I'm with Andrew Heaton again, everybody.

Welcome back to Walkins. Welcome.

So good to see you.

Live from Scotland.

Hello. Yeah. Live from Scotland. Nice to see you, Bridget. You, you too. You always go there for the, in the summer, correct? I do. I used to live over here. I lived over here right after I graduated college. and then I got a master's degree over here.

And then all my friends were like,

well, I guess you're part of us now.

We can't get rid of you.

That's fine. So I come over every year to reinvigorate my weird community. I need to get like a mistress or something. That way I can completely compartmentalize my life. But I usually come over for six weeks. Yeah, exactly, like a secret secret second family uh have some kid named hamish

and olga or something like that and yeah so i come over here for like six weeks to two months uh if

i'm able and do you do fringe when you're there because it's around that time right it is yeah so

what i what i've done the last few years is i don't do my own show but but I'll just kind of flirt with other shows. So I'll drift around and I'll do guest spots on other programs. This year, I just kind of took it easy. I was a civilian. I went to a bunch of shows, which was nice. But I was a little, the fringe is a lot. It's a wonderful festival. For anybody unfamiliar with it, the fringe

festival in Edinburgh is the largest comedy festival in the world. Edinburgh goes from 300,000 people

to a million people in the span of a week. So Edinburgh goes from like the fifth largest city to the

second largest city in about 24 hours. It's great. You can totally do wall-to-wall comedy from like 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. But I've done that the last five years. So now I'm just kind of like taking it easy, going to one or two, laughing, stealing jokes, and then retreating to work on other stuff. But I'll come up. I'll be funny next year. I've been off duty as a funny man this year. What are you working on now? So the two main things I do is I host a

show called The Political Orphanage. And I've been doing that full time for five, six years. That's a

podcast designed for people that are tired of the red team versus blue team thing. I try to figure out how things work and make them work better.

So like on my way to Scotland, I circuitously went through Finland and Sweden and Norway to

ask them, why are you so goddamn happy?

What like, what are you people's, they think they are.

But like there's a little, there's a secret I'm going to give you. I looked into this. Like the Finns always top the charts in terms of global happiness. But the question that they ask is just, can you imagine being much happier? And the Finns can't. And I looked at that and was like, well, my fantasies are absolutely lurid. Like if you were to ask me, could you be happier than you are now? Like I have daydreams involving moon bases and fembots. I'm pretty happy, but I could be a lot happy. So I think it's possible the fens just aren't very imaginative. Isn't this the culture that like I think Bill Burr had a bit about it where they just believe nothing happens when you die? Like he was talking about, I believe it's Scandinavian where they're like nothing.

It's more terrifying than anything, but maybe that has something to do with it.

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