biggest dance festival

in the world and it's on your doorstep.

So anyone watching this should go.

It's incredible.

And if you're frugal, as I imagine some of your viewers might be, then...

I would recommend going on the first weekend.

Everyone's doing freebies, two-for-one shows, previews with discounted price.

what what kind of advice would you give to them because i mean people i'm trying to grow my instagram people trying to grow podcasts people trying to set up a business and app and they're like looking this is so hard i don't have stable income what kind of advice would you give to the entrepreneur

Have you got any, have you got any contacts?

Yeah, this, I was gonna say, it's gotta be a man on the inside, or a person on the inside, because I reckon you can get in anywhere with enough confidence if you just know, if you know the layout of the building.

It's that thing of, like, you could nick anything if you walked into a bank with a clipboard.

Yeah

... that's very much how I feel as well.

So people like...

I talk to one guest for an hour or so about how they write their stuff, and people like Ross Noble was on it recently and asked to be on it 'cause he's a fan of it.

Yes,

and also they are motivated to keep it private.

That's right.

Like my son has some privacy now and there is some stuff going on at school, some of which I know about, that's been stressing him out about two close friends falling out kind of thing and him being sort of trapped in the middle.

And then there's some other stuff he's alluded to, which he sort of wanted me to kind of play a guessing game, like he kind of wanted to tell me but didn't want to tell me.

Yeah.

And we've sort of ended up- we've ended up we've ended up at a sort of a a bit of an impasse where i'm like okay you keep your secrets you know what i mean it's a bit like you are entitled to privacy but you know if you're going through something i'll go through it with you we'll go through it with you but also if you decide not i just what i don't what i've said to him is what i don't want to happen is that you end up getting really stressed and anxious about something which if i were to know what it was i could give you a perspective on it that might make you go oh it's not problem yeah It'd be wasted emotional time, the offers there.

This was a couple of hours

Do you know what I mean? Where everyone sort of

blinks and nods and goes, oh, right.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, but it doesn't affect them.

So what I'm trying to do with Stand Up is try and give people permission to be worried, to laugh at some of our fears, to laugh at all of the ambiguities and the contradictions involved in facing the idea of climate and all of the cascade effects, not just... not just the cascades, like the tipping points that could happen, this goes wrong and this goes wrong and this goes wrong, but the sort of the cascade effects of like, if you start caring about the climate, you pull at the thread and you're like, oh God, does this mean I'm not going to be able to enjoy anything? How am I going to cope with this? How am I going to cope with where my chocolate and my coffee comes from? And do you know what I mean? Like all of it, as soon as you start caring about any of it, you're like, oh God, if I care about this, I'm going to have to care about everything.

And what I try and do with comedy is take those contradictions and those ambiguities and say, look, it's okay to consider this.

I mean, it's OK to go, oh, God, I don't want to say anything about the climate in case everyone finds out that I flew to Portugal last year and they get me.

It's for... china or india or i accept that it is for us but what can we really do about it or i accept all that but well you got to think about the economy and even if they know it's not bad for the economy they're pretty good at saying well we just don't know we might do so pretty better or just so yeah

So Stuart, is it odd to get on stage and make people laugh about something which genuinely scares you?

Yes, it is.

It's n- Well, it's not completely outside of my experience as a comic.

I've been doing stand-up for 20 years, climate, uh, stuff for the last five, and the origin of that is my kind of climate dread really and wanting to process about it.

You know, the, in comedy, the problems are the material, so we talk about the problems that we're having.

And I have talked about other things that scare me.

I've talked about, um, uh, death, for example, or loss, you know, other, other unpleasant things.

Right.

How do you win over an audience? Do you want to take that estimate?

No, I'll start with you still.

Okay, sure.

I keep going first.

Sorry.

So, yeah, as you say, so if it's a corporate audience, not necessarily a sustainability audience, then I certainly have got material about And I need more really, like I've got stuff about flying first class generating three times the emissions of, or business class rather, three times the emissions of economy.

But then I've also, you know, I might look at wine or ski resorts or something like that if they're an audience who are kind of like chief executive type level that really want to, they're probably less concerned about plastic bottles because they're thinking bigger picture.

Does that always work? Do people love it when you sort of go dark with environmental humor?