S3 EP3: Trevor Noah on growing up during Apartheid, landing ‘The Daily Show’, and being friends with Bill Gates

31:54And I guess funny was part of it. So in school they always said, Trevor is just, he's too much and he's not disrespectful, but he just doesn't stop making people laugh and he doesn't stop cracking jokes in class and he doesn't. And I just, I was like, this is, my whole life I've always found funny, both essential and wildly entertaining. Because it's such an unpredictable thing that you are interacting with. You know, out of thin air, you're sort of plucking at these strands that send reverberations out that create these convulsions in other human beings. I've always found it fascinating in myself and in other people.

32:37And it makes people feel good. I think that was a bonus. It's like no one was crying. No one was feeling bad. So the teacher was saying, hey, stop that. But everyone in the class laughed. What a wonderful experience. You know, scrolling forward. So when you're in America, having made the leap, according to what I read, it didn't flow all your way straight away. Right. And there may even have been a time when you thought this isn't working out. Like basically a better head back and give up on the American dream. Is that correct? no I don't think it was a dream in that way it was more me not falling for for the for the allure of the American dream you know there's this idea and and you you know you said it earlier on like many people even in the UK will go ah America we look down in so many ways but then I'll speak to them and they'll go oh but I would love to live there I would love to work there I would I would speak to british comedians who dream of going through the u.s and and and implying their trade and there's something enticing about it and i'd be lying to you if i if i said i had that because i in south africa i had my friends i had my my familiarities my food as you said our cultures i was doing comedy in english and then playing with six or seven other languages in that english show what a you know and and now i lose all of that when i travel to another country so yeah it's like you've lost all your superpowers yeah to mention that it's you know america's not the easiest place to crack if you're not it's hard enough if you're american but if you're from somewhere else how you i mean again i feel like i'm galloping forward but at a certain point um you get hired as a as a contributor to the the daily show you know america's leading i guess satirical daily kind of news program, then hosted by Jon Stewart.

34:35Again, according to legend, you came onto Jon's radar and he looked at some of your tape. He saw one joke and said, yep, let's bring him in. And then stood up and said, that guy's going to take my chair one day. Have you heard that story? Yeah, I've heard the story. I've heard different versions of the verbiage, but it's pretty much the same story. I heard he watched something of mine on YouTube and he said, if that guy wanted to, he could do my job, which I think is John being very kind. But also, now that I know John Stewart, and I'm lucky enough to call him a friend and a mentor, I think John always saw something in me that I see in him.

35:17We have something in common despite all of our differences, and it goes way beneath the surface, and sometimes it's how we see the world or how we see the conversations that the world is having. So maybe that's what he saw in me. It's funny. The point that you've galloped to is now me. I'm out of America at this point, basically. I'll speed you through it. I went 2010, 2011. I'm like in the US. I'm doing comedy in random places. Because of David Meyer and these shows that he puts on for me in LA, I now get management in America and they go, you should do comedy. And now I am. but very quickly I realized this is like a it's a it's a it's a heartless slog you're in random towns in America depressingly going from one city to the next begging people to come watch your show and barely earning enough to fly back home and and really just reset and get ready for the next show you you're completely living from hand to mouth and and I I was just like this is not the life I'm looking for but even though people were selling it to me I was like no this is not what I'm looking for.

36:23I'm not trying to be famous and I don't care to blow up quote unquote in America. And one day I was talking to a friend of mine, Neil Brennan, who's a really great comedian, wonderful writer, creator of many things. He was also starting his standup career at that time. And I remember having a conversation with him in Denver, Colorado, and we're just commiserating. And then Neil said to me, why don't you go home? He said, why are you doing this? He said, I'm doing this because it's sort of all I have and I have to try he said why are you doing this and I was like yeah you're right I don't know why I'm doing this and so I left and then in the years that followed I was performing more all of us now the UK was growing as a market for me so now I was performing everywhere from Birmingham to Newcastle and Brighton all the way through like I was performing everywhere in the UK I was doing shows in Australia I was performing in the United Arab Emirates.

37:15I was, America was gone as a concept to me. And I promise you, I didn't feel like I had lost anything. And then one day I got a call from Jon Stewart. And when he called me, I will never forget where I was. I was standing in Harrods in London. I was in one of like the lower levels in Harrods where they sell technology, because we never had anything like that in South Africa. And I mean, if you've never been to Harrods, just go for the spectacle and i remember i was standing louis in front of a um was a an underwater moped or scooter whatever you want to call it essentially you sit under the sea with a bubble over your head and at the time it cost a hundred thousand pounds and i remember looking at it and i was like how long in would i have to work to get a hundred thousand pounds i was like i would never be able to earn it but i was like but i need this thing and i just stood there watching it and my phone rang it was an unknown number from america i answered and the voice on the other side was john stewart and that was the first time we spoke he invited me to to the show i politely declined because i i had a uk tour that i was doing and i was enjoying my life in south africa and he was really gracious enough to not like be offended by me declining but he instead said he said okay said if you if you're ever in new york look me up and i was like all right i'll do that and then when i was in new york he reached out again he's like you're in new york i was like ah this guy's relentless um and then he invited me to hang out and that's that's literally how it began i walked in the building i i was i could not believe how smart he and his team were and i also didn't understand half of what they were talking about you know what is a filibuster what what is gerrymandering who who who is Mitch McConnell what's a John Boehner what is happening I was like I don't know I don't know about this world and and then John said to me do you want to do something and I said no I said no thank you your world is very this is not me and we had another conversation about Africa and laughing about my experience in New York and then John said why don't we do that he said this exact thing that you just said to me why don't we do that on the show?

39:30And that was my first appearance on The Daily Show was a conversation I had with John, just walking through the building, laughing about being in New York, and, you know, being shocked at how terrible the roads were. I'd like come all the way from Africa to experience the worst roads I'd ever seen. And that was that was the genesis. And that's how it began. I mean, how was your experience on The Daily Show? I mean, just to contextualize it, because we have a lot of UK listeners who may not even be that familiar. Obviously, it had been around a while. Initially, it was Craig Kilbourne that was the host.

40:03Then Jon Stewart took it over and took it to the moon. He remade it in his own image and became such a trusted and beloved truth teller. And he sort of took it beyond the realms of ordinary comedy to the point where he became a sort of voice of sanity at a time when things in politics were going really crazy. And he'd also do a lot of great coverage of media. He did a lot of takedowns of Fox News. You take it over. You're less well-known to the broad public. You're coming into something that's, you know, you're putting on a pair of shoes that have been fashioned to fit someone else, right? Yeah.

40:38Then, just to reflect in passing, then there's a mini-drama over some old tweets, and then that became... So it was like, he's no Jon Stewart, was the first part of the narrative. The second one was like, oh, and now he's made some jokes about fat people and some other stuff. How was all of that for you? oh it was it was it was everything a roller coaster ride is but but that makes it sound quite fun yeah that was about to say the thing about roller coasters that makes them fun is that you know that you're on them yeah but if you blindfolded somebody put a bag over their head and then like whisk them away and put them on a roller coaster but didn't tell them what it was and they'd never experienced it they would think that they are about to die at every turn and then there would be moments where they'd be like i think i'm having fun but um that's that's what it was it was a whirlwind because for you know to put in the world of the the uk it's like it's like coming in and taking over like a beloved show like qi for instance and all of a sudden everyone goes the new host of qi is going to be albert grape and everyone's like who's albert grape and it's like well he's from another country and he's hosting qi so yeah immediately there was a mad dash to figure out who I am.

41:51And I didn't understand it because The Daily Show didn't hold that place in my heart. You know, which I always say is probably the only reason I was stupid enough to say yes to it. Many people said no. A lot of people don't know that side of the story. A ton of people were approached to host The Daily Show. I think everyone from Chris Rock to Amy Poehler and Amy Schumer and, I mean, tons of people were approached. And I think everyone said no. Everyone was like, that is the hardest show. We would never say yes. Why would we give our lives up to do that? Everybody said no. And I guess literally, I think because it did not stand in the same esteem for me, I had visited it.

42:33But after every single show that I'd done at The Daily Show, I went back to South Africa and I carried on living my life. And what excited me most about it was, I wonder if I can inject more international news into The Daily Show. I wonder if I can talk more about other countries. And I wonder if we can become more digital, like it's only on TV. I wonder if there's a way for this thing to exist on YouTube. And so that was actually the thing that I was pursuing. It wasn't the Daily Show itself, but it was this idea of trying to not modernize, but just slightly alter this idea of a show. And that's why I said yes.

43:09And it was terrible in the beginning, absolutely terrible. It was first, who is this guy? He shouldn't have it. he's a nobody where's he from and then it was like his comedy's horrible and and then people would take tweets of mine old tweets and the funny thing about the tweets was like people never gave it the context which i don't expect them to but twitter has had many evolutions you know i mean we're in one right now i feel but when twitter first started it was a status update platform if you remember It was just, you know, Trevor is, Louis is. And then slowly over time, it morphed into like a short joke platform.

43:47And that's sort of where like I built my followers. And it was really funny and it was really well-meaning. And I would jot down like the genesis of ideas on the platform as sort of like a notebook for myself that I would keep for doing jokes later. So it wasn't even like this is the joke. It was just like, just write this down, just to bookmark it as a concept. And it was really small back then. It was, you know, everyone following you sort of knew you. It wasn't what it is. It definitely wasn't what it is today and how it's evolved into like a news platform slash. Yeah, you know, I don't even know that.

44:23That doesn't even need that much unpacking. Like, I get that. I feel as though we're over that whole idea of, oh, we sent a tweet that sounded a little bit rude about such and such. in 2011 uh you know it feels as that i'd like to believe that that's no longer kind of worthy of much interest i am curious whether it is do you think so yeah i think it still is and i think it's because we we don't understand that social media has evolved into something more than what we think it is we still treat it i think like a cute little me you friend connect and that's how it's sold to us but it's not that it's it's it's a strange tool that has this pervasive way of making people bump into the one thing of another person that they will hate you know and and i and so i think we we we may be over one version of it but i i only see it getting worse in different ways i i you know i i have yet to read a series of tweets from people on let's say an issue like israel Palestine that has brought nuance and and has brought like a level of understanding from one person to the other now it just seems like it's it's just it inflames so I I don't I honestly respectfully I don't think we're like over the thing I just think it's going to take different shapes and forms and some will be more destructive to us than others

46:12How are you feeling? How's your energy? All good? Wonderful. Good. I want to go back. The sands of time are trickling. You know, I'm really intrigued by the mosaic that is South African racial politics. And then America, which, you know, I love America. I'm half American. It tends to see the world through American eyes. I mean, that's understandable. You know, the South African artist Tyler recently fell afoul of perceived sort of, well, kind of constructions that Americans make about race and specifically on the use of the term coloured, right? Oh, I hated that. Did you follow this? Yeah, what did you make of all of that?

46:48You know why I hated it? because I felt like any system of oppression, you know, I sometimes picture like a villain or a treacherous beast that is terrorizing a populace. That's how I see it. And you know, there's always that moment in the movie or in the story where the beast is felled and as it descends into the depths of the ocean or as it falls off a cliff, its tentacles reach up one last time and grab a few people who thought that it was completely over and they're sort of like impaled or dragged to the depths. Well, the Balrog did that to Gandalf in the first Lord of the Rings film. Exactly.

47:30It's like just when you thought it was over and then it's like, oh, no, one additional. One tentacle. I feel like when I watched the Tyler thing, I felt that about apartheid. I was like, damn you, apartheid. You know, we're out here living our best lives and Tyler's out here conquering the world and putting out amazing music and then your little tentacle of confusing racial dynamics has now thrust her into a conversation that's far more complicated than the internet would ever allow because it's so hard to explain this to people. It's funny when you talk about Daywalker, my first special, one of my jokes was about this, was about the perception of race and coloured and not coloured.

48:11So for people listening to understand this, the apartheid government developed a system to oppress people based on the color of their skin. One of the more insidious and genius elements of apartheid was that it realized in order to oppress a majority of people, you had to make sure that they were constantly a minority. And so because white people were a minority in South Africa, they didn't have the quote-unquote sort of luxury that America had of just saying, if you have one drop of blood that is from a black person you are black they couldn't afford to do that because then very quickly the whole country would be black and they would be up against you know insurmountable odds instead they said no you are not just black you are the tribe that you're from so for instance my family Xhosa right Xhosa is my mother's tribe and so if you were Xhosa you lived in the Xhosa homelands as they called them and that's where you were restricted to and you could move to some places but that's really where you were you were supposed to be and so you zulu and your twana and your you tonga and you and they move and everyone stayed in it so even amongst black people there was a separation of what your blackness meant you know and some of it was worked because it acknowledged funny enough the complexities of of blackness and that it's like black isn't just a flat idea there's culture that's involved in it so that's part of why it worked that's why i said it's an insidious genius system.

49:37And then the apartheid government had this sticky issue to deal with. What do you do with the product of people who have sex and they're not the same race? Primarily white people and black people or white people and the natives as they called them. Because despite what the apartheid government was telling everybody, it was possible for a white person to have sex with a black person and it was possible for them to have children, which was a terrible thing for the apartheid government because fundamentally they were telling people that people were sort of different species in many ways and so this now was undermining that theory and so what they did was they decided that this skin tone that I have by the way they would call this colored and so even in my family as Trevor according to the apartheid government my father's a white man they'd go white my mother's a black woman black tribe and then they would go this child is colored and that's why I was born a crime, because I wasn't allowed to be, my parents weren't allowed to be a couple.

50:37And the way my mother got around it, she just always found a way to navigate systems brilliantly. Because they were, I think because they were ridiculous, she used logic. She just told the doctors, because babies, when babies are born, your skin color is really hard to pin down. She just told the doctors that her father, my father was from Swaziland. And she basically said, no, he's a light-skinned black man from Swaziland. And so on my birth certificate till this day, it says that I'm Swazi. Doesn't say that I'm Xhosa, doesn't say that I'm black, doesn't say that I'm colored. It says that I'm Swazi.

51:07And that was how my mom was able to circumvent any suspicion in the beginning of my life. But now as Trevor, I grew up in this country. When people see me in the townships, funny enough, they used to think I was white. They didn't think I was colored, right? So people would see me walk through the streets. Kids would scream, literally, Louis, they'd scream running down the road in the opposite direction that there was a white man approaching. Now, I wasn't white and I wasn't a man. I'm like a six, seven-year-old kid walking down the street. In fact, earlier when I was like four maybe even, I'm walking down the road and they're screaming because they've never seen anybody who is not black other than the police who are white.

51:50And for a lot of my life, people thought I was white. Obviously, my family didn't think this. Then when we moved later on, we moved to a colored area, which was the mixed tone. You know, like in the UK, they just say mixed, right? They'll just say like mixed. But we moved to an area where imagine if mixed was forced to be with mixed because mixing wasn't allowed. That's sort of what happened in South Africa. So now instead of just one generation that's mixed, you now have multiple generations where if you go back multiple steps, those people are also mixed. So sometimes people can't even really pinpoint a white or black person in their family.

52:27their whole family is colored which is mixed which is unique in the world by the way we we haven't really seen that take place anywhere else not even brazil you don't think maybe not not really in the same way because there they'll still like intermix i mean they'll have like mulatto and they have all those things but it it wasn't like as restrictive you know but there's a pride that comes with being colored that i don't think should ever be taken away just because the world doesn't understand it doesn't mean that now they shouldn't experience it colored people have created much of their own culture, their own vibe, their own food, their own.

53:02And it's a beautiful thing that is adjacent to and oftentimes overlaps with black, but doesn't necessarily need to be contained only in the flatness of what black is considered in the rest of the world. And so I think what was tough for Tyler and what has been tough for Tyler and then her fans is that some people in the world go, wait, you're not proud to be black, but you are singing and performing a black music style and we're supporting you partially because of the blackness that you that you bring and then tyler's going no it's not about not being black or being it's like and it's it's as weird as it is to say i've realized sometimes it's just understanding that in england your name will be michael and in france your name will be michelle nothing's really changed it's just that in one place that's how they say it in england your name will be john in an afrikaans community in south africa your name will be johan nothing has changed and in brazil you will be joao but you are still you it's just in that place they have a different way to say the name that you have have have um identified by and um and yeah i think in the same way we talked about the twitter thing where i said i don't think it's over the thing that happened with tyler is that it's like a tentacle a little spike of apartheid you know it even like makes us question how we think of race as a whole and it shows us how fragile the whole concept is and um yeah i don't think she deserved it and i don't think she should be forced to like deal with i don't think tyler now has to turn into a historian every time she goes to an interview or you know delve into the the socio-political aspects of her very identity just for her to sing and enjoy herself um but i but i do think it's been interesting to see how people deal with it because going back to our conversations it's amazing how quickly people go straight to you're bad we hate you you're wrong you're this and I think people spend very little time saying huh what does this tell me about how different my world is to another and what could this tell me about how I could see my world going forward well put um I know we haven't got much longer I want to shout out your book uh Born a Crime number one New York Times bestseller uh i'm going to summarize uh basically this is dangerous kind of what it talks about which is that you know growing up between two well not between two worlds but as you put it kind of chameleon um as you said you your father was white he was swiss and not you kind of intermittently involved but mainly you were living with your mum and her family but almost like not an object of curiosity but a figure of some uniqueness even in their world like your grandmother you say at one point didn't like to spank you because it felt wrong spanking yeah she spanked me once and never again she felt weird like i don't feel i feel weird spanking a white a white boy i guess yeah yeah and then and then your prayers were favored because it was viewed that uh prayers spoken in good english found more favor with jesus and god both of them native english speakers of course and and and then you grow up kind of going between different worlds speaking like four or five languages and navigating these different and complicated political and cultural reality, then if that weren't enough to deal with, you've got this turbulent figure in your household, your stepfather, who becomes increasingly erratic.

56:31And I thought you handled your relationship with him really well because he emerges as a figure of some likability. He's got certain qualities that you seem to admire or there's aspects of him that you seem to get along with. And then he, I guess, drink takes over along with his inborn, whatever it is, so anger, anger, chaos, trauma. And, I mean, are you okay talking about how it kind of reached to kind of a hideous climax? Yeah, yeah. And one of the reasons I, okay might be the wrong word, you know, because it reminds me of a time that's terrible and still haunts me in my life and my family, I think.

57:14But I speak about it because I realized how many people are experiencing this behind closed doors. Domestic violence is a strange, pervasive issue in society that is swept under the rug because the shame is somehow borne by the victims. You know, children are ashamed to admit this is happening in their worlds because it says something about them somehow. You know, the people who it's happening to, predominantly women, obviously, they are ashamed because it says something about their choices in life or, you know, what they've subjected themselves to. Yeah, so I'm not okay. Okay would be like the wrong way to put it.

57:59But I'm always open to speaking about it because I too am still navigating it and its effects. is it okay if i say what happened yeah no you can well so uh after she's finally got shot of him and moved on he evidently slips into well one can only speculate a pit of grievance angry drunken rage and um and shoots her in the head yeah and i think that was um since since then i have read far too many stories where the same has happened but unfortunately the outcome hasn't been the same because i was lucky my mother survived um miraculously my mother survived being shot in the head a bullet passing literally through her her whole skull um from the back of her head out through the front of her face and um yeah i i when i first told the story i told it primarily because it was told in in in the newspapers i've always tried to be a private person with my life and also very carefully with my family's life you know i they didn't subscribe to anything fame related so i'm very careful not to tell their story for them but the newspapers you know wrote like everything and and the way they wrote things didn't give it the nuance that I think it deserved and it didn't tell a complete story and yeah and so that's really why I wrote about it um was not because I'm a tell-all kind of person but rather because it was out there and I was like well I would rather give it the thoughts and the nuance that I feel it deserves um and I'm glad I did because a lot of the healing that I've gotten has come from commiserating with people all over the world who have experienced something similar, maybe even with a worse outcome.

59:58And then sometimes with an outcome that isn't as bad, which has meant that people have been stuck in it for longer. I should say, by the way, because she appears briefly in the documentary we were talking about, and she comes across as a force of nature and just oozes a kind of charisma and quality of vivacity. And she just lights up the screen. Yeah, she really She has that. She seems like an amazing person. Someone said you speak to her every day. Is that really true? Yeah, yeah. She sends me like Bible verses every single day and then other times it'll be life updates. This is heavy. I'm going to just...

1:00:31Is it okay if I say what you said? When you heard the news, you called your stepfather and incredibly, he, having just shot your mum in the head, answered the phone. You said, you killed my mum. He said, yes, I did. you said you killed my mom and he said yes and if i could find you i would kill you as well

1:00:58yeah that's a long pause maybe you should inform listeners what happened to him what did the judicial system do oh they didn't didn't really do anything he spent a little time in holding and then went on trial and then the courts decided that he wasn't a threat and because it was his first criminal offense that he should be given leniency and this was somehow sort of like a crime of passion etc and it would be better to have him outside than inside and yeah and that's pretty much how it turned out and it's it's it's an interesting and complicated one because my mom survived he wasn't punished as if he shot her um and and so there's like there's a complicated conversation that i'll always have with myself about justice versus um people having second chances versus incarceration it's a it's a really complicated one because i go what what is justice is it the idea that somebody's punished in kind?

1:02:11That's not really possible. I mean, I've had every feeling, the grief, the fear. I think as time has passed and as I've worked in therapy, it's definitely gotten easier for me, but it doesn't mean that it's a chapter of my life that will never, ever be erased. There are a few things that you can remember more than the day you thought your mother had died so i think what it's also done for me is it's made me a lot more aware and conscious of how we treat young men and men in general who start to show us signs that their rage at the world is is spilling out you know because I think we're seeing that more and more.

1:03:04And now people are having to play catch up to ask the question, what is it that's making men angry? And how can you help heal that pain that that anger is caused by? And if you don't, what is the price you pay? You know, and I think unfortunately, time and time again, we see the price that is paid is paid by the weakest in society. It is the women and children. What strikes me about you is you, given everything you've been through, levels of trauma that are described and sometimes just hinted at in the book and other things you've been through, and yet you ooze a kind of poise, a tranquility, an equanimity.

1:03:45And your stand-up actually is, how do I put it, like friendly and positive and ingratiating in a good sense. you don't seem angry and yet I feel as though you've got every right to be angry or at the very least in some respects wounded I think I think I've definitely been both you know for many different reasons wounded most certainly and I think wounded I was I was happy to accept very early on anger was one that took me a long time to to appreciate and accept you know because we live in a world where we're told so many times that anger is is not something we should feel and it's like why are you being angry and anger is you losing control of yourself and anger and and it took me a long time to learn that the emotion is not the issue it's your reaction to the emotion that you really want to be cognizant of and and so in in that time I've learned to accept things I'll be like, yeah, I'm angry.

1:04:49I'll be angry at things that happened to me, that happened to my family, things that have happened in South Africa as a country, as a whole. I'll be angry about stuff I'll read in the news, geopolitical events. I will get angry. And I do admit that anger. The one thing I don't ever wish to be part of, and maybe that's partially because of my upbringing, not just in my house, but in the country I was born in. I don't ever want my anger to be taken out on others. I've seen that close up and I've seen it on a macro level in South Africa seeing that anger pour out it's funny you say that I remember once I had this conversation with Louis C.K.

1:05:31this was right before I was about to host The Daily Show and I was at the Comedy Cellar in New York City in the West Village and I walked past Louis and I said hey what's up Louis how you doing and he was like hey what's up man and then he turned and he's like wait wait he's like hey Trevor and I was like yes and he said uh he said hey you you you're taking over from John right and I said yes I am and said are you how are you feeling he's like are you nervous are you are you like how are you feeling and I said oh man I said I'm I'm shitting myself I said every day I'm shitting myself I said I I barely sleep I'm reading everything about American politics none of it seems to make sense and I'll never forget his reaction he looked at me and he said oh wow he said oh I like you so much more now I said what and he said he said i've watched some of your interviews leading up to the daily show and i thought this guy has no fear he has no apprehension he he's completely unflappable and he was like he's like what a piece of shit he's like he's about to take over the hardest job arguably on television in america and he doesn't seem like it has changed his day at all what an idiot what an arrogant idiot.

1:06:42You know, going back to the genesis of your question, I, yeah, I've never felt the need to involve people in the thing that I'm going through. And that's been one of the issues that I've worked on in therapy on a personal level, which has been great. Now I lean on people more, I share with my friends more, I'll tell them I'm stressed, I'll tell them I'm tired, I'll tell them where before I felt like I was burdening them. Now I understand it's either venting or giving someone an opportunity to show up dude i know i've um monopolized your time well you were meant to so i know actually that was the plan that's called hosting a podcast it's sort of been the job um but thank you for sharing a bit of um your thoughts and and and thank you for your feedback uh about having seen some of my programs that was my main takeaway was that you'd actually seen my incredible body of work yeah yeah and and thank you for real like Like, you know, I don't know if you ever thought that your work would be encouraging a South African kid to think about how they approach the world differently.

1:07:47You know, you were cheeky, you were funny, you were incredulous. But I always felt like you were kind. Handsome. You know, definitely. I always felt like you were, like I'd never seen anybody speak to a member of the AWB the way you did. I just hope we can do more of that. Don't get cocky with me, my friend, because I don't need you or your publicity. I'm not a man. What was this other one? Anyway, you don't think it's wrong. What? Racial mixing. No, I don't. I really don't. Oh, wow. And I'll be presenting my one-man show, Encounters in South Africa. I'm still workshopping it with my friend Trevor.

1:08:32Don't get cocky with me, my friend. That needs a little work. I'll meet you at the robot Yeah, now you're going a little It's like you've slipped into the English version of that But you have it sometimes It has to stay deeper than that Deeper than that Even in the way that some of the words are If you're meeting you at the robot There's a certain particular way I'll be in my bucky That you want to hold it I'll bring some biltong Left over from the braai And that's the extent of my vocab Thank you so much Trevor I appreciate it Thank you so much See you down the road

1:09:21Hi, it's me again, I'm back Hope you enjoyed that And in case it wasn't clear Yes, I'm a big fan of his comedy And in particular, check out his first special From when he was in South Africa Daywalker it's on YouTube, it might be illegal but it is there, I think well, anyway, we don't encourage piracy his accents are incredible and you get the full gamut of his South African accents of which there are quite a few and also read Born a Crime, his amazing memoir which talks about his upbringing and, well I summarised it in the chat didn't I, check it out, it's well worth a read along with his new book which is for kids but has a lovely poetic quality It's called Into the Uncut Grass out in the UK on the 8th of October.

1:10:06Today, if you're listening to this on the day of release. A big thank you to Trevor for going into some emotionally raw terrain with me. That story of his stepfather shooting his mother is unbelievable and horrific. And that may be the longest pause I've ever been in in an interview. And I think Millie might even have trimmed it down a bit. If you have a spare moment, feel free to check out some of my South African documentaries. They're on BBC iPlayer if you're in the UK, or just find them on whatever your local service provider is. The first one was called Louis Theroux. They called it Whites.

1:10:44It was just the episode that was about Boers and South African white separatists. It was a Weird Weekends episode. The second one was about Louis Theroux's African hunting holiday, where I went and declined, as it turned out. Spoiler alert, I declined to shoot a warthog I mean, it's a bit of a no-brainer You know, why don't I shoot a cuddly looking animal That's literally featured in the animated film The Lion King Why don't I shoot it with a crossbow on national television That'll make me popular But I sort of had to go through the charade of Well, maybe in the moment I'll suddenly get the urge to shoot the cuddly warthog But I didn't

1:11:30and the third one was called Louis Theroux Law and Disorder in Johannesburg and that was about, well I described that, it was about crime and law enforcement by private citizens I said to the woman that she'd assembled with a bunch of people some of them were holding string, they'd cornered someone who's allegedly a miscreant I said, what are you doing? She said, we want to ban him, we want to ban him many of these stories appear in Gotta Get Theroux This available from your local bookshop or for£10 on Amazon. We want to, Ben Him. Speaking of South African accents, shall we shout out Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond?

1:12:09That diamond is my ticket out of here. And what's the other thing he says? Some people say, how could God let this happen? I say, God left this place a long time ago. And the BAFTA goes to If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode Spotify do have a website for information and resources Visit spotify.com slash resources Credits The producer was Millie Chu The assistant producer was Amelia Gill The production manager was Francesca Bassett The executive producer was Aaron Fellows the music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira that diamond is my ticket out of here this is a Mindhouse production for Spotify