EP.219 - AYISHAT AKANBI

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Ad Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how you doing podcats?

This is Adam Buxton here.

I'm on a windy hill in Norfolk.

I'm here with my best dog friend, Rosie Buxton.

Half whippet, half poodle, all

groovy.

Not looking too happy today.

Come on, Rosie.

We're not going to go out that long, I promise.

It's a little bit Michael Parkinson out here.

I am regretting not bringing my gloves with me and it does look as if it's gonna start raining.

But how are you doing podcasts?

Not too bad I hope.

I'm not gonna waffle too much at the top here.

It is a little on the chilly side.

So instead I will tell you a bit about podcast number 219 which features a conversation with Nigerian British fashion stylist, writer and social commentator.

Although I do get the impression she's not entirely comfortable with that tag.

Aisha Akanbi.

I'm quoting now from the blurb on the Found website, where people can go to hire Aisha as a stylist.

Although this blurb covers the side of Aisha, which is more the kind of thing I'll be talking to her about today, Aisha's writing positions her as a cultural commentator motivated by a strong belief in the value of open conversation and looking beyond echo chambers.

She most often speaks on the ever-shifting cultural and social landscape, particularly around identity-based narratives and their potential limitations, always in an effort to combat division, extremism and polarization.

As you'll hear, Aisha describes herself as a bit of a hippie.

keen to reintroduce some peace and love into a culture wars discourse that sometimes can lose sight of both.

I first came across Aisha in 2020 and I saw her talking in a video made by the Double Down News Channel.

They describe themselves as an independent progressive media outlet.

Their stuff is very well put together, I recommend it.

But I was struck by what Aisha had to say in this video I was watching and how different it was in tone to so much else that I was seeing online during the pandemic

when of course feverish fury levels were peaking around issues like race and gender and all things COVID related.

It's changed a little bit in the intervening years but it's hardly calmed right down.

Here's a few clips from that double-down media video that introduced me to Aisha.

I think wokeness has robbed many people

of compassion and replaced it with moral superiority.

Compassion and empathy is paramount to any social movement and to any form of progress.

Once you have compassion and empathy, you can often see that you have a lot more in common with people than you do apart.

And it's this system under which we live in that forcefully tries to group us on our differences.

What is radical is kindness.

What is radical is understanding.

That's the one thing they don't want us to do is to understand each other.

Arguing with each other isn't actually radical at all.

It's very conformist actually.

I do think that wokeness does run the risk sometimes in reducing very complex issues.

I don't want what I'm saying to come across as those Generation X baby boomers who are talking about wokeness in a very critical way because they are sad that they no longer have their time when they can say things with impunity and where they could be racist and make homophobic jokes.

That's not it.

I'm just asking for us to be more honest with ourselves, to think about why these issues are happening and to be responsive and to be critical.

You know, maybe in Wokeness 2.0, which is the second stage of the anger, in this new stage, the focus is a lot more inward.

Once you understand yourself, it's very easy to understand everyone else.

So easy, because we're actually not that different.

We're actually painfully quite ordinary.

How our ordinariness and our traumas and our pain manifest is very different, but the root cause as to why we act in the ways that we act often is security, we want belonging, we want acceptance.

Fundamental things to a human.

If we are more understanding of at least ourselves, you know, it's so hard to judge other people.

It's a few moments there of Aisha Akanby talking in a video produced by Double Down Media called The Problem with Wokeness.

It was actually made around 2018 when the whole concept of woke was still relatively new.

But of course, by 2020, it was already becoming weaponized.

And so with a title like The Problem with Wokeness,

it was perhaps inevitable that in 2020 and beyond, Aisha would find herself being invited onto a lot of internet interview shows, sometimes hosted by right-leaning hosts keen for Aisha to endorse their frustrations with what they saw as the madness of the woke mob.

And one of the things I spoke with Aisha about in this conversation

was why she chose to accept and why she continues to accept some of those invitations and whether she's worried that her message may be twisted to suit other people's agendas.

But as well as talking about culture wars politics, Aisha told me about her own background and how her mother feels about Aisha's mission and the circumstances that led to the life-changing epiphany that made Aisha want to add her voice to the social justice conversation in a way that might make it more effective for all of us.

My conversation with Aisha was recorded face to face in London

in late August of last year, 2023, and she had travelled across town to meet me from where she lives in Croydon.

So I began by asking how Croydon is these days, which is, I think, a very good question.

And I might start all my interviews from now on by asking how Croydon is these days.

Back at the end for a couple of recommendations.

as well as a bit of listener communication about my podcast with Werner Herzog and some mysteries from the Christmas podcast Solved.

But right now, with Aisha Akanby, here we go.

How's Croydon these days?

I quite like Croydon.

Croydon has its charm.

It gets a lot of hate, but I quite like it.

It feels like one of the few areas in London that's still,

I don't know, quite similar to how it's always been.

You know, it hasn't been massively gentrified yet.

A lot of the local community is still there.

Many eccentric characters and I like to people watch.

So it's an amazing place to people watch.

Yeah.

But did you grow up in Southampton?

I was born in London.

I was born in East London, in Newham, but I grew up in Southampton.

Oh, yeah.

So I spent most of my life in Southampton and then came to London for university and stayed there.

I went to Kingston and I was always really itching to get out of Southampton.

All my family lived in London and as much as, you know, Southampton wasn't very diverse, you know, in the school that I went to, I was like, you know, one of the only black kids, which wasn't a bother, you know, actually.

It didn't strike me as weird because that was all I knew.

But I'd come to London and I would see a lot more people who we'd have a similar background.

And I was always intrigued by what being around lots of people like that would be like.

Yeah.

What were you studying at Kingston?

I did media and cultural studies.

2008, 2009, 2009 probably be, yeah.

And so when did your fashion work begin?

So that began whilst I was in my final year of uni.

So I never quite knew what I wanted to do.

I had, there were areas that I was interested in.

I was interested in music.

And when I was a kid, I thought I might be a DJ just because I liked music so much.

And then I thought maybe a producer.

I wanted to be a rapper.

And I also was interested, I guess, in style.

I didn't ever think of myself as interested in fashion.

But, you know, as a young girl growing up, I was never, and I'm still not the traditional image of femininity.

And when you're a kid, that's pretty hard when you go against whatever norm is set.

And so I was like, you know, how am I going to, what is the way to do this, you know, where I don't get bullied?

You know, because I can't do what the other girls are doing.

So what is my way?

And so I sort of started developing, I guess, yeah, my own sense of style, probably based on many things I'd watched and everything I was inspired by.

And eventually, I guess I was never expected to

look like my peers.

And that was always really helpful for me.

I was kind of able to do my own thing, carved out my own world, so to speak.

And so by the time I got to university, I was still massively interested in style and specifically why do we buy what we buy.

You know, I noticed that presenting yourself maybe differently to the ways people expected you to dress allowed for certain type of interactions that were maybe unusual or not so common.

I always found that I was speaking to people from all walks of life and yeah, I would be offered opportunities and I thought, wow, this is a really incredible thing.

You know, maybe I could give this to other people.

Maybe I could help other people with this.

Yeah.

So I've met you once before, very briefly, and it was in a clothes shop in the West End.

And it was next to Third Man Records a year or two back when I was recording an episode with the band Spoon.

They were about to play at Third Man.

And as I was arriving there, I passed a clothes shop and I saw you, recognized you, and it seemed very,

what's the word?

Serendipitous.

Yeah, there you go.

Serendipitous.

And so I popped in because I'd been watching your videos.

I think this was in late 2021.

Still felt very much like coming out of the pandemic years.

So I went in and said hello, introduced myself, said I hope that you might come on the podcast sometime.

And

you said you were writing a book.

You said maybe when I've finished my book.

So how's that going?

Oh well, the dreaded question.

So writing a book,

yeah, that was a challenge.

I think I always expected that, but not, I didn't quite, I didn't quite anticipate how much of a mental, personal, and emotional exercise it really was, especially because there were so many biographical elements about my life in the book, as well as commentary on things that were happening in the culture.

I've always been quite reflective and self-exploratory, and that can sometimes be challenging because you spend a lot of time

just going over your thoughts instead of expressing them sometimes.

You know, you're always thinking about different sides of the argument and different counter-arguments.

and I

felt like I wasn't in the right space mentally to write it.

There was still a lot that I was working out, and also the pandemic, everything that was happening like collectively there.

You know, there was a collective kind of mood.

I think we all sort of felt a bit out of sorts.

And yeah, I wasn't in the right headspace.

And so, what I'm doing now is taking a break from that and just reflecting.

It was a hard decision to make because, you know, it was advertised, you know, it was going to be out.

You know, people were asking me weekly, when is it coming out?

When is it coming out?

And I think that also got to me as well.

I think my emergence, let's say, in the public sphere was really accidental.

I don't think I expected everything to happen.

Yeah, because

how did it sort of evolve?

So,

okay, where do I start with that?

Because, yeah, I guess there's quite a big backstory that led up to you knowing who I am

and I think maybe the easiest way to put it but still quite peculiar is in 2013 I had a huge psychedelic experience but a naturally induced psychedelic experience so I've never taken acid or anything like that but from everything I've read around people who take acid and other types of stimulants like that

I had all of those symptoms quite naturally.

And this experience lasted for about six months.

So, for six months, I was in a state of euphoric bliss.

You know, it felt incredible.

I started talking differently, thinking differently.

Suddenly, my speech felt a lot more clearer.

I was having all of these ideas and things that would occur to me out of nowhere that felt true.

And it was scary because it's like, is there someone speaking through me?

You know, I really didn't understand it.

But you weren't like literally hallucinating.

No, so it wasn't like I was seeing figures of people or hearing voices specifically.

Crazy colours.

No, it it wasn't like that i definitely was a lot more animated than i've ever been like an extended bipolar high maybe exactly that and so it was incredible it felt great and but the way that i saw other people completely changed when i went through this experience um i realized that i just had so much more in common with people than i thought of all different backgrounds and i was really quite able to see myself in everyone that i met including the worst parts of people um and in this experience i remember the one thing that happened

before was that I remember having a night where I couldn't sleep.

And for some reason, my brain gave me like a slideshow clearly of everything I'd been avoiding.

So all of these existential and personal, uncomfortable questions came up about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

And what is success?

And why is that success to you?

Who are your friends?

Why are they your friends?

You know, why are you dressing in the way you do?

Why do you shop there?

What do you think these labels or names say about you and why do you need them to say anything about you i don't know there was a lot going on and all i remember is the next day i just stepped into a new world and so that happened and that lasted for about six months it was scary i often thought that i was going to die or maybe losing my mind but overall it was a good experience that allowed me to know myself in a much deeper way and then i guess like any high it ended you know all of a sudden it was gone and i didn't anticipate that and you know i guess anyone who's taken drugs or experimented knows there's a come down.

And so, even though this was a naturally induced high, there was a come down that lasted a lot longer.

And that took me on a journey to work out what had happened to me.

Because at this point, you know, from doing research, you recognize this really wonderful, transcendent experience you had also is categorized by some people as a form of psychosis, you know, or maybe

an early sign or a warning sign of bipolar schizophrenia, maybe something more severe.

And so yeah, I kept that in mind, but there was always this thing in the back of my head that was like, but what if it's something else?

You know?

So you hadn't, sorry to interrupt, but you hadn't seen a doctor or anything, or you hadn't been advised by people around you, like, oh, there's something going on with you, I think you need to see someone.

As much as I was in a really heightened state mentally and was doing things that weren't quite the norm or what I would usually do.

I still had some sense that if I was to speak to a professional at that time, the likelihood that they would tell me that I was having some sort of mystical experience was slim.

And so I had a sense that they, what they might tell me.

And so I always, because I was always aware of that, and I didn't discount that possibility.

But there was also something else here that I don't think they would have been able to investigate for me.

So you wanted to protect it?

Yeah, so I wanted to protect it.

And so I needed to investigate what this was for myself

because I'd recognized that there were so many other people who had similar experiences to me.

In fact, sometimes the exact same experiences, but the outcome was different.

They ended up in different places.

Sometimes that experience would lead them to

a psychiatric facility.

Sometimes it would lead them to being on medication their whole lives.

And it led me to a new way to see myself, other people and my environment.

And I wondered what is the thing that stops it from happening in that way, you know, or what happens in this process that sometimes makes people go in the direction where they now need psychiatric help and a lot of professional assistance and it's a negative experience.

And what do you, what are your ideas of what triggered that?

episode.

So if I'm honest, I think there is probably a fairly clear trigger for me, even though at the time I wasn't quite as aware of it because there was still some distance between the incident and this event happening.

But a year prior to that, my brother had been stabbed and killed.

And so it was completely unexpected.

And he was quite young at the time.

He was 26.

And the person that took his life was 21.

And the person did it just because he wanted to steal my brother's stuff.

You know, like iPhone, MacBook, designer clothes.

A stranger.

Yeah.

Although this stranger was someone that my brother had been getting to know.

They'd been speaking on Facebook and things like that.

So he wasn't a total stranger, but not someone he knew very well.

And I think after that happened, I think I had a lot of conflict about my work, working as a stylist, working in fashion, knowing that there are people out there who have in their minds that these designer labels are so important that they're enough to kill for.

And I really felt like I was potentially playing in

to this collective idea that your worth is dependent on you know what you can afford and what you can own and your status and so yeah that I had a massive internal conflict around the work I was doing as a stylist after that and I and you saw it in those terms rather than it just being a senseless act of violence that your brother was caught up in I think so at that time and it may not have been the right framing but that's immediately where my mind went because this person was 21 and I guess we're all aware that when you commit an act like that there's a chance that you'd be caught.

And so he was willing to take the risk.

You know, he was willing to take the risk for this material stuff.

And I just really wondered.

I was in a state of reflection about what is the value that we've put on material that, you know, some people are willing to kill for them.

And what is it that these things are giving people that they need to possess them at such a desperate level?

And why don't we have that internally?

Why isn't that something we can access within ourselves?

So I remember those were my early thoughts about it.

And they did actually catch the person that killed him and I remember being in the court case and seeing him for the first time and most people I guess aren't in situations like this where they ever come face to face with someone who has killed a loved one.

So I didn't necessarily know what to expect or what to think but coming face to face with this person didn't do

maybe what I'd seen on TV.

Maybe I expected to have some hatred or to feel like a burning anger or stuff like that.

And I was really surprised to find that all I had was like a curiosity about his mental state and his psychological well-being.

I really was quite desperate to understand the mental process that led to that decision.

That then expanded to the broader cultural context, the world that we're living in that potentially makes people feel this way.

What's happening culturally, politically, economically, and psychologically.

To try and make some sense of it, I guess.

Yeah, I guess so.

That was my way of trying to make sense of things.

I didn't know that that was my way of grieving because i'd never i'd never experienced anything like that at that point and i still think now i i learned from that situation that's my way of dealing with complicated emotions and feelings is to get quite curious about them and to work out what's what's happening here you know

and then the next stage for you was this sort of overwhelming epiphany where all these ideas suddenly rush in and converge and and you open yourself up to them rather than closing yourself off yeah exactly.

Like I said, so before this euphoric shift happened, you know, I refer to it as the shift because that's the most neutral way of describing it.

I know some people might describe this kind of experience as a spiritual awakening, a psychological rebirth, which is a Jungian kind of framing, you know, psychosis.

Or, you know, there's lots of different interpretations about this type of experience.

But I think the most neutral is just it was a shift.

There's a shift in my psychological landscape.

And before that, I had uncovered all of these parts of me in the time that I was having this confrontation with myself the night before, you know, when I said I couldn't get to sleep.

And the answer to so many of the questions that came up revealed a person that wasn't really pleasant to look at.

I was a much more murkier, morally ambiguous.

person,

you know, and that wasn't the framing that I had of myself.

But all of this stuff emerged and I realized, oh, there's some gross stuff here.

And that changed me in many ways as well, because I think once you see that in yourself, you can't ignore it.

Then, I mean, obviously, now I'm just thinking about all your moral murkiness.

Yes, of course.

Oh, I don't know.

I mean, it's the stuff that I guess we all have, you know, understanding that you're maybe more manipulative than you thought you'd be.

Right, okay, yeah.

You know, or maybe understanding that you wanted to do something because you thought it was, I don't know, made you a good person, but actually, you're doing it for other, maybe more nefarious reasons.

Reckoning with everybody's,

yeah, all your kind of selfish motivations and the extent to which you're prepared to not tell the truth completely sometimes or be dishonest with people and yourself about certain things that you want and ways that you're cowardly about things.

And yeah, I guess all those things.

Yeah, and in particular, I think it was almost learning that almost everything that I had been sort of portraying outwardly wasn't quite me, you know, almost everything.

And I think you come, you know, after a few years of having an experience like that, you sort of remember yourself.

It's like you lose contact with who you are, maybe through

just, you know, growing up, the expectations of your peers, your family, the things that you digest from culture, from TV.

All of these things maybe make it easy to forget who you truly are, so to speak.

And it's like these experiences kind of just, you know, remove the veil right

so this is in 2013 and when did you start writing about society and moving into your social commentator phase as it were yeah it's interesting because i

had no interest in politics at the time or at least not an active interest i was always one of these people who didn't follow politics but had this idea that I should.

Maybe, you know, because it's the idea that, you know, every sort of responsible, sophisticated person should be engaged with the new.

So I definitely felt that, but even from a really young age, that I should know what's going on.

So then I have this experience.

I come out of it and I realise, okay, the world hasn't changed.

I have.

Now, how do I exist in, you know, the same environments?

I've been massively stretched and changed.

I don't know how or why.

I don't know at this point if I'm crazy.

I don't feel crazy, but many people would probably look at some of what's happened to me and say that, what do I do I'm not interested in the same things anymore I recognize that there's something to our human experience that we haven't tapped into that could be really transformative I want to do something with this or I want to keep thinking more about this and so I was reading a lot of the time and reading a lot of philosophers and if I wasn't like reading like their full works I would just whatever I was on my mind I would type in the keywords and just find quotes from people and really take that in and if I liked enough from someone I'd start reading their work and eventually I just started expressing things myself and then the culture shifted you know I felt distinctly maybe in around 2015 and 16 my friends were speaking differently all of a sudden certain words were coming up the word triggered I'd never heard people use this so casually and frequently in language and that was all of a sudden there you know things were traumatic and things were problematic everyone was using very similar language and I think because one of the things that happened in this shift when it was still in the good stage was I was very focused on language, and it dawned on me that being able to articulate myself clearly was very important.

Um, and I guess I wanted to, if I'm going to be here and I'm going to be alive, and it's only for a short while, I want to really know people and I want the opportunity to

know me and I want to know them.

Um, so I guess that's why it was important for me that we speak in our own words.

That makes sense, but that coincides with a revolution in the way people use the language and a far more intense focus on how people are talking and the words they use.

And you you shouldn't say that anymore, you shouldn't describe this group with that term anymore because it's offensive.

And all that sort of focus on the way the language is used really started to bite.

I mean, you know, it always happens.

It comes cyclically every few years.

You get a a greater focus on these kinds of issues and they're called different things.

When I was growing up, it was political correctness and now it's sort of woke or whatever.

And it always incorporates language as part of it because obviously that's how we communicate.

And it's always been a factor of that that people are going, well, you can't say anything anymore.

Oh, you're not allowed to say this anymore.

You're not allowed to say this.

Balmy.

And it goes on.

I had a talk the other day with a friend of mine.

We were talking about movies.

I was referring to

Julia Louis Dreyfus, I think, and I kept on saying, What a good actor!

I thought she was.

She's a great actor.

And then my friend was like, You keep saying actor.

What's wrong with actress?

She's an actress, isn't she?

Why do you keep saying actor?

And I was like, Oh, well, you know, I'm just

a thing I've picked up.

Someone pointed out to me once, like, you don't say doctor and doctress.

Why do you say actor and actress?

It seems a bit reductive and patronizing.

And I was like, Yeah, that's a good point.

You know, I want to get on the bus with with the movement of not being patronizing if I don't need to be so okay I'll try and make a point of saying actor whenever I'm talking about a woman actor but my friend was just like he I think had identified that I was doing it quite self-consciously also I'm a bit inconsistent sometimes I'll slip and there'll be an actress will pop out but I was trying to justify myself And so I said the doctor and doctress thing.

And then I said, you know, I think that's just the way things are moving.

I think they're removing the distinction between actor and actress in a lot of awards categories now as well.

But then my daughter said, yeah, I don't know if that's any good because that just sort of means that you're reducing the amount of people who get recognition for their work.

And it's not helping anything overall.

Anyway, it was one of those conversations, a kind of culture wars conversation.

But I...

I was reminded again of the strength of feeling around all that stuff.

And I really felt like, I think my friend was being polite, but in that moment, you know, he's a good friend.

But in that moment, I could see he was really annoyed.

He was just like, life's too short.

Who gives a fuck if it's actor or actress?

Just say what you mean.

It's not the end of the world.

There's a line in terms of, you know, we learn more, language moves on naturally,

we just become more educated around different things.

And we question ourselves more because you're right, you know, why is there necessarily a distinction between, you know, you know, actors in terms of actor and actress?

Like, we don't do that anywhere else.

So much of language is arbitrary in that way.

Right, exactly.

And so, you know, with that one, it's a fairly sort of, it's quite harmless.

Like, so

I would adopt actor now, you know, because I, you know, like you, I had a similar situation where I think I was referring to someone as an actress and I noticed that they kept on referring to them as an actor, you know, and I was like, this is the liberal, you know, like they're trying to communicate something here.

And it's not like I cringe when I hear, and many female actors call themselves actresses.

And it's not like if someone says, oh, she's a good actress, I'm like, oh dear,

you're not allowed to say that.

No, exactly.

Sometimes, you know, you've been saying something a particular way and then someone tells you, oh, actually, can you consider this?

And blah, blah, blah.

And it just makes sense.

And you adopt it.

And so, yeah, I'm fine to adopt any new language that makes sense to me.

And that's not because I feel some kind of

this isn't anything to do with being woke or being, you know, or feeling like a social pressure or that I'm a bad person if i don't adopt that language it just makes sense to me but then at the same time of course there is this other side where people do feel an incredible amount of pressure to say things and to caveat and to all of these qualifiers i know i'm a white male and you know like i've i'm you know privileged and you know i haven't experienced this and that we're living in a time where it does feel like because we live so much of our lives on the internet and that means anyone has access to us and can tell us just exactly how much of a twat they think we we are.

We're a lot more hyper-conscious of how we speak.

But at the same time, I am one of these people who is quite conscious of saying, oh, you can't say anything anymore.

Because that's not true necessarily either.

I think you can say what you want.

You can't say it any way you want.

That's the thing, you know, I pretty much say what I want.

I can't say it any way that I want, though, if I want to be heard, if I want to be understood or listened to rather than heard, because maybe that's the thing.

You know, lots of people are heard but they're not necessarily listened to and so for me I've put out thoughts that are somewhat critical of

what some people might conceptualize as contemporary activist culture and I've critiqued a lot of that but I don't get much pushback and I think the reason why I don't get much pushback is because I try to speak in my own words so as soon as let's say you start picking up the language of your tribe so let's say on the left broadly speaking, there are certain words that you may use that may out your political position.

So if you're quite eager or you're quite quick to call something problematic, if you're quite quick to label something bigotry and stuff like that.

But equally on the right, if you are someone who will kind of use the term virtue signaling, you know, or if you're someone who...

Or indeed woke.

Exactly.

You know, people focus on those words, not what you're saying.

You know, they've made their minds up just by the language that you've used.

And so I try not to do that because, you know, still, if I'm honest, I'm still working out where I am politically.

Although I have definitely a lot of liberal sensibilities because of my identity in the sense that, you know, I'm not straight.

I'm a woman.

I'm black.

I understand where a lot of contemporary concerns and issues.

I understand where people are coming from.

And it exists on both sides.

There's a script on both sides.

There's a, you know, what some people would term as a woke script.

And then there's an anti-woke script.

And I don't want to be on the script.

For a long time, I was quite intent on, or it was quite important to me to find a tribe of people that I felt some sort of, I don't know, shared values with, shared ideas maybe, all working towards the same thing.

I found that really difficult.

But also I find that difficult because I feel like once you are quite immersed in a group, I think it can be,

I think it can be suffocating for your voice in many ways because, you know, know we all want belonging and we all want community and we want to be liked and loved and adored and you get that on social media a lot of the time and then you get enough of it and then all of a sudden oh can I say this thing you know like the people who now respect me who I'm now getting these dopamine hits from they don't seem like they like this kind of stuff no you'll get a yikes yeah right yikes so disappointed oh my god exactly and I didn't I didn't like that I started noticing when those kind of thoughts were coming even the whole time that i've been on social media and even though like most of the reception to me has been overwhelmingly positive it still didn't feel quite right it didn't feel right to kind of post sometimes i'd post you know 10 15 tweets in a day so this is primarily how you were putting your ideas out there through twitter through twitter and then through twitter um people would ask to interview me um i would do talks and things like that but i never set out to do this i never set out to be thought of as a cultural commentator or anything like that.

I just knew I needed to express myself and I wanted to express myself honestly.

I think yeah part of the reason why I've had a fairly positive reception when I was tweeting the most was because I don't use the certain language but even though I've had a positive reception I've never I've always been quite suspicious of what it might be doing to this human psyche to come online every day and have people blow smoke up your ass.

Even if they're not intending to blow smoke up your ass, but just you know being complimentary and telling you that like they really agree.

Yeah, I mean, are you on Twitter still?

I'm I still have an account there, but I haven't tweeted in the ways that I once did for a few years now.

Yeah, you know, so ex-Swiss posts.

Yes, I don't know if I'll ever be calling it ex.

No, I don't think anyone ever will.

Right, so Twitter, I haven't used Twitter in that way in maybe about three years now.

Every now and then I might share something.

Yeah.

So the landscape changed, the culture changed definitely between around 2014 and then 2016, Brexit, Trump, etc.

And that felt like a massive sea change, especially online.

And that's where you started to see polarization really taking hold and people taking sides and the stakes being much more serious.

And then, of course, you know, police killings of black people still going on.

But then in the pandemic, in 2020, when George Floyd was killed, then it went to a whole other level again.

And that's when I became aware of you online, when people were having conversations in the wake of George Floyd's death, Black Lives Matter, etc.

And there was a sense that you had to pick a side

and you were in trouble if you didn't pick the right side and even just not saying something was a problem.

You know, there were stories...

Not people I knew, but I was listening to podcasts where people would do a whole podcast about I got cancelled because I didn't do the, like there was one day when you had to

have a black square right I didn't do the black square and my work colleagues found out and I was fired and ostracized from my friendship group and and that particular podcast I was listening to was from someone an American who was still on board with the whole kind of progressive project and still clearly felt that actually there was a lot of it was quite reasonable that they had been ostracized.

They were just talking about the fact of being cancelled and how they moved on from it.

But you could still sort of tell, like they thought, yeah, well, okay, I understand that you've got to punish people.

There just seemed to be a kind of prevailing madness about a lot of what was happening around that time, that you were offsetting with some of the things you were saying and not using all the kind of prescribed terminology and talking in far more inclusive and humanist terms and avoiding some of the things that everybody else was saying at the time, for better or worse, right?

It's interesting that you use the term humanist because I've often thought a lot of the

progressive project in its current form, and of course, that's not the entire thing, but I've often thought of it the way it operates as quite anti-human in many ways.

And I say that it's quite anti-human in the sense that it doesn't appreciate human complication, moral ambiguity, the fact that we all have a light and a dark side, if you like.

I'm interested to know to what extent you felt that it was impossible for you to move politically without being co-opted by one side or the other.

Like that person who didn't use the black square,

you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't, and people on one side or the other were going to resent the fact that you didn't take sides or you didn't say the right thing or you were equivocating about certain aspects of what was going on.

You know, obviously, I think it was sort of taken as read that you would be on board with the general goals of the progressive mission, woke, culture, whatever you want to call it.

But

I think there's also a feeling that you still feel today from a lot of people

that

you are who you associate with.

You shouldn't go on certain podcasts hosted by centrist or right-of-center white men.

you are actually harming the people you should be helping if you do.

Because basically what you might be doing is making people who don't care to examine their prejudice feel good about themselves and it's all dressed up as like look at us aren't we great for having a reasonable centrist conversation and agreeing to disagree but actually the net result is you're just letting some of the people watching off the hook and they are not inclined to re-evaluate their prejudice.

I think that's the biggest problem I think people have had with me.

Like I said, I don't get much direct attacks, but you know, when I've had conversations with friends behind closed doors, it's often, you know, Aisha, it's not that I disagree with you.

It's who you're saying it in front of.

It's the fact that you have Piers Morgan retweeting you.

And as far as I know, at least I think Piers Morgan would identify himself as a liberal, but still I get it.

And you know, at one point, Andrew Neal retweeted you, and all of these kinds of people.

And like, don't you think, yeah, as you said, you're allowing them off the hook.

And I don't know if I see my job or my role is to keep people on the hook.

That's not what I'm trying to do.

But at the same time, of course, it was, it definitely was something to me when I noticed that I was accumulating, you know, a big right-wing audience.

I recognised that, you know,

people who were at least right of center were much more interested in a lot more of what I had to say.

But yeah, I guess I didn't, I wasn't, I wasn't prepared for that.

And it was tough only because I knew that the more I developed that kind of following, then the people that I wanted to hear me would struggle to.

Because I know we live in this culture where, as you said, you know, who you're associated with takes precedence sometimes and it overshadows anything else.

Especially now that the Republican candidates in the US are kind of running on an anti-woke platform.

Right.

And so you in the past have done kind of the problem with wokeness videos and things like that.

So you're bound to be just bundled in with them.

But at the same time, I think people know that I'm not.

Yeah.

And I think they know that I'm not as well.

I've never really, you know, like I said, I think it's clear that I'm speaking from a different place.

It's not political.

I'm interested in the psychological.

Yeah.

Have you felt specific instances of your opinions and your pronouncements on wokeness or whatever being taken out of context and kind of used against you by bad faith people?

Yeah, but then

I don't necessarily trust that everyone on the left who is

in support of the political project or the progressive project, I don't necessarily believe that everyone is a good faith actor.

I think that if I am not to say something simply based on how other people could misuse it, then none of us would say anything.

People misuse many texts that are intended to be decent.

The Bible is a good example, you know, many religious texts.

I don't know if that's a good enough reason for me to not say what I think is honest or what I can observe more specifically.

So that hasn't mattered to me.

I can't prioritize

the feelings

of people who are ill-intended over, I don't know, you know, observations or insights or perspectives that may be valuable to, you know, to other people.

You know, they're not introduced too often.

There's a dearth of perspectives out there.

And so I do think it's important,

especially if I'm honest, for minorities in particular, whether you're a sexual minority or a racial minority, to know that they're available to them.

I think it's particularly cruel to,

I don't know, to suggest that, you know, because you are different from the majority, that you have to think like, you know, everyone in your minority group.

Yeah, so I don't think I mind about that so much.

I think the only part that I mind about in terms of people who I don't align with with everything, and I might align with, you know, some writing people on some things.

I I might.

You know, I'm sure there are, because that's the nature of being human a lot of the time.

But I don't think I worry about that too much, or at least I try not to.

I think it's distracting.

Yeah.

Of course, there's going to be crossover.

I mean, you can see in the way that the Conservative Party borrow elements of Labour Party policy when it suits them.

Exactly.

And of course, it's always going to be crossover.

So yeah, I want to work out what is the most productive and useful way of speaking to the people who I think are most affected by ideas that I think can be quite self-sabotaging and anti-human.

And by anti-human, what I mean is, you know, as I said, I'm someone who finds one of the most fulfilling things in life is genuine connection with people.

And so anything, any ideas in the culture that prevent that from happening because we're focusing too much on what we are rather than who we are, I'm probably going to have a problem with, you know, and ideas like that don't just come from the left, they come from all types of places.

Yeah, that's my issue.

I'm not someone who is anti-wokeness.

I'm anti-sort of, and maybe even anti-is a strong word, but let's say I have problems with movements, belief systems, ideologies that present themselves as radical, but are actually, you know, based off of like lots of insecurity and a lack of self-awareness and resentment.

That's my main issue.

That's my gripe.

I drink

your milkshake

I drink it up

I drink it up!

So, how long do you feel like you've been in the public eye a little bit more, like as a public speaker?

I think that wokeness video happened in 2018.

So, was it 2018?

The wokeness video came out in 2018, but I guess in 2020, when everything was happening around George Floyd, it resurfaced again.

So, it might have seemed like it was done then.

But I think since around 2018, people have been more familiar with me for my musings on the culture, let's say.

And was there anything that you said in that video that you've changed your mind about now?

There's definitely ways I spoke that I probably wouldn't speak now.

I was a bit younger at the time.

And again, like, I wasn't very well versed in politics, and I still don't actually think that I am, but I was, yeah, there was language.

I would have changed the framing of certain things.

But no, fundamentally, I do feel like we can often use politics as a stand-in for a moral compass you know or actually knowing ourselves or actually we use our political beliefs to signal that we're good people yeah I still believe that ultimately I think what I was trying to say probably not so eloquently in the video is that I do think a lot of the ways that we're thinking about progress particularly around identity I think is narrow, I think is limited, and I think will backfire in many ways actually.

For instance, with race, I always had a problem with the casual denigration of white people.

You know, the fact that I could probably go, maybe not me because of the kind of audience I've built up, but the fact that anyone with a large following or even not a large following can go online and be like, oh my God, white men are the bane of my existence.

You know, thousands of retweets.

Or they can say that about white women.

And I was always like, this is...

clearly not right for all the obvious reasons.

But beyond that, I was like, I know me, if I was a white person, like, regardless of what's happened in history,

regardless of what my ancestors have done, I'm not going to be okay with people denigrating me who don't know me based on my skin color.

There's no story that you're going to tell me where that's going to be okay.

There's no type of oppression that you're facing where I'm going to be okay with that.

That's the truth.

I know I'm like that as a person.

And there must be people like me.

I'm not.

Not me.

Yeah, yeah.

You know,

but yeah, I know there's people like me.

And I know there are people who may be less diplomatic than me who have this disposition.

Sure.

And so you keep kind of making it acceptable to say this and that about white people.

Eventually, a group is going to emerge who are going to want to be able to exercise their right to talk about certain groups in any way that they want.

And that is happening now.

I'm very aware of that.

You know, there's certain corners of Twitter that are very openly racist, proudly so.

It's become quite an edgy thing in certain circles.

Well, especially in in the Musk era.

Right, right, exactly.

There's a side of Twitter where it's edgy to be racist.

You know, it's cool.

And I've been looking at that.

I'm quite interested in that corner of Twitter just because, again, I'm interested in what leads people to loads of crazy things.

That's just always been a curiosity of mine or has been for a while now.

So there is this backlash and I don't know where the, I mean, I'm also interested because I don't know what's going to happen in that movement.

Where is it going to grow?

Is it going to grow in the way that the progressive movement has grown?

And it might.

It looks like it has legs.

So it's often very openly racist.

It's cool to be that and openly misogynistic.

And like it has a lot of intelligent people within these groups.

And I know it may be hard to think of people like that as intelligent, but let's say at least well-read, intelligent in the way that the world understands that

articulate, well-read PhDs, degrees, you know, all of that kind of stuff.

Good at arguing.

Yeah, all of that stuff.

And it might grow because a lot of people feel disillusioned with mainstream politics.

You know, a lot of men in particular feel disillusioned with some of the messages that they believe that feminism is putting out in the world.

And so a lot of people feel disillusioned.

A lot of people feel like their identities are being attacked.

And so this movement definitely has the potential to grow into a new form of wokeness in an opposite form.

And I thought something like that would happen.

You know, it makes sense.

It's just human nature, I think, you know.

Equal and opposite reactions, exactly.

What were your parents like when you were growing up?

Were they conservative, or were they sort of uh did they talk about politics?

Yeah, my mum, so I grew up with just my mum.

My dad lived in Nigeria when I was growing up, so it was just me and my mum in Southampton, and she always had CNN on, you know, she always

had a news channel on.

We didn't speak about politics that much together, but she was definitely a liberal, let's say, in terms of

well she would vote labor but vote labor based on the practicality of the things that her life required in terms of values values are conservative i think most people that come from

africa you know south asia i think most of our cultures are quite socially conservative because we grow up quite religious and even though I didn't grow up in a very religious household my mum is Muslim my family's Muslim and so that's naturally there.

So yes, so let's say she would have quite traditional ideas on what a woman should do, what a man should do, you know, the roles that happen in marriage and things like that, certain thoughts around people who are gay and things like that.

Everything that you would expect, maybe someone who isn't maybe hyper-progressive to think.

They were like that.

But, you know, again, I've always, on some level, I think growing up predominantly around white people in Southampton, because their families weren't like that.

I just was always very resistant to any part of my culture that felt suppressive.

So she wasn't super strict with you?

No, not really.

I never had to go to the mosque or anything like that.

The only thing that she enforced is, like, you know, we didn't eat pork and I didn't drink alcohol, and I still don't drink alcohol to this day.

I mean, I do like a bit of pork every now and then, but that's about it.

So, no, they weren't massively political.

Now, me and my mum speak about political issues quite a lot.

It took, you know, she did,

she,

at one point she quite agreed with my stance on racial issues.

Like, I think we both agreed that a lot of the ways that black people are characterized in the West is

quite patronizing and belittling and not very nuanced.

We both agreed with that and I found it really interesting because when George Floyd happened, my mum completely switched, you know, I think the

for want of a better word the programming or the narrative was so strong about how you had to feel.

And if you didn't feel that way, that you were a terrible person.

You know, I remember me and my mum having arguments then, because all of a sudden, so much of what I'd said then suddenly became dangerous to her.

Aisha, look what's happening to, you know, black people in America.

Like, you can't be saying all this stuff that you're saying anymore.

And I remember having quite tense arguments.

about that with her.

She's since come around because I do think 2020 was a moment that so many people got swept up in.

And I actually think we got swept up in something, you know, because I've spoken to loads of people now who look back on that time and are like, I can't believe I said this.

I can't believe I fell out with a friend, you know, a long-term friend because he didn't post square.

You know, yeah, we were sort of intoxicated by, you know, what was happening culturally.

Yeah, well, the lockdown didn't help, I guess.

I mean, there was just a general.

Yeah, no, exactly.

Literal and metaphorical feverishness about the whole thing.

Right, exactly that.

How was your ma when you started having relationships with women then?

She, I didn't tell her for a long time.

And when she first found out, so I didn't come out, she found out.

When she first found out, it was not a good situation.

You know, she was very upset.

I was young at the time.

I was 16.

And so I think I remember like saying to her that, you know, I'm never going to do it again.

It's just a phase.

I never felt like I would ever be able to comfortably tell my Nigerian Muslim mum, you know, that I wasn't straight.

And you'll notice I often say the word not straight as opposed to queer, bisexual, or lesbian, just because sometimes that just feels like the most honest.

Queer to me, as much as I understand the appeal of the word because it's somewhat vague.

I think that's the appeal of it in its vagueness.

And it just means you're not straight.

I often think that word tends to come with a particular belief system.

You know, a lot of people who call themselves queer, there's often a world view that accompanies it that I don't generally share.

And often, you know, with the word lesbian, I don't tend to use that word because as much as like my relationships are predominantly with women and I've only ever fallen in love with women, I wouldn't say I don't have an attraction to men.

I just don't tend to find myself in relationships with men.

So anyway, I just did a little bit of a detour.

But yeah, so my mum was not happy about it in the beginning.

And so it's taken a while.

And my mum, me and my mum are in a great place with my sexuality.

She completely accepts me.

I could talk to her about anything to do, you know, with a relationship with a woman.

I think, you know, of course, she's Nigerian and Muslim.

And I think a lot of African people, from my experience very much care about what the rest of the family thinks.

So even if they're okay with something, how, you know, how is the extended family going to feel?

What are the, you know, what is going to be the talk?

I think she still has a bit of that sometimes.

But one thing with me that is very important in my life is to not seek validation from who I am from anyone else.

It's also a big part of my own personal philosophy and what I'm sharing with people.

I don't care necessarily what white people feel about me.

You know what I mean?

Or I don't care what a racist even thinks about me.

Just don't make it my problem.

You're you're entitled to all of that but you know even my gender or how I feel about it like that's not something anyone else can affirm or validate that's something for me to know yeah I mean obviously that's the way we would all like to be yeah you know like I said it's a it's a process and a journey yeah yeah

what is it like on days where that's not working what does it look like when you have a bad day what do you do what are the things that cheer you up reliably Sometimes I just dance around my room.

You know, there's something really important about movement and about dancing.

You know,

I can see why there's been a few philosophers who've spent time talking about dancing and the importance of dancing.

Yeah, I think it might have been someone like Nietzsche who might have said, like, you know, every day that we haven't danced is a mistake, you know, and I really, really understand that.

Wow, that doesn't sound like classic Nietzsche.

It might not have been him, but it's someone of that ilk.

I don't know, maybe it is, but it's not what I would associate with him.

Yeah,

but I think it actually might be.

And so, yeah, dancing music, that can definitely definitely help.

Reading the words of people.

I have this thing in my phone called Food for Thought.

It's just my favorite quotes from anyone.

Anything that stirs me, you know, and

some stuff comes from books.

Some stuff comes from, I don't know, snippets from films.

Would you be able to read me a couple?

Yeah, okay, sure.

Some of them aren't always...

maybe meant to inspire.

Some of them are just thought-provoking to me.

Okay, for instance, okay, this is one that would just be thought-provoking.

This is the first one that's there.

And this is from a writer and feminist called Camille Parlia.

And she says, repression is an evolutionary adaptation, permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness.

For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

And I think I saved that because I've been thinking about self-awareness and why it's crippling.

And yeah, that seemed to explain that.

So that was just one that's maybe food for thought.

And then in terms of ones that maybe,

I'm seeing, let's see, who else here?

You know, I've even got some Rumi in there.

The beauty you see in me is a reflection of you.

Who's that?

Rumi.

I don't know.

Rumi is like a mystical poet.

And yeah, check out some of his stuff.

Yeah.

I've got some Oscar Wilde in here.

I've got, let's see, what else?

That's interesting about the the self-awareness thing as well.

I think, like, my theory of that in my own life was that it began, well, I guess it's always been there a little bit, thinking too much about stuff, but then it really ramped up when I read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Okay.

And you know that book.

I do know.

I haven't read it.

It's good.

I think it's his best book.

And that book really sort of encouraged me to look more deeply at everything.

And it was saying that small small things make a big difference.

A kind of butterfly effect way of looking at the world and considering every tiny detail because it will, some way down the line, have a much larger and unforeseen effect.

And once you kind of take on that way of looking at the world, it's overwhelming because you're suddenly paralyzed because you know you're thinking about every tiny little thing.

Right, which is probably why they say the more you know, the less you speak.

You know, because yeah,

there's too much to consider or why they often say a lot of hyper intelligent people are crippled with self-doubt

that's me of course it is i can see that um so yeah i it does definitely it definitely tracks um so yeah looking at things like that i think maybe one here that i'll read is from leo tolstoy and it's a simple one everything that I understand I understand only because I love

and I think that's an interesting one to me because I think a lot of my understanding about things just, you know, I have a, I'm a bit of a hippie, you know, like I love people truly.

Like, I'm really curious about everyone.

It doesn't mean I like everyone, but, you know, just for us being here with everything that we have to go through, it's hard not to consider all of those things.

And we're all still standing without some degree of love for everyone.

And I do really think that is what pushes me to understand.

So just, you know, coming across something like that on a day that I'm feeling bad is you know, just a reminder to you know, keep love at the forefront of what you're doing.

Wait, this is a Squarespace advert.

Do you want to build a website?

Yes, I will tell you how.

Visit squarespace.com/slash Buxton.

Now, start a free trial today, and in minutes, you will say, My website dreams are finally coming true.

Just tell Squarespace what you want to do.

They'll suggest some templates that might be right for you.

Drag in pictures and text ads and videos.

And next thing you know, your website will be done.

Visit squarespace.com/slash Buckston today.

Start your free trial and have yourself a play.

And when you have decided that you're ready to pay, type in the offer code Buckstone.

Why?

Because you'll save 10% if it's your first purchase of a website or domain.

Oh, 10%!

That's my favorite percent.

Thank you, Squarespace.

Continue

Hey, welcome back podcasts

Now Rosie I am going to unclip you as there's no one around and we will head back.

Hang on

there you go

Now gamble gamble like the wind.

Oh, it's a little bit cold

Anyway, that was Aisha Akanby there, of course, talking to me.

I really enjoyed meeting Aisha, and I hope our paths will cross again.

Many of the themes that we touched upon in that conversation come up in a couple of the things that I've particularly enjoyed over the last few weeks, so I thought I would recommend them in case they sounded interesting.

One of them

is

the second series of John Ronson's Things Fell Apart radio show.

It's on Radio 4, but there's also a podcast which you can hear on BBC Sounds.

There's a link in the description.

I'm sure a lot of you are across that already.

But for those of you unfamiliar, it's a show in which writer John Ronson traces the roots of culture wars, clashes of various types.

This time, John focuses on the stories behind conflicts over Antifa, the anti-fascist movement in the US,

Black Lives Matter,

anti-vaccine conspiracy theories,

and transgender rights activists, amongst other stories.

I love John's work.

He has been on the podcast a couple of times, I think.

And the stories he finds are always grippingly told without being sensationalist.

And he always does his best, I think, to not lose sight of the humanity of the people he's talking to, whatever side they happen to be on.

In fact, I'm going to record a conversation with John in a week or two that will eventually appear as a bonus episode for the Things Fell Apart series.

I hope.

That's the plan anyway, unless I massively screw it up.

Louis Thoreau did a conversation with John for the first series as a bonus episode.

So I'm honoured to be doing it this time round.

I also saw a fantastic film on the weekend, which you may have read about, called American Fiction,

directed by Cord Jefferson.

I think it's his debut feature.

I think Cord Jefferson was one of the writers on Aziz Ansari's show, Master of None,

which I always quite liked.

Anyway, this is great, American Fiction.

It stars Jeffrey Wright,

who's always good.

Basquiat, he was.

Have you seen Basquiat?

It's worth seeing.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's quite good.

And Xavid is in it, of course, as Andy Warhol.

I like your painting, cotton balls.

Jeffrey Wright also played Felix Leiter in No Time to Die, although he was one of the ones who discovered that actually it was time to die.

It's just a bit sad.

I was like, don't get rid of it.

He's the best guy.

Anyway, in American fiction, Jeffrey plays a frustrated novelist, Monk, I'm reading from some internet blurb now, who's fed up with the establishment that profits from black entertainment, that relies on tired and offensive tropes.

To prove his point, he uses a pen name to write an outlandish black book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.

So that's the kind of topical conceit, I suppose you could call it, which is very good.

I think it's thought-provoking and funny and

interesting but there's also a whole other dimension to the film which is more of a family drama and it's got some really nice observations about sibling dynamics especially in middle age and the painful process of dealing with ailing parents And it's, I thought it was great.

It was handled really nicely, not too grim.

And it quite funny.

Monk, Jeffrey Wright's character, makes the decision to get his mum into a care home.

And the mum, played very well by Leslie Uggams, reminded me a lot of my mum towards the end of her life.

But the care home is expensive, and that's the reason that Monk is put in a difficult position when he starts getting offered big money for this book that he has written to take the piss out of what the industry considers worthwhile black narratives.

American fiction

enjoyed it.

I got a message from a listener

about the podcast with Werner Herzog last week, and it was about Herzog's attitude to therapy in general.

And I'm going to quote a little bit of this message, which is from Paul Carr.

And Paul says, Herzog's perspective fails to acknowledge that many people undergo analysis because they, and just as often others, have reached the end of the road with incredibly destructive behaviors and they cannot move forward without first gaining a new understanding of the causes of these behaviors.

Analysis often comes into play during crises, not when individuals are functioning well.

Herzog's advice against analysis for those in turmoil and their families is naive and unhelpful and shows a misunderstanding of the breadth and complexity of people's psychological problems.

Thanks for the message, Paul.

I wrote back to Paul, and I did say that actually, I think Herzog himself acknowledged that there are times when therapy can be useful.

But yeah, he's certainly not pro-therapy, I think we can say.

I also said to Paul that me and Joe Lysett talked a little bit about Herzog and therapy in our conversation a few episodes back,

and Joe Lysett very entertainingly pushed back on Herzog's position.

Paul, actually, Paul also sent a message off to the Christmas Day podcast,

and he pointed out that

because we played some clips of old films that we used to like, me and Joe, back in the 80s, and

films that had little bits of dialogue that had become part of our bants over the years, including the bit from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where they're watching the baseball game, Cameron and Ferris, and they're going,

They're saying, as Paul pointed out, he can't hit, he can't hit, he can't hit.

So wing batter, he Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Cannedy.

He can't hit in an American accent.

So, uh, yeah, cleared that up.

Also, a couple of other mysteries that I talked about in the outro for the Christmas podcast that I'm sure you will have been worrying about, and I'm glad to be able to clear up now.

I found the details of the person who sent me the Neil Young dock.

It was Lindsay Sinclair Fallus.

Thanks, Lindsay.

I loved it.

I sent you a thank you card.

I hope you got it.

And the other mystery from the Christmas episode was who sent me a lovely blue beanie hat a few weeks before Christmas.

It was Seamus Murphy Mitchell,

who I am about to thank for his invaluable production support and conversation editing on this and so many other episodes.

Thank you, Seamus.

Seamus didn't realize that he hadn't included a card with the hat.

Yeah, I'm sure you're all relieved about that.

Thank you once again to Aisha for making the time to talk to me.

Thanks to Helen Green.

She does the beautiful artwork for this podcast.

Thank you to ACAST and everyone there for their continued support.

But thanks especially to you.

Appreciate you coming back and listening right to the end.

You got a busy life.

Anyway, I'm honored that you would spend more time in my company, and for that reason, I'm wondering if I could

sort of lean in and creepily give you a hug.

Oh, good.

I'm glad that how you're doing.

Nice to see you.

Till next time, take care.

I love you.

Bye.

Like and subscribe.

Like and subscribe

Like and subscribe Please like and subscribe

Give me like a smile and a thumbs up I take a pant when a bums up Give me like a smile and a thumbs up

I take a pant where my bums up

Like and subscribe

Like and subscribe

Like and subscribe

Please like and subscribe

Give me like a smile and a thumbs up I say a pant when it bums up

Give me like a bottle and a thumbs up I take a pat for my buttons up.

Two hours and

five.

Two likes and

five.