The Battlefield Of The Mind
76. Is That Funny To You? Phillip Carter's Views On Life!
Ever wondered how the drive to sell merchandise can overshadow storytelling and character development in the comic book industry? We found the answer in a riveting conversation with Phillip Carter, a writer turned comedian. Phillip takes us on a journey through the labyrinth of comic book storytelling that teeters on the line between integrity of beloved characters and the necessity of adaptation for different media.
Join us as we navigate the dynamic landscape of online communication, explore the impact of diversity in storytelling, and delve into the intricate nuances of gender identity. Phillip generously shares his insights about respecting and understanding different social identities, and how this can enrich not just our writing but our interactions with others. We also dip our toes into the lighter side of things as we discuss the power of introverts, the comedic potential of book titles, the art of dealing with hecklers, and the compelling force of satire in comedy.
Our episode is a treasure trove of humor, deep insights, and thought-provoking discussions. From the intricacies of gender identity and creative freedom to the challenges of navigating offensive jokes and judgement - we've got it all. We end with a captivating discussion on the power of introverts, the importance of receiving feedback, and the need for unfettered expression in comedy. So, buckle up and get ready for a fascinating exploration of storytelling, comedy, and social dynamics with Phillip Carter!
Connect with Phillip Carter HERE!
Praise for WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?
★★★★★ "Incredibly weird, laugh out loud funny and very clever."
★★★★★ "An astonishing creation, filled with conjecture and supposition. I can honestly say that I have never read anything like this before. [...] Phillip also infuses the book with an acerbic devastatingly acidic wit compounded with a bone dry sense of humour. The author’s obvious intelligence shines through in both the creative imagination and the beauty of the language, never pandering to any temptation to “dumb down” instead urging the reader to expand their own knowledge and awareness. [...] I definitely look forward to reading more by Phillip and highly recommend this to any reader wanting more than genre written pulp."
Click the HERE to choose your path!
Click HERE to choose your path!
Book a call to learn how you can become apart of our brotherhood!
Click HERE to schedule a free 30-minute consultation if you'd like support to take the right step towards the great life you deserve.
Join our Discord community for FREE, MEN click here ----- WOMEN click here
⭐Thank you for listening to our podcast! We would greatly appreciate it if you could take a moment to give us a 5-star review. Your support helps us reach more listeners and continue to bring you high-quality content. Thank you!
Ever wondered how the drive to sell merchandise can overshadow storytelling and character development in the comic book industry? We found the answer in a riveting conversation with Phillip Carter, a writer turned comedian. Phillip takes us on a journey through the labyrinth of comic book storytelling that teeters on the line between integrity of beloved characters and the necessity of adaptation for different media.
Join us as we navigate the dynamic landscape of online communication, explore the impact of diversity in storytelling, and delve into the intricate nuances of gender identity. Phillip generously shares his insights about respecting and understanding different social identities, and how this can enrich not just our writing but our interactions with others. We also dip our toes into the lighter side of things as we discuss the power of introverts, the comedic potential of book titles, the art of dealing with hecklers, and the compelling force of satire in comedy.
Our episode is a treasure trove of humor, deep insights, and thought-provoking discussions. From the intricacies of gender identity and creative freedom to the challenges of navigating offensive jokes and judgement - we've got it all. We end with a captivating discussion on the power of introverts, the importance of receiving feedback, and the need for unfettered expression in comedy. So, buckle up and get ready for a fascinating exploration of storytelling, comedy, and social dynamics with Phillip Carter!
Connect with Phillip Carter HERE!
Praise for WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?
★★★★★ "Incredibly weird, laugh out loud funny and very clever."
★★★★★ "An astonishing creation, filled with conjecture and supposition. I can honestly say that I have never read anything like this before. [...] Phillip also infuses the book with an acerbic devastatingly acidic wit compounded with a bone dry sense of humour. The author’s obvious intelligence shines through in both the creative imagination and the beauty of the language, never pandering to any temptation to “dumb down” instead urging the reader to expand their own knowledge and awareness. [...] I definitely look forward to reading more by Phillip and highly recommend this to any reader wanting more than genre written pulp."
Click the HERE to choose your path!
Click HERE to choose your path!
Book a call to learn how you can become apart of our brotherhood!
Click HERE to schedule a free 30-minute consultation if you'd like support to take the right step towards the great life you deserve.
Join our Discord community for FREE, MEN click here ----- WOMEN click here
⭐Thank you for listening to our podcast! We would greatly appreciate it if you could take a moment to give us a 5-star review. Your support helps us reach more listeners and continue to bring you high-quality content. Thank you!
What's up, warriors? Welcome back to the Battle for the Mind. This is Rick hanging out with Phil Carter today. And, phillip, I don't know if people are going to know who you are yet, so I think you need to just give yourself the introductions to people. Who the heck is this guy? Who's Rick Tucker to now?
Speaker 2:Who is this? So I'm a writer who's decided to be a comedian because really, if you're writing stories after a while you kind of get a bit bored. It's very hard to get feedback on novels. It's a lot easier to get feedback on jokes because they take people less time to consume. Started out with like brute efficiency, I was like I want to know if this thing I've written is good. What if I make the thing shorter or take less people less time to give me feedback? And then I realized I really enjoyed hosting comedy nights and stuff. It also gives you a free license to be evil, which is the real motivation that many of us go for. That's the truth.
Speaker 1:It is the truth. So what are you doing now? We're going to talk about your book. We're going to talk about some of the ideas from your book. I want to talk about some of the experiences that you've had and, like you, tell me some of your stories, some of your things. You're like doing this and feel free to pepper in some of your jokes for instant feedback.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like right now. I'm being really disinteresting right now because I knew I had this podcast on. I was like, right, I'm going to do something that I find quite drudgery beforehand. So I've got all my energy for this. So I've been proof checking myself because I've been bullied into writing a sequel to my book who Built the Humans. So my three fans have kind of got around me and hit me a bit and then eventually I was like I'll find, I'll make another one. So now I'm just like checking the continuity. I'm like, did that guy die? If he's in the second book, are people going to ask why he's not dead anymore? I don't remember. It's been a while, so I'm going to work it out. I'm not one of those like new Marvel writers who it doesn't matter if the character's dead. They're action figures to sell in Walmart.
Speaker 1:We got parallel dimensions too. We can just bring them back and timeline changes. You've got all kinds of options.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I actually did stand up about that the other day I did the Manchester Fringe and I made the point that the reason Marvel and Doctor who's time travel makes absolutely no sense it's just products. If they didn't have products to sell, their time travel would be consistent. But you kill Doctor Strange off and some out of fucking nowhere town calls and says hey, we've got 10,000 units of Doctor Strange at the Doctor Strange action figure with removable cake. Yeah, we've still got them. You've killed him. The kids aren't going to buy a dead guy. Bring him back.
Speaker 1:And then the next movie.
Speaker 2:It's like Doctor Strange is back. Everybody, please buy the action figure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a million of them.
Speaker 2:They're everywhere.
Speaker 1:We have to sell these, so bring them back. I'm going to go with you on this one. I actually got really grumpy about some of the writing for Marvel because they take ideas even like the X-Men. When Hugh Jackman came out as Wolverine and stuff like that, I'm OK. You got better as he went going along.
Speaker 1:But at the beginning, the first X-Men movies where they just rewrite all the shit, they just rewrite all of it and just make it something totally different. They do it with Batman, they do it with all of them and I'm like, hold on a second. You're taking these characters who became very popular because the story that they were attached to was really really good, and then you get rid of the story that was really really good. To use these characters, why? Why, as a comic book person, I was kid in the 90s with my comic collection, like if they just went, hey, we're going to do the X-Men series, that was what made the X-Men famous. I would be happy to watch that happen instead of. You know, it's the same exact story. If they did World War Hulk, I'd be no problem If they did any of these things, like the story was already really good. No, you're right, you don't have to change it, it's already good.
Speaker 2:It's such a weird thing because, like going back to the product placement, I think a lot of these newer writers they just think right, well, the characters are already popular. We just need some kind of thing of look at the character, look at how shiny it is. Like you could do it with Lego, for example. Imagine if the Lego movie was just as lazy as Marvel movies were. So they're like okay, so we've got Spaceship Guy and Spaceship Guy.
Speaker 2:He flies from that side of the screen to the other side of the screen and then back again and then there's an explosion. And the explosion happens because, I don't know, the Silver Surfer tripped over a stick in 1985. And that's like one of the side characters. We're going to sell cuddly toys of the stick, but only at San Diego Comic Con. They're going to cost $300. And people are going to scalp them and sell them for $10 grand afterwards on eBay and that's basically the whole economy of Marvel at the moment. And I'm like these are like. I don't know if you had them in the US, but over in the UK when Shrek came out, they had Shrek themed shampoo for kids. So it's like kids shampoo and conditioner and the bottle was shaped like Shrek.
Speaker 2:Now kids went insane for these.
Speaker 2:When it first came out there was like crowds of kids just like going for these Shrek themed bottles. I just remember that every time I look at Marvel stuff because I'm like sometimes, especially when a character is in it for about two seconds and it's a three hour movie, like that's just there so they can have a picture for the front of the box in Toys R Us. That's the only reason that guy's there. So same with the Transformers movie. I watched the one with the dinosaurs in. I don't remember what it was called. That movie is two hours and 30 odd minutes long. The dinosaur robots that are in all of the trailers are in that movie for a grand total of about three minutes. Get out of here. What's the rest of the movie?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the one I skipped so far. Actually, if you really think, like I was okay with, like, the way that they brought Kheimer the movies, I was okay with it being over the top and things blowing up, I'm happy with it, I'm like cool, that's cool, let's go with it. But like, here's one thing that's funny have you gone back and looked at this? I don't know how old you are, phil, but I know that I'm 41. So I was an 80s baby and I grew up watching Transformers and GI Joe and all these things. I grew up in those in that time and I went back and I was watching some of the old stuff again. The things I grew up on.
Speaker 1:Transformers was total shit. Like it was. There was no storyline at all. There was like zero. It was just to sell toys and it was just cartoons moving. In fact, megatron turned into a gun that somebody else had to carry for him to use it. I'm like the main boss turns into a gun he can't even shoot himself. Like I didn't think about this stuff. It was just. It was just to sell toys, that's all it was made for. It was a very clever system, but the old Transformers movie did not. The shows did not have plots. It was total trash and we watched the hell out of it.
Speaker 2:Fair enough. It's so weird, isn't it? Because it's like back then. I mean, I'm 31, but I still watch like the reruns of that and yeah, like looking back those shows, I think the differences they didn't pretend they weren't trash.
Speaker 1:They were. They didn't even pretend at all. The GI Joe didn't even give it a shot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I believe, he's now like oh, we're really deep and meaningful and it's. No, you're not and you don't have to be.
Speaker 1:You don't have to be Deep and meaningful, just means we made an ending that sucks because you weren't expecting it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wanted to shock you with an ending that you didn't see coming, so we made it terrible and you're like I don't think that that's the best way to do that.
Speaker 2:Also. We knew it was going to end terribly. Yeah, we just didn't know how it was going to end terribly Not, as shocking as you think, I do get.
Speaker 1:I get, I think, with, especially Netflix, writers and stuff, and you're a writer, so we can get into some of that stuff too, like the writing strike and chat GPT and all the things that are happening in the writing world right now. I actually am very interested to see what's going to be happening. I did a podcast with Vram recently and he was talking about how the last you know writer strike created the reality TV boom and that created a whole bunch of new things and, like now this one, it's going to create a whole new boom and most likely people like us are people who can create good entertainment concepts or things that people want to watch the Wayne's worlds, if you will. Like now the guy in the basement can create his own show and people go.
Speaker 1:I love that show because now he's got a platform that he can just build that on, and so new things are going to start coming out. Where you're going to start seeing stars come from everywhere? Oh, definitely. This is kind of a cool time for that, but it's also making the writing on Netflix piss me off, because it's just not good anymore.
Speaker 2:No, I stopped watching Netflix about two years ago. I realized I was behind on my word count anyway and I thought right, I'm just sitting and consuming too much. I wanted to shift into creating stuff and the last thing I properly binged was dark and the dark crystal age of resistance. It's so good, that was brilliant and that's probably why they asked it, because all the other writers were like, but my story about teenagers being sad isn't getting any views. I'm angry at the crystal people. Get rid of the crystal people.
Speaker 1:It was so good. I was really impressed. I was impressed by how well they did on that one.
Speaker 2:It was absolutely fantastic yeah so Like that was worth the price of the Netflix subscription on it Really good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's some stuff I actually get disappointed in, like. So people who are fans of like the Marvel or the video games or the things they turn into movies. Now I think that you think that they would have learned. Remember when, like Batman and Robin came out to George Clooney, batman and they're getting into like putting nipples on the suit and star power and nonsense and it was just not good. It wasn't good, it didn't. And all the fans like what the fuck is this? Like this is nonsense.
Speaker 1:Until Christopher Nolan started doing something a little more serious for the demographic of like what people were into Batman, which would make it darker, make it more realistic, make it a little tougher, and people at our age at that point were like, yeah, that makes a little more sense. What was the demographic? This was like the 80s, 90s kids. This is the people like that's who actually read Batman before it turned into like. You know, when Michael Keaton came out, it was awesome. Well, now you take these video game concepts and you take these comic book concepts or these, these shows or these games or whatever heroes are likeable and they turn them into something totally different. Like I've been, I watched the Witcher. The first season was pretty good. But, man, this last season I can't even finish it. The writing has gotten so bad. Like what are you guys? This is a these characters that you can play 300 hours on the game and be like? That was consistently awesome. But the show changes completely and there's really good shows that are going well and then just do complete character destruction.
Speaker 1:Like I watched the show Wednesday I don't know if you the Adams family thing I watched. They have a show Wednesday. She did a great job. The girl who does the plays Wednesday. It was a good job. She was good, but the writing by the end of it started completely betraying the character. All of a sudden she's like become like this, like morally righteous hero who's going to save the school at all costs, even at her own demise, and we're like why would Wednesday do that? And then she's got like this, like oh, you're a monster, you're the monster and we have to stop the monsters. It's like this is Wednesday, adam. She would be like you're a monster, yes, like like she wouldn't be, like we have to stop the monster. She would be like cool the monster, like she wouldn't even care. And then now she's trying to fight the guy who's going to burn down the school Wednesday would get marshmallows.
Speaker 2:It's such a weird thing. It's like it's beyond the right is not understanding the source material. It's almost as if they hate it. Beyond, beyond that. It's almost I would. I would wager that a lot of the people they get a job writing it's not their own intellectual property, but they, they really want to express themselves and they go. And it's like when you, when you play toys, you're a little brother or sister and like the dinosaurs going to get married to the princess and you're like that makes no sense in the story.
Speaker 2:What's wrong with you?
Speaker 1:Is it a dinosaur or a prince?
Speaker 2:Like marriage between species, isn't legal in dinosaur planet yet.
Speaker 1:And is he royalty dinosaur? I need more information. What's going on?
Speaker 2:It's just like. It's so strange because that happened with Doctor who. Over here, we had Jodie Whitaker, female Doctor who. There was a few people who got angry at that the way. The main mention of that Fair enough, it was changing things for them that they weren't comfortable changing. Some people are setting the ways going to glaze over that. She was really good for the first few episodes. She was still a good actress. For the rest of the episodes, however, the writing was really bad and it got it got bad during Peter Capaldi's era. That's when I stopped watching it and he's one of my favorite actors and I just could not tolerate it anymore because it was like every three minutes there was this big speech about how we should all be kind to each other. It's like well, show them, tell.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Let's have a big speech about being kind to each other, and then I'm going to vaporize this alien over here to show you all how good kindness is.
Speaker 1:Super nice, sounds wonderful.
Speaker 2:So is vaporizing nice, because that's what we're doing, as long as the bad guys are some kind of thin metaphor for Nazis. Yes, oh, because that's that's what they'd like. Tried to play that with the other Dalek episode where there was a guy who was very obviously a parody of Donald Trump and his immediate decision was to side with the evil aliens.
Speaker 2:And then, I'm sure, just out of the blue, he made a point about immigration and like slavery, because he was trapping giant spiders under a hotel and the whole. The whole thing just drove me insane. I couldn't watch it anymore. Yeah, I'm already weird enough. I don't need this to make me more mentally unstable.
Speaker 1:Like I'm on a fine line here, it is it is interesting how people can take something that was good and then start putting in their own indoctrination techniques to make it so. People can start altering their belief system simply because of a TV show which you think shouldn't be as as effective as it is. But it is Because they're like. You know what? I watched that episode. For some reason I hate Donald Trump more and they're like was he what? Why? I don't know. I think he's trying to trap the spiders. I mean, he's trying to. You know, you're like what? What just happened? People indoctrinate their belief systems into something that has nothing to do with it. It's very interesting to watch how quickly people can change their beliefs.
Speaker 2:It's my business thing because it's like, oh yeah, it is For me, it's my job to sort of not really change people's beliefs, but if I'm going to change them, change them temporarily in a way that's harmless. So by the end of the story I've had a, I've read a new idea. It's interesting, but I'm not, I'm not now radicalized. That's the line you have to, the line you have to kind of balance on as a science fiction offer, unless you want to go like the failed science fiction offer route and you can just create a cult.
Speaker 2:Oh, business is business man. Yeah, Whatever pays the bills Drink the Kool-Aid.
Speaker 1:All right, so, in which case, tell us more about like. All right, get some of the stories and stuff that you're like, you know what and some of the things I'm going into, like how, like who built the humans, and stuff. I want to hear more. Give us some of your theories, some of your thoughts, some of your ideas that you would like you know it's fun and I like to talk about. Give me some of your passions. Give me some of yours.
Speaker 2:Cool. So like I really got into writing when I was about five years old. My little brother's autistic. He used to have frequent meltdowns and for some reason in my five-year-old brain, in my infinite wisdom, I thought all right, I'm a poem that he's unable to read and that'll calm him down. It's been 20 years, he still can't read, so I've now. I'm never gonna get any fucking feedback on that poem, am I? It's just no, he needs to get his shit together.
Speaker 1:Can you read it to him?
Speaker 2:I could do. Yeah, now you know what I've never actually considered.
Speaker 2:Let me act out the way it was really meant to be read and then, yeah, no, just from then on I wrote like a little bit every day. I played the you know Sonic on the Mega Drive and then I designed my own platform of video games, just drawing them down on paper, wanted to get into game design, did a bit of that at uni, bit of writing as well, and then I thought I want to write my own books and I got really into. At university. There was this culture that traditional publishing is the best way of publishing and that if you're accepted by a traditional publisher that means your writing is by default good and evidently I mean you've just smiled. You know it's bullshit, everybody knows it's bullshit. That's because it is bullshit.
Speaker 2:There's plenty of self-published work which had a lot more effort put into it than traditionally published work, such as Andy Weir's the Martian. That was self-published and I've heard that did okay. I've heard he did all right with that. You know he's, he's, he's doing okay. Every now and again he goes to the shops and he can buy food, so he's doing better than most offers. Most of us just look at the food and cry, and we write about how food the food would taste.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we write really miserable poetry collections about how we and then those poetry collections don't sell because anybody that's gonna buy them also can't afford any food. That's the landscape of the poetry scene anyway. So yeah, I do like a bit of comedy, bit of poetry, bit of sci-fi, and in my head they're all kind of the same. But then when they come out of my head people go oh, you'll fill it the poet, oh, you'll fill it the science fiction offer. Oh, you're a comedian. And I never seemed. It's very rare that people notice me as all three things. But when I did the fringe the other week I mixed them all together. So I had a poem about alien abductions, a joke about going back in time to bully Hitler. He got a tinfoil hat to wear just to protect them, because I can make people's heads explode if I get upset. Yeah, get on, yeah. And a couple walked out with an inflatable alien and there was also a hen. Do there. And they, they are, they have been culture shock.
Speaker 2:I did okay with it. Yeah, he's only been on earth for five minutes. I have no idea how old the alien was like. I don't know. It's not on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, also, I don't know if they measure time the same way. This paradox is there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, due to time dilation, that alien could have definitely been underage.
Speaker 1:Could have been easily, or been like thousands of years old, we don't know. But either way the violation still stands.
Speaker 2:That's like the anime watchers defense, isn't it? Well, in the in the movie she's a thousand years old. She does looks like a kid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, listen, I don't mind talking anime I like anime, stuff I don't get into the weird stuff. But I like, I like the, I like the more serious stuff I watch, like your death notes or fate or you know whatever stuff is in there. I do like, I do like that stuff. You know, I even watch some of the weird ones. I watch Baki Hamma. I just finished the two seasons on that. That's interesting, like I just like watching some of this.
Speaker 2:I don't actually watch anime. I've seen like I watched, like fight scenes and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'll watch like little clips from media that I don't usually consume To give me ideas like see if I'm doing stuff right, basically, Look at stuff.
Speaker 1:Are you writing about kids in high school? Because that seems to be all anime.
Speaker 2:No, just people fighting. And anime fight scenes are so high-paced that I thought that's, if I can bring some of that Fastness into a novel, that'd be really cool. It is cool, yeah, but like anime is not really my thing. Same with Star Wars it's not really my thing. But I've pretty much read all of wookiepedia Okay, cuz I really like the background, world building but I just could not care about the movies.
Speaker 1:Well, the movies really the new ones really dropped the ball hard because I got some people are pretty hardcore Star Wars guys and they're like this cannon is garbage, like this, just decked of the books. The books were fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fair enough. I mean, won't lie, I really like the prequel trilogy. When I was a kid, cuz like I Don't know what it's like where you are, but over here in the UK, a country which it rains a lot, here, when you're a kid in school, whenever it rains they take the school, takes you inside and you have to have indoor play because they worried you'll hurt yourself in the rain. So we'd like sit inside and we just watched the prequel Star Wars movies on one television, just a hundred kids just huddled around one television. I remember thinking, george, I was like the coolest thing ever. Oh, you were the one. Yeah, that was me.
Speaker 1:You're like I lost a lot of friends.
Speaker 2:It was really cool, but you know I had all the Lego figures of him. He was my favorite character, just cuz he was just batshit crazy. Cuz I just cuz like the rest of the movie. It's just politics and people arguing about laser swords, and then this frog guy just jumps around and just chats mad shit. You shut up and go over there for a minute. He's like Just getting everybody's face Cuz he's like the court jester of Star Wars. I saw something in him that I didn't realize until later in life. I kind of I'm like that myself. Fair enough.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of people that Misa wouldn't agree with you.
Speaker 2:He's not a good character. I'm not saying he's a good. He's amusing because of how much he stands out. It's like there's no reason for him to be there. Actually in a job interview. Everybody's like fuck you doing. Pretend to be a person for Get back in your box. I.
Speaker 1:Don't know, sometimes it's fun to let people out the box. Man, don't stay in the box. I actually like mess with my guys a lot too, because I got some. I got some pretty hardcore nerds and so they'll be like going through some stuff and I'll be like, hey man, and I'll have a picture of Spock going like this, and may the force be with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let me just say I wrote that ruffles, feathers.
Speaker 2:I love those like novelty shirts where it's combines five different science fiction. It's brilliant and it's like the the Venn diagram of people that understand that and people that are going to be irritated by it. It's not like there's like five people that get the whole joke, because it's like covers eight different Fandoms as well, like I know people that really like dr who but hate Star Trek, or people that love Star Trek and think everything else isn't technically Science fiction. That's funny. And I'm just sat here like I've wrote a story about crabs that eat weekends.
Speaker 1:That sci-fi I don't give you the crab crabs at eat weekends, is that?
Speaker 2:what you said. Yeah, there's a story in who built the humans where there's like a robot crab at the end of time and Basically the whole. The meta narrative in who built the humans is there's 11 universes, so you can read them in any order. The idea was I wanted a book that was kind of like Netflix, but if Netflix wasn't shit which was one of my first adverts was imagine if Netflix wasn't shit and it was a book.
Speaker 2:Basically, that Anyone of the stories is right at the end of time. All the other timelines have congealed into one, so time is now deterministic, meaning that the protagonist knows exactly when he's gonna die and how he's gonna die, because everything can be predicted. There's no multiverse, there's no probability, but right at the end there's blackness. He thinks it's when he's gonna die, but he gets to that point and he, his life continues, and then he enters this new realm of uncertainty and he meets this race of robot crabs which are just eating slabs of time and knitting together new universes and then after that, the new, the other universes, begin and it's like this really weird Metacommentary on the nature of time and being, and then immediately afterwards, on the next page, is a dick joke. And I just I had to do that because I just thought I Could be one of those writers who writes something profound and then gives people five minutes to rest, or I could give them a migraine, and I made my choice.
Speaker 1:I, like you, got in this esoteric time mind of crabs eating the weekends and like going from Complete certainty into absolute chaos. And then here's a dick joke.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I'm gonna republish that short story on its own because I got a lot of praise for it and I thought not many people buy a book this big because they find it intimidating, which is a really weird thing. But you know, there are some people that only like short stories and that's fair enough. There's a lot. There's a lot of stuff in, like the writing world where, especially in comedy, people people starting to say oh, you shouldn't just make people laugh, you should make them think, and they're kind of deriding people who just want to have a laugh and it's perfectly fine. You had a hard day at work. Whatever, you want to sit down and laugh at a joke, you don't need to be given a philosophy lecture in the middle of it. I'm more than capable of doing the clever jokes but at the same time I think the silly ones. They still have value to people.
Speaker 1:It's kind of funny. It's funny that somebody would give advice like that you need to make them think. You need to make them think like do your niche, man. Like one of my favorite comedians that I could still just makes me laugh was Mitch Hedberg and he didn't do any Make you really think jokes. You just do one-liners all the time and it was hysterical Like RIP, like I'm just saying like, like, pick your niche and do your thing, but when someone goes, you should do comedy the way that I like it be like well, that's you.
Speaker 2:Oh no, it wasn't. Wasn't even advice for me, it was advice for the whole industry.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I just, I just thought like I've got I've not responded to it yet but I just thought like I can't agree with this because these, these are the same people that preach diversity in everywhere and it's like not talking about intellectual diversity. And while we're on the topic, I was told once by as a poet. I've met a few people that care about things and stuff.
Speaker 2:There's a moth, oh hello but, I've met people that have feelings and want the plant, wants to save the planet, and you know, I Admit I'm on their side. I'm a rampant lefty. But I went to an event a few years ago where somebody said this is gonna be a diverse poet. You know, the only diversity was in the color of the hair dye. Mmm, I found that very, very interesting. I don't know it's the artist kind of slid in that direction. But they say we want to represent other voices and it's like all these people know each other from university or college. There's not, there's no new voices here, not just not even saying we're not even gonna go on skin color because that's a lazy point to make. But everybody here's already friends like, could you not just have grabbed a random guy off the street? That would have been more diverse. I'm sure he writes poems Pretty much a lot of people do. They're just embarrassed about it.
Speaker 1:And I think the thing is I actually, because I like to hear all these different points of view on stuff when people talk about like One thing I found that was interesting, especially with, like, the polarization of lefts and rights and all that stuff I find it interesting to see how, like, if you went back five years, pre-covid and all this stuff, anybody from the last was highly inclusive. Like we need diversity, we need inclusion, everyone should be together, you know, no one should be left out. And then somewhere in the last couple years it shifted over to like that group is bad and they should be kicked out and they should be cancelled. And I think it's ironic that the group that was like the more conservative right side, that was like now we're gonna be a little more elitist, has now become more inclusive. I Finded ironic how quickly the entire system has flip-flopped. What are your?
Speaker 2:thoughts, my thoughts are. I mean based on experience that I knew someone a while ago who I shared a meme of Jordan Peterson and it's just like it's somebody pitch, shifted his voice and made him sound like an idiot and like edited in, edited his video so he sounded like he was just talking nonsense and it was kind of I found it funny because of how silly it was, I shared it and she messaged me and went are you transphobic?
Speaker 1:Why would that? I said what, what's going?
Speaker 2:on Because nothing to do with Jordan Peter.
Speaker 2:Calling you transphobic, it's like that was the first one, and it's like. I Asked her why? And she said because Jordan Peterson doesn't trans, doesn't support trans people. I said, well, I don't know anything about that. I know that I found this meme funny and this meme was taking the piss out of him. So why would you think I agree with him if I'm sharing a meme that he's the, he's the punchline, he's the punching bag of this meme, like what's going on? And she was like you can't even share stuff about Jordan Peterson, even if you don't like him, because it's toxic, it promotes a toxic environment.
Speaker 1:I was looking at the judgment system being used there, though, like for you to share a joke, has just been judged, condemned and criticized, and and who's toxic? Then? Like, look at the system itself to go. Like you shared a joke and like, like I Like listening to Jordan Peterson, I like listening to all people. I like, like, listen, everybody's got a point and it's valid to hear. What are they. I want to hear what they are. He's a brilliant guy, but he's also not like a right-leaning dude, Like it's funny. No it's.
Speaker 2:It's a strange thing, cuz like whenever somebody says to him like oh, do you agree with this, do you agree with that? And he's definitely. Why would I agree with this? Like he's very liberal in my eyes, oh you said with regards like gender stuff is he didn't want compelled speech correct.
Speaker 1:I just said you shouldn't be punished by the law because you said words you don't like yeah, he didn't say you shouldn't.
Speaker 2:He didn't say you're not allowed to be upset. If someone must genders you.
Speaker 1:He also didn't, he also didn't say people are rightfully upset you can't change your social identity. He never said that. He just said it shouldn't be against the law for me not to agree to call you a gender.
Speaker 2:Yeah cuz, it's just a slippery slope, because you know you can misgender someone by accident pretty easily well only by their own rules.
Speaker 1:By their own rules. And this is where it becomes interesting, as if it's my social identity. Call me whatever you like. I don't have transgender friends, no problem. Oh, I don't care, I'll call you whatever you want. Do I believe there's only two types of sexes? Sure, but don't call attack helicopter or fairy sprite or you know, horse ninja.
Speaker 1:Yeah, these, these aren't genders. Those can be social identity, though. If you want me to call you like a male or female woodland sprite, I don't give a shit. Which one you want to be, I don't care. No.
Speaker 2:I've never understood it and I get the. I do get people being uncomfortable Keeping up with someone's gender and I know autistic people. For example, I know I've got a few autistic friends. I mean science fiction comedy offer. Most of people I know tend to be autistic, hence Lego collection. Honestly, I was angling for a diagnosis myself. I was gonna go for a diagnosis autism, adhd. I was talking to my doctor about it and he said it might be about a six-year waiting list and I said to him but, doctor, I think I'll be a different person by then. He said to me okay, philip, and the way you said it, I just thought he knows, he knows it's like by then I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be whoever. I am worried about whether I've got ADHD or not. I'll have decided you fuck you government.
Speaker 2:I, I have ADHD, I don't need no piece of paper, I don't even know, I don't know where my master's degree is and I still have that, so paper it's not that important, is it? You know? I'm not got my birth certificate technically I don't exist. If we're gonna have to, if everything has to be on paper, I'm not real. So it's, it's bizarre. But yeah, I, I will say if you know it's, people have names, you know. If you don't want to, if you struggle with what pronouns to keep up with, I just call people by their names. Yeah, it's a lot easier.
Speaker 2:And another life hack that I have is I'm like I'm so old-fashioned in this. This is like 12th century British monarch. I name people on my phone based on what they do or what we last talked about when I went, what we talked about when I first met them. So I know a guy called Ferrari David, and he's called Ferrari David because he used to collect Ferraris, which he talks about when we first met. I'm never gonna know what his second name is.
Speaker 1:I don't need to know. You know, and his gender is technically Ferrari, it probably is.
Speaker 2:It's interesting the whole the whole thing with like Diversity and writing, because somebody was saying how, how do we get More of X people to be represented in fiction? And I made the point when I was doing a master's degree. Well, you don't get me to do it, because I'm not that person. What you do, is you?
Speaker 2:go to the publisher and go. You're not a person. What you do is you go to the publisher and go. Here's an offer of this particular group of people. They've written a good story. You should publish it because it's good. Right, that's as simple as it is.
Speaker 1:That's as simple as it is.
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:That's it. We can just, if we can just get back to just have good things, be good things. That would be fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because there's there's plenty of people of all shapes, sizes, colors etc. That are incredibly talented authors and they do get overlooked. I think some sometimes people swing a bit too far and they say we only want voices. These kinds of voices are we only want our mates from down the pub at this poetry reading? Yeah, it's like you know you're not gonna get the weird kind of artsy. The art is like a science. You need lots of different experiments running simultaneously to be able to learn something. I, I watch, I follow Jordan Peterson on Instagram. I disagree with about 75% of stuff he says and I've been questioned by people, old friends, why do you follow him on Instagram? Because I disagree with it? Because it's interesting, yeah, and I think sometimes I think what's he on about? In particular, the Bible stuff doesn't really vibe with me.
Speaker 1:Well, that's because deep down.
Speaker 2:I'm still an edgy atheist. I always will be.
Speaker 1:I never do your thing. Yeah, this is a heck. You can just stick to Trent resner on that one. Just bow down before the one you serve and you'll get what you deserve. Pick your thing. I don't know the answer. Pick what it is that you want to do.
Speaker 2:It's brilliant, like like it as a writer, as a comedy writer, as a science fiction writer. You can just. You can just do anything you want, you can be anything you want like. I follow Richard Dawkins and I don't follow him because I agree with him, even though I do. I follow him because I find a way he communicates to himself in debates against people that are really angry at him and Sometimes quite aggressive, the way they talk to him. He's still very polite, he's still very kind and, most importantly, efficient with the way he uses language and I just think if I can learn from him how to communicate dialogue, I Can write a character that's really good and really powerful, because he is a fantastic character, he's a fantastic person. The way he communicates is amazing. I was reading one of his books today. I don't know where it's gone oh there it is. It's reading the magic of reality today.
Speaker 2:Nice you know, it's a very short book and it's large typeface as well, which I appreciate because I tend to read while I'm walking, which is Dangerous people have died playing Pokemon doing that. Yeah. Well, if I die reading the book, you know what. You know what people will be like. Now they'll go. Books kill people.
Speaker 1:Books are now murdering.
Speaker 2:Murderous books on the loose. But, actually that reminds me in who built the humans to there's. There's a joke in who built the humans, one on the copyright page, by the way.
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna tell you the joke but I spent about six months working out whether it was legal or not to put a joke in the Copyright page. The correct time, the correct answer, according to a lawyer, is almost. So I was like, yeah, fuck it, I'll do, that'll do. But in the second one, like, the narrator introduces the book and he's gonna say oh so last time you turn the page you killed me in my entire family because my universe was stuck on that page. This time I'm not going to let you kill me. And then, if you turn the page, there's just gonna be me holding a gun to the reader.
Speaker 1:Just like turning back.
Speaker 2:Yeah just like that's. That's the good thing about being self-published. To get back on, sir, what I was saying earlier you can do what the hell you want. If I pitched that to a traditional publisher, I'd have to spend six, seven years on average Getting them to even speak to me. And then I get in their office. I'd say I want an image of me holding a gun to the reader at the start of the book and they'd go. But it insights violence. We can't be having that.
Speaker 2:I'm like what about the scenes where an alien gets its head cave then oh, yeah that's fine and it's like the double, the double standards of like we want stuff to be experimental, but if it's not experimentally in the way we want it, then we don't like it the systems of control.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting to watch people everybody has to control how they think everything should be, even though their own lives are in Just fucking utter turmoil.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1:I really want to tell everyone else how they should be when the people who are telling you how things should be are unhappy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm gonna just try and look as imposing as possible here, so you don't go job, don't quote Jordan Peterson's tidy your room, because I've trashed mine, my bedroom, slash office that I've.
Speaker 1:I've trashed. Well, it's principle still makes sense you can't help other people until you've worked on your own stuff. Oh no, definitely I can't.
Speaker 2:I can't, fucking edit at the moment because this, this is distracting me. So I'm working on that. Let's like before podcast, after podcast. I've got some new new tubs, for the leg of which transparent, which is nice. I'm gonna black sheet to go over that. Got some stuff going on in the wardrobe. Won't tilt the camera towards it. It gets worse.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I just have to, because we moved in here a few years ago and I was never really happy with the arrangement of, like, the building wardrobe. So I've just been rebuilding it bit by bit. But maybe I'll be honest, maybe a part of it fell off yesterday and I've not got about to put it back on, so I had a joke to write so.
Speaker 1:Didn't have time to tie to your room, yeah, I was too busy watching Jordan Peterson videos.
Speaker 2:Ironic yeah.
Speaker 1:I think I think people make good points. It's good to listen to principles on things, but it's also ironic that people will use the things that they Think are wrong as a means to make it right. You know when people hate for peace or Judge to try to make it so that they can find common ground. I'm like these are not the ways to do those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. There's some weird stuff going on in, like the small presses in the publishing industry at the moment, all the way around, even just in basic communication like social media has made us, so people can just say the wildest shit ever with no consequence. Yeah, it's just very odd. I just think I wonder if it's just a breakdown in communication.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:I honestly like people saying all these people hate full, or these people hate me, this people hates me, I hate them. Are you sure? Are you sure you hate them? Like? Because if you bumped into each other in the supermarket, you didn't know what each other's Twitter handles were and one of you dropped their stuff on the floor, would you help out? You would? You would, most likely I still wouldn't help anybody, but and they're hopefully a very, very small minority.
Speaker 1:Well, even if you look at just the way people are in their cars, for example, like you'll see somebody because it's high speed, people are already under High pressure, high stress. It's a little more dangerous If somebody does something where, like they went in front of you a little sooner than you think they should have. People are like you know, you know, and they're pissed off at everybody. They get mad. This is like superhero mentality, because they can't generally get to you. But if you were in the supermarket in line and somebody just happened to be there at the same time and get there just just a little ahead of you, oh, excuse me. Oh for no, go ahead, go ahead, no problem, it wouldn't be a fistfighter, a fuck you. And it's just that little gap of like safety, security, that distance between us to make it so you can't get me makes a keyboard warrior, you know same thing is a good point.
Speaker 1:Just if there's a car door between you and me, you're getting the middle finger, but if there's no barrier, I'll be like, pardon me.
Speaker 2:Mmm, there's a good point and this the perceived danger as well, mm-hmm which is, which is fine that everything is framed as an existential threat. It's like I disagree with you. Oh, so you want me to die?
Speaker 1:You may have added something there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's. There's quite a there's quite a long list of steps, from disagreeing with your voting choices to wanting to kill you. I can count at least three off the top of my head. I'm not even trying yet yeah, I'm not even trying.
Speaker 2:I'll whistled it down to two if you don't shut. But yeah, it's amazing like the way people communicate online. I mean, I just I I did have a deadly serious offer, pedro's all I can, I'm a science fiction offer and I can write clever stuff. I do write clever stuff, but I don't like advertising it, you know. I think if people want to read a story that's fun story about time traveling aliens, I want to be the guy that can do that for them.
Speaker 2:Sure if they want to reread it six months later and reread the chapters backwards and discovered that one of the main characters Was actually traveling back through time the whole time. That's cool too, and I have done that and people have a people have reread.
Speaker 2:Who but the humans have taught and told me, oh my god, he was traveling backwards through time. Why didn't you bring it up in the book? And I said, well, I thought it'd be funny to see how long it took for people to notice two and a half years I actually write speeches to do the same thing. Like.
Speaker 1:I have a speech coming up in three days that I already wrote and sent in, and I wrote it in like probably 30 minutes. It's a 20 minute speech and when I put it up I made it do liberally. This will be published before, after the speech. So this is. It's gonna be kind of funny when people do catch this, if they ever do. But the speech itself is riddled with answers with no solutions.
Speaker 1:Yeah and I do it on purpose to see if anybody goes. You had a lot of answers but no solutions at all and I'm like book a call now we can talk, like the same thing, like I just want to see if anybody catches that it's like it's mostly just a bunch of quotes and ideas but no actual practical application. If anybody catches it, I'm like you're one of my people, come hang out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that, that's it's good to. Yeah, I like doing that in writing as well. It's just the clever stuff I think I Mean as an offer. Sometimes people put the clever stuff on the surface and then that's all there is as well, and I mean it's a bit of a meme. People have started asking me about it, like, was there actually a book where somebody spent eight pages talking about yoga? And there was. I won't say which book, but one of the books that was on my reading list at uni one of the short stories was eight pages of people talking about eating fruit and yoga and it was very serious and it won lots of prizes and lots of people said it was very good and they all clapped like this I imagine they did. They did that clap that you get at award ceremonies. It's like you're trying really hard to like try and bring a frog back to life, kind of I. It's just like no Pritchins of yoga and I know that's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1:I think there's a spot for everybody. I'm just bad for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what I like is variation. So it doesn't really matter what genre it's in if it has a bit of a shape to it. So if the story is like one-sided, it's like we have to fight the aliens, the aliens are the bad guys. I'm like, I'm cool with that. But I want maybe one once or twice to see what the aliens are talking about in between battles, even if they're pure evil. It could be fun, it could be funny. You know, oh, how many humans have you killed today? Oh, I've only killed seven. Oh, you're not meeting your daily targets.
Speaker 1:You know that I don't like that legolas and Gimli keeping count thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, just just just stuff like that. Like what board games do they play in between these intergalactic wars? Well, if you start throwing, in board games.
Speaker 1:Now we're inciting violence, and so you should maybe just curb some of that stuff. Keep it to death, count no less and less board games.
Speaker 2:I have missed whatever news you are referring to them.
Speaker 1:It just seems like when you're talking about the gun thing, like everything's inciting violence that I don't like, and I don't like boy board games on there. So you going to board games is now inciting violence. Can we get back to the aliens killing people? So that way it's a little more fun and playful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought you were referenced in a piece of news. I was genuinely thinking have they claimed that board games of violent Easily?
Speaker 1:somebody has someone's like sorry is a shame game and I don't like the shameful feelings that sorry brings to people, so that game should be banned.
Speaker 2:It'd be very easy to get like someone to write a parody about how Monopoly is training people to be poor. I'm sure Buzzfeed has already done it.
Speaker 1:We could probably make a case on many games.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, like definitely the Lego Star Wars games. Whenever I got money in them I was like I'm gonna buy a new silly character that's does nothing in the game.
Speaker 1:V books.
Speaker 2:I know a few years ago they, like their mom's credit card, was signed into the ps4 and they just you know that people have killed for less. Yeah, I do. Much, much makes it funnier. It does make it funnier.
Speaker 1:It's poor kid's mom. So difficult like we had to file bankruptcy because our kid played fortnight. You're like. I need more info.
Speaker 2:It's. It's such a weird thing. It's like the universe balancing out for all those streamers who make $40,000 by playing fortnight. Fair enough, cosmic.
Speaker 1:I love this kid. Yeah, we're in weird times. It's interesting to watch, though, like I Like that you play with the alien idea to make it so we can talk about some real concepts on things. But it's it's interesting to watch. We're in such a judgmental time, in such an interesting time, man, that I think that sometimes a little satire, a little playfulness and a little more Acceptance in each other makes a little more fun. But I do struggle when I watch people use hate as the method to peace. I don't see how that works.
Speaker 2:I've had to leave a few open mic nights over here because that's the general way that we're going about things. There was there was a few like small, small competitions and stuff I looked at and I think it's fine to be selective. You should be. I'm an editor as well. I'll primarily edit comedy, poetry and science fiction, and it's not because I don't like everything else, it's because I think I do a better job for my clients if I just focus on the stuff I'm really good at and I can do jobs for friends like if they've got fantasy novel, they need it editing, I'll do it for cheap for a friend.
Speaker 2:I know that if I screw up they're not gonna sue me because we've been friends for 15 years, but I'm gonna. You know, I want to build my skills up. But there's I've seen some people and they say I want to work with this kind of person and this kind of person. I think that's great. And then there's another paragraph and you're like oh no, a second paragraph. They go I don't want to work with white middle-aged men and I like what. Why? That's where all the science fiction comes from.
Speaker 1:Have you not seen our Again to say I am all about inclusion, I'm all about your is true. I'm all about inclusion and I want everyone to be included, except for these people and those people and those people, and I'm like which inclusion are we talking about? Hmm, how can inclusion be riddled with exclusion?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's very difficult because I think, like, being exclusive is a good thing. I just think people are sometimes going the wrong way about it because, you sure, if, like I said, it's just a breakdown in communication, like I know I've made the joke that all science fiction comes from white middle-aged guys, that's because I reckon, that's just because they're more often on Facebook.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 2:They just don't shut up. Whereas like you know, the women in India who are writing science fiction. I don't hear anything about them Because they're not on Facebook. They've got other stuff to do besides Farmville and trying to desperately search for their ex-wife. They don't need to be doing that, so I don't hear about them. Nobody's safe. Nobody's safe in my comedy world.
Speaker 1:No, it's good, that's funny.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's interesting because I think if you're gonna list on your you know what clients I want to work with. I want to work with these people. Anybody with a brain cell will know that if they're not in that little paragraph then you're not going to be really useful for them and they're going to find somebody else. You don't then need to list the paragraph of all the people you won't work with, because, aside from you know, annoying that entire demographic of people, you also potentially piss off a lot of your clients because you go I don't want to work with that kind of person. And what if one of your clients is married to that kind of person?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't want to work with anybody who riddles their entire thing for like how they think things should be, with hatred and dismissal, and like trying to say people who are like I just want kindness in the world, so I shall judge and ridicule and despise and cancel and shut people down and be a jerk. I'm like, well, can we just go back to the golden rule for a second here? Do you want anybody doing this to you? You're like, oh my God, no, don't treat me like that. Well then, don't treat people like that. Do you want someone to cancel you? Like no, that would be terrible. Then don't cancel people, just talk. You don't have to agree.
Speaker 2:Definitely my golden rule is show, don't tell. I take that from writing and I apply it to people.
Speaker 1:Marcus Aurelius did the same thing. It was like don't tell me what a good man is, Be one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you meet a poet at an open mic night, you meet a wispy stick fin male poet with gel blue midget jam and he goes hi, everyone, I'm a male feminist. I really like women and non-binary women and tall women and big women and women. I really like women and he just opens up with that. That's how he opens his set. You know what he's going to do as soon as he sets over he's going to be at the bar winding the women up. It happens every time, every time, and it's like when people come up to you and they go hi, I'm really nice. No, you're not.
Speaker 1:No, you're not Nice, nice, nice. People don't have to let you know you're nice.
Speaker 2:You get the 1980s game show, buzzer, sound effects. If you walk up to me and say you're nice, I just immediately like wrong.
Speaker 1:Wait, I got you. That is exactly what I hear in my head.
Speaker 2:Every time I try to sleep with my ex-girlfriend. I got you.
Speaker 1:I'm going to start hitting your laugh tracks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one of the last things she said to me. Was that laugh track?
Speaker 1:Actually I didn't take more advantage of my laugh tracks and stuff.
Speaker 2:I got you on this one. I found out like I'm on this comedians of Patreon discord server at the moment and I found out we have a soundboard, and I discovered it slightly before everybody else. So in the middle of somebody having quite a serious conversation, I just kept hitting the quack button.
Speaker 1:Depending on what it is to, I'll just start being like oh man, here we go.
Speaker 2:That would be good for my book sales in summer.
Speaker 1:They always do.
Speaker 2:Whoa, and then at Christmas people like, yeah, I want to buy a book about alien abductions and dick jokes. Of course, and then it goes back to summer and they're like no, no.
Speaker 1:It's not the season.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Wrong season for alien abduction and dick jokes.
Speaker 2:It's a weird thing because it's like I know.
Speaker 2:I know some people are really good. You know they're really good with summer and some people are really good with winter and I think my fans are winter people. They're night owls. I am. I struggle with sleeping, not nocturnally Like I have to force myself. It doesn't matter what I eat. It doesn't matter what I do. I've always struggled with it and I think you know there's a niche for people like me. I've got long standing Norse roots in my bloodline. Maybe 10, 20,000 years ago I'd be the guy outside the cave going by the way, there's a saber tooth tiger on the way and everybody else would be snoozing. Now I'm fucking useless.
Speaker 1:There's no need for the lookout anymore. Yeah, they don't need me anymore.
Speaker 2:Now I've just got a stand and look out my window and hallucinate a saber tooth tiger. My family's like go to bed. I'm like there's one outside. It's got five legs.
Speaker 1:The fifth one is not a leg.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for continuing that joke for me.
Speaker 1:I thought we're just going to keep going with the dick jokes.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, definitely. It just keeps on going. It's endless, like a momentous strip, One for the topologist. Is that a topologist? Maybe I don't know. I don't know. I always say my fans are smarter than I am and they are 100%. I sent, like I've got a friend who writes stuff for the BBC and he was saying to me you know, this story needs a bit more drama, it needs a bit more intrigue.
Speaker 2:It's about a time traveling tardigrade that goes back in time to bother Stephen Hawking but he gets far too carried away, trying to have sex with other tardigrades from the past and causing paradoxes.
Speaker 1:Oh shit.
Speaker 2:So it doesn't end well for him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they can't book it to everything.
Speaker 2:And a physicist messaged me on Twitter and told me that was one of the best stories she's ever read, and I thought that's my audience. There's probably only two of them, but I know who they are and that's more than most authors. Most authors are like, yeah, my book's selling really well, but I don't know why.
Speaker 1:That's mine.
Speaker 2:But I don't know what I'm doing here, like I know people that have. You know they've started off as serious poets and then they started writing erotic poems, and then they wrote poems about really depressing shit and those are the ones that took off and they hide them under a pen name and they're like this one pays the bills, but every time I write one of them I want to walk into traffic.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And it's like right, okay, we'll just keep writing them, but not that often. And whenever you're like it's somewhere rural, preferably Write the ones that make you happy when you're near traffic, the ones that make you sad when you're far away from traffic.
Speaker 1:That's the system you need. You got a whole entire setup. We know what to do now.
Speaker 2:Two of my pen names are in competition with each other on Amazon at the moment. I won't say who they are because it's funny to me to not say. But like I can do serious stuff, I do have the capacity for it, but I just don't find it interesting to talk about.
Speaker 1:Like.
Speaker 2:I write about it and I might. It's done now.
Speaker 1:You know I got a question for you One of the things that people run into and this is maybe going to be a little serious, so you let me know if I yeah let's go a different way, but like whenever I work with people, especially comedians, when I run into it.
Speaker 1:A lot of times I run into like the the filters of the masks that we put on to keep people away from the serious stuff is generally there to make it so like I don't want to get into this shit. That makes me feel terrible. So I'll tell you a joke so you laugh and stay away from anything that makes me like. So I have to work on some shit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like the.
Speaker 1:Joker mask has been pretty predominant. I've got a few guys who have had to really work through that one to make it Like I just make it silly and funny and get a little esoterically like wild with things and then you stop trying to get into some shit. That makes me sad because I don't want to talk about it.
Speaker 2:I can get that. I mean, there's some stuff that I won't talk about on stage just because I think it's probably going to trigger the people that are listening. It's not so much that it makes me uncomfortable, but that I know that I've. My childhood was pretty odd, and whilst I do find some of it funny, I don't know if everybody else will, whereas there's other stuff. I think that's the beauty in it, though, man. Yeah, listen, I'll listen, I'm going to agree and like you right now I have.
Speaker 1:there's a funny thing. The only thing I could say that really offends me is offended people, because it makes it so people like you won't tell your jokes.
Speaker 2:Hmm, yeah, it's like I don't know it might go a bit beyond offending people. I'm more worried about someone genuinely remembering, like having a violent flashback if I make a joke, so, but I don't know, it's like didn't they?
Speaker 1:found something they got to work on.
Speaker 2:If they know, if they know who I am and they've paid to come to a gig, I suppose then there is, there is kind of a verbal contract there, like I'm going to do a dark joke. Yeah, one of my jokes I did at the fringe and this is a true story. I found out my biological father was a pedophile about three years ago. At the time I was 27. It's one of the best times to find out your dad's a pedophile, because you no longer is type.
Speaker 1:That's fucking funny. It's fucked up, but funny.
Speaker 2:It's fucked up, but funny and it's true, which means that God given rights to fucking say it again and again, and nobody can cancel me because that's a hate crime, that's yeah.
Speaker 1:That's fucking, that's that's.
Speaker 2:I win liberals. And funny. Yeah, I'm going to cancel too. There's an.
Speaker 1:Up yours woke moralists.
Speaker 2:I do. You know what? I found that really cringe, but I fucking love the quote. It's so funny. Just just Jordan Pearson, up yours woke moralists will see who cancels who. I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Nobody's going to cancel him. That's what I. That's the one thing I'll disagree with him on. And it doesn't matter how many millions of people hate him, because there's millions more Without a dad and they need him.
Speaker 1:Like honestly, don't know why people hate him. Like I don't see anything he's doing that's trying to attack anybody.
Speaker 2:It's the gender thing. It's the same with JK Rowling. It got it got misrepresented and they think he's hateful. But they've not met the guy I've not met. I've not met him either, so I don't know whether I like him or not. I know that I like some of his videos, but as a person I don't know him. He's a totally stranger. But that's what I find weird.
Speaker 1:What a weird irony, though, is. People who are trying to be inclusive are filling the world with hatred.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:Like that's the irony to me. It's like it's like hey, you can disagree. If you're like, no, I think it's this way, that's fine. But to go like if you don't think how, I think I hate you and anybody else who listens to somebody who doesn't think like, I think I hate them too. It's like I don't know if you're on the solution team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. I don't think they're interested in the solution. I think it's they're interested in, you know, telling rather than showing that.
Speaker 1:look at me, I'm a good person, anybody who has to announce it, like anybody who has to convince you I'm a good person is not a good person, because what good people don't have to convince they're good, they're just being good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had this conversation with someone after a comedy gig and I said, basically, do you ever worry that you'll be too offensive? And I said no. They said do you ever worry if people don't like who and my cats like me, I get home. Cats are the most judgmental characters on earth. Okay, beyond any extreme left wing or right wing person, they are so fucking judgmental.
Speaker 1:I get home.
Speaker 2:They immediately sit on my feet because they don't want me to leave. Right, and they will just sleep on me. And they will be and they follow me. The boy who you can't stroke him because he doesn't like human contacts, he doesn't like people that much will still follow me up and down the stairs and meow at me for no reason. He just likes being around me, yeah, and he doesn't, you know, he's not turning away from me. So if somebody out there on the street are like a gig doesn't like me because of one joke or one thing I've said, maybe we've misunderstood each other I'm okay with that because at the end of the day, they can never be as judgmental as my cat. And he likes me. So I must be doing something right, yeah?
Speaker 1:I like to know where the food is to be fair. Yeah, you can ask me. You know clean water and shelter, and clean the litter box. You're actually their person that you're not. They're not your cat Like, and so it's the other way around, Like we have trained our human well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's like you know we've got this, we've got a relationship where you know if they've got the cat flap open all the time if they wanted to leave and find a new family, it would not be difficult. And that's what I like about cats over dogs. I'm not saying I don't like dogs, I just like the kind of mutual trust that you get with a cat, where it's like this creature that you know on the surface looks like it wants me dead. It's coming back. I don't really understand why, but it must. It must like something about me.
Speaker 1:Or it's just plotting your demise.
Speaker 2:It just comes back and it's like it's got, like there's more and more sharp objects on the floor. You start noticing and you're like what's going on here? And there's like one day there's just a bit of butter at the top of the stairs.
Speaker 1:Just testing what works. Yeah, just like trying you out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think I mean that's probably the closest to like. A kind of not really spiritual but philosophical point I'll make in the middle of like a comedy set Is that if you get home and your pets are happy to see you, it does not matter what somebody on Twitter thinks. If you get home and your dog runs away from you, you're not the kind of person I want to spend time with. That's as simple as it is. If that's honestly, if you want to judge people's character, just meet them in person, have animals near them, see how the animals react. They don't have any of this fucking social bullshit that we've invented over thousands of years suits and ties and genders and inventions and national rail transit services and motorways, gilded hatred.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they don't do that, they just go like yeah, bad vibe, dogging yeah, dogging yeah. My dog is still a dog, but just in a different way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just in their own way. We should invent cars for dogs, because there's a severe lack of dogging in the dog community and that's a lack of representation there is. We need to sort that out.
Speaker 1:I think you just found a niche that needs to be worked on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a nice little reference to anybody who's listening to this who's actually been to my friend's show. I did a whole 15 minute segment about how my ex-girlfriend left me to pursue her real patterns, which were dogging. So it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing that, but it's like the main point of it is that I don't understand what dogging is. So I like that I also. Yeah, is it?
Speaker 1:wait, there could be so many things.
Speaker 2:Oh, you don't know, it's a slang.
Speaker 1:Well, dogging I mean like remember I'm in America and so like someone dogging on somebody is just putting somebody down. Oh dear.
Speaker 2:So what is dogging? Where you're at, I mean, I'll do you an education, let's go. So what I'm doing is I'm doing dogging here is when married couples meet up with other married couples in a park to have sex in a vehicle.
Speaker 1:In a vehicle, so it's like swinging in a location that's specific has to be in a vehicle. Okay, vehicle has to be involved for some reason, and so that's what you're imagining.
Speaker 2:The rear view mirror helps. That's got something to do with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not called that here and her being like in a vehicle swinging one couple swapping.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, that's good, because I'm hoping to come up to America soon to do some stand up, so I'm going to change it to swinging them. Thank you, you've saved me many confused looks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's not going to swing in, is it's way?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the couples will swap because here in the UK the whole joke was like my girlfriend's going out dogging. But I've stopped. I've done what every man should do and I followed her to the park without her knowing and I've seen the dog harnesses but I've not seen any dogs. And then you know, the joke is that she's basically got bondage gear but I keep thinking it's dog stuff and that's the whole joke and it like kind of. You know, I add more to it If you said she was going to the swings.
Speaker 1:you're swinging and you're waiting for her at the park to go to a swing set, but she was bringing her own swing safety equipment and seemed to be geared up for swings.
Speaker 2:That could work, but it does sound a bit like a defense in court, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:Maybe so Listen, I'm not the one who's making swinging jokes around here.
Speaker 2:Neither was I until 15 seconds ago, so you know working progress.
Speaker 1:You're going to workshop that shit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're workshopping it, that's that's. That's what I like about being a writer, anyways, because I started out as a poet, then went into science fiction. I did do comedy earlier than science fiction, though, and I vaguely remember it. I used to write sketch shows and film in my back garden when I was a kid with my friends and we'd make like silent movies and the joke They'd be visual gags, so a character be talking for a good minute, and then the text would come up and say, yes, and you know, just like those visual gags, everybody's done that kind of stuff and it's always funny and I love doing stuff like that. And then one day we all grew up, they started wanting to go out with girls and they forgot about the comedy thing, whereas I could multitask.
Speaker 1:So you had mad skills, you could do both.
Speaker 2:They got. They got girlfriends and didn't do much else. I got girlfriends and they left because I was cracking too many jokes. And then, you know, I just kept going through that cycle and then realized eventually, at the age of 27, maybe I should do comedy a bit more, because I'm doing it all the time anyway, and when I first brought my book out which on the surface is a science fiction book the most, most of the people that bought it were people that followed my main page. I used to have a main page on Instagram and I would just tear into everything I tear into religion, my most popular post. I compared all of the world's religions, using a table and a flow chart, which ones were the worst.
Speaker 1:Meism in there too. That was a big one. It's probably the biggest one right now is meism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I should. I should add that to that.
Speaker 1:It was probably one of the biggest ones. There is is on the center of the universe. Yeah, that's.
Speaker 2:That is an odd one. I noticed that that kind of intersection, flat earth is a lot, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:You know the all of the, all of the things, that includes both. Yeah, meism thinks both is. It all still goes around me.
Speaker 2:The me doesn't matter if the earth is flat around, it's still me at the middle of it. Narcissism is a fascinating delusion, isn't it? Because, like my, obviously like my, you know, you know, bit about my dad from the joke, but the joke.
Speaker 1:It is now the joke.
Speaker 2:I just, I just think it would be really funny if he tries to cancel me, because I know he's still out there somewhere. He usually writes in and he's like I'm very offended by this joke. Well, maybe you shouldn't have tried to abuse children, then yeah, it's not really, you know there's a part where you did something that's not entirely anything to do with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, at least it's repressed enough that you think it doesn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fucking hell, but good, good, and I was talking about being canceled by Peter.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's true. Yes, let's not lose this one.
Speaker 2:So being canceled by a pedophile? Yeah, it's weird because, like I am, I'm very deadpan. So I've joined a local theatre group just last week because my friend who works there said we need to commit, we need somebody that can read the lines without laughing at them. And that's something I can do. I can do the deadpan thing. I laugh a lot while I'm in podcasts because I'm having a lot of fun, but I can. I can play it straight if I need to.
Speaker 1:I don't need you to do that, be yourself, I know with it.
Speaker 2:I know, yeah, no, like I know a lot of people have to, like they struggle to not laugh when they tell a joke.
Speaker 2:Some people they can't even get through reading half one. That's the main difference, I think, between a comedian and a regular person. It's not even the writing, it's the not cracking up at your own joke, because some of my jokes I find really funny, like I've. I've got some like fairly dark ones about alien abductions and stuff, and I find them hilarious and I have to play them quite straight because the character I'm playing when I'm telling the joke doesn't actually understand the joke. So there's like this extra levels there for what depends on how many drinks people have had, what levels of it they'll get.
Speaker 2:My mom came to my last show and she said you should do more of the comedy poems because they've got a rhythm to them and people are already drunk by the time they watch your show, so they don't understand the clever stuff. And I thought you know what she's actually right, because I will have, like I'll have a drink on stage but I'll drink it so slowly that it's really just there as a prop, right, and I probably won't have a drink afterwards. I definitely won't have a drink before because I know I know that you'll know this that becomes a bit of an issue for some comedians. It definitely has. Yeah, you get your liquid courage and then one day the actual courage that you used to have has you don't know where it went.
Speaker 2:You know I've seen that happen to people, so I consider myself lucky that I've actually watched it happen to somebody else rather than watching it happen in the mirror. So I'm trying to be very careful with that. But yeah, it's really interesting the different layers that you can bring into comedy and it's interesting to see this. You know I consider myself left leaning, but there's a lot of people that I follow and that I like and that I'm friends with and that I really look up to. That at the moment is saying dark comedy is not welcome.
Speaker 1:See what an interesting thing for people to try and block even the freedom of making ridiculous jokes Like that's such an interesting game to play and it's killed comedy Like. I remember watching Joe Rogan when he did his his stand up and one of the most disheartening things about it is he would tell a joke that was funny but then have to explain that it's just a joke. Please don't get offended. It didn't really happen. And even though it's technically him playing the game, well to make sure people aren't trying to cancel his entire system, which is really sad in itself. He's like it's just a shock value joke.
Speaker 1:I didn't really do the thing in the joke. Please don't try and come after me later over this joke. Like, if you have to explain the joke, that means it ruins the joke and it's really sad to watch that people have to do that now to be able to just throw out some shock value stuff that's meant to like. The reason people laugh is because they were surprised, and that's part of the reason people want to be surprised and like well, I think you can only surprise me in the way that I want you to. It's like, but that wouldn't be a surprise.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's a very peculiar thing. Like you know the person that I was talking about before who's said you know some some the better comedy now is the comedy doesn't just make you laugh, it makes you think, and you're not just sort of sitting back and just eating a burger. I can't remember the exact quote and I'm not going to bring up who said it because I'm going to talk to him about it on my own time, but it's not something terribly original. It had been said thousands of times before in the last few months and I do think it's because people are terrified of offending people. And the fact that they're terrified of offending people is very interesting, because I think that's where the cancellation comes from. Yes, it's, it's people going.
Speaker 2:We shouldn't tell dark jokes, not because it might trigger people, but because I want to be seen as somebody that doesn't want to trigger people. I want to be seen as this moral good in the world, and anybody that tells dark jokes you know, if anybody wants to do it, if anybody tells a rape joke, even if they've been through something like that, they're a bad person, and I've. That's incredibly dangerous because a lot of people, a lot of people myself included probably process stuff through talking about it. And this comedy is a way of talking about stuff, and you don't necessarily need to make people think about stuff for them to be able to talk about it. You can just like get it out. It doesn't need to be clever, like, for Christ's sakes, I've got a master's degree in creative writing. I have a God given right I've earned the right, in fact, to say yes, I can do clever stuff, but sometimes you don't have to imagine. If this, this book, for example I'm going to advertise it again. Imagine it's 324 pages. Imagine if all of this was dense, existentialist, sci-fi comedy about time traveling crabs. It would be a headache, but luckily there's jokes about dicks in the middle. You know, there's the balance works and it's not the most popular book in the world, but the people who've read it do really like it because of that, because it's like I'm unapologetic about it.
Speaker 2:You know, and when there's serious things going on, the astronauts they're traveling in their spaceship. What are they doing before they reach their destination? They're going to have some time for a break, not because space travel is easy, but because if they don't have time for a break, they'll have a mental breakdown and kill each other. This is planned in in like space missions already. You don't treat your astronauts like shit. So all these science fiction books where everybody's dead serious the whole time, those spaceship missions would last six months before they cannibalized each other Correct, and you know, if we're going to go realistic, people need to tell jokes. They need to. They need to make dark jokes. There's a joke in like who built the humans, where they're carrying what they call stillies and they're frozen people in cryopods but an asteroid smashes into the spaceship and half of those bodies just get obliterated and the AI dots in charge of the spaceship goes the materials. I'm sorry about that. I thought my phone was off. I've got a new phone.
Speaker 1:No, it was fine.
Speaker 2:I didn't hear it. Yeah, my, I don't know where the off button is. I have to ask it to turn off. Turn off, please. So I used to do with my ex girlfriend all the time it gives me a lot of flashbacks.
Speaker 1:You were really good at it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was. I'm amazing at turning women off.
Speaker 1:Like this. God gave you a guess.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I think it's something to do with all the creatures I keep in my beard Like they get that close they can. They can see the little canes the cockroaches are holding when they're dancing. Oh boy, but yeah, there's. There's a joke in the book where, like I think it's getting so much more material head.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's stillies and they're smashed up human corpses. It's a really dark time in the middle of the story and the AI immediately suggests why don't we use them as biofuel, why don't we eat them and you can last longer. And then they talk about it and somebody goes up into cleanup and they, they walk back to the spaceship captain and they go. You know, those corpses look exactly like that fudge you brought. And then it's like the rest of the story. They're just telling dark jokes about that and it's like that would be deeply inappropriate in the office. But if you're on a spaceship where, like 2000 people have just been splattered by an asteroid, if you don't joke about it, you're going to burst into tears and it's like there is.
Speaker 1:That's important, there's a place for this.
Speaker 2:And that's a fun favorite story out of the book and honestly it's not my favorite but it's everybody else's favorite.
Speaker 1:I think for me, where it goes on this is there's a place for that. There's a place where people like that joke, there's a place where people want that. There's a place for it. And it's interesting that anyone can be at the center of moral justice, as they are the authority of what all should be based on. An entire system of I can't handle things, hmm, like and I find that very.
Speaker 1:I find that hilarious that I'm going to be the center of what I dictate is allowed to be, because I can't handle things I don't like and so you need to change the way that you are, because I won't do any work to accept things that aren't the way I want it to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a really interesting point. I wonder if you know the way comedies become more accessible over the internet and how people can take it out of its context. So people could. I mean, I had somebody come up to me once a few years ago and they said how would you feel if I recorded this bit and put it on Twitter? And I said, well, that'd be good because I'd have more of an audience. And they did not like that response. They wanted me to cry and shake and piss myself and I did.
Speaker 1:They were trying to threaten you with exposure.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, I was like, oh, you're trying to, you're trying to give me free exposure. This is everything I've ever wanted.
Speaker 1:Please do that. I hope you have a huge following, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I should have just stared them dead in the eyes and done. I have a semi now, please.
Speaker 1:Please. Yes, you know. If you, yeah, I'm getting excited. Please, how many followers do you have? Send it to all of them.
Speaker 2:Send it to everyone. Yeah, I'm just going to say because I my immediate response to that in my head is I didn't. I didn't say it and I just thought I very much doubt your followers on Twitter are going to be as offended as you are, because they were really going out their way to be upset.
Speaker 1:Again, I just think you know it's fine to be offended. I can't handle what you're saying, phil. I can't handle it, and so, because I won't do anything to be okay with what is I'm going to try to control everyone else to be what I think it should be, which is really ridiculous. It's a really weird way to try to control everyone and call themselves the good one.
Speaker 2:I I honestly I used to be angry at people like that and now I just feel sorry for them Cause, like after a few years of bumping into them every now and again, I realized that they are just, they're never going to be happy.
Speaker 1:Well, they can't be.
Speaker 2:You can censor whatever the fuck you want. You can say you know what we're going to do, exactly what you want, and then they'll go oh my God, they're copying me. That comedian's doing all the material I want to do. And it's like oh, so okay, we'll do something a bit different. Oh my God, it's too offensive, it's too different. I don't like it. Give me your opinion.
Speaker 1:What do you think? Because you're able to look, look beyond the veil of being able to look like into, to more funny things, or even get out into the more imaginary and imaginative part of it what do you think happens when a society starts pandering to the weak?
Speaker 2:I think it crumbles.
Speaker 1:And so when we start going I can't deal with things, I can't deal with things, society stop being what you are because I can't deal with things. Society will eventually crumble, and so the only other option is people go shut the fuck up.
Speaker 2:I like that option. It's the only other thing that happens.
Speaker 1:The strong at some point will stop self censoring and stop pandering to the weak, because if we pander to the weak society crumbles yeah.
Speaker 2:If you're going to say, if you're going to write or say anything that has any meaning, it's going to piss at least 50% of the people who read it off and you did something right today. Exactly, there's no. There's no hope for like anybody that wants to please everybody. Well, because if there's 10 people in a room. They're all going to have different opinions, which?
Speaker 1:is good, but if you got 50 people pissed off, listen how many people who are happy with things usually write reviews.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm having an issue with at the moment. Like people will message me on Instagram and say they like my book. They don't leave a review and I'm like I was on needs the reviews.
Speaker 1:I'm happy people.
Speaker 2:I've not going to forgive his help.
Speaker 1:Unhappy people will quickly write a review, and this is the thing about it is people are so quick to pass hate, but they keep happiness to themselves.
Speaker 2:I think we need to sort of restructure that.
Speaker 1:Right, well, it's made it well. What gets more attention is even if you look at how men and women even work. Women have three times higher negativity emotions than men do they do. And so why do you think women are more inclined?
Speaker 2:to gossip.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean that one girl is. But as far as it goes for like how we operate, when I've got three teenage daughters and they come in and the way they share their stories is gossipy and look what she did. And she did this, I'm like you guys lean into negativity a lot, but why? Because if they go hey, I got an A plus on my test they're like, oh, good for you. But if they go did you see Susan shoes? You're like, oh my God, what the fuck's up with the shoes. Like you get way more attention from negativity than you do positivity. And so people stop sharing good things because it almost draws attention for someone to be negative.
Speaker 2:There's also. There's also the kind of like the hunt for a predator, so we don't have any natural predators anymore, correct, but we're still animals at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:So we become our own predators.
Speaker 2:We're looking for an existential threat, which is why the person who told me I had a silly looking beard on Twitter definitely wants me to die.
Speaker 1:That's the lead. That's the lead people take.
Speaker 2:You've had a disagreement with me and now everybody wants me to fight you. We're going to fight first.
Speaker 1:People who talk shit about beautiful beards do not fight people. I'm just letting you know those are the ones that don't fight. And from one beard to another, you have a very wonderful beard, Phil you too, man, I wish I had the same coloration that yours does.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is all natural.
Speaker 1:You like that. This is just. This is called having teenage girls Just started going white a few years ago. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Fair enough, I mean. I mean, I had a slightly stressful experience rescuing two teenage girls from a crazy guy on a bus the other way that's heroic, Phil. So I've? I've not gone gray yet, but God it may. At least the one benefit I got out of it is I got a quote that I'm going to use in my next standup set, which sometimes you have to out crazy the crazies.
Speaker 1:It is. That is not. Well, I mean half true, half true. Sometimes you do have to out crazy the crazies, but a lot of times you really for most of the crazies, you just have to allow them to crazy themselves into the corner and just like cause a lot of times people will try and stop people who are punching themselves. I'm like, don't get in the way of those fists.
Speaker 2:If he was punching himself, I'd have left him to it. What happened is I was on a night bus.
Speaker 2:Oh okay and there was these two teenage girls behind me talking and like we'd waited until two in the morning for this bus and it was absolutely random people and by the time we got halfway to where I was getting off it was empty. It was just me and them and a few other people and I was stood up and this guy runs out of an alleyway two in the morning in front of the moving bus. He's got a cast on his arm, like big bandage on his arm, and the bus screeches to a halt. He then walks around and gets on the bus. It doesn't pay for a ticket, has some bullshit story about how he can't pay for a ticket. The bus drivers like Dom and a deal with it. And I look at the guy and I thought, fair enough, he's got a cast on his arm. Running out in front of buses is probably a habit. Yeah, this is probably like. This isn't his first rodeo. I'm gonna Bus hitting.
Speaker 1:He's been busted before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's done this before. He's like maybe he used to work as a matador, but there's no balls in the UK.
Speaker 1:Right, he's like stop it.
Speaker 2:Just there behind the bus. But yeah, and he gets on and he sits on the front of the bus and there's like one seat at the front of the bus in the UK which we reserve for the crazies Okay, one seat on its own. And then there's these teenage girls talking behind me and he turns and he looks straight past me and he looks at them like this and that goes on for about five minutes. He's just stairs for five minutes, stairs of them. It felt like five minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if it was. And he's just like going like that and grunting and the girls go quiet yeah, because they're not talking anymore and I'm the only person in between them. So I turn to him and I go and eventually he backs down and no words were spoken. It was just some staring match between two psychopaths.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he got off the bus. You know, he got off the bus and as soon as he got off the bus, these two girls are like thanks so much, thanks so much. What did you do? And I went don't worry about it, just don't thank me. I just did the. You know, I did literally the bare minimum. You'd have thanked me if I'd have, like, assassinated him. That would have been cool.
Speaker 1:Hold on a second, you're like ninja tricks and shit.
Speaker 1:Here's a cool. I want to give you something as far as even like, I'm going to take it back to dad for a second, but then we'll bring it back to this bus. On the girls for your hero work. There was a.
Speaker 1:I just saw a video recently of a guy who was talking about an interview that was done on 60 minutes about a famous pedophile and he was. They said I asked him a lot of questions how did you pick your targets and how did you pick which kids would be your kids and what was one of the biggest deterrents for like, what would make you not choose a child that you would want to pursue? And he said what I would do is I would look at the family dynamic and if there was a strong male in the family like a threatening male at all, like the father was around who was like I don't want to fuck with him, I wouldn't mess with that kid, like. And so a lot of times like this is where I even remind my girls is you guys don't understand. My house has five girls in it. They are not trained fighters at all.
Speaker 1:I am a trained fighter and what fucking terrifying person. In person I'm not fun. I can be very scary. Me walking around this place with my dogs is a deterrent to people who want to come in here to get some girls. They don't understand what the protector does because I've done a good enough job that they never had to worry about somebody actually physically destroying somebody in front of them. Yeah, the reason I bring this up is if they're like ever aware ever that the reason they've had a life with a low level of danger is because I present enough of a threat that danger stays far away. They won't understand until they're out of that. You got to be that person for somebody and because you were more of a threat than they would be, the threat dissipated. Don't say I did the bare minimum because you may have saved some lives that night from being able to be in the way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, so like that's hero.
Speaker 1:Work sometimes is disregarded because we didn't go. What? Captain America, that guy in the face, you don't have to.
Speaker 2:You know, you were just literally just going to be in the way, like my sister showed me a while ago. She's 10 years younger than me. She showed me a while ago when we're out shopping. She went walk six feet behind me Soon, as somebody didn't think I was walking with her, she got cat called and then she had to talk me out of pushing them into traffic. You know, I'm happy to admit that because she talked me down.
Speaker 1:So you don't have to be mad at people for cat calling, because if it was more than he?
Speaker 2:was trying to follow her as well, like.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to try and not I'm trying to not get too much into it, but like, fair enough, I was, soon as I was away, somebody like whistles out as she's walking away and then he starts following her, trying to talk to her, and I was just like I'm just a fucking Obviously I've got PTSD as well, so my reaction to it would have been a bit more extreme than the average persons, Right, but she just wanted to show me how bad it is when I'm not around. Fair enough, well played, and it's it is. It's rough. It's rough for girls out there.
Speaker 2:And I do like to circle back to all the other things. You know there's a lot of people are saying, oh, we should get rid of dark jokes to offensive, to hurt people. I'm like you're not focusing on the actual things that hurt people, which is men and women becoming increasingly sensitive to psychological things and completely ignoring actual present physical dangers and becoming weaker and weaker and easy to victimize as a result of that Correct Like I've got. I know people that are so risk averse that they wouldn't have said anything to that guy, they wouldn't have looked at him, they would have walked away, and that's how bad things happen.
Speaker 1:This is why sometimes you've got to put yourself in the way. This is why I train men In order to like to, in order to stop a bad guy who has no social training and does very, very poor choices. You have to have somebody who's more trained, who goes. You need to stop or I'll stop. You Like, and I don't give a fuck what anybody says. Are men and women equal? No, we're not. Like, mathematically speaking, when you go into who's stronger, I got athlete girls. My oldest. Her oldest is 17. She's an athlete. We did the math for what I can lift versus what she can lift. I am six times stronger than her and she's an athlete. She's not a weak girl. She goes to the gym, she works out, she plays soccer. She's not weak, she's in good shape and I am six times stronger than her. That's not. That is not a fair fight.
Speaker 2:You know, and people are determined to ignore those factors at the moment, and it's it's for me, it's concerning, it's suspicious, I'll be honest, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of push for people to say well, there's no difference between men and women.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, there is, I work with both. There is a lot of differences.
Speaker 2:And it's like well, the thing is, I think it's again with people having communication issues, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and say I think it's because a lot of people are borderline illiterate. They hear, they hear differences between men and women and they immediately presume you mean that one of them is lesser than the other, not weaker smarter, correct.
Speaker 1:I just added in a belief system to something that was said, there's also the argument are men equal to?
Speaker 2:men.
Speaker 1:Are all men equal. Oh no, 100% not Right? No, they're not. We're all different. Are all women equal to other women? Yeah, no we're all different.
Speaker 2:That's. That's what I like about the. That's, that's the bits of the Jordan Peters and stuff. That I like is when he covers the graphs and he does the bell curve of like male personality variants. For example, there's more male lunatics just because we have greater personality variants, so it's more likely that if there's a lunatic they'll be male, and that's just like simple statistics. I find that really interesting. I mean, growing up, I play Minecraft once a day. I know the market value of most Lego pieces off the top of my head. I don't need a goddamn autism diagnosis. So yeah, I like graphs about the differences between the sectors and if that's offensive I don't care.
Speaker 1:It's who cares. We have to have. We have to have something to go off of here.
Speaker 2:We've got to know. We've got to know stuff about the universe. I find it fascinating that there's these differences between men and women, or, you know, male humans and female humans. If people should be the first new term, but yeah it's it's very interesting because, like, a lot of people don't talk about it, but they do know it. So it's like you'll see stuff on the news about you know, women have been attacked, and then people, always people, are starting to make the point, like the radical feminist. I don't know why they're called radical feminists by the way, I've never seen any of them skateboarding, but they're radical.
Speaker 2:But they're like, they'll make the point. You know, how did this man know to attack these women? He must have known there were women. How did he know there were women? You know, trying to flip the script back on the people that say there's no difference between men and women because women are disproportionately attacked in in certain ways compared to men.
Speaker 2:And you know, and and that's something nobody wants to talk about and in fiction you have the freedom to explore those things in a clever way so you can have female characters and male characters talk to each other. And I love that in comedy as well, when you can explore the differences between the sections, not in necessarily a safe way, but in a sort of controlled environment where you can sort of like science again, where you can twist the variables. So you could, for example, you could have a spaceship where there's only one guy and there's seven women. How would conversations there pan out? And stuff like that I find really interesting. I forgot what part I was going to make. I very much doubt I was actually ambling towards, I think.
Speaker 1:I think the point that actually we came to here is that fill your hero. Even you're saving. You're saving women from the crazies by outcrazying the crazies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's not even the end of the story. We got off at the same stop, Okay, and I didn't want them to then think that I'd be the next bad crazy in their life. And I saw them walking the way I was going to get. I was going to get my mom to pick me up because I was getting off in a rough part of town. So I was 30 years old. I was like mom, can you come pick me up? And we went to this. I got off the bus at this part of time where there's like a mental health hospital and when they get sick of people they put them in count like big tower blocks.
Speaker 1:When they get sick of people. Yeah, yeah, I'm yeah, I'm going to stand by what I said.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when they can't help them anymore, when they can't help them anymore, they can't get them in their own lighthouses. They're not self-sufficient and they need the bed. They're like fuck off.
Speaker 1:They're in that tower block.
Speaker 2:They put them over there and that means that that place has a bit of a reputation for people walking around at night. You know having the bad mental health experiences and it's scary for some people. If you're not familiar with what's happening to people, you'll see them having that and it freaks you out. So I got off there and the girls got off at the bus stop as well and they waved to me and said thanks, by the way, and I was like no, it's okay, don't thank me. And then they went that way, which is where I was needing to go to get picked up in the middle of the night, and I just turned them on the other way.
Speaker 1:Why? Because I didn't want them to.
Speaker 2:I didn't want them to think I was following them.
Speaker 1:So this is where I maybe get confused. Cause like, why would you add in something for them when, like, like, I'm not, that's just the way I'm going to? Why is it like they're the only ones allowed to go that way? I don't understand.
Speaker 2:It's because it's because they'd already been spooked by that guy, and it just mean them.
Speaker 1:But you made up you made up an answer for them, though. You made up that, if you had to go the same direction, that you're a threat to them. That you didn't even ask them, you didn't talk to them, you just made up a fear for them, and you were the one who stopped them from being in danger and so like why would you all of a sudden become the bad guy?
Speaker 1:If you're like no, I stopped bad guys, wouldn't it make more sense of like hey, I'm going this way too. I'll just make sure no other weirdos fucking jump out at you guys? Well, I'm not going the same direction.
Speaker 2:It was a difference of 20 meters. I just, I don't know, I'm just, I'm just looking the other way.
Speaker 2:I don't know why social weirdness makes it so that somehow, like, if you have to go right as they go right, you're bad to be perfectly honest, I might not have been thinking straight, cause I was like, even though I'm a big guy, I was pretty shook up by having to stare down this guy on the bus. Fair enough, cause I've. I've got a lot of rage in me that sometimes does come out as nervousness, yeah. So, like I will, I will like to avoid people if I've just been in an angry situation. Maybe that was it. Maybe I just wanted to be away from everyone.
Speaker 1:Could be Well played. Yeah, as far as that goes, it could have been for their own protection, then, for you just not to be a angry gorilla.
Speaker 2:Well, no, it's no. At the time I thought I just I don't want them to. You know they're happy walking, I've. They were still talking. I was like I don't, I just want to go home now, I don't, I'm done talking, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:If you're working on your stuff, that's one thing, but I would just say I caution everybody on earth the stuff that you just made up for somebody else isn't a fact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean looking back. I know they were probably thinking like I was the hero. That was the guy who just stopped the crazy fuck from fucking with us.
Speaker 1:If I, if I was in the scenario, I'd be like, okay, I'm going to go the same direction as you. For at least a couple blocks, I get to where I'm going. If anybody fucks with you, I got you. Like you know, I'll at least make sure you can get there safely. You know, I would at least do that, because that's not me trying to be creepy, that's at least. Hey, that's at least safety and numbers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. It would have been the right choice, but you know I've not got. I didn't at the time, I didn't have that self control. When you get into a situation that could potentially escalate, my brain just gets frazzled. Yeah, and I'm just like I don't know what to do now.
Speaker 1:Well, that's that's true. I'll have to. This is also why, like when, I chairfully admit that, so yeah, but we try as well. I would say trained or untrained, because we teach. You know, combat training or martial arts or whatever would be. Motherfucker wants to find out. I don't have to be angry to be able to be effective. In fact, the angrier I am in combat, the least effective I would be.
Speaker 1:I'll make more mistakes and so stumble, well, you'll lose balance or you'll start making wild moves, but the more calm and calculated you are, the more precise your attacks will be. So I would have a game plan. I'm like whatever you touch me with gets hurt, and then you're going to be stopped hard. The more frazzled that I will be in that scenario, the more dangerous I am to myself, and so this is where I would just go, trained or untrained. I just think more people should be trained in self defense.
Speaker 2:Oh, no, no, definitely. I mean I'm not going to disagree with you. I've got a friend who does Kung Fu and I've been, I've been looking into doing that. I'll just something because I've never been, I've never been trained Like when I was growing up I pretty much just hyper focused on the writing thing. I did the, I did the thing every poet does. Oh yeah, isolate, yeah, like you know. You know the answer to this one. So it's like no combat training, none of that. Just sit right about sunset.
Speaker 1:Like you know you know I've.
Speaker 2:I like, literally like people don't mess with me, and it's not because I'm trained in any way to defend myself, it's just, I just look vaguely thrown in. I'm just, I'm just bigger than a lot of people here, because a lot of people in my city are malnourished.
Speaker 1:That's, that's it.
Speaker 2:You know that's it, but I have. I have been thinking of learning some skills. I want to learn some combat training. I also want to learn, like 1940s, dancing, just in case I ever go back three time as well. You should, yeah, and I think you need.
Speaker 1:You should also know Kung Fu.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I should go and do that at some point.
Speaker 1:It's well, it's, it's kind of cool to know too. It's just better to know something and not need it than need it and not know it. So I think both the dancing and the combat stuff is useful. You should know both of those, even if you never need them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, like my primary motive for learning it wasn't even to really defend myself or defend others, it's I just wanted to learn what it'd be like. Well, you remember having a passing interest in it when I was a kid.
Speaker 1:Your confidence will go up quite a bit and your patience goes up quite a bit, knowing that I'm okay, even if this isn't okay. Yeah, like you feel very different. If someone's like I'm going to be fucking crazy and you'd be like I will tie you in a pretzel. Are you sure you want to be tied up? Right now, I know exactly how to do this and I can go at whatever force I want to, whether it be like just to incapacitate or to do a lot of damage, I can pick. Do you want that to happen to you? Decide, because I'll, I'll accommodate. Now, that kind of confidence makes it so. If someone wants to be I'm fucking crazy guy, you're like feel free to be crazy. I will make you really regret that or you'll wake up feeling weird.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because, like you, get the confidence from learning how to fight, and that confidence probably negates a lot of the fights that you would have otherwise got into Correct, because they can pick up on your energy, so if you're nervous they'll target you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I remember there was a guy a few months ago Bullies only pick on the week, bullies don't pick on the strong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. I mean like happy to admit like that. That happened to me when I was a kid. I didn't know how to look after myself, so people saw through that and they just targeted me. And then all of a sudden, like maybe, like when I started college, I thought, no, I can't, I don't want to be fucked with anymore. And one day somebody said something that upset me. I don't remember what it was, but I remember I just looked at him and he burst into tears what the fuck. And he was like, started apologizing to me and I thought there's something. I went home that night and I thought I've changed. I don't know what's happened, but I've changed because I didn't say a word to him. I don't think I actually ever spoke to him again. I didn't need to say anything, Just turn to him. I was just like I'm done.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to put myself into an understanding of somebody. If somebody looked at me and I started just crying, I can't even put myself in that position where someone would.
Speaker 2:It was very unusual. Well, you wouldn't. You wouldn't be in that position because you're more. You're more confident. I don't even remember what he said. I just remember the blind rage. I just just just looking at him like you are below scum to me, like I didn't say anything. I just looked at him and he just got really upset. I remember he texted me like a few days later and asked if he was still friends, and I don't remember ever responding. I don't have no idea what he said.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Hmm, weird.
Speaker 1:That whole interaction.
Speaker 2:Maybe that was the one time I've been offended in my life and I just took it out of psychic powers.
Speaker 1:You just repressed it and then developed a psychic ability.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just that's what these?
Speaker 1:You hit him with your mind. All this needs to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're all just. They're all just staring at diversity, training seminars, levitating using the power of offensiveness. Yeah, you're right. You're right about. You're right about those girls that I allegedly rescued on the bus. But yeah, they were still nervous when they got off the bus, so I didn't want one of them. I knew that you know wherever they were being picked up from. Their car was already like you know, so I thought again.
Speaker 1:I'll just make sure you got to your car and then I'll just keep going, Like, like again. The safety in numbers is a human thing.
Speaker 2:That's not just even a male, and female thing, it's just human thing, and so it's two way in.
Speaker 1:Like there's fucking crazy people out here.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to be as crazy as that one, so I'll be with you guys. Yeah, they were. They were fine, cool, they didn't have long. They didn't have long to walk.
Speaker 1:Well, it doesn't take it. It doesn't take a long time for someone to do a bad thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fair enough. I think you know, with what I knew at the time, I made the right choices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hey, at least your heart was in the right place. And I think that's where people are getting in, like where intentions, the intentions seem to be in the right idea but the delivery that people are doing for their intentions is reckless and wild. Actually, like, even if I go in, I'm not, like I said, I don't go too political on things. I'm I'd be a moderate, because when I started doing it like I agree with conservative views but I agree with the ideas for leftist and left views, I agree with both. I just don't like the way people do it, like the ideas aren't crazy.
Speaker 1:It's just the way people try to do. The ideas are crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. I mean like it's to bring it back to writing. Like a lot of people, I was around about 2015,. 2016,. I was at uni and somebody said somebody said to me on my master's degree. She said I've noticed that none of the characters in your story are black. And I turned to her and I said how do you know they're on a page?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And she went. They don't sound black when my professor just burst out laughing and like I, just I looked at him and he looked at me and we both knew she done fucked up. We found. We found the racist in the room, the people who they weren't talking enough about watermelons and gun violence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I didn't hear fried chicken once. What the?
Speaker 2:fuck is wrong with these people.
Speaker 1:No seriously.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's the same people that go oh, we need to represent more voices of people of color, but we're not going to hire those people. We're going to get white people to write the stories. I'm like that's not how.
Speaker 1:What are you doing? It's part of the filters. The people who create racism where there is none and call themselves the moral high ground.
Speaker 2:It's a narcissist's textbook. Really, it's just engineering an argument where there isn't one.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, trying to isolate people, to make it so that they can start feeding off of the, the the I mean even the the lifestyles that they live, to say like you need to change who you are because I'm the center of the universe, you need to be what I say you should be and you shouldn't get any other opinions, and I'm the one who's good and you're all bad. This wild thought process should not be the people who are in control. All it takes is somebody with a little confidence to go yeah, no, I'm not doing that. Then they got no two. There's nothing after that. The judgment is the weapon, and to create a reason to judge you, that's a straw man argument. Like fill your races because none of these characters are black and you're like. I didn't. I didn't say they were or weren't. How do you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the amazing thing was that one of them actually was black. He just didn't walk into every room going hey guys, I'm black. Yeah, he's not like Tom black guy, yo dog.
Speaker 1:What's up? He's not doing any nonsense. He can. He's what he just as articulate as anybody else.
Speaker 2:It's just a human character.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really funny.
Speaker 2:I mean it's weird. I mean talking difference about men and women. I had a weird conversation once with a writer who was a bit younger than me and he said how do you write women that are so realistic? And I said the trick is to know some. I didn't mean it in a horrible way.
Speaker 1:Because he's like well, what's a woman?
Speaker 2:He didn't. He barely went outside. The only women he knew were cartoons. Women is slight. Then if you're just sat in your room watching Andrew Tate videos, you're not going to be able to write a convincing female character for a story Like. That's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:Well, even also the women that are in a lot of the videos that I've seen for them are also very eccentric versions of women anyways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1:So it's like the entire systems that people are operating when they're looking at the very edge fringes of what things are and calling that the normal.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating because I was talking to somebody who was what's the term from? Eagle. One of my earlier marketing ideas was I was going to get models to pose with my book. That's why I was talking to them, officer, anyway. Yeah, so, and she said to me that she lost a lot of followers one day because she did a makeup reveal video, which is where you put your makeup on in a video but you played a video backwards, so you're removing your makeup. And she said she got a lot of hate comments from guys saying she was ugly at the end of the video. And a lot of them are following her.
Speaker 2:And I'm like these, like yeah, you're angry at first and then you're like what the hell has gone wrong in her life, like how have they got this delusional? How do you? That's like that's a full time job. Being that stupid, it seems like you have to put five hours in a day. At the very least sit down and just hit yourself on the head with stuff. Like there's like if you just leave a guy alone in a park for five minutes, he'll become less stupid than that. And it's like how, how fucking I understand the internet sign now, touch grass, just go out and fucking go outside.
Speaker 1:Jesus Christ, go get grounded.
Speaker 2:Like I have to, I have to do that like every day, like I do a lot of writing and I'm like, right, I need to go and look at nature.
Speaker 1:But again a really good place.
Speaker 2:in a moment I get to look at bats, birds, owls.
Speaker 1:That's kind of cool.
Speaker 2:I just go and just be a fucking tree creature.
Speaker 1:But what a weird thing to do. Like this is again goes to that, like that barrier. There's something in between, because if that guy was around that girl he probably wouldn't say the same dumb shit.
Speaker 2:No, he'd probably be head over heels, you probably still be like I'm still in.
Speaker 1:Would you want to go out with me even without the makeup? But for someone to go like, well, now you're ugly because you look real. What a weird thing. Your real face is ugly.
Speaker 2:What's really wrong? With you Really is, and it's such an odd thing and it's something I've been conscious of as a as a male writer of fiction as well, because I've had people compliment me on the women, women characters that I've written. And again, I'm just like, literally just know some, know some women just like, go outside and talk to human beings. There's a 50% chance that the one you're talking to is going to be a woman. Oh sorry, is that? That's not true anymore, is it? Let's see what's the new number 69.
Speaker 1:69. Let's just go on.
Speaker 2:See my brain was trying to come up with some clever and I just thought, fuck it, fuck it, don't mind anyone.
Speaker 1:We were making up statistics at this point anyways.
Speaker 2:Are women included in the 52 genders or is that?
Speaker 1:I don't, even I don't do the gender thing.
Speaker 2:It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't go by Maslow's either. I think it's wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've. I made a meme about that before and I've just replaced all of the parts of the pyramid with kebab. Post that later. That's funny.
Speaker 2:It's like I just like go with a flow now on social media and stuff, like I did the series off a thing and I wasn't happy and now I'll just post memes that I find funny or I'll make my own and like have just kind of rolled into. I made a burger a few weeks ago and I took a video of it whilst watching a Lego movie and that went viral and people were asking me where I bought the burger from and I was like I made it and they said how do you make a burger that good at home? And I was like I reverse engineered the technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You, just you just go to a restaurant and really get attention. I'm good at Legos.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you just pay attention to that, right. So bread, chicken and then more bread, it's not like wait hold on.
Speaker 1:You lost. Wait, wait, wait, Whoa. I should have said buns. I should have said buns the bun. All right, Now we got wait buns bread and there's a layer.
Speaker 2:Then yeah, and then you put them together. Hold on, oh yeah, you've got sloppy joes over there, haven't you?
Speaker 1:You've got a lot of Not all the time, but they happen, yeah. Yeah, not all of them are sloppy.
Speaker 2:That is a fantastic title for a book. It really is. Absolutely. I don't think Amazon would allow it. They've actually. I actually got an email from Amazon today. So I've had to change the title of my next book because I've been writing a comedy collection with a group of sci-fi authors.
Speaker 1:What was it called? Not all Joes are sloppy.
Speaker 2:It's called the cosmic cock. The cosmic cock, cosmic comedy collection. They don't like the word cock.
Speaker 1:Oh, so I've just Did you have a rooster on the front.
Speaker 2:There is a rooster on the front. Well, played.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a farm reference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I mean, for the sake of the title actually fitting on the Amazon listing, it's probably best if we call it the cosmic comedy collection anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's tough to get the binder to have all the words.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, that is a genuine issue. I wanted it to have a long title because it was funnier which is funnier to have an absurdly long title.
Speaker 1:I saw published my first book and also the abbreviation was CCCP.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, you should start it with an I, then some, I word, yeah.
Speaker 1:So that way it's like I CCC and then maybe even a UP in there.
Speaker 2:It would have. It could have been great. The title. Now I'm pleased with the title. I'm a bit disappointed in the, you know, avoiding the word cock. You know what?
Speaker 1:as well as you should be.
Speaker 2:I don't know why they care. Listen.
Speaker 1:I don't know why All jokes aside, Phil, you're agreeing more and more with Jordan Peterson that you shouldn't be censoring people's words.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I do agree with him, I do agree with him on the censorship. I just don't. I just don't follow some of the Bible stuff because I think I don't, I don't really get it the personal for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I need to look more into some stuff, but yeah, it's interesting, like one of my next one of my upcoming comedy books that I'm writing myself. One of my pen names is called Rod Grasper and he's he's a licensed sexologist and erotic comedy author, and his upcoming novella is a fantasy novel called A Song of Tits and Cox.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, it's a beautiful inspired melody.
Speaker 2:It's about people that get reincarnated as birds.
Speaker 2:So someone comes back as a tit, somebody else comes back as a cock and they have to save the world from the evil witch that turns people into tits and cocks, which are birds and yeah, they're birds. Yeah, you know no relation and it's just, it's great fun. Just, I really like writing the really absurd comedy completely straight, like it's fun to do it on stage. It's even more fun to do it on the page because I don't have to pay to get on the train. It's a lot cheaper. But yeah, I love stuff like that and I think, yeah, jordan Peterson's right, we shouldn't be censoring people, not just because it's wrong, but because it's a tragic waste of our own time. If we let's, let's hack into how selfish these people are. If you spend your day on Twitter being angry at Jordan Peterson, you've really wasted your own time.
Speaker 2:It's actually funny, it sounds like the not to sound like the English teacher that I almost was, but like you're wasting your own time as well as mine Like it reminds me of Howard Stern back in the days, like this was back before.
Speaker 1:It was like you know the cable and all that stuff before it went into satellite and you can specifically listen. He was just on radio and they were blown away that people would listen to him as long as they did, and so the polls were something like the people who really liked Howard Stern would listen for like an hour and then the people who hated him would listen for like three hours and they're like why would the people listening to him listen to him so long that they just want to hear what he was going to say next? And they're like well, why did the people who hated him listen so long? Because they wanted to hear what he was going to say next? And it was one of those things where, like, whether it was a good thing or bad thing, he was getting a lot of ratings, whether you liked them or hated them. And so if you're spending all your day because you don't like somebody hanging out with them all day long, you're still just adding to their numbers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting, and that's been true long before algorithms and stuff, because now it's. Whenever somebody comments something mean spirited on my Instagram, it happens every now and again with a Lego page, because I'm 31 years old, I make memes about Lego. So what? So someone come up to me the other day and they went oh, you're such a loser, why don't you go outside? And I went where did you? And I said to him where did you think I got this phone from? So I didn't just fucking pull it out on my nose. I've not lived inside my whole life and, like I just responding to them with that absurdity, I tell you, pro tip, it upsets them so much, actually I turn right.
Speaker 1:I turn the. I turn a lot of people who want to start with something negative. I turn them into positive. People do it all the time and I think that people are so used to people being triggered all the time that, like I don't get triggered, like I'll just. Even yesterday I was seeing a guy who was we have a video where we talk about the way. Like hey babe, you know what do you think when I say something like why'd you put that there? You know, we're like just something where people have tones or have their ways that they talk.
Speaker 1:And one guy did this why did you make this video when he had, like, the angry face with the smoke coming out? And I put a real answer on it because I hope even one relationship does better by listening to this advice. Thank you for asking. And I was like I was meant to be satire and I was like, yeah, I know and I appreciate you. Anyways, thank you, like. And then afterwards you just hit smiley faces because I'm like I still appreciate you for interacting. I know you were trying to push a button, but that button was actually the real answer to it is actually kind of cool. So what I did is. I took away what is in like the implication was, and I answered it as it is, and then it ended up being a cool conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you get so much inner peace from that. Like I don't hear that really often. Like good on you for doing that.
Speaker 1:I do it all the time I had that with.
Speaker 2:I've only just started doing it. In like one or two years I've only had that realization. But you know I'm 10 years behind, but we're doing this for a long time, so that's good. I had that with. Like somebody heckled me and I said thank you to them for coming and talking to me and they said why are you thanking me? I went because you've felt comfortable enough to come and talk to me about it, even though I've said something that's really pissed you off.
Speaker 1:Also, you're part of the show and thank you for being a participant. I pray they come back and hackle some more, because then we can do some more back and forth, so I appreciate you, I do get.
Speaker 2:I do get, like you know, you get spooked, especially in this current climate. As a comedian, If somebody heckles you think oh fuck, it's over. I get that, I do understand that. But at the same time I think it's really cool that comedy is one of the last few art forms. Or somebody absolutely hates what you're doing. They don't wait until you're done doing it. They will just fucking tell you in the middle of it, Like that would be, that's the book. Equivalent of that is if I flipped to the middle of my book and there's just somebody going.
Speaker 1:I'm like, who's this guy?
Speaker 2:I didn't put him in here and it's like it's. I like that, but I missed the workshops that I had at university. I missed the immediate, severe. I've had workshops since and they've not been as good. There is something in academia and as much as people say, academia has been watered down. My experience back in 2015 was it was pretty fucking spicy, provided you vet people beforehand. So you walk into the workshop and you say to them I'm okay with you telling me this story is shit, I'm not going to cry, and then they'll be more honest with you.
Speaker 1:I think people need to have.
Speaker 2:People need to talk to each other more.
Speaker 1:I think if we pander to the weak society crumbles, just because somebody can't deal with reality doesn't mean I have to try and change myself for them.
Speaker 2:Exactly, I think it's like. You can be offended, it's fine.
Speaker 1:You can be sad and that's okay you found something that you need to work on for yourself, because you can't deal with what is okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's just a good point. Yeah, Like, like in workshops, sometimes people will just like they will not want to give feedback because they're worried about offending you.
Speaker 1:And I think that they just made up that your level of being offended is the same as what they just made believe.
Speaker 2:It's the same as what theirs is? Yeah, but that can't even be close to true.
Speaker 1:That doesn't even make sense. Very strange thing.
Speaker 2:No, and it was weird. So I used to genuinely before classes, like say to people like you can tell me if you don't like the story. It's okay, you know, it's fine. The only thing that bothered me is once somebody just drew a smiley face on the story. That was the only feedback they gave and that annoyed me because I thought, you know, it cost me 10 grand to be here.
Speaker 1:Oh seriously, you got a smiley face better than a frowny face.
Speaker 2:True, but they could have been drawing a frowny face and then the finger slipped. I'll never know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you just made up that your happy face wasn't meant to be happy.
Speaker 2:It's just, it is an odd thing. I just missed a feedback. So there's in comedy it's great, and I know there's like there's some smaller events here in my city where you'll do comedy and most of the audience will be over aspiring comedians. Because I think I would class myself as an aspiring comedian. I've only done like 15 gigs, but I think even when I've done 100, I'd still class myself as an aspiring one, because I don't want the next gig to be the same as the last one, because I get bored really fucking quick. So that's my shtick as a creator is that I'll do a thing and I'm like right done. I've basically had to hire beta readers to remind me that I've got other books to write. I designed a comedy t-shirt last night and immediately forgot that I'd done it and somebody tried to order one and I was like, oh God, yeah, I did that thing. So I kind of need like a manager and I'm sure you've seen this a lot of like artsy people. They need like not a manager, a fucking handler.
Speaker 1:It's like there's parts of my brain that needs to be on a leash. There's a thing in business where it's super useful. We all need this too. There's your visionaries and your integrators, your people who have the ideas and all the creativity and the people who make shit happen. Like we need both. Like I've got an integrator, even with Randy. She's setting this up for you. Like let's make sure this is done right.
Speaker 1:I mess all the back shit up all the time and I used to do it all by myself, and so having someone who handles that is very useful, because I do the creation, I write the books, I build the programs, I work with the men, I do the podcast, I do all the videos, I do all the writing. I do all of that stuff, and I don't want to have to also be checking all the emails, working the schedule, check the payrolls, make sure these things are taken care of. I don't want to post all of these things this way. Make sure the hashtags are right. I'm like I got too many other things to do we have to have some integrator.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I need that because I do all of this myself at the moment, and the beauty of like what you do is that it's symbiotic. It's a brilliant like example of human ingenuity and what we can do together if we actually work together.
Speaker 1:Agreed.
Speaker 2:But you and Randy don't agree on every single political point.
Speaker 1:I make sure she agrees with me. Force it, I'm just kidding. No, we have different religious views. We've got different outlooks and stuff. Both her and her husband have gone through my program so that they understand the principles of what I operate under. But the second rule in the warrior's way is no blame, no shame, no judgment, and so whatever you're coming with, that's where you are.
Speaker 2:But in order to be better as principles not my opinion- Exactly, I think that's the beautiful thing about working with other people and that's what I like about being an author now, and that's why I kind of got tired of being just an author, because a great many others are introverts and I don't think I am. I don't really like the labels.
Speaker 1:Do you want a cool introvert trick? Yeah, Do you want to know how to be the most liked introvert? Is it collect Lego? I wish, but it's not.
Speaker 2:Here's I'm going to give you an introvert trick that works so well and it's worked over and over again.
Speaker 1:Introverts a lot of times, I think that they think they're supposed to be like an extrovert to be liked, and so they have to go way out of their comfort zone to be a storyteller or to be a person who takes the mic and has to do the thing. Extroverts like the microphone. Introverts like watching the show. To be the best introvert get really good at open-ended questions and that's it. If you can get someone talking about their favorite stuff, they'll talk for hours and at the end of it you're the most interesting person that they know and they don't. You don't have to say anything. You just ask them questions about stuff they like.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, that's good news for me.
Speaker 1:It keeps working, because you don't have to all of a sudden start being super clever on the fly. Just talk about whatever their favorite stuff is. How long have you been doing that? For what did you? How did you get into that? Well, who are your favorite people who do that same thing, or your biggest inspirations Like? Just keep asking people about the stuff they like the most and you become one of the favorite people they talk to, because, a you like them having the microphone, b they talk about their favorite things. So now you guys feel like you have a lot in common. D you listen, which they really love to feel heard, and then D you don't got to say shit and you're the man.
Speaker 2:That's very interesting.
Speaker 1:It's one of the coolest tricks for an introvert. Don't try and take the microphone. Just encourage the person with it to talk about their favorite stuff and genuinely be interested, and they will love you for it.
Speaker 2:That's interesting because I've seen that like I can look back and think. There's been a time where that's happened to me Somebody's asked me a question while I've been on stage and they've got an extra half hour of material. I don't know if it was good material. I think it was pretty good.
Speaker 1:It's not subjective anyway.
Speaker 2:It's great, isn't it? It's a great thing. But yeah, because I used to think as I mean, one of my it's not my favorite joke, but one of the ones I wrote a while ago was I used to think I was an introvert until I realized I just didn't like who I hung around with. Yeah, yeah, and that's like like when I left school, I was like I don't mind being on stage, I'm okay talking to strangers, I don't get frightened of things. And like when I was in school, I was like, oh, please don't talk to me, and it's just because everybody was a prick.
Speaker 1:True.
Speaker 2:It's like there was 1500 children in that school and I was the only one that wasn't a dickhead. That's the truth. By the way, I was the only one that wasn't a dickhead. The rest of them are dickheads. Nice reference to your narcissism thing from earlier for anybody who didn't get that joke.
Speaker 1:If you didn't like that, it's because you were one of the dickheads.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everybody else is wrong and I'm right.
Speaker 1:You're all bad, I'm good. Yeah, you're evil. No judgment.
Speaker 2:If you don't come to my show, it's a hate crime.
Speaker 1:Yes, see you in hell.
Speaker 2:Oh wait, no, no, actually I was overweight once. If you don't come to my show, it's fat phobic.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, and yeah.
Speaker 2:And fat shaming. Yes, what if some people are into being shamed because they're fat?
Speaker 1:Some people are.
Speaker 2:So if we can't fat shame them, we're basically depriving them of sexual pleasure.
Speaker 1:Well, multiple forms of pleasure too, yeah. Yeah, it gets in a whole different, masochistic situation though.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, before we go down any dark, trying at Ravensville.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to crack open that kind of worms. Let's leave it there, phil, we got a couple hours in.
Speaker 1:This was very cool, man. I appreciate you very much. If you were to have any promotion or anything that we can do to serve you, what would your request be for people to do to reach out or to be able to get more of your content?
Speaker 2:I think it'd be really cool if anybody who has a sense of humor even if it's one that didn't align with any of the nonsense I spotted today to check out this book called who Built the Humans, or alternatively, who Built the Humans to Brackets the Return of the Humans Close Brackets in which the humans come back and get rebuilt. So it's 11 silly stories about where we came from, where we're going, one of them in which there's some audience participation you get to decide how the world ends. I like it. It will end.
Speaker 1:I hope that it ends with you getting some food from people buying your book.
Speaker 2:My favorite things is I read one of the stories on an Instagram Live and on the same day I got called a bigot and a snowflake. Wow, we've been half an hour. Is that what it ends?
Speaker 1:And I thought I've covered all the bases there.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes I must have said something, and that was the story about the people being turned into fudge. Oh my gosh, and that's not even the spicy one. I'm like you've not even. I've saved the rest of the good stuff's paywalled. My friend, you should see the rest. But yeah, really just check that out. Or check out realphilipkartersubstackcom, where I post free stories and jokes that occasionally are so fruity, people unsubscribe. They're good, they're good jokes, they're a whole lot.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you, Phil Carter. Yeah you're the man. Thanks you too, man. Thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate you and yeah.
Speaker 2:No, I've loved being on.
Speaker 1:This was great, I appreciate you very much.
Speaker 2:I hope I get to come on again and chance youas outside the show as well, of course.
Speaker 1:For sure. Just reach out, brother. It sounds awesome, so we'll let you know when things are up. Make sure Randy has all the things that you need so she can make sure we make a cool graphic for you and we'll make sure we'll get some people to get your books and see more of you.
Speaker 2:Aw, sweet Thanks man.
Speaker 1:Thank you, brother, uncancelled. I actually have a whole section I may have to, because I got a couple of podcasts I do that are very easily able to get me cancelled.
Speaker 2:You've got to send me the link to that. I will.
Speaker 1:One of them is a transgender doctor and the other one is a psychic medium. They go hard. Oh, that's brilliant. That's very funny, very funny stuff and very good stuff. They're great yeah.
Speaker 2:All the best people are real people. That's what I'll leave on Whatever weird bastions of groups that you see on Twitter, they're not real. Go outside, meet an actual person like that.
Speaker 1:They're everywhere.
Speaker 2:Like what you do. You know Real people doing weird stuff. That's what we like.
Speaker 1:We're all just doing stuff. At the end of the day, it's just weird is what we judge it. All right man Be safe brother, thanks for having me on. Thank you, see you later. See you.