A Revolution is Coming! - Jimmy Carr

24:48You guys are going to go and do something else, but you're going to earn money and you're going to keep that money, Keep all of it till you're 30. I think maybe tax between 30 and 60. And then we have to stop doing fantasy politics where we go, yeah, we're going to pay everyone's pension forever. We haven't got enough young people to pay for the pensions forever. So maybe over 60, you go, okay, again, no tax, no tax, just do your thing. That would strike me as kind of an interesting way to cut it up. Do you know what comes to my mind when we're talking and the ideas that you're proposing? and I think why we have a crisis in the elites at the moment is that whenever I talk to my friends who are more of the, shall we say, traditional way of viewing the world, what strikes me is that they have an inflexibility of thought.

25:35And I say to them, have you ever thought about this? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about this or this argument? They're like, no, no, no. No, that doesn't adhere to my worldview. But in this world that we're moving into, the one that you're talking about and the one that we're all seeing, you need a flexibility of thought. You need to be able to consider new ideas. You need to be able to understand that there's a technology coming in, AI, that is going to radically transform the way we live, the way we work, the way we interact with each other, the way that we see ourselves. And we're going to need to actually be flexible.

26:05Yeah, I think that thing about what's a revolution, where everything changes everything, right? So if everything changes, how would you want to conduct your society? I mean, I don't understand. Well, come on to AI, because I've got some views on AI. But that idea of going, why don't we have a sovereign wealth fund? Why have we not got one in the UK? We're sitting talking on the day of the budget. And that would strike me as quite a radical thing to do. There are certain things that should belong to everyone. And one of those things is the oil and gas that sit under the UK. And also the wind farms around the coast.

26:40All of that money goes to the crown. Why? That should belong to everyone. The mobile phone masts. It better be a good thing that you go, okay, I'm not a socialist. I'm not even for state capitalism. But the idea of going, well, that should belong to everyone. We should own that. And we should, and our, you know, I'm not saying maybe we should restart the mining industry. But I would not mind it if our government said, yeah, we're going to mine for bitcoins. Our power stations just, they don't do anything at night, so we're going to mine for bitcoins. Great. New gold standard. Fine. do something radical, something interesting with the finances of the country.

27:17Why does it all have to come from taxation? You know, I look at the Irish. I carry an Irish passport and I'm proudly Irish. The Irish just undercut everyone else in Europe on corporation tax to get the big tech companies to come there. Don't tell anyone Irish I said this, but why don't we undercut them? Why not? We left Europe. We haven't got any rules to follow. We're on our own. Why don't we just undercut and go, yeah, come here, start a company. It doesn't strike me as a crazy idea. If we've got this new technology, AI, coming, then, you know, this is precedented. This happened before. You know, the Industrial Revolution made our bodies obsolete because the Industrial Revolution said, well, we don't need you to plow the field anymore.

28:04we have a machine that will do that okay so 98 98 people worked in farming and then they moved to the factories okay and now uh ai will any repetitive job that people have will be done by ai okay so that's going to change everything and maybe our minds won't be needed because ai will take everything you know you have people and then you go well what are you left with i don't know what advice you give young people now but maybe be a preacher it hasn't got to spirit yet be a priest very old school and that's really what we need and what i find wait what do we we ai priest no this kind of flexibility of thought that jimmy is demonstrating because i look at when i look at the left i'm i go what are the new ideas and they're basically going well we just need higher taxes we need socialism i'm like that hasn't really worked and you look at a lot of people on the right and a lot of and they seem to be stuck in the same kind of limbo which i think is why revolution a type of bloodless revolution political revolution but is that not the you know um is it zizek i can never get his name right slavo zizek yeah i'm mainly on the i love his work i i think he's a really fascinating guy i love that documentary the The Pervert's Guide to Ideology.

29:28It's like really fantastic movie. Look, he's a really interesting guy because he talks about the future's being cancelled. He talks about this idea that you go, yeah, we're talking about communism on one side and fascism on the other side. We're relitigating the 1930s. What we need is new ideas, new ways of doing things. So you look around the world and I kind of think, I'm very positive about life, right? And I go, lots of places have got this right over the years and they've got bits of it right. So why don't you just take those bits is that if the UK is independent, if we go, well, why don't we take those, the bits that work and try those?

30:01It's also that thing of like going, it's a big country that we live in. And I like, I got an awful lot from British cycling over the years, weirdly in my comedy career. I don't like cycling. I find it very boring to watch, but I like the idea of incremental improvement. The idea that British cycling went, look, we can't get 10 % better. It's just not possible. But we can get half a percent better if we, I don't know, shave our legs or if we wear heat packs on our thighs so we never cool down between the heats. And it was these tiny little incremental things that they did that just improved it just a little bit.

30:34I think comedy, I think life is a bit like that. It's not about repetition. It's about iteration. It's about changing things just a little bit every time and split testing. So you might have an idea that's crazy. Well, you might have an idea that's like out there, universal basic income. You might go, well, I think universal basic income might be a very bad idea because it might take away purpose from people. And really, if you were going to design, Morgan Housel was talking recently. He's one of my favourite writers. I think he's incredible. But he was talking about happiness. What's a good design for happiness?

31:05And you go, well, independence and purpose. If you have those two, pretty good recipe. You're going to have it, right? So the idea, I think universal basic income might take away purpose from people. But, not sure. Wouldn't mind testing it. We've got a lot of towns in Great Britain. why don't we take a bunch of people and say why don't we try that? Try it for five years, see if it grows corn, see if it works. If it works, fantastic. If it doesn't, okay, we tried it. The idea that we have to have one system everywhere and not try anything. It's that thing of you want a mix of these things. You want a conservative.

31:40What do you want to conserve? I want to conserve the traditions. What's a tradition? A tradition is an experiment that worked. okay it's it's a progressive thing from the past that just worked just worked for us great and i also want to be progressive i want to try new things and see what works in the future you know as the world changes i want to see what where where do we end up with this you know i think having a a sovereign wealth fund for the uk would be a great idea i think having a um investing in infrastructure but like in power we sort of don't know what's going to happen in the future but you're pretty sure power is going to be important we're pretty sure we're going to need it and anything we don't need we can mine for Bitcoin or set up a data center here whatever we're going to do so the idea of like going well we should be building nuclear power plants I talked about it last time I was on your show we should be building those nuclear power plants and the idea that you that should be a government bond you could buy be easy to raise the money

32:39Francis Foster:people want to invest in that but this is why we need that process of rapid change, maybe not rapid, you know, we can discuss the speed at which it should happen, but this is why you have to have the transformation happen, because you are talking in very creative, inventive ways, whereas the entire system feels very stuck. You know, they're just arguing about tax rates at this point, and it's about how high they should be, and they really should be as high as possible. Well, I do think that there's been a radical shift, and I don't quite know where it happened. But there's been a radical shift in our politics in the last couple of years.

33:16And the radical shift is, I would trace it back to Hillary Clinton calling people deplorable. So people talk a lot about gentrification. And what they tend to talk about is like, oh, Islington used to be a working class area and now it's super fancy. And there used to be a Gregg's there and now there's a Gale's. That's gentrification. Very boring level of gentrification, right? Buildings, a neighbourhood, I think there's been a gentrification of the Labour Party. That party used to be the party of the working man. And it isn't. The white van man now votes for, would vote for reform, a party that's to the right.

33:57When did that shift occur? When did that happen with the Labour Party that used to represent kind of the average working guy? And it shifted. That's a very, that's a big shift. And that's happened in America as well. So that's the, I don't want it to be the end of liberalism, but, you know, it might be. Do you think? Do you think that's what we're actually seeing here, Jimmy? Because I'll be honest with you, I don't want to see the end of liberalism. I think liberalism has many wonderful ideas contained with that umbrella that, I'll be honest with you, I think we take for granted in this country.

34:32Well, I mean, taking for granted is the theme of political discourse at the moment. but it's the Robert Frost line, isn't it? The civilization is a clearing in the forest and everything needs to be relitigated. Everything needs to be looked at again. I'm a huge fan of multipolarity. Do you ever listen to those guys? Philip Pilkington.

34:54Francis Foster:Oh, yes. I think I remember you recommending him, actually. His book is fantastic on this. I think it might be The Death of Liberalism. Someone can Google it. But it's a great read about how, look, this won't survive much longer because how can it survive much longer? You know, that thing of you go, well, in 1929, that financial crash ended in World War II. And you look at what's happening now. Well, there's no world war, but there's lots of conflict going on. You know, if you look at the Middle East, if you look at Ukraine, if you're watching this in six months' time, if you look at Venezuela and Taiwan, you know, it's happening.

35:36And why isn't it a world war? Well, there's different views on nuclear weapons, aren't there? Some people think they were used twice, and it was the last shots of World War II, and then there's people like me that think it was the first shots of the Cold War, and that nuclear weapons have been used every day since. That's why we haven't had total war. We can only have these little proxy boards. You look at what happens when people get nuclear weapons. You know, look when Russia got nuclear weapons and we had the Korean War and then China got nuclear weapons and we had Vietnam. It's like something like the power structure changes, the dynamic changes.

36:17And we've gone in our lifetimes from a bipolar world and then the Soviet Union fell and we were in a unipolar world for, you know, 20 years. and as that happened, tax Americana shrunk. Like the American Navy stopped investing in the same way because it was no longer in an existential crisis with an enemy. So it became smaller. And then you're looking at this multipolar world now, which is fascinating, but terrifying. Because we don't know where the cards are going to lie.

36:52Francis Foster:Just a sidestep from the conversation for one minute, but we've become friends since, I think, the first time you were on, so I'm aware. you have an incredibly busy schedule. You've got a young family. Yeah. You're doing two gigs a night. Often, you know, you've got a call, you power through. You've got podcast appearances, media, etc. I'm sure you have businesses to run as well. When do you have time to read all this? The fact you're tuned into this show means you value common sense. And common sense says if your underwear is uncomfortable, it's time to upgrade. That's why we want to tell you about Sheath.com, A brand we've been talking about for a long time because it genuinely solves a real problem.

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38:53It's all we have in life. And where are you going to put that? And I think a lot of things are, I find it fascinating. I find it like a, and I like, I kind of like, I don't know, this kind of the podcast world is really, I suppose it's given me great access. Because you listen to a podcast and someone's fantastic on it. I heard, I can't remember where I first heard Philip Pilkington, but I just thought, this guy is right. This guy is incredible. and then you start listening and you get the book and you check it out. Or I remember hearing Scott Galloway on someone's podcast. It might have been your podcast.

39:31Francis Foster:The only interview we've done with him is coming out soon. So we wouldn't have done. Okay, but he's like... Maybe Chris. Might have been on Chris Williamson's. I'm just thinking, oh, that's interesting. I wonder what he's got. Yeah. We had a great conversation. I love that. I mean, you know, but I'm not that busy. I mean, I'm in comedy. So it's quite an easy business in a sense because you know what the work is. you know okay I'm gonna need jokes and any success I have is a lagging indicator of work I did three years ago so you write the jokes and you you sort of split test everything with an audience and you see what works and you put show together and I don't know I'm like I'm in I'm in the service industry and I make something that people like I make them happy and they don't remember the jokes they just remember how you made them feel.

40:18That's very true. So that thing of going, like, tonight in Brighton, I've got 4 ,000 people coming out, but it's an advert for the next time I'm in Brighton. I've already got the money for this evening, I'm fine. Checks landed. We just stand and do nothing. And then it's that thing of, like, the thing that's taken off for me the last year, and it was a really interesting lesson in life, of the difference between jealousy and envy. Like, I think jealousy, the politics of envy, it depends whichever word you want to use. but one of them is about not wanting someone else to have something. And one of them is about telling you what you want, telling you what to aim for.

40:54And I've always thought like wishing wells work but not in the way that people think. Not the magic of you get the wish but making the wish, knowing what you want is such a huge thing in life. And I watched a couple of guys, it's about 18 months ago now, I was watching like Matt Reif and Andrew Schultz. I was watching them and like, and looking at them playing arenas and thinking, wow, these guys are like incredible. And then there was like a little bit of like green-eyed monster going, what? I'm a good comic. I put a shift in. This is, why are they? And then I thought, oh, look at how they're using social media.

41:36Look at how they're putting their stuff out there. and then I hired a videographer and I started filming things the same way that they did. I basically said, okay, let's do that and then started filming crowd work and it had a real, it's had a huge effect.

41:50Francis Foster:I see your clips all the time now because of it. It's really fun. It's a really fun and it's a really fun mix of like going, because I'm very careful to like put out like it's 10 funny to one serious is my ratio of going. But actually that's kind of in the show as well. I like to have a few serious moments. It's really nice to have that light and shade and for it to feel like a live event where this is just happening here. This is something that we're all experiencing in the moment. And the screens are not a good proxy. Like the idea of going, the clips are great and they're fun, and I bet you smile when you watch them.

42:22But you come and see a show and you laugh and you release that dopamine and it's a, the great illusion is I'm the only one performing. Actually, everyone in the auditorium is. It's a performative thing being in an audience. and everything we care about, I mean, I've talked about this before, but everything we care about is play. Everything, whether it's sports or comedy or theater or movies, sitcoms, this, podcasts, it's a spirit of play that we're sitting down, we're playing, and I think our whole society is built on that. I think play is upstream of cooperation, and cooperation is what it's all built on, that famous, you know, drop one guy in the jungle, you fed the animals, drop 10 guys you've got the apex predator we're great when we're together and we learn how to do that through playing and i think actually the social media stuff has been a real it's we're not playing in the same way like there's the social media weirdly just lacks the social it's it's a very profound point i remember when i was drama teaching and seeing social media come in we talked about this with jonathan hight year on year because a lot of what you do as a drama a teacher is you teach kids how to do group improvisational work.

43:37So you give them a stimulus and you ask them to create performance around the stimulus, whatever the stimulus may be, a painting or an event or a prop, for instance. The yes and. Yeah, exactly. And so the kids go away, they get 20 minutes and you give them the tools in order to be creative and they put on a performance. And year upon year, I saw the kids become less able to do that because as social media came in and they were more on their phones, they were less able to listen. They were less able to disagree. They were less resilient. And ultimately, they were more focused on self. And when you take all of those things in, you're not going to be able to work cohesively as a group.

44:17And ultimately, what you produce isn't going to be as strong. Because when people go to us about trigonometry, why is it successful? It's successful because it's the two of us and it's the team. and the moment any one person goes, it's all about me, it's over, it's finished, it's like any team. Yeah, well that's, I mean, it's kind of a worry, isn't it? That that's kind of the way things are going. That people, they're not just working from home, they're getting food delivered to their houses and they're watching things at home, not going to the cinema. I mean, like you were saying, I got a movie out, I made a movie with some friends and we wrote this thing together.

44:53I wrote it with my younger brother, Patrick, and guys called the Dawson Brothers, great comedy writers, and we wrote this movie. What's the movie? It's called Facom Hall. It's a good title, Facom Hall. But it's basically, I suppose, like movie maths-wise, we just kind of went, right, okay, so we've got, we do period drama very well in the UK, but it's kind of slightly pompous, and we do comedy very well, and everyone loves Richard Curtis. So we've basically done a Downton Abbey meets Airplane, and we've sprinkled a little bit of, like, Richard Curtis is just like, you go, you know, that kind of rom-com thing.

45:27It's a really fun movie. I mean, I'm not a grifter. I would never sell something that I wouldn't consume. And I go, well, I would go and see this movie. This is a fun date night romp. 90 minutes, you don't have to think about anything else. It's really silly jokes. And I'm kind of, I suppose it's what's missing in our culture. Not that my movies are the answer, but I want more movies for grown-ups that are funny in the cinema. I want people to go to the cinema I want people to see it in the cinema with other people there that's the aim of this thing I mean great if it's a hit online down the line but kind of there's a lot of stuff online I want people to go to the to have that experience of going out and seeing something because it seems so valuable to me

46:14Francis Foster:That's a very good point and it's interesting I couldn't work out why I was so obsessed with it but I joined the gym recently a different one and it's a fairly small one, so there's not a huge number of members. And because of that, particularly in the spa area where I go to the sauna a lot, etc., everyone is super chatty and super friendly. And I've actually found that initially a bit startling, but then I've really, really enjoyed it in a way that I just never imagined. I am someone who used to go to the sauna to be by myself. I'd have my headphones in, I wear the Russian sauna hat on my head, blah blah blah.

46:50Francis Foster:I'm with you. But now I'm the opposite. I'm like, oh there's a person here, let's chat. And I think it's partly because we are just all actually deeply craving that human connection because we feel like we're connected but at the same time we're incredibly disconnected by these devices in our hands. Yeah, Tim Minchin said something brilliant isn't unusual. He's always walking around saying brilliant things. But he said this thing about road rage. If I bump into you on the street, ah, okay, sorry, man. My mistake. But people tend to be cool if you bump into someone on the street. If someone cuts you up in traffic, like everyone's going, you know, people go nuts and it's road rage, and that's just two screens.

47:38And then we multiply that by a billion. Yeah. You know, and everyone's kind of talking and things. And, you know, I don't know. It's not great for the kids. It's not great for us. It's really not great for us. It's actually one of the things that I love this podcast. It's because I get to sit down with my friend, talk to another friend, and we have a laugh and a good time and I learn something or I have my ideas challenged or I push myself. And all of these experiences where in real life, I don't get to do that nearly as much as I should. Yeah, where's the space for that now? Because people aren't going out in the same way that they used to.

48:22I don't think we've recovered socially from COVID, from that lockdown, from that isolation. It's tough. And to find your group of friends is a difficult thing. There's a lot of people that are incredibly isolated. It's difficult. You know, but Eric Weinstein has, I was talking to him about this, about the loneliness epidemic, and he said one of the most dangerous things about cancellation that people never talk about is the fact that when a lot of people get cancelled, you remove their friends from them. And at that point, human beings become very dangerous because they're like, well, there's no way back now, so what do you want me to do?

49:00Well, it is. I mean, that's, yeah. It's a terrible thing about cancellation because most of it happens not to famous comedians. It's like, really? Don't worry about me. I'll be all right. It's happened a few times now.

49:13Francis Foster:Have you ever seen that meme of the guy with the noose around his neck standing next to another guy and he goes, you're the first time? Yeah, that's what it feels like. That's great. I haven't seen that. But that idea of going, you don't invite friends around when your house is on fire. Yeah. And when you get cancelled, it feels like your house is on fire. So it's difficult for people to reach out. But most cancellations are, it's regular people that have, you know, misspoke or said something wrong or whatever and you go and it's, we don't have, you know, we're not good at dealing with that. We're not good at...

49:43There's certain things that religion does much better than the secular world. You know, so forgiveness and, you know, shunning and shaming, we've nailed online. But we haven't nailed forgiveness and welcoming people back and, you know, letting people get on with stuff. And it's also that community element that we just need. Like, if you're going through a really hard time, it's such a human balm to sit down with someone and just go, mate, I'll tell you, it's just rough. It's just, we need that. And if you remove that, then I think that's when people get really desperate. Yeah. It's friendships.

50:23It's that thing. And it's also, you know, relationships. You know, your relationship with your other. I would say, okay, this is a guess, but I'd say 90 % of arguments between couples are one person saying to another person, you are not enough people. because we expect our other half to be everything to us in the modern world. And actually, it takes a village, not just to raise a kid, just to live a life. It takes a village. You need your friends and you need your colleagues and you need people that you see all the time. And, you know, it feels like you could go through life and not have that.

50:59Francis Foster:It's so funny you say that because I think I've told this to people, I've said this to people privately, but it was only, it wasn't until my son was born and it had been around for a while that I suddenly, I found myself, I never in a million years would have uttered the phrase, my in-laws are coming to stay for a month, thank God. Like that never would have occurred to me before. Because the difficulty level goes up and you suddenly realize what family's for in a way. Yeah. Because it's about, you know, up until I... It's very interesting though that you say family because I think a lot of people ask themselves in the world that we live in, do I want kids or not?

51:38and I think part of the reason I don't want taxation for people in their 20s is because I want them to be able to buy houses and I want them to be able to have kids and I think if you ask people do you want kids or not it's like well maybe I want kids, maybe I don't want kids I mean the issue is everything great about having kids is immeasurable and everything that's terrible about having kids there's a metric for you know you can wear something on your wrist that will tell you you didn't get enough sleep and you will know that you didn't have enough time and that you didn't see your friends and that you didn't get to watch the TV show.

52:08And there's lots of things you can measure that are terrible. And all of the good things are the smile, the thing, the connection, the big things. But I suppose it's resume points that you lose and you gain eulogy points. And ultimately, eulogy points is what you want. You know, it's that thing of like, you spend a lot of time working towards the perfect CV, be the perfect resume, but eh, goes to nothing. What do you want people to say when you're gone?" And it's like, I'm not a religious man, but I think there's something about having kids. It was Eric Weinstein said this to me at lunch. He said, I was talking about how much I'm enjoying being a parent.

52:48And he said, as he does, he silenced and he went, you will die and you will be reborn as someone else and you will love them. And I went, oh, it's like a bulb went off on all right i kind of get what reincarnation is now there is an afterlife and it's the kids that's it that's the whole thing that's the that's the the purpose of this and you go once you have that and that's that's a gift now the idea that there are people that are uh if you want to have kids sorry if you don't want to have kids i think that's absolutely fine great Make that decision. Great. But my worry is people that are involuntary childless.

53:29And we talk a lot about women that don't have kids and it's involuntary childless. We don't talk a lot about the guys. And I think the sadness is the same. I want that for people. So and how do we create a world, a society where that can happen? And I think we need to change certain things about how we operate. You know, it's like the house building thing is really interesting because you go, why is China? Someone wrote a brilliant book about this recently. I just started about how, why are the Chinese so good at building and we're so bad? Well, everyone in the West in politics, everyone in America in politics went to law school.

54:11Most of the guys in Westminster, lawyers. And in China, everyone's a civil engineer. they don't think anything can't be solved with an engineering project very different mindset yeah right so we we just put up barriers and admin and rules and laws i mean we need to get rid of some of those we need to you know i care about the green belt i do i want i want the countryside to flourish and i care about bees and all of that stuff but trust me much less than i care about people right yeah I care more about people than any of that stuff yeah and then you and you know certain things you just I don't know the big swings in politics they're not taking that energy seems to be the big thing they're not taking seriously because you go it's built into everything else so it's just naturally inflationary we're paying four times more for our energy than anyone else because we may because we we exported our sins we basically went okay we're not going to mine for coal, we'll shut down all the coal mines, open them up again.

55:14Get the northerners working, Jimmy. Yeah, well, you know, listen, I'm sure there's people that would object to that. And you go, but on the longer term, I would go, well, that should be what pays for a nuclear revolution. I think all Britain can be is an example to other nations. We're 1 % of global output of carbon. So whatever we do is not going to make any difference at all. and I don't think we can stand here and say to the third world or whatever we now call the third world

55:46but that thing of like you go whatever we do, you can't ask those people not to want to be prosperous because there's two different things here, there's the politics of envy which is about the inequality in our society which has never been bigger and then there's also absolute poverty and I'm much more interested in solving absolute poverty than the politics of envy, because we can't. Some people are going to be rich, some people are going to be poor. Okay, fine. But I want everyone to get to a minimum standard where they're looked after, where they have a roof over their head and they have good schools, good medical, and they have the hope of having kids in the future.

56:26That just seems like that's the minimum standard, and we should have that globally.

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57:45Francis Foster:Click the link in the description or go to pure-gold.co.trigger to get your free copy of the Investor Guide. That's pure-gold.co.trigger. Take control of your financial future today. and what we need to do and what i think you're talking about is we need to make young people more of a priority in our politics and we simply don't yeah i mean look there's a thing about like if you have a conversation with someone about immigration they'll often bring up yeah but look at all the doctors and nurses that we bring up for the nhs and i go whoa whoa whoa i'll stop you there that's a terrible thing to do right on two reasons right first the people here that are from overseas working in the NHS?

58:26Incredible, right? And we need them. But we only need them because we haven't made a good decision at the moment. So the good decision I would make is I would say medical school should be not a quota of 11 ,000 people a year, which is what it is currently. It should be a standard. And if you reach that standard academically, you go to medical school. Don't even have an interview. If you're not very personable, you can work in the morgue. Fucking worry about it. If you reach that standard. Because there's two things going on. One, we're robbing young people of their dream of being doctors and nurses.

58:59Because we're importing cheaper ones from overseas. It's cheaper not to grow them yourself. But ultimately, what's society for? It's cheaper in the short term. But in the long term, you bring people in, doctors from the third world. And if you bring in a doctor from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, wherever you're bringing them from, it's not because they've run out of sick people there. It's not because they've gone, do you know what, everyone seems fine. Everyone's really taking care of themselves here. I guess we should go somewhere. Where are there sick people? The UK are here. It's not that.

59:33So you go, it's two things. Those doctors are needed there. We need our, you know, to train young people here to do something. And the idea that we go, we're not, and you want to expand that? You go, okay, well, I guess, I guess maybe let's take some agenda studies budget away. if it's not growing corn. I'm not saying you get rid of the department, but you get rid of some of it.

59:58Francis Foster:Well, not to inflate our very good friend's ego too much, to quote Eric in the same interview twice, but something he mentioned actually, I think is 100 % true, which he said, there's no such thing as a labour shortage in the market economy. If you raise the salaries of doctors enough and if you create the opportunities for them to be educated into the profession, There's plenty of British people that are capable of being very good doctors and will do so provided the conditions are appropriate. And if you don't import cheaper people from outside, the conditions will be right for British people to become doctors, and then we've solved those two problems that you're identifying.

1:00:34Francis Foster:It isn't actually rocket science, but we have become addicted to importing lots of things and also exporting lots of things in a way that just doesn't make any sense, as you said about carbon emissions and everything else. Yeah, well I think that thing about the energy being kind of the, energy is prosperity. So to get that right seems to be kind of the baseline level. But you kind of need statesmen to do that, not politicians that are on a five year track. Because you need people to kind of plan for something and go, right, well how are we going to build that infrastructure? But I think if you had a government bond that was like, okay, well we're going to build these plants and you can buy this thing, I think people would be interested in it.

1:01:10Yeah, yeah.

1:01:10Francis Foster:Yeah. Well, I mean, we've come full circle in the conversation because when you're talking about statesmen, maybe you just need a different elite consensus. I mean, that's really what's been the problem, right? There's been an elite consensus about things like net zero that doesn't work. And if we are at this point when things are changing, then the new elite consensus can be something else. And I think you actually put your finger on it, which is it's about putting human beings and our fellow countrymen and countrywomen first, putting human beings first. Yeah, I mean, I think it's also about like, you know, Derek Parfitt's very good on this, philosopher.

1:01:47Reasons and Persons was his book. And he talks a lot about how we owe a debt to people temporally and spatially. So everyone in the world, you want everyone to flourish. And you go, but you also, you go, well, this little bit is our bit. How are we going to do that? How are we going to make it? I think not stealing doctors from elsewhere is probably quite a good idea. Go to where you need it. you know? Doctors Without Borders is a wonderful organization but it shouldn't be necessary if there's doctors over there already. We haven't taken it, right? And temporally I think we owe people in the future something.

1:02:22And we owe people the opportunity to be dealt into society. To go, well you can buy a house and you can do something. I think some of it's quite sort of classist as well, the idea that everyone needs to go to university. Okay, but do that? Can some people get, can some people do vocational training? I think the Germans do that really well, the vocational training jobs. And I think increasingly you're going to see that more in America.

1:02:47Francis Foster:Well, it brings us to AI as well, because I mean, you talked about what you tell young people nowadays. Francis and I had a conversation, I don't know if you saw kind of wrapping up our America trip. It's one of the things we talked about, because I mean, look, terrifying, I don't know what the right word is, because no one knows how it's going to go. But we went to San Francisco. We were there for a few days. A third of the cars on the road don't have a human in them. They're just driving around by themselves. They're waynees. You know, the big AI stuff is moving. I don't know how quickly it will manifest and things that replace human beings, but it's moving pretty quickly.

1:03:19Francis Foster:And when we were in New York, I don't know if you saw it when you were there, giant billboard in Times Square or somewhere there saying, stop hiring humans. The age of the AI employees here. And I thought that was pretty badly thought through, personally. Wow, that's really Orwellian, isn't it? A little bit. And also kind of stupid if you're that company because you're putting a big mark on yourself, I would think, in many people's eyes. But anyway, my point being, the world is going, I think the vast, vast, vast majority of people, including myself, until we went there, have absolutely no idea what's coming.

1:03:54Francis Foster:And I think even now, after having been there, I don't think we know exactly the way it's going to take shape. Well, it's the one rule of history, unintended consequences. So you go, okay, so the people are worried about the wrong thing with AI, in my humble opinion. People are worried about losing their job. Perfectly valid thing to worry about, but I think you're worried about the wrong thing. There's two other things you could really worry about. Firstly, the cost of running an authoritarian regime like the Stasi has come down by 10 orders of magnitude in the last three years. It used to be, if you had to run the Stasi, if you were in East Germany back in the day, it was like 20 % of GDP on spying on people and keeping an eye out.

1:04:36Okay, that's now, you've got a bunch of cameras, you've got AI, everyone's got a phone on them, and we're tracking everything at all times. That's a worry, because we live in liberal democracies, and we're very lucky to, but our leaders, how long will they resist that temptation? You know, digital ID. What happened during COVID? Digital ID is terrifying.

1:05:03Francis Foster:There's lots of lessons from history about digital ID that we should take very seriously. Because even if the good guys are in charge when it comes in, at what point does the world turn and people vote for a bad guy and then they have the power? More Jews died in the Netherlands than in France. You know why? Better records. Holland kept better records so they knew where everyone was. That's terrifying. You know, the idea of you go digital ID, yeah, great, fabulous, give them all the information. Great, fine. We don't know what's coming down the pike. I think that thing about, it's about, and Thomas Sowell gets quoted a lot, rightly so, a brilliant man.

1:05:46There's no solutions, only trade-off. You know, safety and freedom. Where do you want to be on that line? You need a little bit of both. So, I mean, that's one thing for AI is, okay, the job, fine. You might be worried about your job, but you've got transferable skills. And if you've got critical thinking and you're a smart person, jobs for life is gone, but you'll find something else to do. You will find something else. Great. You'll be all right. Trust in that. Trust in your independence that, you know, if you don't work for that company or work for a different company, you'll find something.

1:06:17You're going to have some belief in yourself. And then the idea that you go running an authoritarian regime becomes very cheap, so we have to resist that. That civilisation is a clearing in the forest. We need to stand very firm against any authoritarian regime, whether it comes from the left or the right, whether it comes from a good place or a bad place. We have to resist that. The other thing is physics. so this is Peter Thiel's point but minus the screens from any room we're living in the 1970s so nothing's happened in physics since 72 string theory has not got us anywhere but if you take the compute power of AI and point it at physics now everything else in science is stamp collecting physics is the real thing, that gave us everything every bit of technology that we have comes from the physics department.

1:07:13And, you know, what happens when you point AI at that? That feels to me like something that people aren't really thinking about and is incredibly, could be incredible. We could have a world of plenty where there's no, you know, if we increase productivity by 50 times and there's a human flourishing, Fantastic. I hope that's the world we live in. But it could go another way.

1:07:42Francis Foster:Indeed it could. Jimmy, it's been great having you back. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters. Lovely. I'm one of the supporters. We know you are. I like this show. Well, we love you. Before we do, though, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? I don't know. I think we need to triage the world's problems. I think we're very self-obsessed in the West. And there's a couple of things that I think we should address. that would be relatively easy to fix, that are huge global problems. One would be burning biomass, so people burn fuel in their homes in Africa and the East, and that kills three million people a year.

1:08:22And that strikes me as it's an easy fix. We don't do that here, and we let other people do that, and we pretend it isn't a problem. It's a huge, huge problem, both environmentally and three million people a year. It's horrific. The other thing that's really boring, smoking. It's like Kaiser Soze, the tobacco companies. The greatest trick they ever pulled was making us believe they didn't exist. Because it's not a problem here, is it? People don't smoke as much here. No. Or in the States. Yeah. Globally, worse than it's ever been. And that's an easy fix, right? It's worse than it's ever been. Really?

1:08:58More people are dying now from smoking than there were 20 years ago. But we're not. So I guess no one gives a... and that's an easy problem to fix. From a utilitarian point of view, that would be a great thing to do. There's some low-hanging fruit. There's some easy stuff that maybe we could fix. That would be good.

1:09:18Francis Foster:All right. If you're watching this in the so-called third world, stop smoking and head on over to TriggerPod. Oh, are people talking about my arena tour? Well, before we go to, I was going to ask you about arenas. It's a bit of like inside of baseball, but I was just curious because I've always imagined that a theatre of between 200 and 500 is kind of the optimum venue for comedy in terms of intimacy and whatever? Or is Irina the more the better? I think there's different ways of doing it. So I learnt from the best. I did some gigs with Chappelle in Australia and we played in the round. And we were doing a 15 ,000-seater and it felt intimate, felt like a theatre.

1:09:59Also, the moment of walking out, maybe the greatest moment in show business, when you walk out and it's like a boxer because you've got to walk out to the middle of the room no one is more than 2 000 seats away in the arena you know so you've got that intimacy and you just kind of turn you've got the screens above it feels like a very intimate space but it's about how you play it if your end on it can be quite kind of in the distance but it's uh yeah and i do a lot of crowd work so it's very important to me that people can join in and i can see the whites of eyes and i can i can make it fun but yeah no it works they look really fun the clips the icy clips

1:10:35Francis Foster:like i said all the time and it looks like you're having a good time the crowd's having a good time yeah i think there's occasional serious moment as well a little touching moment you know it's lots of serious stuff i think that thing of like people um i'm open to that i'm very open to the idea of going especially when people like text in or shout out whatever if if someone's you know comes to a gig and they're they're going through something i i like talking about i think I think it also works because when I'm watching you, I'm expecting a pedo gag. So when one doesn't come and it's actually you being genuine, I'm like, oh, no, I'm actually touched.

1:11:08Francis Foster:And then you get the pedo gag. I think people, though, everyone contains multitudes, right? And it's that thing of like going, since the pandemic happened and I wrote a book and it was kind of, you know, Eckhart Tolle for Dummies. It was like a self-help book that I wrote. And I liked it and I liked that thing about going, well, I love coming on the pod and chatting about serious stuff. But it's also that thing of like, I'm so aware that I have a job to do. And I'm in the service industry. And someone's bought a ticket to my show. And they go, right, I want to laugh for two hours straight and not think about it.

1:11:39Well, no problem, I got you. And within that, there might be five minutes of a moment with someone. But even that, it's going to have that same spirit of play and fun within it. Bill Burr talks about that when they asked, I can't remember the interview that asked him, what do you want people to take away your show? he said nothing he goes I just want to give them their money's worth yeah it's great best way to do that that's such a great line right

1:12:04Francis Foster:pay£5 go to triggerpod.co.uk and you're going to get £5 worth of Jimmy answering your questions alright I'll do my best are there any subjects or topics you wouldn't go near with a barge pole or is everything fair game in your amazing comedy brain

1:12:36We'll see you next time.