Not Sucking At Fatherhood, DIY & Halloween - Alfie Brown | Modern Wisdom Podcast 395

Chris Williamson 0:00 It's like you wear the baby as a backpack, but it's on your front, whatever that's called.

Alfie Brown 0:04 A papoose.

Chris Williamson 0:05 Is that what it's called?

Alfie Brown 0:06 A papoose.

Chris Williamson 0:08 Very nice.

Alfie Brown 0:09 And then they all say ergonomic on them nowadays, because that's a word that we now like. Un-ergonomic papooses kill people. And I don't know, ergonomic means it, like, works with your body. Well, yeah, it should have always been ergonomic. One of these words that you've used to... Like skin-friendly soap. Yeah, I was hoping-

Chris Williamson 0:24 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 0:24 ... that it was gonna be skin-friendly. I was gonna use it on my skin. What are you... (wind blowing)

Chris Williamson 0:32 Alfie Brown, welcome to the show.

Alfie Brown 0:34 Thanks so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Chris Williamson 0:37 It's a pleasure to have

Chris Williamson 0:38 you. Last night was Halloween. How did you, how did you spend your Halloween?

Alfie Brown 0:43 Um, I always, uh, spend my Halloween with the lights off, uh, with my knees tucked, uh, in between my arms, pretending that I'm not in, uh, so that I don't have to... Um, and that is, that's the way I've been for about the last decade. So to now have kids that want to, to have to be more involved, the l- the tiny involvement that I used to have as a, as a man with no children, has now been just so greatly, uh, exaggerated and has, has, has galloped forth into this most unpleasant of areas. Um, so I just don't have the same patience faculty for other people's children as I do for mine. Quite understandably from an evolutionary perspective. Why would I care about them? But that means, like, to tolerate them is such a, i- i- it's (laughs) such a drain on your resources as a human being. Uh, so, uh, my... I was lucky, I've looked after my baby whilst my, uh, girlfriend took my, uh, two elder children out trick or treating. But the day before, my, it was my son's birthday party. He had a, uh, seventh birthday party, and, uh, and it was a Halloween-themed thing. So we all played games and I got them all to do their scariest laughs, and I had to kind of, like, compere the thing. There's no scarier gig than that, compereing a child's birthday party. Man, oh, man, it was a nightmare. Uh, that was the true Halloween experience.

Chris Williamson 2:19 I love how you're, you've been sort of labeled as, "He's a performer." You're used to being on stage, aren't you? I mean, comedian, child's perfo- I just go, six and two, three, you must have all... You've got the mics. I mean, you've got the skills.

Alfie Brown 2:30 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 2:30 You can do this. People just presume-

Alfie Brown 2:33 It's-

Chris Williamson 2:33 ... that you're used to being on stage, so you can do kid stuff.

Alfie Brown 2:35 I said this the other day on, uh, but I, I'll, I'll... I'm happy to, uh, say it again. Um, I have performed at Cardiff, uh, Jonglers, which is in an Oceana with fish tanks that sort of, um, blockade the hen parties in, uh, so that they can't leave. I think I was on at about 11 o'clock at night because the gig had been delayed, so all they'd had to do was drink. And that audience still had more of a kind of semblance of care about my ego than the seven-year-olds. And as soon as you display any sort of like, "I'm a cool, fun guy who likes kids," the children will just start hitting you. Where, wh- can you tell me about that? Can anybody, can a psychologist please report to me on how or why children, as soon as they... "I'll just hit you now."

Chris Williamson 3:28 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 3:31 Three of them, because they like... 'cause I did silly, scary, funny laughs. "I'll hit him now."

Chris Williamson 3:38 That was them showing affection?

Alfie Brown 3:40 Yeah. Is it like pulling on my pigtails? Is that what it's like? Like, saying, "I like you, so I'll hit you," because I don't know how to express myself because my brain's not fully developed?

Chris Williamson 3:48 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 3:50 Is that what it is? (laughs) I've absolutely no idea. But, um, I think I did quite a good job. The weird thing is, because of the kind of comedy that I do, lots of people have always, um, uh, like, crappy comperes have always taken me off stage by going, "Um, there's Alfie Brown, he is available for children's parties." Well, yeah, I am actually.

Chris Williamson 4:13 (laughs) Yeah, and he's experienced.

Alfie Brown 4:13 And I'm pretty good at it, pretty good at it, actually. Managed not to say anything awful. Did a kind of light-hearted joke, the parents liked it. You know, it was a... It was actually a really lovely day. And it, the crucial thing was it only lasted three hours.

Chris Williamson 4:27 Very, very, very nice.

Alfie Brown 4:28 I think that was the

Narrator 4:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:29 My, uh, my business partner has... He's got three little ones. He's got a three, four-month-old, two-year-old, and a four-year-old, and two dogs, and a wife. And I'm, I'm pretty sure that they managed to coordinate an outfit. They were all werewolves, including the dogs-

Alfie Brown 4:48 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 4:49 ... yesterday. So they went out trick or treating. (laughs)

Alfie Brown 4:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:52 And my, my business partner's got one of those... You, you... It's like you wear the baby as a backpack, but it's on your front, whatever that's called.

Alfie Brown 4:59 A papoose.

Chris Williamson 5:01 Is that what it's called?

Alfie Brown 5:02 A papoose.

Chris Williamson 5:03 Very nice.

Alfie Brown 5:04 It's, it's, it's, it's called a pa... And then they all say ergonomic on them nowadays, because that's a word that we now like. 'Cause it... Well, un-ergonomic papooses kill people.

Chris Williamson 5:15 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 5:15 Or whatever it is that they do.

Chris Williamson 5:16 Well, yeah, it just corrupts you. What's it built for?

Alfie Brown 5:17 Break, break your kids' ribs. And I don't know, ergonomic means it, like, works with your body. Well, yeah, it should have always been ergonomic. One of these words that you've used to... Like skin-friendly soap. Yeah, I was hoping-

Chris Williamson 5:28 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 5:28 ... that it was gonna be skin-friendly. I was gonna use it on my skin. What are you... Uh, anyway. Um, yes, that sounds good. I didn't quite... I wanted to be The Joker, uh.

Chris Williamson 5:42 Oh, you've got the-

Alfie Brown 5:43 And, like a-

Chris Williamson 5:43 You've kind of got the hair if you could, if you could dye it. You could kind of pull a little bit of the, the hairstyle off.

Alfie Brown 5:48 Yeah, I think so. I think, I mean, depending on which era Joker. I think, I, the one I'd most like to be is Jack Nicholson. And nowadays, I think he's the most kid friendly. I don't think you can go as incel Joker to a seven-year-old's birthday party.

Chris Williamson 6:01 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 6:03 ... and you.

Chris Williamson 6:05 Black pill. Black, the theme of this kids' party is the black pill.

Alfie Brown 6:08 Yeah. (laughs) Okay.

Chris Williamson 6:12 So you didn't do the Joker?

Alfie Brown 6:14 Uh, no. No, no, no. There just wasn't the time, uh, t- between, you know, working and trying to sell, uh, myself, um, essentially in the various different mediums that it's incumbent upon one to sell oneself. Uh, there just wasn't time to go into Soho and pick up a big purple suit or whatever it was I would've liked to have done, and I didn't want to half-ass it, so-

Chris Williamson 6:36 What did you r- what did you go as, then?

Alfie Brown 6:39 I, well, I was a, I went, uh, dad to a chil- a dad to a children's birthday party.

Chris Williamson 6:42 That sounds a lot-

Alfie Brown 6:43 That's scary enough.

Chris Williamson 6:43 ... like non-committal.

Alfie Brown 6:45 Uh, I, well, I, I didn't actually go as anything, I just went as myself.

Chris Williamson 6:49 Okay.

Alfie Brown 6:49 Uh, I didn't, I didn't dress up. The ad- none of the adults dressed up.

Chris Williamson 6:52 Ah. So had you-

Alfie Brown 6:53 Apart from my mum.

Chris Williamson 6:53 ... gone as the Joker, you would've been the only one.

Alfie Brown 6:56 Yeah. But I was, as the kinda host of the event, I thought that would've been appropriate, you know?

Chris Williamson 7:01 'Cause it gives you the illusion of authority.

Alfie Brown 7:04 Uh, yeah. And, like, I'm the one, you know what I'm for if I'm the one that's dressed up.

Chris Williamson 7:08 Mm.

Alfie Brown 7:08 Don't you? Or you know that I'm the one that's about to be, like, you can't... It almost looks weirder that I'm joining in all the children's games not dressed up. I just look like a kinda creepy, overenthusiastic adult. Whereas if I was in, like, a kit, then other people would've gone, "Okay, good. That's what his role tonight is."

Chris Williamson 7:25 Yeah. He's the-

Alfie Brown 7:26 I-

Chris Williamson 7:26 ... authority here.

Alfie Brown 7:27 He's aesthetically provided us with context for the way he's behaving.

Chris Williamson 7:30 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 7:30 Whereas just seeing me in a cotton Oxford shirt, they'd say, "Who this, who's this creep getting hit by my kid? Loser. Stop talking to Reuben."

Chris Williamson 7:40 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 7:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 7:40 My business partner's, my business partner's kid's called Reuben. So he's, I'm, I'm pretty adamant that Darren has crawled out of the working class on the shoulders of his children's names.

Alfie Brown 7:59 (laughs) Yes. Yes.

Chris Williamson 8:01 Reuben, Cooper, and Zahra with a H.

Alfie Brown 8:06 Wow. Wow.

Chris Williamson 8:08 Beautiful names, beautiful kids, fucking absolute dream family, but I do have to remind him every so often that he's from Adel in Leeds and no matter w- h- how fancy the names are that you give your children, you're always gonna be from that-

Alfie Brown 8:25 Yeah, but he's a business owner as well.

Chris Williamson 8:27 Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alfie Brown 8:28 So, like, he's, he, he is, he's craw- he has a...

Chris Williamson 8:31 We both have feet in-

Alfie Brown 8:32 I don't, I, I, I don't think that I should say the word crawled, but, um, you can say crawled, I suppose. Uh, I, I, well, it doesn't sound well when a posh bloke says it. Um, uh, yeah. Yeah. I ma- I, that is what I'm always reminding my friend, um, uh, Vaz about is that kinda class changes. He's much more middle class than I am. Just 'cause I, 'cause he came from Hounslow and I came from, you know, a l- a leafy suburb of West London. Uh, and now he, you know, likes, um, cooking with samphire and drinking red wine, and a star of anise and I don't, I don't know. He's, he's a, he's actually a brilliant, brilliant cook. Uh, and, um, uh, but class is, what's the, what's the word? It's, you can, you can move. It shifts about.

Chris Williamson 9:19 Yeah, yeah.

Alfie Brown 9:19 I mean, that's what my mum, that's what my mum did. She was, she was, uh, you know, a working class girl, and then became middle class, and then she had a middle class child, and now I'm earning a very working class wage.

Chris Williamson 9:36 (laughs) I did all of this work.

Alfie Brown 9:38 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 9:38 Do you know how hard I worked to fucking get us out of this?

Alfie Brown 9:41 Class mobile, that's what I was-

Chris Williamson 9:43 You've-

Alfie Brown 9:43 ... trying to think of. It's mo-

Chris Williamson 9:44 ... chosen, chosen-

Alfie Brown 9:44 It's, it's mobile.

Chris Williamson 9:44 ... the only career that could've sent you back a generation.

Alfie Brown 9:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Entertainment.

Chris Williamson 9:49 Fuck.

Alfie Brown 9:50 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 9:50 Fucking fuck.

Alfie Brown 9:52 As a, as a, as a, as a completely unmarketable, uh, human man.

Chris Williamson 9:58 What do you think-

Alfie Brown 9:58 What a shame.

Chris Williamson 9:59 ... why, why unmarketable? What's wrong with, what's, what's the challenge with the marketing?

Alfie Brown 10:03 Um, I don't think I have a strong enough identity. I think people, uh, you need to be good at... Have you ever written a treatment for a TV program?

Chris Williamson 10:11 I know what they are.

Alfie Brown 10:13 Uh, when you write a treatment for a TV program, uh, you have something underneath the title called a logline, which is essentially, you know, the program is, uh, it's called, th- the show's called Red and, uh, it's a sitcom. Uh, it's like, uh, Only Fools and Horses meets a caravanning holiday. And that's what it is, it's, uh, Only Fools and Horses meets a cara-... And that's, oh, okay, I know exactly what it is. I almost don't need to read the rest of this because everything I'm about to read has been so informed by the logline. And I think as a comedian now, you need to have a good logline, and I don't have a good logline. Uh, I mean, at least, it, it, I don't, uh, it's fairly nondescript. I suppose having children helps and, uh, the style of comedy that I do sort of helps. Most of my shows have, uh, thematically, um, similar structures and, uh, not structures but, uh, they're thematically similar, I should say. Um, and I, maybe it's one of those things, like, uh, you and I were speaking about when it's you, you're a very bad judge of what it is.

Chris Williamson 11:28 Mm-hmm.

Alfie Brown 11:29 Uh, but I even think that the way that I, I was thinking about this, and I don't think it, like, looks particularly good or maybe likable or maybe it's, again, me overthinking it that when we think about how we dress, we think about how we're aesthetically presenting ourselves, especially as somebody who's on stage performing and delivering a, a set of ideas to an audience and performing them with some sort of attitude that befits what I've made decisions about. I've made a decision to have a beard, albeit that might be because I just thought it might be a good way to, uh, put my chin into the singular.

Chris Williamson 12:03 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 12:04 Uh...

Chris Williamson 12:05 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 12:07 (laughs) Um, uh, but I've made a decision about everything, so why not? I, I, I, I wear these shirts, these kind of nondescript cotton Oxford shirts from business suit kind of providers, and think, "Why am I hiding, uh, so much?" Uh, so maybe thinking more in these terms about how we're, um, uh, presenting ourselves isn't something to be sniffed at. I think comedy purists have this idea whereby they think, "Well, I just want to do jokes, and I'm a joke purist." But I think the whole element of performance, just because, uh, cinema is a visual medium doesn't mean that we don't think, uh, about the music or about the font of the titles or, um, you know-

Chris Williamson 12:52 And it's all cohesive.

Alfie Brown 12:53 ... whatever. It's all cohesive, yeah. And I think I need to be thinking a little bit more in- uh, cohesively about things like my logline and my aesthetic. If you look at the pictures for the last series of Live at the Apollo, they were all dressed like cartoon characters. Like every- and it's great. They all look great. Everybody on it looks, everybody on it looks great. Uh, but, uh, they all are dressed v- w- as, uh, in statement pieces.

Chris Williamson 13:20 Yeah.

Alfie Brown 13:21 Uh-

Chris Williamson 13:21 It's like archetypes, right? It's the-

Alfie Brown 13:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 13:23 ... same as when you have a TV show and you know that the maiden, uh, is got big eyes, and the villain wears black, and the hero's sort of muscled like this, and the nerd's got glasses, and it's a shortcut because it, it's an energy-saving device for our brains. I don't need to work out, "Oh, hang on a second. I, I had this vision of him, but then he's, he's added this bit on the side, like a lump of clay that doesn't look like it's supposed to be there. And what's that bit? 'Cause that bit, I thought, I thought I had this sphere, this perfect round ball, that was a box that I could put him in, but now there's this bit on the side of it." And, um, yeah. That's... I, I think about this a lot actually. Uh, I did a TEDx Talk at the start of the year about something very similar, about the fact that we live our lives in archetypes and we, we look to the examples that other people set and that (clears throat) that cohesion, that ease of, uh, being able to work out what, what someone is, what someone's-

Alfie Brown 14:15 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 14:15 ... what someone's got going on, it lends... Uh, it, it makes affinity more easy with people. Um, but the problem is if you don't fall into one of those archetypes naturally, you end up having to be performative in order to do that. So a lot of people, they are friends with others based on a performance, a role that they're playing of the person that they think their friends want them to be. So I see this with young guys a lot. I do a lot of nightlife, and you see, I, there's... I was one of them. I was a, a professional party boy for a decade, as a guy who now wants to talk about whether you can genetically engineer human life to reach other star systems or the philosophical basis for good. Like, that's-

Alfie Brown 14:54 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:55 (laughs) ... you know, so standing in the front door of a nightclub was never facilitating that, but I'd created this, this person that I could be 'cause it was effective and, and, and people could, could get it. "Oh, it's Chris. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big name on campus. Yeah, yeah, yeah." Shagger in that. And that was the persona. Um, but the sacrifice that you make is that if you don't fall into one of those charact- uh, characteristics, uh, one of those archetypes, that you end up having to kind of shave bits off you.

Alfie Brown 15:22 Uh, how conscious is this persona? Like, at the time, if you're saying this persona that you had is, you know, party boy, great night out, good pint, good shagger, whatever. Uh, big shagger, not good shagger. I couldn't possibly comment. Um, but how, when you're in... 'Cause that's 10 years.

Chris Williamson 15:40 Yeah.

Alfie Brown 15:41 Are you going home the next day going, "God, I really better read more about Aristotle's Eudaimonia," or-

Chris Williamson 15:47 No, no, no. So that, that was, um, me just doing the thing that I thought would get me popular. So all I was trying to do was please other people.

Alfie Brown 15:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 15:55 And my route to doing that was split testing a type of me, and then when one of them was successful, just continuing to go down it. But it wasn't, uh, it wasn't thought out in advance, it wasn't done reflectively, and it took t- 10 years and then a, a season of Love Island for me to go, "Oh, fuck. What, how did I get here? This really doesn't feel... There's something wrong." And then you do a ton of self-work and inquiry, and you scrape off all of the mud and the, the, the feces that has accumulated on top of the person that you are. And then eventually, you get to something that approximates truth, right? You end up going, "Right. All of this that I thought I was, all of these opinions I had, all of these ideas about the world-

Alfie Brown 16:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 16:32 ... all of these ways of living, all of the things that I held up in esteem, and all of the things that I didn't, okay. Right. What have I, what have I got left? Well, fuck knows. I'll just keep going, keep digging, keep digging, keep digging." And then eventually, you s- you hit something that seems a bit more firm and you go, "Okay. Maybe I can, maybe I can start speaking some truth forward from here."

Alfie Brown 16:51 Wow. That's so interesting. That's so interesting.

Chris Williamson 16:55 The differences-

Alfie Brown 16:55 And also kind of, but it's also terrifying in a way because if you're, uh, enveloped in something that is, um... I'm not sure if artifice is the right word, but a construction based on something, uh, e- exte- like, uh, based on trying to find yourself based on, uh, uh, uh, things that are exterior rather than interior. Like, outwardly reflecting and letting the outward realm affect who you are and who you present yourself as. It's just, um, if you can... I mean, do you feel like that's, like, lost time or important time? I imagine you're kind of quite stoic about the whole thing.

Chris Williamson 17:38 Yeah. It's just, it's, it was time, you know? Maybe that was the route.

Alfie Brown 17:42 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:42 (laughs) Maybe-

Alfie Brown 17:44 It was time.

Chris Williamson 17:46 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 17:46 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:47 I, I, I'd, I couldn't-

Alfie Brown 17:48 That sounds like something Yoda would say. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:51 (laughs) Yeah. "There is no good or bad. There is just time." Um-

Alfie Brown 17:55 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:56 Yeah. Uh, there, uh, there was no alternative. You know, I, I, I discovered the thing when I discovered the thing. I realized that there was a discordance between the person I was and the p- persona I was playing when I discovered it. And that, that came about. Now, the difference and the difficulty that I can see with yourself is that comedic personas...... they, they're important. And I've actually taken over the last couple of months, uh, my comedy coach, Dec, has been working with me, and I, I, I just wanted to become a, learn how comedy works. I thought this would be fun. It's a skill, good skill to acquire. And the first thing that he started talking about was comedic personas, about the fact that you have an offering that kind of positions you in terms of power. It's the, "I know what this person is when they step on stage." Right?

Alfie Brown 18:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:41 You know Peter Kay.

Alfie Brown 18:43 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:43 You know, he comes out on stage, very strong comedic persona. You understand. You, you get him.

Alfie Brown 18:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:48 Um, someone with a much more sort of subtle comedic persona would be like a James Acaster perhaps 'cause it's kind of like a bit, like, "Okay, is it, is he, is he, is he sort of, uh-

Alfie Brown 18:58 (coughs)

Chris Williamson 18:58 ... being childish? Is he being kind of, like, funny? Is he awkward? Is he cool?" And then he's pivoted with this most recent one, and he's, like-

Alfie Brown 19:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:04 ... pretending to be a rockstar type thing. Um, but-

Alfie Brown 19:07 I think that works in the context of his former shows though.

Chris Williamson 19:10 Yes.

Alfie Brown 19:10 Like, we, we, we, now that we know who James Acaster is, it's really interesting to see James Acaster break who we thought he was.

Chris Williamson 19:17 Yes.

Alfie Brown 19:18 It's, uh, that was really, really, really exciting. I mean, I think that the heat was very good at... Like, I think it's, it is more subtle than Peter Kay's persona, I sup- uh, uh, uh, you know, I, I, I suppose, but I don't think that, uh, I think that James Acaster was brilliant at building this, uh, aesthetic, brilliant at building this, you know, i- in advance had three shows that began with R and had a similar style poster and did them all in a row in Edinburgh, and they were all kind of brilliant, similar but different enough, th- you know, similar enough that they were cohesive and different enough that they were, um, th- they were brilliant as kind of standalone features. And, uh, I, um, I, yeah, it's, it's certainly, uh, uh, it's certainly hard to puzzle out, and I think actually one of the things that comedians often undervalue or perhaps they don't speak about enough is that, um, self-awareness. When people... But almost more important than wit, I think, is self-awareness. If you, if I know more about you, and this is th- in small amounts, if I know more about you than you do, you're fucked. Okay? That you're just immediately not funny. It's over. Okay? It's totally over. You, I cannot know more about you, uh, than you do. And that's why when, you know, these blokes do these jokes on stage and they go, "The thing about women is..." And you go, "Well, I immediately know too much about you. Okay? And m- uh, much more that you do. You have some, you know, uh, middling to quite severe psychosexual issues that you haven't worked through, and I can't laugh at you now because I have the power, and you don't. Okay?" Uh, (laughs) sorry, uh, made myself laugh. And, um, uh, you know, I remember seeing all sorts of... That's, that's, that's like, in his, in as tiny amount is you can't go on stage with your zip undone or, like, your fly undone. And then everybody goes, "Well, lost it."

Chris Williamson 21:10 Yeah.

Alfie Brown 21:10 Okay?

Chris Williamson 21:10 (clears throat)

Alfie Brown 21:10 "You've lost your power. Sorry." And, or up to, "We can tell-"

Chris Williamson 21:15 (clears throat)

Alfie Brown 21:15 ... "that there's something up, uh, with you, uh, because of the kind of jokes that you're doing. Why are you choosing to say that?"

Chris Williamson 21:22 Yes.

Alfie Brown 21:22 "Why are you choosing to tell us that?" And even if, uh, audiences aren't conscious of it, they'll sort of subconsciously interpret your weakness unless they are as weak as you, which is why, you know, m- more basic comedians tend to have more basic-

Chris Williamson 21:37 Basic crowds.

Alfie Brown 21:38 ... fans. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:38 Yeah, the... So, there's a, a YouTube channel that I found yesterday called Comedy Without Errors. Have you seen this?

Alfie Brown 21:44 No, I'm interested.

Chris Williamson 21:46 Bro, it is awesome. It is so-

Alfie Brown 21:49 Okay.

Chris Williamson 21:49 ... sick. So, it's a, a guy, British guy, who obviously really, really fucking understands comedy, and he's just done breakdowns of different s- comedic styles. So, James Ac- Acaster's got a 30 or 40-minute breakdown where he explains all of the different elements of how it worked in terms of storylines on there. Um-

Alfie Brown 22:10 Oh, my God. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 22:11 He's got, uh, he's got one about Dave Chappelle and about how Dave Chappelle uses callbacks. He's got one about, uh, how to deal with hecklers. And it's, it, it's part of a body of work. There's three different styles of doing. Comedy Without Errors, fucking outstanding YouTube channel. I was fascinated. I always thought he was really, really fucking cool. So-

Alfie Brown 22:30 Big shout-out to Comedy Without Errors.

Chris Williamson 22:32 Comedy Without Errors. Uh, I wanna talk about, um, being a dad and when you start to do, like, dad stuff-

Alfie Brown 22:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 22:41 ... because I'm not a dad yet, that I know of. And the, the gulf between me and my father-

Alfie Brown 22:53 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:53 ... when he was my father, he still is my father, but you know what I mean, when I was a child and things needed doing-

Alfie Brown 23:00 And he was your age.

Chris Williamson 23:00 ... doing, like, DIY or going to the sh- the, to just thi- dad, dad, dad shit, right?

Alfie Brown 23:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 23:07 I just feel like there are certain archetypal dad qualities that I don't have. W- do they... What happens? Do you do a course? Is, do they-

Alfie Brown 23:18 (sighs)

Chris Williamson 23:18 ... just arise?

Alfie Brown 23:20 Uh, well, I think, uh, that there is an element of, um, uh, sinking, uh, well, swim, trying to swim and indeed sinking, uh, or, or, or, or puzzling it out. I don't think it's ever been easier because there are lots of YouTube t- tutorials on how to, um, on how to resurface your deck, which is, I think, uh, you know, pretty, m- I think that's like advanced dadding, isn't it? Uh, y- you know, when you get your, uh, power washer and you power o- off, wash off all the old varnish and you re-varnish your, your deck.

Chris Williamson 23:53 That's peak dad.

Alfie Brown 23:55 Um, (clicks tongue) I was pretty bad at that, and I think we lost the deposit on that flat. Uh, so I (laughs) did have to make many apologies to many different people sadly. Uh, but, (laughs) so stupid. I repainted it orange, and, like, without asking the landlord. What an idiot. Uh, tried to put up lots of shelves, but there was loads of, like, bits of m- m- metal in the concrete so the drill wouldn't go in, so I couldn't put up the sh- I felt like I'd r-... And this is lockdown, and lockdown was my first-... foray into, um, into, i- i- into, into trying to do the more DIY stuff. In terms of being a provider, I earn significantly less than my partner, Jessie. So, I mean, I d- I do understand there is a, uh, maybe an evolutionary impulse that you have to overcome to want to kinda come home with a zebra in your jaws and say, "Look what I got for everybody. Isn't it great that I made sure that everybody's still alive?" I ... Y- ... A- and there's an extent to which I feel t- or feel decorative as a father. Um ...

Chris Williamson 25:06 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 25:06 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:06 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 25:10 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:15 (laughs) The sperm donor that stayed around. (laughs)

Alfie Brown 25:17 Yeah. Like, uh ... (laughs) This sperm donor's keen, isn't he?

Chris Williamson 25:23 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 25:23 Look at him, still knocking about after seven years.

Chris Williamson 25:26 (coughs)

Alfie Brown 25:27 Loser. Um, (laughs) so, uh, I, uh, I, I, I, I mean, I'm really grateful for, uh, my ... But she ... Like, the, when you're s- looking at her with a newborn and you see her breastfeeding, and then, like, earning the money as well, you think, "Well, shall I ... What shall I do? Shall I just h- am I, shall I ha- hack, uh, can I go to the pub, then, if you're gonna do that?"

Chris Williamson 25:55 (laughs) If you've got-

Alfie Brown 25:55 If you've got enough-

Chris Williamson 25:55 ... everything sorted.

Alfie Brown 25:57 If you've got, if you've got a handle on everything, I'll just go out and see Vas for a bit. He's cooking, um, uh, a, a goose or something. Uh, (laughs) there you go, Chappelle, there's a callback.

Chris Williamson 26:08 Yeah.

Alfie Brown 26:08 Uh, so yeah. I, I mean, it, uh, uh, it made me feel incredibly uneasy, and I think, uh, perhaps I overcompensated with my desire to be a shelf, uh, putting up father type person. But, um, yeah. Uh, i- i- it, it, you know. Uh, there we are. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 26:32 There is a, there is definitely a sense, especially, I think, in earlier, when, when kids are just born, I mean, again, this is all voyeuristic, uh, second and third order told to me. But that, uh, for instance, I have a buddy who was in high, high echelons of the US Marines, and he's been to war multiple times, done tons and tons of tours, and said that he's never felt more helpless, alone, or scared than watching his wife give birth to their first child.

Alfie Brown 26:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:59 Because there is nothing that he can do. It is entirely on that person. It's completely out of his hands, and he just has to sit there with his fucking hands in between his legs, just-

Alfie Brown 27:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:11 ... waiting.

Alfie Brown 27:13 I, uh, I, uh, I ... O- on the birth of the third child, because of, uh, COVID, don't know if you've heard of that, um, there was nobody allowed in the hospital. Uh, so I had to kinda come in only when I was asked for at specific junctures. "Don't come in a second before we ni- like, literally crowning, and then call him up." Uh, so it was not quite that urgent. But I couldn't stay with her the night, and I usually, for the b- usually, w- we have so many kids, we've got a protocol.

Chris Williamson 27:43 (laughs) Pumping them out all the time, yeah.

Alfie Brown 27:45 Uh, um, so I would've slept for the previous two on, um, on, on the, on the seat that they have beside the bed. Uh, and, uh, and it's so awkward. And for, uh, uh, I, I mean, for a dad, I think in any of those situations, going to scans, going to ... It, it's ... And they don't talk to you, either. And same when you're looking around a school, really. It's just like you just get ignored, like, 'cause maybe the head teacher doesn't know how to talk to you, or like ... Oh my God, I remember, like, sitting in the ... (laughs) I remember sitting in the, uh, in the waiting room, not the delivery room but the d- uh, the, uh, waiting room before we go down to b- before it all kinda kicks off in the labor department. And they have to come in and check her every now and again to see how dilated she is, which means that you have to sit in a chair and sort of ... Like, how, like, you know when you try on shoes and you forget how to walk? Like, some pretty midwife comes and sticks her fingers inside your girlfriend, and you kinda go, "Oh, well, I wonder, I wonder what the ceiling's like. It's just amazing, the ceiling. I love the ceiling now." And th- it was so bizarre, like, ha- watching her root around, like, her fingers inside my, that I'd sort of tried to make it-

Chris Williamson 29:03 That's my job.

Alfie Brown 29:04 I tried to make it hot for myself.

Chris Williamson 29:05 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 29:10 And then, and the sweetest thing is as soon as she left, I went, "That's so awkward, I just, the only ..." And I said to Jessie, "The only way I could get through that was I just, I tried to make it hot for myself," and she went, "Yeah, me too."

Chris Williamson 29:21 Wow. Jesus Christ.

Alfie Brown 29:23 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 29:23 I mean, uh, I think that shows that you're a good pair.

Alfie Brown 29:25 Yeah, good match. Similar senses of, uh, humor and depravity. Um, yeah. Yeah, but, and then during the bir- uh, so I went home that night, and then got a call at 6:00 AM saying, "Oh, by the way, I've just started going into kind of, like, full labor, so anytime ..." That usually means you've got about five or six hours before there's a baby. Uh, for any parents will know how insane this is. Uh, I got there at quarter to, the baby was out within five minutes of my being there. She went from, like, one centimeter to fully dilated in, like, 45 minutes. It, it was insane. And because it was, he came out so quickly, you're usually ... The baby usually has lots of fluid squeezed out on the way out 'cause it's bit of a squeeze, famously. And, uh, he didn't have enough of his fluid pumped out, so he had, uh, lungs full of, uh, amniotic fluid, so had to go straight into the, um, ICU for, like, seven days. And had strep B or something, so had to be on in-... tubes, and we just had kind of visiting hours with the baby for, uh, uh, for a week. So in terms of, that was a real ... And she was sleeping downstairs, and I would kind of go home, look after the kids, order too much pizza, um, try and make the most of, yeah, I'm or- I'm ordering what I want.

Chris Williamson 30:45 The deliberation, yeah.

Alfie Brown 30:46 'Cause, 'cause you're not allowed to tell me not to. A bottle of red wine? Absolutely.

Chris Williamson 30:50 I have two.

Alfie Brown 30:51 Um, and, uh, would go in the next day, and, uh, yeah, the powers, the powerlessness, uh, extended itself over a week there. Uh, and there is a very real feeling of, uh, wanting to do right but then not being any, uh, specific guidance or, um, or, or guidebook. Uh, my brother is really, really into, um, weightlifting. He finds, uh, social interaction a, a bit more tricky. And, uh, and I was speaking to him once and he was sort of explaining to me that the reason why he likes weightlifting so much is that it's, there's quantifiable progress. There is, with social interaction, "Ooh, have I done well? If you could just score me 6.8 on the quality of the chat, that would be amazing, just so I know if I'm, uh, making tangible improvements to my, uh, my ability to interact." Uh, whereas weightlifting, "I l- I bench pressed X amount last week. I bench pressed X amount this week. My body fat f- fat percentage," or whatever your, whatever your goals are at home, uh, you know, "is X and now was Y." And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's easily, there's numbers there that you can look at and go, "Progress." Uh, and I think, you know, with shelves, I can put shelves up and go, "Look, some shelves."

Chris Williamson 32:13 Shelves.

Alfie Brown 32:13 But I can't get scored or like-

Chris Williamson 32:18 (clears throat)

Alfie Brown 32:18 ... "Was I good at being a, a, a partner during the delivery of a child and then for the subsequent week whilst it was in the, um, uh, the, the, the, the intensive care unit?" Um, I, I have no idea. Uh, which is sort of frustrating. You just have to trust that you did do something that constitutes your best and you were well-meaning. Like, whenever anybody ... I'm awful at talking to people when they've got a serious illness. If somebody's got a serious illness and I talk to them, I kind of go, "Hello," and all I can sort of think to say is, "How are you? How are you?"

Chris Williamson 32:52 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 32:53 But you don't want to say, "How are you?" because I know that you've got, like, a disease, and it's bad. So you can't go, "How are you?" because we both know, "So what should we do here? Should we just go, 'I'm sorry that you've ...' " And it often is that you should say something as simple as, "I'm so sorry to hear about your illness."

Chris Williamson 33:09 "You."

Alfie Brown 33:09 That's absolutely shit.

Chris Williamson 33:11 Yes.

Alfie Brown 33:12 But then you don't want to say, "illness" to them because they might have been, that might have been the five minutes that day that they had just forgotten, they were thinking about, "Oh, Alfie's coming over."

Chris Williamson 33:19 "Oh, Alfie's coming over. He's gonna cheer me up."

Alfie Brown 33:20 "Alfie's coming over. He's gonna cheer me up." And then you go, "Disease." And then you go, "Oh, fuck."

Chris Williamson 33:24 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 33:24 "Just managed to get that disease out my head." Uh, so yeah. Life is a, a constant, um, a- a- array, uh, an obstacle course of social pitfalls and, uh, wrong things to do. And thank God we have, uh, shelves to put up and weights to lift so that we can-

Chris Williamson 33:43 Fucking get something done.

Alfie Brown 33:45 ... at, at, at my estimate ... Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:45 So at the end of my life, I can look back on a series of shelves and weights-

Alfie Brown 33:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:49 ... and think, "At, at least I left this."

Alfie Brown 33:51 "I achieved something. I produced something."

Chris Williamson 33:52 "I left this for the world." Yeah. It's a-

Alfie Brown 33:54 I think that's why I like getting my earwax out my ears so much. I've, "Look, I've produced something."

Chris Williamson 33:59 (laughs) That's a fucking low bar.

Alfie Brown 34:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 34:03 So I, I, I heard this story, um, from a psychologist I spoke to a couple of months ago, and he said that during World War II there were these patients who were completely catatonic in psychiatric wards in London, completely comatose, unresponsive, just roll them over, clean the bedpan, feed them however the, however you feed them, nurses would do this thing, unresponsive for years and years and years. Uh, bombs start falling during the Blitz, and there are fewer ambulance and fire truck drivers than there are ambulances and fire trucks to drive. So the, there's this shortage. And these men, mostly men, most people in psychiatric wards were men, uh, these men got up, people that had been comatose for years and years and years, got up out of bed and started driving fire trucks and ambulances around London, helping out. And his point was that, um, male mentality in terms of goal-setting and also depression but principally goal-setting, is done based on trying to do things. "If you give a man the ability to, uh, a goal, the ability to achieve it, he'll crawl over broken glass with a smile," was his argument. Um, and you see this with these men, that they were motivated out of a completely comatose state to go and do a thing. And I think that that's the difference when you look at what women are motivated by. You know, a, a woman, (clears throat) I would guess on average more so, would be happy just being emotional support. If, if women had children with other women or, you know, in lesbian relationships where you, one of the girls is pregnant or whatever, the one that's in the corner is perhaps more likely to just, "I was there for emotional support. I felt..." Whereas your compulsion to, to do a thing-

Alfie Brown 35:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:46 ... is actually quite restrictive.

Alfie Brown 35:49 Yes. I think during, uh, lockdown I, a lot of the time I said, when p- people would say, you know ... I, I, I wasn't too much of a drag that I said this to absolutely everybody, but, you know, when my mum would ask me how I was, I would often say, "Oh, well, not so good actually because I've had my, I've had my purpose taken away." Uh, and feeling like y- your purpose is now, well, it's gone. It, that, that does send you, you know, not, uh, to the psychiatric facility, uh, although, you know, given, uh, you know, let's do a fourth lockdown and see where we are. Um, I incredibly, incredibly depressed and missed it all so much, and I think I missed...I spoke to my, uh, hairdresser, who I do go and see on a, a quarterly basis. And, um, and he said w- first haircut I got after lockdown, I said, "How did you find it?" And he said, "I just missed being good at something." And, uh, and I, you know, awf-

Chris Williamson 36:50 Fuck, that's such a good quote.

Alfie Brown 36:53 Yeah, I almost started weeping. Uh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 36:56 "I miss being good at something."

Alfie Brown 36:58 I just missed being good... Yeah. And I mean, I started trying to do bits and pieces, and I started doing Instagram Lives in the hope that that might, uh, uh, you know, put a little, uh, nicotine patch over the craving. But, eh, it didn't because you've developed a set, a very s- specific set of skills, uh, that, uh, w- are suited to stand up. So, uh, very hard to get that to translate. And oh- also the endorphins and the, and, and the, and the, the experience of communicating with a group in a live sense, and having something, uh, uh, as, uh, the, the, the messily emotional reality of other people who are present, uh, w- was gone because it would just be, you say something funny on Instagram Live and a flutter of hearts come up from the corner of the screen.

Chris Williamson 37:54 And that's it, that's all you've got. I mean... (clears throat)

Alfie Brown 37:55 You think, "Well that, that feels good, but it doesn't feel that good." It, you know...

Chris Williamson 37:58 The reason that, the reason that I went to go and see you in Edinburgh was because Sloss had told me that I should do. I was like, "Hey man, I'm, I'm up this weekend. Who should I go and see?" And he said, "Alfie Brown's got a show on, show on." Like, "You go, go see that." And, um, but he, he said the same. He was, he was having arguments with his girlfriend, uh, now fiance, that he has the most perfect relationship with, uh-

Alfie Brown 38:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 38:21 ... because he needed her to love him like 500 strangers a night.

Alfie Brown 38:26 (laughs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 38:28 And he was, he was, she was still doing her thing, and he was moping around the house smoking weed and playing Xbox badly, and poking her and being, "Hey, what are you doing?"

Alfie Brown 38:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 38:41 "Hey, love me."

Alfie Brown 38:43 Yes, I think I, you know, I did a lot of... I can remember once my girlfriend was trying to watch, um, that Sally Rooney thing that seemed to... It's like ev- after every single episode you go, "How was that only 20 minutes long? It felt like it was going on forever." Anyway, um, I would, I was like, I remember bouncing on the trampoline, uh, like, 'cause we bought the kids a trampoline during lockdown. And just like a little exercise trampoline that you use, that old people use to strengthen their bones. And, um, (laughs) she was trying to watch Old People. I was bouncing on the trampoline staring at her kind of, like, "Why aren't you looking at me? Like why are you..."

Chris Williamson 39:19 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 39:19 And like, and then I, and then I looked at myself and thought, "I've gone, I've, I've gone mad. This is like not, this is not an appropriate way for an adult man to be." But I was so starved of everything, uh, that I just couldn't, I could, I could barely function. And when I'd speak to comedians who say they didn't miss it, I, there is no stronger and more vociferous "fuck you" that I have for anybody else in the world. Don't do it then. Don't do it, 'cause you just, you know, your gigs are gigs that I could have. I'll have yours then, 'cause I'll do two, I'll do two f- I'll do one for me and one for you, and I'll do them both with a smile on my face, okay?

Chris Williamson 40:01 (laughs) Because you've had to jump up and down on a trampoline to assuage your feelings of uselessness.

Alfie Brown 40:06 Uh, yeah, I've been singing, I've been, I learnt the Moana rap to impress my children.

Chris Williamson 40:10 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 40:10 Like, I've, I've, there is no depths to which I haven't stooped to try and, uh-

Chris Williamson 40:16 Feel relevant again. (laughs)

Alfie Brown 40:17 ... extract some screed of, "Do I have your love? Am I entertaining you?"

Chris Williamson 40:23 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 40:23 "Have I made your life better? Have I illuminated the, the torpor of our everyday experiences for you?" And then, uh, between that, between this kind of mad, uh, court jester type character to slumped in an armchair staring at a book I'm not reading. Didn't read one book during lockdown. Uh, I mean, an incredible sense of atrophy to the whole experience of everyday life. And then, and, and nothing, no, no, no ability to go and do the thing that you love to do. Awful business.

Chris Williamson 41:01 Yeah, man. It's, it's, dude, this is the thing. So few people have spoken about lockdown after lockdown. I think everyone kind of was a bit bored of the same conversation over and over again, "Oh, it's hard, isn't it?"

Alfie Brown 41:12 Yes.

Chris Williamson 41:13 "Oh, yeah. Yeah. Are y- you getting on all right? Yeah. Yeah, I am. I am. You know, getting by." And people, we had that for so long that that conversation kind of just feels a bit like old hat. But the echoes, right, the reverberations-

Alfie Brown 41:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:29 ... of some of those situations and the realizations that you had, that this is the time, if you had a strategic learning experience like you did, which was there is a part of me, there is a void which gets filled by the art form that I have chosen to express myself in. Um, that realization's really, really fucking important.

Alfie Brown 41:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:47 And by not having the conversations about it, you actually don't end up perhaps learning and then maybe even transcending some of the suffering that you went through during the time.

Alfie Brown 41:56 Yeah, and I think, (laughs) like, and the really, uh, this is to be taken with a kind of pinch of salt 'cause I'm... But my, Jessie's brother, my partner Jessie's brother is a doctor. And I went, "Man, this must..." And do you remember meeting up socially distanced in a park last year? And I went, "Mate, how are you doing? This is just awful. Like, how, how are you, how are you coping?" And he went, "Mate, this is like, this is much worse for you than it is for me 'cause I didn't become a doctor 'cause I, I didn't wanna have to, like, work to save people's lives." Obviously, it's harrowing and awful, and I think, you know, what he was saying is to be taken with a pinch of salt 'cause obviously it was nightmarish. But at the same time-... th- th- that he had his purpose.

Chris Williamson 42:40 That's his call to arms.

Alfie Brown 42:41 He had his, he had his calling, uh, met, and it was very difficult and horrific and f- much of the time. But I thought it was so interesting when he said that. Such a bizarre thing for, uh, m- maybe not a bizarre thing. Maybe ... I mean, we don't know. We only know about people who were saying ... It's like one of those things how, "Oh, it must be so hard for doctors that ... You know, let's all think about the doctors. It's worse for them than it is for everybody else." Maybe the, all the doctors were thinking, "No, no, no, no, this is why we, this is why we got into this."

Chris Williamson 43:09 Yeah, "What the fuck's everyone clapping us for?"

Alfie Brown 43:10 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 43:10 "Are you clapping arseholes that are sat at home wanking five times a day? They're the ones-"

Alfie Brown 43:14 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 43:14 "... that need our support in this difficult time."

Alfie Brown 43:17 God, if only I had the spirit in me to wank five times a day.

Chris Williamson 43:20 So I was ... Here's another one, man. I wa- ... Having a conversation with a buddy about a year ago, and we w- ... I can't remember where we were, some, some bar somewhere, and we'd been talking about something, and then we were going away, we were doing a little bit of work, and then y- in between bits of work, you'd chat. Out of the blue, he turned to me and said, "Man, how much, how much do you think you come?" And I thought, "What do you mean?" "Like volume." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "So l- let's say that there's a sort of percentile, right, from zero to 100. Where, where do you think you fall in terms of the volume of semen that you create upon climax?" And I, I didn't really know what to say, because the only times that, unfortunately, I've made it to the end of a porn video-

Alfie Brown 44:13 Hmm. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 44:13 ... to watch the man complete-

Alfie Brown 44:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:19 ... I don't think that that's a representative sample of men, of s- of, of semen for men.

Alfie Brown 44:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:26 And so I explained this to him, and I was like, "I, f- I fucking, like, like, a normal, like, probably a normal amount, probably 50, probably 50th percentile."

Alfie Brown 44:36 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 44:36 And then quick as a flash, he went, "I'm 95th percentile."

Alfie Brown 44:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 44:41 (laughs) I thought, "Okay. Uh, uh, t- tell me about that." And he said, "Frankly, bit of a nuisance, if I'm honest." That was-

Alfie Brown 44:54 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 44:56 ... that was his-

Alfie Brown 44:59 I, I worked out when I was, I think, about 25 years old that, uh, I'd been wanking at that point for about 13 and a half years, and I probably hadn't missed a day of an average, I'd been going every day. I worked out what the average, uh, come shot weighed-

Chris Williamson 45:17 Volume.

Alfie Brown 45:17 ... volu- ... Yeah, uh, w- what it was for a man. Uh, so I started working ... For 13 and a half years ago. At that point, my kid brother was 13, so I started wanking around the time he was born, although I don't think they were related incidents. Um, and I, uh, uh, I'd worked out that if I'd, uh, saved all my come, like, in its weight, since the day I started wanking, I'd have about seven and a half stone of come-

Chris Williamson 45:43 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 45:43 ... which is about the weight of a 13-year-old boy.

Chris Williamson 45:49 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 45:49 So, interestingly, like, human beings grow at the same, like, amount that you shed every day in come. And I could've, like ... If I'd saved it, I could've made my own, like, come brother.

Chris Williamson 46:01 (laughs) Like a, some disgusting X-rated snowman.

Alfie Brown 46:08 Yeah, it ... From the people who bought you The Human Centipede.

Chris Williamson 46:11 (laughs) It's Come Brother.

Alfie Brown 46:12 Your, his Come Brother. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 46:20 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 46:21 Wow.

Chris Williamson 46:21 Oh.

Alfie Brown 46:21 Is it ... This is, this, this, this podcast has been quite high and low, hasn't it?

Chris Williamson 46:25 Yeah. We've gone to the depths of, of deep-

Alfie Brown 46:27 Um-

Chris Williamson 46:27 ... depression in lockdown, and also we've gone to-

Alfie Brown 46:29 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 46:29 ... Come Brother. I wanna know about

Chris Williamson 46:31 your ... Speaking of atrophy and weightlifting, I wanna know about your fitness journey, 'cause you're starting a, a, a foray into health and wellness, are you not?

Alfie Brown 46:40 Well, I'm so incredibly, um ... I'm so incredibly gullible, and so incredibly, uh, uh l- like ... I have a, a sort of fantasy idea of the m- of the man that I would be. And th- if you look at him in his com- com- like, i- in his complete form, all of his facets are incompatible with each other. So there's a heavy-drinking guy who's in great shape, and then you're immediately done, uh, because I love ... I'm a g- I'm a g- I'm a good pint, and I like ... I haven't quite worked out this kind of balance yet whereby I manage to ... And I saw that I was at a kind of, uh, crossroads as it were, uh, in terms of being a, like, a 34-year-old father of three just eating all their food all the time, and b- uh, uh, and, and being exhausted, so having to just fuel yourself on scraps, and, you know, uh, uh l- like endless packets of oatcakes with the hummus in the fridge, and, and feeling like, "Was that really a meal, or am I-"

Chris Williamson 47:48 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 47:50 "It doesn't ... I should still eat a meal. I'll eat a meal as well." Um, so I just don't think (laughs) I had very good habits, and then, like, you know, uh, loads of red wine, and, and great beer. Anyway, I mean, a f- a th- so a fitness journey, I'm not sure ... Like, a fitness is quite a highfalutin word to, you know, I, I don't want my knees and my heart to give out by the time I'm 45 journey is the kind of journey that I'm-

Chris Williamson 48:16 (laughs) I'm avoiding, I'm avoiding the diseases of kings from the Middle Ages.

Alfie Brown 48:22 Y- yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:22 If I can evade gout by 50, I'm gonna consider this a success.

Alfie Brown 48:26 I don't want, I don't want gout. Uh ... Although, you know, g- gout is a kind of like, an emblem of-

Chris Williamson 48:32 (laughs) It's a fucking badge of honour.

Alfie Brown 48:33 ... a really good time.

Chris Williamson 48:34 Yeah. (laughs)

Alfie Brown 48:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like how soldiers get a Purple Heart. You know, people, looshes get gout.

Chris Williamson 48:41 (laughs) Right. So you're-

Alfie Brown 48:44 Uh-

Chris Williamson 48:44 ... you're trying to just-

Alfie Brown 48:46 I, um-

Chris Williamson 48:46 ... extend your mortality a little bit.

Alfie Brown 48:48 I've started doing high-intensity interval training courses. I don't like saying HIIT 'cause it's got two Is in it so it sounds crap. Um, and, uh, and I do them with, uh, energized and, um, wonderful, gorgeous men and women shouting at me, uh, and, uh-

Chris Williamson 49:08 In a, in a gym or at home?

Alfie Brown 49:10 In a gym. In a gym. I go to a gy- yeah, they're like a fitness class people round the corner. Eh, and it's brilliant, and actually that's the best thing I've ever done. When I'm at the gym I spend the whole time, you know, o- on Twitter getting angry and listening to a podcast and yawning at the bench press, uh, thing. So, and I, and I don't do any cardio 'cause it's too awful. So, uh, and I don't... Also, it's, it's, it's the same... Fitness to me is the same as having a podcast. I just want somebody who knows everything to be able to go, "Here's how long the podcast should be. Here's, uh, what you should do on YouTube. Here's what you should cut up onto Reels. Here's how often you should do it. Here's the best day to put it out. Here's, uh, if you should do Instagram TV as well. Here's how to market it on Twitter. Th- there's all your information. Go away, do that, and if it's good then it'll work and if it's not then it won't. And it, also if it's not good it still might work 'cause, you know, and if it's good it still..." I mean, who knows, but, you know, at least you know that you're doing the right thing. And the fitness thing as well is like, "Oh, shall I eat... Shall I eat slow carbs? Shall I focus on my gut health? Shall I eat butter coffee?" And, like, uh, I mean it was just disgusting. And I'm, you know, predominantly vegan anyway so it would have to be sunflower butter coffee, which I'm not even sure really works 'cause I'm not sure if the science abides by sunflower butter coffee. Um, or should I just cut fat out or should I just count calories or should I do intermittent fasting? And all of these things. Could I just have somebody say to me what's effective, please? And then I'll just do it. And, and, and have done with it, and it will be so much easier to, uh, uh, to, to, to keep off this, uh, this layer of dad fat that I've accumulated over the last three or four years. Um, and, and, and if I'm keeping it off, yeah, that's easier isn't it? It's easier to keep it off than it is to-

Chris Williamson 51:07 Correct.

Alfie Brown 51:08 ... get rid of it.

Chris Williamson 51:08 Correct, yeah.

Alfie Brown 51:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:09 Well, man, I think you've reached... If I was to give a bunch of different advice to someone that was doing what you were doing, the first thing I would say is join a class because you outsource your accountability and your motivation and your intensity to a group of people. You get a bit of-

Alfie Brown 51:25 And your money.

Chris Williamson 51:26 ... and your... Oh, you... And your money, but fuck man. When you-

Alfie Brown 51:27 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 51:27 That's, that's one of the things that I really don't get. I understand if you have legitimate financial restrictions that do not permit you to be able to pay between 70 and £180 per, per month to get someone to shout at you and tell you what exercises to do in a, in a class setting. I understand.

Alfie Brown 51:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:44 But if you have the money and you're choosing to spend it elsewhere and complaining about your fitness goals, that's a you problem. Like, that's you not doing the thing that you should do in order to get the goals that you're saying that you want. You're complaining about not getting the results that you-

Alfie Brown 51:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 51:58 ... didn't get from the work that you didn't put in. That's what your problem is. So classes, number one. Like, it's so good, man. Even I... So I've been training for 15, 16 years and I still rely on classes when my motivation's a little bit low. So I'll just go and do them for a few months, build a little bit of motivation back up, and then coast on some, some programming if I wanna do a little bit of stuff myself. That's awesome. And then-

Alfie Brown 52:21 Coast on programming?

Chris Williamson 52:22 Yeah, so, um, the... What you pay for or the, uh, compromise that you make with a class is that if there is a particular modality of training that you want to do, let's say that you really want to work on getting your resting heart rate down or improving your cardiovascular fitness, or you want to spend some time doing hypertrophy 'cause you wanna gain weight or what- whatever it is, um, you are at the mercy of whatever the class is doing. And you can find different classes. One class may be a bit more lightweight and more cardio, one may be a bit more heavy, one may be a bit more complex. But you are never doing precisely the program that perhaps you would want to do. Let's say you wanna work on your chest and the, the, the classes only do chest once a week or not at all. Um, so that's the sacrifice that you make. But I find that if you use the classes for motivation and then you can kind of coast-

Alfie Brown 53:09 Yes.

Chris Williamson 53:10 ... back into some, some custom stuff, if you wanna do that or not. Um, and then with regards to the diet and the other things like that, that is a fucking minefield. I have a bunch of buddies who, they, they've made their careers out of telling people that almost every different diet that people are trying to sell you is fucking horse shit.

Alfie Brown 53:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 53:31 Um, and calories, counting calories is, is literally all that matters. And there is, there is an entire industry, a counterculture industry of people, that is... They've made their careers out of saying, "It's just fucking calories, bro."

Alfie Brown 53:45 Yeah. Um, I, uh, I, I, I like all that. I'm fond of it. Um, but I... I mean, but then it's not, surely it's not because then if you have... I mean, it, it obviously 20... 'Cause at the end you have to kind of thi- get things like, you know, enough protein so that you're servicing... And, like, you could, you could... It might just be calories, but you might be... What you're eating and the quality of food that you're eating will have a huge effect on your mood. If you do loads of great exercise with some gorgeous, um, man shouting at you, uh, and you eat, you know, uh, I don't know, honey.

Chris Williamson 54:23 Haribo.

Alfie Brown 54:24 Only honey.

Chris Williamson 54:25 Yes.

Alfie Brown 54:25 Um, then you'll feel, like-

Chris Williamson 54:27 Shitty. Oh, yeah.

Alfie Brown 54:28 ... in a really, really bad mood.

Chris Williamson 54:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So wha-

Alfie Brown 54:29 So it's-

Chris Williamson 54:29 In, in terms of weight loss, um, it is literally just calories. Now, you can improve your weight loss and your mood and your gut health and everything else on top of that, and your performance, by getting your macros right, so you've got maybe a bit more protein than you think that you might do, and you avoid processed carbs, and you avoid s- too much saturated fat and blah, blah, blah. But I think...... what most people do is they repurpose diets like keto, which is a restriction diet, or intermittent fasting, which is a restriction diet, or Atkins, which is a restriction diet, or vegan, or fucking pescetari, or whatever it is. Most of d- most diets come down to restricting some different food groups that you're not supposed to eat.

Alfie Brown 55:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 55:05 And then people go, "Well, look, I lost weight on this diet." And you go, "Well, yes, obviously, because you cut out two-thirds of all foods, and then someone else did a- the complete opposite diet, cut out two-thirds of all foods, but two-thirds of different foods that included the foods that the other person ate." So I understand why it's- why it's complicated.

Alfie Brown 55:24 I think also a lot of the, um, fitness, uh, w- kind of c- the culture around it and the way in which people talk about it and try and puzzle it out is difficult for me to... First of all, there's a k- whole vernacular to penetrate and, like, you know, you'll-

Chris Williamson 55:42 Programming, yeah.

Alfie Brown 55:43 ... just said a bunch of things that programming modes and stuff. I- and I kind of can't... And there's also, and this is really stupid, and I, uh, i- and it's, um, uh, it's something that I'm prone to do quite a lot, whereby I'm cynical about something because I am, uh, jealous of it, or suspicious, or have preconceived ideas about the archetypes involved, I think as it was, like fitness idiots being fitness idiots and talking all their jargon. Um, and, uh, uh, uh, and I'm prone to think that at the same time as wanting all the f- like b- I look at them and go, "Well, it'd be great to look like you obviously, but, um, but shut up." Uh, (laughs) so th- that's where I'm at with it, and then I look at my heroes and think, "What, what, who..." Nobody that I loved was, you know, going on about their, uh, or speaking openly about their fitness goals. Christopher Hitchens never once mentioned his fitness goals.

Chris Williamson 56:39 (laughs) Hitch-

Alfie Brown 56:40 But then he's dead-

Chris Williamson 56:41 Hitch did die-

Alfie Brown 56:42 ... and h- w- like way too soon. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 56:43 Yes.

Alfie Brown 56:44 Because by his own admission he burnt the candle at both ends and it shone a bright light. So I think I'm not going to stop, uh, drinking. I mean, my job takes place mainly in the pub. Um, uh, but I- I do want to find a way to balance, uh, w- the life that I would like to lead, um, with, uh, w- w- with- with- with being healthy and feeling energetic, and, you know, not having such ruched eye bags the whole time.

Chris Williamson 57:19 I honestly think if you do four good classes a week and you're under the age of probably 45 that you- you can pretty much get away with whatever you want.

Alfie Brown 57:34 Okay. I'll, I'll-

Chris Williamson 57:34 Un- unless you have- unless you have a metabolism that's a bit suboptimal or you have a- a propensity to gain weight quite easily. Like, if you're training consistently and hard and you're doing progressive overload, I- I- I struggle to see... If s- there's people that go to the classes that I know of that literally do not care about their diet, but if you're training five days a week and you're doing it quite hard, they're in fucking great shape because their body is just desperately trying to accumulate whatever it is, that Merl- that lovely Merlot from last night, and the remainder of the cupcakes-

Alfie Brown 58:07 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 58:07 ... from little Johnny's birthday party for Halloween.

Alfie Brown 58:10 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 58:11 And it just thinks, "Well, he's fucking pushing us really, really hard here."

Alfie Brown 58:15 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:15 "We need to... I- I- we find, right, get the cupcake, get the m- can we, have we got any more Merlot left? We'll use that."

Alfie Brown 58:21 I do- I do always find the mood is quite a good gauge of, uh, you know, what's going on. I th- 'cause I- I mean, I was doing these classes and thinking, "My mood is absolutely in the toilet." Um, I'm- and- and but I was eating really well, or, you know, well healthily, and then think, "I need to be... my body used- would eat- this would be me eating well for a sedentary lifestyle." So now that I've got, you know, gorgeous bloke screaming at me for 60 minutes, you know, a few times a week, I need to recalibrate-

Chris Williamson 58:53 Fuel it properly, yes.

Alfie Brown 58:54 ... what eating well means because that is absolutely not sustainable. Uh-

Chris Williamson 58:59 I tried, here's another thing that I tried that I was thinking about, 'cause you talked about

Chris Williamson 59:03 getting into soup, I think, when I saw you live, about-

Alfie Brown 59:05 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:05 ... you did something to do with soup.

Alfie Brown 59:07 I did, yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:07 And it made me- it made me think about a- a brief period where I tried to get into candles. So I thought... I wanted a thing. You know you f- you feel like you need a thing.

Alfie Brown 59:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:20 Or you- you want a th- it's- this is gonna be m- well, so what are you into? Oh, uh...

Alfie Brown 59:25 Ju- is this during lockdown?

Chris Williamson 59:26 Yes, yes.

Alfie Brown 59:26 This sort of feels like a lockdown obsession, yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:28 Correct, yes. So beeswax, soy wax, all different incense varieties, ones that burn in-

Alfie Brown 59:36 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:36 ... and then they combine and the- the wax is kind of together but then when you burn them it- it- it congeals and then you get multiple different... Uh, and I really got into candles, and I just- it got me thinking about people that want a thing-

Alfie Brown 59:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:49 ... quite badly, and I wanted a thing, and I tried to make it candles. And all that I achieved was I coated, um, the ceiling of this room in so much soot that came off the candles-

Alfie Brown 1:00:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:01 ... that I actually needed to get it paid to be repainted. (laughs)

Alfie Brown 1:00:07 (laughs) Oh, good God. That's really funny. So how- and how long did it last for you this obsession?

Chris Williamson 1:00:14 Probably about four months, I think. Um, probably between four and six months, 'cause I'd tried- I'd kind of done it once before and not really committed.

Alfie Brown 1:00:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:24 Thought that that might be my thing, and now the nail's in the coffin that it's not- it's not my thing.

Alfie Brown 1:00:32 Christ. Uh, w- what- how old are you?

Chris Williamson 1:00:36 33.

Alfie Brown 1:00:38 And how many things do you think you've taken on post the age of 25 do you think that have been... I mean, this is one.

Chris Williamson 1:00:45 Yeah. Yeah, so most of them have been commercial projects because I'm a-... ruthless, sacrilegious-

Alfie Brown 1:00:52 Capitalist.

Chris Williamson 1:00:53 ... capitalist, yeah, precisely.

Alfie Brown 1:00:54 Yeah. Good.

Chris Williamson 1:00:54 Yeah. Who, who is trying to fill the void with money. Uh, but-

Alfie Brown 1:01:00 Fair.

Chris Williamson 1:01:01 ... not many, not as many as I'd, not as many as a lot of my friends. A lot of my friends-

Alfie Brown 1:01:05 Yeah?

Chris Williamson 1:01:05 ... have tried to, t- tried to do, t- tried to do the thing. How about you? Have you been-

Alfie Brown 1:01:09 D-

Chris Williamson 1:01:09 ... have you been getting a thing? Or are the kids-

Alfie Brown 1:01:11 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:01:11 Kids are kind of a thing.

Alfie Brown 1:01:13 Uh, kids are kind of a thing. Um, I suppose, uh... Uh, no, I've, I've fantasized about a thing. I've, I've, I've learning-

Chris Williamson 1:01:23 Motorbike?

Alfie Brown 1:01:25 No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I remember as a child, my, uh, father, uh, said, we were at a theme park and he went, "Do you wanna go on the big ride?" And I went, "No. It's horrible. Why would I wanna do that?" And he went, "Good. Good. That's a g-" And he said, "Good. Do you know what that means? That means you've got a good instinct. You want to stay alive."

Chris Williamson 1:01:45 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 1:01:46 Uh, uh, d- and that means that you'll be, uh, you know, you'll, you- you've got your head in the right place.

Chris Williamson 1:01:52 Y- yeah. Life might not be very exciting-

Alfie Brown 1:01:53 Why, why-

Chris Williamson 1:01:53 ... but it shouldn't be dead.

Alfie Brown 1:01:55 ... yeah, why, why would you want to, "Oh, peril!" Like, "Why would you want to feel that?"

Chris Williamson 1:01:59 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 1:01:59 It makes no sense (laughs) . So (laughs) , so I, uh, uh, yeah. The, the, the same reason I don't wanna ride a motorbike, I don't wanna ride a bicycle. I just, I don't at all want to... Why put myself in that position? You're, you know. People get scared about terrorists on the Tube. You're, what... You know. You're much more likely to get knocked off your bike than you are, uh, than you are blown up on the Tube. It's been years since that happened. Uh, I'd like to learn a language. I'd really like to learn a language, and I'm, I'm, I think I'm reaching the, it's r- we're reaching crunch time. And I'd like to, uh, and, uh, what I'd, what I'd really like to do, and this podcast and doing all this (laughs) , I've started my own podcast, Listener. I've started my own podcast.

Chris Williamson 1:02:47 Link in show notes below.

Alfie Brown 1:02:49 Link in show notes below. Thank you. Um, thank you. Uh, I, and, and l- learning all about this and going back to what we were saying about fitness and indeed podcasting, I want to know everything about it. So I've watched hours and hours of charismatic 20-year-olds from Sacramento telling me about algorithms. And I (laughs) like, "What? You don't know anything." And, but what I do feel like is that YouTube is incredibly, incredibly exciting. The whole idea of being a YouTuber is, it's sort of a pejorative term, YouTuber. It's like, well, it's, YouTube's just the... You don't call Ingmar Bergman a cinemara. It's just where it's on, isn't it? It's any, it's literally anything. You can put a f- you can do a feature film and stick it on YouTube. Does that make you a YouTuber? No, it just means that you're putting... So you can do anything. All these programs that they're putting on to, to Dave and Comedy Central, none of which I'm in, well, they're not making them 'cause they're really expensive to make. Precisely the opposite, they're making them 'cause they're cheap. And given they're cheap, I'm staring into a Sony camera that's good enough to, so I can just go where, I could go to Brussels and show you all what it was like for me in Brussels. And if you like Brussels and if you like me, then you'll like watching that. And it doesn't have to be me being a YouTuber there. It can be me engaging in an, an, in a funny and intellectual way with the experience of travel with somebody or not with somebody, and I could film a bit of a gig that I do there. And it, it, it's, it's, or, or I could film my own feet and draw faces on them, and I could do whatever I want. And I don't need to go to a development producer to have a conversation about whether or not my feet would work on a... No, I get to make that choice. And I'd, people speak about, you were speaking about the algorithm to me before. Like, I'd, I'd, I'd much rather compromise with an algorithm than I would a development producer. At least the algorithm will be honest with me. Like, uh, uh, or be, uh, b- be straight with me. I, yeah, well, uh, and I, and I don't actually have to talk through it. It's the other key thing. There are some brilliant development producers, I will add. But there are some, you know?

Chris Williamson 1:05:08 Man, I think that the, I think that the venture into YouTube for pretty much every comedian that I know is a fucking great idea. So many (clears throat) , like what most YouTubers are trying to repurpose is what comedians have learned on stage. Or-

Alfie Brown 1:05:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:22 ... classic theater actors or impro- especially people that do improv and stuff like that, like Jesus. Uh, and then you look at someone... Logan Paul is a good example of this. So love him or hate him, that guy is a fucking media genius. So you put him in front of a camera, and his ability to control the cadence and the timbre and the tone and the way that he speaks and what he says is fucking, it's media training. It, it, it's post-media-training media training.

Alfie Brown 1:05:48 Wow.

Chris Williamson 1:05:48 And he's so fucking effective. And he learned it by just doing daily vlogs for a bunch of years. And yeah, he fucked up and did some, made some mistakes or whatever. But the guy is shit hot, absolutely shit hot at what he does. And you think, every comedian that I know that does podcasting or YouTube is a killer. All of them. There isn't anybody that you port across onto this medium that's done it for an appreciable amount of time-

Alfie Brown 1:06:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:14 ... uh, standing on stage that isn't fucking well, well, well more competent. Because they understand about pacing and they understand about joke structure and they're comfortable with silence, all of the things that takes a normal person that does this forever.

Alfie Brown 1:06:30 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:06:30 With no feedback, with feedback from a s- a silent lens that looks like the void.

Alfie Brown 1:06:34 Well, that's the harrowing thing about it, is that you'd s- speaking into this and going, "Hello, this is my podcast." And then suddenly, it's you're, uh, y- y- you're, you're... Th- th- then it's out there, and you go, "Well, was that funny? Am I bad? Shall I, you know, sh- shall I go away for a long time?"

Chris Williamson 1:06:52 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 1:06:52 Like, "What's (laughs) , what's, what, what am I, and what was that? And was it good? And oh God, what did I say?" And, um, uh, yeah. It's, it's, it's, uh, the immediacy of the feedback and...... the beauty of stand-up is that it has to die in the room. It's beautiful because it dies, like a flower.

Chris Williamson 1:07:11 Ephemeral.

Alfie Brown 1:07:12 Uh, exactly. Uh, and that's what's scarier about stuff like this. But, I mean, there is an extent to which, well if, if the thing that's gonna get made that I'm gonna be on on TV would just be me traveling about and meeting people anyway, well I can do that.

Chris Williamson 1:07:29 Shortcut it. Yeah, exactly.

Alfie Brown 1:07:30 Um, there's a, speaking about Logan Paul, I think that's so interesting and I will look at, uh, his videos now despite the fact that, um, there have been, you know, moments of bad man about him. Uh, love him or hate him as you- as- as- as you say. I actually have no idea what it is he's supposed to have done, so I'm not sure how, uh-

Chris Williamson 1:07:48 What you're supposed to love or hate about him, yeah.

Alfie Brown 1:07:50 How extravagantly I should be going, "No! Boo! Awful!"

Chris Williamson 1:07:53 (laughs)

Alfie Brown 1:07:53 Or like, you know, to be, uh, to be woke adjacent. Um, so

Alfie Brown 1:08:00 yeah, uh, there's a really good YouTube video by a guy that I love called Nerdwriter. Have you heard of him?

Chris Williamson 1:08:04 No.

Alfie Brown 1:08:05 Uh, brilliant video essays and does a brilliant one on how Donald Trump answers a question, and there's exactly the same, there's like, the simplicity of the language, the fact that he structures every single one of his sentences in an answer to have the key word, "tremendous bad people", "tremendous bad pe-" We get, we get the key word of what he wants to get across, "It's gonna be horrible, it's gonna be horrible, tremendous bad people, bad people." And it's every single line you could take out of context and know exactly what he's saying. They did, they, he examines the, the reading level of all, uh, uh, presidential nominees over the past few years, and like, so Mick Huckabee and Bernie Sanders are way up there at A-level reading level, um, and then you've got like Clinton down a bit, and other Clinton down a bit, and you've got, uh, George Bush down a bit, and then you've got way down at like kindergarten sort of just above like early years reading level, is that's how Donald Trump speaks. And that's why everybody gets it, and that's why everybody understands, and that's why everybody i- i- immediately, "Well I know what that guy thinks." There's no, there's no two ways about it. And it's not about how many people hate him. Like the interesting thing when Hillary Clinton was campaigning, I thought, they had this slogan, "Love Trumps Hate." Well it, it did, because the people who voted for Donald Trump loved Donald Trump, and the people who didn't vote for Donald Trump didn't love Hillary Clinton, they hated Donald Trump. And love did trump hate in that election, but just not in the way that Hillary Clinton thought it would or wanted it to.

Chris Williamson 1:09:45 So that was the smartest tagline ever.

Alfie Brown 1:09:49 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:09:50 But she just didn't realize.

Alfie Brown 1:09:52 I mean, well, yeah. Well I mean it was, yeah, smartest tagline for him. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:09:54 Yes.

Alfie Brown 1:09:56 It was, oh God, that was such a sad night. But, uh, yeah, it's a really interesting video essay that I'd recommend to you-

Chris Williamson 1:10:01 That's sick.

Alfie Brown 1:10:02 ... and, uh, all his, Nerdwriter, he's got a bunch of good stuff.

Chris Williamson 1:10:05 There was a article that I saw that looked at how much Democrats and Republicans love their own party versus hate the other party.

Alfie Brown 1:10:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:14 And for almost all of time, it was that you, you voted for the party that you wanted to be in as opposed to not voting for the party that you don't want to be in. Uh, and 2012, that changed. So now, it- it's- it's literally like a- a- a protest vote. It is, everyone is protest voting-

Alfie Brown 1:10:30 Everyone is protest voting. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:32 ... against the side that they dislike. And this is, this is a- a whole other fucking rabbit hole, but the fact that out-group hatred is stronger than in-group bonding is a really fucking interesting mechanism that you see at the moment. The fact that most people bind together over mutual distaste of another as opposed to mutual love of someone or something within that circle. I think that's, that's so interesting.

Alfie Brown 1:11:02 Yeah. It's, uh, it's, I think, I- I don't know where it's come from. I think it's b- I think it's very, uh, we haven't learned how to deal with new media yet, uh, new digital media, social media, et cetera. And um, there's really interesting, um, if you look at the invention of the pa- the printing press was exactly when you had, like in late 19th century, so 1870-something, what, I can't remember the exact dates, but right directly after the invention of the printing press you had the, this huge rise in populism, uh, and the- the- the- the corn laws being brought in, and everybody saying, "Well, now the papers exist, everybody can just be taught what to think." And it's the death of democracy. Uh, and it's something that we're, to an extent, experiencing again. We learnt sort of arguably how to deal with papers or how to ingest them or, uh, perhaps, uh, perhaps the way that papers went, you know, social media took on. It- it carried, the extremities carried on kind of further in each direction. Uh, obviously papers got wind of the fact that sensationalist news stories sold copies, selling copies earns money, earns, earning money means that we're all, you know, we can all buy new cameras and whatnot. And that's, you know, that's- that's- that's- that's where we all are. We're all, you know, I- I made my, the title of my episode something I thought was juicy because that made it more clickable.

Chris Williamson 1:12:30 Clickbait, yes.

Alfie Brown 1:12:31 We're all thinking like this. Um, so, given that we haven't learned how to use this media yet, I think with a little bit of time, maybe that stops. Or we learn that there's some sort of cognitive revolution whereby we switch away, uh, from anger and that the algorithm stops serving anger and utilizing it as the, uh, touch paper for, eh- eh, all virality and explosive news th- there is and we, we get to a new place. There has to be something to push us past this, which I kind of remain optimistic there, there will be, but I don't know what it is. And on the left and on the right, I think people have confused-Uh, and this is without-- you know, this is not a shameless plug, but the reason why my show is called Sensitive Man is that I think sensitivity is something that we have completely sort of expelled from all discourse. And people confuse or people, or perhaps, uh, you know, on the, on the left, the, the, the Corbyn left would say that they are sensitive. They are... But I, I think that true sensitivity is the only thing that can defeat righteousness, and righteousness is what you have at either end. And sensitivity is completely anathema to, to, to, to, to that. Um, so a, a call for sensitivity. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:13:58 I'm reading a book, a proof of Johann Hari's new book. Johann Hari wrote Lo- Lost Connections and Chasing the Scream. So it's in a book.

Alfie Brown 1:14:07 Is he the guy that did that, um... He said the controversial stuff about mental health?

Chris Williamson 1:14:13 Mm, yeah. Well, his book's about mental health. I don't know how controversial it ended up being. He said that it was a combination of-

Alfie Brown 1:14:20 He didn't.

Chris Williamson 1:14:20 ... of, of environmental and biological, but he put less weight on the biological, "It's just imbalances of chemicals in the brain, bro." Um, so it may... Well, I mean, he, he wrote a book on, on mental health. I don't know how much-

Alfie Brown 1:14:35 Yeah. No, I think the art... The Guardian did a, uh... The Guardian and everybody I follow on Twitter did a take-down of it. Um, so again-

Chris Williamson 1:14:41 Sounds like what they would do, yeah.

Alfie Brown 1:14:42 U- again, everything that's controversial is controversial depending on, uh, our own, uh, algorithmically interpreted version of reality.

Chris Williamson 1:14:49 Yeah.

Alfie Brown 1:14:50 Um, anyway, he got a shellacking from lots of people that I saw.

Chris Williamson 1:14:53 Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

Alfie Brown 1:14:53 And, uh... Well, I, I... Well, everything, every criticism that everybody had of him, I kind of had to under my breath go, "Oh, yes, but I do agree with him about all of it."

Chris Williamson 1:15:05 (laughs) Yeah, I think, um, that was an-

Alfie Brown 1:15:08 'Cause it's what I've been saying about mental health for such a long time. And I even did a, uh, I did a keynote speech at Keele University about, um, about, about this, about, you know, the, the, the, uh, not over-diagnosis, but diagnostics being in, uh... The diagnostic element of mental health taking away from the human aspect of it. It dehumanizes it slightly, and we're getting away from the kind of emotional human experience of... And I think that causes a sense of detachment from what's going on that isn't necessarily helpful.

Chris Williamson 1:15:43 People like the labels because it gives them... It brings some order to the chaos of their phenomenological experience.

Alfie Brown 1:15:51 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:15:52 And-

Alfie Brown 1:15:52 It gives us... Helped me help to put on our logline as well for, uh-

Chris Williamson 1:15:54 Correct. Yeah, exactly. It's like, "Autistic Only Fools and Horses, Depressed in a Caravan Site."

Alfie Brown 1:16:01 Yeah. (laughs) Well remembered.

Chris Williamson 1:16:04 Um, so yeah, he's got a new book out called Stolen Focus.

Alfie Brown 1:16:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:16:11 And it's about why we're more distracted, why our attention is being robbed of us and stuff. And I'm only one chapter in. For the people that want to listen to this, it won't be out until January. The book isn't out till January, and he's not coming on till January. But it's a big book, and Bloomsbury sent me a super, super early proof. Um, and it's really interesting.

Alfie Brown 1:16:28 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:16:28 Really fucking interesting. And the first chapter talks about the fact that we have more information coming in than we can actually filter, that we have a surplus of information. And what it causes us to do is we need to utilize filtering in a way that we never would have had to before. So humans are information foragers. Where squirrels look for nuts in trees, we look for information, 'cause information kept us alive. The problem is, for almost all of history, we had a scarcity of information. We would get a story... We'd hear the same fucking story from the elders of the tribe 150 times.

Alfie Brown 1:17:02 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:17:02 And that's how you get stories and myths that are passed down, right? Passed down and passed down and passed down 'cause you've heard it so many times. Whereas now, you have an abundance of information, almost all of which is noise and almost none of which is signal, most of which is manipulated or contrived or whatever. Um, so our filtering mechanism just is not tuned up to be able to do this. Uh, and it's all done along the, uh, narrative of Johann going to some island, uh, near America and taking, getting rid of all of his technology while he writes the chunk, a big chunk of this book. Uh, so he's down-

Alfie Brown 1:17:40 Wow, cool.

Chris Williamson 1:17:40 He down-regulates all of his information as he's trying to write about it, and then he sort of... It puts his personal journey of down-regulation and, uh, and re-centering his, uh, his thoughts and his stimulus, how much stimulus he's got. Um, and it's really fucking interesting, man. So that's coming out soon.

Alfie Brown 1:18:00 That sounds brilliant. And I think a lot of the problem that I have with nonfiction is the, uh, is the fact that it... I just kind of can't take it all. I mean, ironically, um, given what the book's about, I can't take all the information. So you're reading this book, uh, and think... I can't... I just don't... And I have suspicions with some nonfiction books. Like, I don't think The God Delusion needed to be that long. That... You just wanted to sell a big book. Just didn't need... As a vanity thing, okay? Richard, didn't need to be that long. Give it to me in 200 pages, okay? Can't do it in 200 pages, don't do it. Um, but, uh, I have a suspicion with... I mean, that's... A narrative, a nominal narrative journey, I think, is what was missing from a lot of that sort of thing. Uh-

Chris Williamson 1:18:48 Gives it a human element, right? This is-

Alfie Brown 1:18:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:50 There's definitely... 'Cause, I mean, that behind me is... All of that, and all of that is just books. Books and books and books-

Alfie Brown 1:18:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:56 ... from publishers, from people who've got books coming out. And they are awesome. Uh, most of them are awesome. But there are some...

Alfie Brown 1:19:04 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:19:04 The books with which I resonate the most are the ones that have personal elements and stories woven throughout. This is why James Clear's Atomic Habits was so good, because it wasn't just this rote memorization game of how to do habits. It was...... illustrated with examples from Team GB Cycling or from the Chinese weightlifting team, or from a speed reader, or from someone that knows 17 languages or something. Uh, it was illustrated with personal examples, and James sort of brought some of himself in there and he talked about his own journey. But, uh, yeah, o- one of the other things you said about the, the diagnostic criteria and the, the labeling, I spoke to Robert Plomin, who's a behavioral geneticist. So he looks at the heritability of everything that we are, right? Everything psychologically, whether that be your dyslexia or your propensity to fart or how tall you are or how much you come. Um, he looks at the heritability of all of these different things, and one of his problems that he has is with labels, because what you're talking about is a spectrum. A, a, a particular