#691 - Jimmy Carr - What It Means To Live A Fulfilled Life

26:26We're going to take all that money, and we're going to spend it on rehabs, and we're going to spend it on education, and we're going to spend it on making it easier for people to make good choices. Great. And it worked. You walk around Lisbon now, one of the safest cities in Europe. It's magnificent. It's buzzing. buzzing, it's fabulous. You go, that's a brilliant idea. Why don't we just take that and do that here? It seems to work because the other people sort of go, yeah, but drugs aren't good and drugs. I agree. I don't do drugs. It's not my thing. And some people have got real issues around them, but what we're doing at the moment isn't working.

27:03And that seems to work. And then you'll always have a very small percentage of people that have real problems. And that's fine. But at least if you know those people aren't criminalized, then they don't most petty crime is drug -related. So that's a problem that's been fixed. We could just take that. I think the energy crisis have been solved. But only on nuclear submarines. Nuclear submarines strike me as, that's there. Why is no one talking about these? People are living in tubes with a nuclear reactant. They have been for 50 years. We've tested it. And those guys seem fine. self -sustaining much worse environment than we've got up here where we can breathe water and we don't need to recirculate the carbon dioxide And it's working, right There you go.

27:46There's the I mean I'm apps. I'm with extinction rebellion I think there was an environmental crisis. It's awful But I don't think the person that solves the problem is I don't think we say in 50 years time Oh, we came pretty close there to an environmental collapse But thankfully someone glued themselves to the top of a car that did it, I think it's going to be a physicist that does it, right? It's going to be a scientist that has a wonderful idea and does something. So it's that thing if you go, if you care about that, where should you be putting your energy? And I think it's again, it comes back to where's the agency.

28:22So that, you know, gluing yourself to the top of a car is, it's saying, look, I need this is important, something needs to be done. I don't think any politician has the vision to do it. I don't think he gets solved through a law. I think he gets solved through science and technology and I read David Doitch's The Beginner of Infinity and was just blown away by what if we're the first hundred billion people?

28:55That's how 100 billion, I'm including us in that. And it could be trillions in the future, if we get this right. It's exciting, right? And the idea that science is this particular meme that can, you know, we've got this AI technology which people seem scared about. And you can, well, maybe this is gonna be the solution. People are worried about nuclear catastrophe. We've already priced in the downside, right? We've priced in nuclear war. That's already a possibility. Why not take the outside? Did you read William McCaskill's What We Are The Future? Did you see that? No, but I heard people talking about it.

29:33I haven't got around to reading. Is it good? Interesting guy. Good. It's an important book, I think, to read, especially if you think about these topics in a big way. Well, that idea of people being... People are important, temporally and spatially. Yes. So the idea that we're quite obsessed with us in the West, in America, right now, Europe in our village, in our community. What do we owe the future is very good question. What do we owe the rest of the world? Because the idea that the environmental problem could be solved by doing less and cutting back. And maybe if we lived in 1985, that could cure things.

30:08I don't think it's, you know, the populations out of control. I don't see any volunteers. Have you heard Peter Singer's thought experiment about the drowning child? Explained to the distance thing that you were talking about very nicely. So you're walking down the street and you see a drowning child in the river that's next to you. It does sound like a setup for a joke, doesn't it? It sounds like the kind of thing I would go. So, walking down the street, so there's a drowning child in a river. Okay. That's the start. Peter Singer's a nice, softly spoken Australian man in his late 70s. I don't think that he was meaning it as the setup to a joke.

30:47But feel free to take it for tonight. Okay. If you were to walk past and not save the child, you would be seen as abhorrent, right? The fucking drowning child, you're the only person that's around here. Why would you not go into the river and go and save this kid? Okay. Now... Some kids are dicks. Let's call it. Let's call it. Do you know... Do I know this kid? No. Is it baby Hitler? No. Why would it be baby Hitler? I don't know. Thought experiment. Go to Hitler. Okay, so go on. What's the... Basically, he continues to use the distance of you. Okay, now the rivers... 100 yards away. Now it's 300 yards away.

31:28Now it's half a mile away. Now it's a mile away. And the point is which distance does the drowning child become less important to you? And the argument kind of is that there's no distance. It becomes an arbitrary, an arbitrary decision. If you would save the child that was there now, you would save the child that is on the other side of the planet starving of yeah it's that you get to that I think quite quickly to that what is it best things first the is it beyond Longberg book oh like the idea the UN has got 148 things that they want to do these are our priorities and you go well you don't have any priorities then because there's a lot of things what are the things that we should do now that make a difference so the simple stuff like mosquito nets really does make it makes a huge difference.

32:14Well, that's what do you do because you go, would you value your life much more than you value someone's life in? You know, it's interesting what we're not talking about. Like, no one talks about what's going on in Venezuela. No one seems that bothered about Venezuela at the moment. And it's a, I don't know, the phrase fucking shit shows brings to mind. What's happening in Venezuela? It's, you know, the stories I'm hearing is, you know, teenagers are hunting cats in the street. people are dying of malnutrition. Yeah, it's like it's hell on earth. That thing of like, you know, the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed.

32:50It goes back as well. You can go back into it. The past is still here, it just hasn't caught up yet. Yeah, it's, you know, there's not every wise kind of running on the same system. And maybe we should be. Maybe, you know, I mean, we live in an incredibly privileged time. and I'm big on gratitude of the opposite of bitinism resentment, that idea of just going, well, what are you grateful about? And it's ever expanding. The idea that if I'd been born in North Korea today, never mind 400 years ago, but today, it's really funny, it's really good at saying offensive things. I wouldn't have lived to six and a half years old.

33:33Yeah, it's gone. It's gone. I'm not giving your ponch hunt for being positive and for gratitude. What do you make of this culture of cynicism that we see on the internet? Fatalism, nihilism, despondency? I mean, it's, the internet's a problem for me because the anonymity is an issue. You with Jordan Peterson on this? What on the, he says that no one, no one should have a Twitter account that hasn't uploaded a fault of their ID? I, I, I kind of would think that's be an interesting thing to try. I mean, what's the argument against that that that whistleblowers couldn't operate? Well, I guess whistleblowers existed before Twitter and they used to have to go to a paper and the paper would then print the story.

34:19That doesn't seem like a terrible system. So we go back to that and everyone has to upload and then you go, well, you can still ship host, you can still do all that stuff. It's just it has to be traceable to you because we are who we are. we are when nobody's watching. If you want to know who you really are, be on your own, go somewhere on your own, on holiday, whatever, and that's who you are. If you're driving along and you throw the soda can out of the window of the car, that's who you really are. No one does that with kids in the back, monster. But if you do that, if that's who you, that's, it's interesting to kind of note that, you know, it's the difference between character and reputation.

34:59You know, you really know who you are. Reputation is what everyone else thinks about you. You know who you are in yourself. It's interesting to me to think about how the way that we act when nobody is looking tells us an awful lot about ourselves. It's that adage about, listen to how he talks about his mother and how he treats the serving staff at the restaurants when you're on dates. It's like a good litmus test for the guy that you're Because that shows kind of who, when the stakes are incredibly low, how do you show up as a person? But yeah, go back to the cynicism angle. What do you think is going on?

35:44I don't know. I suppose it's easy. It's easy to be kind of cynical about stuff. It's also, do people not feel like they don't have agency? You know, as we learn more about what's going on in the world, as we, you know, So you're surrounded by new stories that you can do nothing about. You know, COVID was very interesting for that because it actually affected us. But normally you're reading about an earthquake happening and you go, well, what can I do? What difference does it make? It's beyond my control. Or they're fracking for oil in Alaska. Oh, okay. Well, no one's listening to me. Or they're going to war in this.

36:19Okay, well, I'm not sure I've got a dog in that race. But, and you feel very, so it's, you kind of get cynical about it. I think people have got cynical about politics. It feels like they need big new, exciting ideas that people can get behind. And it feels like a lot of politics is like talking about changing this thing a tiny little bit, changing that, and it's people are kind of in one camp or the other. I wonder whether the skepticism around the legitimacy of elections is born out of this sort of sensation people have that they don't really have any, that they can't contribute and what they do doesn't matter.

37:00Because that's the most extreme version of it, right? Even my vote didn't matter, even my legitimate vote didn't matter. So regardless of whether or not you think that the voting machines are hacked or whether or not it's part of some big conspiracy, which is very well maybe, it definitely seems like you could sort of extrapolate forward. Oh, well, if what I do doesn't matter at all, this is a perfectly designed continuation of that narrative as well. So maybe people were primed to believe that a little bit more. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a very interesting point to kind of go, well, if people don't even think they're vote counts, then what can you do?

37:41But I guess if you're pinning your hopes for self actualization on your party getting in. It's like following a football team. It's a fun thing to do, but don't let it take over your life. You know, these are eleven guys that don't give a fuck about you and they're kicking a ball around. It can't be everything. It can't be the whole of your life. The politics is wrong. It can't be the whole of your life. You can't hope that that's going to bring you everything. You want You want a better world, but how are we going to get, you know, there's a good question to ask like how do we get a better world?

38:17How do we bring the standard of living up? What do we actually want for the world? Because it's not just more money. You see what happens when people get more money and there's just more inflation. That hidden tax kicks in. So what do we want? We want better education, better chances for everyone, better opportunities. I guess. It's pretty like there's a lot of stuff that everyone agrees on, right? Why do you think we think about luck incorrectly? My thing on luck is like we're incredibly lucky. There's certain things that we devalue, right? So, so, looks is a really good example. Like if someone's a model and they're gorgeous and they're photographed, lucky.

39:01People are kind of a bit dismissive of that. If someone's born really smart, you're never going, you're lucky. You're born with an IQ of 162, a bit of luck. No one thinks that. We saw the two great myths in our society are, it's hard work and talent, aren't they? Again, it's always total bullshit. It's always a mix of the two and finding the right medium, the right edge for you, the right thing to be doing. So you go, people think, oh, Bill Gates, oh, he worked so hard. He used to work 18 hours a day, slept at the office, he worked so hard to build that company. He's incredibly bright. He had to, you know, it's always, you know, the talent and the hard work.

39:44You know, Michael Jordan, if he hadn't shown up to practice, would be just a guy. And also, if he was living 200 years ago, pre -basketball, I don't know. I don't know, you know, that skill set is very particular. So you, what's, what's, what's luck? The everyone's incredibly lucky. I mean, just to be here is, it's beyond, right? I don't know, I kind of, I like the idea of just going, okay, look, we're very lucky, we've got what we've got. Run with it. Also, you're not going to change it. You might, that thing of like acceptance being kind of that first step in therapy strikes me as really sensible.

40:23Just looking at what you've got and go right, this is it. This is it for the whole journey. I can work on this It's like nature nurture obviously nature. It's got a bigger effect the nurture But nurture is the only bit anyone gives a fuck about because the only bit you can play with yeah Until I can start fiddling with my DNA sensibly Then I'm gonna be I'll be nurturing and nurture people seem to think nurture stops You know people seem to think nurture and environment is the thing for kids. Yeah, and the right school But really look at you as a shining example of environment. So you put yourself in the micro and the macro in a better environment than you were in five years ago.

41:03You're not surrounded by people on love island, you're surrounded by these incredible intellects and you've taken yourself out of your, where you grew up and went to university and you've taken yourself to Austin because there's this kind of energy there and there's other people that are trying to do the same thing as you and you put yourself in that environment. and that strikes me as incredibly powerful. But the idea that if you're still hanging around with people you hung around with 25 years ago and they're not adding value, then what are you doing? Yeah, me and George had this idea that we're gonna write an essay on together.

41:34So I'm gonna try and explain it to you now. It's not fully thought out, but we'll see if we can get there. The difference between observable and hidden metrics and how they influence our motivation. So a lot of the time people will trade a hidden metric for an observable metric. A good example of a hidden metric would be something like peace of mind. And something like an observable metric would be money. People will happily trade something which may be more valuable, ultimately, for something which is less valuable, simply because they can measure it more effectively. Like time's an interesting one because...

42:11John Lennon Lyric, isn't there? I give you everything I got for a little piece of mind. There we go. But it's a very interesting point because that idea of going, you know, if you can't measure it, we tend to go towards measured. Correct. And so the idea of going these, but actually what matters is it's, you know, emotional. Yeah. And there's no dashboard. This is why George tries to have a dashboard for all of the things that he does. He's got this end of day assessment type form, custom type form. he's made himself the auto -populates to a Google sheet. And at the end of the video. Yeah, he was born in in -sell, but managed to ascend out of it.

42:49He has got himself to the stage where he's tracking, what were the three things that I did today? What was my sense of presence? How connected was I did it all the way down? And his goal is to track this over time, right? To see what are the correlations between my actions and the way that I felt. So he's trying to make the hidden observable. And the problem that we have is that things that really, really matter to us, like connection and peace of mind and dopamine and serotonin balance throughout the day, like how content and fulfilled did I feel. All of these things that just fucking words is this nebulous, ephemeral, wishy, what's trying to hold smoke, right?

43:27To try and work out what this is. But money, a bank account, it's fucking good game. The number of followers I've got on social media, it's a really fucking good game. So I'll chase down the observable. Well, it gets back to that story of like, what's the most successful story in human history? Money. Money's the greatest story ever told. Because what even is it? When you break it down, it's not anything. And yet everyone believes in it. Everyone believes in that story. And what you're getting to is what's really important in life. and the stuff that maybe you can't measure is kind of what matters, right?

44:06I wonder if there's this hidden observable framework that we've got here. I wonder if there's an equivalent to do with luck. So what you were talking about is that the actual chance of us all being here, which I did for my TEDx talk, I actually looked at this, it's the same likelihood as all seven million people in Ireland rolling a trillion -sided dice and all of them coming up with the same number. It's astronomical, it's way, way, way, way more than all of the particles in the observable universe. Because your parents had to meet at that particular ovulation cycle with that particular sperm, all the way back, who forget surviving in all of the rest of it.

44:46It's a prehumanist. Correct. All of the way, the only way that you're here is with the exact precise combination of each different iteration that goes all the way back up, how to be that sperm, how to be that way. find that slightly makes my head hurt. You know, with that thing of Sam Harris was talking about this recently, the idea that maybe there's no free well. Maybe we have to be having this conversation now because when the big bang happened, everything rolled out. This was ordained. Of course. Robert Sapolsky's got a new book coming out called Determined. You know, Robert Sapolsky harvoured evolutionary biologist.

45:17He's coming on in month and a bit and his new book is called Determined and it's like how to find happiness in a life with no free well. So it'll be interesting. I think one of the things that Sam failed at doing. I'm still like, some people I speak to talk about, like ways that free will kind of just come through and all the rest of it. But one of the things that I think Sam has at least not instructed me who has listened to a lot of him in is tactically, how do I use the information of a deterministic universe to feel more fulfilled? Given the fact that both of us are such massive fans of agency and everyone that's listening to this podcast will be as well, They want to feel like they're the architect of their own life.

45:59Right. That they are actually able to make some sort of imposition on the world. It's very disempowering to find that, oh, I'm just domino number 48 million out of today's fucking, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. It doesn't make me feel very empowered. I want someone to come in and tactically tell me if this is the case. How should I live? It's interesting that thing of like the time scales kind of comes up and also the idea of like what? What are we what's important here? You sent out a thing recently about fuck you money Yeah, which I was really interesting the idea of like the meme of fuck you money the idea that you could have enough that you could tell people to fuck off If that's particularly something that you know, you want to tell people to fuck off in my experience You can tell people to fuck off with no money good luck But then there's this fuck you freedom was the next iteration and then you got to fuck you family The idea that actually what really matters is having a unit and and family I would take in a broader sense of friends and family having like a Coatery around you your tribe if you will around you.

47:07That's really it's very interesting to me I'm like where you're gonna play that game where you have agency in the world. And the idea of going, okay, well, there's certain players, you know, Elon Musk has got agency at a ludicrous global level. But, you know, in the global leaders, great. But on an individual level, we all have agency. We can all, we can all be, you know, we can all make a difference. Yeah, I really wish, I really wish I could give the gift of sort of higher agency to a lot of people. I think it's such a lack of... No, I think sort of the greatest gift, like if you could give your child any gift.

47:48Likeability. Likeability goes a long way. That's a Peterson's thing. Do not let your children do anything that makes you not like them. Like a likable child. I think I was in fear. I may need to ask my mum. When I fear I was an incredibly unlikable child. And I think that that shaped that was probably quite formative in a lot of my experiences with other parents, with other kids. But do you not think that, I mean, I know a little bit about your childhood and kind of what you went through as an only child and feeling slightly isolated? But is that not the thing that untethered you and allowed you to sort of fly free?

48:24That's so true. I spoke about this yesterday with Stephen Bartlett that there's layers to unpacking the things that you went through and the formative experiences that you've had. So the first layer is a chip on your shoulder about whatever it is that happened to you. So for me, being bullied in school, being ostracized, not feeling like I was part of a group, then the second layer is alchemizing that into something that you really care about. So saying, okay, the skills that I got and the resilience that I developed from spending so much time on my own, I've turned something that was toxic into something which is valuable.

49:04then the layer after that is I get to use the chip on my shoulder and the resentment for the people that came before me and that caused this problem as the activation energy to now deploy this skill set. Okay, so there now I'm not only not only if I made lead into gold but I've now turned this gold into something that's useful. I've formed it into something that I can move forward with. But then the final one and this is the really fucking difficult one is to realize that if the people who tormented you are the reason that you've developed the skill sets that you care about. Then you can't resent them, you should thank them.

49:40That you genuinely should look back at most of the things that you were ashamed of or guilty about or fearful of in your past and realize that that's the dark side of one of the lightest and most proud things that you've got. So overall, if the challenges that you went through formed a person that you like, those bullies in school, I should sit down with all of them and say, yeah, thanks mate. Yeah, that's a very interesting to listen to because when you go, you know, to go through that experience, it's kind of easy now, you're 35, you're a grown man and you're doing great. But to sort of think back to, you are still that child.

50:22You're still that lonely kid searching for connection. But is that not the whole of the show? Like every episode I listen to, you're sort of there, kind of looking for a hug. Your sort of, your whole demeanor is, I want to connect with this person, I want to know what they know, and I want to have a friendship. And it's incredibly healthy. It just seems like it's, it's a, yeah, everything that happened, absolutely worth it. And also, what are you going to do? You can forgive them and move on or you can hold resentment. But it's ultimately that's what's the important thing. We can't measure that metric of what that forgiveness gives you as to what that resentment gives you.

51:05But I'd bet the house on the fact that the forgiveness is lighter and breeds more activity. Yeah, I've been thinking recently about the idea of we can't know the future and we don't fully know ourselves and we don't fully know the present, we don't fully know everybody else. So we have to concede that some huge proportion of our worldview is a delusion. Yeah, isn't it? Does anyone talk about the three humiliations? You've heard of that? No, it's not. The three humiliations of humanity. So it was Copernicus. We're not the center of the universe. And then it was Darwin. We're descended from animals.

51:44We're not special. Oh, Jesus. Alright, and then the third one, Freud, our self -conscious is running the show. We don't even know ourselves. Ah, fucking hell. Fucking hell. It's like humanity's really taken a combination. One big hit after another. Yeah, there's a big hit. You go, yeah, we don't really know ourselves, but that's kind of the journey and that's the whole thing. I mean, that's why I think not to bring it all back to stand -up comedy, but I do think there's something magnificent about doing a bit of stand -up. going and finding your voice and what you find funny and your sense of humor.

52:19Because everyone's got one, right? In other news, this episode is brought to you by Nomatic. No, literally, it's actually brought to you by Nomatic. Their carry on pro is the hand luggage that I used to transport my laptop and all of the stuff that I brought with me to the UK. The difference between having proper, well -designed, durable, high -quality luggage and not is everything. It makes the difference between packing a complete hell or actually quite enjoyable. The team at Nomatic creates the most functional, durable and innovative backpacks, bags, luggage and accessories, everything from Nomatic comes with a lifetime warranty, which is exactly how confident they are in the quality of their products.

52:56Especially if you're someone that travels quite a lot, you need to make sure the luggage you're using is high quality, and Nomatic is the best that I've found. So if you need to upgrade your luggage game for work, for travel or for anything else, the first place to go is nomadic. Head to the link in the description below or go to nomadic .com slash modern wisdom and use the code modern wisdom at checkout for 20 % off everything site wide. That's nomadic .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. Yeah, I, uh, so this delusion thing. People, people don't fully know themselves or the world around them or what's going to happen or all of the rest of it.

53:33Given the fact that you don't know yourself and you're deluded in some way. Why not pick a delusion that is useful to you? Well, this is what NLP gets to neuro -linguistic programming. It talks a lot about presuppositions. Because you can't know, you know, know it for a fact. It's kind of a little bit of a pseudo -science. So what's useful rather than think about what's correct, what's useful, what makes a difference? If I believe I can do that, I can do that. The belief is often the thing that makes the difference. Did I do that bit? Did I tell you about the symbolic truth but literal falsehood framework?

54:14No. This is fucking cool. Okay. So things can be symbolically true but literally false. Okay. And this is most religious stories. So the belief that porcupines can throw their quills, right? Literally untrue. Porcupine can't throw its quills. Like it's not a fucking, it's not filled the power fucking Taylor. Right. Good luck, American listeners, without reference. Ah, I feel Taylor. It's a fat Naka dance player. Legendary dance player from England. You say legendary, I say fat Naka, but you know, potato potato. Yeah, you can throw a sharp thing. So they can't do that. They can't throw their quills.

54:51They're a useful thing to believe. Yeah, because they're barbed and if they're getting you, you're fucked. So not good. The belief that porcupines can throw their quills is symbolically true in that it's adaptive for you to believe it. Another one would be that pigs are uniquely dirty animals, ever seen a cow, cows pretty dirty as well. So all of the religious traditions that said we don't eat pigs because pigs are uniquely dirty animals literally false. Figuratively, pigs do carry a higher pathogen load typically than other animals in their meat. So by believing that that's the case, it's an adaptive outcome for you.

55:26Now, I learned this from Winesline six or seven years ago, right? Then I've been playing with it for ages and ages to try and think of something which is literally true but figuratively false. So what's the opposite of this, right? So I was trying to think about something which is, it might be accurate to know but unadaptive to believe. And I think that free will is one of these. I think that even if we do live in a deterministic universe, even if that is is literally what is true, figuratively, it's an information hazard. I don't think that it really, unless you go false, like, Sam Harris Enlightenment mode and get out the other side to, no one is the architect of their own decisions, therefore empathy and forgiveness so much easier to come by, which I don't think, like, practically is that easy for most people to do.

56:15I don't think that the same is the behavioral genetics, Radpill, if you believe that almost most, more than 50 % of what you are psychologically is locked in. And you only get to play with this tiny little sort of cake dressing on the top of it. How many cherries do I want to put on top of this cake? It doesn't feel, it's not very supportive in terms of how you show up in the world, even if it's true. So that's something that might be literally true, but figuratively false and the porcupine throwing their quills. I mean, it's certainly, it's a very interesting area to sort of talk about because it's about, belief makes such a huge difference.

56:50If you believe in something, you can kind of, you do it, it gives you the kind of the will to do it, to give it a go. About what you think is possible, what your dreams going to be. I mean, when you started this podcast presumably, you didn't think I've been Austin, Texas talking to the great and the good and trying to figure things out. That's why I think the book thing is really interesting for you now. I've like trying to rather than just at the level of, okay, trying to figure this thing out and It's kind of interesting to chat about. It's like putting down these thoughts and going, you know, does it, does it grow calm?

57:23What are the bits of wisdom that are most affected how you live day to day? It's one I think the next 24 hours is really interesting. Yeah. I'm like, what could you do that adds value to you tomorrow? It's such a lovely frame. Such a lovely frame. You talk about disposition being more important than position. Yeah, what do you mean by that? Well, listen, I know some billionaires that are pretty miserable. and I know some guys with boring office jobs that are very happy. I think your disposition is, it's very difficult to change, but it's often easier than changing the world. You know, you're in your head on your own an awful lot of the time, no matter how connected you are, no matter how great your family, you are you, and the acceptance of that and the way that you see the world, the rose tinted glasses of looking at the world, looking for jokes, is pretty tremendous.

58:14I think the thing that makes a difference to people on disposition is in the most part it's gratitude. You can kind of move the dial. That's the thing that seems to make it a difference because it's that thing of like, if you're in a bad mood all the time, you're not in a bad mood, you're an asshole. It's the truth of it. So it's got, how are you most of the time? How you treat a waiter or a waiter or how you react when you get out of speeding ticket or any of those little things that, because life is gonna throw lots of that stuff at you, how do you react to it? How are you in the world? What's your, is it a sunny disposition, or are you kind of, you know, are you boring?

58:54Well, you've been through bouts of depression, as I have, I actually thought throughout all of my 20s that I was depressed, I thought that that was the texture of my mind, I thought it was locked in, like the worst weed trip that you've ever had. This is me for the rest of my life. Okay, so I'm interested in conflated words, And I often think depression is completed with sadness. And sadness is much more difficult to admit and there's more of a stigma around being depressed. There's a certain glamour to being depressed. A loof of this mysterious thing, it's pathologized. It suggests depth. A word sad, this is just a sad fuck.

59:32You sad. What do you do? You've got a surface level life, run clubs, I'm sure you're having a nice time. or whatever, but it's surface level. So that depression was maybe sadness, but I think if it's environmental, if you could change it, if it's not to do the serotonin levels in your head and the chemical imbalance, then if you can do something about it, it's sadness. So assuming it's sadness and that you can do something about it, I mean, since people with real mental health problems and my heart goes out to them, but for a lot of people, it's just there, it's circumstantial. But you went through periods of acute sadness or depression, however you want to label it.

1:00:11And yet you've managed to get yourself to a stage largely. Anxiety has been the big, is really my... Drug of choice. Yeah. Anxiety, I think there's a gift in there. I think the gratitude that I have for anxiety is it's the flip side of creativity. That your mind is racing and sometimes you're trying to solve a problem in the future because you don't have anything to do now. It's why people talk about, you know, I'm so happy when I exercise because you're giving yourself a problem right now. And your mind is dealing with whatever lifting that up, putting it down. Yeah, you put 120 kilos on a bar.

1:00:46You're not thinking about much else other than I really need to get this off me. Yeah, that thing of like that simple thing of going, you probably don't have enough to do if you're anxious about silly things in the future or the, I mean, I get very tied up with counterfactuals and wondering about what might have been and what should have done. And you know, it kind of links to me to that weird thing of like no one's scared of falling off a cliff. Worried about jumping. There's kind of a weird thing of going, well what if I'd done something different? I could tell you that you've heard that Douglas Murray thing about in life we must choose our regrets, right?

1:01:28Yeah, and then you can have anything, you can't have everything. Yeah, that what could have been we can't split test life, we can't go back and give this another crack. I tell you, for a guy with a sunny disposition, it's a very serious conversation, is that? Yeah. I quite like this. I feel this is very, I feel like in the moment to call it, it feels very revealing to have this conversation because it doesn't feel unlike the conversation we had at dinner the other day. But it is that thing if you go, it's kind of showing more of yourself than you, you know, normally it's just Dick jokes wait until people see haven't got pants on and Yeah Uh, cut to the white It needs to be very wide um Yeah, I so I'm interested in this If anxiety is your melody your mental melody of choice yeah, and yet you've managed to get yourself to a state where you are in a sunny disposition at least some non -zero amount of the time.

1:02:27Yeah, sorry, just to go back to because I'm still thinking about disposition position, because people climb to a position and they think happiness is going to live there. And I think you'd be better served trying to make yourself happy and then worrying about where you're going. I think your happiness, your emotional wellbeing, working on that first seems to be a very sensible thing because it doesn't live down the road. It doesn't let you know you put a million dollars in the bank, it won't, it won't make you less insecure. That kind of scarcity mindset is kind of poison. Is that a lesson that can be learned without going and seeing the top of the mountain yourself?

1:03:09Because there will be a lot of people that could say, Jimmy, easy for you to say about fame isn't going to fix your problems, isn't going to fix your problems, you've achieved both. Well, fame, fame, I think has replaced heaven in a secular world. Fame is the land of milk and honey, where everything is okay, and you're looked after and it's perfect, and I'm not knocking it. I love being famous, but it's not the beal and end all, and actually, again, you can kind of split to a stack, because I can get to a country where I'm not known. Not many, but there's a few. you talk about why trajectory is so important as well.

1:03:49And I think that this is in here. It's all people see, isn't it? Like people aren't interested in how, you know, if you're playing 250 shows a year, like, have been doing that for years. It's not exciting, it's not news. It's news when people arrive and they're new. So when something, you know, in I think film and TV and comedy and kind of entertainment, it's like, it's all about where were they last year, aware they this year, just maintaining no one seems to care. Although comics aren't entertainers in the true sense, the true definition of an entertainer is, if you don't like me, I don't like me.

1:04:27Oh, that's interesting. You've got a real entertainer now. You've outsourced yourself worth to the crowd. Of course, that's what an entertainer is. And there's, I know guys that are entertaining. So, friends said that to me and it was like, oh man, that is your journey. Good luck. That's how comedians desperately want to be loved, but entirely on their own terms. It's a lovely paradox. Do you see that in yourself? What's the lesson here between the desire to make people happy and laugh and being this, how do you say, intrinsic drug dealer? Yeah. And the fact that you need to be able to go home at night and put your head on the pillow without having, if your self -worth is inflated by the crowd, then it can be deflated by the criticism.

1:05:20Yeah, I mean, listen, that's the, if something out there makes you happy, losing it's going to make you sad. So it matters. I think putting on a good show, though, is about going, do I think it's funny. You know, there's certain things that I write and I go, ah, it feels a bit, don't feel quite, hasn't got a great structure to it. It's not quite the right sort of joke for me. I'm going to leave it. It's not great. And then the stuff that I like more than the crowd and it's finding a balance where you go, look, I know what you paid to see. I know why you're here. And the, you know, the world ordered a standup comedian and I'm to honour that.

1:05:59I'm going to be as good at this as I can be. And, you know, it's kind of a mediation, but it's very much on my terms in terms of these are the jokes that I tell. We spoke about that trajectory thing over dinner, and it's really interesting because Andrew Tate, someone you might not have thought wisdom from this area of the world would have applied, but he says having things isn't fun, getting things is fun. And while I stopped locked clock is right twice a day. I mean, he says a lot of things. He's bound to get some stuff right. He's kind of an interesting cultural phenomenon because I think the...

1:06:35What do you think happened with Tate? Have you done a post -mortem on his ascendancy to... No, I mean, the only thing I would say is that, you know, young men, I feel are in crisis. And not that young women aren't in crisis. I mean, young people generally. But it feels like young men are having a silent crisis. You know, we talk about certain things and we don't talk about other things. And, you know, young men committing suicide seems to be a huge problem at the moment. And a lack of purpose and agency is a huge, you know, why video games so popular? Especially with young men. And it's a facsimile of career and purpose and drive and different levels.

1:07:21and there's something in us that's not that men and women are so very different. I always think like the big difference gender wise is men are all taking a performance enhancing drug every single day and that drug is testosterone. And really if you had to talk about what testosterone does for men, it's risk taking. So, and we talk a lot about all the CEOs, all the big CEOs are men and it's very unfair. What are prisons a full of men because men take ludicrous risks? So I think if you were gonna life hack for I mean, I've got a daughter and the advice I'll give her is take more risks And you can because you're making it a conscious decision.

1:08:01It's not a hormonal decision Then maybe you can actually do better because you can not do the dumb shit You don't need to jump from the high board, but you can move to a city where there's more opportunities taking those risks that, you know, the average man takes. Like, I kind of look back and it seemed so easy, but I left my job and became a comic, because I did it. The idea that that was pretty ordained, so fucking stupid. Such a ludicrous mid -twenties, Hail Mary Catcher Bay, It's life's boring. I'm going to go and do something more fun. Crazy. So I think that's kind of that's kind of an interesting point of going the How do we how do we make things more equal between men and women in our society?

1:08:54And I think encouraging greater risk in young women is is a really sensible Because that's what that's what guys have got like they're taking crazy chances. I mean you you you leaving you had a very comfortable life and a good living and a good career and you traded it in for madness. For like, oh, well, I'm just going to be, you know, an auto -addictor. You know, it's like, you're self -educated. You seem to be, you have this kind of thirst for knowledge. They're going, yeah, well, I'm maybe I'll just do that. Just doing the thing that you love. It's one of the reasons why I had such a problem with the term it was meant to be.

1:09:35So the reason I hate this post -hoc rationalization of how a bad situation became a good situation because it was meant to be in the end. It completely removes all of the agency that you had overturning that shit situation into something that was good. Let's say that you lose a leg in a car crash and you're in a hospital bed and while you're there you begin watching history YouTube videos about ancient Rome and you realize that you're really interested in it. And 10 years later, you are now the biggest ancient Rome historian presenting shows for your own channel, maybe you're on the BBC, written books, you're best, you've only got one leg, but it doesn't matter.

1:10:23Saying it was meant to be, I got in that car crash for a reason so that I would spend enough time in a hospital bed so that I would find the videos about the Roman Empire I saw that I could have this career. Ultimately nets out at taking away all of the alchemy that you had. Yeah. To turn this, hang out, let's do it in a reverse way. You had, you got dealt a really unfortunate card and managed to, there we go, that's blackjack. But the cards you got dealt are the cards you got dealt. I really like that thing of like, at some point, you gotta go with what you got or you're not gonna go. So you do what you need to do.

1:11:04I like it's interesting now, the educational bit of this, the idea that you're going, look, it's you're educating yourself now to what end to what purpose, what you're making it easier for other people down the line. I'm working on, I think, at the moment where I'm trying to write a language for comedy. I'm trying to write it for this. I'm trying to write a comedy course, a book. I'm not quite sure what it's going to be, but the idea of going, I think there's too much mysticism about writing jokes. I think even professionals, even some of the goats, they kind of write it on stage and they embody a part of their persona on stage and they can conjure up these funny things and there's alchemy.

1:11:50I go, yeah, maybe, but actually you can break it down. You can break down what you're doing there and it can be taught. The idea that it can't be taught is to me so incredibly limiting. The idea that comedy can't be taught is like, well music can't be taught of course. Because, basically, the issue is, the comedy industry has a disproportionate number of narcissists in a gym. That would be a surprise. How dare you? Yeah, I've got a good line on narcissism. I think I've got a couple of narcissists in my life. So, my line is, a narcissist, they've got the disease and you've got the symptoms.

1:12:26It's pretty much sort of sums it up, isn't it? It's an issue. If you've got on any life you know about it. Yeah, I think it's really interesting that thing of going, if it was like music, more like music, and people could sort of discover themselves, because really what are the teenagers about? It's uncomfortable being a teenager. It's uncomfortable like, and we're all growing. It doesn't really stop, but that idea of going, well, who am I? If you're the person you were 10 years ago, then you fucked up. If there's no growth in it, if you haven't progressed, but it's constantly asking yourselves kind of the right questions.

1:13:03And finding a bit of humor in that is just makes the journey a little bit easier, doesn't it? Talking about that trajectory and how it's important to think about where you're going and other people respond to the rising or falling of your stock in kind. There's an argument. But that's character versus reputation. So, character is what you know about yourself. If you have a crisis and you're getting cancelled, your reputation is in a toilet. But you still know who you are. You know who you are and it's the fundamental question when you're in the middle of a cancellation crisis is who are you? Oh, I'm going to Jimmy, I'm a standup comedian, I tell edgy jokes.

1:13:49Oh, okay. That's fine, this seems appropriate. There's no problem. You know who you are, you know what you're about. It's ultimately, it's about that kind of thing, just going, okay, this is fine. And also, where's your happiness lie? If it's outside of you, if it's in that true entertainer's self, if you don't love me, then I don't love me. What does it feel like to be cancelled or attempted cancelled? It's interesting, what the term means now, I don't think it's you call it cancellation, I call it free publicity. It hasn't really had, I don't know whether it really exists. I think it does, I think there's extreme cases, but people can no longer work and are shunned.

1:14:36But as there always been cancellation, it's kind of a new word for something that we've always had. There were always people that were, you know, but you've said something unsaid about me. You've got to write size it as well. The things I've been canceled for, I told the joke and some people didn't like it. We've got to write size that. That's not that bad. I've got cancel once over tax avoidance, not tax evasion. You know the difference? No. It's about 18 months in prison. You know, that thing of going, you, you were, that was very easy because if you get canceled for tax evasion and you say, well, I'm going to pay the money back, great.

1:15:20We cannot forgive what we cannot punish. The certain things that religion does better than a secular society where we cannot forgive what we cannot punish. so certain crimes, like no laws been broken, but ah, that guy now gives me the IK. Okay, well should he never be allowed to work again? What did he do? Are they criminal charges? What's going on here? What's actually happening? And the reputational damage and what could be done online in a day? I mean, you can tear something down pretty quick. And it happens every week. It happens to regular people. There's a lack of, I suppose, because we live online, and we're not seeing the whites of each other's eyes.

1:16:08Kindness, compassion, forgiveness. Very dehumanizing, especially when you get to a certain level of fame, people no longer see very famous people as people. They see them as a representation of an ideology. There are conglomeration of ideas sat behind an at symbol on some form of social media, which is why they're prepared to say completely reprehensible things that they wouldn't say to someone who is much smaller, but they would even say much more reprehensible things to the person that's much smaller on social media than they would say to them face to face. Or they would even say to them fucking resume.

1:16:45No, weird thing is more with the cancellation one. The press would have you believe. Press opinion, public opinion, and Twitter, X are the same thing. And they're all very different. Well, they want to be the arbiters, the gatekeepers of true public opinion. They're not. The news aren't in the news business. They're in the clickbait business. Clickbait is their product. Yeah. It's, I wonder what news looks like without that. I mean, it's... What was your idea? You wanted news without the video? I sound... Yeah, news with that opinion would be, I think, very interesting. There's a website at the moment, like an app called The Knowledge, which gives you all the day's news.

1:17:33And it comes out about noon, great, not first thing. Have a cup of tea and relax first. But it's like five sentences tells you all the news you need to know for the day. Kind of great. Yeah, it was an interesting idea. I've got, well, do you need all the commentary? Do you need to know what they think about it? It's like, it's a weird thing. There's a great book called by Neil Postman called Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it came out in 1984, and it's him kind of railing against. They put music on the news. It's a show now. That's the beginning of the end for him. They put music on the news, and you go, yeah, this is its entertainment.

1:18:15I really enjoyed that what's our problem book by Tim Urban? Yes. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. Just the idea of going, you know, you kind of follow politics like you're following a team. You know, people are, they're just one or the other and they're following and they're not really watching politics, they're watching the real politicians of Washington DC, where they've picked seven great characters to follow, like real housewives. You know, reality's boring, reality TV's great. Well, the news is the same. It's a great book. I really, I think that's the book that's changed the way I think about things more than anything else the last sort of 12 months.

1:18:51Really? A great book. You wish you'd read that 10 years ago before you went through a bunch of... I wish I'd read it when I was at college. I think that's a weird thing where, you know, stuff I was reading at college was sort of nonsense. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. We have decided to land in the UK during a heat wave and every hotel I've stayed in, that aircon has broken. I thought I'd left Austin so I could escape the heat, turns out I haven't, and the pod cover from 8th sleep would have been a lifesaver. The pod cover sits over the top of your existing mattress, just like a normal mattress topper, and actively cools and heats each different side of the bed based on yours and your partner's sleeping preferences.

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1:20:09That's Regardless of character and reputation and how much you've tried to bifurcate the two and silence them off from each other There must be a felt sense of fear there must be a felt sense of Like this is happening and bloodshed being done being no it's the worst breakup you've ever been canceled This is the worst breakup you've ever had because you lose in the person you love the most you're losing you because you've created and this created and curated this person, this thing, and you have a reputation, which is your brand is sort of a decentralized opinion on who you are living in other people's heads and in a day it's gone or changed or you know, ruined.

1:20:57But it's you know, it's alright. I think it makes you more, the good to take from it is the empathy it gives you. I always call on the day. What do you think people who aren't famous don't know about fame?

1:21:11I don't know, I mean I'd sort of stand by that idea it's the land of milk and honey it's kind of a secular heaven. It's kind of my view is it's the natural state to be because we're meant to live in tribes right for the longest time we lived in tribes and let's say there was 60 80 people in the tribe and everyone knew everyone and meeting a stranger was weird. What being famous is like is it's like you live in one of those tribes, but you've got Alzheimer's. So I don't know anyone, but they all know me. So people come out and makes the world a very friendly place. So I go into a coffee shop and get a coffee and people go, oh, you're the guy from the thing and you, there's no small talk you're into talking about your career in your life and what's going on with them.

1:21:50And you have a connection with people and sometimes people don't like you. And those people ignore you. And that is just a regular stranger. It's great. People don't bother having a negative interaction with you. So they just come up and say something nice, if they're going to say something nice, or they don't say anything. So it's like a selection effect. The only people that do bother coming up to you are the people that like you. The people that don't like you just ignore you. Yeah. Oh, they just don't know who the hell I am. You know, I think I came up on one of the last guys I think to come up and be famous in certainly in the UK in that sense of, you know, mass media.

1:22:25I'm tele -famous. And now I think increasingly we're going to have people that are famous, but in a very limited way. So if you think about musicians, there's very few musicians now that your mums heard of. Right? If your mums heard of them, they are massive, right? Same amount of records were sold in the 1980s as today, but by, it used to be sold by 500 artists now sold by 10. Same things happen with books. Used to be 500 authors brought out novels they all do pretty well and now it's like four a year and they sell incredible numbers. But music and books and if you're into something now, it seems like it's marrow casting.

1:23:06So it's interesting that the other night we went out for a drink, someone came up and said, oh hey, how are you? Someone came up to you and was so into it. It's like, Oh, this is my guy. This is my guy, but it's probably fewer, but much more intense. Mmm. Yeah, it's interesting. It's just, I know, we're often told about the perils of fame, right, that it's reality warping and that you privacy gets lost and all the rest of it. There's a great line. I'm a watching, breaking bad. And my girl said, well, he's talking about it and going, well, you know, power. He power corrupts. And you know, power reveals.

1:23:50It's like reveals who you really are. Like the more, it is kind of a revealing thing, I think. Palser. I think you become, you're allowed to be, you know, do you live in someone else's world or do they live in yours? It kind of gets to that, you know, do we cover that charm charisma thing? I've got a real sort of thing on charm and charisma are being very different and they're conflated words. They sort of mean the same thing in conversation, but I think they're very different. I think charm isn't someone you like. It's someone you think would like you.

1:24:28Charisma is you come to me. Charm is I come to you. Obama, incredibly charming. Look at his speech patterns, look at the way he hurls himself. He's like he's mediating the situation. So damn charming. Trump is charismatic. You come to me. One isn't better than the other particularly. I mean, there's a, you know, exactly. There's one that I prefer there, but as an individual, Jennifer Aniston is charming. Angelina Jolie is charismatic. Now, you both get to fuck Brad Pitt. That's the good news, But it's a very different skill set and I think knowing yourself knowing which one you are is Very valuable which do you think you are all charisma zero fucking charm Like zero charm Of course But that's what it sounds very arrogant.

1:25:22I'm all charisma, but you bet that's what I'm working with That's the thing of like it likes so someone charismatic trying to be charming

1:25:34smarmy, falsely disingenuous. It doesn't come across. It doesn't read. So you've got to know what you're dealing with, know what you're playing with. And there's no judgment, particularly on which one it is. But it's pretty sort of interesting thinking about what you are, how people perceive you. How you'll perceive this, sorry, but how you'll perceive this is so important in our world. And And it's useful to know because when people meet me and when people see me on TV, they have a perception of me. Now is it true? No, there's more to me than that. You know, I'd suffer a bit with the anxiety.

1:26:16I'm very dyslexic. Not very good at writing. I read quite slowly. Now that comes across. People just go, he's all right, he's looking in. When a sharp suit is really cutting and sadonic, he's probably unthinking and whatever. But knowing that is really useful. You don't have to be that person. But it's good to know what others think about you. There is a thing about fame where if you wear the mask for long enough, the mask becomes the face. You told me that line the other night. That took a good chunk of my 20s to realize that. And Aubrey Marcus taught me that the persona is incapable of receiving love.

1:26:58It can only receive praise. And what he means by the, yeah, fucking that's very good. Isn't it? Correct. Yeah. That was like a, because this was when I was probably 20. No, it must have been 31. I think when he said that to me for the first time. So like 2019. So only, you know, only four years ago. And I'm still kind of this big name on campus party boy, I'm not a real fish, but I'm also not, and I'm feeling this pain. So I've got enough distance. I think how do I have learned it when I needed to hear it? I wouldn't have had the perspective to be able to understand it. What is the kind of thing with wisdom is it's, you could tell any 18 -year -old all of this stuff.

1:27:35And it will just different things, will resonate at different times. So you can't read the same book twice. Here we talked the other night about Lindy books. That's one of the things I got from this podcast, which I love. I got, I was listening to this and I was reading Quentin Tarantino's cinema speculation. I just want, why am I watching new stuff? Who gives the fuck about new stuff? I want the best stuff. So you go back to 1970's cinema and books that you read years ago that meant something to you and read them again. It's that, like no man steps in the same river twice because he's not the same river and he's not the same man.

1:28:09Yeah. Yeah. So this like strange idea around the person who is incapable of receiving love it can only receive praise. Was really important to me because I realized that I hadn't necessarily felt particularly connected to a lot of the successes in my life. I hadn't felt like they really got me, right? and the reason being that if you are only playing a role, everyone's support and adoration of you will feel in some ways hollow and shallow because people aren't in love with you, they're applauding the role that you play. You know, we don't love Russell Crowe, we love Gladiator, we don't love Russell.

1:29:03He might be listening to this. Your is made. So that's different. But yeah, that thing of, I suppose it is the actor. It's that we're playing a role and that role is, yeah, you kind of don't love someone at work. They're in a chair. They're the boss, whatever they're doing. It's a part of them, but it's not authentically them. And that's why finding that work -life balance where you have a place where you can totally be yourself and be open to love. But also, there are love things interesting to me, just as a sidebar, every song for 400 years was about God and every song is about love. How do you mean?

1:29:49Every song is about love, right? Every song used to be about God. Everything used to be, every piece of music pre -1900 was about God. Everything. And now it's about love. I mean, you could make an argument to say it's the same thing, but it's just interesting to me that that culturally that's kind of what we sing about the Gauss. Well love is what's slightly taken over now. The love song has, you know, it feels to me like comedy is having a moment because it's reflecting back the world in a very interesting way. It feels like comedy is having the moment that music maybe had in the 60s and 70s in cinema in the 70s, were really connected with people.

1:30:28People are connected with comedians in a way that's, I mean, listen, I'm part of this, but I feel like I'm in at the ground level, like podcasts are new, and we can see podcasts are new because it's like less than five years. But really, comedy's only existed in the current format since, I mean, who are the, who's the John the Baptist, you know, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Richard prior, right? These guys standing on stage, talking for an hour, and people just came to see them. We ran about really happened before. You can trace it back. There's never a first, but you can trace it back to whenever, to shame inistic skunk and antsy.

1:31:06But really, it's a very modern thing. Stand up comedy this way of it's an American medium, and it feels That's incredible to be kind of part of that as it and it's rising. It feels like it's rising and becoming more important. And I don't know. I don't know who the goats are, but I kind of like to think they're in the future. I like to think the goats are 12 years old now going through high school. And they're going to be they're going to grow up with this language around them. Oh, I came up with an interesting idea the other day. So I was in Brighton giving that live talk and then James one of my friends got up on stage and it was packed.

1:31:491600 people, wall to wall in this massive auditorium in Brighton somewhere. And I just wanted to watch his show from the front. So he's done what I'm about to start doing a lot. He sold out Sydney Opera House. He sold out the Round House in London. He sold out the palladium. So he's done the thing that I'm about to begin doing with my live show. And as I'm going to watch the guy, not from side stage, He's not from backstage. I'm gonna fucking observe it. I'm gonna be out there with the peasants. So, descend into the muck in the mire and the feces and the blood, sit down. During the interval, this guy comes over, sit in front of me and we get talking and he was discussing about how he has changed the way that he sees himself about how he has what I called personal growth guilt.

1:32:38So, survivor guilt, someone goes away to war, their truck gets blown up, all of their friends die, he gets stuck in the back, but somehow you survive, right? Maybe you're injured, maybe you're not, but you get to come home. And there's a very specific type of guilt that's associated with that, which is his belief that he should have gone with his friends, right? That he should have been killed along with them. I think this is relatively common amongst soldiers that come back from war. He was talking to me about one of the things that he feels, which is like a personal growth guilt, that as he begins to pull himself away from these beliefs and insights and lifestyles that no longer serve him, he was starting to feel this degree of guilt for leaving his friends behind in some regard.

1:33:31And I thought that was very interesting. I think that this is one of the draws that pulls people back into old habits and old patterns that they almost don't believe that they are worthy. Well, it's interesting the move to Austin that you've made because that thing of like, you can't beat your environment and that idea of, I made a move quite early in life. I was 16 and I moved schools. And it was the first kind of that sort of discovery that you are, who you say you are. Yeah, I mean, ultimately you'll be judged on what you do, not what you say, but it was interesting to kind of be able to reinvent myself quite early in life and go, well, I'm not going to just mess around and, you know, at crazy at school, I'm going to work really hard and go to Cambridge and really apply myself.

1:34:19off. And no one thought it was crazy because I could just turn up in this new place and go, hey, I'm smart and alpha and I'm going to go to Cambridge and everyone, okay, great. It's interesting now with things like Facebook where I think it's becoming increasingly difficult to distance yourself from the past, your tethered to your past. There's memories and those photos and those friendships and the connections. It's just difficult to let go. There used to be a high school reunion and you'd meet someone 15 years after you left school and go, what have you been up to? Now are you already now? It's never going to happen again, right?

1:34:58Because if you're interested, you're going to know all you're still connected to them. They're following you. They're still part of your life. So you don't get to kind of reinvent yourself. And I think it's quite a healthy thing. It depends. You might have just come out fully formed and be great. But I think for a lot of us, it did involve going, well look, this is what I am now. this is what I want to be and I've got a bit of ambition as opposed to entitlement and I'm going to work hard to get to there. And sometimes you can be kind of dragged back by friends of family can be incredibly supportive, but they can also kind of drag you back.

1:35:28There's a lot of comics have spoken about this, the idea of when you start out, you don't really tell your friends. You just go and do it. And like after a 10 or 20 or 30 gigs or whatever, you tell people you're doing this new thing. But by then you're off, you're you're enjoying in the circus. One of my friends as a quote, we're not afraid of failure, we're afraid of what other people will think of us if we fail. Yeah. Which I think is a nice reframe. You know, I've never understood the quote about, you're not afraid of failing, you're afraid of what will happen if you succeed. No, I'm not. No, that's what I'm aiming for.

1:36:05I'm afraid of what will happen if I succeed. That's literally what I'm trying to do. But I think we're afraid of the judgment of other people if we do fail. or that feels pretty on the money to me. And you could live a very, you know, contained life. You do scared of being ridiculed. You're scared of humiliation. You're scared of saying, I want to do great things, and they're not doing great things. But I would argue saying you want to do great things and not doing great things is better than just not doing anything. I'm not saying anything. Give it a crack.

1:36:37Thinking about that... That ability to deal with failure, that ability to sort of face up to things not going so well. And also this, well, it's, there's different failures, aren't there? There's kind of, there's, there's recoverable and non -recoverable failures. So you tell the joke and it doesn't work. Very recoverable. You've got another line straight away, locked and loaded. We'll try something else. And then if they all don't work all the new lines, then you've got the old lines that you know do work. So you're, you're okay. And then there's there's there's proper, you know kite surfing failures.

1:37:12Where you drown. It's different failures, right? There's different levels of risk and different tolerance for risk. So making sensible choices on what could you risk? Yeah. Is that seems very sensible? George reminded me. I was lamenting about two years ago to George about whether or not George Mack for the people that don't know the mutual George friend about whether or not I should move to Austin and he gave me a frame that was very instructive which is it's a reversible decision. You go out there, it doesn't work, you come back with detail between your legs, maybe you're going to look a little bit silly, but it's hardly the end of the world.

1:37:51Reversible and irreversible decisions I think are such a lovely... I should cry to see if you're looking at something and you're saying, well, should I have these kids. That's a big, that's a big decision. It's really hard to put them back in, I've heard. Yeah, I mean, even, and there's a, there's this real stigma to put them up for adoption. And as a parent, there'll be days when you go, that might be an angle. But you, you go, that's a reverse, that's forever. Whereas other things are, you know, pretty easy to reverse. So take those risks. And, you know, even, but there's certain things, I think we're set up to think or the our society set up to tell us losing your job is the worst thing that can happen.

1:38:34You can you find another job your skill set is the thing that's interesting add to that. There's this lovely idea that the skills that you develop along the way of what you are working toward in any case. So whatever pursuit it is that you're going through whatever challenges are placed in front of you. What you are working toward is not the end goal. It is not necessarily even the outcome because whether it fails or whether you succeed, the skills that you developed while you are doing this, it's kind of analogous to that. That's correct, it. Y -Pon, Y -Poth. It's also analogous to man's search for meaning, right, Victor Frankl?

1:39:14But ultimately, your ability to respond in any situation is the thing that can never be taken away from you. If that not disposition is more important than position. Yes. You know, writ large. You go people went through, that life is beautiful movie. The idea that you go people went through the worst things in the world. They came out. There's, I heard an interview with Esther Perage. She said this thing that really kind of shook me. And she was talking about her parents were in the death camps in Germany. And she said some people didn't die and some people lived. And she talked about like people that have plastic coverings on the furniture.

1:39:54They're waiting to live, but they're not living now. They're sort of, it's a really interesting analogy because I think we all know those people that are saving that room for special. But special every day. This is it. This is, you know. There's a lovely frame, the original name for this podcast before I woke up at 3am with modern wisdom six years ago was crushing a Tuesday and it's a sentence from sentence from Tim Ferris and he talks about you want to design your life so that the average Tuesday is pretty fucking good. Yeah, I think so because it's you're like the idea of the mountain, the idea that you're aiming towards something where you will be satisfied, there's always going to be someone that's got it better than you somehow.

1:40:39The idea that your you know comparison as soon as the thief of joy is one of my favorite quotes. You just, because you're constantly, I've sort of got a holistic theory of jealousy. Where you, you know, if you're comparing yourself to someone else, you might look at their career and go, oh my God, they're playing 15 sold out nights at the Ota Arena. Oh my God, they must be making bank. All right, incredible. No, you have to be jealous of the whole thing. Take the whole thing, correct? You need their wife, their kids, their car, their house, their life. Who would you actually swap lives with? Like there's, like, I feel like there's no one because you go, well, this is my, I like the adventure I'm on.

1:41:20I wanna see how this turns out. It's like my favorite show. Yeah, I, I, I mean, that frame changed an awful lot about jealousy for me as well. You don't know what the inner texture of Elon Musk or Konome Gregor or... What's also... Kip Kardashian's mind is... It's that thing of like, especially with people closer to you than those kind of the icons. The icons are very useful, I think, to really admire people that are doing fabulous things in the world. Great. But that kind of close, when you've got someone close to you, is it a real friend or a friend of me? So if their success is your success, if my friend gets a show and sells out a tour and gets a big break and he's in a movie.

1:42:04If I'm, ah, I wish it was me, I can't hang out with that person. I can't. It's like that would be, that's, it's poison. But if you, if your friends were someone, their win is your win. Like when they get the thing, you're like, ah, even if it's a thing you really would aspire to and think was amazing. I remember when James Corden got the show in the States just thinking, this is so cool, this is like. And then you know, you can compare yourself to your friends, but you go, yeah, but he's got charm for days and he's got skills I don't have. What are you going to do? What's your theory on kindness?

1:42:47Well, my theory on kindness would be that we have maybe Everyone wants to be kind and the problem is the marshmallow test. You can have one kindness now or two kindness later. We have to, I think, as a society, as people, I think it's the thing that sort of parenting has taught me, but just life in general, be kind to yourself, be kind to others later. I think we all know that thing of the kind thing to do now is to go to Greg's and buy some donuts and smash them. Great. Get that sugar here right now. And the kind of thing to do is to have a salad and feel good tomorrow. And with yourself, with others, just delay it.

1:43:34Delay it. Do the kind that it's easy to give in now to whims and desires, but actually if you hold back, it's better.

1:43:47Yeah. Kindness is kind of like an unsexy thing. It feels almost like the sort of thing that's very hard to just define a capitalistic world. One where everyone's striving. Well, here we are. You know, you've got a non -measurable metric that is incredibly important. So if we talk about disposition, tough to measure. position? Oh my God, so easy to measure. How are you doing? How many downloads this month? How many people listening? How many people tweeting? What do they say? Easy, disposition, not done what's about you, how you feeling? Yeah. That kindness is, and it comes, you're not being kind.

1:44:30It's ultimately it's for you. It's just a nicer way to live. Yeah, I love this position, disposition, hidden, observable metric frame. I really think there's something in there. I think they're hidden observable. I think maybe we could apply that to everything. You know, because what's the... The successful show is... It's sold out. Does that make it successful? You could fill the room but can you fill it with laughter? You know, it's... How are you viewing things? It's like the wrong time scale often. People often think of these show as being the show tonight. All my show is a sales pitch for next time.

1:45:10So all it is. All the podcast is today is a comeback next week. There's more of this. It's great and he's chatting to people and this is the kind of conversation he has. Great. It's just doing more. It's process -driven, not outcomes -driven. Do you know what good -harts -law is? Good -harts -law. Good -harts -law. It sounds like a sequel to a movie. It's kind of like people that brought you, how'd you like them, Apple? Kind of like Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the time given for it. Okay. Fundamentally, it's the justification for time blocking and productivity strategy.

1:45:48It's why you completed your university assignments the night before they were due in, or sometimes if you were me throughout the entire night before they were due in. Yeah, what's that great line? I think it's Dickin said, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time.

1:46:05So that's Parkinson's law. Good heart's law says when a measure becomes an outcome, it's ceases to be a good measure. So when it's the over lines on dashboards for everything, right? If I was to optimize on the podcast for plays, right, that's a measure. Plays are a measure of the success of the podcast. If I begin to use that measure as an outcome, come, it no longer is a good measure because it doesn't measure the thing that it's supposed to measure. Right? I could get lots and lots of email addresses by posting all over the internet, sign up to my mailing list and every single person that signs up will get a thousand pounds.

1:46:45Right? People will then sign up and I won't give them a thousand pounds because I'm not going to do that. So the metric of acquire as many email addresses as I can, good, did that. Yeah, but the actual Outcome I wanted was Accumulate lots of people on a mailing list who actually want to hear from me who trusted me and are going to click on links And are going to care about what I've got to say like that's the actual outcome. Can I ask about that like a sidebar? But the I liked the email that you sent. I'd rather you said it I wanted to dictate it. I'd rather that was a mini podcast that came at the beginning of the show Here's what I've been thinking about I'd rather it was just a little because it's not it's often that thing if you go, I'm listening to it, I kind of, you know, I like it.

1:47:31I like those things, those thoughts. But for me, it's the, the medium is the message. And for you, it seems to be podcasts are, and I think actually if you put those together, I think maybe that's the book. That's, it's taking these little things. So you're, you're sort of the process is you're writing it as you kind of go along. And you're taking those, those things that really resonate with people and I don't disagree. I mean, it's the thing that fires me up the most to do. This, like, whatever we want to call it, bro philosophy, like common guy life insight stuff. I really like it. I like bringing those two things together.

1:48:05But have you seen Jonathan Hight? Right? Hight. He's writing his next book in public. It's really interesting. See the Kotlin of the American Mind? That's right. That's a great book. Yeah, fantastic. He wrote this great essay for the Washington Post, I think, called The Tower of Babel. And it's kind of a development on from where he was, coddling of the American mind. He's sort of big into this anti -social media thing. He's concerned about what it's doing to especially young girls, sense of self and anxiety and so on. It's awful. However, what he's doing on his maybe sub -stack, maybe something else.

1:48:39He's writing the book chapter by chapter, publishing it, maybe just to paying members or maybe for free to everybody. What? Just getting feedback on it. Getting feedback and iterating. So he will have released every single chapter of his book's first draft for largely free over the space of a Euro -18 months. Great idea. I mean, it's kind of the wisdom of crowds. If you think about music as well, like the great bands often go out and play it first before they finish the album, they go and play it and see what the reaction is. It's interesting. I suppose the not looking behind the wizards curtain, but with great stand -up comedians, when you see Chris Rock do an hour, you go, yeah, well, he wrote probably 2 ,000 jokes in order to do those 70 that worked brilliantly, and in order to do those, he put how much time in, and you know, you want to road test it.

1:49:37You don't want to do all new material. I came up with an idea, which is similar to something you talk about a lot. You call it the court life crisis, and I called it the manor pause. So that a pause is nice. Yeah. It's nice, but it's the, it's, it's early, right? It's that mid 20s. I think it's when you start to make your first decision in life. So pretty much on a treadmill, if you think about it from the age of five, you're going to the education system and it was great when we had an empire, because we needed people that went through the education system to go and run the empire. That was what it was for.

1:50:11That's what the education system in Britain that's kind of gone out to the Western world was for. Now, not so much. So this idea that it's exams at all these stages and you know what the metric is. You know what the measurable is. So the measurable isn't what you found now, which is the joy of learning, the joy of reading, the joy of ideas. is. That's what school should be about, but it isn't. It's about passing exams and get to, did I choose to stay on and do my levels? No. No, the obvious thing to do after your, the 16 you do stay on and everyone goes to university. I mean, everyone goes to university now and you go to the best one you can.

1:50:49So I had to Cambridge and then after Cambridge, what do you do? One of us getting a job now. I've got to get a job. What do I get a job with? Well, the biggest blue chip company I can find. Yay. So you get a job And then you kind of turn around what a year, two years, depending on how bright you are, not that bright, about two years in, I kind of went, the fuck am I doing? You know that great quote of every man's got two lives. And the second begins when he realizes he's only got one. And fuck that. So you get off the treadmill and go, and then it's very, there's a book called, What Color is Your Parachute, which I read at the time, which is kind of a asking questions that lead you to that, what are you going to do?

1:51:29There's loads of that kind of self -authoring stuff on the internet now, which is I always think it's like, it's horoscopes for people with A levels. You know, the kind of, whether it's Myers -Briggs or whatever, but those are fascinating, because you kind of go, why do people like horoscopes? I just want to read about myself. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a little bit self -obsessed and narcissistic, but doing those personality tasks, actually, if you do them seriously and the self -authoring sort of things, it's fantastic for, well, who am I? Am I charismatic? Am I charming? I'm like, what's my edge? What's the thing that I do?

1:52:01That I find easy, that other people find difficult, and there's a little bit of gold there, and I could pursue that. That would be a purpose. That would be something that's a true north. Is it tealik and antitelik? You pronounce the differently to me. I don't know. Tealik and exotelik. Yeah, I've only ever seen it written down. I kind of like that when you don't know. Yeah. But that idea of like tasks without end will make you happy. task with an end could be a bit depressing. If you get to the end of a project and it's done, huh? Finite and infinite games, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, I, uh, that manopause thing, it came about, I first called it the fitness manopause.

1:52:41So I noticed around about 20, 27, 26, 27 that I was, all of the training strategies that I'd been relying on, like pushpull legs and bro split and and I was looked fantastic, but kind of got out of breath, going up a set of stairs and I couldn't bend over and touch my toes and all the rest of it. So what I realized was I probably should try and pivot my training and I saw it with a lot of my friends, a lot of the guys that are listening to this podcast will feel this as well. The training protocol that you followed, especially if it's a bro split through your 20s, you get to all the end of your 20s and I'm like, ah, am I stepping in my only rosy, powered by 500 milligrams of caffeine looking at myself in the mirror?

1:53:23I'm kind of dumb with this. and then people pivot and they start doing yoga or they do Brazilian jiu -jitsu or they do kickboxing and they go and try crossfit, they do whatever. And I noticed that first, but it was actually the lead measure of a whole bunch of other changes, which was the things that I thought served me in my twenties, weren't self -authored, the things that I thought I wanted and the things that I wanted to want had diverged. I didn't want the things that I wanted, right? I actually, when I looked sufficiently deep, does... Well, is that... I mean, what do you want to want as a question is, I mean, that should be the name of the book.

1:54:05It's so good. It's so fucking good. But that thing of, I didn't want what I wanted is dopamine. That's just dopamine. It's the idea of going, no, the chase was the thing. The chase was your reward. So when you go shopping and you buy the watch, the car, the whatever, the trinket is that you thought you wanted that represented something and then you get it into it. Blah, it's that how many times do you have to do that before you realize, okay, trinkets aren't for me. There's nothing in trinkets. Your, your, the ambitions should be emotions. Can I spin you a yarn about the pineapple? Apple. The pineapple.

1:54:44Yes. Not what you can tell me about pineapples, but yeah, sure. Very important fruit. Let me show you that you're wrong. So, 1492, Christopher Columbus lands on the island of Guadalupe, and for the first time ever, Western person discovers the pineapple. It kind of looks like a royal fruit, right? It's got a little crown on its head, and he describes in his journal eating it. If you've never had a pineapple before, and you hadn't had other fruits that were sort of created outside of the UK, stuff like apples and stuff. The pineapples overpowered as fuck. Like it's a super fruit, right? It's so sweet and juicy.

1:55:16Nice. Anyway, it describes it. It brings it back, right? Right. Prince or King Ferdinand, the second of Aragon, King of Spain. I think he takes it back to first. And they take a fucking literally boatload. Take all of these ones back. One isn't rotten. When he brings it back, he gets given to the king. So the first pineapple that's ever eaten by somebody who's a westerner, is it's done in a very sort of ceremonial fashion. This myth about the pineapple propagates and after a little while, trade begins to improve a little bit, the pineapple becomes one of the most ostentatious displays of wealth that anybody in the British aristocracy can rely on for about 300 years.

1:55:57You know, you know on the strand in London, is there a pineapple? You used to be able to rent pineapples. $8 ,000. Oh, $8 ,000 is the equivalent of what it would cost. But people would rent them for dinner parties. They would parade them around. Look at this. They would have statues out front of the estate as if to say, you know what the gag is on the statue. So the pineapple, I'll go toe to toe on pineapples. So on stately homes, they'll often have a stone pineapple out the front. And it's a gag. So the gag is when sailors would come back from the West Indies, they'd often bring a pineapple. And they would put the pineapple in the window.

1:56:36The girls would put the pineapple. And the pineapple kind of meant no gentlemen call us, my husband's home. And he's a sailor. And that gag, that gag has been lost in the, in the mid, but the aristocracy put a pineapple at the front of their house. It was kind of a joke. It was a reference to that. But the joke got lost. So that's interesting. I didn't know that. You're teaching me things about pineapples here. I thought about pineapples once, but my friend wrote a book about pineapples. But that thing in the strand, you could, yeah, you could rent pineapples and you would show them off and then, and then suddenly that thing that was the most lauded special thing, ain't nothing.

1:57:15And see where I'm going. You look at it now and you go, what's the thing? there's nothing you can buy in a shopping mall that you will give a fuck about in 10 years. Nothing. There's nothing for you there. Fast forward. Do something for you in five years time. Don't buy the thing. You don't need it. So that story about the pineapple and it's subsequent demise when the French invent greenhouses and you can grow fruits from much more tropical climates where we are, related to a lesson that Rogan taught me when I went on his show last year. And I called it Rogan's Value Difficulty Conflation. Look at the car he's driving, look at the watch he's wearing, look at the girl he's with.

1:57:56That's unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable, but then you attained it. And then you realized, oh, this isn't valuable, this is just difficult to get. And there's a difference, there's a big difference. What's valuable is something that fulfills you intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and lovingly. Most smart people realize that there is value in stepping outside of their comfort, that On the other side of discomfort is something valuable, we're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain because if they weren't difficult to attain, they wouldn't be worthwhile.

1:58:25This is how non -valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. Attaining something worthwhile is often going to be difficult, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's worthwhile. We use the challenges of proxy for virtue or value or alignment or integrity. There's some signaling going on here too, difficult things by design will be attained by a small number of people, which makes them desirable, simply because it's an easy way to stand out from the crowd. But just because it's difficult to attain does not mean that it's valuable. I mean, that's great.

1:58:57The only thing I would take issue with there is most smart people realize, no, no, they fucking don't. And I can prove it, yachts. Fucking yachts. Someone's today. Yots. Great. There's a level at which people are just okay, maybe okay. If you don't enjoy a conversation with a friend, you're not going to enjoy a yacht. What do you think you're doing on the yacht?

1:59:30Yeah. I mean, that in a vowel quote, if you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy on a yacht. Yeah. It's perfect, right? Yeah. It's perfect. It's because you go, that is, it's so true. How early in life can you know that? How, what age do you have to be before you can go, ah, you're chasing rainbows? This is, there's nothing, that external stuff isn't going to bring you the thing that you want, but how much of a quest you need to go on before you can sort of realize that? Well, that's the, you know, that's been a repeating theme throughout today about you can and bestow all of these insights.

2:00:10But the 18 year old version of me wouldn't have listened to this in any case. And it seems like even if someone shows you a photo of the top of the mountain, this is what it looks like. This was the route that I took to get there. He was the pitfalls that you should avoid. Ultimately, it takes a very singular person to be able to learn from the mistakes of others rather than the mistakes of others. Who had that line about? It was climbing Everest or whatever. and someone chop it up there. It wasn't ever as a result of the math, but they didn't climb up. They got a chopper up to some voters and went.

2:00:44It's a nothing experience. Now who cares? Most of us just get, you can get sent some photos. Like there's nothing in that. Like doing the arm, I wanted to do that pilgrimage, but I thought I'd do it real quick. So I did it on a jet ski. It's not anything. If you're not willing to take the journey yourself, it's, you got nothing. It's interesting that thing of the manopause that you had 26, 27, that links to the developmental kind of biology of the eye, when's the brain finished? It's interesting your brain was just finished. What do I think about 25 for guys? It's a 24 -4 -minute, it's like, but it's that old that we're fully integrated, ready to go.

2:01:29And then at that age, miraculously about 12 months in, you went, well, this is nonsense. I've got to do something else. Yeah. Yeah, I see it. I see it in a lot of people. We spoke the other night about inocritics. What do you think is the relationship that we should have with our inocritic? I mean, I think it's interesting. Walt Disney had three different rooms. So we had a room to be creative, like just come up with ideas. No bad ideas. Great. Other than some of the anti -semitism. Anyway, so he's got his ideas room and then he's got his management room. Well, how do we make those room? I don't know what those ideas happen.

2:02:07How are we going to make that stuff happen? And then you're another room for criticism. And I think we should sort of think about the inner critic like that. The idea of going, if you're trying to do something creative, don't let the critic in too soon. Wait until you've had the whole idea, wait until you've let the management get involved a little bit, wait until you've tried to write the whole joke and come at it from a few different angles and try it twice before you critic, you criticise it. And outsourcing your critic I think is smart, I mean comedy does it with the audience. Really they make the decision as to what the show is, they do the editing for me.

2:02:45Do you got a much better relationship with failure with that? It engenders a much better relationship with failure. Yeah, because it's not identity level. Yeah. They have the jokes, the bullets, I'm the gun. Easy come easy go. Yeah. So you let go of it. But also when you're doing something creative, you've got to kill a lot of babies. They're all very precious to you and you think they're fabulous, they're fabulous, little idea and they're nothing. Audience just dead at you. Okay. Try the next one. Yeah, that was a swanimus. Yeah, great. But isn't that kind of a nice attitude for, it's hard though when you've made something that's, you know, if it's a movie or a book that you've worked on for years, but that super smart guy trying every chapter as he goes along, that's super smart.

2:03:33Yeah, low stakes, low pressure, creativity is something. I wonder whether it's played into by this sort of concretizing of everything that you've ever said throughout all of time being there that it doesn't feel like the ephemeral can be ephemeral anymore. You can't just blast it out. It's going to be. I phones at a comedy show are kind of the enemy of creativity. Censorship is not a problem in comedy. Self -censorship is a huge problem. people not saying the unsayable, risky thing that could be the funniest fucking shit because they're worried, well, if that's taken out of context, what if people don't understand?

2:04:13I mean, like, why do people like comedy? There's a lot of nuance in comedy, isn't there? There's no nuance in the modern world. There's no nuance in in, you know, what's reported in the media. It's all a weird new speak. And then in comedy, like you can say the craziest shit and people know, it's not. Yeah. There's Did you see Rosanne get popped for that little bit she did with Theo Vaughn? She was making a joke about the Jews and she basically said that not enough of them were. It was the most probably the most egregious clipping of a bit. Yeah, I didn't see it, so I can't really comment. But the idea of like the bad faith argument that journalists make of going, I know it's a joke, it was in a comedy show, at a comedy club, that's the context, it was a joke, and they go, okay, well let's report it as if it was a statement that was made.

2:05:10So there's some gentlemen can I get your attention, I'll make a comment here, about, no, no one said that. She'd made a bunch of obviously sarcastic, very over the top, opposite statements. It was like, and the pigs will fly and the sky is green and the da da da da da basically for ages and ages and ages and ages and ages and ages. And then at the very end said like and not enough Jews, something, something, something. It was part of it was an ever -escalating statement about the ridiculousness of some of the claims that were being made with some, some thing. And they just took the bit at the end.

2:05:50Yeah. And I was like, come on. You know, I'm all for or saying, you know, this needs to be able to stand upon its own, like, things can be taken in a little bit of isolation, but not that much isolation. Yeah, and it is interesting though, is the idea of you go, well, you could take anything out of context and someone's going to be upset as well. Also, you've got how much access to people now, everyone's got to say, it used to be that would have been an eye roll and a touch from someone. Yeah, right. Someone said, not for me, thank you. Won't be buying a ticket. I won't go and now it's the the idea of saying I don't like that seems very reasonable to me No one should have access to that seems like a different thing So you know the free speech thing is you go well until we find a better system We have to have free speech.

2:06:37What about the Chinese system? That's a good system Yeah, I mean, I mean that's the world we could be living in you know where I mean It's you know Charlie Brookers are made in mind and that those kind of black mirrors where people are getting so social points and then it's happening right now. It's unbelievable. It's like 1984 is happening right now. You know that they've got in China gate analysis that can work out even face covered, wearing clothes, can work out who someone is with about 90 % plus accuracy just from the way that they walk. So hiding your face, hiding everything, dressing differently, doing whatever isn't sufficient to protect you now.

2:07:21They've fingerprinted your movement. It's interesting that thing of like the micro, the macro, so you can't move privately, but I think maybe with social media now you can't think privately because everything's it becomes slightly performative and there's no boredom. You're constantly stimulated. I think we're slightly overstimulated as a society. Like being bored is really good for creativity. But you're a bit bored and a bit like listless, you know? Sometimes I look, even now it happens, but it used to happen more previously, at how many things I'll be doing at once. So I'll be replying to an email while I'm waiting for the kettle to boil.

2:08:06I'll be setting the dishwasher away while listening to a podcast at two -time speed, and I'll be waiting for somebody to... I'm like, I've got like... I'm literally waiting for five things to happen while I'm doing three. That's the modern condition, though, isn't it? You're so addicted to activity, doing something, and feeling like you're being productive, and actually just letting yourself kind of sit having some time just to think. It's the Charlie Munger thing, isn't it? The idea of waiting and just having time just to think and do nothing. Read stuff. Read more Chinese. You've got a theory on the Chinese.

2:08:44What's your theory about the Chinese? My theory on the Chinese, the same theory is, well, my theory on the Chinese, we don't need to worry there are covers bound. The rolling stones are not worried about the bootleg rolling stones, right? Because they're the rolling stones. They're coming up with this shit and playing it and someone's doing a cover version. China at the moment is a cover's band. And there's something, there's some sweet source in our system where innovation is created and we're coming up with stuff. And you look at the five biggest companies in the world and they're all tech companies that came up in the last 10 years, 15 years, whatever it is, it's incredible, the innovation that we have.

2:09:26You don't need to worry about it. It's like AI, I'm not worried about AI. It's artificial intelligence. As soon as it's artificial consciousness, great, I'll be concerned. That can compute those right jokes. Yeah, when they start laughing at jokes, that's when there'll be a problem. There was this, I think it was George that told me this one as well. A really good measure of AI will be, I think it's called stairway wit. You heard of this? Stairway wit. Stairway wit or stairwell wit. it. So there's spirit to scaliere, the French term for, you know, you have a dinner with someone and you're walking down the stairs from the restaurant and you think, I wish I'd said that.

2:10:07Correct. Is that the yes. Yes. What's that called? Spirit to scaliere. I'm going to guess that means the spirit of the staircase. Yeah. There you go. There you go. The French, they're always going to make everything so much more. But I think it's because the restaurants were often on the... Of a floor in the war down the stairs. That's cool. So that was there. It's a French thing. And the French are like genetically not very funny. So presumably... Yeah, they are. Who's funny? I don't know that. Gad, the guy called Gad, very funny. There's a girl called... Oh, what's she called? Come back to me in one second.

2:10:48Oh. I'm blanking on her name. Because the French used to date Blanche Garthan is... I watched it. That's a fucking French name. I don't speak French. I watched it in French with subtitles. Blanche Garthan's special. Blue my fucking mind. Really? So fucking too thin. No, there's incredible funny people everywhere. But that weird, the stairs thing, this is very unattangent. But it's interesting. Let's talk about the environment again. Okay, so you were aware of New York at the turn of the century. Okay, so New York turn of the century, incredibly loud. Every street is cobbled, seeing gangs in New York, you get the visual, right?

2:11:29Every street is cobbled, horse and carts everywhere and people on horseback rank, so you gotta get around. The horse shit is yey deep, okay? When horses die, they die in the street and they have to wait for them to atrophize slightly before they cut them up manually and cart them off. So you know that kind of trope about you've heard about smelling salts and people to work this fetch the smelling salts it's from that era London was the same But New York had it really bad because it's an island So you know there's the steps going up to the brownstones the steps going up to the brownstone buildings with a little metal scraper And that was so you could walk out of the shit and scrape it off your feet before you went into the house covered in shit.

2:12:11The whole of New York was covered in shit and they had a law and they wrote a law about it and then another law and then they brought in a tax and then they brought in another tax and another law and another law, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or that nothing changed. It was covered in shit and it smelled awful and it was a hell. And then Henry Ford came along and horses went from a million horses to six of them now in central a park taking tourists around and no more horse -hit problem. And I kind of think things can change very quickly. I mean, maybe that's a ludicrously optimistic view of the world because the biggest industry in the world in 1902 was wailing.

2:12:56You're kidding. No, biggest industry in the world was wailing because they would need the blubber and the oil for The oil was everything. You know, what's a resource is a really interesting question. So you go, that oil from Wales was a resource and we didn't wipe out the wiles but we came as close as you'd ever want to get and then suddenly a bit of tech came along and save them. Yeah. So you know, it's kind of a little bit trope, but one of the best ways to ensure that people pivot from a behavior that they do to a behavior that you want is to make the behavior that you want more attractive than the behavior that they do.

2:13:32It's the way that Elon Musk managed to do what the Prius never did because he made an electric car that was cooler than a normal car. Yeah. It's... Yeah, it's interesting that thing of like, whatever you look at society, wherever you're calling from in this moment, we imagine it's finished. We imagine this is the last iteration of humanity. All the technology up to now, but that's pretty much it, right? We're never going to get beyond this, right? Because it's never going to get... Computers don't get better than this. Fones don't get better than this. We don't have better medicine than we do today This is it we've reached the pinnacle right look around.

2:14:10It's never gonna get any better We somehow can never factor in that's never ever been the case We can't in our heads. We can't get our head around the idea things are gonna get better Tell you what else I loved I learned this term from a a historian of existential risk. So I'm big into ex -risk and trying to avoid it and learning about personally, you're trying to avoid it because that doesn't work that way. Yeah, it's difficult to do. Yeah, but I don't want humanity to go extinct and I think that are... Someone write that down. That's a lovely thought. Efforts are placed in the wrong direction, they're placed in the wrong place, which is, you know, beyond Lombog's kind of like fundamentally his thesis within human flourishing, but I think he could even spread it out further than that.

2:14:58This is William McCaskill from the Future of Humanities Institute. This is Nick Bostrom and Toby Ords' work again from Oxford. 30 ,000 foot view, all of our attention is currently paid up. The vast majority of our attention in terms of existential risks are paid on things that are not existential risks. There is almost zero percent chance that the next thousand and yours humanity is going to be wiped out by climate change. Well, I don't know because I think what do you consider climate change? Because the super volcano, if that goes, that could, you know, for many of this theory of, I think it's called Baducus, Baducus blanket.

2:15:38You've heard of this? So it's the idea that if you put coal, in coal -fired power plants into the atmosphere, it causes warming. It's terrible. We should stop doing it. But if you go high enough with the chimney into the stratosphere, if you go high enough, those particles reflect light and it cools the Earth. The stratosphere reflects light from the Sun. the sun's the only thing heating us, we cool down. It's a thermostat on the globe. And here's the thing, here's the kicker, it's been tried. Okay. When crack a toe, I went off. Such a huge volcano, it put so much ash into the upper atmosphere, the earth cooled by, I think it was two degrees, I could be wrong about the amount, and there was no summer in Europe the next year.

2:16:31So it's kind of, we know we could do it, but I mean, the amount of how bad does it need to get? before we do that, how bad does it need to get before we harness the atom? You know, the idea that you go all of the existential risk of nuclear power is there because we have weapons, but we're not really using the power as much as we could be. And that seems to be the why not take that and people go, what about safety? Why, okay. We'll put some more safety on it then. Yeah, the conversation around X -Risk is what's called anthropogenic risks are our risk. Human created versus natural risk. Super volcanoes, asteroids, Godzilla coming up from underneath the ocean.

2:17:16I mean, the idea is the Super volcano goes off as an asteroid lands on it. Plug the hole. Perfect. Yeah. We might get lucky. We might get lucky. Let's just, let's try and focus on that. Let's try and focus on that. That's your positivity coming in again. So what's the other one? What's the other big existential risks? So the most likely one is AI, right? And this book, the original conception by Toby Ordin the precipice was written probably about six years ago, maybe four years ago. So this is before chat GPT. And I'm going to guess that he would have increased his estimations. AI is going to wipe us out.

2:17:49AI is, it's the most likely. So he says that there's a pathogen's AI. So natural pandemics, engineered pandemics, AI, nanotechnology. They're the big movers, right? We all get turned into Grey Goo. We have Unaligned AI. We have an engineered pandemic from some bastard in a lab or some gain of function research that accidentally gets released or we have a natural pandemic that fucks everybody. Now the reason there's very specific way that there's wording put for existential risk, it's total unrecoverable collapse. Yeah, right? Sorry, when do I plug my show in this? Because I feel like people need to buy tickets for a comedy show at this point.

2:18:28In this point in the comedy, like, I mean, you watch more of this, but, whew, this is, this is bad, right? So unrecoverable. Yeah, permanent, sorry, not total, permanent, unrecoverable collapse. And the problem with almost everything, including nuclear weapons, you'll notice that nuclear weapons weren't in there. Nuclear weapons, all of them go off at the same time. It's catastrophic, it's how un -earth, but it's not permanent, unrecoverable collapse. The difference between a really great thought experiment, what is the greater difference between 0 % and 99 % of humanity being killed, or between 99 % and 100 % being killed?

2:19:08And when you look at it with the long -termism lens, it's the 99 to 100. But also, you're looking at the wrong thing. You've read the Selfish Gene, you're looking at humanity, you'll be looking at DNA. That's, I mean, listen, we're just, we're just meat puppets, getting this stuff to the future, right? That's obviously low. I'll be low, I've had this idea, I had him on the studios looking, he's going to fire a light sail, fire a laser from the earth at a light sail and try and propel a craft up to about 20 % the speed of light, send it towards Alpha Centauri. That's going to happen within the next decade, something like that.

2:19:43And the message is going to read, it's just a very thin piece of like reflective foil, I think. I don't know how much. Does it say help? Maybe send help, SOS. But I asked him, do you ever think that we'll send generationships to other planets? Do you ever think that we will have, you know? All aboard the SS book carkey. Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, presumably the SS inbred is going to be the name of the ship. Yeah, maybe. It's the, yeah. All aboard the SS Norfolk. Get on board, intergenerationaly marrying what? Yeah. His argument is the best way. You're half of the ship. Can't be about half of the ship for 20 generations or we're all fucked.

2:20:29Yeah. His argument is that you get to, the best way would be desktop DNA synthesizer attached to one of these ships. Keep everything frozen. Get it over there. Drop it down. Artificial wombs. Where you go is this not okay, you'll worry about this is not we talked about anxiety earlier Right and anxiety if you were going to sum it up is it's a restless mind and your problem solving for the future because There's not enough going on now. I would argue this quite a lot going on now that we could nail here And as a byproduct of that, like the idea of intergenerational ships traveling at light speed, I don't think it gets us anywhere.

2:21:19I think I'd be with Eric Weinstein on like a new physics might be the thing that gets us somewhere. And if you think about where we were, isn't there some weird fact about from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon? Is it 67 years or something? Yeah. We've done it before. Although, you know how NASA did it? Someone told me this recently. I was talking about NASA. I went to the airport of Man on Moon. Yeah, absolutely. They put a man on the moon. How did they do it? At my moment, when we know what the budget was, unlimited. They had an unlimited budget. You can have anything you want and anyone you want.

2:22:00I'll put a man on the moon with that. I mean, that's interesting. Not tough, could it be? Unlimited. You can have any one you want and it can cost anything you want, but it can't take as long as you want as well. So remember we learned about Parkinson's law just before the task will expand to fill the time given for it. That was not it was before dot dot dot before the Russians. Yeah. Well, it was that thing of like you don't. There's a great lawn Michaels quote about Saturday night life, which says the show doesn't start at 11 on a Saturday because it's ready. It goes on because it's 11 o 'clock on a Saturday.

2:22:39Sometimes you've got to go with what you got, right? Yeah. Before the Russian thing of like what did we, you know, wars are great apart from war. You could take the war bit out of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the innovation that comes of it. Yeah. Because in those desperate times and now, you know, I don't know what's going on with the, you know, with fighting these proxy wars and the human suffering and the devastation you've had in for what? You can't see what happens. I don't know, man. There is a degree to which there's an ever increasing velocity of the spiral of ping -ponging between this thing and the next thing and what's going to be.

2:23:18And I understand why people feel overwhelmed. I get it too. But I don't know. Oh, the last few years since being around more smart people and more hopeful people, I've got faith for some reason that everything is going to be fine. I listen, that thing that we were talking about earlier about, what's your belief? Is that the truth? It doesn't matter. It's a useful belief. Very useful belief to think that things will be okay and that maybe in some small part way, in some small way, we could play a part in that. That would be huge. So that thing of going, well, what are you going to do? Well, if you have an aptitude for physics, go and study physics, chemistry, and math, or whatever you're doing, do more of that.

2:24:06You spoke earlier on about your kids, and you said about how we mentioned the other night. I think you identified the difference between life on easy mode or life with the low states. Yeah, so this was my theory on life, was I have a partner, I've been with for many, many years, and we get on great and it struck me that not having kids was like we didn't want kids and it was living life on with a cheat on the video game. This is super easy. Why was it easy? Because what I didn't realize, you think you have skin in the game, but you don't have skin in the game until you have kids because it's a medical procedure where your heart now lives outside your body.

2:24:49That's what it is. So you go now, you feel invested in the future and you're more worried, you're worrying more about your mortality. Now you've got kids because it's, what's the worst that could happen? You could die. Well now it's much worse. There might be a saying goodbye. So I think it was, I thought I was living life on easy settings and actually I was playing a very low stakes table and now I feel like I'm playing in a higher stakes table. And it's very joyful. Is it also terrifying though? You've got this heart that lives outside of your body? Yeah, I think so. I think I spend a lot of time with the...

2:25:29You know, thinking about what could happen and anxiety. You know, if I let myself... There's a tendency towards counterfactuals and what could happen. and what if he walks into the road, what if something all far happens. But I read that the coddling of the American mind, but can it really kind of mean be that, yeah, childhood is about experimentation and risk and letting kids be kids. Let them do their thing.

2:26:02Yeah, it's interesting to think about But the protective motivation that a lot of people have, myself included, you hear about this sound of freedom film that just came out recently and I had one of the guys who was a part of it on the show. Please tell me about these kids that are being trafficked and you know, it's like a fucking like visceral compulsion that you have to make it stop and to help them and to do all. I didn't see the movie, but is that how he made his money? No. Yeah. Rune is business. Oh, you got really interesting guests on this show. Rune is business. And there's something about that, you know, this sort of desire to protect.

2:26:43But for me, it's largely abstract, right? Like I know that it's an ethical thing to protect a child, right? It's the same for me, exactly the same for me as thinking about fucking a sister, right? Right. Incessive version for me is not an emotion that I have. I don't feel incessive version. Because your sister's fat. Because I'm an only child. Oh, right, that too. Yeah, sure. That's fucking with you. But the, the, the, the. So when people talk about like, I can make like, would you fuck your sister jokes all day long? Yeah. Because for me, it doesn't, there's nothing visceral. I understand, I understand, and I'm sure that if I had a sister, I wouldn't fuck a much, but the bare minimum.

2:27:30Yeah, yeah, okay. And it's the same, I think, a little bit with this, and I'm interested to work it, because you've got a good example of long enough life without kids to then have them. Do you, is there like a global cartel of parents that become extra protective and more invested in the well -being of all children? I always found it very annoying pre -heaven kids It's that like that kind of, you wouldn't understand because you haven't got kids here, you do. You're a person in the world, you don't change entirely when you have kids. It's a lovely thing to do. And I think there's kind of a final, it feels like it's another bit of growing up.

2:28:11It's another bit of growth where you kind of go, oh, especially in my business, where you are a bit self -obsessed at your business. You go, well, there's someone else to worry about now. Don't, you know, and it's fun for me and I kind of, you know, because you're kind of in play mode with kids. And my job is kind of play mode. It's good to anchor myself in that. It's, um, yes, it's joyful. It really is joyful. It's lovely. I mean, there's a weird thing of like, you know, it's, it's, I think parents kind of can sometimes. They're either going, you desperately, you've got to have kids. Oh my god, it's ruined my life.

2:28:46And it's, you can find people in both camps. And I think again, it's, it's, uh, it's disposition. They're all parents, there's some very happy parents and some not very happy parents. And I think it's about expectations. What did you think it was going to be like? Or what's happiness? It's expectations exceeded. Right? Then why is New Year's terrible? Why birthday's boring? Because you're expecting it. It's going to be the best night ever and then it was okay. Or even if it is the best night ever you go, you're always expecting that. And somehow crushing a Tuesday, sometimes having a great time when it was unexpected it is the most joyful thing.

2:29:24So having kids, what do you think it was going to be like? How did you think it was going to be? To think it's going to be terrible. Not even think it's going to be terrible, just like being realistic about it, going out, it's going to be, it's going to be, there's lovely moments and you're very present with you. I don't really, I always want to meditate and I never really find a time to meditate and I think I'm terrible at it. But I'm going on walks and I'm good at playing with kids. When you're with a kid playing with a kid, you're in the moment. You're just there, there's nothing else. It's lovely.

2:29:54Yeah, I think that there's a few decisions that you can make in life downstream from them. It's an entire lifestyle change, so buying a dog would be one, right? Especially because dogs are usually a precursor to kids in some form. Yeah, so babies. And downstream from that, you have something else that you're responsible for. You need to get up at a time and it needs to be fed and watered and walked. Yeah, it's often my thing of the cure for depressed friends is to encourage them to get a dog. Oh hell yeah. Because you might not need to get out of bed till noon, but the dog needs to poop so you've got to get up and out and put something on and go to the shop and buy some food and taking care of someone else.

2:30:34It's often like if you're having a really tough time finding someone who's worst off and calling them and checking in is really valuable. It's not strange, it's odd but it really helps. You know, it's that thing of, you know, if you're going through something, reach out and try and help someone. And it just puts you in a different position with the, you know, your problem. One trend that I see amongst some of my friends who are more resilient or capable is sometimes they allow themselves to be relied on and allow themselves to serve others and a lot of the time end up not being served themselves.

2:31:17So it's that guardian rather than dependent dynamic continues to just get flipped with them always being the person that's the one that's having that internal critic. The idea that you sometimes the circle of compassion, you're not in the circle, it's everyone else around you and then you're not in it. And you know, you meet a lot of people that aren't very good to themselves. If we're generous with everyone else and then they're not very good to themselves. That's a strange, I don't know what's going on there, but it seems like that's something you ever encountered. No, I'm pretty good to myself.

2:31:49I think. No, it's not really a... That's not something I had. Less so now, but it's something I had. It's right to me, it's an interesting thing to talk about because it strikes me that your journey will be the worst bit will be when you've got one kit. You almost want twins off the about because your story is an only child that needs to connect. So it's a weird thing when you have two. The dark thought you have when you have two is, well, if anything happens to us, at least they got each other. And you don't even have a sister to fuck. We've established this. Tried. Tried. Yeah. Yeah. It's I kind of think that's, is that not the journey though?

2:32:30Is that not the thing of going and the quiet, the kind of the listening that you've done for the first five, six years of this podcast, I feel like that's going to remain and then there'll be another gear where you're on scent. Yeah, I feel like that, you know, it's often easier to see in other people like what the trajectory of their career will be because it's like it's kind of your, you're in training to be a wise man. You're a wise man in training. But you're a bit young to be a wise man, right? But that's kind of where it's going. I have a friend. David Perrell, you're a really good follow on Twitter if no one, if people I'm following him.

2:33:13He was the one that wrote the article, think like an athlete, which in classic Twitter fashion, I didn't read, read the headline, made up my own idea about what the article was about. and then that ended up being really formative. So he didn't write an article that ended up being very formative to me. What I ended up, hang on, what's untrue? But figuratively false, but literally true or the reverse, yeah. So, he, first off, he was one of the people that poked me toward turning pro with the show. What would happen if I treated the pursuit of being a podcaster like athletes do, where I review game tape and I get a speech coach, an addiction coach, and a comedy coach, and I do improv and I go to bed on time and I'm hydrated and I learn how the mouth moves and all of these things.

2:33:59What would happen if I did that? And it worked out to be really great. From one sentence, think like an athlete, which wasn't what the fucking article was about. Right. But he is in this great relationship. He lives in Austin and we had a phone call before I even moved to Austin. Tell me there's really beautiful sentiment. He's worked an awful lot throughout his 20s. Very successful. Spent a lot of time thinking and being around people and networking and doing self work and meditation and you know he's got a fucking rabbi that he goes and sees at 6am every Saturday because he wants to learn about Jewish canon.

2:34:32And he said, everything I've done in my 20s was preparing me to be the dad that I wanted to be. You know you got this guy who's got a million dollars and million, million, million people business, all this stuff. And he was like, yeah, it's just in service of becoming the dad that I wanted to be. And I thought that was a really beautiful sentiment. I've always known, I haven't always known that I wanted to be a dad. I was I just had a sense that I wanted to be a dad and then definitely the last five years, so I can't wait to be a dad. So yeah, it's nice. It's nice to know that even though the kid isn't there, ready for you to bestow the hard work and the fruits of your labor internally, externally on, you're kind of doing it for them in a way.

2:35:16Yeah, I could see that. I mean, it's also that thing if you go, it's the role that you wanna play it. And you don't know yourself yet. The interesting thing is like, it's interesting to think about getting to know your kid, because your kid arrives and they go, I haven't really met them yet. You're going to meet them at some point. You're going to meet them and connect with them and, you know, great. And you get a sense of who they are, but it's a bit by bit. But you don't have a sense of who you are as a dad. And it's interesting. What would you be like? I think. Fritzel. Yeah, very good at DIY.

2:35:54No one talks about that. I can't put a shelf up. I can't put a shelf up. You built a house under his house. Probs. I've heard you talk about enjoying the passage of time as a good synopsis. Well, I think anything where you're in a flow state seems to be a magical time. So whether it's a hobby or a job ideally, but something where you're in a flow state So good conversation is kind of flow state, right? So I'm not quite sure how long we're talking. I'm sure listeners are going off too long, frankly, but it's you're kind of in a flow. You're in a flow. You're enjoying it. You're not looking at the clock.

2:36:31You're not conscious of other things. You're just where you are and focused. So on stage, I find that's a flow state. I mean, playing tennis, I really like it. I'm not a good attentist, but I really like playing it. And that thing of like when you're doing sports, I suppose it lifts the anxiety because the thing that we talked about, anxiety is solving future problems at a time and when you're doing something in a flow state, you're in it, you're dealing with that thing. Your conscious mind is busy. And it's just for the purpose of that as well, you know, going back to the telek and anti -telic and anti -telic stuff.

2:37:03Pickleball for me is my, it's just, it's so rapid and so all consuming that I can't, I can't think about anything else. And you know. So that's switching off. Yeah. Yeah. Great. I think you need something like that as well, something that's low stakes. A flow state that's low stakes in life. You're not bothered about the outcome. Oh, that's interesting. You're not becoming a professional pickable player. You are a professional podcaster. This is a flow state, but it's high stakes. This matters to you. Yes. Greatly. But to have something where you go, it's really just for fun. I'm not trying to get better at this.

2:37:42Like you and the gym, you're trying to achieve something aesthetically, physically, health -wise, probably less health -wise and more aesthetically in your 20s, and as you get older it would be more health. But that idea of going, what something you could enjoy being a flow state and it's just fun. Low stakes flow state is a lovely framework that I haven't thought about before that a A lot of people will continue to pile high stakes onto the thing that they choose to do. And I don't know if that fully encapsulates the relaxation that you have. It may be able to drill your focus even more. You may be completely dialed in and very, very concerned about the outcome.

2:38:26But I don't know if it achieves everything that you could from this variety, this sort of relaxation, This very sort of parasympathetic. I'm just at ease here. I lose the game of pickleball. My friend Aaron calls me a pussy, so what? Like it's, you know, it is what it is. Yeah. But his parents never loved him anymore. Look how far they got in the book of boys' names. Oh, dude. He is currently in New York and he's become the director of of director of physical therapy for the Aaron Rogers, the current best living quarterback in all of the NFL. He plays for the New York Jets, I think. And it's easier if everyone the team's called Aaron.

2:39:23He's not the best, he's just his less fuss. Aaron has been here in the head too many times. But I remember the name Aaron. So we have to hire an Aaron. If you shout Aaron, 50 people turn round. Well, the quarterback doesn't need to sort of have to... Right, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now he's over there. But yeah, doing something that's low stakes, that's low state, I think that that's a really nice conception and it's like a good justification for having hobbies, you know? Yeah, I mean, that we need a justification is really speaks to our, the activity. I mean, I get really guilty of this, even when you go on holiday, you make a little list of books to read when you're away to relax like it's homework.

2:40:07But that's really the only thing I got from my education was work ethic. You find what your work ethic is when you find what you love doing. But then it's hard not to replicate that in all areas of your life. Productivity purgatory was what I called it, that even when you're supposed to be doing something for leisure. It's still in service of the outcomes that you're going to get at work. So it's the walk that you take on a morning, not because you get to relax and spend time in nature, but because you heard an Andrew Cuban in episode about how it improves dopamine to dopamineurgic seesaw so you can focus better.

2:40:46The wonderful thing about being a comedian, I mean, I could be getting a colonoscopy and thinking, well, there might be some material in this. You never know. Literally. You never know. A virtual colonoscopy. No. in the future. Maybe a VR one where they fly a tiny little micro drone up. Yeah. That's what he told me anyway. We were in a park. What have you got coming up next? What can people expect from you? I've got a new tool. I'm going to go out on the road again. I'm touring slightly differently. I hope it works. I think it will. But certainly around the UK, I'm going to do two shows a night every night.

2:41:20One's day to Saturday. So work less and more than I've worked before. I'm gonna do more shows, but more compacted. And I'm gonna do a show at seven and a show at 930. I'm a big show at seven fan, by the way. It's that thing of you, I either have dinner afterwards or before, you either have drinks after or before, but you go, it's not a big with an interval. It's like you pack the stuff in, you know, do maybe a hundred minutes, that time to a hundred, maybe even two hours, sort of straight through. And that's a great show to hold people for that long. It's great. because the break and then you build it again.

2:41:55And with the bigger shows, sometimes you just do it with a regular interval, but I'm putting that tour on. I'm working on a book at the moment, it's probably the easiest conception of it, about how to write jokes. I've had a really great run in comedy. And what am I leaving for posterity? Some dick jokes, right? Great, lovely jokes, I've done a bunch of specials. I'll record a new one next month, I don't know when it'll be out. But I wanna leave something behind for the community, because it's done an awful lot for me. So I'm working on this thing. And hopefully it'll become something for, you know, other comedians.

2:42:30America, you're doing America? Yeah, doing a tour in America, sort of kicking around the place. I mean, so, you know, it's quite nice. It's nice, I can play quite big rooms. It turns out that because of the, that one of the major benefits of the biggest TV channel in the world is YouTube. And no one noticed in mainstream media, no one noticed, oh, that's the biggest TV channel in the world. So your Netflix and your YouTube's the global entities mean you can play anywhere in the world, which is fantastic. I do about 40 countries And I'll do America and I'll play cities I've never been to and 2000 people turn up.

2:43:03It's amazing I'm looking forward to Austin Sunday the Something the October Sunday maybe the 17th of October somewhere in there Jimmy, I really appreciate you. I we got introduced by mutual friend. Yeah, and I feel like a It's a real flourishing blossoming. It's lovely. I'm a huge fan of this. Please don't stop and please do more. I think more conversations and more learning and it, yeah, it grows corn. It's a great show. I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thanks.