S3 EP9: John Robins

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Speaker 10 Podcasts, there are millions of them. Some might say too many.

Speaker 4 I have one already.

Speaker 10 I don't have any, because there are enough. Politics, business, sport, you name it.
There's a podcast about it, and they all ask the big questions and cover the hot topics of the day.

Speaker 4 But nobody is covering the most important topic of all.

Speaker 10 Why is that? Are they scared?

Speaker 4 Too afraid of being censored by the man?

Speaker 10 Possibly, but not us. We're here to ask the only question that matters.

Speaker 4 We'll try and say it at the same time, Max.

Speaker 10 What did you do yesterday? What did you do yesterday? What did you do yesterday?

Speaker 5 That's it.

Speaker 10 All we're interested in is what the guests got up to yesterday, nothing more. Day before yesterday, Max?

Speaker 4 Nope. The greatest and most interesting day of your life?

Speaker 10 Unless it was yesterday, we don't want to know about it. I'm Max Rushton.

Speaker 4 And I'm David O'Doherty.

Speaker 10 Welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?

Speaker 10 Hello, and welcome to today's episode of what did you do yesterday i'm max roston alongside me as always the mighty the pioneer of comedy the man who invented it david o'doherty

Speaker 4 it's me the inventor of comedy well done for doing that yeah no problem just it's about giving something back and boy what a guest we have today max yeah john robbins obviously known from edison john his podcast how do you cope i would say this is the deepest episode that we have done.

Speaker 5 I mean, the bar is not, it's low for that, let's face it.

Speaker 10 And you think about it.

Speaker 4 Like, there is a spectrum of John Robbins, and it runs from the hilarious clips you may have seen from the Ellison John BBC radio show and podcast, then to the incredible intensity of How Do You Cope?

Speaker 4 his own podcast where the guests are in fact we get into that today and i feel we do get that spectrum here. We brought the spectrum out of him.
I think, Max.

Speaker 10 I think so. I think we probably, I wouldn't give us too much credit in bringing out just this is his day, right? He lived his day and we lived it with him.

Speaker 10 And I think it's probably why he is so loved, right, isn't it? Because of that. And we talk about sort of what honesty is, right?

Speaker 10 We do get to the meaning of life in this podcast, which I guess we don't normally, we normally just get to how many times to go to the toilet, but we do get to the meaning of life. Yeah.

Speaker 10 And I think it's really interesting for us as well to be sort of taken on that journey where normally we sit on this and just go, oh, so do you like chicken?

Speaker 5 You know?

Speaker 4 Yeah, there's an authenticity to John Robbins that I feel it's something that he's really thought about in the last few years. Look, you'll get all of this.
I think it's a great episode.

Speaker 10 Yeah, this is what John Robbins did yesterday. And look, there are, you know, he touches on addiction in this episode.
And obviously, some of you have been affected by that.

Speaker 10 So it's worth us letting you know that. And we'll put some helpline numbers and information stuff on the show show notes in the description of the pod page.

Speaker 5 But here's what John did yesterday.

Speaker 10 John Robbins, welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?

Speaker 11 Hello, everyone.

Speaker 10 A star, David, of a previous episode, of course, because John starred in the Alex Horn episode where you met a man on a golf course who only ate bison or something like that.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 13 Well, it's

Speaker 18 we went to play at my golf club and a guy who I've played sort of like competitions with was there and he said he'd only eaten meat and eggs for two months

Speaker 6 and had lost a lot of weight and I think, you know, suffered enormous changes to his digestion.

Speaker 10 Have you seen him since? Because I mean it'd be great to get, I know this is your day, but I'd love an update on the meat and eggs man.

Speaker 4 This is why you're a hero.

Speaker 28 No, I've not seen him since, but he does, I think he works in the

Speaker 30 water company, spends a lot of time down the sewers.

Speaker 5 So I think in a sense, he's able to cut out the middleman in terms of any sort of extreme dietary effects on his digestion.

Speaker 4 Ironically, my main memory of it, and this was said by Alex Horne in that episode, he's down to 12 shits a year. He shits monthly.

Speaker 21 Yeah, which I don't, I mean, I've spent a lot of time googling this over the years, you know, what's normal, what's abnormal.

Speaker 40 I think we all do.

Speaker 43 And, you know, it's between

Speaker 46 twice a day and sort of twice a week tends to be within the realms of sort of like margins of error.

Speaker 15 I know someone who's once a week.

Speaker 6 That I just cannot imagine it.

Speaker 10 You'd have a ceremony, wouldn't you? If it was once a week, it would be a real moment.

Speaker 46 I just can't imagine.

Speaker 50 It was like a totally different lifestyle.

Speaker 27 It's like someone who says they go running every day.

Speaker 38 And you're like, how on earth does that work?

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 10 It's good of us to start. We get occasional complaints that we talk too much about.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 Sorry.

Speaker 10 Fecal matter. So we have not, if you're one of the listeners that doesn't like that, you could just start now.
We'll put a time code on it.

Speaker 5 Well, also.

Speaker 23 Also, that listener needs to.

Speaker 52 Thank me because you actually asked me to come on this show about three months ago,

Speaker 54 maybe longer ago, and I was in the middle of a intimate bum procedure journey.

Speaker 49 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 44 I wasn't really willing to talk about

Speaker 56 what I was going through.

Speaker 10 And are you at the other end? I mean, that seems the wrong way to phrase that. Yes.

Speaker 57 I have completed my intimate bum procedure journey and

Speaker 35 can definitely get through what I did yesterday without talking about the toilet.

Speaker 4 While you were in that journey, though, that would have severely constricted your monthly numbers, surely.

Speaker 4 Like, is there an element that maybe that's what the bison eater, in fact, you know, has a problem down the far end?

Speaker 60 No, it wouldn't have restricted my numbers.

Speaker 61 It just really brought a lot of prayer to the whole process because I was in so much pain.

Speaker 27 It would have been for a more specialist podcast, I think.

Speaker 4 Got it.

Speaker 10 Got it. Okay.
Anyway, what time did you wake up yesterday, John?

Speaker 65 Half past five.

Speaker 62 Okay.

Speaker 26 Or sort of six, half five, six.

Speaker 10 Okay. Wow.
Is that just natural body clock or an alarm?

Speaker 66 No, natural body clock.

Speaker 68 I usually wake up at half six.

Speaker 33 I would say that's my usual time.

Speaker 45 This morning, half seven, but yesterday, half six.

Speaker 4 Does John Robbins use curtains or do you just allow the Lord to come in and punch you in the face?

Speaker 66 No.

Speaker 52 Well, this does get into an issue I've had today.

Speaker 46 I use curtains and an eye mask.

Speaker 30 So I always sleep in an eye mask because my eyelids are very thin.

Speaker 54 So I can be woken up by a sort of a single LED charging light on a plug.

Speaker 21 However, I've just had my bedroom repainted.

Speaker 45 In order to do it, the guy took the blind off,

Speaker 76 but he's not reattached the fitting properly.

Speaker 21 So the blind now...

Speaker 21 I have to take physically take off and on every time I want to close the blind.

Speaker 45 And I'm in a classic anxiety spiral where I am so worried about scratching the paintwork when I take it on and off.

Speaker 45 But in order to avoid that, I would need to find a screwdriver and do 20 seconds of work, which I'm not willing to do.

Speaker 30 So instead, I go through this ridiculous ritual every morning of physically taking the blind off, scratching the

Speaker 45 paintwork, hating myself for that, but not being willing to go downstairs, get a screwdriver, and readjust the fitting.

Speaker 4 Yet another reason why I should be your butler. Like, I love

Speaker 4 that stuff. You know, I love to fix things, particularly a 20-second fix that'll make such an immediate difference to your existence.

Speaker 5 God, that's me.

Speaker 4 That's me in a single task.

Speaker 35 I like to think of myself as the sort of person who's very practical and solution-orientated, but I really will just take the bodge approach until I am forced to do the thing, you know, because my wall is now covered in scratches.

Speaker 81 Gotcha.

Speaker 36 And I will eventually do it too late and end up with the worst of both worlds.

Speaker 10 Yeah. How many years do you because I would leave that for maybe three to four years? Oh, God.

Speaker 21 Well, Hillary's blinds are coming in a week's time to fit a new one.

Speaker 10 Question. Have you medically checked that your eyelids are thinner than

Speaker 4 yeah, great question. Great question.

Speaker 74 Yeah, I've got very stretchy skin.

Speaker 84 I don't know if you can see it there.

Speaker 5 So I've got that thing you do where people like pull their

Speaker 5 neck out.

Speaker 85 and that does stretch to the eyelids, which are, I just can't get them closed enough.

Speaker 10 Right. So you think when you close your eyes, it's sort of not me closing my eyes, I can't see anything now, but you basically can still see.

Speaker 87 I could drive, yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 4 It's kind of like, who is the body where you can see inside it as to how all the organs work? That's what I've always said about you. Like, I would see you.

Speaker 4 Do you remember in the 90s, it used to tour around event spaces

Speaker 78 and you would see the plasticized corpses?

Speaker 41 Yes.

Speaker 4 That's what you're in my phone as.

Speaker 43 I think of it more as like, you know, the wonderful story of Henry Sugar by Roal Dahl.

Speaker 4 No, what happens in that?

Speaker 45 The guy who teaches himself to see with his eyes closed.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 30 It's an amazing, amazing short story made into an unbearably twee film by Wes Anderson.

Speaker 10 We'll put details in the show notes. Okay, so 6.30, you're awake.
The blind is doing its job, but there's the paint scratches on the wall. Do you hop out of bed or do you reach for the phone to scroll

Speaker 10 about the doom of the world?

Speaker 21 Here comes what defines my day every day.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 19 The first thing I do is Wordle.

Speaker 10 Good.

Speaker 76 However,

Speaker 45 I sometimes make the mistake of doing it before I've fully woken up because I'm so desperate to do it.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 81 I've done it every day for maybe three years.

Speaker 44 I've got a WhatsApp group.

Speaker 45 We post our scores.

Speaker 90 I have a spreadsheet.

Speaker 35 That spreadsheet is now open.

Speaker 15 I am the dominant force.

Speaker 46 I've got 51 game week wins.

Speaker 21 A game week is 10 days.

Speaker 4 Oh, okay, interesting.

Speaker 93 However, because I'm so desperate to do it, sometimes I'll do it while my brain hasn't quite woken up.

Speaker 35 So the ideal situation is I wake up, I go for a wee.

Speaker 52 I go down, make my cup of tea.

Speaker 13 I come back up, I whirdle.

Speaker 21 However, yesterday I was literally rolled over on my side in bed with my phone which meant that I went

Speaker 79 storm story stalk and it was stalk

Speaker 96 and I hadn't eliminated all of the possibilities because usually what I'll do after my first two words is I will then work out using my brain all of the possible words that it can be

Speaker 49 and then I might try a third eliminator to get it in four or hopefully the dream get it in in three however I just hammered them out storm story stalk I've got it in five my friend Phil got it in two come on what's going on here

Speaker 10 I got it in two I hate you and yesterday in my very middle-aged man moment I was trying to explain to a young Italian waitress I had to explain what wordle was and then explain how I got it in two how did this come up because the word was stalk and the word that i began with i always begin with a different word i began with spork the thing that is a sort of spoot leaf, a spork and a spoon.

Speaker 5 I hate the speaker. Who guesses that? Who guesses part of that? Why?

Speaker 10 Why do you hate that?

Speaker 5 I hate the fact you're boring an Italian waitress by trying to explain what Wordle is.

Speaker 10 It was terrible. I just presumed everybody knew what Wordle was.
But once you said, what's Wordle? Then I was already committed to trying to explain. I gave up in the end.

Speaker 67 I hate the fact you're clearly doing Wordle in a restaurant and not in championship conditions.

Speaker 10 No, no, no. I'd done Wordle in championship conditions.
I was talking about the Wordle. Oh, God.
This gets even more detailed.

Speaker 10 With a friend of mine, Ollie, who had actually, he hates tactical Wordle play. You know, when you do a different word to eliminate some letters.

Speaker 38 Well, he's a fool.

Speaker 10 Well, he and the rest of my friends are purists, and I play tactically. They'd actually recently started a new Wordle WhatsApp group without me.

Speaker 5 What would you be a purist?

Speaker 40 What's purist?

Speaker 10 Purist is you don't go tactical.

Speaker 25 What does that mean?

Speaker 4 Spork. It means spork.

Speaker 10 Well, it means that if you've got S-T-O-R, you wouldn't just go, right, it could be Storm Story or Stork. Let's come up with a word with those three letters so you know what it is.

Speaker 52 That's how you play the game.

Speaker 10 Well, you and I sing from this hymn sheet. I'm very much the pantomime villain in the what.

Speaker 98 Well, they're just playing hard mode without playing hard mode.

Speaker 85 And hard mode is just guessing words.

Speaker 99 It doesn't tax me.

Speaker 100 Right.

Speaker 74 But I also hate the fact you change your word every day.

Speaker 92 That makes me itch.

Speaker 10 No, I think you have to change it every day. That's part of the thrill because the thrill for me is to try and get it in one.
And I guess who guesses spork?

Speaker 5 I feel sick.

Speaker 4 Robins, what's up with you having your phone by your bed? I thought you would be the number one person I can think of that has eliminated that.

Speaker 35 I went on a silent retreat about a year ago.

Speaker 10 Alex Horn told us about it.

Speaker 92 I came back

Speaker 45 very strict, you know, physically turned the phone off 8 p.m.

Speaker 71 to 8 a.m.

Speaker 67 And I was very evangelistic about this and I did it for five days.

Speaker 52 And I think I just have to...

Speaker 35 My therapist talks about this because she works in a sort of a Buddhist adjacent modality and she was like,

Speaker 49 if you try to impose unrealistic conditions on your life, you end up hating your life.

Speaker 37 I get that.

Speaker 28 You have to let some things slide.

Speaker 21 I would love to be the no phones between 8 p.m.

Speaker 20 and 8 a.m.

Speaker 43 guy, but then, you know, I live alone and have lived alone for 10 years.

Speaker 84 My phone is really important in terms of my mental health.

Speaker 62 You know, like

Speaker 67 the best part of my day, which I'm sure we'll come to, it's like catching up with people on WhatsApp at about nine in the evening in my bed.

Speaker 102 That's my social life a lot of days.

Speaker 11 And I think it's easy to go, oh, just phone equals bad.

Speaker 4 Sure, sure.

Speaker 4 So my excuse is that in case one of my ancient parents has fallen into a hole, I therefore need to have the phone beside me because it has happened once or twice.

Speaker 4 They're in their late 80s that someone needs a hand at a curious.

Speaker 10 You should get your dad out of the hole.

Speaker 4 You got to get your dad out of a hole.

Speaker 21 Why do you need an excuse?

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 it unfortunately then opens the door to just looking as I did this morning, doing that surfy thing where you just keep clanging Instagram stories up, up, up, and it takes you through everything from my various interests of bicycle repair into

Speaker 4 people looking in rivers for small pieces of Roman pottery into what's happening in Gaza and then more terrible American culture war bullshit and I wake up furiously and I'm angry as I put Dercos, the current medicated shampoo that I am evangelical about, into my hair 20 minutes later and other ways of that 20 minutes.

Speaker 4 That's the trap, John, that I am not yet strong enough to not walk into.

Speaker 21 Yeah, but I think we are living through a period of optimization fatigue.

Speaker 60 Like I am constantly being told the five things I need to do every morning, the 10 things I need to cut out of my life, the, you know, the best way to have have vitamin B,

Speaker 106 how to optimize my exercise.

Speaker 45 And I think sometimes you go through that period of obsession about, okay, I need to be eating this stuff, I need to be cutting out this stuff, I need to get this much sleep.

Speaker 55 And then you come out the other side with perhaps a more compassionate view to go, I just need to live in a comfortable way and a comforting way and a compassionate way.

Speaker 28 And if that means I spend 20 minutes scrolling through my phone, I don't have to beat myself up about that because what's worse, the 20 minutes scrolling or the mood it puts you in where you're like, fuck's sake, John, you've just fallen into the trap.

Speaker 76 You've just spent loads of time brow.

Speaker 19 The criticism is worse than the shit.

Speaker 10 My algorithm tells me that all I need to do to get fit now is hang off a bar for two minutes a day. So I've really, I haven't done it yet, but I'm...

Speaker 10 I feel like this is where I'm going to go is just find a bar and hang off it for two minutes and I'll be ripped. Oh, he's now telling me that I'm too old to do sit-ups and I or do Tai Chi as well.

Speaker 10 So I'm going for that too. I don't know if you've reached Tai Chi levels, but I'm in for it.

Speaker 19 Like, who would have thought that, you know, 15 years ago when there was that real stepdad energy thing of like, don't people spend an awful lot of time on their phones these days?

Speaker 75 We're essentially, we think we're having a much more evolved version of that conversation.

Speaker 13 But essentially, what we're all still doing is going, don't people spend an awful lot of time on their phones these days?

Speaker 10 Right. So you wordle.
Yep. You're sad about getting it in five.
Yeah. Do you then go on to the other word games or is it wordle and up?

Speaker 14 I do wordle.

Speaker 19 I've recently discovered discovered.

Speaker 109 Discovelled.

Speaker 13 That sounds like another one.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 57 I've recently discovered waffle.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 28 Which is great.

Speaker 19 So I do that every so often.

Speaker 79 But the only other game I'm religious about is Octurdle.

Speaker 107 And I do that when I do my first poop.

Speaker 10 Right, okay. So we're not there yet.
We're not at Octurdle. We're not there yet.

Speaker 4 Yeah, okay. Octurdle.

Speaker 48 So that's that's eight wordles at once, and that's the best.

Speaker 19 I've tried, there's a thousand wordles at once. Stop it.

Speaker 45 And there's an optimized amount of guesses where you can do that very quickly because it auto-completes.

Speaker 110 But

Speaker 45 so I then, and we won't linger on this, after my cup of tea, that sounds the alarm for the octurdle.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 67 Do that.

Speaker 92 Then a cup of coffee.

Speaker 26 That sounds the alarm for the second octurdle.

Speaker 5 Got it.

Speaker 48 And regular as clockwork, twice in the morning.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 45 And then the rest of the day is my own.

Speaker 10 Hot drink poo, hot drink poo. It's a nice way of doing it.

Speaker 67 And then I went for a 5k run and

Speaker 98 I sort of had to talk myself into it because I have over the past couple of weeks had quite low mood

Speaker 45 and the various things I do to sort of deal with that.

Speaker 45 Sometimes I have to force myself into the mindset that you will feel better today if you move as early as possible.

Speaker 104 So I said out loud in my house another great thing about living alone is you can just talk to yourself all the time.

Speaker 73 But I said, you're going to go and run and you're not going to think about whether you want to do it or not.

Speaker 64 And I went out for a run and

Speaker 63 felt much better.

Speaker 4 Is this a silent run, as in no headphones or anything?

Speaker 54 I listened to Three Bean Salad podcast.

Speaker 4 Wonderful.

Speaker 86 I tend not to listen to music because I don't have enough songs that sort of fit my running rhythm.

Speaker 5 They don't write them that slow anymore.

Speaker 10 Well, do you know what I found? Because I'm with you in running. I hate doing it.
And I haven't done it for a while. I went for a run the other day and that was my first in about a month.

Speaker 10 So I play football and my knees get painful. I can't do any exercise till the next football match.
And it's sort of like three months of just not being able to walk properly.

Speaker 10 I also have to force myself out and I'm pleased when I've done it. But if I want to run fast, I have to listen to TLC's Waterfalls.

Speaker 5 That's really quite slow though.

Speaker 10 It's not a fast song, but the beat without sounding like an old man.

Speaker 4 You know what I mean? I think that's a reasonable pace.

Speaker 10 I'm thinking I might be doing two steps in one of those, but

Speaker 10 my 5k is, I would say, five minutes faster if I have TLC's waterfalls compared to, you know, any other sounds of the 90s.

Speaker 4 Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence. I lit the fuse, and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

Speaker 5 He's going the distance.

Speaker 4 He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

Speaker 57 When it started to change, it was quick.

Speaker 4 He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show. No, Charlie's sober.

Speaker 10 He's gonna tell you the truth.

Speaker 4 How do I present this with any class? I think we're past that, Charlie. We're past that, yeah.

Speaker 107 Somebody call action.

Speaker 10 Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Speaker 4 John Robbins, I had this thing because cycling is generally my, what I enjoy doing, and I do enjoy it, but it does involve putting on a little outfit and checking your tires, etc.

Speaker 4 And sometimes that's one too many things, just enough to put you off doing it, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 And I did get around that last winter by getting a machine that clips onto the back wheel of a bike and talks to your laptop, which means you can go into your spare room and ride against divorced Belgian dentists on the laptop screen.

Speaker 85 Yeah, I follow a YouTube account where the guy does a lot of this.

Speaker 59 What's it called? Zuff?

Speaker 13 Zwift was one of those.

Speaker 4 Wahoo is the other. Yeah.

Speaker 35 But also, again, it's like being conscious of that critical voice in your head.

Speaker 24 So I started doing CrossFit about four years ago and

Speaker 45 it is one of the most important things I ever started doing because it just introduced me to some form of exercise because I did no exercise before apart from walking.

Speaker 31 But my head always tells me I'm not doing it enough and I'm not good enough.

Speaker 45 And I've started running in the past year.

Speaker 91 I'm going to do a marathon next year.

Speaker 13 I now have to do lots of stretching before and strength work.

Speaker 79 in order to make the running easier.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 73 So you're like, oh, running's great because I can just nip out for 20 minutes and I can fit that into my day.

Speaker 27 And then you're suddenly like, no, I've got to do fucking 20 minutes of stretching before it's another thing that I don't want to do.

Speaker 71 Yeah.

Speaker 19 And I get angry at myself if I do it because I start doing it and I'll think, you don't do this enough.

Speaker 31 You're not good enough.

Speaker 102 I get angry at myself if I don't do it because I'm like, you're pathetic.

Speaker 34 You can't even do your stretches.

Speaker 57 And then my sort of feet hurt and stuff.

Speaker 72 Yeah. And then I don't warm down.

Speaker 67 And I think, well,

Speaker 67 I can't do 80 minutes of exercise every morning.

Speaker 5 There just isn't enough time.

Speaker 76 So it's trying to find that compassionate voice that goes...

Speaker 4 Swimming pools. We all need swimming pools.

Speaker 10 It's so boring swimming, isn't it? And you can do breaststroke for ages and not actually exercise. I'm sure about this.

Speaker 34 But there's so many barriers to swimming if you don't have your own swimming pool.

Speaker 43 It's like, I've got to get there.

Speaker 81 I've got to dress. I've got to be wet.
I've got to be dry.

Speaker 45 I've got to be in a changing room. I've got to have a locker.

Speaker 34 I've got to leave.

Speaker 32 I've got to scan a card. I've got to...

Speaker 73 I'm not going to do that.

Speaker 4 What's the minimum sport you can do he's got it is that it do you reckon it is trampolining or something i think it's probably cycling because you don't have to i mean obviously you need a bike but you don't have to wear the outfit no you can't go running in jeans and like flat shoes yeah yeah that's something else if you see someone sprinting towards you in that outfit something bad has happened do you ever have this where i don't know whether it's my brain but whether it's wordle or running or crossfit or golf

Speaker 16 i I immediately get obsessed with it and begin comparing myself and researching it through professionals

Speaker 75 and then get angry at myself that I'm not committed or as good as professionals.

Speaker 67 And I then lose interest.

Speaker 5 And I forget the fact I actually have a job that has nothing to do with golf or running or CrossFit.

Speaker 10 You're not Wilson Kit-Couture, are you?

Speaker 30 I'm getting tips from people who spend six hours a day doing this and get paid for it and and then think, why am I not like that guy?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I definitely benefit from having done loads of sport in school and a couple of years after school when I was in university. Like my mother was a tennis and hockey international.

Speaker 4 So there was always a lot of just going out to do a thing, be it a game of tennis or a run or a cycle.

Speaker 4 And if you can just somehow normalize it so it's not an event at all, it's just as dull a thing as having a shower or a cup of tea because you never regret it.

Speaker 4 You know, afterwards, it has released whatever happy chemicals into your brain.

Speaker 45 That's that atomic habits thing, isn't it?

Speaker 104 Make it a habit.

Speaker 37 We're only up to 8 a.m.

Speaker 10 Okay, so the run is finished. We're motoring through this day.

Speaker 10 I presume you shower now?

Speaker 28 Yes.

Speaker 7 Socks on the clothes dryer because they're too wet to put in the washing, the dirty washing.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 4 What's the thinking there?

Speaker 52 So you come back from a run and you're like sweaty tops, sweaty shorts, sweaty pants, sweaty socks.

Speaker 34 If I chuck them into the dirty laundry, they're just going to sort of,

Speaker 112 I don't know.

Speaker 90 I don't like that idea of them being wet in there.

Speaker 33 They're not going to dry.

Speaker 36 So I hang them out for a couple of hours and then put them in the dirty washing.

Speaker 10 Right. I understand.
I might avoid the laundry basket, but I might put the sweaty running kit straight in the washing machine.

Speaker 10 It will then be joined later by its dry, dirty compatriots and then then be washed.

Speaker 86 That relies on you having a wash good to go every time you go for a run, because I don't want it getting moldy and mildewy sat in a washing machine for two years.

Speaker 10 I mean, I have two young children, so I mean, the washing machine is basically the odds 24/7.

Speaker 4 Hang on, what wash do you use as your regular default wash, John Robbins Express, or the one-hour, surely not the Eco Night Wash?

Speaker 40 David, David, David, you have gone into my pain cave

Speaker 113 because my washing machine

Speaker 18 my life in many ways has been a search for things that don't exist

Speaker 7 so if I'm ever selecting something for example I need a trowel for weeds

Speaker 46 special trowel that's thin these things exist but something about me wants one so perfect it doesn't exist

Speaker 18 so it has to be the perfect price it's like quality but not too much quality it's got the right reviews.

Speaker 116 It looks right.

Speaker 27 And it's not there. No one's made it.

Speaker 73 Yeah.

Speaker 57 Because no one's made John Robbins's perfect weed trowel.

Speaker 48 Sure.

Speaker 15 So what I do is I then end up just needing a weed trowel still.

Speaker 3 It's in my Amazon basket.

Speaker 83 But I can't bring myself to spend $8.99 because I want one that's $15.99, but not $40.99.

Speaker 46 But Amazon has now gone into this place where it assumes you want the cheapest, crappest version of something.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 68 And all of the brands are like Senco,

Speaker 72 Hawaii.

Speaker 117 And you're like, well, where is this stuff?

Speaker 118 Where's Spear and Jackson?

Speaker 67 What happened to the old brands?

Speaker 10 Does that mean every time you buy something on Amazon, you have to take a cheap trowel out of your basket and then add it into your basket again?

Speaker 5 I just wait until I'm in so much pain, like emotional pain over a weed trowel that I just think, fucking hell, man, buy the trowel.

Speaker 27 it doesn't matter which means what wash do you put on then as a result this is the thing I want a wash that's not provided by my washing machine because the quick one is too quick and the regular one is too slow and the only one that is an hour and a half which I think is a reasonable wash time

Speaker 17 No, it only goes up to a maximum of 800 spins because it's the synthetic mix wash.

Speaker 38 But that means it comes out too dry.

Speaker 118 So I'm thinking, why have you made this, You made elements of the wash settings alterable.

Speaker 12 So I can alter the temperature sometimes.

Speaker 73 I can alter the spin speed sometimes.

Speaker 5 Allow me to design my own wash.

Speaker 37 I want a 40-degree cotton wash that's an hour and 45 minutes that spins at 1200.

Speaker 48 But you've denied me that and given me every other option.

Speaker 26 So my washes settings are either three and a half hours or 60 minutes.

Speaker 4 1200 is too high.

Speaker 70 1200.

Speaker 4 Because it starts to wear out the clothes. I'm an 800 man and I'm also, I don't put them in the dryer.
I hoist them. I put them on a ship's hoist.

Speaker 4 You know, one of those things that you dry your clothes.

Speaker 21 Because you live in a Moretti advert.

Speaker 24 And you pass the bottles along the Italian street to your neighbours and you all meet for pasta in the evening in some impossible dusk.

Speaker 4 And drink beer like no Italian person you have ever met ever. Yes.
Yes, I do. 800 800 sufficient.

Speaker 10 Well, fans of the podcast will know, David, that it's been established, John. I have very generic face.
I look like lots of people.

Speaker 10 And there's a generic man on ITV, sort of goes on this morning called Dr. Alexander van Hugenfugenflugen, or something like that.
And he was explaining that 40 degrees is completely wrong.

Speaker 10 I'm nervous about adding more to your thoughts about washing machines, but it's not hot enough to make a difference. And it's too hot that it is environmentally bad.

Speaker 10 So I have now, as a result, I listen to this man who looks like me, and I sometimes just do naught degrees, maximum 20 degrees. I know, and it's no different.

Speaker 67 I had an ex who every single wash was naught degrees, and it meant that the colors in her clothes always looked amazing and was never a problem.

Speaker 91 And I think, why don't you do that?

Speaker 76 And just something in me, I'm wedded to 40 degrees.

Speaker 40 And also, I think we all are, yeah.

Speaker 5 My carbon footprint is so low because I live alone and I don't have kids.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 57 So I allow myself some really extravagant environmental harm.

Speaker 4 Big spin.

Speaker 10 Big spin, 40.

Speaker 71 If I can't be asked to rinse out glassware like a pickle jar, it goes in the fucking bin, like the actual bin.

Speaker 104 And I don't care.

Speaker 10 Right, so we've put the socks on the dryer, on the clothes horse, and we're now in the shower.

Speaker 25 Is that right? Yeah, I'm in the shower.

Speaker 102 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Cold shower or warm shower, John Robbins?

Speaker 25 Warm shower.

Speaker 4 Cold dart at the end of it?

Speaker 30 No, because cold is really unpleasant feeling.

Speaker 91 So I don't add unpleasantness to my day if I can avoid it.

Speaker 10 And now where do we go?

Speaker 117 Well, there's no skirting around the fact we go to an online AA meeting.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 79 And we don't have to be very solemn about that.

Speaker 4 The Automobile Association, right?

Speaker 90 Yes, I like to check in on the latest recovery prices, whether they do start at home.

Speaker 7 How much extra is it to have your battery covered?

Speaker 10 How is the meeting?

Speaker 61 It's good. It's good.

Speaker 4 How long does it take? How long is an AA meeting?

Speaker 69 Well, if it's an in-person meeting, anything from an hour to an hour and a half,

Speaker 108 no support and no interval.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And the bar is closed.

Speaker 4 Is it a very different experience between an in-person and an online meeting?

Speaker 35 Very good question.

Speaker 77 Online meetings sprung up in COVID

Speaker 54 and they have huge advantages in that you can log on to one at any second of the day in whatever country and there's one in LA that has been running since the start of lockdown continuously.

Speaker 51 Wow.

Speaker 7 So it's still going.

Speaker 45 The meeting is still going now.

Speaker 32 It's never been offline.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 55 That gives enormous access to support for people all over the world.

Speaker 13 I just find that so powerful.

Speaker 45 There is something about,

Speaker 86 it's not as big a difference as the difference between an in-person comedy show and an online comedy show.

Speaker 41 Right, yes.

Speaker 45 Because there's just enormous difference in the sort of atmosphere, and you're changing the very thing.

Speaker 32 They can both be very powerful in very different ways.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I have done counselling with online and in-person,

Speaker 4 and in retrospect, I don't remember the difference between which ones you see.

Speaker 13 I just think that's a very

Speaker 7 useful comparison.

Speaker 3 It's a similar difference to that.

Speaker 53 Every so often there is a certain power that comes from being in a room of people who all have exactly the same problem and can't go anywhere else to meet people who know what their problem is.

Speaker 45 And sometimes I just find the act

Speaker 45 of sitting very moving because there's something so punk about about it.

Speaker 33 It's like no one's in charge.

Speaker 21 No one's made you be here.

Speaker 113 No one is ticking your name off a register.

Speaker 110 No one is selling tickets.

Speaker 57 There's no record of this.

Speaker 19 And yet all of these disparate people

Speaker 85 have decided that at 8 p.m.

Speaker 7 on a Tuesday, they're going to this community center or this church hall or this cafe or whatever it is.

Speaker 85 Yeah.

Speaker 35 And they're going to sit and they're going to help each other and share their problems and their solutions.

Speaker 73 And it's, I can't get that anywhere else in in my life.

Speaker 4 Is it tiring? Afterwards, do you take a moment to sit there or can you just carry on immediately afterwards?

Speaker 67 I can carry on immediately and probably take a moment during it.

Speaker 36 I guess one of the downsides of online is that you can easily be distracted because you've got tabs open.

Speaker 60 You know, you're on your device.

Speaker 45 The world is knocking at the door of your device with notifications and fucking screen time analysis and all this crap.

Speaker 18 I have to accept that sometimes I will open the BBC News website, which bear in mind, when we talk about my day, I would say every 90 seconds I'm just reloading the BBC News website.

Speaker 43 That and vaping, I'm vaping throughout this day on the toilet,

Speaker 20 on the way into the shower, out of the shower.

Speaker 4 Not running, not running, come on.

Speaker 37 I vape during a football game.

Speaker 19 but not whilst running. I have considered getting a small one to take with me.

Speaker 75 So we're constantly applying nicotine and independent news.

Speaker 10 So hang on. When you're playing football, you'll vape, but presumably during stoppages in play, or will you vape, you know, while you're going for a header?

Speaker 46 I usually play in goal.

Speaker 28 Okay. So I'll have my vape by the goalpost.

Speaker 121 And if I come out, I might nip back and get it.

Speaker 45 But I did Alex Horn's charity game.

Speaker 70 this year. You were there, David.

Speaker 79 You will have seen me vaping as I ran.

Speaker 4 Very impressive. It was the game where there were additional rules.
And one of the rules was when the song Sit Down Down by James played, only the keepers were allowed to play football.

Speaker 10 And it was

Speaker 4 a friend of the podcast, Charlie Baker, and exactly 100 yards away in the other goal is Jay Robbo.

Speaker 4 So the song comes on, and we all have to suddenly lie down on the pitch, including some semi-professional and professional players.

Speaker 4 And these two keepers are just suddenly like a sort of death match sprinting towards each other. I'd say it was the highlight of the game.

Speaker 122 You don't think the highlight of the game was when I came up for a free kick in the 96th minute and scored a goal as a keeper?

Speaker 107 That's embarrassing for you.

Speaker 4 Or it might have been my unsavable penalty where it actually hit the underside of the bar and I didn't even celebrate. I just turned and said, the postman has delivered the mail.

Speaker 10 That's what I do. The meeting finishes, and where do we go?

Speaker 21 Well, we go, obviously, into a realm of unending spiritual peace.

Speaker 5 Mixed with vaping and checking the BBC News website every 90 seconds.

Speaker 86 Then I had a call with my dear friend Lou Sanders.

Speaker 7 Another sort of spiritual injection.

Speaker 67 We talked about our thoughts, our feelings, our hopes, our desires, our dreams.

Speaker 10 Has she bought that house in Margate she was looking for in series one, episode something of what are you doing today?

Speaker 5 Yes, I'm going there this weekend.

Speaker 24 That's what we were talking about.

Speaker 101 Because I'm going to stay for the weekend.

Speaker 75 We're going to do the park run and we're going to do some writing.

Speaker 45 And I've written a book and she's read it and she's going to give me some feedback.

Speaker 45 Actually, yesterday, this is what another thing that happened is I started to get emails from people I'd sent a draft to and I couldn't open them because I was just sort of, it's the first time anyone's seen it.

Speaker 4 Oh, wow. Got it.

Speaker 33 And I could neither cope with praise nor criticism.

Speaker 31 So I just had to leave them, sat in my inbox.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 4 And is it the J-Robo story? Is it my way?

Speaker 38 I'm afraid it is.

Speaker 19 Well, what I've learned is that there is no J-Robo story.

Speaker 86 There are just, you know, a thousand versions.

Speaker 38 It all depends on what, how much you trust your memories.

Speaker 13 Wow. But also,

Speaker 95 you might read it and think, God, that's really honest.

Speaker 104 And because I'm talking about alcohol a lot and the impact it had on me, you might think, oh, how is he so honest?

Speaker 67 And that's what people have said who've seen it.

Speaker 54 But in a sense, you're never able to be fully honest ever in anything.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 45 Because you're always being conscious of not telling other people's stories. And there are parts of yourself you don't want to share.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 45 I think that's what's like powerful about 12-step meetings is that I've never been in a place where you can be 100% honest apart from there.

Speaker 21 And it's like mad

Speaker 4 what people are able to say in that space that you can't share with the outside world because the just the understanding isn't there the empathy isn't there and the impact could be too disruptive so you're constantly walking a line between sharing and concealing so john if the world was set up such that everyone was as honest as they were in a 12-step meeting it wouldn't work then because everyone would be being rude about other people or

Speaker 5 being

Speaker 30 a really interesting criticism Adam Buxton had of, you know, that Ricky Gervais movie where he's always honest.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 98 I can't remember the name of it.

Speaker 4 Something lying. The lying king.

Speaker 95 The lying king.

Speaker 10 It was the lion king, yeah.

Speaker 79 And he made this really great point is he says it makes the assumption that if people are honest, they're always going to be rude.

Speaker 27 And I think that says so much about Ricky Gervais.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 19 Is that like his version of an honest world is where people are mean to each other all the time.

Speaker 10 But I suppose aren't you, like if you honestly think someone looks nice, you are likely to say it.

Speaker 10 But if you honestly think someone looks terrible, although people quite often say that to me, given how tired I am, you're less likely to say it.

Speaker 10 You know, like you're more likely to conceal rudeness than you are positivity.

Speaker 76 Yeah, but what about, you know, the person you love who you've never told?

Speaker 33 the person who you've thought about every day for three years, that it would disrupt their life for you to say to them, I think about you when I wake up.

Speaker 30 The things we don't say to our parents maybe that we sort of wish we had said or we say on the deathbed or all of those things, you know, were the world as honest as a 12-step meeting, the reason those places are honest is because everyone in there has lived experience of the same thing.

Speaker 74 And you can't impart, you know, 26 years, 10 years, two years of lived experience on someone in a conversation who doesn't have that lived experience yeah and so much of what is healing about being away from any addiction is just time right yeah and the experience that comes with time because I could talk to you for two hours about how to get sober if you were struggling with alcohol you would not take any of it in because it took me two and a half years or it's taken someone 40 years.

Speaker 38 So it wouldn't work to be that honest.

Speaker 68 It would be helpful, but that's not to say you can't impart little sort of fragments here and there.

Speaker 32 But over time, you put all those fragments together and you create a sort of a new way of living.

Speaker 10 So where are we?

Speaker 5 I don't know. I think we might be in heaven.

Speaker 5 We are.

Speaker 10 We're in Nirvana. This is the one other place where you can be totally honest.
It's this podcast on your day

Speaker 10 yesterday. We are now all floating.
You're not looking at your inbox. You're washed.

Speaker 67 Oh, I'm having a chat with Lou, of course.

Speaker 10 Chatting to Lou about Margate and Margate.

Speaker 69 Yeah, yeah, got it.

Speaker 4 She and I, two weeks ago, we are allowed to say this.

Speaker 4 There's an NDA element to it, but we went on a popular quiz show that will be broadcast on Christmas Day with major celebrities who are all dressed as Martine McCutcheon was dressed as the snow queen.

Speaker 4 And I was dressed as a Christmas cracker, and Lou was a Christmas pudding. So we were very much the comedy sidekicks on that show.

Speaker 28 That's so nice.

Speaker 4 Lou's good at quizzes, it turns out.

Speaker 34 Lou is terrible at quizzes.

Speaker 10 I don't know what to know anymore. One of you is not being honest, as we've established on a serious subject.

Speaker 28 Lou is obsessed with using quizzes to prove that she's not in some form of mental decline.

Speaker 19 So whenever we're spending time together, she'll insist on doing a quiz.

Speaker 124 She will then fail

Speaker 17 in hilarious ways and then get more worried about cognitive decline.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 48 I will give one example.

Speaker 24 It's not fair to say she's terrible at quizzes.

Speaker 36 She does practice. She actually practiced quizzes, but she bought this card game and it was like an estimation.

Speaker 58 You had to estimate.

Speaker 45 So it's like how many meters tall is Mount Everest and it was closest wins.

Speaker 39 Yeah.

Speaker 45 One of the questions was how many homes were destroyed during the blitz.

Speaker 38 And Lou's guess was four.

Speaker 10 They're big houses, though, to be fair to Lou. There were four four massive, massive houses.

Speaker 4 We've spoken to Lou Sanders. Where does this day go next?

Speaker 15 Well, we move, David, into your realm.

Speaker 67 I have a podcast called How Do You Cope?

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 101 It's a podcast where I talk to people about, you know, just difficulties they've been through, how well they've coped or not coped.

Speaker 28 And I interviewed someone yesterday for that.

Speaker 61 That person was Philippa York.

Speaker 110 And Philippa was a Tour de France cyclist before transitioning to female.

Speaker 33 I spoke to Philippa about this because her previous name as a man is very present in her world because it's what she's known for.

Speaker 56 So if I use her previous name of Robert Miller, she wouldn't mind that at all.

Speaker 45 And we talked about holding space for that name and that previous identity in her life.

Speaker 35 So I was interviewing her at two o'clock and I was preparing my questions because I'd read her book, The Escape, which is written with David Walsh.

Speaker 37 It's an incredible book.

Speaker 95 Shit, I have to read this.

Speaker 28 However, I am a cycling thicko.

Speaker 47 Sure.

Speaker 45 And every time I've ever watched cycling on TV, it seems to find a way of being absolutely baffling.

Speaker 27 Whether it's people not moving on a velodrome

Speaker 79 or people touching hands and then going really fast and then going really slow and you're like why don't you just go a bit faster you idiot have you not done this before

Speaker 104 what I got from her book the way it's structured is her and David Walsh drive the course of three tour de Frances I think it's 2020 21 and 22

Speaker 35 and through those journeys they have discussions which are transcribed about her career as Robert Miller.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 70 About her childhood, about her transition,

Speaker 31 about her retirement.

Speaker 76 And this is all wound in with what's happening in the current tour that they're, or the stage that they're on.

Speaker 19 It's one of the best sports books I've ever read because, in a sense, it's not a sport book.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 27 if you don't understand the tour de France,

Speaker 15 the references to like the tactics and the mythology of it are so confusing because you're like they're saying well Poglich lost 30 seconds in the climb so his tour was over and you're like how is it over I thought it was a thousand kilometers long or they'll be like they dominated the sprint they're the best sprinter I've ever seen and they will live in the hearts of the French people for a thousand years and then you look them up and they've never won it And you're like, well, that person's rubbish then, if they're just good at the sprint bits.

Speaker 38 None of this stuff makes sense.

Speaker 4 Well, what certainly doesn't make sense is how you've amalgamated Roglich and Pagacher into the same cyclist, Poglich.

Speaker 10 She's the best cyclist of all time.

Speaker 125 And all the stuff about...

Speaker 45 I mean, I don't want this to become me, David, explaining the Tour de France to me, because that would just take forever.

Speaker 46 But it gives an insight into,

Speaker 81 you know, as a cricket fan, I know what it's like for someone to go, what, five days?

Speaker 5 What do you mean, five days?

Speaker 116 What do you mean they drew and it was amazing?

Speaker 13 However, I think with the Tour de France, perhaps more than most other other sports, because it's so badly suited to TV,

Speaker 17 it's like it's not been compromised for TV.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 11 And they're even talking about reporting on it.

Speaker 67 You're sort of at the start and the end because you can't really follow it.

Speaker 76 So you're sort of being told what's happening, trying to pass that on.

Speaker 63 So anyway.

Speaker 18 I watched a few clips of Robert Miller cycling in the 80s and of 80s coverage of the Tour de France to just.

Speaker 10 It's like David's dream. It's like David's absolute dream.

Speaker 23 It's what he does every day.

Speaker 62 To get a feel for what it's like

Speaker 79 to put images to that book I'd read because I didn't want to Google it while I was reading the book.

Speaker 4 God, there's a stage in the 1988 Tour de France. Here we go.

Speaker 21 Well, this is my fear is coming true now.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no, no. You may have seen it.
Like, winning a stage is a really big deal. So, Robert Miller, as she was then, is in a breakaway up a mountain with Giles Burt Duclo LaSalle.

Speaker 4 And the gendarme, because the cars come through with the cyclists, the fucking gendarme waves the cyclists into the little lane to the side.

Speaker 4 And so, the guy who's in third place ends up winning the stage.

Speaker 4 And there is an interview with Robert Miller where, like, the whole year has built up to this, slumped over a bike just with the ultimate kind of like biblical level of agony as in it was a small piece of bureaucracy that has ruined this may be my last chance to ever win one of these.

Speaker 4 Ugh, that's as much as I'll say. Was the interview amazing? Philip E.
York's one of my heroes.

Speaker 78 It was.

Speaker 13 I was conscious of my own extreme anxiety of talking to someone who has transitioned and getting it wrong somehow.

Speaker 4 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 81 I was aware of how present that was in my mind.

Speaker 43 And you know, when you are so focused on getting someone's name right, you often get it wrong.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 85 That sort of anxiety.

Speaker 75 But she immediately put me at ease.

Speaker 119 And one of the things that's great about the book is that David, who is interviewing her, these conversations they have, are totally free wheeling and

Speaker 70 nothing is off the table because

Speaker 70 Pippa has the right to say, you know, fuck off, or I don't want to talk about that.

Speaker 78 But I said at the start, like, how do you feel coming into a media environment?

Speaker 49 Because she's had some appalling experiences with the tabloid press, like really life-alteringly brutal, horrible treatment by the Daily Mail.

Speaker 45 She said, look, I've been asked everything from the most sensitive question to the most inappropriate inappropriate question.

Speaker 89 So there's nothing, you can't really get this wrong, which was really generous of her.

Speaker 108 I noticed, so when they're talking about Robert Miller, the cyclist, he hated journalists and was known for being cold and not giving them interviews because he wanted time to prepare for the race and time to recover from the race.

Speaker 110 So the less people spoke to him, the better.

Speaker 105 So he wasn't sort of well-liked amongst the press.

Speaker 62 And there were elements of when you're interviewing someone about quite intense stuff which i've done quite a lot now some people you press a button and they just go and they just talk and you know you might be lucky to get 10 questions in in an hour some people stop

Speaker 30 and pippa is one of those peoples whose answer ends

Speaker 28 So you just have to get into that rhythm of, okay, I need to have my next question ready to go because this isn't going to become a really freewheeling conversation someone is going to answer my questions which is fine you know neither of these sometimes it'd be quite frustrating when someone just goes on and on and on but once i'd got into that rhythm it's like a sort of game of tennis yeah my backhand needs to be ready before the ball comes it was amazing and she relaxed because it's a i'm used to that environment i know what that studio looks like i've sat in that chair every week for 30 weeks but someone coming into the first time you don't know what they might be terrified, often are very nervous.

Speaker 108 But I did manage to get a little message from Pippa for you, David.

Speaker 5 Oh my God.

Speaker 10 Here we go.

Speaker 10 What? It's like surprise, surprise.

Speaker 7 Hello, David.

Speaker 31 This is John Robbins, and hello, Max.

Speaker 5 I'm coming to you from yesterday with a very special guest to my right.

Speaker 127 Hello, David. I used to ride the tour of France, but I don't anymore.
Now I just commentate on it and make snarky remarks.

Speaker 73 That's Pippa York, winner of the what jersey was it again?

Speaker 13 How could it?

Speaker 9 I think it was white with red dots on it.

Speaker 73 I think it may have had something to do with the hills.

Speaker 84 Anyway, I'll be chatting to you tomorrow, dears.

Speaker 111 Bye-bye.

Speaker 5 So there you go.

Speaker 10 Do you know what? It's really interesting, the art of interviewing, which I wouldn't say I...

Speaker 10 have ever mastered at all, but when you know you've got to have your question ready, but at the same time you've got to be listening because they might say something which means your question is not the right question yeah that is much harder than you're right one of these sort of freewheeling you might not get as much out of them because they're just talking and talking and talking but having that sort of double focus of my next question is if there's a silence i ask this but actually the next question might just be why or what or having done lots of these you will know better than i will i guess for how do you cope so it's sort of two extremes ellis and john which we record on a friday i mean literally we're talking five minutes prep yeah for three or four hours of recording and that i love that because it's just purely improvising with how do you cope i take that research and preparation very seriously and i'd like to think that comes across in the interviews so i have all of the questions so i'll have about 20 questions in a specific order so that's what i'm doing before i go into london is i'm copy and pasting all of my questions from a word document into an order that i I feel will drive a sort of a story of the interview.

Speaker 45 And sometimes that like goes awry and people will answer a question you haven't asked right at the start or will take it.

Speaker 42 So I need to know it inside out so that I can move across and sort of a mixture of controlling it to an extent, but also being flexible enough to let it be its own thing.

Speaker 95 And you can't do that if you haven't read everything and watched everything and lived in that person's world for a few days.

Speaker 4 There's an incredible surviving of the difference between your How Do You Cope podcast and the What Do You Do Yesterday podcast in the one crossover guest between the two, which is Tom Rosenthal, where he was incredibly open and vulnerable, like from his first answer onwards, where you go, how are you?

Speaker 4 And he goes, I'm good. And then utterly contradicts himself.
When he did our one, he'd prepared a 25-page PDF with photos of everything that he'd done yesterday. It was, oh, I love it.

Speaker 4 They're both like beautiful windows into the same person, where in a stupid environment like this fun podcast, he needed to keep some sort of control on the whole thing.

Speaker 4 So he'd be like, I bring you to page 13, diagram three, where you will see my bank statement or whatever it is. They're both very honest versions of the same person.

Speaker 50 And that's really interesting in terms of like writing a book about yourself.

Speaker 46 So if Tom's writing a book, is he going for the Tom who does the spreadsheets and the PDF, the sort of humorously neurotic Tom?

Speaker 84 Or is he writing a book about the spiritual explorer Tom who prays before he goes on stage?

Speaker 21 So what is being honest about who you are?

Speaker 49 Yeah.

Speaker 27 In a sense, there is never perfect honesty because even if you try and meld those two people together.

Speaker 14 So like my editor for my book is often like is the his main note is could we have more humor here and you're like well yeah we could we could make this all humor

Speaker 76 or we could make it no humor because what I'm talking about is both funny and serious

Speaker 56 so how do I tell you a story which is at times very

Speaker 43 traumatic in a funny way.

Speaker 45 I have to give space to both of those things.

Speaker 22 So So

Speaker 126 I have to let you get to the end of a paragraph feeling like, fucking hell, wow, that's full on.

Speaker 47 But I also have to get you to the end of some paragraphs going, that was funny.

Speaker 76 But I can't do both all the time.

Speaker 19 And they're just two strands of a personality, which, as all personalities do, has a thousand strands.

Speaker 10 Have you eaten anything today? At what time is it?

Speaker 71 Yeah, I had... I'm going through a cornflakes phase.

Speaker 5 Okay, good. Sue me.

Speaker 10 No, they're good. Have you forgotten how good they taste?

Speaker 97 Well, I'm usually a toast with vegemite and hummus guy.

Speaker 23 Interesting.

Speaker 47 I'm a savoury breakfast guy.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 13 But I was walking down the cereal aisle

Speaker 114 and I thought, do you know what, John?

Speaker 51 To hell with them, man.

Speaker 5 They can't put you in a box.

Speaker 13 They don't know you.

Speaker 19 You're going to buy some corn flakes.

Speaker 56 Because we never had sweet cereal when I was a kid at at home my mum was quite into sort of healthy eating so if we ever went away i would be allowed to take a a variety pack yes and just the best thing in my life cocoa pops shreddies frosties ricicles i mean sugar in a box

Speaker 10 do you have brothers and sisters because i'd me and my sister we'd have the variety pack but it was like the new system or the system they try and introduce a penalty shootouts a b b a a if you went first you got first pick and then the other person would get so you get the cocoa pops but then my sister would steam in and take the ricicles and the crunchy nuts cornflakes are well down i mean they're sort of last pick cornflakes like opting to bowl because you think there's going to be clouds coming in and then just the sun shines all day your sister is batting on an absolute road exactly and it's like 400 for three exactly yeah yeah yeah my sister's eight years older than me so we were sort of never going through the same things at the same time so not variety pack rivalry, I'm with you.

Speaker 104 I think she'd moved beyond variety packs being the sort of make or break of her week in Bridlington.

Speaker 19 So in a sense, it was win-win.

Speaker 10 I get it. Yeah, you get all eight.
Okay, so conflicts for breakfast. The research you're doing is what, before lunch?

Speaker 24 So I had to leave at 12 to get the train.

Speaker 76 So 10 till 12 was when I was, I'd already done all my questions.

Speaker 45 Right.

Speaker 91 But 10 to 12 was just putting them in the right order and coming up with some kind of form act.

Speaker 10 So we're at 12 and we're heading to the station to get into town.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 10 How's the journey?

Speaker 58 We're going to go back into Booze territory.

Speaker 84 I was behind a woman who was talking very loudly on her phone and it was annoying me enormously.

Speaker 4 What was she talking about?

Speaker 26 I remember exactly.

Speaker 125 She said, what was that thing?

Speaker 120 Wet in an otter's pocket.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 120 Wet in an otter's pocket. Yeah, you've got to write these down because I forget them and I want to tell my friend.

Speaker 31 And I'm thinking, fucking hell, because my journey into town's quite long.

Speaker 30 So I'm like, I'm going to be 56 minutes of this.

Speaker 82 Wow.

Speaker 29 And then she took out a quarter bottle of vodka from her handbag and just took a swig of it.

Speaker 5 And I was like,

Speaker 90 okay, I see you.

Speaker 65 I know you.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 45 it's hard to explain what it's like.

Speaker 22 to

Speaker 98 see someone and know them better than they know themselves just in that instant.

Speaker 45 And I'd say this woman was like late 20s.

Speaker 28 Part of you just wants to sort of go and grab them.

Speaker 13 And like I was saying, impart all of that stuff that I've learned over two and a half years of not drinking.

Speaker 93 And I know I can't.

Speaker 86 And I know she is in that madness.

Speaker 42 And

Speaker 33 I know so much about her future.

Speaker 73 And yet I don't know anything.

Speaker 29 And I want to influence it.

Speaker 45 And I want to say, I can help you.

Speaker 33 and I want to say,

Speaker 45 This is going to end badly.

Speaker 35 Wow, I want to say to a stranger on a train, you're going to die,

Speaker 76 but I can't.

Speaker 36 So, I'm just watching her get through a quarter bottle of vodka in the space of a 50-minute train journey at midday.

Speaker 119 And towards the end, there's these two guys to her left: one is black, one is brown, and she starts being

Speaker 72 too friendly to strangers and racist in what she would say was a fun, jokey sort of, I'm just having a laugh.

Speaker 73 We're all, you know, having a laugh on the train at fucking quarter to one.

Speaker 36 And she's handed.

Speaker 82 Oh, God.

Speaker 117 And she was like, how old are you?

Speaker 45 And the guy said, he was sort of trying to joke. He said, I'm 12.

Speaker 38 And she went, 12. I've done 12 years in prison.

Speaker 74 And I'm just sort of at the same time feel so much compassion for this person.

Speaker 45 But also, I want to get away because I don't want to be around, you know, that shameful thing of, I just want to move further down the carriage because I don't want to be stuck here.

Speaker 117 Yes.

Speaker 70 And also, should I be saying something?

Speaker 43 Should I be intervening?

Speaker 47 I know I can't because she's drunk.

Speaker 45 And just sort of seeing how her day is going to go.

Speaker 37 It's one o'clock.

Speaker 122 Fucking hell. And she's falling off a train at Great Portland Street.

Speaker 45 And who knows where that day is going to end?

Speaker 73 She could end up in hospital.

Speaker 36 She could end up in an awful situation.

Speaker 28 And just wanting to

Speaker 79 help her and not being able to.

Speaker 36 And it's a strange triggering of so much stuff as well, because part of me, there is a part of me that is jealous of her.

Speaker 5 Wow. It's mad.
That's interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 38 Sorry, that's quite a lot.

Speaker 10 No, that's what happened yesterday.

Speaker 4 Since starting your recovery, do you see stuff like this more in the world? You know what I mean? Are you more aware of it?

Speaker 13 I've always seen alcohol everywhere, wherever it is.

Speaker 27 It was interesting talking to Pippa

Speaker 30 because I wanted to say this, but I don't think it would have been appropriate because I didn't want to diminish her experience of transitioning because it was enormously traumatic.

Speaker 73 And I hadn't quite appreciated the trauma of transition. I thought it was a sort of a great thing.

Speaker 32 Yeah. You know, to sort of finally be the person that you weren't.

Speaker 18 But the 10 years from when she decided that she needed to address this issue to her surgery at the end of that 10 years, and it's not like an overnight thing, it's stages and stages and coming to terms with the impact you'll have on other people and agonizing and getting to a stage of hormone therapy that you think might be enough to stop there and realizing it's not enough and you have to go a step further.

Speaker 45 And I didn't know any of this stuff.

Speaker 41 But she was talking about how I said, so now, now that you are living in what I'm guessing is the right gender is everything okay

Speaker 70 inadvertent comments maybe perhaps a slightly naive question but she said no I still get triggered every so often but it's much less now

Speaker 29 and she was talking about seeing a a young woman maybe going off to uni or

Speaker 86 being free you know being in a park with your friends as a 25-year-old woman and getting triggered as sort of seeing the part of her life she didn't get.

Speaker 108 Yeah. Because this came later in life.

Speaker 18 And I have empathy with that as an alcoholic because when I see alcohol I get triggered and I see it all the time.

Speaker 3 So there's a phrase which is for the normal drinker the alcohol stays in the bottle.

Speaker 45 So alcohol is only present when alcohol is present.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 122 But for the abnormal drinker, it doesn't stay in the bottle.

Speaker 58 It's in your mind.

Speaker 45 So if I see someone drinking on a train or if I go past people in a park drinking, I see the part of myself that I miss.

Speaker 36 I see the part of myself that I hate.

Speaker 36 I see the part of myself that I can't have anymore.

Speaker 58 And I see the part of myself that I'm glad is no longer in my life.

Speaker 3 So it's a very confusing

Speaker 36 place to be.

Speaker 47 And I've got to live amongst alcohol forever.

Speaker 122 You know, it makes me emotional to think about it because that's

Speaker 108 that is the problem of my life.

Speaker 91 Everyone has lots of different problems.

Speaker 72 That's the main one of mine.

Speaker 32 How do I exist in a world with alcohol in a body which alcohol is its best coping mechanism or its most the one it's used for 30 years?

Speaker 45 It's very strange existence and holding that strangeness and not being too critical or or necessarily needing to find a solution to that strangeness yeah is a daily practice fucking hell yeah

Speaker 10 I think like you say it's really interesting that you don't want to you know bring your own story when you're interviewing somebody who has their own story that's what the podcast is to learn from that but the comparison is legitimate I think in that thing that is

Speaker 10 would be top of your mind. I always sort of think about the complete lack of compassion, you know, around the whole the trans culture wars and that nobody just talks about

Speaker 10 actually for young people, it's hard enough to be a young person for lots of people, let alone thinking all the time I'm also in the wrong body, you know, like add that right at the top of all your thoughts.

Speaker 10 And I suppose the same for you with alcohol, it would have been, and maybe still is, I don't know, but it certainly was at the time, just at the top of your mind while you're trying to get on with everything else.

Speaker 87 Yeah, I think what the kinship I have with Pippa,

Speaker 33 which I had not realized until that conversation, is we both know what it's like to live two lives in one lifetime.

Speaker 128 And the reason I didn't mention it is because A, I don't want to bring myself into those conversations all the time because I think that's a

Speaker 45 it's something people struggle with when someone is talking about something intense or something difficult that's happened to them

Speaker 44 The temptation is to go, oh, I know what that's like because like bring it back onto terra firma.

Speaker 57 Yeah, my and people get very frustrated by this.

Speaker 30 Let's say like um my mum passed away and I'm really struggling.

Speaker 93 Oh, I know what that's like.

Speaker 26 My dog died.

Speaker 38 And you're like, it's not, you don't know what it's like.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 45 We never know what it's like to have lived someone else's life.

Speaker 18 So to make it about ourselves is a defense mechanism that's not often appropriate.

Speaker 78 But also, I don't want how do you cope to constantly be me going, yeah, it's like alcohol.

Speaker 32 Yeah, it's like being an alcoholic.

Speaker 39 Yeah, it's like not drinking because it's not like that.

Speaker 18 But I felt a commonality with someone who and you know anyone who's made a big change in their life will know what it's like to be two people at once

Speaker 12 and to have been a person that they still have a relationship who are they are not anymore yeah but also i think i didn't want to sound like i was diminishing her struggle

Speaker 42 and

Speaker 24 I was also aware that I didn't want to dignify the culture war about, in inverted commas, the trans debate by sort of going over a lot of that ground because

Speaker 47 what the trans debate isn't ever is listening to people's lived experience it's a projection of a fear or a a confusion or a lack of empathy and understanding and i think it's important to put into that debate as much testimony and i learned and you know i think of myself as you know liberal accepting you know switched on to all these things, woke in the best possible sense of the word, like awoken to other people's experiences.

Speaker 26 But reading her book, it was like, oh, wow, there's so much I didn't understand, so much I hadn't considered.

Speaker 96 And I love being able to put myself into someone's world for a bit to get a bit more empathy with them.

Speaker 4 It sounds to me exactly like how I have 18 bikes and they're all around the house. And Helen's quite angry with me because there's six in the sitting room at the moment.

Speaker 4 John, I'm trying to do the thing there where I relate it back to the only real tension in my life, which is how Helen is angry with me because I have too many bikes.

Speaker 10 Now, John, have you had lunch? Because you've only had a bowl of cornflakes.

Speaker 67 Yes, I had lunch.

Speaker 45 So our podcast studio is at a sort of shared working vibe hub.

Speaker 48 Right. You know, the sort of hot spotting.

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 91 Yeah. Everyone's got a MacBook.
Everyone's got 10 MacBooks.

Speaker 10 No chairs, funny shares. No chairs, no tables, no desks.

Speaker 4 No, okay.

Speaker 32 It's actually a zero gravity hotspot in space.

Speaker 10 Now it's fun.

Speaker 6 That encourages the sharing of ideas.

Speaker 57 I don't know if you ever tried brainstorming in zero gravity. It just pops.

Speaker 119 It flies.

Speaker 10 Just you flow into someone else's meeting. That is the issue.

Speaker 122 Aha. Interesting, Max.

Speaker 34 You've fallen into a very out-moded way of thinking.

Speaker 10 Oh, really? So the QI buzz has gone off.

Speaker 26 We don't have meetings.

Speaker 45 We have commonalities.

Speaker 10 Yeah, got it. Okay.

Speaker 4 Fuck.

Speaker 10 Hey, hey, I've not got to talk sport yet. Those commonalities, I'll just point out.

Speaker 26 Everyone's constantly pulling each other's mag safe plugs out of their laptops because you're just floating around.

Speaker 47 Everyone's desperate to find a charging point.

Speaker 124 I had

Speaker 32 a

Speaker 82 mushroom and halloumi flatbread and they forgot to put the halloumi in.

Speaker 4 Oh, no.

Speaker 112 And I had to go to the kitchen and I had to do that bit of public theatre where you go, they look at you and they're like, something's wrong because he's at the kitchen entrance.

Speaker 72 So he does that look, eyebrows up and I go, is there halloumi in this?

Speaker 26 Whereas that's not really, that's not me being honest.

Speaker 25 So in the in the honest world where we're all honest, I'd say, I asked for halloumi and there's no halloumi in this, but I'm scared that that sounds is going to upset them because they've made a mistake it's perfectly legitimate to make.

Speaker 81 The lady who took the order has forgotten to write halloumi or he's forgotten to read it.

Speaker 13 So instead of going, I haven't got the thing I ordered, because that would be too mean, I go, is there

Speaker 40 halloumi in this?

Speaker 128 And he says, no.

Speaker 45 And then we sort of fudge a solution. He makes some halloumi and brings it over.

Speaker 33 That delays me because I'm someone who likes to be like half an hour early to everything.

Speaker 45 So I'm thinking, what if Pippa comes into the cafe while I'm still eating my halloumi and mushroom?

Speaker 103 That's going to look unprofessional.

Speaker 32 What if I am bloated for our interview?

Speaker 13 What if I am burping?

Speaker 51 But it all goes fine.

Speaker 36 I then go up to the studio and I then, part of my process before these interviews is printing out the questions onto A5,

Speaker 74 cutting them out and sticking them into a notebook.

Speaker 89 I find that quite soothing.

Speaker 36 So I have prick, stick, and scissors. and a notebook full of questions.

Speaker 4 Because his podcast, Max, is a filmed podcast, unlike this.

Speaker 10 We'll put out some videos in five years' time.

Speaker 12 Well, also, here's a fun little fact.

Speaker 102 I also received a notification on my phone that the company who makes my podcast no longer exists.

Speaker 5 Oh, right.

Speaker 63 Because

Speaker 21 Amazon have discontinued Wondery.

Speaker 76 So all the while through this podcast, I'm getting like...

Speaker 47 Pinging messages are coming to my phone that's on silent on the other side of the room going, is that we still making this?

Speaker 117 Is this going to be put out?

Speaker 4 whoa what's going to happen and no one knows what a philosophical freeson while you're having this other philosophical conversation as well is it resolved no because you're

Speaker 19 it's that thing where the press release goes out before any of the detail has been confirmed because obviously you can't make 150 people redundant and restructure a company before telling people that this is going to happen because the first person you make redundant is going to say, oh, by the way, Wondery are making lots of redundancies.

Speaker 47 I think something's up.

Speaker 19 So it's that thing of we control the story, but there is no story yet apart from the headline.

Speaker 67 So we're going to give you the headline

Speaker 34 and then we're going to fill in the actual columns of the story over the next two to three weeks.

Speaker 10 I was once doing, I was on Talksport and there was some issue with. Twitter and Talksport had decided to stop using Twitter.
So they announced it in the five o'clock news and I was doing drive.

Speaker 4 So they came out of the news and I had to say, does that mean I'm not allowed to talk about it now like is this what if somebody messages me so I'm sort of on air going could somebody tell me what I've had a tweet about us not being on Twitter anymore but can I read the tweet because why did they stop using Twitter I think it was about one of the presenters being abused in some way you know it was like the bad form of social media and social media companies not taking it seriously it was quite a long time ago actually John does this influence the interview in any way like i always think of this moment in primary school this is a very irish irish education system in the 80s thing i remember once doing out long multiplication like doing the 10 sums that were in the workbook and finishing a copy book as you used to and then just walking up to the front of the classroom and putting the copybook in the bin

Speaker 4 like mid-class and then just going back and moving on to the next thing do you have this fear as you have this conversation with Pippa York?

Speaker 75 It's not fear.

Speaker 66 It's a lack of control and not knowing.

Speaker 68 And I definitely have a,

Speaker 98 you know, you could say it's an alcoholic trait, but like wanting to be in control of everything.

Speaker 68 I guess what I have been given one of the like good parts of my life now is that I am able to be aware of that need for control and to get things done and get things sorted.

Speaker 36 So one of my defects is that I will,

Speaker 27 you know, if someone texts me something

Speaker 19 where there's any uncertainty is like I will immediately reply with a solution and be like, we need to to do this.

Speaker 45 Why can't we do this? Can you tell this person?

Speaker 7 Can we get this done?

Speaker 72 Why haven't you replied?

Speaker 30 I am now able to sit with uncertainty for a little bit longer than I used to be able to.

Speaker 79 So it's not necessarily fear.

Speaker 28 It's almost like a spiritual exercise in not

Speaker 28 affecting anyone by my need for control.

Speaker 49 So not firing off that reply, which is like, well, what's happening?

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah. Get him on the phone.

Speaker 102 It's to actually just notice the need to do that in myself and be able to go, you know, this will all still be here in two hours' time.

Speaker 63 This is not today's problem.

Speaker 58 That's a good mantra I have.

Speaker 51 When stuff starts to agitate me, I'll go, it's not today's problem.

Speaker 112 And if it is today's problem, I'll sort it in a sort of timely way, but not in a aggressive or overly energetic way.

Speaker 10 Unless it's a blind. And then it is today's problem, but you.

Speaker 23 The blind is today's problem.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 73 And I can either solve that problem or I can let it bother me for another two weeks before the man from Hillary's comes.

Speaker 10 Hillary's going to come. Okay, so we do the episode.
Are you then straight back home? Straight back on the train?

Speaker 4 He's in London now. He's in swing in London.
Are you going to a hotspot? What are you doing in London?

Speaker 33 I'm getting the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

Speaker 51 I mean, literally, I know to the 10 seconds how long it takes me to get from the studio to the station.

Speaker 44 I'm very much someone who, if we're wrapping up something in London, And you're saying,

Speaker 114 like, oh, what train station are you going to?

Speaker 35 I'm already on City Mapper thinking if I can end this conversation in 30 seconds, it means I can get a train eight minutes earlier.

Speaker 30 I'm saving myself eight minutes by wrapping up this conversation now.

Speaker 47 And it struck me yesterday, I am never someone who just, someone says, like, what station are you heading to?

Speaker 45 I never just head to the station and get the next train. I'm always looking to try and get the train before the next train.

Speaker 19 which is pointless.

Speaker 112 It's a pointless time saving because I'm going to be home on my own for six hours.

Speaker 33 And yet my great obsession is making that six hours and eight minutes.

Speaker 10 But I love the idea that you've had this really intense, really valuable, interesting conversation with Pippa and you go, thank you so much for your time. And then you go, right.

Speaker 5 See ya. That's good.

Speaker 5 That's me.

Speaker 4 You sprint out. You jump out a window.

Speaker 18 Pointless efficiencies could be the title of my life.

Speaker 4 Interesting. So is there a moment where you get home, though, where you sort of shut the door and then lean against it as it's shut and just raise a fist and slowly bring it into your chest?

Speaker 4 We did it.

Speaker 38 Oh, definitely.

Speaker 20 Then there's part of my brain when I'm on the train, checking the time of the train afterwards to think, you've absolutely those idiots.

Speaker 23 Those idiots on the 452 when you're on a 446.

Speaker 13 What awful lives they have.

Speaker 58 You know, that guy who came down the steps to the station, hadn't he checked when the doors closed, hadn't he checked?

Speaker 120 Didn't even know.

Speaker 39 And I'm John Robbins and I'm sat on the 446 and I win.

Speaker 5 And then you get to your car and there's temporary traffic lights outside of the station and you're still there when the next train comes in and you're like, I'm not sure you have one, John.

Speaker 5 I think you might be an idiot. Ah!

Speaker 10 You're home, John.

Speaker 4 Yes. Dinner.
He's a man with a big casserole that he's about to put on.

Speaker 98 I definitely get home and I feel the sort of the anxiety of the city leave me.

Speaker 16 Moving out of London was

Speaker 36 definitely met a need in me to, I just felt tense in London all the time.

Speaker 88 So I get back here and I live in a sort of rural-ish area.

Speaker 58 So I'm very close to woodland and stuff.

Speaker 33 But I get home, there's a question about dinner.

Speaker 90 But I go to a chip shop actually and have some chippies.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 7 annoyingly for the variety on this podcast I go to another 12-step meeting

Speaker 4 do you take your chips do you take your chips in yeah he's got the he's eating a smoked card yeah dipping my curry sauce no I sit and have my chibies then go to the meeting Can I ask you this?

Speaker 4 And please don't answer if you don't want to. Would this have been planned or would it be a spontaneous thing that you would have felt? Is it fulfilling a need in you or is it a habit kind of a thing?

Speaker 102 Both, definitely both.

Speaker 45 I knew I was going to this one.

Speaker 45 Like everyone's recovery from anything they want to stop doing goes in like waves.

Speaker 107 So it might take a little bit of pain to make you think, I haven't been to a meeting for a week or I haven't been paying enough attention to my recovery.

Speaker 87 I think a...

Speaker 59 a misunderstanding I had and a lot of people probably have is they think, well, when you stop drinking, that's sort of, it's all sorted.

Speaker 35 That's really when the problems begin because you've removed your coping mechanism so you then are faced with all of the reasons you drank or

Speaker 96 ate or

Speaker 90 didn't eat or whatever it is that is your thing that's damaging your life you take it away and you realize it was a solution not a problem and you're left with you know that dis-ease that whatever it is restlessness that anger or that pain or that whatever you're using all these different things to sort of treat yourself.

Speaker 102 So that's why it needs to be regular and continuing.

Speaker 128 But, you know, sometimes when I was first sober, I would try and get to a meeting most days and I knew where all the meetings were locally and I would sort of have, well, I'll go to that one, then that one, then that one, then.

Speaker 32 But now it's more that like, I'll start to go mad.

Speaker 81 And I'll be like, okay, you need to get to a meeting because you're a bit like needing to go for a run.

Speaker 26 If exercise is part of your wellness routine or whatever, and you have four or five days where you're not able to do it, or maybe two weeks, or you get ill or you're on holiday, and you get back and think, I feel like, why did I get so upset about that blind?

Speaker 96 And you're like, oh yeah, that's why, because you're mad.

Speaker 38 So you need to go to the place that stops you being mad.

Speaker 10 Can I ask a question, which might be a stupid question. When you're in a meeting and you decide you want to say something, and I...

Speaker 10 obviously have no idea how these things really work apart from what I've seen in the movies, because you're also a comedian.

Speaker 10 So, throughout your life, when you have had the stage to talk, your instinct is to be funny. Is there part of you that sort of is sort of goes to that place sometimes?

Speaker 10 In what is because you're very serious about the same thing.

Speaker 4 Are you trying new material, Joe?

Speaker 4 Are you using them for new material?

Speaker 68 I would need to say that I can't say anything about what is said in

Speaker 36 meetings, but I can say that people

Speaker 51 share their experience

Speaker 73 of both drinking and of not drinking in order to help other people and help themselves. I think that my way of talking

Speaker 33 now comedically is so similar to my way of talking.

Speaker 45 I'm not like putting on a persona to have this conversation with you guys where we have talked about both very serious and very funny things and we've talked about serious things in a funny way.

Speaker 80 So it's not like I'm switching on comedian or switching off comedian.

Speaker 10 It's not Lee Evans.

Speaker 73 No, but it's also not, there are some comedians who, whenever you hear them talk, it's like they're now talking comedically.

Speaker 4 Sure.

Speaker 86 I don't really have that separation in my head.

Speaker 7 And sometimes that's a good thing.

Speaker 45 Sometimes that's a bad thing.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Totally.

Speaker 37 You know, there is a lot of humor in recovery.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 122 And often it's when you're talking about the most appalling stuff.

Speaker 33 And that for me is like, I love that.

Speaker 88 That's really nourishing.

Speaker 36 And to me as a comedian, but even, you know, while I was drinking, that was what my comedy was, I would say.

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 12 How can you make an audience laugh when you've just said the most depressing thing that they will have heard recently?

Speaker 36 And those are the moments in terms of writing and performing that I really live for.

Speaker 4 So, John, has the attending meetings, has this influenced your on-stage style since you started attending meetings then? Or is it something that had developed before that?

Speaker 4 How do you think you'd found that honesty and that switch between, you know, making jokes and then being very, very honest? I mean, that's kind of what I always thought your comedy was like.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I would say I'd

Speaker 32 even like my, when I think back to my first Edinburgh show in 2009, it was a show about the breakup of a relationship.

Speaker 83 I wanted...

Speaker 102 what I was talking about to have meaning.

Speaker 30 It was like every year I just removed another layer.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 33 I always thought when I first started the comedy, it was about adding stuff, adding stuff and being something.

Speaker 59 Whereas actually, it was about removing artifice again and again and again and again.

Speaker 5 Fuck.

Speaker 30 Until you are completely authentic to whatever it is you want to be.

Speaker 69 I've only done one show since I stopped drinking and that was very difficult because it was a show that I had written when I was drinking and when I was probably at my most unwell.

Speaker 73 But bits of it were really funny.

Speaker 44 So it was like, can sober John with all this knowledge do routines that drunk John in his ignorance wrote?

Speaker 13 And there was a whole routine that had to go about this book called The Boy, the Fox, the Horse and the Mole,

Speaker 7 which I just absolutely savaged.

Speaker 16 And I don't know if you read the book,

Speaker 59 it is what it is.

Speaker 47 It's a sort of

Speaker 4 picture book. Inspiration adults,

Speaker 51 sort of life advice.

Speaker 79 But I was like, like i just can't do that routine now it's too mean spirited to something that means a lot to people even if some of the observations i made i stand by

Speaker 102 so that had to go and then that tour and that edinburgh

Speaker 7 i did two shows a day

Speaker 32 six days a week in the edinburgh festival and then went on a 50-day tour and it was way too much and I went completely fucking mad.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 36 as a sober person, you're thinking, thinking, hang on, you're going to be better now.

Speaker 107 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But you're like, you've just done like a hundred shows in three months.

Speaker 89 Of course you're fucking mad.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 125 Like that's insane.

Speaker 5 And exhausting.

Speaker 13 And part of you thought that was normal.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 10 So we have the meeting. Is it straight home?

Speaker 96 Yes.

Speaker 10 Surely the telly's going on.

Speaker 39 I don't have a telly. Wow.

Speaker 36 I haven't had a telly for over 10 years.

Speaker 4 He's got a projector. He's got a giant projector.

Speaker 5 He's got a cinema.

Speaker 23 You know that screen they have at the Oasis gigs.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 10 You're watching cool runnings on that.

Speaker 5 It's more a monitor.

Speaker 4 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 126 I mean, I watch bits and bobs on catch-up and stuff, but I really don't.

Speaker 47 I don't say this in a sort of superior way.

Speaker 16 I just don't have any interest in

Speaker 62 bits of it.

Speaker 81 I have a great deal of interest in.

Speaker 10 You should watch Death in Paradise, I must say. I can't live with it.

Speaker 4 There's a murder every week.

Speaker 4 A white guy has come from England. He fixes the whole thing.

Speaker 10 And it's some really nice music. The sun's out.
And at the end of it, they solve it. And everyone at some point says, sure, you don't think I'm capable of murder.
Yeah, he owed me $5,000.

Speaker 26 I love it.

Speaker 18 I used to watch a lot of films, but I just don't.

Speaker 117 I honestly, I just don't have the patience. I just think, oh, fucking two hours.

Speaker 23 Are you kidding me?

Speaker 111 So, what do you do?

Speaker 4 This is special John time.

Speaker 61 So I go for a walk in the woods.

Speaker 61 I will sit for a portion of that walk

Speaker 42 and

Speaker 64 meditate.

Speaker 122 Might bring up too strict an image of some kind of very observant practice, but I will take like 15 to 20 minutes of just being in that natural environment and sort of decompressing, I suppose.

Speaker 4 Is it proper woods or is it like plastic bag in the trees, porno mag in the leaves, wood?

Speaker 36 You can never escape the plastic bag bag of dog shit in the trees because some people are just awful and they're awful through and through and their awfulness will just forever be a part of your life.

Speaker 10 Do you think if they miss, you know, they throw it and if it doesn't stay in the tree, do you think they keep throwing it?

Speaker 19 I think they think that biodegradable means it biodegrades in like 20 minutes.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 81 Whereas actually it's like five years.

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 84 Like imagine if you saw someone dropping like their all their McDonald's meal on the pavement and they said, don't worry, in five years, that will have decomposed to an extent.

Speaker 10 The best way would be to say, okay, well, you and I are going to wait here until that moment.

Speaker 79 Like, it's all practice.

Speaker 7 So, walking past a bag of dog shit.

Speaker 48 I mean, literally, like the worst, most offensive thing you could do to the world is like put dog shit in it.

Speaker 5 In a bag.

Speaker 38 That's a hate crime if you put it through someone's letterbox.

Speaker 55 You put it on someone's, on a gate, and somehow that's like acceptable.

Speaker 117 But, you know, how do I deal with that?

Speaker 26 Do I let that bubble away in my head and ruin my day or do i just accept it and move on to my place where i get a bit of peace and serenity but it is proper woods and there's deer and there's kites and there's rabbits piglet and

Speaker 34 there's our piglet who's been set free somehow and um

Speaker 14 all of the

Speaker 83 nonsense of

Speaker 13 the

Speaker 7 world we have created over the past sort of 500 years and the stress and anxiety and the questions and the you know criticism and the worry just disappear.

Speaker 5 That's great.

Speaker 44 And that's so powerful.

Speaker 28 And we had to create cities and we had to create trains and times and tickets and contactless and taxes and all this stuff.

Speaker 117 We had to do that.

Speaker 102 I definitely think that we

Speaker 33 for thousands and thousands of years we lived in the natural landscape.

Speaker 19 If you're never able to see it and never able to be in it you lose something of yourself

Speaker 10 Back in those times people just threw dog shit into the trees not in a bag but like what you were saying about the doom scrolling and the the Instagram stuff.

Speaker 100 I am unable to Control my access to that by turning my phone off however, I am able to counteract that by regularly getting into an environment where that no longer applies and feels mad.

Speaker 19 Like when you're sat in a wood looking at the sky and feeling the wind, and this people may roll their eyes when they hear this and think, yeah, whatever, this is boring and I don't have time for that or whatever, and that's fine.

Speaker 80 But when I'm able to like watch a deer forget I'm there and just watch the world

Speaker 13 be

Speaker 19 in its seasons and its weather and its noises and its smells.

Speaker 5 The idea of Instagram is so ludicrous to that world.

Speaker 10 So you set a timer on your phone, you take a control to go, hashtag blessed woods, hashtag dear.

Speaker 57 I get the headspace app up, I get the sleep app up, I get my screen time app up to tell me whether I'm truly in touch with this landscape.

Speaker 17 There's a brilliant poem by Mary Oliver.

Speaker 108 And again, I don't know how much your algorithms throw mindfulness or wellness stuff at you, but people may not engage with this sort of thing.

Speaker 30 But the famous line is, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Speaker 73 And that's been often quoted.

Speaker 36 And that line does not make sense without the rest of the poem because it sounds like it's saying, well, you should be going skydiving and you should be going and going to Hawaii and seeing the sunset.

Speaker 28 And it's not what it's saying.

Speaker 7 Earlier on, she's looking at a grasshopper and really

Speaker 33 taking in everything about this grasshopper.

Speaker 85 And she says, I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

Speaker 32 I do know how to pay attention.

Speaker 30 So when she says, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Speaker 114 She's saying,

Speaker 67 are you going to look at this grasshopper?

Speaker 79 Are you going to really see it

Speaker 39 and sit with it? Yeah.

Speaker 56 And she says, I know how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I've been doing all day.

Speaker 49 Tell me, what else should I have done?

Speaker 17 I love that so much.

Speaker 11 That I get whatever life is, whatever the meaning of life is,

Speaker 122 I get from that moment of just paying attention to the natural world.

Speaker 10 This is the perfect time where Ian Rushton has entered the chat.

Speaker 10 Hey, what's going on? Good? Yeah? What are you doing?

Speaker 129 I was just playing some micro just playing some mobilo

Speaker 10 what did you build

Speaker 10 um i didn't build anything so aussie sounds so the helicopter's already been built hasn't it yeah but where is it is it downstairs yeah i'll be downstairs in one minute

Speaker 10 oh you can stay here the other child is not napping hence ian is joining us Not to impart too much weight onto what your kid just said there,

Speaker 66 but he said I was playing with my mobile or whatever.

Speaker 29 Yeah. And he said, did you make the thing?

Speaker 40 And he was like, no.

Speaker 103 Like, there doesn't have to be an end point.

Speaker 45 And kids are so good at paying attention.

Speaker 47 And, you know, just staring at ladybirds and grass of the sky.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 84 And there doesn't have to be a sort of a solution or an end point or a, nothing has to necessarily come of it.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 35 And I think so often a good way of dealing with my head is to try and just be more like a child.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 108 I'm just looking at something.

Speaker 47 I'm just sort of exploring it.

Speaker 4 It's where I spend a lot of my, you know, I hang out with a lot of kids and I do a lot of readings for kids. And,

Speaker 4 you know, it is a brain space that I have tried to get back to in recent years,

Speaker 4 which is when you fully engage with kids, when you actually crouch down to their level and start talking talking to them, it's not about what have you achieved today.

Speaker 4 You know, it's about this, whatever we're doing right now, and to really get stuck into that.

Speaker 10 Which is unscrewing a microphone holder, if you're interested.

Speaker 10 So we leave the woods. Not that I'm now in a rush to end your day, John.
Are we home to bed? Or let's just say it. Please say you're home to bed.
No, what happens now?

Speaker 82 Well, luckily for you, Max, I am home to bed.

Speaker 90 I really, I could never, ever have predicted this about myself i used to get back from a gig at like maybe midnight and i would drink for three hours on my own in front of my laptop wow and i would look at the clock and it would be like quarter to 3 a.m and i'd think fuck how is it quarter three why can't this last forever

Speaker 98 and now I really value getting into bed at like nine and doing cryptic crosswords and listening to music.

Speaker 91 Last night I listened to an acoustic guitarist called Nathan Salzberg, who is brilliant.

Speaker 29 And I listened to an instrumental musician called Sven Wunder.

Speaker 10 Ah, Sven.

Speaker 29 Who takes like Eastern European sounds and scales and stuff and transposes them into

Speaker 122 these long instrumental tracks.

Speaker 28 Yeah.

Speaker 36 And I messaged people on WhatsApp.

Speaker 33 I had conversations.

Speaker 4 How long can you be in that place for them?

Speaker 112 Like minimum, ideally.

Speaker 85 The dream is two hours.

Speaker 59 My back does start to hurt after a while.

Speaker 44 So

Speaker 102 my personal trainer, who I saw for a while, told me to get a breastfeeding cushion

Speaker 102 to support my back when I'm sitting in bed doing my crosswords.

Speaker 92 The problem is the breastfeeding cushion is so comfy.

Speaker 31 that I now spend even longer in bed

Speaker 70 in this breastfeeding cushion.

Speaker 4 i do love that you found this positivity in what most people would consider the dead time of it's like the thing we said at the start about oh staring at your phone and that kind of a thing whereas to yeah work out i love that too i love going right back and like who haven't i responded to in the last three weeks and getting in touch with people that do bring me a sort of joy yeah it'll be going through like so me and josie long are having a never-ending boggle game together yeah

Speaker 73 and so we leave each other sort of faux

Speaker 41 aggressive slams about the most recent boggle game and that might turn into a really tender conversation about our lives yeah

Speaker 126 and it might end in a call and it might not

Speaker 45 And I might be catching up with a silly WhatsApp group where it's just running jokes that have been running running for 10 years.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 47 And GIFs and memes and screen grabs of cringe-worthy comedians' tweets.

Speaker 19 All of those things. I love that sort of interplay of all that stuff.

Speaker 104 And it happens via my phone.

Speaker 7 And I'm not going to give myself a hard time about.

Speaker 26 you know, picking my phone up and then doing a crossword clue and picking my phone back up again and listening to music and sending someone the song I'm listening to and then putting on the song they send me in reply.

Speaker 101 There's a community in that.

Speaker 10 I thought Boggle was a speed game.

Speaker 117 Oh, it is.

Speaker 5 And Josie knows that more than anyone else because when you come up against the speed king.

Speaker 5 Come over here. Yeah.

Speaker 5 You don't forget that Boggle is a speed game.

Speaker 97 No way.

Speaker 10 And there's Josie Long.

Speaker 4 Oh, I played Boggle yesterday and I beat Josie Long.

Speaker 10 We've just had that bit, yeah.

Speaker 4 So we're just finishing the podcast.

Speaker 4 And Ish Kumar and Josie Long have just... There's Ian Rushd and it's a full.

Speaker 4 Did mention that I beat him at Bogle yesterday didn't he mention that no we were just about to get on to that I actually beat him at Boggle yesterday so let's let's go back Josie have you checked your messages

Speaker 25 hi by the way hello Josie dear this is so insane that you're on here I'm just getting up the messages because there's a new message for you Josie about the score of course

Speaker 5 thumbs down thumbs up to the kids okay

Speaker 4 okay we're just finishing

Speaker 4 down to the adults beautiful day and

Speaker 94 That's my conversation with Josie, where I have just written something that I think Louis XIV said, which is a prémoi le Deluge,

Speaker 122 after me, the flood.

Speaker 10 Now, we are in danger of going longer than Ross Noble, which is something we never thought would happen. I know, Ian.
It won't be long. Are you asleep? Are you asleep, John? Tell me you're asleep.

Speaker 5 How do you get to sleep?

Speaker 4 Do you have music playing or do you just raw dog at the end of the day?

Speaker 28 Well, because Max is in a rush, we can skip the hour-long masturbation and

Speaker 73 we can skip the hour of tawdry, hairy-handed sons of the soil

Speaker 60 and being humorous, of course.

Speaker 43 I'm not afraid of humor,

Speaker 5 guys.

Speaker 28 I don't flinch from being light-hearted as Max, I think, smells a nappy or a bum or something.

Speaker 10 Yeah, no, he's currently doing gymnastics on the doorframe.

Speaker 5 Max, this is the second podcast we've done where

Speaker 62 you have failed to control children for two hours straight.

Speaker 10 I generally can't. Doing it for an hour is impressive for me.

Speaker 86 Yes, no, you did very well, both of you.

Speaker 7 I listen to Downy Champion of the World, the audiobook, every night.

Speaker 4 Even when you finish it, do you go back to the start again?

Speaker 19 That's the exact noise that girls make when I tell them that.

Speaker 36 I dip in and out, depends what chapter I want to hear.

Speaker 30 Usually it's when they're heading into the wood.

Speaker 34 There's some tender moment between a father and a son, which I've been searching for for 43 years.

Speaker 4 And is that what you were doing actually when you were in the wood, poisoning pheasants?

Speaker 75 No,

Speaker 39 but I did...

Speaker 7 in a sort of quite nice Danny Champion of the World style, harvest some poppy seeds from the poppies in my garden and put them into a plastic packet.

Speaker 39 And I walked along my walking route and I strew them into the weeds covertly without the landowner's permission.

Speaker 10 So the game is what will happen first? Will the poppies grow or will the dog shit in a bag disintegrate?

Speaker 37 Perhaps even acting as fertilizer to the very poppy seeds.

Speaker 116 Good point.

Speaker 72 But maybe in a year's time when I go on my walk, the poppies I planted might be there, and that will give me great pleasure.

Speaker 4 And then you will get your cartel to turn those poppies into heroin and become a Mr. Bigstuff.

Speaker 45 Well, that's how we eventually get spiritual enlightenment, is once we've got enough heroine to

Speaker 22 finally escape this terrible world.

Speaker 4 And we doze off listening to Danny the Champion of the World, narrated by Stephen Fry.

Speaker 5 Who narrator

Speaker 10 Alan Carr, Alan Carr, Joe Pasquale.

Speaker 26 Have we got time to go down this rabbit hole?

Speaker 10 I mean I don't.

Speaker 53 I had all of the Roll Dahl audiobooks when I was a kid.

Speaker 30 Unfortunately they sort of update them every 10 years.

Speaker 51 So

Speaker 45 some of them I can't listen to the modern ones because it's like people I know.

Speaker 79 So it's like Lolly had a phopie.

Speaker 38 And I'm like, I can't listen to Lolly while I'm going to sleep.

Speaker 81 So I managed to find cassettes on eBay of all of the ones I had as a kid and got my friend to digitise them.

Speaker 51 However, Danny Champion of the World on Spotify is narrated by Peter Serafinovitz and he does a very good job.

Speaker 69 So I flip between him and the one I listened to when I was a kid.

Speaker 10 John, thanks so much for doing this.

Speaker 40 No worries.

Speaker 4 John Robbins, what a beautiful day. And I don't think I've ever said that at the end of one of these episodes as our guests normally go kicking and screaming into the night.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much for coming on. What did you do yesterday?

Speaker 125 Thank you very much for having me

Speaker 10 so there is john robbins day another long record where we end up with ian sitting on me and your room full of other comedians but i thought it was so interesting like such a fascinating insight into and i don't mean this in a glib way you know because you always reflect on yourself right on yeah on how people, we all exist in the world and we live our lives.

Speaker 10 We live very different lives within the same sort of remit of existing, right?

Speaker 10 And just the simplicity of my life, because I don't have the anxieties that John, you know, now copes really well with, actually.

Speaker 4 And I do also like that it's this constant thing with John, whereby, you know, he's aware of how his brain could go.

Speaker 4 So particularly to end the day by sitting in a forest to the point where the animals just start ignoring you and treating you as part of nature.

Speaker 5 It's powerful stuff.

Speaker 10 We didn't ask if he was vaping and checking the BBC News website every 90 seconds while he was in that forest. We missed that question.
But yeah, thank you, John.

Speaker 10 I think it was a very different episode to the ones we normally do, but I think it was probably richer because of that. Yeah, that's my view of it anyway.

Speaker 10 We were talking about this as like a day, a day after we did the episode.

Speaker 4 Also, the only episode we've ever recorded with a voice note from genuinely one of my heroes of growing up. So yeah, thank you very much, John Robbins.

Speaker 10 If you'd like to get in touch with the pod, here is how.

Speaker 10 To get in touch with the show, you can email us at whatdidyoudo yesterday pod at gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram at yesterday pod.

Speaker 10 And please subscribe and leave a review if you liked it on your preferred podcast platform. And if you didn't, please don't.

Speaker 10 Thanks, David. In it for life, everything is showbiz.

Speaker 4 Everything is showbiz.

Speaker 2 Hello, Max Rushton here. You might remember me from Series 9, Episode 2 of Parenting Hell.

Speaker 130 I'm here to tell you about Dog by the Bakery Door, the debut children's book by author Jamie Bruce.

Speaker 2 Dog by the Bakery Door is a charming story of the magical things a little boy sees on a normal trip to get a coffee with his mum.

Speaker 130 Perfect for newborns, three-year-olds, six-year-olds, all children. Just Google Dog by the Bakery Door.
Here's a review from my three-year-old son.

Speaker 129 Dog by the Bakery Door. I have this book.

Speaker 2 Full disclosure: the author might be his mother and my wife, but even more reason to buy it.

Speaker 2 She has to live with us and a baby 24/7 has sacrificed her career for mine while also being an amazing mum to two boys. Thank you.
Goodbye.