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Hello, welcome to Let Me Bore You To Sleep with a begging Vinnie for no reason really because we've been indoors for what an hour and twenty minutes so you can't be wanting anything. I've got him some food, he didn't eat his food this morning, now he's not eating his food, I've just given him now and to be honest I'm getting a little bit fed up with chucking food away.
I don't want to chuck it away but he doesn't like to eat it once it's not fresh which is weird because I've seen him eat some weird pretty strange stuff off the floor you know when we're out not in my flat although there is some pretty strange stuff on the floor here as well to be in my feet so please only listen when you can safely close your eyes.
My two websites are jasonnewland.com and that's where I'm in the process of rebuilding it That's where all of my recordings from the past until today including all my videos as well are available to download for free and the podcast website for Let Me Bore You To Sleep is letmeboreyou.com. So I've made some changes, what are you doing, you're being a bit weird.
I'll just tell you a couple of changes I've made to the let me bore you, there it is, it's basically the website so you go on there and you can play it, you can download it, you can share it, what else can you do, if you click on it what can you do, that's it pretty much it, you can subscribe, when you click on the subscribe button it gives you an option of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 different places that you may be listening so it says subscribe through your favourite platform so it gives you choices so it just means then you don't necessarily need to come to the website to listen because you can listen to it on wherever you listen,
it's just a handy place to have everything in one place and also if you're listening on a lot of podcast hosts they'll have the last 250 recordings which is usually enough for a lot of podcasts but for me 250 doesn't really cut it, so I have, I don't know how many, what am I doing, what am I on now, 1,000 and 1,123 which yesterday's recording, so 1,124 today, so what I'm going to have, what I have on here is, you've got the episodes, then you've got reviews,
there's one review on there so I'm not quite sure how that's working, you've got a contact which you can send me an email as a contact form, I need to sort out the review section because there's a way you can post reviews, then I've got playlists, so this is on the letmeboreyou.com, playlists for all podcasts and these are all the ones related to Let Me Bore You To Sleep, so that includes the ASMR Whisper Let Me Bore You To Sleep, Bedtime Storytime, Sleepy Boring Objects and Let Me Bore Your Pain Away as well as the Let Me Bore You To Sleep,
all categorised by the numbers and whether they've got music or no music, 5 hours or 10 hours long, so that's all kind of in one place, I will change that a little bit but it's all cool, then there's a link for background music which just lets you know where the background music is from, the information and copyright information, because it's copyright free, but it tells you where you can visit the person that does it and everything like that,
then there's a support me button which takes you to 7 ways that I've figured out that you could perhaps support the service I do, number 1 being perhaps sending a PayPal gift, then you've got a few others there so you can check that out if you want, the next link is Find Me Online, so the Let Me Bore You To Sleep, I've searched all over the internet and I've got links to lots of different apps and podcast hosts that have this podcast, there's quite a few there,
just in case you can't find it on your own place, you should find it easily that way, and then there's Bulk Downloads, which does send you to the jasonnewland.com, but I just got the links, so you've got Let Me Bore You To Sleep with no music, Bulk Download 1-50 and then most of them are in 50s all the way up to 1075, some of the later ones are a little bit longer, so I couldn't do 50, so there's a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, there's 23 different Bulk Downloads which you can do, when you click on one of them, it takes you to jasonnewland.com, but the product page, there's just basically, you can just download it, wow, you're right, that is amazing, wow, and then you've got another link on the website, and this is expenses, this is my monthly expenses, it just goes through what I'm paying out every month, basically to run this free service, so you've got Shopify, which is the jasonnewland.com website, podcast page, which is the LetMeBoreYou.com website,
TurboScribe, which is what I use to transcribe the recordings, ChatGPT Pro, which is what I use to also work with images and podcast descriptions, reading podcast transcriptions, things like that, Canva Pro, which is for image and video editing, the YouTube Premium, which I use for a lot of research and learning and to look up things, how to do certain things, you know, when it comes to websites and stuff, and it's a great, it's a great, it's a great resource basically, but that's without adverts, that means it's just, it's,
it's better than having adverts all the time, SoundCloud LetMeBoreYouToSleep podcast, SoundCloud Hypnosis Asleep and Deeply podcast, and then the broadband for the Wi-Fi, which I wouldn't need if I wasn't doing this, I could just use my mobile phone and that would be fine, I could, I use my mobile phone for I think four or five months for TV and everything, using the data, you know, the hot whatever hot thing, so the broadband is really just mainly for this, so that's, that's it, and then there's a subscribe button, which I've already mentioned,
so that's, that's all that is, what a long boring introduction, so get on with it, you may say, and you'd be right, I will get on with it, so today, today is Q&A Friday, Q&A Friday, and I do this every Friday now, it's a new thing, although it's now a month old, I've been doing, this is either the fourth or the fifth week, I'm not sure, so let's have a look, I'm just having a look, see what, what messages I've had, I've had quite a few questions,
and I will try and answer all of the questions, what I'm first going to do is just check my normal Facebook pages, and then Jason Newland's boring group, where most of the questions will be, just check to see if anyone's left a question at all, Q&A, no, nothing on that page, and just check, nothing on this one, and you're right, I could have done this earlier, but I didn't, did I, so what can I say, I think it's what you call lack of, lack of preparation, I would say, oh, shut up,
stop it, okay, right, so, no, I can't see anything on that one either, all right, yeah, okay, my first question is from Sebastian Knickers, K-N-I-K-E-R-S, when will you unblock me on Facebook, when will you do a boring objects about me, when will I be famous, well, when will I, will I be famous, what else did he say, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy, I think the, I think possibly the second one, Sebastian, so, yeah, I have unblocked you, Seb, Sebi, Sebubu, I have unblocked you, so,
the only reason I blocked you, because you kept hammering me with your comments, which were highly inappropriate, so, if you can behave yourself, you're unblocked, I never blocked you from me, only from Facebook, I'm always available if you chat to me and stuff, but Facebook is not, it's not necessarily the best place, my Facebook page is, because bearing in mind, I'm not on Facebook for chatting to people, you know, kind of like, it's not like a friendship place or family place, I don't have family members, in fact,
I blocked most of my family and real life friends from actually seeing my Facebook page, so, I kind of, it is solely, and it has been pretty much solely just for the online stuff I do, since 2007 when I started Facebook, so, yeah, I mean, if you wanted to add me as a friend, don't bother adding me as a friend, just join the Jason Newland Hypnotist, no, the Jason Newland, Jason Newland's Boring Facebook group, just join there, and then you can participate and ask questions and, you know,
be part of that group, and, okay, what's this, Judith, oh, so I've got one person, this is my Jason Newland Hypnotist Facebook group, 26,000 likes, 26,000 followers, how many comments have I had, how many likes have I had on my post this week, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and, you know, not a lot, there's not a lot going on on that page, I don't know where those 26,000 people are, but they're definitely not on my page, and there's no comments either, so I will remove that one,
well, move away from that one, and I've still got 13 million, I had 19 million, I think, in the end, on Spotify, what was it, the other podcast host I used to use, so here we go, here are the questions, I've answered Sebastian's questions, I've already answered one, it's not bad, is it, I think it's pretty amazing, there was a question from last week that I need to find, that was posted just before I did, and just after I'd recorded, let's have a look, right, so I, I, I, I, I,
right, Matthew, who are your favourite comedians, so that's the first question, well, it's the second question, I suppose, but this is from last week that I didn't get around to doing, because it was posted a little bit late, well, too late, because I'd already recorded it, I mean, not too late, because I'm doing it now, who's my favourite comedian, I would say, again, I like to break things up by eras, by periods, by countries, you know, who's my favourite American comedian, who's my favourite British comedian, who's my favourite comedian from the,
during the last 20 years, or during, during the 90s, or during the 60s, before I was even born, so I've got comedians that I really like from the past, that I don't, I never even, they, they were dead before I was even alive, for example, Lenny Bruce, so some, I've got a few favourites, to be honest, I don't, if I was going to really push down to who my favourite, at the moment, comedian is, it would be, Stuart Lee, Stuart Lee, a living comedian, Stuart Lee, as a stand-up,
and I would say probably he's, he's up there with the best, he's, yeah, I'd say he's probably my favourite, but then there's other comedians that didn't do enough shows, like, you know, Sean Locke's one, he did a couple of stand-up specials, but he could have done loads, and he didn't, I don't know why he didn't, but he, he was brilliant, Sean Locke was brilliant, but he's no longer with us, so for living comedians, Stuart Lee, Stuart Lee, I'm not so in touch with the American or Canadian or Australian comedians so much,
but there is an Australian comedian that I do like a lot, I've seen a lot of these, Jeffreys, Australian, Jim Jeffreys, isn't it, Jim Jeffreys, I think, Jim Jeffreys, Jim Jeffreys, yeah, Jim Jeffreys, he's one of my favourite comedians as well, and so he's, he's done quite a few stand-up specials, and what was I going to say, I, there's a few that I absolutely loved over the years, but if you're going to say who's my favourite comedian now, and I'm not so in touch with what's, I'm not in touch with what's relevant now,
to be honest, I haven't seen a stand-up comedy performance live since, what, 2014, 2015, probably, it was a long time considering I've seen thousands of live performances over the years, I just haven't seen any for a long time, and yeah, so there's probably some comedians out there that are, that I would love, and I absolutely love, but I've not, I've not seen them yet, I may have seen them on panel shows, not really, you know, known for what they like as a comedian, as a stand-up, I mean, because I think some,
some comedians are, okay, I'll be careful how I word this, some comedians aren't necessarily suited for TV shows, like panel shows, or those kinds of things, and some comedians, stand-up comedians, are actually funnier on those shows, because they're, they're not funnier, but they're, they're more, gives them more flexibility, more food, as a sense of, they might be a reactor, their comedy might be reactionary comedy, so they, they got, almost like they're continuously being heckled, and then come back, and yeah, so some comedians are more suited on that, and they're perhaps funnier on TV,
than they would be perhaps in a stand-up show, but I'll tell you, I'll tell you an example, now a lot of people listen to this, won't even know who I'm talking about, but if you get a chance, check out this person, people from the 90s will remember, if they're from England, you'll remember, you probably remember the name, and also he was on telly for a long, quite a long time as well, Mark Lamar, now Mark Lamar was a stand-up comedian in the 90s, and I think he might have even started in the late 80s,
because he was already a headliner when I started in 91, so he was one of the first alternative comedians, like at the comedy store, you know, sort of in the late 80s, and he was a young bloke, good-looking, young, perfectly dressed, had a suit on, he was just so, I don't know, there's something about him, he had something about him that was, because there's a lot of, and I include myself in this, a lot of scruffy comedians, because it was like alternative, and there's a lot of people just walking on in jeans,
and weird get-ups and stuff, but he was like proper sophisticated, he looked like a catwalk model, kind of, kind of, kind of, and swore like a trooper, he did, he probably swore and smoked on stage, and he was, he was like a rebel, like James Dean type, he even had the hairstyle a bit like, like Elvis, kind of, you know, anyway, he got a, he got his big break on TV, he got two really big shows at the same time, coincided pretty much, he was on The Big Breakfast,
and he also hosted The Word, I think they were both on Channel 4, yeah, I think they're both on Channel 4, and the story is that he, Bob Geldof phoned him up, this is a story that I heard him talk, say, it might be on TV, or it might have been actually, I might have heard him say it himself, but, and this was like about 92, maybe even 91, but 92 around that time, and he said, he got a phone call from Bob Geldof, who was in charge of The Big Breakfast at that time,
he was hosting The Big Breakfast, I think, or he was kind of involved in it, and his wife was, used to do interviews on the bed, which is where she met lots of different people, and so Mark Lamar got a phone call from Bob Geldof, like, who's worldwide famous, saying, oh, I want you to, I want you to be on my show, I want you to be on The Big Breakfast, Mark Lamar thought it was a joke, he thought it was Alastair McGowan, just because he was a really famous impressionist,
he thought it was him, so I think he said, oh, go away, you know, not realizing it actually was Bob Geldof, so that was, that was quite, quite a funny story actually, but funny if it was my story about me, because it means I'll be famous, but anyway, he got on his two shows, and neither of the shows, I believe, showed him, showed what he was about, maybe the word a little bit, because he was interviewing, and he's quite hard hitting and stuff, but his style of comedy was dealing with the audience,
making fun of the audience, and he could get five minutes of material out of someone just looking down at their table, because some comedy clubs would have tables, you know, where people could put their drinks, and they'd be sitting behind the tables, and I actually saw him once get five minutes of material just out of someone looking at the table in the front row, and it was funny, it wasn't like, it wasn't just like, because, you know, anyone could get, I suppose, five minutes of rubbish stuff, but his was funny,
he was brilliant, absolutely brilliant stand-up comedian, I can't emphasize enough, brilliant, and I remember I saw him once, he came back from watching, oh, who's the one that said, oh, can fix, oh, oh, one of the most famous can fixes, no, not that one, okay, I can't remember, it's got to be, what's the biggest hit of the 91, biggest hit of 91, biggest hits, biggest hits of 91, okay, I can't remember, it was huge, it was, was he Jamaican, first time, maybe, just, can't touch this, can't, I haven't actually seen it on the screen,
I just remembered it, can't touch this, can't touch this, I might have the tune wrong, but it was that one, so he watched him, whatever his name was, it's gone out of my head, instantaneously, see, he'd gone to the concert, and then he, I don't know if it was an afternoon concert or something, and he'd come back, or maybe it'd be the night before, I'm pretty sure it's the actual day, because this was quite a late night show, so he was on about 11, half 10, 11, so on stage,
I mean, the Mark Lamar, he does the whole 20 minutes talking about Mark Lamar, MJ, MK, MD, can't touch this, MC Hammer, MC Hammer, I know it started with M, MC Hammer, so MC Hammer did a concert at Wembley or in London, or it might be an open, open air concert in one of the big parks, because sometimes they'd have big acts doing stuff like that, Pavarotti did it in, I think, 91, and I turned up, and I waited for, I think it was Hyde Park, and I turned up,
and I literally, I was sitting on the grass for four, four, five hours, waiting for Pavarotti to get on stage, and the good thing about Pavarotti, it didn't matter how far back you were, you could still see him, so that was good, but it was just, he took so long, and then it had this whole area, rings, not ringside, stage, near the stage, that was cordoned off for the Royal Family, and Princess Diana was going to be there, so that's who I was excited to see, sorry, that's just the way it is,
I grew up in the 70s, and in 1980, 81, that's when I kind of became more aware of, you know, when I was like 9, 10, 11, more aware of the Royal Family and everything, and she was the most famous person in the Western world, possibly, other than Mother Teresa, possibly one of the most famous women in the entire world, because she travelled around, didn't she, she got about, so people in lots of different countries knew who she was, so, you know, the idea of seeing her, even a glimpse,
was more exciting than seeing Pavarotti, but the reason why Pavarotti was so big, excuse the pun, is, he was huge anyway, again, excuse the pun, I mean, I'm not exactly slim, so I can't, I'm not judging him, but he was, the reason why he was so massive, excuse, I'm talking about success-wise, in the UK, was because his song was used in the 1990 Football World Cup, which is weird.
However, and I want to double check this, but this is true, because I remember Freddie Mercury's Barcelona was also played constantly, so there was two songs, so 1990 World Cup, World Cup official song, okay, here we go, the 1990 World Cup official song, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go, official cups, official songs, 1999, no, 1990, what are you talking about, 1990, FIFA's women, how, how complicated was that, just a 1990 World Cup official song, that's all I wanted, I wasn't after anything else, nothing complicated,
just that, but nope, has to start giving me stuff that I don't need, which means I'm going to have to go to ChatGPT, because then at least I'll get some kind of concision, let's have a look, so let's put this in, 1990 World Cup official song, oh, the official song for the 1990 World Cup was Un State Italiano, an Italian summer, performed by, oh, oh, there goes that theory, performed by Italian artist Edoardo Bonato and Giano Nannini, oh, ah, so why did Pavarotti become so, everyone wanted to,
something happened and Pavarotti became really popular, maybe he was singing it, if I ask the question, why did Pavarotti, why did Pavarotti become so popular in 1991, Luciano Pavarotti became popularly, particularly popular in 1991 due to several key events and factors that significantly boosted his international fame, the three tenor concerts, oh, that's it, I got you, yeah, the three tenors concerts, July 1990 and the concert was held at the Baths of, in Rome, which is part of the festivities of the 1990s FIFA World Cup, recorded and released as an album,
becoming the best-selling classical record of all time, or one of them, Nessun Dorma, one of the highlights of the three tenors concert was Pavarotti's performance of Nessun Dorma and Aria blah, blah, blah, blah, this rendition became an iconic piece of music, widely associated with the 1990s World Cup, so even though it wasn't the official sound of the World Cup, it kind of became connected to the World Cup, see, I was kind of right but not, the 1990 World Cup provided a global platform and the concert was broadcast to a vast international audience,
millions saw him that wouldn't have known who he was or hadn't seen him before, so that, yeah, cool, so I'm going to ask what songs were very popular, okay, Barcelona, okay, what other songs were connected to 1990 World Cup, so I bet you it says Barcelona by, what's his name, so world in, world, really, world in motion new order, now I'm not happy with this answer, I'm going to put, what about Barcelona, what about Freddie Mercury, what about Freddie Mercury, come on, while not directly tied to the event itself,
their song Barcelona gained renewed popularity and it's often associated with the World Cup, see, it was released in 1987 but it became the unofficial anthem, including the 1990 World Cup, see, all that was true, all from memory, plus a little bit of, you know, checking, so going back to the question, Mark Lamar was one of my favourite comedians, I remember, and he'd been on TV and then he did Never Mind the Buzzcocks, which ran for years and years and years, he also did Shooting Stars,
where he was a panelist on there for a few years and so he did a lot of TV stuff, and well, in about 1999, maybe 2000, he did a tour, he did like a UK tour for the first time in a long time and I think a lot of people didn't even know he was a stand-up comedian, or maybe they knew he used to be, but they didn't know he still did it, and I remember I saw him and I had a chat with him and I said, look,
we were just chatting and he said, you know the amount of people that come up to me during the tour, so people are coming to see him because he's on telly, so he's got a big audience, people sold out, you know, all over the country, all over, you know, the UK, and he said the same question or the same thing was said to him, uh, which is a really weird thing to say to a stand-up comedian when you've paid to go and see him, they'd say to him,
oh I never realized you were this funny, and I said to him, you know what, you know why, not, obviously not, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, I think that was in, that was in the 2000s though, so I don't think he'd done Never Mind the Buzzcocks at this point, Never Mind, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, I think that was, not Never Mind the Buzzcocks, yeah it was Never Mind the Buzzcocks, oh it was 1996, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, presented by Mark Lamar, Simon Anstel, Greg Davies, Rod Gilbert, um,
so the show ran from 1996 to 2015, to 1996, so at the end it was, at the end of 2005, Mark Lamar decided to leave, or he was going to take a break, so it started in 1996, so he was on TV doing that, so that was a funny TV show as well, but still he was the host and it was, um, uh, I don't know, lots of different people on there, full Jupiters and different people on there, but what they didn't realize, even with his TV stuff,
it wasn't the same as his stand-up, his stand-up was on a different level, because that was, I think, I personally think that he would have been, he would have ended up, he'd have become like a major, worldwide major, major stand-up comedian, like selling out venues, we did that anyway, but like, you know, having DVDs, loads, he had one DVD, I think, maybe two, but you, I don't know, what I'm trying to say is, I agree to what he said, is that actually, the TV didn't make the most of him,
what he was capable of, so Mark LeBar is one of the greatest comedians I've seen live, but then, I'm a little bit, I've seen so many, so many, Dennis Leary was one of the funniest people I ever saw ever, Jerry Sadovich, another one, these, these two, Jerry Sadovich and Dennis Leary had me in fits of laughter, like, could, from the start to the end, could not stop laughing, because they were saying stuff that was, my, I like dirty humour, to be honest, sometimes, not all the time, I like silly humour as well,
but sometimes, the more wrong it is, the better, because it just, if it makes me laugh, it makes me laugh, it doesn't matter what kind of humour it is, you know, I laugh at kids humour, I laugh at anything, if it makes you laugh, it makes you laugh, it's not, I don't have that part of me, so I'm not going to laugh at that, I'm not going to, if it makes you laugh, it's uncontrollable, it's an uncontrollable thing, laughter, not something you can control, I don't think, and not if you're being honest,
so, I'd say Stuart Lee, he is a genius comedian, he's a genius, but then, I would also say, to be fair, Ricky Gervais, he, I mean, I don't think anyone, he is, again, on a different level, considering he was never a stand-up comedian to start with, most people don't go from being famous to doing stand-up comedy, you know, it's usually the other way around, and he's gone on to, well, no, one of the blokes, one of the kids who was a kid, from the Inbetweeners, the posh one,
the one that always had a girlfriend in it, he's now doing stand-up comedy, but he's now in his 30s anyway, he's probably 35 now, maybe 40, I don't know, because they're not kids anymore, but, um, yeah, so, I took a long time to answer that question, I do apologize, it's so unlike me, so unlike me, so, let's get back to the questions, I hope I answered that, I would say Stuart Lee, Ricky Gervais, yeah, probably, I'm trying to find the actual page again, the actual link, so I can see,
Q&A Friday, it's a Q&A Friday, 11th of May, so 17th, 11th of May, 18, where's the, but then prostate test, that was Monday, oh, maybe it was after the prostate test, okay, Jason, okay, that's it, I cannot find, oh, Q&A Friday, three days ago, so I must have done a Tuesday then, Q&A Friday, so, um, so where did I see that then, who's your favorite comedian, I don't know, sorry, is it, um, Terry, wasn't it, Terry, Q&A Friday, so, it's the thing, I've answered that, I think, sorry,
I'm losing track of what I'm doing here, I'm not very good at multitasking, so the first person is multi-questions, there's lots of multi-questions, so, um, from Megan, so what I'm going to do is, I'm going to ask, I'll answer, I'll answer Megan's now, I'll answer all the questions as well, it doesn't matter how many questions you ask me, and Sebastian, if you listen to this, this does not apply to you, you'll send me like a thousand questions or something, but, um, Megan, you're next, I've also got Diana and Jen,
so thank you everyone that sent messages, or rather questions, that's just a drink of water, let me see if I've got any, I just want to say thank you to Christine and Joanne for your PayPal gifts today, thank you very much, I always send you personal messages, but thank you, okay, right, thank you all, Jen, help me get some food till Wednesday, Jen, no, Megan, Megan, Megan, what's your favourite animal?
You know what, if you'd have asked me that 10 years ago, I'm conflicted between, I love monkeys, little monkeys, not King Kong, but like, little, the little, just, there's something about monkeys, the cheekiness, the running around, the stealing, you know, when they steal things off people, just, I just find that hilarious, I find monkeys very funny, the little ones, but, uh, my, it's a weird one, because I would say ferrets, because of Andre, having Andre, then you could say, why didn't I get myself another ferret, I nearly did,
nearly got myself another ferret, nearly got two actually, little two babies, I thought maybe this time I'll have two together, and they'll keep each other company, and, but I couldn't, I just couldn't face getting another one, and then Vinnie dropped into my lap, out of nowhere, and kind of, by the way, because this is a Q&A Friday, I've not really had a chance to tell you what's happened today, Vinnie ran out of the park, he was running around with a friend, one of his little friends, he ran out of the park,
he did it on Monday, but a different entrance, or different exit, this time he ran out of the entrance, which is not, not safe, goes onto a road that's sometimes quite busy, and it's a windy road, so people go quite quickly around the corner, so they don't see what they're, you know, and he just ran straight in the road, and he's fine, but the reason he ran out, because there was three adults, and they all had two dogs each, and they had these badges, and jackets, I don't know what they were,
not the dogs, the humans, I don't know what they were, someone said to me, maybe they were professional dog walkers, I don't know, but Vinnie, it was too much for him, six dogs, he had to go and see them, and I was shouting, and shouting, and he ignored me completely, so I can't let him off the lead anymore, until I sort out that problem, it's, yeah, it's this, but anyway, it really, I'll be honest, it upset me, but there you go, because I love seeing him running around with his friends,
got a couple of friends now, that he loves running around with, and can't do it anymore, not, not, not until he's learnt the recall, and so I'm gonna figure a way to do that, so what's your favourite animal, I would say overall, if we go all the way through my life, my favourite animal has been two, one is birds, love birds, not all birds, never been a big fan of seagulls, if I'm honest with you, just a little bit too shrieky, and aggressive at times, you know, pigeons, I like pigeons,
it can be a little bit annoying, I say quiet, because Herbert's might, might be outside listening, but yeah, I like birds, I just, there's something beautiful about the birds, and all different types, and just, just the, the sound of a bird singing in the morning, or early evening, you know, it's, it's beautiful to me, I just, it's like probably the nicest sound, and, but there's a few birds that, whose sound doesn't, it doesn't, doesn't, I don't feel relaxed when I hear it, like a, a cock, you know, go, go,
that's not relaxing, and then a pigeon, that can be, it's not that relaxing, and seagulls, I can't do that, because it's just too much of a screech, and it wouldn't be fair when anyone has fallen asleep, so there are three, three that I find a little bit hard on the ears, but generally, I love listening to birds, and, and seeing them, they're just, you know, seeing them eating and stuff, out of feeders, or washing in the bird bath, it's just, I don't know, it's beautiful, so, and the other one would be a ladybird,
ladybirds I love, so I was, I mean technically, everything's an animal, isn't it, humans, fish, you know, insects, cow, whatever, every, we're all animals, aren't we, so, I, yeah, ladybirds, love ladybirds, ever since I was probably five, and we had a, a plague of ladybirds, oops, in the UK, or in England, I don't know if it was a whole of the UK, so ladybird invasion, birds invasion, UK, so, so look, 1975 or 1976, when was it, okay, so it's not gonna, I can't do that on Wikipedia, but you know what,
if I put that into the other one, I bet you it'll come up, chat GBT, but yeah, so let's have a look, ladybird invasion, UK, so let's see, the UK has experienced periodic invasions of ladybirds, now you might call them ladybugs where you live, we call them ladybirds here, I think certain parts of the country might call them ladybugs as well, there might be another name as well, so they're from Asia, and time in autumn, typically happens in autumn, okay, right, so I'm just going to put, so it's giving me the information,
tell me about events, tell me about dates, so they should tell me, tell me about dates, dates are the fruit of the date palm tree, which is cultivated for its sweet and nutritious fruit, oh dear, okay, I'll start again, 1975 ladybird, ladybird invasion, UK, it might be 1976, oh, it was 1975, I think I've talked about this before, I remember being in the summer, but they said then that it only happens in the spring or in the autumn or whatever, the 1975 ladybird invasion in the UK is a notable event in the country's entomological history,
during that summer, it was during the summer, there was a massive influx of ladybirds, particularly the seven spot ladybird, that's the red ones or the black spots, which is the most common species in the UK, this phenomenon was largely driven by climatic conditions and abundance of their primary food source, aphids, I don't know what that is, these are some key points about the 1975 ladybird invasion, the summer of 1975 was exceptionally warm and dry, creating ideal conditions for the aphid populations to boom, is our flower,
ladybirds which feed on aphids found an abundant food supply and consequently experienced a population explosion, reports from the time indicated the number of ladybirds was so high that they were seen covering entire walls, cars and gardens, in some areas there are reports of millions of ladybirds swarming together, I remember standing there, my friend standing there and covered in ladybirds, do you remember how, if you can go far enough back, I don't know,
if you ever visit Trafalgar Square and you can see pictures on the internet of this and we're going back a long time because you know they got rid of most of the pigeons but there used to be huge amounts of pigeons and you could stand there with your arms out and be covered in pigeons and pigeons stuff as well if you're unfortunate, it was the same with the ladybirds, absolutely covered and some people didn't like it, I loved it because I love, I've always loved ladybirds, always, love them, love them,
love them, love them, so impact on humans, while ladybirds are generally harmless to humans, the sheer number of them during the invasion caused inconvenience, oh no, the worst thing that happened to one of the biggest things, you know, it's like inconvenience, people reported them in entering homes and their presence was noticeable in public spaces, yeah because there was billions of the things, the invasion received significant media attention at the time, it was both a source of fascination and mild annoyance as the insects were everywhere, so once the food supply ran out they all decreased and that was it, overall the 1975 ladybird invasion is remembered as an extraordinary natural event illustrating the interconnectedness of weather, food supply and insect populations, what was the question?
What's your favourite animal? That is one of my favourite animals, so I think I've answered, maybe I went a bit too in-depth, my favourite band, musician and song of all time, oh okay, here we go, I suppose I have to say Michael Jackson, if we go by who did I listen to when I was a kid, who did I listen to in my 20s, my 30s, my 40s and even now, who do I listen to today?
Michael Jackson, I was listening to his history album, I still listen to his albums right from Ben when he was what 11 or 12 all the way up to, no I wasn't listening to history, I was listening to Invincible which was his last good album I would say, which was 2001, I didn't really listen to anything after that, I think that was his last album, I don't know, but I listened to Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, History and Invincible, so there's six albums that I listen to, Ben, Off The Wall,
Bad, Dangerous, History, Invincible, yes six, and so there's six main albums that are, and I love every song on all of those albums, so yeah, I mean history was a kind of best of, the first album, the first side was just the best of all the stuff he'd done previously, what he classed as the best of, and then the next side was all his new stuff, and I remember getting it 1990, no yeah 1991 was Dangerous, and 1995 was the History, and I remember getting it and playing it for the first time,
because I think I bought it and I had it in my like Walkman or whatever it was, probably wasn't an actual Walkman but it was a version, a cheaper version of that, and listening and like thinking wow, this is Michael Jackson, and like yeah, love it, yeah, other ones, other people that have done lots of, done albums where I've listened to a few albums of theirs would be Stevie Wonder, there's a lot, I mean, I mean if you, if you was to ask my favourite album,
but that could be another question someone else can ask, I can tell you that another time, but favourite band, musician, songs of all time, when I was a kid my favourite singer was Shakin' Stevens, you know it's really hard though because I still go back to Elvis, although I love Elvis, who do I listen to most, out of all the different, you know, all the different albums, I still love Madonna, there's two albums that I love, which is True Blue and Like A Prayer, they're the two albums out of,
I like the first two she did as well, but Like A Prayer, True Blue and Like A Prayer, they will always be my favourite albums that she ever did, and you know Amazon music ruins stuff by not having the actual original album as it was, it annoys me, they put, they slip in newer versions of the same song, and they've got that on the Like A Prayer, this one song is really updated and music's different, it's like much faster than the original one, I was like why, why do that,
I just don't, don't really get it, but anyway, this is moaning, I'm just moaning for the sake of moaning, moaning, so what's next, so yeah, Michael Jackson, I'm gonna say my favourite band, probably the Bee Gees, because again, it's, who do I keep going back to, love the Beatles, used to love Oasis, some of their, especially the Morning Glory album, love that, what's the story, Morning Glory, but that was the only album that I really liked of theirs, that I really kind of, I love that album, you know,
when I think back to 1996, that's one of the things that I remember, listening to that album and listening to the Beatles Anthology, that's a bit, a bit spitty wasn't it, Anthology, the Beatles Anthology number three or number four, the last one, I had that on double tape and I used to listen to that, and I used to listen to Oasis, so I kind of alternated between the two, in 1996 that was, favourite, yeah, favourite song of all time, I'm gonna, okay, I've got, I haven't got just one,
I'll be honest with you, I haven't got just one, because there's some songs that I just love so much, you'd have to ask me, because I'm really into, I'm not really into music as in knowledgeable and I'm not so into modern music and I don't mean that in an old, I'm an old fogey, it's just that I would be more into modern music if Top Of The Pots was still on, if there was music programs with all the top charts, I'd watch that, because I always used to, even in the 90s,
even in the 2000s or whatever, you know, I used to, I used to listen to the top 40 before I moved in here, every Sunday, so I could try and keep updated with, with the music, with the latest music and then when I lost my job, when I got ill, because that was before I moved here anyway, but I was watching quite a lot of music TV, not MTV, because that's not music TV anymore is it, even though it's supposed to be, it's just, I think it's,
isn't it just reality shows pretty much now, but the, there is, I don't know what channels it was, but there'd be like videos constantly and I became quite up to date with, because I was seeing the same videos over and over again and I was working on my website and stuff, so it was just in the background and yeah, so I got up to date, but now I'm not, in fact, thinking about it, I want to get up to date, because I did listen to the number one album by,
what's the name, Jay Z's wife, Beyonce, I listened to her new album, which was, I think it's like one of the biggest albums of the year and it's kind of like country, but a mixture and she does some covers as well, so I liked it, it just, it didn't seem like the other stuff, because I used to, I used to really like her stuff in the early 2000s and when she was in Destiny Child, if you can't find a, if you can't find a thing to put a ring on it,
if you can't find a thing to put a ring on it, something like that, it's just, yeah, that's great, I think they were great, she's, what an amazing singer, so favourite song, shall I say, Total Eclipse of the Heart, shall I say, Down Under, but then I could also say, Who Can It Be Now, because that, although I love that song, it also reminds me of me sitting in my flat, who's not, who's at the door, but then you've got Toto, Africa, but then you've also got these, the theme from Arthur,
the movie, there's nothing but a hundred men and more could ever do, that's the Toto, Africa, didn't they also do Joanna, I love you, but then the album by the Cranberries, I'm not going to go into albums, because you might want to ask me what my favourite album is, but the Every So On Then, because of her voice, Delores was such a unique voice, and then I could go like, Everything Compares To You by Chinoud, so it's like, these were like, really epic, epic songs, or I Will Always Love You,
Whitney, or, Take My Life, Take It For What I Am, I'll Never Change These Colours For You, Any Much Farther, Where You Must Go, These Pastures Inside, You Can't Run Out Of Them, There's No Way To Hide, Oh When It Rolls One More Tour, I Don't Want To Hurt Anymore, See In My Arms If You Can, that one, I can't remember the name of it, but it's I Owe You Nothing, I owe you nothing, nothing, nothing, if I don't have you, or I Have Nothing, so that was on the Bodyguard album,
so I got that out, I actually got a copied version of that, back in 92 probably, for a pound, something like that, and it played fine, absolutely fine, so I had that, and I got it because, I didn't see the movie, I didn't go to the cinema to see the movie, because I didn't have a girlfriend at the time, which sounds very sexist, as I said it out loud, I generally didn't go to the movies on my own, generally, I mean I have been to the movies on my own,
since and even before then, but generally, do you know what I would tell you, I would tell you about a date I had, when I was in the chip shop, can't remember her name, she had ginger hair, but I can't remember her name, Tiffany or something like that, she, I liked her right from the start, she was, she was probably, she might have been a year younger than me, she might have been a year older than me, I can't remember, she was kind of roughly the same kind of age,
I think she might have already been 16 when I was 15, I pursued her in a kind of, I don't know, not pursued her, but I liked her, but we used to argue a lot, and I told her once that I liked her, and that was a bit emotional for me anyway, but this was a separate situation, but she agreed to go out with me after about a year, or seven, eight, nine months of me, sort of, I didn't have a hassler to go out with me, because we didn't like each other,
we didn't get on very well I mean, but I did like her, so I asked her to go to the cinema, and she said yes, and it was to see, what's the Australian Crocodile Dundee, was it Crocodile Dundee or the second one, anyone, Crocodile Dundee movies, let's ask about, let's get that, Crocodile Dundee, Dundee movies, just have a look, Crocodile Dundee, 1986 was the first one, so this was yeah, 1986, Crocodile Dundee, the second one was 1988, it's possible it could have been the second one, but it would have had to been very,
very early in the year, for it to have been that one, but anyhow, well what happened is, and I shouldn't have done this, I don't know why I did, but I decided to play a prank on her, I saw her coming, and the cinema was literally opposite the chip shop, I mean it was, you see the chip shop from there, I was in the queue, and I had a little stool to sit on, you know, as you do, I think that always gives a good impression, if you see her sitting down,
and I see her coming over, and it's, she's like 30 seconds away from being here, so I hide, and I'm planning to just jump out, and make a jump or something, so I hide, but I hid for a little bit too long, because the longer I was hiding, the more I was hiding, the more funnier I thought it would be, and I thought she'd just go to the end of the queue, and just wait for me, I was wrong, she didn't, and I didn't know that, I thought, oh she's just gone in,
because you know, sometimes you go to the cinema, and your friends will be at the front, and you just like, blag your way in, so you can get in quick, I thought maybe that's what she'd done, so I was waiting around for a while, until the film was about to start, there was no one, she wasn't there, I checked the alleyways, got on the roof, nowhere to be seen, so I went in, paid for the ticket, to go and see the movie, and I'm trying to walk through,
and look to see if she's there, and it was dark, because the pre-stuff had already started, and you know, the adverts, and the previews of new movies, and it's like, okay, so it was dark, and I couldn't see her, and I realized, oh, I might as well just watch the movie, so I did, and the next day, I said to her, where was you, she said, well I came, but you weren't there, so I went home, and I said, well do you want to go tonight, and she said, nope,
that was it, like you don't get to mess me around more than once, she was like 16, I was 16, or 17, 17, I don't know, something like that, come on, surely I should get another chance to be annoying, I mean, we annoy each other all the time, for the last nine months, and she said, nope, so that was it, and she said, you're too immature, and then she starts dating a boy of 15, when she's about 17, and I remember picking her up on it, and she said, yeah,
but he's more mature than you, probably more mature than you'll ever be, and I realized that she was probably right, so I couldn't argue on that one, so yeah, that was, how did I get talking about that, so my favorite song of all time, so yeah, I'm thinking, always look on the bright side of life, Monty Python from the Life of Brian, that's probably my favorite song, and possibly, if it wasn't a cliche, something that I'd like to be played at my funeral, but then I thought about that,
and I'm thinking, there's a song by Michael Jackson from the Ben album, Ben album songs, and it's from 1972, blimey, I was only, I wonder what month it was, it doesn't say, recorded November 1971, released, okay, so yeah, I was like one or two years old, the tracks, no, it's not, you can find my shoulder, not, what goes around comes around, ooh, my girl, everybody, somebody's fool, we've got a good thing going, people make the world go around, greatest show on earth, Ben, nope, it is In Our Small Way,
and In Our Small Way, trying to think if I can get the lyrics for that, In Our Small Way, lyrics, and I can just tell you why, so it's a Michael Jackson song, he was about 12 or something when he sung it, he had a big hat, wearing a big hat in it, so, it's the words, I realize it's a little kid singing it, but it was an adult that wrote it, and I did think maybe I could have that at my funeral, so this is the words,
maybe you and I can't do great things, we may not change the world in one day, but we can still change some things today, in our small way, and empty words are not enough, but maybe you and I can't do great things, we may not change the world in one day, but we still can change some things today, in our small way, empty words are not enough, when there's hurt, I can't do it, but, yeah, it's kind of that sentence, to be honest, that little, that one paragraph,
that maybe we can't do great things, but we can still change the world, or maybe we can't change the world, we can still change some things in our own small way, which is kind of what I'm trying to do, or I've at least tried to do, and, you know, you may say, well, it's very, very small, and I agree, but it's something, so that's one of the songs, the other one is, I tell you, one of my favorite songs of all time is I believe, I believe when it will go astray,
someone will come and show the way, I believe, I believe, the Elvis Presley version, I believe, or I believe I can fly, no, not that one, we don't mention that one anymore, I believe Elvis, so, I believe Elvis does not exist, okay, fair enough, I know it does exist, I believe song from Elvis, it's on his, it's on the Christmas album, Elvis Christmas album, which is, yeah, even now I listen to it, I listen to it during the summer, I just love the album, so some of the lyrics,
and I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows, I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, a candle glows, I believe for everyone who goes astray, someone will come to show the way, I believe, I believe, I believe above a storm, the smallest prayer can still be heard, I believe it's someone in a great somewhere, hears every word, so it's just, it's a beautiful song, every time I hear a newborn baby cry, or touch a leaf, or see the sky, then I know why, I believe, believe,
I believe, and it's quite a short song, but love, I love that song, so that might be the other one that I have for my funeral, but I don't know if I don't write this down, and the family are in control, it'll probably be some kind of song that I don't even like, you know, it won't be, because they don't know me, that's the weird thing about it, the people who listen to this podcast know me better than my own family know me, they don't know me,
they just know this person that they see, you know, a couple of times a year, they don't know what I'm like day to day, and I do this every day, seem to these days, but anyway, I couldn't give you one song, I struggle with just giving one answer to the question, clearly, because I've been talking for five hours, if you could pick one country to move to, where would it be and why?
I'd quite like to, I've heard England is nice, if you pick the right place, possibly Thailand, but then the heat is a little bit, I quite like the idea, this might sound very strange, quite like the idea of the Arctic Circle, or Iceland, is it Iceland or Greenland, I don't know, Iceland, you know, where it's like half the year is dark, and half the year is bright, I don't know, maybe America, also Phoenix, because that's where Milton Erickson used to live, and he's like the king of, the king of hypnosis,
so yeah, maybe America, but there's, you know, there's pros and cons of every place, I mean, Denmark looks like a nice place to live, or some parts of Europe, there's places I wouldn't particularly want to live, I'm not going to mention those, just because it just doesn't appeal to me, maybe because of the heat, there's some countries that are very hot, and that I don't think I'd enjoy living, and places where very crowded, like there's a lot of people, so I don't know if that would be necessarily ideal for me either,
but then, you know, just because there's a lot of people in the country doesn't mean that there's going to be a lot of people in any, like on the outskirts, you know, maybe in the city centres, yeah, I do like to talk, and talking is much easier if the person can speak the same language, and having that language barrier is quite difficult, I found in the past, it's not that I'm you know, when I was in Bulgaria, for example, back in 2003,
I so wish that I was able to communicate better with some people that I was talking to, I hope that I answered that, pretty much, I'm not sure if I did really, where would I go, I don't know, I'll tell you what I would like to do, I'd like to travel around, visit different countries, stay for a while though, you know, maybe a couple of weeks, a month, each country, and then either, if I find one that I really love being in, stay there, or at the end of my travels,
kind of decide if I want to stay there or if I want to come back here, maybe keep here as a place, you know, a home, but travel, I like the idea of travelling maybe, not anywhere, not too extreme places, I don't want to climb Mount Everest or, you know, I don't want to swim with sharks, it's stuff like that I don't want to do, don't really see the point in it, I know people who love doing it, good for them, but for me, it's not really for me, so yeah,
I'd like to travel around, so there's not one particular place that I've longed to go to, but I met some really lovely people in Bulgaria, I met some really lovely people everywhere I've been actually, so yeah, not that I haven't really travelled a lot, but for places that I have been, there's been a lot of friendly people, which I would say is probably the same everywhere, whether you're going to China, Russia, Japan, India, Africa, anywhere in Europe, anywhere in Asia, Australia, it's going to be lots of really friendly people,
that's what I believe, so I'd like to go to Australia, definitely, I don't know about living there, but I'd definitely love to go there, heck of a flight, but I think now that I've, I wouldn't do the flight, okay, here is what I would do, if I went to Australia, I'd also like to visit New Zealand, because to go to New Zealand, it's such an even longer flight, so what would make sense to me is to, if I had the finances to do this, go to Dubai first,
I'd like to go to Dubai, I've been to Dubai, but only the, they said only the earthquake, only the airport, so I'd like to spend some time in Dubai, but it's one of the most expensive places in the world to visit, I think, I might be wrong, but it seems like a very expensive place, but it is state-of-the-art and futuristic, so I like that, that kind of, yeah, because I remember being in Dubai airport and there was robots cleaning, you know, and you could ask the robots for information, it's just,
it's amazing, so to go to Dubai, stay there for a little while, or maybe even do a few flights on the way, so even though Dubai is like six hours, then another six hours from Dubai to Thailand, if I was going to do that, then I'd stay, do that, then I go to Thailand, and then maybe from Thailand, stay in Thailand for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, and then go to Australia, which is another, I think, three or four hours, maybe six hours, I don't know, and,
but then you've got, probably is another six hours to New Zealand, I think, from Australia, so then go to New Zealand, so that, that'd be quite, because if you're gonna, I know New Zealand's nowhere near Australia, but it's a hell of a lot closer than it is to anywhere else, you know, because some, I know, people say, oh, New Zealand's nowhere near Australia, yeah, but it's nearer, nearer than it is to London, isn't it, you know, if you're gonna travel 20 odd hours on a plane, you might as well,
and you, you know, if you want to visit two different places, and both of those flights is going to be 20 odd, 24 hours or something, you might as well visit them both at the same time, or in the same kind of period of time, that's what I would, yeah, for example, if I was gonna, if I wanted to go and visit Manchester, and I wanted to go and visit Liverpool, and I really wanted to visit both of those places, and I had the time, you know, I had an allotted space of time,
which was enough time, I'd probably try and do both, you know, let's say, if I really, I was a huge Oasis fan, and I was a huge Beatles fan, and I wanted to visit both of those places, or maybe I was a big Liverpool or Everton football fan, and a big Men United or Men's City football fan, and I wanted to visit both, so I could, because it's not, they're not far away from each other, sort of travel-wise, so, which does make me wonder why there's so much rivalry,
it's actually rivalry within the same city, like two, four major football teams in two cities, like Liverpool's got two, there might have been more than two, but Everton and Liverpool, and then you've got Men United and Men's City, and it's like, but then you've got London, how many football clubs are in London? I don't know, do you know? I'm gonna have to check this, how many, how many football clubs in London?
I can remember some of them, you've got West Dan, you've got Chelsea, okay, professional, they're the ones I'm interested in, professional football clubs, there are 17 teams playing in professional leagues in London, seven play in the Premier League, six in the Football League, so there's a lot, there's a lot of football teams just in London, and London's not a huge place, not really, not compared to, you know, America, where you might travel three hours to get to work, which is a long time, that's a heck of a journey, you can get to the other side
of the country, practically, in that time here, and maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, so that's my answer for that, Megan, also, do you know that you are very awesome indeed?
Of course, the next question, I think that's all my question, do I know that I'm awesome? I don't, but I do appreciate you saying that, I haven't felt very awesome today, actually, it's been a weird day, I think it's because Vinnie ran out of the park, and I got a little bit, yeah, non-relaxed was probably the best way to describe it, because I saw him running in the road, well, at least that's what I thought I could see from a distance, and luckily, one of the dog people, they had six dogs, three adults, six dogs, the bloke caught him and held his collar, and I came and got him,
and he was saying, oh, he's enjoying his freedom, and I was like, yeah, but he wouldn't enjoy it, and I was angry, but not at the bloke, because he obviously saved the day, really, so I was kind of, thank you so much, thank you for getting him for me, but at the same time, I was just, it's hard to tell Vinnie off, because he doesn't really know what he's done, you know, he's a kid, he's just a kid, he's a little kid, and he doesn't know that he's done something wrong,
and I don't know how to put it to him, so I just had to leave it, and just bring him back into the park, finish the walk, and then come home, but as far as awesome, thank you, I really appreciate that, Megan, yeah, I do, but I don't, it's hard to feel it, but I do appreciate it, as far as, I'd like to be useful, I like to think that my life has had some kind of use to other people, a benefit to other people, and sometimes I struggle with that a little bit,
when I do these recordings, I'll tell you why, when I did, when I was predominantly doing hypnosis recordings, it was almost like, well, I was focusing on a specific thing, and, you know, focusing on relaxation, or sleep, or chronic pain relief, or whatever it was, and those people listened to those recordings, I felt that I was helping people, with these Let Me Bore You To Sleep recordings, and I'd say this style of podcast very much suits me as a person, it suits my way of interacting, it just, I don't know why,
but it just seems to fit quite well with who I am as a person, but at the same time, I do think, well, I'm just talking rubbish a lot of the time, and how is that useful to anyone?
I don't know if that makes sense, so yeah, it's something I've got to figure, it's just one of those things, I guess the more, the more I hear that what I'm doing is useful, and how it's useful, and what benefits has been gained from listeners, then I get a kind of more of a sense of purpose, or like that what I'm doing is actually worthwhile, other than just talking for the sake of it, which sometimes feels like it, because, you know, I'm here on my own, there's no immediate feedback, there is,
I don't get many comments, I don't get much, you know, sort of on the, I get, the stats for the podcasts are going up, I get a lot more listeners on the Let Me Bore You To Sleep podcast than I've ever had, ever before, so, you know, I used to sometimes, I was, to get a thousand a day would be a really good day, sometimes 1500, that'd be a really good day, but now I'm getting, what am I getting, so today 5700 so far, and it's only 613 even,
yesterday six and a half thousand, so it's, yeah, it's, it is growing, and I just don't always know why, or who's listening, or where they're listening, and I don't know, but I'm gonna take it, so thank you very much, I accept that, so thank you Megan for all your questions, and I'm going to move on to Diana, what do you do to de-stress?
Well, I'd have answered this question differently when I was 20, I'd, I would say, I like to do nothing, listen to music, sometimes music that I like, well, I mean, as far as like an album that I like, sort of like, you know, let's say Michael Jackson, or the Cranberries, or the Bee Gees, or something like that, Stevie Wonder, I also like to listen to classical music, sometimes I pick an instrument, so obviously there'll be other instruments as well, it'll be within an orchestra, but predominantly piano, or predominantly the violin,
or predominantly cello, something like that, so I never get a triangle, which is weird, but that's kind of, I find that's relaxing, I also like to listen to audiobooks, but I listen to them on YouTube now, and there's quite a few YouTube, or it could even be a lecture, it could be like a long lecture on a subject, so I can, that's nice and relaxing as well, and I'll be in here, and I'll just sit on my chair, and I'll fall asleep, usually fall asleep, I don't always fall asleep,
but it's very relaxing, but early on I was, I was relaxing in bed, I had a little nap, my afternoon nap, and I was listening to a Michael Jackson song, album, and I was almost like in a dream world listening to it, and it was so relaxing, so relaxing, it's like, oh, this is, oh, and I kind of didn't know where I was, almost, it was, it was nice, and Vinnie was fast asleep as well on the other chair in the bedroom, because there's a chair just under the windowsill,
and he climbs onto the windowsill from there, so he can look out into the garden, there's a new dog, so he gets excited every time the dog goes into the garden, and, but he sleeps on that, that chair as well, doesn't sleep on it when I've got the curtains drawn, because he doesn't go on that chair, but when the curtains are undrawn, that makes sense, open, he, he, he tends to, he spends time on the windowsill, and then he goes and sleeps on the chair, and listening to audio books,
sometimes old audio books, of, just, it's just nice, so that, that relaxes me, and I kind of feel at the same time educational as well, occasionally I'll listen to myself, because, you know, I have to listen to my recordings sometimes, just to kind of see if they are okay, you know, and I always fall asleep listening to myself, but I don't listen very often, but I do, you know, they always send me to sleep, so that, that's the kind of thing, I do find that exercise is pretty good,
I've got a punch bag, and I've got some weights, and sometimes when I've done a bit of exercise, and it does give me a little bit of rush of calmness, and reading as well, reading is quite a calming thing, although I'm trying to get back into reading, because it sounds weird, but I haven't really read much for a long time, so I'm starting to read a bit, I was reading yesterday, haven't read anything today, because I've been busy, but yeah, a bit of reading as well, that's quite relaxing,
so that's my de-stress, if I'm actually needing to de-stress, de-stress, as in, like, need to do something kind of urgently to relieve that, I might go for a walk, I go for a long walk, sometimes getting on a punch bag is good, sometimes meditation is good as well, just allow myself to just be there, you know, just to sit there, not needing to think about anything, not needing to do anything, not needing to, just sit there, and let the thoughts come and go, not holding onto anything, and I find that's useful as well.
So, thank you Diana, I realise that's quite a quick answer to your question, wasn't it? I didn't mean to be quick, sorry, not the first time I said that. Jen asks, and I think this is the last question, one of the last questions, Jen asks, what advice would you give to your 20 year old self? Stop! Don't do it!
Well, the 20 year old myself, the 20 year old self of mine, was about to move back to London to embark on a career in stand-up comedy, which didn't quite work out, but you know what, I don't think I'd want to give that up, it was, I wouldn't want to go back from having done that, because even though, you know, I've kind of been pretty much a failure for most of my life, in some kind of context, you know, I've not really been a success, I have tried, you know,
I've given it a go, you know, I try to be good at, I try, you know, web design, I try to really get a good go with the comedy, the hypnosis, you know, even the martial arts, but I've never particularly been good at anything, but I did give it a go, I think I can at least say that I gave it a go, I had a go, let's keep saying the word go, yeah, I made an effort, but yeah, I don't know, I think my biggest, well, even though I'm not,
I'm kind of, things haven't necessarily gone very well, one of my biggest, I had two worries in life, when I was young, like when I got to probably my age, maybe 50s, 60s, maybe even 40s, maybe I was thinking, because back then 40 was old, when I was 20, I suppose, but I was concerned that I'd either be living in a very dysfunctional lifestyle, drugs or alcohol, you know, like really bad, that was one of my biggest fears, that I'd end up living that kind of lifestyle, myself,
I did end up being around that lifestyle, for quite a few years, but I didn't live that lifestyle, I had a period when I was drinking quite heavy, you know, when I was doing sales, but I was still working, you know, I wasn't like at home all day drinking, you know, that's what I mean by, I wasn't doing anything else, but just just the, yeah, drinking and drugs and all that comes with it, so I really was scared that I'd end up like that, and I kind of came from that,
you know, the very beginnings, kind of, I lived in that lifestyle, lived in that environment for a while, when I was very, very young, and I never wanted to go back to it, the chaos, the chaoticness of it, I didn't want it, I had enough chaos in my brain, I didn't want, I didn't want my, the environment to be chaotic, because then it's almost an impossible, well, it's very difficult to kind of, to maneuver, if there's chaos in your brain, and there's chaos around outside your brain, it's like,
how do you deal with that, so I managed to deal with the chaos in my brain, unfortunately, self-medication most of the time, until I was diagnosed with that, but more information than you all needed, I guess, and the other thing I was concerned and worried about, is that I would end up living in that little town that I used to live in, in my, sort of, late teens, or my early teens, all through my teenage years, really, most of them, I was living in this little town,
and although it was a perfectly nice little town, the idea of living there, and then getting to be 50 or 60, and still living there, and never having followed any of my dreams, I mean, at the time, I didn't really have any dreams much, but just the idea of not having, at least, given it a go, I wanted to be something, I wanted to do something, for a long time, I didn't know what, I just knew that, I felt that I was destined for something bigger than I was doing,
something more important, I think, or something more interesting, even, like this, so, I don't know, I, what advice would I give, I'd probably give myself a few bits of advice, one would be, I would, okay, here's what I would say, but again, my whole life would be different, but I'd just say, generally, don't, don't smoke, don't take drugs, don't take alcohol, keep away from anyone that does drugs, or drinks excessively, those would have been some, something that I would have told my younger self, don't get involved in anybody, that environment,
if you can help it, because it can go bad, and it's, and it's not good, the chaoticness of it is not good, especially if you've kind of already lived that a little bit when you was little, and there's kind of, most people that have the chaos, they're doing that because of the chaos they've been through previously, so it's kind of like, you know, that self-fulfilling roundabout thing going on, so I just thought, well, I do want that, and I would tell anyone the same, but at the same time,
it's hard to tell someone not to do something that I've already done, so, you know, it's a difficult one, like me telling people, don't drink coke, and don't eat chocolate, because I've probably done a bit of that myself, probably eaten a little bit of chocolate myself over the years, even today, follow your dreams, follow your dreams, I think that would be it, to find something that helps, you need a win-win situation, I just, I kind of read this years ago, about 30, 40 years ago, in sales books, the ideal situation was a win-win,
so that the customer wins, and you win, the customer wins by buying, of course you win by selling, but at the same time, you're both happy, they're really happy, because they bought something that they're really happy with, and I've always kind of agreed with that idea, a win-win situation in life, if you can find something that you're really good at, pursue it, even if you don't get to earn a living out of it, or you don't earn to be able to do it as a job, and maybe do it as a hobby,
and that's it, it will make a big difference to someone's life, whether it be going bowling on a Saturday night, or doing Kung Fu or Karate, couple of times a week, playing basketball, whatever, whatever it might be, playing golf, football, it doesn't matter really, it's about doing something that you, if you do something that you love doing, that's kind of the first step, I would say, I'd also say to my other, because I did a lot of really, really horrible jobs over the years, a lot of really dirty,
not like illegal, but just dirty, grimy, low-paid work, and I didn't care, because I didn't know any different, I just did it, you know, I didn't, just didn't know, I didn't believe that I was worth anything else, and it wasn't really till my friend Noel came into my life, that I realized maybe I was worth something more, and I wasn't, I was 27 or 28 by then, so you know, I'd already lived quite a few years, would have been working for 13 years at that point, so the next step of the thing is like,
do something you love, if you can do what you love doing, and earn a living from it, even better, but if you can do something that you love doing, and it helps other people, to me that, that's the important part for me, that's, that's the most important part, if it helps other people, you love doing it, and then you can earn a living doing it, and you can afford to run a car, have a nice home, buy clothes, you know, just do all things, go on holiday, and live a nice life,
live where you want to live, stuff like that, and I mean, that's like, that's the dream, isn't it, regardless if you're a Hollywood movie star, a chart-topping singer, you know, entrepreneur, entrepreneur with billions in the bank, or someone who is doing a podcast, I guess, I'm just trying to think of an example, let's say doing someone doing a podcast, or someone with a YouTube channel that is successful enough for them to enjoy their life, so yeah, and I think that's what the internet has opened up for a lot of people,
people that were maybe, wouldn't have even attempted to do things, but the internet opened that up for them, but yeah, so for all the criticism the internet gets, I think it's worth remembering some of the amazing things that it's opened up for society, how it's improved society, I know it's natural for newspapers and everything to like, focus on the negative, but like, yeah man, there's a lot of really good stuff, and so I'd probably say, follow my dreams, I probably would have, if a 20 year old, go to university,
I didn't realise I could, I didn't realise I was even able to go to university, and I didn't go until I was 30, 37, but you know, I don't know if I was ready, I wasn't even ready then, I don't think, so it's one of those things, I don't know, what would I say to a younger, I can't just say a sentence and move on, can I, and what advice would I give a 20 year old version of myself?
Okay, if I break it down to, if it was, if you like, you can say one thing, and probably something along the lines of, remember that you're a decent person, you're worthwhile, something along those lines, because I used to think that I was absolutely dumb, stupid, useless, all those things, that's what I used to believe about myself, and that I was worthless, and of no use to anyone, and I kind of proved that, I kind of proved it to others along the way as well, because of my behaviour,
to be fair, but you know, it took me to get to nearly 30 before I started to come around, and even then, it's still a work in progress, process, progress, something like that, so yeah, just like, maybe I would say, just remember to be kind to yourself, you know, you deserve to be happy, maybe that's why I say that, because I'd like people to say that to me, maybe I'd like to, not people, but I'd like to remember that, and you know what, to be fair, okay, should we just be real,
I'd just like to know, I'd like to tell myself that I'm loved, or lovable, maybe, maybe, I was getting, yeah, well, there's too many things, one sentence isn't enough, I'd just like, don't take life too seriously, trust, trust in your own, trust in yourself, trust in your own thoughts, because I, what I noticed is, when I was a kid, even when I was in my teenage years, and my early 20s, it happens less and less as I got older, but the amount of people that were trying to tell me what to think,
and like, I didn't have any thoughts of my own, like I wasn't, and there was times when I didn't actually believe that what I thought was worth anything, because older people, with much more life experience, and clearly much more intelligent than me, were telling me stuff, and I thought, oh, okay, but it's only really when I hit, when I hit about 18, 19, 18, 19, that's when I started to kind of wake up a little bit to myself, and like, oh, wait a minute, I do have my own thoughts, yeah,
but that's it, that I'm, I'm gonna be okay, maybe, you're gonna be okay, you're okay, maybe that's what I needed to tell myself, you're okay, to be honest, I could probably write a whole book just on things I would tell my 20-year-old version of myself, I mean, I could, I could literally sit here talking for the next 10 hours, just about things that I could say to myself when I was 20, to hopefully guide myself into a, or prepare myself for the future, but then I'd be preparing,
I'd be preparing myself for a future that I had, but then that future wouldn't necessarily happen, because you change one thing, and everything else wouldn't have happened the way it did, so if I was to say, I could give myself lots of advice, so I don't, don't go and work in a chip shop when you leave school, nothing wrong with working in a chip shop, I've got no issues with chip shops, it's just at that time, I could have done anything, apart from A-levels, I could not do A-levels,
I wasn't allowed, but I could do pretty much, or be a policeman, because I was too short, I could do pretty much anything, okay, swim in a channel, that wasn't going to happen, but I'm just saying generally, I could have got, I could have done what so many other people of my age did, get a job on the docks, as a runner, on a moped, or bicycle, just dropping off documents between offices, and I'd have got paid, probably three times what I was getting paid, for what I was doing in the chip shop,
for less hours, and I'd eventually would have got promoted, and have a, a secure job, which would have been enough for me to get a mortgage, and all that stuff that I wanted to do, that I would have kind of, just start living a life, a normal life, run a car, and all that stuff, have a family maybe, and, but then if I'd have done that, I wouldn't have to be so concerned about all the other stuff that I ended up doing, because that all came from me, having started off working in a chip shop,
and then not having, because I didn't have that self-confidence that I might have had, had I gone into working for a big company on the docks, a big shipping company, or something like that.
I partly think that I might have given myself advice saying join the army, because it may well have given me something that I needed, but on the same side, it might have given me, it might have allowed me to tap into a side of myself that I really shouldn't tap into, so yeah, I don't know, and I've also like, well, take up boxing, give it a go, when I was young, like proper, you know, teenager, or 20 even, go to the boxing gym, and just show them that you can do it,
and just go from there, see what you, become an amateur, have some, have some fights, and see, just give it a go, but I never did that, yeah, so it's a weird, yeah, I could talk forever on that one, good question, thank you, so that's, that's that one, that's those questions, but I have more, I have more, let's have a look, today, this is few more comments, so if I go for all, top comments, all comments, there's now one, two, three, four, five, six, six more, blimey, right, I have to,
I have to watch the time to make sure that the thing doesn't stop recording, after nine hours, it stops, Ben says, how are you finding dog life, compared to ferret life, also, how's your mindset on moving still, and do you have a check-in buddy, like you did Luke, and what's the plans for the future of Let Me Boil Your Sleep, and how does your family see you, and your audience, and fan base, that's a lot of questions, in one question, um, how are you finding dog life, compared to ferret life,
it's very different, they've got similarities, they both sleep quite a bit, Andre didn't have to go out, he didn't need to, he liked to, but he didn't need to, Vinnie, on the other hand, is, you know, with Andre, I could sit in door, indoors, for weeks, and weeks, without leaving the house, can't do that with Vinnie, it's just, unless I take him in the garden, or something like that, but even then, still got to go out, so it's different, um, when I had Andre, people used to talk to me,
and stuff, but more people talk to me, now that I've got Vinnie, because he's a dog, and I think quite a few of the other dogs, when I had Andre, wanted to eat him, so they'd keep their dogs away, and some people thought it was a bit weird, walking a ferret around, and stuff, I think, well, some people told me, so, in fact, someone, um, you know, when you go onto the internet, and you can see other people's internet names, can't log in, because they're blocked, but someone that put a,
put a, they changed their name to the internet, to, oh no, not another ferret, something like that, it's like a local neighbour, so it's like, well, that's a bit rude, and that was the name of their internet thing, um, so, yeah, it's more, it's more work, more work, and he's, I want him to be happy, but I just don't know what to do, I mean, right now, he's on the floor, curled up next to my feet, or leaning up against my feet, all relaxed, probably asleep, listening to my voice,
probably bored in, and it's raining outside, so I don't want to go out there, it's just, it's a little bit more, there's a lot more involved, I guess, um, yeah, it's different, different in, neither of them were good or bad, well, they're both good in their own ways, neither of them are bad, apart from him running out of the park today, that was bad, and Vinnie, well, really, the only bad thing about Andre was when he got ill, other than that, it was, it was great, and I loved, loved having him,
so at the time, I would have said that he's the love of my life, because I loved that little boy, yeah, so it's different, how's my mindset on moving, well, financially, I'm stuck, to be honest, uh, Ben, so, I'm stuck here, the thing is with the, the moving thing is, to find someone that wants to move into a one bedroom flat, upstairs, in the middle of nowhere, is that they'd probably be downgrading from a two bedroom house, maybe because they're trying, or two bedroom flat, because they want to not have the extra bedroom tax,
but I'm not allowed to swap with someone with a two bedroom flat, I could only do that if I had two people living here, um, if it was a down floor flat, then that would be more, because people would maybe, uh, some physical issues, where they need to be on the floor, rather than be with stairs, if you know what I mean, so that, that's more of a thing, um, I went on there a few times, actually signed up when my friend, when Luke passed away, and I thought, okay, I'm,
I'm getting out of here now, been for months, and months, and months, nothing, and it's, where would I go, the only place really, is to go and live close to my dad, but then, I don't know, was, I don't, the idea of going back there, not, not near my dad, but because I didn't particularly like that town, didn't like living there, which is why I moved away at the first opportunity, so I don't think I'd want to be going back there, I like the beach, that's nice, but I like all beaches,
um, so yeah, I'm kind of, if I had the finances, I'd probably move somewhere, like Torquay, or somewhere beautiful, somewhere that I, what I personally find beautiful, if I was, if I had to stay in the UK, if I had to stay in England, um, I'd consider moving to Ireland again, and I would consider, yeah, like I said earlier, traveling and that, but, because we were podcast, I can go anywhere in the world, and still do this, which I proved, you know, a couple of years ago,
I can still do the podcast anywhere, uh, so, you know, it's, possibilities are endless, really, I don't have to just, as long as I've got a microphone, and a laptop, so all the equipment I really need, is a microphone, I've got a digital version, a small version of the recording studio, which is portable, so I can record on there, with a microphone, laptop, and the iPad, and I don't need both, but I use both, because it's easier, but I could do everything on just, just the laptop, if I wanted to,
just makes it easier, because I could do two things at once, um, and internet, you can get internet anywhere, so it's anywhere, pretty much, that I would go, there would be internet, probably faster internet than what I get here, so that's what I'd like, I'd like to, yeah, so that's where I am with that.
Do I have a check-in buddy? You know, I saw this, you posted this yesterday, Ben, and, oh, you posted it on Wednesday, because it's Thursday now, no, it's Friday, you posted it on Thursday, because Friday now, when you read, when you listen to this, it'll be Saturday morning, or Saturday, whenever you listen, if you listen on Saturday, um, your next question touched me a bit, because I started thinking about this, um, so, have you a check-in buddy, like you did, Luke?
I never thought of him as a check-in buddy, and he was, wasn't he, and I didn't, I guess, no, I haven't, I noticed that yes, um, yeah, yes, was it yesterday?
Yeah, that's yesterday, because I think I must have seen your thing, either just before, or just after I got the, the, uh, telephone, where I spoke to the doctor on the telephone, or the receptionist, and got the results for the prostate test, and I wanted to tell someone, like, immediately, wanted to tell someone, I wanted to celebrate, and I didn't have the money to do anything, but in a, that's a situation where I might have, let's get a pizza, or let's get a curry, or let's, I don't know,
let's do something to celebrate, not necessarily go out or anything, but just, um, I needed someone to tell, and I realised that, okay, we can have friends, or, okay, I talk for myself, I've got friends, people that I'm pretty close to, but I don't see them, I've got a few neighbours that I get on with quite well, I see them occasionally, I see the dog walkers more often than anyone else, but they're not friends, they're just, they're, you know, like, they don't really, they don't even know my name, but they're,
they're friendly, friendly, so, um, I kind of really, I mean, I spoke to Luke's dad, I think it was Wednesday he phoned me up, he calls me every couple of weeks, or I call him, and he, he said, I said to him, you know what, I was watching TV, I think it was about the boxing, because there's a, the, the boxing coming on tomorrow, and me and Luke have been talking about that for, forever, you know, ever since Tyson Fury won the world title the second time, um,
and Joshua was a world champion as well, there was also, like, it was that thing with, what if Joshua, Andy Joshua and, um, Wilder fight, or what if Joshua and, um, Tyson Fury fight, there was that kind of thing, those were the fights we wanted to see, and then Usyk came along, and kind of took over a little bit, he got most of the titles from Joshua, and Tyson Fury beat, um, Wilder twice, so that kind of, didn't get rid of Wilder,
but it kind of put him out of the picture as far as being a world champion, so what was left, really, was either Tyson Fury against Joshua, even though Joshua had lost a couple of times, three times, it didn't matter, because he's still a force to be reckoned with, he's still a main, main player in the world heavyweight championship stakes, um, and it's, so Tyson Fury against Joshua, or Tyson Fury against Usyk, which would then get all the belts together, and that was kind of what we wanted, what me and Luke,
we wanted both of those fights to happen, we want to see Joshua and him together, we want to see Usyk and Tyson Fury, and we nearly got it, but it got cancelled, and um, and that was it, so it's like, well, yeah, you didn't get a chance to see it, so it's on this weekend, and it was, I don't know if I was watching something, maybe it was the conference, the press conference, or something like that, and I was like, oh, I had this little urge, I just wanted to go down,
or phone him up and say, about it, just tell him about it, and like, oh, no, I can't, and the same happened yesterday, I got off the phone with the doctor, and I wanted to go down and speak to Luke, just tell him, it's good news, um, and he would have known that I'd had the test, and he knew all about my, he knew about the family stuff, prostate stuff, he knew all about that for years, so he's known all about that stuff, you know, my uncle and everything, um,
and he knew I needed to get it tested, he's known that for months, so I kind of delayed it, to be honest, because I thought I was going to have to have a, well, get probed, basically, that's what I thought, I didn't in the end, it was a blood test, but, um, I was so disappointed, I wore my best underpants, so, yeah, I don't have any check-in buddy like him anymore, I ended up telling just another neighbour about it, I kind of needed to tell someone, so I told her,
and I think she was as interested, I could have said to her that I dropped a mars bar on the floor, and that was about as interested as she was in what I was saying, um, but it's alright, it's fine, I did phone my dad though, and let him know, and he was really pleased, so, god, there's some noisy people in the garden, uh, yeah, so, hopefully you can't hear them, but it's screeching, no, uh, what was I saying, oh yeah, so, I, I spoke to my dad, so I kind of did,
but obviously he's my dad, he's not my check-in person, I don't speak to him very often, but on this occasion, we had a reason to talk, and he, yeah, so I did kind of get to talk about it, and, and this is the next question, what is the future of letting me bore you to sleep?
I don't know, I don't know, because I thought about stopping doing this a while back, to be honest, I mean, at the end of November, I didn't know if I was going to do anything again, I didn't know if I, and there's been a few times like that in the past, and, you know, when all the podcasts kind of got stopped, and I had to, you know, I couldn't do the ones with music anymore, and I had lost my couple of podcasts, were deleted, and things like that have been a few stumbling blocks, where I've just like thought, what is the point?
Every time I get, just get a little bit ahead, you know, but not a little bit ahead, but a little, a little bit ahead, and I, yeah, at the end of November, I didn't know if I wanted to do this anymore, and I've noticed as time's gone by, I've become, this is the only thing that I kind of enjoy doing, out of all the stuff, the, the hypnosis is kind of, I don't know, I just don't want to do that anymore, that strict, stuck to a kind of script,
although I didn't read a script, I would do it off the top of my head, but it was still very, felt quite limiting, and this pretty much has no limits, as long as I'm not, I don't say anything like hugely offensive or anything, and you know, I think it's pretty much okay, I can do what I want on this, and so I can just be myself, but I don't know, because I've noticed, well I've noticed, I mean, those that listen probably notice as well, if you listen regularly,
that I've been doing one every day for quite a few weeks, it's, I can't tell you exactly how many days it's been in a row, but I know I've done at least three weekends in a row, and all of that, all the days either side, that kid is so noisy, the, what's weird, you know when you see people and they think, oh it's so noisy, there must be the other end of the garden, you see them, and they're literally inches away from each other, but they're talking at the top of their voices,
like how, how is that even possible, how can that not be irritating to each of you, so, but then you find loud adults, kind of create loud children, sometimes, because that's, and also big families as well, I noticed that, because sometimes you have to shout to be heard, and I think my family were quite loud at times, because we had three, four kids, so we, the only way to be heard was to sort of speak the loudest, which I didn't, I used to just keep quiet a lot of the time,
because I couldn't win, because my brothers were bigger and stronger and louder, and my little brother was louder than all of us, and stronger and bigger than me as well, and but, yeah, as far as the Let Me Bore You To Sleep goes, I've been doing it regularly now, every day, I've got a little routine going, I spend probably three hours in the morning, first thing, when I wake up, doing all the editing, all of it, I've worked it out, it's about three hours roughly, it takes to get everything done,
and then there's the time in the evening, or the late afternoon, when I'm making a recording, so for example, it's now 20 past seven in the evening, and according to this, I've been doing this for, well, on the clock, it's two hours, 43 minutes, but I've not been talking for that whole time, because I did take a couple of breaks, while I was, Vinnie had to go, and he was barking, and stuff like that, I had to go to the toilet at one point as well, but I edit that out,
you need to hear me going to the toilet, so I don't know, I'd like to get a little bit of feedback, it may be what people would like from the Let Me Bore You To Sleep podcast, and I think I'm going to continue the Q&A Friday, because that's one of the first things I've done different for a long time, but I've kind of stuck to it, I didn't think I would, after the first one, because it went on for a long time, as long as this, or if longer,
and it was a little bit knackering, to be honest, and also took a long time to edit, and when it's recorded, because it's so long, it was broken into two, so I had to splice them together, but based on the amount of questions I've had, it seems to be something that maybe people are wanting, or enjoying, or liking, or tolerating maybe, I don't know, so I'm going to continue the Q&A Fridays for the foreseeable future, I'm thinking about maybe doing a, I talked about this yesterday, like a movie review,
film review once a week, because I listen, I do like to watch movies, and I tend to watch, maybe not, maybe a Netflix review, maybe Wednesday N, is there any day beginning with N, February, what was it, January, February, no, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, there isn't is there, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, oh N, I wish there was a name, I wish it was Nunday, then I could say Nunday, Netflix Nunday, that's really where I was going with that, I was a bit silly,
so maybe something like that, do like one week, or one day a week, I could do a question, you know, a movie, a film review, film review Wednesday, for example, or I could do a Netflix review of a TV show, and I'll just watch, I'll watch a whole TV show during the week, like a whole season of eight, eight episodes or whatever, during a week, and then I'll make notes as I'm going, kind of, and then I'll talk about it, maybe, it's possible, and the only thing is that,
I noticed this when I was making this recording earlier, I spent a fair bit of time at the beginning talking about stuff that wasn't about the Q&A Friday, wasn't questions, and I do wonder that sometimes I might go on a bit, um, I might not always stick to the subject, I'm beginning to think that maybe I'm not quite as focused as I thought I was, what are you doing Vinnie, okay mate, you couldn't eat your dinner Vinnie, you're eating bones that are pretty much gone, why don't you have your dinner,
are you looking at me like, what's it got to do with you, okay, fair enough, so that's where I with that, thanks for your questions, and how does your family, one more, how does your family see you and your audience and fan base, they don't, pretty much, they don't, they don't, they don't, they've got no interest at all in what I do, and so yeah, that's it, the, my little brother, I talk to him about it sometimes, but his attitude is, if you can't afford to do it, then don't do it,
that's his stop, so if I can't afford to pay, you know, the outgoings that it costs, which is quite, I don't know, 200, 200 a month or something, so if you can't afford to pay it out, then stop doing it, and I try to explain to him that this is my life, I have nothing else really, this, this, I mean, I've got Vinnie, but this is what I get out, I get out of bed for this, I go to bed thinking of this, I go to, you know, any distant doesn't understand,
because he's not doing it, he's, he's very busy, he's got his own home, got a, you know, he's living a life where he's working really hard and, and I guess to him, and I think to my family, I'm just a bit of a loser, a bit of a waster, you know, unemployed, not contributing anything to society, just to take and don't give anything back, and I think that's kind of how they see it, I'm a, yeah, and I suppose in some ways maybe they're right,
but as I try to say to my social worker years ago, I might not be much use, I might not be contributing much to my local society, but I do think I'm contributing to society as a whole, you know, I'm contributing with what I do to people around this country and people around the world, you know, there's thousands of people around the UK that listen to me, that audience has grown over the years, so it's people all over the country that are listening to me, and so I think, okay,
there might not be anyone in my town, but does that matter, does that have to be, are we only allowed to contribute, it's only valuable if it's, if you contribute into your own town that you live in, or you can, it's only if you're creating money that it's a worthwhile contribution, I don't know, but yeah, that was his, he actually said those words, why don't you just stop doing it then, like, no, you don't get it, but he doesn't, and there's no reason why he should get it, but my dad,
he thinks this is a hobby, he actually said so, once he said it's all right for a hobby, if it doesn't earn money, it's not a job, which technically is probably correct, you know, from the, from an economic perspective, if you don't earn money from something, then it's not an occupation, it's not a job, perhaps, I suppose, but I didn't, never seen it like that, and I don't see it as a hobby, for me, this is not a hobby, it's never been a hobby, ever, since 2006, and I started doing this,
it hasn't been a hobby, it's been, I mean, every night, every evening, every weekend, I've been working on this stuff, you know, since, for 18 years, I don't, you know, even if I'm watching TV, I'm still working on a website, or doing something, although I keep changing the website, I should have just stuck to one website, and grown up, I mean, I made it bigger, but now I keep deleting websites, and starting again, but hey, let's not focus on that, hey, make sure it's still recording, yep, oh,
I don't want to be sitting here, and talking, and realize it hasn't recorded anything, so, so that's that, family don't recognize what I do, and I did say, I don't know if it was, oh, I said to my brother, I said, you realize, if I, when I'm dead, you realize that people actually, I've helped people, and he said, well, no one's going to care, I was like, okay, like, he said, your family will, but probably people, that's all that matters is your family, said, oh, okay, well,
I'm not saying a family doesn't matter, but what I do, and people that I try and help matter as well, and I said, look, if, you know, you don't realize, because I do get messages, I've had enough messages to, from people over the years, to, to see that it's, I've helped some people, and because of the numbers of people listening, what the hell, why would you listen to me going on, if it wasn't useful, I wouldn't, there's better things to be doing, if it's not helping to relax you,
or to calm you down, or as a distraction, even, or as a, as a friendly voice, even, so, yeah, they don't, they don't see what I do as, as worthwhile, at all, they've got no interest, none of them, my little brother's shown a little bit of interest over the years, but not much, ultimately, his attitude is, what I've told you, is, it's not really, I should do, I should go to work, basically, I still love him, he's still my little brother, but he's just, he just thinks differently to how I do, that's all, Kara, thanks Ben for those questions, Kara says, throughout your life, have you had any hobbies besides following boxing?
I can list my hobbies, see, that was, that is what I class as my hobby, boxing, I love boxing, that's my hobby, that's the thing that I, that I follow, that I enjoy, that I, I read up about, and watch videos about, and you know, that's, that's the thing, I suppose, like some people, well, millions of people follow football, like that with boxing, instead of having a football team, I, I just have boxing, and I have my favourite, I guess, football fans have got their favourite players from all over the world,
you know, that they just love to watch play, and I'm like that with boxing, I've got my favourite boxers that I like to watch, over the years, throughout my life, a hobby is reading, I would say was a hobby, but that was more of a love, didn't really class it as a hobby, but collecting books was a hobby, definitely, not so much now, but it used to be, I used to have a very large library of books, and, but, I've got, I don't know how many I've got, I counted them once,
but I used to have quite a few, and, and a lot of the things, it's interest, I suppose, I'm trying to like, separate interests from hobbies, because I've had things I'm interested in, but it's part of the hobby, like reading, there's subjects I'm interested in, but it wasn't so much a hobby, so I was interested in meditation, I was interested in beat generation books, the poetry and stuff from the 50s and 60s, I had a big thing for Charles Bukowski, but it wasn't a hobby, but it was an interest,
reading his books, hobbies, probably karate was, I'd say, probably the first thing that I, that I did, that I was really, as a hobby, that I did regularly, and loved, and was dedicated to, but that was my whole life, when I did karate, I was only doing it two nights a week, Tuesday and Thursday, at the local school, but I was thinking about it all the time, and after that, I didn't really have a, I mean, again, when I do a hobby, I don't, it's not a hobby to me,
it's everything, and so when I did stand-up comedy in 1991 onwards, for the first few years, it was my entire life, I didn't earn any money, well, I earned a few quid, but not much, I was working during the day, and doing gigs at the night, in the night time, or just going to comedy clubs anyway, but that was my life, and it's all I thought about, pretty much, and then the next thing would be hypnosis, hypnosis was the next big thing that I got completely obsessed with, and then I got,
so it was a hobby, but I was obsessed with it, and then I got, I discovered the internet, I loved the internet, like late 90s, but then I discovered how to build web pages, in 2000, it was a January time, I think, and I became obsessed with that, and I'd spend all day, every day, focusing on that, I still read some hypnosis books, and I still, um, you know, I'm still kind of into that as well, but the, my main focus for about a year and a half was websites,
the internet, and web, building websites, using the code HTML and stuff, so that was, again, I was obsessed, well, I mean, I think people can be obsessed with their hobbies, but for me, it was, yeah, definitely an obsession, and then nothing for quite a few years, I was definitely, I was still into reading the hypnosis books, and collecting hypnosis books, all the way up to 2006, but during that time, um, I did Wing Chun Kung Fu for a while, so that was, like, my hobby, I went to the Buddhist center,
so I kind of got, probably a little bit obsessed with that as well, from 2002 to 2005, or 6, or 7, or something, and then 2006, really, doing the online stuff, all the stuff I did, that became everything to me, I was still working during the day, and even when I was at university for 3 years, I was still focused on the hypnosis stuff, the relaxation stuff that I was doing, university was second, which probably wasn't useful at the time, but hey, this is how it was, and then, even other things,
like doing boxing, that was like twice a week, and that was kind of a hobby, did that for about a year, year and a half, year, I don't know, I injured myself a couple of times, and then I did, then I was a counselor, that was a job, I didn't see that as a hobby, and I wasn't passionate about, I was passionate about helping people, but I wasn't, you know, I don't know, it was hard, it was a very difficult job, and then I started doing Taekwondo, Taekwondo in 2011,
and that became my hobby, but I wasn't, I wasn't super, like, all about it, you know, I just did it, it was good for, I enjoyed doing it, it was good for my, I guess, good for my health, flexibility, and stuff like that, but I wasn't obsessed with it, to be honest with you, and then I, I was still obsessed with the online stuff, all the way through this period, that's all I could think about, like making videos online, YouTube, mainly YouTube, and also podcasts, and then when I moved here,
eventually, it continued, so this, this, this has been 18 years of, kind of, obsession, the obsessions changed, or what I do has changed, and the Let Me Boise Sleepers progressed out of it, and, yeah, it's been an obsession, it's, I guess it still is an obsession, to be honest, I'm obsessed with it, and I do it, and that's all I really think about, that's why I do like boxing, because it gives me a chance to just think about something else, but it's not a bad thinking, it's not like,
it's not a stressful thinking, so when I go to bed, I just turn off and go to sleep, but I'm looking forward to waking up in the morning, and I've never had that in the past, never used to look forward to getting up, I actually look forward to, when I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, and I look at my phone to see what time it is, and I get, I'm disappointed if it's two o'clock, because I want it to say four or five,
so I can get up, I don't want, I'm not getting up at two o'clock in the morning, it's too early, but I love it when I've, because then I can get on, and I can start doing the editing, and I can, I can have something to eat, have a breakfast, you know, start the day, so yeah, this is, I forget what the question was now, hobbies, so this isn't my hobby, this is my obsession, my hobby is boxing, I kind of think it's a veneer hobby, taking him for walks and stuff,
but he's not, he's my love, he's my son, so that's not a hobby is it really, and I like to watch, I class probably watching movies and watching tv, like Netflix and stuff, I don't really watch much normal tv anymore, terrestrial television, hardly ever watch that anymore, apart from the news, just to keep catch up and stuff, and most of the stuff I watch is on Netflix, yeah Netflix pretty much, or Amazon, though Amazon's not much going on there these days, and or YouTube, but YouTube is more for educational,
I like to sort of learn new stuff, learn how to use the AI stuff that I use, and things like that, so yeah, thank you, which does make me think, I did have a question, I did have a question, but I can't see where it is, and Robin, someone asked me about how I do my stuff, but I can't see where it's written there, if I've missed anything out, let me know, and I will try and remember to do it another time, Robin says, thank you Cara,
I hope that I've answered your questions, Robin says coffee or tea, both, but I'm very disciplined actually, when it comes to coffee, one coffee a day, first drink of the day, well apart from water, but I have a coffee with my cup of tea, I have a cup of coffee with my ready break, and I have one sugar in the coffee, so I try and put enough milk in the coffee, so that it's not too bitter, because one sugar is not enough, otherwise, so, and I have that,
and then I have probably four cups of tea a day, so tea would be the choice between the two, if you say, what can you drink all day long, tea or coffee, well I wouldn't drink anything all day long, but tea, coffee sends me a bit dilly-dally, to be honest, it wires me up too much, and yeah, one, sometimes when Luke was here, I'd have a cup of coffee, and he'd knock on the door, like an hour later or something, and he'd say, oh is the kettle on, can I have a coffee,
I don't have any coffee, he's like, okay, yeah, and I said, no, I'll make it, don't worry, I'll try and do that, try and be, what's the right word, a good host, maybe, so I've made him a cup of coffee, and it got to the point where I had to just not make myself one, because it'd be too much, I'd already had one, then add another one, and he'd always want another one, one coffee was never enough for him, because he's, I don't know if he was just drinking it to keep awake or something,
I don't know, but he always seemed to like, I need another one, so I'd do that, and I did, you know, I'd like, no, because then I'd be like a bit too jittery, so tea, definitely tea, and since I stopped drinking Coke, I don't drink fizzy drinks anymore, don't drink Coca-Cola anymore, and that's partly because of the cholesterol, and why did I stop drinking, oh yeah, weight, I just, I know it's just not healthy for me, and the, it's not good for my hernia thing, the acid reflux thing,
which is caused by like a herniated hernia, isn't that thing, so I don't drink Coke anymore, although saying that, I did have a, I did have a bottle of Coke, I think, when I met up with my dad a few weeks ago, but that's, I don't mind that so much, because I have a cooked meal, we go around the, around this place, a restaurant, and we have a cooked meal, like a roast dinner, so I figure, well, if I'm drinking that, I'm also eating stuff that's really good, like vegetables, and,
and like, it's a, you know, so it should be fine, it usually is, so thanks Robin, I hope I answered that, too many, I could have just said tea, and moved on, but no, never, never can seem to just, why choose two words when 500 can do, Jenny says, have you had any other pets besides Andre and Vinnie?
Oh, well yes, yes I have, um, I had a, what did I have, my first pet that I remember was a goldfish called Popeye, and I won him on a fete, or a fair, which was in, we used to have this, what was it called, oh, it was like an annual fair, every summer, and we'd go there, there'd be like parades during the day, like a fete, or a street party, I can't remember what they call them, um, excuse me, bloody, and sometimes I'd actually be in it,
when I was in the Sea Cadets, and I think also during the Karate, I went, did the float with the Karate club, and then in the evening, we'd all congregate in the local park, big old park, and there'd be fair, there'd be, um, stalls, and, uh, coconut shy things, you know, um, win, win goldfishes, and stuff like that, just, what was that noise, restart required, no, it's telling me I've got a restart required, it means I might lose all the information that I just, you know, just the questions,
so I'm going to leave that for now, but anyway, um, yeah, I had a, what, a stomach churn, I need to eat, I had a goldfish, I won it, and we called it Popeye, because one eye was really big, so, and it was popping out, so we called him Popeye, turned out he actually had a disease, and, uh, yeah, he didn't last long, but it's like, I felt a bit guilty calling him Popeye, because like, you know, it's almost like getting a cat, calling it Stumpy, and realizing that, you know,
it's, it's got a fractured leg, or something, it's like, it's a bit rude, but I didn't know, I didn't know, I was only, what, eight or something, nine, I was only 43, I was, I think I was about eight, seven, eight, and that was my first pet of mine, we did have a cat, we had a cat called Tigger, it was a family cat for a little while, and, but my own pet, Popeye was mine, it's funny, my little brother, he said, uh, he was talking about his goldfish,
that lived for about seven years, and my dad started laughing, and my brother, this was recently, my brother said, why are you laughing, he said, no, it wasn't the same fish, I just kept changing it every time it died, and he said, what, he said, yeah, I think you're old enough to hear this now, now that you're 45, and he said, did you not notice that there were different colors, at one point, he said, I couldn't find a fish, so I got a, I got a frog, but he still didn't even notice that,
I was like, okay, I'll just bang the microphone there, right, so what other pets I had, we did have a dog called Misty, who was a big old St Bernard, but it wasn't my pet, it was a family dog, tiny little thing, but not for long, and you could literally, you could watch her grow in front of you, huge, and that was a shame, because it wasn't practical, and she was too big, just too big, and we couldn't, there was no one there during the day, we were at school,
parents were at work, it just wasn't, just didn't work, it was a shame, but hey, she was a beautiful dog, massive, but she needed dogs like that, and need, dogs need to be around people, and not all the time, but they'd need to, I mean, she ended up being an outside dog, because she was too big to be indoors, she's just knocking tables over, and it just wasn't, it was, yeah, it was a bit of a mistake, but she was rehoused, and she rehomed, and she was happy, I'm pretty sure,
so that's good, but she had this big kennel outside, and I just don't think that's the way for a dog to have their life, just personally, I mean, everyone's different, but I wouldn't want to live in a kennel, would you want to live in a kennel?
Well, I suppose it depends if it was a nice kennel, so I had a budgie, I had a budgie, and when I was about 14, I got myself a budgie, and I kept it in the next room to me, because my oldest brother had moved out, and I kept it in there, but unfortunately, there was no heating in there, and the whole house was freezing cold a lot of the time, and the budgie froze.
Now, I wasn't sure if the budgie was okay or not, because it wasn't moving, so, I mean, this is true, I don't feel good about this, but this is what I did, I was a bit, I didn't know what to do, I didn't have much, I'd learned a little bit of first aid, but it was on humans, not on budgies, so I did mouth to mouth, and then I did, you know, compression, chest compression, that didn't seem to work, and then I thought, and again, this is really weird,
I thought maybe he was just faking it, because, like, the whole, maybe he was just in shock, or I thought, well, what I'll do is, I'll let him fly away, and that's not ideal, because, you know, uh, they can't really be in the world, but it's better than where he was, because it's so, too, too cold, and there's not anything I could really do about it, and I hadn't really thought it through, to be honest.
So, I'm at the top, three-story building, and I let him fly, and I say, go, budgie, whose name I forget, fly, he didn't fly, and, but the next door's cat did get a treat, so it's like, it's weird, because, for the next week, the cat was outside, exactly the same time, looking up, waiting for another one, still there now, but it was alright, I just didn't, I didn't know what to do, I was trying to, I was trying to help.
Now, you probably thought, maybe, think that maybe I shouldn't have got any more pets after that, and you're probably right, I had another two goldfish in my other place, and, oh yeah, they, unfortunately, they didn't last too long either, and then I got Andre, and in some ways, I feel like he was the first, he wasn't a pet to me, he was my son, and Vinnie also, however, regardless of how naughty he is, he's my little boy, so, yeah, I didn't really feel a huge connection with the goldfish,
to be honest with you, and, I don't know, they just, the other dog walkers, they just don't stop, like, you know, they're not interested in talking to a fish, I don't know why, so, yeah, that's it really, other than Andre and Vinnie, just those pets, I've lived in houses where there's been dogs, on one, two, three occasions, I lived in houses where there's been cats as well, and I, one, on one situation, I did get, I was quite close to one of the cats, she took a real shine into me, and, but, other than that,
no, not really, and, so, thank you, Robin, I hope, I mean, Jenny, I think I answered that, I hope, the next one is William, what made you want to become someone that helps others?
Um, I'm not sure if I wanted to, as opposed to just had to, there was no choice, I had to do this, I'm not going to have to do this, but I had to do something, and I had to do something, I couldn't just live the kind of life that I was living before, where it was all, just all about me, the whole time, um, isn't that, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I'm just saying, for me, that, that wasn't healthy for me, where all I was,
it was just self-centered, in some ways, I still am like that, but, yeah, I had no choice, something had to, I waited for years, like, what is my purpose, what is the, you know, what am I here for, what, not, not really even in a spiritual way, more just from a kind of practical way, like, what, what, what, what's the point, what, why I'm supposed to be contributing, or make it, you know, leaving something, making it, making a difference, in some way, surely, and because I never had kids,
I never got married, I didn't raise a family, um, because that's an opportunity to do that, isn't it, if you raise a family, you'll leave, you're basically, you're leaving part of yourself in the world, when, when you leave, because 50% of our DNA goes into that person, so, it's, I don't know, just for years, I wondered, what, what, what am I going to do, what should I do, what can I do, and then this just sort of happened, I guess, um, yeah, I mean, and maybe, this is a weird one,
I used to watch, I used to always been impressed with, you know, things like Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Buddha, just to name some, you know, people that have really, kind of, had a huge impact on the world, on the, their local people as well, the world, and I quite like the idea of, and then you've got the things like Scrooge, you know, where he's not remembered, he's not going to be remembered nicely, when he's gone, because of how ruthless, and rude, and cruel he'd been, when he was alive,
and then, but then saying how he could be, if he was different, so, you know, he wakes up, and he, he orders some kid to get a turkey, and doesn't pay him, or whatever, I don't know, so, you know, so, it becomes nice, and then there's the, It's a Wonderful Life, and I was influenced by that movie, the whole idea of someone being, you know, he said, I wish I'd never been born, because I used to have that, that kind of opinion, to be honest, and just seeing the difference that he's made,
that isn't obvious, you know, because it's like, for example, his, his little brother, he saves his little brother from, from a lake, frozen lake, when they're little kids, but then his brother goes on to, to become a hero, during the Second World War, by saving thousands of people, I don't know, in some situation, but because George Bailey wasn't there to save his brother, his brother wasn't there to save those people, and because he wasn't there, the housing, you know, all the houses that he built, for the local people that worked and lived in that town,
were built by someone else, and it was a slum area, and just things like that, I mean, you've got, you've probably watched it, it's a very, it's probably been on TV millions of times, but, and I started thinking, well, I can't change the past, I can't change the stupid things I've done, I've still done so many, I probably still will as well, do lots of really silly things in the future, but I'd like it to be, if it was weighed, as in like a court of law, you know, when they do that,
the scales of justice or whatever, that I've done nice, more nicer things, I've done more, more good things than otherwise, and that my life's been worthwhile, because, yeah, that's kind of it, it's a bit of a deep answer, I guess, to a simple question, well it's not a simple question, but it's quite a deep question actually, but I enjoy it, I enjoy, it's just I don't know if I'm helping people, that's the thing, is when I was doing the face-to-face relaxation groups, I could see almost instantly that what I was doing was of benefit,
because people would be falling asleep in front of me, and with this, because it's online, it's almost very guessy, like not gassy like me, but guessy, I have to kind of guess whether or not people are liking it by, well sometimes I do get a little bit of feedback, but also from, you know, the numbers of people listening, so I don't know, it's a hard one, but yeah, I've been influenced a lot by the story of Jesus, I'm not going into religion here, just the story of him and helping people,
and being, you know, that, and the Buddha as well, and people that just devote their life to helping others in a much more profound way than I could even imagine, so that's something that I've always admired, so if you can hear the background screaming, there's nothing I can do about that, I don't know why they exist, I mean why they're shouting. The last question is Kate, from Kate, what is your favourite meal now, and has that changed throughout your life?
Well I would say my two favourite meals has always been, well as far as I can remember, actually no, now would be a roast dinner or a sweet corn pineapple pizza, they're my two favourite meals, however there was a time when, when I was a kid, when I was little, beans on toast, or beans and sausages on toast, or beans, it's amazing how those little sausages can make such a difference, beans and sausages on toast, there was also a time when on a Saturday we used to have burgers, but not,
not from McDonald's, there was no McDonald's near us, it was actual home burger, like cooked and in proper rolls, with a bit of flour on them, you know, and some chips, and maybe some beans, and tomato ketchup, and beautiful cheese on the burger, oh, so yeah, I'd say probably now, roast dinner, and I do like a nice pie, vegetarian pies actually, I quite like, but it's the, it's the past, the pastry, I like a nice pasty as well, but it's the pastry I think that I like most, I really like pastry,
I don't eat much of it, but it's nice, but sweet and corn, sweet and, sweet corn and pineapple pizza, and a roast dinner, not at the same time, but they're my two favourites, but I used to really, there was a time, right, when I was about, when I was about five, six, I wouldn't eat anything but beans, wouldn't eat anything, would just refuse to eat, and which probably explains why I was so little, eventually my step-mom had to figure out what I could eat, so I was refusing to eat,
and she just had to test things on me, to find things that I liked, because before that, we was, where we was living, it was cooked meals, probably healthy cooked meals, you know, but I didn't like them, and like cabbage, and vegetables, and stuff like that, so it took a while for me to figure out what I liked, so that's it, I do believe I've answered all the questions, I think there's one that I've missed, but I don't know where it is, I'll be honest with you, I don't know where it is,
so I can't answer it, if I missed your question, please post it at the bottom of the reminder, or whatever, and I'll try and remember it next week, so thank you for listening, remember to be kind to yourself, let's have a look, if I do all, all comments, yeah, I did them all, all the ones I could see, remember to be kind to yourself, because you do deserve to be happy, be gentle with yourself, lots of love, bye.
Paragraph spacing and recurring name or title errors have been tidied. Because this began as a voice transcription, an occasional word or piece of punctuation may still be incorrect.