show. | ||
| But that didn't sort of work for people because they said, we want a completely new show. | ||
| So now I do this WIP shows, work-in-progress shows, and I will go on stage and muck about, just talking about chickens or banjos or helicopters. | ||
| So do you have a structure when you start? | ||
| Like, say if it's the day after your special's done, and now you have to work on a whole new special, you're doing a work-in-progress show. | ||
| How do you develop your material? | ||
| I would start with my life. | ||
| I did it once where I'd just say, okay, let's go through my life and So you may not know this, but I was living in Northern Ireland and I was born in Yemen. | ||
| I've done this where I went, trawled through my life. | ||
| I need some sort of structure, otherwise I'm stuck. | ||
| I also found that once I'd recorded the show, like last tour, I toured for five years because I just found there were no rules on touring. | ||
| I could just keep going back. | ||
| I did 45 countries, so I could just keep on going. | ||
| And I found there were certain things I'd developed after we'd recorded it that were interesting and worth keeping. | ||
| So I said, okay, well, that's not in the old show. | ||
| I'm going to pull that and start off the new show with that little bit, which is that little piece of material, which is fun. | ||
| And I was training on a marathon, and dogs were woofing at me. | ||
| I ran past the house where a dog was woofing at me. | ||
| And this is in the show now. | ||
| And I suddenly thought, for the first time ever, because dogs have woofed at people all since the beginning of time, I thought, what is the dog actually trying to say? | ||
| If the dog had Fox P2 injected into him so he could suddenly talk, what would he say to me? | ||
| What is that woof woof woof? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| And so it goes into, he's basically saying, assassins! | ||
| He's shouting, assassins are here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I'm a dog. | ||
| It's my job. | ||
| Get a gun. | ||
| Because all dogs are very sure. | ||
| You've never heard an unsure dog in your life. | ||
| When they're barking, they're sure. | ||
| They are absolutely sure that it's assassins. | ||
| It's not the postman. | ||
| It's not the guy with the hamster outside. | ||
| Assassins are here. | ||
| Alarm, alarm. | ||
| Danger, Will Robinson. | ||
| Why have you never written anything down? | ||
| Well, initially I started to write stand-up, but I would go... | ||
| I was trying to type it or write it. | ||
| So if you go into a super... | ||
| I'm dyslexic, so I'm slow. | ||
| Supermarket. | ||
| And there, I just thought, I couldn't write. | ||
| I seemed to be fast if I was just ad-libbing it. | ||
| So you go to the supermarket, there's a guy there, and it's always fruit. | ||
| You go in and there's fruit. | ||
| There's fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit. | ||
| And I found that if I just did it by finding it with the words, And you're supposed to squeeze it, aren't you? | ||
| And so I just think, all the things I can think about fruit. | ||
| So why is it fruit there? | ||
| Why not toilet paper? | ||
| You never go in the supermarket and toilet paper there, because they'd say, well, that's a poo shop, you know? | ||
| You have to go in. | ||
| It's a fresh shop. | ||
| We've got fresh fruit here. | ||
| So we're a very fresh shop. | ||
| Okay, that's why the fruit's right up the front. | ||
| And you've got to squeeze it. | ||
| But how much do you squeeze it? | ||
| And how do you know? | ||
| Is that the right pressure to squeeze it? | ||
| And what if it explodes? | ||
| So I would just keep chatting. | ||
| And if it didn't work, you'd just move on. | ||
| And that's how I developed... | ||
| And this very conversational style that I have, which people say it's supposed to be improvisational. | ||
| It's just I'm always ready to improvise at any point. | ||
| Some people, if you write a thing, you say, well, that is how that piece goes and it's locked in. | ||
| But if you improvise a thing, I've noticed, I came up with this thing of molten material. | ||
| When you first create a new idea and it's working, it's very open and live, like Quicksilver, like Mercury, and then you can add another bit, another bit, another bit, and you can add another bit. | ||
| Once you've got it into a shape, then it becomes locked down, it becomes like a prayer, and you can lose the joy of it. | ||
| It becomes a recitation, and I thought, so don't ever have it locked down. | ||
| Keep it open. | ||
| Keep it always loose so that every time you say it, you're saying it a bit differently. | ||
| And that's the style I've developed. | ||
| And so I can improvise at any point in the show. | ||
| I can just stop it and go, what are walls? | ||
| Why have we got walls? | ||
| We've got walls. | ||
| You know, most animals in the world don't have walls, but we've got walls and they're that good. | ||
| You know, when it's raining, they don't have walls, but they're okay. | ||
| Should we have walls? | ||
| You know, I just waffle about walls. | ||
| Okay, don't talk about walls ever again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I'll show you. | |
| So if I don't get anything out of it, I get jokes on the way out. | ||
| I get laughs on the way out if I don't get it on the way in. | ||
| So that's the technique I've developed. | ||
| Now when you say dyslexic, so if you read something, what do you see? | ||
| I see it, but I get word blindness. | ||
| Word blindness? | ||
| I just see other words, long words. | ||
| I couldn't... | ||
| Rhabdomyolysis took me ages to say, let alone to spell. | ||
| I just find it... | ||
| I sub-vocalize, so in my head I'm going... | ||
| Jack, what are you doing here? | ||
| I would almost say that, you know, when you're kids, they actually read it out loud. | ||
| And I'm not reading it out loud, but I'm saying it in my head. | ||
| And other people, they can do a page, you know, they do this speed reading, and they just, and they could just take in whole pages. | ||
| And it's stunning. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I don't understand that either. | ||
| That's tricky. | ||
| So my spelling was cat with a K, ceiling with an S. Very logical spelling. | ||
| My writing is all over the place. | ||
| Bigger letters, smaller letters, bigger letters. | ||
| And they tested me and they said I'm severely atypically dyslexic. | ||
| So I have a huge mental map memory. | ||
| I can hold a lot of things in the memory in my head. | ||
| So that's just sort of a permanent distinction? | ||
| Like this is just who you are? | ||
| There's no way to fix that? | ||
| It seems so. | ||
| I haven't heard of anyone... | ||
| Coming out of dyslexia and saying, now I can read much faster. | ||
| Now I can do things. | ||
| I just think you're stuck with that. | ||
| But it means you think sideways, and I think a lot of creative people are dyslexic, I think. | ||
| Sideways? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you see clouds. | ||
| You see a lion in the clouds. | ||
| You see a train going through the sky. | ||
| It's a creative thing. | ||
| Juxtaposing things on your wall, you have a juxtaposing thing, which is... | ||
| They don't lead from one to the other. | ||
| They can be fighting right against it or completely bonkers or out of it. | ||
| Just looking here in the room, you know, and linking things together. | ||
| I think creativity, we're always trying to throw ourselves in comedy by something that's weird and opposite and funny. | ||
| Caesar, you should, you know, I'm going for the salad line when I said that, Caesar, do you ever think it was salad? | ||
| And then it seems to make people laugh. | ||
| They go, oh yes, he's a salad. | ||
| This guy murdered a million Gaulish people. | ||
| And he ends up as a salad? | ||
| He's not a cognac? | ||
| Napoleon gets a cognac, a brandy. | ||
| But he's a salad? | ||
| What's that about? | ||
| So, yeah, this is my dyslexic traits. | ||
| But I think you get dealt these cards when you're born, whatever genetic cards they are. | ||
| And the art of life is to play your cards as well as you can. | ||
| And the art of comedy is to relay your life in a humorous way. | ||
| Very much. | ||
| And that's your unique fingerprint. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As you know, if we all have... | ||
| Because people say, well, I seem like another comedian. | ||
| Well, talk about your own life and your own perspective. | ||
| It's got to be different to the next person's because no two people are the same. | ||
| Is that what you enjoy the most? | ||
| The stand-up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, dramatic films I probably enjoy the most because I wanted to do that when I was a kid. | ||
| I discovered that films existed. | ||
| I broke into Pinewood Studios, one of our big studios, when I was 15. Broke in? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like illegally? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What'd you do? | ||
| Well, I was watching a film, Battle of Britain, and at the end it says, filmed on location in Spain and England, and at Pinewood Studios, Ivor Heath Bucks. | ||
| And in the 70s, and if you remember, we didn't have videos. | ||
| We couldn't freeze things. | ||
| We just had to scribble things down. | ||
| So I was scribbling down stuff off the end of films. | ||
| And I said, Pinewood Studios, Ivor Heath Bucks. | ||
| Okay, Ivor Heath, what is that? | ||
| So Bucks, okay, Bucks is short for Buckinghamshire. | ||
| Ivorheath must be a town? | ||
| It's a weird name, town. | ||
| City? | ||
| Village? | ||
| No, it must be a village or a town. | ||
| So I got a map of the United Kingdom, which had alphabetically every town and village and city there going, listed alphabetically. | ||
| And I went all the way down, and I found Ivorheath. | ||
| Okay, that's where it is. | ||
| So I took a train from the south coast of England up to London, a tube train, an underground train, to a place called Uxbridge, then a bus to... | ||
| This roundabout, and I got off, and I said, it's Pinewood Studios, and they said it's about half a mile down that road, so I marched down the road, and I got to the big gabled entrance where all the big stars would come in, and I went up, and I hadn't got this bit worked out, so I went up and I said, I'm going to be in films. | ||
| Can I come in, please? | ||
| LAUGHTER It's what? | ||
| I want to be an actor. | ||
| Can I come in? | ||
| Just piss off, kid. | ||
| And he just told me to piss off, and I thought, no, I've come miles. | ||
| This is a big... | ||
| So I thought, there must be another way in. | ||
| So I went up, and there was another entrance that was near it, but it wasn't the main star entrance. | ||
| It was just the kind of more lorry entrance, the track entrance, the bringing stuff in. | ||
| And I saw people going in and out. | ||
| There was a drawbridge, a bit like where Eagles Dare, the film. | ||
| Anyway, there's someone on the gate, and some people were showing them passes and stuff, and other people were just walking in. | ||
| So I thought, okay, you've got to have the confidence to walk in. | ||
| So I did... | ||
| The 15, 16-year-old confidence, and I just marched in. | ||
| And suddenly I was through, and I was in. | ||
| I was into Piper Studios. | ||
| So then Spielberg broke into Universal. | ||
| I broke into a thing. | ||
| He got a career going pretty immediately. | ||
| I didn't get nothing going. | ||
| Well, you were 15. I know. | ||
| What did you expect was going to happen? | ||
| What was your anticipation? | ||
| Well, anticipation was, as I've said in a piece of stand-up, because... | ||
| I had to walk at a certain speed. | ||
| If you're moving at a certain speed, I thought, no one's going to stop you. | ||
| So you can't creep around looking, what's this? | ||
| Because they say, what are you doing here? | ||
| You know, I just thought, in fact, it's kind of loose inside studios. | ||
| No one really knows what everyone else is doing. | ||
| So you can actually creep around a bit. | ||
| But I moved around at a certain speed, and I sort of marched. | ||
| So I was marching down streets and up aisles and past studios, and I was hoping someone would go, hey, you! | ||
| Kid, yeah? | ||
| You're marching around. | ||
| Yeah, we're doing a film called The Marching Around Kid. | ||
| Our lead kid has just exploded. | ||
| Can you continue marching? | ||
| Yeah, I can march around. | ||
| Can you say words? | ||
| I can string a few words together. | ||
| How did you leave? | ||
| I marched out at the same speed. | ||
| We're done here. | ||
| I marched around for two hours, and I marched out. | ||
| And I have since filmed twice or three times in Pinewood. | ||
| And every time I go back and I'm actually filming there, I go, I broke in here. | ||
| And I just walk at very slow speeds down the streets, knowing that anyone can stop me. | ||
| And I go, I'm just filming around the corner. | ||
| So I love films. | ||
| And I just finished my first film, Six Minutes to Midnight, that I've co-written and produced in. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It's set just before the beginning of World War II. I grew up in this little seaside town. | ||
| America has a seaside town as well from the old days when people used to go to seaside towns before they all went to the hot countries. | ||
| And it's called Bexel on Sea. | ||
| It's now Hastings, Brighton. | ||
| Anyway, south coast I think. | ||
| And there were 26 schools there. | ||
| For some reason, 26 schools, it was linked up. | ||
| There was an Earl Delaware that had set the place up. | ||
| Anyway, one of these things, new. | ||
| And one of them had young girls, German girls, who were linked to the Nazi high command. | ||
| And they were over to learn English and make friends and be ambassadors. | ||
| Because there was, you know, obviously fascism in Germany and there were fascists in Britain and they were making friends. | ||
| And that was the idea. | ||
| Hitler had this idea of linking up with British and taking everyone on, which some people in Britain were for, and obviously a lot of us were against. | ||
| And so it sat around this girls' school. | ||
| And I was showing the badge, the blazer badge. | ||
| All the girls had a blazer, a blue blazer. | ||
| And it had a badge, and it had the name of the school, Augusta Victoria College. | ||
| Bexhill on sea, and at the top it has a British flag and then the Nazi swastika next to it. | ||
| And I thought, holy cow. | ||
| I've just never seen those two flags right next to each other in the same bed. | ||
| So I thought, there's a film in that. | ||
| So we've made a film. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Judy Dutch is in it, Jim Broadbent, both Oscar winners and myself. | ||
| And when will that be released? | ||
| Rolling it out from the end of this year, from fall, as you call it, autumn fall this year. | ||
| So your love of acting and creating films, that's your primary creative... | ||
| Even Trump's stand-up. | ||
| I do love stand-up, and I can do stand-up whenever I want. | ||
| Isn't it weird that Trumped is still a word? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Isn't it weird? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| It's weird. | ||
| He must love that that word exists, that Trump actually means to one-up and better. | ||
| I'm not even going to go there. | ||
| It's crazy, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It also means making tricks. | ||
| You trump things and you can make tricks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| We have tricks and cards. | ||
| How many tricks have you got? | ||
| That was Tricky Dicky Nixon. | ||
| So that's another person who did one or two lies and untruths down his career. | ||
| Yeah, he was also a bad guy. | ||
| So, anyway, yes, I do love stand-up. | ||
| Well, I was never planning to be a stand-up. | ||
| I was going to be a sketch comedian in comedy. | ||
| Well, I was going to be an actor, and then I thought, I can't do... | ||
| In my teenage years, I had no sexual self-confidence. | ||
| The transgender thing didn't play a part in it. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I was playing football to soccer up till 13, so I was going, hey, I'm a runabout guy. | ||
| I'm kind of fast, athletics, whatever. | ||
| Then I go to a school, I'm nothing, and there's no girls here, and I can't do this, and oh, whoa, body's changing, all that. | ||
| And I just lost all my confidence, and I just thought, I can't, and I was quite small. | ||
| So at school, it was all about tall kids, you play the romantic lead. | ||
| Small kids, you're the slave and the servant. | ||
| So I thought, okay. | ||
| Forget this. | ||
| I'll do comedy. | ||
| I'll do the comedy because I love the comedy. | ||
| And Monty Python discovered them. | ||
| I thought, okay, I'll do the, darling, I love you. | ||
| You're made out of cheese. | ||
| I have my knees on fire. | ||
| You know, I just make up rubbish. | ||
| And I thought, okay, that's easier. | ||
| So I did that. | ||
| And it wouldn't take off. | ||
| My career just wouldn't, you know, left school, dropped out of university, couldn't get it going. | ||
| And by the time it got going, when I was about 30, I thought, I'm now going to hold on to this comedy and start doing drama at the same time. | ||
| So I've run these parallel things. | ||
| And I'm going to be on Broadway at the beginning of next year, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Laurie Metcalf. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Scott Rudin production. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| That was a great movie. | ||
| Yeah, great movie. | ||
| As I said, I'm doing Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor, and I'm playing Richard Burton. | ||
| Yeah, so that's an amazing production. | ||
| You know, I'm performing with Judi Dench in films in a Stephen Frears film, Victoria and Abdul. | ||
| So I'm getting great drama roles now. | ||
| I've pushed a long time to do that. | ||
| But normally if you do comedy, they won't let you do drama. | ||
| If you do drama, you don't really do comedy. | ||
| That's sort of breaking down though, right? | ||
| Steve Carell. | ||
| Steve Carell. | ||
| He has moved out. | ||
| I'm not sure if he's doing the comedy so much anymore, but exactly where Steve Carell's gone. | ||
| John Lithgow could also say he was someone who had a very much dramatic career, but then he did Third Rock for the Sun, which he was beautiful in, and he was nominated every year and won two Emmys and nominated six times. | ||
| Just fantastic work. | ||
| Yeah, I was on news radio at the same time. | ||
| I was also on the same network. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, his stuff was... | ||
| He's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a great actor. | ||
| Yeah, he's stunning. | ||
| You know, he played Churchill in The Crown, Winston Churchill. | ||
| A darker side of Churchill that people don't know about, which I knew about. | ||
| Well, he's a guy that really has a love of theater, a love of performing. | ||
| When he talks about it, you can see his goosebumps raise, and you can see he gets excited. | ||
| Yes, I can absolutely feel that. | ||
| I mean, he's played such a range of characters. | ||
| If he's playing evil, you just think, this guy is so evil. | ||
| When he's playing the character in The Third Rock for The Sun... | ||
| It's just so beautiful. | ||
| For some reason, I couldn't download it in Britain, but I found a place I could find it. | ||
| I've watched every single episode, and now I'm going through the second time. | ||
| So it's just beautiful stuff. | ||
| So when you got into stand-up comedy, when you first started doing that, what is the scene like in England? | ||
| Was there comedy clubs where you could go to an open mic night? | ||
| How do you start your career? | ||
| We were copying you guys. | ||
| I think Lenny Bruce set up the more alternative version. | ||
| But I still think in America, it's always stayed kind of mainstream, but Lenny Bruce was definitely doing alternative. | ||
| I noticed you got a lot of Lenny. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| Yeah, and I played him on stage, and that was a wonderful thing. | ||
| What did you play him in? | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Lenny. | ||
| You know the film was from a stage play? | ||
| The Dustin Hoffman film? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Really? | ||
| That was a stage play. | ||
| Dustin Hoffman was fantastic in that movie. | ||
| He was so close. | ||
| And the guy who plays him in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is very good as well. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's very interesting, isn't it? | ||
| Because I'm watching that and I'm thinking, okay, now I've gone through the clubs myself, but I did mine in the 80s and into the 90s, and that's in the 70s. | ||
| 50s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And I sort of take myself there. | ||
| And then there's Lenny there. | ||
| And I'm thinking, I know Lenny. | ||
| And I play them. | ||
| I used to die. | ||
| Oh, God, that's me. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| But I was doing the stand-up. | ||
| See, that's the photo. | ||
| I put that together. | ||
| And I called him the Jesus Christ of comedy because as a Jewish guy, he died for us to give us the freedom of speech. | ||
| He died for freedom of speech because in the end... | ||
| A little bit of heroin too. | ||
| I know, but to mix it together, he shouldn't have conflated the two. | ||
| But he meant that we could say what we wanted to on stage. | ||
| Yeah, the Mrs. Maisel thing makes it a little, it's a little homogenized, like him, like even his struggle, it's almost like it's no big deal. | ||
| Are you in the latest season? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it three or two? | ||
| Well, three hasn't released yet. | ||
| They're filming it right now. | ||
| I've gone through both of them. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| It's not accurate. | ||
| Like, historically, it's way off the mark. | ||
| There's no woman who was talking like that back then. | ||
| There was no Mrs. Maisel. | ||
| No, I really liked it. | ||
| And it's interesting. | ||
| She... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, Norm Macdonald got mad about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did he? | |
| He's like, yeah, there was no woman like that back then. | ||
| Can we give it to the fucking show, man? | ||
| The Hulk's not real either. | ||
| There's no guy who becomes the Hulk. | ||
| Can you enjoy it? | ||
| I really like Norm Macdonald. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She was swearing like a soldier on stage. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Very quickly. | ||
| Very quickly. | ||
| Which that was, I found, I don't know how she ramped into that, and then she ramped down out of it. | ||
| It was, that was something. | ||
| And then she went to France on one episode and did stand-up that someone was translating. | ||
| That was weird. | ||
| I have done it in French, and I don't think I could have got that. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| That scene just seemed to be a slightly shark. | ||
| It's not jumping a shark, going up to the shark and swimming around a shark. | ||
| It was artistic interpretation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't realistic. | ||
| But it was still... | ||
| As a person who makes a living doing stand-up comedy, I was willing to let that suspension of disbelief take place. | ||
| And I like the sexual relationship. | ||
| It's almost coming back. | ||
| The husband's almost coming back into the frame. | ||
| And his... | ||
| And his fight there. | ||
| Because, yeah. | ||
| But I did watch it. | ||
| I binge watched it all. | ||
| That's what I'm doing now. | ||
| I just sit down now and I just watch everything. | ||
| And then I move on. | ||
| But, yeah, Lenny. | ||
| How do we get into Lenny? | ||
| We were talking about something else. | ||
| But anyway, no, it was great playing Lenny. | ||
| But, oh, yes, I was doing the stand-ups. | ||
| And I was just told by director Peter Hall, I'll leave the stand-up to you. | ||
| So I had no direction on it. | ||
| So I just did it as close as I could to how Lenny would have done it. | ||
| Did you listen to a lot of recordings? | ||
| I did. | ||
| It's very difficult for British kids, or maybe even American kids of today, to know, because he's doing a lot of hipster references, a lot of, you know, the Sophie Tucker references, and there's a Lawrence Welch, is it? | ||
| Welch? | ||
| Welch, yeah. | ||
| We don't know those guys, so when he was doing it, it goes to Sophie Tucker, and they're going, I've got to look up Sophie. | ||
| I've had to look up some of the punchlines or a number of the references because without the references you can't get it. | ||
| This is a trick I do in Universal Humor that I take either huge references or explain my references so that, you know, Caesar, everyone probably knows about Caesar, and if they don't, well, yeah, anyway. | ||
| Well, as good as Lenny was, it's really hard for people to listen to that comedy today. | ||
| It doesn't necessarily transfer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he's talking about Nixon. | ||
| And you're going, oh, Nixon, Nixon. | ||
| No, this is Vice President Nixon. | ||
| This is Eisenhower's Nixon. | ||
| Different thing. | ||
| So I worked out that nearly all my stuff is non-dateable. | ||
| I don't do any topical stuff. | ||
| I don't do party political stuff. | ||
| So it should not date. | ||
| I do historical stuff because that never dates. | ||
| Caesar is not going to come back. | ||
| Now Caesar's changed his whole thing. | ||
| He's much nicer now. | ||
| He's come back from the dead and he's cleaned up his act. | ||
| So, I've tried to do that, and Python did this as well. | ||
| You do stuff, it just doesn't really date. | ||
| Most of it doesn't date. | ||
| Which is a handy thing, so the stuff can stick on. | ||
| But much stand-up does. | ||
| And it's also, the culture is so significantly different between the late 50s and 60s, where Lenny Bruce was sort of starting out and making his mark, versus today. | ||
| It's like the things that were naughty back then, the things that he could say that were controversial. | ||
| They were nothing today. | ||
| Literally, it's a non-controversy. | ||
| Well, there was one that still was when he said, how many people using the N-word and the S-word, you know, he just went to all the racial epithets. | ||
| And I did this. | ||
| I used to do that on stage every night, and that was still striking. | ||
| Tense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but the sentiment behind it was that these words only have power because they're forbidden. | ||
| Because we give them power. | ||
| And if you could use them again and again and again, and for the gay community, they've taken the word queer, they've claimed that so it doesn't have the force anymore. | ||
| And that is a truth. | ||
| That was a true analysis that he did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was... | ||
| We had some still jokes. | ||
| There was a... | ||
| Unfortunately, accidentally, a friend of mine stole one of his jokes and didn't know. | ||
| He actually just thought of the same premise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the premise was... | ||
| That homosexuality in some places is illegal. | ||
| And what do they do if they catch you? | ||
| Well, they lock you up in jail with a bunch of men who want to have sex with you. | ||
| And that was Lenny Bruce's line. | ||
| Like, dig. | ||
| Homosexuality is illegal, right? | ||
| So what do they do? | ||
| They put you in jail with a bunch of men who want to have sex with you. | ||
| You know, like, that was his whole, like... | ||
| And, like, that still would work today. | ||
| Like, if there was a place where homosexuality was illegal today and you did that joke, it's a good joke. | ||
| It's, like, set up punchline. | ||
| It's all right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lenny was ahead of us. | ||
| And, you know, his early stuff was more mainstream than you could ever believe. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He was doing... | ||
| Way, way, way. | ||
| Same as Carlin. | ||
| Have you listened to Carlin's early stuff? | ||
| No, I've heard of it. | ||
| Oh my god, it was like a typical Jack Parr Tonight Show set. | ||
| It was all really down the middle, squeaky clean, and he wore suits, and He was a clean cut. | ||
| You ever seen Carlin in the early days? | ||
| I think I've seen him once. | ||
| Yeah, I do know. | ||
| Wasn't there a tie and a suit? | ||
| There was a change. | ||
| Well, Lenny had a complete change. | ||
| And that thing in the film where he says, you'll never play here in, what's the area in upstate New York? | ||
| Catskills? | ||
| Catskills. | ||
| You'll never play in the Catskills again? | ||
|
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I want to play in the Catskills again. | |
| I remember when I watched it first, I thought, oh, that's a terrible thing to have. | ||
| But now that I know what that was, it was a certain belt of, you know, how you're going to play. | ||
|
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Look at that. | |
| That's George Carlin. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Play a little bit of this. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| From the Merv Griffin show. | ||
|
unidentified
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Big hassle. | |
| We never see how the Indians prepare. | ||
| Look at it. | ||
| It's their attack, right? | ||
| How awful that suit is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now, the Indians were good fighters. | |
| Just because they started in Massachusetts and wound up defending Malibu doesn't mean... | ||
| But it was that sort of style. | ||
| You know, he had that... | ||
| I mean, that's what you did back then. | ||
| This is the Merv Griffin show. | ||
| I mean, you really didn't have any options. | ||
| That's how you performed. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Otherwise, they wouldn't let you on. | ||
| Yeah, that's what you did. | ||
| Did he change on a dime? | ||
| He got arrested a bunch of times, you know? | ||
| And he became a marijuana enthusiast. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| The times changed. | ||
| And I think you can only sit back and observe for so long before you start commenting on things. | ||
| And then he shifted and he became... | ||
| And I think he was also experiencing Pryor. | ||
| Like Pryor, of course, was... | ||
| I think Lenny Bruce was the original. | ||
| But Pryor was the one who made it insanely personal and he was insanely vulnerable on stage. | ||
| And also... | ||
| He had a point to a lot of the things he was doing. | ||
| I mean, I think if there's a great... | ||
| I don't think there's a greatest stand-up of all time, but if there is, it might be prior. | ||
| You know, that he just... | ||
| He had this perspective that was just wholly individual, like wholly him. | ||
| Except 10 years later, that's what he looks like. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| The beard really does change. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he was... | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| He's got, like, a fucking Steve Jobs outfit on now. | ||
| Yeah, he became a hippie. | ||
| Hair got longer. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Now, Richard Pryor, I think Richard Pryor is... | ||
| For me, he was... | ||
| Because I had this base of Monty Python, which is what I was going to do. | ||
| And then I had Richard Pryor and Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian, Billy Connolly. | ||
| Those two, Billy talks just so relaxed when he's talking to large groups of people. | ||
| And what Richard was doing... | ||
| It was the acting out of all the characters thing. | ||
| That was the wonderful thing. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| No. | ||
| The dog says, come on in. | ||
| Hey, come on in. | ||
| To burglars. | ||
| Yeah, you come in. | ||
| You shall not leave. | ||
| Yeah, Dobermans. | ||
| Yeah, playing these different voices and characters and what he could do. | ||
| And that was just stunning to me. | ||
| Yeah, he was something special. | ||
| Look at him back in the day, too. | ||
| That's literally him on the wall back there, the mugshot. | ||
| That's the same era. | ||
| Could that have been that night? | ||
| Yeah, might have been that night. | ||
| There's some fantastic recordings that I don't know where they are now, but they used to be able to buy them. | ||
| I bought them at a truck stop, and they were from Red Fox's Comedy Club, and they were cassette tapes. | ||
| And I was doing a road gig, and I think I found them, and I bought a bunch of them. | ||
| And these recordings were, they just had set up a tape recorder, and he was doing these random sets at Red Fox's Comedy Club. | ||
| It was a lot of experimenting, a lot of ad-libbing, a lot of, I mean, he was clearly high on stage. | ||
| I mean, he would go on stage high a lot, and he would just ramble about stuff. | ||
| And you would see these bits forming and coming out of that, and then some of those bits eventually would be on some of his more famous albums later. | ||
| It was great, great stuff. | ||
| Just to see this guy who was just so... | ||
| If you go from your traditional stand-up comedian from 1960, like you were seeing George Carlin on stage, to what Pryor was doing in the 70s. | ||
| It's just so different. | ||
| So radically, radically different. | ||
| He took it to a different place. | ||
| You were talking about the scene in Britain. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| We don't really have much of a film industry. | ||
| We don't have it as quite a set. | ||
| Obviously, it's huge in America compared to what we have. | ||
| We have quite a good TV industry. | ||
| But we tour like crazy. | ||
| So there's lots of tours in 100-seaters, 500-seaters, 1,000-seaters, 2,000-seaters. | ||
| That goes on endlessly all the time, way more than it used to before. | ||
| And there's lots of clubs, and a lot of them were just room above a pub-type clubs. | ||
| So I believe the clubs in America were much more set up. | ||
| There was a bar thing, the system. | ||
| People come out and do the drinks. | ||
| And it was quite a cash outlay to get this club going. | ||
| And it would be, you know, most nights of the week. | ||
| We'd have it one night a week. | ||
| It'd just be a function room in a pub that existed for maybe hundreds and hundreds of years because all these pubs used to be taverns, drinking. | ||
| And it wasn't used. | ||
| Some guy would say, hey, I'll run a club up here. | ||
| I'll take the door money, you take the bar money. | ||
| And that was the deal. | ||
| So a lot of amateurs running it. | ||
| So we had lots of clubs. | ||
| We had about 60, 70, 80 clubs in London that you could zip around. | ||
| That many? | ||
| Yeah, it was a ridiculous amount. | ||
| And so for me, what the Beatles had with playing in Germany, I had with London and we all had with playing in London. | ||
| You could do four in a night quite easily on Friday and Saturday. | ||
| You just jump in taxis and zip between different gigs. | ||
| Like they do in New York. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it was just so many clubs. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So it was beautiful. | ||
| I think it's less now, but there's lots of open mic nights now, and so many people wanted to get into it. | ||
| There's no top to the career now. | ||
| People are playing in an arena. | ||
| I started doing arena tours. | ||
| I'm now doing more theater tours on this one. | ||
| My audience has got a bit older, but anyway, jumping between the two, like playing Hollywood Bowl here, you know, in LA, that's such a beautiful thing to play. | ||
| And the Greeks got it right. | ||
| The laughter rolls down the hill. | ||
| I've played it twice now, and it's just gorgeous. | ||
| Yeah, I've never played there, but I've been there for a few times for a few different things. | ||
| I saw Annie there, and I saw the, what is it? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Nightmare Before Halloween, yeah. | ||
| For Christmas. | ||
| So Annie, the musical? | ||
| Yeah, they do the musical there. | ||
| They do a version of it. | ||
| And they do the Nightmare Before Halloween where they play the movie and then they have a symphony. | ||
| And the symphony... | ||
| I didn't think Annie would be your kind of... | ||
| I have kids. | ||
| You needed to say that. | ||
| I didn't enjoy it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm bored out of my fucking mind. | ||
| No, I must have. | ||
| But I was high. | ||
| I'm just going to leave it there. | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| Annie's your kind of gig. | ||
| It always comes in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I like everything. | ||
| I like a lot of things that you would think I wouldn't like. | ||
| You know that for the people of L.A. or people of the world, I believe that Hollywood Bowl is a L.A. park. | ||
| So you can actually go up there and have your sandwiches anytime you want. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Which is a beautiful thing. | ||
| I do that. | ||
| I can drive up there because it looks like don't come in here. | ||
| There's barriers and stuff. | ||
| But no, you can park up and go in. | ||
| It's a park. | ||
| It's still a park. | ||
| I love that space. | ||
| It's just great. | ||
| And I knew that Monty Python had played there, so I thought, I've got to play there. | ||
| Well, it's beautiful, too, because it's all outdoors, and LA has such amazing weather, and you look around, you see the houses in the distance, and it's a special little spot. | ||
| It is beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know Dave Chappelle's done some gigs there. | ||
| I think Chris Rock did a gig there. | ||
| It must be a fun place to perform, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just works. | ||
| That amphitheater thing, I think it was the Greeks. | ||
| It came out. | ||
| Democracy and amphitheaters. | ||
| Do you still go to clubs at all? | ||
| I don't so much. | ||
| I was reading the definitive thing on Robin Williams and how he would jump into clubs and do stuff and go on. | ||
| And I... That doesn't really work for my stuff. | ||
| I tend to get a small – I can do a club like for the work-in-progress shows I was doing. | ||
| I was taking – they have the Al Murray Club in Islington – no, Angel in London, sort of northeast London. | ||
| And they had a show going on at 6, one at 7, and I would take an hour of that and just do that again and again and again. | ||
| So I'll take an hour and I'll go out for an hour and workshop the show. | ||
| As opposed to coming on and doing 15 minutes off the top of my head. | ||
| Because I find that if I'm completely going scattergun, just trying to find funny, that doesn't really help me. | ||
| I need to keep crafting the stuff. | ||
| You need more time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also I don't need... | ||
| If it's a... | ||
| If it's a comedy club, they want it faster, they want it quicker, they want it smoother. | ||
| And I'm not looking to hit the gags. | ||
| I'm just looking to find things and have the space to stop and go, what is it about cheese? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Why has it got two E's in it? | ||
| I just want to waffle around until I go, okay, that's a good one. | ||
| I'll keep that pit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you ever feel like when you're doing that, like, Jesus Christ, I've got to get off this fucking subject. | ||
| Like, there's nothing there? | ||
| Well, yeah, I do that. | ||
| But then I do this thing. | ||
| I write on my left hand, like it's a note to self, and I go, if I do pig farming, talking about pigs and stuff, I go, never talk about pig farming. | ||
| Are you guys all pig farmers? | ||
| All right, I'm not talking about that. | ||
| Never talk about cheese again. | ||
| Cheese jokes do not work, especially in northeast London. | ||
| You just try and get laughs on the way out. | ||
| And the career is over. | ||
| Cheese is taking over my life. | ||
| Do you do some gigs dressed in your girl mode and some in boy mode? | ||
| I can. | ||
| I can. | ||
| I can do it whatever mode I want now. | ||
| It's a complete human torch thing. | ||
| I can flame off, flame off. | ||
| I can wear a dress or I can wear trousers and it doesn't matter. | ||
| And they don't give a monkeys either. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Well, they're your fans. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're coming to see you. | ||
| Do they get disappointed if you dress as a man? | ||
|
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Like, hey, we came to see girl mode. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I shouldn't care. | ||
| I can't be on stage going, oh, I wonder if this... | ||
| Because that's nothing to do with the comedy. | ||
| And I do think some people thought it was... | ||
| He's going to talk about lipstick for two hours. | ||
|
unidentified
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LAUGHTER So anyway, another lipstick I know is cool. | |
| Do you dress it at all? | ||
| Do you dress it at all in your act? | ||
| I do, but diagonally. | ||
| I will do it diagonally. | ||
| Diagonally? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's never the front part of the thing. | ||
| I will just say... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just... | ||
| It would not be the front of the subject. | ||
| I might point it in passing. | ||
| So I'll talk about Ancient Kings stuff, weird banjos, dogs fighting cats, anything like that. | ||
| And then I might mention it just in passing as opposed to, let me tell you about being transgender. | ||
| I just don't do that. | ||
| Am I talking about the fights? | ||
| I talked about the fight I had, which was in the street, and that this guy was saying this, and I said this, and so... | ||
| I built the fight into a huge thing, a huge standoff stuff, so I can make that into something. | ||
| But no, it's not... | ||
| because it's supposed to be the background of uh of what i'm doing the essential thing if you like surreal comedy off the wall comedy that's what i do and i just happen to be transgender which makes no odds in these these days do you find that more today than ever people are asking you questions about transgender issues because they're they're at the forefront No, less, actually. | ||
| Less? | ||
| Yeah, less. | ||
| Really? | ||
| There was a point. | ||
| You were the spokesperson? | ||
| It was on, and they would, yes. | ||
| Well, if not a spokesperson, I was someone who was going to talk about it, at least. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Tell us all about this. | ||
| And I'd do an interview, and if it was an hour interview, about 40 minutes would be on that. | ||
| And then when they came to write it, they thought, well, I'm just writing all about this. | ||
| All right, let's put that back a bit. | ||
| And they used to balance it out when they wrote the interview out. | ||
| Would you rather that they just accept it and just not bring it up? | ||
| I'm fine with it now. | ||
| After the marathons, it all... | ||
| It changed. | ||
| Yeah, it changed. | ||
| Because they said, oh, so... | ||
| Because I used to say action transvestite and executive transvestite. | ||
| I was in New York. | ||
| I was playing New York, and they said, article, a guy was found living in one of the caves in the park in New York, and he was found to have a lot of women's shoes in there, so he's probably a transvestite. | ||
| And I went, okay, well, that's weirdo transvestite. | ||
| I'm not living in a cave. | ||
| I'm traveling business class on the planes. | ||
| This is executive transvestite. | ||
| So I came up with that one. | ||
| Then the action transvestite was just kind of a fun, because I was more kind of boysy about things, and I'll give people grief in the streets if they give me grief. | ||
| And then after the marathons, it became a different thing, and everyone just went, oh. | ||
| I've had some, you know, I remember a guy, this was a very interesting altercation, because there's hardly any words in it, so I live near Victoria Coach Station in London most of the time when I'm around, and I was walking down there, and anyway, it's a coach station, | ||
| so people are traveling all over Europe from there, and I walked up, and I was in girl mode, and this guy looked at me, he said, hey, Eddie Izzard, you run all those marathons, and you wear all that clobber, which is And then he went, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it was just like he was giving me a pass. | ||
| He was going, well, okay, okay. | ||
| Yeah, they have to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what my... | ||
| I mean, I didn't have a negative opinion of you. | ||
| I had a positive opinion of you. | ||
| But my positive opinion of you elevated once I saw you did those marathons. | ||
| That's a person with an iron will. | ||
| That's a different kind of person. | ||
| It was so... | ||
| Huge, what you did, that everyone had to respect it. | ||
| Like, they knew they couldn't do it, or if they could do it, they haven't, you know? | ||
| That actually does cover it. | ||
| Yes, I hadn't talked about it. | ||
| You accomplished something pretty spectacular. | ||
| It was beautiful, and it did about five things at once, and it was raising money. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I think I've raised about four and a half million pounds, about six million, seven million dollars. | ||
| So that feels great, and that's with their help, because the organization is good at raising the money. | ||
| And it gave me this confidence, this health thing, back from when I was a kid. | ||
| A lot of us were running around kids. | ||
| How old were you when you did that? | ||
| First one was, I was 47. So you're 47 and you just decided, yeah, I'm off. | ||
| It was training. | ||
| I wanted to do something. | ||
| It's an adventure as well. | ||
| And, you know, I think you have to live life as an adventure. | ||
| Otherwise, life is too hard. | ||
| But if you look at it as adventure, it means there are highs and lows built into it. | ||
| And I got this health kick out of it. | ||
| It was just a number of things. | ||
| And then I could meet people. | ||
| I remember on the first marathon, I met three army sergeants. | ||
| And they said, we've heard you're doing this. | ||
| This is from the British Army. | ||
| And I was just having something that we... | ||
| Halfway through my... | ||
| What was it? | ||
| About my 10th marathon. | ||
| He said, we heard you're doing this. | ||
| And they were chatting to me, you know, because I know forces and I'm of that mentality. | ||
| I'm very happy to chat. | ||
| And suddenly I thought, wow, this is an interesting respect thing. | ||
| And they said, we're trainers. | ||
| We train. | ||
| We work out the training regimes for the Army. | ||
| And so we were very interested in what you're doing and what you... | ||
| Seemed to be able to do. | ||
| So they just found it fascinating. | ||
| And I found that fascinating. | ||
| I could suddenly talk to service people in a certain way, sports people in a certain way. | ||
| Everything just shifted. | ||
| And people from different ethnic groups, some people are very down on... | ||
| Some ethnic groups are down on being transgender or whatever. | ||
| But if you're doing that, then it says, okay, we put these two together and... | ||
| You're in a different place. | ||
| So it has completely changed the way a lot of people react to me. | ||
| Yeah, I can only imagine. | ||
| They don't necessarily come to the comedy, but that's fine. | ||
| But they respect you. | ||
| Yeah, it's just certain different things happen. | ||
| And I like to chat to people. | ||
| I found that chatting is very important. | ||
| Because if you see someone and it's a bloke, they're wearing makeup, whatever, and you get lipstick, and you go, people can go, ooh. | ||
| But if you say, hi, nice weather today. | ||
| And they go, oh, yeah, it's quite nice. | ||
| And then they're on a different footing. | ||
| They're trying to put you into a place of normalcy. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm trying to put myself in. | ||
| They will allow me in. | ||
| They will allow me in. | ||
| Okay, it seems normal. | ||
| The talking is the most important thing. | ||
| Just chatting away and being boring. | ||
| I have a natural boringness. | ||
| I think maybe everyone has a natural boringness. | ||
| I think the really interesting people probably just blow up in their 20s and stuff because they just do stuff that's too far out. | ||
| But most of us are pretty boring, and then we add layers of interestingness on top to... | ||
| To reach that level of, okay, I think I'm quite interesting now. | ||
| I think I've got enough interesting going on. | ||
| But my boringness in chatting, I am trying to talk about weather or wood or walls or, you know, trees or banjos. | ||
| So that introduces the normalcy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The boring chatter. | ||
| I won't say... | ||
| I won't say, we've got to do something extreme now. | ||
| I'll just chat about... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Normal things. | ||
| Yeah, where'd you get that jacket? | ||
| That's quite a good jacket on you. | ||
| It won't work with me. | ||
| Just talk about things. | ||
| Be human. | ||
| Be a human being. | ||
| The biggest controversy in America in terms of transgender people, probably the biggest, or one of the biggest, is competing in sports with biological women. | ||
| That's the biggest one. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you're asking me for answers on that, I haven't really got them. | ||
| I know... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've got a good one for washrooms, as you call them. | ||
| What's your take on that? | ||
| Urinals, as you call them. | ||
| We call them urinals. | ||
| Just chuck them all out, and everyone just... | ||
| It's all cubicles. | ||
| And we already do that in restaurants. | ||
| We already share stuff, the toilets. | ||
| We do it in airplanes. | ||
| We have no bother. | ||
| But if you just remove urinals in theaters and places, there won't be queuing. | ||
| Often the women are queuing forever and the men are not queuing. | ||
| This way everyone shares. | ||
| Everyone behaves with their own responsibility. | ||
| I've heard of it working in a school as well. | ||
| There was less bullying in the loos. | ||
| So it's the idea, it's regression of technology, I take it. | ||
| So get the urinal, chuck it out the window. | ||
| Everyone has a cubicle. | ||
| Just go to the loo and then use the mirrors and then go away. | ||
| And so everything being for both genders? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You just make it all even and then we get outside a lot of problems. | ||
| Some people will have pushback on that and have other reasons why they don't like it. | ||
| A lot of women don't want to be in a washroom with men, though. | ||
| Well, they already are going into, if they're sharing it in the loo's in the airplane, if they're sharing it in a... | ||
| Yeah, but an airplane is one, you know, it's only one person to go in there. | ||
| I think their concern is there's, you know, some men are fucking creeps. | ||
| And some women just want to have a place where they could just be themselves and just check their makeup and go to the bathroom and wash and talk amongst other women. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| It's just I've, you know, if you think about anything that's going to change anything, there's usually something that won't change. | ||
| Right, but the only reason to do this is to accommodate people who are transgender in a way that it seems like it doesn't put them in a position where they can be judged because everyone's doing it. | ||
| Well, if it stops bullying in schools, then there's a number of things in there that it can make easier. | ||
| It just makes a whole area of things a lot easier. | ||
| How would it stop bullying, though? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just giving you the figures that have... | ||
| What have they said? | ||
| Well, they just said that they tried it in a school and the bullying went down. | ||
| So if there's girls and there's boys together, it's like boys will bully the boys or girls will bully the girls. | ||
| But if you have them all together, they don't. | ||
| It seems so. | ||
| And they just punish the creeps, which is really what you, I mean, if someone's being a creep in a bathroom, the problem is the creep, it's not the bathroom. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, so this is, you know, I haven't scientifically proved this with chemicals and a slide rule or whatever, but it's an idea that gets us to a better place and surely we're all somewhere on the spectrum of something. | ||
| So the idea that... | ||
| That anyone who is expressing themselves in a different way, that that is a problem. | ||
| If you take it by just straight, if we all went back to how we used to think that there was just men and women and everyone had straight sex, even that sex, no one would talk about that. | ||
| People, you know, Victorian age and your equivalent Victorian age, no one would talk about that. | ||
| That was all horrible. | ||
| Sex was, procreation was dirty. | ||
| The whole idea of everything. | ||
| So... | ||
| I'm trying to get to a practical place where people just go to the loo and behave like adults. | ||
| Even the kids seem to behave more like adults, which is interesting. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah, that is the concern, right? | ||
| We have a system in place, and someone tries to change the system, then people get upset. | ||
| And that always happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, but also women do queue forever and men don't queue at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Or queue much less. | ||
| But this makes it so easy. | ||
| It makes it so easy. | ||
| Cueing evens that out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And everyone just behaves like an adult. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a toilet. | ||
| The Romans used to have it with open plan toilets. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that. | ||
| We have made it into a problem. | ||
| We have... | ||
| Made this a whole psychological problem. | ||
| Whereas the Romans just sit down there and have a poo and have a chat. | ||
| And once they did make it a problem and categorize people by gender, then it became this thing, and now you don't want to change that. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| They might have had male and female toys in the Roman times, but just the fact that they were more open about the idea that it's bodily functions. | ||
| It's just normal. | ||
| And we've, you know, back before we came in, we were just going out into the woods and the forest and having a poo. | ||
| And it was just having a poo, and now we feel it's a big... | ||
| Problem having a poo. | ||
| We don't like the fact we have a poo. | ||
| We don't want to admit that we have the poo. | ||
| Does the Queen ever have a poo? | ||
| Maybe never. | ||
| Has the attitude, besides the marathon thing, has the attitude culturally shifted in the UK the same way it's shifted in America where people are more? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I think the more and more people are out and positive. | ||
| I mean, you've basically got to... | ||
| From every group. | ||
| This is ethnic groups. | ||
| This is from women. | ||
| This is from anyone that feels slightly out of the loop. | ||
| If you can have any positive role models that go out there that do other things, just something that's nothing to do with sexuality, you're very good at cooking. | ||
| You're on television for this. | ||
| It tends to be television helps. | ||
| You're a great sports star. | ||
| You're this, you're that. | ||
| Those things, people say, well, there's a positive role model, and they are of a different color or of a different sexuality. | ||
| And that just helps everyone. | ||
| Adjust their mindset. | ||
| And the younger people come through and that's all they know. | ||
| I know about this person. | ||
| I mean, like, you know, in baseball, do you see the famous documentary, Baseball? | ||
| Ken Burns? | ||
| Yeah, the Ken Burns one. | ||
| And that black people, after the Civil War, black people were playing baseball. | ||
| And then there was some guy who was very powerful. | ||
| He said there would be no black people in major leagues at all. | ||
| And it was blocked from about 1890, something like this, all the way through... | ||
| To 1950s. | ||
| So it was actually happening and then it went backwards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there was a positive role moment. | ||
| Well, why ever that happened? | ||
| Things can go backwards and things go forwards. | ||
| And I just think, you know, if we're trying to get to a world where everyone's living that live... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's really what we need, right? | ||
| Just live and let live. | ||
| As long as you're not interfering with other people's lives, as long as you're not doing something that somehow or another fucks with someone else, who cares? | ||
| Why would anyone care? | ||
| I mean, I think people care because they're unhappy with themselves. | ||
| I think that's the only time people care. | ||
| And my... | ||
| My issue with this that I've come across is with athletes. | ||
| It's with transgender athletes competing against women, particularly in my field, in fighting. | ||
| There's been some, there have been, at least there was one very vocal case, one very public case, of a transgender athlete who was male for 30 plus years, transitioned over for a couple years, for two years, and then started fighting women. | ||
| Didn't tell them that she used to be a man. | ||
| And it became a giant issue. | ||
| And people were outraged and angered. | ||
| The women who got beat up were angry because they got destroyed. | ||
| Two of them did. | ||
| And then she was public about it and then started fighting women that were willing and knew. | ||
| You've got to say things up front. | ||
| I came out. | ||
| I think one of the interesting things about it is that there are no real answers, that it's one of those things where you just got to go, huh, what do we do here? | ||
| And this is what I think one of the more unique things about being a person is that we have this opportunity to look at this unusual circumstance and communicate about it and try to figure it out. | ||
| Communication. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The whole thing. | ||
| I just knew, on my personal thing, if I came out, if we started talking about it, we'd get in a better place than not talking about it and just saying it's a negative thing. | ||
| When you came out, did it give you a feeling of relief? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, you know, because you've got this secret, and the secret is I did self-analysis. | ||
| I lay on a bed and said, why am I thinking this way? | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| Why do I get that? | ||
| What are the thoughts? | ||
| Because you still like women. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, okay, here's the clearest way I can show it. | ||
| There was a woman on television. | ||
| She said, my daughter, she was 12, and she was upstairs. | ||
| She was wearing my makeup, and she was wearing my heels, and I told her to get that stuff off. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| She said to her daughter, who was 12, and that was from an age point of view. | ||
| And I just thought, well, that's what I'd be doing at 12. That's what I was doing in my stepmother's clothes and stuff. | ||
| So I thought, well, hang on, I'm having the exact same desire to express myself in that way. | ||
| So I just wanted to express myself in that way, and I was told, like, by society, you're not allowed to. | ||
| And I just thought, well, you know, some people are allowed to, and I'm not. | ||
| I gave myself permission. | ||
| I said, I'm allowed to. | ||
| And it's not hurting anyone else. | ||
| And I was stealing the makeup, and after that I started buying the makeup because the police got me. | ||
| You got caught stealing makeup? | ||
| Yeah, and I go back into the shop in Bexhill and I say, I'll buy this lipstick, thank you very much. | ||
| And I always make a point. | ||
| They say, yeah, it's him again with the bloody lipstick. | ||
| So, yeah, it's... | ||
| So you just had this desire to express yourself in a way. | ||
| Yeah, just like some women do, and some women don't. | ||
| Some say, I'm not going to wear any makeup. | ||
| I'm not going to paint my nails. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if I look very female, then I might wear different things or express myself in a different way, but I look kind of more boyish, more male-ish, so I have to choose certain clothes, certain look. | ||
| And I do it that way. | ||
| And quite a lot of people are sort of going, okay, fair play. | ||
| That seems okay. | ||
| And you're looking fairly well put together. | ||
| That's what I get to. | ||
| So when you finally came out, the relief, though, you could just be yourself. | ||
| Yeah, and you don't tend to look terrible. | ||
| When you first go out, you go, well, that doesn't work with that. | ||
| Why was I wearing that? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But you've never had that teenage girl chance to be able to try things out and have your peer group say, you're not wearing that, are you? | ||
| Because that's rubbish. | ||
| Okay, so then I gradually learned, okay, how does makeup work? | ||
| Okay, that's how it works. | ||
| So you gradually get better at things. | ||
| Don't buy that. | ||
| That color doesn't work. | ||
| Oh, it can work. | ||
| But the relief is huge because you've no longer got this hellish secret. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then you can begin the dialogue. | ||
| I didn't really have a dialogue with anyone at that point, but on stage, I could talk about it. | ||
| The hell is secret. | ||
| I have friends that are in the closet, and they don't know what to do. | ||
| And even comedian friends, they don't talk about it. | ||
| They hide it. | ||
| And I'm like, God, if you just let it go. | ||
| I mean, people in this day and age, the people that will accept you... | ||
| That's the people you want anyway. | ||
| The people that don't accept you, you don't want them. | ||
| That's their own problem. | ||
| It's this live and let live thing. | ||
| The people that don't want you to be who you actually are to fit their own narrative in their own head. | ||
| Those people are the crazy ones. | ||
| It's not you. | ||
| It's really obvious they're gay people. | ||
| It's really obvious they're transgender people. | ||
| It's really obvious. | ||
| No one's just making this up. | ||
| And back through history as well. | ||
| Yes, forever! | ||
| I say quite often, you know, this is a genetic thing because I didn't feel I got up, you know, when I was 23 and a half and I said, I think I've all become all transgender now. | ||
| No, I was four or five when I first knew, and it has not moved those thoughts. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So I think it is for most gay, lesbian people I've talked to, I just think it's locked and it's built in. | ||
| It's something you get given these cards, as I say, and we're trying to be upfront and be positive and express ourselves. | ||
| Well, it only makes sense when you look at the other variabilities. | ||
| The other variables when it comes to people's personality, their body shape, their mentality, their drive, their ambition, all these different variables. | ||
| It only makes sense that there's feminine and masculine variables and that these shift back and forth with certain people and that certain people are just like they're somewhere like where you are, where you have boy mode and girl mode. | ||
| And I would imagine that you're talking about it so openly and that you're just so free with it. | ||
| That there's probably people out there that are listening to this. | ||
| They're like, God damn it, that's me! | ||
| And the youngest young people around the world, I have met people who are talking about it in school. | ||
| Actually, when I came back from South Africa, my co-writer, Kellen Jones, he said, can you go in? | ||
| My daughter's in class, and they've been talking about your runs in South Africa. | ||
| So I went in, and they could talk about racism, because I was running a salute to the Mandela, 27 marathons to his 27 years he had to spend in prison. | ||
| So they could talk about racism, but they could also talk about being trans, transgender, or self-identifying and LGBT stuff. | ||
| Because there was some kid in the class who was already identifying, wanted to identify as a girl. | ||
| And so they were being positive. | ||
| And these kids were eight, I think. | ||
| So it's way different to our childhood. | ||
| Our childhood was just, do not talk about it, do not mention it. | ||
| And if you mention it, you're going to get your head kicked in by your peer group. | ||
| And that's why I never mentioned it at school. | ||
| Especially, you know, I fancy a girl so I could... | ||
| Just going that route. | ||
| Did you run into girls that had an issue with it? | ||
| People that I know less of, but if you talk about relationships, it gets really tricky because it reflects upon people's relationships with yourself. | ||
| But it's cool, and I've never been great at relationships. | ||
| That's always tricky. | ||
| Well, you know, I got this career thing and I worked out how I could work that and I can just keep staying four steps ahead of the game and I'm playing in all these countries and I'm doing the four languages. | ||
| So I've got all that going. | ||
| But then you're never really in one place to be able to continue a relationship. | ||
| And then there's the being transsexual and that goes on. | ||
| So that all gets complicated. | ||
| Can't be everything. | ||
| Get everything working. | ||
| No. | ||
| But I'm okay with that, and it's all good, and I enjoy things. | ||
| On stage, I try and make myself laugh. | ||
| This isn't comedy. | ||
| This is my trick. | ||
| I actually just try and I'd live, and I go, oh, that's funny. | ||
| So I'm going off of this weird trip. | ||
| I'm going to tell you this bit. | ||
| This is a later show in Wunderbar. | ||
| But I talk about J.R.R. Tolkien. | ||
| I talk about the imagination. | ||
| We have written all these stories. | ||
| And the animals haven't done that. | ||
| All the wild animals don't seem to have written any stories. | ||
| I haven't heard of any good ones. | ||
| But we've written that. | ||
| J.R.R. Tolkien. | ||
| And I say J.R.R. Tolkien. | ||
| J.R.R.R. Tolkien was born, J.R.R.R.R.R.R. Tolkien. | ||
| You may not know this. | ||
| And people are also going, is this true? | ||
| And he was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. | ||
| So he's grown up there. | ||
| And then they moved to Birmingham in England. | ||
| And it's a different axis. | ||
| It's a South African axis. | ||
| And then Birmingham was like this. | ||
| Let's talk a talk. | ||
| That's got this kind of sound like this. | ||
| And then I said, when he's 5, he turns to his mother because he realizes he's called J-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-Tolkin. | ||
| And he says, it is South African Birmingham twang. | ||
| And he goes, I do this strangulated accent that is trying to fight between South Africa and Birmingham. | ||
| And it's such a stupid line to go on, you know. | ||
| There's no logic to where I'm going. | ||
| And his mother's going, what are you saying, J-R-R-R? I can't understand it. | ||
| Because she's still in South Africa. | ||
| So I'm spending time going into this sidebar, which is making me laugh. | ||
| And I think a lot of the audience are going, what is he on about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is he on about? | |
| What is he wittering about? | ||
| And you can't really even hear what I'm saying. | ||
| But I just do this strangulated accent. | ||
| And in the end, he has to talk in a Yorkshire accent to get his mother to understand if he could cut down the number of hours in his name. | ||
| And he becomes J.R.R. Tolkien. | ||
| So that's typical of my stand-up where I just go off on a tangent. | ||
| To make yourself laugh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think it's sort of funny, a little bit funny, but it's probably more funny for me. | ||
| Well, if it's funny for you, though, it's funny for people that are listening because comedy is contagious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and if the person on stage is having a good time, then the audience would probably have a better time. | ||
| And this thing of it's not being locked down, that it's living and breathing in front of them, they do love that, and you put more energy into the next bit, and then this, and then that, and the other thing. | ||
| Yeah, so I do love stellar because it's, you know, you can just do it and do it and, you know, there's no one. | ||
| Well, I was a double act. | ||
| I was a four-person act. | ||
| And whenever you, if you're even just a double act, if you go off on a tangent, then you have to look across to your partner and your partner's going, what? | ||
| Where are you going? | ||
| You might want to go with it. | ||
| You might not want to go with it. | ||
| Keep to the script. | ||
| But on your own, you could just go off. | ||
| And Lenny Bruce, you know, the gigs he did in front of the band, you know that thing in the film, that part of the film? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he's trying to make the band laugh and there's the people, the raincoats in the front and the strippers coming on. | ||
| And because when we did the play Lenny, we had a live actual jazz band on the stage, a real good jazz musician. | ||
| So I was trying to make them laugh in just the way that Lenny had. | ||
| I was trying to crack them up because I would go off script and I could do this. | ||
| And that was just beautiful. | ||
| And they said, you're riffing, aren't you? | ||
| You're just riffing like we're riffing. | ||
| And I thought, whoa, this is weird. | ||
| This is... | ||
| It was really nice to cruise down his life and do stand-up as close to him as I could. | ||
| Even the mainstream, I did more mainstream stuff and then the really edgy stuff and the weird stuff and where Jesus comes at the back and you've got St. Pat's Cathedral, that whole sequence where he's got, call the Pope, call the Pope, Jesus is here. | ||
| And yeah, that was fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got very ill doing it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How? | |
| Well, you started off dead, naked, and then you put your clothes on and you start going backwards. | ||
| Oh, so the play starts off dead. | ||
| Yeah, you start off dead by... | ||
| So when he killed himself in the bathroom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then as you start, and you're talking to either God or... | ||
| I think I'm talking to a judge who is a bit like a God at the beginning of it and explaining things as I'm putting my clothes on. | ||
| So you start off naked. | ||
| Then you have simulated sex with my wife about a quarter of the way through the film. | ||
| So that was interesting doing that. | ||
| And then you end up dying at the end of the film. | ||
| So it took a lot out of me, three months of that. | ||
| So emotionally? | ||
| Yeah, emotionally. | ||
| It drained you, and then you physically got ill. | ||
| And I've never been ill out of a show, but it just took me down. | ||
| I just was not well enough. | ||
| So you think it was just contemplating his existence, his life, and what he went through? | ||
| I think it was, yeah, I think part of his journey, and also it was physically very grueling. | ||
| It's mentally... | ||
| And physically quite grueling and mentally really grueling. | ||
| And together, I was knackered and I probably just wasn't drinking enough water. | ||
| I should have, you know, I tend to think, I don't know, this is a me trait, definitely, that I will just carry on until I get ill. | ||
| I won't necessarily think, okay, you're going into a stress period now, so let's get some good water on, let's eat some healthy food so that nothing comes in and takes you out. | ||
| You just bulldoze your way through things? | ||
| Yeah, I tend to bulldoze. | ||
| We just bulldozed through three hours. | ||
| Did we? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's three o'clock. | ||
| How's the clock there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was thinking, I have no idea how long. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like a time warp in here. | ||
| Well then, you're good at it. | ||
| You're used to it. | ||
| I once did a street show for about two hours without starting, which was quite beautiful. | ||
| Because on the street, if you imagine it, there's no nothing. | ||
| Edinburgh Festival, so you know the Edinburgh Festival. | ||
| And there's this place called The Mound. | ||
| So there's people milling around. | ||
| So I was almost starting a show, and I was just mucking about for two hours. | ||
| I was just there, kind of not starting, kind of starting, kind of chatting, kind of playing around. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| I've done the most fun things on the street because no one's in charge of anything. | ||
| There's just no rules. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen Dave Chappelle do that. | ||
| Dave Chappelle did that in Montreal. | ||
| We were doing this club soda and then he came downstairs after we did it. | ||
| I think he was like 18 or 19 and just took his hat off and started doing stand-up and had people put money in the hat. | ||
| He was doing stand-up on the street. | ||
| I was like, look at that. | ||
| It was pretty wild. | ||
| Pretty free. | ||
| As you see in Washington Square Park, he used to do that. | ||
| Charlie Burnett was famous for that. | ||
| Charlie Burnett was a guy who was one of the original street stand-up comics in New York, and he would do that in Washington Square Park and gather everyone around. | ||
| There's video of it that people could watch online. | ||
| I think he might have come over to England at one point. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| I think he might have. | ||
| He was brilliant. | ||
| Brilliant performer, really good at grabbing people and grabbing their attention, and Dave learned a lot from him. | ||
| Eddie, thank you very much, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| This was a lot of fun. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| I really appreciate you coming here. | ||
| I'm glad we got a chance to sit down. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And tell people about your tour, where they can find where you're going to be, tickets, all that jazz. | ||
| EddieIzzard.com, that's where it's happening. | ||
| And I am, next two and a half months, all the way up to mid-July, I'm around, so 40 cities. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| All in America. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I've already played all 50 states. | ||
| Which is kind of beautiful. | ||
| You played Montana? | ||
| I played everywhere. | ||
| Where'd you go in Montana? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| What's the capital city? | ||
| Billings, I think? | ||
| Yeah, I think we played Billings. | ||
| If not, it was near Billings. | ||
| Helena. | ||
| Helena? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What about Wyoming? | ||
| You did Wyoming? | ||
| Yeah, all of them. | ||
| Alaska? | ||
| Yeah, I made a point. | ||
| I played Alaska twice. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| We ended up in Hawaii, but played every single one, including Mississippi and Alabama as well. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| So, everywhere. | ||
| But it's nice. | ||
| I just love playing, you know, I just love playing around the world. | ||
| Onward. | ||
| Good luck to you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Appreciate you. |
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