“We’re At The Beginning Of A Revolution” - Jimmy Carr - #1135

25:32But what are you going to do tomorrow? What's the small thing that you can break off and it's manageable and you can do it today. It's why I love kind of what I do. You know, mainly it's jokes and writing jokes is comparatively easy because you can just sit down and write one and then you test it. There's no point discussing it. There's no point having a meeting where you go through it with some friends. Just go out, find an audience, tell them. They'll tell you whether it's funny or not. Great feedback loop. I suppose the problem with most other projects is that you can't iterate a product and get audience feedback quite so quickly.

26:05You can't work out whether or not you want to release a t-shirt design in one small chunk. Go through all of the process of getting the t-shirt design, get it printed, see how many people want to buy a one-person book. Well, let's update it again. The iterative nature of that is pretty cool. Yeah, it's harder. I mean, I'm very lucky, I think, to be in a business where it's that thing of like, if the audience like it, they tell you straight away. And they can't not tell you either. Even people can dislike you. But if you tell a joke that's sufficiently funny. I think that the response just sort of kicks in.

26:35Well, even if it's like my favorite noise in comedy is still that kind of cognitive dissonance laugh, where there's a laugh followed by a deep... They're shocked at themselves for having just done that. Oh, I guess you laughed at it because the laughter kind of betrays you. I think your laugh... It's kind of a deeper level of you. I suppose, actually, I might be a little bit wrong there. If you really, really don't like somebody and you decide to sit in the third row with your arms crossed, you go, go on then, funny man make me laugh i think you can will yourself or convince yourself into not liking somebody that's doing well at their craft in comedy i don't think that the same thing is quite so true in music i think that an absolute banger pierces through your defenses even more so than comedy i think something that would be less than that would be a conversation right conversation between two people on stage or some sort of like keynote speech or whatever i wasn't even that interesting i didn't find it engaging comedy is deeper and then music is deeper still it's like the art the art and the artist and can you can you separate them can someone that's done a terrible thing and you know they've done a terrible thing can they still be funny can they still be musically gifted yeah yeah i think you probably can tease it out i think it's probably fine peter crone's got a question who could you be in the absence of your concerns it made me think about that's it that's that's really good isn't it like that's that's uh you could you be in the absence of your concern.

27:58There's a great line I have to think of, which is you can do anything you want, you only have to face the consequences. It's really powerful because it's that thing of going, you've got absolute freedom, but you have to wear it. There's freedom of speech, but not freedom of consequence. And I think about St. Lawrence a lot. You know the story of St. Lawrence? No. He's the patron saint of comedy. And St. Lawrence was burnt by, I think it's a really good name for an emperor. It's something like Voldemort. This emperor burnt him alive over a fire. And as he was being burnt alive, Sir Lawrence went, turn me over, this side's done.

28:39And it makes me think of bravery, right? That's a very brave thing to say in a pretty awful moment. But the only reason we remember him is because he said that. He goes, there's a certain amount of bravery. Like, yeah, no, say the thing. Say the thing. good luck. Some people won't like it, it'll be all right. Who could you be in the absence of your concerns? But me and George keep on talking about the fact that so many people are held back by a lack of confidence rather than a lack of competence. Their self-belief is the biggest rate limiter on what it is that they can achieve. Yeah. But I mean, that self-confidence comes from Mr.

29:17Hall-Mosey's line. Self-confidence comes from giving the world irrefutable proof you are who you say you are. So it's that thing of like, find something small that you can do, do what you can with what you've got where you are. You could wish away the first two. I wish I had different things than I was somewhere else. Just accepting the reality of where you are and working with that seems to be pretty powerful because you just start off. And you can't choose where you start, you just choose where you finish. What's your relationship like with gratitude? I do a lot of gratitude practice. I think there's a Meister Tole said, if you only said one prayer and it was thank you, that would be enough.

29:59I think that's bang on. I think the only thing is disposition is more important than position. Where you are in the world doesn't matter. Your disposition is everything. And the only thing that seems to shift disposition is a sense of gratitude. So across time and space, like we're lucky to be here now. And we're lucky to have the friends that we have. We're lucky to have living the world that we live in. It's extraordinary that we're in a privileged position. And I think acknowledging that on the regular is great. Are you able to take time to celebrate when you're moving so quickly? Yeah. I kind of think that thing of like celebration and gratitude are kind of linked.

30:34I think done correctly, celebration is gratitude in action. Like you throw a party and you invite everyone and you celebrate and there's something lovely about that kind of connection to other people and kind of doing it with others. I don't think you can really celebrate on your own. I think being grateful with other people is really good as well. You can sit down and chat with other people about how great is this. It's really nice. I think a lot of people struggle, especially when they're at their busiest, to take time away from doing the thing, to think about the thing, and to realize how fortunate they are to be in that situation.

31:07Yeah. Well, Chairman Mao, wasn't it? you can't smell the roses from a galloping horse. I think I should put together - Dropping Chairman Mao quotes. I should put together a book. I was thinking about this. I would put together a book of like incredibly wise stuff from dead by shitty people. It'd be quite a good quote book of like going, well, I guess, you know, stopwatches right twice a day. It would be nice to have the quote on one page and then the person that said it on the next page. Yeah. Oh, equanimity with impermanence. Wow. Hitler. Oh, fuck. Damn it. Yeah. Fuck. That's ruined that for me.

31:38Yeah. uh but i not that he never said that it is a it is it is an interesting challenge right when things are going well and everything's busy and you're not really paying that much attention that is the time when gratitude is probably most available to you but you're so busy and the calendar is always packed and you're moving forward you're excited about the future so taking time to reflect on the present is pretty tough and then when things slow down and stuff starts to go a little bit worse that's when you wish that you'd had the gratitude from before to be able to rely on and you retroactively trying to think about...

32:10It's the frames as well. It's how you think about stuff. It's like problems, right? Problems are a feature, not a bug. A problem just means something needs your attention. And I think people have a crazy notion, if they stop and think about it, that one day their problems will be over. They'll have dealt with everything and it's done. And it's obviously not. You just level up. All you do is level up and you get more complex problems. If you can solve really complex problems, you're doing very well in the world. Elon Musk is a trillionaire. Why? Because he solved some very complex problems, and there's money to be made doing that.

32:45So you go, so problems are a bug, a feature, not a bug. They're great. It just means something needs your attention. You should be grateful for that. Someone needs your time. You need to take this call. You need to deal with this thing. Boredom, I think, is unappreciated serenity. it's just you're in a serene moment there's nothing going on great doesn't happen often like i can get to where tibetan monks get to in an airport lounge in detroit nothing going on as long as you don't get your phone out yeah it's fine just yeah well that thing of like we're kind of we're carrying the phone everywhere with us now the the the it's it's like the mobile labor camp tracking our every mood crazy i was in the gym a couple of months ago.

33:32And one of my friends was talking to me about how his wife keeps on complaining at him that he uses his phone at night and he's always sending messages, organizing stuff, running businesses or whatever. And he came up with a very fortunate, but I think actually philosophically pretty interesting excuse, which was he said, I've got a mind that likes to solve problems. I'm just trying to give it good problems to solve. I think lots of people have a problem solving brain, but only some people have great problems that they're going to solve with it. Well, that's what I think of with anxiety. My mind is often racing.

34:08I often wake up, I suppose what you call a panic attack at four or five in the morning. I'll wake up when my mind's just on, and I'll worry about stuff. And it's often counterfactuals. Worried about things going wrong, people getting hurt. You just kind of ruminate on crazy stuff. And if I give it like, oh, we know, but we need to write a joke about Keir Starmer or Andy Byrne or something, you go, okay, right. Great. Give it something to do. So using action as an antidote to anxiety then. Yeah. I love that. I love the idea that you go, well, that's, that cures it pretty, pretty well. It's very difficult to worry about the future when you feel like you're moving yourself toward it.

34:47And yeah, that, that problem solving brain thing is interesting because I wonder how many people are churning themselves up inside because they have a brain that likes to solve problems, but they don't have any good problems to solve. So they pay attention to politics or porn or their ex or this situation that's outside of their control in some foreign country that they can't get access to. Is that not what the news is? I mean, if you were trying to design something to engender mental health difficulties, you'd make someone aware of a problem and give them no agency. And that's what reading about the Middle East is.

35:24So you just go, it's an absolute clusterfuck of a situation and there's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing we can - There's nothing that you can do about it. Because if, I don't know, I wonder whether it would feel better or worse for the situation to actively have nothing you could do about it. There's an asteroid coming to Earth, no one can do anything about it. It's the simulacrum that someone could fix this, but not you. Yeah. I mean, we're not in that game. I think that thing about having agency at a... Okay, there's a bigger thing here, which is I think we give maybe empathy to people that we like and agency to people that we don't like.

36:11So if you imagine there's two marches, right? And one of them is like super far-right dudes marching with skinheads and jackboots, we give them agency. If they put a brick through a window, we say, right, lock them up and throw away the key, right? And then there's another march and it's people marching for social justice, right? And they throw a brick through a window. We go, well, you know, that's the language of the streets, you know, the unheard. That thing of like, so we give them empathy and then agency. And actually you should give both, both. You need agency and empathy for everyone. Like the idea that you go, believe that people can handle it and believe that everyone's got a part to play.

36:55We need to be responsible for the things that you did, but also you're enmeshed in the situation that sort of brought you to that point too, like the motivations of what got you there. But yeah, that problems thing, I really do think, I wonder how many people would, all that they need are better problems to solve. All that they need is something to focus their time and their attention on in a better way. And yeah, if you've got this situation that's occurring overseas, I came back from a meditation retreat last week. I'd spent seven days without my phone, almost exclusively in silence. And I came back and I was flying out of SF and walked into the departure terminal.

37:32and one of the pieces of advice that we've been given was to put sunglasses on and put airpods in because you've basically been in silence for a week and no screens no nothing like it's a lot of stimulus to go from zero to a hundred i went and sat down in this some airport restaurant thing i looked up at the screens and it was wildfires in europe raging that was the first thing i saw on a screen basically since i'd got off of this retreat i remember feeling this strange constriction inside of me and i'm like right i better get a hose why yeah why the fuck is that what's on i'm aware like is it newsworthy like yeah kind of but like what does it do it's it makes us feel like we're being informed about the world but really all it's doing is just piercing our nervous systems and making us feel worried about stuff strange and yeah i want to be informed about what's happening in the world i feel like i i'm so i guess addicted to that like i like knowing what's going on.

38:28I like thinking about what the solution might be, but I guess you don't, you know, you get to chat about it, but you don't really get to influence what happens. Before we continue, most people in their thirties are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their twenties. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy produces inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habits stay strong.

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39:39And right now, you can get up to 20 % off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. The gratitude point is Michael Smokes got this line where he says, I have a hard time celebrating my achievements because in my mind it was my obligation to achieve it. A lot of people that are high performers have this sense that the higher that you climb, the further you have to fall. As you get better, your standards are always going to increase. So you're always going to suck in comparison to what you think that you should do.

40:14And that's great because it continues to push you to work harder, to improve. but also it means that success isn't a cause for celebration it's just the minimum level of acceptable performance and anything less than success becomes a failure yeah well i think that that thing then you need to you need to be in a state of um uh i guess imposter syndrome once every 18 months two years you need to level up constantly where you feel like you're in a space where oh this is this i can't believe i did that that was good uh like push yourself a little bit i think try and do something else is that difficult when you've got close to the top of your game well it depends what game you're in you can change games you can just sort of do things a little bit differently so that thing of like going it's um it's about i suppose you know my my business is you know you i'm in the service industry right i make something that people want i make them happy and no one seems to remember any of my jokes but they remember how i made them feel and the show tonight is nothing more than an advert for the show when i come back next time that's the way i'm kind of thinking of it and then you're trying to find these moments now i've the show's changed over the last couple of years where there's moments in every show there's like a moment someone will ask something and you'll chat to them and it'll be slightly more um heartfelt and they'll always be kind of they're kind of sweetening the pill with laughter why did you change that?

41:39I think it was, I don't know what happened. I don't know what, you know, went on that I suddenly started chatting to people in the audience and we started to connect in a slightly different way. It's been really lovely. And people, I think, I think comedy is, it's a, I love that line, laughter's the shortest distance between two people. And I've often done this thing. I've spoken about it, I think to you before about, Now, your best friend is the person you have the least filter with, right? So if you meet someone on a plane and you go, wow, I see the World Cup. It's a good game, isn't it? Nothing, right?

42:14It's surface level. And if you say, oh my God, you have to see these hemorrhoids. It's incredible. Like, it's connecting at another level. You're just like, you've got no filter with that person. That's your best friend in the world. And if you treat the audience like that, you get paid back 10 times over. Like people feel that, oh, okay, there's no, he's treating us like adults. he's saying the things that he thinks are funny and there's a real there's a connection there and then increasingly like people aren't talking about things in the in the in the media in the mainstream media so there's a gap there to chat about things that you know what's going on in the world isn't it interesting that what you're looking to do with comedy to kind of say the thing that maybe lots of people think or hadn't realized that they thought and to say it with a degree of no fucks slash bravery that mean that you're the person that pushes the boundary in that regard.

43:05Well, I think the Overton window, like people talk about the Overton window in politics, the idea that you go, what's the most left-wing and what's the most right-wing thing you could say that's socially acceptable at a dinner party, right? That's the Overton window of conversation, right? And it's expanded massively in politics the last couple of years to the left and to the right, for better or for worse. I think comedy does that for conversation. I think the real benefit of going to a comedy show isn't necessarily the two hours you spend laughing at the jokes at the show. It's the conversation you have on the way home, where the conversational Overton window has broadened.

43:35I don't think people were as open talking about sex and politics before and after George Carlin and Richard Pryor came along. I think they expanded the window. And I think, you know, someone like Chappelle's out there expanding the window of what you can and can't talk about. So you've got that with, I don't know what to say, how to categorize it, spicy, topics, insights that might be somewhat controversial or inflammatory or on the edges of what people would typically do. But there's another dimension, which is a sort of level of sincerity or earnestness or emotionality, a depth, maybe, an unapologetic, self-deprecating, sometimes exposing look at how people are motivated, and maybe how you are motivated or maybe how somebody in the audience feels about something.

44:27And that almost feels like another type of Overton window and it's separate from the first one. Yeah, it doesn't all need to be, you know, you talk about the incredibly controversial thing. I'm very happy to talk about third rail topics and try and be funny about them. But I'm also very happy to be earnest and to be sincere about stuff. There's a level of earnestness as well, which is commonly publicly accepted. And there is a level of earnestness and depth, which pushes outside of that as well. kind of obsessed with this idea that people are desperate for authenticity, but they're allergic to sincerity, that people love the idea of someone just being themselves, speaking their truth forward.

45:03But when you see a father break down crying because his wife left him, a lot of the internet has this sort of allergic aversion response to that. We want people to show themselves. I think if you're going to do anything that's even vaguely out there, you've got to turn off the comment section. Other people's opinion of me is none of my business. Just you do your thing and you go, you've got your audience and they come and they enjoy it and we have a good time. Great. Like anyone kind of, you know, throwing shade on that and going, well, you know, how can, how can you talk about serious things?

45:36He's, he tells offensive jokes. Okay. Well, I mean, we all contain multitudes. You get what I mean though here, right? Like you have the classic Overton window and then you have this emotional Overton window as well, which is how, how deep are you prepared to go in a live show? How, how edgy are your jokes allowed to be and how earnest your conversation is allowed to be. And there is a limit. There is a, not even a limit, but there is an expected bar beyond which people really sort of prick their ears up and pay attention and have a kind of, they have a more animated response to it. And I think that one of the areas that you can dig into is like, holy shit, like he really, he really went there.

46:13Or when you're sat down with a friend or you're having a conversation with a friend over dinner. And it's bouncing between the level of emotionality that's normal, and then it descends into one that is not so common. What are you solving for in a comedy show? Laughter is the main metric for comedy. You want there to be three big laughs a minute, and you want to have that frequency with the jokes. But also, silence. Don't be afraid of silence. Silence where there's a poignant moment and everyone has a little think. Good. Fine. We can have that as well but it's nice that it's changing because i mean it keeps it very exciting for me that you're not you're not doing the same thing again and again it's not like you're doing the same show that we've got kind of different flavors certainly you're looking to optimize for memorability to a degree as well like for people to go like yeah i really really loved that sensation as opposed to what did you do what was it like to go and see this artist last year and you're like i can't fucking remember well the memorable is interesting because if someone choosing to come and see you live, it's a big deal.

47:16But really, I think people want to go out to festivals, see music, they want to see play. But also, we used to gather around the fire and talk. And then we gathered around the radio and we talked. And then we gathered around the television and we talked. And even something like The Royal Family, remember that sitcom in the UK? Yeah, it was great. It's like a distant memory, people watching TV like that. Because now we have the phones and people are on their own. They're watching their own thing. They're watching their own stream. Even if they were in the same living room together, each person would be on a screen of their own that nobody else is looking at.

47:53And I suppose, hey, have you seen this thing? But yeah, you are right. The royal family, which I guess Americans are definitely not going to understand. The reference. But people sitting around watching the television together as a family, and you would watch shows that you weren't necessarily that into because mum liked it. So you go, oh, I guess we're watching Desperate Housewives, whatever it was. Because there's only one TV. as opposed to five TVs per room. I was thinking about this recently about the idea of social media and the issues around it, the bigger picture. There used to be a thing when I was at school where people talk about the Native American peoples having this belief that if someone took their photo, it would steal their soul.

48:32And I remember thinking, oh, that's crazy. That is ridiculous. They think their photo is going to steal their soul. And now I think, Yeah. I mean, it might not be one photo, but a thousand a day, that'll do it. That'll absolutely do it. That will break you away from who you are. You'll be alienated from yourself. And then I was thinking about even the language of it. It's not hiding. It's nets and webs, the internet. How so? It's the web, right? It's the internet. What do nets and webs do? They catch people. That's what it's doing. I think Aldous Huxley was right about this. Our power will not be taken from us by some overlord.

49:11I think we'll give it away for cheap dopamine. And Aldous Huxley said it was soma, which was the tabla, right? And he was even right about that. It's just a different kind of tabla. So not some equivalent here of treating people like slaves caused them to not work as hard as you might want them to, and they would rebel, and sometimes they would be lazy. But if you can manage to create a system where people actually want to work as hard for you as you want them to work by incentivizing them on the back end, then you'll get them to continue to drive themselves insane as they work harder and harder.

49:44I guess it's kind of the same here, but with regards to distraction and freely giving away your information and giving away your attention as well, you don't need to demand it from people. You just need to make the incentives align that they want to give it to you. Yeah. It's a really interesting time. I think we haven't got this. It's a very new technology as well. These new technologies are coming along. and we have to integrate them into our society. I think ultimately, the trajectory will be up, and it'll be better, but we have to learn how to work with this stuff. I mean, AI is the other thing that everyone's talking about.

50:12You go, we haven't quite figured out what it is yet. I think AI is like a musical instrument. And anyone can sit down at a piano and make a noise at the piano, but it takes time and attention and practice to direct it into creating a symphony. right it's it's it's like an instrument you're we're going to be using that tool but how do we use it and at the moment it's it's very sort of early stages it's that thing of um my take on ai is like i don't have religion i don't think we were made in god's image but i think we so wanted there to be a god we created one in our image it's all-knowing all-powerful can create miracles and lives in a cloud.

50:54Well, what am I talking about? I think it's like that. Hegel and Nietzsche had the idea hundreds of years ago, the idea that God wasn't there for the Big Bang, but the universe is a device for creating God. And that we are the universe experiencing itself. Everyone's very impressed with AI because they've forgotten what they are. We are much more impressive than AI. AI is really good at left brain shit, really good at left brain stuff, but the right brain stuff, and the left brain apprehends, but the right brain comprehends. It's all Ian McGilchrist's stuff. And that idea that you go, the gestalt, the whole, the complex stuff, it can't do.

51:37It can do the complicated though so well. So in a sense, maybe it'll take away the drudgery of life and allow us to be more human and to do more artistic, fulfilling fun things with our lives that make us feel more connected that's the dream yeah that's that's the dream that's being put forward i think a lot of people have kind of forgotten about the connection comprehend side of things of their own existence so much that if there is a threat to the drudgery being taken away and that's not to say that that's all it's going to do right it very well might take away everything else as well. Well, but we can only see the jobs it will take away because they already exist.

52:19We can't see the jobs it will create because by definition, they don't exist yet. So it's that thing of like going, well, we're in a pickle now and this has happened before. This is precedented. The industrial revolution really made physical strength obsolete. You don't need that anymore to farm the land, to make things. You don't need physical strength. Machines do all of that for us. And then this is taking away some of the drudgery of white-collar work. But hopefully, the creativity will be uniquely human. Favorable conditions never come. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs.

53:03If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. Yeah, that's really good, isn't it? But just there is this sense that at some point in future, my problems will be out of the way and I can finally get down to doing the real thing. As opposed to thinking, this is the situation that I'm existing in. I'm always going to be faced with problems. There is never going to be a time where I have none, like completing a video game and arriving at a level where there's no more enemies.

53:43That's just what life is. Yeah, well, you want people to have some idea that there's a future, that they want to start families, that they want to live a life. You know, there's shocking statistics about the abortion rate in the UK. You heard this? I don't know. So I think it's one in three viable pregnancies now and an abortion in the UK, which put the morality to one side. That's not my business. But the idea of going, well, what does that really suggest? That people feel that they can't start a life. They can't build a family. They can't settle down. They don't feel able to with the climate that we have at the moment.

54:24Yeah, favorable conditions never come. Yeah, the favorable conditions. You want people to feel like life's going to be better for their kids. Life's going to be better for them. Wouldn't it be wonderful if favorable conditions felt like they were here even when they weren't? Like that's the kind of world that you want people to be in, right? An abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset. Believing that you need to wait for favorable conditions in future is by definition a scarcity mindset. Right now is not enough and in future it may be better if I can construct the world into this very specific kind of a way.

54:52It does feel like we're living through a very kind of unique time. I mean, I suppose everyone always thinks this, but like did they in the 90s? There was nothing going on in the 90s. You lived through it, you tell me. Relatively quiet. It's kind of the end of Pax Americana. And really since this phase of history starts in 89, 91, as the Berlin Wall collapses, the Soviet Union's gone, and suddenly you go from being a bipolar world to a unipolar world. And no one noticed for 30 years. But just as the American Navy got smaller, the canary in the coal mine was the Somali pirates. That never would have happened when the US Navy was at full strength with an enemy in Russia, that it would have policed that, no problem at all.

55:36Safe navigation, yeah, they would have schooled them. And then suddenly things fracture. Suddenly you've got all these different things. We live in a multipolar world now, and it's very confusing. On a geopolitics level, it's a very strange time. And you're seeing this revolution go on. If you take revolution to mean the replacement of elites, like the mainstream media is being replaced. The academia, there's a replication crisis and they've lost a lot of credibility. Politics now, the major parties in the UK may never win another election, the ones that we've had the last hundred years. It really is kind of a fracturing of our system.

56:18I suppose it gets back to Robert Frost and the idea of civilization is a clearing in the forest. Then we have to relitigate and rebuild all of this stuff. Did you know your gut controls your energy, your recovery, how well you absorb everything that you eat, and the one nutrient that keeps it all running properly is fiber? Well, it turns out that 95 % of Americans don't get enough of it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Momentous' Fiber Plus. Most fiber supplements are a one-trick pony, one type of fiber solving, one part of the problem. Fiber Plus is a three-in-one formula built to tackle digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once.

56:53I use this every single day. It is kind of hard to get enough fiber just through food alone. And best of all, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it every single day for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they will just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35 % off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. Do you think that people are going to look back in 50 years time, 30 years time at 2026 and go, those were the good old days?

57:28The nostalgia that a lot of people have for the nineties? I don't know. I think there's, there's something about the, uh, the, what's that lovely quote? The, uh, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men. And so it goes. And I think there's something about we're in a very tumultuous time now. Do you think this is hard times? Yeah. Yeah, I think this is hard times. I think it's very tough out there for people. And I think that there's a lack of leadership and there's, you know, you look at how countries are being run. It's, yeah, it's clearly these are hard times.

58:07You know the idea of kayfabe, right? That thing from WWE, where it's all about the kind of the meta game that's being played, the optics. Everything is unreal and surreal. and definitely if you look back i mean there was that um debate analysis between obama and i can't remember who it was that he was going up against uh in sort of 2012 2008 and before they begin they just wanted to i just wanted to say my opponent i respect him very much and i appreciate that this thing and then you roll the clock forward to this literal wwe event where there's personal insults and swearing and back and forth and you think i i don't know the the is statesman-like behavior unnecessary stodge is it this sort of uh the prim and proper pomp and circumstance which isn't needed or has something there been if not lost like caricatured sort of turned into this exposition of itself, this sort of ridiculous role-playing game.

59:20Everybody's LARPing is what they're supposed to be, and it's all being turned to extremists. It certainly feels very extreme at the moment. I mean, it really does. But I don't think it's unfixable. I think we've been in worse spots than this in the past. You know, there must have been people sort of in 1943 going, we're in the middle of a world war. This is bad, isn't it? This is bad. What's going to happen? How are we going to straighten this out? I think about that a lot. I think about how kinetically and literally things were significantly worse at almost every period in human history up until now.

59:50But I wonder whether metaphysically and symbolically things were quite as bad. I wonder whether we have the most confusing time now, even if it's not the most kinetically dangerous time. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think there's solutions out there. And I think it's a question of, I think statesman is really the thing that you need. You need great leadership in these kind of times. You need someone that's good thinking about sort of 20 years in the future, rather than the election cycle. What's happening in the UK at the moment? I've not been back for a while. The UK is not in a great situation.

1:00:22And I mean, I think Andy Burnham is going to take over and I wish him well, and I don't know what's going to change. I think it requires some sort of radical realism. You know, if you were going to fix the UK, what would you do? I think the fundamentals are it needs to be more competitive as a nation. And what makes a nation competitive? Well, 2 % on income tax either way, or changing the stamp duty laws, it's all kind of nothing, just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They need someone to come in and actually address the real problem. There's four things that affect a country's competitiveness, I think.

1:01:00There's the currency, the rate of the currency. There's the energy cost. There's the amount of, what do you call it, red tape bureaucracy. And then, hang on, I'll have a drink. Culture? No, no.

1:01:19Sorry, I'll give you that again. So you've got the currency, you've got energy costs, you've got red tape, and you've got tax. And you can do things to all four of those to make the country more competitive. And really, Britain needs to be competitive on the global stage. When we left Europe, for better, for worse, people voted for that, and we never really did it, and we never really competed. So, I mean, if I was in charge, right? If I was in charge for the day, I devalue the currency. I devalue the pound. I think the pound's overvalued. And why a pint 750 in London? Well, because it's overvalued as a currency.

1:01:57The idea that you would decrease the value of the pound, people talk about redistribution of wealth to the north. We keep it high because of the city of London. And actually, I'm not really concerned about the exchange rate affecting your holiday in France being more expensive for two weeks of the year. I'd be more concerned with the other 50 weeks of the year where you work. We've got to be a net exporter of things. So our things need to be cheaper. And in order to do that, we have to lower the currency value, which is relatively easy to do. People say that the UK is the seventh biggest economy in the world, but it's not.

1:02:29It's the seventh biggest city in the world surrounded by a very poor country. But you want it to be redistributed. You want there to be factories being built. As far away from London as you can get. Yeah, it didn't feel like the wealth of the city of London was reaching Newcastle on Middlesbrough, Stockton. Yeah, we have the most expensive energy in the world. I think it's like four times higher than America. No way. And you go, it's crazy. And it's systematically being – Is this Green New Deal stuff? Is that why that's – Well, there's a bit of that, but I mean, it's like, I'm all for the Green New Deal.

1:03:00Just give me a long enough runway. Give me 25 years and I'll give you net zero. Not 2013. But what I want to do, I want to be as technologically advanced, if you can imagine this for ambition, as technologically advanced as France was in the 70s. So France in the 1970s built 56 nuclear plants. They've got the cheapest energy in Europe. They give a what Russia says, or what's going on in the Middle East, because they've got their energy sorted. Do that. Do that. And then, but it's a very long range. Anyone that says they can fix energy in two months, like you're living in a dream world. It's a very long range problem.

1:03:32And then regulation, the red tape the regulation just cut all of that cut all of that we're like we're like the sort of it's like the end of the soviet union the amount of regulation you need to do anything in the uk now they could cut an awful lot of that red tape and and kind of free people to be more um entrepreneurial everybody likes the idea of being in a country that's got an illustrious history it's so esteemed like how long it's been arrived he's got he get a guy comes out he's got this mace and he dots his cap and there's wood everywhere everything's fucking mahogany you go yeah, that's great.

1:04:04But you also do accumulate a lot of bullshit along the way and a lot of bureaucracy. And there's a lot of hurdles that you need to jump over in order to get stuff done. Well, like, you know, the tax thing as well, it's very close to my heart, but the tax thing is like, if you go to like Estonia, post the Soviet era, they went, oh, we've got to do something. And they didn't have much time to think. And they've got one tax form. Because Estonia has one tax form. Estonia has a law where the government can't ask you for the same bit of information twice. price. So if you give your address to your doctors, they assume that the taxman knows your address and everyone else because it's all joined up.

1:04:35And the tax form's one page. And they have a flat rate of tax. And they collect an awful lot of tax. I'm not interested in equality. I'm interested in abundance. What would be the thing that would just get everyone living in Britain? We just have to compete with other countries and get people to come to us, start businesses, and want to live where we are. We've got the same number of universities in the top 10 as America does, but we produce five times fewer entrepreneurs out of those universities. I think we probably produce the same amount of entrepreneurs, but they end up somewhere else. They're not in Great Britain.

1:05:09Brain drain. Yeah. They're all somewhere else. I think it's possible to change it. I mean, listen, that's what I would do with the UK. I'd go, right, currency, lower that. Energy, you need a 20-year plan for energy in the UK, regulation, you'd cut a bunch of that, and you'd have a flat rate of tax, and then just, you would see if that works. And then if it doesn't, you would change it. But I think that'd be a kind of a positive thing to do. I think America's like, America's like, I think I could fix America in two moves. All right. So I would have open primaries for Congress, Senate, presidential, everything would be open.

1:05:51open. So people would have to go to the center. You wouldn't be appealing to your constituency, you'd be appealing to the center. 90 % of people agree about 90 % of everything. And then I would have term limits for senators and Congress. Because I don't blame Donald Trump for being powerful, I blame the checks and balances for not checking and balancing. They haven't done their job. It's an amazing piece of technology, the American Constitution, but you've got to work it. It doesn't just sit there. It's an active thing. I mean, I had Bernie Sanders on the show and he's been in government longer than I've been alive.

1:06:28Yeah. All right. I mean - It's pretty intense. Yeah, that's it. I think the idea of like 20 years, maybe? 20 years doesn't sound, that sounds reasonable. Is there term limits in the UK? No. Right. But there were term limits that didn't used to be a term limit on President. I think it was, they brought it in with Roosevelt. Right. Roosevelt did, I think, three times. He was trying to go for three. Yeah. Yeah. well anyway yeah that's we solved the problems of the world haven't we fix it yeah it's super uh have you heard david ogilvy's line you can't save souls in an empty church heard it a couple of weeks ago and i've kind of been obsessed with it since this sort of idea that if you believe in something you have a moral duty to spread that message around and that a lot of people insulate themselves from having to have their ideas meet reality by, it's just so sophisticated and refined.

1:07:20That's the reason that it hasn't managed to become sufficiently popular. It's like being the underground band whose music is just, you know, it's sort of virtuoso type thing. It would be very hard for you to, the proletariat, they wouldn't be able to understand how sophisticated it is that we're doing. But yeah, you can't save souls in an empty church, to me, makes it kind of incumbent on anybody that believes in a thing to find a way to get that message out. and to Monday morning quarterback, whatever it is that you care about, whether it's climate or young people or suicide or the birth rate or fucking art or taxes or whatever.

1:07:56Yeah. It is kind of incumbent on you to find a way to... I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I think the idea of like talking about those things that are third rails and getting a message out there is really good. It's probably the most difficult, but the most kind of beautiful bit of my show at the moment is I talk about suicide in the show. And I tell people the terrible truth, which is suicide doesn't work. People commit suicide because they want to get rid of the pain, but you can't get rid of the pain. All you can ever hope to do is redistribute the pain to the people that loved you.

1:08:36And it's a big moment. It's like people that are, And there's a non-zero number of people in the audience that are suffering that go, oh, right. This is my burden to carry. It's a tough thing, but it's interesting to talk about that stuff. It's interesting to have that platform and to feel like, okay, I can say that. That's a terrifying realization. Yeah. Yeah. It's big. But if one person listens to that and goes, oh, right. Okay. Yeah. That means I can't. Great. There's some data that George from the Tin Men told me that I think 90 % of men who took their own lives had sought help from a mental health practitioner before they did it.

1:09:26So the, we just need people to sort of open up and talk to the professionals thing. doesn't seem to be working in the way that we anticipated it to. Yeah, it's real charisma. Feel everything, beauty and terror. No feeling is final. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, it can be if people decide to make that decision. Yeah, there's something similar from Blake Burge. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, if you want to calm a life, you need to address small problems while they're still small. the cost of dealing with an issue rarely gets cheaper with time procrastination turns uncomfortable things into unavoidable things basically like if it doesn't fit eventually it'll hurt wearing it yeah i think that's that's really that's again it's on the that kind of compound interest yeah on the positive things and you know if you're saving money it works if you're building skills it works but also if you have problems you don't address them it's going to get worse over time.

1:10:24So addressing that and having that tough conversations. I think getting a quality of your life is kind of, you could probably track it with how many uncomfortable conversations are you willing to have. Or do you feel comfortable to have, right? How many people around you can you speak to with no filter? And then there's the other half of that, which is who can you sit in silence with and not need to fill it the most? It's the way that you can work out who your best friend is. Yeah, make a terrible fucking podcast. Yeah, but it would be wonderful regulating for the two guests that were there. Just don't publish those ones publish the ones where you talk with no filter yeah but yeah it's uh i don't know i i really feel like we're on the cusp of something happening where okay we've got these new technologies and they're atomizing people and they're distracting them and then everyone kind of becomes a little bit aware of the fact that maybe they're dangerous or maybe they're making us live our lives in a way which is maladaptive and although immediately gratifying, ultimately becomes kind of destructive.

1:11:23And now we're just about getting to the point where people are thinking, I probably need to take some really intense action to try and get rid of that out of my life. I need to join a run club. I need to start going out to shows. I need to force myself to head to a coffee shop. I don't want to be working from home anymore. The self-imposed working from home, I'm going to go back into the office. I'm going to spend time around people. I'm going to try and change the scope of my sniper rifle to adjust for the wind, which is blowing toward me so that I can start to shoot more toward the target that I want to live my life like.

1:11:57But people's ability to adapt to new technology, technology is able to move so much more quickly than our habits are. And that means that for a long time, last decade, decade and a half, people were on the receiving end of it. And now I think people are starting to realize, Okay. I think it's knowing what we are as well. It's that great quote of the paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. Let's roll the dice on that and see how we do. It's crazy. And it's only going to get worse, I think, now with the interface of AI, the idea that this new technology has come along and how's that going to change the world?

1:12:35So it's shifting sands. I just think people do... We need to be connected. And that's kind of the business model of what I do is like getting people out to shows and to sit in a room together and to laugh. They've had to put pants on. It's a big deal. Yeah. But I do think that thing of like, that's what people kind of crave, going out and being together. They don't necessarily even have to know the other people. So to be that, it's like church. They're kind of coming together and finding something. You might not believe me, but this is what peak sleep optimization looks like. I'm not talking about the nightgown.

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1:13:41That's why 8Sleep has been clinically proven to add up to one hour of quality sleep per night. They have a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. If you don't like it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to$350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below by heading to 8sleep.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. yeah the addressing problems while they're small thing i think works very much personally as well like the way that you degrade your trust in yourself like we were talking about earlier on happens with one missed promise with one uh attempt at a change that you decided against doing or that you couldn't hold yourself to doing and this is why yeah small changes do end up compounding it's also why it feels very unfair like people can look at someone who's at the top of their particular industry and so well like why is it that all of the gains accrue to that person it's like well because the compounding interest is working in their favor and the same thing happens in reverse unfortunately too that people kind of spiral up it's another thing i do worry about the the arts for that reason like the um uh oligarchy of the arts there's an oligarchy in the arts now where you go with movies um it's existing ip or it's sequels or prequels that dominate i mean really dominate it's like five big movies a year that dominate like 90 % of the box office.

1:15:06And with music, it's the oligarchy of five huge artists that dominate globally. And it used to be 100 artists or 200 artists that all sold pretty well. Books is the same. Books are the same. I hope comedy is broad enough that people can pick their favorite stuff and it doesn't get dominated too much by big names. You want it to be so that there's lots of different people enjoying it. I mean, my big kind of driver is I want to get more people interested in doing comedy rather than just going to see it. I mean, I've written this book on jokes with my friends, Abby Grant and Amanda Baker, and it's like how to be a comedian, really.

1:15:46Essentially, how to write jokes. Can anyone become funny? I think so, yeah. I think so. I think everyone's got kind of a story to tell. And if you think about what stand-up comedy is, right? It's ordering your thoughts, writing them down, and finding your own authentic voice. That strikes me as an incredibly worthwhile activity. That should be taught in schools. That's probably got more going for it than learning music. Music's very valuable to learn as well, but you go grade eight on the piano, won't come in handy when you're doing a best man's speech or a presentation at work or talking to your partner.

1:16:19And actually having that ability to write down your thoughts and find find some perspective in life, which is also kind of what comedy does. It's very good at waking us up. Think about what jokes are, right? It's kind of like cardamom. Is it cardamom? Thinking fast and slow. Cardamom. Cardamom. Okay. So first order and second order thinking. So the setup for a joke is first order thinking. You make an assumption about what the guy's going to say, and then the punchline kind of snaps you into, oh, I actually had to think about that. Oh, okay. So it's that idea of the brain - It's a good way to think about it.

1:16:57The brain is designed to not have to think. Your brain is designed to - Your brain's an LLM. Yeah. It's pattern recognition. It's exactly LLM. Yeah, right. And then comedy makes you kind of, oh, okay. I've got to think about that in a new way. I've actually got to think about that thing. It snaps you awake. I think it's quite childlike in a sense, because children really think, and grownups tend to be beyond a certain age. You're just pattern recognition. you've seen this all before. And so comedians have this ability to really think about stuff. It's a very attractive way of being. I think teaching that is a, I'd like more people to kind of get into it.

1:17:32I think they'd enjoy watching it more if they knew a little bit more about it. And also I think the idea of going, there's so many great, it's quite a new medium comedy. It's not been around for as long as music. You know what the, well, hang on, I'll have a drink, I'll tell you a story.

1:17:51You heard of Gregorian chants? Yes. Okay. Do you know why you've heard of Gregorian chants? And I will tell you, don't panic. Okay. So Pope Gregory, I don't know, a thousand years ago, is wandering around the Vatican and he goes to some local churches and they're all singing the songs differently. And he goes, well, this is some nonsense. I want them all to be sung the same. write down the music. And the guy, the bishops or whatever go, ah, the thing is though, you can't write down music because it's sort of ethereal. It's like from another realm and it just has to be, it's about soul and a groove and whatever the fuck they said.

1:18:29And he went, here's the thing, I'm the Pope, write it down. And so they wrote down the music and we know what Gregorian chants are. Now, interestingly, fast forward 400 years from that and you have Bach and Mozart, Beethoven, which couldn't have existed without musical notation. So writing down comedy, like there's too much magical thinking in my business. There's too much, oh, that guy's just got funny bones or, oh, he just gets up there and does the thing and, oh, he just wings it. He's just funny. No, it's like jokes. They're jokes. It doesn't diminish the enjoyment of jokes to know how they work.

1:19:11I think it's, and the less magical thinking, the more everyone can go, yeah, can you learn how to be funny? Yeah, kushka, kushka. And you've got a story to tell and you've got a voice. Most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a song unsung. I don't want that to happen. I'm on jokes. Right. So you're kind of arguing that unlike music or acting or writing, comedy's never had a shared vocabulary and you can invent one. You've invented one. Why do you think - I suppose it's about putting it together. I mean, you're standing on the shoulders of giants. You kind of didn't invent anything.

1:19:48You just spotted what was there. In the same way as musical notation doesn't create music, it describes music that already exists. Yeah. And then can you reverse engineer it and see if it works? So I'm working on, I've written the book, that's coming out in October, or we've written the book, it's Abby and Amanda and I. And then we're working on putting together a course, an interactive course, there's such great teaching methods out there, especially using AI as a teaching method. It's really interesting, what can you achieve with that? I mean, is it going to grow corn? Can I build a comedian with that?

1:20:25If I can, then great. You say that you've got the first scientific theory of what actually makes jokes work? Well, I don't know if it's a scientific theory. You know, we've got, it's kind of, it's all in there. I mean, it's a bit inside baseball, but that thing of like the different ways the jokes work and the, I mean, it broadly speaking is that thing of like taking that pattern recognition and reversing it, like making sure that you're waking up the mind, the sudden revelation of a previously concealed fact. it's it's so simplistic in a way but that trick is just delightful have you ever felt guilty at giving the trick away like do you think that other comedians are going to get annoyed at you for demystifying it no it's like the it's like the everywhere had a guild right everyone had a um a secret society it's like the magic circle of comedy i think most comedians that i know don't really know how they write jokes they kind of they find it on stage or stuff occurs to them and they note it down and they remember it, but they don't have like - They're virtuoso musicians, but they don't know notation.

1:21:28Yeah, they wouldn't be able to teach it because they haven't thought about it in that way. Great, but they're doing their thing and they're doing great, fine. But I think the idea of being able to be more systematic about it is a really sort of positive idea. And I'd like to have that, I'd like to give that gift to people to be able to throw the rope down and say, come on, we can all do this. Is writing harder than performing? I think writing's the job. And writing is self-assignment. You've got to sit down and no one ever tells you. There's no point in a comedian's career where their manager sits down and goes, all right, you've got to write.

1:22:02It's like, people just assume that. And that's the preparation. That's the reason that you succeed or fail. You've got to deliver on that. How do you feel about comedians having writers or buying jokes off other comedians? I guess if you write on TV shows or whatever, it's the absolute norm. as like on 8 Out, 10 Cats or Last One Laughing or any of those shows that I do. We've got like a writing room and they're brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And some people are great at writing. Some people are great at writing and they don't really want to perform. So that seems pretty valid. Yeah, there must be a comedian today who you think sort of embodies everything the book's trying to teach.

1:22:40And then presumably there's someone who you think is great despite discarding many of the rules. Well, I think, you know, it's comedians you're dealing with. So I mean, I think knowing what the rules are is the first step. and then breaking them all will be. Who do you think breaks them the most? In terms of comedically, I'm just trying to think of like someone that's funny. And it might be someone like Bob Mortimer, which I don't think Vic and Bob might be slightly lost on your American audience, but like really surrealist comics where you go - Kind of absurd. I can't quite put my finger on why that's funny, but it's really, really funny.

1:23:17And it's taken me kind of back and by surprise and out of nowhere. Is that stuff less formulaic? Is that a little bit more kind of the jazz virtuoso improvisation? Yeah. It's less fungible than - I think so. But I mean, but Vic and Bob love jokes as well. So, I mean, it's, yeah and no, and it's whatever you want to be. I mean, they're very unique. I think also they kind of fall into that thing of going this, if done correctly, I think learning how to write jokes and then you put yourself into it. So it's that thing of like, with comedy, you don't want to be the best. You want to be the only. There's no best in comedy.

1:23:54There's no, oh, he's the best comedian. Like a top 10 list is meaningless because it's what makes you laugh. What do you like? And the more someone is themselves on stage, the more people sort of gravitate towards them. So the idea of going, it's like, it's not a competition. It's like, it doesn't matter how many people do well. It just makes it a bigger pie. Let's say that you had six months with someone completely unfunny to try and make them as funny as possible, what would you be teaching them first? I think the first thing would be to recognize their story. What do they want to say? What could they say that no one else could say?

1:24:32What's their story? What's their take on life? And it might be they want to tell a personal story. It might be they want to talk about politics. It might be they're interested in sports. Whatever they want to talk about, you sort of assess that and then, okay, how do we get into that? How do we make that surprising and delightful to listen to? It's nice because I think everyone's got a sense of humor. It's like everyone's got, like you say someone unfunny, everyone's got a sense of humor. How dark or sardonic or sarcastic it is, that varies. And what you like varies. It's that thing of like, your taste in comedy is like your taste in food and sex.

1:25:10Some people like spicy. Some people like vanilla. It's great. What about timing? What's the secret to comic timing? There seems to be a pattern in rhythm that's the approximate speed of development, where if you speak at about 92 beats per minute, if you speak in that rhythm, that tends to be not just for comedy, actually for spoken word, for political speeches as well. and that seems to work very well for people. They get into that rhythm and you can see the audience respond to that. It seems almost magical. I don't think it is. I think there's something about that cadence of speech that just lends itself to an audience being able to tune into what you're saying and focus.

1:25:58Some people rush it and it feels a bit garbled and they're all over the place. That doesn't mean speaking fast or slow. It's where you put the intonations, where you put the beat. So I think the rhythm is incredibly important. I Have a Dream is at 92. I think there's a Winston Churchill one as well. Obama's 92. And he speaks quite slowly, but he's on that beat and he's a magnificent public speaker. What joke template do you think has survived longest? What's the most classic? The most classic is, I guess, the pullback reveal where it's almost like a comic strip where you're kind of looking at this thing and then you pull back and he's on the bus.

1:26:38That seems to work sort of universally across time. And there's wordplay. I mean, I think that jokes are the ha-ha and the ah-ha are very similar. They're often kind of insights into something and when people kind of realize something. I think the oldest joke is the, it's like there's a, the lover of laughter. It's an old Roman book of jokes and it has a joke in it that still works. I think where a guy's in the barbers getting his haircut and the barber says, how do you want your haircut? And the guy says in silence. It's almost like 4 ,000 years old. It's joke shaped. I wouldn't open with it, but yeah.

1:27:27what's been the change since doing more of the crowd work stuff and putting that online so seeing an awful lot of that at the moment i think it's it's made it slightly uh bigger um in terms of the audience is like you know it's growing um i think it's there's there's more of a connection to people now so you kind of come up and it would have been you know five years ago people might come up and say well i saw the show and i thanks a photo and now people kind of want have a conversation about something. It's very nice. It's deep in the connection. Yeah, I think so. I think I'm trying to kind of, okay, so it was like I had my standup sort of persona on stage telling jokes, and then this kind of podcast mode, and they're merging.

1:28:11And I'm really excited about that. I really like it. I really like the idea that there's like, there'll be, don't panic, there'll be 90 minutes of bang on one-liners in the show, but there'll also be half an hour of this, chatting about stuff and life. Great. How much has that influenced you? Because obviously, you were pretty well established doing the jokey thing. And then even though you've been well-read and you did the university stuff and all the rest of it, it does feel to me like there's been a pivot. And fortunately, me and George have been able to be a part of that and be friends and hang out and stuff.

1:28:46How much has the Wisdomverse come podcast world influenced that thinking? I think it's been a huge influence. It's also that thing of like, it's what are you interested in talking about? You know, it's like, it's not, it also, you don't want it to be one note. Like if you see a band play on stage and everything is a floor filler, but sometimes you want to slow it down. You need a couple of ballads in there. So it's nice to have a mix in the set where you go, okay, well, I know, you go out there and you do 20 minutes of just one-liners. Great. But then you want to have a little bit of a chat with people and see where the evening takes us.

1:29:23And to also make it feel like it's just live in the room and this is happening now and it's not going to happen again. The quick silver of it's really nice. The idea that it's like, okay, this is happening now and then the moment's passed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been thinking a lot about some of the reliance that me and the boys have had on really trying to drill home a bunch of core principles. And I came across this Nabeel Qureshi quote that said, a cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others because they always sound like cliches.

1:29:59And I understand why permanently drilling the same or what appear to be variants of the same kind of like trite insight around, well, you know, you fake it until you make it, but you need to believe in it beforehand. Is it trite though? I don't think it is. I think it's like that thing if you go, coming through. But it's also that thing of like, if you read the comments, you know, it'd be someone being terribly kind of above it all going, oh, rubbish. Oh, oh, systems beat goals. Oh, whatever. Yeah. Okay. Well, what have you done? Well, there's definitely a question of if, if you're so smart, how come you still haven't done it?

1:30:37Like if you get bored of people talking about cold, dark, quiet for your bed, why is it that your sleep still sucks? Yeah. It's, okay as well. It's okay to go through that. I think early 20s is really the best time for that. If you want to be super cynical and shit on everything, great. Do your thing. And then at some point you go, right, what can I do? Because it's that thing of there's two different ways of learning. Sometimes some lessons you have to go and... The reason to write the book on jokes is I feel like I macheted my way through the jungle to become a comedian. I feel like it was not a well-worn path.

1:31:12You have to kind of get there and how do I write this and how do I put on a show and how do I do the thing and okay, doing two shows a night. Whatever that thing was, I've created this career for myself. And I feel like now it's incumbent on me to help and to say, well, look, just do this. Do this. That'll help. That'll definitely move you. That won't be wasting your time if you want to do the same thing as me. Just that's how you write the jokes. Great. then go and do your own thing. But I think the idea of not repeating this stuff because you think, well, people heard this before. Well, maybe, but...

1:31:48I think... What's that great quote about in the work of genius, we see our own discarded thoughts? So the idea that we're constantly, we're hearing stuff that we kind of know a lot of the time. It's like there's nothing that I'll say that people will go, oh, that's totally new. But they might go, oh, I've kind of forgotten that. I think if it's something that is totally new, often people probably will be more likely to discard it. I've got no anchor point at all. You need to be incredibly brave and have quite high conviction around whoever it is that you're listening to, to pivot your entire worldview based on something that you had no reference point prior to.

1:32:26But yeah, I don't know what the critical mass is of people needing to hear an insight before they become convinced by it. But I know that it's usually not once. And with that in mind, yeah, look, I really like trying to drill home pithy insights that are condensed down in a way that you can remember. Like my memory is not that great. So for me, synthesizing or condensing down a big idea into pithy little aphorism or a mantra. But it's almost like it's what remains, right? So let's say you read a book and it's 500 pages long, you remember one little quote from that book. Well, that's what remains.

1:33:02That's the thing that you just can't get rid of. You can't get out of your head. It's in there. And you go, well, that's kind of brilliant. That's great. That's the nugget that you were looking for. And then you walk with that. And if it changes how you interact with the world a little bit, then fantastic. Has your opinion on trajectory and position changed, given that your trajectory has sort of continued to rise now to, I think, whatever the most dates in the world or something like that that you did last year, or was it the biggest global tour by tickets sold in comedy, something like that?

1:33:34You'd struggle to find anyone to care. But yeah, I think the trajectory is very good. It's building nicely. And I think more important than that, I think, when are people happy? When they're getting good at stuff. I think competence is such an important thing for people, to get good at something. It doesn't matter what it is. And to feel like they're getting better as well. And you think about kids. Kids learn lots of different things. They learn how to ride a bike, right? So you couldn't ride a bike, and then you struggled, and then you could. It's really fun to learn how to do stuff, right? And then some people get better at it, and they could do tricks and mess around or whatever.

1:34:10Comedy is something that there's endless amounts of tricks. So you just keep on getting a little bit better all the time. I really like that. Is it Kaizen? I think is the name of the Japanese thing, like getting very, like British cycling does it really well, getting very slight improvements, incremental improvements over time brings an awful lot of satisfaction. I kind of think that thing about going, that's very exciting to me. And then trying to put myself out of my comfort zone every 18 months or so, trying to put on bigger tours or play different rooms or do it in a different way that makes me feel slightly uncomfortable.

1:34:42Maybe try and hold some silence and space on stage for people in a way that feels new to me. You know what else is interesting about the spiraling up or the compounding of doing things and becoming brave at trying new things with a bigger skill set underneath? I think that people's sensitivity to cynicism keeps them in place. And as they don't do much more than the basically zero that they're doing now, their fear of cynicism just stays the same. and you need to be able to kind of get past it because there are going to be people who just say, I don't think that that's cool or that's a silly idea to try and do something new.

1:35:17But the fewer fucks that you give, the more you become acclimatized to not giving a fuck, which means you give fewer fucks over time, which means you can be more brave and you can be more experimental. You can take bigger swings with a bigger skillset underneath. But if people are welded in place by their fear of criticism or skepticism or cynicism, that means they don't get started. yeah that's a really it's a it's slightly tragic i think like worrying about what what other people are thinking of you the whole time and they're not wanting to i remember like mid-20s i remember when i um i left my job and i told my friends that i wanted to be a comedian and i'd left my job and the reactions were really like oh i think jimmy's having a breakdown i think he's because obviously they didn't see this they didn't see where it ended they just saw the beginning of it like going no no you've got a good job boy, what are you doing?

1:36:09You lunatic. And I was like, yo-ho-ho, a pirate's life for me. And it seemed kind of crazy. But if you'd listened to that, it was that, you talk about it very nicely, the lonely chapter where you kind of go, you have to slightly leave who you were behind. You have to say goodbye to that. And there's a grieving to that. And you have to sort of move on to that new phase. Well, there's two things. There's a grieving of where you were, and there's a fear of where you're going, because you don't know that the next step has actually got any promise for you. And again, if you're in a world where you don't have an abundance mindset, which I think a lot of people don't, that so much complexity and uncertainty and chaos, what's gonna happen in future?

1:36:49I don't know if this thing's going to go completely terribly wrong. Why would I give up a certain five out of 10 for an uncertain eight out of 10? Because it might be a three out of 10 and that would make me feel really bad. And if you've got high inequality too, you can see not how high you could climb, but also how low you can fall. you know oh fuck i really don't want to fall low that looks horrendous to me yeah i mean it's it's um uh there's two most important days uh the day you're born and the day you find out why and the finding out why is like what what could you commit to what could you say well i'm all in on this i'm going to do this thing i mean i'm a big advocate of specialization you know find the thing that you enjoy that you can't stop thinking about what's play to you and work for them that's kind of where your edge is, that's going to be the thing that you're going to do better than anything else.

1:37:41And the safe option is, it's fine. Some people don't find that in work, they find that in hobbies and other pursuits. And I was chatting to someone recently about someone in the crowd was asking about music and saying, I'm a musician, have you got any advice? And I don't know anything about music. I was like, well, if you would do it anyway, then do it. It doesn't have to be the way that you make money, doing something creative and fulfilling could be the hobby. And if it becomes the way you make money, well, great, but it should be something that you would do anyway. There's an interesting relationship between discipline, motivation, and obsession.

1:38:18So discipline is saying, I will make myself do the thing. Motivation is I want to do the thing. And obsession is I can't not do the thing. And a lot of the time when we look at somebody who on the outside appears motivated, what they're actually doing. It's just the cooled off version of a past obsession. It's this thing that they were obsessed with 20 years ago that is now just, it's formed into a part of their identity. That's somebody that goes to the gym, but they were completely obsessed with this is me. Like when I was in university, I would not go on nights out and I'd stay in and read bodybuilding.com forums.

1:38:52And I'd get up and make sure that my protein was right and all the rest of it. And I'm like, that's fucking lame at the time. But now when I go to the gym, it doesn't really take discipline to go and do it and not superbly motivated. It just is who I am. But people are kind of serial obsessives. Some people are serial obsessives. But if you don't ever allow that obsession to sort of climb inside of you and really weigh your life for a little while, kind of like a puppet, you don't get to benefit from all of the accrued gains down the line because this obsession isn't going to last forever. It's this weird...

1:39:23But those forearms are. Alignment, this is true. These are going to be... The heat death of the universe is going to be gone before these finish up. It's like talking to Popeye. That's true. Yeah, but no spinach. The problem I think that people come up against is that if you don't allow yourself, if you're not prepared to let that obsession kind of really, really get inside of you and drive you forward, you miss out on this beautiful opportunity. Lots of people go their entire life without having an obsession that's worth anything. And sometimes people can become obsessed with shit that they really shouldn't be right which is the politics porn your ex gambling video games stuff like that unless video games can be quite fun but if you're the sort of person that is consistently becoming obsessed with stuff like that's good i think that you really should allow that to embrace your life for a period because it's this it's this odd alignment of like motivation and opportunity and skill set and timing and life situation it's all of this shit kind of comes into alignment in one go.

1:40:25And then this weird kind of magic, I don't think you can engineer obsession particularly well. You can force discipline, right? Which is why people love it. People are obsessed with discipline because if you're prepared to pay the price, it's always there. Motivation is halfway house. You can kind of engineer it a little bit. Maybe you start to spend a lot of time around other people who do the same sort of thing that you do. It involves a bit of a feedback loop, to a degree. You can have some social pressure. Maybe you can listen to your favorite playlist, you know get yourself amped up like motivation's halfway between the two but obsession you can't really engineer and that means that when it comes along it's got a a certain sort of magical quality to it and it's temporary but it's going to leave you're not obsessed by the same things typically most people aren't obsessed at 50 by the same stuff that they were at 30 and that i think means okay if i'm going to have people that are you've heard of correct because i think the people the people that have got that, because again, it's the compound interest.

1:41:23That really builds up over time if you can keep doing that thing, if you're still interested in that thing. It's the freest discipline and motivation that you're ever going to get, right? I can't not do the thing. It's what I think about when I go to the toilet. It's what I think about when I fall asleep at night. It's what I think about when I'm eating my lunch. It's what I think about when I'm waiting in line to get into the airport. All of every single part of your life is cohesing to get you toward this thing and that's fucking cool and i know we have society has a really bad relationship i think with obsession because it comes laden with a lot of baggage that i don't know people either don't understand it or they fear it well i guess it's it's linked to addiction you know i think people with addictive personalities never really get over the addiction they just get addicted to something else yeah so some of my best friends that are in you know a would have been then addicted to the gym afterwards or addicted to eating right or addicted to what shopping, whatever the next thing that comes along is, but they'll be addicted to it.

1:42:21It's compulsive behavior. But if you can direct that compulsive behavior to something that builds and grows and feeds back, then fantastic. That's the problem solving brain thing again, right? It's like, give yourself good problems to solve. Give yourself an obsession that's worth something. And again, you can't generate all of them, but I think you can kind of help to guide yourself so yeah i just that really is the the freest way to become granted to your insight around like do what feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else the bar's line if you can manage to i don't know find something that is positive some and pro-social and isn't going to destroy you or the world around you yeah like that just let it let it fucking wear you for a bit as long as it's not fentanyl great yeah well you know there's trank now which is like fentanyl is fentanyl.

1:43:10They just keep on releasing new versions that are more powerful at all times. I think fentanyl really scares me. I think you know a drug is powerful if you're using heroin to take the edge off it. I'm going to come down from my fentanyl. This is a bit strong. I might put some heroin in this. Yeah. Like, okay. I cut my fentanyl with heroin. Enough now, yeah. There's an argument that the fentanyl crisis is China's revenge for the opium wars. What were the opium wars? Because I've heard this, but I don't know what the opium wars. It's when the British went to China and forced them to trade with us, and we sold them a bunch of opium.

1:43:43That's what we did. Fentanyl is mostly landing in America. Yeah. So the British started it, and the Americans are - We are paying the price, yeah. On the receiving end of it. Yeah, but I can definitely see a connection. We are Greece to America's Rome. Right, right. You know, we're kind of part of the same thing, really. I mean, I know they had the War of Independence, but come on. A lot's coming over the southern border through Mexico. Yeah. The fentanyl. Crazy. Yeah, I've seen some videos. There's this area in Philadelphia, I think, where constantly YouTubers are going and filming these, like it's skid row, skid row.

1:44:19It's so intense. No, I've seen it in some cities around America. It's really, it's, well, I mean, look, you know, what happened? We shut down all the asylums in the 80s because we saw one flew over the cuckoo's nest and we decided asylums were terrible places. We didn't run out of crazy people. you know there's a lot of crazy people out there so i think that thing of like going you know the homelessness problem is ultimately a you know a drugs an addiction problem and uh and a problem with um mental health and we need to treat that and and to take it very seriously rather than you know it's you know building new houses is a part of that but it's a very small part of it well the safety net in america doesn't sweep people up in the same way as it does in the uk i don't see in the uk the same kind of shuffly shouty at the sky clutching there's still there's still too much there's still i mean it's like it's really it feels like a um there's other places you i mean i travel maybe 50 countries around the world on tour and you become very aware of the it's my favorite quote will william gibson the sci-fi writer from canada said the future is here but it's not evenly distributed i think the more you travel around the world you see how different places deal with different problems, you sort of go, oh, right.

1:45:30We could have a utopia if we took all the elements from all these different places. It's like having the perfect outfit, but you'd have to go to 55 different stores. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Where's had the least intense problems with homelessness that you've been to? Well, I think Lisbon really turned it around because Lisbon was one of the roughest towns in the world. Lisbon, Portugal was one of the roughest towns. Port Town in Portugal was really rough, big heroin problem, and they legalized drugs. But that's only half the story. It's a very small bit of the story. So they legalized drugs, but they basically said, we're going to ring fence the money we spend fighting the drugs war.

1:46:06And we're going to spend all that money on rehabilitation and education and some housing. So they basically took that money, legalized drugs, and then went, okay, anyone that wants to get off drugs, you come here. Anyone that needs to be housed, you go here, anyone. And they basically solved the problem. they ended up with very few people on heroin that they can get from a pharmacy. And the crime rate obviously falls off a cliff when you take illegal drugs out of the situation because people don't have to feed their habit. Petty crime goes down massively. Presumably organized crime as well also has the arse pulled out of it.

1:46:42Yeah, a lot of it. So it's that thing where you go, that kind of solved the problem. I think it's slightly creeping back a little bit now because the ring fencing that money you can do for a certain amount of time, but then politics gets in the way and people go, actually, we need that money for something else. And you take for granted the progress that's been made. Sure. So the problem creeps up again, but the idea of going, there's always going to be, you know, a problem around that. We're going to need to fight that. It's kind of like the strong men make good times, but the equivalent for government in relationship to society.

1:47:14Well, it's like Chesterton's fence. They forget why they're spending that money on that thing. It only happened like 10 years ago. Yeah, 15 years, yeah. It's interesting, those kind of problems that are solved. I mean, I've got quite spicy views on drugs. Here's my take on marijuana. Do you want to hear my hot take on marijuana? I think it should be illegal for the under 30s, right? Because it's kind of the opposite of a performance-enhancing drug. It's a performance-inhibiting drug. It takes away people's drive and ambition. And in those kind of early mid-20s years when people really need to have that drive because you're out of the school system on your own and you've got to be a self-starter.

1:47:52It's self-assignment, right? So banned. 30 to 50, it should be legal. You're a grown-up. You make a decision as to what you want to do, what you want to put in your body. 50 and above, mandatory. And not because I think it's a good drug. I don't think it's a good drug, but I think it would redistribute the wealth to the young because old people would be slightly high and out of it right okay so you're going to pharmacologically retard the people that are old yes and make the playing field more even for the people that are coming up yeah okay yeah i'm down i'm down i hate weed it does not it does not agree with me at all but uh yeah i think it's a an interesting theory.

1:48:34I, I, on the Portugal thing, I really get the sense that the more we try to legislate our way through things, those are kind of like the one good article per hour long doom scroll on X insights that encourage people to keep chasing red tape. And it's like, ah, but what about that one thing that went well? And therefore we just add bureaucracy and add bureaucracy and ad bureaucracy. I would be fascinated to know what the relationship between organized crime and the government is. It's one of those nationwide slapdowns that completely cut off at the knees an entire universe of pretty dangerous, pretty nasty guys who are all trying to cartel their way to wealth.

1:49:27But it is a single move that would be able to basically put a huge industry of people out of business. They're all just in an underworld as opposed to listed on the FTSE 500. There must be so much pressure between a government and then you imagine if you're part of some organized crime group, how many different favors you're going to call in to try and not get this thing passed because it's going to stop your entire business. I don't know. I feel like I'm writing a new Tom Hardy series here. I like the idea though of the cartels getting a lobby group together to go, we can't have drugs. You're putting us out of business.

1:49:58This would be terrible for our business plan. Exactly. Think about the gangs. What are you thinking about the gang? The year on year is going to fall behind. Yeah. I like what you're saying though about young people really need to use that drive. And it's kind of like the obsession thing that a lot of the time people talk about nobody is coming to save you as a line, but nobody is coming to save you also implies that nobody's coming to stop you. Well, yeah. And nobody cares more than you. I think that thing about, you know, empathetically, you want to have there be a great safety net for everyone, right?

1:50:32You want there to be universal basic income, which essentially we sort of have in the UK under the benefit system. There's a version of that where you'll get something from the state and you'll be okay. You won't go hungry, we hope. But the idea of going the universal basic income is a bit too close to we don't need you. And I worry about that. I worry about purpose being one of the key things of like, if you take Morgan Housel has a great, he's got great equations, Morgan Housel. He's got this great equation on happiness being, it's freedom and purpose. If you have those two, you're pretty much on a good road.

1:51:08Because everyone wants there to be benefits available for everyone, right? Everyone wants there to be a safety net. But when you think about it, no one wants that for their kids. No one looks at their newborn and goes, oh, wow, I hope he gets really great benefits. You want him to have, or her to have a fulfilling life where they go out and they do something and they add value to society. That's what we want. It is an interesting challenge, I suppose, where we want to be able to support people. We've got this future of automation coming through. We know that purpose is important, but if you clear off all of the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which was all that anybody was obsessed by for almost all of human history.

1:51:50But self-actualization, you asking the question, am I self-actualizing, is actually an indication that you're in a really wonderful position across the expanse of human history. But that is much tougher to answer. Where do I get my next meal from? I think it's a false read, though. I think in liberal democracy, we've oversold for the individual, the liberal bit, and the demos is underutilized. So there's not enough connection between people. So the idea of like going, it's the family and the friends and the community beyond that. So it's that smaller level stuff, those connections is what people are, I think, missing.

1:52:32So I do think that kind of, it's the safety, security, you know, calorific. You want to take care of the basics for everyone, you know, education and healthcare and making sure everyone's okay to a level. And then you want it to be abundance. You want it to be that everyone can have an exciting, fun time. You want that for your kids. And if you want that for your kids, you want it for everyone. Yeah. Yeah. The intergenerational competition theories, I've never even thought about it before, but what you said earlier on, you want your kids to do better than you did. And also your kids want to do better than you did.

1:53:10But that means that there is this embedded growth obligation that everything always needs to be getting better all of the time. Well, there's another way of, again, Morgan Housel is such a genius writer. He's wonderful. But he has this idea of going, the biggest inflation in the world is not currency inflation. It's expectation inflation. But there's another word for expectation inflation. We expect so much more than we did in the 1970s, right? I remember the 70s, shit, and it's so much better now. But the expectation is so much higher than it's ever been. But the other name for expectation inflation is progress.

1:53:44That's what progress looks like. You just factor in all the stuff that's there and you go, yeah, and we want more. And that's a good thing, ultimately. I mean, if you look at it on a global scale as well, you go, if you care about humanity as a whole, like getting everyone up to our level would be an incredible achievement. You know, the biggest things in the world are not talked about. Like the worst things in the world, the easy fixes that we just ignore because they're not sexy. Like burning biomass kills 3 million people a year. There's burning like wooden peat and stuff inside homes. It kills 3 million people a year.

1:54:21From asphyxiation? Yeah. Well, it's cancer. Right. It's horribly bad for people. Smoking is a much bigger problem than we think it is because we've solved it here. Solved it in America and kind of the English-speaking world, really. But in South America and Africa and Asia, smoking is a huge problem. And it's so easy to fix. We could just, the playbook is there. We know exactly what to do, but we don't. So that's the future being distributed to a different area, from our future to theirs. I think it's Peter Singer is very good on this stuff. the uh oh no um is it Derek Derek Parfitt's got really good things on like the the debt that we owe to future people and to geographically you know disperse people the idea that we should care about that stuff at least I had William McCaskill on the show he's the long-termism guy what we owe the future and um I think he was the youngest philosophy professor the youngest tenured philosophy professor in the world, William.

1:55:23And anyway, he's talking about, yeah, what we owe future generations. But people don't really think about that in quite the same way. They think about - It's odd, that thing of like, because you go, like, net zero is a really good example of that, of like going, well, we have to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels. But in the short term, that's very, very difficult to do. And it affects the poor massively. Disapportionally. Yeah. So the idea of going, well, that should be an aim in like 25 years, but you go, well, you have to start building the nuclear plants now in order to make that happen.

1:55:53And then you could have that eventuality. That'd be great. But it takes statesmen to look on those timescales. And everybody just wants to get elected for their next four-year term or whatever it is. Yeah. And it's that thing of going, Britain, I think, could put its feet up now in terms of it's had a big effect on the world. But the idea of being an example to other nations of how to do that that would be the flex that'd be the thing to do to go to get there before anyone else because you go well we built the plants so in 25 years we look like geniuses and also if you get energy down to essentially zero cost how many businesses would that attract to to the uk when it comes to culture british culture what do you wish more british people understood or knew what culturally yeah Like, for me, the British culture has an awful lot of charm to it, but there's some kind of, like, lethal poisons thrown in with it.

1:56:51Like, the tall poppy syndrome is one of them. The sense of maybe a lack of mobility, the quite ossified class system that in the U.S., what somebody earns kind of determines their current level of class. But in the U.K., it's where you went to school or it's your accent. is there something that you wish more British people sort of if you could uh inject something into British culture what would it be I think it'd be uh I think there's a I think it's oinkophobia is the fancy term it's the hatred of one's own culture I think that people need to take a bit more pride in that you know it's not immediately apparent that a place without a past has a future and I think having that shared um belief in what what we've done in the past I mean it's you know We beat the Nazis and we ended slavery.

1:57:34It's not nothing. It's big. And the English language is a beautiful thing. George Mack's got a good line on this, on like, if you had top Trump cards for Great Britain, and you go, well, name a thing. Okay, music. The Beatles. Okay, physics. All right. Stephen Hawking. Biology. Okay. Tim Berners-Lee for the internet. We've done great things, and we continue to punch above our weight, and people should take some pride in that. I think taking some pride in where you're from is is quite an important thing and the local communities are kind of there's there's that kind of at a lower level i think people like where they're from have a sense of that heck yeah jimmy carl ladies and gentlemen jimmy love you appreciate you coming for coming through no i i really enjoy i think you know you're right i think coming on this show and doing this kind of thing has really changed me as a as a performer it's been really incredibly valuable to me hopefully in the right direction yeah they'll decide look at the comment section until next time thanks bye everybody yes is that right yes