And this

is how bad I was when I was here through what these guys have suggested.

I've gone on to have a decent life.

I'm doing this stuff now.

So I went back to do this talk.

And yeah, I got real good feedback from the kids that were there.

And one of them said, have you thought of writing a book? And I explained why I'd always avoided it.

What are you hearing back from people as they grab a copy? What are they saying back to you as the author?

Yeah.

So he was kind of against the Kennedy Center and things like that.

Do you think that on some level that putting cage fighting on the White House lawn is a, a deliberate attempt to do something that the, the right-thinking folk would think is tasteless and crass?

Do you write them down? Yeah

... and stuff people shout out in audiences.

I mean, there's a whole bit in the last live, um, thing that I shot where someone was shouting out at me the name of the manager of Manchester, uh, one of the Manchester football teams, and I just didn't, couldn't understand it.

But that's, that's no replacement for that real-

No.

Well, there's t- there's two things going on, right? F- first of all, uh, you can, you can really make the case for the arts being, um, economically valuable to a country.

I mean, for o- lo- loads of people in the '70s and '80s were getting by on the, on the dole and doing bits of cash-in-hand work, and y- and you only need one of those people to form, um, a simple minds and, and play stadiums, and the tax has already covered whatever.

It's covered hundreds of people doing that.

So there's the eco- there's the economic value of, um, of, of, uh, culture, which is quite hard to, to calculate, but it's obviously, you know, has a genuine value.

But then there's also the thing that it's not just about that.

... that short sort of soundbite.

You might not have a career

...

I was incredibly lucky, right? You know, with the breaks that I got.

I got, I won, um, Hackney Empire New Act of the Year in February 1990, which got my ... which meant I, you know, jumped, jumped the queue a little bit on things.

I was lucky enough that I was, I was hanging around at Radio 4 trying to freelance for comedy, and I got asked to write on a couple of things that ended up doing really well, like On The Air, which was that Alan Partridge thing.

So you had, like, kind of cred from that.

But I think, I think ...

That you were paying for?

Uh, but rather than the fact that he and his government and his party have for a long time been wary of blaming Brexit for fear of losing voters to Reform.

Yeah.

He's just explained that they know it was a disaster, but they didn't want to risk alienating those people, so they wouldn't say it.

They've lost those people anyway, 'cause they've all gone to vote...

They'll all be voting for Reform.

So now someone's, someone's thought, "Maybe if we can win back some of the voters we're losing to the Green Party or the Lib Dems." That's what's happened.

... withdrawal agreement

...

But I th-

I thought that, I thought, you know what? I thought I'd judge that really well, and I thought Paul Squire was one of those people who's right on the cusp of memory, and you would be so delighted to be reminded of his existence that you'd forgotten that it would create a huge laugh.

But I had just picked something just slightly too obscure-

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

[upbeat music] Artificial intelligence is going to change everything from healthcare to transport, from social media to every search you make online, and it's already all around us.

[laughs]

It's really interesting how, uh, someone only has to say this, and you're all aware of how dreadful these things are without actually ever having had to articulate it.

Let me be clear, or the, the even better, let me be quite clear.

[laughs]

... for example? Do you think anyone has looked at what's happening now, and looked back at all the quagmire disasters they've got themselves into previously, and said, "Lessons have been learned"?

everyone lives in Stroud now utopia

I went in and the bloke went what do you do I said I'm a comedian I must be really difficult with political correctness it's not like the old days it was better wasn't it when you could say anything I went what was better was it good that you could do this this and this and he went Oh, no, it was worse, wasn't it? I went, yeah.

Basically, it's just the thing people say.

And as soon as you actually ask them, what are the things that you used to be allowed to say that you can't say now that you'd like to say, they clam up a bit.

And I saw an interview with Paul Rudolph from the Pink Fairies, 70s hippie rock band.

They used to be part of the Ladbroke Grove scene that did benefits for CND, for women's rights, for gay rights, for vegetarians, for everything.

And he was complaining about political correctness gone mad.

was good, but I felt like,

Anyway, and you say, like, "Imagine James Corden

CordenWatching one of my routines, it's like a dog listening to classical music Well, the reason I did that about James Corden was because I was kept being told that James Corden was a fan, and James Corden would turn up at little tryout gigs that I was doing.

And I had to think, what would the character of Stewart Lee...

I, I don't mind him.

I don't know anything about him.

But unfortunately, the character of Stewart Lee would be a snob about him, so I had to say that.

I had to ruin that, and sometimes I have to say things that I know will make my life worse and more difficult.

Okay.

Yeah.

He doesn't even...

The, the royal family's pr- press people are involved in a game of trying to say as little as possible and mention as few proper names in any statement that they put out, aren't they? [laughs] And, and they're inventing, having to in...

I mean, reign change is, the, what it, it conjures up regime change as well, as if the Queen was-

I mean, that's where we're at, as, as in I do not know whether that is a true or a false story.

It's sad though because, you know, if only that had been the end of his mischief.

[upbeat music] Well, uh, you talk about prime min- prime ministers being remembered, you know, like Gordon Brown.

What about this? This is according to Kevin Maguire in the New Statesman.

We are then disappointed when they discover that the promises they made don't stack up.

Well, and, and another reason we're ungovernable, and if you're listening to this program or this podcast, you're probably one of the minority of British people that still get their information from what we would call reputable sources.

But a vast amount of the news information out there is just made-up lies and rubbish floating around on social media and being deliberately encouraged by Russian bots and Elon Musk on X.

Well, the, it's-

So they don't...

So the politicians don't address what people think is happening 'cause what people think is happening is not happening.

Uh, people argue with me blind that Keir Starmer defended the Southport killer's parents in court, for example.

There's just, there's all these just fake...

Yeah.

The Conservatives have had more positions in fourteen years than the Kama Sutra, but without any of that ancient mystical text's philosophical emphasis on Dharma, righteousness and moral values; Artha, prosperity, economic values; Kama, pleasure, love and psychological values; and Moksha, liberation, spiritual values and self-realization.

The chapter on sexual positions being only a small percentage of the book as a whole, whose contents have often been misrepresented.

No wonder they left the country feeling emotionally bereft and without meaning.

That's how you do it.

Well, that's been fun.

Well, that's the problem with coming on these, is that I've never heard it articulated quite so well, this idea that, um, that we're involved in a kind of a dob- a, a theatrical game with politicians where we, we know that they can't say what they mean because we're playing a game, and that we're also involved in a game of pretending to trust them.

I've never heard it articulated quite so well, and I will leave here feeling even worse than I did two hours ago when I sat down and read the papers on how everything's even worse than it was last night.

Mm-hmm.

"I feel this must have been mentioned on the show at some point already, but the political nonsense of at pace, in inverted commas, usually combined with delivery or delivering, makes my eyeballs itch with discomfort.

The intended interpretation is presumably that something is being done, AKA delivered, quickly, whereas pace can describe something that may be fast, slow, or anything in between.

If I was holding the microphone when someone insisted they were delivering at pace, I would immediately ask them, 'At the pace of what? A startled meerkat, a one-legged pigeon, what?' Please take this phrase round the back of the metaphor tree and put it out of its misery," says Paul Hagan.

Things are being delivered at pace.

Well, it's, it's-

Mm, mm.

But every now and again, someone will ring me up and go, "You're credited as an elf in Arthur's Christmas." [laughs] It's the...

So

basically, it started off rewinding way back.

I used to be a professional motorcycle and snowmobile rider for a long time, around like 10, 12 years.

Retired at the ripe old age of like 25.

Yeah.

And tried to work a normal job for a few years.

Couldn't hack that.

How did you navigate that?

Of course, I don't have a lot of corporate experience by any means, but what got you first involved in sustainability or interested in pursuing sustainability? And then how did that lead to what you do? Well, how did that lead to when you first initially start working with companies?

Yeah.

I suppose when I look right back, I was so fortunate to grow up in New Zealand, which is three hours a bit to the south of Australia.

And a lot of Kiwis, you know, come to Australia because it's a bigger opportunities and so forth.

But I grew up where I was never more than half an hour away from the bush, mountains or ocean.

And part of growing up in the high school, you had at least one or two weeks a year as outdoor education where you're just in the bush.

And I just love what they call tramping.

we're