12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word

24:48I mean, this is a progressive guy sounding like Goebbels, right? And Jeremy Corbyn supported him. And when I used the phrase at the front of his mind, I got massive hate on Twitter. And in fact, Jeremy Corbyn himself said, what does he mean? Is he my psychiatrist? How does he know what's at the front or back of my mind? And I realized then that I should have said, Jeremy Corbyn is showing unconscious bias. Because what my whole thing, to some extent, is about is I am modeling the language and vocabulary of identity politics. And I'm showing how it doesn't apply to Jews. I must just say this. And I truly believe that if anyone was to say to Jeremy Corbyn or any other progressive about any other minority, I think you're showing an example of unconscious bias here, they would at least stop and think about it and think, well, it's not my place to say, how dare you?

25:32You're not my psychiatrist. But that's not what happens with Jews. And you were actually trying to say something inoffensive. Well, nuanced. Nuanced, yeah. You certainly weren't trying to say Corbyn is an anti-Semite. I don't think he is an anti-Semite. I think Hitler was an anti-Semite, and I believe Kanye West is an anti-Semite. These are people who directly say very, very negative, murderous things about Jews. Absolutely. He would never say anything like that, and I do not believe he would think it. How do you feel about Labour now, today? Because you're basically a Labour person. Yeah, I voted Labour all my life.

26:05I didn't vote Labour in the 2019 election. I can't remember if I did in 2017. Was that the previous one? Yeah, 17. Why didn't you? In 2019, I had become someone who did believe that there was too much of an issue with the really just this sort of not listening to aspect of the Jewish issue. I felt the Jews were saying there's a problem here and they were being dismissed. What were the problems? So there was the mural. What were the other problems? Well, there are lots of other specific problems. Like there's that book, Imperialism, which is a very good example. A lot of the time, what I was trying to point out with the mural and that book, Imperialism by Hobson, is it?

26:40is that if I felt with Corbyn and with quite a few people on the left, they feel there are bigger issues going on. So with the mural, it's about world poverty. And, you know, that's the important thing. And it's just irritating if people think, you know, but they've represented them in an anti-Semitic way. That's annoying and it's a distraction. Similarly, Imperialism is a big book about imperialism in which Hobson just says there is a race of Jewish financiers. It's a sort of early 20th century book who are controlling imperialism and it's their responsibility. and Corbyn wrote just a glowing forward without any mention of that.

27:11Not because he's anti-Semite, because anti-Semitism is not big. It's not important on his list of issues. How much do you think? I mean, obviously... But within the Labour Party, there was lots of other stuff going on. So if you actually hear, for example, the way that Luciana Berger was sort of alienated out of her local Labour Party, it's sort of really unpleasant and violent. And how much is... So I live now in Jordan. How much of this... You live in Jordan? I live in Jordan. I live in Amman in Jordan. That is really quite a commute. I know you had a hard time with the Tory party. You didn't have to leave the country, go and live in Jordan.

27:46So I'm wondering how much of this is driven by people's views about the Palestinian issue, how much of this is Muslims and the Labour Party. I don't understand the context of what's going on here. Have you read my book? No, I haven't. Okay, so one of the things I say in it is that I personally, there's a very short bit about Israel, and I make a point of not talking very much about Israel because I think there's an assumption, again on the left, that the whole conversation is about Israel. So, for example, Tariq Ali, as an example of a very progressive person, at a high part march in support of the Palestinians a couple of years ago, said if the State of Israel would end the occupation, anti-Semitism would disappear.

28:28So the State of Israel was started in 1948. There was quite a big anti-Semitic incident just before that. There's no way in the world that anti-Semitism is just about Israel. And the notion that it's all about Israel is dismissive of anti-Semitism, in my opinion. Unquestionably, it is still important. Unquestionably, it is used by the left. And the most bald and annoying way it's used by the left, and this is partly why I refuse to talk about Israel, is that if you're talking about anti-Semitism, nothing to do with Israel, say online, someone will instantly say, what about Palestine? It's as if you can't talk about that subject without putting your cart on the table about Israel.

29:03Will you at some point get round, do you think, in your life to focusing on Israel and Palestine, taking it seriously as an issue? No, I don't not take it seriously as an issue. I just think it's not. But is it something that you inform yourself about? I inform myself about it. Do you travel there? Do you think about it? I do, but I don't feel, this is part of my thinking, Rory, is that I think it is not my responsibility to either defend or attack Israel as a Jew. because that is not a stricture placed on any other minority in relation to any other country. If I was a British Muslim and I wanted to talk about Islamophobia in the Tory party, for example, I don't think anyone would say, well, first of all, I'd like to know how you feel about what's happening in Iran or human rights in Saudi Arabia.

29:44Can we clear that up first? It's a sort of mirror of Jews that are not counting. Yeah, it's the same thing. It's a way in which there's a sort of arbitration that happens with Jews between Jews and what they want to talk about. There has to be a serious hoops and hurdles that they have to go through and I reject those. Well, we're going to have a short break, then we'll come back and explore, first of all, what you're going to do at the next election. I'll vote Labour at the next election. Okay. I know. I'll go with that. And then the second thing, I think we'll be fascinated to hear your account of your conversations with his former leader, Mr.

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31:51see whether I've got an analogy here. Often when I was teaching in the States, people would think because I was a sort of upper middle class British person, I needed to take responsibility for the British Empire. And I needed to provide a big analysis of slavery in the 19th century and the responsibility of Britain towards India. Is that analogous? I don't think it's quite analogous because I don't think an upper middle class English bloke is a minority. All of this has to be keyed into the fact my thinking is that Jews need to be counted as a minority, as a vulnerable minority, which is what they aren't thought of because of the Jewish association with privilege and power.

32:25But my point is, no, we are a vulnerable minority because of years and years and years of persecution that is ongoing. And because you don't suffer. By the way, I don't think you should have to answer for that particularly. It seems a bit mad. But I wouldn't say it's something that I would consider in the conversation around how you talk to minorities about minority experience. I'm very interested in this. I mean, I think you've got yourself a very interesting angle into the wedge issue of identity. And I think one of the things that is both revealing and troubling around it is that it cuts in both directions.

32:59You're cutting in the direction of saying that Jews as a vulnerable minority who've experienced immense historic suffering, hatred and abuse should be considered alongside other minorities. I'm not saying exactly the same way. Right. There are differences. But you also, it cuts in another direction too. Sometimes there's a sort of a reduction taking place here where you're pointing to things which are odd about the way that identity politics in general works. Yeah, maybe. And the more that you keep claiming this, there's a risk that somebody like me listening to it is like, where does this end?

33:39Okay, so what you need to know about that is I am not saying in the book, oh, I desperately want the sort of madder ends of what happens when identity politics becomes the way we all think and a kind of triggered culture happens and everyone becomes offended about everything to necessarily be applied to Jews. I'm just saying, I'm modelling how that is thought about, how that is talked about with other minorities and asking the question, why are Jews left out of this and what does that mean for how people think about Jews? How people take that is another conversation, but it's not a manifesto about, and now I want people to get incredibly angry every time there's a tiny bit of what might be considered to be casual antisemitism, which by the way, is never going to happen.

34:22It's never going to happen. Can we talk about language? Yeah. Because I thought it was fascinating in the book, you talk about how nobody will use the P word, rightly, apart from maybe a few far-right racers in the privacy of their own homes. Nobody will use the N word. But the Y word gets used a lot, and it gets sung at football matches. And I want you to tell Rory the story about your exchange with David Cameron. So I start the book, and indeed I started the film that I did about a due-time-gap film I did for Channel 4. with a series of examples of what I call the Jews Don't Count phenomenon.

34:58I then go on to try and explain why I think this is happening to do with the privilege thing and the whiteness of Jews or whatever. But probably the most violent example is that me and my brother go to Chelsea every home game, and we have put up with, for 20 years, 30 years, the fact that because there is this association of Tottenham Hotspur with a sort of phantom idea, a racist idea of Jewishness because they are located in a fairly Jewish, that they are called Yids, and I'm going to use the word. They are called Yids, and their fans not only chant Yids and Yid Army, but it's said back to them, which is the key thing, by Chelsea fans and Arsenal fans and West Ham fans in extreme ways, including with Holocaust stuff, Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz, all that kind of stuff, hissing to simulate gas chamber.

35:44That's gone on for years and years and years. There was one particular incident where me and my brother were at Chelsea, and that chant started. We weren't even playing Spurs, and then it was directed at us, at me and my brother, with people just going, fuck the Jews, fuck the Jews, over and over again. And my point is not that there was an anti-Semite at a football match. My point is that that happens. The point is stewards, by then, and in the program, and this is my point about the conversation and about identity politics, by then, 2009, the program said any racism heard in the grounds will lead to immediate ejection and a banning for life.

36:18Nothing happened. Literally, no one said anything. The stewards just - Because it didn't count. Well, didn't hear it. They don't even recognize it as racism. And then we did a film about it called The Y Word, but that was difficult to get on and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the story, which is a funny story, but sort of also very indicative. I say in the book that if you want to believe, because a lot of people question this idea of the hierarchy of racism, but if you want to sort of prove it in a prior way, Alistair is right. You know, no one here, no one in this room, would use the N word and the P word, which is a good thing, but I can say the word Yid.

36:49I am Jewish, but I reckon either of you could say it, and it would not be the end of your career. I'll talk about it. Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, it would definitely not be the end of your careers. And I'll prove why. I'll prove why. I mean, obviously, this was a little while ago, but not that long ago. When I first started talking about this, it became a bit of an issue. A lot of people disagreed. They started saying that Spurs fans should be allowed to say it and blah, blah, blah. And in 2014, I think it was, David Cameron was, I think, asked by a journalist who doorstepped him at number 10 from the Jewish Chronicle what he thought about that.

37:19And he said, I think Spurs fans should be allowed to call themselves Yids. I think it's fine for Spurs fans to call themselves Yids. Then there was a funny incident where I was on the agenda, which you may remember, Tom Bradbury's program, and he was on it, and I'm waiting in the green room. Cameron was on it, and he was the prime minister, so he came in, but he comes in, he bustles into the green room, he comes straight over to me, and he says, again, with no compunction, I'm a Jew, with no compunction, are we going to talk about the Yid thing? And I said, I don't know, you'll have to ask Tom Bradbury.

37:49And he said, well, I just want to say, if we're going to talk about the Yid thing, you're right. I've spoken to Lord Feldman and he says, but deal's right about this. I'm just going to say you're right. And what I took from that is not that he'd listened to Lord Feldman, a Jew, but that he would not, I think, in 2015, have gone up to a person of color and use any of the hate words about a person of color, even while saying you're right. He wouldn't have done that. And the reason he wouldn't have done that is that Jewish hate speech is not as hateful. It's seen as not as hateful or as bad because Jews don't count.

38:20but more importantly, Jews are not seen as a vulnerable minority. Do you think it affects anything that David Cameron is interested in his own Jewish identity and Jewish heritage? Not really aware of his Jewish heritage. So he's a quarter-Jewish, and that's something he talks about a little bit. And I guess... I don't think when he came up to me and said that, he was saying, as one Jew to another, I think we could use his word. The reason this is relevant is that actually Alistair got in trouble with this because he produced a poster of flying pigs with David Cameron and Oliver Letwin. No, it was Michael Howard.

38:48It was Michael Howard. Well, that makes quite a big difference because Michael Howard is what you might call properly Jewish. I mean, this is the trouble to some extent with anti-Semitism is that, you know, someone said to me about this book, a progressive person said on Twitter about Jews Don't Count. Oh, I think I'm a progressive person, but I actually realize I share some of these assumptions. And I realize now that anti-Semitism is the racism that sneaks past you. And my book is to some extent a primer to spot these things because it is quite an elusive thing. and I personally as a Jew think that when Anne Whittacombe said that Michael Howard has something of the night about him that there is an antisemitism in there.

39:24I don't think she's aware of it. I think that's a good example of unconscious bias. Was I a victim to unconscious bias when we put a poster out of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin's heads on pigs when it literally did not cross my mind that they were Jewish? No, because apart from anything pigs are not kosher. Pigs are actually not an example used much, as far as I'm aware, in tropes about Jews. Jews are more, the tropes about Jews, the anti-Semitic tropes are more about vermin or about huge fat capitalists controlling the world or horrible sexual tropes of them sort of approaching young Aryan women, blah, blah, blah, blah.

40:04Pigs is actually not used very much as a trope around Jews. Well, the Jewish community will not happen with me. Yeah, I wouldn't have been bothered about it. But, you know, I'm an outlier in many ways. so you're increasingly I mean you're a serious writer I mean I'm looking here at a serious writer of short books I found my niche writing short books and I'm happy with that I'm looking here at 12 books is that right? yeah I think so I mean 9 of them not 9 of them 8 or 7 of them are children's books but children's books are I think are very cool and also a great thing to write and you were doing a thesis at university in English literature is that right?

40:40I did a long time ago I mean to be honest with you even though I think that was a good piece of work in its own way, I did it mainly because I had no money when I left university and I needed to get some money and back then you could get a grant to do a PhD which allowed me to do comedy at the same time and what was your thesis going to be on? it was about Victorian sexuality and literature is what it was about and what was your big idea? my big idea was about, I believe that the way that women were represented by a lot of the big male writers in the 19th century shows an inability to imagine women as an actual, as actually kind of like sort of sexual beings.

41:19So the only versions of women that were allowed in the 19th century by Dickens and people like that tended to be sort of idealized little girls, quite creepy idealized little girls, or very maternal wife-mother figures. So for example, in Dombey and Son, Florence Dombey is a tiny little girl for most of the books, sort of angelic, like little Nell. Then she goes to China in the middle of the book to completely erase any actual sexual growth on her part and comes back with three children. You went through studying English literature. You were obviously very good at English literature at Cambridge.

41:49You went on to do your doctorate. You could almost become an academic if you wanted to. My grandma, the one who was from Germany, wanted nothing more than for me to be Dr. Baddiel and to have a PhD. And even though she was still alive when I first was on the telly, she was not happy about it. She was just pissed off. I guess one of the questions is, is your perspective on the world, the way you do comedy, the kind of humour you see, the kind of criticism you see, does that have a link back to the tradition of the type of criticism you apply to Victorian sexuality, for example? I don't know that so much about comedy.

42:20I think the books… Oh, there's a PhD in that question. There is, but I think the books… Well, someone said, which is not exactly the answer to your question, but it might have adjacent to the answer to your question, is a Jewish academic who's read that book and God Desire, which is my new book, and Jews don't count, said that I have a Talmudic way. of looking at these questions. And if anyone's read the Talmud, which I haven't, but what I have a sense of the Talmud is that it's very, very digging into the deep logical questions of life. And I do, I think, do that in these books. I have a very, very, like, what is actually happening under the skin of these quite complicated questions.

42:55And what I do include in both these books, The God Desire and Jesus Again, is jokes. So I also have, I see no reason why, if you're doing some quite hefty, intellectual, rigorous work, you shouldn't put a gag in. Is your comedy also based on looking at structures or uncovering hidden structures? I don't know. My comedy now tends to be very, very... So I take one subject. So my last three stand-up shows, I've taken one subject. Fame was the first one. Then My Family and lastly Trolls. And tries to... Well, actually it is, yeah, because it tries to dig into what's going on here. The Family one was just very personal.

43:31Tell us about Fame. the fame one was about how and you'll both know this um personal to me in a way because i spend a lot of my time trying to project a version of myself that i feel is authentic because i don't like to be inauthentic i'm not very good at playing someone who is not me but as you'll know erica young said the more famous you are the more people will get you wrong so what fame involves is mistaken identity uh literally in my case where people mistake ian brody of the lightning exceeds or Ben Elton or whoever it might be for me as a quick story about how Roland Keating or Boyzone came up to me once and said I love you I'm so pleased I love your work everything you do is brilliant but I particularly like was Blackadder and I said I'm not Ben Elton and he looked really pissed off like I was deliberately trying to trick him with my face I was I wasn't mistaken for Nick Clegg the other day which was Nick Clegg yeah I once got a free meal in a restaurant in Swansea because someone thought I was Steve Wright, which I really don't know.

44:27No, I can see it now. But the fame thing was about that. It's about how there's a version of you out there that is not you, and that's destabilizing, but it's also kind of funny. And that's why you're obsessed with trolls. Well, the trolls thing was about, I think, so it was just about, it came from something very specific, actually, which is that when I first started dealing with trolls on social media, I thought they were hecklers. And as a comedian, I thought, I can't ignore these. I can't not feed the trolls. I've got to try and make it funny. That's, they're abusing me from the doc. And so I need to make it funny.

44:58And I would do that. And I made a show out of it, really. But it was also a show about what does it mean, this level of abuse that's just in public. What have you, because I think there was a time when you were actually obsessed with social media. Yeah, I stepped away now. So how do you define the history of your relationship with social media? Because I think Rory's a little bit in this, entering into this space a bit. Is he? He doesn't tweet that much. No, but he looks at it a lot. Oh, do you look? I don't know. I think it's an interesting... I think, as Alice's amateur unpaid therapist, used to get very wound up on social media.

45:31You could get incredibly angry on Twitter. I do, but I don't get wound up by social media. You're sure the algorithm's not training your brain? It's interesting that because the key element I always say with hecklers, I don't look at the stuff that they say. Don't get angry. If anything, agree with them and then take that out. We're doing this while Boris Johnson's giving evidence. If I was watching Johnson now, I'd probably be tweeting every minute because i want to say what i think about what i'm seeing i don't care about what people then say what i say whereas i've got the feeling that you really don't anymore i think that'll be true of me a few years ago uh but actually uh what i realized was that the whole treating them like heckless thing is impossible because normally if you're in a room and you've got a heckler in an audience of 800 people it's one person and they shut up soon after you've taken them down right but that doesn't happen on social media it's thousands and thousands and And yeah, you get into it and they take your stuff out of context.

46:20And it becomes maddening and impossible. And so latterly, I've completely changed my opinion about it. Having said publicly, oh, yeah, you should treat them like hecklers and you should make them funny or whatever. I now don't use it as an engagement platform. I do it very occasionally. But most of the time I say something and don't check responses now. I'm sorry. So you've been very successful. You know, famous guy. Books, plays, television. Films. Films, music. Yeah. We haven't even talked about that. I haven't talked about music. We're going to end with that. We're going to sing it together.

46:51But do you reckon a happy person? Has this made you a happy person? Yeah. I always think that people who complain about being famous, unless it's really ruined their lives, it totally hasn't really ruined my life, are, you know, sound churlish, because, you know, I am, as a result of not a result of fame, but as a result of what I do, of which fame is a part, able to write books and tell jokes and make documentaries for a living, which really is better than working for Amazon. You know, it really is. And so anyone pretending, anyone who writes songs or whatever about how terrible life is in fame, about how you have to perform.

47:30I'm going to give you an example, actually, in the fame show. I talked about how in the fame show, I am not going to be talking about how, like, Janis Joplin, I do my show and then I go off lonely to my hotel room and I have to take lots of heroin. And I'm going to be talking about how I once got on a Ryanair flight and I deliberately booked only one priority seating thing. And then I tried to keep the seat so that my family could get on quickly. But a man saw me doing that and said, that's very tight. And he didn't say that's very tight. He said, that's very tight. But deal. And that is what my slightly annoying mundane level of fame is like.

48:05You can be spotted doing something like that. But that's not a big deal. I am pretty happy. I'll tell you what I am. Happy isn't quite the right word. I am, in my opinion, incredibly comfortable in my own skin. I kind of think I always have been, but I think as a result of that, all the destabilization that happens with fame, the mistaken identity, and I've seen it happen to other people, it kind of couldn't happen to me because I have nowhere else to go except me. You do... No, I get depressed. You get depressed. That's not because of fame. No. You've had that before. That's why I didn't say I was happy because I've had clinical depression and I know what it's like to be clinically depressed and I still feel it from time to time.

48:43And why do you get depressed? I think that... Depresses never know the answer to that, Rory. I don't really know the absolute answer to it. I do think, to come back to what we're talking about, it will have a little bit to do with inherited trauma. Because my grandfather was in and out of mental hospital. My mother was definitely, you know, had lots of issues. Your dad as well, probably. Yeah, my dad, I don't know if my dad was depressed, but, you know, I came from a difficult, in a way, background. And I'm not really a glass half full person, I wouldn't say that. But I am very happy with who I am, which is a different thing to being happy.

49:20Shall we close with the thing we haven't mentioned, which is football's coming home and all that sort of said about our culture. I mean, do you think it's going to go on forever, this sort of myth that England are going to win a major tournament and football coming home is going to be the anthem to it? Well, the interesting thing about that as a question is that, of course, Football's Coming Home, or Three Lions, is primarily a song about losing. That's what it is. The reason that it chimed such a large chord with England football fans is it was the first England song about the real experience, perhaps the real experience of all football fans, except if you're a Manchester City fan now, which is that most of the time you lose.

49:58And what you do is you go to football magically thinking, well, maybe this time we're going to win, even though most of the time we don't. Certainly as an England fan. Certainly as a Burnley fan. certainly as a Burnley fan yeah so so I'll just put that on the record yeah got to the quarterfinal of the Cups played Man City played them off the field just that they beat us good yeah good I mean I think one of the things that's good is that you know you come from a football fandom that isn't just about winning everything and most people that's most people's experience right but it's sort of England's experience I mean England's experience is a bit it's maybe more about like really thinking we're going to do well and that's partly to do with the songs because the songs were all this time more than any other time.

50:39You know, they were all about winning. Did you think when you wrote it? And we weren't winning. And then what happened was we wrote Three Lions and people now talk about it, as you say, as like, oh, football's coming home as if it's a song of triumphalism. It's not. It's a vulnerable song about thinking we're going to lose. But did you think when you wrote it that it would become the sort of phenomenon that it has? I mean, it's a bit crazy. That's the case with everything. But I mean, to be fair about me, I only write things that I feel quite deeply. I've never really written anything or done anything, but it doesn't engage me in a very deep level.

51:09And when me and Frank were asked by Ian Brody to provide the lyrics to that song, we sat around and talked for a bit. And what we said was, let's try and write a song about what it's really like being an England fan. And we didn't know, but on the, and I have told this story, but hey, on the day of England, Scotland at Euro 96, after the song had already come out and done quite well, got to number one, all very excited, but we thought that it's time had come and gone. And England weren't playing very well in that tournament. They'd lost or drawn to Switzerland in the first round, first game. And then they closed Scotland.

51:41They weren't playing very well. In the second half, Gary McAster missed the penalty. Seaman pumped the ball upfield. Gazler scored one of the greatest goals ever scored. The sun came out. And a man who I really owe an enormous debt to, and I don't know the name of, the DJ at Wembley, put three Lions on as they came off the pitch. And here's the thing. The whole crowd, apart from the Scottish fans, started singing the song. At a point in time where there was no lyrics on screens, we didn't know everyone had taken the song to their heart. We had no idea, me and Frank. Like 80 ,000 people just start singing every line, not just the chorus, every line of the song.

52:16And people say, the best day of your life is when your children were born. Sod that. Well, David, thank you for being with us. My pleasure. It's been a real laugh.

52:27So, Rory, what do you think, David Baddiel? By the way, you should have read his book. You should have read The Jews Don't Canberra. I sent that to you. You did. Come on, do some bloody research. Do some homework before I go on. That's right. It's good that you're plugging his book, though. He did pretty well plugging his book. I counted his seven. I counted his seven book plugs. And you've just added an eighth book plug in there, too, haven't you? I think he's extraordinary. I mean, he's obviously, he's got a very interesting, quirky, yeah, quirky mind. He's good at being tough and taking it back to the interviewer.

52:59we haven't done an interview with somebody who's interrupted us as much argued back as much speaks very quickly doesn't he no he's and he's very good he's actually got that sort of that um tactic the lot of politicians use is that they spot when the next question's coming but they just sort of you know steamroller through it but i do think i mean honestly you should read jews don't count it's a very very interesting clever book and and i think he does have an interesting take and it's quite interesting the he's now writing about god from this atheist perspective I don't know if I buy the kind of people believe in God because they believe in a superhero.

53:32No, I don't. And I think that is the thing that if I'd had more time, he says he's very comfortable in his skin, but he's also very, very confident in his views. And I think this idea that the reason why people believe in God is that they're afraid is a lack of imagination, that there are many, many varieties of religious experience or many varieties of religious belief. And I think that's a slightly, if I was going to confront him, a slightly patronizing atheist view of the situation. The other thing we didn't really talk about, I've talked to him before about is the fact he's a terrible insomniac, sleeps very, very little.

54:06He says he never, ever has a good night's sleep. And I think it's hard to say you're comfortable in your skin if you're not sleeping. There's got to be stuff going on there that's keeping you awake. And as you said, he's depressive, right? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if he takes medication now, but I know he has done in the past. no I think he's I think he's got a very very interesting mind and also he's gone through these sort of various stages of his career I don't know why he cares so much about how people perceive him you know that whether they see him as the football lad with Frank Skinner or the intellectual who's writing interesting books or I think if you're comforting your skin you don't really care about what anybody's really thinking and I think he's moving to that but I'm not sure he's really there yet I reckon he'll find God in the end yeah there we are it's a good prediction I know I really enjoyed it thank you for setting that up and I thank you for the conversation you too Thank you.