Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin critique UK comedy’s ideological censorship, where a zero-tolerance list of biases stifles free speech—like their Trans Women Aren’t Women episode removed by YouTube before reinstated. They compare it to Soviet-era conformity, warning that redefining terms (e.g., "safety" as opinion suppression) shrinks debate without legislation. Foster’s teaching experiences reveal how classist assumptions and fear of backlash undermine creativity, while Kisin notes foreign powers exploit Western divisions, citing Lavrov’s post-Ukraine claims. Ultimately, they argue rigid identity politics risks cultural collapse by prioritizing groupthink over individualism and rational inquiry. [Automatically generated summary]
It is a popular thing, but like everything, it really started to get motoring during COVID, particularly in our space with comedians, when everything shut down.
And then comedians realized, hang on a second, we were just doing the comedy circuit and then wanting to be on TV. And then that moment was a really eye-opening moment where they realized ratings on TV are collapsing.
Nobody's watching TV for ways that we'll get into through the podcast.
So what else are you going to do?
And everybody started to get onto YouTube and podcasting.
Because the thing is, Joe, whatever happens in America, in the UK, we do it four or five years down the line.
Well, this cultural thing that we always talk about, you know, we import straight from you.
And that's why we have conversations.
Like during BLM, we had these protests in the center of London with these protesters going, hands up, don't shoot, in front of cops who don't have guns.
This is why I love America, man, because in the UK we have libel laws, so if you say something like that, and you then have to be able to prove it, otherwise you can get sued.
Oh my god, the Vatican City's equal age of consent being raised from 12 to 18 following the announcement of an overhaul of the Catholic Church criminal code by Pope Francis.
Francis is like the most progressive guy, right, in terms of popes?
I don't know if you followed the grooming gang stories from the UK, but basically we had a situation for decades where young girls were being abused in the thousands, potentially half a million, and it was covered up.
So what happened was it was basically people from a certain background.
It was what we call in the UK South Asian, so Bangladeshi and Pakistani mostly.
And they were abusing Sikh and local British white girls in hundreds of thousands.
We had one of the victims on our show, Dr. Ella Hill, a very brave woman.
And it was covered up for decades because we've just had a report come out to try and find out why it was covered up, why it wasn't investigated, because these people went to the police and they were told there's nothing we can do for you.
Because the politicians who should have been exposing it, the people who should have been talking about it, the police who should have been investigated, were worried about being labelled racist.
In fact, one famous tweet from a Labour MP told some of these people to shut up for the sake of diversity.
Even to talk about, in polite society, people feel very uncomfortable talking about this because it comes from communities, what you would say, like Asian communities.
And particularly white working class girls and Sikh girls.
So people feel very uncomfortable about this.
They're far more comfortable talking about Epstein because in their heads it's punching up.
Whilst if you talk about this crime, it's seen as punching down, that it's racist.
And it's far easier for them to silence it.
But the problem is, Joe, is when you do that, what happens is that nefarious people can then get involved in this and they say these words...
They're not representing you.
Look what's going on.
If the powers that be aren't going to represent you, I will.
And that's when things start to take an ugly turn.
We need to be able to talk about these subjects.
It doesn't matter how uncomfortable they are.
It doesn't matter how difficult they are.
It doesn't matter how awkward they make us feel.
Because we had a great guest on the show called Ed West, and he made one of the most profound points I've ever heard on our show.
Which is, if you are not prepared to talk about a subject honestly, then you are never going to find a solution to that subject.
And what happened was when we got one of the victims on our show, Dr. Ella Hill, I remember because we were trying to get the Member of Parliament, who was one of the women that started to expose this, she wrote an article in one of the newspapers, and she got so much hate That she didn't want to talk about it anymore.
So when we called her up and we said, do you want to come on the show and tell us about this?
She said, I just can't do it.
And that's when I remember sitting in the car talking to Francis on the phone and I went, we've got to a point where a member of parliament whose job it is to protect these children is getting so much hate for speaking out about it, she doesn't want to talk about it anymore.
Maybe they didn't have a parent or maybe something like that.
They ply them with alcohol, drugs, get them addicted.
And when some of the families tried to go and take their kids back, the police, I can't remember the exact details, but in several cases it was like, oh, she's just a prostitute.
And the father would get arrested for trying to get his daughter out of that situation.
And this is why this identity politics is such a problem because when you stop treating people as individuals who behave correctly or incorrectly, lawfully or unlawfully, you start to go, well, these people can't commit a crime anymore, right?
And these people commit a crime by just being whatever.
That's a problem.
We've got to get back to the MLK idea of everybody being judged by the content of their character.
That's one of the most disturbing aspects of this hardcore left progressivism is that they are willing to ignore reality for the sake of this narrative that they have.
And also they're willing to lump, make these mass generalizations and lump everyone, like particularly if they're hard to defend, like straight white men.
Like that's a great one.
That's an awesome scapegoat.
You can toss that into there.
Wealthy people, you know, upper class people, people with money.
It's just a very bizarre thing that's going on where people are unwilling to look at people as individuals because it just doesn't fit this narrative that they're trying to push.
I remember when Brexit happened in 2016, I started to notice more and more when people were talking, the term old white man became an insult.
And suddenly, if you're an old white man, that meant that you were racist, particularly if you voted for Brexit.
And that really angered me.
And for the reason my dad...
He grew up in a very poor part of the north of England, which is Wigan.
Orwell actually wrote a book about it, The Road to Wigan Pier, talking about the deprivation of that particular part of the world.
And my dad voted for Brexit.
My dad voted for Brexit because he said that he wanted the UK to be independent of Europe.
He loves Europe, but he didn't believe that the EU should be making rules For the UK and my dad married my mother who is Latin American a woman of color and I fucking hate that term.
And so, like, my dad married my mum, like, back in the 70s, where we lived, which was a predominantly working-class area.
And, you know, there was a lot of, you know, there was racism.
The pub down the road from where I grew up was a pub which had links to the BNP, which was the British National Party, which was a far-right organisation.
And some of those guys operating out of that pub had assaulted Asian people in my area.
And my dad married my mum, but as a result of that, my mum wanted to call me Francisco Jaime and take, in the Latino tradition, her last name as well, which was Palis.
My dad was worried about racism, so he called me Francis, gave me the name of a middle-class white woman, which I'm very grateful for.
LAUGHTER And that's how I live my life and that's how I was brought up.
My dad is one of the nicest, sweetest, most generous, honourable people I've ever met.
And to then have him be called racist and stupid and ignorant, it just enraged me.
Generalizations have always been a thing that it's looked down upon.
You can't generalize.
You can make generalizations with caveats.
You can say, in general, democratic-run cities or this or that.
But when you do it with human beings, And you just decide to dismiss someone based on some immutable characteristics that they have zero control over, like being born white.
And that should be promoted at the forefront of whatever ideology that we accept.
And then everything else, all the other things that we have to worry about and deal with, that should kind of fall into place secondarily.
But it should be that even people that you would like to or that you have a license to dismiss, like older white men, you have a license to dismiss them.
Don't do that because it's not right.
It's 100% out of their control to be who they are.
Just characterize them and judge them based on who they are as an individual.
To judge people based on their individual merits, their character, their personality, what they do.
Because, you know, we both voted remain in that referendum.
So that's kind of like the equivalent of voting for Hillary Clinton versus Trump in 16. And suddenly there was this narrative like what Francis is talking about all, you know, old white people, all this.
And for me, I'm a first generation dark skinned Jewish immigrant from Russia into the UK. And suddenly all these people were like saying, oh, yeah, we've got this country is really racist.
What?
I've lived in Britain almost my whole life since I was 13. That is not true.
Half the country isn't racist.
And I was like, wait, this doesn't make any sense.
Let's work out what's actually going on.
Right.
And that's why we two remainers started interviewing people who voted for Brexit, particularly from the left.
Because the narrative was only right-wing people voted for Brexit.
Completely untrue, as it turns out.
And we were trying to understand where they were coming from.
That's kind of the genesis of our show.
Trying to understand people who have a different opinion to us.
Well, there's a lot of right-wing people that don't want to vote for Trump based entirely on his personality, but there's a lot of left-wing people that voted for Trump just because they didn't like Hillary and they didn't like the policies of the Democratic Party and all the stuff that she stood for this ancient form of corruption that's been running America for a long time.
It's a weird world that we're living in right now, because we're inundated with information.
We have more information than ever before, but we also have these very clear boxes that you can shove people into that make it convenient, because there's so much information, because there's so much to sort out, because nuance is difficult, because looking at things for what they really are is complicated.
And a lot of dull minds who have accepted these narratives of, you know, being just something that you just, if you're a good person, this is how you think and behave.
Yeah, but man, you tell me all the stories about working in the school way before then, when you were being told, well, you can't teach people of this race.
For instance, in school, I remember attending this one workshop, and this had my blood boiling.
So I used to work in East London, in a place called Newham, in this wonderful school.
And I remember we got this one guy coming to teach us, to do a bit of teacher training.
And he was teaching us how to teach boys.
And I'm like, okay, in particular English.
Now, I'm a boy, obviously, or a man, and I loved reading when I was a kid.
Reading was my escape, particularly being an only child.
And he was saying to us, right, you've got to have different expectation with boys than you have with girls.
And suddenly my ears picked up.
I was up.
I was thinking, where are you going with this?
And he was like, you can't expect them to sit down and write like a girl could.
Because they're different.
Boys, you know, you've just got to expect that they're going to write a little less, they're not going to be as engaged, and you need to have extra stimuluses for them as a result, and all this.
And I'm thinking, this is the bigotry of low expectation.
What I've got in my classroom are working class boys from desperately poor backgrounds, many of whom have grown up without a dad.
And we all know the stats about what that entails.
For most of those kids, the only way out of the poverty that they have grown up in It's education.
That is it.
And you want me to go into my classroom and say to these boys who have already got enough challenges as it is, and you know, 10 and 11, the gangs are starting to circle, and they're starting to stray into that world.
You want me to say to them that they are not as capable for their writing as girls.
Well, why don't we just scrap it and just let them run free?
It absolutely infuriated me.
To me, the worst thing about this progressive movement is the bigotry of low expectations and saying to people, you know what, you need our help or you're not going to be as good as us.
And to me that's disgusting because you're dooming people to not have the life that they could have if you have high expectations for them.
Because I'm telling you something, if you go into these schools or these places of learning and you have high expectations for these kids, the vast majority will meet it.
But here's the thing, there's a joy that boys bring to a classroom.
Girls tend to be more obedient, but with boys you can tend to have a little bit more fun, you can have a little bit more back and forth or banter as we call it in London or in the UK. So boys are different like that.
But the thing is with boys is they respond to a challenge.
If you say to them, I want, by the end of this lesson, Tony, I want four paragraphs, and I want capital letter, full stop, I want you to have all your apostrophes, and I want you to get that done by half-pass.
Prove to me you can do it.
A boy will be like, yes!
Because that's how we respond as men.
We respond to challenges.
We respond to people saying to us, come on, meet this expectation.
But if you say to somebody, you're never going to do it, most people will agree.
I mean, they'll be the odd kid who will just want to prove you wrong, but the vast majority will never do that.
So do you think when they're dealing with boys and girls in classrooms, it's just complicated to deal with all the variables that the boys bring and the girls bring, so instead of handling that, they just lower the expectations for boys?
I think not all teachers, I think a lot of teachers push back on that, but I think there were certainly some teachers who would take on board what this person was saying.
And look, let's be fair to teachers, particularly in the type of schools that I worked in, you had 30 kids in the class.
I had everything from a kid who potentially had the ability to go to Oxford or Cambridge, he was that intelligent, that smart, or she was, right the way through to a non-verbal autistic kid.
So you had to make sure that all the resources were prepared in a way that all the children could meet.
And not only just those two extremes, you also had all the ones in the middle and upper and lower and all the rest of it.
We all remember that special teacher who, for whatever reason, took an interest, not necessarily just in the classroom, but maybe outside, maybe we're having a tough time, who took the time out from their day to help us or inspire us or actually give us a fire and a passion.
Like one of my old teachers...
I remember like I was in sixth form, which was 16 to 18 in the UK. And I hated Shakespeare.
I could never get into it.
And I remember he sat us down and he taught us Hamlet.
And I don't know how he did it, but he just unlocked it for us.
And we were kids from South London, you know, from all different backgrounds, whatever else.
And we just learned the magic of Shakespeare.
And it doesn't matter what happens.
Mr. Potter, if you're listening, big shout out.
He gave me a gift that I will treasure right the way through to the end of my days.
Especially from my background, I come from martial arts, and the best instructors were all great martial artists.
All of them.
You cannot be.
I mean, there's some boxing instructors that weren't great boxers that turned out to be great coaches, but most of the great martial arts instructors were, in fact, great martial artists.
They just had a passion for it.
They had a passion for learning it, and then they had a passion for explaining all the various, like, very nuanced details.
Like, all the great jujitsu instructors are all world champions.
Almost all of them, or champions in some way, shape, or form.
Because to truly understand the subject, in order to be able to teach it, you need to be able to understand every part of the process.
If I'm teaching you, I don't know, equations, and I don't fully understand it, I'm not going to be able to teach it, because you're going to go to me, Francis, but how did you get from this point to this point?
And if I can't explain it, I'm not going to be able to help you.
And it does make you better at whatever you're teaching.
I was much better at martial arts after I started teaching it, and I recognized that in a lot of my friends that had regular jobs and went on to start teaching Jiu Jitsu.
They all got way better at it, way better at it.
And it's just because your understanding of it is ingrained deeply in your mind, like of all the various positions and transitions to different positions and the hazards and what you have to do to avoid and how to defend.
All that stuff is complex, and to be able to explain it to another person, watch their mind light up with these infinite possibilities, it really does stimulate your own growth.
It does and one of the things that teaching gives you that is a real understanding of discipline and how important discipline is and without discipline without understanding that the most important thing is turning up and doing your best Yeah, it doesn't matter how smart you are.
It doesn't matter how gifted you are It doesn't matter all of these things if you're not going to turn up every day and do your best You're not gonna make it.
No It's really interesting to see.
The kids frequently who did the best, they were the kids who worked.
They were the kids who focused.
They were the kids who understood that in order to be good at something, you need to turn up.
And it was only when I became an adult and I realized that I want to do things in the world that I realized, actually, you have got to work so hard to create anything.
And that's when I started cultivating this in myself.
But I saw this at school.
You know, there was a guy that I went to school with, wasn't as smart as me, wasn't as this and that, but he was way more successful.
And then I met his dad.
And I remember his dad telling me this, we were on the sidelines watching a rugby game, and another kid said to him, oh, yesterday there was this situation in a game where someone was taking a penalty kick to win the game.
Imagine how scary that must be.
And my friend's dad, the friend who was successful, his dad, he went, no, think about it like this.
How many people want to be in that position?
And when you score, how many people are just so with you and delighted?
And that little reframe, that's all it takes sometimes, just a little understanding how to build confidence in yourself or how to work hard.
And not enough kids get that, man.
And I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity as an adult to develop that because you can't do anything without that.
No, but that's why I had to spend my 20s doing a shit ton of personal development because I wanted to be efficient, effective.
I wanted to get places.
I wanted to create things, most of all.
I wanted to create things.
And if you want to create things, you've got to have these skills that otherwise you're going to struggle without, whether that's working with other people.
Stand-ups struggle with this because everyone's so individually minded.
But we've built an incredible team, not just me and Francis, but you met Anton, our producer, and a bunch of other people.
That's an interesting part of our life now, is we've got a team of people to manage, and you've got to run that, you've got to look after them, you've got to make sure they're growing, they're getting what they need.
It's an exciting challenge to be in the position that we're in.
You just need the top dogs to accept this new way of thinking of things and try to help the young guys coming up and encourage this different kind of thinking.
When someone does really well, that weird green envy that comes up, you gotta figure out how to turn that into motivation.
Instead of looking at it like, fuck that guy, why did he get this?
Instead going, wow, look at him, he's killing it.
And what did he do?
He worked hard, his jokes are well-crafted, he's really likable.
I gotta work harder.
I gotta work harder.
My jokes should be better.
I have to do more stage time, get looser.
I have to revamp my act.
And if you could just look at it that way, all those people around you that are killing it, those people are all fuel.
They're all motivation.
Stand-ups, great stand-ups in particular, don't exist in a vacuum.
And this is one of the things that I drill into these young guys' heads out here and young girls and non-binary folks.
I try to drill into people's heads like we need each other.
We are not individuals.
We are this one biological superorganism.
And that's what a community is.
That's what a civilization is.
And that's what a group of comedians are.
It's an organization.
But everyone together is like feeding off of the inspiration of each individual member.
And when people are doing really well, especially like young people, I love when up-and-comers are really starting to make it, and they're starting to make money, and they can afford a nice apartment, they get a car.
I get excited.
I love it.
I love it.
Because it could also inspire all these other people that might have been on the cusp of quitting.
They might have been on the cusp, and they might turn out to be great comics.
Because so many of us in the beginning in particular, just such a...
Touch and go business.
You just wonder whether or not you're ever going to make it.
Are you wasting your time?
Am I going to be that 45-year-old guy at open mic nights who can't get a laugh?
We all played the clubs in the UK. You played the clubs in America.
You know, there's that comic, that headliner, who's just burnt out, who just sits in the corner of the green room, who looks like he's got some form of PTSD. He's not engaging.
One of the beautiful things about doing a special is you have to write new material afterwards.
You release that special and it's not like the Rolling Stones can go tour and do fucking Gimme Shelter over and over and over again and everybody cheers.
You have to have new shit.
You can't have 30-year-old jokes.
You have to have new shit.
Some guys just get scared by that.
It's a very daunting, terrifying feeling to abandon all of your material and start from scratch.
You have to do that.
It's one of the beautiful things about stand-up is you become a beginner every time you write a new joke.
And I saw a guy there who came on, he did 10 minutes, I didn't know much about, and he ate shit for 10 minutes straight.
It was just, there was no laughter, it was bad.
And I was there, this new guy with my amazing five minutes going, and I was like, oh yeah, I went and smashed it.
Anyway, I forgot all about it, who the hell is this guy?
And then I was doing a pro night somewhere else, because this was a new act, new material night.
And I saw this guy in the green room.
I was like, what the fuck is he doing here?
And he went on and he closed it and he absolutely fucking destroyed.
And that's when I realized, like, you got to be prepared to go on and do 10 minutes of new and not give a shit that you die in front of all the people that you want to respect.
I tell everybody when you're starting out, oh, how do I do a podcast?
Go watch mine.
They're fucking terrible.
Go watch mine, start out, and just do it and get better.
And don't be scared that you suck in the beginning.
Everything you do when you start out, you suck at.
There's no way to be amazing from the jump, especially at something complex.
And if you are amazing at it, you're the rarest of the rare and just work even harder because you just have a very unusual gift and you should be very fortunate, feel very fortunate.
When you were teaching stand-up, this is one thing about America that's unusual, is that there's no really good comics that teach comedy.
It's real weird.
We kind of teach it to each other in green rooms.
We teach it to each other on airplanes, on the road, and hanging out in hotels and having lunch together.
We talk about comedy.
We go over our processes.
Sometimes we...
I think more education has been sort of distributed about stand-up comedy from podcasts, from conversations about podcasts.
really ever in the history of comedy like having great comics sit around and talk about their process and talk about what they did when they first started and what they realized they were doing wrong or you know how they improved how did you get into doing that well i was working at this club uh angel and you know it's tough to make money at comedy i was i was doing all the weekends at clubs uh but one of the reasons i was doing
it is because my mom's disabled so i need to get get money back to my dad and my mum in order to support them to pay for cleaners and stuff like that So I needed more money.
And they very kindly said to me, why don't you run a stand-up course?
When I qualified as a teacher for six years, I was a drama teacher.
That's how I originally started, and then I went into primary.
And then I thought about it, and I saw the way that other people were teaching, and I thought, I've actually got the opportunity here, as someone who trained as a teacher, who's got 10 years or 9 years experience at the time, I can actually teach it like a proper lesson.
So I created lesson plans.
So the first time we started off, we started off with improv, for them getting to know each other, various improv games.
And then the second lesson, we went into joke writing.
So I did the structure, set up, punchline.
And then what we did is we looked at joke structure from people like Carlin, who else, Mitch Hedberg, all these different people.
And what I would do is I would put six jokes on the board from these people, but I wouldn't put their names.
And one of them, two jokes were written by the same person.
I got them into pairs.
I go, right, analyze the jokes.
Which one was written by the same person and why?
So what that would do is, because in teaching, if I'm just there being didactic and talking at you, eventually you're going to switch off because that's how the brain works.
But if you say to them, right, analyze it, discuss it amongst yourselves.
So that was one of the exercises that really worked because then they looked at it and from that they looked at tone.
They looked at language.
They looked at who is the butt of this joke.
They looked at style.
They looked at does gender influence jokes, which of course it does.
And we then started to look at it, pick it apart, and then they could work out who it was and why.
So we then started off.
I then gave them a generic setup, sorry, just headbutted the mic, and got them to write a punchline.
For a generic setup.
I can't remember what the setup was.
I took Grandad out the other day.
That was the setup.
And then they had to romp punchlines for it.
I also looked at pivot words.
So an example of a pivot word is...
I'm trying to remember this now.
So I had a joke from Emo Phillips who said, I called my wife in bed with another man.
I was crushed.
I said, get off me, you two.
Great joke.
The pivot word in that is crushed.
And it's a pivot word because it's got a duality of meaning.
And that's why the English language is magical when it comes to joke writing.
It's got this duality of meaning.
2016, I opened for Eddie Izzard, but I did comedy in Spanish, and it was actually a lot more difficult because Spanish, it doesn't have those words which have those dual meanings that you can pivot on.
So by understanding that...
With these words which you can pivot on, which you can twist, you can make the punch even stronger.
Great joke writing is like writing a thriller.
It needs to make sense.
It needs to be logical.
But they can't predict where the twist is going to come.
Because if you predict where the twist is going to come, it's like watching a thriller and go, okay, I get it.
He's a killer.
She really fancies him.
They're going to go out on a date, then it's going to be a twist, and you're going to get bored.
If the twist doesn't make sense with your jokes, you're going to be like, This is a stupid plot.
But if the twist makes sense, is it has a logic, if it has a consistent worldview, then you're going to be hooked into the thriller and you're going to be hanging on every single twist and turn.
And that is the art of great joke writing.
So we do three hours on joke writing.
And I used to love it.
And then when they would say out their jokes about, you know, I took Grandad out the other day and they gave the punchline.
If they laughed, I'd analyze it.
And we'd go, why did that work?
But here's the thing.
This is when people really started to learn.
If it didn't work, I'd ask everyone to stop.
I'd say, look, we're just going to use your joke as an example.
And I just want you to know, I write hundreds of jokes, the vast majority of which will never work.
And we'll put it up on the board and we'll go, why doesn't it work, this joke?
And together we would work out why it was.
And most of the time it was logic.
And then I took it back to them.
I go, can we make this joke work?
And then they'd go off and then they'd write.
And a lot of the time we'd make a joke that would actually work.
So it's by doing that consistently, all the time, I used to do things like worlds colliding, where I used to take, I don't know, this was in 2018, take a topic like Trump, take a topic like supermarkets.
I go, right, we're going to create a joke about Trump and the supermarket, you know, target whatever it is.
Think about everything you can think of Trump.
Think about a spider diagram.
Everything you can think about The supermarket, a particular supermarket, whatever it be.
Okay, now trying to find links between the two.
And then we would write jokes with Trump and the supermarket.
And a lot of the time they wrote good stuff that you would never ever have heard a comedian do before.
Because I said to them, it's not about first thought, second thought, third thought.
Because here's the thing.
If the audience can predict your punchline, throw the joke away because it means that your joke isn't good.
They can't predict the punch.
That is the most important thing.
So we just went over it.
And then one of the things that I said to them was, you need to tell a story.
I want you to tell a story.
I don't care about interesting.
I don't care about funny.
I don't care about any of that.
I want a story that you would tell your bodies around the table in the pub.
And they would get up and tell the story.
And then I would ask them about their lives, who they are, where they're from.
And here's the thing.
We've all got stuff that's interesting about us.
This is why this woke crap is so toxic.
Because I used to hear people say more and more, oh, I'm just a white guy.
I'm just like, fuck off.
It doesn't matter.
Where are you from?
Oh, I'm blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What about your mum?
Oh, my mum passed when I was eight and then I did this and I did that.
I said, that's interesting.
Let's talk about that.
Talk about what it's like to grow up as an only kid in a school where you were bullied, you didn't have a mum, but you did this.
That's interesting.
And by the end, most of it, even if they weren't the funniest comedians in the world, they would come out and they would be interesting.
You felt like you actually understood who they were.
And that's the most important thing.
Because most comedy courses were like cookie cutter.
And I never wanted to create that.
I wanted to create somebody or help somebody get to be authentic.
Because it's like David Mamet said, words that come from the heart go to the heart.
So the first half would be on theory and we'd look at things like joke writing, you know, all the rest of it.
And the second half would be them being on stage, doing their thing on stage.
And then I would give them feedback and I'd be like, this is great.
This is really interesting.
You can do better than this.
But really focus on this, because this is really interesting.
That great joke you did there, maybe you can talk about this here, and that, and this.
And gradually, they got to have a really lovely five minutes.
So by the end of it, I think I did it for about two years.
A lot of the guys that I taught, they got to the finals of competitions, national competitions.
And they started to come through, and a lot of them are still doing it, and I see them on the circuit, and it's great, man, because they kill, and then I go, I wrote that joke.
I did it for a couple of years, and I loved it, because it meant that I could cut down on teaching, because the thing is, with school teaching, it's just draining, particularly when the schools that I was working in, it meant that it freed up a little more time.
And look, I'm a comedy geek.
I just love being around comedians.
I love teaching comedy.
I love the art of comedy.
To me, writing a great joke is like alchemy.
You take words that individually they don't have no connection, but you put them together in a particular order, with a particular rhythm, and you create something that's so beautiful.
I think, I remember like a lot of the times when comedians were in a club and they would say like, oh are you going to talk about your stuff about this and I'm not going to do my stuff about that.
I never wanted that.
I always wanted my set, what I wrote about, to be completely original, authentic and also honest.
So the way that I would do it is I'd go, what do I really think about something?
Like, honestly, Francis, what do you really think about this particular thing?
So I remember, like, when everybody was doing jokes about Brexit, and they were saying, well, people voted Brexit, whatever.
And I remember thinking, oh, man, this isn't...
There's something here.
And then my mum voted Brexit.
A first generation Latin American immigrant to the UK. And I remember thinking, there's something in that.
And I played around with it, and it took me a long time to actually figure it out.
And then finally I went, like, my mum is a first generation who came here from the UK 40 years ago, unable to speak the language.
Boom, boom, boom.
Set it up.
So you've got an image of this woman in as few words as possible.
And I said, and two years ago, she voted Brexit.
First laugh.
And then I said, and when I asked her why, she said, Francie, it's because there are too many foreigners in this country.
And that used to get a big laugh, but I knew it was good when I would meet people whose parents were from a different country and they'd come up to me and go, my mom's like that.
I remember a black guy came up to me after a gig and went, my mom's Jamaican.
She does the exact same thing.
And that's when you know a joke is good.
When everybody does surface shit, but you do something that's actually deep.
It's a long and complicated story as well because one of the things that happened when we started doing the show is we became evil and right-wing and whatever.
Well, we were just interested in having conversations with different people, but what we found very quickly is, certainly in the comedy world that we were coming from, this is, you don't do this.
It's different in the UK because it's a small industry, and the gatekeepers in terms of getting on television and whatever is like five people.
And in 2018, the woman who runs the Edinburgh Festival, which is how, in the UK, that's how you get anywhere, right?
You do the clubs, then you take your own show, like a special, to the Edinburgh Festival, you get seen by people, you get plucked, and then you go on TV, and that's how you make a career.
That's how it works.
The woman who runs the Edinburgh Festival, a woman called Nika Burns, she said, I look forward to the era of woke comedians deciding what isn't, isn't acceptable.
So what happened to us when we started the show was we found ourselves on our own and gradually pushed out and out and out, which has been great for us.
Which has been brilliant for us because now we have our own thing.
I actually stopped doing stand-up after the pandemic because I realized it was just killing me physically, the driving around, all of that.
And now I just wake up every day.
I love my life.
I can't wait to do the thing I'm about to do.
And I've got a new baby now as well.
But yeah, it was difficult.
So what happened is we gradually kind of got pushed out and ended up doing...
And now trigonometry takes up so much of our time.
Well, this is why I said we're so glad to be here with you because we looked at people like you and we went, like, he's having interesting conversations with fascinating people.
That's what I want to do, you know?
And the other thing was we were trying to understand some of the things that we've talked about already.
Why is it suddenly people claiming half the country is racist?
Why is France's dad supposed to be this evil monster?
Why...
Why are we seeing increasingly comics going on stage?
Because you're standing backstage and you're listening all the time, right?
When you're on the circuit.
And you started hearing people suddenly one after another, well, I'm a straight white man, so this, and I'm this.
People just started regurgitating all this stuff and we couldn't work out what was happening.
And also there was a lot of censorship going on, self-censorship.
I remember I was always political with my comedy, satirical.
That's what inspired me because I grew up in Russia where we didn't have this.
And then when there was a bit of an opening up in the early 90s when the Soviet Union collapsed… There was this guy called Viktor Shandorovic who wrote a TV show which was based on Spitting Image.
These puppets of politicians talking and it was hilarious.
It was incredible.
And you've got to understand, to people who've never seen their leaders made fun of...
That was revolutionary, right?
So I was always someone who was interested in politics anyway, and I wanted to write comedy about it.
And I remember coming off stage at a brilliant comedy club in London called Top Secret.
I love them to bits.
And I'd just come off.
I did, you know, whatever my political material did really well.
And then this guy came up to me, another comedian, and he said, man, I love that.
And also as well, going back to that point that Constantine made, The people who decide whether you get spots on TV, the only way you can do that is through the Edinburgh Festival.
And the only way you're going to get noticed is if you adhere to the company line.
Because then it's TV, radio producers, and then you get your run at a West End theatre.
That's the only way to do it.
Now, things are changing, and this way of changing is brilliant.
But that was how it always was.
So people were terrified.
And as you know yourself, the worst form of censorship is self-censorship.
When you're sitting down with your pad and paper.
And go, you know, I wrote a joke, which I didn't have the courage to do until recently, about, you know, because I was saying, like, my voice, I've got a racist voice, because in South London, this is...
In London, I was banging on him for years to do that better material, because his voice is associated with someone who is, you know, intolerant in the UK. His accent.
And then I would say, but you know, here's the thing, all my girlfriends have all been black, mixed race, all Latin American, so my voice is racist, but my dick is woke, right?
You know?
And I was terrified to do that, because I'm openly mocking them.
I'm openly, and I would say, oh, I could never do this.
And he would always say to me, mate, you've got to do that.
It's That's funny.
That's funny.
And I never felt I could do it.
And that is replicated right the way through our industry.
We got on David Baddiel, a comedian, very famous comedian, brilliant comedian, lefty, liberal, all the rest of it.
And he made this point that he felt that way.
Now, imagine if a lefty, liberal, and these I don't use words in a derogatory sense at all with David.
So, at the very end of 2018, I was doing a gig at Top Secret, a brilliant club.
If you're ever in London, you should play it.
And this guy came up to me and said, oh man, I loved your set.
You absolutely crushed it.
Will you come and help us raise money for charity at my college?
I was like, yeah, sure, whatever.
I forget all about it.
And then in about three weeks, I got an email from them saying, please come and help us raise money for charity.
And in order to perform, we have a contract that you need to sign.
Okay.
I opened the file and it said, we have a zero tolerance policy on racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion, anti-atheism, and all jokes must be respectful and kind.
I tweet about it to like a thousand people at the time or whatever it was.
And this thing goes super viral.
Super viral.
I'm talking about this was the day that it was the second most read story on the BBC News website, which is the biggest news website in the UK. On the day that the Prime Minister had nearly been removed from office by her own party.
So that's equivalent of the Democrats impeaching Joe Biden.
And the second story on CNN and Fox is no-name comedian turns down unpaid gig from Two-Bit College.
And that's when I realized, Joe, this is the thing.
See, I thought that Francis and I and a couple of other, the rest of us, we were just like these weirdos who were campaigning about, you know, the stuff that was going on in comedy and generally.
But when that story went that viral, I got thousands of messages and thousands of emails from ordinary people saying, I can't say what I think at work.
I can't say what I think.
And that's when I realized we've got a genuine problem in society where everyone feels like they're walking around having signed that contract.
We had musical at the very beginning, which was turn of the 20th century, which produced people like Chaplin, etc.
But that was always kind of based in variety.
You'd get a juggler.
You'd get a music act.
When what we call alternative comedy started in the 80s, It went back to those roots.
So on a night, you would get a juggler, you might get a mime artist, you'd get a magician, and you'd get a comedian.
And that's how comedy...
What we now know as modern stand-up comedy started in the UK. And it came through from that.
But what has happened is more and more and more, there's these kind of restrictions apply.
So people...
They can't be creative, because the number one thing that you need to be creative is the ability to play.
That's why when you...
Actors do a play.
That's why it's called a play, because you've got to be playful.
And if you feel restricted, if you feel that somehow, if you say this, that you might cross an imaginary red line, you're not going to be playful.
And the best material, as far as I'm concerned, is where people take contentious issues, contentious subject matter, like a Bill Burr, for instance, and they're playful with it, and it pops attention, and we're all able to laugh.
It's so important.
It's cathartic.
We need it for society.
But the moment you go, oh, you can't say this, and here's a red line, and if you do say that, then we're going to come down on you on a ton of bricks...
We have a friend who's from Barbados in the UK, great comic, Nico Yearwood.
And he was tweeting something, and another comedian, this is how fucked up the industry is, went to him, the optics of your tweets are really right-wing.
Because he is a black dude, isn't allowed to say this.
The optics.
The optics.
And that's the way it is.
That's why I said it's crabs in a bucket, because everybody's watching everybody.
And, you know, it's only 120 seats where it will sell out and then, you know, he'll put on, you know, these comedians.
But a lot of the time, this is the interesting thing, a lot of those comedians won't go public that they work with Ricky because they're terrified of what will happen because he's a vicious, evil transphobe.
But they definitely tried him multiple times for obscenities.
You ever see the recordings of the later stages of his life where you'd go on stage with legal notes and just read off of the transcript of the trials?
I mean, he was losing his mind towards the end, but I mean, I would imagine the pressure of, you know, having essentially the entire legal system and a good part of society coming down on you for the things you're saying and not being really recognized as what he is in terms of a true—he's the true godfather of— American stand-up.
That's the guy.
Everyone before him was just doing jokes.
It was just jokes.
And he was talking about social issues.
He was talking about what society's like.
He was talking about hypocrisy.
He was talking about things that he thought mattered.
And using language that people would use outside of the stage.
And you couldn't for some reason.
You couldn't use that on stage.
And he was pushing back against that and literally getting arrested.
People were embracing the pharmaceutical companies, which was bizarre to me.
The people that have been the most deceptive that have caused irreparable damage to people and families because of lies, because of...
Faking studies because of withholding data and information and they've been fined to the tune of billions and billions of dollars and all of a sudden people were putting all their eggs in that basket I was like you guys are out of your fucking minds like you don't remember the past you don't remember that remember the history of what these people have done and you don't they clearly don't understand how these studies work and how they get funded and how politicians get funded and how Special interest groups are working behind the scenes to make sure that these things get mandated.
What I did find very strange is that we got to a position where you've got people who aren't medical experts telling doctors to take a vaccine that they don't want to take, and they're forcing them.
We had this in the UK, man.
They were attempting to introduce vaccine mandates for medical staff.
There was an incident where a doctor is talking to the health minister and the health minister is forcing him, trying to force him to take it when he doesn't want to take it.
Does that make sense to you?
A non-medical expert forcing a medical expert to have a medical procedure?
And he goes, God, can I go and check out hell for a day?
God's like, okay, go for it.
Turns up to hell, the gates of hell open, and it's a casino.
There's fucking booze over here, girls over here.
Oh, amazing.
That was a great day.
Goes back to heaven, goes, that was great.
I'm good.
And after about another year, he gets bored again.
So he says, can I go back to hell for like a week?
No problem, sure.
Turns up at hell, same thing, girls, booze, everything you want.
Comes back refreshed.
He goes, God, listen, heaven's great, but I like hell a lot more.
Can I move?
And God goes, yeah, no problem.
You can move, no problem.
One condition.
You can't come back.
It's like, what the fuck would I want to come back here?
This is incredible in hell.
Okay, no problem.
Turns up in hell, the gates of hell open, the fires, the brimstone, the devil grabs a pitchfork, sticks him in a pot of boiling tar, and as he's drowning and his face is melting off, he goes, what happened to the girls, the booze?
And he goes, don't confuse tourism with immigration.
And then that just made me understand that America is where stand-up is created, but it's also where the best stand-up is created, where the pushback occurs, where people like Burr and yourself and all these people...
And that is the American spirit, which is, you know what?
I'm going to do it myself.
I'm going to create my own thing.
I'm going to go out there and do it.
Whereas the thing is with the UK, and please, I love the UK, we're always looking for approval from the ups, because that's the way the class system works.
So you're waiting for approval from the people above you to then go to the next level.
Whereas here, it's like, well, no, I'm going to do my podcast, I'm going to go out, and we're starting to learn that now.
But it's because of America that we're taking that on board.
You showed us the way, but with the internet now, All the cool, exciting stuff that's happening in the UK is people who are going around that machine that Francis is talking about.
And by the way, him and I, we both used to write for these TV shows and we watched them get shit as we were on them.
And what happens is now we've got to a point where some people build a thing online and then they start getting asked back onto the mainstream thing because they've got the audience and because of what they're doing.
Yeah, because they've invested and they've bought into a system.
And when they see you doing something different, they're going, hang on a second.
But my last 10 years, I've been following the rules.
What do you mean you've become successful doing something else?
I followed the rules.
And this is the beautiful moment about the time that we exist in.
The rules are crumbling, man.
It's now about going out and connecting.
And whereas before, a gatekeeper would look at a particular comic and just go, nah, he's too on the edge, or she's too this, or they're too that, and whatever else.
A mainstream audience isn't going to like them.
That doesn't matter anymore, man, because you've got your people out there.
Whatever you do, however you think, there are people who are going to think and are going to enjoy your stuff immediately.
Because of the fact that you know that this one incompetent person with their shitty, narrow-minded ideology is trying to force their sensibilities on your art, you get frustrated and you try to figure out workarounds.
If it was open and inclusive and easy, maybe people wouldn't expand as much.
Well, man, where we are now is like none of us is a person of faith, but we've started saying grace, like a secular version of grace around the table at the studio when we're having food because we're just so grateful for those people that made our life difficult.
And now we're in this position where we build something and every day we just like wake up and pinch ourselves.
Grace is saying it's about gratitude and whether or not you have to have gratitude towards an invisible deity or just for the experience that you're currently engaging in.
There's still a lot of room for that positive energy and that positive thinking.
And again, in that contagious mindset, it transfers to other people and then as you watch them benefit from it, it inspires you more.
And I would say to anyone who is maybe listening to this and they're going through hard times and they can't see a way out, just get a piece of paper and write down all the things that you're grateful for and be honest.
Just be honest about the things that you are grateful for and I guarantee you'll look at that list and you'll You'll be inspired because that is a springboard to something.
And look, we all went through tough times and there were moments where we were looking at our life and thinking, holy crap, how am I going to get out of this?
Is this it?
Is this all I've got?
Is this all I have?
Is this all I'm ever going to be?
But I promise you, if you keep working, if you're honest, if you have integrity, if you push through and you keep pushing, things will change.
It's really important.
Yeah.
Especially, I worry, like, I'm 40 now, you're right Joe, I don't look it, thank you very much, but, um...
There seems to be a crisis and there's a lot of young men who are very angry and they feel that things haven't gone their way and they're never going to go their way.
And it's really important that...
If you're grateful, but also if you identify what you're going to do, and you just keep working, and you keep pushing, and you keep striving.
Even if that, I wanted to be an actor when I started out.
That didn't work.
Then I became a teacher, and that worked, and then I went and did, and I gradually found my way.
And it took years and years and years of knockbacks and grafts, but if you're prepared to do the work, you will get to where you're meant to be.
I watched this incredible movie about a soccer team.
It was called The Damn United, and it's about two men.
One of them is like this...
Driven, ambitious, young, handsome manager.
And the other one is his assistant.
And they can't work without each other, but they don't know it.
And the ambitious guy is being a dick and he sort of takes over and they fall out.
And they have a really bad time.
And then when they get back together, it works out, right?
And I just, I always thought that if we can stick together and if we can encourage a sense of, like, we can work through anything, we were gonna be successful.
And we've gone through some really difficult things together, man.
You know?
Really, really difficult.
But I just, we always had that attitude of, we are gonna make it if we stick together.
We've been kicked out of studios, we've lost producers, we've had all kinds of crap happening.
And that video is like on 1.2 million views, which is a huge amount for us back then, particularly.
And the thing about that episode is what happened was...
We are people who are – we want to hear what you have to say, and if it makes sense to us, it makes sense, however controversial it is.
And if it doesn't make sense, we're going to ask you questions and challenge.
So it's basically an hour, like I said, of him sitting there shitting himself and me trying to find the logical flaw in her argument, but I can't.
I can't.
So I'm sitting here having to admit that this woman is correct about what she's saying, and I know that that means we're going to get shat on from a great height.
And I've always said, man, from day one when we started this, I always said, this progressive shit, the way that it's gone, this is the thing that's going to blow it up.
The clue, as Francis always says, is in the name, progressive.
It's always about going further and further and further and further.
They don't know where to stop, man.
Because see, I am progressive.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know what I am.
But what I mean is, sometimes, this is why I don't understand people who have a fixed political ideology.
Because it's like me saying to you, Joe, you're driving a car.
What's the best thing for you to do?
Slow down or speed up?
Well, it depends where you are.
It depends what you're trying to get to.
It depends what the situation is, what's around you, right?
Sometimes society is going a bit too fast and you need to slow down a bit.
Sometimes it's going a bit too slow.
It's become stale.
It's stagnant.
We're not moving enough, right?
Sometimes you need a bit of progress.
And, you know, so...
But the problem is if your ideology says we must always be making more progress, you're going to keep going to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
Another thing I think is technology.
You know, a lot of the change, this is where my disagreements with conservatives come in because You know, Hayek wrote about this and why I'm not a conservative.
The big tension between progressivism and conservatism is about your attitude to change, right?
If you're progressive, you think change is always good, at the extreme, right?
And if you're conservative, you think that change is bad, essentially.
That's how some people think.
But change is inevitable.
It's inevitable.
And largely it's driven by technology.
So I think one of the reasons we talk about the trans issue so much now is that we have the technology to facilitate some of this transitioning in a way that we didn't have in the past.
So I think that's also part of the thing that's driving it.
But the reason I say that it's going to destroy this whole thing from the inside is, number one, you're trying to deny basic biology that we all know.
Everybody knows the truth.
There's a difference between men and women.
And chopping pieces off yourself isn't going to change that.
They believe that if they get everything, if we do all of these things, we're going to reach this magical utopia where everything is free, everybody lives in perfect harmony.
We are going to perfect the human race.
But the problem is, humans can't be perfected.
I was talking about Shakespeare earlier.
Why does Shakespeare still resonate?
Because it deals with the human condition.
Ambition, greed, lust, fragility.
All of these different things.
If we were able to perfect humanity, do you think people would still read Hamlet or Macbeth or all of these works?
No, we wouldn't because we would have evolved beyond that.
But we don't evolve beyond that because we are human.
And this idea of progressivism and we're going to reach this utopia, we're never going to reach utopia.
In the Soviet Union, most people knew that the system was bullshit, right?
But they went along with it anyway.
My granddad, in the 1980s, he said the Soviet Union was wrong to invade Afghanistan.
He said in a private conversation, one of his friends snitched on him, reported him, and he was immediately made unemployable, and people would come up to him, his friends, and go, Yeah, I really agree with you.
He's evil!
Do you see what I'm saying?
In public, he's evil.
In private, I agree with you.
And that's the world we're increasingly starting to live in now, where people have a public view and a public opinion.
Do you know how many comedians who used to hate us on the comedy circuit for starting trigonometry now contact us and say, actually, you guys were right?
Do you know how many people do that?
They won't say anything in public, but we have a lot of messages like that now because people are starting to realize where we're going.
So when you say support, yes, not many people publicly support it, but a lot of people are worried about losing a job.
A lot of people are worried about losing a newspaper column, their reputation.
We had a guy He worked in a supermarket and he shared a Billy Connolly, you know Billy Connolly the comedian?
He shared a Billy Connolly routine on his Facebook.
It was a routine about religion.
He was fired for sharing a routine about religion from a Billy Connolly DVD that they sold in the supermarket in which he worked.
Right?
And we've got laws in the UK now where, you know, we had a guy on our show who posted something about this issue, the trans issue, something that was offensive, and he had a policeman call him up and say, we need to check your thinking.
A policeman in the UK calling someone up and saying, we need to check your thinking behind what you said.
We had a comedian recently who was on tour, not an offensive comedian at all.
An audience member reported him and he had the police investigate the joke.
The police investigated his joke.
And most people in the economy industry won't say anything.
They won't say anything.
Because they're afraid of losing the few opportunities that they have.
Because that is what happens when you work in an industry where the majority of the gatekeepers come from Our equivalent of Ivy League colleges, Oxford and Cambridge, who drink this Kool-Aid, and then the people in charge of the awards saying they support the ideology.
So what are you going to do?
You're going to have to adhere in some form to the ideology, even though you may think it's bullshit.
Otherwise, you're not going to progress in an industry.
We were talking about this kind of stuff on the podcast in like 2012 when it was primarily isolated into colleges.
We were talking about how crazy some of these conversations they were having in colleges were and how they were yelling at professors, you are not making this safe for me.
This is not a safe space.
And people are like, why are you concentrating on what's happening in these liberal colleges?
People graduate, and then they get jobs, and then they enforce those ideologies on the new corporation that they work for, and the corporations are scared, and so they go along with it, and they have these diversity and equity and inequality meetings, and they try to make everything perfect and balance everything out.
Some of these companies are recognizing it, and one of the ways that they recognize it is when it starts hurting their bottom line, like Netflix.
Like Netflix, before they released the Ricky Gervais special, they put out a memo saying, listen, if you don't agree with the kind of content that we put out, you could always quit.
You don't have to agree with every individual content creator that puts something out that Netflix distributes.
This is why what happened in the Soviet Union was trying to make everybody the same.
It stunted the best people.
And it lifted up people who were lazy and stupid, right?
I think the solution, if you're asking that question, is to accept that people aren't equal and to create a society where we get the barriers out of people's way.
And likewise, there are people on the right who are extremists.
You're not going to win them over either.
What we need to do is win over the 80% of people in the middle.
That's all you need to do.
There's always going to be a bunch of extremists on both sides, whatever that issue is, that you are never going to reach.
You're never going to reach someone with blue hair on a university campus that teaches that there's 73 genders.
You will never convince them.
What we need to do is two things.
We need to convince the sensible people in the middle, and we need to teach them and show them that they can be brave, they can be courageous, and they can speak their mind.
And if enough people will do that, this whole thing will become irrelevant overnight.
How do you do that, though, when they lose their job, if they speak out or if they just put a Billy Connolly routine on their Facebook, they get fired?
You have to fight to get rid of the laws that are in place.
And we have initiatives to do that in the UK. People are doing that.
And you have to create a culture in which people start to speak their mind.
We're doing it right now.
We're doing it right now.
That's the way to do it, man.
But coming back to your point about where this goes, there is another dimension to this that we haven't talked about yet, which is what's happening in Ukraine right now.
And these things are not unrelated.
They're not unrelated.
I'm from Russia, right?
And I have family both in Russia and in Ukraine.
The barbarians are at the gate.
They know that we are in this divisive moment, that we've taken an eye off the ball, and they're waiting.
The Chinese and the Russians, they know what this is.
They know that we're distracted, we're weak.
And actually, I think the Russians overestimated how divided we are, which is one of the reasons they did what they did.
If we don't get our shit together, the worst case scenario is that the world is no longer dominated by the West.
And I can't explain to you how bad that would be for every single person who's watching and listening to this.
We have to get our shit together.
So that's worst case scenario.
Best case scenario, which may happen, and I'm enthused, for example, by the unity of the West, I mean Germany aside, in response to what happened in Ukraine.
Best case scenario is every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and perhaps the concern there should be that we don't overreact.
You know, that's something also we're going to have to think about.
But I think best case scenario is we gradually win over that middle that I was talking about.
And we let go of some of these ideas and we get back on the right path, which is working towards what we started, which is everybody should be treated based on their individual characteristics.
Identity politics, Joe, has been tried many, many times in the history of the world and it always leads to one thing.
I think the one note, another note of optimism, it's like my girlfriend always says, she's American, she's a massive Bernie bro, and she always says to me, capitalism always wins.
You know, eventually, people are going to have to wake up.
You're not going to drive your company into the ground.
Eventually, you're going to put the brakes on this thing.
When you stop making money, when you see your profit margins go through the floor, when you see competitors who don't adhere to this ideology start to streak ahead, eventually you're going to have to say, look, we can't keep doing this.
Because, look, think about yourself.
If something doesn't work with your show, and it means that less people are watching, less people get interested, whatever it may be, you...
As a business owner, you look into it.
Of course you do.
So that's one of the things why I'm thinking, actually, capitalism will win, because eventually you're not going to bankrupt and you're not going to make yourself out of a job.
Now, the extremists will do that, but the vast majority of ordinary people who have got families, who have got mortgages to pay, will go, hang on a second.
That's what I'm hoping for, is that we come to our senses, a collective coming to our senses.
The problem is, whenever we have this conversation, and in the West this is a very common thing, people underestimate the power of ideology.
We think we're very rational.
We're really not.
Ideology is a very powerful tool, and one of the things that's happening in the West is...
These institutions are being captured, as you mentioned.
And once you've got the laws on the books, it becomes very hard to get them back off once you start to implement some of these concepts.
So we're going to have to work very hard to challenge this stuff in a healthy way.
And like I said, I think we're doing it right now.
I think we're having the conversations you are, we are.
We see initiatives in the UK which are aimed at preventing this sort of censorship, people being cancelled, people losing jobs for things they've said.
The Free Speech Union does some good work.
But it's a difficult spot.
And I wrote an immigrant's love letter to the West, Joe, because I love particularly the United States, Britain, and I'm deeply concerned that I'm seeing some of the patterns that I saw in my life and in my grandparents' lives in the Soviet Union.
My grandma was born in a gulag.
She was born in a concentration camp for people who said the wrong thing.
I'm not saying we're there.
We're not there.
We're not there in the West.
Let's be clear about it, right?
But the direction of travel bothers me.
When I see people pursuing a quality of outcome at any cost, that bothers me.
When I see people being divided into groups and being told that this group is good and this group is bad, that worries me.
It's not a healthy direction and a house divided against itself cannot stand.
It can't stand.
We've got to understand that, you know, the beauty of the West is we are going to have different views and different ideas about things, but we can't destroy our own civilization from the inside.
We can't undermine the very values that built this civilization.
And freedom, we talked about freedom here in Austin, it's such a big part of it.
You can't make the technological and scientific progress that we've made without scientists being free to pursue science.
And if we can't agree with what a woman is, Biological fact.
We're eating our civilization from the inside.
This is very dangerous.
We've got to push those extremists to where they belong, and we've got to concentrate on the sensible middle of people who want to have a reasonable conversation about these issues.
And you know, as we travel around America, we talked about how much we love it.
We talk to people here.
This is a divided country right now, man.
And a lot of people are scared.
A lot of people are angry.
A lot of people think that the other side is not just wrong but evil.
That worries me.
That worries me because America is the thing that holds...
Simple solutions never work for incredibly complex, nuanced problems.
They might make you feel good.
They might make you feel that you have the answer, that if only we do this, that suddenly we're going to reach some utopia.
Life doesn't work like that.
Complex problems Take years to resolve, and sometimes some problems are not resolvable.
You can tinker at the edges, you can do your best to solve it.
There will always be poverty.
You may be able to reduce it, but you're never going to be able to eradicate it completely.
There will always be evil people, murderers, rapists.
Unfortunately, that is part of the human condition.
Now, you can put steps in place to minimize it and all the rest of it, but you're never going to stop that.
There's always going to be that element of people.
I think part of the problem is, and Constantine and I talk about this a lot, a lot of people in the US and the UK and all around the Western world have got what I call Western privilege.
You grew up in a country that is comparatively safe, where you don't worry about things like electricity, where you don't worry where your next meal is coming from, Where the water is clean.
All these things you take for granted.
That ain't normal in the rest of the world.
In Venezuela at the moment, I was talking to my cousin and I said to him, Johan, how are you doing?
And he went to me, well, I mean, things are tough, Francis.
I collect the rainwater in a tank.
On my ceiling of my house.
But now people are stealing the rainwater from the tank.
And here's the other thing.
And this really worries me.
So one of my friends, Henry, came over from Venezuela to see my friends and particularly my family because my parents have known Henry since he grew up.
And we took him for a meal.
And my parents are in their mid to late 70s now.
They're old people.
And Henry was talking.
And my dad said, Henry, I'm an old man now.
Could you speak up?
And he said, sorry, Jim.
He went, because in Venezuela...
We're used to whispering.
And that's the problem, where you live in a society where people have become used to whispering.
And that's what I'm seeing in the UK, where people are afraid to say what they think and they feel, where if you say something out loud, you're constantly looking over your shoulder because you're worried that somehow that's going to reduce your Your opportunities, your career, it might isolate you from friends.
We can't live in a society where we whisper.
That is not the West, and that's not a free society.
Joe, and I'll tell you a couple of quick stories about the power of ideology.
My grandmother, who was born in a gulag, right, when they released people from these camps, you were not allowed to live within, I think, 100 miles of any of the big cities in the Soviet Union at the time.
You had to live in a small town in Siberia somewhere.
And in these towns, the only people that lived there because they were so remote were the people who were former prisoners of the camps and the people who were former guards in the camps, right?
And when Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev, who took over from him, exposed his great crimes and he said, this wasn't real communism, blah, blah, blah.
And these people who lived together, the guards and the prisoners, right?
My grandmother's family, on their very landing in their apartment block, opposite them was a guy who used to be a guard in the camps.
And when these great crimes of Stalin were exposed...
Many of these men shot themselves because they thought they were doing the right thing.
They thought they were acting correctly by beating and torturing and imprisoning these people.
It was for a greater good.
It was for the right ideology.
And we interviewed a guy, a friend of ours, who runs the oldest family-owned Italian restaurant in London.
He did a fundraiser for Ukrainian orphans with J.K. Rowling.
And when she tweeted about it, he got a wall of one-star comments on his page calling him transphobic.
And we don't know if it's related, but the very next day someone smashed in the window of his restaurant.
If you're doing that, you're not a good person.
You're not a good person.
I don't care why you're doing it.
When you're smashing people's businesses up, you're not a good person.
And ideology is what allows people to feel good while they attack people, while they send them death threats, while they send them rape threats.
Do you know how Stalin, do you know how the Soviet Union got a nuclear weapon?
So, the Manhattan Project was probably one of the most gigantic advances in human technology in the history of the world, right?
It cost a huge amount of money and it was very difficult.
The first bomb that the Soviet Union dropped in test was a carbon copy of one of the two bombs.
I think it was Nagasaki or maybe Hiroshima.
It was one of those two.
Because scientists who were working on the Manhattan Project, who had communist sympathies, they had ideology, they gave all of the blueprints and everything to Stalin, to the Soviets.
This regime that had killed millions of its own people, because they felt justified by their ideology, they gave the West's greatest enemy in that time a nuclear weapon.
That's how hard they believed in stuff.
This is the power of ideology.
When you believe that you've got the right idea and you can go and burn down cities and attack people and tell people that you're going to rape them and kill them, you're not a good person.
And this is what I always say to people.
Don't be that thing.
Don't be a useful idiot.
Do not be a useful idiot.
Someone who thinks they've got the right ideas and therefore you're entitled to commit violence against people or to threaten people or to cancel people and to end their ability to make a living.
One of my friends who's sadly since passed away, and I'm making the details very obfuscating because I don't want people to know who this person was.
This person was very sick.
They were very sick with their illness.
And I knew this person was sick.
And we messaged back and forth on Facebook, not as much as I should have done, because I didn't realise how ill they were.
And he said to me, I really admire you, Francis, because you're brave.
And I said, what do you mean?
And he went, I couldn't do what you do.
And I went, what do you mean?
He went, for instance, he goes to me, I just couldn't be honest the way you're honest.
And he went, when people come round to my house, I've got Douglas Murray's books, and then I hide them away.
Because I know that if they see them, that I will lose friends, that I won't be accepted, and that I will be ostracised.
And when this person passed away, I saw on Facebook loads of people saying, what a nice person he was.
And he was a nice person.
He was lovely.
He was kind.
He was all of those things.
But that's what they didn't mean by nice.
Nice meant that he told the party line.
He didn't challenge.
He didn't stand up for himself.
That's what nice means.
And the thing that I hate about this ideology is they say that they're doing things to be kind.
They're doing things because they're doing the right thing.
We're creating a safe space.
It's not a safe space.
What does safe space actually mean?
I don't want you to challenge my opinions.
That's what's so dangerous about this ideology, because it's a form of tyranny masked with kindness.
And it's not kindness.
It's just a different way of silencing people and getting them to shut up.
And if they don't shut up, you're going to take everything from them.
But what's really interesting in it isn't like the authoritarian, like in Venezuela, people know the rules.
They do it because they're being kind and respectful and they're manipulating language and it's insidious and it's in our culture where now we can't define what a woman is.
You ask somebody what a woman is and if on the liberal left they'll have a fucking meltdown.
Well, because if you accept this one thing, this one thing which is very strange, right?
This one thing that not only can you be a biological male with a penis, but you're a woman and you have sex with women and you make that woman pregnant.
If that woman identifies as a male, that's a pregnant male.
Do you think it signals a pivotal chapter in this whole thing that this is where, and you were saying this, that this is probably what's going to force it to implode.
And do you think that, do you find an encouragement in the fact that out of the people that are completely free, And the word completely is probably the wrong word.
But out of the people that do commentary on the internet, where they don't have a network that they have to answer to, they don't have producers that they have to answer to, and executives that have this woke ideology as their center point, you're seeing far more of How people excel and advance and succeed in rational, objective commentary?
And that being the case, you know, we all say that the internet is the great hope for us to be able to debate and share ideas.
But what's happening, because these companies are coming under a tremendous amount of pressure from governments in order to, you know, to toe the line.
Of course, but what a beautiful way to shut down a conversation.
Not by shouting over somebody, but by taking the moral high ground.
And once you take that moral high ground, if you then criticize me, well, you're being transphobic.
And I have this moral high ground, and if you attack me again, then you're in the wrong.
And this is where it gets dark.
This phrase, sorry that I keep head-biting the mic, that they always use, the right side of history.
We are on the right side of history.
And you just think to yourself, How arrogant are you that you think you're so sure of your own opinion that hundreds of years down the line people are going to look at you and think you are the new MLK? How arrogant is it?
And it's so beautiful as well because they say you're on the wrong side of history and immediately...
Your opinion doesn't matter anymore because you're part of the problem.
And if you're part of the problem, we don't have to engage with you.
And it's something that I said in 2020 when the whole world went nuts, when you had the BLM marches and they were saying things like abolish capitalism, defund the police.
And I had friends who got on board with this and I saw what happened in Venezuela.
And I said to them, be very, very careful.
You don't understand the forces that you are messing with.
You don't understand.
He's seen it.
I saw what happened in Venezuela.
I saw, like, my cousin had to flee for his life.
He's a journalist because if you criticize the government, my grandfather was murdered when I was 31. His murder was never investigated, even though we know who did it, because investigating crimes is a sign of right-wing oppression.
You've got to be careful.
You've got to be very, very careful.
But people who have grown up in the West, they don't understand the magic trick.
And it is a magic trick.
Because once again, it's simple solutions to complex problems.
And in the Soviet Union, the groups that were, you know, the privileged were the aristocrats and whatever.
And the underprivileged were the working people.
The ideology of Marxism is based on class.
What we're talking about here is a new form of it, which is Marxism and ideology based on ethnicity, identity, sexuality.
And it's the same thing, just being applied in a different way, right?
There's this privileged people and underprivileged people, and we must flip the thing, right?
That's why it worries me because I do think, you know, obviously Western societies, like every other societies, have racism in them, have sexism, have discrimination.
They're people who are bigoted.
They genuinely are.
I've seen them.
I've experienced racism, right?
But the solution to that is not to start to undo the entire Western project.
So, you know, Francis and I, you know, we had the conversation about comedy, but the truth is the reason we do what we do is we're both people who've come from different societies who are deeply, deeply concerned about what's happening in the West.
And for two reasons.
One is we're destroying ourselves from the inside.
But I know how people think outside of the West.
I have lots of Chinese friends.
I'm from Russia.
People out there aren't talking about gender pronouns.
They're getting ready.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, after the invasion of Ukraine, do you know what he said?
He said, the purpose of what we're doing here is to push America out of Eastern Europe.
That's what they're doing.
They're seeing that the West is weak and they're capitalizing.
They're capitalizing.
And the Chinese, they will do the same if they have the opportunity.
Because everybody wants what we have.
They want the prosperity.
They want the stability.
They want to be top dog.
And why wouldn't they?
Right?
And what happens?
I mean, you understand the fighters.
What happens with fighters when they see someone who's a bit weak?
I have sympathy for anybody who's going through gender dysphoria, which is an utterly awful, terrible mental illness.
Of course we have to have compassion for people.
But that doesn't mean just because you go through transition that you are a woman, you are still a biological male.
I'll give you an example.
Question Time, which is our biggest...
It's a debate show where they get notable people on to debate.
Constantine's been on it, and they get on to debate various things.
We had Robert Winston, Sir Robert Winston, one of the UK's most eminent biologists, and they were talking about this very issue.
And they asked him what his opinion was, and he went, your sex is quite literally coded into your cells, into the very fabric of your DNA. The host of the program turned around and looked at him and went, some people may disagree with that.
You go, we're insane!
You've got a man who is eminent, who is one of the foremost biologists, explaining something that we all know is true, and that's your rebuttal?
It's not living to have the handbrake on and be scared.
Because being a human being is difficult.
It's hard.
Every day is hard.
You have to meet challenges.
You have to stand up.
You have to improve.
You have to be better.
But all of a sudden, if you're having to live this life where there's tripwires around you, and if you say the wrong thing, then suddenly all these horrible things can happen and you can be exposed for these things that you know you're not.
That's a terrible way to live.
You're living your life in a straitjacket.
And I think it's just really important that people understand.
We use this term gaslit all the time.
Progressives always use it, gaslit.
But I think what we're seeing is a population of people who are being gaslit, who are told that they're racist, sexist, they have their internalized homophobia, all of this kind of stuff.
When the reality is, and I really believe this, Most people are honest, decent, and here's the thing that I find really upsetting, is people are starting to believe that they're problematic, and you just go, you're not.
You're not.
You're a human being.
You're fragile.
You think the wrong things.
Here's the thing.
We're constantly in these silos.
Nobody's having their opinions challenged anymore or their views.
And that's dangerous because I've got stupid opinions.
So do you.
So do you.
And it's only by voicing them and I say my stupid thing that you go, hang on, brother.
Yeah, I didn't think of it and we improve and we move forward and by doing this We're just drilling down and our opinions aren't being challenged and we're not gonna be able to move society forward What's fascinating is that those kind of conversations where you can say to someone I think your opinions wrong and they go ah you got a point That's only happening on the internet, right?
You're not seeing that on any of these major news broadcasts any of these opinion shows you're just not seeing that it's just echo chamber and A hundred percent.
This isn't a left or right wing point at all because I'm really, really not interested in that false bullshit about these two teams.
I think the problem is the tribes.
I don't think we're ever going to get away from it because we're human beings, right?
But it's that left versus right thing that is the problem, in my opinion.
That's how you get the echo chambers in the first place.
But the problem is, you know, what happened with the Hunter Biden story?
I woke up that day and I saw what had happened and I said to the guys, this is one of the biggest stories and this is one of the worst things that I've ever seen.
Because once you start fucking with the electoral process like that, once you start making up bullshit like this is Russian disinformation and we later learn that it's true, I don't care that it's Biden or that it's Trump.
You can't do this.
You cannot put your hand on the scales in favor of one team if you are the public square.
But that was the problem with Trump, is that he was so problematic to people on the left, they were willing to break the rules in order to hamper him and to hamper his success, in order to empower the Biden team.
They wanted to withhold information that they thought would be a problem.
But it's far more impressive because it's something that's beyond anything that's ever existed before.
Whereas these people who went, many of them, straight from college, right into positions in these companies and then right into positions of power in these companies, Are literally in charge of the narrative of the civilized world.
They don't have real life experience in many cases.
A lot of these people in high positions, like the guy who's the CEO of Google, he's in his fucking 30s, man.
But we've got to understand that we cannot have these big tech platforms messing around with this structure that is built to allow people to express their opinion democratically.
Because once you undermine that, you're going down a very dark path.
without being destroyed is narrowing yeah there are new and new rules about what you can and can't say why is it the overton window was i have no idea yeah okay it just makes me sound intelligent so but and then and then he made that was such a profound point because i thought to myself of course if you don't stand up for people that you disagree with eventually it's going to happen to you right the weapon and also this is something that progressives need to understand and
The weapons that you use against others will eventually be turned on you.
And we saw that in the UK, where suddenly, you know, comedians were celebrating, you know, Count Dankula getting arrested.
Then suddenly she gets investigated by the police.
We need to wake up and realise that if you start using these weapons against your enemies, it won't be long before they wake up and they're going to use them against you.
And once that happens, we're going to be in a very dangerous place in society.
It's very fascinating to me that these conversations that we're having are so unusual.
And that this is kind of the only way you can have them.
The only way you can have them is in a kind of format like this.
And that these things that you're saying, although they're very logical and they're based on reality and history, they're uncommon.
That's very strange.
My hope is that the popularity of these kinds of conversations, like your show and my show and a lot of other shows like it, That this is sort of an unexpected twist in the narrative that people didn't see coming.
And that the freedom that we enjoy before the Overton window slams shut on us, it does give us the possibility to spread this idea and let people recognize that this is a genuine, real problem.
That although it might make you feel better to deny it, it might make you feel better to go along with it at work or at school.
It ultimately will lead to a far more suppressive environment than the one you're experiencing right now.
I'll tell you about the people that work with us, right?
I'm going to get a lot of emails now, but we only ever employ people who ask to work with us, right?
And we're not looking to employ anyone right now, by the way.
And our team, we've got, so Conservative Christian, we've got a guy who, this is a funny story, man.
We've got a guy who's from a Sikh background, his family is Sikh.
They moved to the UK via Africa.
And he was telling us that when he was working on TV, and he didn't want to work on TV anymore because in the last two years, people started basically, he was just a token there.
They were just looking at him as his race.
And they'd be like, oh, well, you know, BLM happened.
How are you feeling about this?
The guy's from a Sikh, but what the fuck does he have to do?
And so when he came to us, he was like, man, this is such a relief to be working in a place where we don't care.
We were looking for someone to make the thumbnails for our YouTube videos, so we put the word out, and we got a bunch of responses, and we picked the best one, right?
We picked the best one, been working for him for a while, and then he goes, by the way, I'm trans.
This comes from the internet where we see other people as an avatar.
Richard Grannon on our show talked about this.
Where we've spent so much time on social media, we just see other people as avatars, and that we can't have a discussion, we have to destroy, we have to win, we have to humiliate them, we have to be the one who wins in the discussion.
Whatever happened to just agree to disagree?
And just accept that people see the world differently.
Because here's the thing.
Your experiences and my experiences of life are fundamentally different.
They just are.
You grew up in a different way.
I grew up in a different way.
Different countries, different cultures, different experiences.
As a result of that, we're going to see the world in a different way.
And here's the thing.
That's valid.
And that's fine.
And because we experience the world in a different way, we're going to have different political opinions maybe.
We're going to have different opinions on a wide variety of things.
That's cool.
And it's fine.
And it should be celebrated.
Let's stop trying to have this uniformity of opinion.
Because again, you're denying people their right and the opportunity to be human, to be multifaceted.
Some people are right, and some people are left, I would argue.
We just spent a couple of days with somebody, like I said, we've got a friend, I've got a friend who's on the Green Party side of things.
We just spent a couple of days in D.C. with Sebastian Gorka, who's like a Trump attack dog, you know, and a bunch of his Christian conservative friends.
Don't you think that this is a very unique time, though, that I'm exposed to the way you think in a way that I would never be exposed to this 50, 60 years ago?
And here's the thing, when we were spending time with Seb, we started talking, they were on the right Christian conservative, but I said, look, one of the real problems I have with America is your lack of socialized healthcare.
And they put forward their argument, but then a lot of them disagreed with each other and they started to have a debate about it and go, look, and then one of them went, look, it's obvious the system isn't working.
Another one went, I've got this friend who's really sick and they can't get the treatment.
We need to do something about that.
So that was my point about on the right, even on the right, they still disagree.
And some of them were saying things like this idea that someone who's fundamentally ill needs to be taken care of by the state.
Well, this is what happens, like you say, Joe, is when you take your foot off people's throat and when you stop making them feel that they're evil for having an opinion and you just listen and hear and discuss, that's when you find out human beings are actually quite complicated.
And you can change people's minds sometimes just by listening to them.
And a lot of times the opinions that they have, they've taken out of comfort.
They've taken these opinions because it's easier to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of ideas and opinions than it is to form your own.
If there's a very clear-cut ideology that you can just subscribe to and all of a sudden that makes you a good person or accepted in your community, it's very easy to do that.
The thing about weed being illegal is when we are in places where we're actually allowed to smoke it, it's so much better because you're not worried and because you can pick what you want and stuff like that.
This is one thing that I do have hope for is the implementation and adoption of psychedelics.
I think if there's anything that's going to change people's minds, that's going to be one of the things because it's going to change your whole understanding of what is rigid and what structures exist and why they exist and why you think the way you think and it'll make you question yourself in a way that I don't think anything else happens.
This isn't about psychedelics, but do you know that there's more than one way to get there, to that place that you're talking about?
I studied a lot of hypnosis in my twenties, and there's this exercise that you can do in hypnosis called deep trance identification.
And the idea is if you put someone into a deep hypnotic state, their identity is almost like a set of clothes.
You can take off your identity.
And you can try on a different identity.
You can try on what would it be like to be Francis Ngannou or whoever it is that you want to understand how they do what they do.
And I did this, there's two stories I'll tell you about this.
So I did this once on a course that I was doing with a woman.
She was this very mild-spoken, softly-spoken South African woman.
And she wanted to try on being some kind of like American, she was I think religious, like evangelical preacher.
I don't know why she wanted it.
Anyway, so we put her into this trance, took her through the process, and then we said, open your eyes, and she opened her eyes and said, holy shit!
And she was speaking like this guy, right?
So when I was doing this exercise with me being the one, I thought, you know what, I want to do this with the universe.
I want to feel what it's like to be the universe.
So the guys put me in this deep trance, take off your identity, try it on.
And when I opened my eyes, I just felt connected to everything, to every human being on the planet.
And you know how the universe is expanding?
I felt like my heart beat.
The idea that I got is, what if the expansion of the universe is one half of a heartbeat of some kind of creature?
That's what I got.
And I know that people who take various psychedelics and stuff like that sometimes have a similar experience of deep connection with other people through this thing.
And that's why I'm not someone who's...
I don't believe in God, but I know that we're all connected in some way as humans.
There's something that unites us.
And I don't know what that is, but the fact that you can get there different ways tells me that it's real.
I never say I don't believe in God because I don't even know what that means.
I don't know.
Do I believe that everything that man has written about religion, all the religious texts or the inaccurate interpretation of the will of God?
No, I don't believe that.
Because I think there's too much that's cultural in that.
There's too much that it's like a sign of the times, the laws and the rules of the land.
So it's clearly at the hand of man all over everything.
But like, why did they write it in the first place?
Like, what were they feeling and experiencing that they wanted to lay down ground rules and talk about some connection with the Almighty?
And maybe there is a thing and just we don't know what the fuck it is, you know?
We're stuck in this strange sort of very limited existence for a very short amount of time to figure things out.
And most of the time you're alive, you're trying to manage your anxiety.
You're trying to figure your way through this maze of civilization and culture and conversations and relationships and friendships and business and bills and mortgages and all that shit.
And in the meanwhile, you're a part of this massive super organism that is but a speck.
In the atom of another being that is far more infinitely, not just impossible in size to consider, but that's a part of something that's far more impossible than that.
So much of what we see in fractals We like to think that the universe is so vast and so amazing that that's it.
What if it's not?
What if the universe, what if this idea of the infinity of the universe is like it's just a part of a cell that's a part of something far greater and far larger?
We are here but a brief instance.
It's so fucking short that most of the time you're just trying to figure out what's going on and then it's too late and then it's gone.
And you hope that you've transferred some of your wonder and some of the information you've accumulated during your lifetime to the next group that's going to look at it and they're going to have a little bit more knowledge.
They're going to take it to a little bit better place and hopefully they're not going to blow themselves up before they work their way through many of the problems we've already worked our way through.
When you were talking earlier about this is one of the greatest times ever to be alive, like Pinker gets criticized all the time for his conclusions, but his work is pretty clear.
What he's talking about is if you go back in time and you look at all the violent crime and the murder and the rape and just the chaos of life, it's way better now than it's ever been before.
People are way kinder.
And I think out of all the bad things that the internet has done, one of the good things is I genuinely think it's made a percentage of people way nicer.
Yeah, I go deeper than that, to be honest, because if you look at how gods have been used throughout history before monotheistic religions, before religions that had one god, god was always a way to explain things that human beings couldn't explain scientifically at the time that they were living in, right?
The god of rain, the god of lightning, the god of fire, the god of war.
So, to me, I worry about using that word not because I'm scared or whatever.
It's because I don't think it accurately describes what I think exists.
And what I mean by this thing above us all is not some kind of being.
It's the deep connection that all human beings at the end of the day have with each other.
Sorry, Francis, just to finish this point.
You can meet somebody who's a completely different race, doesn't speak the language, doesn't do anything, and with just the basic movement of your meet, you can connect with that person quite at a deep level.
You know, Jordan Peterson had a very interesting take on this, and I'm going to butcher it, because I don't remember it totally, but I think his take was, like someone was talking to him about whether or not he believed in the God of the Bible, whether or not he believed in Jesus Christ, and I think his take was that if you live your life as if it's real, you'll have a better life.
It's like it's not necessarily a thing you need to question.
And that's an interesting perspective.
And people could disagree with that.
And there's a lot of people that I'm very good friends with that are absolutely atheists.
And they have this very fatalistic view of this life that it's here and it's gone, and you're never going to figure it out, and you're conscious because you're suiting a purpose.
You're part of this biological machine.
You're part of the food chain and your consciousness enables you to continue to innovate and continue to create and contribute to this thing that allows people to breed out of control and create technology that literally can change the surface of the earth.
What we're doing is very, very strange.
We're operating together as a gigantic superorganism that's making technology.
They cannot process the world in that way and be fulfilled because their fear of death or because of something else just doesn't allow them to experience life fully unless they believe there's another world.
I think we want to do that with the living entity of the energy of the universe, which is so crazy to think that it's a thing, like that it's a god, a thing.
It might just be a force, like fire causes trees to burn.
There might be a force that creates things, and it might We're so limited in our understanding of what language is and what thoughts are and trying to express ourselves.
We're so burdened by the weakness of the chimp structure of our bodies that we're like some sort of hybrid between an animal and an enlightened being.
And what if it's past all that and it is the very source Of everything and it brings things to it in a very messy way and that's what we're doing We're moving towards this source of ultimate love in the universe in a very very messy way by figuring it out through itself But here's the thing Joe and this is maybe this is part of the beauty of life Maybe we just can't figure it out because we're simply not capable Like an ant doesn't know you're hovering your hand over it.
Well, I think that and then the idea, if you believe in evolution, is that this has always been going on.
The idea that it's done now, that we've finished.
Ta-da!
We made it.
That's ridiculous.
If we go back to early man, to early hominids, and you look at us, we're a very different thing that interfaces with the world in a very different way.
There's one in Austin and there's one in Woodland Hills in California.
And you go into this place.
There might be more of them.
You go into this place and they give you a haptic feedback vest and you put on a helmet.
And I do it with my whole family.
And you go into these games, and you get to like, you're on a pirate ship, and you're fighting skeletons, and they're slashing at you with swords, and when they hit you, you feel it.
You feel like haptic feedback, and it's wild.
It's all VR. And I'm watching this as a kid who grew up with Pong.
I remember when Pong came around, we were like, this is crazy.
We're controlling the TV with knobs.
And here I am with my kids, and one of my young daughters killed me with a fucking sword.
We're in some sort of combat fight.
You have these crazy weapons and you're living in the future.
It's wild, man.
And it's kind of crude in that you know it's not real.
But there's one called, I think it's called Deadwood Mansion, is that what it's called?
Where you're in a fucking haunted house and zombies are running at you and you're gunning down the zombies and when you're shooting them they splatter and they hit you, you see red and red splatters.
And I'm like, we're close.
We're close to recreating all kinds of experiences.
This is Pong.
This is Pong to what we're going to feel when it can interface with some sort of a neural link type system and give you an artificial experience.
That's fucking coming, kids.
That's coming.
And if it's better than real life, good luck telling kids they have to go outside.
We are going to invent forms of weapons using the artificial intelligence way before we invent something that is capable of the type of intelligence you're talking about.
So you feel it's just human nature that if we have control of artificial intelligence, the first thing it's going to do is devise weapons of insane destruction.
So you're saying the kind of artificial intelligence that's already available, not like general artificial intelligence, which is what they think of as like a sentient being.
So you're saying that this artificial intelligence that's in place right now, that they already use for a lot of things, is going to be used and make weapons.
I mean, whenever anybody talks about anything that anyone's done anywhere in the world, when they talk about horrific things, I always go, dude, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is insane.
That was a completely untargeted city in the sense that there's not like there's an army there and they're shooting at us.
No, they just nuked cities.
The kind of death and destruction that must have happened on those days to be a person who's an innocent person living on this regime in this city.
I know that the consequences for something that you've done nothing to.
All you've done is live your life.
All you've done is work in a market.
All you've done is do whatever the- you've been a farmer.
And then your entire world is obliterated instantaneously by an atom bomb for the first time in human history.
That is one of the biggest fucking sources of anxiety for people is the idea that we're living in this conflict that we have zero control over that might lead to a global thermonuclear war at any moment in time.
The wrong buttons might get pressed and the wrong people might get mad or the wrong military decisions might get made and someone just tries to fucking do something wild.
We didn't really think that that was a possibility until this Ukraine invasion.
I think the Ukraine invasion opened up a lot of people's eyes because there's so many people from Ukraine that have relatives in Russia and vice versa.
It's not like you might be at war with your own people, people that you are literally related to.
And when you hear the government bragging about how much money they're sending over to Ukraine to help fight the Russians, it's like, maybe we should shut the fuck up all the time.
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Remember that one you might want to keep under your hat.
If you think about all the different times we've done this, all throughout history, to aid armies and fund them and give them weapons, at what point in time would someone who opposes those people feel like we're at war with them?
I'm saying that the argument, not the perception of the Russian people, the argument that is being made is that we are, you know, it's siege mentality.
So, from their perspective, they already feel that we're at war.
And have done from the beginning.
Now, if you're talking about kinetic war, right, then I think the only way that becomes an issue is if the United States gets directly, or NATO gets directly militarily involved.
Like you start shooting down Russian planes or shooting Russian tanks.
But apart from that, I don't see it because you talk about vulnerability.
America is the least vulnerable country in the world.
But here's the thing, people are terrified in the UK because we've bought into this idea that the West has eliminated war.
You know, we have a few pockets of things going on, but we're safe and we don't have to concern ourselves with that about having another country, you know, being aggressive and invading and whatever else.
So we've bought into that and we felt really safe, so safe, that we've eliminated it from our minds.
And this has been an incredibly sharp wake-up call.
This has been a slap to the face around the West.
And what it's saying is, you ain't as safe as you think you are.
The constrained, what he calls the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.
And the constrained vision says that human beings are flawed, human beings have certain predispositions, human beings aren't rational, human beings behave the way they behave, and the best way to understand how they are likely to behave in the future is to look at how they behave now and how they've always behaved, right?
And the unconstrained vision is essentially progressivism.
It's the belief that this can be changed fundamentally.
It's the belief that if you do enough social engineering, you're going to get to a position where people are going to stop being the way that they are and we're going to build new people.
A new man.
This is what people said in the Soviet Union, homo sovieticus, right?
A new type of human being can be created.
And we view the world now through that vision, through the progressive vision, the idea that there would never be war, the idea that people would never want to attack us, the idea that, you know, when I went to university to study politics, the thing that was doing the rounds at the time was, they called it the golden arches theory of international conflict.
Which was that no two countries with McDonald's had ever gone to war.
And I think we also have to take into consideration that when you're talking about Russia, when you're talking about the population, they're not as exposed to information, to the free flow of information as we are in America.
There's a lot of people that might have these notions in their head based on what they've seen on television.
You know what I love, actually, is how people, like you said, who are really celebratory about their virtue or whatever else, a lot of the time, when they get home, they're really dreadful people.
Obviously, this is the kind of doctor that's willing to fucking sedate a person.
That's not an ethical person.
I don't know if he's lying.
But he did say that Michael Jackson was chemically castrated.
Now, as someone who got fascinated with castratos...
That they used to do that with young boys.
They would castrate them so they would keep a certain tone.
There's a guy that they recorded who's a castrato.
Have you ever heard it?
There's like one recording.
Find the one recording of a guy who's a castrato.
It's haunting.
It's a guy who as a boy they chopped his nuts off so he could make a certain noise.
And so I thought when I listen to Michael Jackson, I'm like, listen to that voice.
That's so different than any other male voice.
Especially when you get into like the Billie Jean era.
So this was a person who is castrated as a boy and then grew up to become the singer Now knowing what you know about what created this tell me this isn't a haunting sound I don't know how old this guy is, though, during the recording, right?
If you were an evil person, and I'm not saying that this is what happened, but if you were an evil person and you said, I need to keep that voice like that forever, that would be the way you would do it.
However old he was, 10 years old, he shouldn't be able to sing with that much emotion, that much connection.
Now, maybe it's because he was a kind of astral level performer, but you did really feel that he knew that what he was talking about, there was a soul and resonance to his voice, which it wasn't just his voice.
I remember reading that Randy J. Tarberelli autobiography, which is brilliant.
When he was touring with Motown, he was literally watching the greats in front of him.
He was watching, you know, Smokey Robinson in The Miracles.
He was watching, you know...
Upbeat dance numbers.
All of these different people.
And he then watched it and incorporated all of their styles into one performer.
So I can't remember the exact examples.
So for instance, the falsetto of Smokey Robinson, he incorporated that into his performance.
I think it was the dancing.
I think James Brown might have been on one of his tours with James Brown.
So he sort of like James Brown dancing incorporated that.
Until what you had was the fusion of the perfect performer.
Because you've got to remember, this kid never went to school.
He never experienced school or hardly any of it.
This was a kid who was taken and the only thing...
What they did with him is transform him into the greatest musical performer of all time, modern day.
It's very similar to Tyson's journey, if you think about it, Mike Tyson.
Mike Tyson was nearly in school, was never really in school.
He got taken over, he got taken by Customato and they trained him to the point when he was still youth, right the way to become heavyweight champion of the world at 18. Those are people, and you hear, Tyson explained it on this very podcast.
He was an unstoppable force of boxing knowledge and drive and desire and determination and knowing his place in history.
He knew he had a legitimate chance at becoming the heavyweight champion at 20 to be one of the greatest of all time.
And he did it.
He was one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest heavyweight of all time.
In my era, my time when I was a young man and I was watching boxing and he was the heavyweight champion, it was the most exciting moment in all of sports.
Because when he would fight, everybody would grab the cushions of the couch and be like, fuck!
I mean, if people want to go for it, make a more exciting fight because they want a bonus, like performance of the night, maybe that will incentivize people to do that.
But I don't think...
I don't think the win bonus incentivizes people to fight any harder.
I think the problem is, especially when you're really well matched, you can only fight a certain way.
Here's an example.
A lot of people were upset that Israel Adesanya's fight with Jared Kananir wasn't the most exciting fight.
Because that's how you have to fight Jared Cannoneer.
If you want to win, that's how you have to fight.
This idea that everybody should make everything exciting and just go in there guns blazing against a guy in Jared Cannoneer who had knockouts at heavyweight And light heavyweight and middleweight.
He's an enormous middleweight.
He's super powerful.
Super dangerous.
And he's on a win streak and he just knocked out Derrick Brunson.
So you're stepping in against this guy who can close the lights off on basically anybody if he clips him.
Jared's a powerful guy.
You have to fight him that way.
He's in phenomenal shape.
He can't just rush in and he's gonna get tired.
He's not gonna get that tired.
He's gonna be able to hold that pace with you for five rounds and he did.
So you have to fight that way because if you don't fight that way, he clips you and then you're fucked because you opened doors, you left mistakes, you left openings that shouldn't have been there and wouldn't have been there if you were fighting cautiously.
Because you've got to know when you can attack and know when you can't.
And when you're better, like striking-wise in particular, like a guy like Stylebender, when you're better, you impose exactly the amount that you need to in that moment right there.
And if you push further, you might hurt the guy, but he might hurt you.
But if you stay at this one range where you know you're completely in control, you can basically just run it.
And that's what Stylebender can do.
And when he's at his best, when he's in there with a guy who's not capable of standing with him, he just picks him apart.
Just picks him apart.
And they can choose to make big moves at him in which time he'll counter, like Robert Whittaker did in the first fight, or you could do the approach that Robert Whittaker took in the second fight, more grappling-heavy and more cautious in the way he rushes in.
But you only can fight the way you're supposed to fight in that moment.
You know what you can do physically.
He's a striking virtuoso.
You know how tall and long he is for the division.
I believe that Floyd Mayweather is, if he's not the greatest boxer in terms of talent of all time, you could say that he's the greatest fighter of all time.
He's definitely the greatest in terms of figuring out how to make money.
The greatest of all time.
And he's the greatest of all time at not getting hit.
The greatest.
If you go and look at all the other greats, the Sugar Ray Robinson and, you know, the Marvin Haglers and Tommy Hearns, Roberto Duran, Julio Cesar Chavez, early career Ali.
Like Henry Cooper dropped him and had him badly hurt.
They had to cut his gloves.
They had to like do some figazi stuff on the gloves and give Ali a bunch of time to recover.
You see, that's part of the problem with Ali, is that because so much of his career was in this kind of black and white, you know, we can't truly remember him.
Because the content will never be as good as Floyd Mayweather.
Joe, I'm going to ask you this question because we're starting to see this getting talked about more and more, and especially in the mainstream press, CTE, particularly with contact sports.
They're talking in soccer about eliminating it from certain age groups and blah, blah, blah.
Where do you stand on this?
Do you think these contact sports are ultimately going to be unsustainable because people are suing people?
But in terms of sports, there's a great long history of people playing football.
There's a great long history of people playing rugby.
There's a great long history of martial arts, of boxing, of wrestling.
All these things are contact sports, and all these things have the potential, at least, for damaging people.
And it happens all the time.
And then when you have sports like mixed martial arts, where the whole goal is to damage people.
And then you have sports like football, where you have enormous super athletes in the prime of their youth running full clip at each other and colliding.
I mean, the impact is for us puny humans...
We don't even understand what that's like.
Imagine a 300-pound super athlete at a full sprint and collides with you.
I mean, that's what those guys are doing.
So that's just a part of that sport.
There's no getting around that.
It's not good.
It's not a good part of the sport.
And many guys have quit because there was a guy who was a very promising guy.
Do you not think there's going to come a point where so many people are suing the Rugby Federation for having CTE or suing the Boxing Federation?
It's a good point.
Isn't there going to come a point with that where they'll say, and they can make a quite coherent legal argument going, I was doing my job, I suffered this industrial injury as a result of doing my job, Therefore, the work area was unsafe and you were liable for it.
You would see it from older boxers who get interviewed on ABC Wide World of Sports.
You would see them slurring their words and it would be weird.
But now we know a lot about it.
So it should inform people's choices if they choose to do something that's that dangerous.
If they fucking love football, I don't want to be the one that tells them they can't play football.
If they love MMA, I don't want to be the one that tells them not to do it.
I think people should be able to take risks in their life, just like they should rock climb, just like they should be able to do whatever the fuck they want to do.
I don't think this world is meant to be just living in a safe way.
There's an excitement and a glory to fighting.
That doesn't exist outside of that.
And once those guys have experienced that, once you've been a Kamaru Usman, once you've been a Frankie Edgar, and you've experienced the top of the heap, those guys, their life, the way they view the world is different than you.
That thing is worth it.
It's worth it to them.
That thing, to be the fucking champ of the world, to be standing there on your trainer's shoulders, holding up a UFC belt while the whole fucking arena goes nuts.
So the story was he was taking money to try to keep the UFC out of New York so that they would put pressure on the owners of the UFC who owned a bunch of casinos.
And so there was some sort of deal they were trying to...
But at the end of the day, the sport, it's too many people enjoy it.
And I think it's safer, honestly, than other combat sports.
It's not safe.
Let me say that very clearly.
It's not safe.
You're literally trying to separate someone from their consciousness.
You're literally trying to rob someone of their health by kicking them in the chest.
It's a fucking dangerous way to make a living.
It's a dangerous way to compete.
But I think you have more control over what happens than, like, a football game.
I think a football game is so crazy that, I mean, I'm sure the best athletes can avoid a lot of stuff, for the most part, but I've seen guys get clipped when they don't know it's coming, and it seems so wild that you could do that.
Like, when a guy's running and some guy takes them from the side or, like, right from behind them and collides with them, like, those guys can run, like, 30 miles an hour, and they're super athletes.
So England won the World Cup in 2003, and I don't know if you know anything about rugby.
There's a position called hooker, right?
Which is the center of the scrum.
Ha ha.
We're 12.
And the guy who played hooker for England in the 2003 World Cup, he's 43 years old.
Because of his CTE, he cannot remember winning the World Cup.
We've got...
Huge swathes of elite rugby players, elite rugby players who've played for the greatest nations and they are developing dementia-like symptoms in their late 30s, early 40s.
One guy is a dude, I think his name is Alex Popham.
He played for Wales, played for loads of different teams.
Phenomenal rugby player.
His wife can't leave him on his own with his three-year-old because he keeps leaving the oven on and he nearly set fire to the house.
So I guess this is my point.
Is it worth it?
I don't know the answer to this question, but I think what's happening at the moment is that we don't want to have this conversation.
I don't think we want to have it because it's going to throw up a lot of very difficult, very challenging questions which would go far deeper than sport and about personal responsibility, liberty, freedom, etc., etc., and safety, which is a lot of what we've been talking about.
And I also think one of the things that's interesting about this conversation is that many of the people that signed up for this early on in life, and they achieved a certain amount of skill and talent, it wasn't until deep in that they really knew what the dangers were.
They were already on this path of being an elite.
If you're an elite professional rugby player, I just assume that it's like being an elite professional football player.
Like you probably played football when you were young, in high school, in college, and then you make it to the pros, right?
That's got to be what it's like.
So that means you have a very...
You're really good at this one fucking game, and it makes you exceptional.
And you can either back out of it because you think it's gonna hurt you, or you can pursue your dream, which you've been on for two decades.
Well, it's also they get used to doing martial arts, right?
They learn it for self-defense.
They learn it because they want to find something they can achieve at and something they can get really good at and it helps their self-esteem.
And then along the way, someone offers them a fight.
Along the way, people realize, like, hey, have you ever thought about competing?
You're really good.
And they go, maybe I'll try it.
And then they get into it, and then it looks a lot better than working in a fucking office.
And maybe you can make 10 and 10 on your first fight.
Like, oh, wow, that's $20,000 if I win.
And then, you know, all of a sudden, you know, out of taxes and all that, you've got some money in the bank.
And then you keep going.
You have another fight in three months.
Two years later, you're a fucking full-time professional fighter with a diet plan and you're fucking wearing a cardio strap every day and monitoring your calories and like, whoa!
You can get sucked into this.
And if you all of a sudden start feeling like you're losing your memory, what do you do?
And so I think it's some expression of the gene, if they can find that in your DNA, I might be fucking this up, but I know I'm not fucking up that there is something in your genes that makes you more susceptible to CTE. That makes sense.
And when people have it, they get it way easier, or easier at least.
It is also why people love the game, because it's that moment, you know, especially when you live in a world that's so safe, suddenly you're watching something so fundamentally unsafe, it's that when you see someone get knocked out, it's that visceral, it's an instinctual, physical reaction to it.
That's how Ray Boom Boom Mancini was after Dukku Kim.
You know, Ray Boom Boom Mancini fought Dukku Kim on, I think it was on ABC Wide World of Sports, and he killed him.
And I think he died in the 13th or 14th round and after that they started changing fights to 12 rounds and I think Kim had cut a lot of weight to make the weight class you know this is back in the day when they used to weigh in the day of the fight so they'd weigh in I think it was lightweight so it was 135 pounds and they would weigh in the day of the fight so Super dehydrated.
And it's also the impact it's having on the rest of your family.
I saw this documentary about Frank Bruno and they showed, I think it was the second Tyson fight, him going to his training camp and his five-year-old girl holding on to him, crying, going, please don't go, daddy, please don't go.
No, but it's something to talk about because all this, what we're talking about, about CTE and combat sports, it's the one thing that bothers me the most about the sport.
I love the sport because it is the most exciting and because it is what I call high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences.
All these people, they come in and they're just different.
There's something about them.
And you know, especially if you watch soccer or whatever else, you see someone go on.
Lionel Messi was like this.
Wayne Rooney at the start of his career.
The moment he touched the ball, the moment he moved...
It didn't look like someone who had learned something.
It looked like something completely fluid and natural that nobody else could do, no matter how hard or how gifted they were or how long they spent on the training pitch.
And they offered him a shitload of money when Canelo Alvarez knocked out Kovalev.
I know they were calling on him.
And his response was intelligent and well thought out and smart.
And the proper...
Look, if you want to keep your brain and you want to keep your health and you know you got it right now and you did everything that anybody could ever do...
Everything on top of what Andre Ward, other than the financial rewards of having a big Canelo Alvarez fight, that would be the only thing to lure him in.
As far as accomplishments, he did everything.
Olympic gold medalist, two-division world champion, undefeated, retired.
I don't think there's, in boxing at the moment, I don't think there is anyone, there are better boxers, but there's no one more fun to watch than Ricky Hatton.