The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 233. Carr On Comedy | Jimmy Carr

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

This episode was recorded on November 02, 2021.Jimmy Carr is an award-winning comedian, author, and TV host. Carr recently came under fire for the career-enders subsection in His Dark Material, a Netflix special that’s deemed “deeply offensive” or “faithful to its title,” depending on who you ask. Carr’s latest book, Before & Laughter, is part memoir, part life advice, and mostly funny. We had a stimulating conversation about human nature, comedy and the physiology of laughter, experiencing jokes, half-filled rooms, truth, growth, self-deprecation, love languages, religion, and the 15’ replica of his head. His Dark Material:https://netflix.com/title/81478151Before & Laughter: The funniest man in the UK’s genuinely useful guide to life:https://amazon.com/gp/product/B09H7MTJJL/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0Carr’s Twitter:https://twitter.com/jimmycarr& Instagram:https://instagram.com/jimmycarrTake the Understand Myself personality assessment:https://understandmyself.com________________Chapters________________[00:00] Intro[01:47] Jimmy’s 15’ Head[03:05] Biggest Venues [07:22] Comedy & Collab[13:06] Half-filled Rooms[15:25] Laughter[18:47] Satire & Self-deprecation[23:20] Comedy & Perspective[25:18] Physiological Effects [27:49] Live Shows[32:43] Carr’s ‘Understand Myself’ Assessment[35:04] Contempt & Responsibility [40:37] Backstage Life[44:52] Nature & Nurture[47:54] Flow [55:36] Christianity[01:01:15] The Promise of an Afterlife[01:05:22] Understanding Myself II[01:09:40] Love Languages & Personality[01:11:15] Hard Times[01:13:41] Best Ever Comedians [01:21:20] Live Shows II[01:24:04] Evading Cancellation [01:26:33] Jokes & Truth[01:29:55] Carr’s Appreciation for Jordan[01:32:50] Outro#Comedy #Truth #JimmyCarr #CancelCulture #Flow

Welcome to episode 232 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. In this episode, Dad hosted Jimmy Carr, a world-renowned British comedian. For those of you who don't know, Jimmy's been the focus of the newest cancellation craze over his latest Netflix special, his dark materials. Specifically, people were offended by jokes about the Holocaust in the last part of the special. He referred to the jokes as career enders and they almost were. Dad took the opportunity to ask Mr. Car about the controversy, seeing protesters outside his gigs, PC and canceled culture, the role of comedians in society, laughter, religion, love languages, and more. If you're tired of me interrupting this podcast for ads, which is how we afford to keep this podcast going, visit JordanB Peterson dot supercast dot com

and sign up for the ad free version. It works on all major platforms and it's just $10 a month. You also get exclusive access to presale tickets monthly. Ask me anything episodes. You can submit questions for. Again, that's JordanB Peterson dot supercast dot com. And now without further ado Jimmy Carr. Hey everybody, I'm thrilled today to have with me Mr. Jimmy Carr, one of the world's funniest men, one of the world's purposefully funniest men, which is an important distinction. An award-winning comedian, writer and television host, Mr. Jimmy Carr is one of the biggest selling comedy acts

in the world, is performed in venues in 40 countries. His last two are best of ultimate gold greatest hits, just a somewhat narcissistic title we might add, sold almost half a million tickets globally, whose current show, Terribly Funny, set to exceed that figure by the end of 2022. He's a household name in UK television, hosting Channel 4's eight out of 10 cats

and some variants of that and presenting Comedy Central's roast battle UK and your face or mine. He's also performed as part of the Royal Variety Performance three times, which is something particularly impressive to us, Kanox enamored archaically with the Queen. He was the first UK comedian to sign a stand-up deal. I think that means a comedy deal,

rather than a straight deal, with Nepslix in 2015, releasing business 2016 in best of ultimate gold, greatest hits, 2017. He's also performed in my favorite city, Montreal, at the Just for Lauf's comedy festival, which I'd highly recommend since 2003, with more appearances than any other UK act in that time. His YouTube channel, where he's accrued

over 500,000 subscribers and 130 million views was launched in 2018. And because all that is not enough, he's also a published author, he co-wrote the naked jape, uncovering the hidden world of jokes in 2007, and is highly anticipated memoir before and laughter launched in September 2021 and made the Sunday Times bestseller list.

So I have a question for you to start. I have to know the answer to this. This is serious business. You have a 15 foot tall replica of cars head was used in an advertising campaign for Walker's crisps, and has subsequently appeared in various publications. And then it was transported from Preston to the Wickham and Festival. I have to know about that. How in the world did that come about and why? There was a charitable campaign for this brand of crisps called Walker's, very beloved British crisps,

and they built an enormous model of my head. I mean, who knows, one, my head's quite big enough as it is, and then it's been turned into a bar. And so I occasionally, my Twitter will blow up once every couple of years when they're transported because it goes on the back of a flat, they hit truck and they take it up and down the motorway and people just go, was that an enormous effigy of Jimmy Carr? Is he finally lost his mind?

Did you say it was a bar? It was a bar, yeah, they turned it into a bar. It was a huge thing. You could sort of climb up inside it, so they turned it into a bar. I don't know. It's a weird world we live in, isn't it? Yeah, it's weird to say the absolute least. So your head is a bar.

Okay, well, that's an answer, and thank you very much for that. So what's the biggest venue you performed at? I'm gonna play a couple of stadiums. I've done like shows in stadiums, but I think, often when you're not setting a stadium like in a arena, like a 10 or 12,000, but it's very much

whispering into the abyss. You're telling your jokes and they're sort of they you're just on send. And I like comedy to be a conversation. And even if there's like two and a half, three thousand people in an amphitheat in a room, you feel like there's a discursive element. So if something happens in the room, I want to be aware of that. Let me ask you about that immediately. So because I always think of my lectures in venues like that as a conversation as well. And I also found that if they get too large,

and maybe that's more than 4,000, something like that, then it is, in a sense, whispering into the abyss. It's as if the individual people start to disappear and then you can't make contact with your audience the same way. Yeah, it's like, if that thing about what's the right side, the medium is the message as opposed to your Canadian, of course, you'll be quoting with the clue.

The idea that you go rock and roll feels like it can sustain a bigger audience than comedy and maybe a lecture even a little bit smaller than that. Like what's the, you know, you need a critical mask for the audience that you also need it to be the right level that you feel like you're part of this thing and you're an important part of it. So it feels like in a comedy show, if someone at the back of the room shout something out I have to be able to hear it and I have to be able to respond to it.

Otherwise they're not really in the room in the conversation. So, and I love that. I encourage people to join in. I always think there's a very special thing when you become a comedian and you find your own audience. There's lots of different audiences, but my audience come and see me and they have, we share a sense of human. And there's a sense, one of my favorite quotes of our comedy is, you know, laughter is the shortest distance between two people. The idea that it connects us, and that we have the same sense of humour. And in that room, we can joke and we can mess around and they can be a funny thing. I don't have, sometimes when you go to see a musician, you just blown away by that talent.

You think, this guy is just phenomenal. I can't get over how great they are. I could never do that. With a comedian, it's not quite the same thing because you're thinking this guy's got the same sense of humor as me. You can be as funny as anyone. And, you know, my book is about this really. It's a case for living through humor. And I think the best jokes, the funniest things that that ever been said are not said by famous comedians they're said by you and your friendship group and your family they're in jokes and comedy at its best recreates the in-joke of the tribe within within that space. Yeah so the rock and roll types you know when you go to a great concert in a

large venue if the if the audio is good, is if the musicians are playing in some sense to the crowd. But I've noticed in the lecture, and it seems to be the same in stand-up, which I think has very many similarities with a good lecture in front of a live audience, that you have to be talking to individuals. And I always talk to one person at a time in the crowd. You know, I actually look at someone and I have a little conversation with them and switch to someone else. And so there is something that seems to be intimately,

and that's partly why it's a dialogue. And there seems to be something that's intimately personal about that that's not the same with something that's more purely artistic. Yeah, I think so. I think you could perform a song in an empty room and it's still a song. And I think a comedy act, a joke without, you know, it's, it's fidelined punchline laugh, it's binary or either get a laugh or you don't. Without the crowd, it isn't anything. The crowd performs such an important functionly comedy above and beyond all other art forms

because no one can tell you whether that's a good or a bad song. It's like well, it's interpretation, but with comedy it either makes people laugh or it doesn't, it's a binary response to your first one. I think the critics are a big fan of the audience because we don't need comedy to be mediated by critics. It's either works for you or it doesn't. Yeah. we don't need comedy to be mediated by critics. It's either work to you or it doesn't. Yeah, yeah.

So the problem is such an important part of comedy. I think one of the things that I advocate in the book is comedians, but one of the comedians kind of superpowers is failure. We're very good with failure because our feedback loop is so short. We're allowed to take a million different chances. So when you go and see one of the greats, when you go and see Chris Rock or you watch a

Chris Rock Netflix fashion, you're seeing an AR of material and everything works and you're just seeing the results. You're not seeing the the tireless campaign to get to that hour. The thousands of jokes he tried that didn't work, the the the the the wording that to that hour, the thousands of jokes he tried, that didn't work, the wordings that weren't quite right on the jokes that did work, you don't see any of the, you just see the results. So it's often that thing about the audience has told him every step of the way.

The audience is a genius. Lady Bruce said it first, the audience decide what isn't funny and what isn't acceptable. The audience will tell you what's acceptable. If you just get a response from an audience, that's neither here nor there. It has to be a laugh. Even if one of my favourite noises in comedy is cognitive dissonance. And I get it a lot. You get an enormous laugh and then you get a sharp intake of wreck because the audience have laughed at something,

and then their conscience has arrived late to the party, because the conscious part of the brain, or where the consciousness lives, is a bit slow. A laugh is a reflex. What you find funny is very much like your taste in food or your sexual preferences. How spicy you like it really depends. And you don't get to choose that. It chooses you. Some people like spicy food, some people like kinky sex, some people like edgy comedy, and it really chooses you. So I love the idea that sometimes a laugh will betray you. Your sense of humour tells you something about yourself. You laugh at something that's incredibly transgressive and edgy, and then you kind of feel bad about it immediately. And you have to, you know, I like that cognitive distance. Well, then you have to decide whether it's your

sense of humor that's at fault, or the judgment of shame that immediately follows your recognition of the fact that you laughed at something dark and, you know, and horrible. And it isn't obvious to me that your sense of humor is likely to air the same way your judgments air. It seems to me to be a pure spirit in some sense. And it's fascinating to me as well that you're watching the audience while you're performing comedy, but you're also saying that as you construct your routines, if you're a really, really good watcher and listener, then you try to see what sticks,

so to speak, you throw things at the wall to see what sticks, and if you really pay attention to the audience, then they'll tell you how to be successful, right? Yes, I mean, that's all you have to do is collect that. Yeah, you're really collecting data over 20 years. So you've obviously got... The thing about comments as well, when a good audience work is, it's like airline pilots. Like, if you ask an airline pilot, how long it'd been a pilot, they won't give you a little years.

They'll give you it in hours in the sky. And I think there's something about that that's very, I love the analogy because the amount of time spent on stage is where you learn that skill. You become kind of battle hardened to that or I suppose the analogy in your world would be the amount of time you spend researching or the amount of time you spend in debate. So you're ready for that. It's not your first rodeo. You've not had that exact thing happen before but something similar to it. So you kind of know how to respond to that and it's your feedback loop is constantly you're kind of getting better and improving. Yeah well you know both, I generally tended right from the beginning of my career, not to lecture from notes very much. And once I got more conversant with what I was lecturing about, I just abandoned notes altogether. And the huge advantage to that was that I could continually watch my students, and I could see what it was that I was saying that mattered and what didn't.

And I could drop everything that wasn't gripping and intriguing to them. And, you know, to the degree that I was attached to my notes and a pre-prepared lecture, then I would lose the contact with the audience. And that's why it's boring in some sense. It's like, go hear a lecture. You know what I reminds me of, it reminds me of the great Mike Tyson quote.

Mike Tyson said, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. And I think when you're giving a speech when you're doing a performance, the audience is the punch in the face. You didn think when you're giving a speech when you're doing a performance, the audience is the punch in the face. You didn't think they'd laugh about that, or you didn't think they looked bored and they're not engaged yet. Now, I haven't got them. And I often use the analogy of on my toes and on my heels at a show. So sometimes you're going to show you, on your toes for the first five minutes. And then at some point in

the show, you feel like, I got them. I got it. We're married together. That's right. Your body language changes a little bit and then something happens on your toes again and there's a sense of an ebb and a flow to it, which is yes, it's interesting because it's an art form, I guess, that involves the audience more than any other, and the audience with no training, no prior qualification required, no instinctively. Like anything above maybe 50, 60 people is like, if a joke works in front of 60 people, it will work in front of 3,000. There's a real consistency, and across the globe as well. I don't notice, I mean, if you speak English, I'm doing my performance in English. It's really, it's incredible how beautiful audiences are and what they will laugh at and how loud they will laugh, what gets in a close break, what does it?

So, do you find a market difference? Now, maybe you haven't had much of this experience because you're so successful, but I don't like going to movies, especially comedies, if the theater is empty, and I don't like lecturing to a hole that's half full, because I find it much more difficult to get that response that you were describing of everyone being there together and something flowing if the place is sporadically populated. Yeah, no, I would agree. I mean, I think comedy is a social, I think,

so let's unpack that, because the first bit is about seeing a comedy movie in a crowded cinema is that's just smart because laughter is tribal. Laughter is a signal to other people. It's it's remote tickling. Laughter is about a million years older than language. It's a different part of your throat than you're using. It's it's basically remote grooming. And I think it's I mean, I'll say, do you know rats laugh? Yes. Of course, yeah. If you tickle, if you tickle them with a pencil eraser, then they laugh,

but it's so ultrasonic that you can't hear it less. You're down. I don't know. It's also the BBC. Oh, you did. Oh, I think we see about a horizon special about laughter, which I think is on YouTube. You'd be able to see, But we've got Dunbar in.

So Dunbar obviously, the Dunbar number is the number of friends you can have. They often quote up and they talk about social media. And the interesting thing about humans is we have a much higher Dunbar number than silverback gorillas. So silverback gorillas can only groom themselves literally. So they've got, you know, you've got 50, 55 sort of macroleaders in a group, they all groom each other a little bit every day. And that's how it goes. That's the size of that. That allows a certain amount of specialization. But humans can get to

150 in a time, because we can remote groom and remote grooming is about laughter. And why do you, And why do you specifically make that argument that it's specifically about laughter? And why is it that you associate it specifically with grooming? And what because the purpose of laughter, sort of pre-language, certainly, would have been to sort of go,

I am not afraid we are friends. There is a connected, so if you think of the most basic example, tickling, if you tick is a connected, so if you think of the most basic example, tickling, if you tickle a child, it's an aggressive act that is made benign by the laughter. So the fact that- Well, so I was thinking a while ago with some of my friends about the use of self-deprecation and humor among tough working class men because one of the things, and I really like that, one of the things that working class men do, and I really see this as a class-based thing, at least to some

degree, is that they hurl insults at one another, but they have to be funny, and then, you know, you're prowess, you're status in some sense within the group, especially if it's a friendship group, but even sometimes if it's a work group, is how barbed your darts can be and still be funny. That would be the first one. So how close can you get to that line where it's actually an insult? And then the second thing would be, well, can you take a damn joke? And let me tell you a story.

Maybe you'd like this. So I worked on this rail crew in northern Saskatchewan with a bunch of guys, a native Canadians, a lot of them had been in jail. It was a rough bunch of guys, a native Canadian, a lot of them had been in jail. It was a rough bunch of guys. When I first started working, they're all skeptical of me. This is back when I was a kid, but I persevered and I made jokes and I wasn't a twit or a twat or an asshole or any of those things, hopefully. Then I got into the group and just went fine.

While I was there, this guy came along who was pretty touchy and pretty arrogant. And he brought this lunch box along with him that it looked like his mum packed, which was a big mistake socially. You're supposed to bring a paper bag that's not too showy. And so he got this appellation lunch box and that really made him mad. They called me Howdy Duty, which I didn't really like. And I asked the guy why. And he said, because you look nothing like him, which I thought was a really good joke. And anyways, lunchbox, lunch,

it's a good joke. Lunchbox didn't like being called lunchbox. And he get irritated all the time. And so the guy is on the crew. And it was stretched about half a mile down the railway, would throw pebbles at his hard hat while he was working. And that would piss him off more. And so the rocks got bigger and bigger and you know the whole crew was watching this and now and then a pretty decent sized rock would hit lunchbox on the head in the helmet and everybody would sort of laugh under their breath and you know he was chased off in a week and all that was testing to see if he could tolerate you know being pushed a bit and they didn't want him in the group if he couldn't do it. I'm very I'm very interested now there's a lovely Australian turn of phrase,

which is typically crude and Australian. You might have to bleep this, but in Australia, there are a phrase that kind of sums it up. You'll call a mate cunt and you'll call a cunt mate. There's an intimacy to insults and language and take them a piss out of each other. There's an intimacy to insults and language and take them a piss out of each other. There's an intimacy to that because it's family. It's friendship.

It's a connection. And I think language is so nuanced. Like if you just take the, if you take the human out of it, it's, you know, you're just being brutal. But the human is, yeah. It's sort of like, it's sort of like we love each other so much

that we can trade blows and that doesn't even matter. It's so much like that. It's the, it's the, it's, I suppose it gets to that thing of, you know, love is unconditional friendship isn't. So it kind of gets to a thing of going, listen, if you love each other, you can sort of take this and it's fine. And the badge of honor of being able to take a joke. So it's almost the worst thing you could say about someone British is our, he can't take a joke.

Yeah, well, it's fun being a Canadian in relationship to comedy because we, I watched a fair bit of British comedy when I grew up. I loved Monty Python, which I discovered when I was 12, and I just, I thought it was actually a circus show when I first watched it, and I thought, what the hell is this? And then my dad turned out to like it too, which I thought was extremely bizarre. And so what I loved about the British Brit comedy in particular, and I think this is characteristic of your culture, is that British comedians tend to be extremely self-deprecating, and British satires like that too, they're after themselves a lot.

And in Americans really didn't have a great hand for satire, I didn't think until the Simpsons came along. That was the first truly self-satirical comedy that I had seen coming out of the US. Well, I guess you can't go ahead. You know, a lot more style or Lenny Bruce or any of those kind of greats would have been a huge influence.

I mean, you know, the Simpsons didn't come out of nowhere with him standing on the shoulder of giants. As he's always been wanting with comedy, you know, we're kind of part of a very proud tradition that goes back through variety and court gestures and tricks to gods. We're part of that tradition where outside looking in, where we're slightly other. I mean, is that thing of comedians in a room of 3,000 people? Are we the one person facing the wrong way? That kind of sums us up as a group. Well, that's kind of the position of artists in general, you know, because artists tend to be outside the, what you say the traditional competence hierarchies.

They're, they're viewers from the outside and observers. And so they're, they're not in the hierarchy in some sense. And I do think that that's true of comedians. And the fact that the gesture is the only person that can tell the king the truth is extremely interesting. And also it's interesting that the king who can't tolerate his gesture has become a tyrant. That's a way of telling.

Yeah, it's a great story about the Great Wall of China. Do you know that story? No, not. When the Emperor was building the Great Wall. I mean, it nearly back up the kingdom, the Great Wall of China. And the plan was to paint it red. That was always the plan. We're going to paint it. We're painting it red. And the jester made so many jokes about painting it and how it would back up them and how it would destroy the kingdom and made all the jokes. The emperor changed his mind. It's sad how we're going to need to paint it. It's crazy. But it's an interesting kind of thing. I'm likely the effect that sort of speaking truth to power is not an easy thing to do.

It's much easier to get your point across if everyone's laughing. Yeah, that's for sure. Well, I also thought when I was lecturing, when I was at Harvard, I was lecturing about the most serious things I could think of. And it was usually about totalitarianism and atrocity, like really dark things. And this thought always came in my mind. It was like, look, if you really mastered this, you wouldn't be so dead serious about it, you'd be able to do it with a light touch like with a bit of comedy And I thought Jesus how can that possibly be true given the topics that I'm addressing But I've certainly come to realize that I'm at my best as a lecture when I can when I'm not so dead serious

And maybe possessed by a certain amount of anger when I can leave in what I'm saying with jokes I'm in the right place then well, I mean the audience loves that I mean but in the macro and the micro because I mean if you look at totalitarian states, not fame for their sense of humor. I mean, they're a cabaret. Yeah, they're not funny. Well, but cabaret is really interesting as a piece because the idea of the cabaret clubs in Germany were shut down because they realized you can't hate someone you're laughing with and laugh the builds of bridge. It's tough to be racist when you're laughing with a comedian from a different ethnicity. It makes bonds in society and it joins things up.

And Russell Peters really has done that well, I think. Yeah, the idea you bring lots of different people together and share that common experience. So yeah, I think there's something in, and actually when you're doing a lecture about something incredibly serious, to be able to make a point about something and to be funny about it is kind of magnificent, because it shows confidence and competency and being able to be a little bit self-deprecating and taking oneself too seriously.

It's kind of at all to the good. Yeah, well, it's a mark of transcendence, I think, in some part, right? Because, you know, if you do something stupid and then you laugh at yourself, it's like simultaneously you're the fool. But you're also the thing that can look at the fool and say, well, I'm a fool, but I can do better and I don't have to take that to you. Well, isn't there something with life with, you know, if you look at the mental health crisis that's going on globally at the moment, it's about perspective. You know, comedy offers perspective in a way that I think is incredibly profound and meaningful to me because you look at, you know, what suicides like the extreme

example, right? So suicide is the is the is a symptom of depression and depression is it's basically it suicide is the permanent solution to a temporary problem and comedy is very good at lending perspective. I go and look, this is the step back from this. We all talk about that. Yeah, and the question is, where are you stepping back to, do you think? Like if you make a joke about an extremely serious subject, you know, and you're stepping back somewhere, right? And you're sharing that with the audience

and they go there too. Where is it, do you think? I think it's going when you step back. I think it's processing. I think there's a sense in which when we joke about something, we're taking something that's too horrific to talk about to acknowledge and we're making it okay. So that theory of benign violation on comedy comes up. The idea that you go, we're taking things that are violations in our

culture, in our world, and we're making them benign by laughing about them. We're taking away their power. So if you imagine the vendaiogram of violations, and we're making them benign and joking about them, and processing that thought. It's a very important part of our, because so much of life is terrible, and so much of our culture is, you know, issuing, obviously, you know, it is the obfuscation of decay. That's the phrase is, it's the, we're trying to hide death. We're trying to not think about mortality. And that idea or to transcend it or to transcend it, you know, it's, I don't think comedy is denial. I think it's genuine transcendence.

And that idea that you take away someone's power with laughter, it's like that's actually literally true. When I used to work out, a couple of friends I worked out with a lot and they were pretty damn funny. And one of the things we would do when we were bench pressing and sometimes heavy weights is make the guy laugh. And you cannot exert muscular force when you're laughing. And that's where the phrase sort of collapse

into laughter comes. So that's really interesting physiologically. That's the only difference in the book about what happens in the Vegas stays in the Vegas now. What happens to you from a physiological point of view when you laugh is I think fascinated. I mean, it's really I like to think of myself as a drug dealer. I'm a drug dealer, but the drugs are already on the audience. I'm never going to get taken by the police because I'm releasing endorphins, but you've got the endorphins on you. And dopamine. Because dopamine mediates positive emotion. And cocaine and the drugs, the psychomotor stimulants are very potent dopamine releases. And so it's literally the case that when you laugh and facilitate positive emotion, you very potent dopamine releases. And so it's literally the case that when you laugh and

facilitate positive emotion, you are activating that circuit. And not harm, right? And it's the without harm. Yeah. And I sort of view, you know, watching things on screens and spent it all. It's a, it's a substitute. It's not the real thing. You need the real thing. When you watch it on a screen, it's like that those drugs are being cut up, someone stepped

on that cocaine. You need the pure thing of being in a room with other people. That's where you release it. You don't laugh in the same way. When you're watching your favorite, you see multi-clifing on a screen, you laugh. But if you go and see them live, if you go, you know, they do that tool show, it's a different order of laughter you're falling about. It's a, you know, and you, you know,

as you say, you come out into laughter. You have fits of laughter. You feel like, you know, what it does for the vagus nerve, it tells your body, you can digest your food. It calms you. It's, it's, it's perfect. And it's, I think it's a necessary part of that.

Yeah, do you have any idea what the movement of the abdomen that's associated with laughter does physiologically? Yeah, I mean, I've kind of looked into I wouldn't be the expert on that but the idea that it does allow you to digest and to process in a way that's you know very very beneficial. It doesn't have any negative effects that. If you could buy a drug that did what laughter did with the amount of side effects that laughter has, which is literally none, it would be the perfect drug. And so that idea about having to be there with the people, that's interesting too, because I'm going back on tour, I did a tour in 2018. I think it sold just about as many tickets as years by the way. Ha ha. And so anyhow, I'm going back next year and I'm wondering why I'm doing it because I

could just do YouTube videos and you know, they're pretty effective and I could just sit here and do them and they're pretty fun. But I really want to do it. I really find it ridiculously exciting. And part of it is the feedback from the audience, right? That there's an I get informed by that in the way. It's more than that. You're giving people an experience

because I, I, I, you never forget who you saw live. You never forget who you saw live. You know, no one goes to Ronan's house. Did I see that live or not? I don't know. But a YouTube video, did I see that YouTube video or not? I don't, I don't know. Yeah, maybe, maybe I watched it, maybe I didn't. But going to something like, going, it's also the thing that

you're doing the high before the high, the people that will buy tickets to the show. They buy tickets to a comedy show, they buy tickets to a lecture, and they go, I'm going to go out, I'm going to laugh a lot, or I'm going to stimulate it. I'm buying into this is this defines me. This is my sense of humor. This is my kind of speaker. I'm going to buy into it. I'm going to go there. I'm going to be with my tribe for the evening. Other people that, you know, everyone has something in common in that room and they come and see where everything has someone in common when it comes to me. That's sense of humor. Like, do we know how anything else in common? There's people from

all different walks of life in my area. It's people from 16 to 90 in the crowd. And they all have something in common. For that one evening, we've created a village. And that's a very, very special, very powerful thing to let people be part of that. And sure, you could just stick it on YouTube and put it on send.

And that's a fact similarly. And it's a pretty good fact similarly in the world that we live in and it's been on my fly the last 18 months for people but but really giving them that experience is very special and also you have to kind of limit that a little bit because actually you can't really play the arenas I mean you could but it becomes a different thing in the arenas what what the sort of thing you do in arenas becomes kind of a Tony Robbins event and then it's all, it's at a different frequency. It becomes about

jean people up rather than connecting. You know there's yeah we did I didn't know. I was making the distinction between, there's a distinction, There's comics you go to laugh with, and there's comics you go to see. Sometimes you get comedian where people love them so much that don't really care about the jokes. They just want to be in a room. You know, it's that thing. Dave Chappelle, is that Dave Chappelle? I mean, better category.

I play. He's a good storyteller, right? Yeah, I played with Dave last weekend in London. He was over in London, doing shows, and I hung myself a Jeff Ross open for him. It was pretty fun. It was a good scene. Yeah, I think there is a sense of kind of hero worship and wanting to be in the room.

And there being something, I think George Colum probably had as well, that kind of almost preacher feel is really interesting that people are drawn to that in a secular world. We're looking for people to... Yeah, Rogan has some of that, I would say. Yeah, I think he's got a lot of that. Yeah, he's got a lot of that. Yeah, John Malaney, he's got more of that kind of one line thing,

but he's got an interesting persona. I don't know how much of that's his true character. He's kind of like this 1950s advertising executive middle America suburbs nerd and he plays on that real well. It's interesting. You can't really convince people you're not what they assume you are. You know, John Mulaney, I don't know if he's had some issues recently. Much more complex, an interesting character than people would maybe give him credit off the map. I'd say the same about Theo Vaughan. Theo plays this bumbling southern hirke. He's a very very smart man. He's a smart guy. Yeah it's it's often the way that you go it's there's two things in life isn't it? There's

and I write about this a lot in the book this you have to know who you are right that's the first big journey in life it's finding out who you are what you're about what your skills are what your edges edges in life. What do you do best? Not bad in any one of the world, but what do you do? And that's not marketing work at Shell. Definitely not. Definitely not. So it's that thing of like you have to find out who you are, but it's also important as a duality because you have to find out how you're perceived in the world as well. What do people think you are?

People look at me and they don't see an immigrant, they don't see someone that's dyslexic, they see a very confident British man somewhere between Hugh Grant and Mr. Bean, right? So they see that. So you better know how you're perceived in the world and you also better know who you are Authentically, and I think having both of those things is it's very important kind of armor for going out to the world I mean, I did your um she before coming on this today. I did the your understanding yourself Oh, you did understand myself. Yeah, so tell me what your personality is like well, let me guess your extroverted as hell You're probably pretty disagreeable. I don't imagine you're that conscientious

because it's hard to be conscientious and to compete in your high and openness. 90, 90, 70% tile in conscientious, yeah, incredibly conscientious. But the feeling of life, I mean, without getting into the horoscope of the everyone's fascinated by themselves, I did find it like it's an incredibly useful tool because you go, well, most people are looking at that's

that there's too great adventures in life. There's fighting your purpose and then there's pursuing it. And most people don't get to do either. My book really is about trying to share that. So I did the autobiography, but I wanted it to be, I wanted to be half about me and half about you and half about like what are the beliefs that you have to have in order to pursue that journey? What are the good questions to ask yourself? What are the right way? I found that and I knew what was talking to you today. So I thought, well, I'll be a good student. I'll do a little bit of research and did that and just thought, yeah, are

you married? Are you married? No, I'm I'm just just had our first care moving together 21 years I so you know if you do that understand myself and she does it it will generate a report about your differences and similarities and where you're likely to misunderstand each other and why So all she has to do is sign up and do it and then you can link your accounts and it'll generate this third report. Yeah, it's really, I did it with my wife recently and it was really useful. Does it put you in touch with the boy or do you have to find your own? Yeah, well, that's a feature we should add, like a value added feature. We can do the lawyers to pay for that. If it comes up, then it's really you're not great match. You should just come up. Like I love that thing in,

do you ever read that researcher, the love lab? Do you ever read these stuff? Are you talking about the research and what predicts divorce? Yeah. You mean eye rolling, for example, which predicts divorce with 95% accuracy? Yeah, and then you can do it in five minutes.

We often do it with couples over dinner, where we've got myself in Carolina, but it's right, 100% of the time, where it's like if someone displays contempt for their partner, it is fucking over, it's gone. Hey, so let's talk about that for a sec. How about if we all display contempt for our political opponents?

Does that make it over too? I think maybe it does. I think there's a sense in which political parties now have become like sports teams. You blindly follow left or right, blue or red, whatever your team is, and you become entrenched in our culture. People talk about echo chambers, it's amplifiers. The left have moved to the left, the right have moved to the right, and there's a couple of liberals left in the middle going, what we need something, the problem to the right, the right have moved to the right, and there's a couple of liberals left in the middle going, well, we need something, the problem with the middle of the center ground is it's not exciting. I want that to be kind of, you know, I want

to be a radical moderate, but it's such a deal. That's what I've been trying to do with responsibility, you know, and to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, Responsibility needs crisis management because responsibility sounds boring, but it's incredibly empowering. If you take responsibility, like no one ever, when you win something, you never go, I'm responsible for this, but you go actually responsibility is about the nexus of control is within you. It's the idea that you go right, I'm in charge of this now. So that's really the story of the early part of my life is about going, taking my life and actually leading my life as opposed to just letting things happen. Okay, yeah, let's talk about that. So you graduated and then you went, worked as a

marketer for Shell, but you didn't like that. And then you took a sideways, okay, please tell that story. I didn't make any decisions in my life until I was about 25 months. So what, why did you do the things you did if you weren't making decisions? I did the best next thing. So when you're 16, you decide to set, you can get a job where you can stay on a school. The best thing to do is to stay at school. The best thing to do is to try and pass those exams. Try to go to the best university you can. So I went to Cambridge because that was the best one I could think of.

And so I went there and I got the best degree I could. And then at the end of that, you got the best job that you could. So far, I've not made any decisions. It's been what's presented to you and the next step are very well-worn paths. Yeah, typical kind of conservative path. Yeah, as you will see, since. So then the idea of being kind of in your mid-times isn't done. Well, hang on, whose life am I leading? Where's this going? And you can see, because it's such a well-worn path, you can see into the future, go, well, actually, I know exactly who I'm going to be in 10 years time and five years time and 15 years time, but whatever the time period is, by looking at someone ahead of you on that road, and then going, no, I don't want that, I want life to be an adventure, I want to find a purpose, I want to find something

special for me, and I don't think there's anything special about me, I don't think anything magical happened. I think I was exposed to, for what a better phrase, self-help, NLP and cognitive behavioural therapy at the right age when I was ready to go, right, that's for me, I'm going to be like that person. So something as simple as a personality care, something as diverting as, it's like kind of, I suppose, a rationalist's horoscope. It's such a powerful thing because the more you get to know yourself through doing that stuff, the better able you are to go, right, what's my edge? What am I bringing to the party in love?

What do I do better than anyone else? What am I going to devote my life to? Because you make your own luck. It's your edge, what you do best, your hard work plus time. That's your luck. We're all of us just buying lottery tickets. Nothing's guaranteed. But if you want it to kind of pay off, you're going, right, everything into this, it's going to pay out eventually. What do you mean by everything when you say that? Because you made this shift into comedy. It looked like it was pretty sudden and pretty successful pretty soon. So that's a very weird thing to do and a very weird thing to do successfully. So what do you mean you do everything? Success came later, but I think being all in, when you find it being all in, is quite important. So finding comedy for me, it felt like suddenly I arrived

in this space where work is more fun than fun. So I was working 300 nights a year and it didn't feel like anything. We both had a similar experience actually. I know a little bit about you in our mid-20s of giving up alcohol because work was more important. And it reminds me that I'm of the opinion that the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety. It's purpose. If you have...

Hey, the clinical literature on that is crystal clear. The only reliable treatment for alcoholism that's ever been discovered is spiritual transformation. That's it. And even the hard-nosed researchers know that. That's very tightly akin to this notion of pursuing something meaningful and so forth. Yeah, but I think that could be expanded in a very meaningful way, because you go, well, purpose doesn't need to have

a spiritual element to them. And I think it does, because it's about your life's meaning and your gender. It might be the spirit of laughter, you know. Yeah, I think so. You know, certainly I feel that, that the more I read about tricks to dogs, the more you think, oh, I think so. You know, that, that, that, certainly I feel that the, you know, the more I read about Tricks to Gold, the more you think, oh, that's a very

interesting position in society. Yeah, he's the precursor to the savior. The trickster is always the precursor to the savior. Yeah, John the bad was the was the Tricks to right? Yeah, yeah, Christ's fool. I don't know if he told jokes, though. And of course, my head will end up on a plate. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I mean, I wanted the book to be quite, I'm quite sort of passionate about it, the idea, I wanted the book to be funny and engaging and my story,

but I also wanted it to be, look, there's the heroes journey. I wanted it to have the tools in there for someone else to go, I'm not interested in comedy at all, but I can see how I could do my thing and if I believe the same things, what would happen for me? Because your beliefs become everything. They're not not your beliefs in terms of your spiritual beliefs, for say, but the assumptions we make about what we can, what we can't do. They're almost, I don't want to call them, the unseen beliefs about what I'm not the kind of person that

does that, or I'm not the sort of person that would do this, or I'm not the kind of person that does that or I'm not sort of person that would do this or I'm not the kind of person. Yeah, I told my niece phone me the other day. She wanted to talk to me. She's 17, I believe. And she just applied to university and she was happy to share the news of her acceptance to a couple of institutions. And we had a good conversation about the fact that you know when you leave to

university if you leave home one thing that can happen to you is that you can be a new person. You can decide what garbage and wreckage you're going to leave behind and not drag with you and you can decide who you're going to be and what kind of friends you want and if you're lucky in life you get a few chances to do that. This is you drop a lot of catastrophe. You're preaching to the choir here. I was 16 and I changed schools. Through happenstance, we moved to our center, changed schools for what we would call sixfold.

So for the last two years, and you become acutely aware that you are a story, you tell yourself that you can choose to kind of be, I was quite a terror wire my first school, like I'm not lot of trouble. And then I changed. I can't believe that. But in my second school, I kind of went, no, I'll be academic and I'll do well and I'll go to a good university. And then at university, you can kind of reinvent yourself. I mean, the cliche really of finding yourself is travel. And you go, especially if you've got one your own, which is probably easier for young men in this day and age than young women, but you trip to travel

on your own, in Southeast Asia or something, and you kind of, you meet new people and you try on different hats. And hey, I got something cool to tell you about that. If you'd be interested. Well, I read at one point Jung's description of the maze in the Shartre Cathedral, and in the maze you enter on one side and then you traverse the entire circle, and that's equivalent to traversing the globe. And the maze is set out so that you walk all four quadrants, and then you come to the center. So then you're at the center. If you walk all four quadrants. Now, what happens when you go somewhere new is two things.

One is you learn new things, so you pull in new information, and that enriches you. But here's something that's even cooler, and it's related at a deep level to the psychobiology of play and pretend. So if you go somewhere new that requires you to be someone other than you were, new genes turn on in your nervous system and code for new proteins. It turns on biological potential. That is, in fact, implicit inside you and builds you into a new creature. So the idea behind that traversing the circle, which is an equivalent to a pilgrimage, is

that if you go all places, you get to the center of things because you turn everything in yourself on by doing that. And that's the same thing you're doing in some sense when you're listening to your audience so intensely and finding out what they appreciate and what's funny, right? You're visiting these new domains and that transforms you into something, well something they want and something you want if you're lucky, if you're careful and you're lucky. I find it a fascinating kind of, you know, I mean, a travel is obviously, I sort of think the nature nurture thing comes into it because I think a lot of people assume like nature

nurture, the debate is pointless because you can't get nature is very important, but there's nothing I can do about nature. That's the cards I've been dealt, right? So other than a little bit of plastic surgery. Nose job, yeah, nose job. Hair transplant, you do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, those are pretty nice teeth for an Englishman. Thank you.

There's. Thank you. Thank you to my audience. You paid for it. But the idea that you go, look, you've got your nature. That's the cards you're dealt. You make the best of that. That's nurturing is making the best of that. The idea that I go, look, you've got your nature, that's the cards you're dealt. You make the best of that. That's nurture is making the best of that.

The idea that, I think a lot of people have the idea that nurture finishes very early. It's about parental nurturing and when you're 18, you're finished. But the idea of nurture as a lifelong pursuit, and you can't really beat your environment. So it's important you're in an environment. I mean the environment in the kind of literal sense of going not just where you are, but who your whip is your environment. So it's important you're in an environment. I mean the environment in the kind of literal sense of going not just where you are but who your width is your environment. So yes, I would just like the people where I think we're all quite narcissistic. I think I like who I am when I'm with certain people. I like being a father. I like who I am. But that might not be narcissistic. That might be the bet. Like if you love being a father,

you have a great relationship with your children. How do you? It's perfectly reasonable for you to assume that that's when you are your best self. I thought that when I was a father, I loved being with my kids and what a great relationship. Even I think about the conversations that you have, the friends you choose to get in the fall, the work environment, I have about arriving in the world of comedy age 25. And just thinking, well, this is, I like who I am here. This is fun.

Right, right. There's a spur of possibility here that I hadn't experienced before. So success happened very early on within that world, not in terms of financial gains or status, because sort of who cares, that's for someone else, that's very external, that measure of success. But the idea of happiness came out of that, it was transformational, just in terms of my whole way of being changed.

And I think happiness is one of those words that's become conflated. In the book, I'm sort of obsessed by the accuracy of language and how we... That's a good thing if you're writing a book. Yeah, but that idea that I told you about my mid-20s and my early 20s being sad. I wasn't depressed, I was sad. And there's a huge difference because depression is about serotonin levels and chemical imbalance about your mind. It's a very serious disease with very serious repercussions,

suicide being the most serious symptom. Sadness is about circumstances. Sadness is fantastic. Sadness just means you don't like things as they are. Well, things are going to change. You know, you're not now on your reversion. Yeah, well, things are going to change. You know, you're, you're, you're not now in your reverse. Yeah, well, you're going to change. One of the things I did constantly as a therapist, so this is part of the cognitive behavioral process, let's say it's collaborative empiricism. It's like, okay, your mood isn't good, but there's some variation in it. So what you're going to do for the next week is you're going to watch yourself like you don't know who you are and you're going to see if you can identify times when you're not so sad. And then see if you can figure out like where those, where you are, what you're doing, what you're thinking.

Why are you not sad then? Yeah. And then can you do more of that? Could you do more of that? Well, it's interesting. I mean, again, I talk about this in the book. I wouldn't have the same qualification as you, but the my cure for that is flow state. Get into a flow state where you're not aware of the passage of time. Yeah, yeah, that's a marker. That's a weird marker that one that you're out. And you know, that's way, that's where you're outside the domain of mortality concerns at that point too, right? Because that weight of mortality that weighs upon us

is integrity linked with consciousness of time. And that flow state that disappears and that means in some sense you're united with eternity in those flow states Yeah, I have a trivial thing. No, it's it's hugely important I think I read a fabulous thing on it I mean, I think sport is is often where people you know, if you're playing tennis or whatever That's happens to be my sport, but you would you go I'm not aware of how long I've been doing this This is just just a pleasure. long I've been doing this. This has been just a pleasure. And I've been so focused, taking your conscious mind and giving it something to do so that

your subconscious can relax is I think, I'm not great with meditation, but I quite do, I quite like doing the leg out of puzzles with my other half because you go, yeah, I'm just gonna get busy, get all that busy so that you can then relax. You know, I suffer. Yeah, I talked to Sam Harris about that a fair bit a couple of weeks ago, because he has this meditation app that he's been using. I've got his waking up, I think is fantastic.

But I tend to listen to the talks on waking up rather than doing the meditations, because it always seems, I don't know what that is about me, but it always feels like doing meditations is, are not am I doing this right? Am I going to get it? I should go back and investigate more, but it's, well, you know, you have that out that you already described

to though that because you're being successful. Yeah, absolutely, but, you know, we discussed the possibility, you get in that worried state where you're possessed by your by your Propositional thoughts about gloom and doom and all that's running around in your head and to get out of that into a different state is actually Psychophysiologically rejuvenating. I think I've got a I've got quite positive in the book as well Actitude towards I suffer anxiety more than oppression. I think a lot of people do um and for me I try and see than oppression. I think a lot of people do. And for me, I try and see it as the negative side of creativity, the idea that all of the good things that have happened to me happened through creativity and being open to the muse.

But also, once you open those gates, there's an anxiety that can come in as well. You're racing mind, might get you a joke very quickly on the spot, but it also might result in you waking up at 5 in the morning with a panic attack. And I think sometimes seeing the negative things in life for what they are, a part of the whole, is very, very kind of make your peace with what life is. Like if you're a Hispanic comedian, there's a lot of travel. There's gonna be a lot of planes,

trains and all of them are vehicles and travel. You're going on a concert tour, making your peace with that going, yeah, that's part of the thing that I'm loving doing. This is part of the whole. You can't just have that bit. You have to take it all. Well, that's also part of the problem with envy.

When people compare themselves to other people, they say, well, I really wish what that son of a bitch had and that kind of malevolence often comes along with it. Well, here's a question. Here's a point about envy that I make in my book. I make a very clear distinction. I suppose you could have it either way on the, on the, on the, on the etymology of the world. But for me, it's envy and jealousy are very different. For me, jealousy is about, I don't want him to have that. I'm jealous of what they have, but I don't necessarily want that myself. envy, I think, could be a very positive thing

in one's life. Because envy, for me, it's frightens me that the only question that really matters in life in any given situations, what do you want? It's the most profound meaningful question at every level whether you're looking at a menu in a restaurant or trying to decide what to do with your life, what do you want. And envy often gives you very accurate pointers. You know, but you look at someone else, you read someone else's book. Let's say from your perspective, you might read someone else's book on psychology and you might go, that guy absolutely nailed it. I can't believe how good that is.

And it's supposed you want to work harder to say, well, I need to be more succinct in my language. I need to clarify better. Or for me, I might watch someone's comedy special and just go, are that blue mind mind what they did? I got to get better at this. I'm going to break down what they did and I'm going to get better at it. So NV I think can be powerful. The idea of not wanting someone else, you know, comparison is the

feed from joy. Uh, is is one of my favorite quotes. And it just it 100% of the time it kills it. As soon as you look at someone's having more fun than you somewhere. 100% of the time it kills it as soon as you look at someone's having more fun than you somewhere. That envy, you know, that's interesting to use that dark, that dark emotion in some sense as a guide to what you actually value. So if you notice what you're in for yourself, then you can tell what you actually value. And what you want. Yes, and I mean, I mean, I've got that lovely first people's story in the book about the The white wolf and the black wolf You know that story right? Yeah, I don't think so

There's a black wolf and a white wolf and they represent good and bad I mean, you know the The first people and they say so which wolf are you gonna feed? the first peoples and they say, so which wall for you going to feed? And the colonial white man's retelling of the story was what you feed the white wall, you feed the good wall. But if you only feed the good wall, there's actually a downside because the dark wall, the black wolf, doesn't just disappear. He's waiting around every corner to attack. So, waiting for... Yeah, you also might need him to scare off other wolves. Yeah, so that idea of going, well, actually, you feed them both and you kind of use that the darker things you turn to good.

You say, well, something as negative, potentially as envy, could be an incredibly powerful forcing like, it tells you what you want. And when I say what you want, something as negative, potentially as envy, could be an incredibly powerful forcing like, it tells you what you want. And when I say what you want, it's like, I'm going to sound like an old hippie here. But I genuinely, on that question of, what do you want? I think wishing wells work.

But they work, why do you prefer people think they work? The magic wish, not so much. But knowing what to wish for is everything. You'd be amazed how many people that go to a washing well, and they wish for a million pounds. She's like, it's like they're wishing for a token, they don't know what they want.

They're putting off answering the question, what's the thing you really want? And it's like, that's so fundamental to happiness in life and to find your purpose. I mean, why is that thing at the base level that you want? Because you're in the dark and the door will open, asking you will receive. But yeah, that has very much to do with specifying and admitting to yourself and then actually working towards what it is you actually want.

So many people that I wanted to be a comedian, I'm going to have been told that I wanted to be a comedian. I remember telling people that I want to be a standup comedian. I remember calling my first Edinburgh show and I first did a show, their face-to-face ambition because I was very, I want this to be my life. I want to do this. I want to pursue it. I want to be successful at it. I want this to be who I am.

I want this to be an identity level for suit for me. And the universe conspired to help me. It felt like everything was, and once you tell people what I'm gonna do this, it was like, okay, everything's pointing in the right direction. There was a real congruency to who I want to be. Yeah, you definitely sound like a happy now.

There's no doubt about that. So. Yeah, so well, you had this job that you took after you graduated from university, and it was a good, you know, solid, stable job. And so why didn't that work for you? And when did you know that you might be funny, and, you know, not in the pular way, obviously,

but the community anyway? I hadn't written a joke until I was 25. I was like a fan of comedy, but I hadn't written a joke. I was 25. I was like a fan of comedy, but I hadn't written a joke. I had not been in school plays, particularly, I had not taken an interest in comedy above and beyond being a consumer. I was about 25, and I suddenly kind of went,

well, this is my age. The thing that I'm good at is talking to people. The thing that I'm good at is getting ideas across and making people laugh was such an important part of my life. I trace it back to my mother, I trace it back to she had an extraordinary laugh. She was a very funny Irish woman, I had a lovely turn of phrase, and there was a high value put on making people laugh in our house. Could you make her laugh? Yeah, it wasn't a particularly happy home, but I think if you're talking to

comedians, I think the question to ask is people often people ask about depression and in comedians because the tears the clown thing is so it's such a delicious irony. Why wouldn't you ask about that? But actually I think the question to ask that's more interesting is which of your parents was sick? I think comedians often have to make things okay within their family And I certainly had that experience and then and then it was it was about kind of when you obviously your your life is understood backwards lived forwards and it's it's understood in the rear view but looking back it was it was obvious, of course, that's what

you're going to be good at. You're good, you know, within friendship groups, within family, and making people laugh, and making things look happy. Okay, so you knew that you knew that about yourself, that you could make your friends laugh, your family laugh, and you said also make things okay. Is that, at least making, or was that humor? I think peacemaking was part of what I do humor as. I think it's a methodology for making things okay

for lending the mood for me. It's kind of a panacea. I mean, I'm ultimately self-medicating with humor. So how in the world did you come about the decision to leave your job and you also mentioned cognitive behavior therapy in there that you did something that that Yeah, I'm right. I went. What did actually when you work for a large company like shall there's a there's a training budget every year that they're signed to their cell phones. So if you work on the oil reads, it's all health and safety training. I was working in a fancy office in central London, so there's no need for any health and safety stuff, it's all fine. The most dangerous thing was the coffee and the coffee machine. So for me, I could go and do with that kind of those courses and those days that they get, I went and did some NLP training

with a guy, you know, one of these of these corporate away day things, and I got exposed to NLP and just went, oh, this is phenomenal. I lost my religious faith on a trip to Israel, so ironically, the scales had fallen from my eyes and that kind of went, well, if I'm right about Christianity, everyone else is wrong. That fundamental kind of, it's kind of a tiny pebble in my shoe had become a boulder. And I just couldn't live with it anymore.

And I slowly, over about a year long period, lost my faith. And then I found NLP, and I kind of thought, I basically liked Sean to another belief structure. And the idea that the map is not the territory, the idea that, how you perceive the world is, how the world is, we see the world, not as it is, but how we are. The idea that, you know, I suppose, disposition is more important than position. And it's very difficult to change your disposition, but it's so much easier than changing the world. And I kind of, suddenly, everything through being exposed to that became possible,

but the possibilities became like, well, fundamentally, my belief became anything anyone else can do, I can do. And that's incredibly empowering and it's scary, and you're suddenly not leading your life for the afterlife. I mean, I've still got a huge belief in the next life, but not the afterlife, the precision of that phrase.

I think the allegories of religion I still enjoy, but I don't believe them literally. So the idea of going there is a next life. Of course there's a next life. You move through phases. I'm a father now and I'm in my late 40s. I'm a very different person than a person that started on this road 25 years ago to being a comedian. Every molecule in my body has changed. Of course, I'm a different person.

There's a next-like literary, but the afterlife, it struck me that the afterlife was a way of the ultimate imprecastination, and it struck me that religious belief was very good for the trolley, not great for the individual. In our society, at the moment, maybe there's an interesting thing going on at the moment where the pendulum has swung too far to the individual and there's not enough tribal thinking going on. There's an awful lot to unpack there. What specifically? So you said you moved from Christianity and you moved into a psychotherapeutic realm in some sense and that opened up all sorts of possibilities for you started to realize that you had been hindered by your own presumptions of some of them unexamined about who you were and what you should be doing. How did you have family around at that time? Like, restrained in your choices in some sense or not. I think I was a little bit constrained by a sense of duty that was, I'm not sure whether that was real or imagined. I think very often it's,

that's one of the assumptions you make about what I should do to be a beautiful son. My mother died around the same time and that was weirdly quite sort of, I was quite, I believe what Psychotherapist would call in next at a very close sort of a Substitute partner for my mother, you know very close you could argue too close. So when she done like that was crippling for me, you know the grief was was was very overpowering but also Freed me up to go the thing that I feared as a child the the but also freed me up to go. The thing that I had feared as a child, the the loss of the key parents had happened, the worst thing had happened, and I know you kind of look around, you're still standing, and you go, you know, what

are the lessons from that? We'll go and live your life the best you can. Suddenly there was a sense of urgency to my life, that this is, you know, you get one life. Mortality became a very real thing through Greece. The idea that this is the only chance you get, you have to make good on them. This is a... Right, so that's kind of the black wolf and the white wolf there.

You know, the white wolf, you might think, well, that's the meaning that you found in this pursuit. But you're also chased by the fact that you realized the fragility and shortness of life. And it's definitely better to be, if you're going somewhere, it's better to be running from something and running towards something. You're a lot more motivated than... Yeah, I felt like it was a... I felt incredibly old when I was 25, I'm working in an oil company. I felt as old as I've ever felt. And then the next year, I was suddenly in this other world

where I felt like a teenager again and I kind of have done since it felt very, it's, you know, I don't view a few of us as a cold, pride, academic pursuit, I view it as kind of an impound rush of blood to the head. An incredible sense of responsibility was overwhelming. The idea that you were responsible for your life. And at some point, you have...

How is that associated with the atheism, that realization? I think it was the idea that you weren't living for the afterlife, you were living for this life, because you were focused on making this life, you were responsible for making this life as good as it could be. You weren't waiting at the analogy to hippie. You weren't waiting to be brought flowers, you were planting your own garden.

You're responsible for this. You better make this work for you. So that felt to me like a lot of responsibility, but also great. This is going to be an event. So in that transformation, I believe, heightened the sense of the significance of your life for you by forcing you in some sense to realize, well, how irreplaceable it wasn't, how time limited it was, that also didn't undermine you by the sound of it. Generally, I genuinely felt like I was waking up. I genuinely felt like I was in a bit of a day. Like the scale has been lifted. I've been, I've been kind of waking through

true people in my early childhoods, like post-college, that kind of trying to hold on to that previous life. Like, you know, it took about, I did my next life. There was a university was, I blasted, I had a lot of fun, a lot of drinking, great. And then you leave and suddenly you're in the real world. And it's just, I didn't like it. I didn't like where I was in it. I didn't find it. I hadn't found a purpose.

So it's kind of, there's a lot of treasury. And I hadn't found that thing. And then suddenly I found this incredibly privileged position where Work was more fun than fun, so I could put everything into it So on that personality test were you high in openness to experience? Yeah, how high? 98 and you're 98 and conscientiousness as well. You said something like that So that's that makes you kind of a strange person politically, because you've got the conscientiousness of someone

who's conservative, and that would maybe account for your dutifulness, that initial presumption about duty. But openness runs in some ways contrary to that. That's the wellspring of creativity. And so maybe that job at Shell was good for duty, but not for that gesture and artist. I'm a radical moderate, is what I am. I'm like a classic kind of liberal thinker. You know, that, I guess that's where I am, so right in the middle of things.

So political parties for me sort of aren't really the thing. It's, I don't find the particular, I don't think it's a, they're not useful, I think. It's right to be that being a member of a political party now is like ordering from a set menu in a Chinese restaurant. You know, you order from the set menu maybe the first time you go, but as soon as you know what you're talking about,

you kind of think different things on different issues. I don't agree with anyone about everything. How did you score on agreeableness, do you remember? I think I was pretty high. I'm going to look. I've got it here. I've got it on my phone. That's how the hour grew. I think it was quite extreme. I was, I was, I was angry. I'm curious about that in relationship to humor because, you know, comedians are often blunt and you have a real edge to your humor. I mean, it can get pretty dark and there is a real element in your comedy of, well, there's

provocation. I mean, that's not that unique, I suppose comedians do a fair bit of that, but maybe everyone should do this test before they get agreeable. No, I was typical agreeable and did it split into politeness? Do you have the split there for politeness and compassion? I think it had Yes, I think I had more compassion and politeness more compassion and politeness. Yeah, yeah.

I'm not the most polite of guys. Well, it's not that easy to be a polite comedian. Yeah, compassion very high, politeness very low. Yeah, okay. Conti-atributious, very high, industriousness, very high. I mean, it's a pleasure to take this test, orderliness high, very high. I mean, it's a pleasure to take this test orderly this high.

Extraversion, exceptionally high. Yeah, it's that particular, both enthusiasm and assertiveness. I would present enthusiasm very high assertive this exceptionally high neuroticism, exceptionally low. That's how nice for you. That's, yeah, if you have to have one temperamental gift, that might be the one to wish for. Yeah, we've drawn very low volatility, exceptionally like actually the listeners of this can recommend you, I think it's like 10 bucks or something, but going and doing this, it's understanding myself.com. I must say it's a very pleasant half hour going and doing it, not really questions. Understand myself.com just to clarify. It's a really interesting kind of process because you go, well, no matter what comes out, you can kind of agree with it or just agree with it or whatever.

But it's a very nice thing to kind of go and kind of assess, okay, that seems about right. That seems... and says, okay, that seems about right, that seems. Yeah, well, it's also interesting to know that, you know, that is how you are in some sense. And other people are actually different than that. They're actually different. And so they're like an extrovert and an introvert have a certain amount of trouble in a relationship because the extrovert is actually filled with enthusiasm as a consequence of social interactions and really wants them. Whereas the introvert feels drained by that and needs much more time by themselves and perhaps in nature. Those are real differences and you can mediate between those to some degree if you're good

negotiator, but you're starting from different principles from different a priori principles. Yeah, I must say those things are very useful. I mean, that whole thing about love languages, I find fascinating. The idea that, I mean, that's kind of the most simplistic, I think of all the the relationships that you have. The idea that different people have love languages, different people. Well, look, a conscientious person would like to have a conscientious person would offer due to full work to their partner. And an agreeable person would offer empathic love. No, and an extrovert would offer enthusiasm and joy. And so because those temperamental differences do, in some sense, set what we value. And in some sense, reflexively, like you can differentiate your personality with work

and you can develop the traits on the other side of you. But that takes work. You're sort of granted those a priori values and commitments to begin with in your temperament. It's really useful to see where you might be different from your partner. You know what, my wife is less polite than me. She's more blunt than me.

So you less or less, less She's more blunt than me. Sorry, less for my more blunt than you. What? What? I'm actually very high in agreeableness as it turns out. I actually don't like conflict at all. I mean, I've watched a couple of people debate and I would beg to defile on agreeableness. Yeah, I know, I know you'd think that,

but see, what's happened to me is that what I learned partly being a psychotherapist is that conflict delayed is conflict multiplied. And so all weighed in when I think there's something wrong and it terrors me into pieces, I really hate it, but I know it's better than putting it off and waiting for the alternative. I mean, that's the other premise of my book. Like, it's not 12 rules for life, but it's got a lot of life advice in there. And the hard choices now, easy life later,

strikes me as the, I mean, all self-help basically says the same thing, prioritized later. If you can pass the marshmallow tests when you're fine, you just, you're, I mean, life just becomes easier. Spoken like a conscientious person, but yes, it's a very good predictor of long-term success that ability, and the marshmallow test is a predictor of long-term success as it turns out. Yeah, I mean, there is such a thing as the, as a time machine, enemy, it's just time when you move in this direction at this speed, but you get to meet yourself in the future and you get to decide how fit and healthy you are and

how wealthy you are and everything else besides how happy you're going to be. It's all kind of it, it's all the trade-off and everyone has a natural bent towards right now because we live right now. The cutting edge of now is always happening. So it's always easier to set an account, you can do nothing, rather than go to the gym or read a book or whatever the thing is that's a little bit chowel. Well, if you get really lucky, you can live on the edge and benefit your future self at the same time, right? So that you could fall into that flow state in a disciplined manner so that you're present in the present and you love that because it's so engrossing and simultaneously serve your multiple future selves. That's kind of like an optimal uniting principle you

might say. And I think that's signaled to us when we fall into that flow state is that we're simultaneously serving, well, maybe not only ourselves, but other people, but also ourselves across multiple timeframes. And that's an instinctual signal that that's happening. Yeah, serving ourselves over multiple time-products, I think it's a very, it's one of those analogies that's so useful, that it's underutilized and so useful to think about yourself, not just as being yourself solid state now in this moment, but being a verb over time. So the idea of mortality and deterioration, and also how much health can you give yourself

later on, who you're working for, ultimately you're in a bargain with yourself and the rest of society, how you're acting right now. It's a very interesting sort interesting thing to think about. So let me turn back to comedy for a minute. Who do you really like for comedians? Who do you really find funny? That's creating right now. I mean, I suppose it's that thing about you often find your friends are funny.

I mean, I find there's a guy called Neil Brennan, who co-created the Shepalshut, who has one of the best. I think you would love his special. It's called Three Mikes. It's on Netflix. I think it might be the best comedy special that anyone's done. So the first mic is jokes.

One-liner jokes, not dissimilar to the kind of thing that I would do. Great. The second mic is standard, longer-form material, you know the kind of thing that I would do. Great. The second mic is standup, longer form material, you know, kind of routines. And the third mic is the truth. Obviously you start watching the L show and the first five minutes you just do,

yeah, tell us more jokes, jokes are fun, give me more jokes. Not about 30 minutes in, you're like, standup is really good. The standup bits are more fun, at least jokes placed. And then by the end of it, you're just just telling me what happened with your dad, just telling me what happened. It's fantastic. It's just, it's a really interesting and the idea that

he's made is very clear, distinction-wise, I think a lot of people organically do that in a show, but he literally had three mics and three different settings. And I thought it was a... Yeah, well, I watched Sheppell's recent, so controversial show and he did a tremendous amount of storytelling and one of the things that was masterful about what he did was that he tied everything together at the end so nicely. So it was like the whole joke sequence had a punchline, right? The whole story had a point and it was coherent across all the story and the jokes. And that, that, that, so it elevated it to some degree, I think to a place that just sequences

of jokes can't attain. I mean, not that they, not that they're not worthwhile. No, I think the refining is a, but there is a sense in which you know, watch better comedians. And you go, I've got, I've got a ticket to the lottery, right? Let's imagine there's a mountain rush more of comedy and the four greatest comedians are up there. I'm not on that mountain rush more, but I could be. I love the fact that being a comedian is a task without end that I can, I'm not done yet. I'm in my late 40s and I still feel like I'm kind of, okay, I'm in the gym now. I know my way around one line as I'm pretty great with jokes, storytelling, I've done a little bit of it,

I've put my tub in the water, but I'm not there yet. But with the books, certainly, I'm becoming better, I'm better at opening up and sharing, and it's an ongoing, I mean, the great thing about most comics that are considered to be the greats, did their best work in their 50s and beyond. Well, that is interesting because that's at variance with most artistic endeavor.

Yeah, it's what it happens in youth. I don't have it so much with, well, it does with musicians even. It tends to be a younger person's occupation. So that's not so much true for fiction writers if I remember correctly, but it's interesting that it's not true for comedians. Yeah, I've got a whole sequence in the book back, because I used to find it very

impressive when I was young, reading about people that had made it very early on in life. You know, child geniuses, and when you're a kid, it's like, ah, this guy's done everything, and you feel like you haven't even started yet. So I might be a dude of my, I used to often read kind of magazines, people that I made it later in life. I like that kind of that thing of my society worships youth so much, you kind of, I like the idea of that, making it a little bit later as I'm character.

It doesn't have to happen early. It can happen at any stage. I mean, my story was up someone in their mid-20s finding their way in the world. So that kind of the analogy of the course of life crisis finding purpose and purpose being sort of the key that kind of that that that hero's journey. I'd that can happen at any stage, that can happen in your 50s, that can happen in your 60s, it really doesn't matter. I think it's quite't matter. I think it's quite an empowering thing. So you like Neil Brennan, three mics.

Who else do you think's great at the moment? As a lady called Beth Stelling, you might not be aware of. I think she's a brilliant joke writer, storyteller. I like Michelle Wolf. I like in the UK, there's, I mean, so many great comedians. I've been watching a lot of my ad-friend that died recently, Sean Locke, who was a huge figure in my life. And obviously, when he died, the first thing you do is you go back and you look at his

work, and you look at all the stand-up that he did, and I found him just so incredibly funny this guy. Sean Locke, just everything about him was because he looked just certain way. There was every joke was kind of heightened because he looked like a guy that he can't, he looked like a worker man, he looked like he'd come to fix your boiler and then he was doing this kind of incredibly surreal, light touch jokes. And that for me is like everything was kind of a heightened surprise because of that.

And who do you think were the comedy great? I mean, I think you know, you'd be hard pressed not to, I mean, Richard Pryor is one of, you know, there's a sense in which everyone's doing an impression to a lesser or greater degree of Richard Pryor. Everyone's a tribute actor, Richard Pryor because he was named Pryor then, isn't it? It seems quite fitting. Perfect. Perfect bit of language there. He was an extraordinary talent. And really there's a great fable in his life. I put this in the book actually. I've done a chapter on Carichabra in the book on the fact

that he was basically, it was a pretty successful comedian. He was good. He was on TV. Bill Cosby was the biggest comic in the world at the time. And Carichabra was a pretty successful comedian. He was good. He was on TV. Bill Cosby was the biggest comic in the world at the time. And Richard Pryor was a poor man to Bill Cosby. He was doing pretty mild, but very accessible comedy. He was on things like the tonight show. And he was very funny in a soothing tie. And he looked upon the short hair and very funny in a suit and tie and he looked the part of the short hair and broke. And around 1968, 69, his mother died, his father was dying. There was the rise in the civil rights movement.

This incredible thing was happening in America. And he was on stage in Las Vegas in front of a predominantly white crowd. And he looked around and he said, fuck it, I'm out. And he walked off stage and he walked away. And he really didn't come back for four years. He went, he worked in, in, in black clubs and predominantly black cities. And he didn't even come back straight away with like people think I've he came back. was rich a pride he took him I think it was his turn out of the back this end word crazy hit and it hit big but the two previous albums were underground and he became this he started using his language he started

being authentically himself he started he was himself. He started, the good was the enemy of the best. He had this ill-set and he turned it into this, he just, he was transcendent. He became this thing that was kind of bigger than the kind of reinvented the form. It's an extraordinary inspirational story about, and because of, you know, the other things that have happened to him it's

It's literally like the Christlike story of life is a bird to himself very badly said Everything that wasn't burned away. What remains is the kind of the thing that I take from that story is that everything There's no but the essence of of who he was So yeah, I think it's burned things burn away if you listen to your audience. Yeah. Well, it's that thing about what remains, I love quotes, because the quote is what remains when everything that's not essential disappears.

You know, not many people have read a Balsac. Mythological memory is like that. But you know, Balsac or Voltaire or any of that. Like, it's all, no one's read the books. But those quotes keep on coming up because they're just the truth. It just keeps on, like, they keep on reappearing. And you know, some of Richard Price lines just keep on reappearing because you're almost just, you kind of nailed that thing. I saw Cosby in Edmonton and he did a two-hour show and he came out on stage with a cigar because you could do that in those days. He just sat on a stool.

I was at the stage, was completely bare. And he told stories and jokes for two hours. And the audience, the guy in front of me was laughing so hard that he was almost in convulsions. His wife had to keep elbowing him in the side trying to get him straight up because he was embarrassing her, but he had that audience in the palm of his hand for two and a half, two hours, I believe it was, and they were roaring with laughter non-stop. It was absolutely masterful, tremendously funny, dark, dark, but also warm.

He was a great storyteller. It was really something to see. It is, I sort of like the Montreal as well. It's a weird one isn't it. I think, you know, the separation of someone's work from their reputation, I think is becoming, it's a, I mean, let's say if we can't do that as a solid team, we need to, well, we need to be lovely. Because wouldn't it be lovely if we could always live up to our best?

Well, it's also because human beings are nuanced and difficult. Frankly, I don't think anyone is the worst thing they've ever done. But also with that, they're not the best thing they've ever done. People are people and sometimes their work can transcend that. But my problem with cancel culture at the moment is I'm slightly suspicious. It might be the new burning books and whereas we're very arrogant in our secular culture of our achievements, religion does set the things better. Religion has a road for redemption and redemption. A very underrated in the world of cancel culture.

Confession as well, right? Well, confession is a key element in psychotherapy. You basically do in psychotherapy. Here's all the things I'm doing that might be stupid and hurtful or the things that have happened to me. That's also a possibility, but it's often the things I'm doing that might be stupid and hurtful or the things that have happened to me That's also a possibility, but it's often the former that are more useful So yeah, how come you haven't been canceled? I Have several several times I was I was I had a Tax scandal that nearly ended my career. I had maybe four or five jokes over the years that have become a problem, you know, the papers. It's an interesting thing when it happens. When the first time it happens to you, it's very shocking because you think, oh my god, I found this incredible

road, I found this life of being a comedian and I could lose it all in an instant and that is terrifying. And then you realize it's kind of okay. It's like you go, everything doesn't fall away. The people that like you like you, the people that don't like you have a stick to beat you with. And it's often when things are taken out of context, when jokes are taken out of context, like I'm telling jokes in theaters to a paying audience

of an evening, people have come to see me, they're brought into it. I'm not shouting them through someone's letterbox at 8am in the morning as they're reading their call flights. But that's what happens when it turns up in the newspaper. And if you've seen a joke written down, you haven't heard the joke. There's a dialogue, there's an interaction with the audience. There's a difference between seeing the words that with the audience, there's a difference between

seeing the words the way in that joke and hearing that joke and experiencing that joke in the same way. Well, that's probably true for the most daring jokes, you know, because when you're in a live theater and you say something that's right on the edge, right? Yeah. You're hilariously funny, it's because you're carried away with the moment, you get this witty idea and bang, you nail it, but that sort of. But that's right at the edge of what's permissible. You take that out of context.

It's a catastrophe. Here's the thing again, you can joke about anything, but not with anyone. You know, that's for sure. My audience is not the same as your audience. So if you go on, if we both decided, Rob, we're going to do a show together and your audience came to the show and I opened for you,

I did 10 minutes at the top. And I think they would love it. It's like it did a different, so there'd be overlap, there'd be something, some people would, you know, it's, we attract our own audiences to come to the show. And the idea that you go suddenly, then your jokes are held up to the scrutiny of everyone on social media

and the loudest voices of the ones that ring out are the negative voices. And there's something that disingenuous about the press as well, where they'll report a joke. Yes, that bit. As if, well, but they report a joke because because if you're making a statement, and I don't really miss the result stage, I make jokes, so you go with the defense is always, it was a joke. Well, what do you, what do you think the relationship is between jokes

and the truth? I think, and it's very interesting. I think it was Bertram Russell that said that something is funny, such it very carefully for it in truth. Yeah, yeah. Well, the comedians often say things that everybody thinks are true, but no one will dare to say. Yeah, I think comedy lives and it's best somewhere between what it lives between public and private discourse.

And there's a huge difference between public and private discourse. Certainly, at the moment, it feels like it's never been wider. If you watch... So, comedians are even more necessary? Yes, but yes, I'm building my role. But, you know, the idea of you watching these news, you would swear that everyone thinks in the same way and thinks the same thing about everything. And actually, there's a huge variety of opinion out there. And so different people go down different routes, and hold some to their own media, but you go, there's a lot of comedians that kind of be a little trying to make sense of it all and talking to an audience. And everything a comedian says has to be based

in the level of honesty. It was just isn't funny. So if you're just... Yeah, it's so strange, though, because there are truths that aren't funny. So what's... What is it about truth? What is it about some truths that make them funny? What is exactly the relationship? Because funny is a subset of true in some sense. Well, I don't think a joke needs to be true per se. It just needs to... Often the funniest things when you're pointing something out,

that's the akin to the Emperor's new clothes. Yeah, yeah. You're pointing out something that kind of, it seems obvious when you say it, but everyone kind of goes, oh yeah, I guess. That's so cool. Oh yeah, or they go, oh well, oh yeah, we're all like that.

Ha ha ha, we know that. Yeah, so we'd say it. Yeah, observational comedy does that job of kind of going, you know, we all have this human experience. And if you're talking about something that's slightly more transgressive in society, it's like it's talking openly about it. So there's a there's a sense in which it mimics friendship because it's having a conversation that you're not walking on eggshells. So political correctness at a comedy show

is like health and safety at the rodeo. It just doesn't, it doesn't sort of belong there. It's not to say that political correctness is a bad thing. It's just saying it's about the application. What does that work? I mean, I'm not, I think the obsession with words, with linguistics in PC is,

I don't know, fuck what you call me, I can't how you treat me. So I'm very interested in social justice, but I'm not interested at all in political greatness. And I think the two are being completely, because it's an easier fight to win. That, you know, the straw man is the language. And it avoids having to talk about the real topic of all the time.

Yeah, I might also avoid having to confront those particular demons in your own soul as well. So that's a powerful form of avoidance. Yeah. It's interesting. One more question. We've gone about 90 minutes and so why did you want to talk to me today? Why did you think that was a good idea? What sparked your interest? I'm curious about that. I was, I think you're an incredibly interesting guy because I think there's a sense in which what you're trying to do, certainly in 12 rules, but I think, you know, amounts of meaning as well. I think it's such a valuable, you know, you're reaching out, you are a father figure

for a lot of men without farmers. That's the, it strikes me that that's an incredibly difficult station to take. And you've been given, I think, a very hard time, I think, for trying to do something that's incredibly valuable and necessary. And I think in trying to write my book, I discovered that I wanted to try and give something back a little bit. I wanted to try and help in some small way. Partly was about being father, and it was about having that energy as a father of going, look, if something happened to me tomorrow or what, I'm leaving myself, what

do I, you know, so from my kind of ego point of view, saying, what do I want to, what do I think about how the world works? And I felt that my book was something that you would respond to because it's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a much more, I mean, I kind of went down the self-help route because I told it was low-hanging fruit in some sense. You know, yourself and Sam Harris are great, but you neither of you know you're aware around a dick joke, and I felt like there's a way in which, you know, delivering that material with a lightness that feels that it feels like your audience might might get a kick out out of my book. So suppose it was a kind of self-interest but also I like what you've done.

Well thank you that's I like what you've done too I think you're extremely funny and is that actually your laugh? Yeah it's oh my god that's so horrible. Well, yeah, I mean, it's wonderful because it's that thing works a very, very distinctive laugh. I think I think a laugh got me into comedy because my mother's laugh, she had a nokelepsy, she had a think called cataclexic, which is a bit of nokelepsy where you lose muscular control. So what you love, you have to be some of them makes no noise when they laugh. So she had a very extreme version of that, where she would properly kind of just melt when she laughed.

So obviously I was massively motivated to make her laugh. I guess she was driving when I was a kid. If you could make a laugh in the car, you'd have to go out the wheel and kind of steer because she kind of collapse in giggles, properly collapse. And it's, I don't know, always be very, I like straight locks, I think they're quite magnificent, infectious. There's no doubt about that, yeah. Well, look, I really enjoyed talking to you. I'm coming to the UK, I'm going to Cambridge and Oxford. I'm there for the last two weeks in November.

And I have a couple of talks. Maybe I could shoot you over an invitation. I would love to come. I mean, I work every night, but if there's really, I'd love to come and see you speak. And I'd love to see, you know, what the reaction is. But I think now as well, I'll be looking at something like 12 rules now. I really think there's a hunger now, post-pandemic. People have been locked away for 18 months and they've had sort of, we've come out of this collective hibernation. And it's, right, what am I going to do next? What's my plan? Like, everyone's had that chance to kind of go, right, what's the next step? What's the people of search for for a little bit of guidance, and I think when you look at

you know some of the things that you talk about certainly in in maps of meaning the idea that myth and story and You know, they're kind of young in archetypes of the term I would use the you know They're so important and they're so sort of interesting in our in our culture because we've kind of slightly thrown the baby out of the bath also so important that they're so sort of interesting in our culture because we've kind of slightly grown the baby out of the bath also. Now that's the sort of thing I'm going to talk about at Cambridge and at Oxford. So I'll be in touch in relationship to that then. Well that would be, we can meet in the UK that would be really good. I loved it. I mean I've

very much enjoyed this. I hope it's just you know very interesting, free, really conversation. I hope people will enjoy it, get a kick out of it and yeah, more power to you. Good luck. Same to you and I'm looking forward to your next Netflix special to watch with my wife and crack out that you're laugh. I think Christmas day. Yeah, but if your wife is even more fruitful than you, wow, she's gonna love it. Oh yeah, man, it's something to argue with her, because she's really provocative. She'll just nail me with like these most,

she can string together more vicious one-liners than anyone I've ever heard. And sometimes I'll just be in a frenzy because I'm so angry and she makes me laugh. It's like more vicious one-liners than anyone. I'll take that for all that's. Well, maybe you'll get the pleasure of meeting her, but you won't see her at her best, I'm afraid. Yeah, I mean, lots of times in the middle of fights

we've been having, we're both like, I rate, you know, at each other, and she'll say something so unbelievably vicious and horrible, and then follow it up with something even worse. It's, it cracks me up. It's, I just can't believe she can do it. It's really quite something. It's very, but that's kind of what there isn't enough of in the world like proper debate. Everyone strikes me that we're like in the culture wars. It's like World War One. Everyone's in their trenches and no one's getting out to have a little look around in a chat and a, you know, the discourse. It's that's where the game is played, the discourse is everything. And it strikes me that that's happening now on YouTube because academia is, there's only one team have turned up to play. And so you go, well, that idea of going there has to be a discourse

and there's going to be, there'll be a breakthrough,, they'll, but I think it's going to come from, you know, popular science books and YouTube videos is going to be where people find their way. Yeah, and from comedy. Yeah, obviously, yeah, a little bit of my relief along the way. Well, a pleasure to you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. My pleasure, man. Thanks very much for talking to me today and I hope to see you in the UK. Good luck on your tour. See you in UK. Oh, I'll have a book. And in Montreal next summer, the greatest city in the world. Yeah, it's a great place, man. I love Montreal. You know how like summer Montreal, it's French food, American portions. The best. And it's also North American plumbing and European charm. And it's also North American plumbing and European charm. Yeah, that does it.

Let's sum it up. All right, look. Well, let's leave it there. I'll speed you again. Take care. Ciao, man. you