Comedian and actor John Hamm joins Jemele to discuss the differences between being a Brit and an American. They talk about the differences in their names and accents, and how they came to be. Plus, they discuss the difference between being British and American, and what it means to be a Brit or an American in the 21st century. It's a fun, light-hearted episode that you don't want to miss! Featuring: John Hamm, Jemele, and special guest John Hamm. Music by Jeff Kaale ( ) Art: Mackenzie Moore ( ) Editor: Will Witwer ( ) Music: Hayden Coplen ( ) Audio Engineer: Ben Kuklinski ( ) Mixing: Christian Bladt ( ) Producing: Zac Efron ( ) Executive producer: Patrick Muldowney ( ) Art: Steven Kanter ( ) Editing: Matthew Boll ( ) Special thanks to our sponsor, and our sponsor for producing this episode of the podcast, . is a proud supporter of the show. and we'd like to thank you for supporting the show and the support we've gotten so far this year. We'll see you in 2020. Thank you for all the support and support in 2020 and beyond. Thank you so much for all your support. , and we'll see y'all next year for the rest of the work we've done so far and we look forward to seeing you next year! in 2020, thank you so far in 2020! - Thank you, bye! , bye - Cheers! Cheers, Cheers. Cheers Cheers - Jon & Rory - John & Rory. - The Jerks - John and Rory , Cheers - AKA John and Sarah ( ) - Paul - Michael - Stephen - Jake - - Jack - Chad - Ben - Tim - Sarah - ( Joe - , & Jon - Mike - John - & ? Ben & Rory - Jack :) Jake & Sam - James - Tom - Daniel - Chris - : ) Jack, - And Matt - Dan - Joe Dan Michael Tom Brad - Jim - Matt Daniel Brian Mike
00:01:09.000Maybe Lafayette is sitting next to Washington and said, we will use Albs with this stuff here, and then we could do the Revolutionary War, and then you guys will win, and then we'll hate each other forever.
00:01:19.000Well, you guys also do a lot of weird stuff, where you put like a U in color, and you have a Y in tires.
00:02:01.000Yeah, I always wondered, because I grew up in Boston, and I always wondered, like, those were the first people to leave England and Europe.
00:02:08.000Like, what the fuck happened to their language?
00:02:10.000Because they developed the most disgusting brand of it.
00:02:13.000Well, you've got your A's, your Boston A's, which I can't hear a strong Boston coming out of you.
00:03:32.000I think at the base, having played 45 countries now, I think everyone is actually the same when you get down below a level.
00:03:40.000But, you know, if you're going to reach for you, there's got to be a number of things which...
00:03:45.000Would make it seem different and brand names will be different than your sports stars, you know, everyone's sports stars, everyone's politicians, that kind of thing.
00:03:52.000But underneath it all, it's going to be, there's going to be more mainstream people, there's going to be alternative people, there's going to be, and the whole spectrum now, like in the old days, it used to be everything was mainstream and a bit of alternative.
00:04:02.000Now, I think your country, my country, we have a whole spectrum of what interests people.
00:04:20.000And, you know, we're tightly smashed together, what are we, 65 million, and you're 300 million, and you're such a large, your country is so large compared to us.
00:04:31.000Because there was a thing of only 10% of Americans have passports.
00:04:34.000But if you look at the area, something like that.
00:04:37.000But then if you look at where the 10% can go in America, it's just so huge.
00:04:41.000So it's slightly more understandable why a lot of Americans say, I don't need a passport because I'm just going to go to that place, which is miles away.
00:04:48.000That's an understanding of you, but I think it would do everybody good to go somewhere like Asia.
00:04:56.000Every time I go to Asia, I always think, okay, people are like this too.
00:05:00.000This is an interesting thing to experience.
00:05:03.000Thailand in particular, which I really loved.
00:05:06.000Thailand is amazing because it's like, wow, they hit this perfect frequency where everybody's really friendly and really nice.
00:06:26.000But yeah, I mean, I find that from an American perspective, it would be very interesting people going there, even if they were there before and during the time of war or after, just to see how people are.
00:06:48.000I hope new generations coming along don't bring the baggage of previous generations and we can all try and move forward into a world that's more positive even though it doesn't necessarily look like that.
00:07:00.000Well, what has always been really interesting to me about Vietnam that I learned from Bourdain Was that they don't hold any grudges towards Americans, which I find incredible.
00:09:28.000I think there's quite a lot And if you analyze masculine and feminine, if you really get down to it, I find it impossible to come up with anything that was particularly masculine,
00:09:44.000particularly feminine, except for the ability to build muscle mass is easier for men.
00:09:52.000But, you know, great footballers, soccer players, men and women, athletics runners, men and women, strong character men, weak character men and women.
00:10:01.000Mathematicians, whatever it is, there's nothing that you can really say, ah, that is only a good shot with a gun.
00:10:30.000I was in the first team for two years when I was a kid.
00:10:33.000Was planning to do Office of Training Corps and then go Marines or paras and then go Special Forces, RSAS, which would be the equivalent of your Delta Force.
00:11:29.000Instead of going to do a military fighting thing, I've said, this might be Wrong for me to say this, but I say I've done Special Forces Civilian Division, you know, fighting people, screaming at people's feet, and I perform in four languages.
00:11:57.000I think because of probably Caitlyn Jenner and the movement that you're seeing to accept people that want to do whatever and anything they want to do.
00:12:06.000Yeah, it is just we're more accepting of each other.
00:13:04.000And one of the weird things is if we are having less wars, if we're getting better health to people, then more kids are around.
00:13:11.000And some people in, I suppose, lower income backgrounds around the world, they will say, well, we need to have six kids because that's what, you know, for much money.
00:13:27.000I think they feel there will be a leveling off of the population.
00:13:30.000Yeah, I've read that theory that they believe that industrialized nations and westernized society, when people start having two careers, you know, and then two career households, people are less likely to have a bunch of kids.
00:14:03.000I've got a film coming out and I'm touring the country and then I'm going to politics as well and When you first started wearing women's clothes and dresses and makeup on stage, did people think it was a gimmick?
00:19:47.000So I, but you know, and it's happened in your Civil War, in maybe in any war, I'm somewhat encyclopedic about your Civil War and Revolution War to a bit and World War II, but on the spot training, you know, training as you go along.
00:20:44.000It was, yes, it made it too soft and they were rubbing on the running shoes and I didn't know how to, how do I fix it when I'm actually wearing on it all the time?
00:20:55.000So we started bathing it in surgical spirit, which you call something else.
00:21:28.000And then I started, and also apparently, because I did 27 marathons in 27 days in South Africa in 2016, and that was, the temperatures were crazy on that.
00:21:36.000But it seems that the body will switch on a healing property that we've got latent in ourselves that we don't use, and you will heal quicker.
00:26:03.000A fighter died from it recently in Boston in the Massachusetts area.
00:26:08.000Yeah, it's apparently something that happens when fighters overtrain as well.
00:26:14.000Sometimes they're not doing it scientifically, so they're not analyzing their heart rate, their heart rate variability, and they don't know that they haven't really truly recovered and they continue to push themselves because they want to prepare harder.
00:26:26.000They have this sort of mental mindset, just train harder and you'll be better off.
00:26:32.000But that's not necessarily the case if your body can't physically keep up with the recovery.
00:27:19.000Last day of your run, you've only done 25 marathons, and it's the day 27. And when you go through that finishing, the final flag where you should be waving flags, you've got another marathon to go.
00:27:31.000My brain, I thought, this is kind of good, but it's 90K you're going to do today.
00:28:53.000So I said, okay, stop the clock, put me in the thing, drive me to Pretoria, stop me off, and then I'll run there, and we'll just continue it on there.
00:29:00.000So we got behind because I wasn't running, because I had to be driven across this dangerous point of road to be dropped to Pretoria, and then I just had to run the kilometers off.
00:29:12.000Yeah, they have certain areas where it's kind of out there, there's no one really out there, and you just go along there, and anything can happen.
00:29:20.000So my field producer, Fixer, he was just saying, we don't do this.
00:30:21.000And then I talked to the, this is a very interesting thing, because you know if you're talking to, it was a press, I talked to the press after that, but it was a Sunday.
00:30:27.000And so they kept talking, normally they say, we can't talk anymore, we've got two minutes, and then we've got to talk to important people, go away.
00:30:33.000That's what normally happens if you're talking to live press, national press.
00:30:36.000But I was on the thing, and they just kept talking to me, because obviously a slow news day, nothing was happening.
00:30:40.000And they say, we've got this idiot who's just run, you know, 27 marathons.
00:30:44.000And they kept asking me other questions, and what favourite colour do you have?
00:30:50.000I don't know what they were asking me, but in the end, these two interviews I did with National Press, I just said, I'm going to go away now.
00:31:12.000The, yeah, the certain community, and if you're a transgender guy and you come out, certain people go, wee, but I crossed into a line of, well, if you're going to do that, and you, I hate, I know you do some comedy, you do the drama stuff, we think you're a bit, you know, bonkers and out there, but fair play.
00:31:27.000I got this sort of, I got to pass a fair play to you.
00:31:58.000So if you come out, you could stay in the closet.
00:32:02.000And down the millennia, if we go back to the ancient Egyptians and further, there's probably a lot of guys that said, I'm not going to tell anyone about this.
00:33:19.000I taught myself jiu-jitsu from a book, if you can believe that, which is, you know, you get these books with the different moves in it, and you can't teach yourself that.
00:33:25.000But I did judo when I was six, actually, as well.
00:33:27.000So I liked the idea of doing these things, but I felt judo was always at the bigger kid...
00:33:32.000You all get in pajamas and the bigger kid just throws you around a bit.
00:33:35.000I could never quite get the hang of it.
00:33:50.000And he's working out with these young men.
00:33:53.000And you see his mastery of judo as these young, powerful men try to manipulate him and throw him around and he effortlessly, watch this, this old man, when you see him, he's very, very old.
00:34:06.000And he's throwing these guys around and me as a martial arts expert, These men are not doing this willingly.
00:35:29.000My background was in striking, which is in Taekwondo, and then eventually kickboxing and Muay Thai, and then I got really into Jiu-jitsu when I got older.
00:35:37.000And Jiu Jitsu, what's the difference in Jiu Jitsu?
00:35:56.000They figured out what the best way for a smaller person to defeat a larger person is through leverage.
00:36:05.000Jiu-Jitsu is really the only martial art...
00:36:08.000that I can think of that works like you think of a martial art in a movie like in a Bruce Lee movie like there's all these people and they were always bigger than Bruce Lee but Bruce Lee fucked them all up but in the real world that doesn't usually work like the bigger people have such a giant advantage when it comes to like striking like you're never gonna see like a heavyweight in the UFC fight a bantamweight A person weighs 135 pounds.
00:36:37.000In jiu-jitsu, it's legitimately possible for a 140-pound man to strangle a 200-plus pound man and do it relatively easily if they're talented.
00:36:48.000I saw a documentary on Bruce Lee and he had The Way of No Way, which really appealed to me.
00:36:54.000I mean, it's like a philosophy, quite apart from a fighting philosophy, but to be so trained up in so many things that they do not know what you're going to do.
00:37:07.000Well, he had to overcome significant prejudice to adopt that perspective because when he was studying martial arts, you were supposed to be loyal to your style.
00:37:17.000So if you learn Kung Fu, you were supposed to be a Kung Fu man for life.
00:37:20.000You weren't supposed to also dabble in boxing and wrestling and all these different things that he was interested in.
00:37:25.000He was interested in taking what's useful from all different martial arts and applying them.
00:37:30.000So in a sense, he was really the founder of mixed martial arts, which you see today.
00:37:34.000In the UK, they have cage warriors, and the US is UFC, and it's worldwide now, the art of mixed martial arts, of putting all the different styles together, and you can do whatever you want within the rules.
00:39:12.000I got home from playing Australia, took the train up to Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish border, ran up to Dunbar, which is one marathon, ran across to Edinburgh, second marathon.
00:39:21.000Are you running a marathon with other people, or are you just running it for yourself?
00:39:24.000No, I just get a backpack, put my stuff in there, change of clothes, wash kit, off I go, no backup.
00:39:29.000And is this something that started because of the series of marathons that you did?
00:39:33.000Yeah, and I want to stay match fit for life.
00:39:35.000Because that's what, I noticed that everyone's a natural, all animals are natural animals.
00:39:40.000And then there are the wild animals, which we were, and then there are domesticated animals.
00:43:52.000There's a great video that I was watching this morning of a lion that was trying to take out a small buffalo, and the other one got behind the lion and launched it through the air.
00:44:01.000It was literally flying, like 40 feet in the air, like flipping head over heels.
00:44:06.000Because the strength of this thing to take a giant cat and just, with its head, just whoop!
00:46:16.000No, I was right next to the green vehicle.
00:46:18.000So the big metal green vehicle was there, and they just said, stay close.
00:46:22.000So I was one door flip away from, I just launched myself into the, it was open top, so I would have been in that vehicle before they got to me.
00:46:31.000Did you hear about that woman from, she was an editor on the Game of Thrones, and she was in one of those parks, and she had a window rolled down, and they told her, keep your windows rolled up at all times.
00:46:42.000She was trying to take better photographs, and the cat reached in and grabbed her, and pulled her out of the vehicle and killed her.
00:51:01.000So I thought last day I'll do a double marathon and that'll be a good climactic end of my South African thing.
00:51:08.000What is going on with your mind when you're doing this?
00:51:11.000Because you're not listening to any music, and you're in this sort of meditative state where you're just left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.
00:51:19.000Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
00:51:22.000I'm saying it's kind of zen, but it's not in a kind of like I'm listening to my heartbeat or anything.
00:52:43.000I've got a whole theory about the heel of the foot, which it should never, you know, you should, you know, sprinters are always on the toes.
00:53:10.000And I notice on horses, if you look for the heel of a horse, it's right up by their bum, because the hoof is the toes, and then you go all the way up that leg, and right by the bum, that's the heel.
00:53:24.000And you go, well, that's never going to hit the ground.
00:53:26.000And dogs don't do it, cats don't do it.
00:53:28.000We are the ones that use this heel thing.
00:53:30.000Obviously, initially, for walking, to make us balance when we went from the chimpanzee gorilla stage into the, you know, we need to get balance.
00:53:38.000Yeah, but even then, I mean, most people, if you just give them, if they're barefoot, like children, for example.
00:53:42.000Like, one of the things that I was reading this book about...
00:54:26.000And I was also initially in South Africa running on certain road surfaces where they just dropped, instead of doing a tarmacadam kind of covering, they had just put rocks, obviously some lorry had come along and this truck had just dropped rocks out of the back to sort of hold together the mud in the rainy times.
00:54:45.000And very uneven surface, very hard on the foot.
00:54:48.000And I was doing these very thin-soled, running in very thin-soled shoes.
00:54:53.000What kind of shoes are you running with?
00:57:25.000But it's easier for me to be in girl mode because then if I can deal with that, you know, some people stare at you and I have a confidence now.
00:57:34.000I carry myself with a certain confidence.
00:57:36.000They go, oh, he seems to be quite confident, so I'll just relax about that.
00:57:39.000And I can actually – I can control other people's embarrassment because if they don't know what to do, I'd say, hi, how are you?
00:58:59.000And then the second film he's in with him...
00:59:01.000Is Towering Inferno, where they are equal billing, and I think Paul Newman is first and Steve McQueen is higher.
00:59:10.000If you look at the names on the poster, Paul Newman comes in from the left, so his name is first and Steve McQueen is on the right, but higher than Paul Newman.
00:59:20.000That's how they got that equal billing.
00:59:22.000How do you put equal billing if you're going to start reading from the left?
00:59:54.000When it comes to billing, if you know about Steve McQueen, and his mom was a sort of sometime prostitute and had men in and out of the house, and his dad was just never there.
01:00:05.000And he found himself through a boys retreat, you know, because he was breaking the law and they sent him off to this place and they told him to talk these kids how to train wild horses.
01:00:17.000And that was one of the first things he did.
01:02:55.000I think transparency as opposed to opacity, if that's the word.
01:03:01.000You know, the more transparent things are, the more we can check, hey, that guy's lying about that.
01:03:05.000If we could work out what's a lie and what's not a lie, that would be really nice.
01:03:09.000I don't know if we could have lie detectors on all the time.
01:03:13.000I think it's going to be mind reading.
01:03:16.000I really think that we're going to have technology within the next 50 years that allows people to definitively understand whether or not someone's being honest.
01:03:51.000Fagazi is one that people use for fake.
01:03:54.000There was a limousine company that was writing bad checks, Fagazi Limousine Service, and it became like a thing on the East Coast where, oh, this guy, he's a Fagazi cop.
01:04:37.000I've said that for nine years, quite consistently, I would like to say that I was going to run in 2020. We had set terms in our politics, like you always had.
01:04:49.000We arranged it into a five-year, but then we've gone back to the old system, which is where the The Prime Minister of the country can choose when they have an election and it can be anywhere up to a day, you know, the next day after the election or up to five years later.
01:05:05.000So the Prime Minister can decide, you know what, we'll have another election in two weeks.
01:05:09.000Yeah, and they wouldn't do that for them.
01:05:11.000But, you know, like we had a general election in 2015. And then in 2017, having been in for only two years, Theresa May was persuaded that if you go for an election now, you're going to win big.
01:05:22.000You're going to win tons of extra seats and then we'll be able to do whatever we want.
01:05:26.000But in fact, they lost seats in that election.
01:05:33.000There's a traditional thing of going in the fourth year because if you've got all the economics going and everything's pretty good, okay, let's go now.
01:05:39.000We've got a year to spare, but let's go in the fourth year because we know we're in a good place.
01:05:44.000And then you have to allow, I think, six weeks for an election campaign.
01:05:58.000Member of Parliament for some constituency, hopefully in England, would be my thing, as opposed to United Kingdom, because there's Wales and Scotland.
01:07:59.000My goal is to try and encourage my country and the world to go in a positive direction.
01:08:05.000I think I've been saying this politically that I think this is our last century on Earth or it's our first century on Earth.
01:08:12.000I think the next 80 years is for everything.
01:08:14.000We're going to choose everything here.
01:08:15.000We're either going to wipe ourselves off the planet or we're going to make it a fair world for 7.5 billion people where you have a right to have a fair world, enough democracy and transparency, enough Money to live a life, to have a family.
01:08:26.000Not everyone, not billions of people living on $1 a day or $2 a day.
01:08:31.000So I think we need to get to there because then immigration raises its head, your country, my country, every country in the world, and that's all people moving around because they haven't got enough money to live on or they haven't got enough security because there's a war, civil war.
01:08:44.000And if we could get beyond that, then a lot of those problems drop away.
01:08:49.000But going into politics and talking about a global vision of the future and whatever is slightly – it's a very difficult thing to do because people are going to say, oh, you've just asked for that.
01:08:59.000How is that helping this global vision?
01:09:01.000But I just thought – We seem to be trying 1930s politics again in political areas, so I thought, well, I'm going to look for a vision, a positive vision of the future.
01:09:11.000And I know when I came out as transgender in 85, there was no way I could imagine anything.
01:09:16.000I didn't know where it was going to go.
01:09:17.000I just thought I need to go out there, I need to argue or discuss at least.
01:09:21.000Try and set up a positive image version, you know, because I'm not sure what age you are, but I think you're 51. You're 51. So, you know, I'm 57. So remember in the earlier years of our lives, it was just so out there.
01:09:34.000Transgender, you didn't even talk about it.
01:09:36.000I mean, there were gay and lesbian people out, but transgender was like some crazy out there place.
01:10:42.000Teenage boys, they scare the shit out of me.
01:10:44.000My friend Eric Crisp, he said it to me once, because he was dealing with some teenage boys in his hometown, and he was like, the teenage boys are the most fucking dangerous animals on the planet, because they have all this testosterone, no one's really giving them any guidance yet, they're sort of just out there wild,
01:11:01.000and they're trying to outdo each other, one-up each other.
01:11:38.000And that has gone on since the dawn of time, unfortunately.
01:11:44.000Well, that's where you see the social currency of today's shame climate, like shaming people for this or that, or attacking people for whatever various things they're doing, trying to get public shame against people.
01:11:55.000Especially people that haven't really done anything wrong.
01:11:57.000What they're doing is they're trying to do that to elevate themselves.
01:12:00.000And they see someone in the public eye, see someone who's famous or rich, and they're saying, that person's a fucking loser.
01:12:06.000And they're, you know, a sports figure is a perfect example.
01:12:09.000You know, like some super athlete, and they drop a ball.
01:12:13.000You know, and they're doing this to sort of maximize this sort of, this, like, this downfall, this...
01:12:22.000If they see anything that's going wrong with that person's life, and if they can accentuate that and pump it up, but somehow or another, they think it elevates them.
01:12:57.000And then they changed it up every few years and they took the woman who was on the back of – I think it was a 10-pound note or something.
01:13:04.000They took her off and they changed it.
01:16:09.000European Union, no one's ever tried, from countries that have hundreds of years of history, to choose to try and learn to live together, work together, some shape or form.
01:17:00.000I'm not getting too right at the center of it because you could just, you know, probably like you have on your news broadcast, you could listen to people talking hours and hours and hours.
01:17:15.000So I've worked out what my worldview is, this worldview that everyone's got to have a fair chance in life.
01:17:21.000I know that automation is happening right now, so there's going to be a whole load of people who won't be able to get jobs because the unskilled labor force, their jobs are going to get automated.
01:18:29.000The younger people are coming online to vote now.
01:18:31.000They're old enough to vote, and 78% of them want to be part of Europe, and the older people who are passing away, probably 78% of them wanted to be out of Europe.
01:18:40.000So it's a fear thing, like a fear of immigration, fear of...
01:19:05.000And that's the fearful and suspicious way.
01:19:07.000And I think we have to be brave and curious.
01:19:11.000Otherwise, we're not going to make it.
01:19:12.000So for us in America, you're essentially dealing with a bunch of different countries that speak a bunch of different languages, whereas we're dealing with a bunch of different states that speak the same language.
01:19:45.000But it's an easier way to be xenophobic slash racist on it.
01:19:48.000And I've always said that xenophobia is just a racist with a xylophone.
01:19:53.000Which is my joke, which I got to use somewhere in a political situation.
01:19:57.000But it doesn't seem to make the big difference in the end.
01:20:02.000We have enough ways of translating and stuff.
01:20:05.000And most people in most countries now can reach for English if they need to.
01:20:10.000You know, like some people, I think Putin will always speak in Russian.
01:20:14.000Any leader of a country will probably use their own language first, talk to their own country people first, and then they might throw in something in English or in an interview.
01:20:21.000But we can work out from vibe where most people are coming in.
01:20:28.000Well, I think that we're probably pretty close to some form of viable translation technology, like Google had these Google Earbuds.
01:20:38.000You can do it on the Google app without even the earbuds.
01:20:41.000If you go to Google Translate and you hit the microphone on there, you can just say, hello, good afternoon, and if it's on the French button, it'll come out in French.
01:21:22.000So the Google Translate verbal one at the moment does line by line.
01:21:25.000So you have to say a line, receive a line.
01:21:28.000Yeah, I mean, just think about what technologies existed 20 years ago and how much more advanced they are now and then add that to translation and that exponential increase.
01:21:37.000We're probably going to lose a lot of these barriers of misunderstanding.
01:22:25.000Yes, that's an easy line to say and it's very difficult to work it out.
01:22:29.000But I do think as you gradually learn to live together, work together, as we gradually come together, I mean, it's like in the European Union, say in America, if certain parts of America or European Union are having a tough time, then money goes to those places having a tough time to try and get them back on their feet so that they can come back in and start making enough money to be able to help other parts.
01:23:31.000I still don't know what Reagan was doing in Grenada.
01:23:34.000Tenly veiled attempts to control natural resources.
01:23:37.000Yeah, well, I think that's what a lot of these are.
01:23:40.000Yeah, and you know, and then it's economic wars as opposed to...
01:23:44.000And then stopping terrorism in its tracks and trying to keep these radical terrorists from taking over certain countries and strongholds, but we really haven't done a good job of that.
01:23:55.000And there's political will you need to do that, and then...
01:23:59.000People in their countries, understandably, don't like people dying abroad.
01:24:04.000And then, you know, wars of defense, do they...
01:24:08.000I wonder whether that's going to happen.
01:24:10.000You know, there's this thing called right to defend, the idea that countries that are better set up should be able to go in or should be willing to go in and defend people having a really tough time and try to get the politics to work on that.
01:24:41.000Well, we don't even go in for North Korea.
01:24:43.000I mean, we're in this weird position with North Korea where we have this military dictator who's clearly...
01:24:49.000Oppressing his entire nation and this was strange to see in 2019 the limited internet I mean they have like an intranet they have like their own version of the internet where they have a few websites you could visit yeah they've got everybody locked down and extreme poverty extreme hunger like the the ones that have escaped from North Korea I mean if they've had these soldiers and they're malnourished they have parasites it's It's an awful,
01:26:23.000There was something like in Germany, something like 10,000 people were wanting to vote for the Nazi party, or maybe it's more, but that's a country of 80 million, so let's get the perspectives right.
01:26:33.000If certain things happen and they're on television, you go, whoa, and that's obviously why they do them, to create an outrage, get on television, and you go, wow, it's all over.
01:27:14.000I think World War II was a test for God, because 60 million people died, and at some point we were thinking, okay, how many people need to die before you come and blow a whistle and just say, whoa, what's the guy with the mustache doing?
01:27:27.000That was my test for God, and he didn't come, so I think it's up to us kids.
01:27:32.000Well, he didn't come when we, I mean, what they did, the Nazis did, was obviously horrific, but what we did when we dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that's pretty fucking horrific as well.
01:27:42.000No intervention whatsoever from the big guy.
01:28:42.000I think the Thais developed the best striking style, and then the Japanese developed the best grappling style.
01:28:48.000But the Japanese are known as more warlike than the Thais.
01:28:51.000You never hear of the Thai, or did they used to...
01:28:53.000The Thais figured out the best way to gamble on fights.
01:28:56.000They figured out the best, most brutal style of fight, and that is they incorporated a lot of things that other people didn't, including leg kicks and knees and elbows, and they fought really often.
01:29:10.000To this day, they have Lumpini Stadium and all these different stadiums in Bangkok.
01:29:16.000These stadium champions and they have matches on a consistent basis and so these people are fighting from the time they're really really young like they're taking like six and seven year old boys and girls as well and they're sending them off to these Thai camps and teaching them how to fight and then having them fight you know they'll have a hundred fights by the time they're 16. Wow.
01:29:38.000With Thailand, it's very strange because they're so friendly.
01:29:43.000They're so smiley and friendly, yet they developed probably the most fearsome, striking style on the planet.
01:31:13.000I think that, I think people, I mean, I follow Steven Pinker's logic of that people will sort of look at the horrible things that we have today and say, God, this world is terrible.
01:31:25.000There are definitely terrible aspects, but this is without doubt the greatest time ever to be alive that we've ever seen, at least in recorded human history.
01:32:18.000For nine years, I've been saying I'm going to politics, so I'm going next year.
01:32:21.000But it might not be a general election.
01:32:23.000I try and plan ahead because if I randomize it, if I just float, because a lot of people do, wow, this happened, and then that happened, and that could be a wonderful life.
01:32:34.000If you're canoeing down a river, If you go at the same speed as the river, it could throw you onto rocks, it could give you a wonderful ride, it could be anything.
01:32:46.000I have actively backpedaled against things.
01:32:49.000And sometimes, usually I'm pedaling faster than the speed of the river to try and guide myself through the river.
01:32:54.000You see that whenever I do these canoeing, well, anyone driving a boat through a river.
01:33:00.000When I look at human interactions objectively, part of me Yeah.
01:33:21.000Or relies upon negative things to reinforce positive things.
01:33:26.000That this yin and yang that we exist under, that we see the horrors of war and horrific poverty and all these terrible things and horrible violence, we see this and it actually serves to reinforce our desire for positive things and push our society in a more positive direction.
01:33:46.000I mean, I almost think that this is When we see national tragedies and shootings and all these different terrible, terrible things, there's all this fear and anger and frustration, but there's also action.
01:33:58.000And we might think there's a lack of action by politicians, or a lack of action by the police, or a lack of action by whoever we think should be responsible for mitigating these horrible situations that happen.
01:34:12.000But publicly, the social fabric of the world, the way people communicate and interact, I think it reinforces our desire to not have that happen.
01:34:21.000It reinforces our understanding of peace and our love of peace.
01:34:27.000And I think that these bad things that we see in our world, they almost propel us towards a better world because human beings are constantly striving for improvement and innovation.
01:34:50.000So my thought is that even what we're experiencing in this country, it seems at times that we're almost like on the brink of civil war between the right and the left and people lying on both sides and conflating people's opinions and changing people's perspectives in order to suit their own narrative.
01:35:07.000That I think that this, ultimately, all this angst, and you see it from the outside, and you look at it and you go, what the fuck are we doing?
01:35:14.000I think it's a natural part of the way human beings figure out life.
01:35:45.000It wasn't even the political will on that.
01:35:48.000If the Japanese hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor, we wouldn't have had you guys with us for D-Day and all the forces and the money and the armaments and the tanks.
01:36:02.000The Shermans coming in, you know, we needed that coming in.
01:36:05.000And without the Russian people, we wouldn't have won World War II. And they were in this agreement.
01:36:18.000On the Brexit, Brexit hate thing that's been going on is a lot of young people are coming on saying, so we're going to lose all this stuff, the ability.
01:36:24.000We could travel to Europe without visas.
01:36:46.000And also, once we get to a good place, I've noticed that a lot of people will say, okay, I'm not going to be politically active anymore.
01:36:52.000I'm just going to carry on doing my life and other people can sort things out.
01:36:56.000I've noticed that people will get activated to get to a result, maybe an election result or something or a referendum or whatever it is, and then they will just back off.
01:37:05.000Well, they just think, well, that's done.
01:37:07.000That's bagged in a positive way, maybe.
01:37:09.000And just say, but now I'm not even going to pay attention to what's going on.
01:37:12.000But things will start rolling backwards.
01:37:14.000So I think we're going to keep having it like that.
01:37:17.000Maybe the percentage of positive things to negative things has never changed over all the years, over the last 10,000 years.
01:37:26.000It's just there's more people in the world doing more positive things than doing more negative things.
01:37:30.000Maybe humanity hasn't changed because our brain sizes haven't changed, even back to the caveman days.
01:37:35.000Even back the last 100,000 years, the size of our brains has not moved.
01:37:39.000So if you went back to 70,000 years ago, we would still be able to have conversations like this, even though we wouldn't have the radios and the things.
01:39:22.000Well, I don't think it's a bloke upstairs floating in the clouds because they used to live in the clouds and then we flew through the clouds and no one ever mentioned, hey, he's not in the clouds.
01:40:05.000Randomizing thing, maybe we'll never know.
01:40:10.000But it has happened, and I just don't think a bloke did it upstairs with a big beard who said, now is the time that you speak, and now you make handbags, and now fight wars with the MG42. I just think it happened,
01:40:55.000You know, and I... So I despair about humanity, and I celebrate humanity.
01:41:04.000I do this thing, actually, which I think is nice.
01:41:06.000I'm going to say this, because obviously I'm doing a tour at the moment here in the U.S., but I'm going to come out of this U.S. tour on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, and I fly to Cannes in Normandy.
01:41:36.000But I go to Normandy, 75th anniversary of D-Day, and they fought the Battle of Normandy in German, obviously on one side, and then French and English on the other side.
01:42:13.000So it was partly a sort of low-level political thing.
01:42:17.000I just thought, if I'm an English guy going to France and doing it in French, then maybe a French kid would go, well, I'm going to do it in English.
01:42:40.000French kid, my friend, Yasin Berlus, has performed in Helsinki in Finland, and Finnish kids have been watching in the second language.
01:42:47.000They've been watching in English and listening in English.
01:42:50.000And he's been performing, a French guy performing in English, so they met and laughed in a second language, which I think is an amazing thing.
01:42:57.000But now you can tour the world that way.
01:42:59.000So I'm going to go to Normandy, and it's a commemoration that the battle happened, and it's 75 years ago, and it's a celebration that now we don't go to war in those three languages anymore.
01:43:12.000And you have different 50 minutes for French, different 50 minutes?
01:43:45.000Did he ever think that he one time as salade end up would have?
01:43:52.000So you've got the verb right at the end, but they still laugh at the same place, but maybe about half a second later, split a second later.
01:44:37.000If you work in a restaurant, anywhere you work where no one's giving you any English coming in, you just have to pick up the words and our survival instincts would pick them up.
01:44:45.000And then you might have a strong accent, but you, me, everyone, we can pick it up.
01:44:51.000So I just, again, I can set up this artificial scenario of I have to do this.
01:46:09.000And the comedies I do is sort of Python-esque.
01:46:13.000Monty Python type surreal comedy and so I just need to find that audience in France, that audience in Germany, that audience in Thailand if I was there.
01:46:48.000Unfortunately, less to the locals, they'd had these couple of earthquakes, which you tend to think, oh, everyone has earthquakes, but no, they hadn't had them for ages, and suddenly they had two bad earthquakes.
01:47:05.000But, no, it was a nice setup, but I played, you know, I went all through and played in Tokyo and I played in Hong Kong and in Shanghai and had all the guys from, because you have the people from the Communist Party come along to check you out.
01:47:21.000So I'm not going specifically in on certain things, but anyway, you know, my stuff is all...
01:47:47.000But it wasn't like I was going to change.
01:47:49.000I have weird stuff about Gandalf talking to butterflies and talking about my ancient kings like Henry VIII and William the Conqueror and stuff.
01:51:49.000And I could stand up there on my own and talk to no one and build up an audience.
01:51:53.000I would set out these tea cozies, which are little animal tea cozies, ducks and hamsters, weird things, things that just look like animals, and put them on the floor.
01:53:51.000How do you develop new material once that special's been released?
01:53:54.000I will do work-in-progress shows, which I took from Lily Tomlin, who did a lot of work-in-progress shows, and then she did her show on Broadway, I think.
01:54:02.000And I thought, because I used to do the old tour, and I used to tour, tour, tour, until at the end we'd film it.
01:54:07.000And I'd begin the next tour with the old tour and just keep improvising in the show, because I'd only improvise on stage, and by the end of the next tour it would be a different show.
01:54:16.000But that didn't sort of work for people because they said, we want a completely new show.
01:54:20.000So now I do this WIP shows, work-in-progress shows, and I will go on stage and muck about, just talking about chickens or banjos or helicopters.
01:54:29.000So do you have a structure when you start?
01:54:31.000Like, say if it's the day after your special's done, and now you have to work on a whole new special, you're doing a work-in-progress show.
01:54:40.000I did it once where I'd just say, okay, let's go through my life and So you may not know this, but I was living in Northern Ireland and I was born in Yemen.
01:54:48.000I've done this where I went, trawled through my life.
01:54:51.000I need some sort of structure, otherwise I'm stuck.
01:54:53.000I also found that once I'd recorded the show, like last tour, I toured for five years because I just found there were no rules on touring.
01:55:30.000And I suddenly thought, for the first time ever, because dogs have woofed at people all since the beginning of time, I thought, what is the dog actually trying to say?
01:55:37.000If the dog had Fox P2 injected into him so he could suddenly talk, what would he say to me?
01:57:17.000And this very conversational style that I have, which people say it's supposed to be improvisational.
01:57:23.000It's just I'm always ready to improvise at any point.
01:57:28.000Some people, if you write a thing, you say, well, that is how that piece goes and it's locked in.
01:57:32.000But if you improvise a thing, I've noticed, I came up with this thing of molten material.
01:57:36.000When you first create a new idea and it's working, it's very open and live, like Quicksilver, like Mercury, and then you can add another bit, another bit, another bit, and you can add another bit.
01:57:45.000Once you've got it into a shape, then it becomes locked down, it becomes like a prayer, and you can lose the joy of it.
01:57:50.000It becomes a recitation, and I thought, so don't ever have it locked down.
02:01:37.000Well, I was watching a film, Battle of Britain, and at the end it says, filmed on location in Spain and England, and at Pinewood Studios, Ivor Heath Bucks.
02:01:47.000And in the 70s, and if you remember, we didn't have videos.
02:02:17.000So I took a train from the south coast of England up to London, a tube train, an underground train, to a place called Uxbridge, then a bus to...
02:02:26.000This roundabout, and I got off, and I said, it's Pinewood Studios, and they said it's about half a mile down that road, so I marched down the road, and I got to the big gabled entrance where all the big stars would come in, and I went up, and I hadn't got this bit worked out, so I went up and I said, I'm going to be in films.
02:05:55.000Hitler had this idea of linking up with British and taking everyone on, which some people in Britain were for, and obviously a lot of us were against.
02:06:03.000And so it sat around this girls' school.
02:06:06.000And I was showing the badge, the blazer badge.
02:06:08.000All the girls had a blazer, a blue blazer.
02:06:10.000And it had a badge, and it had the name of the school, Augusta Victoria College.
02:06:15.000Bexhill on sea, and at the top it has a British flag and then the Nazi swastika next to it.
02:08:16.000My career just wouldn't, you know, left school, dropped out of university, couldn't get it going.
02:08:20.000And by the time it got going, when I was about 30, I thought, I'm now going to hold on to this comedy and start doing drama at the same time.
02:09:07.000I'm not sure if he's doing the comedy so much anymore, but exactly where Steve Carell's gone.
02:09:11.000John Lithgow could also say he was someone who had a very much dramatic career, but then he did Third Rock for the Sun, which he was beautiful in, and he was nominated every year and won two Emmys and nominated six times.
02:11:05.000Because I'm watching that and I'm thinking, okay, now I've gone through the clubs myself, but I did mine in the 80s and into the 90s, and that's in the 70s.
02:11:46.000I know, but to mix it together, he shouldn't have conflated the two.
02:11:49.000But he meant that we could say what we wanted to on stage.
02:11:52.000Yeah, the Mrs. Maisel thing makes it a little, it's a little homogenized, like him, like even his struggle, it's almost like it's no big deal.
02:14:02.000It's very difficult for British kids, or maybe even American kids of today, to know, because he's doing a lot of hipster references, a lot of, you know, the Sophie Tucker references, and there's a Lawrence Welch, is it?
02:14:15.000We don't know those guys, so when he was doing it, it goes to Sophie Tucker, and they're going, I've got to look up Sophie.
02:14:20.000I've had to look up some of the punchlines or a number of the references because without the references you can't get it.
02:14:26.000This is a trick I do in Universal Humor that I take either huge references or explain my references so that, you know, Caesar, everyone probably knows about Caesar, and if they don't, well, yeah, anyway.
02:14:37.000Well, as good as Lenny was, it's really hard for people to listen to that comedy today.
02:15:25.000And it's also, the culture is so significantly different between the late 50s and 60s, where Lenny Bruce was sort of starting out and making his mark, versus today.
02:15:35.000It's like the things that were naughty back then, the things that he could say that were controversial.
02:15:44.000Well, there was one that still was when he said, how many people using the N-word and the S-word, you know, he just went to all the racial epithets.
02:16:07.000And if you could use them again and again and again, and for the gay community, they've taken the word queer, they've claimed that so it doesn't have the force anymore.
02:20:45.000There's some fantastic recordings that I don't know where they are now, but they used to be able to buy them.
02:20:51.000I bought them at a truck stop, and they were from Red Fox's Comedy Club, and they were cassette tapes.
02:20:56.000And I was doing a road gig, and I think I found them, and I bought a bunch of them.
02:21:01.000And these recordings were, they just had set up a tape recorder, and he was doing these random sets at Red Fox's Comedy Club.
02:21:11.000It was a lot of experimenting, a lot of ad-libbing, a lot of, I mean, he was clearly high on stage.
02:21:17.000I mean, he would go on stage high a lot, and he would just ramble about stuff.
02:21:21.000And you would see these bits forming and coming out of that, and then some of those bits eventually would be on some of his more famous albums later.
02:21:32.000Just to see this guy who was just so...
02:21:34.000If you go from your traditional stand-up comedian from 1960, like you were seeing George Carlin on stage, to what Pryor was doing in the 70s.
02:22:37.000It'd just be a function room in a pub that existed for maybe hundreds and hundreds of years because all these pubs used to be taverns, drinking.
02:23:34.000I'm now doing more theater tours on this one.
02:23:37.000My audience has got a bit older, but anyway, jumping between the two, like playing Hollywood Bowl here, you know, in LA, that's such a beautiful thing to play.
02:24:54.000And I knew that Monty Python had played there, so I thought, I've got to play there.
02:24:57.000Well, it's beautiful, too, because it's all outdoors, and LA has such amazing weather, and you look around, you see the houses in the distance, and it's a special little spot.
02:26:45.000I write on my left hand, like it's a note to self, and I go, if I do pig farming, talking about pigs and stuff, I go, never talk about pig farming.
02:29:53.000I was playing New York, and they said, article, a guy was found living in one of the caves in the park in New York, and he was found to have a lot of women's shoes in there, so he's probably a transvestite.
02:30:04.000And I went, okay, well, that's weirdo transvestite.
02:30:12.000Then the action transvestite was just kind of a fun, because I was more kind of boysy about things, and I'll give people grief in the streets if they give me grief.
02:30:20.000And then after the marathons, it became a different thing, and everyone just went, oh.
02:30:27.000I've had some, you know, I remember a guy, this was a very interesting altercation, because there's hardly any words in it, so I live near Victoria Coach Station in London most of the time when I'm around, and I was walking down there, and anyway, it's a coach station,
02:30:42.000so people are traveling all over Europe from there, and I walked up, and I was in girl mode, and this guy looked at me, he said, hey, Eddie Izzard, you run all those marathons, and you wear all that clobber, which is And then he went,
02:35:00.000The biggest controversy in America in terms of transgender people, probably the biggest, or one of the biggest, is competing in sports with biological women.
02:36:08.000You just make it all even and then we get outside a lot of problems.
02:36:13.000Some people will have pushback on that and have other reasons why they don't like it.
02:36:16.000A lot of women don't want to be in a washroom with men, though.
02:36:19.000Well, they already are going into, if they're sharing it in the loo's in the airplane, if they're sharing it in a...
02:36:24.000Yeah, but an airplane is one, you know, it's only one person to go in there.
02:36:28.000I think their concern is there's, you know, some men are fucking creeps.
02:36:32.000And some women just want to have a place where they could just be themselves and just check their makeup and go to the bathroom and wash and talk amongst other women.
02:36:42.000It's just I've, you know, if you think about anything that's going to change anything, there's usually something that won't change.
02:36:50.000Right, but the only reason to do this is to accommodate people who are transgender in a way that it seems like it doesn't put them in a position where they can be judged because everyone's doing it.
02:37:01.000Well, if it stops bullying in schools, then there's a number of things in there that it can make easier.
02:37:09.000It just makes a whole area of things a lot easier.
02:37:31.000And they just punish the creeps, which is really what you, I mean, if someone's being a creep in a bathroom, the problem is the creep, it's not the bathroom.
02:37:40.000Anyway, so this is, you know, I haven't scientifically proved this with chemicals and a slide rule or whatever, but it's an idea that gets us to a better place and surely we're all somewhere on the spectrum of something.
02:37:58.000That anyone who is expressing themselves in a different way, that that is a problem.
02:38:04.000If you take it by just straight, if we all went back to how we used to think that there was just men and women and everyone had straight sex, even that sex, no one would talk about that.
02:38:13.000People, you know, Victorian age and your equivalent Victorian age, no one would talk about that.
02:39:19.000They might have had male and female toys in the Roman times, but just the fact that they were more open about the idea that it's bodily functions.
02:39:41.000Has the attitude, besides the marathon thing, has the attitude culturally shifted in the UK the same way it's shifted in America where people are more?
02:40:01.000This is from anyone that feels slightly out of the loop.
02:40:04.000If you can have any positive role models that go out there that do other things, just something that's nothing to do with sexuality, you're very good at cooking.
02:41:17.000As long as you're not interfering with other people's lives, as long as you're not doing something that somehow or another fucks with someone else, who cares?
02:41:34.000My issue with this that I've come across is with athletes.
02:41:39.000It's with transgender athletes competing against women, particularly in my field, in fighting.
02:41:44.000There's been some, there have been, at least there was one very vocal case, one very public case, of a transgender athlete who was male for 30 plus years, transitioned over for a couple years, for two years, and then started fighting women.
02:42:00.000Didn't tell them that she used to be a man.
02:42:24.000I think one of the interesting things about it is that there are no real answers, that it's one of those things where you just got to go, huh, what do we do here?
02:42:37.000And this is what I think one of the more unique things about being a person is that we have this opportunity to look at this unusual circumstance and communicate about it and try to figure it out.
02:42:52.000I just knew, on my personal thing, if I came out, if we started talking about it, we'd get in a better place than not talking about it and just saying it's a negative thing.
02:43:00.000When you came out, did it give you a feeling of relief?
02:44:30.000And if I look very female, then I might wear different things or express myself in a different way, but I look kind of more boyish, more male-ish, so I have to choose certain clothes,
02:46:22.000I say quite often, you know, this is a genetic thing because I didn't feel I got up, you know, when I was 23 and a half and I said, I think I've all become all transgender now.
02:46:31.000No, I was four or five when I first knew, and it has not moved those thoughts.
02:46:37.000So I think it is for most gay, lesbian people I've talked to, I just think it's locked and it's built in.
02:46:42.000It's something you get given these cards, as I say, and we're trying to be upfront and be positive and express ourselves.
02:46:48.000Well, it only makes sense when you look at the other variabilities.
02:46:50.000The other variables when it comes to people's personality, their body shape, their mentality, their drive, their ambition, all these different variables.
02:46:59.000It only makes sense that there's feminine and masculine variables and that these shift back and forth with certain people and that certain people are just like they're somewhere like where you are, where you have boy mode and girl mode.
02:47:12.000And I would imagine that you're talking about it so openly and that you're just so free with it.
02:47:18.000That there's probably people out there that are listening to this.
02:47:22.000And the youngest young people around the world, I have met people who are talking about it in school.
02:47:30.000Actually, when I came back from South Africa, my co-writer, Kellen Jones, he said, can you go in?
02:47:35.000My daughter's in class, and they've been talking about your runs in South Africa.
02:47:39.000So I went in, and they could talk about racism, because I was running a salute to the Mandela, 27 marathons to his 27 years he had to spend in prison.
02:47:47.000So they could talk about racism, but they could also talk about being trans, transgender, or self-identifying and LGBT stuff.
02:47:54.000Because there was some kid in the class who was already identifying, wanted to identify as a girl.
02:48:19.000Did you run into girls that had an issue with it?
02:48:26.000People that I know less of, but if you talk about relationships, it gets really tricky because it reflects upon people's relationships with yourself.
02:48:35.000But it's cool, and I've never been great at relationships.
02:51:07.000Yeah, and if the person on stage is having a good time, then the audience would probably have a better time.
02:51:12.000And this thing of it's not being locked down, that it's living and breathing in front of them, they do love that, and you put more energy into the next bit, and then this, and then that, and the other thing.
02:51:23.000Yeah, so I do love stellar because it's, you know, you can just do it and do it and, you know, there's no one.
02:51:32.000And whenever you, if you're even just a double act, if you go off on a tangent, then you have to look across to your partner and your partner's going, what?
02:52:19.000It was really nice to cruise down his life and do stand-up as close to him as I could.
02:52:26.000Even the mainstream, I did more mainstream stuff and then the really edgy stuff and the weird stuff and where Jesus comes at the back and you've got St. Pat's Cathedral, that whole sequence where he's got, call the Pope, call the Pope, Jesus is here.
02:53:49.000And physically quite grueling and mentally really grueling.
02:53:51.000And together, I was knackered and I probably just wasn't drinking enough water.
02:53:55.000I should have, you know, I tend to think, I don't know, this is a me trait, definitely, that I will just carry on until I get ill.
02:54:05.000I won't necessarily think, okay, you're going into a stress period now, so let's get some good water on, let's eat some healthy food so that nothing comes in and takes you out.
02:54:14.000You just bulldoze your way through things?
02:55:24.000Charlie Burnett was a guy who was one of the original street stand-up comics in New York, and he would do that in Washington Square Park and gather everyone around.
02:55:32.000There's video of it that people could watch online.
02:55:34.000I think he might have come over to England at one point.