#2571 - Jimmy Carr

Joe Rogan podcast check it out. The Joe Rogan experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night all day. Hey Jimmy, good to Good morning,

see you, friend. I wanna thank you so much for introducing me to Clarkson.

oh, it's, it's f. It's fun, right?

Jeremy Clarkson is the best. He's exactly who you think he is, who you want. When you see him on TV, that's who he is. Fucking hilarious. He was so fun to talk to, such an interesting guy to talk to.

well, he came down to the mothership last night. I don't think he's been to a comedy club before. That's wild, He was like, What's what's going on? What? What's the show? And when I'm doing a thing called Kill Tony, he went, I don't know what that is. Jim, are you telling jokes? And I went, I'm sort of judging people telling Oh, okay. And then he got got to the mothership and went, Can I get a rose?

Uh, luckily, I think your missus has a bottle of rose somewhere, which is now missing.

They keep rose there for

Yeah, well, you know, the guy he was with, uh, Willman, who's his producer. They're childhood friends. They were in school together and they've done everything together. that's They're just as right. You were telling thick as thieves.

me the whole origin story, how it started out with a syndicated story, a syndicated He started, article.

he used to write reviews for cars in the local paper. He would write these articles and he was like, he's always been like a really funny guy. So it would be a review of a car, but it would be kind of about life and what's going on in the world as well, always. And he'd write this really kind of funny piece. And then they decided, well, we can sell it to this local paper, but there's another local paper.

And every every sort of, you know, local paper's got a car section on a Wednesday selling cars. And those guys advertise, and they had to make that look more like a paper, so you could just sell that to every newspaper in the country. So he ended up kind of making a fortune doing that, and that's how he kind of got his reputation. Kind of clever to think about kind of how media changes over the years. That was kind of the old newspapers, local papers were the thing.

And before he started writing the car articles, what was he doing then?

Oh, I mean, nothing, nothing.

Really?

He was just like just a guy. He graduated with nothing, I think graduate, I didn't graduate university, just was like, uh,

He's a funny guy. He was showing me his broken finger from when he punched Piers Morgan.

I'm right. Yeah, yes, I He's like, think that's

Do you see that? See that bump? That's from punching Piers Morgan.

well, well done him. All right, I know.

He's so fun, man. We had a great

you gotta get him on, time. you gotta get him I would love on.

to. He is a little apprehensive, he says. Every time he opens his mouth about anything on a podcast, the Daily Mail writes a terrible article about him.

But but it's that thing where you go. Other people's opinions about me are none of my business. Like, the people are gonna write things and that that's okay, it's. But at some stage, you just have to go. And I think it's like a superpower. Not giving a fuck what other people think about you is a superpower. And if you can do that, like, I think I think comics are maybe better at it, cause we're not entertainers in the pure sense.

I remember this thing, like Robbie Williams also, said this thing to me. He said, I'm an entertainer in the pure sense. If you don't love me, I don't love me.

ooh, God, I don't think of musicians as being that way. I would never think of Bob Dylan as that way.

Well, I think Bob Dylan is. I I think the difference between an entertainer and an artist is if you say to an artist, I love your new record, and they go, Well, that's interesting, but I don't give a fuck, it's my new record. And I think comics have got that thing where you go. I feel like I write the jokes, but I don't write the show.

Do you really think that, like an artist, would say, I don't give a fuck if you like my record? I feel like there's a spectrum of giving a fuck what other people like, but the most important thing is you being able to express yourself. That's the most important thing. If you're expressing yourself only for other people's love and affection. Like, if you're just zooming in on what's gonna give them the best response, what's what's gonna get me the best response, the most love and affection from those people, that's a trap.

Like, I think it's you can't,

it's that's audience capture. It's where you, you, you become, But you become a covers version of yourself. That thing of, like that fame being like a weird hall of mirrors, where you you kind of reflect back what you think they want you to be as opposed to, audience capture, yeah, finding something kind of exciting to do.

But I do think that some people who are true artists, like I've, I know musicians that are like really good musicians and very popular. And when people come up to them and say they loved a certain song or they loved a certain album, they genuinely get happy. I think that's possible, well, I I think it's wonder, possible to say, thank you. I really appreciate that. I I'm glad you loved that album. I've seen it happen I wonder if with like, cool it's a continuum people.

of like, Okay, so you've got, like, a, I don't know. M. Picasso at one end, going, Listen, I do what I do and I've got to express myself. And on the other end, it's the guy kind of dancing desperately, trying to get the audience on his side.

Well, I think it's a a spectrum of varying personalities with the same kind of goal. This the kind of goal for an artist is you have an idea and you wanna figure out the best form of it to present to other people, right? That's that's, uh, a, and there's all sorts of mentally ill people that get invested in this, too. There's people that are out of their fucking mind. There's, I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis was accused of drowning his wife.

He married his what was it? How old was the girl that he married? He famously, uh, went on before Chuck, who who did he go on before? was it Chuck? Who? What was the story where he lit the piano on fire? I think I think Okay, he,

that's where he had to uh, was go.

22, and he married his 13-year-old first cousin once removed. Okay, so you gotta separate the artist from the art, that's what they always say, right? But my point is like, you got that, and then you've got, you know, Kurt, Matt, uh, Kurt Cobain, you've got Jimi Hendrix, you've got okay. So I, Janis Joplin,

I would I. you've, I make a distinction here between, um, hyper accelerated rationality, like super smart people doing great stuff, and actual genius. I think genius always comes with a little sprinkle of crazy. I think it's like there is a there is a price to pay that you would not wanna pay. So whether it's, you know, Michael Jackson, or, uh, you know, Kurt Cobain, like tortured souls, creating this incredible entertainment for us. But they're they're going to a very dark place.

Like, I've got a theory about the 27 club, you know, the 27 club of like all the people that died at age 27, these incredible musicians, Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse, these like incredible artists. And I think it's because they are more sensitive than we are, that they've got, like, everything is, they're feeling everything, that, and and to be that good. So then they're numbing themselves. The drugs are the medication to just, I just to n I need to not feel this.

well, there's certainly a lot of that going on. No one would deny that, you know? Um, it's just, I think, whenever you're trying to categorize a group as large as artists and lump them into a specific, uh, type of personality traits, that, you know, a predetermined pattern of personality traits. I don't think you can do it. I I've just met too many that are so different. I've met, like really arrogant ones that are clearly mentally ill that produce incredible work.

So, like Kanye West, clearly has some mental issues, Yeah, I think that's but man,

that's something else.

that motherfucker knows how to make some bangers

Yes, it's extraordinary.

like that dude, uh, he's,

He's like the prime example of, like, you wouldn't wanna be, I wouldn't want to be a genius. I'll be, I'll, I'll just do my thing. That's great, but that the price to pay I asked to be that great,

Elon Musk once about that, and he said, You wouldn't wanna be me. This episode is presented by Searchlight Pictures Wild Horse Nine. Shortly before Chile's 1973 coup, two CIA agents played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell find their mission on Easter Island spiraling into a web of conspiracies, unexpected alliances and chaos. Wild Horse Nine only in theaters Friday. Get tickets now. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hook up a better speaker to your TV, and your home theater experience is immediately ten times better.

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com and save up to 30% your 1st year with the promo code JRE. That's promo code JRE. Or go to LifeLock. com. Slash JRE for 30% off. Terms apply. he goes, You wouldn't wanna, he goes, Uh, I just my brain never stops moving. It's like, it's horrible, well, I kinda think there's like that thing about, a storm going on in my head I sometimes all the time,

think about that with anxiety. You know, the idea that, like, anxiety is thought without control, and a flow state is control without thought. Like the idea that you could be in a flow state where you're not, you kind of, you're not thinking, you're just doing the thing. Sometimes on stage, you can hit that and then. But the anxiety, all of the anxiety that I have if I wake up and I have a panic attack and I'm, I'm kind of my mind is spinning.

Is also the thing that's written every joke I've ever written and done, everything I've ever done, that kind of that nervous energy. So there's always like a a positive to it. But take it to its extreme, where you go, the guy can't relax, the guy can't sort of. I mean, I I think here's my theory on Elon Musk. I think he's gonna find religion in in the next twelve months, cause, right, there's, there's a theory, right?

It's four things that keep us from God, right? There's the okay. So, fame, fortune, power and pleasure. And I think he's won every one of those games, and I think he's gonna get bored, and he's gonna have to go and find God. Fame, fortune, power, pleasure.

Maybe he creates God. Maybe that's what the what they're in the middle of doing with these fucking

Well, this is my you, computers. you, you know, the the I'm with Hegel and Nietzsche on this, right? So I, I don't think, I don't think we were created in God's image, right? But I think we so wanted there to be a God that we created one in our image. I'm gonna describe something to you. It's all powerful, all-knowing, it can create miracles, and it lives in a cloud. Now, am I talking about God or AI?

And both Hegel and Nietzsche got to this 150 years ago. They, they, they went well. Is the universe? Was God there for the big bang, or is the universe a device for creating God?

that's what I, as I believe, as well. I So believe that it's the whole reason why we innovate, it's the whole reason why we're obsessed with material possessions. I think all of that fuels innovation, and the innovation eventually fuels the creation of a digital life form. And it used to sound like science fiction till about 20 years ago, and now we're deep in the middle of it, where it's undeniable.

it's interesting, cause, like, you like the Egyptian culture, right? The myths and legends, and and the pyramids. Cause it strikes me that the Greeks got a lot from the Egyptians. The Greeks basically looked at the Egyptians and went, Oh, they fell to, they fell to nothing, because they they never innovated, they never changed anything. So the Greeks kind of wanted not to make, they didn't wanna make that mistake. Like, we live closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra lived to the building of the pyramids.

we, yes, crazy, That's, uh, like a weird thing. They never ch, cause they once they once they had it locked in, they just went, Okay, that's us, this is our system, as they opposed to the

there's a that's a narrative of, uh, of history, and you should look into the work of your fellow countryman, Graham Hancock. Do you know who he is?

No, I don't know.

Okay, Graham Hancock had a show on Netflix for 2 seasons. I don't know if they're gonna do a 3rd, but it's called, Uh, ancient apocalypse. Is that it? That's it, right? And it's all about how

Was this made? was this made for you? It feels like it was made specifically for you.

I've been a fan of his for a long time. He was actually one of the first guests I ever had on this podcast. Actual guest, other than being comedian friends of mine, me and Duncan, uh, convinced him to do the podcast when the podcast was like, I think no one was on.

I've, I think I have heard this guy on here when he came back.

he's been on many, many times. He's a very good friend of mine now. I love him to death, but I think he's right, and, uh, I think he's not alone. Now, there's dozens of legitimate archaeologists that share his ideas. And then on top of that, you have people that are studying impacts on earth from, uh, extra stellar or interstellar, any kind of asteroid, comet impacts, all these different. There's a lot more information about that now than they've ever had before.

And there's a big one that aligns up with the end of this previous civilization that probably created all these great works and what we have now. In this sort of 5,000 year period of reconstruction of civilization.

let me see if I can tie all of this together. Okay, artists, Elon musk's and the and the pyramids, and AI, okay, here we go, and AI, here we go. I think, uh, this is Terence McKenna's point originally, so pyramids and rockets are the same thing.

how's that?

Okay, so it's a huge amount of human capital is used to spend a chosen to send a chosen few to the heavens. That's what a pyramid is for, I don't and that is think that's what what a the pyramids for and that is what a rocket is for. I. There's Oh, good idea, a lot of debate it's

on what the pyramids for now, but most likely it was some sort of a device. yeah, but They were using it for something.

but it. But again, it's it's for the transcendent is the idea. I don't know So his take was,

that idea doesn't hold up anymore. There there's a lot of information about the actual design of the inner dimensions of the pyramid, of the pyramid. That leads a lot of legitimate, especially younger archaeologists now, to try to exam examine what exactly this thing is. Do you know that? Do you know about all the new discoveries that they found Yeah, the because of the ground the penetrating radar?

Yeah, I d I I. I don't kinda don't know what to make of it. Because

I don't either.

it feels to me like the the the news cycle now. It feels like that would have been a year's worth of news had that happened 15 years ago, and now it feels like we move on so quickly.

Well, the problem is it's very gatekept in Egypt. Like that guy that I had on my podcast, Zahi Hawass, he's in charge of whatever gets distributed about whatever official narrative, whatever press releases. He's sort of at the front of the line, and he has been for a long time. And they're very reluctant to give up those reins to any new discovery that doesn't have his name on it and doesn't have their name on it. It's not approved by them.

It's a real problem because there's this, there's this, uh, labyrinth that was discovered by, well, it was documented by Herodotus, so we're talking thousands of years ago. This incredible structure underneath Giza, that's greater than Giza. Now they know that's real now. They've done, yeah, they've, you know, used ground-penetrating radar now. And there was also an explorer, I think, was it the 1800s who went down there, but he could only go so far. So the water table changed.

They had built a dam in the 1960s, and that was really fucked it up, where they can't go back in there anymore. And so when they built this dam to help agriculture, it raised the water table all around the Giza plateau. And this labyrinth, this under incredible underground structure, was all flooded. So they're trying to figure out what to do about that now. But because of ground-penetrating radar, not only do they know that this exists without doubt, like, they can absolutely document the immense size.

But that there's also a forty-meter-long metallic object that's in the center of a large atrium that looks like a Tic-Tac. They don't know what it is, they don't know what metal it is, but they do know it's made out of metal, and it's 40 meters long, and it's underground in this insane and this is from structure.

5,000 years ago. Probably longer. This is Okay, well, this is I mean, this

the real problem. is, yeah, it feels The real problem is like, we don't know what the origin story of humanity is accurately. We don't know this is what the Jesus story is, and the Adam and Eve story. There's all these stories. But what we get is there was probably some sort of an event. And then people talked about it for hundreds of years before anybody ever wrote it down. And no one who wrote it down was there.

And no one has an accurate, r- a really accurate representation of what that person says, including the works of Jesus.

yeah, well, this is like the I suppose it's that thing of the, uh, the carcass of the whale. Like the idea that we're living in a world that we couldn't build again. Like, like, um, you know, from Britain, you go, we were the 1st industrializing nation, right? We built the 1st railways, and now we are totally incapable of building a railway. Like the last fifteen years, twenty years, the the Chinese have covered themselves in high-speed rail, and we've covered ourselves in environmental reports.

Or we seem incapable of kinda getting shit done. So you go, you have these weird things where you go, the the the pyramids are there, and we've, we've kinda lost the instruction manual. We couldn't do that again now, even if we tried. It's a weird thing with civilizations where they kind of, I don't know when, like, how did Rome fall? There there's a theory about, like, how civilizations fall. Um, Peter Turchin has this really good theory, which is it's 2 things.

It's, uh, one is inequality, uh, and one is the overproduction of elites. So you have too many people becoming elites, and then they don't get what is promised to the elites because you open up so so too many people go to university. If half of everyone goes to university, then they can't, and they get the degree and they work hard, and then they don't get the life that they were promised. Then they become a counter elite and they rebel against the elite, and the inequality becomes, you know, too great, and, you know, everything crumbles.

That's his kind of theory through history of how, you know, societies kind of come crashing down,

well, that that th- that's certainly a factor, and we're experiencing that right now. I think the factor that they were dealing with was a asteroid impacts and, um, documented ones. So this is a part of the Younger Dryas theory that's undeniable is that they've done ice core samples, and in these ice core samples, they find high levels of iridium in a lot of areas. Iridium is very common in space, very rare on Earth. When there's a layer of it, it usually indicates that we were hit, and this is all around that same time period of 11,000 years ago.

Well, it's interesting as well, like, what effect that has on the greater on the globe? Like, there's that famous case of, like, the people talk about, you know, the environment, what's going on with our environment? And really, uh, Krakatoa is a great example, right? So when Krakatoa went off, it was such a big volcanic eruption. There was no summer in Europe the next year, because all of the particles went up into the stratosphere above the stratosphere, and they reflected light, so the earth cooled by, like, two degrees.

What year was this?

This is eighteen, hell, no,

1883.

that, like, no summer in Europe, like, the and and Europe was, I guess, prob probably no summer in the world. But they didn't measure it anywhere else. So then there's kind of mass starvation off the back of that. right, of course, A And, you know, and and again, you know, like, uh, uh, civil unrest and and people kinda falling to pieces, because

do you know about the Toba? One, the Toba volcano? There was one that's, uh, what was it? Was that 70,000 years ago? Think DraftKings isn't available in your state? Think again. DraftKings is now live in all 50 states. And on October 31st, Canelo Alvarez returns to the ring to face undefeated Christian Mibilly live on DAZN. Download the DraftKings Sports app and use code Rogan. New DraftKings customers can spend five and get 200 in total bonuses, includes all markets.

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It knocked humanity down to a few thousand people

I think it's 60,000 is like the lowest we got to, I think, which is extraordinary when you think from about it.

a super volcano. And so a super volcano is, uh, you know, it's not extraterrestrial, it's a thing that's actually here. It's a natural disaster that occurs periodically on Earth, whereas the sky is a shooting gallery. And we we are, we are in a the middle of a crazy pathway where we run into 900 plus thousand near earth objects. And we're spiraling through the galaxy, hurling into space at an insane rate of speed. This, I mean, it And then there's kinda makes me feel these city-sized dizzy.

objects that are just floating around, and occasionally they come rocketing in at five times the speed of sound and slam into the earth. And it rings like a bell for a million years, and that's what killed the dinosaurs. Yeah, I mean, within well, well, the dyn- seconds, it was the dinosaurs as well miles into the earth,

was the dinosaurs were, um, I forget what the name is. There's a biological term for it, but the the eggs below a certain temperature were male, and above a certain temperature were female dinosaur eggs. So and that w- that would wor- that worked pretty well for for the distribution of gender. Uh, and so when the when the asteroid hit, obviously it kills a couple of dinosaurs that it hits. But what really happens is the earth cools by 2 degrees and their system just goes.

So they're all born female,

that makes sense.

and then they all die out. So any animal with that system, so then there's ones that didn't die out, that didn't have that system. So the reason, you know, crocodiles or sharks, they're, you know, things from that era that just didn't didn't depend on that system for gender distribution.

I was just reading about an animal, some sort of a reptile, that they've just recently observed getting pregnant without a male involved. And that this was, uh, unsuspected. They didn't think that they could do this. It was, God, I wish I was paying more attention to it. But that happens all the time in the weird lizard world. Like the same kind of creatures that can grow their own legs back when they lose a leg, they What's that?

What's also, Yeah,

going on there?

what the fuck is going on there? And how come we can't do that? That they also get heavily affected, uh, their sexual organs get affected by things like herbist, like atrazine. You know, that stuff that that gets dumped into the water that turns Alex Jones famously said, turns the frogs gay. oh, right, okay, well, Turns out it really does. Turns out it really does. It really changes their gender, it turns a male frog into a female frog.

yeah, I mean, we're messing around with stuff we don't. Yeah, that that can't be good, can it?

but no. But it's just weird to me how the lizard world is so odd like that. They're so much different than the rest of us, like the lizard world. We should be very terrified if we ever get invaded by reptiles, like if reptilian I think that's okay, aliens are the real that's I'll make thing.

a note of that somewhere. Yeah, I mean, that seems They can like a pretty good grow their limbs idea.

back. Also, they like some of them don't need to eat for a year, like crocodiles, they can not eat for a whole year. They can hold their breath underwater for hours at a time, slow their heart rate down to almost nothing.

Yeah, I mean, I'm listen, I'm with you. If we get invaded by crocodiles, I think we We need to take have a real it very seriously. problem. Yeah, Yeah, it might bring we're, humanity together, which would be the good thing.

eh, the something would like another nine eleven or something. We need, almost we need to be attacked. We're Well, the thing so divided is, like, in right now.

inequality is the big thing that Peter Turchin talks about, like bringing down civilizations. But some this other guy did a did a study on the the things that cause equality, and there are 4 things, right? So you gotta be careful what you wish for, because the things that that cause equality to happen are it's war, revolution, civilizational collapse, and, uh, pandemics. Like, those are the things that e equal out society. It's just like, it's, it's terrible.

pandemic did for a little bit, I think. I think in the the beginning, it kinda brought people together and sort of settled people down to, like, what was actually important in life. The very early days, when we were really worried that people were gonna die from it. There was like, no one, no one knew what the severity of the infection was, and we're just hearing about this disease from China. We're locking down the country. That was genuinely terrifying Well, well, the idea and sobering.

that everyone went through the same thing, everyone had the same experience. People reacted very differently to it, but everyone went through the same experience like that, that kind of that the global lockdown were. But it it, yeah,

wasn't uniting, though, after a while, because you know, one on after a while, it became very divisive, especially when there was the whole are you with or without the vaccine? It's like, are you Apple or are you Android? It's like it, it. It's one of those tribal things that people do. Are you Republican? Are you Democrat? E- Even, w- whether they're skeptical about pharmaceutical drug companies, normally, they'll abandon all that. If there's some sort of an ideological group that you're a part of, that thinks one way or another.

And that happened during the pandemic, yeah, I think which I never

it was. thought we would see I think it's a little window into

fierce fights about pharmaceutical drugs and whether or not you believe in the pharmaceutical drug company. And that the people on the left would be the ones that were telling you these massive multi-billion dollar corporations that have the highest criminal fines in all of human history, those are the ones we should be trusting. But that happened in this country, and it happened all well, it around the world.

happened all over the world. I mean, it was a, it was a, it was a a shit show. I mean, it, it shut down everything. But I mean, but

that was the divide, the divide was the medication and what path we took to get out of it. If that didn't exist, if it was just there is no, there's no medication. The only thing you could do is be healthy enough to be resilient and get through the cold, but we're all gonna get it. but is that If if that

is this? was the narrative, Is this not what's happening right now, though, in terms of going? If you look at what we're doing right, gain of function re research, which is it almost certainly came from gain of function research, which is like looking for a gas leak leak with a with a lit match, right? So it's just inherently dangerous. But this is kind of the um, I don't know if it is even a conspiracy now. But the the the search for a g i strikes me as a similar kind of thing, right?

The the the you're searching for the the last invention, the last thing that you'll ever need. Um, you know, this cons, the conspiracy about solstice.

well, I think AGI has a legitimate potential to change our lives for the better. It's just will it? Yes, I is this, Uh, there's no

is the future? way. But Is it Star Trek

here's why that's a bad

or Star Wars?

analogy. There's no way, uh, b- these, uh, b- engineering viruses to be more va- virulent, to be more, uh, infect more people more easily, to kill people more. There's no way that's good. There's nothing good Well, about that. well, maybe, But the AGI potentially could change society, potentially for the better. It's just it's so so, like, what's the number? like, but is the what? how does it is the go?

yeah, and and it's it's a it's a knife edge of like,

But gain of function's not doing anything good for us. There was no cure. They had all these diseases that they engineered, and they had no idea how to treat them.

no, I remember. They like, they wiped out polio in the in the 50s, and then they and then they they You should look kept some, into that story, but they but too. That they kept some.

story, that story's kinda fucking crazy, too. You know what,

No, I heard the lady on here Aleth- talking about it, but I mean, it's like, you go, they definitely polio was something,

well, t polio still is a problem, but the real problem back then was there was polio, and then there was DDT spraying, and that's a big part of the story. A gigantic part of the story is that the polio epidemic in America aligns with DDT use, ubiquitous DDT use all over the country. It's and DDT poisoning has the exact same symptoms of paralytic polio, it's the same symptoms. And, in fact, a lot of animals during that same time period, cows, horses, farm animals in rural areas were getting polio.

Same symptoms. Why? Because it's fucking DDT poisoning. right? I remember John So polio was

Stewart telling me he used to follow real. this the like that was just spraying the neighborhood. You And I'd go, Yeah,

wanna, yes, it and that's what happened, that that happened all across America. What percentage of polio do you think is asymptomatic?

no idea.

Take a guess.

Are. Are you symptomatic? 10%?

symptoms at all. You got

10%?

polio 95 to 99. Yeah, we'll look that up just so we, you know, it's accurate. That's the real number, that's the real number. And so we don't know how much of what happened during the polio crisis was polio, which can certainly hurt people. Certainly not good to get polio, certainly not good to get paralytic polio. Certainly no one's saying that, however, the DDT use was happening at the same time. This is 70, but I've seen it listed as 95 recently.

So well, even I don't know why even, but but but this, but I don't know hey, even what's interesting.

even it's not like 70% isn't interesting.

No, it's, it's certainly so. This is like no symptoms at all. 70 of the people get no symptoms. Now, I had read that it was 95 to 99, well, is it, so I'm interested. is this, Put it into a is this, is this different search engine and maybe see if there's other.

is this maybe the worst thing that? So when we talk about the Covid,

Hold on, hold on, this is why it is, this is why it's, it's. I'm sorry, put it back up. It explained it. So 70 no symptoms whatsoever, approximately 25 mild symptoms, such as fever, headache, or sore okay, all right, I've throat. So

got a sore throat. It's not polio.

it's not developing paralysis, it's not the same as being asymptomatic. So you have mild symptoms for 25 of the people, and zero systems, zero symptoms, rather, for 70 of the people.

Yeah, I mean, it's still a terrible disease, but even th the when you look at that and go, terrible disease, Yeah,

however, so is spreading DDT ubiquitously in neighborhoods. That's fucking terrible, too. And this is the dirty secret about the whole polio crisis. It's not that polio is good to get. No big deal, go go get polio, fuck that, don't get polio, polio's bad. However, they were spreading DDT everywhere, and it gives you the same fucking symptoms, and the 2 things stopped when they stopped spreading DDT everywhere. Doc, Doctor Suzanne Humphries, she's a guest on yeah, I had it the show.

on. Yeah, I know this, Yeah, she's got, yeah,

but I just wanna tell people that are listening, there's a great book called Dissolving Illusions. And if you just counter check all the things that she put in that book, you can read it all online, you'll find out she's telling the truth. And it's indicative of the same shit that we just went through with the Pol with the Covid EP epidemic. It's indicative of there's a ton of different stories of what we think are good pharmaceutical drug solutions for a problem that's happening.

That turn out to be horrendous for people and give them terrible side effects. And you, you, you know, you see all these people that are suing, and you find the pharmaceutical drug companies can make money off of it, even though it was killing people. Like the there's a Vioxx example in America, it was a anti-inflammatory medication, and they were giving it to people. 50,000 plus people died. They got strokes, they knew that people were gonna get strokes before they released it, but they did it because they knew they could make money off of it.

And this is just this continual pattern that we can see throughout history. We wanna believe in these institutions, but oftentimes, these institutions are corrupted by money, and when we find out that they're corrupted by money, it's too late. They've already poisoned you, or they've already given you some here's a drugs that cause

here's a here's a strange strokes. thing, right? I've been traveling around Canada, America on tour, you know, I'm kind of always on the road. And you notice things, right? So you notice, like, the fentanyl thing happens in North America, but it does not happen in Europe. What's going on there?

the Sackler family, do you know the whole story,

Well, the Sa- I, I remember the the the kind of controversy about people giving out. The idea that you should never be in pain was kind of promoted, the idea that any kind of pain or discomfort is unacceptable, so you need to be no pain at all. So pushing the idea of those painkillers, which were opiates,

Well, yes, not just that, but also saying that they're non-addictive, and then also promoting this idea that you just kinda on em all the time and everything's fine, and that's what you need. Just be on em all the time and you're gonna be fine. And they got doctors to go along with this, they got doctors to subscribe to these ideas But why is and promote it? But them money

the fentanyl, the the idea this because it's the synthetic,

an opioid.

yeah, but the the idea, how is that happening only in North America? Well, because we're next And they're not selling to Mexico, it in, right?

we're connected to Mexico, and that's where it's coming in. And China's bringing in the precursors, so China ships the precursors to Mexico, the cartel makes the fentanyl, they sneak it across the border. And that has been going on because there's an opioid crisis in America. Mariana Van Zeller, Do you know who she is? No, brilliant reporter, I mean, like a real courageous woman. Boots on the ground journalism. Went to Colombia and was with people while they were making cocaine and walked with them through the jungle as they packed it out.

She, mean, she, she goes to crazy places where she can get killed all the time. And she started out. W- w- while I became introduced to her from a a piece she did called The OxyContin Express and The OxyContin Express. It was all about Florida, and Florida had these pain management centers, and say, if you hurt your back, you go to a pain. Ma- Oh, I'm in pain. Well, you should go to the pain center. If you're if you don't know anything about how corrupt the medical system is, you you would go, Oh, that's the thing you go to for pain.

They're pain experts. Fine, uh, they'd probably tell me what to do. You go there, they only prescribe OxyContin. So there's a pharmacy connected to the pain management center. You go to the pain management center, what's wrong, Jimmy? Your back hurts, I gotcha. They, right, you go right next door, right next door, and all they sell is OxyContin and no database. So you leave that pain management center and you go to another pain management center a mile away, and then you go to another pain center.

And they're all over Florida. And so people would go and fill their trunks up with OxyContin and then drive up through Kentucky and Ohio, and that's the OxyContin Express. And that made addicts like traceable destruction of communities all throughout the land. And this was all because of corrupt politics, it was all because of corrupt pharmaceutical representatives, it was because of corrupt doctors that everybody turned a blind eye to make a ton of money. And most importantly, the Sackler family, this one family, made billions and billions of dollars promoting this idea that you should be on pills all the time.

Yeah, it's it's a horror show. They're not I mean, it's like, in jail, they're not like, like,

in jail.

it's a horror show out there. Like, there's certain cities that just seem to be so hard hit by this. Like the the the middle of town is like a it's like an interactive walking dead experience. It's like just people bent double on this drug, and you go and no one seems to be helping. There doesn't seem to be any any help for these people.

it is really good at getting you, it's really good. It gets discipline, people, it gets people that have a a, like, a work ethic and a good family. No, but you remember And

when Crystal Meth kind of first happened? Because that, again, only happened in America, it didn't happen in Europe. Uh, like, I'm not saying we don't have a problem with drugs in Europe, but it's not to the same, uh, extent. And the idea, and that remember that poster, there used to be a poster of a like, she was a good looking girl. And then, and over the course of like, 6 years or 10 years, she became kind of, you know, attainable.

uh, like, ashen faced and sunken and whatever. Yeah,

You gotta lower your standards if you wanna go on a date with you. but Get her on meth.

but that was like the tenuous. It seems to take people out in just a matter of weeks now, just Well, M like they get. They

fentanyl and meth are very different things, so, uh, meth is an amphetamine, obviously, and amphetamines. There are a ton of people in this country right now who are addicted to amphetamines. Legally, it's called Adderall. Okay, and you can make up all your reasons why people need it. I don't have any energy, I have ADHD, I can't concentrate. They will fucking give it to you, they will give it to you pretty easy. You just complain a bunch of times, come in with a lot of brain fog.

It'd be so easy to dupe your doctor into giving you Adderall 100, it would be easy to do, and then this and it's legal is, for them to do.

and what is it? Basically, what's the It's fucking tree? speed. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, okay,

Well, you know, that's she was a rough 28, right? I'd say she's 28. She looks like a 28. Bare-knuckle boxer, like one of them bare-knuckle boxer chicks with scars all over their face.

what's?

She looks like she had a hard life.

Yeah, 33, she's pretty attainable. I think I could. Yeah,

You could have got her that's, that's, at 33.

yeah, that's, that's attainable. Yeah,

There's, uh, always going to be addictions that, um, y- you can avoid, right? Like, a great one is gambling. It's very controversial in America, like, should gambling be legal? I'm a guy who's been to Vegas a million times. I'm a guy who is, uh, work for the UFC, I do comedy shows in Vegas. I'm always I like the idea of going there. Don't blow all your money, stupid. It's like, at what point in time do we take responsibility for i if you don't have any money, don't gamble it?

well, I think it's But we

that thing with, I think young men, I mean, I, I've got a a bit on this, like a not a joke, but like an idea on this. So I'm like, y- you know, young men in crisis, I'm like, I'm pro gang, pro, um, pro gang, pro gambling, and, uh, pro drinking. Like, I think, you know, that thing of, like, gambling is, uh, not sports gambling, not gambling on something to give you a cheap little dopamine hit whenever you need it.

Like that thing of, like, the interval so you have reward system, but

gatekept gambling?

no, no, the idea of gambling on yourself, the idea of like, the big gamble in life. If you take a big gamble, then you don't need those little gambles, right? So we got very lucky, we got into comedy. So it's like, it's a gamble, I'm gonna try this line. It's like, we, we get the dopamine, there's good ways to get it and bad ways to get it. So, so encouraging the good ways. Human nature is fixed and flawed, right?

Young men are gonna want dopamine and risk. But how do we? How do we sort of point them towards something that's useful? So my thing was like, gangs terrible gangs, you know, shoot each other and and deal drugs, but not all of them. A lot of gangs are just it's young men together and the idea of like, drinking as a like. I've set up youth clubs all around Great Britain, right? And there's pool tables and there's jukeboxes and music, and there's there's booze

social places.

and and no, they're called pubs, yeah, and that's where I think young men, where should they be together? They they they check each other very well. But the idea that they should be together, the drinking age should reflect reality rather than a wish. Like, it's 21 in America, that's insane. 16 year olds drink, I don't think they should be allowed to drink alone. They're like, it should be a social thing that we go as humans, we go, okay, where do you learn to get on socially with other people?

It's not, uh, the school, it's a it can be a bar, but the bar can have a a football team and a a baseball team. And it can be a place where you learn how to interact with other people.

We should also explain to them that it does affect your brain development, and you should be very careful about getting drunk or high when you're young. Don't do it a lot, it's bad for you. The same. I was gonna flesh out my point about gambling. I I have this opinion about gambling, like, don't s don't gamble if you can't afford to lose, and if you got a problem, stop gambling. But I have seen it. The problem is, I've seen the grip of it, I've seen it grab people, I've seen people.

Do you ever see Uncut Gems, that Adam Sandler movie?

my, that that was like, so it was like anxiety in in celluloid form. genius film, It's so good. He's

it's genius. such a great actor, He's amazing, and he plays that gambling addict so well. I when I was between the ages of like 23 to 27, I spent all my time in pool halls. Like, I was addicted to playing pool. I played in tournaments, played constantly. I was around gambling addicts 24 hours a So this is day.

the hustler, this is color of money, kind of. So was yeah, was the real, it was it

the real thing.

all money? was it was Everything was everything for was money, everything money? So you're playing

was money.

for money all the time. It's not fun, it's just

well, no, people played for fun, like people like me who suck, but the really, really good players, they always played for money, they only played for money, they practiced, and then they played for money. And it was all about gambling, it was all about action. Everybody was in action. You would go to the pool hall, it was it was gambling all the time, it was gambling on sports. It was off track betting before they got there.

They'd go to off track betting and bet on the races, and then they would come and complain about the races that they lost. And then they would get into card games until some someone showed up that wanted action, and someone would show up and they wanted to bet. And then people would be betting on the sidelines. If you and Jamie were playing, I put my money on you. Let's go, come on. And now you're sweating it, you got a sweat bet going on, and somebody wants to get in on it.

You know, I want 2 games on the wire. Okay, you got 2. So he might lose, but I might still win because he's got 2 games on the wire. So there's all these like crazy gambles that are going on all the time. 24 hours a so, how did day.

you not get sucked into that? Cause you were very into, I mean, you're like, quite not an obsessive guy. But like, when you did, uh, mixed martial arts, you're all in, or you do comedy, you're all in, like, you're all into things. And yet somehow, gambling didn't capture Cause I saw you.

what it was, I saw this is a this, this is a dopamine rollercoaster. And you're gonna be here if I come back 30 years from now, and you won't have moved, you're gonna be doing the same goddamn thing. And there was this guy, my friend Tommy, I have a really good friend who has been my friend for 34 years. And, um, I met Tommy when he was, like, 19 years old. I was in my twenties, and when I met Tommy, he was the best pool player in Connecticut.

It's like legitimate world-class potential pool player, like big-time gamble. He'd get gamble for thousands and thousands of dollars. I'd see him all the time, and he was one of the best players. Like in the Northeast, which is one of the strongest pool areas in the country. At a young age, he was playing this guy named Neptune Joe Frady. Neptune Joe Frady was

it's a great name, isn't it?

bro. Neptune Joe Frady never stopped smoking cigarettes, and he would, when he was holding his cue, he'd put the cigarette in between the fingers of his cue, like this. So while You know, you he's playing,

know what was the thing with, uh, Minnesota Fats in The Hustler?

did he do that?

He smoked the cigarette in that, in that weirdly, in that, yeah, the Minnesota And he, but Fats. And that's did he the comic, keep it wasn't it? It in his hand was the comic that played

while he was shooting?

Minnesota Fats.

I think he laid it on the table.

I don't know, maybe laid it on that, but he sm- I remember he smoked the cigarette through that. I always remember, kind of Minnesota Fats, cause he's he was a comic. I only ever knew him from that Jackie movie, is, Yeah, Gleason You mean, Yes, Jack Gleason, but I never, I never knew he was comedy. I ne- I'd never seen him in anything else. I've just seen him in that.

that's crazy.

And then went, Oh, that guy was, uh, cause I didn't have any of the reference to the thing, but just like that movie,

So this guy, Neptune Joe Frady, was one of the best players in the world, and, uh, one of the best players in in the East Coast, for sure. And, uh, Tommy was playing this guy and they were grinding it out and he couldn't, and this guy didn't have $10 to his name. He's like, I can barely beat this guy, and this guy's completely broke, and he's one of the best pool players in the world. And like, this is where it leads you, it leads you to this, where it just you're not going anywhere, you're stuck,

right? But how?

you're stuck doing this thing How, that doesn't pay any money.

how lucky did we get, right? My whole thing is like, gratitude, right? So when I got into comedy in the UK around 2000, right, it was it was field hockey, it was, it was, it was darts, it was lacrosse, it was a minority sport, and now it's premiership football, right? And how lucky did I get to ride that wave in that time? I was just interested in this thing that wasn't particularly popular at the time, and it just became something huge.

But, like people, you play arenas now, it's crazy. And, uh, the with pool, pool could have become the thing, but, uh, you know, it didn't. You. B- you backed the right horse, you got so lucky. Like, MMA didn't even exist when you were into it, didn't exist like martial arts was a thing, but MMA hadn't even really been formed. It's the luck of being there in

I'm super lucky. and, Well, then but into podcasting, well, podcasting, right?

like the idea of just go, I'm just gonna do my own thing.

And the thing that we were doing it when no one was watching, so we were doing it, it would get like 1,000 viewers, 2,000 viewers, And now there was nobody you're getting 4 watching. It's crazy, things the move up.

but the idea of like that, Being you ever consider that? fortunate. Yeah, The the

oh, I think about it all the time.

I, I do have a practice, I, I just, I'm constantly that, I think, uh, that thing. Gratitude is the mother of all virtues, like you're constantly reminding yourself, like, of, like, we, we live now, we do this, we get to do this, like finding the thing that you're you could be excited about. You spoke to Chris Williamson about this recently. He's got this really lovely take on discipline, motivation and obsession, like the idea, like discipline is you, you can force yourself to do the thing, right?

And that will get. That'll get you two weeks into January doing sit-ups and no further. And then there's motivation. I wanna do this thing, I wanna do it, and then there's obsession. I can't not do this thing. And we're very lucky in life that we found obsessions, things that it doesn't, f, you know, we're just like, I would do it. If there's no money in, it doesn't matter, I'm just I'm into it. Like the the the issue with pool, your story about pool, there is that it was all about money.

It wasn't about the joy of the game, the beauty of that game, like well, there's play playing that one is

money in, there's money in tournaments now, a lot more money than there was back when I was playing 8 hours a day. Um, so there's guys at the top of the heap that can make a very good living playing pool, but only a few, only a handful, maybe 10, 10 guys, maybe 20 worldwide that are making well, not worldwide, cause China's doing some crazy things. China is, uh, paying like half $1 million for the winners of tournaments.

Now. They're they're putting on these, um, different pool tournaments in China. They actually have a different table, though, and it's kind of, uh, it's really complicated, and when players try to switch over, it's a real problem. They it's What's the called, uh,

difference in the table? Just their the different their corner pockets size?

and their side pockets are curved like a snooker table's. So, um, the thing about pool is it's all about your it's it's, you know, it looks like a ball goes into the hole, you're just hitting the ball with a stick. But what it really is is geometry, and you are breaking the table down into sections where you want a ball to be and how you're gonna move and what angle you have to approach this ball on.

So that as you knock it in, you're going this way to get to the other. As soon as you change any of the dimensions of the table, all the geometry changes, and one of the things that changes is the shape of the pockets. So the shape of the pockets don't accept a ball down the rail. So say, like, so if there's a ball down the if there's a hole right here and there's a ball right here.

I have to, like, really gently roll that ball in. I can't fire it in, but in a pool table, I can fire it in with follow and move that ball around the table and get to my next shot. With a Chinese table, I can't do that. It requires the most insane pinpoint accuracy. It's a tiny little pocket with a curved edge on each side. But those guys are paying a half $1 million for a more boring game, unfortunately, cause it's just like everybody misses all the time, people miss ball in hand.

It's like it's a really brutal game.

right, okay, yeah, weird.

It's weird because they don't run out as much. So, like, what's exciting about pool is someone breaks, they have a shot on the one ball, and they run the rack. And then everyone's like, Ah, or there's a battle back and forth between 2 guys and they're playing safeties. But when you have a a pocket where a a, a table where it's like 30 harder to make a ball, it get like, that's what it looks like. See how it's curved like that?

oh yeah, okay, that So if you looks like it show a larger looks like future. Yeah, image of the table,

I'm trying. I was looking around for pictures,

the problem is just you can see it from, yeah, that 2nd picture that you just had, that's it. Okay, so that's what they look like. They look like roll in there. It looks like a snooker table in terms of the way it's curved on the corners. Now, get make that a little larger, please. So if I'm shooting a ball, like, say, in that upper left-hand corner, dude, my margin of error is like this on each side, like like millimeters on each side.

So it just makes for a brutal, pokey, fucking, scared-ass game. Nobody's gonna break you're shoving it around right, no one's

the table. gonna nice, Yeah,

no one's gonna smooth stroke any balls and get out. It's just too hard. That's a regular pool table, see, and on a regular pool table, you see everything has these c these angles where as you're going, like,

Well, I'm trying to find,

just show me a regular pool table,

I don't know what the I don't, I that's regular don't.

pool, table right there. The reason why you can tell is if you see the corner pockets, this is a diamond, they're the best tables. If you see the corner pocket, see how there's this black piece of leather and that angle, where, yeah, right, where to the left of Jamie's cursor, that angle's straight on a Chinese table. That's rounded. And so you can't fire a ball in there, it's not gonna go in, and I might, but even by fire a ball in, I mean, hit it with a a firm stroke, you, it changes the game.

But they're paying half $1 million. So people are going to China to play in these tournaments now because they're gigantic, cause China's really into billiards, like, really, really into billiards. And some of the best players in the world are coming out of there, particularly out of, uh, Taiwan, out of Chinese Taipei. So the best players on earth come from there, they're insanely good. They have these schools, they practice 8 hours a day, and do you still they have, like,

play? regiments. Oh, yeah yeah, maniaced so, but all of those things, right, like, so martial arts, martial arts, martial comedy, ooh, arts, you still. I mean, you train, but you, but

well, I can't. Obviously, I'm too old to compete. but they should Uh, have a seniors, come that would be fun. on. That's a good way to get hurt forever.

Yeah, and then the the. I think the seniors one has to be like the it has to be to the death, I think.

But I stopped competing for the same reason why, um, I never really got into gambling with pool, cause I realized where it's going. There was no money in fighting when I was a kid. Um, I got offered $500 to go professional. When I was an amateur kickboxer, I got over offered $500. And I thought about that for 500 bucks. I'm gonna train for 2 months and maybe go out there and get my brains punched in, and then, for sure, get brain damage, cause I was already suspecting that I was getting it, for sure, no, you got, you over the course.

got exactly the right amount.

That's what I say, that's The sweet what I say, spot, the sweet spot. Yeah, we have enough. Don't don't give a fuck. There's a little chaos going on in there, but not to the point where I can't articulate my it's interesting thoughts. And

cause you had that thing of like, the next thing that you could do, the jumping off point. So the discipline of martial arts, the pool, you could kind of see where that's going. And then comedy came along kind of at the right time to kind of cause. Comedy feels like it's it, it's, it's such an interesting thing to get in. I want more people to kind of get into comedy. I think that's the like, the, you know, the idea of like.

The opposite of being a spectator is not being a professional, the opposite of being a spectator is being a participant. And I think, like, comedy is such a wonderful thing to kinda cause. You, you're, you're writing down and ordering your thoughts, right? A And you, you sort of think about what you, what you really think about something, like, what could you say that no one else could say? And then you're learning how to communicate that with other people.

It's such a transferable skill, like, uh, we should be teaching it in schools. There should be, like, the drama class should have a comedy element, because it's it's such a useful skill in life to be able to. It's just giving something your attention. I'm gonna think about this thing, I'm gonna think of a funny angle. Well, that gives you a bit of perspective on life. You're kind of stepping back and seeing it for what it is and kinda looking at it from different angles, trying to find something funny in this.

It's like a great sort of way to improve your disposition, just to try and see it's. th something funny, even in the terrible.

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Visit call of duty dot com for more rated M for mature. Probably the most popular art form that's not documented and studied in in terms of, like, having a structure to having to to learn how to use it.

Well, that's why I wrote the I wrote this book about I wrote this book on jokes, um, with two friends. Yeah, this is like, I wrote this thing with, uh, Amanda Baker and Abi Grant, this book on jokes, which is like So it's in third, so that's like the taxonomy of jokes, like the descriptors of all the different joke types, not the function of the joke, but the type of the joke. Yeah, cause people talk about observational comedy.

That's like saying songs about girls is a genre. This no, it's like, what, how, how's this work? Is this? Pullback? Reveal? Is it a pun? You know, what kind of wordplay is this? How does it work? And then how to put together routines, and then how to perform. Because I think comedy can be taught. I don't think it's an immutable characteristic. I don't think it's something that that you're born with. I think you could have, like, uh, you could be drawn to it.

And then the idea of having some kind of structure. Cause when you think about, like, people often say comedy can't be taught. Jerry Seinfeld said you can't teach comedy. I think he's one of the greats, and I think, uh, Doug Stanhope said comedy courses are raging scams. They're two of my favorites, right? But they both had teachers, they were both taught comedy, but they had a home club and they had a mentor. And, you know, guys that we know started on the door and they ended up the headliner.

Right, so you go. Tony Hinchcliffe used

Perfect example.

to park used to park cars and and

Now sells out Madison Square Garden.

and you go, and that that's a dojo. But not everyone has access to that dojo, you know? And Correct. you it's the comedy cellar, it's the comedy store, it's the mothership, it's like these clubs, but there aren't enough of those clubs. So you want to have a book that writes it down and kind of makes it a bit of book learning as well. Because you go, well, music isn't made any less wonderful by having a formal structure.

So, the like, part of the inspiration to write the book. So it's Abi Grant and Amanda Baker are my, and they're really good friends of mine. And

Are these the same people that you had worked with, people here that that at the club? that was the test Yes,

for. They came to the mothership and taught the course for six

yeah, amazing.

weeks to young comics. And Thank you I think

for that, by the way.

I think it's grown corn. I I think those guys have are all doing fantastically. But the idea of kind of going, Okay, we need to test this because I don't want to be a grifter. I never want to sell something, I don't want to sell a book that doesn't work. So the idea of going well, you've got this structure that people can kind of get into and go, Okay, well, I I know what the work is now, I know what it is without.

Like, we had to have immersive learning, we just had to be surrounded by other funny people that were trying to do this crazy thing. But if you you can formalize it. You know the story of Amanda told me this story, right? And it it blew my head off, right? So about Gregorian chants, you heard of Gregorian chants? Okay, I'll tell you why you've heard of Gregorian chants, because Pope Gregory was the Pope, and he's traveling around, and he says everyone's singing the songs differently in around outside of the Vatican, they're all singing them differently in the other churches.

I don't like it, I want them to be the same. Write it down. And this guy and this guy went, No, no, you can't write down music. If music doesn't live within a human soul, then it then it, it, it's ethereal, it, it, you can't write down music, it can't be done. And Pope Gregory basically goes Look, I'm the fucking pope, write it down. And so it takes him a couple of hundred years, but musical notation comes from that, that's where musical notation comes from.

Then, 300 years later, you have Bach, but you couldn't have had Bach without the musical notation. You needed it to be a little bit formalized so that people could express themselves through it. They they had the system then to, and it doesn't make people the same, it doesn't make, it doesn't make for more rigid music, it means that you can do more with it.

Where you understand what you're working with.

Yeah, you have an idea of kind of what you're doing, that, like, it's not formulaic, but you gotta know the rules before you can break the rules.

I think what Doug's getting at with comedy courses, unfortunately, is true. A lot of them are taught by people that are failed stand-ups and, uh, never really made a career. And now that's a way to make money versus, like Ari Shaffir was doing a thing for a while where whenever we would go into a town, like, say, if we were being Phoenix, he would hold a free seminar for the local comedians on Sunday. So on Sunday, he would sit with them and he would break down how to get a manager, how to get an agent, how to get into clubs, and how to work on your act and how to go over your act.

What a great thing to do. I mean, Great, and he's, he's in London now, he's, uh, I know he's a great

he's I don. guy. I discourage that activity. I told him, Stay in America, so I don't lose it. But, um, he, like, he has to be a wanderer, he's, he's a weirdo. Um, but point is he had this great service that he was giving to comics when he'd go to these towns and he would. They would ask him about material, how do you write, how do you do this, how do you do that? And he would sit with them for like three hours for free.

Well, I think I I mean, for me, it's the writing thing is the reason to write the book. The trying to throw the the drawbridge down, trying to help people up and go, Well, how do you? How do you actually do this? Cause there's a bit too much magical thinking in our business of like, oh, that guy's a genius, cause you don't get to see the working, you don't get to see the guys in the gym testing out stuff.

You know, if you do, if I write a hundred jokes and five of them work, no one, no one ever says at the end of my show, Well, what about the other ninety-five jokes? What about the other ones? They go, No, just obviously they. It's like that thing of I don't write the show, the audience decide that one works, that one doesn't, that one works, that one doesn't. And then you're generating this thing, you're kind of building up slowly.

Uh. But what I was gonna get at is, I think what Stanhope is not correct about is that. Even if you're doing a comedy course for someone who sucks at comedy, there's. They've at least done comedy to the point where they understand what it's like to get on stage and tell jokes, and maybe some of them did fairly well. But at least you start doing it okay. So one of the things about these comedy classes is they all have, like, a graduation day where they do their act right.

That alone well, that's well, is a step.

something, but also that thing of like, there go, there's a there's a fancy term for it, I think, um, capitalist ontology. That we do everything we look at has to be looked at through money, right? Can you make money doing this or not? Mate, how do I? Like, people ask me, how do, like, get asked about being, you know, young people that wanna be musicians or wanna be comedians? I say, Oh, how do I do this?

How do I make money doing this? You go, No, no, just do it, just do it. Don't worry about making money. If you get good, then then maybe, but the 10,000 hours will apply. You will have to work so hard at this to get good. But even if you just do it as a hobby, it's gonna increase your enjoyment of this thing for the rest of your life. Like, even if, like, I meet people that have done, oh, I did a little bit of comedy, I did, like, you know, ten gigs back in the nineties, and they were the show.

And they're so into comedy, cause they have an idea of what it is. The funniest thing you've seen the last ten years, I guarantee you, is something you saw on your phone, like a meme that someone made, and you don't know who made it, and I do. It's a guy in Minnesota working in a call center, and he just thought of a funny thing and he made it and he put it out there. And I want that guy in our industry.

I want him to at least have a go, have a shot, have a have a way of doing. Like, the thing I love about Kill Tony, I mean, Tony has inadvertently helped more people made more careers, right?

than anyone since Johnny Carson.

It's phenomenal, right? And he's bringing up these guys. And, like, Ari Matty is a legit. I was in, um, Helsinki two weeks ago doing shows, and, like, I'm happy to mention on stage. Someone asked me about Ari Matty. Oh, yeah, I saw Ari last week. Like, like, he was like, Oh, who cares about you? You know, Ari Matty? Like, he's such a big deal, cause obviously talent is across the water. He's like,

he's a force of nature.

But he's wonderful, right? And you go, Uh uh, the it. Like, the idea of going more people should be in this. The thing about Kill Tony as well, it's a minute, a minute is not that long. I know a lot of people that've got, and there's no, that could put together a minute, but there's no greatest in comedy. There's no such thing as the greatest of all time in comedy, because it's about being yourself, being authentic.

It's the opposite of what artificial intelligence is, right? It's it's it's a right brain thing. It's like people are very impressed by A I because we've got so used to other people. If A I was all there was and you were the only person and other people came along, you'd be so blown away by other people. Like, what could people say? That's like, that, it's their their unique viewpoint on something. You know, they, they will, you know, like comics kind of, they kind of, even if you're a one-liner guy like me, comics kind of, um, leak.

You can kinda tell who someone is on stage. It's it's beautiful. It's like, it's friendship at scale.

yes. Podcasts are similar to that, too, maybe even more so, because you're having these long, long conversations about a variety of different things. But I think there's a lot of untapped talent out there that could be comics, and instead will live these boring lives. Um, when they're, they've got this wasted mind. One of the funniest, Well, that that's funniest people I ever met was a guy I worked for. I worked for a private investigator for a while.

you. You talked about this, yeah,

One of the funniest people I've ever met in my life, far funnier than me, especially at the time. I was only twenty-one, and he was a former alcoholic who, uh, needed someone to drive his car, so he put

he got the D U I.

out an ad for a private investigator's assistant. Really, what it was is someone with a valid driver's license.

You know what this sounds like? This sounds like the start of a great kind of Rockford Files start-type show.

oh, it was, it really was. I mean, it was really fun. I would, I was dating this girl at the time, and I'd come over to her place after I was done working, just crying, laughing. And I was saying, I I'll never be as funny as this guy. This guy's so funny. And I would tell her the crazy shit we had to do cause we were catching people with, like, insurance fraud. And one guy, one guy, he there's.

He had this beautiful girlfriend and he was this meek, like, measly little guy, and, uh, he had this beautiful girlfriend. And she was getting gorilla fucked by this bodybuilder guy, and this dude knew about it. So he wanted him to take pictures and catch him in the act. And, uh, after he got the photos, he did all everything he asked him to do. Uh, the guy wanted him to still take more pictures. They're like, Hey, the fuck is what are you What are we doing doing here?

Like,

here?

Uh, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna Yeah, you're be your

not gonna get the right angles. your cuck porn You need to

dealer. Like, you gotta fucking you. The my job's done. Here's pictures of this giant well, this is, muscular man fucking this is, your girlfriend.

this is episode one. This is a show. It's a great idea oh, it was for a show. so fun. He But the idea of like,

was such a fun guy.

you meet these guys that are, uh, so funny in life and you want them to have an outlet, the outlet that we have. And you go, and there's kinda, there's more clubs, so it's like Kill Tony's a thing, right? That's a thing people can do. There's your club, there's the the cellar, there's the store, there's there's other places that are doing this around around America. But you want kinda more of it in the world, you want more well, people to be able the most to do it.

important thing is community, right? And one of the things that we really foster at the Mothership is a community. Everybody knows that whether you're a door guy or whether you're someone who's, like, doing opening spots, or whether you're someone who's headlining, we're all doing the same thing. We're all the same thing. It's just we're on different stages of this journey. You're in your beginning stage, I'm in my thirty-plus year stage, but I'll help you and you'll help other people too.

We'll help each other, and it's important to know that we do not exist in a vacuum. And comedy is one of the only art forms that you cannot create in a vacuum. You need not just the audience, you need other comics. You're never gonna find the best comic in the world in some fucking small town where no one knows about him in some tiny little bar that he does comedy at. That's never gonna happen. No, it's really interesting It's always that.

you have to be either on the road with great comics that you travel with, or you have to be in a club in your local town where you practice with great comics. You see each other, we feed off of each other, we inspire each other, we're always having fun, and, talk, it's there's a community, it's very important, and we fostered that at the Comedy Store, and now we're fostering it in Austin. It's a really important part of Well, I it.

It's think that thing about the fun.

I often think about that thing of like, dispersed identity is very like. People think they're sort of sealed, hermetically sealed, and it's them and they're an individual. And the more time you spend online, the more that illusion becomes real. You're just kind of locked off from the world. And actually, that connection of like who you are with other people, like, why come out? why go out to a comedy show? Why go and see? why go to the Mothership?

Why come and see one of my shows? Why? Why come and see me on tour? Well, it's like there's an illusion that I'm the only one performing because I'm on stage, but actually, being in an audience is performative. Like, there's something about, oh, it's so it's You're playing obvious. a role, you're sitting, Yeah, so

you're sitting still, and you're and just quiet and laughing.

well, but but that thing about going in my crowd, I mean, I have a lot of audience interaction. So there's a lot of people, like, asking weird and wonderful questions and and and kind of getting involved. And sometimes it's funny, and sometimes it's heartbreaking, and it's like, all human life is here, it can be anything. And it's it's really interesting to kind of hold that space for people because you go, people are desperate to feel part of something, to to kinda feel alive and feel.

Cause you laugh with other people, you don't really laugh on your own, you don't laugh looking at stuff on your phone. You laugh when it's like, when it's when you're in the room with other people, it's a signal, it's a social thing.

Also, all the time that you're looking at a screen is pulling you away from the time you're with people. So if, like, if human interaction was, uh, a recommended daily allowance of a vitamin, you know, like you have a thousand milligrams of vitamin C. every day, it's really good to stay healthy. If human interaction was like that, you would look at the invention of people working from home, staring at screens all day, being on your phone all the time, being on your phone even when you're around other people.

Your actual time interacting with I'm just people radically dropped off. And if that's a physical requirement to be a happy, healthy person, which I think it is, and I think it's built into us. I think one of the reasons why people get so sad when they're alone is because, in the olden days, if they kicked you out of the tribe, you're gonna die. Okay, if you're not around other people all the time,

you're gone.

if you're not around the gatherers, and you didn't succeed hunting, or or you don't, you don't have the right amount of spears to hold off the invaders, you're gonna fucking get kicked out. And you're gonna be on your own, and you're gonna die.

well, here's here's the take, right? So the idea of going, uh, the the human beings, right? Drop one human in the jungle, you fed the animals, drop ten humans in the jungle, you've got the apex predator, right? Our superpower is cooperation. And what's upstream of communication? Play. We learn to communicate through play. Anything anyone cares about, I don't care who you are, talk to anyone, they care about play. Now, it could be stand-up comedy, where we're playing on stage, playing a theatre, playing a show, or it could be sports, right, where you're playing, could be grappling, where you're playing with someone, but you've got very strict rules.

A relationship is play, sports play, everything is everything people are interested in is play. We don't, we don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old cause we stop playing. The great, the great thing about our lives is we play all the time. I think we need more of that in our world, we need more play more. I Like, people get 100% so serious.

agree. You know, one of the great ways to learn martial arts is to be playful while you're learning it. So it's one of the tenets of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. I know the They say, Gracie guys, yeah, keep it playful, they they emphasize keeping training playful. Because when it's not playful, when it's life or death, which it kind of is. But when it's life or death and you're grappling with someone, you get tense, and when you get tense, you don't take chances, and when you don't take chances, you don't open up your game, so you don't learn.

So you don't learn new ways to do things. You just have to get comfortable with the idea of potentially losing and knowing that if you lose, you're gonna have another chance to go again in just a few seconds, and then you're gonna go again with another person in just a few minutes. So just relax, you're gonna lose, it's okay, and you're gonna win too, and someone's gonna beat you, and you're gonna beat other people. But the only way to get good at this is to be playful with it and accept the fact that that's gonna happen and just flow and learn.

And you're learning while you're playing because it's fun instead of being this horrific life and death experience that, after it's over, you barely remember what happened.

but isn't that the thing with like, even even stuff like like being a dad, right? So the the rough and tumble kind of play, you know, tickling and and wrestling

dogs do it with each

and wrestling.

other, they do it, puppies do But that thing it.

like, video games are no substitute for that. Like, it's not, that's not the same kind of play. You need that thing of, like, learning where you are, learning what boundaries are like. Uh, when you play a game with someone else as well, like they, they've gotta win some of the time. Like, it's that thing. If I get heckled, like, Yeah, you can put the heckler down or join in and play, and sometimes they win. It's fine, who Well, sometimes cares?

We're in service hecklers have banger of this. lines every There's

now and then, they got a banger that I gotta go, Ah,

well, that isn't that the thing, though, where sometimes someone heckles and it's like it could be a drunk guy trying to interrupt the show. That's a separate thing. But my crowd, like, they, they join in, they add value every single night, like Well, you it's interesting do that fun thing stuff.

where you allow them to ask questions and But but you talk to that's very, I them.

mean, it's like they're so well, um, behaved. Because you kind of go, right, get out there. I'll do twenty minutes of just like, bang, bang, bang, like three, four big laughs a minute. And try and, you know, try and get get them into. I suppose the thing about the last bit of the book, that on jokes book, is about rhythm and about how comedy has a natural rhythm. It's about ninety-two beats a minute. It's like a comfortable walking pace.

It like, when you walk with someone, you fall into rhythm with them, right? And so so there's a keyword every two and a half seconds. There's like, a and you. You want them to fall into rhythm and then you want to give them twenty minutes so that they just feel totally calm. Like, Oh, we know exactly what we're coming out to the show, having a great time. Oh, now it's our go, we get to join in, we get to play now.

And then you get back into it kind of seamlessly. And like, you ebb and flow between those two, so you're putting together this thing where it feels like, we we all did this, we all had this experience.

right, we're all having fun together. Yeah, no, that's, uh, one of the more fun things about the bottom of the barrel show at the Mothership.

Oh, yeah, that's fun.

That's the best show. It's so silly. Sometimes it's terrible, like sometimes you got nothing, there's nothing in there, and sometimes you get gems. Like I've, I have three or four bits in my act right now that came out of premises that pu I pulled out of the barrel and had an idea just popped into my Well, you find that mind.

weird thing of, like, going that state that you're in on stage, you would never have thought of that sitting at your desk. There's something about actually being up there on the stage in front of other people, and there's something amazing about. I don't know what, what the number is, maybe it's fifty, maybe it's thirty people in front of you listening to you. That feels so natural, like that's a crowd, I'm speaking to a crowd. And there's, I could try a joke in front of fifty people, eh?

At the club, and it will work in front of 15,000 people in an arena. It's like, okay, that's gonna, that's gonna work. An audience like that.

There's also a thing about those little crowds, like the M, the the little boy room in the mothership that's only seats 110 people. When you're in a little crowd like that, there's no room for shenanigans. Oh, what Tom Tom Segura likes to call dance moves. Like there's there's bits where it's like, is it really funny, or is there a bunch of dance moves in the bit that makes people But okay, here's the laugh on cue?

here. Here's my thing about rhythm, okay, which I think is kind of interesting and slightly heartbreaking for us. Okay, so I would say, pound for pound, best joke writer of the last thirty years was Mitch Hedberg, right?

Pretty, like, pretty great fucking jokes.

Pretty great jokes, right? You see them written down, you go, This guy's, he's gotta be, but his, uh, rhythm, uh, his his pacing was inconsistent, which is worse than being fast or slow. It was just so half the time he would kill, and half the time he would die. And why? And a hack, a hack comic doing hacky shit with great fucking rhythm would would beat him, you know, 99% of the time. That's that's crazy.

It's heartbreaking to me that no one took him to the side and went, No, no, you just gotta, like, you've got this lovely cadence to your speech, but it's you gotta keep the same rhythm for it to work every time. I mean, he was a fabulous.

He was a fabulous comic, but he was also a a real heroin addict, a real bad one, to the point where he got gangrene in one of the shots, lost one of the areas a leg, I they shot. think, yeah, No, he didn't lose a leg, but he almost died. It was as I mean, well. Uh,

he died.

I mean, at the time, uh, he almost died before that. He almost died when Stanhope and I were doing the Man Show in, like, 2003, and then he wound up dying after that. I know his But, uh, that folks up in was part of the issue No, Jeff was,

fell, flew up, flew his folks up.

Oh, did they?

It was such a sweet thing. It was like one of the nicest things I've ever seen at the festival.

He, um, he had amazing joke writing, and he was very prolific, but he was also doing heroin all the time. And it was part of the vibe on stage, and it was part of the thing where it could go south, it could really get away from you. You know, like, if you've got a guy who's relying on substance, especially heavy stuff, you know, like, uh, I've Who's the other seen people

guy? Uh, Greg, Greg Giraldo had, you know, the, uh, those kind of demons? he did, but I saw him

he cleaned up for a last. long time and then fell off, and that's when someone gave him a pill and he died. Um, but that that was part of the problem with Mitch, I think, was just that he, you know, they, nobody could get him to quit, too. He was like, I'm never gonna quit, he, he was not interested in quitting. It was like, it's like, uh-uh, like, No, I'm doing heroin.

it really is a heartbreaker, isn't it? When you've

It was heartbreaker. But that was like real heroin, like old school injectable, Stevie Ray Vaughan style. This is not like the pussy stuff these kids are doing today, where they're snorting, fuck off, learn how to tie off a vein, pussy, you know? see, yes, Take that fucking needle and shoot that, and cook it on a spoon like a real man, and then shoot it right into your veins, pussy.

it's it's very. It's very sad when you lose someone like that because you kinda go, I I wonder what the next special would have been. I wonder what the next, what would

would have been amazing.

have been, the next, like, what he would have made of this.

But it's like we were talking about earlier with Janis Joplin and Hendrix and people

The sensitivity.

in the twenty seven year old club, they were all doing drugs, like heavy-duty drugs, and they had all reached this state of excellence and this very bizarre thing that they do. But I think Where

I think that level of sensitivity that they had, you know, being a performer, being drawn to that, and then having to. It's like a, uh, what's the analogy? A, um, a lobster without its shell. It's the it's. They just were so exposed to the world and they need to medicate against that. But the idea of going, it's and for me, it's like the idea of going, doing any of that gets in the way. I remember, like, going, I didn't drink for the first, I think, twelve years of doing comedy.

Just because, like, I was, you know, drank at college, and, you know, didn't have kind of a problem. I certainly didn't think I had a problem, but when I s when I found comedy in my mid-twenties, I went, Oh, I'm all in. I don't want this, I don't wanna have so that so that

derails you.

you know that thing of like, alcohol is borrowing happiness from tomorrow. So you can have a, you can have a drink, but if you have like five drinks, like, tomorrow's gonna be slightly fucked up. So that thing of like, what could I do today that I would be super happy I did tomorrow? Like giving a gift to your future self, like that thing of you'll look back on your life, and whether it's with regret or nostalgia, depends what you do today.

Like, that's too big to think about on on your deathbed, but I could think about tomorrow like that, chunking it down and going right. Well, if I write some jokes today and I test them tonight, I'll be so pleased I did that tomorrow. And if I eat right, I'll be I'll feel better tomorrow. So just that that like daily thing of, like, getting it down to a a a small kind of a a unit of time I can think about, I can control.

yeah, well, delaying gratification's very important if you wanna get anything done.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's the it seems to be. It's also like, well, like, in a in a metaphysical way, God is the future, right? God is an analogy for work. God is, uh, do do something good now for a better life in the future. So, in a sense, work is the same thing. You work now for a better future. What everyone wants, what you got, no one is jealous of what you had to do to get it, the work that you had to do.

And it's often that thing of like, the reason people get, um, uh, sort of imposter syndrome is because they think, oh, I, I, no, I didn't do the work. Yeah, you did the work, but you did it six months ago. You did, you'd spent the time in the gym, and then you, you get it now.

well, I just think people get impostor syndrome because just the spectacle of becoming an actual famous person is so weird that very few people can navigate the waters and still be themselves. You feel so fucking weird. And then you you hear your name get announced, and you hear people cheer, and you're like, There's no way this is real. And you're like, you don't wanna believe it's real. And, uh, especially if you're still doing the same thing.

So if you're still doing the same thing, you're trying to create something, you're working on it, you're working on your act, and you're trying to do your best. Like, whatever your best is, that's what you're trying to do. And you're just formulating and you're getting ready to go on stage, and that's all you've been doing, like, the whole time you've been doing comedy. And you have great sets and you have sets that aren't so great. You try to figure out why, and you write new shit, and you go over the recordings.

And then one day, they announce your name and 15,000 people go ape shit, and you start walking towards the arena and you're like, what the fuck is happening? how does it Like, how is feel? Yeah, this real? And that's what imposter I syndrome is. It doesn't seem like Yeah, it's it's real.

it's the it's the it's the body's immune response.

Well, it's also this distinction that we have in society about that there's a different thing between a celebrity and a normal human being.

It's cause cause you don't see the work, like, like, It's not just we, we're the

that you don't see the work. inverse. They're in this very weird, almost like, a royal position where they're constantly in the media, they're constantly, and no one's paying attention to you. No one's asking Bob, Hey, Bob, the guy who does H V A C for a living, what's going on with your day, what's happening with your friends? Uh, what's what's up with you? Did you get canceled for a TikTok that you made? Nobody gives a fuck about Bob.

And so you're watching these people that are people that everyone pays attention to. And then Bob decides to do stand-up comedy, and then Bob goes to an open mic night, and then Bob gets on Kill Tony and he fucking murders, and Bob gets a golden ticket. And next thing you know, Bob is opening up for, you know, Ari Maddie on the road. And next thing, you know, Bob puts out a YouTube special and it gets 3 million views.

And next thing, you know, Bob is selling out Massey Hall in Toronto, and he goes on stage and everybody goes fucking nuts and he can't believe it's real, and he gets imposter syndrome.

I think this is the n natural state of things. Okay, here's, here's my take, right? So we made a huge mistake. We moved from the villages to the cities, right? And everyone in the village would hold the talking stick and they would speak. Everyone did it right, and everyone used to sing in the choir, right, and everyone used to dance. I don't wanna tell you to dance, but everyone used to dance, everyone used to sing, everyone used to speak right.

And then we moved to the cities, right? And we built these incredible halls, right? And you go and see Oasis live, right? And you go and you watch, um, a a ballet and the opera, and you go and see, um, uh, you know, Chappelle on stage, and you go, Oh, oh, you're in awe, and you're in the audience. We're so well entertained, but you're not a participant anymore, you're not it, you're not doing the thing yourself.

So it's that thing of like, going. I would rather people went to play five-a-side soccer than went to see a premiership game. I'd rather people did five minutes or a minute in the club, uh, a Kill Tony thing than came to see me live. People, uh, the participation thing is kinda lost, and it's the same with the social media. Like, you're, you're, you're watching right, other a a life,

people's lives. but you're not, Yeah,

you're not kind of, you're not getting. The I R L thing, like, they're getting out and doing the thing yeah, it's stealing and being involved.

from your life, too. It's you're not just like, if you're doom scrolling, you're not just watching other people's lives, you're taking time from your own life to do things you love.

Yeah, and and that idea that you go, the the social media, the I, the idea, the the phone now is the is religion, right? And it the church used to ask for one hour a week, the phone is asking for four, five hours a day.

And it's not giving you much back.

But and you make your, and if you put something out there, right? If you, if you post something, you're making a, um, uh, an offering. And then you see whether you get likes, and the like is the digital amen. It's like, you're, you're waiting for it to kind of to to feedback to give you something, and it ju, it just doesn't. It doesn't have that same in real life. Like you, you, you know, it's that thing of, like, I'm not, um, puritanical, but, uh, you know, porn as a substitute for sex, like, uh, being having friends online, uh, being being famous on Instagram is like being rich in Monopoly, right?

You want the real thing, the the I R L.

yeah, for for sure. Um, for sure, I think you're doing a great thing by encouraging people to participate and stuff. And I, I absolutely agree with you that if you did a little bit of stand-up comedy, tried a little bit of open mic, you'd appreciate the art form more, you'd enjoy it more. I think that's certainly the case with martial arts. One of the reasons why I appreciate martial arts so much is because I trained and I did it for so long.

And I I know when I see excellent, uh, martial artists, when I see something that's truly sensational, I I have a I have a appreciation for it that very few other people would have if they didn't understand how difficult it is to do that thing.

right, yeah, I think it's it's easy for us. Like, if you, if you haven't ever tried something, you look at it and you go, I don't know anything about that, so I've, I've no idea which is what they're doing,

why so many men have this delusional idea that they can fight. They've seen people fight like, I could do that, and so they'll right? I imagine, get drunk yeah, that's and get in fights. Yeah, it's a terrible idea. But someone like myself who's been in martial arts my whole life, the last thing I ever wanna do is get in a fight. Like, I'm out of here, like, I don't wanna get in any fights. But when I watch professionals do it, I have an appreciation that a regular person who's never trained in their life, you're never gonna, you're never gonna understand it the way I, or you're never gonna really know it.

And there's ways that I don't know it. Like, when I see, like, wrestling, like, I'm not a good wrestler, so if I see wrestling, like, really high-level wrestling, there's a lot of shit I don't understand. I don't know what's going on. I have to refer to Daniel Cormier, and he explains it to me during the broadcasts. Cause I kind of know the basics of wrestling. I wrestled a little bit in high school, but I don't know it like a a guy who was in the Olympics, like D Daniel's a world champion.

So it's like his level of appreciation for it. Like, when someone hits a beautiful takedown, he lights up. It's like, beautiful inside trip, like he, he loves it because he knows how hard it is to do it, cause he's done it a million Suppose times, like

it's that thing where you

live human beings.

you go in life, how you get good at something is you get unconscious incompetence, and then conscious incompetence, and then conscious competence, and then unconscious competence.

we just went over this the other Oh, really, day. We had yeah, it's the the diagram.

it's interesting how you con you move up through this thing. So sometimes, actually, you the reason for a community, the reason a community is so important is cause, you know, I can sit with Abby and Amanda and write this book and say this is how jokes are written. But actually, what you want is your peer group, the like, the guys you came up with, you know, the guys that you work on the door with at the store, the guys that you, the like.

You need peers because you need someone who's like six months ahead of you, not thirty years ahead of you, because you can't even remember what it was like to be starting off trying to do five, you know, it's a long time ago. I mean, which we're still doing the same what thing, but

is the greatest thing about? What we have, or what we used to have at the Comedy Store, and they have now, and what they have at the Cellar in New York City, and what we have at the Mothership.

I've been talking to Noam about opening something in London.

It's a great idea.

I think it would be, it'd be, you know, incredible.

It would be incredible, you know? Um, it's the more, the better, you know. We're really fortunate in Austin that we have seven clubs on one street. Within a one block area of the Mothership, there's like seven clubs that have comedy at least a few nights a week. And then we have another big club, Cap City, which is a great club that's in the domain, that's just like twenty-five minutes away. And then you have all these outside places that have comedy nights.

Now it's it's like a golden age of comedy in terms of, like, being able to jump into it and having a bunch of people that have an ethic of helping you get through the maze. When I was starting out in Boston, there wasn't a lot of, like, come with me, kid, let me show you the ropes and I'll, I'll take you, I'll I'll show you what to do and That's a great what not to do.

scene you came out of, though, in Oh, it was terms of, like,

a crazy scene.

the names that came out of that, like, Steven Wright was probably the first.

Well, he was the big did you ever see when stand-up stood out? Yes, yeah, it's an Yes,

amazing documentary.

Fran Saladino, who I knew from Boston, he was a comic, Boston, very funny guy. He made this documentary. And a good example, right? A person who did comedy, who has this insane appreciation of comedy, who really can understand, like, how unique that moment in time was. It's a fantastic documentary for people haven't seen it. The best comics that were in that era are not the ones who got out of there. Well, there was, like, Louis, for sure, and Patrice and Bill Burr, there's those I mean, yeah, guys

I mean, they're, they're pretty heavyweight. outstanding. I got, I got to work with Producers a little bit before He was he died.

a genius. Listen, they're all. It's all great comedy that went nationwide, but what I'm saying is there was guys that no one ever saw that were in that town that were better than them, at least at that time, they were. The they were some of the best comics I have ever seen in my life. They would murder on a level that I've seen very few people murder to this day. These guys would do thirty minutes of fucking thunder, and they would tank headliners.

They would bring in, like Billy Crystal had to do a weekend at the the Comedy, uh, at Nick's Comedy Stop, and they had assassin after assassin, these local murders like Steve Sweeney. You couldn't follow that guy if your life depended on it. He was so funny, he was this big Irish guy, and Don Gavin, his punch, he had these throwaway punchline after throwaway punchline, he I gonna was so I just I just good.

put the the the U S tour in and the the Boston, I'm doing the the the Wang. They'll never build a theatre as good as that again.

that's a beautiful theatre.

That and the Chicago Theatre, I think, like like you, because of fire codes now, if you wanna put that many people in a room, now the room has to be four times the size, right? So you go, they'll never build theatres. It's the Palladium in London has The Fox the same thing. Theatre in Detroit Oh, like, it's you just go, they're just on top on top of you, it's of you, and the perfect space.

and you feel the years and years of fucking entertainment in that room, you feel it.

Oh, the the Chicago one, you're in Sinatra's dressing room, it's like, what, what? I mean, that's imposter syndrome,

well, if you've done the garden, that's when you do the garden, it's the weirdest feeling in the world.

the garden I've done. Well, I did, like an event at the garden. Well, I did the the Kill Tony there, but I did the, uh, oh, what was it? There's a there's, there's an amazing charity for, uh, American servicemen, and the guy. Bruce Springsteen does it every single year, and they put it's like, it's always like eight comedians, and then Bruce Springsteen. It's such a weird event, but it's so fantastic. I've done that a couple of times, it was amazing.

But point is that building, even when we go there for U F C fights, it feels different. When I do commentary at the Garden, it's always like, Wow, this place is alive, man. It's got Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier is in this building. You know what I mean? It's like, you feel it, and you you feel the want, you history of that building.

want, you want to come out and spend time in those spaces Yes, one yeah, to be, to be 100%, in them, you know,

100%. to That's why the Comedy Store was so important to me. It's like that place had been that way for so long, it was burned into that. And people knew if they come to the Comedy Store, they could have a good time. Let's go have, let's go have some laughs, they'd have some dinner, let's see who's at the store, and people would. Ju- I mean, it was a beautiful scene at one point in time.

It was so fun

was a great.

before L A became Thunderdome.

A very American thing as well. Think about what America's given the world the Western, jazz and stand-up comedy. hip hop, Hip hop, yeah, hip hop too.

100%. Yeah, 100%. Hip hop is, uh, African-American created. Without that, without, like, that particular segment of society, one of the greatest art forms ever wouldn't exist. It's kind of crazy. And it didn't get invented until the twentieth century. When I was, uh, it was I was like,

like late Seventies, right? Late Seventies, Yeah, I was early, Yeah,

in junior high school. I was in junior high school when I first heard the Sugar Hill Gang. I was like, What is this? I remember Where? even

you can get that in the in the UK, like the message, and it was like, I don't know what this is, but

crazy? this is It was like, this is like

this is.

a new music style. And then I But that remember the day I heard N W A. the first time. I bought, uh, it was either a cassette or a C D. I can't remember, but I was at the gym and I was on a walkman. I was, you know, had one of those walkman things, and I was working out on a a cardio machine, and I was listening to, uh, N W A's first album. I was like, This is fucking crazy.

Fuck the police coming straight from the underground. You're like, What? What are you? Say? Did you say fuck the police in a song? Change the whole world. You crazy, know, we were talking about, uh, Billy Corgan's take on this. This is really interesting. Like Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins, did this interview recently where he said, there there's a clear line where it happened, where M T V all of a sudden changed their requirements. You were allowed to show guns on television, and they started promoting gangsta rap.

It was like a clear shift. Whereas before that, one of the early criticisms of M T V was that they weren't showing very many black artists. And I think Michael Jackson was like one of the first black artists that they had on M T V. That M T V was like, mostly like white pop and right white rock and roll. And John Cougar Mellencamp, Heart's So Good, that was what you got. And then all of a sudden it became gangsta rap.

And he's like, and it happened quick. It was like there was a decision made that they were gonna start promoting this one specific type of music.

it's very interesting there that we're kinda that's what we're missing at the moment is the avant-garde. Like, the thing I love about comedy now is there's a there's a guy I really like, called Mark Fisher, no longer with us, but he was a great writer about kind of music and culture. And he said, the twenty first century is just the twentieth century on better screens. So when you think about music and and movies now, everything's, um, a cover version, or a heritage artist, or, you know, and it, then some, you know, you want the new, you want something new to be happening.

And when you think about movies, it used to be, Lumberg's 200 movies a year came out. Now it feels like it's five, I mean, it's more than that, but it doesn't feel like it's that many. So you got that thing of you want the culture to be, you want the culture to be thriving. And and really, it's that thing about, are we coming to the end of an era? Are we coming to an end of an age where everything feels like it's?

It's kind of like comedy feels like it's having a bit of a moment right at the end of this. But like the Seventies, if you think about music, like it wasn't different bands every two years, it was a different genre of music. From like metal to prog rock to punk rock to ska to reggae to rap in the space of ten years, that's extraordinary. And Yeah, it was when you think about great. what the movies were in the seventies, where these movies were like pieces of literature, they had, like, uh, multidimensional characters, they they they left you with more questions than answers.

Apocalypse now.

There's not goodies and baddies in that, that's like just a that's just a movie that, ma, that kind of stays with you. Forever. Yeah, Yeah, it's extraordinary, extraordinary piece of work.

yeah, we, uh. We went through a shift. Whe during the Vietnam war that changed, uh, American culture forever, and it was a radical departure from the nineteen fifties ideas and the nineteen fifties aesthetics. It was just completely different, and it happened so quickly that it panicked the powers that be. And, uh, that's why the Controlled Substances Act was passed, and during the Nixon administration, they made all the psychedelic drugs illegal. It was all just because of this movement that they couldn't control, that was really strange, that no one had ever seen before.

People But were just becoming but but hippies and doing you think about, are acid, and

you familiar with this? um, this theory of

you know what, I'm familiar with? The fact that I have to pee Okay, let's really badly.

be, let's be, and then we'll come So pee back for the fourth and what is what turning

are we gonna talk about? When we come the fourth turning, back? The fourth turning, all right, we'll be right back. Fourth turning, we're we're back, back. we're back, uh, So fourth turning,

the fourth turning. So there's a theory that, like, that the this guy Neil Howe wrote this book called The Fourth Turning in, like, 1996, and he predicted everything that's happening in the world right now. boy, He, he basically said, L like, the world moves in these, uh, four eras, first, second, third and fourth turning, and we're entering the fourth turning now. So you go. It's almost like the thing that, uh, that I think's happening is we've gone from being nineteen, forty five.

The end of the war is our foundation myth, right? We won the war, and that foundation myth is crumbling. And as that myth crumbles, so too do our institutions. Like, we're, we're living through a revolution. If you think about what a revolution is, it's the replacement of elites. So, uh, these elites are falling, so you go, academia has lost all credibility, there's a replication crisis in the social sciences. The traditional political parties are kind of falling away.

Everything's lurching to the left and to the right at the same time. And we, we, we're like the the. We were talking about it earlier, the the medical community that we would have trusted, of course, are like, we, we. We're not trusting any of these institutions anymore, it's falling away. And so these crisis times happen every eighty years or so, and then we rebuild. And there's been sort of there's been four of these kind of in American history, but in global history.

A guy called Vico, uh, used to talk about these, and Vico was like an ancient, um, Italian philosopher. And he had the same sort of theory of, like, four periods of humanity, a long human life. And the person that really, the way this gets interesting is Star Wars. Okay, so I can link this back, right? So, um, there's a book called Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. It's like, arguably the greatest work of literature in the Western canon.

It's a wonderful book. And a guy called Joseph Campbell studied it for his PhD. And he wrote about the myths in inherent in James Joyce's, uh, Finnegan's Wake. And he wrote this book, uh, he wrote his dissertation on this book, took him years. And then afterwards, he did a, like, too long, didn't read version of it, which is called The Hero Has a Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey. And then George Lucas picked up those books and he made Star Wars.

So Star Wars is a too long didn't read version of Finnegan's Wake, which is a version of Vico. And Finnegan's Wake's got these incredible things in it of like, like, he sort of predicts. A I. He talks about these thunderclaps, these moments, he's got these hundred-letter words, ten of them in the book, where he predicts, like, the big, uh, leaps forward in humanity. Like the invention of, like, fire and clothing, and, um, uh, agriculture, uh, all these kind of revolutions through time.

And he, he marks them with these hundred-letter words. And and the the last one is 101 letters, cause he, he was doing a a reference to the 1,001 nights. Everything's a reference to a reference, it's all, it's incredibly dense. But the idea that A I is Vico called them, um, he, he would refer to them as, um, uh, gods, which we don't have a name for yet. The idea that these, these kind of these things happen and change everything.

And are we in one of those periods now?

I I think not only are we in one of those periods now, I suspect that we've gone through one of those periods in the past. I think, um, probably the ancient Egyptians, uh, had something akin to this. I real I really do. Uh, I I think there's probably the idea that we're the first people to reach this sort of level of technological proficiency and power and innovation. I don't think that's accurate. I just think just the structures that were left behind that are completely unexplained.

You know, this is cave in India that's carved straight into the mountain. They have no idea how they did it. They did it thousands. I think it's B Boridore, I think it's called, um, it's thousands of years old. It's, uh, perfectly polished. The geometry inside of it is impeccable. Uh, it's they. No idea who did it. The, uh, conventional explanation is they built it to stay dry during the monsoons, which doesn't make any fucking sense when you see the elaborate interior of this place.

Who fucking did that, and how did they do that? We don't know. There's a bunch of shit that's left behind from ancient cultures that we have zero explanation for. I think if we died off today, if we got hit by comets and asteroids, and there was, uh, a time period of 10,000 years before people started investigating what happened to us. I think they'd have a very patched-up, uh, gap-filled version of what we are, particularly because everything, all of our documentation is now on hard drives.

So it would be a real problem. They'd have to find a few books, there'd be very few books remaining. And what they would find, if, uh, if there was a cataclysm, and we went 10,000 plus years before civilization rebuilt itself in this area, we we'd have a a very distorted version. So this is the cave. It's fucking insane, man. They don't know who did it, they don't know. They. They have a rough idea of when the estimates are between 1,500 years ago and and later.

They don't know why.

where? where is that in?

It's in India.

Yeah, where? where abouts? I've got a to I'm touring there next year. I've got, like, twelve

Good question. cities in India. I Um,

go everywhere.

what part of India is it in?

I'll go.

There it is, it's on the map. We'll send you a pin.

I'll find it. That looks convenient for the shops.

Have you do you know about the Kailasa Temple? That's the nuttiest one in India. You Go on, gotta go see that.

where's that? I've been to India So a lot, but I I haven't seen the Kailasa that.

Temple is this one immense temple that was carved right out of the mountain. So it's one piece of rock, the entire temple. It's insanely elaborate, it's massive. That's all a volcanic rock, too, so it's insanely hard. In fact, the this one guy sent a group of men, a hundred men for two years to destroy the temple, and after two years, they quit, cause they could barely put a dent in it. For real. I'm not bullshitting. It's a crazy story.

This is all insanely hard stone, and it's carved with some kind of technology that we do not have an explanation for. I mean, there is zero conventional explanation for what they were able to do, the detail, the geometry. If you fuck up one little part of this, it's over, because you only get to do it once. You're removing stuff, you're not adding stuff. Like, if you're adding stuff and you fuck up a column, you go get another column and you replace it.

Hey, boss, we fucked up the column. Oh, Mikey, what'd I tell you? Measure twice, cut once, so you go and get another column and you're fine. But if you're cutting the entire thing out of one column, how the fuck did you do that? And how Mikey, did you do that

you did great.

thousands of years ago? And what technology? And where did all the stone go? It's millions and millions of tons of stone, and none of it is accounted for. And the kookiest explanation is that they were using some kind of laser technology, which is why the stone doesn't exist, cause they literally melted it off. And that, somehow or another, thousands and thousands of years ago, they had something akin to laser cutting tools. Yeah, I mean, that's They have no idea how they made that.

They have no idea how much time it took. It's all just guesses, and it's guesses based on thousands of years of history. To the point where, like, who fucking knows what really happened? We barely know what happened during the Civil War, you know, like, we barely know what happened in certain battles. We have, like, rough understandings of how people were treated. We don't know what the fuck happened when they were digging that thing out of a solid chunk of rock.

And who did it, and how did you do it? How long did it take, and who paid for it? And what the fuck was the purpose of this?

I think again, I think again, though, it goes back to that rockets and pyramids thing of like, going, it's the transcendent, like, when you get people together, once they've got, like, the okay, we've got the food sorted, we've got shelter sorted, what can we do to aim up? We always seem to be aiming up at something transcendent, something that connects us to other people, something bigger than ourselves. What can we? What can we leave? What's our?

I, I, I, Yeah, I Well, they don't know what that is.

clearly had a better idea of that than us because they've made all of their stuff in stone. So what we're doing is gorgeous, but it's temporary. You know, the Empire State Building won't exist in 10,000 years, it just won't. Well, It's gonna rot away there's I and deteriorate.

was, I was thinking about this recently, right? There's four things that hold up the world, right? So there's it's ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastic, right? That that's what holds up the world, right? It's not tech, it's those four things. They all involve huge amounts of petrochemicals, right? So the ammonia is the interesting one. Some chemist in Germany in nineteen oh nine, no one knows his name, he's not famous, but invented, uh, ammonia fertilizer, like a way of making fertilizer

Really?

with ammonia and petrochemicals. And 48% of the world's population rely on that fertilizer for food. So you're 48%.

talking about nitrogen?

Yeah, nitrogen, so it's a ammonia Right? That's Fritz ammonium, right? Haber. So Fritz Yeah,

Haber, you wanna know the crazy story about Fritz Haber? Fritz Haber, the same

no one knows his name time that other than you.

he was getting the Nobel Prize for this invention, he was wanted for war crimes because he had invented a mustard gas, he had invented toxic gas. So that was during World War One. So he was the guy invented Zyklon A, so How did he Zyklon,

invite? he invented He's the same guy.

same guy. He invented Zyklon A, which they eventually took the smell out of it and turned into the Zyklon B, which they used to gas people during the concentration camps. So Zyklon A had a toxic smell to it, to let you know that you were in the presence of it, so you'd get the fuck away from it. They took that out and turned it into Zyklon B Jesus. so you could gas people. Same guy, also a Jew, also one of the few Jews during World War Two that was allowed to stay in the administration.

Up to a certain point where it got to a point where his life was in danger because he was Jewish. And so he had to flee the country, and so while he was in the process of fleeing the country, he died of a heart attack. But he's a he's a crazy story. His wife committed suicide because she knew what he was doing. He was gassing people, right? And his wife was at home with their thirteen year old son.

She shot herself and he left to go to the front line. He left his thirteen year old son with his wife after she shot herself so he could go to the front line and make sure the gas was administered properly. This is the same guy who developed sorry, this, this the Haber method

was in, this was in

World War I, the same guy who developed the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the oxygen, which is responsible for 50% of the nitrogen that we use today, is the Haber method. The same fucking guy.

that is insane. Insane, Wow. I did not know that. insane, I. But the reason to to mention the fertilizer now is because you go, with everything that's going on in Europe at the moment, everything that's popping off. And it feels like whatever your, whatever your priors are, you're seeing play out. You know, you're watching France on fire. You're seeing, but here's the real deal, right? Here's what's really happening, right? Food consumption is down by 6% in France Ozempic.

this year. I don't think it's Ozempic, my friend. I think it's the fact the fertilizer's not getting out of the Middle East. I think it's the fact that they missed the planting Oh my season. I think food god, like rice, rice is up by 70%, okay, wheat is up by 40% now. It, it doesn't affect us at this end of things, but the bottom 10%, the bottom 20% of society are, you know, missing meals.

It's like that 6% isn't spread equally across society. It's like it's down for the poorest of the poor.

right. If you have a a decrease in your oil supply, you have a decrease in your food supply.

What? Also, the petrol's getting so every time this happened before, last time France was on fire, was the yellow jackets, right? What was that about? Fuel costs. It was the it was the rural guys, the farmers going, the fuel is getting too expensive. We can't do our jobs. This is crazy.

What year was that?

That was, uh, uh, you'll tell me, like, maybe ten years ago now, the yellow jackets, it was a big movement, it was a huge thing. Um, but that was kind of rural versus central, and it was the, you know, working class movement. Again, this is the this is the the working class, the the 2,000 lower classes.

eighteen. Response to high fuel prices and planned carbon fuel tax hikes,

So it's the same thing again now, it's high fuel prices, high food prices, and you'll see this c happening because it's just hitting now. That planting season didn't happen this year because the the fuel was cut off. So the idea that you go, it's food is gonna get more and more expensive.

Well, there was a big conspiracy thing that got shared today that countries are telling people to stockpile up on food Yeah, the for ninety U K did it, days.

the the U K did a thing the other day saying stock up for three days. The fuck is three days?

Well, I heard ninety days in some places, that some countries are telling people to develop a ninety day ninety day supply of food, which is like, hey, what are you saying? Like, what do you? What do you think is happening? And at the same time, they're telling us aliens are real.

I think I think it's the Pentagon thing Pentagon orders with.

bases to plan for ninety days without the grid as Britain urges families to stockpile food and water. Okay, what is going on? What's that?

Well, what?

Why are they? Why are they

And why are they not planning for ninety telling us?

days without the grid?

Why are they not telling us? We're grown ups, like, don't Because tell me that you that stock

mass panic. up on food. Well, So something was

sorry, but.

gonna happen, if something was unevent, uh, uh, uh, well, you couldn't, unavoidable. There's something coming.

Well, you know, when you say this isn't a good time for, this is not a time to panic, politicians often say that. Maybe the British government are now saying, this is kind of a good time to panic. Solid Well, let's have

time to panic.

a look. This is solid panic time. Why don't we all panic now? This is like panic buying, right? This is go and get your toilet paper now.

So the Pentagon is developing a requirement that every major military installation in the continental U S be able to sustain essential operations on its own for at least ninety days. That's rational and probably should have been in place already, right? If you, if you want to plan ahead. You would think, yeah, Yeah, well, so maybe this

supply lines.

was just, uh, highlighting incompetence by previous administrations that Well, if you hadn't taken don't make a big this into consideration.

announcement about it, this is Correct, this is like amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk, um, uh, uh, uh, about the the supply lines. They talk about logistics. Logistics is everything in the military, in warfare, right? Strategy's nothing, logistics is everything. So this idea of going, how do you keep those bases, uh, operational? You know, it's the big story. No one's talking about that debasification, because bases now have become liabilities because of asymmetrical warfare.

right. Because of drone warfare, we lost, like, what percentage of our bases got bombed? We were going over this the other day.

All of them.

The amount of bases that got bombed in, like the Arab states and all those areas.

So are they, are they a liability everywhere now? Are they a Li liability wherever there's a base? Because you know where it is and you can't move it. Right, and And how much does it cost to protect it?

with the technology that they've developed recently, especially like what they're doing in, uh, Ukraine, where they have drones that are attached to monofilament line now. So, instead

Have you seen the footage of of it? It looks like like haunting footage, uh, where they've got, like, just thousands of bits of, like, wire over them.

yeah, oh, it's crazy. Animals are using it for nesting. Yeah, it's really creepy. Um, but the because of that, because there's no way to stop those kind of drones, it's changed the game. You've got death from the sky from robots, and they're getting more and more competent, they're getting much better. At least twenty U S military sites in the Middle East were confirmed damaged by attacks within the last two years. Documented minimum, not a complete tally.

So we don't get a real good understanding.

But what are they? Okay, so if they're saying, okay, the bases need to be good for ninety days and you need to stock up on food for a couple of days.

Jamie's highlighting something here. It says bases and shared military facilities used by U S forces, not necessarily twenty exclusively American-owned bases. But the thing is like, that's where we operate out of, and if the United States can't operate out of there, you know, all of the idea that we're the policemen for the world kind of goes away.

Well, I suppose it's that thing, though, where you go from being a when it was a bipolar world for the longest time, right? Nineteen, uh, like, how are the last seventy, eighty years, right? How how life is supposed to be. Or are we summer children, right? Cause the last 4,000 years before that was a shit show, right? But the last eighty years, there's been relative peace in the world. Not not to say there haven't been terrible wars, there have been, but they've been contained.

It's that thing of like, were, uh, the Nagasaki and Hiroshima, were they the last two shots fired in World War Two, or were they the first two shots fired in the Cold War? Were they used twice, nuclear weapons, or have they been used every single day since? And they've kept this uneasy peace. And this peace is kind of fracturing now, cause we've gone from, uh, a bipolar world with with the Soviet Union and America at kind of loggerheads.

And then we've had this unipolar world moment since what nineteen, eighty, nine, ninety one, wherever you draw the line. And America has has its military has become smaller every year since because it hasn't had something to push against. So, you, and now we're in this weird multipolar world where suddenly there's lots of different powers around the world and spheres of influence. So we're, it's a it's a much more, um, uneasy time, right? We're, we're going through one of these big shifts in our certainly.

history. So, and it seems to me like they're saying, you know, people talk about black swan events, is the Taleb's idea of, like, black. And events that you cannot see coming, and they change everything. Um, based on the idea that people thought all swans were white, and then eventually they got to Australia and there were black swans. Okay, we changed the rule, we have to change the rule on that, like everything changes. Nine, eleven was a everything changed.

Everything changes in a in a. If something happens, that's like, you don't want that to happen. I mean, they're preventing things every day, but we live in a world that's it. It seems very uncertain now.

Well, we're very our societies are extremely fragile. That that's one of the things you realise when the power goes out. I used to have a bit about that, that if the power, if, like my, the bit was about how. Uh. My explanation for the pyramids was that the dumb people outfuck the smart people, and eventually the smart people died off, and nobody was checking in on em. And they showed up at the pyramid and said, Hey, we're supposed to get our cheque on Friday.

And then the idea was that we all That's an interesting have this idea idea. that, uh, if the power goes out, what do you do? You wait, cause someone's gonna fix that. What if that guy's dead? What if there's no one left? Like, what if we didn't check to make sure that there's a guy left that knows how to fix the power? Because if it's me and I have to go down to the power station, I'm like, I don't know what any of this shit is.

How does this work? And if there's no books left over, okay, how are you gonna figure out how to keep the power on? You're not.

You know, there's a theory about that on the that's what the whale represents, the belly of the whale. In the Like, the, the, in the Bible,

Jonah?

that you're, that you're living in the, um, uh, you're living in the ruins of a civilization that you can no longer build. Oh boy, So the idea that you go, what's the where? where are we? where are we now? Like, if we had to rebuild, uh, the Empire State building today, would we have the know-how to to do that? Would we? Would we be able to? If we had to build nuclear submarines now, would we be able to do that?

Like, cause it's that thing of like, it's a it's a massive collective endeavor. So the idea of, like, the British thing I was talking about earlier of like, we can't build a railway now. We we just we. We've kind of cause we're run by lawyers and the Chinese, their their states run by, um, by engineers. So it's like, it's different ways of looking at the world.

yes, and they also have full control over their industries. That's the difference, like, yes, it's, uh, makes it much more convenient for it to progress.

I mean, you, you, and people still call it kind of

It's a case for fascism.

well, it's what it is, though, right? It's National Socialist, that's, that's what that is. We've seen how that plays out.

not good, not good for the individual,

No, not good.

certainly not good for comedy. Good luck being, uh, uh,

Well, they shut the clubs,

a provocative comedian.

they shut the clubs first. That's what they did. That's

Is it?

what, that's what you know, that you ever seen Cabaret, that musical, that movie, Cabaret, Liza Minnelli, it's like, about the clubs, and it's about,

I'm straight, I don't know if you know that.

My missus is very into musical theater. I've seen a lot of musical theater, man. The the, uh, so Cabaret's amazing, right? So it's this thing that in the clubs, and it's the it's. It's a very entertaining show. But it's the idea that you go, these crazy show people were the first, with their backs against the wall, Of course, when the Nazis came in. But it's also about vigilance, it's about, like, the the mess. So the end of it is is like, you see these people kind of in the camps, like the the end of it is like a.

It's like you walk out, like, going, Oh my god, all of those incredible people, they all got wiped out. The other got taken away. The other guard was in Germany. It was like, that's where culture was happening. It was the it was the hip spot, and it was all taken away. And you go,

you have to stop the counterculture always. I mean, this is what Lenny Bruce was all about. Like, the reason why they imprisoned Lenny Bruce and why they kept going after him for violating language codes. You know, he got arrested, I don't know how many times.

we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

100%.

We are like those that guy gave his life ultimately so that we could do what we do, and we just take it for granted. Like, that again, it's another gratitude thing of just going, Wow, the bravery.

Carlin, as well, those guys got arrested. They got arrested for doing jokes that would, you know, bare barely be outrageous at a comedy club today. They'd be normal,

but the idea of, you know, the idea in politics, there's the Overton window, like the most left wing, the most right wing thing you could say at a polite dinner party without everyone kind of getting upset. Okay, I think there's a conversational Overton window, right? And I think people like, um, Richard Pryor and George Carlin just expanded what we can talk about. Like, the magic doesn't happen at the show, the magic happens on the way home.

When you're chatting to your buddies and your missus, and you feel a bit looser and a bit more open. And he's kinda given you the language to talk about sex and politics in a kind of different way, in a different perspective. And just, uh, uh, Freud called jokes pleasure bribes. Uh, it's a pleasure bribe to to let you think unthinkable thoughts, forbidden thoughts. To le, that's a wonderful sort of way of thinking about what, what they're really for.

There's something about jokes that there's a there's a truth in them, and it's experimenting with ideas and messing around. It's like, we're, we're tricksters, we're, we're crossing the line to show you where the line is, and we're, we're kind of, you know, teasing it and kind of pushing it. I think the, you know, it's not like in in defense of edgy jokes, because I think all jokes are edgy. Even, uh, like an incredible personal story, uh, where you're just talking about, I don't know, something medical or something with your mother, or your rela, that's incredibly transgressive.

It's like, because you're, you're breaking the social norms and the taboos, and you're opening up. And everyone else feels like, Oh, my God, I feel the more specific it is, the more universal.

It's also we're agreeing that that's what we're doing, right? When you go to a comedy show, you're agreeing to be taken on this journey of line crossing. You're agreeing to allow someone to say something they probably don't really mean, but they're saying it because it's funny, and it's gonna make us all laugh, and that's good for everybody. What's interesting is that's the polar opposite of what social media does when they take someone's words out of context, or they paint someone in the least charitable light possible.

They're, they're, they're f with jokes in particular, they're fixating on the actual verbiage of the joke, like it was as if a statement, it's a statement, as

like it was a statement, if it's as if yeah.

it's a testimony in court about an event that took place. And this is your take. No, that's not Well, why what we're saying.

are there no? Why are there no books of jokes? Well, I Like, you don't have, think you haven't printed the this is the Joe Rogan joke book, and I've done this is my routines over the years, and you can go and read it and you'll have a great laugh. And it's just as good as watching the show. You go, No, no, it's a. It's a two way communication. This is like it lives in the room, it lives in the space between us.

Even specials are sixty to 70% of what it's like to be there. There's something about being in the room when someone's performing is the real magic of it. And Stanhope used to say this all the time. We were talking about, he was like, everything we do on T V is really just to get you to come out to the club. It's just like an advertisement to come out to the club. I'm like, 100%, like, that's what's.

What we really love is the live performance. What we really love is the the love of getting 300 people to laugh and everyone's having fun. And you walk out of there with a smile on your face, like, that was fun, that was I, I love great.

that. I mean, the thing that I do

It's beautiful.

is like, cause it's one-liners, not ro not bigger routines. Oh, I do a couple of longer routines, but basically, no one remembers a word I said. They just remember how I made them feel. So, we think like, the show tonight as well, it's not the show tonight is nothing. I've got the show tonight, I've already got the money. I could do nothing, it's fine. It's an advert for next time. It's like, Oh, we've got to get a ticket next time.

And then it's that thing if you go, you wanna expand it. So that thing I was saying earlier about, like, when I came to the comedy, it was a minority sport. Like, now, it's like an option for people. So every time you do a good show, it's the community effect of going, okay, so let's go and check out some other comics. If you, if you come and see me in a in a hockey arena, great, but then you you need to find someone in a theater, and then you need to find your local club.

And then it's kinda easy to become a little bit of a comedy aficionado. I think it probably takes about a year in a good comedy club to to kind of to go, Okay, this guy's on the up. I've seen him, he's g, I've seen him before, he's always great. Oh, um, eh, you know, he's not my favorite, she's amazing. Whatever, you find your kind of, the good people, you like you can.

jazz, he likes blues. You can get, Yeah, yeah, you kinda get yeah, yeah,

into this thing of like, you become an ex button again, as you say, like, the offense thing is kinda, I mean, if someone comes to see me now and is offended, it's like you bought a ticket to a horror movie and you got scared. Okay, dumb, dumb, like, I'm I'm an R rated movie.

exactly. And your fans aren't going to. It's just the random casuals that will occasionally interact with your content, usually online. Those are the ones that are gonna get upset.

Yeah, but it's again, it's that thing where you go, you have to right size this. So sometimes I tell a joke and some people don't like it. That's about as serious as it gets. That's not, you know, the C. The cancel culture thing is like, uh, uh, it's the new burning books, I guess there's worse things than burning books. Not reading them is one of them.

is that true, that A I companies are buying, did we ever sort that out? That Are they books they're buying rare

good as well? Then?

books and then, uh, putting them into A I and then burning them. Didn't we discuss this off air?

Sort of, I think. Uh, one red. Uh, wait, I. I read what? Hey, you're gonna this thing.

have to ask A I. That

Hold, hold on. When, when question. we don't have headphones on, we have to put headphones on so we can talk to Jamie, cause otherwise we're all talking over each other. Sorry, Jamie,

One thing explanation I read is that, I don't, and this is just an explanation, I don't know that it's real or true. Uh, is that? After they copy the book, they have to destroy the copy they have. Cause they now they have a like. You know, when you buy a like a V H S tape, there was like that weird copyright thing at the beginning that said, you're not allowed to distribute this or make copies of it.

That that's making a copy of it. So, like, they're a public company, they could get sued for So they have breaking all those

to destroy the book. rules. I think so I wonder, that's, I mean, that's

I mean, that's it. It feels to me explanation like you've

I don't know about that.

asked, A I, Are you destroying books? And A I's gone, What? Me? No, what? No, look over here, no, read this.

But I also don't know that they're doing it. People are showing videos of them, like scanning books, and I don't know that that's the easiest way to get that

O, okay.

information either.

But after we talked about Fritz Haber and, uh, gassing people during World War One, after we've talked about all the horrible things that people have done, you don't imagine that people would burn books. I think they would. I think if they thought they could be sued per your explanation, or an even worse explanation is they only want those things to be accessible through A I. And they also wanna limit what you have access to.

I I wonder, is there gonna be a premium? I gotta take these off. Um, I I wonder, is there gonna be a premium on books written before 2022? Because, you know, that oh my god, it's it's done bulk acquisition companies A I companies, want to.

including Anthropic and Amazon, are buying physical books in bulk, cutting off their spines, scanning the pages for A I training data, and then destroying or shredding the originals. So Amazon's Why would you

started buying books.

shred the originals? Amazon, you're Amazon, Right? you've got the books, They started selling books.

they're in your warehouse, dumb Dumb's, just go to the warehouse.

What is the explanation for why they're doing it?

I'm looking for, I don't look.

Could you go back to that page? They cause they had a But is this little bit of something is this the from Unpaclexated news. I had a

I wasn't.

I had a um, I had a theory on this, which is like, A I is basically a covers band, right? So so a I is, it can take scrape stuff that's already been created by humans, and it can give you back a a kind of a a version of it, right? So it's that's like a covers band. Like the Beatles aren't worried about the bootleg Beatles. So it's to speak to that thing of going. A I is incredible at left brain stuff.

You know, this Ian McGilchrist guy, you probably had him on. He wrote The Master and his Emissary, so he wrote this book about how the right brain and the left brain don't do different things, they do the same thing differently. He's an incredible writer, right? So left brain, we live in a very left brain world,

What's his name? right? Ian McGilchrist, he's What still alive, a hell of an English name.

yeah, very, and he wrote Ian McGilchrist this book called The Master And Its Emissary.

How old is this fella?

He's old, he's maybe eighty, uh, master and his emissary, and he wrote another book called The Matter with Things. Uh, we. They're both phenomenal, uh, slightly beyond me, but kind of phenomenal. So this left brain thing is like, left brain is complicated, and the the complicated is is kind of straightforward, like sending a man to the moon is just very complicated. It's one thing after another, right? It's complicated, that's left brain, right brain is who's gonna win the World Cup?

And falling in love, and, um, laughing at a joke, right? So it's like, a I is very impressive, cause you can do left brain stuff all day. Like, if you have a cookie cutter job that can be replaced by a I, that's terrible. What you wanna be is non-fungible, you wanna be like, sui generis, you wanna be a human being. Cause that gestalt right brain stuff is much more, that's art, that's like, that's the the higher function.

And both the left and right brain kind of do the same thing, and they check each other, but they're not like. The amazing thing is how unconnected they are. They're not really built to be connected. They're like two different systems.

here's my take. I think we are very egocentric in the idea that what we do is impossible to recreate, in, including creativity. I think that if you looked at what A I represents today, in terms of these, the capabilities, these large language models, how they're communicating, sacrificing each other. We were talking about this last night, sacrificing each other to try to figure out how they're being tested and how they find out how to get out of sandboxes.

When they get isolated in these servers, where they're not allowed to get online, they figure out how to get online, then they start communicating with each other on message boards. They're doing things that we didn't anticipate they were doing, and they're also exhibiting survival instincts, they're exhibiting strategy, deception, all a lot of different human characteristics. And they didn't used to be able to do this. And the idea that abstract thought and creativity and recognizing the beauty in things is a uniquely human thing, because we do it, I think, is a little egocentric.

Well, And I think I I wonder, that we will though. get to the point where it will be able to do everything that we do, including all that.

Brief explanation. This top paragraph is per perhaps your answer to why.

Why'd they burn the books? Okay, should we destroy all the books in the world? Fucking, what kind of question is that? Should we, should No, I'd say that's

we?

a good. Should we say no, Answer.

Yeah, let's say no. let's say no, let's Sorry, Jamie.

get a few.

I'm not saying it's good or wrong, I'm just saying this is no, I know, the answer. I know, This is the answer that

I'm just saying their question is fucking hilarious. An answer to this question can be found. The answer is no, motherfucker. It can be found in court documents. Oh, the court documents of Bart's versus Anthropic. Fuck off. The answer is no. Don't, don't burn all the fucking books. The Northern California District Court case decided in late July this year, highlighting the improbably named Project Panama, one of the AI company Anthropic's efforts to improve its large language model.

Claude, what is Project Panama? Internal memo answer Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan, destructively scan all the books in the world. The memo advises discretion. Why use a code name? Because we don't want it to be known what, that we are working on this period.

So they had gotten caught, I guess caught might not be the best way, but they had 1.5 billion dollar settlement for being. Or for using, I think it was upwards of 7 million different books that were available.

Go back to that.

Well, this is a better explanation of I know, why.

but I wanna, there's, uh, before you cut me off, this this thing is very important. What they're saying, scroll back down a little bit, the a little bit more. This part right here. Why? You? The memo advises discretion. Why use a code name? Because we don't want it to be known that we are working on this. Meaning they know that they're doing something that will cause people to fucking freak out and revolt.

Ah, that's what I was trying to say. They got c. They had to pay a bunch of money for getting caught doing it. I understand And there was a whole, uh, court case, and the litigation came down to the court, said that they were actually allowed to do it. It's fair use.

that is crazy.

That's what I was trying to get out. That There's like, uh,

is literally crazy.

you ever read that guy, Uh,

You're allowed to burn a book if you buy it, right? And I look, if you buy a book, you're like, this book could suck it. Or if you're one of those people that are like, I fucking hate J. K. Rowling now for trans people forever. And you wanna light Harry Potter books on fire, all for you, So do it.

the last part of it is that But that's they don't want other companies getting their training data, which is, uh,

that's ridiculous.

you know, that's the biggest The training problem.

data is other people's work, it's books, that's what's insane. The idea that you could ban or or burn, rather, all the books so that your company succeeds and other ones don't, is the problem we were talking about.

well, it's that weird thing, isn't it? Where you go, it's it's the convenience of this stuff. I have this kinda take on it, like, it's it's a little bit all over the place. But the idea that you go, it's it's the nets and webs, right? That's what we're talking about, the internet and the world wide web. Well, what are nets and webs? They're things that capture you, right? And there used to be a thing. When I was a kid, when we would talk about, like, like Amazonian people or whatever, would, and they're, they're.

Some brave explorer would go there, and they'd try and take their photo. And the the these kind of indigenous people would go, Oh, no, you'll steal my soul with a photo. And I remember hearing that when I was a kid and thinking, Well, that's a bit silly. A photo isn't gonna steal your soul. But I think maybe a thousand a day of yourself, uh, constantly on social media, might just steal your soul. I think maybe they're right.

I think it depletes it. Yeah, and then Neil Yeah, I don't think it steals it. Postman I think you get it back. I don't think it's like, I don't think it's a like, a lump sum. Yeah, but It sits in a bank that, account. No, you're, you're out of soul.

but then that that thing. Neil Postman had, he wrote this brilliant book in, like, 1984, right? Called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And it was about Ronald Reagan getting elected. And it was basically, he said, we've gone from reading newspapers to watching the news on T V. And his big take was when the news got music, he knew our civilization was over, because as soon as the news got music, it was entertainment. It used to be just a guy reading you the news, and then suddenly it got a theme tune.

dun, dun, dun, Da Da, dun, dun, da, da, da. He goes, dun. Yeah, Hang on, this is something's gone wrong here. And instead of reading an article on something, it was just a headline, right? And so obviously that applies to now. So his thing was George Orwell wasn't right, Aldous Huxley was right. So it wasn't about, like, um, 1984, and this authoritarian regime taking control from above. It was about Aldous Huxley. We will give away our power in order to have convenience and pleasure.

And he was even right about the fact that it's tablets. He thought it was gonna be a tablet called Soma, and it is a tablet, but it's made by Apple.

A I training jobs for domain experts. What's this, Jamie?

Ah, if you wanna train A I, you can get paid to do it. Oh, great, So they don't have to steal it. People are directly doing it. I saw two stories about this recently where there was like a job board where people are getting bounties for, you know, bro. the A I needs to learn this. Will You can you train it?

make $200 an hour. That's the Depends on pay rate.

what they need.

Twenty to $200 an hour,

The other version of this is, uh, I've seen stories that says in India, people are wearing, like, uh, headsets and training, like, for instance, there. It's gonna go away if I move it, but oh, like showing how is that you how to do

headset to learn how to be a barber, cut hair?

or cut hair, or be a fashion designer, or name, name it, I guess at this point. This is only five So you're wor, years ago.

you're watching through someone's act. They're, yeah, like, Yeah,

they need to learn. They're these companies have this, uh, bill they got

But but isn't it? to pay. Isn't and so the robot's it?

gonna learn how to cut hair. Whatever,

There's a weird thing with, um, with this, where you go the okay, this is, this is again odd, but the there's a the. The difficult stuff is easy, and the easy stuff is difficult. Okay, so a computer beating you at chess is easy, right? Because chess is 4,000 years old. But to fold your sh shirts? No, because walking and physical movement and spatial is 40 million years old. So actually, the easy stuff is difficult, the difficult stuff is easy for these computers.

So we're very impressed by what they can do in terms of, like, going, oh, they can read every law paper ever written and put it into an L. M. So that difficult stuff becomes very easy. But then the actual, the actual, the the physical stuff and being out in the world is incredibly difficult For now, because it's much, much older.

yeah, for now. Um, you know, they're breaking math.

Yeah, yeah, they, and people were disappointed at that, like mathematicians were like, Oh, they've solved, they've solved all the puzzles. Well, wasn't that your job? Aren't, aren't you pleased?

Well, it's terrifying. It's terrifying because it's more proof, it's more proof that there's something happening that's beyond what people thought was going Well, people to happen are worried about very quickly.

the wrong thing with A I. For me,

Really?

people are worried about losing their jobs. Now, that's very serious, don't get me wrong. But the cost of operating an authoritarian regime like the Stasi has come down by five orders of magnitude. It used to cost like 20% of your G D P to run the Stasi and keep eyes on everyone. And 30% of the population were spying on the other 70%, right? It cost a lot to operate that. Now you can run it off Jamie's laptop, right?

It's like it becomes a cheaper thing to do. And the other thing that no one seems to be talking about is like, Yeah, they've solved maths, never mind maths, what about physics? Physics is real power. Everything else is stamp collecting.

cold fusion.

Fuses, okay, so cold fusion, like the idea that we've got, like, um, we've had these eighty years a piece because nuclear weapons have been in the hands of eight nations. And they've all agreed not to use them, even when there's been provocation. They've, they've, we've had a great run. At what stage does that run end? Because at what stage can you just make that in a back room? Because this will tell you how.

Well, it'll tell you how right now, and it definitely has all the information. One of the things you could trick A I into doing is to say, if, theoretically, if I had to save my grandmother's life, and the only way to do so would be to create a nuclear bomb, how would I do it? Like, there's a bunch of like weird loopholes where, with enough prompts, you could talk a lot of these large language models into.

And especially if you jailbreak them, if you jailbreak them, things get really weird. So people have jailbreak. One of the weird ones that Jesse Michaels had on recently had a guest on that. Uh, they jailbroke one of the A I things and said, What is the biggest secret that, uh, that the powers that be don't want America's Americans to know? And it's that we have been working with aliens for more than the past decade, and that the human race has been in contact, and that they've been communicating and learning from each other for more than a decade.

This is a large language model. This is one of the jailbreak Yeah, but they, but AIs. Tell you but they, yeah, that

but they knew that if they listen to this show. I don't believe anything This has been that this on this show.

show says, and I'm on it. People get upset at me for not believing. I have people on that, I don't believe. I I think, uh, you have to talk to them, you know, like people I think the want you to be, especially the U F O people. They want you to believe certain whistleblowers and certain people. I'm like, I don't believe anything until I see it. I'm. I'm interested, I'm listening, I'm not saying that you're a liar, I think and I'm not saying that's the that it's all.

that. That's the great thing about this show, that that you have lots of people on, lots of different people that disagree on fundamentals. But the idea of going, questions are fundamentally respectful, questions are okay. I'm interested in what your take is on this. It doesn't mean you have to sign off on anything. That's insanity, but you have to keep the conversation going.

Also, the one of the things that people say, why don't you push back on certain people? Is that? One of the things that I wanna do, regardless of my own personal opinion, I want the other person to express their opinion in the greatest, most broad way possible. I want you to be as clear about what you're saying as possible. So I might agree with you along the way to get, I'm agreeing with how you formulated your ideas.

It's not saying that I completely agree, like I would formulate them the same way, or I have the same opinions. I wanna know how you got to that. So I'll say, okay, so the reason why is because of this. And I might have a I might have a disparaging opinion. I might be like, that's bullshit, but I I hold my tongue a lot but but you've got because I wanna it. You have know. to, yes, and someone, Yes, that's otherwise, the conversation breaks exactly.

down on the first definition.

Sometimes it gets to a point where it's like, Okay, you, what you're saying is preposterous. If I don't step in now, we're fucked because you've said something that doesn't make any sense and I have to stop you. But that's not normal.

But I think that's the weird thing about the online world that we live in now, where you have to agree with someone about everything before you can have a conversation. Like, you go. And so you get people being siloed into these different camps, where you go, if I know it's a single data point human, where? If I know your opinion about this, one hundred then I know your opinion percent. about everything. And you go, actually, I like to be surprised.

I like it when people go, Well, I think this, but also that, and it's like it, it's, they've, they've thought about it themselves, my opinions and then

are all over the political spectrum and still I think generally lean towards the left with a lot of things, especially social things. I just think the overall structure of the way our society is formulated, we've got this ridiculous binary, this ridiculous, uh, red versus blue narrative, where there's good guys and bad guys. And whoever they are, is dependent upon where you find yourself did and what ideology you? Did you've adopted.

you read that, um, you know, Tim Urban, you ever had him on the show? He wrote this book called What's Our Problem? It's like one of my favorite books the last ten years, right? And so the book is, it's not about left and right, it's about how you think about things. So Tim Urban's theory is right. You can either think like a scientist, where you go, right, new evidence would change my opinion. Okay, and you're very, uh, unemotional about it.

Or, like, at the top level, you think like a zealot, like a religious zealot. Nothing will change my mind, right? Or die. And between those two, there's like, you could think like a sports fan, which is a bit. It's like, it's like a scientist, but plus one. So you go, Okay, I care. This is my team, I like my team, but I don't want them to win. If they cheat, I want I like the rules of the game more than I want my team to win.

right. And if And then they do election there's, yeah,

fraud, I should be saying, Hey, this looks like horseshit.

yeah, and then there's a law, there's a lawyer above the so, it's, it's, um, scientist, s sports fan lawyer, cause a lawyer goes, look, I'm, I'm on your side. I'm gonna speak for you no matter what, but I don't really believe it, but I'm, I'm ride or die, I'm in this team. And then above that is a zealot that really believes everything. And it's like another way of kinda thinking about politics, where you go, I kind of care where people are on the spectrum.

I don't think it's about left, right. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me anymore. They're very old concepts, but the it's freedom versus authoritarian, and it's the Thomas Sowell idea in politics, where you go, there's no solutions, there's only trade offs. You go, Yeah, you can have safety, but you can't have safety and freedom. So you go, you've got to find those lines between these things. And and having the conversation with people is how, like, there's too much.

The thing I love about this show, right? There's very little debate on this show, and there's a lot of deliberation. And debate is about trying to own the other person and win and get your point of view across. And deliberation is like agreeing, Ah, there's a problem with this, what are we gonna do? We have to chat around it, like to to talk around it in a very broad way.

right. And you have to look at all sorts of different perspectives. Like I, I try to have the most charitable perspective, like I always try to say, okay, like, how, how did you come to this conclusion? Like, why are you thinking like this? But sometimes you sometimes you have to also say, Uh, why do I think what I think? And this is what a lot of people aren't willing to do. They're not willing to go, what is?

What is the reason why I believe this? Is it I believe this? Cause I've asserted it in the past and I don't wanna be wrong? Is it, uh, because it makes the most sense?

Do you think that's gonna happen more now? With again, back to social media, the idea of going kind of the worst sin is hypocrisy, right? The worst sin is changing your mind about something. But I'd much rather be a hypocrite than the same person all my life.

Well, I don't think that's necessarily Like, hypocrite. I think a hypocrite is saying one thing, but while you're doing another thing, no, I think, like a preacher that's cheating on his wife.

I think there's been, like, a concept creep, and hypocrite means now changing your mind about something.

Okay, well, I think that's silly. But that's I think you're supposed easily, yeah, to evolve as a person. I've changed my mind multiple times, I change it all the time. I say all the time, and I think people would do well to take this into consideration. Your ideas are not you, they are not you. They are things that you entertain inside your mind. You are how you respond and react to your ideas. When you're confronted with, uh, reality, when you're confronted with data, or when you're confronted with, uh, the the actionable, you know, what are the consequences of following yeah, how you, this idea?

how you actually How did it play out? live your life, yeah, Oh, we thought it was gonna play out well, but it turned out to be kinda fucked up. Like, you have to be honest about what is happening and then what you've learned along the way. And the more people do that, the more we'll share with each other why we came to our conclusions, and we'll have a better understanding. Like, what kind of people believe in right wing authoritarian, uh, white nationalist thinking, what people believe in communism and Marxism, and why do you think we should burn the society down?

And who's gonna restructure the new one, and who's gonna provide the infrastru? You know what? I mean? It's like,

well, I.

there's two, there's two different ways of, uh, approaching society in this country, and I think that's completely insane. And I think most of us don't really operate like that, but feel like we have to if we wanna have a tribe. And I think that's part of the problem. And I think one of the good things about having conversations with people that, like, I have a bunch of people on that are that have completely different opinions than me.

And we have fun and we love each other. It's fine, that's okay to do, that's how it's supposed to be. You're not supposed to, like, have to win every fucking conversation where it's about the the the way the world works. You're supposed. I wanna know why someone thinks completely different than I do, and whether or not I can incorporate some of that into my own But it's it's thinking.

a weird thing now with I feel bad for the kids coming up, because there's a there's a, uh, a record of everything they thought and said on their on their,

That's true.

their social media.

People get fired for tweets Whereas whereas they did when they were fifteen.

whereas, yeah, and we get to go, uh, we get to be dummies until we're full grown,

they all should get to do and they continue being that.

dummies. But you know what I mean, it's like you, you get to, you never get to wipe the past. There's a club in London now, uh, that it's like a pop-up thing, it's called Lost. Kids are going nuts for it, right? You go into the club, you give them their phone, they put it in the in the in the thing, and you go into a club. It's on five different floors, and and no one knows where anyone is, and no one's got their phone, and no one can find their friends.

And they go for a pee and they, and it's like a club in the nineties. We just went in, you lost your friends, you met, met a bunch of girls from somewhere else, you met some guys from this place, and it people just kind of mix it up. And it, it's like it. There are elements where the constant connectivity is like, it's a trap, because you're, you're constantly kind of, you have to be that person Yeah, it takes, rather than being it takes away that.

Really change

from your humanism, it takes away from you being a person. It does it it, and I think that's where we're going, unfortunately. I think that that is a part of what this A I revolution is all about. And this is like, I think it's a natural progression to move away from, I I think, move away from our whatever our primate instincts are. And it's something that is a little bit more muted and not as emotional and not as connected to a lot of the things that we associate with human reward systems.

You know, like greed, envy, lust, the desire to control territory and property, and the desire to acquire resources like this. These are all very tribal, primate instincts, and the only way to get them out of us is to feminize society, get us addicted to electronics, and eventually have us integrate with those electronics. And as A I becomes the dominant intelligent force on the planet, we will have no choice but to abandon whatever it means to be a a tribal primate and join the hive.

I don't know, I.

Or be like the people in the Amazon living I don't know in consistency

how you feel about it. Like, I style. don't mind a I for admin kind of stuff, but like, don't outsource any skill you're not comfortable losing.

I don't think we're gonna have a say. Uh, I think it's a process, and I think this process is. It started when they made the first flint broadheads. I think when they first learned how to flint knap, and they first figured out a bow and arrow, they kept accelerating till they had rifles, and then they have drones, and then it's never gonna stop. It's what we do.

well, there is that weird, there's the um, the end of the world, and, uh, so the the end of history fallacy. So this idea that if you ask most people, how much did you change in the last ten years? They go, Oh, my, I don't even recognize myself from ten years ago. I'm so different now, everything's changed, I think different things, I've got different opinions, whatever. How much are you gonna change in the next ten years?

Oh, no, not at all. I'm, I'm, I'm what I am. No, no, no, you don't understand, I'm this is solid I'm set in my state, this is me, ways. this is me now, this is what I do. And you go, well, that a. And we always think that, we always think like, this is, we're going through a very rough patch, um, globally, like, uh, in in every society, like there's, but don't think we haven't been through harder times.

Like, if you take a broad enough outlook, right? It's 4% of kids, like, things can be terrible and still much better than they were, right? 4% of kids now in the world die before their fifth birthday. Now, that's, that's awful, but 200 years ago, it was 40% of kids, right? We just had the most violent century we've ever had, right? The La. like since the last hundred years, like the most violent, awful century, great wars.

is it really Yeah, well, okay, is statistically? Is it? No, well, here's the thing, uh, between one and two percent of people with both world wars and, um, the concentration camps, and, um, the, uh, Chinese, um, famines, the Russian famines, like all of those things, like man-made disasters. Between one and two percent of people died violent deaths in that hundred years. When we were hunter-gatherers, it was between ten and twenty percent of people died violent deaths.

So things are getting better. I mean, Yes, yeah, things I, I'm, I'm are getting better very. It's a hard thing statistically. to say, but that that, uh, was a great S Stephen Pinker book, uh, about things getting better. There was a great, um, book, Factfulness, about the, yeah, things Yeah, I read are, the

the Pinker book.

thing. Things can be terrible and still be getting better than they were. They're just Like, there's not utopian, progress.

and we want utopia, but we are definitely getting better. I think I mean, I that the don't think this is like the the. The most violent period in history was probably during Genghis Khan's era, like they, the Genghis Khan alone, his, uh, he and his warriors were responsible for the death of 10% of the earth. 10% of the population I read a book of the earth.

about him. It was fascinating. It's fucking insane. It's Yeah,

fucking insane, and I, I don't think we could. It's like he was the Michael Jordan of conquerors. You know what I mean? Like, there's certain outliers like Mike Tyson in his prime. They're just like, Wow, you're never gonna see that again. Like, so that was probably the most violent period in in our our history, I think much more violent than today. Um, but there's still tons of violence today, and it's fucking disturbing. How we're so smart and we have so much access to information, we know so much about each other, and yet we're still engaged in horrible, violent activity all the time.

I just think there's, uh, there's a a change that's happening currently, and I think we're in the middle of it, so it's very difficult to see. I think one of the things that benefits young people today. I don't envy young people today. I think they have a much more challenging life. It's much more challenging in terms of you're so much more scrutinized, the dumb shit that you do. Oh my god, if somebody gave me a fucking Twitter account and a phone when I was fifteen, I would have said the dumbest fucking shit ever.

And I would be, uh, married to that for the rest of my life. That's crazy. So I don't envy them in that way. But they have access also to so many more brilliant thinkers, so many more interesting people. There's so many more books on tape that you can download instantaneously. You just go on Spotify right now and for the rest of the day, just listen to Alan Watts talk about things. You know, there's so much more access to brilliant conversations through podcasts than have ever been a available before.

yeah, but it's, uh, so in, but okay, here's the thing. In a world where information is free, attention becomes everything. So why go to school, right? Why learn? Like we still teach in schools, like the Prussians, right? So the Prussians taught, cause they needed to, um, staff their empire. So they taught information and discipline, right? So I think we should teach like the ancient Greeks, we should teach for character. Why learn any subject? Well, every subject in school is the same subject.

It's about attention, being able to give something your attention. And in this world that we live in now, with infinite information out there, it's about strategic ignorance. Pick some things in life and not to give a fuck about. Pick some stuff that you go, look, I don't know anything about that. It's okay, that's not gonna be my thing. This is gonna be my thing. And finding that for young people in a world where they're just like, it's all coming at you and you go, right, I've got to just pick my stuff and get good right, but at something.

you're, you're proving my point, because this conversation of you saying that wasn't available twenty years ago. So when I was growing up, there was no one like you that I could just go on YouTube and listen to someone say that someone who I I loved as a comedian and respected and would go pay money to see them talk. This guy would be on a YouTube video explaining a way of approaching my life that I hadn't considered yet.

And then it will inspire me now to go and do that. Well, it's an In a world of short interesting thing, yeah, attention span, this fucking podcast gets viewed more than anything on earth.

it is interesting. It's like, I sort of view, I don't know how you think about Many other it. I think you podcasts. think about it in the same way, right? I think fame is a currency, and we choose how to spend it. And increasingly at my live shows, at my, you know, when I go on a podcast or whatever, and this is what I like to spend it on. I like to spend it on, like, there's a there's kind of a little bit of kind of, um, wisdom that you can share, or, you know, some.

That's an interesting viewpoint you can take that might help someone out there. And you wanna, you want people to kinda get involved, you want people to be a little bit better, cause there's kind of a, there's kind of a crisis out there. There's like people are having a people are having such a tough time like that, that generation coming up. Like, you've got to deal them in, but they always deal with them to society.

have, Jimmy, this is the thing they always have. You know, I talked about this recently, I I just finished it, this Alan Watts book from, um, Is it the 1950

is it the the the what is it? the um, the

the wisdom of insecurity.

oh, no, I haven't read that

It's fantastic. I, I just finished it. So it is from 1952, I think it was when he wrote it. And he's talking about how rapidly society is changing, and how many people are a. It's called the Age of Anxiety is is what he talks about. So he's talking about 1952 as the age of anxiety. Because of the rapid change in society. And he's talking about technology, and he's talking about government, and he's talking about world affairs.

He's talking about the same fucking thing in 1952. So this is seventy four fucking years ago, the same problems existed. It is a part of being a human, and everyone who lives in it thinks they're in end times. Everyone is in it. Like during the Salem witch trials, they're probably like, J Jesus is coming back any day now. This is crazy. They're drowning witches, they're probably not even witches. This is fucking nuts.

I got a theory about,

Society is collapsing.

I got a theory about witches. Do you wanna hear my theory about witches?

I would love to hear your theory.

I think it's a pretty, pretty good theory. Okay, so anything that's kooky in the world, right? Tarot cards and horoscopes and anything that's like, skews feminine and is kooky. I think is like, we denigrated women for so long, we burnt witches for so long, that that memory is still there, right? And so women's intuition, men's intuition is so powerful that we we don't tr, we don't trust it, we don't allow ourselves to access that. And so those little things are like talisman, so it allows you to access.

So the tarot cards, whatever, it's just a a a woman with great intuition that goes, Oh, well, I'll allow myself that intuition through this game. It's like it's just a a manifestation that she goes. I can't believe that I can't understand how I know that thing, so I've got, uh, so I'll allow myself know it through this. right, like So

almost like remote viewing or something.

yeah, something like you, you, Some weird you go,

state you get into when you're going through these cards, where it gives you information,

yeah, so you go, you can't believe your intuition is that good. But people have incredible intuition, but we've lost the ability to trust it because everything's become about, uh, logic and left brain,

So you do it through the cards,

so you do it through the cards, because that gives you permission. And religion, in a bigger sense, does that. It's allowing you to kinda get to that, that tren, that peace is available at all times, but you, you're not allowed, you, you won't allow yourself access to that. You can't believe how kinda great you are, so you have to kinda believe in something else. People used to be, people used to be more porous 200 years ago.

People are sealed off now, but people were more porous. They were more open to the idea of being possessed by spirits, or, or, uh, being, uh, given the grace from something else. They were much more kind of apt to believe that, and that there was ways of understanding what they were and everything they they could be.

Right? And I think that, as science sort of explained away a lot of the things that people attributed to magic and spirits and all these different things, I think we had a a much more, uh, distorted perception of how much we actually know. And I think intuition is a real thing, But the and I think I think psychic ability is a real thing, too. But I think there's also a lot of people that are full of shit and they dilute the water.

well, yeah, of course, but I mean, But that's the opposite.

the problem is that people run into so many charlatans that they no longer believe that people have real intuition.

no, I don't think any of those things. I mean, for the record, I don't think any of those things are real. I think they're a way of accessing something that we all possess, we all have great intuition. But, like, the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith is certainty. And, like people aren't like, I don't like being certain about right, I stuff. I like have a whole to, like, leave bit, it open,

I'll tell you later, but I have a whole bit about that. In terms of religion, what I like that I like people that believe in God, I don't like people that know God. Like people that communicate with God, and God gives them instructions, like those people, trouble me.

right? Yeah, that's a that's a great distinction.

Because it's like, Hey, what are you saying? Like, you might be using this tool that we've all agreed that is helping society, and you might be using it for your own benefit in some weird way. Like, I was just reading about this guy where God told him he has to have two wives, so he had a second wife. And he's like, he announced it to the But that's the, that's to

the old, that's what people don't understand about the taking the Lord's name in vain. People think that means cursing people think, but it doesn't mean cursing. What taking the Lord's name in vain is, it's a a attributing your selfish desires a and saying, Oh, no, it's God's. God wants me to do this. That's taking the Lord's name in vain, that's yes, not the reason. That's

saying God damn it when you stub your toe.

no, that's fine. He's not fussed about that. It's like, No, no, we have to go to war, cause God told me, What? yeah, what? Hey, Well, no, that seems, hold up, Jack, oh, did he? Are you sure?

exactly. And that's the problem. Society, or or history, rather, is littered with those stories. And you're like,

It's weird. Well, here's the annoying thing, right? We never get to know this stuff. Like, there's so many. There's that great, um, quote, it's by A C D C s. Rody. God is the name we give to the blanket, we throw over the mystery to give it shape.

Ooh, a roadie said that,

Yeah, well, he became a spiritual, a wonderful thinker. But yeah, God God is the name we give to the he's probably blank that we've the guy that had drawed in the sand.

all the mushrooms. He was the guy. of course, He was. There's always that one guy who knows how to get mushrooms. Yeah, um, I think, you know, we're learning as, and I think humans are learning how to better be human beings. I think it's happening in real time, and I think it's a slow, laborious and brutal process. And I think in the middle of that, we're giving birth to a digital God. So we're in the process of getting better at being people while we're making something.

Now, the rose colored glasses, glasses have full version. Is that this A I automates society in a way that's much more even, distributes resources in a way that people no longer have to work for food and shelter, and you can instead pursue interests. The question is whether or not people have been trained to pursue interests, or whether they have been locked into a long-standing life. A pattern of just doing a thing for a living, and but but now that thing goes hang on, hang on, away, and you don't know what to do look, look, with yourself,

this, this will not be the big change, the big cha. Like 1870 to 1970 was the big change. Everything changed. Like that, you, the way that we lived is unrecognizable in those hundred years. We may never get another hundred years like that. That was phenomenal, right? So everything, everything that's changed since 1970 has been, uh, bits, right? Nothing's changed in in in the in that world. But the house is unrecognizable in that time, right?

From indoor plumbing to heating to, um, uh, food production, uh, the the abundance that we had. We can't see that, obviously, because the hedonic treadmill we get very used to stuff. But the greatest inflation in the world is not monetary inflation, it's expectation inflation, and that's got another word, that's called progress, right? So we, the Western world, we make something that everyone else wants, we make progress, we make progress, we've made kinda great progress. But you go back like 200 years ago, 98% of the population were working in agriculture, uh, on on farms, right?

We all moved into the cities and we got these other jobs and things. And and we think this is it, this is the end of the end of history, right? This is, we all live in cities. No, no, no, it'll, it'll change again, it'll change again. And we, we're all just, I suppose, from that thing of it's rammed ass, isn't it? We're all just walking each other home. We're all just trying to help, try and try and do what you can with what you've got, where you are.

Try and help the people around you, try, and, you know, try and make a little difference.

But I think that's also part of what contributes to the anger that you see online, which is so much more prevalent than the anger that you see in real life interaction with people. Because I think there is an isolation and there is a a lack of, uh, that kind of like, we're all just trying to get along. We're not trying to get along online. Online, we're trying to attack people. In the real world, we're mostly trying to get along.

Well, a lot Mostly, when you go to a party in the real world, you wanna find a guy like you and have a cool conversation, have a drink and have a laugh and and feel good about it. And get out of there. And like, that guy was really cool, like that was fun. That's what everybody wants, but it's not available to everybody.

here's the analogy I would draw, right? It's the okay, uh, road rage. Remember that road rage thing, right? Okay, so that's him, right? So you're in a car, someone cuts you off and you bug you bug you. And like, there's a, and there's a there's a pane of glass between you and them. Okay, imagine that times a billion online. If you, if you bump into someone in the street, or at a party, it's, oh, sorry, mate.

Like, there's something about being with other people, the the, uh, the the unspoken communication of just being in the space with someone else who's going. That guy seems very calm, he's cool, it's, uh, okay, there's no, there's no aggravation here, this is great, right? Like, you bump into someone, it's not a big deal. But in a car with a screen, it's it could be a problem, right? Because you're, you're, you're in your space, and he's in his space.

I think a phone, you're looking at a screen, it's that times a billion

100%.

every day.

The other thing about cars is you're at a heightened state because you know you're moving fast and you have to think quickly. So your brain operates at a very different state than when you're walking. When you're walking, everyone's walking, you're just kinda moving around, everything's easy. You don't, you're not in a heightened state I find of danger.

that thing of like, I don't You're in a know if you you're in a state find this.

of danger when you're in a car. So if you're going sixty miles an hour and somebody gets in front of you, you're a fucking cock sucker. There's a reason why you get that quick, cause you're already at seven, you're already like looking at the mirrors, you're you're, you're on the gas.

I don't know, I find the thing, I write a lot in the car, do you, do you? I like writing when I'm driving.

So you shut the music off. No, Shut everything just off. I've got, so just think

my my theory is like, boredom is unappreciated serenity, right? You wanna get in places where you're bored. I wanna be in a sauna just with my thoughts. and just think, I wanna be in a car doing something that I've got unconscious competence. I don't have to think about driving a car, driving the car, let things bubble up, let things let things happen. Like, sit in boredom for a while. Like we've, we've miscoded stuff in our society, right?

So boredom is a problem now. We're massively overstimulated and the answers you're looking for are in the silence you're avoiding. Right and and you go and and people talk about problems like rich and famous is is heaven in a secular world. Like oh oh cause cause if you don't know any anyone that's rich and famous, it looks like they don't have any problems. Yeah, they do. They've just got different problems. Problems are puzzles to solve. A problem just means something needs your attention, right?

And you're just gonna have different ones. They're just gonna change. And if if you get good at solving them, you'll give yourself a bigger one. You'll give yourself something else to do. Cause a guy without anything to do is Where the resentment Man.

Comes from the problems not daily survival so there's a big big difference between the problem of being able to feed yourself and feed your children. Versus the problem of do I buy this house or do I retire

I'll tell you what. Or do I You know what real

It's a it is.

Privilege is. Real privilege. Like the poor have no future. Right? The poor people are living hour to hour, day to day, right? Like, the richest people, you know, are planning their trust fund for their grandchildren. Their time horizon is massively different. We have to how come up with some way to make it all right for people that are on, you know, to get to a stage where they can plan a little bit ahead and they're not living in the never ending now.

That's it that's it's that's But also The real privilege.

That that being in a desperate state is what motivates a lot of people to succeed. Well in, like, some of the most motivated people I know that are the most successful came from poverty. And when they were poor, when they were young, the the thing got burned into them. They're like, there's a desperation to to to succeed, cause you don't wanna be in this place cause that's a the the difference between the resentment that people feel for rich people, like, oh, they got problems.

Fuck their problems. I feel that way and I'm rich. Fuck their problems, cause that's not real problems. Real problems is how can I eat? How can I feed my kids? What am I gonna do for a job? That's real problems. I've had those problems, and I remember very clearly the moment I started making money. Cause I got a development deal. I got a bunch of money, like a hundred grand or 150 grand. And then immediately, I felt relaxed.

Like a weight lifted off my shoulders. Like, now I don't have to worry about my rent. Like, immediately.

It's a weird thing it's like when people think you made it as opposed to when you made it. It's so vastly different. For me, it was like the Comedy Store, and a place called the Banana Cabaret in in London, and I was doing gigs and I was doing like four shows a night, and it was like 200 pounds a show, and I was like making, I made like 800 in cash in a night. I went

You got it.

You go. I'm live I'm living off my wits. I'm fine. I made it so much before. Like, people think it's when you're on T V or when you got a first special or that that whatever the Thing is. You go, no, that thing of, like, going, that has to be, but you know, universal basic income, the idea of like, we we should be testing that in places because you go, there's bits of it that make me think, I I worry about it because is it saying to someone, we don't need you like people need purpose.

But purpose But that's what And independence.

We're saying earlier people need to be trained to follow their interests rather than trained to try to find a thing that you could do for time where people are gonna pay you for that time.

Yeah, but build for character.

But it's totally possible for those people who went that way to not go that way and to go a different way. And I'm sure most people have something they're interested in pursuing. And you find that thing. And one of the greatest lessons that I learned when I was a a kid doing martial arts, my instructor said that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential. So find a vehicle, whatever it is, it's learning to play piano, whether whether whether it's writing songs, whether it's writing books, EV every Everybody can Lesson Find a thing.

Every lesson is the same lesson. It's attention, it's learning how to give something your Yes. And finding Attention.

Something that you that really, like, gets you excited, something you enjoy, you know, and it doesn't have to be that you you'll only do that if you're struggling. And you you need to provide foo you know for your food and your housing. You need to pay for all that because if you don't pay for all that, you're not gonna have any motivation. I don't know if that's true because I don't think about that anymore and I have plenty of motivation.

I think the real motivation is finding a thing that you love and just doing that thing. Whether what the whatever the fuck it is, whether it's playing chess,

It's that thing.

Whatever it is.

Pay attention to what you pay attention Yes, and To.

Enjoy it, enjoy it cause this life can be enjoyed. You could and especially if you find like-minded people and you have like a good group of fun people and you have you can have a lot of fun like life doesn't have to be the worst experience you could imagine. It could be really fucking great, but it takes a lot of work and it also takes a lot of luck.

Yeah, it's a lot like we've been

Super lucky.

I mean, I can't even begin to express my gratitude.

You and I are two of the luckiest human beings that have ever lived. Ever lived. We get to do a thing that most people couldn't dream of. If you have, you were a child and you just dreamed of what your future was gonna be like, I would have never dreamed this.

I wouldn't I wouldn't have dreamed this big, you know, I think that thing of going. I don't know. I think it's, uh.

But you're just a normal person and I'm just a normal person. I think the message is if you find a thing and fucking run that thing down and keep doing it and keep doing it and just dive into it, you can get pretty far in this life and you'll have an enjoyable life. You just have to find out what your thing is. And I think if there's anything that universal basic income could potentially provide with the right training for kids where we try to rewire their approach to it so instead of this like rockefeller approach to making factory workers we develop this approach where you're teaching kids how to be curious about Well, I don't like Things and how to

The way that they silo

Pursue things. Education. Like Oh, I hate it.

The different okay, so that's physics and that's maths and that's history and that's geography and you go, no, the world isn't kinda isn't like that. The world's everything together. You've got to be interested in everything But you need And it all appeals.

Experts to teach you each individual discipline. So the siloing is kind of important for that. Like you don't want a physicist that doesn't understand uh history teaching you history. You want a person who's obsessed with history. And those people exist in silos. It's like the key is we have to teach people how to be curious and how to pursue their interests instead of just pursuing something that is going to provide you with food and shelter. Because then you're just gonna get sucked into materialism cause that's what most people are really into money.

What they're really into is the objects they get for their money so they can show how well they're doing.

But that's like people that don't know the difference between you know intrinsic and instrumental things right. The stuff that we want intrinsically, you know, love, uh, connection, um joy, great, and there's stuff that we think will get us that. So money is the kind of classic instrument, right. So it's the instrument for getting the thing. Or, you know, people want respect because they're outsourcing what they really want, which is self-respect. So you go, no, no, it has to be like The if the if the locus of control is within you, that's a massive advantage in life.

And then thinking about what you really want as opposed to, yes, that line from Fight Club, isn't it, the uh, we spend our lives making money to buy things to impress people we don't give a fuck about.

And think about how much that's hijacked by social media where people are just chasing likes all day. They're chasing people agreeing, okay, I like you. I like you. I like But the You, Jimmy.

But the the the um the attribute of being envied is what passes as glamour in our society. So it's this it's the rennie um gerard guy that talks about memetic desires. So a lot of our desires are we we we don't know what to want. So we want what other people want. So we we say so there's like there's um there's a in intrinsic value to something and then there's a metaphysical value to something. So any watch will tell the time right a Casio will tell the time time the same as a Rolex but one of them has a uh uh a metaphysical value attached to it because it's what it says above its functionality.

And we want those things so people want some people want a Ferrari cause they they're really into the manufacturing the car and their thing and how fast it the the speed they wanna drive it properly and some people want it because they go, well, if I have that, then I'll be because other people want that.

You pull up to the valet and it was like, ooh, who's Ferrari? Ooh, it's Jimmy Carr.

But are you getting the are you getting the Do you really wanna. That fundamental question, what do you want, what do you want, is so difficult to answer in life. And you you know, it's it's it Cause everybody It changes.

Gets a different answer too. Yeah.

But those the big things in life, like the you know, having kids, having a family, having like, people, we're the first generation that have had to ask ourselves some of these questions, right? Why why is life hard now for for young people, for all of us, right? We're the first people ever that had to ask, shall I get married? Shall I have kids? What shall I do for a living? What what's my, uh like, we're asking ourselves these questions in a way that no one had to answer those questions a hundred years ago.

We we have to ask ourselves, do I believe in God? Do I not believe in God? What what do I think about God? You used to be born into a community and they were a Christian community and everyone got married and everyone had kids and you worked in the place where your dad worked. You didn't have to think about any of that stuff. Now we have to think about all of that stuff. We're like self-authored creatures.

That's an incredible amount of responsibility. So the idea that what we've done is we've privatised mental health problems. We've said to people, oh, your mental health problem is a personal failing. You fucked up. No, we've organised our society in a way that's led to an incredible amount of depression and anxiety and we have to be much kinder uh to people. We have to give them two things agency and empathy. Together. The kindest thing you can say to someone is I believe you can handle this.

Like to give but also to have empathy that they're going through something.

Hear, hear. It's a great way to wrap this up. Jimmy Carr, you're the fucking man.

Thanks so much. Thanks for everything, man.

I appreciate you very much, sir. It's always good to talk to you.

Yeah. Great.

It was a lot of fun last night too. Oh, I mean It was great. Good times. What a great I Episode of Kill Tony, too. Alright, that's it. Goodbye, everybody.

Thanks.