Mexican Batman, Britain’s Downfall, Mr Bean’s Comeback & Jimmy Carr - Rabbit Hole #5 - #1143

28:31Like, let's say that you can get into a relationship with somebody, like an intimate relationship. This is maybe going to be your new wife for the rest of time. And she keeps on turning her blade. She keeps on disrespecting you. And you're like, no, just give, give, give, give, give. But within reason, completely defeats. It's almost like when I say decisions rather than experiments and somebody's like, well, I'm going to shoot up a load of heroin and I'm going to punch a police officer to the face within reason. And I'm talking about people that air one way. So if you air naturally towards the, I'm going to wait for this person, then I'm going to mirror, and then I'm going to mirror.

29:01I think I'm with you. I think it's the, you can't win an argument with your wife. Everybody loses. Yeah. Because if you win, you lose. Everyone's in a bad mood. So that thing of like going, and relationships are transactional, right? There's like codes of conduct that you expect within it. And that's okay. But then I think if you enjoy the act of giving, then just give, give, give. And I do think the other person ends up giving way more because you just push it so far and listen if you're 50 nil up then yeah walk away but until you get to 50 nil just keep giving it's a way better way to live i think it's more yeah it's more enjoyable but there is also there is also no 50 nil like i there is no 50 nil exactly that's a good you know as soon as yeah i i agree with you i think once you decide i think you have to make a decision in life and then once you've once you've made a decision then you've got to make that decision right and i think people kind of sort of waste a lot of time in this space of like i can't decide I can't decide.

29:56And that's when maybe the school board's pinging off, pinging off. But once you've decided, then you're the same person. I saw Alex Hormosey. He's up on the wall there. We met for the first time this weekend. I was in Las Vegas. And I kind of know him. We've spoken on Zoom and I know a lot of his work, but I met him for the first time. And it was that kind of thing that he has this sort of theory on. His new theory is about optionality and the idea that people are getting all the options they can. They want optionality on everything. So they get five degrees and they train and they're ready for everything they're ready for options but until you cash in those options it's meaningless yeah i think it's kind of a genius idea of like at some stage you you go with what you've got now or you don't go at all do what you can with what you've got where you are yeah or you just it's like otherwise you're like 40 and waiting for something to happen so so george kind of decided at one point in our in our um interactions that we were friends i don't know when it happened but at one point george just decided that we were friends and then he started he started just i mean i i would say you're i would say if i was to describe i would talk about your generosity and it feels kind of weird to speak highly of you because i've i've been abusing you a week but you're i think you're an incredibly generous guy and i think that like you know i don't think there's any expectation of anything which comes with that you just kind of like i touched down an austin airbnb sorted you know i touched down like it's just i think it's a lovely way to live and i do think there is a point where as chris is like yeah if someone, if you, it's a feeling, as soon as the feeling goes.

31:22So that's my, that's my point on the, not needing to turn it into the metric. Why is it that we like to hang around with some people and we don't like to hang around with others? It's that there is some form, and this would be Alex's argument. And I'm, if you're on one end and Alex is on the other, I'm somewhere in the middle. Alex's point would be, you are tracking a scoreboard, whether you're doing it mentally or not. And the scoreboard is the vibe of how you feel around somebody. we have friends that we've stopped hanging out with because we're like, I just don't feel like this vibe is, the scales don't feel like they're balanced regardless of whether or not you're keeping count.

31:58And I do think that that's true. My rough rule of thumb is that awful line of like, you're the average of the five people you hang around with. Incorrect. I do think in essence - Average of the five podcasts you listen to. Yes. Then what ends up happening is you have this, you're always trying to fuck upwards if you follow that approach anyway, which means that by definition, that why should those people hang out with you? I think a better rule of thumb is forget how much money they have, forget what they've achieved. Surround yourself with who you feel the most alive with. So I don't care if someone's a poet that's broken.

32:32If I hang out with them and I feel alive, it's way more interesting than some billionaire where you feel dead behind the eyes after hanging out with them. Aliveness is probably the best metric. So I still think that you are the average. You are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with is fine. It's just what is the metric that you're optimizing for? Because some people might want to be in a room with people that have got the highest net worth or are the most well-known and highest status, whatever. But it can just be. And ultimately, what it comes back to is if you ask enough why questions, I just want to feel good.

32:58I want to feel good around these people. I don't know. It's a weird thing on what are friendships for. And I don't think friendships really pay out until the bad days, right? So you're going to have a really bad day before you know what a friend is. because on good days, it's fine. Everything's fine. You can hang out with anyone. It doesn't matter. They're giving, they're taking. It doesn't matter. When you have a bad day, like if you get cancelled, which I have been a number of times, it's a filter. It's such a great filter. It's like a gift being cancelled because at the end of it, you end up with fewer friends, but much better ones.

33:29And it's the foul weather friends. It's the guys that call on the bad day. That's what really matters. And that's what you ultimately, I think somewhere at a deeper level, we're solving for that. We're solving for, well, if things get bad, who could I actually rely on? person stay with me in the trenches. Yeah. When it comes to like cancellation or public criticism, what's the idea that's kind of non-obvious that you only appreciate, apart from that, once you've gone further, that most people wouldn't understand? I think it's the impermanence of it is interesting. And the idea that you go, is anyone going to care about this in a month or a year?

34:02And if no one's going to care in a year, why do you care now? Jose's got this line. He says, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. and I quite like it. Mourinho. Of course. You just quoted that's the first ever Jose Mourinho quote. It's good though, isn't it? It's that thing where you go, it's a real sort of test. It's character versus reputation because your reputation is being destroyed and your character is who you know you are. What was the loveliest text or cool you had? Like who was there for you? There was a few. James Corden would really stand out. So when I got, it was the text thing actually and he was in Broadway.

34:39He was busy winning a Tony for his performance in One Man, Two Governors and he called me every night in his interval of his show and he just called me and then he called me and I said, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. And then he called me the next night because he knew it wasn't and then he called me the next one because he knew it wasn't and he just kept on calling. That's amazing. Yeah, it's a lovely thing and when you sort of, it just, and all it teaches you is like, I can't do that for him but I could do that for someone else. Yeah. And when it comes along, that thing of like being the person that calls when something awkward happens or when something terrible happens, phoning and saying, I don't know what to say, but I thought I'd call.

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36:12Or heading to timeline.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. I think it's just a lovely thing when people do stuff for you which there can be zero ulterior motive. there literally can be i'm trying to think of a good i'll give you i can give you one from my life so this was the moment that i became like properly properly good friends with yousef so um for the people that within the last 600 episodes of the show he only appears once a year but he was most of the episodes for the first 400 with johnny and um he had hurt his back he has a uh like a bulging disc he'd hurt his back in the gym doing flips or dead lifting or whatever he was doing at the time and I was on my way to drive to one of our club nights and his house was like kind of out of the way but not a million miles off so I was like I'll come over and I'll bring you something because I know what it's like debilitating back pain you sort of laid up and he's like no no you don't need to come and see me anyway I managed to get into his house and brought him a loaf of saurine some ivy leaf some nerofen and like went and got a hot water bottle for him and like he couldn't move but he just the classic male denial of medical problems or whatever and he's 25 right He's made of rubber and magic.

37:24He'll bounce back. He'll be fine. But he was just miserable and felt like it sucked. And that was a palpable moment when our friendship changed. And even though we were really good friends before, I could just tell that there was something that happened at that moment when I decided to go around with some malt loaf and pain relievers and a hot water bottle. And I was like, all right, man, I got to go and be in a nightclub with 1 ,000 18-year-olds. Like, I hope you're all right. And then he sent me this sex afterwards, like being teary and being like, man that was just how wonderful like what a lovely thing to do you are right like especially in a world where everybody is looking out for the transaction where uh effort can be so low effort right like just sending a text i think the bar has been lowered for what constitutes becoming a very good friend like you got me for my birthday one time you got me a newspaper from the day that i was born and a printed off graph of the first episode and the biggest episode with the play count in between it.

38:19And I was never, I couldn't even take, it was left in Mike Thurston's apartment in Dubai for like two years because I couldn't fly back with it because it was so big. But like stuff like that, you know, it's just, it's, it's really. Being, yeah, being better at just aggressively going, give, give, give, and figure out the next life. Aggressive friendship. And figure out the next life. But isn't this a BDSM friendship? You're often very good on this kind of stuff, right? You pointed out this, I thought about this a lot, right? There's a lot of books about being a good parent, but there's no books about being a good kid, right?

38:50Which is kind of interesting. And really, it should be a book about being a family. But it's interesting. There's loads of books. There's, you know, kind of the game and stuff about pickup culture and finding women and getting women. Great. But there's very little about friendship. And actually, that seems to be the thing that I think friendship is upstream of having a relationship. I think it's not gay to practice on your friends. But that thing of like building friendships and building kind of... And that's kind of what's missing from, you know, rough and tumble play has been replaced by video games.

39:19And it doesn't work in the same way. Like there's something about like that male friendship thing and building that up over years, having your boys, having your guys that you're with, that's really incredibly valuable. And we don't do enough of it. Robin Dunbar's got this insight. So he was the guy that came up with 150 number. I interviewed him once. He's brilliant. He's fantastic. And he says that you have your close group of friends, which is five, of a slot, five very close friends, but a relationship takes up two. So a relationship takes up two of the slot of five. And that would also mean that if you lose the relationship and you want to keep that same level of connection, you can't just replace your chick with a new friend.

39:56You probably need to replace them with two. Yeah, well, it's also that thing of like, men tend not to do very well post-divorce because they outsource their social life to their other half. Correct. So then it's - The wife and the friends. Yeah, they're entirely isolated afterwards, which is a terrible way to be. Robert Dunbar we hit. Go on, you were going to say something there. I've lost my train of thought now, but I think, you know, I always think of, I think a lot of what we're discussing as well, I wonder if the American audience appreciates it as much as the British. Because they're so giving, dude.

40:26They're so, Americans don't understand just how pro-social they are. Like you can be on the side of the lake. This happened, this happened the other week when we went to the Jasper Mike's house. and I was on the side of the lake and a boat just went by. We're like, do you want to come wake surfing? Like, they didn't know me. Like, yeah, sure. Went wake surfing. Like that just, you would need, in order to get to that level of friendliness, that would be a three-year project in the UK in order to warrant being invited onto this thing that was part of, I don't know, maybe it's because everyone's a, it might be an Austin thing because everyone's kind of a social transplant from somewhere else.

41:06Or it might be an America thing because everyone's a cultural transplant, you know, sort of historically from somewhere else. But I don't know. I noticed there's three types of interactions I'd have with strangers. So interaction one would be, stranger would just not look at me. Interaction two would be, we'd mirror one another's energy. So, or you give a nod. And then you'd have somebody who actually says something. I realized a lot of the time I just like mirror. So I'd kind of head down. Somebody says hello and I'll say hello back. Somebody gives me a nod, I'll give them a nod back. And if they have their head down, I'll have my head down.

41:38Versus, oh, you can just do things. You can be the leader. You're using the proportionate force of being in a fight. It's like, well, if he's got a knife, I can use a knife. But you just always use a gun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do wonder if we're trying to coin this. Welcome to Texas. Trying to coin this term, which is British syndrome. And America syndrome is another thing. But British syndrome, I was out for dinner the other night with a friend of mine. and he's had this employee that he's kind of complained about for the last six weeks, like issues he's trying to get him to do. When he finally like sits down at the dinner, he goes, I've realized he's not no agency.

42:13He's just British. Uh, that's true. Well, you had that. You had a great razor for that on, uh, I think it was you. Yeah, it was like British versus America. So you go, the British disease is cynicism and the American disease is bullshit. Yeah. Which is, I mean, it's great. There's a great comic, Jeff Green. Do you ever know Jeff Green? Great observational comic. He said, I prefer America to Britain. I'd rather be told to have a nice day by someone that doesn't mean it than told to fuck off by someone that does. Jeff Green. Great, great comic. So I have a role of fun, which is whenever I criticize Britain, I'm going to criticize America as a return or compliment Britain.

42:49Sounds like you're keeping score. I was thinking, have we ever had like an Elizabeth Holmes, a Sam Bagman-Friedman, I think We're just not playing at that level I think that's the reason why The level of brazenness That you need to pull that off I don't think any British person Except maybe Gary Stevenson has enough self-belief To be able to Drive that home You need to have banks to rob them Yeah, that's a good point I'm just trying to think of it like a great huckster In the UK That's what I mean A great huckster Gaff in the market, we should do it I feel like Andrew's kind of hovering over that area, but that's the British huckster.

43:31Who? Andrew. Prince Andrew. Oh, the OG Andrew. Right, okay. Mountbatten. Yeah. I got in a lift. I was in Austin last year, and I got in lifts. They call them elevators. Do we call them elevators? One of us calls them elevators. We call it a lift. They call it an elevator. I was getting in these elevators or lifts, and I would say, people started asking me what number I was on the elevator. Six, I'd say, you know, punching six. And I thought, I'll come back to England and I'll try this out. So two Moraine Road, probably shouldn't have said that. Into the elevator I go, the lift I go, I say, hey, what number would you like?

44:10And I say, number? I say, yeah. Some people say number, some people it's headphones on, and it's a starkly different experience. um having said that i also learned about the californian lunch well i've never been to california but apparently if you go to california everyone says they want to have lunch with you oh yeah but they don't actually want to have lunch with you right yeah that i remember a friend of mine saying to me you know it was in hollywood and they said to be careful you could die of encouragement it's just it's just everything's very positive jeannie how do you is this a how do you i feel like there's two different ways into like creating stuff right and i feel like there's the volume method which is like i'm just gonna write a lot of jokes and some of them are going to be good and that sort of prince when he was recording music would just make a lot of he'd record a song a day you know and then there's like the leonard cohen approach if i'm gonna spend five years on hallelujah i'm gonna write 80 verses and i wonder in comedy are you more like i'm just gonna write write write and some jokes are gonna stick or I'm going to work on one joke for a good couple of days?

45:16No, I don't find working on them really helps. It's like they come out pretty much fully formed and then it's iteration. It's just trying new things and the audience tell you what's going to work. So the audience feedback, the audience is a genius. They tell you what is and what isn't funny and what is and what isn't acceptable. And you just go back to them time and time again. So at the end of the show, I still got it on me from last night, you got new jokes and then you just try the new things and that's like how you're writing your book George almost yeah do you set yourself a number of jokes to to write is it like that or not really I mean there's always like there's always new stuff to try there's always like a uh I've got a file it's huge you're like okay the print off okay I'll try 10 tonight and then the next 10 and then you sort of maybe you tweak them a little bit but it's not a full kind of rewrite you might tweak it a little bit if you go I didn't really got that at all and that wasn't clear enough but it's very rare that you tell a a joke and it doesn't work and you can rescue it with a rewrite it tends to be just the idea is just not there and some and if they're immediate then that's and you're looking for the triple a's you're looking for the ones that are going to work every single time no matter how you deliver them you're looking for that kind of quality so the idea of like polishing something is kind of a different some sometimes it's like you change the wording a little bit and it it perfects it yeah i remember jason freed uh said this about writing he said if i write if i write it down and it just doesn't it's not feeling right he said i'm not i'm not going to come back to i'm not going to rewrite it i'm just gonna leave it start again the next day and it's like a different route in which is funny because i have a very different i i don't particularly work like that do you ever hear the um bob dylan leonard cohen story when they met up they met up for lunch and they uh he talked about um hallelujah 80 verses yeah four years or whatever no it was like he it was bob dylan went i think he said but he said how long did it take you to write um uh all along the watch hour and bob dylan said 20 minutes and he said how long did it take you to write hallelujah and he said 12 years because he was embarrassed that it had been 20.

47:06But it was like, it's a long time. So what's your process? Do you sit and - I like writing. I think that you can't really write, you can only rewrite. So I guess I'm not writing jokes, you know? But that thing of like, you can't write, you can only rewrite. I think the idea of doing, you do masses of stuff. I think the reason most people don't succeed in the arts is because they get into it because they like really good stuff. They've got great taste, but then they don't stick around long enough to be able to produce good stuff. It's like you start bad and then you get good over time. If I was going to give one piece of advice to anyone trying to learn to write, I would say, honestly, I would forget quantity.

47:41And I would think about trying to genuinely write one good sentence or maybe even two, and then maybe just a good paragraph. And I feel like the real problem is people can go their whole careers without actually writing anything good. And what you really need to do is you need to understand what it's like to write just one thing really good. Because a great book is just like, it's a lot of great sentences, which then form paragraphs and whatnot. And I remember, who was it? Hunter S. Thompson. He rewrote The Great Gatsby just to know what it felt like to write a good book. And I do think there's something in there.

48:11But he rewrote the book. By hand, yeah. Just to get the feeling of extraordinary. I have a collection of, you've seen it, the folder of what I like about what I like. And I've turned it into an app as well where it's like starts, intros, middles, ends, quotes, reference setups. What was the Orwell's five rules that you keep banging on about? I only bang on about them when I read your one. I know, so I'm not doing the job. I can't remember them. I think number one, actually, number one, I love. It's never put, never, actually, can we get on the internet? Can we look it up? First one is, I think the first one is just basically never put something in print which you've seen in print is the idea.

48:46So essentially just avoid cliched all times. And I think if you want to quickly improve any essay, I would just, you could drop it into Claude or you could just look at yourself and say, have I seen this sentence been written down before? Well, I pulled you up because you said yesterday when I was editing your writing and you said, what did you say about Churchill? Something like during his darkest days. During his darkest days is a really great example of this. It's just been said, if you go to Google search and you put it in quotation marks, during his darkest days will have been said millions and millions of times.

49:15And it's the debris of someone else's thinking. That's what a cliche is. And you really want to just write original sentences. If you read East of Eden by Steinbeck, it's the last sort of big book I read, and you drop his sentences into Google. No one said sentences like that, like the whole book. And I looked at the chapter you had and you drop a couple of things into Google search, direct quotes, and it's just been said before. It's a very good proxy for like average writing, which your book's definitely not. But talking nervous, baby. What's the drop it on the, this is one of the best ones you've given me, the drop it on your pho idea.

49:46Okay. So this is really about going from abstract to concrete writing. So essentially anything abstract, I'm trying to think of an example. Let's say someone's trying to come up with an app for fitness. And they said, I got an app. The idea is to regain your fitness. You can't really visualize regaining your fitness. And what you want to do is you want to take that and sort of convert it into objects, physical objects, which you can drop on your foot. So Chris, let's see how we go. Regain fitness. Drill into that. Drill into regain. What do we mean? What could we mean by regain fitness? Give me an object.

50:25Give me a starting point and an end point for regaining fitness. Not loving your body to loving your body. You could drop a body on your foot. So that would be closer. What you could also drop on your foot would be a couch. A couch. Couch to 5K. Couch to 5K. You know where this is going. It's huge. That's the Nike thing, right? Yeah, because it makes it real. And people think in analogies, really. It's like that. If you can't see it, it's not there yet is really good writing advice. So if you can't visualize it, it's not there yet. That's a great kind of, I mean, that kind of ad copy as well, that when you've kind of got that thing where it just feels like that was always going to be a hit, but it wasn't, of course, they could have just called it the app.

51:11So Couch to 5K was done by a guy in New York. I forgot his name, but he was living with his mum at the time. It was sort of this crazy breakout application, which had no right to be. And I think then it got bought by the BBC and it's the most downloaded fitness app of all time. And that's like the, I think ideas are, but I feel like even ideas are somewhat underrated. Like you really just need the conviction to do them and those two things together. There was a Nike advert or Nike or an added, I think Nike during the Boston marathon. And it said, runners welcome, walkers tolerated. and it went it was great but it was the the uh difference here was the taste of the direction it was going in it was so effective and catchy that all of the people who walked during the marathon which is probably most people most people are going to walk at some point uh and i got into a lift fuck me in la at the start of the year and there was a woman wearing hoka uh mid-50s something like that nicely dressed like fit mom women like off to the gym or do whatever and both of them were talking about how much they disliked nike because and both of them referenced that campaign one of them was wearing hokas the other was wearing rads or something and they said oh yeah that that campaign was just runners welcome walkers tolerated they don't they're so they're so out of touch now in any case and they had this everyone has a degree of um distaste for the top dog i can't wait for that to sort that that fall to happen and especially if you play the out of touch i don't care about the everyman game like there's two things that are cohesing together there to like really move in the same direction they've gotten so big they've forgotten their roots right it's like it's a cliche you're playing into a trope that makes it very easy for somebody to attack you so yeah um i think they put their foot there's like there's there's a few of those aren't there kind of examples in marketing where people have absolutely shat the bed like done really badly was uh was it ratner the jeweler in in the uk was a guy called who gave a speech where he said oh we just sell fucking tat and it just shut down yes yes yes yes yes just in a single in a single uh tweet keep going it was like it wasn't a tweet even it was like pre that it was like an after dinner speech which is about it's just fucking shit that we sell yeah but it you know like it's funny because let's say you have ron seal the um the fence painter and they say what do they say it does exactly what it says on the test and that's that's it's different to just still intact but like that's because the language of fence painters that's that's how they talk whereas jewelers you know they probably don't want that don't want the word tat to be used as they look at their rolex doesn't this all just come down to your favorite word of positioning a position here it is uh the most famous uk example of a jewelry store saying their own product is bad is gerald ratner ceo of ratner's group who in 1991 described his company's products as total crap.

53:59This caused a 500 million pound loss in value and forced a rebranding to Signet Group. Another recent instance is complaints regarding the website Scarlet Jewels, which distinct from genuine Scarlet Jewelry, to receive poor reviews. Yeah. His infamous speech stated that some of his earrings were cheaper than a prawn sandwich, but probably wouldn't last as long. Pretty good, right? You've got one job, mate. That's really, you know. Wow. Sell your tat. That's gone. That's gone very badly. Sell your tat. It's interesting that thing of like industries that are like businesses, industries that disappear overnight.

54:32I love the fact 1901, biggest industry in the world was whaling. Whaling? Yeah. Whale oil to light. Whaling, catching whales. What's whaling? Catching whales. They needed the oil in order to put the lamps, right? And then the light bulb comes along. I think whaling was the biggest industry in 1901 and it had fully disappeared by 1903. Yeah, like there's whole towns and Canada just like shut down. Well, fax machines are kind of like that. Fax machines go from everywhere to now, just running the NHS and the trades. Horses in New York, in Manhattan. Horses in New York, yeah. And it's always the technology that's the...

55:07Because they brought in so many laws to get rid of horses in New York, because the horse manure problem... You know the reason there's steps up to brownstones in New York is because the horse shit was that high. And there's the whole thing of smelling salts like people, because the whole place smelt horrific. It was just horse shit. And if the horses died, they had to chop them up, wait for them to atrophy, chop them up in the street, and then cart them off using other horses who then died on the way. So the whole thing was just, it was an absolute mess. And they kept on bringing in new laws, new laws, new laws to try and get, you know, a tax on horses and other tax on horses.

55:38And then Henry Ford comes along, invents the motor car, and people go, yeah, we don't need horses. What do you think's that now? What do you think five years, 50 years, 100 years will be like, oh, it's gone? Well, I think it's a very interesting question because obviously the AI thing, we can see the jobs it's going to take, but we can't see the jobs it will create. But I wonder with that whether... I think talk shows would be quite obvious point. Is there still... It's close to Jimmy's heart, careful. No, no. I think you're like the... It's changed. From old media to new media, I think the idea that something like, you know, I love Saturday Night Live, but I can't see it being around in 10 years.

56:18I remember going to see a recording last year and just thought, wow, this is incredible. the amount of people to put this show on to make this happen. It was really genuinely spectacular. And then you just go, well, I can't imagine this being, it can't compete with people just doing funny sketches on their phone. Because the size of the screen seems to be inversely proportionate to the amount of money you can make. So the movie business might not last. I think what's funny though is all the sketches on the phone, I can't really recall one. whereas i think of carrot in the box like yeah i'll tell you cats um sean lock and i i i you know it's it's i think tv weirdly sticks like i i can't remember there's a great essay by um oh who's the guy that wrote abundance with um as recline derrick thompson derrick thompson has a great podcast and he did this episode called he wrote this essay called everything is television and his argument was everything is television television won't disappear because uh tiktok is television.

57:12You don't think of it in that way because it's streaming. YouTube's the biggest TV channel in the world. Of course it is. It's television. Facebook isn't social media. People think it's like, but that would be for us to know each other and be sending videos to our family and sharing them with friends. That's the idea. But the reality is people watching videos that other people have made that they don't know. That's television. It all comes back to it. It's a bit of a shame because Gavin and Stacey Christmas special was sort of, in my opinion, and probably actually the world cup somewhere right now but the last time like the uk came together for a thing why christmas tv is such a big deal in the uk i'm not sure what it's like in the states but christmas tv is a big deal not because it's better than the tv the rest of the year but because people sit down as a family and want to be watch the big fat quiz and watching it together it's just nicer to do things in a communal way like people used to gather around a fire and then around the radio and then around the tv and it was all great and then we went off to our bedrooms with our phones.

58:07It's also a more communal time if you're generally, where you're back in your old childhood bedroom or your old childhood house or whatever, or you're with the families coming over to you and it's a meaningful, slightly slower-paced, sedate moment there. So I think, yeah, if you could own anything. I mean, that has to be why Harry Potter just keeps on getting run back over and over again, right? It's the thing that you watched when you were a kid. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be.

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59:14Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30-day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. Speaking of technology, a new study claims that an eight-minute conversation with chat GPT can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about 20 % and these effects last at least two months. I'm always wary of tiny interventions that purport to have large and long-lasting effects, but I don't see anything immediately fishy about this study and the mechanism is plausible.

59:54I bet most 9-11 truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously and who knew a lot about 9-11. And I think this is an underrated and positive aspect of AI. People are worried about the hallucinations and AI psychosis, and rightfully so. But keep in mind that many people do not know basic, uncontroversial truths about their world. 37 % of Americans, a plurality, believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10 ,000 years. 40 % don't understand how a control group works. 26 % think that the sun goes around the earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality.

1:00:31I think it's an interesting point because conspiracy theories for me are a symptom of a much larger problem, which is we've lost trust in institutions. I think they bubble up when you have no faith in institutions because you desperately want to believe in something. You desperately want to trust someone, but you don't trust the government anymore, and you don't trust the medical profession, and you don't trust academics anymore. So you're desperately searching. So these kind of more and more kind of incredible theories come to the fore. I mean, not to say that people do conspire to do things.

1:01:04That's a different thing. I mean, like conspiracy theories in their traditional form, like an unforcifiable sort of theory. Let's say, for example, the coronavirus pandemic happened. It never happened, and it happens in 2026, which you're in. I wonder what the AI bots would be saying about the coronavirus. Oh, that's fascinating. Because people would be arguing online with other people based on what their bot had told them to derive from the fact. As well as you would have the Fable model, for example, would have replied because it'd be around biology. You can't ask any basic questions to Fable right now around biology because you might be thinking you're printing a 3D virus.

1:01:40So everyone would be asking Kimmy and the Chinese models, which would be interesting, the cause and effect, the full circle. How long do you think, I mean, I'm not, who's to say AI didn't create COVID? Who's to say that it wasn't, I mean, it seems to be now people are saying it was created in a lab. Do you think this technology arrived when we think it arrived? Or do you think it's been around for 10 years? I think it's arrived when it arrived. Yeah, because the transformer technology that you need. Here's my favorite conspiracy theory at the moment. Okay. So there's two terrifying scenarios. One is there's a Manhattan project currently underway in America, and they're working on a AGI.

1:02:25It's the big thing. It's the doomsday weapon is the AGI and they're working on it and it's called Solstice and it's somewhere in America. We don't know where, but that's being worked on. Right. Second terrifying scenario, they're not. Jimmy, when do you think of all your ideas? Hmm. I've got the days free. But that is, it's an interesting kind of weird thought, right? Which would you rather? Well, I'd rather they were working on it. I think that it's kind of happening, right? They're putting ever more powerful computers together, and people are worried about the wrong thing. I think people are worried about losing their jobs.

1:03:04But I think if you point AGI at the environment, it might be able to solve the problem of net zero. It might get to that much quicker. And if you point it at physics, who knows? I mean, physics is real power in a way that nothing else is. Every other science is stamp collecting. Physics really changes the world. And there's been no, you know, Eric Weinstein and Peel was always saying, nothing's happened for 50 years. String theory has just kind of gone a different way. But if there was a unifying theory of physics, I mean, if that could happen, that'd be extraordinary. And whoever had that would have some power.

1:03:43But if you saw it, Sir Claude released Fable, and then they had the issues with the government, then fables come back. And then you had this kind of cock tease, shall we say, where they would say, you've got access to it until the 5th of July. And then Chak Chibi Tees released their new model. So Corde have now gone, well, you've now got access to it to the 12th of July, and they've moved it again. And what you're actually seeing is because there's so much competition right now, it's so hard for any of them to run away or create any form of monopoly. So the answer being a Manhattan project, it feels way more like there's going to be 15 at Watts.

1:04:23I get the sense that the COVID thing, I certainly don't think that AI would have had that much to do with it. I had Annie Jacobson on the show who wrote Nuclear War, a countdown scenario. Oh yeah, that was a fun episode. Yeah. Well, her new one is about bioweapons. It's about El Ablee. And she said the Russians during the 80s, when we are not working on enhancing bioweapons to make them more transmittable, they had programmed into the virus, they'd programmed euphoria in. That's how pernicious this plague, it was called a super plague, and they'd programmed euphoria in as one of the side effects.

1:05:09Because if people felt euphoric, they would go out and dance. And then they would become their own super spreaders. So they'd even put a behavioral modifier into this super plague. And apparently this thing, this existed, but never got out, was never used, but probably sits in some bank, some frozen virus bank. Here's a hot tech, right? So in the late 80s, there was a thing called mad cow disease. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. They thought everyone was going to go crazy at - BS40 or whatever it was called. Yeah. Maybe it happened. The guy that hosts The Apprentice is president now. Maybe we all went crazy.

1:05:46Everyone has got mad cow disease. Maybe we all went crazy and just no one noticed because we all went crazy. I tell you what, the amount of phones I've seen in saunas, it wouldn't shock me. You've got - That's the real - I don't have my phone on me. Describe your phone. I could sell my phone. It's a Quinn F22 Pro. It has applications, but it's too useless to get addicted to. Great. Purposefully dumb phoned yourself. No, genuinely. Actually, I don't really like talking about it because I got it because I hate these people who get their new phones and it's all stupid phones. They make it their thing.

1:06:24So I feel self-conscious talking about it on the show. But my younger brother, Jack, had this phone and he got the non-pro version, which is a bit of a mistake because it's actually just too useless to text on. But I got the Pro Quinn F22 Pro. But I love Jack because I was on holiday with him and he didn't mention it once. I was like, Jack, what's this phone? And I feel like the way to get people onto these phones is to not ram it down people's phones. Sometimes you've got to let them know because Harry came out for Austin for my birthday, said goodbye to him. I don't hear anything for a few days.

1:06:51I'm like, what's happened to him? And then he finally gets back in touch via WhatsApp on his desktop. And he's like, what did you do to your phone again? You threw it in the river? I threw it into the car. I didn't throw it into the river because that would have been disrespectful to the fishers. I threw it into the bin by the river. And then I switched out. I really, if I come across a lot of money, I think it's what I would like try and change in the world. I just, I do feel it really depressing. Like you walk into a sauna in Austin and it's an epidemic of people with air pods in. I'll take you to a sauna in Austin where there's people with something else.

1:07:24There is someone in a sauna right now listening to this on Airpods episode. Why are they shaming me? Genuinely, look at your life if you are doing that. You might feel like you got it all worked out. If you have that one step, you are doing it. You haven't got nothing worked out. Wait there for a second. How do you feel about people that wear AirPods during massages? Sorry, Chris, how do I feel about people wearing AirPods? Full stop. You're done. Right, but okay. During massage, you're also done. It doesn't change the question. I listen to audiobooks during a mass art, yes. All the time. No, no, no, no, no.

1:08:00You're being very diplomatic about how - Even during the happy ending? He speeds it up. He speeds it up. That's where it's Napoleon. My younger brother works in politics, and his idea is to understand what real people think. And he does a bloody good job of that. But I said to him, Will, what do real people think? And I'm in a taxi with him. And he's got his damn AirPods in, trying to listen to what real people think. I said, Will, there's a taxi driver that row. Why don't you ask the taxi driver what real people think? I think it's bonkers. Was he getting a massage at the same time? You need to stop wearing AirPods during massages.

1:08:30Why? I just, it is the perfect - Wait, is he massaging you? That's true. It's more a client - Why has he got this level of - It's a client-service worker dispute. Ah, this guy's not even paying attention. Listen to this gibberish as he's on. Go on. I just, it is the perfect time to be with your thoughts, to do some good thinking without feeling like you're wasting time, you're falling behind, being in the dark playground, being in a reverse version of it. We talked about that earlier. I think boredom is unappreciated serenity. And allowing yourself to be bored, like planning it, is quite a good idea.

1:09:05Like train travel, it's quite good to be on a train, be bored, be in an airport, be bored. I'm bored enough. I'm bored enough. I do enough time and time in my own thoughts. When I'm having a massage, I want to have Napoleon. Speed lesson. Speed lesson. Andrew Roberts, 40 hours. I didn't realize Napoleon even recorded an audiobook. This is tremendous. Yeah, I slightly disagree. To play devil's advocate, how do you know you're not in the mass hysteria of TV's going to give you square eyes, like calculate should be banned? Luddite syndrome. Yeah, Luddite syndrome. How do you know when you're going against smoking versus being a Luddite?

1:09:41I don't know when I'm going against smoking. How do you know you're pushing back against something that's generally negative versus going too far? I will tell you why. I will tell you why, because what I'm doing is I'm doing nothing. So you can't, it's not like I'm smoking cigarettes here. My idea of where I'm trying to move the needle is just less, less, less, less, less. So if you're smoking, you're doing something. If you're going skiing, you're doing something. What's a different example? If you're saying like having energy drinks, what did Taleb say? Subtract. So if you're subtracting, you can't go wrong if you're subtracting.

1:10:16I think there's something to this. I think that whole Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt thing of like, it's not good for kids. And there's this kind of, you know, they think social media is as harmful as cigarettes for kids. But I think what we need to do then is give kids cigarettes. Yes. The idea of like, and there's kind of a joke on the language, but you go, actually, it's the point that he makes in that book is not just ban social media. It's ban social media and let kids play outside. Because they can't have infinite freedom online and then no freedom in the real world. And really, it's the freedom in the real world that we haven't quite...

1:10:48Everyone's kind of on this idea of like, oh yeah, we'll take away the phones from the kids. But actually, what else do they get to do? It's interesting that the average person spends six hours a day on screens. We haven't gained six hours. Days aren't now 30 hours long. So off of the time that we had previously, that's had to get squeezed from somewhere. Yeah. Which means that you've lost time doing other things. But certain smart people are getting massages while listening to stuff. So there's outliers out there that have gained the system. They're geniuses. outing me publicly for my audio during massage, you've got a worse phone addiction than me, my friend.

1:11:21I don't disagree. I'm horrendous with my phone. I'm saying that the massage is not the place to have your AirPods in. It is weird now that the technology, it was kind of the thing of like, I've got the new phone, the new thing 10 years ago. Now the most opulent thing you could do is say, oh, we went to a cabin and there was no Wi-Fi and we just put away our things. It's the most opulent thing in the world. Meditation retreat with no screens. Yeah, what are the wealthy well doing now? What are the billionaires doing now? They're trying to live without that social media, without those grains. How was the retreat?

1:11:52It was intense. Yeah, to do seven days. I mean, it'll be the longest time since I was probably a child. There would have even been a TV in the room, right? One of the guys, there was an AI interface that could help you with your practice. What? That sounds like absolutely defeating the purpose. Look, I didn't use it. I didn't use it. If none of the facilitators were available and you were coming up against some blocks in your practice, there was a chatbot that was on a laptop and had been sort of imbued with all of the principles of the thing. But the interesting thing, this was Timur who was one of the...

1:12:27They have fucked up so hard there. I didn't go into that. I didn't go into that room. I didn't use that. However, he thought, am I able to find out the England score by messaging the meditation chatbot? Every time that I sit down to meditate, I keep being distracted by wondering what the England score was. Would it be possible for me to find out so that I can get back to my practice, please? But no, fascinating. Northern California, it was JANA practice, J-H-A-N-A. It was also OpenAI's Global Reset Week. so a lot of the engineers were off from work they have two global reset weeks which is basically enforced holiday here as a way to try and sort of front run people not getting burnt out by saying hey you've got you you can't come into work essentially so i go and there's all of the guys a bunch of guys from open ai but there's also all of their main competitors from anthropic and a bunch of other guys that are in there from google as well so there was kind of like low-key silent meditation retreat turf wars going on between people at the forefront of AI development.

1:13:33That was kind of interesting. And yeah, like you kind of learn, the particular school of meditation I was doing, which was Jhana, you're learning to allow conductivity through your emotions, and that is to allow them to move freely without any constriction. So you're noticing and releasing mental tension. It's like primarily what you're doing, but that drops down into emotional tension. what you realize when you come back into the world is how much of your life is spent constricting emotional tension because there's times when emotions come up but it's not appropriate for it you might feel a little overwhelmed as you're walking through the airport which everybody did as we went reintegrated back into society well that's not the time for you to talk about how i feel so scared and awkward and this is too much it's like no you you swallow down the overwhelming wildfires in Europe and the fat guy presenting the football on the screens and you just sort of move past it.

1:14:30Also, it's very difficult to hear what your soul is whispering to you when the world's shouting at the same time. So you start to hear far more fleeting thoughts that come up. A lot of the thoughts that you wouldn't have been able to pay attention to if you were regularly even talking to people, let alone being on screens. So that was kind of interesting. What was your soul whispering to you, Chris? It's all whispering to me, probably fucking spend more time in silence, I think. Like it was quite meta. It's vegetarian, which meant that almost everybody's digestion was ruined for the first three or four days.

1:15:03Lots of beans, lots of tofu. Trying to do group meditation with 40 people in a room while there's farting going on is relatively interesting. Some guy, I have no idea how, but entered the retreat single and left the retreat with a girlfriend. So that is the level of game. And that boy's got game. Mate, that's the level of game. None of us could pull it aside. How did the guy - I don't know. Did you - Honestly, just sheer frame. He should be a guest on the show. I think just straight up frame. Oh yeah, not like you, your tiny little forearms. That's true. Anyway, it was really good. Enjoyed it, very intense.

1:15:39The most interesting thing is then coming back and like having your old patterns come into conflict with your sort of new system, new worldview. you and it takes a good bit of time yeah i feel like titrate you know i couldn't use my phone i just simply cut it was i know it felt very icky very sterile after just staring at like trees the only thing that i was looking at was trees yeah a few points i was saying this it's the most chris williamson thing ever that i've been trying to get this man to take a holiday for he's not been on i call it proper holiday for five years so then he goes and does a john a seven day time meditation retreat.

1:16:16Even Gopkins is his own holiday. I think an interesting question I have around the phone stuff. Question. Question. There's a great guy on Twitter called Chris Lakin. His whole idea is that the phone itself might be Chesterton's fence. Do you know what Chesterton's fence is? Yes. It's this idea of if you see a fence, don't take it down until you understand why it's there. He helps a lot of people with a phone addiction. Then it will often discovered two days later they've got a vaping problem or they've got a porn problem. And actually the phone was never the problem. The phone was the solution.

1:16:52And if you actually get a little bit deeper, the phone addiction goes away. And I do wonder how much of the phone addiction is actually a solution to a much greater problem. I think it might be that we've spoke about this. Mark Fisher talked about this before he died, about the idea that we've privatized mental health problems. We sort of think it's a personal failing for people to be depressed or anxious. And actually, I think it's a societal problem. We're not organizing our society correctly for people to flourish. I think it's like the phones are kind of a symptom of a much larger problem within our society that we're quite sort of isolated.

1:17:30We're kind of looking for something to do. We're not in groups, we're not with other people. We'll go back to the thinking of your hands, mouth, feet. Feet, step count massively down. Hands, you almost, you're using your hands on your phone, but you're not using your hands like how most humans used to throughout history. You wasn't... Say what. Here's what. Go on, what you got? When Winston Churchill was going through... The Black Dog. The Black Dog. Yeah. He would put up 200 bricks a day. Apparently he was actually a terrible bricklayer. The bricklayers had to go in afterwards and do it. Fix it.

1:18:01But Churchill, just to keep his mind at bay, he would do something with his hands every single day. So when you lose the lack of feet, hands and mouth, I do think that can be not necessarily a full explainer of mental health problems, but it definitely contradicts. It's interesting that thing of how much is a hardware problem, how much is a software problem? If you've got a friend really going through a tough time, it's like, are they sleeping eight hours? Are they eating well? Are they exercising? Are they walking in nature? Are they seeing their friends? You cover that sort of simple stuff, but it's very difficult to regulate that stuff when you're feeling terrible.

1:18:36It's like you get into a spiral. The most absurd one was when it was a study that came out. It's like a meta-analysis of all the causes of depression, all the biggest treatments that have an impact on it. And the big headline was exercise beats SSRIs. And that was the huge thing that made like global news. But if you actually go into the meta-analysis, exercise is number five on the list. Now SSRIs are further down. Number one on the list. It's just an absolute sleeper that nobody talks about. Dance therapy. dance therapy outperformed exercise and it's interesting one of you have a lot of the benefits of exercise but you're with people and you're out of your own head with music well also you haven't got you haven't got headphones on when you're dancing whereas if you're exercising you have headphones it makes me think when did we get involved enough to be depressed yeah i guess that there's kind of it's like we're busy busy fighting saber-toothed tigers for a while like too busy.

1:19:34I think it's that thing where we have a, but if you really want to know how privileged you are, how far into the future are you planning? Because I think poor people have no future. And I mean that literally. If you're living hand to mouth and you're thinking about the next meal, you're not even thinking about what you're doing tomorrow. You're just trying to get through the day. And then really wealthy people think on like, oh, I wonder my grandkids, I need to make sure they're okay. It's like, it's a different timeframe. But I think that thing about having having too much time we have my dad i got three brothers and my dad would what he was a radio presenter back in the day and he'd he'd um work a night shift in radio and then he'd work a day shift teaching radio and he just didn't he slept in the car for a couple of years he just didn't have enough time to to get down you know when you've got kids to feed it's yeah that is a hell of a double shift radio by night and teaching radio by day yeah my dad's great he was uh he was an electrician he really wanted to this is kind of a story a little story about like the para teacher because he was kind of he wasn't the smartest cookie in the shed and when he was from he was from hull and he was he was disadvantaged right there he was in a um his great grandpa built hull prison um and he's in this little classroom and he's listened to noel edmund's last ever radio show because his big dream was to be a radio star and um and you know this teacher i can't remember the teacher's name but like he thought he was going to be told off wearing a cap to cover the, you know, the big old headphones he used to use.

1:21:01And he says, well, dry. What are you doing dry? And he says, Noel Lemon's the last ever radio show. I'm listening to it. And teacher goes, carry on dry. And he went on to, he won a Sony award. His career was very up and down, but, you know, and it's just an example of like, I don't know. I love it when teachers just acknowledge actually what's important in kids, you know, upbringing. Yeah, it's lovely. It's lovely. Is your father still with us? Is he still knocking around? Yeah, he's still knocking around. The thing in radio, and I don't think you'd mind me saying this now, you get fired a lot.

1:21:32It's show business. You're in one show, you're out the next. So we play Articulate. You all know Articulate. The game where you have to describe individuals. And my dad would just, he infuriates us because he'll constantly just say, interviewed him, and we'll go, come on, dad. And he goes, I think he was trying to describe Joan Armatrading once. And he shouts at my mother, Sang dropped the pilot, interviewed him in OA. and mum is just like but i i don't know it's kind of a great thing now because radio is about i was like old school showbiz uh like being an actor or being a presenter you're waiting for someone to bring you flowers you're waiting you're waiting for someone to come along and give you permission to do the thing that you really want to do and now with new media it feels like that permission is already is you give it to yourself you go well no one's stopping me i could just start a podcast and interview people and do whatever i mean it's what you did in a bedroom in middlesbrough and And it's just kind of, you know, you give yourself permission.

1:22:27As long as you keep doing the thing, kind of it happens. Substack has done the same thing for writing that YouTube did for video and that Apple Podcasts and Spotify did for audio. It's the same thing. Yeah, Substack has, I used to have this joke that if aliens looked at human reading and writing data, it's going up. but then as soon as you zoomed in it's just subtitles and text messages everything else is like collapsing yeah they do they do talk about people being kind of um post-literate now like not they're not people aren't reading books i had this realization this week um what we're talking about earlier around the wailing going out from 1901 and then sorry being the number one and going out have you used whisper flow much yet i've been told to it's but yeah it was from a transcription perspective, because I realized I write so much that that muscle, and you'll know that in anyone, Harry, it's quite an arduous task.

1:23:25Or there's only so much writing you can do per day until you've exhausted. And as a result of writing so much, I'd struggle to reply to text messages. Yeah. Because it'd be used in the same... It's like I've trained my triceps all day, and now someone's asking me to do dips in a gym, for fuck's sake. And with Whisperflow, I'm now suddenly getting so much out there. And I was like, oh, people are going to stop writing. this is going to become a bigger and bigger trend. People will be right. You think speech to text? And read it as well. I think both of those two things are unfortunately short. So Americans are more likely to place a gambling bet than read a single book.

1:23:57Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 % read a novel or short story. Study analyzing 236 ,000 responses to the American Time Use survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day from 28 % in 2004 to 16 % in 2023. Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book, with 57 % of Americans placing a bet last year, but only less than half reporting reading a book of any kind. And this included audiobooks. They included audiobooks in that. I wonder, is there... I've got... Okay, my theory at the moment.

1:24:36Here's my big theory. Friction is very good in life, right? All the best things involve friction. So if you look at a TikTok, It's very low friction, right? But then you look at a YouTube video for five minutes, there's a bit more friction. A TV show, that's half an hour. Okay, it's a bit of an effort. A movie, a lot of friction. You read a book. I mean, come on, this is arduous. But you get so much more out of the thing, the more friction there is. Like the TikTok video, you can't remember. No one ever says, oh man, you've got to see my favorite TikTok video from 2025. It's awesome. It's just, it's nothing.

1:25:11It's gone. and the things that involve friction seem to seem to be better but in all areas of life like the exercise sports arts anything more friction is better i also feel like it's just a little bit about the story you tell yourself so if i was when i personally watched a lot of tiktoks and instagram and whatnot i would just tell myself that i was a bit of a loser and i walked around thinking that and then when i when i read a full book you know i'm like bloody hell like i can do things here and i think you really try to transmit it into the day you put me on to stoner that was a wonderful book it is a wonderful book um what's it about it's about a it's about a guy called william stoner who lives on a farm with his parents and he says he says to his dad dad i want to go to university and learn about farming and his dad doesn't say many words to him so his dad said okay whatever pops off to i can't remember which university mississippi maybe and he um and um he he starts his farming course and after about a semester he flips into english and he starts learning about books for the first time there's a professor and then the war starts and the professor sort of there's that amazing sequence as well where he doesn't understand he's like he's reading shakespeare and he doesn't understand what it means and he goes to his professor and goes i don't know what this means but he's like interested in it in a way that no one else is he's like so excited by it like i've got to know what this means i don't know what it means yeah it's like that's kind of the pivotal bit it's the thing i i'm i'm amazed you read it the thing i took from it is he marries essentially marries the wrong woman and i think it's it's it's a i do think it's a book it's so about so many things but one thing is about picking the person you marry to be honest because this this one woman he marries really in a sort of sort of there's no there's no grand moment where she where she screws up his life it's just sort of it's a thousand cuts it's a thousand paper cuts and and his life kind of just sort of becomes subservient was she abused by her father that's the she was abused by well no but that's like it's never explicitly said, but it's kind of implied.

1:27:06There's kind of a weird... A father commits suicide randomly on one sort of Tuesday because there was a bank run. The real advert is like the opening couple pages of the book where it starts with his death and he works at this university and nobody really noticed. And it's such a flip of a book because most books you have the giant hero, you have the Joseph Campbell, whereas this is a man who lived such a mundane life, that that's actually interesting, that you see yourself or you see your potential worst self in them. One of my favorite songs ever, it's like low agency in a song. Have you ever heard Pearl Jam?

1:27:42It's called, Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town. Long song title. And it's just the point of view of this 80-year-old woman who's never left her hometown, wishes she did. And the guy who was her teenage sweetheart comes into the shop that she's and she recognizes him and he no longer recognizes her there's this beautiful line of i changed by not changing at all small town predicts my fate and every time i listen to that song it's actually way more inspirational than the hero's journey and stoner's another so how how stoner ends is the bit i'll always remember from it is he's on his deathbed and before i tell you the the four sentence question which i i like stuck with me the author of the book has a really different interpretation to everyone who read the book it's also kind of weird the author of the book's like actually no he lived a pretty good life and he taught and he really loved english but book book ends and and william stoner is is he's got his wife behind him and his one kid who's sort of become an alcoholic and he says um he just starts saying this question over and over again he says what did you expect what did what did you expect what did you expect and i think what he's kind of referring to is like like if you actually if you fast forwarded your life william when you were 20 see this was always going to happen you were going to die in like a little small old room with your wife who doesn't love you sitting by you and and he wrote one book which he wasn't particularly proud of and he had a lovely affair which actually kind of sounds bad but actually wasn't bad because his marriage was so screwed up and he just says what did you expect and it was kind of thinking like yeah like god like if you don't change what you know that that's how i'll die what did you expect harry but he did i mean for me i think he changed massively because there was a guy that was toiling the land for the first 16 years he was like working the land really hard.

1:29:23And then he made it to a university, and he spent the rest of his life reading books and teaching other people about his passion for books. It's beautiful. He achieved so much. But it's like, you could compare to what? Well, compared to the life his parents expected, which was just physical toil and putting food on the table. And that was all factored in. And it's like, what did he accomplish beyond that? Well, no, that's enough. It's enough. And it kind of goes to that Morgan Housel line. He talks about happiness being your current experience. Reality minus expectation. Yeah. Which is like, what did you expect?

1:29:56Well, maybe you expected too much. Yeah. Well, that's the thing because he's outstripped his parents' expectations of him but underperformed on his own expectations of himself, maybe. Not in the bedroom. He found a lovely young woman who was, well, not young. She was actually quite old, relatively speaking. What is it about young women today? What is it about young women today? What is it about young women? That'll be clipped. That's a good thing. In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that.

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1:31:33Yeah, it's like the new thing, the new thing, the new thing. And then you're kind of putting a show together and that's kind of an exciting phase, but just whatever the latest thing is. It's interesting the good and the bad of any industry because the good thing for you, I guess, that you get to constantly come up with new material. But it's also like if you're a Noel Gallagher and that's a two-year stretch and does those songs, the leverage of that exists forever. A lot of musicians, they don't want to end up in Las Vegas being a covers band of themselves. So it's that thing where you go, be careful what you wish for.

1:32:06I've constantly got to come up with new stuff, but that's also the fun bit is coming up with the new stuff. Well, we was debating this once of, if you could imagine Impact and then doing it over time, you've done an incredible job of doing it over multiple decades. But a lot of musicians, they'll have that one album and then they can't repeat it ever again. Whereas some people like Christopher Nolan's probably, in my opinion, one of the best who's managed to keep going. Kanye, by the way, Kanye is the best. College dropout. He is. stuff's a little bit. His recent stuff, College Dropout, Late Registration, 808s and Heartbreak, Yeezus, My Beautiful Thoughts Is To Fantasy, Life Of Pablo are just completely different albums.

1:32:46Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they're completely different albums. It's very rare. It is. It's very interesting, I think. It's very interesting, that thing of like genius. People often talk about genius, but they don't. What they're talking about is like hyper-accelerated rationality, not genius. I think genius is a different thing. I think he - That's a big word, Jimmy. Can you - Well, once he has that kind of level of - he's got a level of genius where you go, he does all the crazy stuff that he does. That's part of it. It's almost like there's a mental health thing going on. It's a cross to bear to be - It's a beautiful line of genius and sound to your next door neighbors, and then they sometimes borrow one another's sugar.

1:33:24And it's one of the thoughts I've had around LLMs. An LLM can write good, and this may change, but right now it can write good, but it can't write great. And I think there's a little bit of a horseshoe theory with great writing. Great writing is kind of like next door neighbors to terrible writing. You've got to take risks. When you have something that's trained on the averages, it doesn't take risks. Like some of my worst ever pieces are quite linked to my best ever writing. Yeah, I think that thing of like the average will be free. In the world of AI, average will be free and the very good will be very expensive.

1:33:56Like excellent will be very expensive. I think there's a sort of weird texture just a when you believe in something you no one can see your belief in it especially if it's words written down on a page but i think you can feel when someone really believes in something i think the problem with artificial writing or ai writing is like you don't actually believe it you just got it kind of from from from the robot and i think there's just a weird you can tell when you read something and you just know that the person really really really believes about believes i think of a I can give an advert. I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he basically has this idea, I'm going to suspend a car above the chap who made the car to prove how good the suspension is.

1:34:37I think it was a Volvo. And they say, we can't get that past legal. So he says, oh, it's going to be me then. So anyway, the writer of the ad suspends this big car which wires just above himself. And it's one of the most famous ads of all time. And it's like that only got across the line because he just really believed in it. And I think your conviction in an idea is more important than the idea in so many cases. It's often the way with comedy, especially with edgy jokes. Intent is much more important than content. And people intuit the intent. They just know. I think of Norm Macdonald. You give his material to someone else and he's going to bomb.

1:35:13But because Norm had this weird belief in a bad joke, it would become a good joke. Yeah. What could you say that no one else could say? That's his whole career. Only he could do that. Just a properly non-fungible human. One of the reasons that AI uses very strange tropes, I told George about this the other week. Most writing that AI is trained on, the corpus of writing that it's trained on is not good books because most writing is not good but it's not distinguished between the hundred greatest novels of all time and the millions and millions and millions of pages of anime fan fiction that it's been trained on and there's there no waiting given is it doesn't give waiting no no i don't think this is dostoeski and even if it did it would have to be so overly weighted, right?

1:36:02Some 14-year-old's seventh sequel to the Twilight series or something that they're just putting out on their Tumblr account, that should not, it would require so much, it would basically not exist, but it has been trained on it. Anyway, and what they did was they looked at a bunch of short stories that won a bunch of awards recently, and there were some very obscure analogies that were used, talking about his stomach like swallowing a shout, which sounds like kind of evocative, but in the flow of the story felt a little bit clunky and it was a bit harsh and it didn't seem to be quite necessary so much.

1:36:41And they use this AI to trace where on the internet that piece of writing has been seen before. You know, you were talking about analogy being quite trite or it's sad. This sentence sounds like I've heard it before. It sounds like something that you could have, and they go and they actually find it and they found so many of the source material pieces were random anime fan fiction websites so that is all writing of all time right lots of it is good most of it's not and the total world that has ais have been trained on includes this like just endless dross it's going to end up also i think talib said it ends up being trained on itself a lot of the time now.

1:37:22Correct. And there's nowhere to go. I think there's going to be a big sort of premium on books pre-2022. Because you know that they've not been written by AI. Yeah. Because you know that there's kind of no help given as well. There's no editing. They did that in the old-fashioned way. It's like losing weight before a Zen pick. Yeah. There's an extra kind of flex on it. Yeah. It was interesting you were talking about coping mechanisms. After gastric band surgery, people sometimes commit suicide and gastric band surgery is quite traumatic. Sometimes the surgeons make really silly errors, like leave utensils inside of people and sew them back up or bits of gauze.

1:38:04But the big reason that people commit suicide after gastric band surgery is that the reason they were overeating was probably because of an underlying emotional issue. Yeah. That's how they were using the food as medicine. bingo and they still have the underlying issue but they're no longer able to use the flu yeah so yeah crazy and the same thing with the phone right what is the phone using the chest and spuds baby yeah being there to distract you from what so you shouldn't get a gastric band fitted i guess i wonder what surely can you chat gpt jared gastric band surgery what's been the impact of glps on gastric band surgery that's that's the whaling industry literally yes hey Yay.

1:38:43Very good. That's gone. Very good. That's gone. Yeah. When you're so quick, is it algorithmic or is it like, is it like a sort of algorithm in your brain, which insert topic, you know where to go, or is it intuitive? What's the, say you're, say you're roasting somebody. You don't even know. No, I don't even think of it as being quick. It's often that thing of like, I'll, I'll feel like I'm sitting on it for 10 seconds before I say it. And the worst person for this is Lee Mack. Do you know Lee Mack? Lee Mack, they often have to put a thing into the edit and add a pause before he says the line. Because he's just like, it's so quick.

1:39:21Yeah, it's amazing. I had a question. I had a question. It's actually, it's about, do you know who the biggest comedian on YouTube is? And I'll give you a, I won't give you a clue. He's actually four times bigger than every single other comedian. Well, it ain't me. Is it Matt Reif? No. Right. I'm trying to think about it. 40 million subscribers. You'll all know him. Are they digital first? I don't understand the question. No. I'd go Rowan Atkinson. Rowan Atkinson, bang on. No way. Mr. Bean. Yeah, much bigger, yeah. I feel like there's... So I teach advertising. Within Mr. Bean is the silent comic of, say, 21st century.

1:40:05And I think he has the best position. He's like the Charlie Chaplin of his day. if you want if you want to get stuck in the mind you want to get an idea stuck in the mind what is positioning like what do you mean a position i would say is the space you own in the customer's mind like real estate so say you've picture like um picture like 100 filing cabinets or hundreds of thousands of filing cabinets in your head and they've all got labels written on them so if we were playing this with chocolate bars like a chocolate bar for when you're hungry best-selling chocolate bar in the world would be...

1:40:37Snickers? Snickers. It's the best-selling chocolate bar in the world. Yeah, for a break would be Kit Kat. Yeah, sure. And then you take this to comedy. A good example would be like English, family-friendly comedian, bring the whole family. KK. KK, McIntyre, they own that space. And then you've got like, don't take the whole family. Don't sit in the front row, especially if you're English. Right, yeah. I was thinking Frankie Boyle. Or you've got read by Guardian readers... almost too clever for punchlines. Go on. Stuart Lee. Stuart Lee. Great. Bang on. It's the real estate you own. I think it's...

1:41:16Sorry, to take Mr. Beast, he is the only most famous silent comedian. Oh, sorry, Mr. Bean. Mr. Bean. Very different people. Yeah, Freudian slip. You know the Rowan Atkinson story about Italy? No. So when Rowan was first doing Mr. Bean, he uh he's a big car enthusiast and he likes to take a holiday so he basically carved out italy on the sales of mr bean and said don't sell it in italy and then what's crazy we sell it to tv channels all over italy he went no no i don't want to sell it to italy and then why not he went so i'll go on holiday so for the first 10 years of mr bean it wasn't available in italy that's greatness and then and then after like 10 years there was some offer or something whatever and they translated it and they put it on in italy and it's the biggest show in italy ruined his holidays yeah it's ruined his holidays really ruined his holidays what must have been fascinating i wonder how many americans know what mr he did a movie right mr bean ron i think people do know i think kids know and it's a it's that silent comedy thing it like shines through that must be great for an international audience exactly i think that's the thing i think that is the point in one it's why charlie chaplin was so universal because you didn't he didn't speak and then so i I think movies then had sound again.

1:42:28And Chaplin was at this kind of crossover period of like, I can now talk, but if I talk, I've kind of ruined what I've done for all these years. So I can't remember the film. I think it's called The Summinger River. And it ends, and the only words Charlie Chaplin ever asked is a gibberish. And that's kind of how his final silent movie ends. And it's just this perfect end to a film. How would you fix it? How do you go about fixing your positioning? What do you think? Well, there's two things here. there's like a position is the space you own in the in the customer's mind so jimmy's got a pretty like you know you go to a jimmy car gig you're going to get roasted there's going to be stag do's and now it's a little bit deeper but you know what you get there's like a situation which you would attend a a gig for um i suppose then there's something called positioning which is how you organize the customer's mind so i think stuart lee is a funny example of this like when stuart lee i think he retired from comedy in 1999 and he had a good career he was very good career he won an award at hackney prize or something like this and then he starts writing on tv shows like radio 4 and whatnot and he returns to comedy in 2001 and then i i saw stuart lee um live like four years ago and it was really good and stuart lee's kind of repositioned to the competition and very implicitly well actually not so implicitly his set design was was 1p um dvds from like modern english comics and he did lots of impressions of russell howard and i think basically lee's repositioning is like is like very much us versus them so there's three ways to get a space in the mind you can be first you can be only or you can be against and and stuart lee is very much against like he kind of pops like michael mcintyre peter k russell howard james corden in this little box uh you picture that being the mind and then and then that's mainstream or that's like laugh a minute and then there's stuart lee who and he and he isn't punchline he's like you know almost too clever for the punchline who else does like against like who else has positioned himself or what else has positioned himself against.

1:44:23So I think Trump's a pretty obvious example of that, but also even like Coca-Cola launched in 1886. Liquid Death. Liquid Death. I would say, yeah, Liquid Death, Pepsi versus Coke. It's interesting because you almost create, you almost create the, you know, the David Foster Wallace line of the fish can't see the water. With like Liquid Death, you almost didn't even think about plastic water bottles because everything was plastic. And then you suddenly create, oh no, here's the water and here's the lamp. like you're craving something against that people don't even realize you could be against yeah i i think i what do i think um i think be against is you probably see it more and more these days as the world gets slightly more polarized i don't know i don't know i i mean i don't love it in comedy because i think it's kind of the narcissism of small differences we're all doing the same job all trying to make people laugh and it seems that there's there's a there's a lovely camaraderie in that that's that you're kind of missing out on if you're kind of punching against.

1:45:17I mean, does jealousy come up a lot in comedy? I don't think it should, but I think it does occasionally. I think there's that thing where, for me, comedy has never been about that because it's not like being an actor where you go, look, there's one guy's going to be Bond, right? There's one actor that's going to be announced as the new James Bond, and none of the others are going to be. And that must be heartbreaking for them. You can do the stand on Monday. It doesn't mean that the other guy can't do the stand on Thursday. You can play the theater. You can pack out the O2 for five nights, but the venue's still there.

1:45:45someone else can play it the next night and it's it's also that thing of like the more people that go and see live comedy and enjoy the experience it's like it's kind of like the early days of rock and roll you go yeah the more people that go the more people that want to go and if they have a great experience expand grow the pie yeah you want to grow the pie and you won't be and the idea that you go well there's different people that you like more or less but everyone's kind of doing the same it's the same intention certainly when it comes to content online i think that the against for balance is actually skewed in against.

1:46:16I think there are more people producing critiques via content about for content than there is for content, like which is relatively right. I mean, you know, in some industries, there's probably more people writing about football than there are people playing football, but there's far more people paying attention to the playing of the football than the critique of the football. It spreads so much more fast. Like being critical of something is incredibly mimetic. Being for something is actually quite anti-mimetic. So James, Element James, what was the company that was slandering Element, do you remember it, that James was doing a lawsuit against?

1:46:53Fuck, not Tides. Yeah, the AI health checking app. Yeah, like waves or something. They were slandering them with a load of fake information. They got millions of views. It was completely like the guys butchered all of the studies, all the claims he was making. Then the apology gets like a few thousand views. And it's like the disparity between that. We was looking at somebody where there was this essay writer. And you can see this a lot with people that become these professional critics, where they'll have a piece that attacks a Chris or attacks somebody. And he goes super viral. And then you click on it and you scroll back and you go, oh, they've been doing this critique thing for a while.

1:47:33and you go you see when the moment they once did it everything spiked but if you go back further it was just in the void it's always optimistic or or slightly creative content that wasn't working and then this thing started to work it's quite sad yeah everybody against something is once a hopeless romantic for a person that was for something yeah it's like in politics i'm really frustrated with political political opinions just constantly being against things i think in uk politics right now, what are you actually for? I think it's an unanswered question. You look at all the parties and they just love to disagree with each other.

1:48:07And they don't love to actually stand on a table and have their own opinion. But 2012 was the year where most people voted not for the opposition as opposed to for their own party. That was the year in America where most votes were protest votes. I am not voting for the person I don't like as opposed to I am voting for the person that I do like. Yeah, I've been creating bots before bots were controversial. And one of the bots I wanted to create on Twitter is whenever you have like a cynic or somebody where it's just quote-tweaking, having a go, applying everything, it's just this dossier thing that then re-quotes them of, you sense that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one.

1:48:46You felt that you were destined for other things, but you had no idea how to achieve them. And in your misery, you began to hate everything around you. Mm-hmm. And that's some, like it's the perfect cynical line for the cynic. Oh man. That's heavy. Yeah. I didn't, it feels to me like there's a kind of bank account that you're supposed to pay into or withdraw from. And if you find that you're critiquing more than creating, you're kind of in negative equity. You're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're putting things into it. I've had this conversation with, uh, Eric Weinstein about like a experts only mentality where a lot of people believe, oh, the only way that you're allowed to talk on this topic is if you're somebody that has all of the requisite qualifications and this sort of esteemed history behind you but the reason the enforcement mechanism of that is people on the internet they're going to call you out for i see he doesn't actually fully understand what he means by dna are recombinant you're like i remember that that just means that nobody can ever get to play with ideas publicly and everyone begins to be on tenterhooks and they're worried about maybe I'm going to say something that's going to get me rumbled.

1:49:55Like, I don't know. It doesn't create the, what is it? The Oxford manner, the ability to play gracefully with ideas. We've very much lost the Oxford manner, the ability to say, ah, I see what you were trying to get at there. And look, you've made some errors of this side, but I think it's interesting. Even if you're wrong about what you talked about, it's cool that you're trying to apply something from your industry to one that is new or is novel to you. So, yeah. I think that's your podcast though, Chris, like why it works is because it genuinely seems to fill that space of like, it's okay to not have things completely worked out and we're going to work that out together.

1:50:33Like that's what I think a lot of your conversations are. I think that's a good summary. Yeah. How to understand yourself and the world around you has kind of always been the summary. And also to have, there's a person in front of me or a bunch of people in front of me, like how do I make them look as good as possible? how can i try and draw out of them the best version of them as opposed to the opposite there's far more people on the internet that are good at doing critique takedowns and breakdowns than i am but i'm pretty good at going okay what where's some as my dad would say a streak of piss in a pile of shit sometimes or you know like silver lining and how do you do that like how do you silver lining is maybe a nicer expression i think i think like i think we're workshopping writing today i think maybe yeah dad you didn't win that one um i don't know just look i i understand i think i tend to try and give people the benefit of the doubt as best i can i tend to try and yes and their ideas as opposed to no but their ideas stress test them in a way as you were talking about intent versus content you're like hey what do you mean by that i'm not saying it because i'm trying to trip you up i'm trying to be i'm trying to get you to strengthen your own argument by drawing out an area it feels a little bit sometimes you're having a really good conversation it feels like running your hand across the top of a membrane and everything's kind of smooth.

1:51:50And then you feel a little divot in something and you're like, huh, the flow of what was being said there just felt a little bit off. Oh, that's because there's a, you made it, you said a word that I didn't understand or there's a premise that I didn't feel was fully fleshed out. You made this claim and I didn't really understand how it linked back to what we were talking about before. And that's the moment where it kind of breaches the threshold of me just sitting and nodding along and listening. And then we go, oh, can I just, what do you mean by that? Can I ask you, it's quite a hard question, but we had all those five rules of writing.

1:52:19What would your five rules of communication be? That's good. Speak precisely whenever possible, which is not using more or fewer words than are needed.

1:52:35It's never bad to ask the question, why? As in, what do you mean by that? Why? What do you mean? like those little moments i think allow people to dig deeper um i like it when you say you say like it's very quite infrequent but you go say more yeah say more like just give someone and you know that they've got more yeah just give them a little a little it's permission they're being polite in the podcast and going i don't want to say too much here i feel like i'm i'm monologuing and you go no no yeah yeah and you that permission is great um so that's yes anding uh what else would i say using silence is probably one of the best tools so just shutting the fuck up and giving the room space to breathe and okay well actually oh there we go it was just a half step off from the next insight that you wanted to give out there and you're not making somebody rush you know you're not sort of driving them through it uh those would be some those would be I think that talking is the best example that the 10 ,000 hour road is a load of nonsense.

1:53:38Because everybody has done 10 ,000 hours, yet it doesn't seem to... Not every is a world-class conversation. But again, very, very precise practice. I mean, me and you had this idea a long time ago. One of our prescriptions was if you want to get better at communication, have a fake podcast with a friend where you put your phone down on record once a week for half an hour, phones out of the room. You don't need to publish it. You don't need to put it anywhere. Listen back to it and listen to your verbal tics and the flow of your conversation and how you talk over each other or how you actually give them a little bit.

1:54:09Oh, I quite like the way that if you really, really, really want to do it. But the easiest way to do it is to actually have a project. Like somebody who thinks I want to become funnier will take so much longer to become funny than somebody who has to step on stage and have all of the pressure of an audience. Someone that goes, I really want to improve my writing. You're so good at writing. How do I improve my writing you go are you writing for anything are you publishing anything in the moment no well you don't have the pressure of developing your writing skill oh you you done really well with your communication are you are you part of a project that requires you to communicate with enough pressure and scrutiny that means that you need to hone the skill and if not i think this is like it's the homoses thing of like going it's the optionality people want to get like the action perfection ratio is all wrong people want to get it's kind of brilliant that something before they even start and to have a perfect record.

1:54:59And I love the idea of like just being messy, just having a messy start, trying something. Like you don't talk about jokes, you just try them. That's the problem though, what we were talking about while you were out of the room. The experts only idea that Eric Weinstein has an issue with, and I think I agree with too, which is if you're not allowed to use the Oxford manner to play gracefully with ideas, you're always going to get sniped at, especially early on. Well, that's, you know, that's stupid. The early stages of anybody's work tend to be scrutinized, not with the amount of discount that it should have.

1:55:32And I think it causes people to get worried. They're like, fuck, what if I... And isn't it ironic that a lot of the current expert classes built off some anti-expert at one point that went against it? How so? If you go back through most of science, Galileo going against the Catholic Church, who were the expertise at the time, was remarkably unpopular. Yeah. Conformity is a coffin and heresy is a cradle.

1:56:03Yeah, it's interesting. I've told you that story about Copernicus, right? About the fact that he had the same insight as Galileo 100 years earlier and sort of squeaked it out on his deathbed. He had this great work, De Revolutionibus, and he was worried about ire from the church. So I had the same heliocentric learning. It took a full century to do the next one. And you might say, well, stupid Copernicus. He should have said it. He should have shouted it from the rooftops. But Galileo was forced to recant, kept under house arrest for the rest of his life, nearly killed. His treatment justifies the silence of the guy that came 100 years before him.

1:56:40It's the first humiliation. you familiar with that three humiliations so copernicus was the first we're not the center of the universe darwin was the second we're no different to the animals and then um freud was the third we're not even in control of our minds and then the fourth is ai we're no longer the smartest thing just kind of i mean it's not that humiliating i can live with it well when we when you've created it i think there's a degree of all of us feeling like we can't that's why yeah we did it we did it guys we did it some jimmy car bullshit will be in the corpus that it's yeah yeah it's it's it's interesting that thing of the um yeah that kind of next step if we get to it if there's a abundance in the future be amazing we're already there we're already here right it's already pretty bloody abundant this is your indomitable optimism coming through I'm very optimistic long-term, short-term, there will be problems.

1:57:44Well, I always use the example of my morning routine. So, my morning routine, which everyone's dying to know is going to get to max morning routine. Sure, sure. I know you had your one with Mike Thurston and got. Oh yeah, my four-year-old quick clip about a four-year-old's morning routine. My morning routine is I woke up this morning on a bed, I had a hot shower and I brush my teeth, okay? Which sounds not that impressive, but it's Emperor Augustus, the emperor of Rome, slept on a sack of straw. Mary Antoinette, who was going to be the future queen of France at the time, as she was wandering around her palace of Versailles, they used to throw their sewage out of windows because they didn't have toilets.

1:58:30It landed on her head. It's even like the air conditioning, which they'd think about, President Garfield, who was the president in the late 1800s, when he got shot because his body was overheating, they had to get 500 ,000 cubes of ice to blow over him because they didn't have anything near air conditioning. I think King Louie's mouth rotted from the inside as well because he couldn't brush the teeth. So even when you look at the David Foster Wallace thing, we're already in post-abundance. He's just going to potentially keep accelerating more and more. But when people get there, they won't think about it.

1:59:04And we were having this argument the other day. You were trying to talk about how we should de-accelerate or potentially pause things. And it's that Deutsch line of even the United Kingdom is an artificial concept. When you think about it. Like the Hunter-Gavras wouldn't have been able to live in the United Kingdom. We would have died on a cold winter night from the cult. So we're already living on Mars. Yeah. Mate, we're already living on Mars. But what I mean is when people talk about terraforming Mars, we've already terraformed the Earth. We're already living in unlivable places. That's the human thing today.

1:59:39Wonder around Bolton, man.

1:59:44How do you feel about that, Harry? I feel like me and George disagree on most things in life. We agree on the most important stuff, but we disagree on everything else. We were talking about death the other day. George is very pro-living for a long time, and I'm not pro-living for that long time. Oh, yeah. We had this debate while watching the England game. Who's the guy? Brian Johnson that wants to live forever. Kind of, yeah. Jimmy, what's a good age? Well, I think it's that thing where you've got problems to solve, and you have dilemmas that you just have to live with. And death is the big one, right?

2:00:18Death is in the Muslims, what do they call it? The certainty. And I think you have to just make peace with it. It's going to happen at some stage. You don't get to choose when. You don't get to choose how long your life is. But the depth and quality, you can have a big effect on. And that's where you should spend your time. I mean, I think that thing about it's absolutely completely inevitable. And the idea that these crazy, whatever, this guy trying to live forever. George wants to live until the heat death of the universe. Yeah, I want to keep going, baby. Well, there's the live forever or immortal, which is just ridiculous, because at a certain point you have the heat death of the universe.

2:00:54But living to 150, that much significantly different than living to 80. I did this research once with Claude, where I was looking at if you have everybody ever to live today, the average age, and then you had everybody ever to live ever the average age when they died, the average age of that room would be 15. So we were already way past. And I used the example, the example I thought of the other day was my dog, this beautiful little Bernadu, called Barkley. Parents do. It makes me sad that 10 years from now, he's probably going to die. If I can take a dog's life from 12 to 24, is that bad? It sounds like a terrific thing.

2:01:35So what's the problem of going from 80 to 160 years old for a human? I agree forever is a completely different concept, and that's a very vague language. But is 150 or 200 a necessary bad idea? Because we're already not dying at 15. We're all dying with the devil, and it just depends how long you're spouting. So I'm not saying 120, whatnot, but where does this end? I also don't feel like it's our universe to roam for that long. I feel like the old must make way for the new, man. There should be a new George Mack sat in that seat. You've got 10 more years of podcasting. And I think, bring in the new George Mack.

2:02:11Let's get some new insights. There should be a new Jimmy Carr. We should be taken out the back of the shed. Well, there is that thing where you go, people are very scared of death. There's a great Mark Twain said, I wasn't alive for 10 billion years before my birth, and it didn't inconvenience me in the least. You kind of go, yeah, it's just you go back to the same thing. We're in this brief shaft of light between two oceans of darkness. And you've got 4 ,000 weeks. What are you going to do with it? I think that thing about it is kind of a, it does set the clock of going, okay, what am I going to do?

2:02:41And I think if you live, if you're talking about 160 years, I think there's a manana to that of kind of going, well, you don't have to do anything now. And actually the sense of urgency that you have, I think it's quite, it's kind of a rush of blood to the head. So right now, I don't even know where to start. Like I think you live to 160, right? You live to 260. That's how many wives you have. Sorry. Let's just get down to the tap. Great that that's the first place that you go to. It's also how many kids, like you have your kids, they have their kids. And at some point there's like a deep heartbreak.

2:03:15It's a really deep heartbreak. Go back to the dog argument and talk about why going from 12 to 24 would be the worst thing for a dog. But you're not trying to extend the dog's life. You're trying to extend your own life. And I do feel like, what about the lions out here? Are we still going to be killing the cows? Is there going to be enough meat to fill these new humans who are just now powering on to 500? Well, that's kind of interesting when you talk about, like, you know, we're chatting about problems in the world, and you talk about the environmental crisis that's going on now. Are you aware of, like, the late 60s, there was a book written that was about how overpopulation, everyone was going to starve, and it was going to be kind of a Mad Max scenario?

2:03:52Is that Malthusianism? I've got that wrong. Yeah, Malthusian trap is when you have a growing population without resources that can support it. Yeah. So they thought that we were going to run out of food. And basically, two bits of technology happened at the same time. So they figured out how to kind of GM wheat and grain, and they also found out how to do it with rice as well. And they increased productivity by like 4x in that time. And basically, we can sustain a huge number of people. Because they worked out there's not enough land to support 4 billion people. And now we're at 8 billion and we're fine.

2:04:23It's really interesting how problems change. They also thought there was going to be a new ice age in the 70s. It was not that long ago in the 70s. And now it's kind of all worried about the heat. It's weird how it kind of changes over time. Well, hopefully, we're sort of one step ahead and we solve it. Isn't there a Roman port that's like 100 miles off the coast from where the coast used to be? I'm pretty sure that because there was an ice age not that long ago, and during the Roman Empire, the entire climate was significantly different, but their ability to invade the UK was facilitated by the fact that, here it is, once a major coastal port and likely the landing area for the Roman invasion of AD 43 is now about two miles inland because the Wansom Channel silted up.

2:05:11Interesting. Anyway, Romans, mate. We've gone to the Romans. This is what men are meant to do every two hours. Reference the Romans. I've been thinking about it the whole time. Yeah, sure. Simple question. Who do you want to be the next Prime Minister of England? Assuming there's no, like, they can be, they want to be. Anyone in the world, you could ship him in at a la FedEx. Oh, that's good. Dominic Cummings. He had a go. He had a go. And I think the thing with DC - You didn't ask who do I think could get elected. Okay. Mike, you got me talking, right? Mr. Cummings. I think he's really competent.

2:05:48and not that likeable. And I feel like there's a real kind of like what you want in a leader is really competent while also being kind of likeable. Okay, what was Keir Starmer? Neither, man. I mean, he's gone now, but I don't think anyone's going to forget Keith Starmer in a hurry.

2:06:09Lee Kuan Yew. Lee Kuan Yew would be good. Lee Kuan Yew is really interesting because that kind of Singapore example. There's a guy called Roger Boutle, who's a brilliant economist and a great writer. I know him a little bit. And I think if you look at Roger Boutle's kind of assessment of what Britain needs, it's a really good checklist of what... He says there's no silver bullet. There's no big solution that changes everything. And he gives these eight examples from around the world of where extraordinary things have happened and countries have turned themselves around. So from post-war Germany to post-war France to South Korea, North Korea, Singapore, all of these different examples of that.

2:06:48How did those economic miracles happen? How did people get from a relatively poor circumstance to abundance? And it's brilliant because it's lots of little things done right. I think he'd be a great guy to have in charge. And can he talk? Does it matter if he can talk? He's very likable. And his thing is like, it's not really about the... He's a big fan of the um the singaporean dude uh but he's not really about like uh charisma in the leader it's more about okay these are the things that you need to do these are the priorities that a country needs to have and you need to know what um what gdp is for you need to know what what are you doing this for why do you need this to be what's the what's the purpose of this nation what's the point of it and that's he's very good on that stuff who do you want harry my so i talked about yesterday i genuinely the girl i'm dating i think would be a good pick um keep her busy right bro bring your fucking chick to work day that's who i'd pick right like right here right now i bet she's american so i'm not sure how it would go down bring your chick to work day this is this is what's happening you're gonna implant your lady at the top of the country what does she do in current life uh applied theater applied theater yep she's the one for the job it's gotta be isn't Yeah.

2:08:03Fine. Sold. George? Don't Dominic Cummings. Are you in Clance? Okay. Who do you want? He's an old, he's an old, like Cummings is like that old Labrador, you know, he's beamed around the track. Like I, I think fresh energy. Jimmy? What? If I, if I said I'd like Mr. Carr to lead us into the next century, what would you say? I'd say that we've, we made a mistake in the early eighties and we shut down all of the asylums. And now the crazy people are just wandering around. No, I think, I don't know if you're familiar with recent American history, but game show hosts have become politicians recently and not always with stellar results.

2:08:52Tushar, give it a German. You give it to the England manager. It seems to be working at the national team level currently as we're recording this. That's not a bad shout. Or you could put Gareth Southgate in, given that he's got the job free. All right, boys. Give me Giggsie for the end of season. Give me Giggsie. Let's bring this one home. I appreciate you all. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. It was really fun. Goodbye, my beauties. See you. Bye. Bye.