John Cleese - Creativity: How Modern Culture Has Stifled Comedy & Shifted What Is "Funny"

Full transcript: John Cleese on London Real

2:47 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is John Cleese, the British comedian, actor, screenwriter, author and founding member of Monty Python.

3:05 In a career spanning six decades, you created some of the most iconic shows in film and TV history, from Fawlty Towers, for which you won a BAFTA, to Life of Brian, to A Fish Called Wanda. You also appeared in multiple James Bond and Harry Potter movie franchises. In more recent years, you’ve spoken out about your disappointment and how Britain has changed, the poor leadership in this country, and in particular your distaste for the UK’s written press.

3:28 Last year you permanently left the country and relocated to the Caribbean. Your new book, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, explores how the mind works as you search for inspiration and how everyone can develop their creative unconscious. John, welcome to London Real. Well, thank you for being in London. I’m I’m on the island of Mustique, and I just got out of the swimming pool, so I better shut up before people get envious.

3:53 And I see birds behind you, and it sounds like a completely different feel than what’s going on here. John, so excited to have you here. I wanted to start off and talk a little bit about censorship because it’s something you’ve talked about for a long time, but I didn’t really feel it until April of this year when we started having conversations with people, and we had a narrative that was different than the mainstream media, different than the government and we were censored on the technology platforms.

4:20 Ofcom wouldn’t allow our programs to be put on television. We were attacked by the BBC and a lot of publications, and it was a really bumpy ride, John. And before I understand a lot of this. Let me ask you a couple of questions. You’ve been doing this for nine years, yeah nine years.

4:37 Didn’t have six years without any problems, and then in April you did something that was not on the beaten track and you’ve got a, which can I ask, what if what do people complain about? Well, what happened is we started the lockdown here, and you know, the government was kind of saying this is what’s happening and we started asking questions about, are we sure of the details? And let’s talk about the science. And we started having different conversations than the government and the mainstream media was having, and as opposed to just have those ideas out there, free speech, to let people decide for themselves.

5:14 We got shut down. It was almost like they were treating our viewers not like adults, but almost as children that had to be protected. Richard, can I ask you, were they criticizing you, or were they actually shutting you down so that you couldn’t broadcast? Well great question. So YouTube, which is, you know, the biggest, really, video streaming platform in the world, on April 6, John, we did the second largest YouTube live stream in the world, so it was massive.

5:42 65 000 people were watching concurrently, because we were talking about ideas that were different than the government. We were asking the government, okay, tell us more about this, why do we have to lock down, is it really the right thing to do? And what happened is 30 minutes later, we were the episode was deleted, and then we were banned from continuing to stream on YouTube. So it was really interesting to see the Facebooks and the Instagrams and the YouTubes really shut us down, and it was my first introduction, John, to this world of censorship and mainstream media attacks.

6:17 So it was a real introduction for me to this whole new world that I think you’ve been talking about for a long time. Well, yes, but I, you see, because I’m a comedian and therefore what I do isn’t serious. I don’t think anybody’s ever got to the point of closing me down. I mean, sometimes they get upset because somebody said a word, like a recent thing with the major, on 40 times, but nobody’s ever closed me down. It seems to me, at first sight, to be an absolute disgrace.

6:47 I mean, the whole point of a democracy, a society where people feel free to live their own lives and to express their own thoughts. So not being allowed to challenge the government is an absolute disgrace, and there seems to be, at the moment, a wave of authoritarianism all over the world, whether you look at Russia or China or India or Israel. But now even here, I mean, we knew it was always the case in America. I couldn’t believe under George W. Bush, the people who said we shouldn’t be invading Iraq, they got a whacking, an absolute verbal whacking.

7:30 Nobody was interested in anything they had to say, or whether it might throw light, and now everybody knows the government was wrong and lying anyway. So it’s terribly important that we get to speak. But I think that’s disgraceful. Of course we should be discussing the various ways, but we should be discussing them with an open mind and basically asking questions of the other side rather than just attacking the other side. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

7:56 I mean, free speech is something I kind of grew up with, at least the concept of that, in America and same in Britain. And so when we started having these ideas, it was strange that someone would want to shut an idea down as opposed to let it stand on its own merit. I think it’s because England’s changed or maybe I should say the UK, but I’m quite old, as you know. I’m 81 in a couple of weeks. 1956.

8:20 The British concocted a most ridiculous plan with the French and the Israelis to attack the Suez Canal, which Nasser had just nationalized and the BBC took a very critical attitude to this, and there was a lot of argument, but it was pretty civilized, because the debating in those days was quite intelligent and it was, until relatively recently, I have a very good friendly yet, it’s my books, and he’s one of the brightest people I know, and a few weeks ago he said he’d been watching TV interviews from the ’70s, in the instance one where Roy Jenkins was arguing with Redwood men and he said they obviously didn’t like each other, but it was civilized. They were answering each other’s arguments with other arguments and facts, and the whole thing was intelligent and civilized.

9:17 Well, you don’t see that on television now. We have become a tabloid culture ever since, basically, Murdoch took over, because the reason Murdoch was at the beginning of the tabloid culture is he was the first press lord, sorry, the first editor or rather a newspaper owner, the first newspaper owner who didn’t want to become a lord. Up to that time they’d always kept their noses clean, because they were more than anything, there in the world, they wanted to perish.

9:48 Mud up didn’t give a damn, so he just went down market and took everyone else down market too, and since then the culture has been deteriorating, becoming less intelligent, less civil, less well informed and more sort of based on emotion. I mean, now, as far as I could make out, there’s a lot of people who get involved in the arguments about transgender who have interesting things to say, but who think that anyone who disagrees with them must hate them. Now that’s insanity.

10:23 And you started speaking about this a few years ago, and calling out the UK press here, but the reaction, you know, it wasn’t a great reaction from the media. They didn’t necessarily agree with you, that you made them feel very uncomfortable when you did that. Well, I don’t know what they do. If you criticize them is they try to starve you of oxygen. Do you see what I mean?

10:47 They won’t actually take place in the debate. I mean, the first time I ever noticed this, I saw the way the press was going, and I can’t remember what year it was, but it was probably early ’80s, and I remember I was doing a Michael Aspel show with a very strange combination, Norman Tebbit and Julio Iglesias, and at some point I spoke out against the press, and I said I thought they were nasty, and they were not running proper stories anymore, and that they weren’t really working hard and checking their facts, and it was the first time I’d ever said anything like that, and you know, I got a big round of applause from the audience, and it quite surprised me. So I watched the show a couple of days later, when it was actually, what’s wrong, it transmitted, and we got to that bit, and they’d cut it out.

11:46 The television company didn’t want to annoy the newspapers, and you begin to realize they’re very powerful. They can hurt people’s incomes. You see, one of the reasons I speak out about them, of course, is I earn most of my money abroad, but they’ll do absolutely everything in their power to cut you off financially. First of all, they starve you of oxygen, and then if you, for example, compare the reviews of my book from around the world, you know, Canada, America, Australia, Northern Europe, all these places, and compare them with the reviews in the Mail, the Telegraph and the Spectator.

12:24 You’d think they were talking about different books. Wow, I mean, the Telegraph critic, who was the number two music critic, says there’s not a chuckle in it, and several papers say, ‘Just hilarious, fall-about funny.’ Now, why? And the answer is, the word has been passed down: give a bad review to this person because he criticizes the press. And so I hardly trust them at all.

12:51 I trust the BBC. I’m doing Radio 4 or something like that. That’s fine, but I wouldn’t give interviews to the press. I would write a piece for them, but I wouldn’t allow them to edit it, because they have no scruples. They’re completely unfair in their editing, and they’ll take anything out.

13:08 For example, I went on television once with Emily Maitlis to talk about the fact that the European broadcasting union had had a poll of every European country. They’d asked a thousand people in each country about the printed press and said, do you trust it? And we came last. We came last in Europe, and we have come last in nine of the last 10 years. Brian, did you ever read about that?

13:37 I heard you talk about that, and I was, I was shocked. I didn’t think confidence was that low in this country with the press. Most of my friends now say that they don’t read any newspaper at all. Right, they don’t trust anyone, because it’s someone else’s narrative, someone else’s agenda, and it’s not real. Yes, I mean, you know, I just noticed in the last few days, in some of the right-wing papers there have been more interviews or other pieces more supportive of Trump.

14:06 You know, at this point and where is that coming from? Well, certainly in the Sunday Times it’s coming from Murdoch. Murdoch’s making a fortune, an absolute fortune, out of providing television for people who are not really educators and who have very few information. There was a poll, admittedly it was some years ago, that showed that people who watch talk, Fox Box television, were less well informed than people who didn’t watch television at all, which is kind of funny, but I don’t trust any of them.

14:41 They’re in it for the money, and they’re in it for the power. and if I criticize them, then they ought, still, if they put their readership first to let their readers know now and again what’s being said, but they’d rather be powerful than serve their readers, so they would just starve me of oxygen. That’s why there’s hardly been a review of the Creativity book so far and it has been very warmly spoken of in a lot of places. Interesting. I want to ask you about it because you’re an engineer.

15:12 Yeah, I’m an engineer. Right, yes, I am, and the book really spoke to me. I, when I want to jump into the book for sure. Just want to finish with the media. You know, also also, you know, we’ve also seen recently this kind of real change with this movement of kind of the wokeness of the world, and also going back and revising old content and taking it down.

15:35 I know temporarily one of your old episodes of Fawlty Towers was taken down, and I know you, you called out against that also, because you’re a comedian, and a comedian, you walk a fine line between you know, cultural commentary and entertainment, and sometimes what you say is particular case, Brian. I was appalled at the people in charge of the BBC who are supposed to know something about entertainment, and some of them are supposed to know something about comedy. They don’t seem to realize you can attack something in two ways.

16:07 One is a frontal assault, and the other is like Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, or was it Archie Bunker in the American version? If you put these ridiculous views into the mouth of someone who’s clearly ridiculous, and that’s how you ridicule the views. But there are always going to be some completely dumb people who are literal minded and lack any sense of irony who are going to say, at last these things are being said on television, when they’re being said in order to make fun of them.

16:42 So you can’t fool-proof comedy. People have to have a certain level of intelligence before they get intelligent comedy. Do you think we should not remove old programming regardless, or do you think there’s always some historical record that’s important there, or do you think there is a time where you need to take down programming? Well, I’m very dubious about it. I think it’s very, I mean, everyone’s on about British imperialism at the moment, and I’m reading a couple of books by Rory by Noah Harari.

17:16 I always forget his first name, and he’s pointing out that basically empires have been the way of organizing the world for something like four and a half thousand years, so if you’re suddenly going to say this is very wicked, you have to say, well, everything in the last 4,000 years was a bit wicked. The fact is that the history of the world is basically a history of crime. And it’s a question of, any strong nation was always bullying the weak ones around it.

17:43 That’s not the nasty side of human nature. To time, pretend that the nastiness is all concentrated in the British Empire, which was actually a lot better run than a lot of the other empires. Compare it with Belgium, for example. People who are trying to pretend that all the wickedness are, no, as, no, Harari says many good things came out of the empire. You what I’m completely against is any kind of thinking that this is all good or this is all bad.

18:12 That is paranoia. That’s the definition of paranoia, and what we need to see is everything spread over a spectrum. Yes, there were all empires everywhere, because that was the way the world was, but some were a bit better than others and some were worse than others, and on that spectrum it’s interesting to talk, but the old idea we got to wrap up four and a half thousand years of human history because a few young people in the last 10 years have decided it should be god.

18:40 It’s patently absurd. What do you think? What do you think when you see statues being pulled down? What do you think? Uh, I guess there are some statues one would want to point out, but the whole point is a lot of the people whose statues are being pulled down were also philanthropists, and if you say, yes, but they were connected, for example, to the slave trade.

19:03 Well, yeah, well, so were Plato and Socrates. Right? And Aristotle. They believed that culture was only possible with a slave class. Now, what do we do?

19:17 Not let’s not read Plato anymore, then? You’ve got Isaac Newton. Well, he had shares in the East India Company. So does that mean? And they had slavery.

19:27 I think it was only seven percent of their business, but that means we were going to go back and redo optics again. It’s, it’s a question of being much more interested and much more balanced about it, and looking at what’s good and what’s bad. And if there’s someone who’s really concerned with slavery, then that I think there’s an argument. I don’t mind seeing this going over the Colston guy in Bristol, but of course he did an enormous number of good works, and I have a lot of friends in Bristol, West Country men like myself who actually, both they always thought of him as a philanthropist.

20:02 So it’s not black and white, and the only people who wanted to be black and white are people with very paranoid minds. And what worries me about the woke people is they’re trying so hard to be pure that they see hatred in everyone else. Yeah, we see a lot of that, and we see a lot of division. You know, we see, you know, a lot of people saying, are you on our side or their side? I mean, we saw JK Rowling kind of canceled because she made some comments that obviously she believed in, and she thought about, but immediately kind of that left side says, well, you’re either all in or all out, it seems, and now they want it.

20:39 Not by, that’s insanity. I mean, that is a form of insanity, and it’s called paranoia, and I know a bit about this because I helped Robin Skinner write a couple of books, and it was a subject we talked about a lot. So even though I’m not in any way a qualified psychologist, I’ve had seminars for four years with one of the top psychiatrists in England. You know, that enables me to have a reasonably well informed opinion about things like this, and what I’m trying to get people to see is it’s all on a spectrum as my mother said, there’s good and bad in all people.

21:12 Yes, there’s good and bad in all people. Mother Teresa said that she began her work because she realized that there was a Hitler lurking in her. Now, those people I love because they’re trying to see the whole picture, but the little self-righteous ones who sit around waiting to be offended so that they can experience this warm glow of moral superiority. I think they’re clowns. So what do we do about the political correctness?

21:38 And it feels like we just keep talking. We just keep talking. We try and get so, like, a few we publicizing the book. I was talking to a lovely lady, Martha Kearney on Radio 4, and I talked to her about this, and I said I would love to have a debate, a perfectly friendly one, with a woke person. I never heard another word.

22:02 Now, you would have thought, if the woke people were up for it, that they would have said yes, let’s have a debate, let’s hear what you have to say. You hear what we have to say? Nobody suggested it. You see what I mean? They’d rather go on being righteous and sticking exactly in their present position than they would to try and find out.

22:19 Whereas I’m always trying to find out stuff, and people send me stuff. You know, I’m worried about this New Zealand weightlifter, I think, Laurel Hubbard, who wasn’t a particularly good weightlifter when she was a man, but she then said she was a woman, and is now winning all the competitions. Now, if you start life with a man’s body and then later on you become a woman, you are at a huge disadvantage against women who’ve always been women, because they didn’t start life with a man’s body, and men’s bodies are on the whole, this is generalization, are bigger and stronger.

23:03 So what I’m doing is I’m trying to say I don’t think this is fair to women who’ve always been women, and then you could say, well, then you’re into hatred, and the answer is no, you’re batty. and you just got cancelled by saying that, probably. John, probably. My daughter is always trying to restrain me. She’s a darling, darling girl, and she once warmed my heart by saying that I was one of the least precious people she’d ever met, and I love her very much.

23:31 She’s always saying, be careful, be careful, and the nice thing is I’m going to be dead soon, so I can actually, you know, I don’t mean I don’t have a terminal disease yet, but I’d rather speak out, and I don’t mind idiots insulting me, but Winston Churchill once said the most exhilarating thing in life is being shot at, provided people miss. Well, I love being insulted by very stupid people. It braces me in the morning and makes my breakfast better. But like you said, these people, they don’t want to debate.

24:05 They want to cancel you, or they kind of want to destroy something. It feels like they don’t want to compromise or learn. They just, it’s kind of their way or the highway. That’s right, and you know, the standard of journalism and of politics in this country used to be much higher. And I think what I really noticed, it started to go downhill, and I would pin it on Thatcher, because Thatcher believed in argument by assertion.

24:34 There is no alternative. She would assert something, and ten years ago people would have backed that assertion up with evidence and argument, and she didn’t bother. She just said, this is the way it is, and once that happens, then the other side starts behaving the same way too. The effect of anybody getting paranoid is to make the other side paranoid, more paranoid, because it’s very nasty when people try to lump all the bad things in you, then you tend to react by trying to lump all the bad things in them, and then you can’t have any kind of conversation.

25:08 That’s what paranoia does. Yeah. And John, what does that do to comedy? Because as a comedian, almost by definition, you have to take risks. You have to potentially offend people to do your job.

25:19 So does that change comedy today? Is comedy too safe because of all this? So I think it’s always been a little bit like that. I’ve always noticed that there are some comedians going back 40 years who would very carefully stay out of any kind of political argument, because they knew that whatever they said, it would offend some people. You see what I mean?

25:42 Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, go on. No, I just, if you think about some of your creations from the Monty Pythons to A Fish Called Wanda, I mean, could that even be allowed to be produced today, or would it offend so many people that the producers would can it? I don’t know, and the answer is I don’t know, because I discovered some years ago, when I had to go on working hard as a result of that divorce, that the easiest and cleanest way of making money was to do stage shows, and if I do stage shows, and I’ve done an awful lot, now I’ve done several hundred, I go out in front of 1,500 people, and I make them laugh, and I always get the standing ovation.

26:25 One or two people walk out. I’m proud to say Trump supporters tend to walk out in America, but otherwise I get a very nice reaction. But the whole point is they’re a selected audience. They’ve come to see John Cleese because they like his comedy. Otherwise, if they hate me and can’t stand my comedy, they don’t buy tickets.

26:46 So I have an audience pre-selected to like what I do, and when I go out I do my kind of humor, and there’s a lot of laughter. They don’t complain about my jokes because they think that’s nonsense. They think PC stuff is nonsense. Like, I do the big problem would be if I started to do a television program now, that goes out to lots and lots of people, and then I’m absolutely sure that I would immediately cause offense. But I’ve always known that.

27:14 I mean, one of the funniest episodes in Fawlty Towers is The Dead Body. Well, when Connie and I were writing that, we thought, you know, anybody who’s just lost a relative, who is going to watch this show, is going to be a bit upset. We thought, well, they can turn off, and that means that 95 percent of the population, who don’t find it shocking, can enjoy a terribly funny program. But are we going to say no, you, you all, you people out there, you can’t enjoy this because it might offend a very small number of people?

27:47 And it seems to me the woke people are amongst the most easily upset, the most oversensitive, whereas for an older generation, I think, was a little more historical about it. They, if somebody attacked them, they just shrug their shoulders. John, when you create something that’s actually that funny, as that episode, by definition, will you always have to offend a certain number of people? Does it have to be pushing it that far to make people think it’s so funny enough to make their day?

28:18 Are you by definition going to offend other people always? That’s what I thought I learned early on. I know if you try to please everyone, you finish up with pablum, as they used to say. In other words, you finish up with dross with no character. That isn’t very funny.

28:35 I always thought, what would a woke situation comedy be? A comedy about a functional family and it would be very, very heartwarming, and there wouldn’t be a laugh in it. You see, because comedy or humor, except for puns, humor is all about criticism of the weaknesses of human beings. If you tried to write a funny show about someone who was wise and generous and kind and thoughtful and well informed, it would be a disaster. An American agent once said to me, show me a comedy about Frank Francis or CC and I’ll show you a bummer.

29:14 It’s about the failures. Basil is funny. He’s such a failure, he has so many faults. If he was a nicer person, he wouldn’t be so funny. And how important is comedy in the fabric of society?

29:30 I mean, people almost need that relief, and comedy can say things that other people can’t say. They can cut in and criticize in a way that’s packaged in through humor, and it can actually change a society. But if you’re not allowed to do real comedy, then are we all going to pay for that? Yes, we will. Yes, absolutely, we will.

29:52 I mean, there’s so many things in what you said. I mean, the great value of the court jester in medieval times was that he could say things that were a little bit cheeky about the king, but everybody laughed, and the king couldn’t really get cross because everyone else laughed. You see what I mean? Yeah. So that the court jester was allowed to say things, and I know sometimes that I have that license as a sort of court jester.

30:19 But there were so many things raised by that. Ask it again, because there’s at least two other things. Yeah. No, there is, because, well, first of all, comedy, when done really well and intelligently, can change the narrative in the course of a civilization by pointing things out that a frontal assault wouldn’t. For example, if you told the king that he was being lazy, you get your head cut off, but if a court jester does it, the king might get the idea and change his habits.

30:46 Exactly, exactly. That’s why he was so important in a medieval court. But there were other things that you were saying, I can’t remember whatever, but there were so many things packaged in what you said. The other thing was that if we don’t have that biting, real satirical comedy, that’s going to upset the woke people, which you’re not allowed to do anymore because you’ll get canceled and the publishers will get canceled. If we don’t have that, how is that going to hurt our society?

31:12 10 years, 20 years on, when we can’t have that release, we can’t have those ideas even entertained in our brains. I just wonder what does that do to us? Well, it means that there has to be a way of thinking, and you’re in trouble if you don’t think that way, which is, of course, the complete opposite of a democracy. It’s good that people in a democracy argue. They should argue and try and listen to each other.

31:39 As I say, I’ve been following some of the trans stuff, but I’ve been getting quite a lot of stuff to read, and I want to understand why, if you disagree with the general trans attitude, that makes you a hater of transgender people. I don’t get that yet, and I don’t think I’ll ever get it, but I’m open to an argument that that’s a form of hatred, not that I can see. So if we are listening to each other, we learn. I mean, if you have somebody, let’s say a Russian government, that suddenly decides that there are no innate abilities, as they did earlier on.

32:21 Then that meant that scientists had to come up with all sorts of science to do with the fact that everything is a blank slate and is formed by environment instead of by heredity. So you just get nonsense spoken, and at the moment the biggest single nonsense is the refusal of science to accept some of the anomalies that are being pointed out by people who study psi phenomena, and as someone who’s read a lot of the literature, all of it by scientists, there is overwhelming evidence that some of the psi phenomena that exist. The science, standard science, can’t face it.

33:07 You know, I’ve had a guest here that they feel they can’t explain it, and so they say that’s not possible instead of saying we don’t have a theory that could explain that, which would be a more open-minded way of approaching the problem. And these are like concepts about the universe and scientific ideas, and something like remote viewing, which is a, there’s a very interesting woman. She was the top woman in the American statistical association. She made a speech a few years ago in which she said most of the existence of these psy phenomena, like remote viewing, and precognition, and telepathy, have been proved.

33:46 She said the only reason they haven’t been proved is, in such a hot subject, the scientists won’t accept it. But this is a very good example of how a sort of group think among a certain group of people just says you can’t think or say that. I mean, if you are interested in psi phenomena, you can’t study it at university. You can talk about it if you’re a professor. One professor told me this, but you can’t talk about it, and you can be interested as a student, you’ll never get a PhD thesis on it, despite the fact there are experiments out there which are absolutely inexplicable at the results in terms of ordinary and materialist reductionist science.

34:27 Yeah, as humans we think that we see everything, but if you actually look at the bandwidth of light and sound, it’s a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of all the information in the universe, and yet we assume, as the higher primates, that we’ve got it all figured out, and there’s no other possible explanations. And it’s one of our flaws. That’s exactly right. I mean, one of the greatest scientists of all was Richard Feynman. And Richard, who was lovely, and when he had time off, he’d go and play the drums.

34:58 Right, a mensch. And Richard Feynman simply said once that he would rather be open to all possibilities than to be attached to one particular mindset, which he knew probably wasn’t right. And that’s one of the top physicists, probably of all time, who was all about theory and numbers, and he was willing to also say that there could be things out there I can’t explain. Yes, but the resistance of scientists to change is quite extraordinary, and people don’t realize that one of the earliest breakthrough scientists who laid the basis for quantum physics was Max Planck, and Max Planck said on one occasion, science progresses one funeral at a time.

35:51 Now, if Max Planck says that, we need to think about it. He said it’s people dying off that allows us to change theories. That’s powerful. My dad actually learned from Richard Feynman when he was at Caltech in 1961 or ’62, and told me great stories about him. Yeah, he knew him for many years, and he’s a fascinating guy for sure.

36:15 Oh, do you know, do you have any stories about it? You know, so, my heroes. So Richard Feynman, he went to, I think he was teaching at MIT, where I studied engineering, but he did a couple years at Caltech in Los Angeles, where my dad was studying electrical engineering, and he taught the basic freshman class, I think, in physics, and it’s still recorded to this day, and it was, it was like the biggest celebrity ever coming in and teaching you, you know, basic stuff, but so they recorded it, and it was a big deal for the freshmen to learn from this guy, and my dad said he used to come and hang out with him in the dorms, and in their 20-year reunion he came back before he got his cancer, and he just said he was just this incredible guy to hang out with.

36:53 I mean, he was a rock star, because he had, you know, been at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project in his 20s, so, and he’s written incredible books. So, how did you know him? Well, I came across him years ago, and everything I ever read about him, it just struck me what a marvelous man he was, because he was so alive and so unrigid and so open to everything, and yet he was absolutely brilliant. And this is true of a lot of scientists, you know, who are really, really good, but you don’t get to hear about them.

37:26 I mean, I was talking about a cardiologist a couple of years ago, and because I pop in every year, I think it’s a good idea to get things checked, and he’s lovely. He’s an Aussie. He trained in Melbourne, and I said to him, well, what is this about fats? And he said, well, we got it wrong. I said, well, God, he said, well, we know now it’s really sugar, it’s not fats, and I said, but it’s been fats for, he said, 60 years.

37:51 I said, well, how, how can the medical profession have been saying it was fats for 60 years? Isn’t that what, about the science? And he said, well, you can’t get funding for research that challenges the current paradigm, so you can’t get money to do experiments that show that the paradigm is wrong, because the people in charge don’t give money to people who are challenging the current paradigm. Now that, what do you think about that? It’s, this is bordering on insanity, and this is why, you know, the whole idea of creativity is so important, because the creatives are always bumping up against the people who want to know what they’re getting for their money.

38:36 You give that, you say to a writer, if there’s a screenplay or something like that, you say, here’s your money, we want to see an outline in three weeks, which immediately puts him under the time pressure that will make sure that he does something that’s more stereotypical and derivative, because that’s the way you can get it done in three weeks. So you and the people in charge want to know what they’re getting, although they haven’t the slightest bloody idea about whether it’s any good or not. They just agree with each other.

39:10 You see, what that means is built-in tension always between the creative people and the people who finance things, which means the people who make things happen. And my experience, my professional experience over the years, and I was lucky to be at the BBC with Billy Cotton, John Howard Davies and Michael Mills, and people like that, major figures who operated out of confidence and trusted their gut, and now you just have a little scurrying group of marketing people and executives who’ve never written, performed or directed comedy, who do sometimes think that because somebody’s given a big desk, that they suddenly understand comedy. Most of the executives I’ve worked with have been no good at all, but the trouble is they have no idea that they’re no good.

40:02 I mean, on that note, how do you, how did you get the funding for the movies you did with Monty Python, The Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and even something like A Fish Called Wanda, because it seems like those guys behind the desk would have never given you the millions and millions you needed for the high production value on those movies? I have to tease you about this, Brian, because the millions of millions. I mean, the first film we ever made cost £240,000.

40:28 Okay? Which one? Which movie was that? That was Holy Grail. Oh, there was one before that that cost a hundred thousand pounds.

40:37 I mean, my Holy Grail cost 100,140,000 pounds, I think it was, and then Life of Brian cost 2 million pounds. Brian, can you believe that? And not a single English or Hollywood studio would back it. Life of Brian, recently voted best British comedy of all time. I don’t take those things very seriously, but it does mean it’s up there with the best, and we couldn’t get two million pounds from anyone in England or three million dollars from anyone in the United States.

41:10 So we made it eventually, because that Martha’s man George Harrison put the money up for it, because he was a creative and he could see what it was about. But once you had experiences like that, you just realized the people in charge, they haven’t a clue. So you had to find some independent financing, and you were going to make it happen. That was it. There was a will, there was a way.

41:32 You were, you were all highlighted. That’s a nice way of putting it, but actually we’d given up, and it was only because Eric Idle was a good friend of George Harrison, and he gave George the script and George read it, says he fell out of bed. I don’t know, that’s apocryphal, and he rang Eric up and said, I’m putting the money up, and Eric said, what are you talking about? And George said, oh, I’ll put the body up for the film. Why?

42:01 I said, I want to see it. Isn’t that the most wonderful story, to see the possibilities in it? You see, I mean, when we went into the BBC to sell Monty Python, it’s extraordinary story, but they heard we wanted to do a series together. We never worked together before, though we’d all been on the writers’ table for David Frost. We knew each other, and when we went in he said, well, what are you guys proposing to do?

42:29 If I give you a comedy series, and we couldn’t answer because we hadn’t discussed it. Can you believe that? This meeting in which writers have not just discussed what they’re going to do, and he asked us questions like, guest star and whether there’d be music? And in the end he just looked at us and shrugged and said, go away and make 13 programs. And I believe that it was because we didn’t have a concept that we were able to go out there and explore with no limitations at all, without any parameters about what we were going to do.

43:05 And that’s why it was, I believe, a very original series. But again, 99 percent of the time would not get picked up, and particularly, you know, last, about four years ago, the guy in charge of BBC comedy, so he wouldn’t have commissioned it, because they were four white guys. Right, right. Where did that confidence come from, John, and the rest of the group and the troupe, to be able to really believe you could pull it off, to pitch that? I mean, that’s a lot of confidence.

43:37 Yeah, you just get a feeling. You think the other guys are pretty good, and you think, I think we could do something interesting, and then you get a little bit excited about it. It’s really as simple as that. Okay, you Just get, you just get excited, and you see, in those days, the BBC was acting out of confidence, and if you’re dealing with an organization that acts out of confidence, then you can find out what the decision-making process is, and you can get a decision.

44:07 If the organization is running out of fear, you can’t really find out who’s taking the decision, and you find it’s all about committees who get together and make sure that nobody’s out of step, because if you’re out of step, you could be proved wrong, whereas if everyone in the committee agrees with you, you’re kind of safe because you all made the mistake together. So you get group think. You just get a group of people who think they know what they’re talking about when they have honestly no idea at all, and they seem to think I often get on commercials.

44:41 It just happened on the Specsavers commercial. I did that. When you first meet, they all fall all over you and say how wonderful you are, but when it finally gets down to decisions about the entity, they know better than you do. Right, right. And does that type of group think, or fear-based decision-making, kill any creativity or any gems?

45:04 Yeah, yeah. Because what they want to do is to repeat something. They want to know what they’re getting, so they make a film that’s a sequel or a prequel. Oh, if they can’t do that, then they buy a well-known book or comic or something like that, and they just, they just follow that. You see, the thing is, when you have people operating out of confidence, that they can trust their gut and not do everything, I’m sort of ticking boxes and we were lucky, because in the ’60s and ’70s when I was working in television, we had people there like Bill Cotton who were just wonderful, very wise, very smart.

45:50 They knew show business. They’ve been in it all their lives, and that was a delight, and you see, in those days the BBC had confidence because they had the licence fee, and that meant they were not pushed around by market forces. You won’t believe this, bro. When we were doing Monty Python, we didn’t know what the viewing figures were, because it didn’t matter. People just sort of shake their heads and say, no, no, we didn’t know.

46:19 We were interested in a thing called the AI, which is the Appreciation Index, which is what the number of people who thought it was especially good. That was what we were after. We never knew how many people watched us. But then what happened is a man called John Birt took the BBC over, and Birt I think was a person who did everything with his left hemisphere, and was never judged anything on the basis of his feeling. It was all done with statistics, and they began to get scared that if they didn’t pull in the audiences that ITV did, they might get their licence fee taken away.

46:57 So once they took that decision, they were under exactly the same commercial pressures that the commercial companies were. So all the advantages of the licence fee were thrown away by that one completely half-witted decision. And has it been making fear-based decisions since? Yes, I think their main, well, the main fear they have at the BBC is losing their job, which is why there’s nobody there with any courage. Right, right.

47:24 See what I mean? They’re all frightened, and they all want to work in committees and you can’t get, you can get a decision out of them, and they’re just hopeless. My agent said to me recently, he’s a very bright 40-year-old. He said he’d rather deal and negotiate with anyone rather than the BBC. They’re just a bunch of people clinging together, trying to hang on to their jobs, and there’s none of that excitement, or let’s try this, let’s do this.

47:50 And the word quality. We used to talk about quality programs, and I talked to somebody who worked for Murdoch, and he said, you never heard the phrase, it was only viewing figures. It was never about the quality, intrinsic quality of the program. It didn’t because you can’t measure it, but you can measure the number of people watching it. So that’s when Murdoch started taking over in television and dragging us down market in various ways.

48:18 Has that same attitude carried over into the way we make movies in Britain, and even in Hollywood, where it’s just again trying to minimize risk, or are there people out there still doing bold things? Well, the indies do. A lot of the independents are making very good films, very, very good films, and that’s great, but it’s so, it’s a big struggle. I mean, just before I left England to come down here to the West Indies to get some sun and rest, I did a movie in Yorkshire, and it was shot in about three weeks, and everyone seemed to be from the Yorkshire area except from there for the cast, and there was a sense of community about it, which was absolutely lovely, and that can’t be replaced, that feeling, everybody was from the same part of England.

49:06 I love that. Almost everyone except for the director, one cameraman, and I. When I did the Bond movies, I only ever did two, incidentally. I did four days on Bond movies over four years, so it never really pulled my life off balance. But when I was doing the Bond movies, it was lovely down there at Pinewood Studios.

49:27 There were people whose grandfathers had worked on Dr. No, and the atmosphere was great, but now of course they’re made in Prague because it’s cheaper. So everything is about money, and everything is about people who are primarily interested in money and who are very much more frightened of losing it than sort of making it by doing something a bit special, and that comes out on the screen. Right. You might not know it consciously, but subconsciously you know it’s just not the same as if those other factors were in place.

49:56 That’s right. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on at our unconscious levels that we really don’t know about, and I think I get onto my own pet hobby horses a lot. Conventions of filming that everyone accepts, because they’re all in the books about cinematography, and I think they’re wrong, because I think they’re sending the wrong unconscious messages to audiences. But that’s a huge topic. All right, we’ll get into that at the end.

50:22 Let’s talk about this book, John, because it really struck a chord with me. Creativity, because when I grew up, I felt like I was given a decision: this is in the ’70s in California, you’re either a creative artist type or you’re a, you know, scientist type, and I chose the science route, and I was the science guy and the computer programmer and the engineer at MIT. And I always thought that creativity was for someone else, but it’s only in the last 10 years, since I’ve been doing this show, that I realized, wow, I actually can tap into a lot of creativity in my head, and then there’s a lot of that in here, and a lot of unconscious thinking that goes on.

50:58 Tell me how you came up with these ideas, John. Totally, because I had an experience like yours. The only difference between my experience and your experience: the creative option was never there. The education I received, which was a good English education in a prep school and public school, and I did Latin at the age of eight and still remember a lot of it, and I’m okay at maths and all these kind of things. I discovered early on that you seem to get more money from maths and Latin than you did for anything else, so I sort of became good at those and not very interested in anything else, but the whole way through, I was just being ever so gently told that I had to be right about things.

51:47 You know, yeah. No, that’s Peter. You saw, maybe laugh once. He told me he’d once taken an exam and said, name one Russian composer, and he said, Rachmaninoff, and the teacher said, no, it’s Tchaikovsky. And that’s sort of got education in a nutshell.

52:09 When I was 15, I was asked to write a lesson, an essay on time, and I’m quite proud of this in retrospect. I wrote the whole essay about the fact that I’d not had time to write the essay. You see, now you smile, or not. It’s quite nice, isn’t it? Yes.

52:24 You know what the teacher said? He said, John, this isn’t a proper essay. So they went. It was never drummed out of us, never beaten out of us, the creative side. It just, it wasn’t the slightest, but encouraged, and it didn’t get you marks.

52:37 Right. So what I discovered, I got to Cambridge, I got in on science like you. I had no idea that I had any creative ability. I joined the Footlights, which is like the Hasty Pudding and Harvard, and we used to get together in the club room, and I joined them because they were the nicest bunch of guys at Cambridge, because they all had a good sense of humor and they didn’t take themselves too seriously, whereas the straight actors, what about wankers, you know?

53:05 He knew they were going to be huge Shakespearean stars, and they would talk about things like motivation, which frightened me, but this bunch was funny, and I found I could write stuff that would make people laugh. Okay, which is creative. I had no idea I had this ability at all, and I went on developing it, and because it didn’t come naturally to me, and no one had told me I was creative when I was eight, I watched it, and I was very puzzled. I would work very hard at night trying to finish a sketch and I couldn’t finish it, and I in the morning I’d wake up, make a cup of instant coffee, and sit down at the desk, and suddenly the solution was there.

53:44 Right. And that’s some of the IP that you put in this book, as far as to allow your unconscious mind to solve a problem, but also to give it time. Right. We’re taught in science You see, every time you try and rush it, you go back into stereotype thinking. All right, every time you rush it there’s a, this takes some time to explain, but somebody there was a guy, always forget his name, Donald Hebb.

54:08 He was a Canadian neurologist, and he said when neurons fire together, they wire together. In other words, if you use the same thought path on a regular basis, it sort of becomes more than a path. It becomes a wire. The only way you can go is to go down the wire. Yeah, so what you’d got to try and do is get out of your normal stereotypical way of thinking.

54:33 If somebody said, well, it’s like you take a little house for the summer, and when you arrive there, the grass in the back garden is four foot high, and there’s a shed over this. You want to see what’s in the shed, so you push your way through the, you get into the shed. When you come back, you come the same way, don’t you? Then the next day, well, you’ve got to go to the shed. You’re going to go this path, you’re slowly forming, and eventually that’s what happens with our thinking is we just always go by the same path.

55:02 But of course, if we went off the path, we might not get to the shed so fast, but we might find something that we don’t know about in the grass, and that’s what creativity is: getting out of a rut. We’re all, you know, that’s what it is. It’s sort of a mental rut, and in certain circumstances, but they are circumstances when you can be playful and when you’re not under pressures, like time pressure in particular, or feelings of inadequacy. I can’t do this, this is much too difficult.

55:32 You have to get rid of all of that, and then you can play, and kids could play. You know, they know how to play, but we kind of slowly educated out of them, not cruelly, but just by not encouraging them. Yeah, it’s something I try to do around here. We just, we call them thought experiments, where I say, what happened? Oh yeah, I thought it was experience.

55:52 Well, I just posed to someone. I said, what happens if we stop doing shows? People like, we need to stop doing shows. We do a show every week. That’s what we’ve done for nine years, but what if we didn’t?

56:02 Then what would we do as a brand? And everyone freaks out. I’m like, just meditate on it. I use that term. One of my mentors said, I’ll meditate on that, and he’s not a meditator, but he said that term, and it’s what you cover in the book, John.

56:14 It’s like, that means give your unconscious brain a few days to process it and get that, that, that, whatever, the left side of the frontal cortex out of the way, because it’s going to make everything logical. Let’s do a spreadsheet, pros and cons. But that’s the greatest bit of research ever done, showed that the creative, creative people could play. That was the only difference. Well, there was one other minor one, but that was the key.

56:38 Could they play? Could they just sit back and think, hmm, and be played, not in an anxious, got to solve this, got away. But you’re sorry, I said, well, what about this or what about that? Why did I think about rhinoceros? And all that playful quality, that’s what gets you off this path to the shed, and you must have done a lot of that at Cambridge, and that improv troupe is playing.

57:00 No, I never did improv. No, okay, so you were just coming up with ideas and creating pieces? I was writing. I was writing, and then latterly I was writing with Graham Chapman. We got together in my second year, but we would just play, and sometimes we’d just open up a book, and I would read words out, and I’d say cucumber, and he’d say, hmm, doesn’t do much for me, is it?

57:25 I said, I don’t think so, and then I said, all right, plummet. He said, oh. He said, I like plummet, and that’s a funny word, plummet, you know, and I said, yeah, yeah, I liked it. What would, what would plummet, and he said, a sheep, and I said, he said the sheep would plummet if it tried to fly. Why is the sheep trying to fly?

58:00 And he said, well, because otherwise he knows he’s going to finish up next to the mint sauce. And it was, it’s that random quality, which is where stuff comes through the unconscious, because no matter how good your logical mind is, you can’t be creative. You can make tiny improvements, but you never come up with anything new, anything that’s a bit of a breakthrough, anything that’s a new way of looking at things, that doesn’t come from the logical mind.

58:32 That comes up from the unconscious. And if it sounds a bit woolly, you read a book called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. Tortoise, slow, bye. and this guy, Guy Claxton, who wrote it, has spoken a lot about, or written a lot about, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, and everything they do is exactly what I’m talking about. Albert Einstein once said that when he was thinking, he could not put into words what it was that he was thinking.

59:03 If somebody said to you, what are you thinking right now? You would say, I don’t know. Yeah, Einstein admits that he didn’t know what his mental processes are. That’s pretty powerful evidence. And Edison, who used to has more patents than anyone in history.

59:20 He used to sit in an armchair because he thought he had more ideas when he was drowsy than when he was up and alert. And he’d have a handful of, what do you call them, little metal balls, okay? And he’d have a metal plate below, and he’d sit there in the very drowsy state, just dreaming and playing, and if he went asleep, his hand would relax, and the ball bearings would drop on the plate, make a bit of noise, and it would wake him up. He’d pick the ball bearings up and go back into the drowsy state again.

59:58 Now, if he had more patents than anyone else in history, it wasn’t because of his clear logical thinking. Right, right. This is neuroscience, really. Here, yes, it is. That’s neuroscience.

1:00:14 It is, and this is Donald Hebb, the Canadian who talked about what neurons fire together. They were together. It’s all about how to get off that wire, that path, into new areas, and you can only do that if you’re not under pressure. In other words, if you’re playing, because kids can play. It’s, of course, another reason kids can play is that the parents are minding the shop.

1:00:37 So what I’m saying is that you can go back to playing if you can create the childlike condition, which is no interruption. So you have to close the door or go and sit in the park, a long way away from anyone, and for a very specific period of time, like when I’m playing like a football referee blows the whistle. You start, he blows the whistle, you finish. For that period, maybe about an hour and a quarter, you just forget everything. And of course the first thing that happens is you sit down and say, right, let’s be creative.

1:01:12 All should have called Bob. Forgot to buy a present for the hamster. This kind of stuff, and you have to sit there meditating, just like you would, say, until the mind just gets a little bit quieter, and all those shouldn’t be doing this, should be doing that. Thoughts go away, and then you can start to play, because at the moment when an hour and a quarter is up, and your watch will watch go back to real life. But until then you’re away from real life, because you can’t play if you’re in the middle of it.

1:01:48 Right. And so that means you have to minimize distractions, and yet most of us these days walk around with that thing in our pocket that’s beeping and buzzing, and it’s constantly distracting us. That’s the business model. So most of us don’t even have a few seconds without being distracted, so why would we expect to be creative? Well, which was more creative, 2020 or 1969?

1:02:12 You tell me. 1969, when people, despite the nuclear threat, they were positive. They felt optimistic about the world, and people don’t know, people feel anxious and pessimistic. That doesn’t make people creative. It makes them sort of retire behind the bunkers, you know, and stick.

1:02:31 Hold on, I think of Trump supporters in particular. Hold on, desperately to ideas that they already have, and feel completely under attack if people start questioning the idea. What do you remember about 1969, John? What, take me back there. What was it like?

1:02:46 What did it feel like? Was it exciting? Was it daring? What was it? I was working hard, that’s all I remember, but I was working hard with these Python guys, and we were making each other laugh a lot.

1:02:57 But if you look at what happened in terms of musical groups, what happened in that short period, ’68, ’69, ’70, the number of famous bands of old men like me now going out and playing in front of their fans. How many of them formed during that period was just extraordinary. It was a burst of creativity, but I think it was because we felt optimistic about things. We thought the old fuddy-duddy, stuck-in-the-mud way of living was changing, and that creativity and improvement was coming anyway.

1:03:31 Right, now we don’t feel that. Right. We, yeah, right. We feel more fear and distracted and anxiety, which is the killer of creativity. You see, any kind of anxiety makes you tighten up.

1:03:44 The moment you tighten up, you get back on familiar paths to the shed. You don’t want to try anything else, because that’s the safe way. Right. You see, that makes a lot of sense. I think yesterday Monty Python turned 51, John.

1:04:02 Well, some of us I mean, that’s a long time. When you look back at that whole period of your life, what do you remember? What were the highs? What were the lows? Well, I remember at the beginning it was rather joyful, because it was as though someone had taken us into the country and opened up a gate to a field, and all these beautiful flowers, and somebody said, just go pick them.

1:04:25 And then as we pick the flowers, there were less and less, and it took a little more time, but then we were getting better at certain things, like packaging the show rather than and then I think what was crucial was there were two things. One, well, there were three things. One thing is that Graham Chapman became an alcoholic between the first and second series. It happened very fast, none of us saw it happening, and because alcoholics were a bit secretive, we didn’t realize.

1:04:52 At the beginning of the second series, and still things started to happen, and that was harder for me than the others, because I wrote with him, and there were times later on, when writing The Holy Grail, he couldn’t remember in the afternoon what we’d written in the morning. I mean, the alcoholism was very severe, and then he was wonderful. He beat it completely in order to play Brian in Life of Brian, and ’87 at Christmas he went cold turkey, and that was fantastic.

1:05:22 But I was fed up with working with someone who just wasn’t really present, and none of the other Pythons, so that was one reason. The other thing is I used to do an awful lot of arguing, my dear old Terry Jones, because I found it hard to work with Jones. I found it very easy to work with Idle and Palin, but I found it difficult to work with Terry Jones, because Terry always felt he was right, that whatever came up, he saw that he was really right, because he really felt so strongly that he was right.

1:05:56 You know, well, how you feel about things is not a measure of their validity. It’s just a measure of how you feel about them. I think nowadays people feel they feel intensely strong about something, and they must be right. It’s complete rubbish. But I used to find it difficult arguing with him, and after we’d made the last film, Meaning of Life, a lot of material, some material had gone in which I didn’t think was good enough, and other more exciting, interesting material had been left out because it had been outvoted, and I thought, well, I’d like to now make my own mistakes rather than making other people’s mistakes, or making mistakes with other people.

1:06:34 So that’s when I went off to do a physical wonder. Right, was that scary to go off on your own, or was it a welcome release to just be you and do your own thing? Well, I think there was a certain familiarity to it, because I’d been working on very small projects with this marvelous old man, Charlie Crichton, who was born in in 1910, so by the time we were working on this, you know, it was ’85-’86. And he and I worked together. We were very comfortable working together.

1:07:07 He did the cameras, I did the actors, and so there was a great feeling I wasn’t on my own, and I gradually got it together, and I was so impressed with Kevin and Jamie, and I always thought Michael was marvelous, so I was trying to get the parts right for them. Then we had a read-through, which was quite interesting, and the least successful part was mine, and everyone else was great, but Archie wasn’t right. Then we talked about it, and it was a great group.

1:07:38 They said, just make him more believable. I was pushing too hard to make him as funny as the others. Well, Kevin and Ken were the funny ones, and Jamie and I were much more the sort of emotional content of the film. So the moment I made Archie sort of more real and incorporated a little bit of my own stuff, like, you have any idea what it’s like, wander, to be English? When I started to put that stuff in, that it all works.

1:08:05 But I had a good group of people around me, and that’s what I’ve always done. I always work with a good group of people around me, because I think what we’re doing is very difficult, and if you listen to good people, they will head you off from the worst mistakes. I was going to ask you, I mean, A Fish Called Wanda, it’s got to be the movie that probably more people in the world know you for, and it’s this film that when I hear it mentioned, I get this special feeling inside me, even though I must have watched it when I was a teenager, and so maybe I didn’t appreciate it as much as older people.

1:08:35 But there was something really special about that movie. And I’m wondering, yes, I agree with you, it was timeless, wasn’t it? Yeah. And is it, I mean, you were talking earlier about how everything comes together, you know, that the crew, and then, I know you wrote and directed, and what made that so special was everyone on the same wavelength, or what do you think? Yes, yes, absolutely.

1:08:56 I mean, we had a very good cameraman, Alan Hume, who shot the Bond movies, and he was a perfect team player. We had a first assistant who was the only first assistant I ever worked with, Jonathan Benson, who was really good, because every 20 minutes he told everyone on the set what was happening, what was going to happen next, what we were hoping to get to that evening. So everyone always knew what was going on, and it’s incredible how that changes the atmosphere on the set, because most of the time people don’t know what’s happening, whether they’re going to be needed in two minutes or tomorrow.

1:09:34 So he was a great first assistant. And then Jamie was so surprised when she saw I was taking lines from everyone at the first read-through. Jonathan, the first assistant, was there, and he suddenly said, I think it would be better if, and I said, you’re right, and I just changed the thing. JB, a first assistant director, suggesting a line for a script, and if you have this atmosphere where everyone can contribute, everybody becomes more creative. Otherwise they put themselves in the box that you hand to them.

1:10:06 Right, and that all came out on the screen. It was a very happy, very happy occasion, and everybody was happy about it. Whereas the next time we got together, everybody had sort of personal difficulties. One person thought they had Lyme disease, and somebody else was having children problems, and Michael Palin was about to go off and go around the world for the first time, and nobody was quite focused, and so it wasn’t as good. It wasn’t a bad, bad movie, but it wasn’t anything like as good as one, and the trouble is it was presented as a sequel, so people thought I was trying to do the same sort of thing, when I was actually trying to make a movie that parents and children could watch.

1:10:46 Okay. And you wrote, directed, and starred in A Fish Called Wanda, right? Yes. I worked the plot out with this marvelous old guy, Charlie Crichton. I worked the plot out with him, and then I wrote it, and yes, I played, and I’d already known that I wanted Michael in it, and I already knew that I wanted Kevin in it, and I spent a lot of time, because I thought that Wanda was going to be English, and I couldn’t find anyone who was right.

1:11:12 And then my older daughter took me off to see Trading Places, right? And that was it. That was it. I just checked out, and everyone said she’s a delight on set, she’s a real team player, and I met her and we got on very well, and I think she said to me at the very beginning, she said, I’ve only done six weeks comedy in my life. He said, I need a bit of help, and I say, I’m there for you, so I sort of helped her a little bit with some of the rhythms, but she’s a very good, very good actress, and Kevin, of course, is a genius.

1:11:50 Yeah, Michael’s not bad for a man of his age. Yeah, that’s true. I can’t imagine it being anything else than an American woman. You know, that’s the perfect call. That’s right.

1:12:00 Yeah, and I’m writing one at the moment, which is a light comedy about cannibalism, and the title is Yummy, and I’m playing a new British newspaper proprietor, and I suddenly realized that his wife has to be American. I don’t know why, but I know it’s right. Okay, that’s that unconscious mind making those decisions. Yeah, that’s right. It just feels right.

1:12:24 How do you know when to be a writer and when to be a performer? And when you first started writing at Cambridge, how did you know that you could be both? And when you write something, how do you know not to take it for yourself and give it to someone else? I mean, that must be tricky. I think, in a funny kind of way, that when I’m writing I’m just a writer.

1:12:45 I remember, quite seriously, in A Fish Called Wanda, I remember writing this stuff with Archie hanging upside down. Yeah. There was a moment when I sort of thought, oh my god, that’s me. So I was seeing it out there as something that was making me funny, and I temporarily forgot, and I’d be hanging upside down. So I didn’t have any problem there.

1:13:08 It was as though there was a distinction in my mind. I did. I could just look at the writing, and the other thoughts didn’t come into my mind. I just pushed them away, but not consciously. Okay, but you enjoy performing?

1:13:22 I enjoyed performing that very much, because I was working with Palin and Jamie and Kevin, and if you’re working with people like that, it becomes playful, you see, because if you’re working with someone who’s not quite as good, you can sometimes worry a little bit about him or her, and then of course that’s not as good. But when you have people working with people with whom you have complete confidence, and who are very generous performers, then it’s really rather wonderful. You just play together, and things happen that you not planned at all, and when you look at them on the screen you just think it’s so simple, but it’s so fresh that it really works.

1:14:05 I’m going to watch it again tonight, John. You got me all excited, and I, when you mentioned the cinematographer, I remember that 180-degree shot where you’re hanging off, about whatever, the part on the Thames, and they go, that’s a great shot. Was that scary to be upside down? No, because I had two safety wires going from a body harness down my trouser legs and they went over into two grooves, and when Kevin Kline was talking to me, he put his hand over the grooves.

1:14:38 You see, so you couldn’t see those, but they were actually attached to a large metal apparatus at the back of the room. Okay, so you could probably act and not just be. I wanted two. I said, I want two wires, not just one. Yeah, that’s very smart.

1:14:53 Yeah, well, it was a gem. Just watching that now, I mean, I’m very pleased with that, and sometimes things come out right. You know, this came out. Life of Brian came up and just occasionally I thought, my autobiography. I was really pleased with that.

1:15:08 I didn’t know what it was going to be like, but it became a great pleasure to write, because as Michael Caine had told me, you start discovering parts of your life you’ve totally forgotten. Yeah, I think I heard you describe that conversation with Michael Caine, where I think he had told you he said it’s wonderful, because you get to revisit and re-remember all the wonderful things in your life. That’s right, that’s right, and it’s exactly what happens, because when you suddenly remember that, that then sparks off that memory, and then that one, and it’s like you could start coloring in the whole, the whole period that that was happening, and some of the stuff that happened during that period was terribly funny.

1:15:49 Chapter four is about the funniest thing I’ve ever read. Written. So do we have to get the book, or are you going to share with us what’s in there? It’s about when I was teaching at a school. Okay, okay, okay.

1:16:02 And so you have all this, there’s all this question about, can the teachers keep order or not? Okay. And so you’re writing in the screenplay now, and what, what else is on your plate, John, for the next one? Well, I’ve been asked by the Pythons to write a stage version of Life of Brian, because I’ve got plenty of ideas for that, but it’ll be hard to really get down to it till I know when a theater might open, and my daughter and I have been working on a stage version, a musical, of A Fish Called Wanda, and we’ve got about 10 songs now.

1:16:36 We’ve got a very good draft of the book, but again, until I know that it’s really going to take place, then I have to get together with Camilla, and we need to work with a producer who I absolutely adore, who’s got very, very good sensibilities, and then it’ll start to happen. And other than that, let me think, I think there is something else, but I can’t remember what it is, because it’s also theoretical at the moment. What I’m figuring out now is how can I earn a little bit of money, and it’s very difficult.

1:17:07 I’m going to start doing chats with fans, which I started to do with a company called Fanmeo, and I found it was extraordinarily pleasant, because I have very nice fans. I know that sounds like, but they’re all nice and funny and slightly quirky and interesting, and talking to them for short periods of time is remarkably rewarding. You feel energized at the end and not depleted. And now I’m going to do that with much longer, something like 10-minute chats, so I’m looking forward to doing that, because if I do that I can pay for the hotel rooms, and I have to be in hotel rooms, because for tax reasons I can’t go back to Britain until April 5th, so I’m planning my hotel costs day by day.

1:17:56 Well, yeah, these conversations with strangers. I mean, you know, we’re doing one right now, but they can be quite therapeutic. They can be quite fascinating and quite interesting, and you know, I think we’re seeing a really interesting, and it’s lovely when they come with questions. Sometimes they just want to tell me how wonderful I am, and I don’t object to that strongly. It can become repetitive, but the funniest one of all was a fellow, and he showed me this black leather jacket of his when he came online, and I told him how nice it looked, and then after we chatted about that for a time, I said to him, so do you have any questions or anything you want to tell me?

1:18:38 And he said not really, and I said, well, can I ask, why are we having this conversation? He said, I wanted you to be the first person to see my black new jacket. I didn’t quite know where to go. That’s kind of priceless in itself, to a certain extent, so very funny, and like now that you’re looking back at this life after 80-some years, John, what do you make of everything? I know you’re not a religious man.

1:19:12 I feel like you have are a spiritual man to a certain extent, but what do you think is the meaning of life? What do you think is the greater, the greater brain of this? In a funny kind of way, I’ve always been interested, but I’ve never been strong-minded enough to really study it, and in fact last night I started reading a book, and I thought, this is really what I want to be doing once I’ve earned enough money to buy a little place in the sun, which I can’t afford at the moment, because, you know, that was crippling, that divorce.

1:19:40 20 billion dollars. It’s a lot of money, particularly if you work for the BBC. Yes. 30 million. My favorite joke is, I do a lot of work for charity, most of it for the BBC.

1:19:53 But I was reading a book last night. What I, I’m I’m not religious, but I would say if somebody said, you believe in God? I would say, I don’t know what that means. I do know that there isn’t someone up there watching every transaction and making sure it works, you know? I mean, but I think there’s other things going on.

1:20:12 For example, I’ve been interested for 10 years at least in a group of people who used to meet at Esalen on the West Coast, with some very interesting discussions to help, and I now definitely believe that some people have an afterlife. I don’t know if everybody does, but it’s not a religious question. People immediately start thinking you’re talking about religion. No, it’s a scientific question. What’s the evidence for an afterlife?

1:20:42 And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s, it’s overwhelming. You know, have you ever listened to the audio tapes of Terence McKenna? He used to speak at Esalen back in the ’80s and ’90s. He’s now, he’s not passed, but he used to talk a lot about you know, what is it all about? And he also talks about psychedelics a lot, that would make him think more deeply about what it’s all about, but that came to mind when you mentioned Esalen.

1:21:08 Terence McKenna. Yeah, I don’t know that name, but I used to have people going there, like Fritz Perls and, okay, that marvelous man. I can’t think of his name. From normal, this is trouble as I get older. I notice it takes me a long time, longer time, to get to the oldest Huxley.

1:21:29 It’s a longer time to get to memory, but I get there in the end. Yeah, you get there in the end. That’s that’s the thing, but I do. I would love eventually to have the chance to do, I don’t know, three one-hour programs, six 30-minute programs, basically about all the psi phenomena that are going on, but with a particular focus on after death and the idea that our consciousness is not produced by the brain. Right, right, because that’s the key to it, and there are many things that have happened that cannot be explained if you think that consciousness is created by the brain.

1:22:10 Most people think, well, how else is it? Well, it’s maybe it’s more interesting than that. Yeah, I’ve been lucky to have a lot of, I don’t read the literature. That’s the trouble. Yeah.

1:22:19 You see, brown people don’t read the literature, and they dismiss it, because scientists like to be right, and they will say things like that’s not possible, and what they mean, as I said earlier, is we don’t have a theory to explain that. Yeah. I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of different people on the show and talk about ideas, and Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who lives in London here, talks about morphic resonance and collective consciousness, and of course the scientists thrash him, but it’s, it’s, I really appreciate the ideas he puts out there that you can consider.

1:22:49 I think he’s a great man. Yes, sir. I have Madame, and I wish I was in London more, because I would love to do something with it. I think he’s great. He’s wonderfully well-mannered and kind and polite and thoughtful and all the things that a lot of these people like Richard Dawkins really aren’t.

1:23:08 I mean, the Dawkins is my whale, no way, you know. And that’s the trouble about scientists. They’re so key to stick to this materialist reductionist view of the universe that they can’t, they really can’t, tolerate anything that might attack that, and yet it’s rather as though they haven’t heard of quantum physics. I mean, quantum physics says you can’t predict exactly which electron to do what. It’s all a question of percentage chance well, once you’ve said that you can’t predict it absolutely accurately, it is a question of percentages, then there’s all this is slightly indifferent, and that’s very interesting.

1:23:45 Yeah, they also don’t seem very happy, John. well they’re not. I mean, the best book I’ve read in the last few years, and I really recommend this, is by a guy called Iain McGilchrist. Extraordinary guy. He taught English at Oxford, and then he decided you shouldn’t try to explain poems, so he qualified as a doctor, and then when he’d done that, he qualified as a psychiatrist, and then he worked at the nearest, the neuroimage people at Johns Hopkins.

1:24:18 He’s most extraordinary, a man, great sense of humor. I love him. I’ve been on stage with him a few times. He wrote a book called The Master and His Emissary, which is really about the difference in quality between the left and right hemisphere. You see, they’re not symmetrical.

1:24:36 People think they’re symmetrical, actually they’re not. It looks as though one was taking them, and somebody’s done that to them, and he said, of course, the interaction between them is incredibly complicated. They begin to understand that, but the left hemisphere is the one that wants to be right and wants to control everything, and is not interested in individual cases, interested in generalities and theories. And the right hemisphere is very much more to do with a sense of value, what is important and what is not important.

1:25:10 And I think this is going back to what you said, what one of the reasons that so many of these very highly intellectual people are not very happy, is that they’re in that left hemisphere, and they don’t have much of a sense of meaning. You can’t get a sense of meaning from life if you’re just being logical about it. You have to feel something. Correct? Have you ever had any psychedelic experiences, or have you ever thought about that, whether it’s an ayahuasca experience or something that changes consciousness, and it allows you to see your own consciousness in a different way?

1:25:42 I once did a controlled experiment, by which I mean the person who helped me through it probably knew as much about LSD as anyone in America, and he and his wife took me through the experience. And what I came out realizing was how extraordinarily creative this thing was, because I had images of color and music and shapes and so forth, and if I could have photographed one of those, you know, or painted it, I could have been a great artist, but it was in there, and it was coming out of my mind. So that’s what I’ve, I had a period of about three or four minutes when I got a bit panicky, but they were there.

1:26:25 They don’t see this a million times. They just held my hand, and then afterwards they gave me a report of what I’d been saying during the time, and I think all I realized was it was part of my realization of the extraordinary power of the unconscious, and that we all underestimate it, because we all want to feel we’re more in control of our lives than we really are, and that we know what we’re doing, and we don’t really. We’re being pushed around by all sorts of unconscious forces, and you know what I mean.

1:26:52 All we have to do is try and keep the boat up right. Yeah, well, Professor David Nutt here at Imperial College is doing some great studies with psychedelics, and they use the fMRI brain scanners, and they can actually see what happens when you introduce, you know, some psilocybin into the bloodstream, and they’re having great progress with anxiety and depression and alcoholism and smoking-related but, and I’ve had an experience in Costa Rica where I drank ayahuasca, which is a, oh, it’s a, you know, it’s a thousand-year-old medicine that used to be used by the natives, and it kind of gives you an ego death, which it’s not always the most comfortable experience, but by doing so it allows you to look at your life in a way that the ego would never allow you to look at it, because it’s constantly protecting itself and filtering information.

1:27:36 So it can be uncomfortable, but it can also allow you to really see things that you might never see your whole life, or it might take you, you know, 30 years of psychotherapy. So it’s been interesting to do that. I Never want to go back, John, because it’s always a challenging evening, but it gives me a lot of insight into it. Was it scary? It was scary.

1:27:57 It was scary. And I felt like a couple times I wouldn’t come back, and But I always know when I would. Yeah, I, it’s, it, I always know that you drink the medicine and for three hours you’re going to be in a place that is uncontrollable, you’re going to have some very positive and very negative emotions. You’re going to be confronted with things you’ve been hiding from or running from most of your life. It’s usually about how you are not doing things right, or treating people right, or yeah, and it goes back to childhood traumas.

1:28:25 I was taken back there, but it allows you to process things, and when you come out three hours later, you’re basically back to normal, but now you have a whole lot of information that you have to now integrate into your life experience. It’s actually the six months after it’s quite challenging, because you have to make sense of these two realities. Your current reality. Yeah. This vision you saw.

1:28:46 So here you saw me on that. I’m going to try that. I will. I know. I maybe, maybe after this we could stay in touch, and you can tell me how to do it.

1:28:55 You say I had one experience once, which it was nothing to do with drugs. It was a breakfast. I was part of a Gurdjieff group. I was in San Francisco, and the guy who ran a Gurdjieff movement in San Francisco was Lord Pentland, who was an engineer, incidentally, first in engineering at Cambridge, and he sat opposite me and asked me a question, and I started talking, and suddenly something happened, and I know he gave me this experience, and I suddenly had this this odd feeling of time being coming at me in packets of things instead of as a continual stream, and I suddenly I just knew things weren’t quite the same, and I stayed, and then the person next to him asked him a question, and he turned to them and said, I’m sorry, I was preoccupied, what was your question again?

1:29:50 In other words, what he’d been focused on, me, not being able, and I couldn’t understand what had happened, and I went outside afterwards and just sat on a great big stone and sort of held my head and filled with huge sadness at the fact that I did everything in order to impress other people. Yeah, almost nothing was really coming from me. It was all about creating a favor, and I never forgot that, and I see it now to this day, but I can watch it. Yeah, without feeling bad about it, but at the time it felt, yes, you felt so empty, of course, because you’re not there.

1:30:33 Yeah, but the idea that we’re run by all these forces, well, we’re desperately trying to pretend we’re in control. It’s hilarious. I mean, it’s Trump right at the moment, isn’t it? The whole man’s out of his head, and he’s still desperately trying to sort of keep everything under control with his left hemisphere. Yeah, exactly.

1:30:49 It’s, it’s right. It’s, you know, it’s an example of what we all do to different extents with our own self. But imagine if you hadn’t had that realization, how the next 10 years of your life might have been lived in a way that continued to make you unhappy. And now you know it’s there. You can observe yourself and try to make it still something.

1:31:06 I haven’t sold. I mean, I have to figure out now, at 81, how much longer do I have? Well, it’s not 40 years. So I think to myself, am I doing things out of the desire to still be irrelevant, to do, to still be in people’s minds? Is this what I like to do, or do I really need to retire a little bit from the world when I’ve got a bit of money and just doing a lot more thinking?

1:31:32 I feel in the end I always want to use, if I learn something like I’ve learned from you today, that I want to incorporate, and then hand it on to other people. It’s a good question to always ask yourself, and I don’t know if you ever get the answer. You know, am I doing this for my ego, or am I doing this because I enjoy it? Um, I had a guy named Graham Hancock that’s been in here, who’s written many books about civilizations, and who also partakes in some psychedelic ceremonies, and he said, Brian, I know it’s important for me to check my ego, but he said the ego gets the book done.

1:32:04 And so it’s the dance, you know? That’s right, that’s right. It’s got its uses, but in the case of someone like Trump, then that’s all his life is about, is trying to make his ego feel a bit better in the next 20 seconds. You know, everything he does is that’s awful. I mean, I can feel my ego.

1:32:26 I can feel, for example, sometimes, feel my envy, but I, that’s good, because if I’m aware of the envy, then it’s not going to be running me. Yeah. Yeah, people who are not aware that they’re envious are much nastier, because they don’t think that’s why they’re having such negative thoughts about someone, you know? So if you can be aware of your feelings, it doesn’t mean you have to. There was a, there was a guy called Maurice Nicoll, who was one of the pupils of Gurdjieff, and he said, in a beautiful series of books he wrote, he said, once you have no control over your thoughts, but you have control over the amount of energy you give each thought, and that’s about the best we can do.

1:33:09 I think. Yeah. When I meditate, I’m allowed to be aware of my thoughts, and then when I see them, on a good day, I can check them and stop them before they take control over me. So if I’m angry, I can be like, why are you angry? Okay.

1:33:22 And then I can usually break it down to not a very good reason and not act on It, you’ve got to excuse me, my throat’s sticking. You got it. You’ve got to catch it early Yes, because the longer it’s with you, the more power it has over you. Yeah, well, I foresee a six-part John Cleese Netflix series in the future. Well, you will go down, it’s almost the Michael Palin interviews of the minds, and you’ll, you’ll talk to someone about psychedelics, someone about near-death experiences, someone about all these things, and that sounds like a blockbuster, John.

1:33:54 John, well, it just, I just wanted people to realize it’s all much more interesting than people think. I mean, there is an experiment by which people sit in front of a monitor, and they are shown pictures, and the pictures are of all sorts of different kinds, but there are some nasty ones, like operations and accidents, and what Dean Radin has discovered is that a split second before they see the nasty ones, they register anxiety on those little pads that you use for lie detection, third of a second before they see the picture. They don’t have that if it’s not a nasty picture, inexplicable, that is inexplicable.

1:34:47 And there’s so many of those things. I’ve had the pictures are randomly generated, right? Right. I mean, I’ve had people on the show with near-death experiences, and the things they tell me, John, will blow your mind, and it’s all quite consistent, and they tell me exactly what happened, and it’s fascinating to hear people, kind of, they have very similar experiences, even though they all were in different operating rooms and different places. Um, it’s hard not to pay attention, and it’s, but again, it needs someone to be able to go into it and explain it to people, because all of a sudden I think I can do that, because I can think I can put the ideas forward without being too proselytizing, just saying I think this is interesting.

1:35:30 I can’t explain this. All we can actually do some of these experiments. You see what I mean? Do them and film them. See are these people getting the anxiety a third of a second before they see the image or not?

1:35:42 Because once you’ve admitted that, then you’ve got to open up science, but scientists would reject all this stuff, because they say the whole body of science would collapse. No, it would just have a new dimension to it, and would make a lot of it much more interesting. We could figure out how some things worked. I mean, I would love to understand the placebo effect. Yeah, yeah.

1:36:07 I mean, when we understand consciousness, if we ever can, it’s going to be a game changer, but maybe some people have to die, like Max Planck said to Dick, to get there. Well, the extraordinary thing is that they, it, you see, they can’t explain it. Yeah, so they say it’s an accidental byproduct, and I want to go, the one thing we know is that at this moment I am aware that I’m alive and that I’m in my room. That’s my consciousness now. How can you say it’s a byproduct?

1:36:43 It’s the starting point. Yes, I was thinking this last night, and I was thinking of really Descartes. Yeah, yeah. I think, therefore I am. Yeah, the first thing you start with is a moment of consciousness.

1:36:57 But they will say no, consciousness really doesn’t matter, and it’s because they can’t explain it again. Some of these things are so profoundly funny. It’s good to have a comedian tell me this stuff. Uh, John, just a couple final questions about you. If I were to ask you what was the best day of your life and the worst day of your life, what’s the first things that come to mind?

1:37:28 The day when I was 18, and I just finished playing in a cricket match, and the professional cricketer who was employed by my school came up to me and said, John, you could be a great bowler. I never had a high like that. That was the best. That was the best, better than the world premiere of Life of Brian. Well, there were very good moments.

1:38:06 I think there was a moment watching rushes in Life of Brian with Michael Palin with the chips up his nose, and I thought this is the funniest thing I’ve ever done, and then I realized I wasn’t even in the seat, but I had written it. You know, when you just explained how you went from plumbing to sheep to flying, I all of a sudden Monty Python just made sense to me when you went through that process. So you know, I remember writing a sketch once about a man with three butter.

1:38:40 I don’t know where that came from. That’s just, and you know, sometimes I think that the absolutely the funniest things, the things that just make you laugh out of control, are the silliest, most meaningless ones. I think you’re right on that. Fish, the fish slapping dance. Another one.

1:39:20 What was the worst day of your life, John? Uh, it was when I found that my second wife was planning to take my daughter to America. Wow, how did you deal with that? I didn’t kill myself. Do you, do you learn a very good way of dealing with things?

1:39:54 Is not killing yourself. It is. It’s not a small thing. Sometimes it really is. Did you, what did you learn from that whole experience?

1:40:06 A little bit. Uh, I think I always knew it would take a very long time before I got back to the same relationship with my daughter. And I’m very, I’m very happy to say now that it’s pretty marvelous. Wow, so special, isn’t it, having those relationships? I have, I have young boys, three and four years old, and, Jesus, I, they break my heart, you know?

1:40:30 I just, they’ve got so much control over my heart. It’s almost dangerous, John. You know, it is. The children are a danger. They’re a terrible danger.

1:40:39 You get very attached to them. My dad said you get attached to them, and then they leave you, because he left his mum to go to the Far East, 1919, and she died while he was in the fairies. Oh, wow. Yeah, so any time you commit yourself to someone, you, you God, I just remember something. I was working with John Lithgow on Third Rock from the Sun, and he came to breakfast on a Sunday with me, and he just heard that his wife was pregnant, and he said to me, and I never thought of it.

1:41:11 He said, isn’t it strange? But the moment there’s a child, maybe in your life, there’s a potentiality for tragedy that was never there before. Yeah, it’s so right. I honestly, John, I spent most of my life, not being attached to other humans, so they couldn’t hurt me, and I finally, and my, at 45 I had children, probably because of that reason, John, and now it’s, I, I feel the same way. It’s this potential source of so much darkness and tragedy, and yet at the same time it’s the greatest source of love and light in my life, and so it’s almost like a gamble you have to take, right, to live life to its fullest, and the complete pests, too, cost a fortune.

1:41:55 Correct. You worry yourself sicker. You never stop worrying. Doesn’t matter how old they are, you never stop worrying, and then they grow up like their mothers, but you wouldn’t take it back, would you? No, no, of course you would.

1:42:09 Um, John, what scares you? I take one of my wife’s back, but Okay, are you gonna get married again or not? Oh, I am married. Oh, yeah, okay, good. All right, yeah, I’m married to someone, and I’ve had the age of 69, I met the love of my life.

1:42:27 Oh, fantastic, and totally in love with this excellent, you both. I think we both accept each other’s madness with good grace. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a lovely experience really to love your wife and to like her, you know. It’s a lovely experience, and I think so many people don’t have it. Yeah, I think you’re right.

1:42:55 Just a few final questions, John. What scares you? I think the world’s a very dangerous place. In the world, so many authoritarians, so much nonsense being taught. Internet, which seems to have more negative effects.

1:43:16 In fact, I’m beginning to think computer stuff, I mean, there’s such a panic now about hacking. Used not to exist. So I find the world very frightening, in the moon. Okay, I don’t think I find anything else. I, I’m frightened of dying soon, but not frightened of dying, if you see what I mean.

1:43:32 Yes, that does make sense. What would we be surprised to learn about John Cleese, something that just is not very clean-like? That you didn’t do that. I think cats are something to do with the meaning of life. You want to expand on that a little?

1:43:51 Oh, I think cats are ineffable. You can, you cannot explain their extraordinary importance in the in the whole organization of the universe. I think you might be on to something there. I was having a, I was having a conversation with a woman named Candace Owens. She’s a big figure in America, and she has a cat, and she said, Brian, I, we, we think of them as just house pets.

1:44:15 They’re just so normal, but they’re these are fascinating animals, with 20, 30, or 40 different sounds that come out of them. The meow the meow is for humans, right? They’re mimicking humans. They don’t use it with each other. They’re fascinating.

1:44:29 I don’t know. I mean, we, you, the Burmese always sounds that they’re complaining. They go, whereas the Maine Coons always sound cheerful. They go, I’ve studied it. My wife actually understands feline.

1:44:47 She can’t speak it because her mouth’s not right, but she can understand it, and we’ve secretly tape-recorded conversations that our cats have when we’re out of the flat, and she’s in the process of translating them into English. So this is my next book, or our next. I love it. They make strange noises when we’re not around. Right, right.

1:45:07 Howls and weird things. Um, couple final questions. John, if you were to pick up the phone, a magic phone, and call up the 20-year-old John Cleese and give that young man some advice. This is after The cricketer noticed you, I guess. Um, what would you tell them based on everything you know now?

1:45:24 What would you tell 20-year-old John, what was he like? I would tell him that Powerful advice. Seneca just came to mind. Oh yeah, yeah, I just, you know, Seneca wrote what thousands of years ago, and yet he seems to have these pearls of Stoic wisdom that are timeless, you know, well, I love what he says about time. It’s the most important quality, and it’s the thing we give away most easily.

1:46:15 So true, so true. For example, I spent a lot of my day when I could be reading philosophy doing interviews. Oh, thank you for that, John. On that note, I guess I better wrap this up. John, thank you for this book.

1:46:35 I really appreciate it. It’s Creativity. It’s a great, great read. It’s short, it’s fun, and it could really change your life. I think it could change your work.

1:46:45 It’ll give people thoughts and opportunities, and things to do that otherwise they wouldn’t have considered, and it can be read in an hour. An hour, an hour. That’s a pretty good promise right there. So I love it. I love this way to tap into creativity.

1:47:06 I think it’s super powerful, and yeah, I, I really appreciate the thoughts, the whole ideas of the unconscious mind, and I love tapping into that stuff. So thank you for writing this book and getting people these ideas, so they can get more creative. I appreciate it. Yeah, I think it’s useful. I think it’s useful.

1:47:23 Excellent. And look, in the future, if you need to tap into anybody I know as far as near-death experiences or psychedelic experiences, we’ll exchange details after this is over, and if I can help, let me know. Um, and I’m a big fan of Rupert Sheldrake. He came to my house for Thanksgiving a couple years ago, and he’s a gem. So I look forward to seeing the gym.

1:47:42 Yeah. Okay. Uh, when we finish, should we finish? I’ll wrap it up right now, and then we’ll be done. So thank you, John.

1:47:48 To everybody watching, pick up Creativity, and look forward to hopefully some musicals coming soon. And John, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. What is that on his arm? It’s horrible.

1:48:00 It’s old, isn’t it? Hmm, that’s great. All right, there we go. We’re out. Thanks so much, London Real.

1:48:06 We’ll see you next week. Bye.