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

Starting point is 00:00:00 A vigilante known as the Batman of Lagos de Moreno has gone viral after catching alleged motorcycle thieves and duck-taking them to lampposts across Lagos de Moreno in Halisco. At least five suspected thieves have been found restrained to polls over the past 10 days, some with their mouths taped and signs labeling them as thieves. Authorities are investigating and say those found tied up are being treated as victims. Police have added the vigilante to a wanted list and are also looking into whether multiple people are behind the incidents. and we've got some pictures of what these people look like. It's like a real, the guy's a real life Mexican Batman that appears to be getting motorcycle thieves and duct tape. People are also calling him duct tape man, which is, but he's really doing it.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Oh, that is, I mean, that's a, yeah, okay, sorry, so you hear duct tape and you think, I could get myself out of duct tape. No. That is, okay. I noticed he's left the motorcycle with them. That seems. There's the evidence. That seems bad, because someone's going to cut them free and they're going to disappear on the.

Starting point is 00:00:58 See? Motorcycle. There it is. Duck tape, man. Okay. That seems, that's kind of great. Because normally, if you see a story about crime in Mexico, you go, oh, this is going to be eye bleach. This is a very fluffy way to deal with crime in Mexico, it seems.

Starting point is 00:01:14 How is he taken down two in one? I mean, they don't look particularly physically and intimidating. They look 14 and terrified. Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, don't steal motorcycles. There's a message there. You would be too if you'd been taped to a lampposed. The rise and fall of civilizations and the rise.

Starting point is 00:01:32 Dug tape man brings back law and order. That's true. You were talking about strong may make good times. That is the strong man that uses duct tape. There was the case about seven months ago in the UK where a guy purposely left his bike, I think outside of the HMP in London, where all the police are based and put like an Apple air tag on it. And it got lost. He calls up the police.

Starting point is 00:01:55 And it's like, we have. the air tag, I have the address, there's nothing we can do. There's nothing we can do. All of a sudden, he then takes this to the telegraph, the Times, it becomes a huge story, and then the police go, we're looking into it. So even when you have the GPS coordinates, they don't take it seriously.

Starting point is 00:02:11 Yeah, it's good, I think it's a crime I could get behind that. The vigilante, it's like, it's nice, you don't hear a lot about it these days. What was the last crime you committed? The last crime? I would say probably, probably some sort of tax avoidance.

Starting point is 00:02:25 was the last big one. When that whole thing happened, this is years ago now, like 12, 13 years ago, when it was all going on, I was like front of the papers and the prime minister was David Cameron at the time, he broke off from the G20 Summit to comment on my personal tax evils.

Starting point is 00:02:40 That is a red flag. But it was all going on. I never once mentioned the millions that I've given to charity because I thought, well, at this point, line's not going to help. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:52 Yeah. Because evasion is allowed, but avoidance is not. No, avoidance is allowed. There's a big difference. There's about 18 months in prison. Right. Or if you ask Gary Stevenson, then there's a big difference. What was the documentary?

Starting point is 00:03:04 You watched the new... Have you watched Gary Stevenson's new documentary? No, go on. What's the documentary? I think he's wonderful. I think he's the best economist. While you were watching it last night, I could be laughing. I think he's the best economist of our times.

Starting point is 00:03:15 And when the Soviet Great Britain becomes, and you guys are fighting over a little bit of bread. Me and Gary will throw you a strip. So I don't want to say any. bad about Gary at all. Right. Because when the gulags come, Christopher, I'm going to be eating bread. This is the same as being kind to your AI in case an AI overlord.

Starting point is 00:03:32 So is this guy a Marxist economist? No, no, no. He's a pioneer. He's a genius, Jimmy. His idea, he wants to bring in a, I think is it, a 2% wealth tax on over 10 million per year inside of the UK is what the policy Gary's proposing. That's it. I thought there was more.

Starting point is 00:03:52 The documentary is called how to become filthy rich, right? So what's the thesis? Tax wealth, not work. Yeah, tax wealth not work, which I actually think you'd like that from a copy writing perspective, Mr. Dry. But his whole thesis is with rising inequality, if we can bring in a 2% wealth text to the UK in particular, then that will raise, I think, about $25 billion is Gary's thesis. But quite impressively inside the documentary, they actually keep on actually a smart economist. who argues a little bit back with him. And his whole thesis is, well, actually the GDP will probably go down by about 4 to 5%.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Because if you're a foreign investor, why not go to France? Why not go to Sweden? Why not go to United States of America? I was talking about this. We were chatting about it earlier. But I think Britain needs to be more competitive. It's like that thing of like we're competing with other nations. People have the ability to move anywhere they want to move now.

Starting point is 00:04:45 And there's a lot of talk about billionaires and millionaires leaving the UK. Whatever. Like, you've just got to compete. So that idea of going, the big thing, the big kind of controversial thing is I think the currency's overvalued. I think the great play every nation has when you print your own currency, you could devalue it. You could devalue the currency and make it very cheap to invest in Great Britain and just have all the money come to you. It's like you are, it's like a zero-sum game in the world. You want people to live there.

Starting point is 00:05:09 There's good schools. It's a great place. Wonderful people, wonderful culture. You want more people to come there. So devaluing the currency has always been seen as a humiliation. But every time the currency's been devalued, there's been 18 months of incredible. credible growth. But you don't have inflation as the currency gets devalued? You could do. I mean, you've got to mitigate against that. But I mean, we've got massive

Starting point is 00:05:26 inflation anyway. So what are you going to do? So we'd be weaker than the dollar. That's your, that's the car mission statement. Yeah. Super weak. Super weak currency that attracts a lot of people. China have been doing it for 20 years. They've massively devalued their currency artificially in order that people, Chinese goods are very cheap in the rest of the world. That's great. So they export a lot of stuff and they do very well as an economy. They've brought more people out of poverty the last 20 years than you could dream of. It's incredible. I guess the idea is then that four British guys podcast back in London and not America, you know, I feel like this is living proof almost of some of the troubles. Yeah. I mean, it's, it is that thing of like, you've just got to

Starting point is 00:06:04 be better than other places, you know, so how do we compete? I thought when Brexit happened, I thought the next day we would have undercut Ireland. I carry an Irish passport. I love being Irish, but I thought we would have undercut Ireland. And Ireland had the corporation tax of like 12%. So that's why all the tech companies are based in Ireland. If you get your, whatever, bill from Anthropic, it comes from Dublin, if you buy it in the UK, right? So, but we didn't undercut them. We just went, oh, great, let them do that. If your prime minister for the day, what are some of your, not like less, maybe less obvious policies that you do, roger policies that you implement?

Starting point is 00:06:39 Okay. Devalue the currency. Okay. It would be the first thing. Is it a bad way mission? Yeah, quite. You could just talk it down. Honestly, you could talk it down in an afternoon.

Starting point is 00:06:50 So the right people at the Bank of England, it will go, yeah, it will go down. I mean, it's going to happen anyway. But isn't that about not? But if we went, yeah, but when the currency naturally devalues, when there's something bad happens, do you go to the IMF and try and bail out the pound or just just go, great, things are now cheap in the UK, come the rest of the world, sales on. It's a bit like roper dope, like I'll eat, just sort of sitting on the ropes. Yeah. And then you come out.

Starting point is 00:07:16 I'm going to wait for that. I'm going to let him punch me in the face so much that he gets tired. It's a lot of labour is cheaper than China and Vietnam. Yeah, but then invest in infrastructure and, you know, you have to have, you have to make it. Yeah, it's a serious idea. But then the other thing that you do is energy. Energy cost is four times higher in the UK than America. And every business has that as a factor, right? So things are very expensive to produce and it's expensive to even run an office in the UK

Starting point is 00:07:40 because energy prices are very high. That affects everyone. That's got to be a 20, 25 year problem, right? So to fix that, you've got to be as technologically advanced as 70, France who built 56 nuclear power plants in 10 years. If you do that, you're off to the races. I've got to say, Mr. Carr, you're talking, very educated young man. You're talking like a man who might be having a bit of a prime ministerial run there. Is that on the cards? I think, yeah. I think now, I believe the system in the UK now is seven prime ministers in 10 years. I think we now

Starting point is 00:08:12 take a ticket, like at a, like at a deliative and you just, it comes up. So you're up at some point soon. And you're saying that you wouldn't want to be, you wouldn't want to be prime minister because it'd be a big commitment. That always used to be the case now. What is it? Six months? I'll be gone for six miles back. It's going to be a shop sign that you turn round. Like, you know, back in five, prime minister. All right, given that we're talking about the UK, let's play a game of guess the Victorian slang word. So I'm going to say different words from Victorian era Britain, and you're going to try and guess what they mean. Okay. Okay. Yeah, lovely. All right. First one, tickety boo. Hmm. It just means good. Something that is in perfect order or a satisfactory condition.

Starting point is 00:08:50 That's kind of... Tickety boo. Tickety boo. Everything's Tickety boo. Muffin walloper. Mm. Sure, sadly tonight, right? A muffin walloper?

Starting point is 00:09:00 Fat. I think it's a, I think it's a sort of rather stout gentleman who enjoys muffins. Yeah. An idle person who sits at home... We can't just kick on. You've got to tell us what are muffin wopplers. That's what I'm saying. I'm literally describing it to you.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Oh, I thought you'd move on for the next thing. No, it's an idle person who sits at home eating cakes and gossip. instead of cooking. Muffin Wallopter. So you should be cooking, but instead you're sitting at home eating cakes and gossiping. Next one.

Starting point is 00:09:30 Church bell. A church bell would be my would be my guest there. No, it's nice. Oh, slank. Is it, would it be an ugly person? Like you've been hit by the church bell, like a Quasimodo reference?

Starting point is 00:09:44 Oh, that's clever, but no. I think it's, uh, this sounds, I think it's a young virgin. Ha! Ha! ha! I'm a young male virgin. Harry's just going to answer young virgin for all of the... When did the young virgins come on?

Starting point is 00:10:01 Paul Pilkington has that great bit, which was when he's watching University Challenge because he can never guess the answer. He just says egg each time because statistically at some point he's going to be right. There's a better chance of just a egg. Gentlemen, gentlemen, I think we've, there's a method to the madness. Church Bell, I'm thinking a young sort of, to the left of the organ master, There's the man who rings the church bell, a young 14. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 00:10:24 That's actually probably way too clever. A woman who talks so much, her voice is reminiscent of the ringing of a church bell. Hmm. Okay. Next one. Butter upon bacon. It's, uh, is it like a hat on a hat? It's too much of a good thing?

Starting point is 00:10:40 Yes. She's doing too much. Yeah. Butter on bacon. It's butter on bacon, yeah. Mathiking. Mathiking. You know what mathicking is?

Starting point is 00:10:48 It sounds northern. It sounds northern. It sounds northern. I'm going to go with... You're really good at this. Some level of incest. It could result in incest. A term for getting wildly rowdy out in the streets.

Starting point is 00:11:04 Oh, I mean, that's just good. Maficking in Newcastle. Matheking on the big market. I love the jump from it sounds northern to some level of incest. Could be incest. Afternoonified. Afternoonified. You're slacking off.

Starting point is 00:11:18 You're no longer taking things seriously. Yeah, exhausted. someone or something that is highly fashionable. Afternoonify. I have to assume that that's because you only dress up in the afternoon. Right. Your afternoonify. Right.

Starting point is 00:11:31 He wouldn't dress that way in the morning. Okay. I wouldn't just walk enough. Chuckaboo. Chuckaboo. A dear friend. Dear friend, chuckaboo. Giggle mug, someone who's always smiling.

Starting point is 00:11:45 Half rats. Bit drunk. Half rats. That makes sense. Half rats. Not rat, ass, just half rats. Evening wheezes. This should be brought back.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Evening wheezes should be brought back. It means fake news. It's evening weasers. And apparently, it's champagne weather means it's pouring or raining. Coffee sisters mean besties. There we go. It's a Victorian slang for you. Well, it is interesting, like, language, like to talk about this, because that's

Starting point is 00:12:11 the same language. That's the English language that we still use. And those words have gone. You never notice when something disappears because it disappears. It kind of becomes forgotten. But the idea that it's the best example of anarchy, the political system of anarchy, is the English language. There's no central system for it. No one sits down and goes, that's a word, that's not a word. We're changing the meaning of that. It's just organically sort of emergent from the group. It's kind of perfect. I think a lot of solutions are like that. You can't do it from top down. It just has to sort of let it happen. I mean, you spend your entire time playing with the English language. What have you come to think about sort of how it's developed recently?

Starting point is 00:12:47 how it's developed. I don't like new words. I mean, this is slightly tangential to the question, but if I was on a date, for example, it's always using lots of new vernacular and new words. I would say, it's been a great night. You know, that's what I'd say. I think simple words are the best words.

Starting point is 00:13:07 What's the phrase? Big things are best said in small words. Yeah, it might be like a mark of intelligence. Like if you can get across a complex idea to a five-year-old, great and if you need incredibly complex language you're some kind of huckster you're selling some bullshit you've got an issue with like leit speak 21st century leit speak and that would be if a lady wants to bag harry dry she can't use too much modern slang i think so if she came out and started talking ticcitty boo that'd really get you going unfortunately i've watched peep show so for any fans of

Starting point is 00:13:40 that show they know that word's a bit of a bit of a turnoff but i i think i read once that the french started a revolution with three words, which are quite big words, but what was it? Egaliter, libertier, fraternity. I don't think you need much more than that. You don't need much more than that to sell soap if the French are starting a revolution with just three words. What's the best example of compression? It's like the most simplest. Oh, geez. The best example of compression. Well, there's like a two-word joke, dwarf shortage. And I had a three word joke, which was stationary. restore moves. He had the six-word story. Oh yeah, for sale. Children's shoes never worn.

Starting point is 00:14:23 Oh, Jesus. Yeah, brilliant. How do you think about words, Jimmy, in comedy? Do you think some words are just funny? Or do you obsess about word choice when you're writing a joke? Yeah, I really do. I really think it's kind of the phrasing, it's more the rhythm of it, but sometimes it's the phrasing like having the right word for the thing and conjuring up an image is very important in people's heads. So you've got the kind of concept that you kind of an I know this thing's funny. How do we get that across to someone else? So it's about that language, the purpose of language of like conveying, like getting space

Starting point is 00:14:55 in their head, getting into their head and making them kind of making them draw the cartoon. Didn't you have stepdad's motherfuckers? Yeah. That's good. I don't like the term stepdad. I'd prefer to say motherfucker. Yeah. It's nice.

Starting point is 00:15:11 Just take a moment to sort of step back from it and go, yeah, that's. It was right there. It was right there the whole time. I had a thing the other day that I just thought, how's no one got to this before? I was talking about that Donald Trump came up. I said, yeah, they tried to assassinate him. And they very nearly did kill him because no one could warn him because no one wanted to sound stupid. No one wanted to shout.

Starting point is 00:15:27 Donald, duck. Very good. That's good. It was right there, but you go, well, how did no one? The palm of everyone's hands. How did no one see that? Yeah. Sometimes it feels like the jokes there.

Starting point is 00:15:36 You're just like getting rid of everything else. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes, the easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf. Right? You want to keep it simple and not makes a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink. And that's why I've been taking it every single morning for nearly five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 next gen backed by four clinical trials. In those trials that were shown to fill common

Starting point is 00:16:07 nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat well. Plus, if you're still unsure, they've got a 90-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will give you all of your money back. Right now, you can get 20% off a welcome kit and that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below, are heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. It's interesting how you have these, you can even explain some of these techniques, yet they still work. So one we've discussed is the A, B, B, A. So it'll be, it's not about the

Starting point is 00:16:46 days in your life. It's the life in your days. Or Churchill's, yes, alcohol's taken a lot out of me, but I've taken more out of alcohol. Or you have JFKs. Don't ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And you'll see this A, B, B, B, A pattern. And it still works. Even when you know it, even you know it's coming, it still works. It's worn in advertising. Everyone will know it. Just beans, means, heightens, but just changing all of the last letters to be a Z. Was just the most genius.

Starting point is 00:17:16 That's another example when you do things in threes. So again, another one, you ever heard the Winston Churchill speech during World War II where he talks about, this is when he comes in, and he refers to, I have nothing to give but blood, sweat, and tears? What's interesting is he didn't say that. He said, I have nothing to give but blood, sweat, toil, tears. But because we like threes, it just disappears. And you constantly see this whenever anybody actually makes a four-way statement.

Starting point is 00:17:41 Although you look at the unit, you go, he didn't toil much, do it? Big, big fellow. Big old boy. What have you got? Do you bring something from? Yeah, I've got some stuff from home. We meant to bring stuff? Yes.

Starting point is 00:17:53 I'm so sorry. No, I'm joking. Okay. What are you got? So, we've, do you recognize what this is? You're going to have to lift it. Put it on the table for the class. Okay.

Starting point is 00:18:03 Do you want it here? So this is. Yeah, yeah, just, uh, Yeah, that looks perfect. That's lovely. Thank you. Do you recognize what this is? Yes, I would say it's the woods. Some woods? British woods? Yeah, Britain.

Starting point is 00:18:15 So this is Charles Darwin's thinking path that he built around his house. So whenever Darwin was stuck on a problem, he would go on a walk around his thinking path, and he would collect, he'd have stones, like, racked up that he would knock off to kind of figure out how many rounds that he's done. His kids would sometimes fuck with him and, like, put the stones back on. whilst he was walking around. So Darwin used to use this thinking path regularly. Okay. He had 10 kids as well, so there's a lot of paths, a lot of kids to...

Starting point is 00:18:43 Do we know what this is? So let's say Yusef. Youssef, kidnapped, Chase, Arthur, Eames, Lim, Copp... Oh, it's Christopher Nolan's Inception. Correct. This is... So Christopher Nolan was working on Inception for 10 years. And one of the things he did was to actually draw the plot down.

Starting point is 00:19:02 So you see the five-part dream plot that he visualised. here. Do you know what this is? Yes, but I'm not going to say it. Do you guys know what it is? It looks like my diary when I was in school. I don't know. No idea. Is that J.K. Rowlings? When J.K. Rowling was stuck on Harry Potter, she turned it into a spreadsheet. This is the fifth Harry Potter, the entire storytelling sequence into a spreadsheet. Is that? And how did that work out? Was it? Is it? All right. Cool. This? I think, does that say at the top? Yeah, it says, I think, and then it has a little diagram. Therefore I am.

Starting point is 00:19:39 Back, no. Back to Mr. Charles Darwin earlier. This is when he opened his red notebook and drew out kind of his first thoughts around what evolution is, like the family trees or how it all interconnects. Okay. And then...

Starting point is 00:19:54 Anybody know what this pub is? Jimmy, this looks like one of your own. Yeah, I know. This looks like... The eagle and child. It's not the pub in Oxford, is it? Yes, it is. Is it the pub in Oxford?

Starting point is 00:20:02 Yes, correct. Where all the great myths of the 20th century were written. Pretty much. So it's Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis. Yes. It's where J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used to meet up, have a pint. Tolkien would give C.S. Lewis his draft of the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. C.S. Lewis would give Tolkien his draft of Narnia or whatever he was working on. They would both read it out loud and then

Starting point is 00:20:25 roast one another over a pint. Hey, do you want to know an interesting, here's a tangential fact to that. So I only find this out recently. So Finnegan's Wake is a book that I've read around a lot. I haven't read Finnexon's Wake, but I read about it a lot. It's kind of the great work of literature. It's, well, James Joyce, obviously. So I didn't realize that Finnegan's Wake is Star Wars. So Joseph Campbell, you've heard of Joseph Campbell, the hero has a thousand faces, the hero's journey, all of those kind of great books that informed Star Wars. Basically, Star Wars is a sort of dumbed down version of those books. Well, before Joseph Campbell wrote The hero's journey. His thesis was on the myths within James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

Starting point is 00:21:07 So he basically wrote that first, and then he thought, oh, this is really good, this thesis. I'm going to make this into a book about the heroes that are in all stories. And so it's James Joyce, and then it's Joseph Campbell, and then it's George Lucas. James Joyce is actually the root of this. Yes, it's a distilled version of these things. That's brilliant. I had Alex Peckis on the show and he did a breakdown of The Odyssey. But because he can read the original Greek, he's able to get much more rich explanation of what's going on because sometimes words have multiple different meanings. And he's digging into that. It's so good. So fantastic. And you see even in that, there's turns, there's a descent. And I'm asking him at each point, okay, so using Campbell's idea, which was like 2,000, 2,000 and a half thousand years later or something like that, at what point on the clock face are we here as he goes around and sure enough? even back then, even the first book ever written, the first thing ever written down.

Starting point is 00:22:06 Before that, it was all verbal story writing. Gilgamesh, wasn't it? Is the myth of Gilgamesh is a bit older. Maybe. Slightly. Not a contradiction on your own podcast, but you know, I mean, feel free. Just to go back to that, isn't it interested, just hold this up for a second? The Eagle and Child, pub in Oxford, where C.S. Lewis and Tolkien would meet up to

Starting point is 00:22:26 roast each other about their fiction. Meanwhile, you two nerds at fucking lifetime over a smoothie, over a honeyberry smoothie. English have lost their way. My point of bringing these is I'm working on a chapter called It's a round of thinking. We've discussed it before. Essentially the premises don't think with your head,

Starting point is 00:22:46 think with your feet, your hands or your mouth. So a few different premises on that. There's a few, I didn't include that. So Dickens, when he was struggling with insomnia and writer's block, would do what his friends described as violent walking, who would walk 20 to 30 miles. Travis Kalanek, when he was creating Uber, he had a racing track built in the office. They would do walking meetings and be constantly walking around. It would be 60 miles a week.

Starting point is 00:23:12 Yeah, you can't get a car. There we go. And then going back to thinking with your math, if you go to the bottom of Mike Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, the paper he published about 25 pages, He credits nobody, but he says thank you to one person, which is Michael Besso, who is his friend that he would walk around and talk with. One day, as he's talking it out loud, his friend, he comes up with this idea. It's why Harry's like, I call him my Besso as a result, because you're having those people to talk to. But I wanted to kind of maybe explain, like, why do I think this is going on?

Starting point is 00:23:45 I think you might be the Einstein. He might be the jury's out. Don't take that. I'll take it. I'll be a Besson. So I went to visualize something that's under discussed. Right. Which is, spin that a little more for me?

Starting point is 00:24:03 This idea here, which is kind of human step count throughout your great, great, great, N times 100 just goes like this, and then suddenly you have kind of the agricultural revolution here, and it just completely pluppets. And then you kind of go down to 10,000, and now we're currently the average is around about 5,000. What's interesting, 18,000 for men was the like average step. count for hunter-gatherers. We estimate about 15,000 for women. Interestingly, how do you get that data? One way you can look at it is with, what's the current people that are, just technology that

Starting point is 00:24:39 forgot? Amish, Amish. So the Amish, they look at the number of steps the Amish do per day to kind of . Surely Amish life is slightly different to 300,000 BC. Hunter Gamow? We can look at a few different things in terms of like walking distances. But that's one of the, the gauges. Do you think it It might be the same amount of steps in a lifetime, but they're getting them in early because they die at 35. Because they're all, they're all. Yeah, it does net down to the same number of steps overall. Yeah, you've got a certain amount of steps in you and that's it. That's Roger Federer's got this canister theory, which was because he had a couple of years out.

Starting point is 00:25:11 Basically, it's like, he got interviewed, I think it was more than 2019. And he was like, I still got stuff in the canister because he didn't play, no, he didn't play in 18, I don't think. And it was this idea that a tennis player just has a canister, which they can even burn it out like Nick Curios and just actually he didn't play much, but more like in the dark. And then the canister, you're at the end of the game. Well, I like that idea of like in relationships thinking about reservoir of goodwill. So you build up a reservoir of goodwill early in a relationship in the kind of honeymoon period and then you can spend it later on. So like how

Starting point is 00:25:40 many how many fights could a friendship survive? Could a relationship survive? And it's all about how much you've stacked up. So you're stacking up those good memories, those good times. And then you've got that reserve that you kind of eat into in the relationship. It's quite a nice way to think about it because you kind of go through hard times to someone and you go, actually it's all right because we've done a lot of stuff in the past. Whereas if it's someone you've just met, you go, fuck this noise. Yes. Yeah, it's like paying into a bank account.

Starting point is 00:26:02 Yeah. If you haven't deposited much in, you can't withdraw much before it goes into the bank. But I don't think people think about friendships in that way, whereas you go, kind of friendships are, they're incredibly important. I sort of think every argument between a couple is one person saying to another person, you are not enough people. The best relationship advice is invest in your friends. Your partner will be fine.

Starting point is 00:26:19 Go out and talk to your friends and then come home and listen. but people don't have that. They think one person's going to be there everything. I think one of the problems of talking about friendships like that is it makes it sound quite transactional and it gives people a little bit of an ick. Yeah, I mean, there's supposed to be something. Loyalty is not just if this person can add to my life. Alex had this line where he imagined that one of his friends asked him,

Starting point is 00:26:48 he'd broken down his car, he got flat tire in his car, he was five blocks away. will you come and help me? And Alex would just ring a roadside assistant to go and see him. And he was like, well, that means that I can do what I want to do. My friend gets a better quality of service. But what it forgets is that he's not just saying, can you fix my tire? It's will you give me your time and your support? But Alex sort of remains staunch. She's like the most like utilitarian when it comes to a friend. I've been thinking about this recently. Because so much education is now done by YouTube. Right. So if you learn how to shave and we've all got differing of. abilities here. But you learn how to shave. You do it with a YouTube tutorial now, but you miss the intimacy of going to a father or, you know, an old friend and going, how do I actually do this thing? And I don't know what's lost there. But like you would think that the aim is to shave, but it isn't. It's like a little communal moment. Sean has this wonderful idea. And I try and, you know, we was talking last time around what we call like hyper meta, which is this idea

Starting point is 00:27:47 that be Asian Greeks or Romans, rather than scroll a newsfeed every day, or read a new book, or listen to a new audiobook, they would have principles that they want to take seriously. So they'd go back and review the way more of this, is forgetting everything. And one of mine would be from Charlene, which is that idea he talks about just to delete the scoreboard. So a lot of people go into the start of a relationship, kind of game theory 101, where it's like, I'm at zero, Christopher is at zero. And I'll wait, wait, wait, wait, Chris, Chris will do something. Tick, tap.

Starting point is 00:28:14 You understand why the scoreboard is there to measure an imbalance in injustice and delete the score. Give, give, give, give. Okay. You get taken advantage of you, after your sociopaths? I don't think you're even going to get taken advantage. I don't think you need to be a sociopath to take advantage of somebody inside of a relationship. Like, let's say you can get into a relationship with somebody and like an intimate relationship. This is maybe going to be your new wife for the rest of time.

Starting point is 00:28:38 And she keeps on turning up late. She keeps on disrespecting you. And you're like, no, just give, give, give, give, give, continue. But within reason, completely defeats. It's like when I say decisions rather than experiments and somebody's like, well, I'm going to shut up a load of heroin and I'm going to punch a police off to the face within a reason. And I'm talking about people that air one way. So if you air naturally towards the, I'm going to wait for this person, then I'm going to mirror, and then I'm going to mirror. I think I'm with you. I think it's the,

Starting point is 00:29:03 you can't win an argument with your wife. Everybody loses. Yeah, because if you win, you lose. Everyone's in a bad mood. So that thing of like going, and the relationships are transactional, right? There is a, there's, there's like codes of conduct that you, you expect within it. And that's, that's kind of, that's okay. But then I think if you just get, if you enjoy the act of giving, then just just give, give, give. And I do think you end up way, you end up, the other person ends up giving way more because you just push it so far. And listen, if you're 50-0 up, then yeah, walk away. But until you get to 50-0, just keep giving. It's a way to live. I think it is more, yeah, it's more enjoyable.

Starting point is 00:29:36 But there is also, there is also no 50-0. Like, there is no 50-0. Exactly. That's a good. You know, as soon as, yeah, I agree with yours. I think once you decide, I think you have to make a decision in life. And then once you've, once you've made a decision, then you've got to make that decision. decision right. And I think people kind of sort of waste a lot of time in this space of like, I can't decide, I can't decide. And that's when maybe the scoreboard's pinging off, pinging off. But once you've decided, then you're the same, like, you're the same person. Yeah, I saw Alex Hormosey, he's up on the wall there. We met for the first time this weekend.

Starting point is 00:30:06 I was in Las Vegas. And I kind of know him, like we've spoken on Zoom and I know a lot of his work, but I met him for the first time. And it was that, that kind of thing that he has this, this sort of theory on, like that, that thing about his new theory is about optionality. and the idea that people are getting all the options they can. They want optionality on everything. So they get five degrees and they train and they're ready for everything. They're ready for options. But until you cash in those options, it's meaningless.

Starting point is 00:30:31 I think it's kind of a genius idea of like at some stage, you go with what you've got now or you don't go at all. Do what you can with what you've got where you are. Or you just, it's like, otherwise you're like 40 and waiting for something to happen. So George kind of decided at one point in our interactions that we were friends. I don't know when it happened, but at one point, George just decided that we were friends. And then he started, he started just, I mean, I would say you're, I would say if I was to describe to it, I would talk about your generosity. And it feels kind of weird to speak highly of you,

Starting point is 00:31:01 because I've been abusing you a week. But you're, I think you're an incredibly generous guy. And I think that like, you know, I don't think there's any expectation of anything which comes with that. You just kind of, like I touched down in Austin, Airbnb sorted, you know, I touched down. It's just, I think it's a lovely way to live. And I do think there is a point Whereas Chris is like, yeah, if someone, if you, it's a feeling. As soon as the feeling goes. So that's my, that's my point on the, not needing to turn it into the metric. Why is it that we like to hang around with some people and we don't like to hang around

Starting point is 00:31:29 with others? It's that there is some form, and this would be Alex's argument. And I'm, if you're on one end and Alex is on the other, I'm somewhere in the middle. Alex's point would be, you are tracking a scoreboard, whether you're doing it mentally or not. And the scoreboard is the vibe of how you feel around somebody. we have friends that we've stopped hanging out with because we're like, I just don't feel like this vibe is, the scales don't feel like they're balanced,

Starting point is 00:31:56 regardless of whether or not you're keeping count. And I do think that that's true. My rough rule of thumb is that awful line of, like, you're the average of the five people you hang around with. Incorrect. But you think in essence, average of the five podcasts you listen to the last. Then what ends up happening is you have this,

Starting point is 00:32:14 you're always trying to fuck upwards, if you follow that approach anyway, which means that my definition, that why should those people hang out of you? I think a better rule of fun is forget how much money they have, forget what they've achieved. I surround yourself with who you feel almost alive with. So I don't care if someone's a poet that's broken. If I hang out with them and I feel alive, it's a way more interesting than some billionaire where you feel dead behind the eyes have to hanging out. But aliveness is probably the best matter. So I still think that you are the average, you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with this fine. It's just what is the metric that you're optimizing for? Because some people might

Starting point is 00:32:47 want to be in a room with people that've got the highest net worth or the most well known and the highest status, whatever. But it can just be. And ultimately, what it comes back to is, if you ask enough why questions, I just want to feel good. I want to feel good around these people. I don't know. It's a weird thing on what are friendships for. And I don't think friendships really pay out until the bad days. Right. So you're going to have a really bad day before you know what a friend is. Because on good days, it's fine. Everything's fine. You hang out with anyone. It doesn't matter. They're giving, they're taking. It doesn't matter. When you have a bad day, like if you get cancelled, which I have been a number of times, like it's a filter. It's such a great filter.

Starting point is 00:33:24 It's like a gift being cancelled because at the end of it, you end up with fewer friends, but much better ones. And it's the foul weather, friends. It's the guys that call on the bad day. That's what really matters. And that's what you're ultimately, I think, somewhere at a deeper level, we're solving for that. We're solving for, well, if things get bad, who could I actually this person stay with me in the trenches. Yeah. What's the, when it comes to like cancellation or public criticism, what's the idea that's kind of non-obvious that you only appreciate,

Starting point is 00:33:50 apart from that once you've gone thorough that most people wouldn't understand? I think it's, the impermanence of it is interesting. And the idea that you go, is anyone going to care about this in a month or a year? And if no one's going to care in a year, why do you care now? Joseph's got this line. He says the dog's bark and the caravan moves on. and I quite like it. Marimio.

Starting point is 00:34:12 Of course. You just quoted, that's the first ever Jose Marimio, quite. It's good though, isn't it? It's that thing where you go, it's a real sort of test.

Starting point is 00:34:23 It's character versus reputation because your reputation is being destroyed and your character is who you know you are. What was the loveliest text or cool you had? Like, who was there for you? There was a few. There was James Corden would really stand out. So when I got,

Starting point is 00:34:37 it was the tag thing, actually. And he was in broad, He was busy winning a Tony for his performance in one man, two governors. And he called me every night. And he's an interval of his show. And he just called me. And then he called me, and I said, no, I'm fine, fine, fine, but then he called me the next night. Because he knew it wasn't.

Starting point is 00:34:51 And then he called me the next one because he knew it wasn't. And he just kept on calling. That's amazing. Yeah, it's a lovely thing. And when you sort of, it just, and all it teaches you is like, I can't do that for him, but I could do that for someone else. And when it comes along, that thing of like, being the person that calls when something awkward happens, or when something terrible happens, phoning and saying,

Starting point is 00:35:09 I don't know what to say, but I thought I'd call it. Because no one remembers what you're saying. I think it's... Just remember you with that. Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out there's a reason for that. As we age our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline.

Starting point is 00:35:27 They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their overall energy. I've been using it for over two years since my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with Timeline and eat your heart out, Martin Schrelli, because they've just dropped the price and it now starts at $99. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee,

Starting point is 00:36:04 plus free shipping in the US, plus they ship internationally. And right now you can get that $99, price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below. Are heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I think it's just a lovely thing when people do stuff for you which there can be zero ulterior motive. There literally can be. I'm trying to think of a good.

Starting point is 00:36:30 I can give you one from my life. So this was the moment that I became like properly, properly good friends with you, Seth. So for the people that within the last 600 episodes of the show, he only appears once a year, but he was most of the episodes for the first 400 with Johnny. And he had hurt his back. He has a bulging disc. He'd hurt his back in the gym doing flips or deadlifting or whatever he was doing at the time.

Starting point is 00:36:54 And I was on my way to drive to one of our club nights, and his house was like kind of out of the way, but not a million miles off. So I was like, I'll come over and I'll bring you something because I know what it's like, debilitating back pain. He's sort of laid up, and he's like, no, no, you don't need to come and see me. Anyway, I managed to get into his house and brought him a loaf of sorin, some I believe, some nirophon, and like went and got a hot water bottle for him and, like, he couldn't move. But he just, the classic male denial of medical problems or whatever, and he's 25, right?

Starting point is 00:37:23 He's made of rubber and magic. He'll bounce back. He'll be fine. But he was just miserable, and it felt like it sucked. And that was a palpable moment when our friendship changed from that. even though we were really good friends before, I could just tell that there was something that happened at that moment when I decided to go around with some maltloaf and pain relievers

Starting point is 00:37:42 and a hot water bottle and was like, all right, man, I got to go and be in a nightclub with 1,000, 18-year-olds. Like, I hope you're all right. And then he sent me to sex afterwards, like being teary and being like, man, that was just how wonderful. Like, what a lovely thing to do. You are right, like, especially in a world where everybody is looking at for the transaction,

Starting point is 00:37:58 where effort can be so low effort, right? just sending a text. I think the bar has been lowered for what constitutes becoming a very good friend. Like you got me for my birthday one time, you got me a newspaper from the day that I was born and a printed off graph of the first episode and the biggest episode with the play count in between it. And I was never, I couldn't even take, it was left in Mike Thurston's apartment in Dubai for like two years because I couldn't fly back with it because it was so big. But like stuff like that. You know, it's just, it's really being, yeah, being better. at just aggressively going give, give, give, and figure out the next life.

Starting point is 00:38:36 Aggressive friendship. And figure out in the next life. But isn't this? BDSM friendship. You're often very good on this kind of stuff, right? You pointed out this, I thought about this a lot, right? There's a lot of books about being a good parent, but there's no books about being a good kid, right? Which is kind of interesting.

Starting point is 00:38:51 And really, it should be a book about being a family. But it's interesting. There's loads of books. There's, you know, kind of the game and stuff about pick up culture and finding women and getting women. Great. But there's very little about friendship. And actually that seems to be the thing that I think friendship is upstream of having a relationship. I think it's not gay to practice on your friends.

Starting point is 00:39:11 But that thing of like building friendships and building kind of, and that's kind of what's missing from, you know, rough and tumble play has been replaced by video games. And it doesn't work in the same way. Like there's something about that male friendship thing and building that up over years having your boys, having your guys that you're with that's really incredibly valuable. And we don't do enough about it. Robin Dunbar's got this insight. See, he was the guy that came up with 150 number.

Starting point is 00:39:33 I interviewed him once. He's brilliant. He's fantastic. And he says that you have your close group of friends, which is five, of a slot, five, very close friends. But a relationship takes up two. So relationship takes up two of the slot of five. And that would also mean that if you lose the relationship and you want to keep that same level of connection, you can't just replace your chick with a new friend. You probably need to replace them with two.

Starting point is 00:39:58 Yeah. Well, it's also that thing of like, many. tend not to do very well post-divorce because they outsource their social life to their other half. Correct. So then it's... The wife and the friends. Yeah, they're entirely isolated afterwards, which is a terrible way to be. Robert Dunbar we here. Go on, you were going to say something there. I've lost my train of thought now, but I think, you know, I always think of, um, I think

Starting point is 00:40:19 it's a lot of what we're discussing as well. I wonder if the American audience appreciates it as much as the British... Because they're so giving, dude. They're so... Americans don't understand just how pro-social they are. Like, you can be on the side of the lake. This happened. This happened the other week when we went to the Jasper Mike's house. And I was on the side of the lake and a boat just went by like, Johnica, I'm wake surfing. Like, they didn't know me. Like, yeah, sure. Went wake surfing. Like that just, you would need, in order to get to that level of friendliness, that would be a three-year project in the UK in order to warrant being invited on to.

Starting point is 00:40:59 to this thing that was part of the... I don't know, maybe it's because everyone's a... It might be an awesome thing because everyone's kind of a social transplant from somewhere else. Or it might be an America thing because everyone's a cultural transplant, you know, sort of historically from somewhere else. But I don't know. I noticed there's three types of interactions I'd have with strangers.

Starting point is 00:41:16 So interaction one would be, stranger would just not look at me. Interaction two would be, we'd mirror one of us energy, so or you give a nod. And then you'd have somebody who actually says something. I realized a lot of the time I just like mirror. So I'd kind of head down. Somebody says hello and I'll say hello back. Somebody gives me a nod.

Starting point is 00:41:35 I'll give them a knock. And if they have their head down, I'll have my head down. Versus, oh, you can just do things. You can be the leader. You're using the proportionate force of like being in a fight. It's like, well, if he's got a knife, I can use a knife. But you just always use a gun. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:51 I do wonder if we're trying to coin this. Welcome to Texas. I coined this term, which is a British syndrome. And America Syndrome is another thing. But British Syndrome, I was out for dinner the other night, a friend of mine, and he's had this employee that he's kind of complained about for the last six weeks, like issues he's trying to get him to do. When he finally sits down at dinner, he goes,

Starting point is 00:42:11 I've realized he's not no agency, he's just British. That's true. Well, you had a great razor for that on, I think it was you. Yeah, it was. Like British versus America. So you go, the British disease is cynicism, and the American disease is bullshit. is. Yeah, which is, I mean, it's great. There's a great comic, Jeff Green.

Starting point is 00:42:31 Do you have a no, Jeff Green? Great observational comic. He said, I prefer America to Britain. I'd rather be told to have a nice day, but by someone that doesn't mean it than told to fuck off by someone that does. Jeff Green, great, great comic. So I have a roller film, which is whenever I criticize Britain, I'm going to criticize America as a return or compliment Britain. Sounds like you're keeping school. I was thinking, do we, we ever had like an Elizabeth Holmes, a Sam, Sampagman Friedman, I think, We're just not playing at that level. I think that's the reason why. The level of brazenness that you need to pull that off.

Starting point is 00:43:06 I don't think any British person, except maybe Gary Stevenson, has enough self-belief to be able to drive that home. You need to have banks to rob them. Yeah, it's a good point. I'm just trying to think of it like a great huckster in the UK. That's what I mean? A great huff. Gaff in the market.

Starting point is 00:43:25 We should do it. I feel like Andrew's kind of hovering over that area, but that's the British huckster. Who? Andrew, Prince Andrew. Oh, the OG Andrew. Right, okay. Mountbatten. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:38 I got in a lift in, I was in Austin last year and I started, I got, I got in lifts. They call them elevators. Do we call them elevators? One of us calls them elevators. We call it a lift, they called them. They called an elevator. I was getting in these elevators or lifts. And I would say, people started asking me what number I was on the elevator.

Starting point is 00:43:54 Six, I'd say, you know, punching six. And I thought, I'll come back to England and I'll try this out. So, to Moraine Road, probably shouldn't have said that. Into the elevator I go, the lift I go, I say, hey, what number? What number would you like? I say number. Some people say number. Some people, it's headphones on.

Starting point is 00:44:15 And it's a starkly different experience. Having said that, I also learned about the Californian lunch. Well, I've never been to California, but apparently if you go to California, everyone says they want to have lunch with you. But they don't actually want to have lunch with you. Right, yeah. I remember a friend of mine saying to me, you know, was in Hollywood and they said, be careful.

Starting point is 00:44:35 You could die of encouragement. It's just everything's very positive. Jimmy, how do you, is this a, how do you, I feel like there's two different ways into, like, creating stuff. Right. And I feel like there's the volume method, which is like, I'm just going to write a lot of jokes and some of them are going to be good. and that sort of prints when he was recording music would just make a lot of, he'd record a song a day.

Starting point is 00:45:00 And then there's like the Leonard Cohen approach of I'm going to spend five years on Alleluia, I'm going to write 80 verses. And I wonder in comedy, are you more like, I'm just going to write, right, right, right, and some jokes are going to stick? Or I'm going to, I'm going to work on one joke for a good, for a good couple of days. No, I don't find working on them really helps. It's like they come out pretty much fully formed. And then I just, it's iteration. It's just trying new things and the audience tell you what's going to work. So the audience feedback, the audience is a genius.

Starting point is 00:45:29 They tell you what is and what isn't funny and what isn't acceptable. And you just go back to them time and time again. So at the end of the show, I still got it on me from last night. You got new jokes and then you just try the new things. That's like how you're writing your book, George, almost. Yeah. Do you set yourself a number of jokes to write? Is it like that or?

Starting point is 00:45:46 Not really. I mean, there's always like, there's always new stuff to try. There's always like, I've got a file. It's huge. I'll like, okay, and I'll print off. Okay. 10 tonight and then the next 10. And then you sort of maybe, you tweak them a little bit, but it's not a full kind of rewrite. You might tweak it a little bit if you go, I didn't

Starting point is 00:46:01 really got that at all. And that wasn't clear enough. But it's very rare that you tell a joke and it doesn't work and you can rescue it with a rewrite. It tends to be just the idea is just not there. And if they're immediate, then that's, and you're looking for the triple A's. You're looking for the ones that are going to work every single time, no matter how you deliver them. You're looking for that kind of quality. So the idea of like polishing something is kind of a different. And sometimes it's like you change the wording a little bit and it perfects it. Yeah, I remember Jason Freed said this about writing. He said, if I write it down and it just doesn't, it's not feeling right.

Starting point is 00:46:32 He said, I'm not going to come back to it. I'm not going to rewrite it. I'm just going to leave it, start again the next day. And it's like a different route in, which is funny because I have a very different. I don't particularly work like that. Do you ever hear the Bob Dylan Leonard Cohen story when they met up? They met up for lunch. And he talked about.

Starting point is 00:46:49 Hallelujah, 80 verses, four years or whatever. No, no, it was like, it was Bob Dylan went, I think he said, but he said, how long did it take you write, um, uh, all along the watch hour? And Bob Dylan said, 20 minutes. And he said, how long did it take you write? Hallelujah. And he said, 12 years, because he was embarrassed that it had been 20. But it was like, it's a long time. Yeah. But what's your process? Do you, you sit and, well, I, I like writing. I think that you can't really write. You can only rewrite. So I, I, I guess I'm not writing jokes, you know. But is that, but that thing of like, you can't write, you can only rewrite. Like, like, I think the idea of doing, you do masses of stuff. I think the reason most people don't succeed in the arts is because they get into it because they like really good stuff. They've got great taste.

Starting point is 00:47:29 But then they don't stick around long enough to be able to produce good stuff. It's like you start bad and then you get good over time. If I was going to give one piece of advice to anyone trying to learn to write, I would say, honestly, I would forget quantity and I would think about trying to genuinely write one good sentence or maybe even two and then maybe just a good paragraph. And I feel like the real problem is people can go their whole careers without actually writing anything good. And what you really need to do is you need to understand what it's like to write just one thing really good. Because a great book is just like it's a lot of great sentences,

Starting point is 00:47:58 which then form paragraphs and whatnot. And I remember who was it? Hunter S. Thompson. He rewrote the Great Gatsby, just to know what it felt like to write a good book. And I do think there's something in that. But by hand, yeah, just to get the feeling of extraordinary. I have a collection of, you've seen it the folder of what I like about what I like, and I turn it into an app as well where it's like starts, intros, middles, ends, quotes, reference setups. What was the Orwell's five rules that you keep banging on about? I only bang on about them when I read your way.

Starting point is 00:48:33 I can't remember them. I think number one, actually, number one I love, it's never put, never, actually, can we get on the internet there? Can we look at up? First one is, I think the first one is just basically never put something in print, which you've seen in print is the idea. So essentially just avoid cliched all times. And I think if you want to quickly improve any essay, you could drop it into Claude,

Starting point is 00:48:55 or you could just look at it yourself and say, have I seen this sentence been written down before? Well, like, I pulled you up because you said yesterday I was editing your writing and you said, what did you say about church? Something like during his darkest days is a really great example of this. It's just been said, if you go to Google search and you put it in quotation marks, during his darkest days will have been said millions and millions of times. And it's the debris of someone else's thinking. That's what a cliche is.

Starting point is 00:49:19 And you really want to just write original sentences. If you read East of Eden by Steinbeck, it's the last sort of big book I read, and you drop his sentences into Google. No one said sentences like that, like the whole book. And I looked at the chapter you had and drop a couple of things into Google search, direct quotes. And it's just been said before. Yes. It's a very good proxy for like average writing, which your book's definitely not. Tolkien nervous, maybe.

Starting point is 00:49:41 What's the drop it on the, this is one of the best ones you give me, the drop it on your far idea? Okay. So this is really about going from abstract to concrete writing. So essentially, anything abstract, I'm trying to think of an example is, yes. Let's say someone's writing, trying to come up with an app for fitness. And they said, I got an app. The idea is to regain your fitness. You can't really visualize regaining your fitness.

Starting point is 00:50:06 And what you want to do is you want to take that and sort of convert it into objects, physical objects, which you can drop on your foot. So Chris, let's see how we go. Regain fitness. Drill into that. Like, drill into regain. What do we mean? What could we mean by regain fitness?

Starting point is 00:50:24 Give me an object. Give me a starting point and an end point for regaining fitness. Not loving your body to loving your body. You could drop a body on your foot, so that would be closer. What you could also drop on your foot would be a couch. Well, so this is, yeah. A couch. Couch to 5K.

Starting point is 00:50:41 You know where this is going. It's huge. That's the Nike thing, right? Yeah, because it makes it really. You know, if you can, and people think in analogies, really. You know, it's like that. If you can't see it, it's not there yet is a really good writing advice. So if you can't visualize it, you know, it's not there yet.

Starting point is 00:51:01 That's a great kind of, I mean, that kind of add copy as well, the way you've kind of got that thing where it just feels like that was always going to be a hit. But it wasn't, of course. They could have just called it the app. So Couch to 5K was done by a guy in New York. I forgot his name, but he was living with his mum at the time. It was sort of this crazy breakout application which had no right to be. And I think then it got bought by the BBC and it's the most downloaded fitness app of all time.

Starting point is 00:51:24 And that's like the I think ideas are, but I feel like even ideas are somewhat underrated. Like you really just need the conviction to do them and those two things together. There was a Nike advert or Nike or an ad did, I think Nike, during the Boston Marathon. And it said, runners welcome. walkers tolerated. And it was great, but it was the difference here was the taste of the direction. It was going in. It was so effective and catchy that all of the people who walked during the marathon,

Starting point is 00:52:00 which is probably most people, most people are going to walk at some point. And I got into a lift. Fuck me in L.A. at the start of the year. And there was a woman wearing Hokka, mid-50s, something like that, nicely dressed like fit, mom, Women, like off to the gym or do whatever. And both of them were talking about how much they dislike Nike. And both of them referenced that campaign.

Starting point is 00:52:21 One of them was wearing hokers. The other was wearing rads or something. And they said, oh, yeah, that campaign was just, runners welcome, walkers tolerated. They do. They're so out of touch now in any case. And they had this, everyone has a degree of distaste for the top dog. I can't wait for that fall to happen.

Starting point is 00:52:40 And especially if you play the out of touch, I don't care about the, every man game. Like there's two things that are cohesing together there to like really move in the same direction. They've gotten so big they've forgotten their roots. Right. It's like it's a cliche. You're playing into a trope that makes it very easy for somebody to attack you. So yeah, I think they put their phone in there's like there's a few of those aren't they kind of examples in marketing where people have absolutely shut the bed like done really badly. Was it, uh, was it Ratner, the jeweler in in the UK? Was a guy called, who gave a speech where he said, are we just sell fucking tat

Starting point is 00:53:14 and it just shut down your business yes yes yes in a single in a single tweet keep going it was like it wasn't a tweet it was like pre that it was like an after dinner speech

Starting point is 00:53:24 where we just about it's just fucking shit that we sell but it you know like it's funny because let's say you have Ron Seale the fence painter and they say what do they say

Starting point is 00:53:33 it does exactly what it says on the text and that's different to just still in tat but that's because the language of fence painters that's how they talk whereas jewelers you know they probably don't want

Starting point is 00:53:42 that don't want the word tat to be used as they look at their Rolex. Doesn't this all just come down to your favorite word of positioning? A position. Here it is. The most famous UK example of a jewelry store saying their own product is bad is Gerald Ratner, CEO of Ratner's group, who in 1991 described his company's products as total crap. This caused a 500 million pound loss in value and forced a rebranding to Cignaut Group. Another recent instance is complaints regarding the website Scarlet Jewels,

Starting point is 00:54:09 which distinct from genuine scarlet jewelry to receive poor reviews. Yeah. His infamous speech stated that some of his earrings were cheaper than a prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long. Pretty good, right?

Starting point is 00:54:22 You've got one job, mate. That's really, you know. Wow. Sell your tat. That's gone very badly. Sell your tat. It's interesting that thing of like industries that are like businesses,

Starting point is 00:54:30 industries that disappear overnight. I love the fact 1901 biggest industry in the world was whaling. Whaling? Yeah. Whale oil to like. Light. Whaling, catching whales. What's whaling? Catching whales?

Starting point is 00:54:43 Huh. Selling the... They needed the oil in order to put the lamps, right? And then the light bulb comes along. I think whaling was the biggest industry in 2001 and it had fully disappeared by 1903. Yeah, like, there's whole towns and kind of just like shut down. Well, fax machines are kind of like that. Fax machines go from everywhere to now and just the running the NHS and the traits. Horses in New York in Manhattan. Horses in New York, yeah. And it's always the technology that's the... Because they brought in so many... many laws to get rid of horses in New York because the horse manure problem. You know, the reason

Starting point is 00:55:13 there's steps up to brownstones in New York is because the horse shit was that high. And there's the whole thing of like smelling salts like people, because the whole place smelled horrific. It was just horses. And if the horses died, they had to chop them up, wait for them to atrophy, chop them up in the street and then cart them off using other horses who then died on the way. So the whole thing was just, it was an absolute mess. And they kept on bringing in new laws, new laws, new laws to try and get, you know, attacks on horses and other tax on horses. And then Henry Ford comes along, invents the motorcar, and people go, yeah, yeah, we don't need horses. What do you think is that now? What do you think five years, 50 years, 100 years will be like, oh, it's got?

Starting point is 00:55:49 Well, I think it's a very interesting question, because obviously the AI thing, we can see the jobs it's going to take, but we can't see the jobs it will create. But I wonder with that whether... I think talk shows would be quite obvious point. Is there still... It's close to Ginny's heart, careful. No, no, I mean, that... I think you're, like the, from old media to new media, I think the idea that something like, you know, I love Saturday Night Live, but I can't see it being around in 10 years.

Starting point is 00:56:18 Like the, I remember going to see a recording last year and just thought, wow, this is incredible. The amount of people to put this show on to make this happen, it was like, it was really genuinely, like, spectacular. And then you just go, well, I can't imagine this being, it can't compete with people just doing funny sketches on their phone. Because the size of the screen seems to be inversely proportionate to the amount of money you can make.

Starting point is 00:56:38 So the movie business might not last. I just think what's funny, though, is all the sketches on the phone. I can't really recall one. Whereas I think of carrot in the box. Like, yeah, I 10 cats. Sean Locke. And I, you know, it's, I think TV weirdly sticks. Like, I can't remember Instagram.

Starting point is 00:56:56 Well, there's a great essay by, um, who's the guy that wrote abundance with, um. As for Clyle, Derek Thompson. Derek Thompson has a great podcast and he did this episode called, he wrote this essay called Everything is Television. And his argument was, everything is television. television won't disappear because TikTok is television. You don't think of it in that way because it's streaming. YouTube is the biggest TV channel in the world.

Starting point is 00:57:17 Of course it is. It's television. Facebook isn't social media. People think it's like, but that would be for us to know each other and be sending videos to our family and sharing them with friends. That's kind of the idea. But the reality is people watching videos that other people have made that they don't know. That's television. It all comes back to it.

Starting point is 00:57:34 It's a bit of a shame because Gavin and Stacey, Christmas special, was sort of, in my opinion, probably actually the World Cup's on right now, but the last time, like, the UK came together for a thing. I've got a theory on this of why Christmas TV is such a big deal in the UK. I'm not sure what it's like in the States, but Christmas TV is a big deal, not because it's better than the TV the rest of the year, but because people sit down as a family and watch the big fat quiz

Starting point is 00:57:55 and watching it together, it's just nicer to do things in a communal way. Like people used to gather around a fire, and then around the radio, and then around the TV, and it was all great, and then we went off to our bedrooms with our phones. more communal time if you're generally, where you're back in your old childhood bedroom or your old childhood house or whatever. You're with the family's coming over to you

Starting point is 00:58:16 and it's a meaningful, slightly slower-paced, sedate moment there. So I think, yeah, if you could own anything. I mean, that has to be why Harry Potter just keeps on getting run back over and over again, right? It's the thing that you watched when you were a kid. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be.

Starting point is 00:58:43 And whoop tracks all of it. Sleep, strain, heart rate, recovery. It's like dog the bounty hunter, but instead of criminals, it's tracking down your bad habits. All of this data gets pulled into a dashboard that actually tells you what to do with the information. And now the brand new whoop 5.0, 7% smaller. It's got two weeks of battery life, shows you how fast you're actually aging. It comes with hormonal insights for women managing the cycle or pregnancy. or men hiding from it. Once you see the patterns, you start making better decisions. It's that simple.

Starting point is 00:59:10 Best of all, you can join for free, pay nothing for your Woop 5.0 strap. Plus, you get your first month for free and there's a 30-day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new whoop 5.0 and that 30-day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.com.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.com.wop.com slash and wisdom. Speaking of technology, a new study claims that an eight-minute conversation with chat GPT can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about 20% and these effects last at least two months. I'm always worry of tiny interventions that purport to have large and long-lasting effects,

Starting point is 00:59:50 but I don't see anything immediately fishy about this study and the mechanism is plausible. I bet most 9-11 truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously and who knew a lot about 9-11. And I think this is an underrated and positive aspect. of AI. People are worried about the hallucinations and AI psychosis, and rightfully so, but keep in mind that many people do not know basic, uncontroversial truths about their world. 37% of Americans, a plurality, believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 40% don't understand how a control group works. 26% think that the sun goes around the earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them

Starting point is 01:00:29 with a more accurate view of reality. I think it's an interesting point, because conspiracy theories for me are a symptom of a much larger problem, which is we've lost sort of trust in institutions. But I think that's, they kind of, they bubble up when you have no, no faith in institutions, because you desperately want to believe in something. You desperately want to kind of trust someone, but you don't trust the government anymore, and you don't trust the medical profession, and you don't trust academics anymore. So you kind of, you're desperately searching. So these kind of more and more kind of incredible theories come to the fore. I mean, not to say that people do conspire to do things. That's a different thing. I mean like conspiracy theories in their

Starting point is 01:01:06 traditional form, like an unforesifiable sort of theory. Let's say, for example, the coronavirus pandemic happened. It never happened and it happens in 2026, which are in. I wonder what the AI bots would be saying about the coronavirus. Oh, that's fascinating. Because people would be arguing online with other people based on what their bot had told them to derive from the fact. As well as you would have the Fable model, for example, would have replied because it would be around biology. You can't ask any basic questions to Fable right now around biology because they might be thinking you're printing a 3D virus. So everyone would be asking Kimmy and... Oh yeah, you'd be getting the Chinese models, which would be interesting the cause and effect, the full circle.

Starting point is 01:01:48 How long do you think, I mean, I'm not, who's to say AI didn't create COVID? Who's to say that it wasn't, I mean, it was, it seems to be now people are saying it was created in a lab. Do you think this technology arrived when we think it arrived? Or do you think it's been around for 10 years? I think it's arrived when it arrived. Yeah, because the transformer technology that you need. Here's my favorite. Here we go.

Starting point is 01:02:10 You want to hear my favorite conspiracy theory at the moment? Okay, so there's two terrifying scenarios. One is there's a Manhattan project currently underway in America, and they're working on a AGI. It's the big thing. It's the doomsday weapon is the AGI, and they're working on it, and it's called Solstice. and it's somewhere in America, we don't know where, but that's being worked on, right? Second terrifying scenario, they're not.

Starting point is 01:02:40 Jimmy, when do you think of all your ideas? I've got the days free. But that is, that's a, it's an interesting kind of weird thought, right? Which would you rather? Well, I'd rather they were working on it. I think that it's, uh, it's kind of happening, right? They're putting ever more powerful computers together and people are worried about the wrong thing. I think people are worried about losing their jobs, but I think if you point AGI at the environment,

Starting point is 01:03:09 it might be able to solve the problem of net zero, might get to that much quicker. And if you point it at physics, who knows? I mean, physics is real power in a way that nothing else is. Every other science is stamp collecting. Physics really changes the world. And there's been no, you know, Eric Weinstein and... 60 years or so. was always saying nothing's happened for 50 years.

Starting point is 01:03:32 String theory has just kind of gone a different way. But if there was a unifying theory of physics, I mean, if that could happen, that'd be extraordinary. And whoever had that would have some power. But if you saw it, Sir Claude released Fable, and then they put, they had the issues with the government, then Fables come back, and then you had this kind of cock tease, shall we say, where they would say, you've got access to it until the... 5th of July, and then Chachachibb T's released their new model. So Claude of Nalore, you've now

Starting point is 01:04:04 got access to it to 12th of July, and it moved it again. And what you're actually seeing is, because there's so much competition right now, it's so hard for any of them to run away or create any form of monopoly. So I think the odds to it being a Manhattan project, it feels way more like there's going to be 15 at watts. I get the sense that the COVID thing. I certainly don't think that AI would have had that much to do with it. Had Annie Jacobson on the show, who wrote nuclear war, a countdown scenario. Oh, yeah, that was a fun episode. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:37 Well, her new one is about bio-weapons. It's about El Abl. And she said the Russians during the 80s, when we are not working on enhancing weapons to make them, bio-weapons to make them more transmissible, they had programmed into the virus. they'd programmed euphoria in. That's how Panishas this plague was, it was called a super plague,

Starting point is 01:05:06 and they'd programmed euphoria in as one of the side effects, because if people felt euphoric, they would go out and dance. Right. And then they would become their own super spreaders. So they'd even put a behavioral modifier into this super plague. And apparently this thing, this existed, but never got out, was never used, but probably sits in some bank, some frozen, like virus banks.

Starting point is 01:05:31 Here's a hot tech, right? So in the late 80s, there was a thing called mad cow disease. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. They thought everyone was going to go crazy that at...

Starting point is 01:05:38 Bs 40 or whatever it was cool. Yeah. Maybe it happened. The guy that hosts the apprentice is president now. Maybe we all went crazy. Everyone has got mad cow disease. Maybe we all went crazy

Starting point is 01:05:49 and just no one noticed because we all went crazy. I tell you what? The amount of phones I've seen in saunas, it wouldn't shock me. You've gone. You get your phone on you. That's the real.

Starting point is 01:06:00 I don't have my phone on me. Describe your phone. I could sell my phone. It's a Quinn F-22 Pro. It's it has applications, but it's too useless to get addicted to. Great. You purposely dumbed yourself. No, genuinely.

Starting point is 01:06:16 Like it's, actually, I don't really like talking about it because I got it because I hate these people who get their new phones and it's all stupid phones. And they're like, they make it their thing. So I feel kind of self-conscious talking about it on the show. My younger brother Jack had this phone and he got the non-pro version, which is a bit of a mistake because it's actually just too useless to text on. But I got the pro, Quinn F-22 Pro. And I, but I love Jack, because I love Jack, because I love Jack, because I love Jack, what's this phone? And I feel like the way to get people onto these phones is to not ram it down people's frozen. It's true. Sometimes you've got to let them know because Harry came up for Austin for my birthday. Say goodbye to him. I don't hear anything for a few days. I'm like, what's happened to it? And they finally gets back in touch via WhatsApp on his desktop. And he's like, what did you do to your phone again? You throw a. it in the river? I threw it into the car. I didn't throw it into the river because that would have been disrespectful to the fishes. I threw it into the bin by the river. And then I switched

Starting point is 01:07:07 out. I really, if I come across a lot of money, I think it's what I would like try and change in the world. I just, I do feel it really depressing. Like, you walk into a sauna in Austin and it's an epidemic of people with airports in. I'll take use to a sauna in Austin where there's, there's, people with something else. There is someone in a sauna right now listening to the airport. Going, why they shaming me? Genuinely, look at your life if you were doing that. I feel like you might feel like you got it all worked out. If you have that one step, you are doing it, you haven't got nothing worked out.

Starting point is 01:07:38 Wait there for a second. How do you feel about people that wear AirPods during massages? Sorry, Chris, how do I feel about people wearing AirPods? Full stop, you're done. Right, but okay. During massage, you're also done. It doesn't change the question. I listen to audio books during a mass art, yes.

Starting point is 01:07:58 All the time. No, no, no, no. You're being very diplomatic about how. Even during the happy ending? That's what audio book? He speeds it up. Yeah, that's where I get to Napoleon. My younger brother works in politics, and his idea is to understand what real people think,

Starting point is 01:08:13 and he does a bloody good job at that. But I said to him, Will, what are real people think? And I'm in a taxi with him. And he's got his damn airports in trying to listen to what real people think. I said, Will, it's a taxi driver. I said, Will, why don't you ask the taxi driver what real people think? I think it's bonkers. Was he getting a massage at the same time?

Starting point is 01:08:26 You need to stop wearing AirPods during massages. Why? I just, it is the perfect... Wait, is he massaging you? That's true. It's more a client... It's a client service worker dispute. This guy's not even paying attention.

Starting point is 01:08:43 Listen to this gibberish as he's on. Go on. I just, it is the perfect time to be with your thoughts, to do some good thinking without feeling like you're wasting time, you're falling behind, being in the dark playground, being in a reverse version of it. We talked about that earlier. I think boredom is unappreciated serenity. And allowing yourself to be bored, like planning it is quite a good idea.

Starting point is 01:09:05 Like train travel, it's quite good to be on a train, be bored, be bored, be on an airport, be bored. I'm bored enough. I'm bored enough time alone why in thoughts. When I'm having a massage, I want to have Napoleon. Speed lesson to. I drew Roberts 40 hours. I didn't realize Napoleon even recorded an audio book. This is tremendous.

Starting point is 01:09:21 Yeah, I slightly disagree. To play a devil's advocate, how do you know you're not in the mass hysteria of TV's going to give you square eyes? Like, calculate should be banned. Luddite syndrome. Yeah, Luddite syndrome. How do you know when you're going against smoking

Starting point is 01:09:39 versus being a Luddite? I don't know when I'm going against smoking. Because, like, how do you know you're pushing back against something because I'll tell you what? I will tell you why. I will tell you why. because my, what I'm doing is I'm doing nothing. So you can't, it's not like, I mean, it's not like I'm smoking cigarettes here.

Starting point is 01:09:55 My idea of where I'm trying to move the needle is just less, less, less, less, less. So if you're smoking, you're doing something. If you're, if you're going skiing, you're doing something. What's a different example? If you're, if you're saying, like having energy drinks, that's, you, you, what did Talib say, subtract. So if you're subtracting, you can't go, you can't go wrong if you're subtracting. That's, I think there's something to this. I think the, that whole anxious general.

Starting point is 01:10:19 Jonathan Haidt thing of like, it's not good for kids. And there's this kind of, you know, they think it's, social media is as harmful of cigarettes for kids. But I think what we need to do then is give kids cigarettes. Yes. You know, the idea of like, and there's kind of a joke on the language, but you go actually, it's the point that he makes in that book is not just banned social media. It's banned social media and let kids play outside. Because they can't have infinite freedom online and then no freedom in the real world. And really, it's the freedom in the real world that we haven't quite, everyone's kind of on this idea. of like, oh yeah, we'll take away the phones from the kids. But actually, what else do they get to do? It's interesting that, well, the average person spends six hours a day on screens. We haven't gained six hours. Days aren't now 30 hours long. So off the time that we had previously, that's had to get squeezed from somewhere. Yeah. Which means that you've lost time doing other things. But certain smart people are getting massages while listening to stuff. So there's certain there's outliers out there that have gained the system. They're geniuses. Outing me publicly for my audio but during massage, you've got a worse phone edition of me, my friend.

Starting point is 01:11:19 I don't disagree. I've got it. I've got, I'm horrendous with my phone. I'm saying that the massage is not the place to have your iPods. It is weird now that the technology. It was kind of the thing of like I've got the new phone, the new thing 10 years ago. Now the most opulent thing you could do is say, oh, we went to a cabin and there was no Wi-Fi and we just put away our things. It's the most opulent thing. The meditation retreat with no screens. Yeah. What are the what are the wealthy well doing now? What are the billionaires doing now? They're trying to live without that social media without those screens. How is the retreat? It was intense, yeah, to do seven days. I mean, it'll be the longest time since I was probably a child. There would have even been a TV in the room, right? One of the guys, there was an AI interface that could help you with your practice. What?

Starting point is 01:12:09 That sounds like absolutely defeating the purpose. Look, I didn't use it. I didn't use it. If none of the facilitators were available and you were coming up against some blocks in your practice, there was a chatbot that was on a laptop and had been sort of imbued with all of the principles of the thing. But the interesting thing, this was Timor who was one of the... They have fucked up so hard there. I didn't go into that.

Starting point is 01:12:31 I didn't go into that room. I didn't use that. However, he thought, am I able to find out the England score by messaging the meditation chatbot? So he's trying to go... Every time that I sit down to meditate, I keep being distracted by wondering what the England's score was, would it be possible for me to find out so that I can get back to my practice, please? But no, fascinating. Northern California, it was J-H-A-N-A. It was also OpenAI's Global Reset Week. So a lot of the engineers were off from work. They have two global reset weeks,

Starting point is 01:13:05 which is basically enforced holiday as a way to try and sort of front-run people not getting burnt out by saying, hey, you can't come into work, essentially. So I go and there's a bunch of the guys, a bunch of the guys from Open AI, but there's also all of their main competitors from Anthropic and a bunch of other guys that are in there from Google as well. So there was kind of like low-key, silent meditation retreat turf wars going on between people at the forefront of AI development. That was kind of interesting.

Starting point is 01:13:34 And yeah, like you kind of learn, the particular school of meditation I was doing, which was Jarner, you're learning to allow conductivity through your emotions. and that is to allow them to move freely without any constriction. So you're noticing and releasing mental tension. It's like primarily what you're doing. But that drops down into emotional tension. What you realize when you come back into the world is how much of your life is spent

Starting point is 01:14:00 constricting emotional tension because there's times when emotions come up, well, it's not appropriate for it. You might feel a little overwhelmed as you're walking through the airport, which everybody did as we went reintegrated back into society. well that's not the time for you to talk about how I feel so scared and awkward and this is too much for me it's like no you you swallow down the overwhelming wildfires in Europe and the fat guy presenting the football on the on the screens and you just sort of move past it also it's very difficult to hear what your soul is whispering to you when the world's shouting at the same time so you start to hear far more fleeting thoughts that come up a lot of the thoughts that you wouldn't have been able to able to pay attention to if you're regularly even talking to people, let alone being on screens. So that was kind of interesting. What was your soul whispering to you, Chris? I was all whispering to me. Probably fucking spend more time in silence, I think. It was quite meta.

Starting point is 01:14:58 It's vegetarian, which meant that almost everybody's digestion was ruined for the first three or four days, lots of beans, lots of tofu. They're trying to do group meditation with 40 people in a room while there's farting going on is relatively interesting. Some guy, I have no idea how, but entered the retreat single and left the retreat with a girlfriend. So that is the level of game. That boy's got game. That's the level of gay. None of us could poll at the side meditation.

Starting point is 01:15:26 How did the guy? I don't know. Honestly, just she a frame. I think just straight up frame. Oh yeah, not like you. Your tiny little forearms. That's true. Anyway, he was, it was really good.

Starting point is 01:15:37 enjoyed it, very intense. The most interesting thing is then coming back and having your old patterns come into conflict with your sort of new system, new worldview. And it takes a good bit of time. I feel like titrate. I couldn't use my phone.

Starting point is 01:15:54 I just simply cut. It was, I know it felt very icky, very sterile. After just staring at trees, the only thing that I was looking at was trees. Yeah, a few points by saying this. It's the most Chris William. Simpson thing ever that I've been trying to get this man to take a holiday for, he's not been what I call it proper holiday for five years.

Starting point is 01:16:13 So then he goes and does a John, a seven day, he'd sign the meditation retreat. But even Goplin's his own holiday. I think an interesting question I have around the phone stuff. Question. Question. There's a great guy on Twitter called Chris Lakin. And his whole idea is that the phone itself might be Chesterton's fence. Show what Chesterton's fences?

Starting point is 01:16:34 Yes. So it's this idea of, if you see it. offense, don't take it down until you understand why it's there. And he helps a lot of people with a phone addiction, and then we'll often discover two days later they've got a bacon problem, or they've got a porn problem. And actually the phone was never the problem. The phone was the solution. And if you actually get a little bit deeper, the phone addiction goes away. And I do wonder how much of the phone addiction is actually a solution to a much great problem. I think it might be that the, we've spoke about this. Mark Fisher talked about this before he died, about the, the

Starting point is 01:17:07 idea that we've privatized mental health problems. We sort of think it's a personal failing for people to be depressed or anxious. And actually, I think it's a societal problem. We're not organizing our society correctly for people to flourish. I think it's like the phones are kind of a symptom of a much larger problem within our society that we're quite sort of isolated. We're kind of looking for something to do. We're not in groups, not with other people. We'll go back to the thinking of your hands, mouth, fee. Feet. Step count massive. be down. Hands, you're using your hands on your phone, but

Starting point is 01:17:41 you're not using your hands like how most humans used to throughout history. You wasn't... Say what? It's what? Go on, what you got? When Winston Churchill was going through The Black Dog? The Black Dog. He would put up 200 bricks a day.

Starting point is 01:17:58 Apparently was actually a terrible bricklayer. The bricklayers had to go in afterwards and do it. Fix it. But Churchill, just to keep his mind at bay, he would do something with his hands every single day. So when you lose the lack of feet, hands and mouth, I do think that can be not necessarily a full explain of mental health problems, but it definitely contributes. It's interesting that thing of like how much is a hardware problem, how much is a software

Starting point is 01:18:20 problem? Like how much of like, if you meet someone that's, if you've got a friend really going through a tough time, it's like, are they sleeping eight hours? Are they eating well? Are they exercising? Are they walking in nature? Are they seeing their friends? Like, you cover that sort of simple stuff.

Starting point is 01:18:34 But it's very difficult to regulate that stuff when you're feeling terrible. It's like you get to aspire. The most absurd one was when it was a study that came out. It was like a metronalysis of all the causes of depression or the biggest treatments that have an impact on it. And the big headline was exercise being to SSRIs, and that was the huge thing that made like global news. But if you actually go into the meta-analysis, exercise is number five on the list. SSRIs are further down. Number one on the list, it's just an absolute sleeper that nobody talks about.

Starting point is 01:19:05 Dance therapy. dance therapy outperformed exercise and it's interesting more than you have a lot of the benefits of exercise but you're with people and you're out of your own head with music well also you haven't got

Starting point is 01:19:17 you haven't got headphones on when you're dancing whereas if you're exercising you have headphones it makes me think when did we get evolved enough to be depressed yeah I guess there's kind of it's like we're busy busy fighting sober tooth tigers for a while like too busy

Starting point is 01:19:34 I think it's that thing where we have a, like if you really want to know how privileged you are, how far into the future are you planning? Because I think poor people have no future. And I mean that literally. Like, if you're living hand to mouth and you're thinking about the next meal, you're not even thinking about what you're doing tomorrow. You're just trying to get through the day. And then really wealthy people think on like, oh, I wonder my grandkids, I need to make sure they're okay. It's like it's a different time frame. But I think that thing about having too much time. Yeah. We, my dad, I got three brothers and my dad would, he was a radio presenter back in the day and he'd, he'd work a night shift in radio and then he'd work a day shift teaching radio. And he just didn't, I slept in the car for a couple of years. He just didn't have enough time to get down, you know, when you've got kids to feed it's. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:22 That is a hell of a double shift. Radio by night and teaching radio by day. Yeah, my dad's great. He was, he was an electrician. He really wanted to, this is kind of a little story about like the power. a teacher because he wasn't the smartest cookie in the shed and when he was from he was from whole and he was he was disadvantaged right there he was in a um his great his great grandpa built whole prison um and he's in this little classroom and he's listened to Noel Edmund's the last ever radio show because his big dreams to be a radio star and um and he had this teacher i can't remember the teacher's name but like he thought he was going to be told off wearing a cap to cover the you know the big old headphones he used to use and says what dry what are you doing dry?

Starting point is 01:21:02 And he says, No one of them is the last ever radio show. I'm listening to it. And teacher goes, carry on dry. And he went on to, he won a Sony award. His career was very up and down. But, you know, and it's just an example of like, I don't know. I love it when teachers just acknowledge actually what's important in kids, you know, upbringing. Yeah, it's lovely.

Starting point is 01:21:25 It's lovely. Is your father still with us? Is he still not looking around? Yeah, he's still looking around. Thinking radio, I don't think he'd mind me say this now, you get fired a lot. It's show business. Like, you're in one show, you're out of the next. So we play articulate as a fact.

Starting point is 01:21:37 You all know articulate. The game where you have to describe individuals. And my dad will just, he infuriates us because he'll constantly just say, interviewed him and we'll go, come on, dad. And he goes, Joe, I think he was trying to describe Joan Armour trading once. And he shouts at my mother, Sam, drop the pilot, interviewed him in a way. And mom was just like, but I don't know. It's kind of a great thing now because radio is about, obviously it's like old school

Starting point is 01:22:00 showbiz, like being an actor or being a presenter, you're waiting for someone to bring you flowers. You're waiting for someone to come along and give you permission to do the thing that you really want to do. And now with new media, it feels like that permission is already, you give it to yourself. You go, well, no one's stopping me. I could just start a podcast and interview people and do whatever. It's what you did in a bedroom in Middlesbrough. And it's just kind of, you know, you give yourself permission.

Starting point is 01:22:27 As long as you keep doing the thing, kind of it happens. And Substack has done the same thing for writing that YouTube did for video and that Apple Podcasts and Spotify did for audio. It's the same thing. Yeah, Substackers, I used to have this joke that if aliens looked at human reading and writing data, it's going up. But then as soon as you zoomed in, it's just subtitles and text messages. Everything else is like collapsing.

Starting point is 01:22:57 Yeah, they do talk about people being kind of, post-literate now. Like not, they're not, people aren't reading books. I had this realization this week, what we're talking about earlier around being wailing going out from 1901 and then, sorry, being the number one and going out. Have you used whisper flow much yet? I've been told to. It's, but yeah, from a transcription perspective, I, because I realized they write so much that that muscle, and it's so, you'll know that in anyone, Harry, it's quite a, it's an arduous task, or there's only so much writing you can do per day until you exhaust it. And as a, as a result of writing so much, I'd struggle to reply to text messages. Because it'd be using the,

Starting point is 01:23:33 it's like, I've trained my triceps all day. Now, someone's asking me to do dips, legit, I'm for fuck's sake. And with whisperflow, I'm now suddenly getting so much out there. And I was like, oh, people are going to stop writing. This is going to become a bigger and bigger trend. People would be writing. You think speech to text. And read it as well. I think both of those two things would, unfortunately, be short. So Americans are more likely to place a gambling bet than read a single book. Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022, only 38% read a novel or short story. Study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day, from 28% in 2004 to 16% in

Starting point is 01:24:16 2023, gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book, with 57% of Americans placing a bet last year, but only less than that. half reporting reading a book of any kind. And this included audio bucks. They included audio books in that. I wonder is there, I've got, okay, my theory at the moment. Here's my, here's my big theory. Friction is very good in life, right? All the best things involve friction. So if you look at a TikTok, it's very low friction, right? But then you look at a YouTube video for five minutes, there's a bit more friction. A TV show, that's half an hour. Okay, it's a bit of an effort. A movie. A lot of friction. You read a book.

Starting point is 01:24:56 I mean, come on, this is arduous. But you get so much more out of the thing, the more friction there is. It's like the TikTok video you can't remember. No one ever says, oh, man, you've got to see my favorite TikTok video from 2025. It's awesome. Like, it's just, it's nothing. It's gone. And the things that involve friction seem to seem to be better.

Starting point is 01:25:14 But in all areas of life, like the exercise, sports, arts, anything, more friction is better. I also feel like it's just a little bit about the story you tell yourself. So if I was, when I personally watched a lot of TikToks and Instagram and whatnot, I would just tell myself that I was a bit of a loser. And I walked around thinking that. And then when I read a full book, you know, I'm like, bloody hell. Like, I can do things here.

Starting point is 01:25:34 And I think you really transmit it into the day. You put me on to Stoner. That was a wonderful book. It is a wonderful book. What's it about? It's about a guy called William Stoner who lives on a farm with his parents. And he says to his dad, dad, I want to go to university and learn about farming. And his dad doesn't say many words to him.

Starting point is 01:25:55 So his dad said, okay, whatever. Pops off to, I can't remember which university, Mississippi maybe. And he starts his farming court, and after about a semester, he flips into English. And he starts learning about books for the first time. There's a professor, and then the war starts. And the professor sort of gets... There's that amazing sequence as well, where he doesn't understand. He's like he's reading Shakespeare, and he doesn't understand what it means.

Starting point is 01:26:21 And he goes to his professor and goes, I don't know what this means. but he's like interested in it in a way that no one else is. He's like so excited by it. Like I've got to know what this means. I don't know what it means. It's like that's kind of the pivotal bit. It's a great. The thing I, I'm amazed you read it.

Starting point is 01:26:37 The thing I took from it is he marries essentially marries the wrong woman. And I think it's a, it's a, I do think it's a book. It's about so many things. But one thing is about picking the person you marry, to be honest. Because this one woman he marries really in a sort of, sort of, there's no grand moment where she, where she screws up his life. It's just sort of, it's a thousand cuts, it's a thousand paper cuts, and his life kind of just sort of becomes conservient. Was she abused by her father? She was abused by her father.

Starting point is 01:27:03 Well, no, but that's like, it's never explicitly said, but it's kind of implied. There's kind of a weird. A father commits suicide randomly on one sort of Tuesday because there was a bank run. The real advert is like the opening couple pages of the book where it starts with his death. And he works at this university and nobody really noticed. And it's such a flip-up book. because most books you have the giant hero, you have the Joseph Campbell, whereas this is a man

Starting point is 01:27:29 who lives such a mundane life, that that's actually interesting, that you see yourself or you see your potential worst self in them. One of my favorite songs ever, it's like low agency in a song. You ever heard Pearl Jam? It's called Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Talent. Long song title, and it's just a point of view of this 80-year-old woman who's never left her hometown, which she did, and the guy who has her teenage sweetheart comes into the shop that she's in,

Starting point is 01:27:59 and she recognizes him, and he no longer recognizes her. There's this beautiful line of, I changed by not changing at all. Small town predicts my fate. And every time I listen to that song, it's actually way more inspirational than the hero's journey. And Stoner's enough. So how Stoner ends is the bit I'll always remember from it is he's on his deathbed. And before I tell you the four-sentence question, which I,

Starting point is 01:28:23 stuck with me. The author of the book has a really different interpretation to everyone who read the book. It's also kind of weird. The author of the book's like, actually, no, he lived a pretty good life and he taught and he really loved English. But book, book ends and William Stoner is, he's got his wife behind him and is one kid who's sort of become an alcoholic. And he says, he just starts saying this question over and over again. He says, what did you expect? What did you expect? What did you expect? And I think what he's kind of referring to is like, like, if you actually, if you fast forwarded your life, William, when you were 20, this was always going to happen. You were going to die in like a little small old room with your wife who doesn't love you sitting by you. And he wrote one book, which he wasn't particularly proud of. And he had a lovely affair, which actually kind of sounds bad, but actually wasn't bad because his marriage was so screwed up. And he just says, what did you expect? And it was kind of thinking like, yeah, like, God, like if you don't change, you know, that's how I'll die. What did you expect, Harry? But he did, I mean, for me, I think he changed massively. Because it was a guy that was toiling the land for the first 16 years. He was like working the land really hard. And then

Starting point is 01:29:23 he made it to a university and he spent the rest of his life reading books and teaching other people about his passion for books. It's beautiful. He achieved so much. But it's like you compare to what? Well, compared to the life his parents expected, which was just physical toil and putting food on the table. And he, like, that was all factored in. And it's like, what did he accomplish beyond that? Well, no, that's enough. It's enough. And it kind of goes to that Morgan Housel line of, he talks about like happiness being your current experience. Pertility minus expectation. Yeah, which is like, what did you expect?

Starting point is 01:29:56 Well, maybe you expected too much. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, because he's outstripped his parents' expectations of him, but underperformed on his own expectations of himself, maybe. Not in the bedroom. He found a lovely young woman who was, well, not young. She was actually quite old, relatively speaking. What is it about young women today?

Starting point is 01:30:17 What is it about young women today? What is it about young women? That'll be clipped. That's it, tough, Tim. In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps and weights that you need to do, everything.

Starting point is 01:30:48 So all that you have to do is show up and lift. RP app could wipe your ass for you, it probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about training, it'll do the same for you too. Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. Heading to RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom at checkout. What's your favorite joke you live?

Starting point is 01:31:21 the last one that worked. I mean, it'll literally be the last... I try not to get attached to them, so it's that thing where you go, while I like the thing that worked the other night that worked for the first time, you go, great, that'll do. So you rip them up, rip them up, rip them up.

Starting point is 01:31:33 Yeah, it's like the new thing, the new thing, and then you're kind of putting a show together and that's kind of an exciting phase, but just whatever the latest thing is. It's interesting the good and the bad of any industry, because the good thing for you, I guess, that you get to constantly come up with new material, but it's also, like, if you're a...

Starting point is 01:31:51 Noel Gallaghan who has a two-year stretch and does those songs. Like, the leverage of that exists forever. A lot of musicians kind of, like, they don't want to end up in Las Vegas being a covers band of themselves. So it's that thing where you go, be careful what you wish for. I've constantly got to come up with new stuff. But that's also the fun bit is coming up with the new stuff. Well, we was debating this once. If you could imagine impact and then doing it over time, you've done an incredible job of doing it over multiple decades.

Starting point is 01:32:21 But a lot of musicians, they'll have that one album and then they can't repeat it ever again. Whereas some people like Christopher Nolan's probably, in my opinion, one of the best who's managed to keep going. Kanye, by the way, Kanye is the best. Like, college drop. He is. He is and stuff's a little bit. His recent stuff. College dropout, late registration, 808s and heartbreak.

Starting point is 01:32:41 Jesus. My beautiful dot is to fantasy, life of Pablo. A just completely different album. Yeah. But they're completely different albums. It's very rare. It is. It's very interesting, I think.

Starting point is 01:32:54 It's a very interesting in that thing of, like, genius. People often talk about genius, but they don't. What they're talking about is like hyper-accelerated rationality, not genius. I think genius is a different thing. That's a big word, Jimmy, can you? Well, once he has that kind of level of, he's got a level of genius where he does all the crazy stuff that he does, that's part of it. It's almost like there's a mental health thing going on. It's a cross to bear.

Starting point is 01:33:19 Exactly. Beautiful line of genius and sound to your next door neighbors, and they sometimes borrow one another sugar. And it's one of the thoughts I've had around LLMs, that you, an LLM can write good. And this may change, but right now it can write good. But it can't write great. And I think there's a little bit of a horseshoe theory with great writing. Great writing is kind like next door neighbors are terrible writing. You've got to take risks.

Starting point is 01:33:41 When you have something that's trained on the averages, it doesn't take risks. Like some of my worst ever pieces are quietly linked to my best ever writing. Yeah, I think that thing of like the average will be free in the world of AI, average will be free and the very good will be very expensive. Like, excellent will be very expensive. I think there's a sort of weird texture to when you believe in something. No one can see your belief in it, especially if its words written down on a page. But I think you can feel when someone really believes in something. And I think the problem with artificial writing or AI writing is like you don't actually believe it.

Starting point is 01:34:16 You've got it kind of from the robot. And I think there's just a weird, you can tell when you read something and you just know that the person really, really, really believe this. I believe it. I think of an advert, I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he basically has this idea I'm going to suspend a car above the chap who made the car to prove how good the suspension is of the, I think it was a Volvo. And they say, we can't get that past legal. So he says, oh, it's going to be me then. So anyway, the writer of the ad suspends him, suspends this big car which wires just above above him. And it's one of the most famous ads of all time.

Starting point is 01:34:50 And it's like that only got across the line because he just really believed in it. And I think your conviction in an idea is more important than the idea in so many cases. It's often the way with comedy, especially with like edgy jokes. Intent is much more important than content. And people intuit the intent. They just know. I think a Norm McDonald's, like, you give his material with someone else and he's going to bomb. But because Norm had this weird, like, belief in a bad joke, it would become a good.

Starting point is 01:35:18 good joke. Yeah. What could you say that no one else could say? That's his whole career. It's like only he could do that. Just a properly non-fundable human. One of the reasons that AI uses very strange tropes. I told George about this the other week. Most writing the AI's trained on, the corpus of writing that it's trained on, is not good books because most writing is not good, but it's not distinguished between the 100 greatest novels of all time and the million and millions and millions of pages of anime fan fiction that it's been trained on. So is there no waiting given? It doesn't give waiting to.

Starting point is 01:35:56 No, I don't think so. This is Dostoevsky. And even if it did, it would have to be so overly weighted, right? Some 14-year-old's seventh sequel to the Twilight series or something, they're just putting out on their like Tumblr account, that should not. It would require so much. It would basically not exist.

Starting point is 01:36:18 but it has been trained on it. Anyway, and what they did was they looked at a bunch of short stories that won a bunch of awards recently. And there was some very obscure analogies that were used, talking about his stomach swallowing a shout, which sounds like kind of evocative, but in the flow of the story felt a little bit clunky and it was a bit harsh and it didn't seem to be quite necessary so much. And they use this AI to trace where on the internet that piece of writing has been seen before. You know, you were talking about analogy being quite trite, or this sentence sounds like I've heard it before. It sounds like something that you could have. And they go and they actually find it. And they found so many of the source material pieces were random anime fan fiction websites. So that is all writing of all time, right?

Starting point is 01:37:06 Lots of it is good. Most of it's not. And the total world that has, AIs have been trained on includes this like just endless dross. It's going to end up also, I think Talib said it ends up being trained on itself a lot of the time now. Correct. And there's no way to go. I think there's going to be a big sort of premium on books pre-2020. Because you know that they've not been written by AI.

Starting point is 01:37:32 Yeah. Because you know that there's kind of no help given as well. There's no editing. They did that in the old-fashioned way. It's like losing weight before a Zambic. Yeah. There's an extra kind of flex on it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:44 Yeah. It was interesting you were talking about how, coping mechanisms. After gastric ban surgery, people sometimes commit suicide. And gastric ban surgery is quite traumatic. Sometimes the surgeons make really silly errors, like leave utensils inside of people and sew them back up or bits of gauze. But the big reason that people commit suicide after gastric ban surgery is that the reason they were overeating was probably because of an underlying emotional issue. Yeah. That's how they were using the food as a as medicine.

Starting point is 01:38:17 Bingo. And they still have the underlying issue, but they're no longer able to use the flu. Yeah. Yeah, crazy. And the same thing with the phone, right? What is the phone using chest and spats, baby? Yeah, being there to distract you from.

Starting point is 01:38:28 So you shouldn't get a gastric band fitted. I guess, I wonder what, surely, can you chat GPT, Jared, gastric band surgery? What's been the impact of GLPs on gastric band surgery? That's the whaling industry, literally. Yes. Hey, very good. That's gone.

Starting point is 01:38:45 Very good. That's gone. Yeah. When you're so quick, is it algorithmic or is it like, is it like a sort of algorithm in your brain which insert topic, you know where to go or is it intuitive? What's the, say you're roasting somebody. I mean, you don't even know. No, I don't even think of it as being quick. It's often that thing of like, I'll feel like I'm sitting on it for 10 seconds before I say it.

Starting point is 01:39:07 And the worst person for this is Leamack. Do you know Leamak? Yeah. Leamack, they often have to put a thing into the edit and add a pause before he says. the line because he's just like, plows through it. He's like, it's so quick. It's, it's, yeah, it's amazing. I had a question, uh, I had a question. It's actually, it's about, position. Do you know who the biggest comedian on YouTube is? I'll give you a, I won't give you a clue. He's actually four times bigger than every single of a comedian. Well, it ain't me.

Starting point is 01:39:37 Is it Matt Rife? No. Right. I'm trying to think about 40 million, 40 million subscribers. You'll know him. Are they very, first? I don't understand the question. No, no, I'd go Rowan Atkinson. I'd bang on. No way. Mr. Bean. Yeah, much bigger, yeah.

Starting point is 01:39:55 And I feel like there's, so I teach, I teach advertising. They're like, within Mr. Bean is the, the silent comic of, say, 21st century. And I think he has the best position. This is like the Charlie Chaplin of his day. If you want to get stuck in the mind, you want to get an idea stuck in the mind. What is positioning? Like, what do you mean? A position, I would say, is the space you own in the customer's mind, like real estate.

Starting point is 01:40:22 So say you've a picture like 100 filing cabinets or hundreds of thousands of filing cabinets in your head and they've all got labels written on them. So if we were playing this with chocolate bars, like a chocolate bar for when you're hungry, best selling chocolate bar in the world would be. Snickers. Snickers. It's the best selling chocolate bar in the world. Yeah, for a break would be Kit Kat.

Starting point is 01:40:42 Yeah, sure. And then you take this to comedy. A good example would be like English, family-friendly comedian, bring the whole family. Cicay. Cicay, McIntyre, they own that space. And then you've got like, don't take the whole family. Don't sit in the front row, especially if you're English. Right, yeah.

Starting point is 01:41:00 I was thinking Frankie Boyle. Or you've got read by Guardian readers, almost too clever for punch lines. Go on. Stuart Lee. That kind of what? Bang on. And it's like, it's the real estate you own. And I think it's, sorry, to take Mr. Beast, he is the only, like, most famous silent comedian.

Starting point is 01:41:21 Oh, sorry, Mr. Bean. Mr. Bean. Very different people. You know the Rowan Atkinson story about Italy? No. So when Rowan was first doing Mr. Bean, he's a big car enthusiast and he likes to take a holiday. So he basically carved out Italy on the sales of Mr. Bean. and said, don't sell it in Italy.

Starting point is 01:41:44 And then it's crazy. We can sell it to TV channels all over Italy. He went, no, no, I don't want to sell it to Italy. And I went, why not? And he went, so I'll go on holiday. So for the first 10 years of Mr. Bean, it wasn't available in Italy. That's great. And then after like 10 years, there was some offer or something, whatever, and they translated it and they put it on in Italy.

Starting point is 01:42:01 And it's the biggest show in Italy. Ruined his holidays. Yeah, it's ruined his holidays. Really ruined his holidays. What must have been fascinating? I wonder how many Americans know what Mr. Bean. He did a movie, right, Mr. Bean. Bean. I think people do know.

Starting point is 01:42:11 I think kids know it. And that silent comedy thing, it like shines through. That must be great for an international audience. Exactly. I think that is the point in one. It's why Charlie Chaplin was so universal because you didn't, he didn't speak. And then, I think movies started, movies then had sound again. And Chaplin was at this kind of crossover period of like, I can now talk.

Starting point is 01:42:32 But if I talk, I've kind of ruined what I've done for all these years. So I can't remember the film. I think it's called the, the Simminkarover. And it ends. And the only words Charlie Chapman never asked. is a gibberish, and that's kind of how, like, his final silent movie ends, and it's just this perfect end to a film. How would you feel, like, how do you go about fixing your position? What do you mean?

Starting point is 01:42:52 Well, I, I, I, so there's, there's, there's two things here. There's, like, a position is the space you own in the, in the, in the customer's mind. So, Jimmy's got a pretty, like, you know, you go to a Jimmy Car gig, you're going to get roasted, there's going to be stagdos, and now it's a little bit deeper, but you know what you get. There's, like, a situation which you would attend a gig for. I suppose, then there's something, positioning, which is how you organize the customer's mind. So I think Stuart Lee is a funny example of this. Like when Stewart Lee, I think he retired from comedy in 1999. And he had a good career. He was a very good career. He won an award at Hackney Prize or something like this. And then he starts writing

Starting point is 01:43:28 on TV shows like Radio 4 and whatnot. And he returns to comedy in 2001. And then I saw Stuart Lee live like four years ago. And it was really good. And Stuart Lee's kind of repositioned to the competition in very implicit. well actually not so implicitly. His set design was 1P DVDs from like modern English comics and he did lots of impressions of Russell Howard and I think basically Lee's repositioning is like is like very much us versus them. So if there's three ways to get a space in the mind, you can be first, you can be only or you can be against and Stuart Lee is very much against. Like he kind of pops like Michael McIntyre, Peter Kay, Russell Howard, James Corden in this little box.

Starting point is 01:44:09 You picture that being the mind and then and then that's mainstream. or that's like laugh a minute. And then there's Stuart Lee who, and he isn't punchline. He's like, you know, almost too clever for the punchline. Who else does like against? Like who else is positioned himself or what else has positioned himself against? So I think Trump's a pretty obvious example of that. But also even like Coca-Cola launched in 1886.

Starting point is 01:44:29 Liquid death. Liquid death. Yeah, liquid death. Pepsi versus Coke. It's interesting because you almost create, you almost create the, you know, the Dave Foster-Wallis line of the fish can't see the water. with liquid dev, you almost didn't even think about plastic water bottles because everything was plastic. And then you suddenly create, oh no, here's the water and here's the lap,

Starting point is 01:44:50 but you're creating something against that people don't even realize you could be against. Yeah, I think, what do I think? I think be against is, you probably see it more and more these days as the world gets slightly more polarized. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I don't love it in comedy because I think it's kind of the narcissism of small differences. We're all doing the same job, all trying to make people laugh. And it seems, that there's a lovely camaraderie in that that's that you're kind of missing out on. I mean, does jealousy cover the lot in comedy? I don't think it should, but I think it does occasionally.

Starting point is 01:45:22 I think there's that thing where for me, comedy has never been about that because it's not like being an actor where you go, look, there's one guy's going to be Bond, right? There's one actor that's going to be announced as the new James Bond and none of the others are going to be. And that must be heartbreaking for them. You can do the stand on Monday. It doesn't mean that the other guy can't do the stand on Thursday. Like, you can play the theatre. You can pack out the O2 for five nights. But the venue's still there. Someone else can play it the next night. And it's also that thing of like the more people that go, the more people that go and the more people that go and the more people and enjoy the experience. It's kind of like the early days of rock and roll. You go, yeah, the more people that's kind of doing the same. You go, yeah, the more and the idea that you go, well, there's different people that you like more or less. But everyone's kind of doing the same. It's the same intention. Certainly when it comes to content online, I think that the, um, grow the pie. I think that the, um,

Starting point is 01:46:10 against for balance is actually skewed in against. I think there are more people producing critiques via content about four content than there is four content, which would be relatively right. I mean, you know, in some industries, there's probably more people writing about football than there are people playing football, but there's far more people paying attention

Starting point is 01:46:34 to the playing of the football than the critique of the football. It spreads so much more fast, like, Being critical of something is incredibly memetic. Being for something is actually quite anti-nomadic. So James, Adam of James, what was the company that was slandering element? Do you remember it that James is doing the lawsuit against? Fuck, not tides.

Starting point is 01:46:54 Yeah, the AI health checking app. Yeah, like waves or something. They were slandering them with a load of fake information. They've got millions of views. It was completely like the guys butchered all of the studies, all the claims that he was making. But then the apology gets like a few thousand beams. And it's like the disparity between that. We was looking at somebody where there was this essay writer.

Starting point is 01:47:19 And you can see this a lot with people that become these professional critics where they'll have a piece that attacks a Chris or attacks somebody. And he goes super viral. And then you click on it and you scroll back. And you go, oh, they've been doing this critique thing for a while. And you go, you see when the moment they once did it, everything spiked. But if you go back further, it was just in the void. It was always optimistic or slightly created content that wasn't working, and then this thing started to work.

Starting point is 01:47:46 It's quite sad. Everybody against something is once a hopeless romantic for a person that was for something. It's like in politics, I'm really frustrated with political opinions just constantly being against things. I think in UK publics right now, like, what are you actually for? I think it's a really, it's an unanswered question. You look at all the parties and they just love to sort of disagree with each other. and they don't love to actually stand on a, you know, a table and have their own opinion. But 2012 was the year where most people voted not for the opposition as opposed to for their own party.

Starting point is 01:48:18 That was the year in America where most votes were protest votes. I am not voting for the person I don't like as opposed to I am voting for the person that I do like. Yeah, I've been creating bots before bots were controversial. And one of the bots I wanted to create on Twitter is whenever you have like a cynic or somebody where it's just quote tweaking, having a go, we're not applying everything, is just this dossier-se-se thing that then recalls them of you sense that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one. You felt that you were destined for other things, but you had no idea how to achieve them. And in your misery, you began to hate everything around you. And that's some, it's the perfect cynical line for the saying.

Starting point is 01:48:59 That's heavy. Yeah, it feels to me like there's a kind of bank account that you're supposed to pay into or withdraw from. And if you find that you're critiquing more than creating, you're kind of in negative equity. You're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're putting things into it. I've had this conversation with Eric Weinstein about like an expert's only mentality where a lot of people believe, oh, the only way that you're allowed to talk on this topic is if you're somebody that has all of the requisite qualifications and this sort of esteemed history behind you. But the The enforcement mechanism of that is people on the internet that are going to call you out. See, he doesn't actually fully understand what he means by DNA R.

Starting point is 01:49:42 Recombinate. You're like, I remember, well, that just means that nobody can ever get to play with ideas publicly. And everyone begins to be on tentahawks. And they're worried about maybe I'm going to say something that's going to get me rumbled. Like, I don't know. It doesn't create the, what is it, the Oxford manner, the ability to play gracefully with ideas. We've very much lost the Oxford Manor, the ability to say, ah, I see what you were trying to get at there.

Starting point is 01:50:09 And look, you've made some errors over this side. But I think it's interesting. Even if you're wrong about what you talked about, it's cool that you're trying to apply something from your industry to one that is new or is novel to you. So, yeah. I think that's your podcast, though, Chris, why it works. It's because it genuinely seems to fill that space.

Starting point is 01:50:28 It's okay to not have things completely worked out and we're going to work that out together. I think a lot of your conversations are. I think that's a good summary, yeah. How to understand yourself and the world around you is kind of always been the summer. And also to have, there's a person in front of me, or a bunch of people in front of me,

Starting point is 01:50:44 like how do I make them look as good as possible? How are going to try and draw out of them, the best version of them, as opposed to the opposite. There's far more people on the internet that are good at doing critique, um, take downs and breakdowns than I am.

Starting point is 01:50:58 But I'm pretty good at going, okay, where's some, as my dad would say, a streak of piss and a pile of shit sometimes, or, you know, like, silver lining on a pie. And how do you do that? Like, how do you? I think silver lining is maybe a nicer expression. I think, I think, like, I think we're workshopping writing today. I think maybe. Yeah, dad, you didn't win that one. I don't know, just, look, I understand, I think I tend to try and give people the benefit of the doubt as best I can. I tend to try and yes and their ideas as opposed to know but their ideas. stress test them in a way as you were talking about intent versus content. You're like, hey, well, what do you mean by that? I'm not saying it because I'm trying to trip you up or trying to be,

Starting point is 01:51:38 I'm trying to get you to strengthen your own argument by drawing out an area. It feels a little bit, sometimes you're having a really good conversation. It feels like running your hand across the top of a membrane and everything's kind of smooth. And then you feel a little divot in something and you're like, huh, the flow of what was being said there just felt a little bit off. oh that's because there's a you made it you said a word that I didn't understand or there's a premise that I didn't feel was fully fleshed out or you made this claim and I didn't really understand how it linked back to what we were talking about before and that's the moment where it kind of breaches the threshold of me just nodding along and listening and then me go oh can I just what do you mean by that can I ask you guys it's quite a hard question but we had always five rules of writing what would your five rules of communication be that's good um speak precisely whenever possible, which is not using more or fewer words than are needed. It's never bad to ask the question why. Then sort of, what do you mean by that? Why? What do you mean? Those little

Starting point is 01:52:43 moments, I think, allow people to dig deeper. I like it when you say, you say, like, it's very, quite infrequent, but you go, say more. Yeah. Say more. Like, just give someone and you know that they've got more. Yeah, just give them a little, a little, nothing being encouraging. It's permission. They're being polite in the podcast and going, I don't want to say too much here. I feel like I'm monologing and you go, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that permission is great. So that's yes anding.

Starting point is 01:53:08 What else would I say? Using silence is probably one of the best tools. So just shutting the fuck up and giving the room space to breathe. And okay. Well, actually, oh, there we go. It was just a half step off from the next insight that you want to give out there. And you're not making somebody rush. You're not sort of driving them through it.

Starting point is 01:53:27 those would be some. Those will be some. I think that talking is the best example that the 10,000 hour rule is a load of nonsense. Because everybody has done 10,000 hours, yet it doesn't seem to... Not everybody is a world-class conversation last. But again, very, very precise practice.

Starting point is 01:53:50 I mean, me and you had this idea a long time ago. One of our prescriptions was, if you want to get better at communication, have a fake podcast with a friend where you put your phone down on record once a week for half an hour, phones out of the room. You don't need to publish it. You don't need to put it anywhere. Listen back to it and listen to your verbal tics and the flow of your conversation

Starting point is 01:54:05 and how you talk over each other or how you actually give them a little bit. Oh, I quite like the way that. If you really, really, really want to do it. But the easiest way to do it is to actually have a project. Somebody who thinks I want to become funnier will take so much longer to become funny than somebody who has to step on stage and have all of the pressure of an audience. Someone that goes, I really want to improve my right. You're so good at writing.

Starting point is 01:54:26 How do I improve my writing? You go, are you writing for anything? Are you publishing anything at the moment? No, well, you don't have the pressure of developing your writing skill. Oh, you've done really well with your communication. Are you part of a project that requires you to communicate with enough pressure and scrutiny that means that you need to hone the skill? And if not, I think this is the Homoz's thing of like going. It's the optionality.

Starting point is 01:54:52 People want to get like the action perfection ratio is all wrong. People want to get, it's kind of bring. at something before they even start and to have a perfect record. And I love the idea of just being messy, just having a messy start, trying something. Like, you don't talk about jokes. You just try them. That's the problem, though, what we were talking about while you were out of the room. The expert's only idea that Eric Weinstein has an issue with, and I think I agree with too, which is if you're not allowed to use the Oxford Manor to play gracefully with ideas,

Starting point is 01:55:18 you're always going to get sniped at, especially early on. Well, that's, you know, that's stupid. But how can you, the early stages of anybody's work tend to be scrutinized, not with the amount of discount that it should have. And I think it causes people to, they get worried. They're like, fuck, like, what if I? And isn't it ironic that a lot of the current expert classes built off some anti-expert at one point that went against it. How so? If you go back through most of science, a lot of Galileo going against the Catholic Church, you were the expertise at the time.

Starting point is 01:55:53 was remarkably unpopular. Yeah. Conformity is a coffin and heresy is a cradle. Mm. Mm. Yeah, it's interesting. I've told you that story about Copernicus, right, about the fact that he had the same insight as Galileo 100 years earlier

Starting point is 01:56:10 and sort of squeaked it out on his deathbed. He had this great work, de revolutionabas. And he was worried about Aya from the church. So I had the same heliocentric learning. and it took a full century to do the next one. And you might say, well, you know, stupid Copernicus. He should have said it. He should have shouted it from the rooftops.

Starting point is 01:56:29 But Galileo was forced to recant, kept under house arrest for the rest of his life, like, nearly killed. His treatment justifies the silence of the guy that came 100 years before us. It's the first. The first humiliation. You familiar with that? Three humiliations. So Copernicus was the first. We're not the center of the universe.

Starting point is 01:56:48 Darwin was the second. We're no different to the animals. And then Freud was the third. We're not even in control of our minds. And then the fourth is AI. We're no longer the smartest thing. Just kind of... I mean, it's not that humiliating.

Starting point is 01:57:06 I can live with it. Well, when you've created it, I think there's a degree of all of us feeling like we can't... That's why people have... Yeah, we did it. We did it. Some Jimmy Car bullshit will be in the corpus that it's been trained on. right? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting that thing of the, yeah, that kind of next step if we get to it,

Starting point is 01:57:27 if there's abundance in the future. It'd be amazing. We're already there. We're already here, right? It's already pretty bloody abundant. This is your indomitable optimism coming through. I'm a very optimistic long term, short term, there will be problem. I always use the example of my morning routine. So my morning routine, which everyone is. Ron's dying to know. It's going to get a tough to match this morning routine. Sure, sure. I don't know you had your one with Mike Thirsten than got.

Starting point is 01:57:56 Yeah, my four-year-old quick clip about a four-year-old's morning routine. My morning routine is I woke up this morning on a bed. I had a hot shower and I brushed my teeth, okay? Which sounds not that impressive. But it's Emperor Augustus, the Emperor of Rome, slept on a sack of straw. Mary Antoinette, who was going to be the future Queen of France at the time, as she was wondering around her palace of Versailles, they used to throw their sewage out of windows because they didn't have toilets.

Starting point is 01:58:30 It landed on her head. It's even the air conditioning, which I didn't think about, President Garfield, who was the president in late 1800s, when he got shot because his body was overheating, they had to get 500,000 cubes of ice to blow over in, because they didn't have anything near air conditioning. I think King Blumie's mouth rotted from the inside as well because he can approach the tea.

Starting point is 01:58:54 So even when you look at it's the David Foster Wallace thing, we're already in post-abundance. He's just going to potentially keep accelerating more and more. But when people get there, they won't think about it. And we was having this argument the other day. You was trying to talk about how we should de-accelerate or potentially pause things. And it's that Deutsche line of even the United Kingdom

Starting point is 01:59:12 is an artificial concept. And you think about it. like the hunter-gavrists wouldn't have been able to live in the United King. It would have died on a cold winter night from the cot, from the cot. So we're already living on Mars. Yeah. May you're, we're already living on Mars. But what I mean is when we've got to talk about terraforming Mars, we've already

Starting point is 01:59:35 terraformed the earth, we're already living in unlivable places. That's the human thing to do. Wonder around Bolton, man. How do you feel about that, Harry? I feel like me and George disagree on most things in life. We agree on the most important stuff, but we disagree on everything else. We were talking about death the other day. George is very pro-living for a long time, and I'm not pro-living for that long time.

Starting point is 01:59:59 Yeah, we had this debate while watching the England game. Who's the guy, Brian Johnson, that wants to live forever? Kind of, yeah. Jimmy, what's a good age? Well, I think what's a good age? Well, I think it's that thing where you've got problems to solve, and you have dilemmas. that you just have to live with. And death is the big one, right? Death is in the, in the, the Muslims, what they call it, the certainty. And I think you have to just make peace with it.

Starting point is 02:00:24 Like, it's going to happen at some stage. You don't get to choose when. You just, you don't get to choose how long your life is, but the, but the depth and quality you can have a big effect on. And that's, that's where you should spend your time. I mean, I think that thing about, it's, it's absolutely inevitable. And the idea that these crazy, whatever, this guy trying to live forever. George wants to live until the heat death of the universe. I want to keep going, baby. Well, there's the live forever or immortal, which is just ridiculous for it, because at a certain point you have the heat death of the universe.

Starting point is 02:00:54 But living to 150, that much significantly different than living to 80, did this research once with Claude, where I was looking at if you have everybody ever to live today, the average age, and then you had everybody ever to live ever, the average age when they died, the average age of that room would be 15. So we were already way past. And I used the example, the example I thought of the other day was my dog, this beautiful little Bernadoodle called Barkley. Parents do. It makes me sad that 10 years from now he's probably going to die. If I can take a dog's life from 12 to 24, is that bad? It sounds like a terrific thing. So what's the problem of going from

Starting point is 02:01:36 80 to 160 years old for a human? I agree forever is a completely different concept and that's a very vague in a language, but is 150 or 200 a necessary bad idea? Because we're already not dying at 15. We're all dying with the devil and it just depends how long your spooten is. So like, I'm not saying 120 whatnot, but like where does this, where does this end? I also don't feel like it's our universe to roam for that long, you know? I feel like, I feel like the old must make way for the new man. Like there should be a new George Max sat in that sea. I get, you got 10 more years of podcasting. And I think bring in the new George Mac. Let's get some new insights.

Starting point is 02:02:13 There should be a new Jimmy Car. We should be taken out the back of the shed. Well, there is that thing where you go, people are very scared of death. There's a great Mark Twain said, I wasn't alive for 10 billion years before my birth, and it didn't inconvenience me in the least. You kind of go, yeah, it's just you go back to the same thing. We're in this brief shaft of light between two oceans of darkness, and you've got 4,000 weeks.

Starting point is 02:02:33 What are you going to do with it? You know, I think that thing about it is kind of a, it does set the clock of going, okay what am I going to do? And I think if you live, if you're talking about 160 years, I think there's a, there's a manana to that of kind of going, well, you don't have to do anything now. And actually the sense of urgency that you have, I think it's kind of a rush of a blood to the head. So right now, I don't even know where to start. Like I think, I think you live to 100, I mean, 160, right? You live to 260. That's how many wives you haven't, sorry.

Starting point is 02:03:05 Let's just get down to the tap. Great. They're not living as long. place that you go to. It's also how many kids, like you have your kids, they have their kids. And at some point there's like a deep heartbreak is going to, it's a really deep heartbreak. Go back to the dog argument and talk about why going from 12 to 24 would be the worst thing for a dog. But you're not trying to extend the dog's life. You're trying to extend your own life.

Starting point is 02:03:24 And I do feel like, like, what about the lions out here? Are we still going to be killing the cows? You know, it is there going to be enough meat to feel all these new humans who are just now powering on to 500? Well, that's kind of interesting when you talk about, like, you know, we're checking about problems in the world. And you talk about the environmental crisis that's going on now. Are you aware of like the late 60s? There was a book written that was about how overpopulation everyone was going to starve. And it was going to be kind of a Mad Max scenario.

Starting point is 02:03:52 Is that malfusiasm? Why have I got that wrong? Yeah, Malthusian trap is when you have a growing population without resources that can support it. Yeah. So they thought that we were going to run out of food. And basically two bits of technology happened at the same time. So they figured out how to kind of GM, wheat and grain, and they also found out how to do it with rice as well. And they increased productivity by like 4x in that time. And basically we can sustain a huge number of people because they worked out basically there's not enough land to support 4 billion people. And now we're 8 billion and we're fine. It's really interesting like how problems changed. They also thought there was going to be a new ice age in the 70s. There's not that long ago in the 70s. And now it's kind of worried about the heat. It's weird how it kind of changes over time. Well, hopefully, We're sort of one step ahead and we saw that.

Starting point is 02:04:37 Isn't there a Roman port that's like a hundred miles off the coast from where the coast used to be? I'm pretty sure that because there was an ice age not that long ago and during the Roman Empire, the entire climate was significantly different, but their ability to invade the UK was facilitated by the fact that here it is. Once a major coastal port and likely the landing area for the Roman invasion of AD 43, It's now about two miles inland because the wantsome channel sweeted up or silted up. Interesting. Anyway, Romans, mate. We got on to the Romans.

Starting point is 02:05:16 This is what men are meant to do every two hours. Reference the Romans. I've been thinking about it the whole time that'd be. Yeah, sure. Simple question. Who do you want to be the next Prime Minister of England? Assuming there's no, like, they can be, they want to be. Anyone in the world, you could ship him in at a al-Fed X.

Starting point is 02:05:32 Dominic Cummings. He had to go. He had to go. and I think the thing with DC... You didn't ask who do I think could get elected. Okay. Mike, you got me talking, right? Mr. Cummings.

Starting point is 02:05:45 I think he's really competent and not that likable. And I feel like there's a real kind of like what you want in a leader is really competent while also being kind of likable. Okay, what was Kea Stama? Neither, man.

Starting point is 02:06:02 I mean, he's gone now, but I don't think anyone's going to forget Keith Stama and hurry. Lee Kuan Yew Leakuan Yew would be good Leakuan U is really interesting because that kind of Singapore example There's a guy called Roger Boutle

Starting point is 02:06:18 who's a brilliant economist and a great writer I know him a little bit and I think if you look at Roger Boutle's kind of assessment of what Britain needs it's a really good checklist of like he says there's no silver bullet there's no big solution that changes everything

Starting point is 02:06:34 and he gives these eight examples from around world of like where extraordinary things have happened and countries have turned themselves around. So from post-war Germany to post-war France to South Korea, North Korea, Singapore, all of these different examples of like, how did those economic miracles happen? How did people get from relatively poor circumstance to abundance? And it's brilliant because it's like it's lots of little things done right. I think he'd be a great guy to have in charge. And can he talk? Does he can talk? He's very likable. And his thing is like, like, he's like, he's like, It's not really about the, he's a big fan of the Singaporean dude, but he's not really about, like, charisma in the leader.

Starting point is 02:07:15 It's more about, okay, these are the things that you need to do. These are the priorities that a country needs to have. And you need to know what GDP is for. You need to know what, what are you doing this for? Why do you need this to be? What's the purpose of this nation? What's the point of it? And that's, he's very good on that stuff.

Starting point is 02:07:33 Who do you want, Harry? My, so we, I'm talking about yesterday, I genuinely, the girl I'm dating, I think would be a good pick. Keep her busy, right? Bro, bring your fucking chick to work day. That's who I'd pick. Right here right now, I bet she's American, so I'm not sure how they would go down. Bring your chick to work day. This is what's happening.

Starting point is 02:07:52 You're going to implant your lady at the top of the country. What is she doing currently, live? Applied theater. Applied theater. Yep, she's the one for the job. It's got to be it, isn't it? Yeah. Fine, sold.

Starting point is 02:08:04 George? Yeah, don't Dominic Cummings. Are you in Carnes? Okay. Who do you want? He's an old, he's an old, like, Cummins is like that old Labrador, you know, he's been around the track. Like, I think fresh energy.

Starting point is 02:08:20 Jimmy? What? If I, if I said, I'd like Mr. Carr to lead us into the next century, what would you say? I, I'd say that we've, we made a mistake in the early 80s, and we shut down. all of the asylums and now the crazy people are just wandering around. No, I think, I don't know if you're familiar with recent American history, but game show hosts have become politicians recently and not always with stellar results. Tusha, give it a, go ahead, do you own?

Starting point is 02:08:55 You give it to the England manager. I think it seems to be working at the national team level currently as we're recording this. That's not a bad shot. Or you could put Garrett Sassiade in, given that he's got the job for a. boys. Give it gigsy for the end of season. Give it gigsie. Let's bring this one home. I appreciate you all. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's really fun. Goodbye, my beauties. See you.

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

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.