Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World.

I'm Christian Guru Murphy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people

about the big ideas and their lives and the events that have helped shape them.

My guest this week is the stand-up comedian Stuart Lee.

Now, Stuart has just written his last column for the Observer

after the Observer's Transfer of Owners, and he is on tour with a show

called Stuart Lee versus the Man Wolf, which we will explore in terms of what it is and what

he's saying. But Stuart, welcome. Thanks for having me.

Normally this podcast begins with this idealistic question of how would you change the world if you could do you have a

How you would change the world? Well, I think one way you could you could change the world massively is is if if we could

If we could bring bring to bear upon the internet and upon service providers and upon social media providers

Some kind of

universally agreed standard of truth and of fact checking. And obviously we're heading into

an even worse situation with that whereby it appears reading between the lines that one

of the things Vance wants if he gives us a trade deal is for us to abandon internet safety regulations and hate speech and stuff like that.

I don't know whether it's so he can create markets across Europe for the tech companies that have bankrolled Trump's government,

or whether it's about trying to leave him free to destabilise European democracy and push it rightwards.

But I think it's just going to be a major, major problem.

And I think it's really hard to move forward in anything while truth is mutable in that fashion.

It's really difficult in stand-up because you sort of come out and do a joke based on something. But now the facts themselves are in doubt. If I get in a cab and talk to

the driver, it may be that he thinks that Kirstama defended the parents of the Southport

killer. And so before you can even talk about that,

...