Transcript of #2571 - Jimmy Carr New

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day. Hey, Jimmy. Good to see you, friend. Yeah, I want to thank you so much for introducing me to Clarkson.

Oh, it's, it's, 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. He's 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's the show? I went, 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 to the Mothership and went, Can I get a rosé? Luckily, I think your missus has a bottle of rosé somewhere, which is now missing.

They keep rosé there for her.

Yeah. Well, you know, the guy he was with, Wilman, who's his producer, they're childhood friends. They were in school together and they've done everything together.

They're just as thick as thieves. The whole origin story, how it started out with a syndicated story, a syndicated article.

He started— 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. Wow. 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. That's how he kind of got his reputation.

Wow.

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. Really? Nothing. He was just like, just a guy. He graduated with nothing, I think. Graduated— 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.

Right, yeah. Yes, I think that's—

He says, do you see that? See that bump? That's from punching Piers Morgan.

Well, well done him.

He's so fun, man. We had a great time. You've got to get him on.

You've got to get him on.

I would love 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 it's that thing where you've got other people's opinions about me are none of my business.

Yes.

Like, people are gonna write things, and that's okay. Yeah. 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 comics are maybe better at it, 'cause we're not entertainers in the pure sense. I remember this thing, like, Robbie Williams 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 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 didn'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? Yeah. 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.

I think it's— that's audience capture. It's where you become a cover's version of yourself.

Right.

That thing of like, that fame being like a weird hall of mirrors, where you kind of reflect back what you think they want you to be.

Yes.

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. I think it's possible to say, thank you, I really appreciate that. I'm glad you love that album. I've seen it happen.

I wonder if it's a continuum of like, okay, so you've got like, I don't know, 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 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 want to figure out the best form of it to present to other people, right?

Yeah.

That's— 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?

Young. Yeah.

He famously went on before Chuck. Who did he go on before? Was it Chuck? What was the story where he lit the piano on fire? Well, there's

the cousin. Okay, I think that's where he had to go.

He was 22 and he married his 13-year-old first cousin once removed. Okay.

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 Kurt Cobain, you've got Jimi Hendrix, you've got Janis Joplin.

I'd make a distinction here between hyper-accelerated rationality, like super smart people doing great stuff, and actual genius. I think genius always comes with a little sprinkle of crazy.

Yes.

I think it's like there is a price to pay that you would not want to pay. So whether it's you know, Michael Jackson or, you know, Kurt Cobain, like tortured souls. Yes. Creating this incredible entertainment for us. Yeah. But 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 aged 27? These incredible musicians, Janis 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. And to be that good, so then they're numbing themselves. The drugs are the medication to just— I just— 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 type of personality traits, that, you know, a predetermined pattern of personality traits, I don't think you could do it. 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 works. Like, Kanye West clearly has some mental issues.

Yeah, I think that's—

But man, that motherfucker knows how to make some bangers. Yes, it's extraordinary. Like, that dude, he's—

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

I asked Elon Musk once about that. And he said, you wouldn't want to be me. He goes, you wouldn't want to— he goes, I just— my brain never stops moving. It's horrible.

Well, I kind of think that thing about—

There's like a storm going on in my head all the time.

I sometimes think about that with anxiety. You know that idea that anxiety is thought without control? And a flow state is control without thought. Hmm. 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 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 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 think— here's my theory on Elon Musk. I think he's going to find religion in the next 12 months. Because, right, there's a theory, right? It's 4 things that keep us from God, right? OK. OK, so fame, fortune, power, and pleasure. And I think he's won every one of those games. I think he's going to get bored. And he's going to have to go and find God.

Interesting.

Fame, fortune, power, pleasure.

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

Well, this is my— you know, the— I'm with Hegel and Nietzsche on this, right? So I don't think— I don't think we were created in God's image. But I think we so wanted there to be a God that we created one in our image. I'm going to 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 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 believe as well. I 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 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 because like you like the Egyptian culture, right? The myths and legends and the pyramids. Because it strikes me that the Greeks got a lot from the Egyptians.

Right.

The Greeks basically looked at the Egyptians and went, oh, they fell to nothing because they never innovated. They never changed anything. So the Greeks kind of wanted not to make— they didn't want to make that mistake. Like we live closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra lived to the building of the pyramids.

We— yes.

That's like a weird fact. They never— because once they had it locked in, they just went, okay, that's us. This is our system. As opposed to the—

There's a— that's a narrative 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 him. Okay, Graham Hancock had a show on Netflix for 2 seasons. I don't know if they're going to do a 3rd, but it's called Ancient Apocalypse. Is that it? That's it, right? And it's all about how—

Was this made for you?

No.

This feels like it was made specifically for you.

I've been a fan of his for a long time. He has— he was actually one of the first guests I ever had on this podcast. Actual guests.

Oh, wow, okay.

Other than being comedian friends of mine, me and Duncan convinced him to do the podcast when the podcast was like—

no one was on. I think I have heard this guy on here when he came back.

He's been on many, many times. Yeah, okay. 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 extrastellar or interstellar, any kind of asteroid, comet impacts, all those 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. And this sort of 5,000-year period of reconstruction of civilization.

Let me see if I can tie all of this together.

Okay.

Okay. Artists, Elon Musks, and the pyramids.

And AI.

Here we go. And AI. Here we go. Yeah. 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. And that is what a—

And that's what the pyramid's for.

And that is what a rocket is for.

There's a lot of debate on what the pyramid's for now, but most likely it was some sort of a device. Yeah. They were using it for something.

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

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

Yeah, I kind of don't know what to make of it because it feels to me like 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 labyrinth that was discovered by— well, it was documented by Herodotus. So we're talking thousands of years ago. Yeah. This incredible structure underneath Giza that's greater than Giza. Now they know that's real now. They've done— they've 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 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 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 40-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 structure.

And this is from 5,000 years ago?

Probably longer. This is the real problem. Yeah, the real problem is 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, a really accurate representation of what that person says, including the works of Jesus.

Yeah. Well, this is like, I suppose it's that thing of the the carcass of the whale. Like the idea that we're living in a world that we couldn't build again. Like, you know, from Britain, you go, we were the first industrializing nation, right? We built the first railways. And now we are totally incapable of building a railway. Like the last 15 years, 20 years, the Chinese have covered themselves in high-speed rail and we've covered ourselves in environmental reports.

Right.

We seem incapable of kind of getting shit done. So you go, you have these weird things where you go, the pyramids are there and we've kind of lost the instruction manual. We couldn't do that again now 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's a theory about like how civilizations fall.

Sure.

Peter Turchin has this really good theory, which is it's 2 things. It's— one is inequality 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 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 too great and everything crumbles. That's his kind of theory through history of how societies kind of come crashing down.

Well, that That's certainly a factor, and we're experiencing that right now. I think the factor that they were dealing with was asteroid impacts, and 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. Right. Iridium is very common in space, very rare on Earth. When there's a layer of it, it usually indicates that we were hit.

Right.

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 people talk about, you know, the environment, what's going on with our environment. And really 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 2 degrees.

What year was this?

This is 18— he'll know. 1883?

Wow.

That like no summer in Europe. Like, and Europe was, I guess, probably no summer in the world, but they didn't measure it anywhere else. So there's kind of mass starvation off the back of that.

Right, of course.

And, you know, and again, you know, like civil unrest and people kind of falling to pieces because—

You know about the Toba one? The Toba volcano? There was one that's— 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 Mabili live on DAZN. Download the DraftKings Sports app and use code ROGAN. New DraftKings customers can spend $5 and get $200 in total bonuses, includes all markets. That's Code Rogan in partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours.

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It knocked humanity down to a few thousand people.

I think it's 60,000 is like the little— is the thing, the lowest we got to, I think. Which is extraordinary when you think about it.

From a supervolcano. And so a supervolcano is, 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 are in the middle of a crazy pathway where we run into 900,000+ near-Earth objects. And we're spiraling through the galaxy, hurling into space at an insane rate of speed.

I mean, it kind of makes me feel dizzy.

City-sized objects that are just floating around, And occasionally they come rocketing in at 5 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.

Yeah, within seconds it was miles into the Earth.

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, that would work, that worked pretty well. For the distribution of gender. Yeah. And so 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, you know, things from that era that just 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 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. What's that? What's going on there? What the fuck is going on there? And how come we can't do that? They also get heavily affected, their sexual organs get affected by things like herbicides like atrazine. You know that stuff 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 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 aliens are a real thing.

I'll make a note of that somewhere. Yeah, I mean, that seems like a pretty good idea.

They can grow their limbs back. Also, they— like, some of them don't need to eat for a year. Like crocodiles, they cannot 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, listen, I'm with you. If we get invaded by crocodiles, I think we need to take it very seriously. Yeah, we might bring humanity together, which would be the good thing.

Something would, like another 9/11 or something. We need almost— we need to be attacked. We're so divided 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've got to be careful what you wish for, because the things that, that cause equality to happen are— it's war, revolution, civilizational collapse, and pandemics.

Yeah.

Like, those are the things that equal out society. So it's like, it's, it's terrible.

Pandemic did for a little bit, I think. I think in the beginning it kind of 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— when no one knew what the severity of the infection was, and you were just hearing about this disease from China, we're locking down the country, that was genuinely terrifying.

Well, the idea that—

It was sobering.

Everyone went through the same thing.

Yes.

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

Right.

But it— yes.

It wasn't uniting though, after a while. Because after a while, it became very divisive, especially when there was the whole, are you with or without the vaccines? Like, are you Apple or are you Android? It's like, it's one of those tribal things that people do. Are you Republican? Are you a Democrat? Even 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. Which I never thought we would see.

I think it's a little window into that.

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 around the

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

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 going to get it. If that was the narrative—

not what's happening right now though, in terms of going— if you look at what we're doing, right? Gain-of-function research, which is— it almost certainly came from gain-of-function research. Yes. Which is like looking for a gas leak with a lit match, right? So it's just inherently dangerous. But this is kind of the— I don't know if it is even a conspiracy now, but the search for AGI strikes me as a similar kind of thing, right? That you're searching for the last invention, the last thing that you'll ever need. You had this conspiracy about solstice.

Well, I think AGI has legitimate potential to change our lives for the better. It's just, will it?

Yes. Is the future—

is it Star Trek or Star Wars? There's no way these engineering viruses to be more virulent, to be more— infect more people more easily, to kill people more, There's no way that's good. There's nothing good out of that. Well, maybe AGI potentially could change society, potentially for the better. It's just so— it's like, what's the number? Like, but is the— is— how does it go?

Yeah, and it's, it's a, it's a knife edge of life.

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, like, they wiped out polio in the, in the '50s, and then they, and then they, they kept going.

That story, but they, but they kept going. That story is kind of fucking crazy too. You know what?

I heard the lady on here talking about it, but I mean, it's like, you go, they definitely— polio was something.

Well, 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. 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, remember John Stewart used to follow this, like they was just spraying the neighborhood.

You want to— yes, and that's what happened. That happened all across America. What percentage of polio do you think is asymptomatic?

I have no idea.

Take a guess.

Asymptomatic? Yeah,

no symptoms at all. You got polio.

10%?

95 to 99.

Wow.

Yeah, we'll look that up just so we, you know, it's accurate. That's the real number.

Yeah.

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 I don't know why this—

But hey, it's not like 70% isn't interesting.

No, 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%. I'm interested, put it into a different search engine and see if there's other—

Is this maybe the worst thing that— so when we talk about the COVID—

Hold on, this is why it is. This is why 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 throat.

All right, I've 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 symptoms Zero symptoms rather, for 70% of the people.

Yeah, I mean, it's still a terrible disease, but even— Exactly. You look at that and you go—

Terrible disease. However, so is spraying 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 get polio. Fuck that, don't get polio. Polio's bad. However, they were spraying DDT everywhere and it gives you the same fucking symptoms, and the two things stopped when they stopped spraying DDT everywhere. Dr. Suzanne Humphreys, she's a guest on the show. Yeah, I just want to tell people that are listening, there's a great book called Dissolving Illusions, and if you just countercheck 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 COVID 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 know, you see all these people that are suing and you find that 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 an anti-inflammatory medication and they were giving it to people 50,000+ 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 drugs that cause strokes.

Here's the strange 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.

Yes.

But it does not happen in Europe.

Right.

What's going on there?

The Sackler family. Do you know the whole story?

Well, I remember 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're just kind of on them all the time and everything's fine. And that's what you need. Just be on them all the time and you're going to be fine. And they got doctors to go along with this. They got doctors to subscribe to these ideas and promote them.

But the fentanyl, the idea— Because it's in OxyContin. Yeah, but the idea— how is that happening only in North America?

Well, because we're next to Mexico. 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. Marianna 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 goes to crazy places where she can get killed all the time. And she started out— well, I became introduced to her from 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 management— Oh, I'm in pain. Well, you should go to the pain center. If you don't know anything about how corrupt the medical system is, you would go, oh, that's the thing you go to for pain. They're pain experts, fine. 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. 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 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— Jesus. —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 in jail. Like, it's a horror show out there. Like, there's certain cities that just seem to be so hard hit by this. Like, 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, well, no one seems to be helping. There doesn't seem to be any help for these people.

It is really good at getting you. It's really good. It gets disciplined people. It gets people that have a work ethic and a good family.

Remember when crystal meth kind of first happened? Because that, again, only happened in America. It didn't happen in Europe.

Yeah.

I'm not saying we don't have a problem with drugs in Europe, but it's not to the same extent. And the idea— and Matt, remember that poster? There used to be a poster of a— 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.

Like, yeah, ashen-faced and sunken and whatever. Yeah.

You gotta lower her standards if you want her to go on a date with you. Get her on meth.

But that was like 10 years. It seems to take people out in just a matter of weeks now.

Well, fentanyl and meth are very different things. So 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. Right. 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 is legal for them to do.

And what is it basically?

What's the street? It's fucking speed.

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Yeah. Well, you know, she was a rough 28, right? 28. She looks like a 28 bare-knuckle boxer, like one of them bare-knuckle boxer chicks with scars all over their face. 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 attainable. Yeah.

There's always going to be addictions that you can avoid, right? Like, a great one is gambling. It's very controversial in America. Like, should gambling be legal?

Right.

I'm a guy who's been to Vegas a million times. I'm a guy who is— I 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— if you don't have any money, don't gamble it.

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

So you have 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? 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 get the dopamine. There's good ways to get it and bad ways to get it. So encouraging the good ways. Human nature is fixed and flawed, right? Right? Young men are going to want dopamine and risk.

Yes.

But how do we sort of point them towards something that's useful? So my thing was like, gangs, terrible. Gangs shoot each other and deal drugs, but not all of them. A lot of gangs are just young men together. And the idea of drinking as a— like, I've set up youth clubs all around Great Britain. And there's pool tables and there's jukeboxes and music and there's booze. Social places. No, they're called pubs. Yes. I think young men, where should they be? Together. Yes. 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. 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 the school. Right. It can be a bar, but the bar can have a football team and 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. I was going to flesh out my point about gambling. I have this opinion about gambling. Don't gamble if you can't afford to lose, and if you've 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— did you ever see Uncut Gems, that Adam Sandler movie?

That was like— so it was like anxiety in celluloid form.

Genius film.

It's so good. He's 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 at pool halls. Right. Like, I was addicted to playing pool. I played in tournaments, played constantly. I was around gambling addicts 24 hours a day.

So this is The Hustler, this is Color of Money.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So was it— But the real—

the real thing. Was it all money? Was it— was everything for money?

Everything was fun.

So you're playing for money all the time.

Yes.

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 gambling all the time. It was gambling on sports. It was off-track betting before they got there. They would go to off-track betting and bet on the races. Right. And then they would come and complain about the races that they lost, and then they would get into card games until 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 would come up 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 day.

So how did you not get sucked into that? Because you were very into it. I mean, you're, like, quite— not an obsessive guy, but, like, when you did mixed martial arts, you're all in. When you do comedy, you're all in. Like, you're all into things. And yet somehow gambling didn't capture you.

'Cause I saw what it was. I saw this is a dopamine roller coaster. 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 I met Tommy when he was like 19 years old. I was in my 20s, 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 gambler. Yeah. He'd 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 Freddie 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 he's playing—

You know, that was the thing with Minnesota Fats in The Hustler.

Did he do that?

He smoked a cigarette in that— in that— weirdly in that. Yeah, that was the comic, wasn't it?

Did he keep it while he was shooting? I think he laid it on the table.

Oh, maybe laid it on the table. But he smoked— I remember he smoked the cigarette and threw that I always remember kind of Minnesota facts because he's— he was a comic. I only ever knew him from that movie. Jackie Gleason, you mean? Yes.

Yes.

But I never— I never knew his comedy. I'd never seen him in anything else. I'd just seen him in that. And I went, oh, that guy was a— because 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 one of the best players in the East Coast for sure. And Tommy was playing this guy and they were grinding it out and he couldn't be— 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.

You're stuck doing this thing 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 field hockey, it was darts, it was lacrosse. It was a minority sport. And now it's Premiership football, right? Mm-hmm. 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 it allowed people— you play arenas now. It's crazy. And with pool, pool could have become the thing, but, you know, it didn't. 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. Oh yeah, super lucky.

Well, then podcasting.

Well, podcasting, like the idea of just going, 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 you're getting 4,000. Crazy. Things move up.

But the idea of like that, you even consider that?

Yeah, no, I think about it all the time.

I do a practice. I just, I'm constantly like, I think that thing, gratitude is the mother of all virtues. Like you're constantly reminding yourself like of like, we live now, we do this, we get to do this. Like finding the thing that you could be excited about. Yes. 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, and that'll get you 2 weeks into January doing sit-ups and no further. And then there's motivation. I want to do this thing. I want to 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— you know, we're just like, I would do it if there's no money in it. It doesn't matter. I'm just, I'm into it.

Yes.

But the, the issue with pool, your story about pool is that it was all about money. It wasn't about the joy of the game, the beauty of that game. Like, playing Matt Wallace—

There's money in tournaments now, a lot more money than there was back when I was playing 8 hours a day. 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 because China's doing some crazy things. China is paying like half a million dollars for the winners of tournaments now. They're, they're putting on these different pool tournaments in China. They actually have a different table though, and it's kind of— it's really complicated. And when players try to switch over, it's a real problem. It's called—

What's the difference in the table?

Their corner pockets and their side pockets are curved like a snooker table.

Right.

So, the thing about pool is it's all about your— it's, you know, looks like a ball goes into the hole, you're 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.

True.

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, right, 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 $500,000 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 1 ball and they run the rack, and then everyone's like, ah, or there's a battle back and forth between 2 guys, they're playing safeties. But when you have a pocket where— a table where it's like 30% harder to make a ball, it gets like— that's what it looks like. See how it's curved like that? Oh yeah, okay. So if you show a larger image of the table— I was looking around for pictures. The problem is, just so you could see it from— yeah, that second 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, right? Like, like millimeters on each side. So it just makes for a brutal, pokey, fucking scared-ass game. Nobody's gonna break— Shoving them around the table.

No one's gonna nice 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, 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— I don't—

That's a regular 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— 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— even by fire a ball in, Yeah. I mean hit it with a firm stroke. Right. You just— it changes the game. But they're paying half a million dollars. So people are going to China to play in these tournaments now because they're gigantic, because China is 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 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 they have regiments. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm an addict.

So, but all of those things, right? Like, so

martial arts,

martial arts, comedy, martial arts, you still— I mean, you train, but yeah.

But I can't, obviously I'm too old to compete.

They should have a seniors.

Come on. That's a good way to get hurt forever.

Yeah, 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 I never really got into gambling at pool, because I realized where it's going. There was no money in fighting when I was a kid. I got offered $500 to go professional when I was an amateur kickboxer. I got offered $500, and I thought about that. For $500, 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, because I was already suspecting that I was getting it for sure.

You got exactly the right amount.

That's what I say. The sweet spot. The sweet spot. Yeah, we have enough don't give a fuck, just a little chaos going on in there, but not to the point where I can't articulate myself.

It's interesting because 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— because comedy feels like it's, it, it's, it's such an interesting thing to get into. I want more people to kind of get into comedy. I think that's the— like, 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. Mm. And I think Comedy is such a wonderful thing to kind of— because you're writing down and ordering your thoughts, right? And you sort of think about 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, we should be teaching it in schools. There should be like— the drama class should have a comedy element.

100%.

Because 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 kind of 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. Yes. Just to try and see something funny even in the terrible.

This episode is brought to you by Call of Duty. Modern Warfare 4 is coming, and they're going all in on this one. The kind of missions that make you go, dude, Did they really just do that? Set during a full-scale North Korean invasion of South Korea, expect a real boots-on-the-ground experience as young South Korean recruits fighting to protect their homeland and North Korean forces, hunting traitors, interrogating civilians, and more. Modern Warfare 4 is available now. Order digitally or pick up your physical disc at your local store. Visit callofduty.com for more. Rated M for Mature. Probably the most popular art form that's not documented and studied in terms of like having a structure to having to learn how to use it.

Well, that's why I wrote the— I wrote this book about— I wrote this book on jokes with 2 friends. You know, this is like— I wrote this thing with Amanda Baker and Abbi Grant, this book on jokes, which is like— so it's in thirds, so it'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. Right. Because people talk about observational comedy. That's like saying songs about girls is a genre. No, it's like, what— how does this work? Is this pullback reveal? Is it a pun? Yeah. 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 You could be drawn to it. And then the idea of having some kind of structure. Because 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 Doug Stanhope said comedy courses are raging scams. They're 2 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.

Right? Yes. Tony Hitchcliff used to park cars. Perfect example. And, and

now sells out Madison Square Garden.

And you go, and that, that's a dojo.

Yeah.

But not everyone has access to that dojo. You know, 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.

Yes.

Because you go, well, music isn't made any less wonderful by having a formal structure. So, like, part of the inspiration to write the book. So it's Abbi Grant and Amanda Baker, and they're really good friends of mine.

Are these the same people that you had work with people here?

Yeah, that was the test for— they came to the mothership and taught the course for 6 weeks.

Amazing.

To young comics. And thank you for that, by the way. I think it's grown corn. I think those guys are all doing fantastic.

Yes.

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 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 can formalize it— you know the story of— Amanda told me this story, right? And it blew my head off, right? So about Gregorian chants. You heard of Gregorian chants? Yes. 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 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— Whoa. And this guy went, no, no, you can't write down music.

If music doesn't live within a human soul, then it's ethereal. 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 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. Mm. You needed it to be a little bit formalized so that people could express themselves through it. They had the system then 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.

Well, you understand what you're working with.

Yeah. You have an idea of kind of what you're doing. They're like, it's not formulaic. You've got to 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 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 would be in 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. Great. I mean, he's in London now. I know he is.

He's a great guy. I discourage that activity. I told him, stay in America, son of a bitch. But he has to be a wanderer. He's a weirdo. But point is, he had this great service that he was giving to comics when he'd go to these towns, and 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 3 hours for free.

Well, I think— I mean, for me, it's the writing thing is the reason to write the book. They're trying to throw the drawbridge down, trying to help people up and go, well, how do you How do you actually do this? Because there's a bit too much magical thinking in our business of like, oh, that guy's a genius. Because 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 100 jokes and 5 of them work, no one ever says at the end of my show, well, what about the other 95 jokes? What about the other ones? They go, no, it's just— obviously, 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. Yeah.

But what I was gonna get at is I think what Stan Hope is not correct about is that even if you're doing a comedy course for someone who sucks at comedy, there's a— 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. Yeah. That alone is a step.

Well, that's worth something. But also that thing of like, there's a fancy term for it, I think, capitalist ontology, that everything we look at has to be looked at through money, right? Can you make money doing this or not make— how do I— people ask me, how do I— I get asked about being young people that want to be musicians or want to be comedians. They say, 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 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. Yes. Like, even if— like, I meet people that have done, oh, I did a little bit of comedy, I did like, you know, 10 gigs back in the '90s. Yeah. And they were the show, and they're so into comedy because they have an idea of what it is. The funniest thing you've seen the last 10 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 gut, have a shot.

Yes.

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. Yeah. And he's bringing up these guys. And like, Ari Matti is a legit— I was in Helsinki 2 weeks ago doing shows. And I happened to mention on stage, someone asked me about Ari Matti. Oh yeah, I saw Ari last week. Like, he was like, oh, who cares about you? You know Ari Matti. Like, it's such a big deal because obviously talent is across the water. He's like—

He's a force of nature.

But he's wonderful, right? Yeah. You go— like, the idea of going, more people should be in this. The thing about Kill Tony as well, it's a minute. A minute's 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 AI.

Yeah.

Because we've got so used to other people If AI 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, it's their unique viewpoint on something? You know, the way comics kind of, they kind of, even if you're a one-liner guy like me, comics kind of leak. You can kind of tell who someone is on stage.

Right.

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 when they've got this wasted mind. One of the funniest people I ever met was a guy I worked for. I worked for a private investigator for a while.

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 21, and he was a former alcoholic who needed someone to drive his car, so he He could do what? Put up 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 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'll never be as funny as this guy. This guy's so funny. And I would tell her the craziest shit we had to do because 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 meat— like measly little guy. And he had this beautiful girlfriend. 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 after he got the photos, he did all everything he asked him to do. The guy wanted him to still take more pictures. They're like, hey, the fuck is— what are you doing here? What are we doing here? I'm not gonna be here.

You're not getting the right angles.

You're a cock porn dealer. Like, you gotta fucking— my job's done. Here's pictures of this giant muscular man fucking your girlfriend.

This is episode 1. This is the show.

It's a great idea for a show. It was so fun. But the idea of like— Such a fun guy.

You meet these guys that are so funny in life and you want them to have an outlet, the outlet that we have. And you go, and there's kind of— 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 Cellar, there's the store, there's other places that are doing this around America, but you want kind of more of it in the world. You want more Mother Ships out there.

Well, the most important thing is community, right? And one of the things 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 30-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 going to 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— 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 it. Well, I think that thing about 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.

Yes.

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 come 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— So it's

obvious you're playing a role. You're sitting.

Yeah.

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

Well, 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 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 really interesting to kind of hold that space for people because you go, people are desperate to feel part of something. Yes. To kind of feel alive and feel— because you laugh with other people. You don't really laugh on your own. You don't laugh looking at stuff on your phone. Right. You laugh when it's like— 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 a recommended daily allowance of a vitamin, you know, like you have 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C every day. Right. 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 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. Yeah. Okay, if you're not around other people all the time, you're gone. You're not around the gatherers and you didn't succeed hunting, or 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— the human beings, right? Drop one human in the jungle, you fed the animals. Drop 10 humans in the jungle, you've got the apex predator, right? Our superpower is cooperation.

Yes.

And what's upstream of communication? Play. We learn to communicate through play.

Yes.

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 theater, playing a show. Yes. Or it could be sports, right, where you're playing. It could be grappling where you're playing with someone, but you've got very strict rules. Yes. A relationship is play. Sports, play. Everything is— everything people are interested in is play. We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because 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 like— people get so serious.

I 100% 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 Gracie guys, yeah. They say, keep it playful. 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'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 rough-and-tumble kind of play. Sure. Tickling and wrestling. Dogs do it with each other.

They do it. Puppies do it.

But that thing 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, when you play a game with someone else as well, like, they've got to win some of the time. Like, it's that thing, if I get heckled, like, yeah, you could put the heckler down or join in and play. And sometimes they win, it's fine, who cares?

Sometimes hecklers have banger lines. Every now and then they got a banger that I gotta go, ahh!

Well, 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. Right. But my crowd Like, they join in. They add value every single night. Well,

you do that fun thing where you allow them to ask questions. Yeah.

But that's very— I mean, it's like they're so well behaved because you kind of go, all right, get out there. I'll do 20 minutes of just like bang, bang, bang, like 3, 4 big laughs a minute and try and 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 92 beats a minute. It's like a comfortable walking pace. Like, when you walk with someone, you fall into rhythm with them, right? And so, so there's a keyword every 2 and a half seconds. There's like a— and you want them to fall into rhythm. And then you want to give them 20 minutes so that they just feel totally calm. Like, ah, we know exactly why we've come 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. Yes. And like, you ebb and flow between those two. So you're putting together this thing where It feels like we all did this. We all had this experience.

Right. We're all having fun together. Yeah. No, that's one of the more fun things about the Bottom of the Barrel show, the Mother show.

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 have 3 or 4 bits in my act right now that came out of premises that I pulled out of the barrel and had an idea just popped into my mind.

Do you find that weird thing of, like, going— that state that you're in onstage, You would never have thought of that sitting at your desk. Right. 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 the number is, maybe it's 50, maybe it's 30 people in front of you listening to you.

Yes.

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

There's also a thing about those little crowds, like the little boy room in the Mothership that only seats 110 people. When you're in a little crowd like that, there's no room for shenanigans, or what Tom Segura likes to call dance moves. Like, 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 laugh on cue?

But okay, 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 30 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 got to be— but his rhythm, 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. Well... And why? And a hack, a hack comic doing hacky shit with great fucking rhythm would beat him 99% of the time. 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 you've 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 real heroin addict. a real bad one to the point where he got gangrene in one of the shots.

Lost a leg, I think.

Yeah, no, he didn't lose a leg, but he almost died. It was his— I

mean, he died.

I mean, at the time, 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. But I know his folks up there. That was part of the issue.

JFL flew him up, flew his folks up.

Oh, did they?

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

He, 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 substances, especially heavy stuff, you know, like—

Greg Giraldo had, you know, the Those kind of demons.

He did, but he cleaned up for a long time and then fell off, and that's when someone gave him a pill and he died. 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 was not interested in quitting. It was like, he's like, uh-uh, like, no, I'm doing heroin.

It really is a heartbreaker, isn't it? It's a

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.

Sure, sure.

Fuck off. Yeah. Learn how to tie off a vein, pussy. You know?

Yes, it is.

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 very sad when you lose someone like that because you kind of go, I wonder what the next special would have been. I wonder what the next story would have been. The next thing, like what he would have made of this.

But it's like we were talking about earlier with Janis Joplin and Hendrix and people in the 27-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.

Well, I think that level of sensitivity that they had, you know, being a performer, being drawn to that, that. And then having to— it's like, uh, 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. Sure. 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, get to the— I remember like going— I didn't drink for the first, I think, 12 years of doing comedy, just because I was, you know, drank at college. And, you know, I didn't have kind of a problem, or certainly didn't think I have a problem. But when I, when I found comedy in my mid-20s, I went, um, I'm all in. I don't want this. I don't want to have something that derails

you.

You know that thing of like alcohol is borrowing happiness from tomorrow?

Yeah.

So you can have a, you can have a drink, but if you have like 5 drinks, like tomorrow is going to 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 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 feel better tomorrow. Yes. So just that daily thing of getting it down to a small kind of a unit of time I can think about, I can control.

Yeah. Well, delaying gratification is very important if you want to get anything done.

Yeah. I mean, it seems to be— it's also like, well, in a metaphysical way, God is the future, right? God is an analogy for work. God is 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. 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 sort of imposter syndrome is because they think, oh, I know I didn't do the work. Yeah, you did the work, but you did it 6 months ago. You did— you spent the time in the gym and then you, you get it now.

Well, I just think people get imposter 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. Yeah. 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. You're like, you don't want to believe it's real. And 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 work 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 it, 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, and 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 apeshit. And you start walking towards the arena, and you go like, what the fuck is happening?

How is this real? And that's what imposter syndrome is. It doesn't seem like it's real.

Yeah, 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

because, because you don't see the work. Like, like, we—

It's not just that you don't see the work. They're in this very weird, almost like a royal position where they're constantly in the media. They're constantly— no one's paying attention to you. No one's asking Bob, hey Bob, the guy who does HVAC for a living, yeah, what's going on with your day? What's happening with your friends? Uh, what's, what's up with— did you get canceled for a TikTok that you made? Nobody gives a fuck about Bob. Okay, so you're watching these people that 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 Matti 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 natural state of things. Okay, 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'm a terrible dancer, but everyone used to dance, everyone used to sing, everyone used to speak. And then we moved to the cities, right? And we built these incredible halls, right? And you go and see Oasis live, right? Right. And you go and you watch a ballet and the opera and you go and see Chappelle on stage and you go, 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 doing the thing yourself. So it's that thing of like going, I would rather people went to play 5-a-side soccer than went to see a Premiership game. I'd rather people did 5 minutes or a minute in the club at a Kill Tony thing than came to see me live. People— the participation thing is kind of lost.

And it's the same with the social media. Like you're watching a life.

Right.

Other people's lives. But you're not kind of— you're not getting the IRL thing. Like they're getting out and doing the thing.

Yeah, it's stealing 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 that idea that you go— the social media, the idea the phone now is religion, right? And the church used to ask for 1 hour a week. The phone is asking for 4 or 5 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 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.

Yes.

It's like you're waiting for it to kind of— the feedback to give you something. And it just doesn't. It doesn't have that same— in real life, like, you, you know, it's that thing of like, I'm not puritanical, but, you know, porn as a substitute for sex, like being— having friends online being, being famous on Instagram is like being rich in Monopoly, right? You want the real thing, the IRL.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think you're doing a great thing by encouraging people to participate in stuff. And I absolutely agree with you that if you did a little bit of stand-up comedy, tried a little bit 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 know when I see excellent martial artists, when I see something that's truly sensational. I have an 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 easy for us, like, if you haven't ever tried something, you look at it and you go, right, I don't know anything about that, so I have no idea.

Which is 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 get drunk and get in fights.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a terrible idea. But someone like myself who's been in martial arts my whole life, the last thing I ever want to do is get in a fight. Like, I'm out of here. Like, I don't want to 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 guy who was in the Olympics. Yeah. Like, 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 because he's done it a million times.

I suppose it's that live human being. You go in life, how you get good at something. Yes. It's you get unconscious incompetence and then conscious incompetence and then conscious competence and then unconscious competence.

We just went over this the other day. Oh, really? Yes, the diagram.

It's interesting how you cut— you move up through this thing. So sometimes actually The reason for a community, the reason a community is so important is because I can sit with Abi and Amanda and write this book and say, this is how jokes are written. But actually, what you want is your peer group. They're like the guys you came up with. Yes. The guys that you work on the door with at the store, the guys that you— you need peers because you need someone who's like 6 months ahead of you, not 30 years ahead of you. Because you can't even remember what it was like to be starting off trying to do 5— it's a long time ago. I mean, we're still doing the same thing.

This is the greatest thing about what we have, 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 Gnome about opening something in London.

It's a great idea.

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

It would be incredible. You know, it's the more the better. You know, we're really fortunate in Austin that we have 7 clubs on one street within a one-block area of The Mothership. There's like 7 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 25 minutes away. And then you have all these outside places that have comedy nights now. 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 take you. I'll show you what to do and what not to do. Right.

That's a great scene you came out of, though. Oh, it was a crazy scene. The names that came out of that. But 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 amazing documentary.

Fran Salamita, who I knew from Boston— he was a comic in 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 who 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 guys.

Yeah, I mean, that— pretty heavy. Outstanding. I got to work with Patrice a little bit before he died.

He was 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. They were some of the best comics I've 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 30 minutes of fucking thunder, and they would tank headliners. They would bring in— like, Billy Crystal had to do a weekend at the comedy— at Nick's Comedy Stop.

Right.

And they had assassin after assassin, these local murderers 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 punchline— he has these throwaway punchline after throwaway punchline. He was so good.

Hang on. I just put the US tour in and the Boston— I'm doing the Wang Oh yeah. They'll never build a theater as good as that again.

That's a beautiful theater.

That and the Chicago Theater, I think, like, because of fire regs now, if you want to put that many people in a room now, the room has to be 4 times the size. Right. So you go, they'll never build theaters— it's the Palladium in London has the same thing.

The Fox Theater in Detroit.

Oh, woo! Like, it's— you just got— they're just on top of you.

On top of you.

It's the perfect space.

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

the Chicago one, you're in Sinatra's dressing room. Yes. What? What? I mean, that's imposter syndrome.

Well, have you done the Garden? When you do the Garden, it's the weirdest feeling in the world.

The Garden? I've done— I did like an event at the Garden. Well, I did the Kiltoney there, but I did the— what was it? There's an amazing charity for American servicemen, and Bruce Springsteen does it every single year. And they put— it's always like 8 comedians and then Bruce Springsteen.

Oh, wow.

It's such a weird event, but it's so fantastic. I've done that a couple of times. It was amazing.

My point is that building, even when we go there for UFC 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. You feel the history of that building.

People want to come out and spend time in those spaces. Yes, 100%. To be in them.

100%. 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, you 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 just— I mean, it was a beautiful scene at one point in time. It was so fun before LA became Thunderdome.

A very American thing as well. Think about what America's given the world.

Yes.

The Western, jazz, and stand-up comedy.

Hip-hop.

Hip-hop. Yeah, hip-hop too.

100%.

Yeah, yeah,

100%. Hip-hop is 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 20th century. When I was, I was like—

Late '70s, right? Late '70s?

Yeah, I was in junior high school. I was in junior high school when I first heard the Sugarhill Gang. I was like, what is this?

We got that in the UK, like the Message. And it was like, I don't know what this is, but— Crazy!

It was like, this is like a new music style. And then, but I remember the day I heard N.W.A. the first time. I bought— it was either a cassette or a CD, I can't remember, but I was at the gym and I was on a Walkman. I had one of those Walkman things, right? And I was working out on a cardio machine and I was listening to 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 saying? Did you just say fuck the police in a song?

Yeah.

Changed the whole world. Crazy. You know, we were talking about Billy Corgan's take on this. This is really interesting. Like, Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins did this interview recently where he said there's a clear line where it happened, where MTV 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. Right. Whereas before that, one of the early criticisms of MTV 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 MTV. That MTV was like mostly like white pop and white rock and roll and John Cougar Mellencamp, Hurts So Good. Yeah. 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 going to start promoting this one specific type of music.

It's very interesting there that we're kind of— 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 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 21st century is just the 20th century on better screens. So, when you think about music and movies now, everything's a cover version or a heritage artist, or, you know, and it's something, you know, you want the new, you want something new to be happening. And when you think about movies, it used to be like 200 movies a year came out. Now it feels like it's 5. I mean, it's more than that, but it doesn't feel like it's that many. Right. So you got that thing, if you want the culture to be thriving. 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 '70s, if you think about music, like it wasn't different bands every 2 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 10 years. That's extraordinary. Yeah, it's true. And when you think about what the movies were in the '70s, where these movies were like pieces of literature. They had like multidimensional characters. They left you with more questions than answers.

Apocalypse Now.

There's not goodies and baddies in that. That's like just a movie that kind of stays with you.

Forever.

Yeah. It's extraordinary. Extraordinary piece of work.

Yeah, we went through a shift during the Vietnam War that changed American culture forever. And it was a radical departure from the 1950s ideas and the 1950s aesthetics. It was just completely different, and it happened so quickly that it panicked the powers that be. And 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 were just becoming hippies, beating their asses.

Are you familiar with this theory of—

You know what I'm familiar with? The fact that I have to pee really bad. Okay, let's pee. Let's pee and then we'll come back for the Fourth Turning. What are we going to talk about when we come back? The Fourth Turning. The Fourth Turning. All right, we'll be right back. Fourth Turning.

We're back. We're back.

So Fourth Turning?

The Fourth Turning. So there's a theory that this guy Neil Howe wrote this book called The Fourth Turning in like 1996 and he predicted everything that's happening in the world Oi! He basically said, like, the world moves in these 4 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 I think is happening is we've gone from being— 1945, 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 living through a revolution. If you think about what a revolution is, it's the replacement of elites. So these elites are falling. So you got academia has lost all credibility. There's a replication crisis in the social sciences. Mm-hmm. 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're like the— we were talking about it earlier, the medical community that we would have trusted trusted, of course. Like, we're not trusting any of these institutions anymore. It's falling away.

And so, these crisis times happen every 80 years or so and then we rebuild. Mm-hmm. And there's been sort of— there's been 4 of these kind of in American history. But in global history, a guy called Vico used to talk about these. And Vico was like an ancient Italian philosopher. And he had the same sort of theory of like 4 periods of humanity, a long human life. life. And the person that really— where this gets interesting is Star Wars. Okay. So I can link this back. All right. So there's a book called Finnegans 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 inherent in James Joyce's Finnegans 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 Finnegans Wake.

Which is a version of Vico. And Finnegans Wake's got these incredible things in it of like, like he sort of predicts AI. He talks about these thunderclaps, these moments. He's got these 100-letter words, 10 of them in the book, where he predicts like the big leaps forward in humanity. Mm-hmm. Like the invention of like fire and clothing and agriculture, all these kind of revolutions through time. And he, he marks them with these 100-letter words. Wow. And the last one is 101 letters because he was doing a reference to the 1001 Nights. Everything's a reference to a reference. It's all— it's incredibly dense. But the idea that AI is— Vico called them— he would refer to them as gods, which we don't have a name for yet. The idea that these kind of— these things happen and change everything. And are we in one of those periods now?

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 probably the ancient Egyptians had something akin to this. I really do. 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 a 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 Baradur, I think it's called. It's thousands of years old. It's perfectly polished. The geometry inside of it is impeccable. It's— they have no idea who did it. The conventional explanation is they built it to stay dry during the monsoons. Right. Sure. 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 a time period of 10,000 years before people started investigating what happened to us, I think they'd have a very patched-up, 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 there was a cataclysm and we went 10,000-plus years before civilization rebuilt itself in this area, we'd have 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 have a rough idea of when. The estimates are between 1,500 years ago and later. They don't know why.

Where is that?

It's in India.

Yeah, whereabouts? I've got a— I'm touring there next year. I got like 12 cities in India. Good question. I go everywhere.

What part of India is it?

I'll go.

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

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

Do you know about the Kailasa Temple? That's the nuttiest one in India. You gotta go see that.

Why is that? I've been to India a lot, but I haven't seen that.

So, the Kailasa 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 volcanic rock too. So, it's insanely hard. In fact, this one guy sent a group of men 100 men for 2 years to destroy the temple, and after 2 years they quit because 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 did you do that— Mikey, 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, because 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. Yeah. We have, like, rough understandings of how people were treated. We don't know what the fuck happened happen 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? Yeah. 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, right? 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?

Yes.

What's our— I don't know what that is.

Well, they 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. It's gonna rot away and deteriorate.

I was thinking about this recently, right? There's 4 things that hold up the world, right? So there's— it's ammonia, Ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastic, right? That's what holds up the world, right? It's not tech. It's those 4 things. They all involve huge amounts of petrochemicals, right? So the ammonia is the interesting one. Some chemist in Germany in 1909, no one knows his name. He's not famous, but invented ammonia fertilizer, like a way of making fertilizer with ammonia and petrochemicals. Really? And 48% of the world's population rely on that fertilizer for food.

So you're talking about nitrogen?

Yeah, nitrogen. So it's ammonium.

That's Fritz Haber. So Fritz Haber, you want a little crazy story about Fritz Haber?

Yeah.

Fritz Haber, the same time— No one knows his name other than you. He was getting the Nobel Prize for this invention, he was wanted for war crimes because he had invented mustard gas. He had invented toxic gas. So that was during World War I. So he was the guy who invented Zyklon A.

So he invited—

he invented—

he's the same guy. The

same guy. He invented Zyklon A, which they eventually took the smell out of it and turned into 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 get the fuck away from it. They took that out and turned it into Zyklon B so they can gas people. Jesus. Same guy, also a Jew, also one of the few Jews during World War II 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, 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 13-year-old son. She shot herself, and he left to go to the front line. He left his 13-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 the Haber method.

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. It was the Haber method. The same fucking guy.

That is insane.

Insane.

Wow. Insane. I did not know that. But the reason to, to mention the fertilizer now is because you got— 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're watching France on fire.

Right.

You see, but here's the real deal, right? Here's what's really happening, right? Food consumption is down by 6% in France this year.

Oh, Ozempic!

I don't think it's Ozempic, my friend. I think it's the fact that fertilizer is not getting out of the Middle East. I think it's the fact that they missed the planting season. I think food like rice— Oh my God. Rice is up by 70%. OK. Wheat is up by 40%. Now, it doesn't affect us at this end of things. But the bottom 10%, the bottom 20% of society are 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 decrease in your oil supply, you have a decrease in your food supply.

Well, 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 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, you'll tell me, like maybe 10 years ago now? The Yellow Jackets? It was a big movement. It's a huge thing. But that was kind of rural versus central. And it was the working-class movement. Again, this is the working class, the lower classes.

This is 2018, 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 happening because it's just hitting now. That planting season didn't happen this year because the fuel was cut off. So the idea that you go— food is going to 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 for 90 days.

Yeah, the UK did. The UK did a thing the other day saying stock up for 3 days. The fuck is 3 days?

Well, I heard 90 days in some places that some countries are telling people to develop a 90-day day, 90-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 it's the Pentagon thing.

Pentagon orders bases to plan for 90 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 planning for 90 days without the grid?

Why are they not telling us? We're grown-ups. Like, don't tell me that you stock up on food.

So something was going to happen. If something was 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 panic time. 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 90 days. That's rational and probably should have been in place already, right? If you want to plan ahead.

You would think, yeah.

Yeah. Well, so maybe this was just highlighting incompetence by previous administrations. They hadn't taken this into consideration.

No, you don't make a big announcement about that. Correct. This is like amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk about the They talk about the supply lines. They talk about logistics. Logistics is everything in military, in warfare, right? Strategy is nothing. Logistics is everything. So this idea of going, how do you keep those bases operational? That's the big story no one's talking about, the 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. The amount of bases that got bombed. bombed in like the Arab states and all those areas.

So are they a liability everywhere now? Are they a liability wherever there's a base? Because you know where it is and you can't move it.

Right.

And how much does it cost to protect it?

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

You've seen the footage of it? It looks like haunting footage where they've got like just thousands of bits of that wire over there.

Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, it's crazy. Animals are using it for nesting. Yeah, it's really creepy. 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 20 US military sites in the Middle East were confirmed damaged by attacks within the last 2 years, documented at minimum, not a complete tally. So we don't get a real good understanding.

But what are they— OK, so if they're saying, OK, the bases need to be good for 90 days and you need to stock up on food for a couple of

Jamie's highlighting something here. It says bases and shared military facilities used by US forces, not necessarily 20 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? 19— at like, are the last 70, 80 years, right, how life is supposed to be? Or are we summer children, right? Because the last 4,000 years before that was a shit show, right? Right. But the last 80 years, there's been relative peace in the world. Now, not to say there haven't been terrible wars. There have been. But they've been contained. It's that thing of like, were the Nagasaki and Hiroshima, were they the last 2 shots fired in World War II or were they the first 2 shots fired in the Cold War. Were they used twice, nuclear weapons, or had they been used every single day since and they've kept this uneasy peace? And this peace is kind of fracturing now because we've gone from a bipolar world with the Soviet Union and America at kind of loggerheads and then we've had this unipolar world moment since what, 1989, '91, wherever you draw the line. And America America has— its military has become smaller every year since because it hasn't had something to push against.

So, and now we're in this weird multipolar world where suddenly there's lots of different powers around the world and spheres of influence. Right. So it's a much more uneasy time, right? We're going through one of these big shifts in our history. Certainly. So, and it seems to me like they're You know, people talk about black swan events. Is it Taleb's idea of like black events that you cannot see coming and they change everything?

Right.

Based on the idea that people thought all swans were white and then eventually they got to Australia and there were black swans. OK, we changed the rule. We have to change the rule on that. Like everything changes.

Right.

9/11 was a— everything changed.

Right.

Everything changes in a— 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 seems very uncertain now.

Well, we're very— our societies are extremely fragile, and that's one of the things you realize when the power goes out. I used to have a bit about that, that the power— like, my— the bit was about how my explanation for the pyramids was the dumb people out-fucked the smart people, and eventually the smart people died off and nobody was checking in on them, and they showed up at the pyramid and said, hey, we're supposed to get our check on Friday, And then the idea was that we all have this idea that if the power goes out, what do you do? You wait, because 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, like, I don't know what any of this shit is. How does this work? Yeah. 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 Bible, that 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 are we now? Like if we had to rebuild the Empire State Building today, would we have the know-how to do that? Would we be able to? If we had to build nuclear submarines now, would we be able to do that. Like, because it's that thing of like, 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 just, we've kind of, because we're run by lawyers and the Chinese, their state's run 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.

Yeah.

That's the difference.

Yes, it

makes it much more convenient for it to progress. I

mean, 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 what that is. We've seen how that plays out.

Yeah, not good. Not good for the individual. Certainly not good for comedy. Good luck being a provocative comedian.

They shut the clubs first. That's what they did. That's what— you ever seen Cabaret, that musical, that movie?

No.

Cabaret, Liza Minnelli? Charlie? It's like about the clubs and it's about—

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

Oh, okay. My missus is very into musical theater. I've seen a lot of musical theater, man. The, the, uh, so Cabaret is 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 mess. So the end of it is like, you see these people kind of in the camps, like the end of it is like, it's like you walk out, like going, oh my God, all of those incredible people, they all got wiped out. The avant-garde got taken away. The avant-garde was in Germany. It was like, that's where culture was happening. It was the hip spot. And it was all taken away.

And 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. Yeah. 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. We just take it for granted. Like, again, it's another gratitude thing of just going, wow, the bravery.

Harlan as well. Those guys got arrested. They got arrested for doing jokes that would, you know, bear barely be outrageous at a comedy club today. That would be normal.

But the idea of— you know that 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. And I think people like 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 kind of giving you the language to talk about sex and politics in a kind of different way, in a different perspective. And just a— Freud called jokes pleasure bribes. Ooh. It's a pleasure bribe to let you think unthinkable thoughts, forbidden thoughts. That's a wonderful sort of way of thinking about 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 tricksters. We're crossing the line to show you where the line is. Yes. And then we're kind of teasing it and kind of pushing it.

I think the— it's not like in defense of edgy jokes, because I think all jokes are edgy. Like an incredible personal story where you're just talking about something medical or something with your mother or your That's incredibly transgressive.

Yes.

It's like— because 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—

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. Yeah. They're— with jokes in particular, they're fixating on the actual verbiage of the joke. Like it was a statement. As if it's a statement.

Like it was a statement.

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

Why are there no books of jokes? Well, that's the thing. Like, you don't have— 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 two-way communication. Yes. This is like, it lives in the room. It lives in the space between us.

Even specials are 60% to 70% of what it's like to be there. There's something about being in the room when someone's performing. It's the real magic of it. And Stan Hope used to say this all the time. We were talking about— he was like, everything we do on TV 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, 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 great.

I love that. I mean, the thing that I do is like, because it's one-liners, not bigger routines— well, 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 I always think like the show tonight as well is 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. Yeah. And then it's that thing, if you go, you want to expand it. So that thing I was saying earlier about like, when I came into 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.

Yes.

If you come and see me 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 kind of easy to become a little bit of a comedy aficionado. I think it probably takes about a year in a good comedy club to kind of go, okay, this guy's on the up. I've seen him before. He's always great. Oh, yeah, he's not my favorite. She's amazing. Whatever. You find your kind of the good people.

You like jazz. He likes blues.

You kind of get into this thing of like, you become an expert. And again, as you say, like the offense thing is kind of— 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 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 going to get upset.

Yeah, but it's again, it's that thing where you go, you have to right-size this. 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 cancel culture thing is like, It's the new burning books, I guess. There's worse things than burning books.

Yes.

Not reading them is one of them.

Is that true that AI companies are buying— did we ever sort that out? That they're buying rare books and then putting them into AI and then burning them? Didn't we discuss this off air?

Sort of, I think. One red expert—

Well, hey, you're gonna have to ask AI that question.

When we don't have headphones on. We have to put headphones on so we can talk to Jamie. 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— is that after they copy the book, they have to destroy the copy they have because now they have a— like, you know when you buy a VHS 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,

right?

That's making a copy of it. So like, they're a public company, they could get sued So they have to destroy the book? I think so.

I mean, that's it. It feels to me like you've asked AI, are you destroying books? And AI'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 were showing videos of them like scanning books, and I don't know that that's the easiest way to get that information either.

Okay, but after we talked about Fritz Haber and gassing people during World War I, 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 AI, and they also want to limit what you have access to.

I wonder, is there going to be a premium? I've got to take these off. Okay. I wonder, is there going to be a premium on books written before 2022? Because you know, Oh my God, it's true. Bulk acquisition companies.

AI companies including Anthropic and Amazon are buying physical books in bulk, cutting off their spines, scanning the pages for AI training data, and then destroying or shredding the originals.

So Amazon started buying books. Amazon, you're Amazon,

right?

You've got the books.

They started selling books.

They're in your warehouse, dumb-dumbs. Just go to the warehouse.

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

I'm looking for— I don't— I'm looking.

Could you go back to that page? Because they had a little bit of something on Perplexity.

I had a theory on this, which is like, AI is basically a covers band, right? So AI can scrape stuff that's already been created by humans, and it can give you back a kind of a version of it, right? So 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, AI's incredible at left-brain stuff. You know this Iain 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, right? What's his name? Iain McGilchrist. He's still alive.

What a hell of an English name.

Yeah. And he wrote this book called The Master and His Emissary. How old is this fellow? He's old. He's maybe 80. Master and His Emissary. And he wrote another book called The Matter with Things. They're both phenomenal.

OK.

Slightly beyond me, but kind of phenomenal. So this left brain thing is like, left brain is complicated. And the complicated 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 going to win the World Cup and falling in love and laughing at a joke, right? So it's like AI is very impressive because it can do left brain stuff all day. Like, if you have a cookie cutter job that can be replaced by AI, that's terrible. What you want to be is non-fungible. You want to be like sui generis. You want to be a human being because that gestalt, right brain stuff is much more— that's art. That's That's 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 2 different systems.

Here's my take. I think we are very egocentric in the idea that what we do is impossible to recreate, including creativity. I think that if you looked at what AI represents today in terms of these the capabilities of 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. And I think that we will get to the point where it will be able to do everything that we do, including all that.

Brief explanation, this top paragraph is perhaps your answer to why.

Why they burned the books? Yeah. Okay, should we destroy all the books in the world? Fucking— what kind of question is that?

Should we stop I'm not saying it's a good— Should we say no?

Yeah, let's say no.

Let's say no. So we'll keep a few.

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

I'm just saying their question is fucking hilarious. An answer to this question can be found— the answer is no, motherfucker. Can't be found in court documents. Oh, the court documents of Bartz 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 a $1.5 billion 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 why. I

know, but I want to— before you cut me off, this thing is very important, what they're saying. Scroll back down a little bit. 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.

That's what I was trying to say. They got caught. They had to pay a bunch of money for getting caught doing it.

I understand.

And there was a whole 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's 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 like, I fucking hate J.K. Rowling now, fuck trans people forever. You want to light Harry Potter books on fire? All for you. Do it.

The last part of it is that they don't want other companies getting their training data, which is— That's ridiculous.

The training data is other people's work. It's books. That's what's insane. The idea that you could ban, 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 the convenience of this stuff. I had this kind of take on it. Like, it's a little bit it all over the place. But the idea that you go— it's the nets and webs, right? That's what we're talking about, the internet. Yes. 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 Amazonian people or whatever would— and then some brave explorer would go there and they're trying to take their photo. And 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 going to steal your soul. But I think maybe 1,000 a day of yourself constantly on social media might just steal your soul. I think maybe they're right.

I think it depletes it.

Yeah. And then—

Yeah, I don't think it steals it. I think you can get it back. I don't think it's like— I don't think it's like a lump sum. Yeah. It sits in a bank account and now you're out of soul.

But then 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 TV. 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-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

He goes, hang on, this is— something's gone wrong here. And instead of reading an article on something, it was just a headline, right? Yeah. 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 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 going to be a tablet called Soma. And it is a tablet, but it's made by Apple.

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

Oh, if you want to train AI, you can get paid to do it.

Oh, great.

So they don't have to steal it. Okay. People are directly doing that. I saw 2 stories about this recently where there was like a job board where people are getting bounties for, you know, the AI needs to learn this. Will you train it?

You can make $200 an hour. That's the pay range, $20 to $200 an hour.

The other version of this is I've seen stories that says in India people are wearing like headsets and training, like for instance there, it's gonna go away if I move it, but like showing how to learn how to be a barber or cut hair or be a fashion designer or name, name it, I guess.

Right. Because there's only 5 minutes in a game. You're watching through someone's act.

Yeah. They need to learn. These companies have this bill they got to pass.

But isn't it—

And so the robot's going to learn how to cut hair.

There's a weird thing with this where you go— OK, this is again odd, but the difficult stuff is easy and the easy stuff is difficult. OK, so a computer beating you at chess. Chess is easy, right? Because chess is 4,000 years old. But to fold your 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 LLM. So that difficult stuff becomes very easy, but then the actual, the physical stuff and being out in the world is incredibly difficult because it's much, much older.

For now. Yeah, for now. You know, they're breaking math.

Yeah, yeah. And people were disappointed at that. Like mathematicians were like, oh, they solved all the puzzles. Well, wasn't that your job? 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 on.

Well, people are worried about the wrong thing with AI. 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 5 orders of magnitude. It used to cost like 20% of your GDP 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. Right. 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. Physics is— okay, so cold fusion, like the idea that we've got like— we've had these 80 years of peace because nuclear weapons have been in the hands of 8 nations and they've all agreed not to use them even when there's been provocation. 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?

Right.

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 AI 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? 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. Yeah. If you jailbreak them, things get really weird. So people have jailbreaked— one of the weird ones that Jesse Michaels had on recently, had a guest on, that they jailbroke one of the AI things and said, what is the biggest secret that the powers that be don't want 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 jailbroken AIs telling you that.

Yeah, but they knew that if they listened to this show.

I don't believe anything— This has been on this show. This 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 think you have to talk to them. You know, like, I think they want you to— especially the UFO people, they want you to believe certain whistleblowers and certain people. I don't believe anything until I see it. I'm interested. I'm listening. I'm not saying that you're a liar. I'm not saying that it's all—

That's the great thing about this show, 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, OK, 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, one of the things that people say, why don't you push back on certain people? One of the things that I want to 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 have the same opinions. I want to know how you got to that. So I'll say, okay, so the reason why is because of this. And I might have a disparaging opinion. I might be like, that's bullshit. But I hold my tongue a lot because I want to know—

You have to yes, and. Yes, yes. Someone, otherwise the conversation breaks down on the first definition. Exactly.

Sometimes it gets to a point where it's like, okay, 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 a 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, then I know your opinion 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— they've thought about it themselves.

My opinions 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 red versus blue narrative where there's good guys and bad guys and whoever they are is dependent upon where you find yourself and what ideology you've adopted.

Did you read that— you know Tim Urban? You ever had him on the show?

No.

He wrote this book called What's Our Problem? It's like one of my favorite books of the last 10 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 unemotional about it. Or like at the top level, you think like a zealot, like a religious zealot. Nothing will change my mind. Ride or die. Right. And between those two, there's like, you could think like a sports fan, which is a bit— 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 like the rules of the game more than I want my team to win.

Right. If they do election fraud, I should be saying, hey, this looks like horseshit.

Yeah. And then there's a lawyer above the— so it's scientist, sports fan, lawyer, because the lawyer goes, look, I'm on your side. I'm going to speak for you no matter what, but I don't really believe it, but 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 kind of thinking about politics where go, I don't 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 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. Right. 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 having the conversation with people is how 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, there's a problem with this. What are we going to do? We have to chat around it, like to talk around it in a very broad way.

Right. And you have to look at all sorts of different perspectives. Like I try to have the most charitable perspective Like I always try to say, okay, like how did you come to this conclusion? Like why are you thinking like this? But sometimes you have to also say, 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 the reason why I believe this? Is it I believe this because I've asserted it in the past and I don't want to be wrong? Is it because it makes the most sense?

Do you think that's going to 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 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.

OK. Well, I think that's silly. But that's also— I think you're supposed to evolve as a person. I've changed my mind multiple times. I change it all 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 reality, when you're confronted with data or when you're confronted with the actionable— what are the consequences of following this idea?

Yeah. How you actually live your life.

Oh, we thought it was gonna play out well, but it turned out to be kind of 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 of, like, what kind of people believe in right-wing authoritarian white nationalist thinking, what people believe in communism and Marxism, and why do you think we should burn this society down, and who's gonna restructure the new one, and who's gonna provide the infrastructure? You know what I mean? It's like,

well, I—

there's two— there's two different ways of approaching society in this country, and I think that's completely insane. Hmm. And I think most of us don't really operate like that, but feel like we have to if we want to 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— they're like, I have a bunch of people on that are— they 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 way the world works. You're supposed— I want to know why someone thinks completely different than I do and whether or not I can incorporate some of that into my own thinking.

It's a weird thing now with— I feel bad for the kids coming up because there's a record of everything they thought and said on their social media.

That's true. People get fired for tweets they did when they were 15.

Yeah, and we get to go— we get to be dumb again. Yeah. Until we're full grown.

They all should get to do that.

And then continue being dummies. But you know what I mean? It's like you get to— you never get to wipe the past. There's a club in London now 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 thing, and you go into the club. It's on 5 different floors, 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 And it's like a club in the '90s. We just went in, you lost your friends, you met a bunch of girls from somewhere else, you met some guys from this place. And people just kind of mix it up. And it's like, there are elements where the constant connectivity is like, it's a trap. Because you're constantly kind of, you have to be that person rather than being—

It takes away from your humanism. It takes away from you being a person. It does. And I think that's where we're going, unfortunately. I think that is a part of what this AI revolution is all about. And this is like— I think it's a natural progression to move away from— I think move away from whatever our primate instincts are into 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, like greed, envy, lust, the desire to control territory and property and the desire to acquire resources. Like these are all very 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 AI becomes the dominant intelligent force on the planet, we will have no choice but to abandon whatever it means to be a tribal primate and join the hive, or be like the people in the Amazon living— I don't know how you feel about it.

Like, I don't mind AI 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. 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 flintknap, and they first figured out a bow and arrow, they kept accelerating until 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 the end of the world, and so the end of history fallacy. So this idea that if you ask most people, how much did you change in the last 10 years? They go, oh my, I don't even recognize myself from 10 years ago. I'm so different now. Everything's changed. I think different things. I've got different views, whatever. How much are you going to change in the next 10 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 state.

I'm set in my ways.

This is me. This is me now. This is what I do. And you go, well, that— and we always think that. We always think like this is— we're going through a very rough patch globally, like in every society. Yes. 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 5th birthday. Now, 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? Since the last 100 years, like the most violent, awful century. Great Wars. Is it really? Yeah. Well, okay. Statistically, is it? No. Well, here's the thing. Between 1% and 2% of people with both World Wars and the concentration camps and the Chinese famines, the Russian famines, like all of those things, like man-made disasters, between 1% and 2% of people died violent deaths in that 100 years. When we were hunter-gatherers, it was between 10% and 20% of people died violent deaths. So things are getting better.

I mean—

Yes. I'm very—

it's a hard thing to say, but that was a great Steven Pinker book book about things getting better. There was a great book, Factfulness, about— yeah, things are— Yeah, I read the Thinker book. Things can be terrible and still be getting better than they were.

This is not utopian and we want utopia. But we are definitely getting better. I mean I don't think this is like— the most violent period in history was probably during Genghis Khan's era. Like they thought— Genghis Khan alone, he and his warriors were responsible for the death of 10% of the

Yeah,

10% of the population.

I read that book about him. It's fascinating.

It's fucking insane. It's fucking insane. And 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.

Yeah,

like, so that was probably the most violent period in our history. I think much more violent than today, 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 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 15, I would have said the dumbest fucking shit ever, and I would be 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. There's so much more access to brilliant conversations through podcasts than have ever been available before.

Yeah, but it's— so in— but okay, here's the thing. In a world where information is free, attention becomes everything. So why go to school? school, right? Why learn— we still teach in schools like the Prussians, right? So the Prussians taught because they needed to 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. Yeah. 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.

Yeah,

pick some stuff that you go, well, 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 at something.

You're proving my point because this conversation of you saying that wasn't available 20 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 loved as a comedian, 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. In a world of short attention span, this fucking podcast gets viewed more than any other thing on earth.

It is interesting. It's like I think I sort of view— I don't know how you think about many other podcasts. I think you 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, 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— it's an interesting viewpoint you can take that might help someone. Yes. Out there. And you want to, you want people to kind of get involved. You want people to a little bit better because there's kind of a crisis out there. There's like people having such a tough time, like that generation coming up. Yes. We've got to deal them in.

But they always have, Jimmy. This is the thing. They always have. I've talked about this recently. I just finished it, this Alan Watts book from 1950.

Is it the— what is it? The

Wisdom of Insecurity.

Oh no, I haven't read that.

It's fantastic. 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— it's called the Age of Anxiety 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 74 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. Yeah. Everyone who's in it, like, during the Salem Witch Trials, they're probably like, Jesus is coming back any day now. This is crazy. They're drowning witches. They're probably not even witches. This is fucking nuts. Society's collapsing.

I got a theory about witches. You wanna hear my theory about witches? I would love to hear your theory about witches. I think it's a pretty good theory. Okay, so anything that's kooky in the world, right? Tarot cards and horoscopes. Yeah. 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, but that memory is still there, right? And so women's intuition, men's intuition is so powerful that we, we don't, 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 woman with great intuition that goes, oh well, I'll allow myself that intuition through this game. Mm-hmm. It's like, it's just a manifestation that goes, I can't believe that. I can't understand how I know that thing, so I've got— so I'll allow myself know it through this.

Right. Like almost like remote viewing or something.

Yeah, something like that.

Some weird 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. Like, people have incredible intuition, but we've lost the ability to trust it because everything's become about 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 kind of get to that, that trend, that peace is available at all times, right? But you're not allowed— you won't allow yourself access that. You can't believe how kind of great you are, so you have to kind of believe in something else. Mm-hmm. People used to be— people used to be more porous 200 years ago. ago. People are sealed off now. But people were more porous. They were more open to the idea of being possessed by spirits or being 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 that 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 much more distorted perception of how much we actually know. And I think intuition is a real thing. And 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, of course. But I mean—

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

Well, 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. Yeah. 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 stuff. Right. I like to leave 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, those people trouble me.

Right. Yeah, 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 2 wives. So, they had a second wife and he announced it to the—

But that's the old— that's what people don't understand about taking the Lord's name in vain.

Yeah.

People think that means cursing People think— but it doesn't mean cursing. What taking the Lord's name in vain is, it's attributing your selfish desires 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 the reason.

He's not saying goddammit 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 because God told me.

What? What?

Hey, hold up, Jack. Whoa, did he?

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

boy. Well, here's the annoying thing, right? We never get to know this stuff. Like, there's so many— there's that great quote by AC/DC's Roadie: God is the name we give to the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it shape.

Ooh, Roadie said that?

Yeah, well, he became a spiritual, a wonderful thinker. But yeah, God is the name we give to the—

He's probably the guy that had all the mushrooms.

Yeah,

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-half-full version is that this AI 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 longstanding life of pattern pattern of just doing a thing for a living. And now that thing goes away.

You don't know what to do with yourself. This will not be the big change. The big change— like 1870 to 1970 was the big change. Everything changed. Like the way that we lived is unrecognizable in those 100 years. We may never get another 100 years like that. That was phenomenal, right? So everything that's changed since 1970 has been bits, right? Nothing's changed in that world. But the house is unrecognizable in that time, right? From indoor plumbing to heating to food production, 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? Mm-hmm. So we, the Western world, we make something that everyone else wants. We make progress. We make progress. We've made kind of great progress. But you go back like 200 years ago, 98% of the population were working in agriculture on farms, right? We all moved into the cities and we got these other jobs and things. And we think this is it. This is the end of history, right? This is— we all live in cities.

No, no, no. It'll change again. It'll change again. And we're all just, I suppose, from that thing of— it's Ram Dass, isn't it? We're all just walking each other home. Mm.

Yeah.

We're all just trying to help. 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's a lack of 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. Mostly when you go to a party in the real world, you want to find a guy like you and have a cool conversation, have a drink, and have a laugh, 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, road rage. Remember that road rage thing? Okay, so that's happening. them, right? So you're in a car, someone cuts you off, and you're like, fuck you, fuck you. And like, there's a pane of glass between you and them, okay? Imagine that times a billion online. Yes. If you bump into someone in the street or at a party, oh, sorry, man. Like, there's something about being with other people, the unspoken communication of just being in the space with someone else and going, That guy seems very calm. He's cool.

Yes.

Okay, there's no aggravation here. This is great. You bump into someone, it's not a big deal. But in a car with a screen, it could be a problem because 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 kind of moving around. Everything's easy. You know how you're not in a heightened state of danger? You're in a state of danger when you're in a car. So if you're going 60 miles an hour on the highway, somebody gets in front of you, you're a fucking cocksucker. There's a reason why you get that quick, because you're already at 7. You're already like looking at the mirrors, you're on the gas.

I know. I find the thing— I write a lot in the car. Do you? I like writing when I'm driving.

So you shut the music off?

No, shut everything off. I've got— so my theory is It's like boredom is unappreciated serenity. Right? You want to get in places where you're bored. I want to be in a sauna just with my thoughts.

And just think.

I want to 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 happen. Like sit in boredom for a while. Like we've miscoded stuff in our society. Right? So boredom is a problem now. massively overstimulated. And the answers you're looking for are in the silence you're avoiding.

Right.

Right? And you go— and people talk about problems. Like rich and famous is heaven in a secular world. Like, oh, it's because if you don't know 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 you get good at solving them, you'll give yourself a bigger one. You'll give yourself something else to do. Because a guy without anything to do is—

Right, but the resentment comes from the problems, not daily survival. So there's a 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 or do I—

it's But it is— You know what real privilege is? Real privilege? Like, the poor have no future, right? Poor people are living hour to hour, day to day, right? Right. Like, the richest people you know are planning their trust fund for their grandchildren. Right. Their time horizon is massively different. We have to come up with some way to make it all right for people that are on— 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 a real privilege. But it also—

that being in a desperate state is what motivates a lot of people to succeed. Well, 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 thing got burned into them. They're like, there's a desperation to succeed because you don't want to be in this place because that's 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, because 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, because I got a development deal. I got a bunch of money, like $100 grand or $150 grand, and then immediately I felt relaxed. 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 is so vastly different. For me, it was like the Comedy Store and a place called the Banana Cabaret in London. And I was doing gigs, and I was doing like 4 shows a night, and it was like £200 a show. And I was like making— I made like £800 in cash in a night. I went, hmm.

You got it.

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

But that's what I was 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 going to 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 kid doing martial 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 it's writing songs, whether it's writing books. Everybody can find a thing.

Every lesson is the same lesson. It's attention. It's learning how to give something your attention.

And finding something that you— that really, like, gets you excited, something you enjoy, you know. And it doesn't have to be that you only do that if you're struggling and you, you need to provide food, 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, or it's playing chess, it's that thing, whatever it is.

Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

Yeah. And enjoy it. Enjoy it, because 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 in your life, 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 of luck. We've been—

Super lucky.

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

You and I are 2 of the luckiest human beings that have ever lived.

Yes.

Ever lived. We get to do a thing that most people couldn't dream of. If you had— 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, keep doing it, 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're trying 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 things and how to pursue things.

Well, I don't like the way that they silo education. Oh,

I hate it.

Like that 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 kind of— isn't like that. The world's everything together. You've got to be interested in everything.

But you need 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 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 and— because then you're just going to get sucked into materialism because that's what most people are really into money. What they're really into is the objects they get for their money so they could show how well they're doing.

But that's like people that don't know the difference between intrinsic and instrumental things, right? There's stuff that we want intrinsically, you know, love, connection, 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. Right. Or, you know, people want respect because they're outsourcing what they really want, which is self-respect. Right. So you go, no, no, it has to be like— 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, 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.

Yeah.

They're chasing people agreeing, okay, I like you. Yeah. I like you. I like you, Jimmy.

But the attribute of being envied is what passes as glamor in our society. Ah. So it's the René Girard guy that talks about mimetic desires. So a lot of our desires are— we don't know what to want, so we want what other people want. So we say— so there's like— there's an intrinsic value to something and then there's a metaphysical value to something. So any watch will tell the time. A Casio will tell the time the same as a Rolex, but one of them has 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 because they're really into the manufacturing the car and their thing and how fast— the speed they want to 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?

Yeah.

Ooh, it's Jimmy Carr.

But are you getting the— are you getting the— do you really want it? That fundamental question, what do you want? What do you want? Is so difficult to answer in life. And, you know, it's—

Because everybody's got a different answer too.

Yeah.

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 is life hard now 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's my— like, we're asking ourselves these questions in a way that no one had to answer those questions 100 years ago. We have to ask ourselves, do I believe in God? Don't I believe in God? 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 privatized mental health problems. We've said to people, oh, your mental health problem is a personal failing.

You fucked up. No. We've organized our society in a way that's led to an incredible amount of depression and anxiety. And we have to be much kinder to people. We have to give them 2 things: agency and empathy together. The kindest thing you can say to someone is, I believe you can handle this. Like, to get— 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 episode of Kill Tony too. All right, that's it. Goodbye, everybody.

Thanks.