Frankie Boyle

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the eggshell stench of starling gogs on the pavements of the birdshit district.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned on a podcast a few weeks ago about

how the news cycle just appears to be

rapidly irrational and how

you can't possibly predict what's going to happen next.

Like literally just today, just today.

So Donald Trump announced that there was a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.

I think Israel and Iran went to war since the last time we spoke.

So Donald Trump announced that there was a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.

The Israelis broke the ceasefire, and then Trump cursed.

Trump cursed on the nose.

And it's receiving more coverage than when someone tried to shoot him into the head.

If you're a seasoned cua or a 10-foot declined, if you've been listening to this podcast a long time,

you'll remember during the first Trump presidency

back in fucking 2018-2019,

I used to read out Donald Trump's tweets as your drunk limerick ant.

I used to do it every single week.

I'd read out Trump's tweets.

He's not on Twitter anymore and I don't want to follow him on fucking Truth Social.

I don't even know how to look at Truth Social.

But I would I'm gonna bring back I'm gonna bring back your drunk limerick aunt

and I'm gonna repeat what Trump said on the news as your drunk limerick ant.

So it's 10 p.m.

Your drunk limerick aunt.

She's tried to sit down and watch an episode of And Just Like That.

Because she used to watch Sex in the City, but now she's watching And Just Like That and she's highly disappointed because it's shit.

I tried, I used to love fucking Sex in the City.

Sex in the City was brilliant.

Any millennial man

who pretends he's never seen Sex in the City is lying, lying.

Because

when I was a teenager, it was one of the few good things on television.

And people used to curse and have sex.

And you felt like an adult when you watched it.

I fucking loved Sex in the City.

But anyway, I've tried to watch.

And just like that, it's not as good.

It's not as good.

It's not the same.

We'll leave it alone.

But anyway, your drunk limerick aunt.

I'm just projecting me.

I'm projecting me onto your drunk limerick aunt now.

So your drunk limerick aunt used to watch Sex in the City.

And now she's disappointed with it.

And just like that.

And she's so disappointed she's after cracking open a bottle of bailies that she got at Christmas, and now she's ringing people up drunk.

And she says, We basically have two countries that are fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Do you understand that?

And you can hear her bailies tinkling, tinkling in the background because it's summertime.

It's summertime, and she's enjoying bailies as a summertime drink with some ice in it.

So that's one there for the seasoned quavers.

Lotsi,

as soon as fucking Trump got back into power, so many of you were asking me, please start doing, start reading out Trump's tweets as your drunk limerick aunt again.

And I haven't been doing it because he hasn't been tweeting.

He fights with Elon Musk, he doesn't use Twitter.

Or X, as it's known now.

And.

So yeah, as of now, as I record this,

now there appears to actually be an agreed ceasefire between Iran Iran and Israel, which

I think was brought on by Donald Trump saying the word fuck.

Not wearing a tie.

He wasn't wearing a tie.

So he looks like he's been up all night.

And he says the word fuck on live TV on the lawn of the White House.

And it was so

unprecedented and unprecedented that I think it freaked out.

It freaked out both Iran and Israel.

And they went, we can't predict this fucker.

We actually can't predict this fella now.

It was so shocking.

And all the news organizations didn't know what to do or how to report it properly.

It's just, he just said the word fuck.

It's so strange and unprecedented that I think it may have actually,

as of 10 p.m.

when I record this now, it may have may have caused a ceasefire.

Like Trump is so narcissistic and so volatile and takes things so personally

that it's possible that Israel in particular were like

this fellow might turn around and not give us not give us any bombs anymore.

And I don't think that's a strategy on Trump's part.

Like Richard Nixon used to do that, but Nixon would do it deliberately.

Richard Nixon

used to have a strategy called the madman theory where Richard Nixon would consciously behave in such a volatile, unpredictable way, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, that the Soviets were like, we don't know what chess move to make here, because this fella might actually be crazy.

But Nixon used to do that deliberately.

I don't think, I don't think Trump is doing that deliberately.

I think people are aware that

this is someone who can take things very personally.

And he went to his truth social last night and announced, there's a ceasefire, there's a ceasefire, everybody.

And for that to be broken, then it bruises his ego, his ego.

And I think.

I think that may have caused a temporary ceasefire.

Which, I don't know, could be broken again tomorrow.

I don't know what could happen tomorrow.

Like I said, the news cycle is bizarre.

Gerard was asking me to bring back the drunk Limerick aunt.

And the other thing I get asked to do a lot is

so I

do live podcasts and sometimes I have comedians on.

And when I do a live podcast with a comedian, I rarely put it out.

Usually because

like when I do a live podcast, I want it to be

it's for the audience.

It's for the people who are there, who are present in the room.

That's who I do the live podcast for, the people who've shown up.

So often when a comedian is my guest,

we both just kind of go nuts and we try to make the crowd laugh.

We try to make the crowd in the room laugh.

Sometimes that doesn't translate into a listenable podcast.

It's more, you had to have been there.

Like I've had Tommy Tiernan on this podcast three times.

Three times I've had Tommy Tiernan as a guest on this podcast and I haven't put out any of them

because it's just me and Tommy screaming at the audience and having crack.

And when I listen back to it, I'm like, no, don't think people are going to want to hear this.

But I am going to, I'm going to share with you a wonderful, wonderful conversation I had with a comedian two weeks ago in Glasgow.

I sat down with Frankie Bile.

Frankie Bile is a world-renowned comedian from Glasgow.

I've done bits and pieces with Frankie.

Jesus, since about 12 years ago, he's always been so kind and supportive of my career and

he's just, he's a deeply intelligent, thoughtful person as well as being hilarious.

He's great for a chat and we had

The most marvelous chat.

It was a privilege to do it in Glasgow to his home crowd in his city in Glasgow.

We had a wonderful night.

and I just want to share it with you because it's so much crack.

Almost as a bit of distraction, as a bit of distraction because we're all glued to the news this week and it's stressful and I think it's okay for us it's all it's all right to take an hour to take two hours out of your day

to not focus on the news cycle.

You have to

putting your head in the sand about events in the news that's not helpful but at the same time as well you do have to

mind your

cognitive fatigue, cognitive fatigue and stress levels.

So it's okay to switch off for a couple of hours a day.

So that's what I want to do for you this week.

So before I get into the chat, first off I want to flag.

I put out a live podcast three weeks ago.

And in this live podcast, I spoke about the Greek myth, the Greek myth of Zeus and Prometheus.

I also speak about it in this chat with Frankie.

So apologies for the repetition.

It was from the same tour.

And when you're gigging every single night, sometimes similar stories pop up with different guests just because that's what's in my head day to day.

So apologies for the repetition there.

And also apologies.

If I go on a little history rant or something and I get a couple of facts wrong, I can't go back and edit that in a live podcast setting or or correct my correct my facts or fact check myself in the moment like I can do with a hot take.

So Frankie Boyle is a legendary comedian.

He's also an author.

He wrote his first book of fiction two years ago called Mean Time and he also has a podcast.

He has a podcast called Here Comes the Guillotine if you want to check that out.

I don't need to be introducing who Frankie Boyle is.

I think you all know who Frankie Boyle is.

So here's the chat we had.

What's the crack?

Happy Eat.

How you doing?

I love all that stuff you do about toxic masculinity and that.

I was listening to the other day, you know, you did a recent podcast on toxic masculinity and how to talk like an adult.

And I was listening to that.

I've always wear noise-cancelling headphones.

So I was listening to that in the park, and I was eating a gelato, 99.

And some guys came up and started to have a go at me about something, some young guys, and they seemed a bit annoyed.

But with the noise-cancelling headphones on, I couldn't hear anything.

And it's just you talking about the drawbacks of toxic masculinity.

And as I was kind of smiling, and they seemed to get angrier and angrier, and I thought this would be an amazing way to get my fucking head kicked in.

Just your gentle voice and the piano,

just a little ocarina pause as my fucking ribs collapse.

I read that you

did you train in G Kondo?

Yeah, I trained here with a brilliant guy who's actually probably the world's foremost teacher of G Kundo, a guy called Tommy Cruthers.

How would you like that?

Gundo is Bruce Lee's specific style.

Yeah.

What was that doing in Glasgow?

Well, I think Tommy was just fascinated by Bruce Lee when he was younger, and he trained with Bruce Lee's first student, this guy called Jesse Glover.

And Tommy used to have this

flyer that he'd hand out, and it had a quote on it from Jesse Glover, which obviously in Jeet Kendo is a great thing.

But the quote was:

Jesse Glover, I think if Tommy punched a man full force in the chest, it would stop his heart.

That's

when we were growing up, uh,

like again, I was mentioning about the days when,

like I said, Prince removed his rib to suck his own dick.

But when that could just fly around and you couldn't challenge it, because what are you going to do?

Ring someone up who knows Prince?

You just had to go with it, there was no internet.

And the other one we had was in Limerick.

Did you know that Bruce Lee was so healthy his heart burst?

And we just had to go with it and go, I don't know, maybe he did.

There was no internet.

Do you think God took Adam's rib out so he could blow himself?

What's your favourite creation, Meet?

My own,

which is Umbumbe, the undying egg.

I believe the world was created by

Umbumbe emerging from the undying egg.

He lays an egg and then dies.

That's my one one, and I'm going with it.

I think the idea that the universe is a hologram, Leonard Suskin's mathematical theory that we are a projection from an infinitely far away source,

I find that quite comforting.

Because what does any of this matter?

Hologram blind boy?

I mean, it's

interesting.

I was telling you backstage that the CIA ended up doing a study and trying to figure out what reality was in the 70s and they millions and millions and they came to the conclusion that reality is a type of hologram.

And then they developed a type of meditation called a hemisync meditation, which you can do on YouTube.

It's a fucking CIA meditation that apparently allows you to leave your body in an astral plane.

And I tried it and I didn't leave my body, but I got that roller coaster feeling and went, fuck this.

I'm going to go back to mindfulness, not the CIA meditation shit.

My favorite origin story is:

do you know Zeus and Prometheus?

Yes.

What I love about that one is just how fucking how much it is about right now.

Like

you've Zeus and I'm gonna I'm gonna make a bollocks of this, right?

But I'm gonna tell it in the Irish way, which means I'll tell a version of it.

So Zeus and Prometheus are like gods, right?

And they're up in Mount Olympus, which is like Greek heaven.

Marty Pelos there wanking.

Hey, he's not Greek, is he?

He should be.

Have you seen him on

Instagram?

He's got a strong Instagram game, Marty.

He doesn't as fuck.

He's doing what?

He's got always his shirt unbuttoned to like the fourth button.

He's got a really fantastic bedroom, and he just sings versions of songs that people ask him to sing.

Fair play, Tim.

So Zeus and Prometheus are there going...

We're fucking...

They're really bored.

Zeus and Prometheus are bored.

They're like, I'm sick of looking at fucking Marti Pello's thirst traps.

I need something better.

I need something more.

Up in Mount Olympus.

So Prometheus says to Zeus,

why don't we just like make a video game full of people like us?

Why don't we make this like world full of creatures that are like us?

And then we won't be bored anymore.

And then Zeus is like,

fuck that, Prometheus.

What if they like get so if they're like us, they'll be smart.

What if they get so smart that they fucking kill us?

And then Prometheus goes, ah, go on.

We're sick of looking at Marti Pedro.

Let's just do something.

So Zeus goes, all right, fuck it.

So they make humanity.

They make us.

They make the world.

And they're living in a different time.

So they get to watch humans progress really quickly.

And it goes from, you know, fucking Cro-Magnum and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, until you got Homo sapiens, but they're kind of stuck.

They're stuck.

They're freezing cold.

And they're miserable.

And the humans are eating raw meat and doing fuck all with themselves and chasing mammoths.

And then Prometheus, he starts to like, Zeus is like, I don't like these little cunts.

But then Prometheus starts to fall in love with the humans.

He's like, I like them.

I want to help them.

So what Prometheus does is he steals fire from Mount Olympus and gives fire to the humans.

And once the humans get fire, then it starts to progress rapidly.

And when the humans get to the point that they start making art, that was the one when the humans start making art, then Zeus goes, fuck this.

No, no, no, no.

These concepts, they're making art.

They're getting real smart.

They're going to kill me.

So what Zeus does

is he finds one of these little humans, a woman called Pandora, and he knows these humans are smart, they're curious.

So he goes to Pandora and says, here's a box, you can't open it.

And then Pandora's like, fuck that, Zeus.

Staring at the box every single day going, you can't just show up as a god and give me a box and say, don't open it.

So she stares at it and then eventually goes, fuck that.

She opens the box.

And what comes out is mental health issues.

Yeah.

This is a fucking 1500-year-old story.

What comes out is jealousy, anxiety, depression.

And then that's it.

Humans can't take over the gods.

And what I love about it is...

In about two years' time, right, when AI goes nuts, someone's going to be like, yeah, we're going to have to teach it panic attacks.

That's what they're gonna do, they're gonna teach AI panic attacks, body image, jealousy, and it's the that's how we're gonna have to stop AI,

give it low self-esteem.

Zeus, he liked to shag people as an animal, didn't he?

He's sort of turn up as a bull.

He fucking did, didn't he?

And maybe that's why he was worried about art.

He was like, they're going to finally be able to do sketches of me.

It was this guy.

If you were getting shagged by an animal back in the day, you'd better hope it was Zeus.

Do you know what I mean?

I really hope this is Zeus, and I'm not just being humped by a dog.

What?

There's a fucking mad story about

it's in Greek myth, right?

There's this woman.

Whatever happens in the myth, one of the gods curses a man's wife so that she's sexually attracted to a bull.

Yeah, that's where the Minotaur comes from, yeah.

It's the Minotaur's ma.

So, this, this, it's, it's,

there's a husband and wife, and the husband, the husband, ah, here it is.

So, the husband gets his hand on a beautiful white bull, and this is the most perfect bull in Greece.

But the thing is, in Greece, if you were to get something as magical as a beautiful white bull, you have to sacrifice it to the gods.

But this fellow went, fuck this, this bull is amazing, I'm keeping it, fuck the gods.

So, then the gods said, all right,

I'm going to make your wife want to fuck that bull more than anything in the whole world.

So then the wife is just like, oh, I really want to fuck that bull.

I just can't think about anything else.

I need that bull to fuck me.

So she goes to

Daedalus.

I thought you were going to say Marty Pell.

No.

Fucking Daedalus, the fellow who invented the Icarus wings thing.

She goes to Daedalus, who's an inventor, and goes to Daedalus and goes, I need to fuck this bull, right?

But I don't know how I can't figure out the mechanics of how a bull is going to fuck me.

So Daedalus has a good old thinking and he goes, I know what to do.

So he invents a big wooden bull's arse

that her arse fits inside.

So she stands around with her arse, her bare arse, and the wooden bulls, and then the bull comes up and gets to fuck her.

And then the child is just this fucking weird, this weird bull man.

And then the daz, like, what the fuck is this?

And then they go, this child is so mad looking, because he's half bull, half human, we need to send him to an island that has a maze on it and that's the minotaur

I think Daedalus said he invented that but he already had it in his shed

now I'll try

truly if you're the husband you just sacrifice the bull hollow it out fuck your wife wearing the fucking bull costume actually that's a good

yeah why didn't why didn't he try and dress up as the bull that's a good one

um

We should do that mythological couples counselling.

I want to talk about

a real name, right?

That sounds like someone had a gun that shot Irish names instead of bullets.

Patrick Martin Francis Bile.

The only person who beats you is Dusty Springfield, whose real name was Mary Isabel Catherine Barnadette O'Brien.

Do you know

Jerry Adams just won that libel case against the BBC?

It was for a guy who was murdered in Donegal

years and years ago.

That's the origin of the case, which obviously he had nothing to do with.

But, no.

I mean, genuinely, genuinely, it was like a stupid case for them to bring.

But I got questioned for that murder.

Why?

Yeah, because I was in Donegal at the time, and there's an IRA hitman who's also called Francis Martin Boff.

Oh,

how long ago was this?

Yeah, it was like 2005 or something like that.

I was doing Mock the Week, so the police turned up and they were like, what the fuck?

Are you serious?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And they were laughing, but they still kind of.

The policemen knew it was you, but they're like, we have to do our job.

Yeah, we have to go through it.

Yeah.

Are you allowed to talk about that?

Yeah, I think so.

That is fucking gas.

I've got DMs from Jerry Adams on Twitter.

I don't answer them.

He wanted me to go up a mountain for a biodiversity project.

Who's turning that down?

Me.

I don't know, like, Jerry, fucking figure something else out.

How are you, blind boy?

My friend's got a mountain.

I'm very interested in taking you up the mountain.

Pause, it's for biodiversity.

so i just left i just left it on red i just

i i met it i met jerry adams once i've only met the man in person once and i happened to be dressed like a black and tan

i'm serious i was shooting a fucking documentary um back in 1916 it was a documentary about the 1916 rising and

I wanted to, I tell you what, from an artistic perspective, this is what I was doing.

In front of the GPO in Dublin, there's the statue of Jim Larkin.

Like, Jim Larkin is a wonderful socialist, he was a compatriot of Connolly, right?

And I was trying to make the points of the vulgarity of having like fucking McDonald's and

Coca-Cola and all this American capitalism around the statue of Jim Larkin.

That's really offensive to me.

So I figured, okay, if that's offensive, why don't I read out the 1916 proclamation dressed as a black and tan at the GPO?

So I did, right?

But it was like a year before the 1916 commemorations, and I was unaware that on the exact same day, Sinn Féin were having their official commemoration of O'Donovan Ross's funeral, and all of Sinn Féin were there dressed up like fucking volunteers.

And I just wander into the hotel as a black and tan.

Sheer coincidence, Sinn Féin weren't fucking having it at all.

And I'm there, I'm there going, my granddad was in Tom Barry's flying column.

It's fine.

Up the ra, up the ra, it's grand.

They were like, no.

Fantastic.

Do you remember you appeared in one of my documentaries and we couldn't tell RTE it was you?

Really?

What was my name again?

Was that called?

Hen Party.

Hen Party.

And

it was either going to be Hen Party or Netflix.

I remember.

We were peeling condoms out your back garden.

We were putting condoms and bananas out your back garden.

That's right, in a Wendy house?

Actually, we did two.

So

I was recording a documentary with RTE, right?

And I gave Frankie a shout and I said, Frankie, will you be in this documentary?

But the thing is,

I couldn't let RTE know that you were in it because they'd just go nuts with us.

And like, because you were doing it for a favor, you were doing it for the crack.

But they would then tell everyone, Frankie Boyle's on RTE.

So we'd hide this.

You made me wear a wig.

You wore a wig.

We credited you as hen party and fucking RTE had no idea he was in it.

It went out on TV.

They didn't know Frankie's like, if they found out that Frankie was on Irish TV, they'd come in their pants.

They didn't know.

And then we managed to get...

So there was a referendum coming up for abortion in Ireland, the repeal the eighth referendum.

And you couldn't have a political opinion in support of this referendum on Irish TV, but we wanted to do it anyway.

So what we did was we counted a lot of bananas, we were peeling them, and then we we said to you, what do you do with the eighth banana?

And you said to camera, we peel the eighth.

Hold on, we went slightly over curfew, you know.

We're supposed to get a pint and a piss out here and then we're going to come back out.

I wonder, is there any one?

God, the one question that my fucking...

What do you think of Billy Connolly?

I love Billy Connolly.

I have a recurring dream where me and my dad go and see Billy Connolly.

It's the most bland, recurring dream anyone's ever had.

We go and see Billy Connolly, it's it's great, and we go home.

What was it hard starting out as a comedian in Scotland with someone like Billy Connolly being there?

Oh, no, that was great because then you had someone who'd done everything.

Because the hard thing is, people are like, oh, fucking Scottish people.

Do you know what I mean?

People are still like this a bit.

But do you know what I mean?

The fact that you could go, oh, no, there isn't actually a precedent.

you know, for Scottish comedy was good because Scottish club comedy at the time was like really, really hard, you know, and audiences were.

What do you mean, hard?

Like, it was like people,

their ideas about comedy came from an album they'd heard in the 1970s, and there'd been a big dead period.

Second gig I ever did, I walked in, there's a guy on the stage, and he was kind of dying.

It was a really rough club, and he lost his temper a bit.

And he went, What the fuck do you expect for a Fiverr?

And someone goes, Change.

Listen

You have to have a pint and a piss we'll we'll come back out and speak about this after a pint and a piss, alright?

God bless

Yes, so we're gonna take let's take a little ocarina pause now.

I've got a it's a lovely nice long podcast to have for you this week, but let's have an ocarina pause.

I don't have an ocarina, I've got a kazoo and a sleigh bell.

So let's I'm going to play a kazoo and a sleigh bell at the same time to see if we can do it.

And you're going to hear an advert for something.

If you're new to the podcast, if you're someone who listens to Frankie or knows who Frankie is and hasn't a fucking clue who I am, and you're a new listener,

I like to have a little pause if adverts are coming in so that you don't suddenly get surprised by an algorithmically generated advert.

So here's the kazoo and sleigh bell pause.

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Sounds like a depressed seal who swallowed a chandelier, begging for euthanasia.

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Upcoming gigs?

Only two really.

I'm trying to chill out.

I'm trying to chill out a bit.

Only two gigs coming up in September.

The 19th of September, I'm in the Millennium Theatre in Derry.

Alright, come along to that on the 19th of September.

And then the 23rd of September, wonderful, fantastic, Vicker Street.

I'm in Vicar Street.

If you like this, if you like the crack that's going on here with Frankie, come along to a live podcast.

It's like going to the theater or the cinema.

You don't have to get shit faced.

It's not a night out.

You can come along to my live podcast and you'll be home in bed, ready for work the next day.

Okay, back to my chat with the wonderful Frankie Boyle.

Like I said,

this is a long podcast this week.

You can listen to it in one go, or you can listen to it in parts throughout the week.

It's up to you.

That's the joy of podcasts.

But we were talking about Cocktail Twins backstage.

Any cocktail twins fans?

Okay, good.

Is Grangemouth as depressing as they say it is?

I need to go there.

Yes, yes.

There's not a lot there.

And now there's going to be less there because the whole oil thing has fucked off.

Because the guys that owned the oil thing has bought Man Yu.

The oil is going from Grangemouth.

With the refinery, yeah.

Because the guy, Jim Ratcliffe, has bought Manchester United.

I didn't know that.

Because we were chatting backstage, right?

And I was bringing up the point that...

Like, I fucking adore Limmy, right?

And we had Limmy here

as a guest.

And

what breaks my fucking heart and something I never ever understood is that I can't believe that Limmy's shows were BBC Scotland.

And like, what the fuck?

Are you telling me this isn't funny in Sunderland?

I didn't know that it was exclusively BBC Scotland.

And like, what the fuck is going on there?

Like, what do people from London think a Scottish person is?

But I think it partly comes from Scotland as well, doesn't it?

Because Scotland doesn't really have enough of a culture.

Lemmy wrote a sitcom after he did those shows, didn't he?

He wrote a Falkenhouse sitcom and took it to BBC Scotland and they went, no, thanks.

Fuck off.

And we're the fucking audience and we would like to see it.

You know?

Because we pay the fucking licence fee.

But you don't get that here because,

like, our middle classes are incredibly Philistine.

It's not like English middle classes where, you know, people are very kind of

literate, francophile.

Like, in Scotland, it's almost an asset in the middle classes to be a Philistine because it's really about social reproduction.

You go to St.

Aloysius, you go to fucking whatever, and you learn to be an accountant and you go and work in an accountancy firm, and you then open your own accountancy firm.

And that's kind of what it's about.

It's about replacing the professional classes, and they have no fucking interest in culture.

And the problem is a lot of people

are working in culture.

I was trying to.

I was on stage in Edinburgh last night with Michael Peterson, who's the macare of Edinburgh, which is like the poet Laris.

And

I'm going to sound something.

I'm going to say something now that sounds like the biggest lie you've ever heard in your fucking life, but this really, really happened to me.

So

I

accidentally found myself at Harry Stiles' 21st birthday party.

Oh, you think that's...

Oh, no, no, no.

And then,

at Harry Stiles' 21st birthday party, party i ended up drinking pints with the glasgow mafia

and they told me that barnes's night was only for protestants

now i know that sounds fucking nuts i'm gonna i'll contextualize it for you i i did i'm not lying this

i was i was working in in soho theater i was in you know the groucher club groucher club i'm not a regular

it's it's a fucking showbiz club right so i had access to this was like 2014 so because I was working in Soho Theater doing a show, I got access to the Groucho Club, which is fucking famous people.

So, I go into the Groucho Club, right?

And then it's in the middle of Harry Stiles' fucking birthday party.

I'm like, what the fuck?

I'd never seen someone so famous in my life.

It was terrifying.

He was at the height of his one-direction fame, and he was even his own birthday party with his own friends.

He looked like an atom.

He was walking around.

I swear to fuck, there was a nucleus of people just facing him.

It was terrifying.

So I was looking at this going, what the fuck am I doing here?

And then I'm at the bar and I had my hood up and this person said,

stop wearing your hood and then pointed at an old man in the corner.

And then they heard my Irish accent and invited me for a drink.

And they were Glasgow, but like hard Glasgow people.

An old man, kind of an oldish woman, and a younger son.

And I was having chats with them.

They were fine.

They liked me because I was Irish.

And then one of the bartenders, this could have been been a live from the bartender, says, excuse me, sir, are you aware you're drinking with the Glasgow Mafia?

Now,

that's all I know.

And then...

Did we find out why they were at Harry Still's?

No!

No!

No!

And then

they said to me, they were going, Robert Burns is only for proddies.

And that's what they said, Robert, and it stuck in my head from the night.

That's it.

And then I brought it up on stage with Michael Peterson last night, and he disagreed with that.

And then I was asking you backstage,

is it just just for proddies or is it for everyone?

Very, very slightly more for proddies.

Okay.

You know what I mean?

Like, if you're a Catholic, you'd be much more likely to celebrate St.

Patrick's Day than you would Burns Night.

Yeah.

But it's not an exclusively Protestant thing.

Is it because of the Ulster Scots thing?

Is that it?

Or is it the Scots language and how they like that over there in an Ulster?

Well, you get that in Northern Ireland where

they have pictures of Burns in Belfast because they, I don't think he even visited.

It's the legitimization of the dialect.

Yeah, to say

we were also a kind of like indigenous

people.

So, like, you don't consider the fetishization of Robert Burns to be evidence of Scottish culture?

Well, it's not enough of a culture.

Like, if you look at, like,

you know, how we always go, oh, there's nowhere left to explore in the world anymore.

Must have been great in the fucking 18th century or 17th century when there were new kind of.

Like, there are in Scotland, like, what's it like to be a teenager in fucking Guruk

we have no idea what is it like to be a mother in fife nobody knows

there is there's no kind of cultural examination of 99% of the country

can you can you contextualize the the the Scottish mind in in a in a colonial sense

Scotland was a henchman yeah

right and when the Czechs dried up, we went, oh, we were sort of a bit like Ireland, you know, because

the fucking money wasn't coming in anymore.

But at the same time, lots of people here did suffer a type of oppression because they lived under capitalism.

So they didn't get any of the money.

So like, you know, I grew up in Glasgow and I got nice streets to walk down.

But, you know, we were fucking poor, you know.

So it's difficult for people in Scotland sometimes to see their role within colonialism.

You know, we were taught about in school the tobacco lords, you know, oh, they just traded tobacco.

What was on the other part of that journey?

Slaves?

Like Walter Raleigh, like he was a fucking prick.

Like, no, a real one.

Like, he was a nasty bit of work, Walter Raleigh.

So I'll speak to English people who come from Irish people, and they'll speak about this.

this struggle of figuring out what am I what was it like because you're fucking Irish Irish like what was that that like here

in Glasgow?

Was that grand?

No, you would just always think of yourself as Scottish, even though your parents largely spoke Irish.

Like, your parents were Goyaltucked, weren't they?

Yeah, and like, we would go there for about seven weeks of the year, and there's just kind of it's Donegal, so there's just sort of nothing.

So, all the counties in Ireland, I don't know if you know this, but the counties all have a wee kind of catchphrase.

So, it's like tip, the premier county, and all that stuff.

And Donegal's one is Donegal, the forgotten county.

Fuck me.

And they had transport links, so they had like a train system in the 1920s and stuff, but it all just gradually died off.

And then it's just become this kind of almost like you described Chernobyl, you know, where it's just kind of overgrown.

It's the thing with the trains is like

when the South got independence from Britain, like we got rid of loads of British shit, we got rid of the statues, changed the names of the streets, but then we went too far and they turned against trains.

Yeah, so the one good thing the fucking Brits did, well, no, they gave us the three-pin plug.

The other thing was a fantastic railway system because the reason Ireland had amazing railways was so that they could distribute troops anywhere in Ireland wherever they wanted.

And then fucking Eamon Devalera goes, fuck that, we don't need these fancy railways anymore.

And then poor old Donegal.

And also, the south of Ireland just didn't really care.

Like the post-Civil War,

post-Civil War, they just couldn't care less.

It was a bit like you know, the old Billy Conley joke about

there's two guys getting stalked by a lion, and one starts putting on his trainers, and the guy goes, You'll never outrun that lion.

And he says, Only have to outrun you.

That's kind of what the south of Ireland did to the north of Ireland.

No, fully.

Like full fucking partitionism.

It was

fuck off with your bullshit up there in Belfast.

Don't be bringing the Brits down here.

That was the attitude.

Even though some people like to say it was different.

But we have a problem with partitionism in Ireland.

We have...

And I grew up with myself, just

free state privilege, I call it.

Like, even

years and years and years ago, a song called Up the Ra,

you know?

And what it was based on was when I was growing up in Limerick, lads would just write IRA on walls.

But it wasn't anyone in the IRA, it was someone's brother.

Do you know what?

They'd just write IRA on the wall, IRA, and then Tupac beside it, and maybe Bob Marley.

Seriously!

But like up in fucking Belfast, you can't write IRA on the wall unless you're in the fucking IRA.

Do you know what I mean?

And all these different things that I had no awareness of because I grew around the safety of that.

Donegal is different though, because it's right beside the border.

Yeah, people like to hide stuff there.

It's a very high decountry.

I don't know, something like questions.

Doesn't look very professional, does it?

I'm supposed to have a fucking clipboard.

These are shit questions, man.

Roll me the ball.

Let's see.

Um,

how do you feel about about satire?

I don't even know why I wrote that down.

Like, I.

Why did I write like it probably meant something different?

What I mean, okay, this is what I want to get at, is

the fucking problem of doing satire now when, like,

I think that the biggest cultural influence, especially on American politics, has been wrestling.

The idea of KFA.

Seriously, if you look at

like it's very what Trump is a fascist, right?

Like that he's a fascist and what you're seeing is a fascist regime.

But the thing is, we think of fascism as, oh, Mussolini and Hitler and Franco, I know what a fascist looks like.

These fascists don't like to laugh, they're very serious.

But America does the fascism, such as getting people and putting them in chains and putting them to El Salvador, which is fascist.

But then the official White House account would post a video of it and be like, ASMR.

But they're joking.

And now it's like, how do I call this fascism?

Because the people who are fascists are joking about themselves and I don't know what this is.

And

like,

how do you do satire anymore?

He never laughs, though, Trump.

You ever heard Trump laugh?

Never.

Yeah.

I think he's at heart a very humorless person, but also

he is unfortunately incredibly funny.

How did that assassin miss his his giant head?

It's like the one guy in America who couldn't fucking make that shot.

The guy's fucking head glows.

He wears a red hat on top of it and stands in front of a flag so you can gauge wind direction.

I think satire is a bit like the problem with satire is it's kind of moralistic at heart.

Do you know what I mean?

And maybe we're just at too late a point in history for that.

So satire tends to go, these people are behaving badly in those roles.

Whereas actually, it's that those roles, those institutions, and that structure doesn't work.

Do you know what I mean?

So it's very hard from a satirical point of view to go, we should end capitalism, which is probably what needs to happen.

You know, it's much easier to go, Boris Johnson's a a bit of a fucking asshole.

It's a tough one.

I mean,

what we're seeing right now will say, let's just take Los Angeles right now.

And like this morning,

there was an Australian journalist shot into the leg with a rubber bullet on camera.

And

that I did a podcast on it years ago.

That's deliberate.

It's called the Miami Method of Policing.

It was invented by a gun from Dublin in the 2000s who became,

he was a policeman in Miami, went to the chief of police, he's from Dublin, and they invented this way of policing.

And one facet of it is the media become a target.

So she was shot deliberately as a way to intimidate the public.

And

you can't have satire when that exists.

What do you satirize?

You know what I mean?

It's very tough.

Well, I think you can have it if it's done very well, but the problem is that you can kind of get drawn into

simply churning out their message.

Do you know what I mean?

They want people to see that.

They want people to hear about that.

And if it ends up in your monologue, you then become part of that process, you know?

You need the...

maybe the people in power to be deliberately trying to hide something.

Like if you go to

what do they always use as a classic example of fucking satire?

Jonathan Swift's modest proposal, which is

the famine is happening in Ireland,

the liberal elite of England are pretending it's not happening,

and then Jonathan Swift goes, why don't we just eat the children?

Why don't we just get the children of the poor and then

feed them to poor people?

and then the problem is solved.

And you need to have that kind of ignorance from the upper class to be hiding something in order for it to work.

But you don't have it anymore now.

You have

Trump's people are just going, how are you getting on?

I'm a prick, I am.

I'm a fucking prick.

Pete Hagsett, he's got Nazi tattoos, you know?

Well, that's at the heart of satire, as you're pointing out hypocrisy.

quite often and if you point out hypocrisy about these people they're like that's one of my better qualities

you're a nerd about rap music.

Like, you, I've seen you share rap tunes, and I'm like, how the fuck does he know this?

You're really, really into your fucking rap.

That has to be something you developed as a kid.

No, I kind of got into it maybe like 20 or something like that.

Really?

Yeah.

But also, as well, you know, you never know as much as people who really know about stuff.

Something like that about comic books.

Like, I was a comic bo, I thought I was a comic book nerd, and then you meet someone who really knows about comics.

And it's the same with rap.

So I went on like Romesh Ranganathan show, and I was like, fucking hell, I have no idea what you're talking about, Romesh.

Like, he's so knowledgeable.

And

was there anything about rap that informed your process as a.

Like, when you started off, you used to be very confrontational, very controversial, and then I won't say you softened, you changed a bit over the years.

What was the thinking behind that?

Like, what I always.

When I was looking at you and you were being mad offensive,

what I used to say was,

you're holding a mirror up all the time to how offensive we say tabloids are.

Any joke that you said that was really shocking, there was nothing.

The papers were doing the same shit, just in a completely different context.

Like, really disgusting, but we never called that.

And I always felt, no, no, no, there's a mirror being held up here.

This is a tabloid thing.

That's the vibe that I got.

But, like, it was always interesting to me the idea that, like, newspapers, which is where most kind of offense journalism type stuff comes from, like, they were sort of moral arbiters of what should go on in culture.

And you're like, have you ever met a fucking journalist?

And the idea that they

should be the moral judges of anything, you're literally going through a stranger's fucking bins on cocaine, you know?

And also, even the idea that they're genuinely offended by anything do you think a journalist genuinely saw two teenagers who went to a student halloween party dressed as the twin towers and went oh my god i'm so offended i must put this and they just didn't they you know they but they realized it was a type of currency you know i did a joke one time it was about do you remember the speaking clock it's this old thing you'd phone up the clock for the time and the guy would go on the third stroke it will be 10 30 right so i did some joke, he died.

And I went, The guy who did this beacon clock died.

Hopefully, it was after a couple of small strokes, right?

I got then an email from a journalist at the Telegraph who went, Well, Mr.

So-and-so actually did die after three small strokes,

and

I'm going to phone up his family and tell them about your joke.

Oh my god!

Is there anything you would like to add?

I'm like, No, don't phone them.

They weren't at the show.

That is unbelievable.

So you would have said this, this, was this

pre-people recording shit?

So this was...

So this is just a shit.

So you just...

This joke was just going to disappear into the ether.

And then a journalist decided, I'm going to start some shit because I'm so moral.

They like to tell the joke because then they get to secondhand tell the joke without the artistic risk.

Do you know what I mean?

They go, oh, isn't it terrible that he said this?

Quite a funny thing.

You know?

It's like, you know, a judge at a Flasher trial going, and apparently he showed you one of these.

You know.

Do you think the red tops have gotten any better?

Like, I mean,

like, there was a particular low point.

I always remember the countdown to Charlotte Church turning 18, just being, oh, my fucking God.

And how that was culture, that was.

That was normal culture.

That was like, people went, okay, is that what we're doing now?

Like, that was horrendous.

Piers Morgan listening to people's phones.

Like, some fucking bad shit went down.

And what makes it worse is like, oh, it's actually funded by billionaires.

Right, okay.

Like, all of these fucking red tops, it's money at the top, you know what I mean?

Do you think they've gotten any better?

No, but I mean, they get less readers now,

you know.

But their websites are still

really hugely influential, you know.

So

I don't think it's going to, you know.

I just think ultimately they're owned by the wrong people.

And what you needed in Levison was something about media plurality.

You needed them to go, people can only own 10% of a newspaper or whatever.

And they had a chance to do that, and they fumbled it.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Because now you've got over in America, Jeff Bees has after buying the Washington Post

and just came straight in and said

from now on we only speak about free market capitalism in a positive way.

And anything he did, and anything that contradicts this, just find a new job.

Do you think they all go up to space because they know we want to see them die?

I've thought about that a lot, actually.

With

do you remember your man Salt Bay?

Yeah,

so something that I always thought about.

So, if you look at Salt Bay,

he's after closing his restaurant in Hollywood now, so it's on the way out.

But at Peak Salt Bay, which would have been about 2022,

it's very, very, very wealthy people because it's expensive food.

But if you look at the full salt bay ritual, it's not just the salt.

He puts the salt on the steak, then gets an incredibly 12-inch long sharp steak knife, gets the steak, and the first bit of steak is put into the rich person's mouth on the end of this fucking knife.

I think it's rich people

that are playing with the idea of the guillotine.

Their neck.

I'm serious.

It's some billionaire.

You can look at his Adam's apple, and then Salt Bay just has a fucking knife to his neck.

And I think that that is the.

Because we just need to radicalize saltby.

I don't think that's going to happen.

He seems like a silly man.

Bizarrely, he speaks English with a Limerick accent.

It's very strange he says avocado.

Avocado.

Like it's.

I can't get apparently fucking.

I think it was Lenin spoke with a Limerick accent as well, like Vladimir Lennon.

He had a teacher from Limerick.

I wonder if Bezos is going up and it's like the rocket is a penis with which he's trying to fuck the universe.

And he is the Ejaculate.

And he went up with his brother, who also looks like Ejaculate.

Do you remember that?

Did you see the clip of him coming down and William Shatner is trying to have a profound moment of having just been in space?

And then Bezos is like, fuck this, where's the champagne?

Elon Musk doesn't even go up in the fucking thing to get that cunt up there.

He's a fucking terrible person, even by South African standards.

I hope they keep going up because it seems real dangerous.

You've never found yourself in the presence of any of these people, have you?

It'll be fucking fun if I do.

I'll tell you that.

Not got that long left.

I think I'll,

yeah, just strap a huge fucking nail bomb to myself.

Hopefully be a Halloween party so I can go as like a snail or something.

So I can just have like a shell that's almost entirely plastic explosives.

Just drag myself into the fire.

Even if it's not a Halloween party, just say this is his thing.

He likes to dress as a snail.

Don't mention it.

An entire new comedy act for Frankie.

Frankie is now a giant snail, like a teletoby, and no one questions it.

And this is the master plan.

Well, I might have to do maybe six months as the snail just doing gigs.

Then I get booked for the fucking Bezos Mask Corporate.

Save the world.

Maybe that's what Russell Brand is doing.

Yeah.

You performed in a Beckett play.

I did.

I was in Endgame.

I was ham, which was a much bigger role than I'd been expecting.

And it was really, really incredibly difficult.

But it was great.

40 nights.

Yeah, we did like 44 shows.

Yourself and Robbie Sheen.

Myself and crazy Robbie Sheen.

He's a lovely man.

But how is he Irish?

He's so fucking handsome.

I was in a pub with him in Cork, and it was just like Irish person.

So it's just like gargoyle, potato.

And then this like fucking Caravaggio.

I know, there's a bang of a torque about him.

What was that like?

I mean, what I'd love to know, right, is so that's that's a difficult fucking play.

Um, it's not a play that

I wouldn't call it enjoyable for the average audience.

Did you end?

Did you get any fucking Frankie Boyle fans showing up and going, I'm going to sit here and watch Frankie doing a Beckett play for a couple of hours?

No, but what we did get was added an Irish accent, and because my parents are Irish, I was able to pick a very specific kind of Dublin, like colonial West Brit kind of accent.

And I managed to get it, you know, just down pat.

So people turned up and thought that I was an Irish actor, and then later found out it was me.

And it was amazing.

Fuck, what you doing?

Because they just thought, oh, that weirdly looks like him.

You know, but that's a great compliment, though.

That's wonderful.

Yeah, it was a great compliment.

But then,

cause in the play, I don't know if you know the play, but Ham is in a chair, so he doesn't have to move, and he wears goggles.

We had blackout goggles.

So it really,

you don't have to be that great an actor.

It's almost like a radio play.

And we got great reviews for this thing.

And I kind of feel I can now go, oh, I did a play and people liked it, and I'll never do it again

because I kind of feel I got away with something there.

Is there what?

Because you're big into your fucking art as well.

Like, you're into philosophy, science fiction.

Did you bring any of that to your stand-up?

I'm trying to make the stand-up a bit winky.

I do sometimes letting smaller shows do more stuff like that.

But then there's something about isn't there getting a show together to go and do it's it's got to work in hull on a Friday night

that kind of brings it down a bit but also tightens it up a bit as well, do you know what I mean?

Um but yeah, maybe moving forward if I did live stuff again, I would just do small rooms and um try and do some more interesting stuff.

And with all the the shit you're interested in, have you ever gone to TV stations and been like, I want to make a documentary about this, I want to make a show about this, and they've just went fuck off oh, constantly.

Constant relic.

What?

What are you like in the middle of the.

I mean, there's no kind of like

there's no sort of logic to it.

So we did that one about the monarchy,

farewell and the monarchy.

And that went really well.

And

it did well ratings-wise and stuff.

And then afterwards, we went, the election's coming up.

Why don't we do

the worst prime ministers, the ten worst prime ministers or whatever, be really, you know, really easy.

We'll get some good talking heads, blah, blah, blah.

And they just went, yeah, we're not interested.

And it's just, there seems to be no logic to what people are and aren't interested in.

But at the same time, you know, I've got plenty of other stuff in my life.

And you wouldn't want to make, like, I don't know, a fucking comic book documentary.

You released your own comic book, didn't you?

We did them.

We pitched a comic book documentary just before

the thugged Batman film came out,

a massive film, the Christopher Nolan film.

And the BBC said it's too niche.

And you're like, it's fucking Batman.

Silly fucking

like, you know, but you can't really get past the fact that, you know, the people commissioning it don't read Batman comics.

But they got that wrong anyway.

Jesus Christ, imagine saying someone out, there's not enough Marvel around.

What do you think of that, by the way?

What do you think of what's happened to film in general just because of the size of these franchises?

I think it's bad.

I mean, I just think, like, the first Avengers movie was good, but then it was too successful.

So then they started looking at all the other ones.

You know what I mean?

Like, are you able to enjoy them?

Can you turn on some Marvel stuff and go, I'll have a bit of this?

No, absolutely not anymore.

I watched them all with the kids and stuff, but I really loved comics.

And I loved, like, a lot of that Marvel stuff comes from the ultimate situation of the Marvel universe.

And I loved all that stuff.

But then by the time it hits the screen, it's been through so many hands.

Yeah.

And it's you're just like, well, there's only two ways this story can go, you know?

And now it's just like, you know, you see like the trailers for the new Fantastic Four, and it looks like kind of AI Wes Anderson.

Yeah.

You know?

And you sort of think, well, there's sort of no way that anyone's ever going to be allowed enough freedom to make this good.

You know, because ultimately, at the heart of things being good,

someone got to take creative risks.

And if it's money people involved, they're going to minimize risk.

And what really pisses me off is like films like The Joker.

And the reason it pisses me off is

here's someone trying to make a non-superhero film, a story about

male loneliness, but they have to fucking do it inside the Marvel Universe.

And it's just insane.

Like, it's

taxi driver basically.

Even the new penguin thing with Colin Farrell.

Why is he the penguin?

Huh?

Like,

it's like an Italian mob story, and he's called cobble pot i know

what they tried to do

make him the fucking penguin then why is he the penguin because they need to have everything in he doesn't look like the penguin he doesn't look anything penguiny it just doesn't make sense

but even i was watching it they should have called it not the penguin

they're having to make normal films within the marvel universe they're they're having they're going to be making these films that are gritty realism and then in the background you just see Batman for two seconds.

But that's what they're going to start doing, because the only way to get the fucking thing commissioned.

He might have to start appearing in old films so that they stay on streaming.

Do you know what I mean?

So, like fucking terms of endearment or something.

Kramer versus Kramer, he

cucks Dustin Hoffman.

And you know the Marvel films as well, they're being edited specifically to go in line with the Chinese government propaganda because they're making so much money over there.

And there was...

Who had the big dad do that huge big apology to the Chinese in the Chinese language?

It wasn't John Cena, the wrestler, was it?

Like, that's mad.

Did you see that?

Was he apologizing for?

So John Cena...

He was in, he obviously was in a movie.

So John Cena is a wrestler and he'd been in some movie that did big in China.

I think he got something wrong about Taiwan.

Easy to do.

They're quite touchy about that.

Yeah.

And he had to give the full apology in the Chinese language because he would just lose so much money.

And it was like, oh my fuck, is this real?

At the same time, I'd like to crack China.

Would you?

Dez Bishop tried to go.

De Bishop tried it, man.

That's true, yeah.

Dez Bishop went in.

You know Dez Bishop, do do you?

He's like an Irish comedi, he's an American comedian based in Dublin, basically.

Yeah, Des

I always try to explain myself in terms of Dez's fame, but I guess not now,'cause no one knows who Des is over here.

'Cause I I I always when people ask me at home, why do you wear the fucking bag?

'Cause I'd be about as famous as Des is back home, right?

And they say, Why do you wear the bag?

And I s before I knew I was autistic, I used to say

if Dez Bishop got drunk and had a hangover and vomited in the middle of Dublin, it'd be all over the papers.

And I'm like, I did that last night and no one knew who the fuck I was.

Do you know what I mean?

But yeah, Dez,

he went and learned Chinese and went to fucking China and did the hard graft of Chinese comedy clubs.

And he didn't break China, but fair fucking played him.

It was really strange for him and really strange for China.

They've got cities in fucking China.

Like really, really, like, like Shenzhen and Chongqing, you'd see them on TikTok.

It's like fucking Blade Runner.

And we don't know about them over here.

It's like they're hiding these giant megalopolises.

And it's like,

do you think they're as bad as people say they are?

Or is that just Western propaganda?

Hail China.

You know, there was

hail China.

Yeah, hail China.

Hail our new Chinese masters.

I reckon they're in the market for some documentaries.

I think there was an interesting thing in a Noam Chomsky book, maybe like 20 years ago, and there was a

introduction, he says, you know, they commissioned a study of these American five-star generals, and they went, you know, what should we do?

There's a futurist study.

What's the best hope for the future?

And they said, the best hope of the future is that China destroys us before we can destroy the world.

I kind of agree with them.

I agree with him too, because another study that I heard, right?

I heard that the only hope that humanity has against climate change is if China is the world leader.

Like, they...

Well, let's start it here.

Do you know what I mean?

But the thing is, just around China,

imagine you find out me and him are getting money from China, and that's what this is.

Imagine finding that out.

How is it parking?

Yeah, I'm just going to use quite a lot in Cantonese.

Imagine that.

That coming out.

No, like, so if you look at the news in in

like I could say Israel's fucking horrendous.

That's awful that's happening there.

Absolutely fucking disgusting.

It's just normal news.

America's fucking nuts.

Horrible, horrible things coming out all the time.

And then China, first after, and this is just the past month because I keep up on Chinese news.

And they're after inventing a type of nuclear reactor that doesn't use plutonium.

They have gotten to a point with this nuclear reactor where if they can do this, which is looking like they will, you can have a nuclear power plant where there's no waste.

They invented a battery that lasts 80 years.

And then they became, they're the closest country to becoming net zero in the past 10 years because they just sorted their fucking shit out with solar panels.

And that's like the past month.

And

I checked all the sources on it.

I wasn't reading a mad newspaper.

I'm starting to kind of think, I'll have a dose of China, please.

China's a bit like remember when you play those old games like Command and Conquer or something where you built your little military base and stuff, and your friend was doing one over here online, and then you build your wee thing, you'd have a couple of week guard tars and you go, This is going pretty well, and then you'd send like a surveillance flight over his thing, and it was like a massive fucking city.

That's China, but that's it's because it's all fucking state-controlled as well, though.

Like, I mean, do you remember during COVID, right?

And they'd just like build a hospital in a week and they'd show you like there's a hospital or there's foundations seven days later holy fuck there's a full hospital and I think what it is is they just had state construction companies state this to build a fucking hospital not

oh we want to build a hospital I know what to do let's go to the ten richest capitalists and get these capitalists to to bid to take the most public money and turn it privately and build a private fucking hospital.

You know what I mean?

It's because it's a command economy.

So like, you know, people have said this for years, but if you if you have a thing in China where they go, oh, we need to cure glaucoma, we've got too many people in the countryside getting cataracts or whatever, we invent a fucking laser, we send the doctor out and we go and fucking do that.

Whereas in in the West, that's like military research is the only place that gets real funding.

So if they invent a laser to cure cataracts, it's something that's supposed to blow up a tank, right?

And it happens that it has.

That's why we have stuff from the space programme, you know and fucking digital watches and stuff they're just kind of offshoots of all this money

that gets pumped into r d for the military like even

do you know auto tune that you hear on on on songs like fucking can you west or t-pain that auto-tune sound do you know how auto-tune was invented trying to find oil

yeah so there was in the 80s they were going right we think there's oil underneath this desert uh we don't want to spend money digging what would we do so they invented a thing that like would shoot sound waves down into the earth and then the sound waves would come back and depending on the tune of those sound waves they would know oh I bet you there's oil there and then from that came fucking auto tune you know what I mean it's mad you ever meet people who smoke so heavily they sound auto tune yeah

no one's smoking fags anymore

it's a shame isn't it it is a bit of a shame do Do you know what you don't see anymore?

Probably they are in China.

Oh, I'd say, yeah.

Oh, I follow a lot of Chinese TikTokers and they love cigarettes.

Do you follow any Chinese TikTok cigarette people?

Fuck me, it'll make you want cigarettes.

I haven't had a fag in ages.

Like, do you remember growing up and children used to smoke fags?

Oh, yeah.

It was just normal.

I knew eight-year-olds that were that size because they were smoking their dad's John Player.

And you had to select coupons as well.

Do you know what I mean?

You get fucking cancer in a toaster.

And when we were kids, we used to tell each other that you couldn't get addicted to nicotine, which was lies.

But if you did get addicted to cigarettes, you had to smoke major.

Did you have major?

I didn't personally, no.

I'm going to ask questions for the audience now.

I'm going to take the house lights up because I'm conscious of curfew.

Can we have the house lights up slightly, please, if you wouldn't mind?

And then one of you glorious people.

Imagine the lights go up and they're all Chinese.

I'm concerned.

We did a very elongated China rant.

Now it is.

I'm suspicious.

Like, is he getting funded?

Am I getting funded?

Does anyone have a question about anything in the whole world?

You can about anything, man.

I'm ready to go.

Okay, Usher, there's a hand up over there.

Is Usher here?

Yeah,

the 2000s RB singer Usher has kindly come along.

You know, the Chinese budget for this podcast is so high.

Usher, strangest hairline in pop.

Completely flat.

Wild enough.

Yeah.

Pass it along there like a collection pane of ideas.

That's mine.

Go on, yeah, what's the cracks, sir?

Right, when's the genocide going to end, and when are we going to do something about it?

That's a fucking well, we're doing something about it.

The whole world's against it.

I think it's important to remember that people are doing things.

I mean, things seem really hopeless, but that is a good thing that they did with the flotilla.

You know, people are trying to get aid there.

there are charities that you can give to uh medical aid palestine are running out of money they need money um

and i i think as well put pressure on media put pressure on media when they misrepresent this fucking genocide that's what i think today right

remember there was like the freedom flotilla in 2010 yeah so there was already this flotilla is a kind of um

a reiteration of something that happened in 2010 where some peace activists tried to land aid in Gaza.

Israeli commandos boarded the boat and they killed 10 people.

The BBC, when they're reporting on this

flotilla today, said this reminds us of the 2010 flotilla when 10 people were killed by Israeli commandos and some Israeli soldiers were injured.

And you're like, you don't need to mention that people got injured in the commission of a fucking massacre.

I mean, how absolutely cucked are you?

But it's important to have hope.

I know it's disgusting.

They want us to feel hopeless.

They want you to feel hopeless.

And there are things you can give to, which is a good thing to do.

There are, you know,

organizations that are asking for you to put pressure on people.

That was part of what the flotilla thing was doing.

It was trying to engage interest and get people talking to the representatives.

And it doesn't feel like much, but, you you know it's worth doing and another thing you can do right

if your favorite fucking influencer or your favorite artist is saying fuck all

be relentless and call them out like seriously because

what the fuck are they doing like what the fuck are they like you look at i tell you who i love fucking macklemore

Like Macklemore, Jesus Christ.

Macklemore came out with that song, Heinz Song, and he was relentless with it.

Just went straight up.

And here are the facts.

Free fucking Palestine.

A genocide is happening.

That's what the song is.

He lost so many gigs.

McElmore, because

he was so mainstream, because we thought he was so uncool, he really made it quite embarrassing for all these people who were comfortably sitting on the fence.

There's a load of people comfortably sitting on the fence going, well, I can't talk about this.

I don't understand.

What don't you understand about dead toddlers?

Do you know what I mean?

What don't you understand about that?

So keep putting pressure on your favorite person who's conveniently saying, fuck all, fuck that.

And some of those people who are saying fuck all have reputations for being fearless truth tellers.

Do you know what I mean?

I know.

Like, you know, this is a very clarifying moment in culture for

who can sit by and watch a genocide and who can't.

100%.

And

I don't know, lads, we've all seen things.

We've all seen things on on our phones that we never ever thought that we were going to see ever in our entire life.

And

that's the difference this time.

Like, if you think,

like, Vietnam, and there were the photographs of the young girls who were burnt by Napam, and you just have that, and we're getting bombarded by something new every day that I didn't even think was possible.

I'm seeing things that,

oh man, I thought I knew what hell was.

We're getting that on our phones.

You go to Sky News or you go to The Guardian, and it's a completely different story.

And that's a fucking toughie, isn't it?

I think Sky News's coverage has been disgusting, what I've seen as well.

I think the BBC's has been very depressing, and The Guardian's has been probably slightly worse than the BBC.

You mentioned earlier that you'd asked Frankie to be in your documentary, and it seems like the two of you have known each other for a while.

So I was just wondering how you got to know each other, and if you have any questions

about that,

we're in China.

Well, my sub-question was: how are the Mandarin lessons coming along?

You were just very supportive of us at the start and really sound, and then you followed me on Twitter, and then I just started talking to you.

And we did this thing in 2012.

Do you remember like

shit?

You got me on your fucking variety show.

So, we did some

variety show kind of thing.

It was like you guys, Rob Delaney,

Tom Stade as well, I believe.

Tom Stade,

Catherine Ryan.

And we did, it was a really fucking meme variety show, and I was in London.

They had like a kind of robot in the crowd that I did some crowd work on, and basically it was all slightly kind of fucking acid-tinged, sort of variety show.

And you guys were on that?

That was great, crack.

But Frankie's always been sound, especially coming on to RTE on credited.

They still don't know, they still don't know, they still don't know.

Any other questions

at the back back there, Usher.

The guy who's doing something which is Nazi salute adjacent, yeah.

Might want to bend that elbow.

Yeah, this gent at the back.

All right, fuck it, Usher.

Just go not to pick wherever you want.

So

you speak about giving everyone a voice and using social media, but what are your thoughts on dead internet theory and the idea of comments you see just being bots put

in the elites?

So that is happening.

The dead internet theory, you know that basically, like i'm seeing more and more like ai comments man full on um it's really a strange bleak feeling i i just don't think dead internet theory is true though so i think there are people out there just because like we're too what's the full i only know it in a cursory way what do you understand the full theory is that mainly it's uh kind of bots

uh talking to each other okay um and promoting each other kind of thing so that there kind of is no point in posting anything, right?

Um whereas actually we can see from Touring, like and you used to get better data from things like Twitter and you could see how many people clicked your link and then you could look at how many people bought your tickets.

So there are there is actually a point to posting still, whether that will still be the case as AI develops

and as like the warfare, the cyber warfare side of social media develops.

I don't know.

But at the moment, I think it is still worth posting uh it's it's still worth posting but something that i'm seeing and i'm wondering what the impact the the intended impact

i go to any news article right

and i go to the comment section on instagram and i just see you're a bot you're a troll you're paid you're not a real person and it fills me with a feeling of there's no point And

it's so blatant that it's like, you're not actually trying to convince me.

You're not trying to convince me that Putin is a good guy.

You're trying to flood me with the sense of this comment section is pointless, so I'm just going to get the fuck away from it.

You know?

A lot of that stuff is...

Our attention is a resource.

Our attention is a resource.

And sometimes they just want to exhaust it.

Like something I found really fascinating was

it was Israel, it was about a year ago, and Israel were raiding a hospital, and they were claiming that this hospital, it's not really a hospital, it's a secret Hamas control center.

So then Israel released a video to prove: see, it's not a hospital, it's a secret Hamas control center.

Look at these weapons we found.

But the video was the fakest thing you've ever seen.

There were edits in it, there were mistakes, the guns didn't look real.

And I'm looking at it going, nah,

Mossad and Israel, some of the best funded intelligence in in the world, they're not putting out a video with mistakes in it.

And then I realized, ah, here's what they're doing.

They're putting out a video with mistakes in it to annoy all the people on Twitter who like to point out mistakes.

So what they're doing is exhausting the resources of critical thinking.

So instead of talking about genocide, everyone's like, fake, fake, there's an edit there.

That gun's not real.

Look at the serial number of this gun.

Oh, it's an airsoft rifle.

It's not even a real gun.

And you have all these really intelligent, smart people wasting their intellectual resources arguing about this one deliberately fake video.

That's the level of propaganda.

It's not even about changing your mind, it's about like what I always take it back to is: do you ever hear of Frank Kitson?

Yeah, yeah, so Frank Kitson, up in the north of Ireland, Frank Kitson is a profoundly evil person who changed the world.

He was a British Army officer and he caught his teeth in Kenya.

So

in Kenya, Kenya was trying to get away from the British Empire.

It was a British colony.

And Kenya wanted a bit of independence.

And there was a group in Kenya called the Mau Mau.

The Maumau were a bit like the Kenyan IRA.

And Frank Kitson was in control of the British forces in Kenya.

So he was going, right,

how do I stop the Maumau?

So what he did was, instead of fighting the Mauma, he created fake gangs that fought the Mauma to create a sense of confusion.

He also sexually tortured Barack Obama's grandfather.

Seriously.

So, you know about that?

Yeah, yeah, Britain.

So, Barack Obama's grandda

was a Kenyan man.

He was in the British Army.

He was in World War II and he became a chef in the British Army.

And when Kenya was like, we want some independence, Britain,

Kitson knew what had happened in Ireland.

In particular, people like Tom Barry in Ireland.

Tom Barry is a rebel leader in Cork, in Ireland.

He had been in the British Army

in about 1919.

He was in the British Army.

He was in Mesopotamia.

And then he's there as a British soldier.

And his ma starts sending him parcels from home that are wrapped in local newspapers.

And Tom Barry sees, oh my god, look at what the black and tans are doing at home in Cork.

So he comes back to Ireland with everything he learned in the British Army and then trains an IRA column.

So Kitson was terrified of that happening in fucking Kenya.

So he starts to pick out who are the highly trained, experienced British soldiers that are also Kenyan.

One of them was Barack Obama's fucking granddad.

So he had him kidnapped and tortured

for no fucking reason other than you used to be in the British Army and you're also Kenyan.

I think it's the reason that when Obama got into the presidency in America, he took Churchill's bust out of the White House.

But anyway, Frank Kitson, he does that in Kenya.

Then he finds himself in Belfast in the early 1970s.

And what Kitson does is he looks around and he goes, Okay, the IRA are gaining traction.

What are we going to do here?

He creates a military unit called the Military Reaction Force.

And what these were were plain clothes British soldiers and their job was just go into any community, Protestant, Catholic, doesn't matter, and just shoot people.

Just shoot a woman who's putting up her washing, shoot her into the head, shoot a child, just shoot whoever the fuck you want.

Because this isn't about winning or losing, it's about creating chaos.

So Frank Kitson came up with the idea of, ah, that's how you win here.

Create enough chaos and sectarian division that it justifies the British military presence.

So all of a sudden now it's like, we have to be here, we have to be here.

Paddies are killing themselves.

Look at them.

They're nuts.

Do you get what I'm saying?

So

Kitson then went on to train the FBI and the fucking CIA, you know?

And you see all that shit now.

So if you're thinking of what are they doing, is this propaganda?

Sometimes it's not propaganda.

It's literally just to distract you, just to confuse you.

COVID was a fucking brilliant example.

Like all of a sudden, you clearly have these vested interests trying to get in, to get everyone to fight about whether or not it's a disease, to fight about a mask, to fight about an injection.

It's not about a narrative.

it's about division at all costs because that can be exploited.

How many completely normal, nice people do you know who were lovely people in 2019, went nuts because of COVID, and now they're far right?

Do you get me?

I mean, that's what's going on.

Kitson's other thing, just want to say.

You're into Kitson as well.

Yeah, his other thing was like their infiltration programme, so they started that.

So the IRA ended up being like pretty thoroughly infiltrated by the end, right?

With British agents, which were like people who would have been people from Northern Ireland Northern Irish Catholics who they turned, right?

But the main plank of that was they didn't take walk-ins, which was different from every other intelligence agency in the world.

Because like if you wanted to infiltrate people, usually you would go, Well, we want people coming in here going, Hey, I feel I have not got my due from the IRA, I want to become a an agent for you, right?

And they refused to do that and they they just got people that they turned themselves so the IRA couldn't infiltrate them, right?

So they would find someone who was unhappy with his boss or whatever, or had been slighted in some way, and they would turn them, often turn them in jail, right?

So what the IRA

should have done was have role-playing classes.

You know, if the IRA had taught acting and improv

to their agents, they could have pretended to be annoyed at their boss.

They could have pretended that so-and-so in the unit was having an affair with someone, got turned,

supposedly, and then been a triple agent.

We were just a couple of really good acting coaches away from the United Island.

Have you read a book called Chaos about Charles Manson?

No, no, you fucking love it.

Oh, it's brilliant.

It's a Rolling Stone journalist in 1997.

It was the 20th anniversary of the Manson killings, and this Rolling Stone journalist was given the job of, you know, do a 20-year anniversary of the killings.

So he ends up going deep and deep and then leaves the case altogether to write this book that took 20 years to do.

And

basically, the CIA and FBI, who had been trained by Kitson,

it appears that Charles Manson was a CIA asset,

and the purpose was for it to frame the Black Panthers.

That was the whole point and it went wrong.

And the reason that what they base it on is Manson kept doing shit that he should have gone to jail from and he didn't.

And all of a sudden he got out.

And

Manson's psychiatrist was also Jack Ruby's psychiatrist.

It's a brilliant book, Chaos by Tom O'Neill.

Listen, we're after fucking going over.

Carfe you know because of the conspiracy theories have been funded by the Chinese government.

Frankie, thank you so much for coming along.

Thank you for having me, man.

This was a wonderful night.

Glasgow, thank you for coming along.

Thank you for coming folks.

Amazing night.

Go out and get your buses.

God bless.

Oh, what a wonderful chat with the magnificent Frankie Boyle.

Frankie, thank you for coming along.

I faded the volume there at the end.

I faded the volume.

I don't want to cut the crowd cheer.

It just feels weird.

But also, I don't want to have it loud, so I just faded the volume there which is something I need to start doing more at the end of live podcasts.

I'll catch you next week with a hot take.

I don't know what it's going to be about.

Hope you enjoyed that podcast.

In the meantime, rub a dog, genuflect to a swan, and pick a snail up and take him off the road.

In Limerick anyway, this week we've got that

moist summer weather so the snails are having a wonderful time.

but if I do see a snail I'll take him I put put put him just put him into the into the varge don't want to see snails getting hit by cars to can avoid it all right dog bless

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