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I got a DNA test done just

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

to check, you know,

and it was one of these 23

and me ancestry.com things, you know, these things that

white people tend to do when they want

to feel more interesting.

And it's also a very good way to find out

where your grandfather went on his gap year.

And

I got it done mostly because I was curious, you know,

because Sri Lanka we're quite an isolated little island,

but we have had quite a few

visitors over the years.

And not just Europeans, not everything is about you.

We've had the Chinese, we've had the Persians,

we've had the Indians a few too many times,

and Sri Lanka in the age of conquest was much like

Britney Spears in the nineties

where everyone liked us a bit too much for our own good.

And Sri Lanka now is also much like

Britney Spears now

in that we are not in the news quite as often,

but when we are, it is rarely for a good reason.

And so I got this thing done

and the results were quite terribly boring.

It turns out that I am

99.95% Sri Lankan.

So wondered what a pure Sri looks like. This is, this is it.

I guess apparently the remaining 0.05%

is Congolese,

and I'm not sure how that got there.

I am not entirely sure which, which part of me that is,

but it is certainly not where I might prefer it to be.

I apologize. I'm not, I'm not

usually a dick joke kind of guy.

But you, you do have to whip one out every now

and again, I like

to consider myself a relatively, I,

I'd say progressive person,

but sometimes the vocabulary of being

as such frustrates me somewhat, especially as it pertains

to groups that I am a part of.

I say there used to be this term

for poorer countries like Sri Lanka,

they're called third world countries.

And it always felt a bit mean, but I never minded it

because it also felt honest about how the rest

of the world feels about us.

Whereas now there seems to be some attempt to replace it

with a nicer sounding term.

You might have heard the the global south

because they want to make it sound like it's the

geography that fucked us.

What I don't like about it is

that it doesn't really make much sense.

Say India, for example, is in the Northern Hemisphere,

but is a part of the global south, whereas

Australia is about as far south as you can go

and is not a part of the global south.

So to remedy this inconsistency, I propose

an alternative classification method,

non eurovision countries

and, and Eurovision countries.

So as to say, countries with dignity

and

those with enough money to no longer need it.

Congratulations. Done very well for yourselves.

And the other one I don't like very much

is in many ways the big one.

It's the, it is the phrase people of color

where I understand it's it's utility to say,

describe the shared experience

of everyone in the world that isn't white.

I get that, but what rubs me the wrong way about it.

It's just the phrasing. People of color seems to suggest

that there are people

and then there's us,

and technically there are more

of us,

so maybe we should be people.

And y'all can be people without color

or so it doesn't feel very nice.

It's a big condescending,

of course.

I, I I would not truly wish that upon you.

I I would like to live in a world

where we're all just people, white people too.

Hey, listen, white people are people too.

Someone had to say, I would die on this here.

Far too many of you have begun paying money to see me.

For some reason, I did some shows back home in

Sri Lanka earlier last year,

and they went all right, I did not get arrested.

And that was the main goal. And

after one of them, this man came up to me

and he was being very sweet.

He said, oh, it's so nice of you to come back home

to Sri Lanka and do, do shows here

and give back to your country in this way.

And I had to reassure him

that I was very much being paid to be there.

And it also made me think about what he said of giving back

to my country where that seems to imply

that my country has given something to me to begin with.

I thought about what, what growing up in Sri Lanka really

has given me as a person.

And really the strongest,

most prominent thing it has given me is

an intense will to leave and never come back.

And that's worked out all right.

But also I, I don't wanna shit talk my

own home country that much.

I think that's more of a me problem than a Sri Lanka

problem, if that makes sense.

I think me, the person

that I am wherever I I was born would've wanted

to leave that place.

You know, if I were to separate people in the world,

into two separate groups, always a great idea.

I would, I would separate them

into people that leave and people that stay.

And I am of course very biased in this opinion,

but I do believe that people that leave

are objectively better in almost every way.

If you were here and you like my stuff, you,

you're very likely a person that left.

And I want you to know That you are right to do so.

And if you are a person that stayed

that somehow ended up here very likely

because you're much cooler friend invited you along,

I want you to know that it's not all bad being you,

you know, because even though,

even though we are so much more interesting than you,

we all are generally far happier than we will ever be.

So it balances out, you know,

and when I say leave, I do mean like a big leave.

I, I, I think it grow as a person in a very specific way

to be out in the world by yourself outside of the context

that you grew up with.

And in a way

that doesn't necessarily happen when you say move from the

small town in your country to the big city in your country

or you move to the country next door.

Even like I was around a group of people in London,

I didn't know that well, and there was a woman from Italy

there who had just recently moved from Rome to London

and she was saying about like, yeah, it's really,

it's really hard to be an immigrant to the uk.

And then she found my eyes in the circle

and said, like us,

I said, listen Ben, now I'm sorry

but have you moved from one Eurovision country

to another Eurovision you are

technically an immigrant and perfectly within your rights

to refer to yourself as such.

But please understand there is no us

if you ever use the machine to go

through passport control at the airport.

No us unless you know

a passport control officer by name, face and finger know us.

People say this thing, right, that

everyone has a moment growing up when you realize

that your parents are just people too.

I think that's very true. I think

what people don't say quite enough is

that if you are extra lucky, you might have a second moment

where you realize that your parents

are particularly shitty people.

And I feel that way about mine

and when I, when I express this sentiment to certain people,

usually people that are closer to their families,

they'll say, they'll be get upset at me.

They'll say like, oh, how could you say that

they're your parents, they made you who you are.

And that is my problem. Exactly.

I have spent the bulk

of my adult life undoing their fine work

and I would get into it with them a lot and

and their main defense for their behavior was that they,

that they tried their best.

Which I understand, you know, sometimes you try your best

and you fall short and that happens, that's life.

But I do feel that with certain things,

if you try your best

and you still fuck up, you are a fuck up.

No, it's fine. It's

anything where lives are on the line,

especially you parenting definitely lives are on the line At

any profession where lives are on the line,

surgeons don't get to try their best submarine.

Designers, pilots are a very easy example.

Pilots that tried their best fly for R now

and those planes are no one's first choice,

not yours and not theirs.

And people will all often use all sorts of excuses

to justify staying in a bad family situation.

Usually along the lines of logic, that family's family,

no matter what my favorite out of all of them is this,

Fraser blood is thicker than water and it is true.

Blood is thicker than water, but so is shit.

You wouldn't catch me fucking my plumber anytime soon.

So I haven't spoken to either of my parents in

a little more than two years now

and someone just, oh, please don't, you know.

'cause when I tell people this in life,

they'll often react like I just told them a sad thing.

And that is only because y'all do not know my parents.

And to be fair, I did not do it in the best way necessarily.

I just sort of slowly faded out of the i

I ghosted my parents is what I'm trying to say.

And I think

because of that though, both my dad especially act like

weird exes that haven't quite gotten the message

where it used to be that every three,

four months I'd get a message from my dad at 4:00 AM on a

Saturday, just hi,

45 minutes later thinking about you.

And so I would try to match his energy

and replied, what are you wearing?

And that stopped the message is that you can use that.

That's for all of this.

I've been doing this now for almost 10 years

and it's only been in the last two years

or so that people have begun

willingly paying to see me.

Prior to that it was mostly trickery

and coercion and it's been very nice.

It's been nice that people come see, see the show.

And it's also been fun to see who comes, you know,

and it's sort of like, look at the crowd.

You're like, oh, I talk about this

or these people or this sort of thing.

And I'm mostly happy.

There are a few demographics that do wor worry me somewhat.

And this is in two parts.

The second is a more written joke

and the first is just, there's something I need

to get off my chest that for whatever reason,

there seemed to be a very prominent

contingent of yoga instructors

that connect with my work.

And

I'm not sure what you think it is.

I do exactly. I I don't know.

I've never spoken about yoga.

I don't know what I've done to incur the

wrath of your people.

I'm aware, but I, what I look like.

But even so, you know, even so, no,

it does not justify this behavior at any given show.

There will be more yoga instructors

than there are Sri Lankans.

And that is odd. It's

odd and it keeps me up.

Other thing I've noticed, there's very few, I say

relatively, at least most of the immigrants that come

and see me is a lot of immigrants that come and see me.

Most of y'all are not to be mean to the latter group,

but real immigrants, you know, you got yourselves here.

There's very few, let's say children of immigrants.

You came over with your parents

and dated all the work for you.

And I think most of the reasons,

'cause I say shit like that, but I get it.

You know, like if you, if you are say like a Sri Laan in my

ca like grew up out here,

I get why I'd be a weird thing for,

'cause I sort of like have the same worldview as you,

but there's an anger behind my eyes

that reminds you of your dad.

And something in my words that suggests that

I do not respect your struggle.

And you're right, I do not. And I don't think I should.

It's also funny for me that when I meet,

say like Sri Lai grew out here generally,

even South Asians, I grew up out here.

You all are often far more conservative

than we are back home.

And the only thing I can think of as a reason for that is

that say your parents moved over here in the seventies

or the eighties, they kept that version of the culture,

you know, and, and raised you with that.

Like I have a friend out here in, not Sri Lankan, he's,

he's a, grew up in London

but in very tight knit Indian Rahi community.

And he is my age 30 years old and,

and celibate by mostly his own choice.

And I was speaking to him like,

well this is a very intense decision you're

making about your life.

Goes, I don't you want to live

with a little bit more freedom?

And he said, no, you know, I want to be true to my culture

and do things the way my family would've done

them back home.

And his family is from Mumbai

and that is a city that makes London look

small and provincial.

And I tried to explain to him, if you,

if you grew up in Mumbai, you would've likely lost your

virgin at 16 to your A level French teacher

while her husband washed or something.

And he said, that is an awfully specific example.

And I said, this ain't about me. I'm just a

very creative person.

Don't, don't read too much into the stories

I got called a packy in public recently.

It was strange. It was strange.

'cause I know intellectually that this is a bad word,

but I did not grow up here.

So it doesn't really like, have that emotional power

to upset me necessarily.

I mean, how I'm Sri Lankan.

I, I look down on Pakistani people too, you know, as well.

Almost as much as I do Indians almost.

And Indians, I know you are in the room

because I'd laugh about the Pakistani bit was just a little

bit too much, you know, racist pieces of shit.

I swear I'm happy you're here.

There's Indian, you are, you are the most methodically

racist people I've met in my entire life.

It's amazing. I'm, I'm impressed.

It is only from the mouth of an Indian person.

I've heard the words. I can't be Islamophobic.

I've read the Quran, which is very counterintuitive to me.

'cause usually if someone is racist you can

at least use ignorance as an explanation as

to why they might feel that way.

Whereas this person went

and did homework to be more

effectively racist.

The only thing worse than being a bigot is being a

bigot and a nerd.

Isn't it embarrassing

but finding that a lot of the white guys I hang out with

are having a little bit of trouble adjusting

to changes in society.

One guy, and many say the same thing

with some version of the words.

It's really hard to be a white guy right now.

And whenever I hear these words, I always reply,

please do go on

some version of like, oh yeah, you know, I feel like,

I feel like there's people out there that,

that don't like me just for the demographic

that I was born into.

And sometimes, sometimes I even feel like I miss out on

opportunities

because of it.

And I'm listening like, damn man, I cannot imagine

what that must be like for you.

No, but there, there is a very specific demographic

of white guy that I have a true empathy for.

It is if you are a young-ish, let's say under 40

liberal white guy,

'cause that's a, I don't know, uniquely difficult position

because you are politically inclined to hate yourself.

And you were born just in time

to miss the glory days of your people.

You all were doing so well for 500 years.

And right before you pop out, everyone hates you

and you can't even be mad about it.

You need to take it on the chin. It is rough.

You were invited to the house parties just in time

for the neighbors to call the police.

One of my closest friends in the UK is a, is a white man,

a white man if you will.

And he's such a lovely, wonderful person.

He's a very empathetic sort of guy.

He will very much walk around carrying the shame

of his race.

He'll, he'll introduce himself like, hi, I'm Joe, I'm a part

of the problem, nice to meet you.

And I, I was complaining to him,

he'll be upset like get sad about stuff

that isn't even his phone.

You know, I was complaining to him about visa stuff one time

and he, he got very upset on my behalf

and he was like, oh, I'm so sorry

that you have to deal with all that man.

And I said, Joe, relax.

You, you are from Essex.

If the British government could have found a way

to deport you and your people,

they most definitely would have.

Unfortunately applying

for visas is still quite a large part of my life.

It's a lot of what I think about. I need a visa to be here.

If I'm living in any country

and if I even visit a country, almost every country I visit,

I need to apply for a visa

because you can look this up,

Sri Lanka's passport is in the top 10 worst passports in the

world, especially Europe.

It's a little bit an extra annoying.

You show all, all these documents usually at the very least

your incoming flight, your return flight,

your accommodation while you were there,

six months bank statements, a letter from your employer.

All this stuff where you're basically trying to prove

to this other country that you're not going

to run away when you show up.

And I was more okay with it when I was younger, I think.

'cause I don't know, I was young, I hadn't done much in the

world and quite frankly, I would've

very gladly run away in most countries that led me into,

but as I get older, it all feels a, a little demeaning.

You know, where I was applying for a visa

to Austria recently

and I was getting all of my documents together

and I had the thought of, you know,

Austria wishes

that I would run away in their irrelevant as country.

I would be their biggest cultural export in two years.

Thomas, who else do they have?

The last guy was the guy that played the Terminator.

And before

that it was, was the Terminator.

It was the real, it was a T 6 million number one.

I do this,

but I do also have a,

a normal job, a day job.

I, I work as a,

a programmer for a tech company.

'cause what else am I gonna do?

And I, I've, I've generally made peace with

that part of my life.

You know, it's, it's keeps my income more stable.

It is and has always been the source of my visa.

And I don't mind the day-to-day work.

What, but sometimes I say when,

when someone ask like, oh, the company you work

for, what do they do?

The only honest answer I can really ever give is

that it doesn't matter.

I mean, of course not to me,

but more strikingly not to anyone.

And it is this violent meaninglessness that has begun

to weigh on me as I get older.

And the best way I can put it, like working

for a tech company is, is that I say, you

say you when you were a kid or you talk to a kid now

and you ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I cannot fathom that any child ever looked up

and said, when I grow up, I want to be

a senior product manager for a cloud-based

AI driven sex toy delivery platform.

It's like Uber, but for d it's like, fuck shut up.

And they're all, they're all like this.

And more children

would rather become a firefighter than

work for a tech company.

And that is because children are smart

and they know at some level, even if not practically

spiritually at least, it is sometimes better

to run into a burning building.

Then to hear that slack notification one,

the the program

and thing wasn't always plan a,

my first attempt at successfully getting outta Sri Lanka

was, I, I went to medical school.

I I finished medical school even mostly

'cause I didn't have another choice.

I never practiced as a doctor though,

thankfully for the public.

I knew halfway through

that I was far too selfish for that profession.

And since I've found my way to show business

where my client belong.

But, but all my oldest

and closest friends are from that part of my life.

And they're all working doctors

and have been for the last decade.

It's been interesting

'cause we've all, you know, been working the same amount

of time and they have always worked

so much harder than I have.

And for the majority of our careers been paid so much less.

And it's just felt a bit fucked, you know, just, just

because by some trick of capitalism,

my meaningless tech company creates more value

for shareholders than a hospital might.

Now I feel two ways about capitalism in general.

On one hand I think it's, as it exists now,

is definitely hurting far more people than it's

likely ever helped.

But at the same time,

listen, I'm trying to get rich, alright.

And it is finally beginning to seem

like I just might pull it off.

So I need capitalism for like five more years. All right?

And then we can do the revolution.

We can use my palace as a headquarters.

But, but I need my palace.

And by palace I mean like a nice two bedroom.

You know,

I don't think I'm asking for a lot.

Me and that gang. We, we've lived quite far apart,

but in the same country since we've been in the uk

and every year, at least once a year,

we will try all get together

and the six of us go on a, a big trip.

And we went on one sort of late summer last year

and it felt like a milestone for all of us.

It it was a trip that made us all feel like, oh,

we're slowly moving up in life

because it was the first trip that we had gone on as a group

or even individually where the,

where the holiday itself was less comfortable

than our normal lives.

And that is some rich people shit.

Because, because when you don't have money, you,

you save up whatever money you do have so

that you can go somewhere kind of nice

and pretend to have money for three to five days.

And then for some reason when you have some money,

you somehow spend even more money

to often go out into nature

and recreate the lives

that your grandparents worked so hard to escape.

I've always take talked such a great deal

of shit about people that like doing all this nature

stuff, you know?

But this, this time me and a gang, we went to Iceland

and we did a bunch of nature stuff

and it was quite delightful.

It was, I things came out

of my mouth in Iceland.

I never thought I would say I looked out a window at a big

rock and I was like, fuck him.

That, that's a good rock, right?

I've never been, I've never been

geologically aroused before.

I'm saving this image for later.

I think about that rock every day.

It's quite an eventful summer. It is.

A little while

before that I went to this, have you all heard

of this American hippie sort of festival Burning Man?

I went something very much like that.

It wasn't Burning Man itself, it was in Spain.

So I spent seven days camping in the Spanish desert.

And it was fun.

I don't think it was really my scene though, you know, just

to give you an idea of the, the demographics, right?

I'm just going to put a statistic out there for you.

Let's just say there were

exponentially more dreadlocks

than there were black people, all right?

You do with that information, what you will, no judgment,

a little bit of judgment, mostly no judgment.

You do what your body, what you will.

But you know, they were, they were

perfectly nice people.

I don't, I just don't know if they were my people, you know?

And so, and like many festivals, of course there were,

there were copious amounts of drugs being taken

by myself included.

But people there didn't take drugs the way I was used

to taking, like say if I'm going out with my friends

and we're taking some stuff, we'll find a dark corner

outside the venue and take our stuff

and get on with that night.

Whereas here, they like to do what

I remember them referring to as an intention circle.

I see some of you're familiar

and for the rest of you, if you have not had the privilege

of being exposed to such a geometric formation

before, please allow me to assure you

that it is indeed just as stupid as it sounds.

So what an intention circle is, right?

Is that okay to give you a lay of the land?

The way it's set up is, so it's in the desert, so there,

there is a lot of dirt as far as that.

I can see dirt, but that's fine. It's a desert.

That's what they do. They have dirt,

but there's a big, there's a festival set up

around this big patch of dirt in the middle,

but they don't call it a patch of dirt,

they call it the player.

And around the perimeter of the patch of dirt,

there are camps,

but they don't call them camps, they call them barrios.

And I'm always

somewhat suspicious when any group of people begins

to develop their own lingo, their own little language,

because that is cult adjacent behavior.

And I was not trying to become the star of midsummer

to Desert Storm.

So I was keeping my eyes peeled.

And so on the first night

before we all went out for the evening, everyone in the,

in the camp, in the, in the barrio got

got together in the common area, got in a circle,

and everyone got out the stuff

that they were taking for that evening.

And so the thing of it was that

before you take your stuff, you tell, you go one by one

and you tell the rest of the group

what your intentions for the evening are.

And I swear, right?

I I have never in my life heard

adults sounds so sincere,

but be so completely full of shit.

I, the first person went

and said something like, oh, I just want to, I just want

to connect more with all of you and with the PLI

and to feel the warmth

of the stars and the stars aren't warm.

That is, if anything, their main appeal.

And then the next person went

and said something like, oh, I I just want

to feel more alive than I ever have before.

And then, so I went like this one by one

and eventually it, it got to me

and I made some shit up.

So I wanted to take my drugs and get on with my evening.

But 'cause I knew, you know, I I,

I couldn't have been honest about

what my real intentions for the evening were.

'cause it wouldn't have gone well with my, you know,

to be hippie friends.

Because if I was being honest,

I would've said something along the lines of like, Hey,

listen guys, I I've been working a lot and I'm tired.

And quite frankly, I'm just trying to get high right now.

I feel, feel more alive. No, no, thank you.

I I would like to forget

that I was ever alive at all.

That's where I,

one of the most interesting people,

I met him my whole life is the, the mother of an ex of mine.

I remember when we first met Ex at the time, introduced us

and then went to the other room

and then her mom, she looked me up and down

and the first thing she asked was, were you hit as a child?

And I was like, strong start. All right, cool.

I just nodded. And she followed up with hit

or hit hit and I said, hit hit.

And she looked me up and down again

and said, I thought so and walked away.

And I do not have closure to this day,

but I immediately understood what she meant, you know,

and also before I go into it, I don't think any

of this is anyway, anyone should treat a kid ever.

But at least the normal hit, you know,

the the hit the wrong hit when it happened to me,

it didn't fuck with me that much.

Like, to me that is when you're a kid

and you do some dumb kid shit, you know, you

break something or you steal something

or you pee on something

and then you're punished physically for it,

which unnecessary shouldn't happen.

But at least when it happened to me, it,

it didn't fuck with my head that much.

It made sense, you know, I did something bad,

something bad happened to me, done.

Well it, it's akin to, it's somewhat akin to when you,

when you hear that, when you hear

that a skydiver died,

listen, I'm not trying to say Skydivers deserve to die,

I'm just saying that if you go skydiving

and you happen to die, It is very difficult for me

to find sympathy for your situation.

It's like when hear that your friend

with an art history degree is still unemployed, it's,

it's sad and it should not be that way,

but they kind of had it come, you know,

and then hit, hit to me is something entirely different.

I think that's what I have quite a lot

of intimate ex experience with.

It's most of my beef with my dad, right?

And to me that's when there's very

little to do with the kid at all.

It's usually the adult has some adult stuff going on

that they don't know how to deal with.

So they take it out on the kid.

And when you're a kid

and that happens to you,

you start thinking you are the problem

and you get this little hole inside

and then as you get older, the hole gets bigger

and eventually you're going to want to start

filling the hole with some stuff.

And that is why drugs

and alcohol were invented in hindsight.

Fortunately at the time I was too broke to invest.

So I think I filled my whole by, I don't know, just trying

to achieve stuff and get validation through that and, and,

and fill it that way.

And sometimes I'll like take it way too far

and completely burn myself out.

And I've been quite a bad state.

And when that happens, I will always find solace in telling

myself that hey, could have been heroin,

However bad this is.

You know what would've been worse? Heroin.

No, it's all, when I had this realization about myself,

it was strangely the only time in my life I've had even the

slightest shred of empathy for this incredible weirdo

of a man Elon Musk.

Hear me out here. Because in some interview way,

way back, right?

I read that he also had quite an abusive dad.

And when I connected those two things, his whole shit

at the very least made sense.

You know, because I thought I had it bad.

This man is trying to go all the way to Mars

to see if there's a dad there that'll love him.

That's tragic. That's a tragic life.

I sorta have this realization about myself.

It was a lot, it was a lot to process, you know.

And I, I was turning 30 in a few months

and I sort of set that as a arbitrary deadline of sorts

to have it mostly squared away in my head.

Of course this stuff takes forever,

but mostly worked out, you know?

'cause I do feel like, you know, like there's no need

to set a deadline, but I do feel like a lot of this,

you know, working out your stuff and finding yourself

and all that is, is real cute when you're in your twenties.

But when you are a 30 something year old man,

people don't have time for that shit.

Of course, I, I still have a few years,

but I wanted to get ahead of me, you know, I didn't want

to leave it alone, forget about it.

And then end up at the 70-year-old at Ayahuasca ceremony

going around telling people how I'm trying to meet God

and have a shaman tell me that it's like, wait five

to 10 years you'll meet God.

He's waiting for, you didn't have to come to Peru

for this.

Around that time I started seeing my therapist much more

regularly as well.

I go every now like for like six weeks at a time.

Like, like a two tuneup every six weeks.

But I started going every week for a while

and it was very helpful.

My only qualms earlier on in the process

was that at these prices

I thought he'd fix me

like a mechanic, you know, like I'm the car

and he's the mechanic and I go in and he fixes me.

And at least for me, I found it very useful

to figure out it exactly in which ways

I am fucked and maybe gain some insight into

just how I got so fucked.

But apparently I am supposed to do all the unfucking myself

is much less a mechanic and more Ikea for your emotion

or you're given the tools and some materials

or you have to put your shitty table of a personality

together all by yourself.

I started around that time trying

to generally get my life together.

You know, I was quite a sedentary person

and I started trying to exercise more.

I, I remember I signed up for boxing classes

and yoga classes at the same time

because I wanted the full spectrum.

And I remember being so much more nervous

for the boxing classes

and in high, I, I really didn't need to be.

I I, I remember I went

and it was such a nice welcoming vibe.

Everyone was very eager to help a new person.

It was a real community sort of feeling.

And then I went to the yoga class

and I tell you, I have never been

so afraid in my entire life.

Everyone was like, like namaste to each other,

but it's just a lot of sociopaths

and spandex, you know, just,

just psychos in Lycra, all of them.

And I wondered why this was,

and the only thing think from the people I met,

at least the, the people in the boxing

classes were pretty chill.

They were just there to blow off some steam

and get some exercise and maybe get better at boxing.

Whereas the people at the yoga classes, not all of them,

but enough seem to be under some assumption

that doing yoga would also make you a better person.

And I'm not sure that how it works.

Say if you are an asshole

and you go do yoga, you're not any less of an asshole.

You are just a, a bendy asshole.

I also started looking to like general, I don't know,

like there's a lot of this personal development self-help

stuff on the internet lately.

And some of it I found genuinely helpful.

I did draw the line

however, at cold showers us

because I remember when I saw it, I was surprised that

it was as popular as it was

or seemed to be where

no one else finds this disrespectful to poor people.

That stuff was mostly all right at home growing up.

But there was a period of my childhood

where we didn't have hot water in the house.

And the idea

of recreating that feeling

for the sake of optimizing my morning

felt a bit grotesque.

You know, it felt like, like financial appropriation

and I, I just didn't want any party.

I I, I'm also not sure if anyone is aware,

Sri Lanka is a mostly Buddhist country

and I grew up vaguely Buddhist

and I sort of got away from it

and I thought, let me, let me look back there,

see if there's anything for me, anything helpful.

And I went looking for resources and such

and was very disconcerted to find just

how many monks

with podcasts there seem

to be in the world at this moment.

It's not that they shouldn't have access

to technology, right?

But it does feel wrong.

I remember growing up in Sri Lanka, it's a Buddhist country,

there's monks just like around and every now

and then you see one carrying a cell phone.

I remember when I saw that, I just, I was like,

what, what's going on there?

Like there's, there's dissonance in that image, you know,

it is like, like when you see a supermodel

with a book, you have the intrusive thought of like, oh,

do they, do they know how to use that thing?

It is very interesting to me that out of the entire show,

it is only at this part where I'm mean about supermodels,

that a good chunk of you pull back real hard

as if, as if I had just

disparaged a marginalized group of some sort

and not hot rich people.

And the reason I keep it in is because there's a bit right

after this related to it that is going to work, watch.

And also that I have

had the immense displeasure of working

with these people in the past.

And however dumb you might imagine, they are

dumber and,

and and they're pretty looking.

So no one tells them, you know, especially male models,

male models in particular, I,

because right male models modeling is one

of the few professions where

men are generally paid less than women.

Which is to say that if you are a male model, you are

so useless to society,

so intellectually devoid of value

that even the patriarchy could not help you get paid.

How am I supposed to respect you as a man?

Well, one of the, the nicest things

that's happened over the past years, I've recently become

godfather to a small Filipino child.

I'm just gonna leave that there with no context.

No, I mean it's easy to figure, I have two close friends

who are both Filipino and they had a kid

and then made me the godfather on, on my birthday

in this room actually.

And it was interesting, they're my first friends

to have had a kid because I generally have quite smart

friends and, and no,

and I had prior always thought of people that have kids

as disorder people I don't want to hang out with.

And they really changed my mind on the whole thing.

You know, I, I remember the first weekend

after the baby came out, right?

And, and Aaron, the daddy messaged me saying,

Hey man, you wanna, you wanna take mushrooms

and hang out in the park with the baby?

And, and I said, I think I want to be a father this time.

Wonderful. And I remember, I remember

that day there was this like, just about newborn baby.

I was holding her and the trees were beginning

to breathe at me and I thought, man,

I I might be a family man after all who,

I've lived in the UK now for about four years

and I've contemplated leaving the

UK For about four years.

Not all parts of it, of course. I, I I enjoy London enough.

But like say I went on tour at some point last year

around the UK and this year I only went back

to one place, Glasgow.

I find my favorite parts

of the UK are all the not English parts.

And of course like in Scotland there's Edinburgh.

But I do find that

Edinburgh is to Scotland.

What Majorca is to Spain,

where they are, they're countries technically,

but spiritually the British have taken

their soul long ago.

I don't know, living here all this time, I I I've come

to find that what it truly means to be British is

to apologize.

To apologize for everything

except what you should be sorry for.

And even that only in the daytime at night,

you are different creatures entirely.

You're like gremlins, you know that eighties movie with the,

the little furry things

and you can't give them water past midnight.

Where with a British person, if you give them even a drop

of alcohol after the sun goes down,

you better get out the fucking way.

Well I remember when I moved here, I was so confused.

I looked around at all these meek, meek people

and I was like, this, these, these are the people

that took two thirds of the world for themselves.

And, and then I saw a Newcastle high street past

sun and thought, there they are.

I see, I see the vision, I see the,

it's such a odd, odd, odd country.

Last year there was these like big anti-immigration race

riot things here.

And it hit me when all that kicked off that it,

it was the first time in a good long while

where this strong anti-immigration sentiment had been

such a top of mind issue in a place that I was living.

And quite honestly, I had missed the attention.

It also really made me feel

and realize that as an immigrant, I owe, not an apology,

but a statement of thanks at least to the trans community

for keeping the bigots at bay for so many years

because they have been so worried.

But where you are going to the

- Bathroom - That we have been crossing borders

willy-nilly, I'm quite literally running out

of pages in my passport.

Numbers are up. It's been a good few years for us.

So I just want you to know that,

that your sacrifice does not go unnoticed.

Your service is appreciated.

Thank you for, for being the boogeyman instead

of us for a few years.

Boogie person, my bad boogie person.

I lived in Germany before I moved here

and I don't know, I'm thinking about, so in a year from now,

have my permanent residency and a year

after that I'll have my British passport

and I'll be British on paper, never in spirit.

And it's a strange feeling.

Even like I, I don't know, I,

I don't know if I'm gonna leave or stay,

but it will be the first time I say I moved away from

Sri Lanka just

because of lack of opportunities for

what I want to do with my life.

And then I moved to Germany, I'm from Germany to here

to make standup happen a little bit more.

And now it's happened enough where I don't necessarily need

to be here anymore.

So in two years when I make that decision to leave

or to stay, it'll be the first time I'm doing it

for an emotional reason and not a practical one.

And that's a weird place for me, you know, to know that I'll

at that point no longer be an economic migrant.

I'll be, dare I say that

an expat, that

it feels strange to know that through my efforts I've become

what I have hated most.

But I've accepted it

and I'm, I'm trying to prepare for the transition.

I, I'm beginning by learning how

to care about things that don't really matter so

that I can more easily come to terms with

how disgustingly secure my life is.

And I'm starting with recycling.

'cause I don't know if you're aware,

but recycling is a lie in a scam.

Especially plastic recycling.

They just send that shit to Asia.

I'm entirely certain that recycling is just a conspiracy

by the United Nations to keep Germany occupied.

'cause you might not be aware here,

but it is, I've been to a lot of places

and people recycle everywhere,

but not with the joy of the Fatherland.

It, it touches something in the German soul to recycle.

I'm entirely certain

that those three bins are the only things standing

between us and a fourth rike.

Alright? I'm sure that post World War ii,

the powers that be got in a room in Geneva

and said, okay, we cannot let this happen again.

We know they like to sort things and throw them away.

We just switch out the people for plastic.

And I think that'll buy us a couple hundred years.

Thank you for coming along with people.

I know, I know it was hard for you. Well, it was a fun ride.

I think about moving back to Germany.

I lived there and it was fun. It was fun.

When I lived there, I lived in Berlin

and well, I think I thought about moving there,

but every time I go back, I am over overcome

with the feeling of like, I'm, I'm too old for this place.

And my, my sexual fantasies right now are much less

behe darkroom,

much more public library.

That's where I'm at right now.

And there are certain times I will, especially compared

to London, miss Berlin a lot, you know, London is a very,

quite a uptight, very businessy sort of city.

And the people reflect that to some extent.

And I was at a train station once

and this lady came up to me

and immediately said, are you straight?

Are you single? And it took me a moment

to process exactly what was happening.

Is this a flirtation or a confrontation or a

or a census of some sort?

And then I said, yes, no, and she immediately walked away.

And I had never felt more like a

piece of meat in my entire life.

And I know that would never happen in Berlin.

First of all, no one in Berlin would ever ask if I'm

straight, because everyone in Berlin knows

that everyone is a little gay.

I I, I have never been intimate with a man,

but I have also never been in the same room

as Lenny Kravitz.

And I do believe that it's not over till it's over.

I'll leave you all on this. My, my main reason for

maybe leaving here, being so top of mind is that not any

of you, your social issues

or anything about what you're like, it's annoying,

but I can deal with it if I'm being paid enough.

But it is very specifically that it has come

to my attention, especially in the last couple of years,

that you are becoming poor.

And I do not fuck with that.

You want one more bad decision away from becoming the

northern most member of the global south.

And I have not worked so hard my entire life

to move from one struggling island nation

to another.

When I express this sentiment to, to British people.

Sometimes some, some people get a little bit upset at me.

You know, they'll say like, oh wow, that's very,

very cynical of you to just, to just move

to a place and use its

resources to build yourself out.

And then when it's, when it's no longer of any use to you,

you just leave.

And I said, I said, I'm sorry man.

You know, I'm, I'm from Srilanka. I learned from the best.

If anything, please, please do not think

of it as me leaving.

Think of it as you gaining independence from me.