Modern Wisdom - You’re Not Depressed, You’re Living The Wrong Life - Jimmy Carr - #1135

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Jimmy Carr is a comedian, television host and an author. From razor-sharp jokes to hard-earned life wisdom, Jimmy Carr can do it all. Whether he’s explaining how he’d fix Britain or revealing the secrets it takes to become a better comedian, Jimmy is back with brilliant insights, unforgettable one-liners, and a few laughs along the way. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Timestamps: (00:00) How Many Shoes Has Jimmy Done This Year? (00:43) Why Jimmy Never Gets Stressed on Tour (03:57) Why We’ve Become So Anxious (18:47) Is Optionality Making Us Miserable? (23:52) Why Broken Promises Keep Costing You (27:45) The Power of Unshakeable Self-Confidence (29:43) Jimmy’s Relationship With Gratitude (33:29) Give Your Brain Better Problems to Solve (39:53) How Comedy Shows Expand Conversations (48:14) Is Social Media Stealing Our Souls? (52:52) Stop Waiting for the Perfect Conditions (57:22) Are We Living in the Good Old Days? (01:00:17) Can the UK Be Fixed? (01:06:53) Address the Problems Whilst They’re Small (01:14:08) Why Anyone Can Be a Comedian (01:20:27) The Science of Why Jokes Work (01:22:34) Why Great Comedy Breaks the Rules (01:24:12) Can You Teach Someone to Be Funny? (01:26:23) The Oldest Joke Formula Still in Use (01:27:27) How Podcasting Is Influencing Comedy (01:33:17) Let Your Obsession Become Your Advantage (01:43:27) How Do We Solve the Drug Crisis? (01:56:33) What British People Still Don’t Understand Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many shows did you do last year? Maybe, oh, God, I don't know. 250, 300, something like that? It's the two shows a night thing that ramps up the numbers. And that's been the big kind of innovation in my touring. There's an old line. I think it was BB King said it. I do the shows for free.

They pay me to travel. And I kind of feel like that. I feel like getting there is the hassle. Doing the show is a joy. And so I do a show at 7 and then a show at 9.30 in most places. So it's that thing of like, it's one for me, one for HMRC. Right? One goes to the tax man.

The other one's just all mine. Yeah, pretty much these days. Yeah, definitely be after that much scrutiny. What's your relationship with worry like? Do you get overwhelmed? That's a pretty intense schedule. Oh, no, I mean, not at all. I think that thing about, if anything, that decreases the stress level,

doing that many shows makes you less nervous. Because it's kind of like being an airline pilot. It's about hours in the sky. So if you spend that much time on stage, and then, you know, I film everything now. So it's often you're kind of in the shows you've got, you never get bored of it because, you know, a good third of it is just that night, just that show. And it changes all the time. It's interesting. I was like, I sort of used to think about jealousy and envy a lot, like the idea that they're different.

And one is I don't want that person to have that thing. And it's a really dark energy, right? And then there's envy, which is telling you what you want. You see someone's got something, you go, oh, wow, I want that. And I remember looking at like Matt Reif and Andrew Schultz and their video content online, and they were kind of blowing up and going, I should do that. I should take someone on the road and film it and just, you know, copy that methodology.

And I did it, and I've absolutely loved it. It's really kind of changed the way that I gig. Why is it the case that you're not, I mean, I've been backstage with you before you go And within minutes before you're about to go on stage, snacking on an apple, not really thinking about it. And then going out and performing in front of 7,000 people, is then just reps now under the belts that nerves kind of don't kick in. I think it's quite self-selecting being a comedian at sort of at that level where people are,

you know, if I play a club, then people have just gone out to see comedy. But I'm not in the entertainment business. I'm not in the comedy business. I'm in the Jimmy Car business. And people have come out to see my show. So they kind of know what they're going to get. If anyone's offended at this point, it's like they bought tickets for a horror movie and they're complaining they're scared. It's like, okay, dumb, dumb.

It's like it doesn't count. It's like, so it's also that thing of like the moments you can have with the crowd now are because they've seen it online because they know what you do. They're expecting it. You okay? Oh, wow. There's got perfect. Can't believe my luck. Thank you.

The service is fantastic. There's this line that made me think about the level of intensity, perhaps, that you go through with your touring. your life does not need to be easier, it needs to be simpler. Your system is designed to handle stress and challenge, but not complication. You probably handle hard things pretty well, but feel overwhelmed when they become messy. Do not attribute to difficulty, that which can be explained by complexity. It seems like if what you're doing is touring and focusing on touring and doing the live shows and getting to the next show and being in a good mood and performing well,

it's kind of one thing all the way, as opposed to trying to do that whilst number two and number three, and number four and number five. Well, I think it's also that thing of like it's not repetition. It's like how many gigs last year you go, you know, 250 or 300. And that sounds in a way kind of boring. Like it would be the same thing again and again. And actually it's not, it's never repetition, it's iteration. So you're changing it subtly every time.

You're changing the jokes. You're trying new jokes in every show. Every single show at the end of the show, you're trying new things. So it's quite, it's very stimulating intellectually to be writing. Why do you think people get stuck in overthinking? Well, let's have a think about it. That'll help. It's like trying to sniff our way out of a cocaine problem. It's just like, how, like the fact that you're the person asking that, the rumination king. I don't know. I think it's like it's anxiety, I suppose is what it is overthinking in a larger form. And my sort of view on it is anxiety is thought without control. Your thoughts are just wild. And a flow state is control. And a flow state is control. without thought. And so on stage, you are in a flow state. You know what you're doing. You know what the jokes are. They're just like, you don't even have to think about it. It's the next thing.

And then people are talking to you and you're just being sort of yourself. You're just being loose. So it's, it becomes like it's a flow state. You're not being anxious about anything. So finding something where you can do that is that's the secret source. Finding something that you enjoy doing that you can be in that kind of flow state. I thought without controls an interesting insight. I think helplessness, a lot of people have this sensation that I can't enact my will on the world. I can't ensure that this thing is going to behave in the way that I want to. But if I think about it enough, it's kind of the same as preparing for it.

I wonder, are we, Mark Fisher wrote about this beautifully, about the privatization of anxiety and stress and the idea that we're blaming the individual for mental health problems. If you look at the numbers now, if you look at the stats of how many people are suffering with depression and anxiety, I think you have to conclude that it's a societal problem. We're not arranging our society in a way that is conducive to good mental health. People are incredibly stressed in the world and it's a collective action problem. It's not something that you can solve on your own. If you're a depressed young man, you cannot solve the problem on your own. You have a dispersed identity.

If you want to be happy, go and make some other people happy. It's a vicious cycle, though, right? Because the thing that you need is to rely on other people, but given that you're around fewer people than ever before, you don't have the same level of cohesion as you would have done a few thousand years ago. Look at what we've done. Everything's now for the individual, right? So what used to be a game of five aside, you know, on a Wednesday night,

is now a personal best at the gym. Well, that's isolating. And the idea that you're tracking your steps every day, rather than going for a walk with a friend. It's like it's very isolating. So I'd have think of like, you know, think about the, the manosphere. You know, there's a lot of kind of talk about it the last six months after Louis Thruh's brilliant documentary. And you kind of look at it and you go, well, it's the wrong prescription for the right problem.

There is definitely a problem going on. So, I mean, my take on it is I'm very, I'm pro-gang, pro-drinking, pro-gambling. Let me give you the argument, right? So pro-gang. where should men be? Together. Men are really good at checking other men. Gangs have got a bad reputation

because some of them do shoot people and deal drugs, but that's a very small percentage. Mostly it's like guys with other guys, hanging out, and they kind of check themselves, and it can be an incredibly positive force. And I'm very pro-drinking. I mean, Scott Galloway has the best line on it. The risk to your liver is as nothing

compared to the risk of social isolation. So I think we should lower the drink. I've set up these, like, youth clubs around the world. They've got, like, jukeboxes and pool tables, and they play sports on a big TV. They're really fun. They're called pubs, and they're everywhere, right? And what we should do is just lean into that and go, the youth clubs are already there. They're called pubs.

We should lower the drinking age to 16. Because if you think 16-year-olds aren't drinking, well, you're living in a fucking fantasy world anyway. Certainly in the UK. I don't know about how much do people drink in the US at 16? quite a bit of a lot. Yeah. People drink at 16. Here's what you do, though.

You legalise drinking at 16, not for individuals. So you've got to bring three mates with you. So you can get hammered in a group and not on your own? Yeah, well, you're not going to get hammered. There's four of you. You're going to check yourself. You're going to make sure you don't get kicked out of the pub. Sometimes I beg friends on in a group of people.

It gets worse sometimes. Yeah, but maybe. But I'm very happy to, I'd rather they were together doing that in a space with other people, and people of all ages. And there's other adults in the room. I'd rather that than they were drinking in. a park. I'd much rather. And gambling is like there's a, there's a huge problem with gambling at the moment where people are gambling, you know, online and sports betting. It's like it's a, because

you're trying to game the system because you can't see a way out, right? You've got to deal the younger generation in. But I think gambling should be, it's the bigger things. It's taking a gamble on yourself, taking a gamble on a career. That's the big gamble, the big risk, saying that you want to do something and kind of coming out of someone that's, you know, ambitious. I don't know. I think the younger generations sort of need to be dealt in in a way that they're not at the moment. You know, what hope is there to buy a house and start a family? It's not that they don't want to. It's like they're not given the conditions to do that.

I don't think there should be any tax on the under 30s. Have you seen Rory Sutherland's one, which is he thinks, I think your first 250 grand should be tax-free, which is an equivalent. That's a great idea. Yeah. So you just get that first 250,000 pounds, dollars, and no tax on that, and then the tax kicks in. afterward. It's a great idea. It's a great idea. I mean, under 30 is just like that thing of like, that life stage of like going just trying to get sort of to the table. It's the same reason that Bill Perkins suggests giving your kids their inheritance when they're 30. Because if that, that book

Die with Zero is so brilliant. It's kind of about so much more than that as well, that kind of what you should be doing at what stage of life. Correct. So the idea that there's young people, you know, feeling anxious, yeah, great. Well, we've arranged our society incorrectly then. if everyone, it's almost like we've inverted Maslov's hierarchy of need. You know that kind of pyramid thing where you go okay so you need food and shelter

and security on the base level? Everyone's like to self-actualized without any friends or a house. Yeah, so 200 years ago people worried about starving but proud of their name and now people are, you know, calorifically, they're fine and they're anxious. It's not a great situation.

Yeah. It's like, it's kind of you get into kind of, I suppose, slightly Buddhist almost immediately, because it's like, I think happiness is a time machine. I think depression is thinking about the past, and anxiety is a worry about a future self. In the moment, you tend to be fine. But it's, you know, people don't have a sense of, you know, being able to do that, being able to kind of sit in the moment. Well, it's interesting with the flow state thing, because at least in my experience, when you're in the deepest flow state possible, you actually don't have much memory of what happened. When you turn around and think about what you were doing at that time. I guess it might be the same. At least when I've

done my show, we did shows within days of each other in Sydney at Darling Harbor a few months ago. And when you drop into the show, you actually, someone said, how did that section go? How did the, you can't remember saying. I have no idea what happened. Yeah, you were in the moment. Because you have moved yourself out of the way. And it's, I don't know, it's interesting that what we say that we want is more memories, right? We want to have time expand and for us to be able to look back. and yet the most enjoyable way to spend the present moment is in a way that we won't be able to remember in future. It's this sort of odd...

Yeah, it's a paradox thing. Yeah, it's an interesting... Yeah, it's cute. But, I mean, the worst thing is to go, oh, well, I can definitely remember what happened, but I remember that I wasn't there. I remember that I was worrying about this thing that was going to come up next

or that I was fearful about this or as distracted. I wasn't really in the moment. That seems like the worst way to spend the present. Isn't that the... That's kind of the Eckart Tollo story, isn't it? You know that story about him? Like, he was horribly depressed in his 20s.

I mean, really, you know, kind of thinking about ending it all. And he was on a park bench. Part bench. And then he thought to himself, I can't live with myself. And in saying that he went, well, who's I and who's myself? Wait a second. And just realized you can kind of separate those two things and get kind of beyond that. And kind of there's an equanimity in being able to kind of separate yourself from your thoughts sometimes.

I really do think that the worry is about control. It's strange because no amount of anxiety is going to make any difference to what's going to happen. But control is an illusion right the way down. I mean, I've said this before. I think it's, I blame the Plato and the Zarathustrans for coming up with the idea of heaven and perfection. There is no heaven and perfection. It's all, you know, I'm with nature on this. It's, it's embraced the chaos. You can't have control over what happens, only how you react to it. So it becomes very stoic very quickly. Because you just go, well, I'll, I'm in charge of how I react to this stuff. I definitely think a lot of people blame themselves.

And to some degree, I understand why, because you want to feel like you have agency over what's going on. You want to be the person that's in control. You don't want to have to rely on anybody else. But a good question to ask yourself is, am I depressed or is my life depressing? Like, am I anxious or is my life anxiety-inducing? Is it depression or sadness? If it's circumstantial, then I think it's sadness.

I think it's much more acceptable to say I'm depressed than to say, I'm sad. But if it's circumstantial, you could do something about it, then great. I've been thinking about a thing recently. Okay. I don't believe in generations. And you won't find someone who's a bigger Neil Howell fan than me, you know, the guy that coined the phrase millennial, but I don't really believe in generations. I think like putting a whole cohort of people into one box, it makes about as much sense to me as horoscopes. So you go, the idea that are people that are entitled and there's people that are ambitious in every cohort. I mean, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are in the same generation.

generation. They're very different motherfuckers, right? So you go, well, actually, there's entitled people that are young and there's people that are very ambitious. And the difference would be where you are and where you want to get to. If you want to do something about it, you're ambitious. And if you want someone else to do something about it, if it's their responsibility, then that's entitlement. It's a pretty good working definition. There's lots of, you know, you meet young people that are just, you know, that are great. And they get lumped in with this, oh, millennials, be like this. Nonsense. But there has to be some sort of delineation. and I do think that there are changes that occur across time, right, across group from a long time ago to now that are changes.

And if you just put these random bars in between them to break them up, does that not make sense? I don't think it's helping. I don't think it helps. And I think it's, well, I mean, listen, you know, there's me sort of saying, I can contradict myself and say, I do think we need to do something for the younger generation. I think we need to sort of change the way. Because effectively, what have we done? We've raised the school at leaving age in the UK to 21.

Because it's mandatory to get a degree now. Yeah, everyone goes to university. And, you know, a university degree is a luxury item. It's a Louvitton handbag, right? That's what it is. And you go, and if everyone's got one, the value of that obviously decreases. So you get into, Peter Turchin talks about the end of civilizations. He's a brilliant, you know Peter Turchin, right?

He's probably been on the show. So he talks about there's two things. reasons why a society collapses. And one is the inequality of wealth, which we've almost supercharged now with social media, because everyone can see everything all the time. And then he talks about the overproduction of elites. So when you overproduce elites, and they don't get what they're promised. So if you go out and you work hard at school and you get a degree from a good university, and then you go, well, where's my four-bedroom house? Where's my wife and family? What's, what, it hasn't delivered? Then that elite that feels let down by the system

and what it tacitly promised them becomes the counter elite. And that counter elite fights against the system and tries to bring it down. So I think that's why we're kind of in the beginnings of a revolution at the moment. I think that's one of the reasons why America has more prevalent victimhood culture

than somewhere like the UK does. And that's because when you're growing up in the UK, you're not really told that you can be whatever you want to be. That kind of blue sky thinking helicopter vision I don't think is given to British people in the same way. If you diverge from the path, that tall poppy syndrome kicks in and you tend to be chopped down pretty quickly. Whereas in the US, for all that it's a horrible and misogynistic,

judgmental, xenophobic country trying to keep everybody down, the American dream still kind of is accepted. It's part of the fabric, I think, that most people believe. And that means that if you did everything right and then grow up and become an adult and the world doesn't deliver to you that which you were promised as a kid, quite rightly you feel indignant. Like, hey, where's my stuff? I think it's the...

You want there to be some social mobility. You want to be able... Essentially, you want your kids to do better than you did in life. That's what you kind of want. But it really, I suppose it's about... And the kids also want to do better than you did as well. Yeah. Sure.

I think that thing about going, you know, from a political point of view, I'm less concerned with equality. You know, Peter Turchin's very worried about there being equality. I'm more concerned with abundance. You know, what does the future hold? is it going to be Star Wars or Star Trek in

50 years time? And I'd love to believe it could be Star Trek. I'd love to believe that there is abundance. Although even if there is, we'll get used to it. Because the world that we live in now, if you showed your great, great-grandfather your life now, he would think you'd be made emperor. Habituations are hell of a drug.

Yeah, you just, you get used to this stuff, right? But, you know, rich and poor is always it's going to be relative and whatever we, you know, but the idea that everyone's needs are taken care of. Because really, people think they want more money, but really money is the thing that gets you what we really want, which is, you know, good health care and good education and the right amount of calories and, you know, until you start to fold status in, right? Because one of the big reasons that you want money is to have more money than the guy that lives next door. Yeah. Well, I think that thing about taking care of everyone's physical needs in society is

is a collective action problem, making sure that there's a safety net there that isn't a hammock. But you can't take care of people's metaphysical needs. And so the difference would be between, you know, a Cassio watch that tells the time perfectly reasonably and a blingy Rolex that shows that, hey, you made it baby, or whatever that, whatever the extra value you get from what it means to you rather than, I mean, you know, you get into that kind of René Girard, we're full of kind of memetic desires. We don't know what to want. And that thing of like, not having to impress other people, that's the superpower. Yes.

That's the thing that really makes a difference to the quality of your life. If you know what you want, you don't have to impress other people. That really does simplify life. That would be a wonderful gift. I don't know how the hell you would give it to people, but the gift of being able to say you don't have to impress anybody else would liberate so many people from perverse desires, from being distracted by things that they don't actually want to do,

that they're only doing to perform. It's the hidden versus observable metrics thing that me and George talk about all the time. It's interesting getting, getting stuff is fun. Having stuff isn't fun, getting stuff is fun. And it's a weird kind of lesson. I mean, you talk about that, the 2D, 3D lessons. Correct. It's a real 3D lesson.

You have to experience that. Correct. You kind of go. Bill Perkins was my first big 2D3D lesson thing. I read the book and then I brought him on the show. That's like a 2D and then maybe a 2.5D lesson, getting to sit down with him and talk about these ideas about how to structure your life and to focus on having fun and spending money in smart ways that brings you together with other people.

And then we finish the. episode and he said, what are you going to do now? And I was like, I'm probably going to go home and write the show notes for this episode and the upload, they could get the file across to my editor and stuff. And he says, Johncombe wake surfing. It's like, okay. Of course I do. Went downstairs. He had a driver outside waiting for us. We got on the boat with the boat captain who had swim shorts and a towel. And then we did that. And then we went back to his house on the lake, which is the most expensive house ever sold in Austin. And then we did this thing. And then his driver on the way to take him back on his jet, drop me off at home.

I was like, oh, that's a, that's a 3D lesson. Like, I could have read the book 50 times and not had the same tangible, visceral experience. Yeah. What should be, what you should be doing right now is, it's hard to get your head around that, though. I think it's, it's not easy for young people, I think. It feels like, it feels like limitations are very freeing.

Correct. It feels once you decide what you want to do and what you're going to work out and who you're going to be with. life gets very simple because you stop thinking about how to live and you start thinking about living. Well, yeah, I guess an analogy would be if you were in a boat in the middle of the ocean, if you just have to row real hard and you know the direction you're going in, that's probably not. That's a much of really a sline, isn't it? If you don't know where you're going, no wind is favourable. Yeah, yeah, not too dissimilar. But I suppose if you're also having to direct yourself, you're lost in the rumination of,

I took five miles in that direction, but maybe I should, if I take a slight right here. So, yeah, I mean, David Epstein's new book is all about this. It's all about the power of constraints and how they breed creativity. And yeah, people think that they want as much optionality in life as they can get. Hormosey's very good on this. I met Hormosey the other day for the first time. But we kind of felt, it felt like getting together with an old friend. I can't imagine two people that are sartorially more different than you and Alex. Yeah, it was. We looked slightly odd at dinner. Yeah, it was

It was really interesting It was really interesting Because his thing is like His new what big idea was like There's too much optionality And if you never cash in those options What's the point? I like getting a

You know An MBA Masters and then a PhD in business It's like no no Just start a business Doesn't matter if it goes bust Start another one The map is not the territory

Get out there and do the thing Yeah there's a I think that's another challenge That young people have Everybody has Fuck it's saying young people it's anybody that is existing in this current world, which is that your ability to say things as opposed to do things

has never been more tuned up. Like you are what you do, not what you'll say you do. And unfortunately, talking about the thing and doing the thing vie for the same resources, right? You need to allocate yours appropriately. Yeah, don't tell me about your priorities.

Show me last week's diary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what you actually did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think if the prospect of being able to kind of talk your way or proclaim your way publicly and privately, right, to yourself, I'm going to put this plan together. I've got this. This is one of the issues of obsessing over productivity too much. That productivity ends up becoming the goal,

not the means in order to be able to get a goal. Yeah. The sort of masturbation of, of productivity keeps on happening. And they're off. Yeah, away they go. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water

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Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase where I go into the link in the description below. I'm heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. There's a Mark Manson line I wanted to get you to react to. The small thing you didn't say six months ago has been collecting interest ever since. By the time resentment shows up fully formed, most people have forgotten what

the original conversation even was. And I think that the same thing is true for when we don't keep promises to ourselves as well. When you had this plan, you made this deal with yourself a long time ago. You can't quite remember it, but there's this latent distrust in you doing what you said you were going to do. And no one else knows about it. It's just you. It's your relationship with you. I said that I was going to do this thing and I didn't show up and I didn't show up and I didn't show up and after a while you begin to resent the part of yourself that makes plans because you don't think that it's going to come into fruition. Yeah. Well, I suppose it's that thing of like having a six-pack it doesn't give you confidence. Being the guy that shows up at the gym every day gives you confidence.

Like you take care of yourself. I think it's that, yeah, it's a very interesting sort of, I think that it's about compound interest really. Because compound interest, on money is miraculous. When you look at, you know, Buffett and his wealth, most of it was built through time. Time is the factor that people don't take into consideration there. Very smart investor, but really time was the thing. 90% of his wealth was accumulated after the age of 60. This is exactly right. Yeah, it's like, but compound interest on your skills is insane. If you put the reps in, if you do the work, it's insane what you build over time. But it's, It gets back to that thing for me about your goals will be beaten by your systems every time.

Everyone's got great goals. Everyone's got big ambitions. But what are you going to do tomorrow? What's the small thing that you can break off and it's manageable and you can do it today? It's why I love kind of what I do. You know, mainly it's jokes. And writing jokes is comparatively easy because you can just sit down and write one. And then you test it.

There's no point discussing it. There's no point having a meeting where you go through it with some friends. just go out, find an audience, tell them. They'll tell you whether it's funny or not. Great feedback loop. I suppose the problem with most other projects is that you can't iterate a product and get audience feedback quite so quickly. You can't work out whether or not you want to release a t-shirt design in one small chunk,

go through all of the process of getting the t-shirt design, get it printed, see how many people want to buy it, oh, one person, well, let's update it again. The iterative nature of that is pretty cool. Yeah, it's harder. I mean, I'm very lucky, I think, to be in a business where it's that thing of like, if the audience like it, they tell you straight away. And they can't not tell you either. Even people can dislike you. But if you tell a joke that's sufficiently funny, I think that the response just sort of kicks in. Well, even if it's like my favorite noise in comedy is still that kind of cognitive dissonance laugh where there's a laugh followed by a deep, where they go. They're shocked at themselves for having just done that. I guess you laughed at it because the laughter kind of portrays you. I think you're laughed. It's kind of a deeper level of you. I suppose, actually, I might be a little bit wrong there. If you really, really don't like somebody and you decide to sit in the third row with your arms crossed, go on then, funny man, make me laugh.

I think you can will yourself or convince yourself into not liking somebody that's doing well at their craft in comedy. I don't think that the same thing is quite so true in music. I think that an absolute banger pierces through your defenses even more so than comedy. I think something that would be less than that would be a conversation, right? Conversation between two people on stage or some sort of like keynote speech or whatever. I wasn't even that interesting. I didn't find it engaging. It's interesting.

Comedy is deeper and then music is deeper still. It's like the art and the artist and can you separate them? Can someone that's done a terrible thing and you know they've done a terrible thing? Can they still be funny? Can they still be musically gifted? Yeah, yeah. I think you probably can tease it out. I think it's probably fine.

Peter Crohn's got a question. Who could you be in the absence of your concern? it made me think about... That's really good, isn't it? Like, that's... Could you be in the absence of your concern? There's a great line I have to think of, which is the... You can do anything you want.

You only have to face the consequences. It's like, it's really powerful. Because it's that thing of like going, you've got absolute freedom, but you have to wear it. Like, there's freedom of speech, but not freedom of consequence. And I think about St. Lawrence a lot.

You know the story of St. Lawrence? No. He's the patron's. saint of comedy. And St. Lawrence was, he was burnt by, I think it's like, he's a really good name for an emperor. Some, like, it's something like Voldemort, like this emperor burnt him alive over a fire. And as he was being burnt alive, Sir Lawrence went, turn me over, this side's done. And it makes me think of bravery, right? That's, that's a very brave thing to say in a pretty awful moment. But the only reason we remember him is because he said that. You go, there's a certain

amount of like bravery. Yeah. No, say the thing. Say the thing. Good luck. Some people would like it. It'd be all right. Who could you be in the absence of your concerns?

But me and George keep on talking about the fact that so many people are held back by a lack of confidence rather than a lack of competence. Like their self-belief is the biggest rate limiter on what it is that they can achieve. Yeah. But I mean, that self-confidence comes from Rhe's-Mose's line. Yeah. You know, self-confidence comes from giving the world irrefutable proof you are who you say you are. So it's that thing of like, find something small that you can do.

You know, do what you can with what you've got where you are. You know, you could wish away the first two. I wish I had different things and I was somewhere else. Just, you know, accepting the reality of where you are and working with that seems to be pretty powerful. Because you just, you know, start off. And, you know, you can't choose where you start. You just choose where you finish. What's your relationship like with gratitude?

I do a lot of gratitude practice. I think there's a Meister tole said, if you only said one prayer and it was thank you, that would be enough. I think that's bang on. I think it's the only thing is disposition is more important than position. Where you are in the world doesn't matter. Your disposition is everything. And the only thing that seems to shift disposition is a sense of gratitude. So across sort of time and space, like we're lucky to be here now and we're lucky to have the friends that we have.

lucky to have living the world that we live in. It's extraordinary. We're in a privileged position. And I think acknowledging that on the regular is great. Are you able to take time to celebrate when you're moving so quickly? Yeah, I kind of think that thing of like celebration and gratitude are kind of linked. I think done correctly, celebration is gratitude in action. Like you, you know, you throw a party and you invite everyone, you celebrate and you, you know, there's something lovely about that kind of connection to other people and kind of doing it with others. I don't think you can really celebrate on your own. I think being grateful with other people is really good as well. You can sit down and chat with other people about how great is this? It's really nice.

I think a lot of people struggle, especially when they're at their busiest, to take time away from doing the thing, to think about the thing and to realize how fortunate they are to be in that situation. Yeah. Well, Chairman Mao, wasn't it? You can't smell the roses from a galloping horse. I think I should, I should put together. I should, I should put together a book. I was thinking about this. I was thinking about this. It would put together a book of like,

incredibly wise stuff. Shed by shitty people. It'd be quite a good quote book of like going, well, I guess, you know, stop watches right twice a day. It would be nice to have the quote on one page and then the person that said it on the next page. Yeah. Oh, equanimity with impermanence.

Wow. Hitler. Oh, fuck. Damn it. Yeah. Fuck. That's ruined that for me. Yeah.

But I. Not that he never said that. It is an interesting challenge, right? When things are going well and everything's busy and you're not really paying that much attention, that is the time when gratitude is probably most available to you, but you're so busy and the calendar is always packed and you're moving forward. You're excited about the future. So taking time to reflect on the present is pretty tough.

And then when things slow down and stuff starts to go a little bit worse, that's when you wish that you'd had the gratitude from before to be able to rely on and you retroactively trying to think about... It's the frames as well. It's how you think about stuff. It's like problems, right? Problems are a feature, not a bug. A problem just means something needs your attention.

And I think people have a crazy notion if they stop and think about it, that one day their problems will be over. They'll have dealt with everything and it's done. And it's... Well, obviously not. You just level up. All you do is level up.

And you get more complex problems. If you can solve really complex problems, You're doing very well in the world. You know, Elon Musk is a trillion now. Why? Because he solved some very complex problems. And there's money to be made doing that, right? So you go, so problems are a bug, a feature, not a bug.

They're great. It just means something needs your attention. You should be grateful for that. Someone needs your time. Someone needs, you need to take this call. You need to deal with this thing. Boredom, I think, is boredom is unappreciated serenity. It's just, you're in a serene moment.

There's nothing going on. Great. doesn't happen often. Like, I can get to where Tibetan monks get to in an airport lounge in Detroit. Nothing going on. As long as you don't get your phone out. Yeah, it's fine. Just, yeah. Well, that thing of like, we're kind of, we're carrying the phone everywhere with us now. It's like the mobile labor camp. Tracking our every mood. Crazy. I was in the gym a couple of months ago. Of course you were. Look at you. Yeah. And one of my friends was talking to me about how his wife keeps on complaining at him that he uses his phone at night. He's always sending messages,

organizing stuff, running businesses or whatever. And he came up with a very fortunate, but I think actually philosophically pretty interesting excuse, which is he said, I've got a mind that likes to solve problems. I'm just trying to give it good problems to solve. I think lots of people have a problem solving brain, but only some people have great problems that they're going to solve with it. Well, that's what I think of with anxiety. Like, my mind is often racing. I often, like, wake up, um, with I suppose what you call a panic attack at like four or five in the morning. I'll wake up on my mind's just on and I'll worry about stuff. And it's, it's often counterfactuals. Worry about things going wrong, people getting hurt. You're just going to

ruminate on crazy stuff. And if I give it like, oh, we, no, but we need to write a joke about Kea Stama or Andy Burnham or something. You go, okay, right. I have to Great. Give it something to do. So using action as an antidote to anxiety, then. Yeah, I love that. I love the idea that you go, well, that cures it pretty well. It's very difficult to worry about the future when you feel like you're moving yourself toward it. And yeah, that problem-solving brain thing is interesting because I wonder how many people are churning themselves up inside because they have a brain that likes to solve problems, but they don't have any good problems to solve.

So they pay attention to politics or porn or their ex or this situation that's outside of their control in some foreign country that they can't get access to. Is that not what the news is? I mean, if you were trying to design something to engender mental health difficulties, you'd make someone aware of a problem and give them no agency. And that's what reading about the Middle East is, right? So you just go, I'd say absolute cluster fuck of a situation and there's nothing. Good luck dealing with that. We can do about it. There's nothing we can...

There's nothing that you can do about it. Yeah. Because if... I don't know, I wonder whether it would feel better or worse for the situation to actively have nothing you could do about it. There's an asteroid coming to Earth. No one can do anything about it. It's the simulacrum that someone could fix this, but not you.

Yeah. I mean, we're not in that game. It's, yeah, it's very... I think that thing about having agency... I think that, okay, there's a bigger thing here, which is, I think we give maybe empathy to people that we like and agency to people that we don't like. So if you imagine there's two marches, right? And one of them is like super far right dudes marching with skinheads and jackboots. We give them agency. If they put a brick through a window, we say, right, lock them up and throw away the key, right? And then there's another march. And it's a march. And it's. It's people marching for social justice, right? And they throw a brick through a window.

We go, well, you know, that's the language of the streets, you know, the unheard. That thing of like going, so we give them empathy and them agency. And actually you should give both, both. You need agency and empathy for everyone. Like the idea that you go, believe that people can handle it and believe that everyone's got, like, a part to play. We need to be responsible for the things that you did, but also your and, meshed in the situation that sort of brought you to that point too, like the motivations of what got you there. But yeah, that problems thing, I really do think, I wonder how many people would

all that they need are better problems to solve. All that they need is something to focus their time and their attention on in a better way. And yeah, if you've got this situation that's occurring overseas, I came back from a meditation retreat last week. I'd spent seven days without my phone, almost exclusively in silence. And I came back and I was flying out of SF. and walked into the departure terminal. And one of the pieces of advice that we'd been given was to put sunglasses on and put AirPods in because you've basically been in silence for a week

and no screens, no nothing. It's a lot of stimulus to go from zero to 100. I went and sat down in this some airport restaurant thing. I looked up at the screens, and it was wildfires in Europe raging. That was the first thing I saw on a screen, basically, since I'd got off of this retreat. I remember feeling this strange constriction inside of me.

I'm like, I better get a hose. Why, yeah, why the fuck is that what's on? I'm aware, like, is it newsworthy? Like, yeah, kind of, but what is it do? It makes us feel like we're being informed about the world, but really all it's doing is just piercing our nervous systems and making us feel worried about stuff.

Strange. And yet, I want to be informed about what's happening in the world. I feel like I'm so, I guess, addicted to that. Like, I like knowing what's going on. on. I like thinking about what the solution might be. But I guess you don't, you know, you get to chat about it, but you don't really get to influence what happens. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little

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The gratitude point is Michael Smokes got this line where he says, I have a hard time celebrating my achievements because in my mind it was my obligation to achieve it. A lot of people that are high performers have this sense that the higher that you climb, the further you have to fall, as you get better, your standards are always going to increase, so you're always going to suck in comparison to what you think that you should do. That's great because it continues to push you to work harder, to improve.

But also it means that success isn't a cause for celebration. It's just the minimum level of acceptable performance. And anything less than success becomes a failure. Yeah. Well, I think that thing then you need to be in a state of, I guess, imposter syndrome once every 18 months, two years. You need to level up constantly where you feel like you're in a space while, oh, I can't believe I did that. That was good. like push yourself a little bit

I think try and do something else Is that difficult when you've got close to the top of your game? Well it depends what game you're in you can change games you can sort of do things a little bit differently so that thing of like going it's about

I suppose my business is you know I'm in the service industry right I make something that people want I make them happy and no one seems to remember any of my jokes but they remember how I made them feel and the show tonight is nothing more than an advert

for the show when I come back next time. That's the way I'm kind of thinking of it. And then you're trying to find these moments now. The show's changed over the last couple of years where there's moments in every show. There's like a moment someone will ask something and you'll chat to them and it'll be slightly more heartfelt. And they'll always be kind of their kind of sweetening the pill with laughter. Why did you change that? I think it was, I don't know what happened. I don't know what went on that I suddenly started chatting to people in the audience. and we start to connect in a slightly different way. It's been really lovely.

And people, I think, I think comedy is, it's a, I love that line, laughter's the shortest distance between two people. And I've often done this thing, I've spoken about it. I think to you before about, if you, your best friend is the person you have the least filter with, right? So if you meet someone on a plane and you go, wow, see the World Cup, it's a good game, on it? Nothing, right? Surface level. And if you say, oh my God, you have to see these hemorrhoids.

incredible. Like, it's a, you know, it's connecting at another level. You're just like, you've got no filter with that person. That's your best friend in the world. And if you treat the audience like that, you get paid back 10 times over. Like, people feel that, oh, okay, there's no, he's treating us like adults. He's saying the things that he thinks are funny. And there's a real, there's a connection there. And then increasingly, like, people aren't talking about things in the, in the, in the mainstream media. So there's a gap there to chat about things that, you know, what's going on in the world. Isn't it interesting that what you're looking to do with comedy to kind of say the thing that maybe lots of people think or hadn't realized that they thought, and to say it with a

degree of no fucks slash bravery, that mean that you're the person that pushes the boundary in that regard? Well, I think the Overton window, like people talk about the Overton window in politics, the idea that you go, what's the most left wing and what's the most right wing thing you could say that's socially acceptable at a dinner party, right? That's the Overton window of conversation, right? And it's expanded massively in politics the last couple of years to the left and to the right, for better for worse. I think comedy does that for conversation.

I think the real benefit of going to a comedy show isn't necessarily the two hours you spend laughing at the jokes at the show. It's the conversation you have on the way home, where the conversational overton window has broadened. I don't think people were as open talking about sex and politics before and after George Carlin and Richard Pryor. along. I think they expanded the window. And I think, you know, someone like, you know, Chappelle's out there expanding the window of what you can and can't talk about. So you've got that

with, I don't know what to say, how to categorize it, spicy topics, insights that might be somewhat controversial or inflammatory or on the edges of what people would typically do. But there's another dimension, which is a sort of level of sincerity or earnestness or emotionality, a depth, maybe an unapologetic, self-deprecating, sometimes exposing look, how people are motivated, and maybe how you are motivated, or maybe how somebody in the audience feels about something. And that almost feels like another type of Overton window, and it's separate from the first one. Yeah, it doesn't all need to be, you know, you talk about the incredibly controversial thing. I'm very happy to talk about third rail topics and try and be funny about them, but I'm also very happy to be

earnest and to be sincere about so. There's a level of earnestness as well, which is commonly publicly accepted, and there is a level of earnestness and depth, which pushes outside of that as well. Kind of obsessed with this idea that people are desperate for authenticity, but they're allergic to sincerity, that people love the idea of someone just being themselves, speaking their truth forward. But when you see a father break down crying because his wife left him, A lot of the internet has this sort of allergic aversion response to that. There is a, we want people to show themselves. I think if you're going to do anything that's even vaguely out there, you've got to turn off the comments section.

Other people's opinion of me is none of my business. Just you do your thing and you go, you've got your audience and they come and they enjoy it and we have a good time. Great. Like anyone kind of throwing shade on that and going, well, you know, how can you talk about serious things? He tells offensive jokes. okay well I mean we all contain multitudes you get what I mean though here right like you have the classic overtone window and then you have this emotional

overtone window as well which is how how deeper you prepared to go in a life show how how edgy are your jokes allowed to be and how earnest are your conversation is allowed to be and there is a limit there is a not even a limit but there is an expected bar beyond which oh that people really sort of prick their ears up and pay attention

and have a kind of they have a more animated response to it And I think that one of the areas that you can dig into is like, holy shit, like he really, he really went there. Or when you're sat down with a friend, you have, you having a conversation with a friend over dinner. And it's, you know, bouncing between the level of emotionality that's normal. And then it descends into one that is not so common. Well, I think it sticks to people. What are you, what are you solving for in a comedy show? Like, laughter is the main metric, right, for comedy. You want there to be three big laughs a minute and you want to have that frequency. with the jokes, but also silence.

Don't be afraid of silence. Like a silence where there's a poignant moment and everyone has a little thing. Good, fine, we can have that as well. But it's nice that it's changing because it keeps it very exciting for me that you're not doing the same thing again and again. It's not like you're doing the same show.

That we've got kind of different flavors. Certainly, you're looking to optimize for memorability to a degree as well, like for people to go, like, yeah, I really, really loved that sensation. as opposed to what did you do, what was it like to go and see this artist last journey? Like, I can't fucking remember. Well, the memorable is interesting because if someone choosing to come and see you live, it's a big deal.

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

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

And I remember thinking, oh, that's crazy. That is ridiculous. They think their photo is going to steal their soul. And now I think, yeah. I mean, it might not be one photo, but a thousand a day, that'll do it. That'll absolutely do it. That will break you away from who you are. You'll be alienated from yourself.

And then I'm thinking about even the language of it. It's not hiding. It's nets and webs, the internet. How so? It's the web, right? It's the internet. What are nets and webs do? They catch people.

That's what it's doing. I think Aldous Huxley was right about this. Our power will not be taken from us by some overlord. I think we'll give it away for cheap dopamine. And Aldous Huxley said it was Soma, which was the tabler, right? And he was even right about that. It's just a different kind of tabler. So not some equivalent here of treating people like slaves

caused them to not work as hard as you might want them to, and they would rebel, and sometimes they would be lazy, but if you can manage to create a system where people actually want to work as hard for you as you want them to work by incentivizing them on the back end, then you'll get them to continue to drive themselves insane as they work harder and harder. I guess it's kind of the same here, but with regards to distraction and freely giving away your information and giving away your attention as well, you don't need to demand it from people, you just need to make the incentives aligned that they want to give it to you. Yeah, it's a really interesting time. I think we haven't got this. It's a very new technology as well. These new technologies are coming along. long, we have to sort of integrate them into our society. I think it will be, ultimately,

the trajectory will be up and it will be better, but we have to learn how to work with this stuff. I mean, AI is the other thing that everyone's kind of talking about. You go, we haven't quite figured out what it is yet. I think AI is like a musical instrument, and anyone can sit down at a piano and make a noise at the piano, but it takes time and attention and practice to direct it into creating a symphony, right? It's like an instrument. We're going to be using that tool, but how do we use it? And at the moment, it's very sort of early stages. It's that thing of, my take on AI is like, I don't have religion.

I don't think we were made in God's image. But I think we so wanted there to be a God. We created one in our image. It's all knowing, all powerful, can create miracles and lives in a cloud. Well, what am I talking about? I think it's like that, it's, Hegel and Nietzsche had the idea, hundreds of years ago. The idea that the God wasn't there for the Big Bang,

but the universe is a device for creating God. And that we are the universe experiencing itself. Everyone's very impressed with AI because they've forgotten what they are. We are much more impressive than AI. AI is really good at left brain shit, really good at left brain stuff. But the right brain stuff,

and the left brain apprehends, but the right brain comprehends. it's all Ian McGilchrist's stuff and that idea that you go the gestalt the whole the complex stuff they can't do it can do the complicated though so well so in a sense

maybe it'll take away the drudgery of life and allow us to be more human and to do more artistic fulfilling fun things with our lives that make us feel more connected that's the dream yeah that's the dream that's being put forward I think a lot of people

have kind of forgotten about the connection comprehend side of things, of their own existence, so much that if there is a threat to the drudgery being taken away, and that's not to say

that that's all it's going to do, right? It very well might take away everything else as well. But we can only see the jobs that will take away because they already exist. We can't see the jobs

that will create because by definition they don't exist yet. So it's that thing of like going, well, we're in a pickle now and it's, this has happened before, this is precedented. The Industrial Revolution really made physical strength obsolete. You don't need that anymore to farm the land to make things.

You don't need physical strength. Machines do all of that for us. And then this is taking away some of the drudgery of white collar work, but hopefully the creativity will be uniquely human. Favorable conditions never come. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. Yeah, that's really good, isn't it? But just there is this sense that at some point in future, my problems will be out of the way and I can finally get to.

down to doing the real thing, as opposed to thinking, this is the situation that I'm existing in. I'm always going to be faced with problems. There is never going to be a time where I have none, like completing a video game and arriving at a level where there's no more enemies. That's just what life is. Yeah, well, you want people to have some idea that there's a future, that there's a, that they want to start families, that they want to live a life. You know, There's, you know, shocking statistics about the abortion rate in the UK. You heard this? I don't know.

So it's, I think it's one in three viable pregnancies now and an abortion in the UK, which, you know, put the morality to one side. That's not my business. But the idea of going, well, what does that really suggest that people feel that they can't start a life? They can't build a family. They can't, you know, settle down. They don't feel able to with the, you know, the climate that we have at the moment. Yeah.

Favorable conditions never come. Yeah, the favorable conditions. You want people to feel like they can, you know, that life's going to be better for their kids. The life's going to be better for them. Wouldn't it be wonderful if favorable conditions felt like they were here even when they weren't? Like, that's the kind of world that you want people to be in, right? An abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset. Believing that you need to wait for favorable conditions in future is by definition, a scarcity mindset. Right now is not enough. And in future, it may be better if I can construct the world into this very specific kind of a way. It does feel like we're living through a very kind of unique time. I mean, I suppose everyone always always. things this. But did they in the 90s? There was nothing going on in the 90s.

There was, I mean, you lived through it. You tell me. Yeah. Relatively quiet. Right. Yeah. It's the kind of the end of Pax Americana. And really since this phase of history sort starts in 89, 91, it's the Berlin War collapses, the Soviet Union's gone. And suddenly you go from being a bipolar world to a unipolar world. And no one noticed for, you know, 30 years. But just as the American Navy got smaller, like the canary in the coal mine was the Mali pirates. Like that never would have happened when the US Navy was at full strength with an enemy in Russia that it was, you know, it would have policed that. No problem at all. Safe navigation. Yeah, they would have, they would have schooled them. And then suddenly sort of things fracture.

Suddenly you've got all these sort of different things. We live in a multipolar world now. And it's very confusing. It's, you know, on a geopolitics level, it's a very strange time. And you're seeing this revolution go on. If you take revolution to mean the replacement of elites, like the mainstream media is being replaced. The academia, there's a replication crisis and they've lost a lot of credibility. Politics now, the major parties in the UK may never win another election, the ones that we've had the last hundred years. It's really is kind of a fracturing of our system. I suppose it gets back to Robert Frost and the idea of civilization is a clearing in the forest. And we have to relitigate and rebuild all of this stuff. Did you know,

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A checkout. Do you think that people are going to look back in 50 years' time, 30 years time at 2026 and go, those were the good old days? The nostalgia that a lot of people have for the 90s? I don't know. I think there's something about the, what's that lovely quote? The strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men, and so it goes.

And I think there's something about we're in a very tumultuous time now. Do you think this is hard times? Yeah. I think this is this is hard times I think it's very tough out there for people and I think that there's a lack of leadership and there's you know you look at how countries are being run

it's it's yeah it's clearly these are these are hard times you know the idea of k fabe right that thing from wwee it's all about the kind of the meta game that's being played the optics it's everything is unreal and surreal and definitely if you look back I mean there was that debate

analysis between Obama and I can't remember who it was that he was going up against in 2012, 2008. And before they begin, they just wanted to, I just wanted to say my opponent, I respect him very much and I appreciate that this thing and a da-da-da-da-da. And then you roll the clock forward to this literal WWE event where there's personal insults and swearing and back and forth. And you think, I don't know, is statesmanlike behavior unnecessary stodge? Is it this sort of prim and proper pomp and circumstance which isn't needed? Or has something there been, if not lost, like caricatured, sort of turned into this exposition of itself, this sort of ridiculous role-playing game? Everybody's is what they're supposed to be, and it's all been turned to extremists.

It certainly feels very extreme at the moment. I mean, it really does. But I don't think it's unfixable. I think we've been in worse spots than this in the past. You know, there must have been people sort of in 1944 going, this is, we're in the middle of a world war. This is bad, isn't it? This is bad.

What's going to happen? How are we going to straighten this out? I think about that a lot. I think about how sort of kinetically and literally things were significantly worse at almost every period in human history up until now. But I wonder whether sort of metaphysically and symbolically things were quite as bad. I wonder whether we have the most sort of confusing time now, even if it's not the most kinetically dangerous time.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think there's solutions out there. And I think it's a question of, I think statesman is really the thing that you need. You need great leadership in these kind of times. You're someone that's good thinking about sort of 20 years in the future rather than the election cycle. What's happening in the UK at the moment?

I'm not being back for a while. The UK is not in a great situation. I mean, I think Andy Burnham's going to take over and I wish him well. And I don't know what's going to change. I think it requires some sort of radical realism. You know, if you were going to fix the UK, what would you do? I think the fundamentals are it needs to be more competitive as a nation. And what makes a nation competitive? Well, 2% on income tax either way or changing the stamp duty laws. It's all kind of nothing. Just a rearrange. the deck chairs on the Titanic, they need someone to come in and actually address the real problem. There's four things that affect a country's competitiveness, I think. There's the currency, the rate of the currency, there's the energy cost, there's the amount of, what do you call it, red tape bureaucracy, and there's, well, and then, hang on, I'll have a drink. Culture? No, no. Sorry, I'll give you that again. So, you've got the current. You've got energy costs, you've got red tape, and you've got tax.

And you can do things to all four of those to make the country more competitive. And really, Britain needs to be competitive on the global stage. When we left Europe, for better for worse, people voted for that. And we never really did it. And we never really competed. So, I mean, if I was in charge, right, if I was in charge for the day, I devalue the currency. I devalue the pound. I think pounds overvalued.

and you know why a pint 750 in London? Well because it's overvalued as a currency. The idea that you would decrease the value of the pound. People talk about redistribution of wealth to the north. We keep it high because of the city of London. And actually, I'm not really concerned about the exchange rate affecting your holiday in France being more expensive for two weeks of the year. I'd be more concerned with the other 50 weeks of the year where you work. We've got to be a net exporter of things. So our things need to be cheaper. And in order to do that, We have to lower the currency value, which is relatively easy to do. People say that the UK is the seventh biggest economy in the world, but it's not.

It's the seventh biggest city in the world surrounded by a very poor country. Yeah. But you want it to be redistribute. You want there to be, you know, factories being built. As far away from London as you can get. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't feel like the wealth of the city of London was reaching Newcastle or Middlesbrose, Stodden. We have the most expensive energy in the world.

I think it's like four times higher than America. No way. And you go, it's crazy. And it's systematically being, being, I mean. Is this Green New Deal stuff? Is that why that's right? Well, there's a bit of that. But I mean, it's like, I'm all for the Green New Deal.

Just give me a long enough runway. Give me 25 years and I'll give you net zero. Not 2013. But what I want to do, I want to be as technologically advanced, if you can imagine this for ambition, as technologically advanced as France was in the 70s. So France, in the 1970s built 56 nuclear plants. They've got the cheapest energy in Europe.

I think of a fuck what Russia says. or what's going on in the Middle East because they've got their energy sorted. Do that. Do that. But it's a very long range. Anyone that says it can fix energy in two months, like you're living in a dream world, it's a very long range problem. And then regulation, the red tape, the regulation, just cut all of that.

Cut all of that. We're like the sort of, it's like the end of the Soviet Union, the amount of regulation you need to do anything in the UK now. They could cut an awful lot of that red tape and kind of free people to be more on Everybody likes the idea of being in a country that's got an illustrious history. It's so esteemed. Like how long it's been a rise. God, the guy comes out and he's got this mace and dots his cap and there's wood everywhere. Everything's fucking mahogany. You go, yeah, that's great. But you also do accumulate a lot of bullshit along the way and a lot of bureaucracy. And there's a lot of hurdles that you need to jump over in order to get stuff done. You know, the tax thing as well, it's very close to my heart. But the tax thing is like, if you go to like Estonia, post the Soviet era, they went, we've got to do something. And they didn't have much time to think. and they've got one tax form. Estonia has one tax form.

Estonia has a law where the government can't ask you for the same bit of information twice. So if you give your address to your doctors, they assume that the tax man knows your address and everyone else because it's all joined up. And the tax forms one page. And they have a flat rate of tax. And they collect an awful lot of tax.

I'm not interested in equality. I'm interested in abundance. Like what would be the thing that would just get everyone living in Britain? We just have to compete with other countries. and get people to come to us, start businesses and want to live where we are. We've got the same number of universities in the top 10 as America does, but we produce five times fewer entrepreneurs,

get out of those universities. I think we probably produce the same amount of entrepreneurs, but they end up somewhere else. They're not in Great Britain. Brain drain. Yeah. They're all somewhere else. Which is, I think it's like, it's possible to, you know, to change it.

I mean, listen, that's what I would do with the UK. I'd go, right, currency, lower that. energy, you need a 20-year plan for energy in the UK, regulation, you'd cut a bunch of that, and you'd have a flat rate attacks, and then just, you would see if that works. And then if it doesn't, you would, you would change it. But I think that's, that would be a kind of a positive thing to do. I think America's like, America's like, I think I could fix America in two moves. Okay. All right. So, I would have, um, open primaries. for Congress, Senate, presidential, everything would be open, so people would have to, they'd have to go to the center. You wouldn't be appealing to your constituency. You'd be appealing to the center. 90% of people agree about 90% of everything. And then I would have term limits for senators and Congress. Because I don't blame Donald Trump for being powerful. I blame the checks and balances for not checking and balancing. They've done their job. It's an amazing. It's an amazing.

piece of technology the American Constitution. But you've got to, you've got to work it. It doesn't just sit there. You've got to, it's an active thing. I mean, I had Bernie Sanders on the show, and he's been in government longer than I've been alive. Yeah. All right. I mean, it's pretty intense. Yeah, that's it. I think the idea, like 20 years, maybe? 20 years doesn't sound, that sounds reasonable. Is it term limits in the UK? No. Right. But there were term limits that didn't use to be a term on president. I think it was they brought it in with Roosevelt. Right. Roosevelt did, I think, three times.

He was trying to go for three. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway. Yeah, we solved the problems of the world there. Makes it. Yeah, it's super. Have you heard David Ogilvy's line, you can't save souls in an empty church? Heard it a couple of weeks ago, and I've kind of been obsessed with it since, this sort of idea that if you believe in something, you have a moral duty to spread that message around, and that a lot of people insulate themselves

from having to have their ideas meet reality by, I mean, it's just so, it's so sophisticated and refined. That's the reason that it hasn't managed to become sufficiently popular. It's like being the underground band whose music is just, you know, it's very, it's sort of a virtuoso type thing.

It would be very hard for you to, the proletariat, they wouldn't be able to understand how sophisticated it is that we're doing. But yeah, you can't save souls in an empty church to me makes it kind of incumbent on anybody that believes in a thing to find a way to get that message out and to Monday morning quarterback whatever it is that you care about, whether it's climate or young people or suicide or the birth rate or fucking art or taxes or whatever. Yeah.

It is kind of incumbent on you to find a way to... I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree. I think the idea of like talking about those things that are third rails and getting a message out there is really good. It's probably the most difficult, but the most kind of beautiful bit of my show at the moment is I talk about suicide in the show. And I say, well, I tell people the terrible truth, which is suicide doesn't work.

People commit suicide because they want to get rid of the pain. But you can't get rid of the pain. All you can ever hope to do is redistribute the pain to the people that loved you. And it's a big moment. It's like a people that are, you know, and there's a non-zero number of people in the audience that are suffering that go, oh, right. Oh, this is, this is my burden to carry. It's a tough thing, but it's kind of, it's interesting to talk about that stuff. It's interesting to have that platform and to feel like, okay, I can, I can say that.

That's a terrifying realization. Yeah. Yeah, it's big. But if one person listens to that and goes, oh, right, okay, yeah, that means I can't. Great. There's some data that George from the Tin Men told me that I think 90% of men who took their own lives had sought help from a mental health practitioner before they did it. So we just need people to sort of open up and talk to the professionals thing. It doesn't seem to be working in the way that we anticipated it too.

Yeah, it's Rilker, isn't it? Feel everything, beauty and terror. No feeling is final. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, it can be if people decide to make that decision. Yeah, I am, there's something similar from Blake Burge. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, if you want a calmer life, you need to address small problems while they're still small. The cost of dealing with an issue rarely gets cheaper with time. Procrastination turns uncomfortable things into unavoidable things. Basically, like, if it doesn't fit, eventually it'll hurt wiring it.

Yeah. I think that's really, that's again, it's on the kind of compound interest. Yeah. On the positive things, and, you know, if you're saving money, it works. If you're building skills, it works. But also, if you have problems and you don't address them, it's going to get worse over time.

So addressing that and having that tough conversations. I think getting a quality of a life is kind of, is you could probably track it with how many uncomfortable conversations, are you willing to have? Oh, do you feel comfortable to have, right? How many people around you can you speak to with no filter? And then there's the other half of that, which is who can you sit in silence with

and not need to fill it the most? It's the way that you can work out who your best friend is. Yeah, make a terrible fucking podcast. Yeah, but it would be wonderfully regulating for the two guests that were there. Just don't publish those ones. Publish the ones where you talk with no filter. Yeah.

But, yeah, it's... I don't know. I really feel like we're on the cusp, but something happening where, okay, we've got these new technologies and they're atomizing people and they're distracting them. And then everyone kind of becomes a little bit aware of the fact that maybe they're dangerous or maybe they're making us live our lives in a way which is maladaptive and although immediately gratifying ultimately becomes kind of destructive. And now we're just about getting to the point where people are thinking, I probably need to take some really intense,

action to try and get rid of that out of my life. I need to join a run club. I need to start going out to shows. I need to force myself to head to a coffee shop. I don't want to be working from home anymore. The self-imposed working from home, I'm going to go back into the office. I'm going to spend time around people. I'm going to try and change the scope on my sniper rifle to adjust for the wind, which is blowing toward me, so that I can start to shoot more toward the target that I want to live my life like. But people's ability to adapt to new technology. so much more quickly than our habits are. And that means that for a long time, last decade, decade and a half, people were on the receiving end of it. And now I think people are starting to

realize, okay. Well, yeah. I mean, I think it's knowing what we are as well, it's that, it's that great quote of the Paleolithic Emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology. Well, let's roll the dice on that and see how we do. I mean, it seems kind of, it's crazy. And it's only going to get worse, I think, now with the interface of AI, the idea that this new technology has kind of come along and how's that going to change the world. So it's kind of shifting sands. I just think people, people do, you know, we are, we need to be connected. And that's kind of the business model of what I do, is like getting people out to shows and to sit in a room together and to laugh. They've had to put pants on. That's a big deal. Yeah. But I do think that thing of like, that's what people kind of crave,

going out and being together. They don't necessarily even have to know the other people. It's like, sort of, it's like church. They're kind of coming together and finding something. You might not believe me, but this is what peak sleep optimization looks like. I'm not talking about the nightgown. It's just for sex appeal. I'm talking about my eight sleep.

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Right now, you can get up to $350 off the pod five by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to 8Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T-Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Yeah, the addressing problems while a small thing I think works very much personally as well. The way that you degrade your trust in yourself, like we were talking about earlier on, happens with one missed promise, with one attempt at a change that you decided against doing or that you couldn't hold yourself to doing. And this is why small changes do end up compounding. It's also why it feels very unfair. People can look at someone who's at the top of their particular

industry and say, well, why is it that all of the gains accrue to that person? It's like, well, because the compounding interest is working in their favor. And the same thing happens in reverse, unfortunately, too, that people kind of spiral up. It's another thing. I don't worry about the arts that was like the oligarchy of the arts there's an oligarchy in the arts now where you go with movies its existing IP

or its sequels or prequels that dominate, I mean really dominate it's like five big movies a year that dominate like 90% of the box office and with music it's the oligarchy of like five huge artists that dominate globally and it used to be 100 artists

or 200 artists that all sold pretty well books is the same you know books are the same I hope comedy is broad enough that there's like people can pick their favorite stuff and it doesn't get dominated too much by big names. You want it to be so that there's lots of different people enjoying it. I think, I mean, my big kind of driver is I won't get more people interested in doing comedy rather than just going to see it. I mean, I've written this book on jokes with my friends, Abby Grant and Amanda Baker. And it's like how to be a comedian, really, essentially how to write jokes. Can anyone become funny?

I think so, yeah. I think so. I think everyone's got kind of a story to tell. And if you think about what stand-up comedy is, right? It's ordering your thoughts, writing them down, and finding your own authentic voice. That strikes me as an incredibly worthwhile activity. That should be taught in schools. That's probably got more going for it than learning music.

Music's very valuable to learn as well. But you go grade eight on the piano won't come in handy when you're doing a best man speech or a presentation at work. or talking to your partner. And actually having that ability to write down your thoughts and find some perspective in life, which is also kind of what comedy does. It's very good at waking us up. I think about what jokes are, right?

It's kind of like cardamon, is it carnaman? Thinking fast and slow. Canaman. Canaman. Okay, so first order and second order thinking. So the setup for a joke is first order thinking. it's it's you you make an assumption about what the guy's going to say and then the punchline kind of snaps you into oh I actually had to think about that oh okay so it's that idea of the brain

the brain is designed to not have to think your brain is designed to yeah it's a brain's an lLM yeah it's it's pattern recognition it's exactly LLM yeah so and then comedy makes you kind of oh oh okay I'm thinking I've got to think about that in a new way they've actually got to think about that thing it like snaps you awake I think it's quite childlike in a sense because children really think and grown-ups tend to be beyond a certain age. You're just pattern recognition. You've seen this all before. And so comedians have this ability to really think about stuff. It's a very attractive way of being. I think teaching that is a, I'd like more people to kind of get into it. I think they'd enjoy watching it more if they knew a little bit more about it.

And also, I think the idea of going, there's so many great, it's quite a new medium comedy. It's not been around for as long as music. You know what the, well, hang on on, I'll have a drink, I'll tell you a story. You heard of Gregorian chants? Yes. Okay. Do you know why you've heard of Gregorian chants? And I will tell you, don't panic. Okay.

So Pope Gregory, I don't know, a thousand years ago, is wandering around the Vatican, and he goes to some local churches, and they're all singing the songs differently. And he goes, well, this is some nonsense. I want them all to be sung the same. Write down the music. And the guy, the bishops or whatever go,

the thing is though you can't write down music because it's sort of ethereal it's like from another realm and it just has to be it's about soul and a groove and whatever the fuck they said and he went here's the thing i'm the pope write it down and so they wrote down the music and we know what gregorian chance are now interestingly fast forward 400 years from that and you have bark and mozart beethoven which couldn't have existed without musical notation. So writing down comedy, like there's too much magical thinking in my business.

There's too much, oh, that guy's just got funny bones or, oh, he just gets up there and does the thing and, oh, he just wings it, he's just funny. No, it's like jokes, they're jokes. It doesn't diminish the enjoyment of jokes to know how they work. I think it's a, and the less magical thinking,

the more everyone can go, yeah, can you learn how to be funny? Yeah, cool. Cushka, and you've got a story to tell, and you've got a voice. Most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a song unsung. I don't want that to happen. I'm on jokes. Right, so you're kind of arguing that unlike music or acting or writing,

comedies never had a shared vocabulary, and you can invent one. You've invented one. Why do you think... I suppose it's about putting it together. I mean, you're standing on the shoulders of giants. You kind of didn't invent anything. You just spotted what was there. In the same way as musical notation doesn't create music.

It describes music that already exists. Yeah. And then can you reverse engineer it and see if it works? So I'm working on, I've written the book. That's coming out in October. And then, or we've written the book. It's Abby and Amanda and I. And then we're working on putting together a kind of a course,

like kind of an interactive course whereby you could sort of, there's such great teaching methods out there, especially using AI as a teaching method. it's really interesting. What can you achieve with that? I mean, is it going to grow cool? Can I build a comedian with that? If I can, then great.

You say that you've got the first scientific theory of what actually makes jokes work? Well, I don't know if it's a scientific theory. You know, we've got, it's kind of, it's all in there. I mean, it's a bit inside baseball, but that thing of like the different ways the jokes work and the,

I mean, broadly speaking, is that thing of like, taking that pattern recognition and reversing it, like making sure that you're waking up the mind, the sudden revelation of a previously concealed fact. It's so simplistic in a way, but that trick is just delightful. Have you ever felt guilty at giving the trick away? Do you think that other comedians are going to get annoyed at you for demystifying it? No, it's like everywhere had a guild, right? Everyone had a secret society. It's like the magic circle of comedy. I think most comedians,

that I know don't really know how they write jokes. They find it on stage or stuff occurs to them and they note it down and they remember it. But they don't have like a... Virtuoso musicians, but they don't know notation. Yeah, they wouldn't be able to teach it because they haven't thought about it in that way. Great, but they're doing their thing and they're doing great. Fine. But I think the idea of being able to be more systematic about it is a really sort of positive idea. And I'd like to have that, I'd like to give that gift to people to be able to

throw the rope down and say, come on, we can all do this. Is writing harder than performing? I think writing's the job. And writing is self-assignment. You've got to sit down and no one ever tells you. There's no point in a comedian's career where their manager sits down and goes, all right, you've got to write. It's like, people just assume that.

And, you know, that's the preparation. That's the reason that you sort of, you know, succeed or fail. You've got to sort of deliver on that. How do you feel about comedians having, writers or buying jokes off other comedians. I guess, you know, if you write on TV shows or whatever, it's the absolute norm. It's like on eight out ten cats or last one laughing or any of those shows that I do, we've got like a writing room and we, they're brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And some people are great at writing. Some people are great at writing and they don't really want to

perform. So that seems pretty valid. Yeah, there must be a comedian today. He thinks sort of embodies everything the book's trying to teach and then presumably there's someone who you think is great despite discarding many of the rules? Well, I think, you know, it's comedians you're dealing with. So, I mean, I think knowing what the rules are is the first step, and then breaking them all will be... Who do you think breaks them the most? In terms of comedically, I'm just trying to think of, like, someone that's funny.

And it might be someone like Bob Mortimer, which I don't think Vic and Bob might be slightly lost on your American audience, but, like, really surrealist comics where you go... Kind of absurd. I can't quite put. my finger on why that's funny, but it's really, really funny. And it's taken me kind of back and by surprise and out of nowhere. Is that stuff less formulaic? Is that a little bit more kind of the jazz virtuoso improvisation? Yeah. It's less fungible than... I think so, but I mean,

Vic and Bob love jokes as well. So, I mean, it's, yeah, and no, and it's, it's whatever you want to be. I mean, they're very unique. I think also they kind of fall into that thing of going this, if done incorrectly, I think learning how to write jokes, and then you put yourself into it. So it's that thing of like, with comedy, you don't want to be the best. You want to be the only. There's no best in comedy. There's no, oh, he's the best comedian. Like a top ten list is meaningless.

Because it's what makes you laugh. What do you like? And the more someone is themselves on stage, the more people sort of gravitate towards them. So the idea of going, it's like, it's not a competition. It's like it doesn't matter how many people do well. It just makes it a bigger pie. Let's say that you had six months with someone completely unfunny to try and make them as funny as possible. What would you be teaching them first?

I think the first thing would be to recognize, you know, their story, what do they want to say? What could they say that no one else could say? What's their story? What's their take on life? And it might be they want to tell a personal story. It might be they want to talk about politics. It might be they're interested in sports. Whatever they want to talk about, you sort of assess that.

And then, okay, how do we get into that? How do we get, how do we make that surprising and delightful to listen to? It's nice because I think everyone needs, I think everyone's got a sense of humor. It's like everyone's got like, like, you say someone unfunny. Everyone's got our sense of humor. How dark or sardonic or sarcastic it is, that varies. And what you like varies. It's that thing of like, your taste in comedy is like your taste in food and sex.

Some people like spicy, some people like vanilla. It's great. What about timing? What's the secret to comic timing? There seems to be a pattern in rhythm that's the kind of the proximate speed of development way if you speak at about sort of 92 beats per minute, if you speak in that kind of in that rhythm,

that tends to be, not just for comedy, actually for spoken word, for political speeches as well. That seems to work very well for people. They get into that rhythm. see the audience kind of respond to that. So if you, if you're, it seems almost kind of magical. I don't think it is. I think it's like a, there's something about that cadence of speech that just lends itself to an audience being able to kind of tune into what you're saying and focus. And some people kind of, they rush it and it feels a bit garbled and they're all over

the place. And that doesn't mean speaking fast or slow. It's like it's where you put the, the intonation, it's where you put the beat. So I think the rhythm is incredibly important. I have a dream. Is it 92? Yeah. And I think there's a Winston Churchill one as well. Obama's 92. And he speaks quite slowly, but he's on that beat. And he's a magnificent public speaker. What joke template do you think has survived longest?

What's the most classic? The most classic is, I guess, you know, the pullback reveal where it's almost like a comic strip where you're kind of looking at this thing and then you pull back and he's on the bus. You know, that thing is, that seems to work sort of universally across time. And there's wordplay. I mean, I think that, you know, jokes are the ha-ha and the aha are very similar. They're often kind of insights into something. And when people kind of realize something. I think the oldest joke is the, it's like there's a lover of laughter.

It's an old Roman book of jokes. And it has a joke in it that still works, I think. We're guys in the barbers getting his haircut. And the barber says, how do you want your haircut? And the guy says, in silence. It's almost like 4,000 years old. It's joke-shaped. I wouldn't open with it, but yeah.

What's been the change since doing more of the crowdwork stuff and putting that online? So seeing an awful lot of that at the moment. I think it's made it slightly bigger in terms of the audience. It's like, you know, it's growing. I think it's there's more of a connection to people. now so you kind of come up and it would have been you know five years ago people might come up and say well I saw the show and I thanks and now people kind of want to have a conversation about something it's very nice it's deep in the connection yeah I think so I think I'm trying to kind of okay so it was

like I had my stand-up sort of persona on stage telling jokes and then this kind of you know podcast mode and they're merging and I'm really excited about that I really like it I really like the idea that there's like, there'll be, don't panic. There'll be 90 minutes of bang on one-liners in the show, but there'll also be half an hour of this, chatting about stuff and life. Great. How much has that influenced you?

Because obviously, you know, you were pretty well established doing the jockey thing. And then even though you've been well read and you did the university stuff and all the rest of it, it does feel to me like there's been a pivot. And, you know, fortunately me and George have been able to like be a part of that and like be friends and hang out and stuff. How much is the wisdom verse come podcast world influenced that thinking?

I think it's been a huge influence. It's also that thing of like it's what are you interested in talking about? You know, it's like it's not, also you don't want to be one note. Like if you see a band play on stage and everything is a, is a flaw filler. But sometimes you want to slow it down. You need a couple of ballads in there. So it's nice to have a mix in the set. where you go, okay, well, I know, you go out there and you 20 minutes of just one liners, great,

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

Yeah. And I understand why permanently drilling the same or what appear to be variants of the same kind of trite insight around, well, you know, you fake it until you make it, but you need to believe in it in beforehand. Is it trite, though? I don't think it is. I think it's like that thing if you go... But it's also that thing of like, if you read the comments,

you know, it'll be someone being terribly kind of above it all, going, oh, rubbish. Oh, oh, systems beat goals. Whatever. Yeah, okay. What have you done? Well, there's definitely a question of if you're so smart, how can you still haven't done it?

Like if you get bored of people talking about cold, dark, quiet for your bed, why is it that your sleep still sucks? Yeah, it's okay. as well. It's okay to go through that. I think, you know, early 20s is really the best time for that. If you want to be super cynical and shit on everything, great. Do you think? And then at some point, you go, right, what can I do? What, like, because it's that thing of like there's two different ways of learning. Like, sometimes, some lessons you have to go and, like, the reason to write the book on jokes is, I feel like I macheted my way through the jungle to become a comedian.

I feel like, it was not a well-worn path. You have to kind of, right, get there, and how do I write this, and how do I put on a show and how do I do the thing and okay doing two shows and I whatever that thing was that I kind of I've created this career for myself and I feel like now it's incumbent on me to help and to say well what how look just do this do this that'll help that'll definitely move you that won't be wasting your time if you want to do the same thing as me just that's how you write the jokes great then go and do your own thing but I think the idea of like not repeating the stuff because you think, well, have people heard this before? Well, maybe, but does, I think, is that, what's that great quote about, um, in the work of genius, we see our own discarded

thoughts? Yeah. So the idea that we were constantly, uh, we're hearing stuff that we kind of know a lot of the time. It's like there's nothing that I'll say, uh, that people will go, oh, wow, it's totally new. But they might go, oh, I'd kind of forgotten that. I think if it's something that is totally new, often people probably will be more likely to discard it. I've got no anchor point at all. You need to be incredibly brave and have quite high conviction around whoever it is that you're listening to to pivot your entire worldview based on something that you had no reference point prior to. But yeah, I don't know what the critical mass is of people needing to hear an insight before they become convinced by it. But I know that it's usually not once.

And with that in mind, yeah, I really like trying to drill home pithy insight. that are condensed down in a way that you can remember. Like, my memory is not that great. So for me, synthesizing or condensing down a big idea into pithy little aphorism or a mantra. But it's almost like it's what remains, right? So let's see you read a book and it's 500 pages long. You remember one little quote from that book. Well, that's what remains.

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

You'd struggle to find anyone to care. Right. But yeah, like, I think the trajectory is very good. It's kind of, you know, it's building nicely. and I think more important than that, I think when are people happy when they're getting good at stuff. I think competence is the, it's such an important thing for people, like to get good at something. It doesn't matter what it is. And to feel like they're getting better as well. And you think about like kids, kids learn lots of different things.

They learn, you know, how to ride a bike, right? So you couldn't ride a bike and then you struggled and then you could. It's really fun to learn how to do stuff, right? And then some people get better at it and they could do tricks and mess around or whatever. comedy is something that there's endless amounts of tricks so you just keep on getting a little bit better all the time I really like that is it Kaizan I think is the name of the Japanese thing

like getting very like British cycling does it really well getting very slight improvements incremental improvements over time brings an awful lot of satisfaction I kind of think that thing about going that's very exciting to me and then trying to put myself out of my comfort zone every 18 months or so trying to put on bigger tours or play different rooms or do it in a different

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

which means you give fewer fucks over time, which means you can be more brave and you can be more experimental, you can take bigger swings with a bigger skill set underneath. But if people are welded in place by their fear of criticism or skepticism or cynicism, that means that they don't get started. Yeah, that's a really, it's slightly tragic, I think. It is worrying about what other people are thinking of you the whole time. And they're not wanting to do it. I remember like mid-20s.

I remember when I left my job and I told my friends that I wanted to be a comedian and I'd left my job. And the reactions were really like, oh, I think Jimmy's having a breakdown. Because obviously, they didn't see this. They didn't see where it ended. They just saw the beginning of it. It was like going, no, no, you've got a good job. boy, what are you doing? You lunatic. And it was like, I was like, yo-ho-ho, ho, a pirate's life for me. And it's like, seemed kind of crazy. But if you'd listen to that, it was that, you talk about it very

nicely, that the lonely chapter. Yeah. Where you kind of go, you have to slightly leave who you were behind. You have to say goodbye to that. And there's a grieving to that. And you have to sort of move on to that, that new phase. Well, there's two things. There's a grieving of where you were and there's a fear of why you're going, because you don't know that the next step has actually got any promise for you. And again, if you're in a world where you don't have an abundance mindset, which I think a lot of people don't, that so much complexity and uncertainty and chaos, what's going to happen in future, I don't know if this thing's going to go completely terribly wrong. Why would I give up a certain five out of ten for an uncertain eight out of ten? Because

it might be a three out of ten. And that would make me feel really bad. And if you've got high inequality too, you can see not how high you could climb, but also how low you can fall. You know, oh, fuck, I really don't want to fall low. That looks horrendous to me. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, um, there's two most important days. The day you're born and the day you find out why. And the finding out why is like, what could you commit to? What could you say, well, no, I'm all in on this.

I'm going to do this thing. I mean, I'm a big advocate of specialisation. You know, find the thing that you enjoy that you can't stop thinking about. What's play to you and work for them? that's kind of where your edge is. That's going to be the thing that you're going to do, you know, better than anything else. And the safe option is, you know, it's fine. You know, some people don't find that in work.

They find that in, you know, hobbies and other pursuits. And I was chatting to someone recently about someone in the crowd was asking about music and saying, you know, I'm a, you know, musician, you got any advice. And I don't know anything about music. It was like, well, if you would do it anyway, then do it. Like, it doesn't have to be the way that you make money, doing something creative and fulfilling could be the hobby. And if it becomes the way you make money, well, great. But it should be, it should be something that you would do anyway. There's an interesting relationship between

discipline, motivation and obsession. So discipline is saying, I will make myself do the thing. Motivation is, I want to do the thing. And obsession is, I can't not do the thing. And a lot of the time, when we look at somebody who on the outside appears motivated, what they're actually doing, it's just the cooled-off version of a past obsession. It's this thing that they were obsessed with 20 years ago that is now just, it's formed into a part of their identity. It's somebody that goes to the gym, but they were completely obsessed with this is me.

Like when I was in university, I would not go on nights out, and I'd stay in and read bodybuilding.com forums, and I'd get up and make sure that my protein was right and all the rest of it. And I'm like, that's fucking lame at the time. But now when I go to the gym, it doesn't really take discipline to go and do it.

And not superbly motivated. It just is who I, am, but people are kind of serial obsessives. Some people are serial obsessives. But if you don't ever allow that obsession to sort of climb inside of you and really weigh your life for a little while, kind of like a puppet, you don't get to benefit from all of the accrued gains down the line. Because this obsession isn't going to last forever. It's this weird. But those forearms are. Alignment, this is true. The heat death of the universe is going to be gone before these finish up. It's like talking to Popeye.

That's true, yeah, but no spinach. The problem I think that people come up against is that if you don't allow yourself, if you're not prepared to let that obsession kind of really, really get inside of you and drive you forward, you miss out on this, like, beautiful opportunity. Lots of people go their entire life without having an obsession that's worth anything. And sometimes people can become obsessed with shit that they really shouldn't be, right? Which is the politics, porn, your ex, gambling, video games, stuff like that. unless video games can be quite fun.

But if you're the sort of person that's consistently becoming obsessed with stuff, like that's good. I think that you really should allow that to embrace your life for a period because it's this odd alignment of like motivation and opportunity and skill set and timing and life situation.

It's all of this shit kind of comes into alignment in one go and then this weird kind of magic. I don't think you can engineer obsession particularly well. You can force discipline, right, which is why people love it. People are obsessed with discipline because if you're prepared to pay the price, it's always there. Right. You can kind of engineer it a little bit. Maybe you start to spend a lot of time around other people who do the same sort of thing that you do. And it works a bit of a feedback loop, I think. To a degree. You can have some social pressure. Maybe you can listen to your favorite playlist, you know, get yourself amped up. Like motivation's halfway between the two. But obsession, you can't really engineer. And that means that when it comes along, it's got a certain. sort of magical quality to it and it's temporary.

But it is going to leave. You're not obsessed by the same things. Typically, most people aren't obsessed at 50 by the same stuff that they were at 30. And that I think means, okay, if I'm going to have... I think the people that are you've heard of. Correct. Because they've never pivoted. The people that have got that, like, because again, it's the compound interest.

They've really, like, that really builds up over time. If you can keep doing that thing, if you're still interested in that thing. But it's the freest discipline. motivation that you're ever going to get, right? I can't not do the thing. It's what I think about when I go to the toilet. It's what I think about when I fall asleep at night. It's what I think about when I'm eating my lunch. It's what I think about when I'm waiting in line to get into the airport. All of every single part of your life is cohesing to get you toward this thing. And that's fucking cool. And I don't know, we have, society has a really bad relationship, I think, with

obsession because it comes laden with a lot of baggage that, I don't know, people either don't understand it or they fear it. Well, I guess it's linked to addiction. You know, I think people with addictive personalities never really get over the addiction. They just get addicted to something else. So some of my best friends that are in, you know, AA would have been then addicted to the gym afterwards or addicted to eating right or addicted to shopping, whatever the next thing that comes along is, but they'll be addicted to it. It's compulsive behavior. But if you can direct that compulsive behavior to something that builds and grows and, and feeds back, then fantastic. That's the problem-solving brain thing again, right? It's like, give

yourself good problems to solve, give yourself an obsession that's worth something. And again, you can't generate all of them, but I think you can kind of help to guide yourself. So yeah, I just, that really is the freest way to become great. And it's your insight around, like, do what feels like play to you, but looks like work to everyone else, the Vars Line. If you can manage to, I don't know, find something that is positive some and pro-social. and isn't going to destroy you or the world around you. Like that, just let it, let it fucking weigh you for a bit. As long as it's not fentanyl, great.

Yeah, well, you know, there's Trank now, which is like fentanyl's fentanyl. They just keep on releasing new versions that are more powerful at all time. I think fentanyl really scares me. I think you know a drug is powerful if you're using heroin to take the edge of it. I'm going to come down from my fentanyl. This is a bit strong. I might put some heroin in this. Yeah. Like, okay.

I cut my fentanyl with heroin. Enough now, yeah. There's an argument that the fentanyl crisis is China's revenge for the opium wars. What were the opium wars? Because I've heard this, but I don't know what the opium was. It's when the British went to China and forced them to trade with us, and we sold them a bunch of opium. That's what we did. Fentanyl's mostly landing in America.

Yeah. So the British started it and the Americans are paying the price. On the receiving end of it. Yeah, but I can definitely see a connection. We are Greece to America's Rome. Right. You know, we're kind of part of the same thing, really. I mean, I know they had the War of Independence, but come on.

A lot's coming over the southern border through Mexico. Yeah. The fentanyl. Crazy. Yeah, I've seen some videos. There's this area in Philadelphia, I think, where constantly YouTubers are going and filming these, like, it's Skid Row's Skid Row. It's so intense.

No, I've seen it in some cities around America. It's really, it's, well, I mean, look, you know, what happened, though? We shut down all the asylums in the 80s because we saw one flu of the cuckoo's nest and we decided asylums were terrible places. We didn't run out of crazy people. You know, there's a lot of crazy people out there. So I think that thing of like going, you know, the homelessness problem is ultimately a, you know, a drugs, an addiction problem and a problem with mental health. And we need to treat that and to take it very seriously rather than, you know, it's, you know, building new houses is a part of that, but it's a very small part of it.

Well, the safety net in America doesn't sweep people up in the same way as it does in the UK. I don't see in the UK the same kind of shuffly, shoutsy at the sky, clutching. There's still too much of it. I mean, it's like it's really, it feels like a, there's other places you go. I mean, I travel, maybe 50 countries around the world on tour, and you become very aware of the, it's my favorite quote. William Gibson, the sci-fi writer from Canada, said the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed. I think the more you travel around the world, you see how different places deal with different problems. You sort of go, oh, right, it's kind of like we could have a utopia if we took all the

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

legalized drugs, and then went, okay, anyone that wants to get off drugs, you come here, anyone that needs to be housed, you go here, anyone, and they basically solved the problem. They ended up with very few people on heroin that they can get from a pharmacy. And the crime rate obviously falls off a cliff when you take illegal drugs out of the situation because people don't have to feed their habit

and petty crime goes down massively. Presumably organized crime as well also has the ass pulled out of it. Yeah, a lot of it. So it's that thing where you go, that kind of solved the problem. I think it's slightly creeping back a little bit now because the ring fencing that money you can do for a certain amount of time, but then politics gets in the way and people go, actually, we need that money for something else.

Because you take for granted the progress that's been made. Sure. So the problem creeps up again. But the idea of going, there's always going to be a problem around that. We're going to need to fight that. It's kind of like the strong men make good times, but the equivalent for government in relationship to society. Well, it's like Chesterton's fence.

They forget why they're spending that money on the, that thing. It only happened like 10 years ago. Yeah, 15 years, yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's not. Yeah, it's interesting, those kind of problems that are solved. I mean, I've got quite, I've got quite spicy views on drugs, right? Here's my, here's my take on marijuana. Do you want to hear my hot take of marijuana? Bring it out. Okay. I think it should be illegal for the under 30s, right? Because it's, it's kind of the opposite of a performance-enhancing drug. It's a performance-inhibiting drug. It takes away people's drive and ambition. And in those kind of, you know, early mid-20s years, when people really need to have that drive

because you're out of the kind of school system and on your own and you've got to be a self-starter and it's self-assignment, right? So, banned, 30 to 50, it should be legal, okay, you're a grown-up, you make a decision as to what you want to do, what you want to put in your body. 50 and above, mandatory.

And not because I think it's a good drug. I don't think it's a good drug, but I think it would redistribute the wealth to the young because old people would be slightly high and out of it. right okay so you're going to pharmacologically retard the people that are old yes and make the playing field more even for the people that are coming up yeah okay yeah i'm down i'm down i hate wheat it does not it does not agree with me at all but uh yeah i think it's an interesting theory i i on the portugal thing i really get the sense that

the more we try to legislate our way through things, those are kind of like the one good article per hour-long doom scroll on X insights that encourage people to keep chasing red tape. And it's like, but what about that one thing that went well? And therefore we just add bureaucracy and add bureaucracy and add bureaucracy. I would be fascinated to know what the relationship between organized crime and the government is. It's one of those nationwide slapdowns

that completely cut off at the knees an entire universe of pretty dangerous, pretty nasty guys who are all trying to cartel their way to wealth. But it is a single move that would be able to basically put a huge industry of people out of business. They're all just in an underworld

as opposed to listed on the Futsi 500. It must be so much pressure, between a government and then you imagine if you're part of some organized crime group, how many different favors you're going to call in to try and not get this thing past because it's going to stop your entire business. I don't know. I feel like I'm writing a new Tom Hardy series here. I like the idea, though, of the cartels getting a lobby group together to go, we can't have drugs. You're putting us out of business. This would be terrible for our business players. Exactly. Think about the gangs. What are you thinking about the gang? The euro on

euro is going to fall behind. Yeah. Yeah, I like what you're saying, though, about young people really need to use that drive. And it's kind of like the obsession thing that a lot of the time people talk about nobody is coming to save you as a line. But nobody is coming to save you also implies that nobody's coming to stop you. Nobody cares more than you. I think that thing about, you know, empathetically, you want to have, there be a great safety net for everyone, right? You want there to be universal basic income, which essentially we sort of have in the UK under the benefit system. There's a version of that where, you know, you'll get something from the state and you'll be, you'll be okay. You won't go hungry, we hope. But the idea of going the universal basic income

is a bit too close to we don't need you. Yeah. You know, and I worry about that. I worry about purpose being one of the key things of like, if you take Morgan Housel has a great, he's got great equations, Morgan Housel. He's got this great equation on happiness being, it's, um, freedom and purpose. If you have those two, you're pretty much on a, you're on a good road. Because everyone wants there to be benefits available for everyone, right? Everyone wants there to be a safety net. But when you think about it, no one wants that for their kids.

No one looks at their newborn and goes, oh, wow, hope he gets really great benefits. You want him to have, or her to have a fulfilling life where they go out and they do something and they add value to society. That's what we want. It is an interesting challenge, I suppose, where we want to be able to support people. We've got this future of automation coming through. We know that purpose is important. But if you clear off all of the bottom levels of Mazol's hierarchy of needs, which was all that anybody was obsessed by for almost all of human history.

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

those connections is what people are, I think, missing. So I do think that kind of, it's the safety, security, you know, calorific. You want to take care of the basics for everyone, you know, education and healthcare and, you know, making sure everyone's okay to a level. And then you want to give them the, you want it to be abundance. You want it to be that everyone can have an exciting, fun time. You want that for your kids. And if you want that for your kids, you want it for everyone. Yeah. Yeah. The intergenerational competition theory is, I've never even thought about it before, but what you said earlier on, you want your kids to do better than you did. And also your kids want to do better than you did. Yeah. But that means that there is this like embedded

growth obligation that everything always needs to be getting better all of the time. Well, there's another way of, again, Morgan Housel, he's such a genius writer. He's wonderful. But he has this idea of going, there's the biggest inflation in the world, is not currency inflation. It's expectation inflation. But there's another word for expectation inflation. We expect so much more than we did in the 1970s, right? I remember the 70s. It was shit. And it's so much better now. But the expectation is so much higher than it's ever been. But the other name for expectation inflation is progress. That's what progress looks like. You just factor in all the stuff that's there and you go, yeah, and we want more. And that's a good thing, ultimately.

I mean, if you look at it on a global scale as well, you go, if you care about humanity as a whole, Like, getting everyone up to our level would be an incredible achievement. You know, that's the biggest things in the world are not talked about. Like, the worst things in the world, the easy fixes that we just ignore because they're not sexy. Like burning biomass kills three million people a year. There's burning, like, wooden peat and stuff inside homes. It kills three million people a year. From asphyxiation?

Yeah. Well, it's cancer. Right. It's horribly bad for people. Smoking is a much bigger problem than we think it is, because we've solved it here. Solved it in America and the English-speaking world, really. But in South America and Africa and Asia, smoking is a huge problem. And it's so easy to fix.

We could just, the playbook is there. We know exactly what to do, but we don't. So that's the future being distributed to a different area, from our future to theirs. I think it's Peter Singer is very good on this stuff. the, oh no, is it, Derek Parfitt's got really good things on like the debt that we owe to future people and to geographically, you know, disperse people, the idea that we should care about that stuff at least. I had William McCaskill on the show. He's the long-termism guy, what we owe the future. And I think he was the youngest philosophy professor, the youngest tenured philosophy

professor in the world, William. And anyway, he's talking about, yeah, what we owe future generations. But people don't really think about that in quite the same way. They think about... It's odd that thing of like, because you go, like, net zero is a really good example of that. I've like going, well, we have to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels. But in the short term, that's very, very difficult to do.

And it affects the poor... Disapportionally. Yeah. So the idea of going, well, that should be an aim in like 25 years. But you go, but you have to start building the nuclear plant. now in order to make that happen. And then you could have that eventuality. That'd be great. But it takes statesmen to look on those timescales. And everybody just wants to get elected for their next four-year term or whatever it is. Yeah. And it's that thing of like going, you know,

Britain, I think, could put its feet up now in terms of going. It's had a big effect on the world. But the idea of being an example to other nations of how to do that. That would be the flex. That would be the thing to do. To go to get there before. anyone else because you go, well, we built the plants. So in 25 years, we look like geniuses. And also, if you get energy down to essentially zero cost, how many businesses would that attract to the UK? When it comes to culture, British culture, what do you wish more British people understood or new? What, culturally? Yeah. Like, I, for me, the British culture has an awful lot of charm to it, but there's some kind of, like, lethal poisons thrown in with it. Like, the

Toll Poppy Syndrome is one of them, the sense of a, maybe a lack of mobility, the quite ossified class system that in the US, what somebody earns kind of determines their current level of class, but in the UK, it's where you went to school or it's your accent. Is there something that you wish more British people sort of, if you could inject something into British culture, what would it be? I think it'd be, I think there's a, I think it's oencopobia. is the fancy term. It's the hatred of one's own culture. I think that people need to take a bit more pride in that, you know, it's not immediately apparent that a place without a past has a future. And I think having that shared belief in what we've done in the past, I mean, it's, you know,

we beat the Nazis and we ended slavery. It's not nothing. It's big. And going, and the English language is a beautiful thing. I mean, it's really, George Max got a good line on this on like, if you had top Trump cards for Great Britain, and you go, we'll name a thing. Okay, music, the Beatles. Okay, physics. All right. Stephen Hawkins. You know, a biology.

Okay, Tim Berners leave of the internet. We've got lots and lots of kind of, we've done great things, and we continue to punch above our weight, and people should take some pride in that. I think taking some pride in where you're from is quite an important thing. And their local communities are kind of, there's that kind of at a lower level, I think. People like where they're from. They have a sense of that. Heck yeah.

Jimmy Carr, ladies and gentlemen. Jimmy, love you. It's a pleasure. For coming through. No, I really enjoy it. I think, you know, you're right. I think coming on this show and doing this kind of thing has really changed me as a performer. It's been really incredibly valuable to me.

Hopefully in the right direction. Yeah. They'll decide. Look at the comment section. Until next time. Thanks. Bye, everybody. Dude, yes.

Is that right? Yes. Yes.