"All Self-Help Boils Down To One Truth" - Jimmy Carr (4K)

Jimmy Carr is a comedian, television host and an author. Jimmy is known as one of the best one-line comics in history, but this episode goes way deeper than you’re probably expecting. It's far less about jokes and far more about Jimmy’s obsession with human psychology, frameworks and thinking tools. Expect to learn what the most important question to ask yourself is, why you have probably been thinking about luck incorrectly, what the two great myths in life are, the most common misconceptions about being famous, how to survive a cancellation attempt, what kind of relationship we should have with our inner-critic, how to enjoy the passage of time in a graceful way and much more... Sponsors: Get a FREE 30-day trial and 2 months at 50% off from Epidemic Sound at https://share.epidemicsound.com/modernwisdom (use code MW50 at checkout) Get 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get $150/£150 discount on Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #jimmycarr #psychology #mindset - 00:00 Ask Yourself ‘What Do You Want?’ 10:57 The Intense Schedule of a Popular Comedian 16:15 Are Comedians Ahead of the Curve on Society’s Issues? 25:14 Our Obsession With Ourselves & Individualism 33:40 The Internet’s Culture of Cynicism 41:39 Hidden Vs Observable Metrics 53:25 Using Useful Delusions to Make Life Better 1:06:32 The Rise of Andrew Tate in the Silent Crisis of Young Men 1:16:45 The Experience of Being Cancelled 1:26:47 Our Personas Crave Praise 1:35:37 Fear of What Other People Will Think of Our Failure 1:42:46 Jimmy’s Thoughts on Kindness 1:49:45 Do Men Have a Quarter-Life Crisis? 1:54:45 How We Value Things At Different Stages of Life 2:01:45 How Should We Respond to Critics? 2:08:45 Should We Be Worried About China, AI & Existential Risks? 2:24:09 Going from the Easy Life to Having Children 2:36:04 The Beauty of Flow States in the Passage of Time 2:41:07 What’s Next for Jimmy - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Jimmy Carr, welcome to the show.

• 0:01Jimmy Carr?

  Thank you very much. I'm a, I'm a big fan of it. I'm kind of nervous about talking to you in a weird way. Because I like the show. I, I really like you as a kind of cultural entity. I think it's a really interesting kind of journey you've had and I get so much from this show. You know, that phrase, I think you use it probably more than any other phrase, does it grow corn? And for me, this show really kind of grows corn. There's so many little things that I've taken from this that I've kind of gone, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do something with that. So kind of the, the practical application of the wisdom, what you get out of people seems to be very easy to integrate into life.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  Right. So the bar's been set high for you today, then, if you start dicking around.

• 0:46Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I mean, dicking around is sort of what I do. So the other thing is like, I, I kind of get more nervous being myself than being sort of the comedic persona, you know, just being funny, just being on things, being funny, I find very easy. It's a, it's an interesting sort of life lesson, the idea of like, what do you find easy that other people find difficult? Go for that. Do that for a living. That's, that's, there's, there's gonna be money there. There's gonna be, there's gonna be some gold. You're gonna be okay. If you find it easy and everyone else is going, that's impossible. So you're standing up in front of people being funny, I find very easy. Like, these kind of conversations, I slightly, you slightly second guess yourself.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  It's what you're used to, I think. It's what you spend a lot of time becoming acclimatized to doing.

• 1:28Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I suppose. You know, it's just that thing of, I've always said in comedy, people sort of talk about how many years they've been doing comedy and it seems faintly ridiculous. It's kind of, it's like when you talk to an airline pilot, they've got a really good view on it. They talk about how many hours they've got in the sky. And for me, like, there's no substitute for stage time. And I'm sure for you, there's no substitute for, for this, for actually doing it. Everything else is, is kind of, it doesn't matter how many years you've had a podcast. I think something about the frequency of your show as well. It's the, it's kind of, it's always there. There's always something new.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  You talk about the most important question to ask yourself being what do you want?

• 2:05Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I mean, I talk about that an awful. I studied a lot of studied and was very interested in sort of NLP. And that question of what do you want in the micro in the macro being um being the absolute key in sort of life? Because people sort of, I suppose it's that thing of going, what does something represent? People, someone might say, well, I want a Ferrari.

• 2:28Jimmy Carr?

  But why? If you if you sort of dig a little deeper, you can't just ask once, what do you want? Well, I want a Ferrari and a Rolex and all of the trappings. But actually, what they want is status. So it's kind of asking yourself, what game are you going to play? I read a lot of that Rene Girard stuff about sort of memetic desires. So this idea that you've got what you really want at kind of a fundamental level. It's about you and what you perceive you should have compared to others. So this idea of kind of being honest about what you want and why you want it.

• 3:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, splitting apart, what is a genuine desire that's come from you that's been self authored? And what is just the things that you've taken from the way you dealt with past trauma and what your parents valued? And what society says that you should and the paths of least resistance and your genetic predisposition. This beautiful quote that says ultimately happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of our mental afflictions and the discomfort of becoming ruled by them. And it's this.

• 3:35Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, that's it's a lot, though, isn't it? I mean, it's like, I don't think anyone gets there. By the way, I think there's there's kind of there's slightly, I think sometimes when I hear people kind of into you talking about this stuff. There's a there's a sense of, oh, well, you know, I'm enlightened now and I know, knowing that you, you know, you only want that thing because you've got that thing. And I want the new iPhone because you've got the new iPhone. Knowing that doesn't really make any difference because when you're out there in the world, you've still got to live a life and do something.

• 4:02Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 4:02Jimmy Carr?

  But it's about what that Will Stor book I thought was phenomenal.

• 4:08Jimmy Carr?

  The Status Game. I mean, all these books are great, actually. He's a really interesting sort of underrated writer. He's wonderful. But that thing of like going, well, actually, you pick what status game you play in. You can have anything. You can't have everything. It's that thing of just the words seem to be very important to me. The idea of saying you can work for anything in life to a kid as opposed to you can have anything. Is the difference between, you know, ambition and entitlement in, you know, summed up. There's that lovely thing you sent out the other day.

• 4:40Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 4:41Jimmy Carr?

  That, you know, the difference between ambition and entitlement being, you know.

• 4:46Chris Williamson?

  Ambition, ambition is when you expect yourself to close the gap between what you have and what you want. Entitlement is when you expect others to close the gap between what you have and what you want.

• 4:57Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, that thing of like agency seems, that's very high on my list of like getting back to what do you want? Agency. I want the, I want control to be in here. Like, I think it's better to be a stand up. I mean, the thing I've been thinking about recently is being stoic, doing less better. Being a stand up is a great job. And there's so many stand ups that get the job of being a stand up. And then they want to be an actor. And I go, you're mad. That's, it's not as good a job. It's better to do a podcast than to have a TV show. And because you're in charge. You're your own boss. You're, you know, kind of what, you know, cancel proof, not that you'd be particularly bothered about that. But the idea of going, you're in charge and you've got agency and you can do what you want.

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's a level.

• 5:40Jimmy Carr?

  There's a huge power to that.

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  There's a level of narcissism, I think, that comes with believing that you would be able to beat somebody else at them doing one thing while you're doing two things. Okay. So you think that you're going to be a better podcaster than the guy that just does a podcast whilst trying to do a podcast and run a business and be on TV and fly around the world and do all of these different things.

• 6:04Jimmy Carr?

  It's also that thing of like going, if your aim is sort of happiness, I think having a process driven ambition rather than an outcome driven ambition, like what do you want to do rather than what you want to be? You know, so that idea of going, look, you do a podcast and you live for it. It seems to be pretty much all you care about and you're loving it and you you you kind of embody that and it's it gets back to that Naval thing of like what's play for you. What's easy for you, what's play, what's just what's fun. No one's going to put this effort in. Look around, look at the 4K cameras, whatever. The no one's putting this effort in that doesn't really care about it. So someone trying to fake it and go, well, I want what he's getting for that. I want the ad revenue. It's like you well, no, that's the you're playing in the wrong game.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  There's a really great quote from Mark Manson where he talks about the most important question to ask yourself is what pain are you willing to endure in your life rather than what pleasure do you want? Because any pleasure or any pursuit that you want is going to come with an in-kind payment of pain. Even your stuff, the fatigue, the roads, everything else.

• 7:06Jimmy Carr?

  But but that thing of like, you know, the the all self-help is hard choices now, easy life later. Everything is the marshmallow test. Everything is about saying, look, you know, that famous marshmallow test of give a kid, you can have one marshmallow now or two later. That seems to be a really good indicator in life of going, what are you willing to? And and and work really is work is the sacrifice for later. And it's it's really about that timeframe. The probably the biggest thing I got from this show and from following you was that idea of serving yourself in 24 hours. You have to serve someone. What are you going to do today that you tomorrow will appreciate?

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Jimmy Carr?

  Because for something about a day seems about the right timeframe. Like if it's if it's in six months' time, and you're trying to go to the gym and motivate yourself by, I'm going to look great in six months. It's like, ah, I don't know. I don't know if you're going to do that. I don't think that's a motivator because.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  It's written on my fridge. What would you tomorrow want you today to do?

• 8:05Jimmy Carr?

  It's a great. I think there's a book in that. I think genuinely, I think it's such a powerful.

• 8:10Chris Williamson?

  You've got me writing. You have told me to write five different books over the last week that we've spent together.

• 8:16Jimmy Carr?

  But I like the idea of that thing of going because it's it's, you know, you listen to a podcast, but the book seems to be the book and the course seems to be the thing that it's just a way of getting all of your thoughts on this together.

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  It's a full treatment.

• 8:28Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. But I think the idea of like your the, you know, what are you going to do that's going to make you happy in 24 hours? And that's really about saying, well, your ambitions should be feelings, not things.

• 8:43Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference?

• 8:44Jimmy Carr?

  Well, the idea that you go, well, how do I want to feel is something that you go, well, that's, that's an ambition you have. I want to feel happy. I want to feel contented. I want to feel healthy. I want to feel fulfilled, wanting those things, wanting material things. Well, the reason you want the material thing is to give you the feeling. Just cut out the middle, man. Yeah, I mean, listen, it's easy for me to say, I'm rich and famous, baby. It's, you know, it's like, it's slightly that thing of like where you're calling from, but you, you just realize there's just more stuff.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Over dinner, you spoke about the difference between jealousy and envy. And I thought that that was really interesting.

• 9:20Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I think that it's a conception where I don't really mind which word you use. But envy for me is, is good because it tells you what you want. So if you see someone and they've got a terrific physique and you go, oh, I wanna, I wanna look like that guy, that tells you what you want. That's, that's great. When you see someone with a, I don't know, a, um, a beautiful girl and you don't want him to have it, but you don't want it. That strikes me, that is a very, uh, that's kind of, um, bitterness and resentment and it's, it's mean and it's, it's that, that, I think it's a, it's a, it's a Nietzsche quote, isn't it? If you, um, uh, resentment is when you think someone has ruined your life. And there is someone that's ruined your life. It's you.

• 10:07Jimmy Carr?

  So it's really, I find that very powerful.

• 10:09Chris Williamson?

  But that's the agentic frame again, right? That you're taking control of that when you realize that it is you that's been in control of most of the things that have gone on. That's taking agency. That's taking responsibility.

• 10:22Jimmy Carr?

  But I think that we're, we're sort of set up not to do that, right? We're, we're set like, and as the economy changes, as our world changes, I think the idea of getting a job is, is a little bit, you know, becomes slightly nanny state. It's like, well, I'll get a job and they'll pay me and then they'll, they'll worry about that and I'll just do this job for them. And it's like this idea of like, new jobs are happening all the time. It feels like there's a, there's a new economy kind of sprouting up and people are doing their own thing. It feels like it's not just comedians. I mean, obviously I'm, uh, very bought into the being a stand-up comedian world, but people are doing their own thing. It's lovely.

• 10:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I wonder, talking about the skill acquisition thing, obviously the pace that you tour at, how many shows have you done this year so far?

• 11:05Jimmy Carr?

  Two twenty, something like that.

• 11:07Chris Williamson?

  And there's probably been about two hundred and fifty to two hundred and eighty days so far this year.

• 11:12Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, something like that, but I make TV shows as well. So, you know, I keep busy. But it's, you know, but really, if you compare it to someone with a real job, it's not that much work because the way that I perceive it is I work for, you know, two hours or four hours a night, depending on how many shows. And most people work eight hours. Now, there's a bit of travel involved and stuff, but it's, it's it's a pleasure. If you find something you love doing, you never work again. That's the.

• 11:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, I suppose if you look at, that's such a good frame to say, wow, two hundred and fifty days of the year or two hundred and twenty days of the year, and there's only been two hundred and eighty days or whatever. Okay, well, if you were to roll that forward for any normal nine to five person, that's that's probably the right number of days, maybe even a little bit less. And there's something about taking a working class spit and sawdust mentality into the realm where it it doesn't seem like it's it's supposed to be there, where you actually end up seeing disproportionate returns.

• 12:10Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I suppose it's that thing of like, it's uh, it it's really about what you're willing to put in as well. Like, if you find something that you love doing, well, why would you want to stop doing that? Just do do more of that and you get better. It is that thing where you go, it's time in the gym. It seems that stress is very good for us in in all areas. You're going to the gym is stressing your body and working and coming up with new stuff is, you know, you're you're stressing yourself, you know, so that thing of like trying to, you know, trying new stuff at every show. You it's only, you know, you saw the show the other night, it's only a five minute bit where I get out a pit of paper and try some new jokes. But that bit means that the next tour is very easy because five minutes at every show.

• 12:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Jimmy Carr?

  You you sort of bank a lot of stuff, a bank a lot of new ideas, and you have a reason to think about the new thing, always. You have a reason to be thinking about, okay, what's the new thing? What's the new thing? What's a new idea for a joke? What am I going to try tonight?

• 13:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's a big hack, I think. You know, it's the Feynman technique. In order to be able to learn it, you must first be able to teach it type thing. But. There's an equivalent when it comes to personal growth as well, I think, which is the best way to ensure that you're going to continue to develop is to have an outlet where it's going to be scrutinized by other people. That's so much of the learning and the reading and the stuff that I do is exclusively because I know that I need to be remotely interesting or prepared for the next guest that comes on.

• 13:34Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it's that, it is that thing where you go, the joy of stand up comedy, the feedback loop is, it's so quick. I mean, people just immediately, and, and an audience, you know, Lenny Bruce first said it, the audience is a genius. They know immediately, that's funny, that's not funny, that's acceptable, that's not acceptable. They make the call on all that stuff. So you're just like presenting stuff and going, is that okay? Is that all right? I mean, you know, it's, it's really easy because you just, you write, I've written so many more jokes that don't work than you. So many more, like thousands more.

• 14:05Chris Williamson?

  It's that Edison thing about, I haven't failed, I just found 10,000 ways that I wasn't successful.

• 14:11Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. And you, but you eventually get to it. And then you go, what you, what's, what's the stand up comedian kind of superpower? It's an hour, maybe 90 minutes if you go and see a live show, because there's better stuff as well. But the, you know, putting together specials and you go, right, it's, it's, that's kind of the best of me of the last 18 months. That's all the funny stuff I, I said in the last 18 months. And that's there for you. Just it's, it's rich. I, I think, I think, I mean, my big thing on stand up comedy is I think it should be taught. I think there's too much superstition.

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  You want it to be in schools.

• 14:43Jimmy Carr?

  I do think it should be in schools. I think it's more relevant than music. I think music's incredibly important and it should be taught more in schools. But I think stand up should be a course in schools. Think about what it's about. It's about verbal dexterity, right? And it's about being able to express yourself. And it's about finding your voice and expressing who you are. And it's a perspective on life where you're seeing the lighter side and trying to find fun in something. That, you know, there's two stories, you know, one story's about a guy shitting himself on a train. And it's just a, it's like, ah, I had the worst day ever. And then there's some perspective where you go, that's the funniest story I've ever heard. That there's, there's something about the ability of a

• 15:27Jimmy Carr?

  comedian to kind of shift perspectives. And for me, comedy has a function in society that no one is calling, which is it's the, we're pushing the overton window. We we're always at the edge of what is and what isn't acceptable. Like, no, I'm not just talking about like, I happen to tell edgy jokes. That's not what this is. It's I'm seeing things as they are, but kind of with new eyes. That's sort of what comics do, even the most kind of mainstream observational comedy, if done well, you're sort of questioning the reality. You're saying, well, this is, this is, uh, this is not normal. This is not how things should be. This is weird. Am I the only one thinking this? Is it just me? That kind of trope of comedy.

• 16:10Jimmy Carr?

  And it pushes what we what we think about the world. It pushes what's acceptable. It's progressive.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  You said that comedians are often ahead of the curve on social issues.

• 16:20Jimmy Carr?

  I think they are. I think like comedians really do kind of.

• 16:24Jimmy Carr?

  It's the canary in the mine. It's the sort of testing area of what you can say. And, you know, politics lags behind.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  And so does culture. You know, if you want to know what are going to be the biggest talking points amongst normal people in about eighteen months' time, look at the jokes that comedians are making today.

• 16:42Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I think there's a, there's a, there's a argument to be said that comedy lives in sort of a space between public and private discourse. And it strikes me that there's never been a wider gap between public and private discourse. What people are saying in bars and homes and on social media to their friends. And what the party line, you know, you sort of, the party line's pretty strong at the moment on what you can and what you can't say. You know, if you want to see where power really lives, what can't you say?

• 17:15Jimmy Carr?

  It's interesting, right? What can't you say in a society and what isn't acceptable in the world? And you get into very interesting topics. I mean, all the stuff you talk about on Modern Wisdom falls into that sort of category of going, well, should we talk about this? You know, you talk about, you know, whether it's environmentalism or gender or, you know, what's what's happening in the world. It's very, it's very interesting to kind of call that and to to mess around with it. So it's actually, it's kind of a great space. And comedy, it sugars the pill as well. You're, you know, it's, it's almost the perfect drug for me, stand-up comedy, because it's the dopamine here if you don't quite know where the line is going to come. And it's the serotonin pleasure of laughter. And going out to a live show has that incredible sort of effect on people of it.

• 17:59Jimmy Carr?

  It it's a physical response. I'm, you know, I've said it before, I I think of myself as a drug dealer, but you have the drugs on you.

• 18:07Chris Williamson?

  That's so nice.

• 18:08Jimmy Carr?

  You know, you've, you've got everything on you, but I'm able to sort of tease it out so I can get across borders with no problem.

• 18:16Jimmy Carr?

  It's interesting, isn't it? It's like the best drug in the world. What's the best drug in the world?

• 18:19Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, I would, I would love to know what the hormonal cascade of someone listening to a great podcast is feeling. I'm going to guess that there would be a good chunk of serotonin and maybe some dopamine from, I've realised something or here's two ideas that I didn't see before and they've been tied together and they've been wrapped up in a bow and.

• 18:36Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it's interesting, the dopamine thing, the thing that we were discussing the other day that I found very interesting was like the idea that you could go, if you had one data point on someone, their view on abortion, let's say, what else could you, what else could you figure out from that?

• 18:50Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 18:50Jimmy Carr?

  You know, so the, the modern day, I suppose it would be modern day cold reading, right?

• 18:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Jimmy Carr?

  So if, you know, old school cold reading was, you know, someone at a seance going, has anyone lost a Mary in Catholic Ireland? I mean, fucking throw a stone.

• 19:05Jimmy Carr?

  But the idea is kind of modern day cold reading on what do you, what do you think about Brexit? Someone tells you and you go, I know everything that I need to know about you.

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Jimmy Carr?

  From that one data. So with podcasts, it's, the thing is, it's about the dopamine of going, when does someone surprise you with their view?

• 19:19Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I, I, so after our conversation, we went for dinner on Thursday and then I wrote my newsletter based off of the inspiration from that. Such a good way to judge whether or not the content creator that you are listening to is acting genuinely and taking their insights from what they truly are interested in and being honest is when was the last time that they surprised you with something that they said?

• 19:45Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. The honesty is really interesting because it's, it's weird being a comic because everything I say on stage is a lie. Ultimately jokes are little lies, but comics leak. There's a weird thing. You can watch someone on stage or watch, you know, your favourite comic or whatever. And you kind of have a sense of who they are. It just, it just happens. You don't really choose your style as a comic. It kind of chooses you. It's kind, it's who you are. It's really, it's kind of an interesting thing.

• 20:08Chris Williamson?

  A caricature of the self.

• 20:09Jimmy Carr?

  Well, not even a caricature. I think there's something about, it's, it's very authentic. And there's something about podcasting, especially the long form shows, you can't hide. There's nowhere for you to hide. So the thing that I found kind of fascinating about your journey, um, and I, you know, my only critique of your show is that I don't think you ever talk about yourself enough. Because it's, you're fabulous at listening and teasing things out of people and, and holding a space. But you never really talk about your journey. And maybe you did in the very early episodes and I missed them, but the idea of like going to go from a guy on Love Island running clubs to this strikes me as a, I mean, you talk about agency.

• 20:52Jimmy Carr?

  You, you basically kind of invented a job that didn't really exist. It wasn't really a thing. And now of course, you know, it is, and you know, everyone's got a podcast, but not like this.

• 21:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I guess, you know, whenever I sit down with someone, for a long time, when you start a show, you're riding on the coattails of whoever is in front of you. You know, I'm riding on the coattails of Rory Sutherland or Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray or whoever. And then I'm always really interested in just making the show an amazing platform and trampoline for the guests. If I walk away with the guest shining as much as possible, that's, that's a good day at the office for me. I made this as energetic or sedate or thoughtful or exciting or whatever as needed to be to get the best insights out of this spectacular person who's very interesting and I want to learn from.

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  That's a good day at the office and it always inevitably puts me in the backseat, but that's how I designed it, right? I designed it to not be, it's not called the Chris Williamson Show, right? It's called Modern Wisdom. Because I wanted to be the most interesting people, the smartest thinkers on the planet. What have they got to say? Life is hard and this show should help. That's where it is. That being said, I know that after a while, sort of the cult of personality starts to kick in and you think, oh, well, people actually want now not just to know about them, but to know about you. I've got this fucking live show happening where it's me on stage for nearly two hours, just me.

• 22:23Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Chris Williamson?

  That's terrifying.

• 22:24Jimmy Carr?

  How are you finding the, because you did the first one on Saturday, right?

• 22:27Chris Williamson?

  I had a dry run. Yeah. Assisted by some words of wisdom from you the night before. Um, it was good. I really enjoyed it. Scary. I don't know how you guys do it.

• 22:36Jimmy Carr?

  What do you mean? You just did it.

• 22:37Chris Williamson?

  But it's different. What I do is I just get to waffle. What you have to do is this unbelievably zero percent fat, lean down to the nothing but muscle, fucking bodybuilder presentation up on stage.

• 22:50Jimmy Carr?

  I don't know. I think it's, I think it's, you know, what are people looking for really? I mean, with laughter, they're looking for, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a response you could kind of measure. You look at laughs per minute and go, well, you're doing a great job because you're getting the last minute, but ultimately they're coming out to be part of a crowd. They could watch it at home on Netflix, but they're coming out to see a show because they want to feel connected. What are you offering? Connection. People want to feel connected and you're standing on stage and you're saying, well, you're giving of yourself. Here's what I learned. Here's what I think. And, you know, hopefully they, they feel like they're, they're with like-minded people. They're in a room.

• 23:24Chris Williamson?

  Collective effervescence, I think.

• 23:25Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it's, it's tribal, isn't it? It's that idea that we're, we sort of, there's an illusion that we're individuals. I really like that line. There's, um, there's no such thing as a baby.

• 23:36Jimmy Carr?

  It's always a baby and someone caring for the baby. It's a baby and a mother, baby and a father, baby and a family. Babies don't exist on their own. We're all babies. We all, it takes a village. You know, if you look around behind the cameras at the other people that are just in the room right now, never mind the other people that work on the podcast, the idea that a stand-up is standing on stage on his own. It's an illusion. It's a very pleasing illusion because we're in our heads a lot of the time, but we are searching for community in a space where that's sort of been lost. You know, the idea that we're kind of, we've never been more connected and never felt more alienated.

• 24:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, you talk-

• 24:12Jimmy Carr?

  Because it's about the depth of the connection.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  In other news, this episode is brought to you by Epidemic Sound. If you have ever tried to put sound effects or music behind any video, you will know just how hard it is to do. Epidemic Sound has over 90,000 sound effects plus a vast music library that will avoid any copyright concerns. Your videos are not going to get demonetized or infringe on someone's copyright, which happens all the time if you're not using a professional library. All of their tracks are professionally produced by a diverse collection of artists and are exclusive to the platform. If you've ever been wondering how your favorite creators take their videos to the next level, a lot of it comes with sound design, and that is the sound library selection they have access to. So many of them are using Epidemic Sound, and you can join them for free for 30 days

• 24:56Chris Williamson?

  by clicking the link in the description below or going to share.epidemic sound.com/mordenwisdom. And if you cancel within that 30 days, you can still keep all of the sounds that you've used during your trial period. That's share.epidemic sound.com/mordenwisdom. We spoke the other night about the problems of the self. You have a problem, or there are many problems that are associated with this obsession with the self and the rise of the individual.

• 25:24Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I think that's, you know, that's the, yeah, it's, it strikes me that it's, if you, if you look at different communities around the world, you can sort of see where there's certain communities where the self is, is sacrosanct, and there's other places where not so much, you know, it's much more tribal. I mean, it's kind of an interesting thought. My favorite quote of all time is William Gibson, "The future is here, but it's not evenly distributed."

• 25:52Jimmy Carr?

  And you think, wow, like, yeah, of course.

• 25:55Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean to you?

• 25:56Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it means that there's a utopia in the world. I'm a very positive person. I mean, I really do think the world is great and we're going to crack it. I think we may have already solved most of the problems in the world. But in in in just particular areas, right? So the, you know, so you go to Portugal, let's say, go to Lisbon now. And the drug laws changed fifteen years ago, they legalized all drugs. Said all drugs are legal and we're going to take all the money we were spending on fighting. Uh, the war on drugs, which we're just patently losing. We take all that money and we're going to spend it on rehabs and we're going to spend it on education. And we're going to spend it on uh, making it easier for people to make good choices. Quite, and it worked. You walk around Lisbon now, one of the safest cities in Europe.

• 26:40Jimmy Carr?

  It's magnificent, it's buzzing, it's it's fabulous. And you go, that's, that's a brilliant idea. Why don't we just take that and do that here? It seems to work. Cause you know, the people sort of go, yeah, but you know, drugs aren't good and drugs are. I agree, I don't do drugs, it's not my thing. And some people have got real issues around them, but you go, but what we're doing at the moment isn't working. And that seems to work. And then you'll always have a very small percentage of people that have, you know, real problems and that's fine. But at least if you know those people aren't criminalized, then they don't, most petty crime is drug related. So you, that's a problem, that's been fixed, we could just take that. I think the energy crisis has been solved. But only on nuclear submarines.

• 27:24Jimmy Carr?

  Nuclear submarines strike me as, that's there. Why is no one talking about these? People are living in tubes with a nuclear reactor and they have been for fifty years, we've tested it. And those guys seem fine.

• 27:36Chris Williamson?

  Self sustaining, much worse environment than we've got up here where we can breathe water and we don't need to recirculate the carbon dioxide.

• 27:42Jimmy Carr?

  But, and it's working, right? There you go. There's the, I mean, I'm apps, I'm with Extinction Rebellion. I think there is an environmental crisis, it's awful. But I don't think the person that solves the problem is, I don't think we say in fifty years' time. Oh, we came pretty close there to an environmental collapse, but thankfully, someone glued themselves to the top of a car. That did it. I think it's going to be a physicist that does it, right? It's going to be a scientist that has a wonderful idea and and and does something. So it's that thing, if you go, if you care about that, where should you be putting your energy? And I think it's again, it comes back to where's the agency? So that, you know.

• 28:23Jimmy Carr?

  Gluing yourself to the top of a car is is great. It's saying, look, I need this is important. Something needs to be done. I don't think any politician has the vision to do it. I don't think it gets solved through a law. I think it gets solved through science and technology. And I read David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. And I was just blown away by what if we're the first hundred billion people? That's how many people have lived, right? Yeah, a hundred billion. I'm including us in that.

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Jimmy Carr?

  And it could be trillions in the future.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Jimmy Carr?

  If we if we get this right. It's exciting, right? And the idea that science is this particular meme that can, you know, we've got this AI technology, which people seem scared about. And you go, well, maybe this is going to be the solution. People are worried about nuclear catastrophe. We've already priced in the downside, right? We've priced in nuclear war. That's already a possibility. Why not take the upside?

• 29:26Chris Williamson?

  Did you read William McCaskill's What We Owe the Future? Did you see that?

• 29:31Jimmy Carr?

  No, but I I heard people talking about it. I haven't got around to reading it. Is it is it good?

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  Interesting guy, good. It's it's an important book, I think, to read, especially if you think about these topics in a big way.

• 29:40Jimmy Carr?

  Well, that idea of like people being, people are important temporally and spatially.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 29:47Jimmy Carr?

  So the idea that we're quite obsessed with us in the West, you know, America, West Europe.

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  In our village, in our community.

• 29:56Jimmy Carr?

  What do we owe the future is a very good question. What do we owe the rest of the world? Because the idea that the environmental problem could be solved by doing less and cutting back. And maybe if we live like we lived in nineteen eighty five, that could cure things. I don't think it's, you know, the population's out of control. I don't see any volunteers.

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard Peter Singer's thought experiment about the drowning child? This explains the distance thing that you were talking about very nicely. So you're walking down the street and you see a drowning child in the river that's next to you.

• 30:30Jimmy Carr?

  It does sound like a setup for a joke, doesn't it? It sounds like the kind of thing I would go, so I'm walking down the street. So there's a drowning child in in a river.

• 30:39Jimmy Carr?

  Okay.

• 30:40Chris Williamson?

  That's the start. Peter Singer is a nice, softly spoken Australian man in his late seventies. I don't think that he was meaning it as the setup to a joke, but feel free to take it for tonight.

• 30:49Jimmy Carr?

  Okay.

• 30:49Chris Williamson?

  You, if you were to walk past and not save the child, you would be seen as abhorrent, right? The fucking drowning child, you're the only person that's around here. Why would you not go into the river and go and save this kid? Okay, now.

• 31:02Jimmy Carr?

  Some kids are dicks. I mean, let's call it, let's call it.

• 31:07Chris Williamson?

  The world's better off.

• 31:08Jimmy Carr?

  Do I know this kid?

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 31:10Jimmy Carr?

  Is it baby Hitler?

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  No, why would it be baby Hitler?

• 31:13Jimmy Carr?

  I don't know.

• 31:14Chris Williamson?

  Thought experiment. Go to Hitler.

• 31:16Jimmy Carr?

  Okay, so go on, what's the?

• 31:18Chris Williamson?

  Basically, he continues to use the distance of you. Okay, now the river's a hundred yards away. Now it's 300 yards away. Now it's half a mile away. Now it's a mile away. And the point is, at which distance does the drowning child become less important to you? And the argument kind of is that there's no distance. It becomes an arbitrary, an arbitrary decision. If you would save the child that was there now, you would save the child that is on the other side of the planet starving of.

• 31:49Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's that, it's that you get to that, I think quite quickly to that, what is it? Best things first? The, is it Bjorn Lomborg book?

• 31:59Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 31:59Jimmy Carr?

  What we, like the idea the UN has got 148 things that they want to do. These are our priorities. And you go, well, you don't have any priorities then, because there's a lot of things. What are the things that we should do now that make a difference? So the simple stuff like mosquito nets really does make, it makes a huge difference. Well, that's what do you, what do you do? Because you go, well, you value, you know, your life much more than you value someone's life in. You know, it's interesting what we're not talking about. Like, no one talks about what's going on in Venezuela.

• 32:27Jimmy Carr?

  No one seems that bothered about Venezuela at the moment. And it's a, I don't know, the phrase fucking shit show springs to mind.

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  What's happening in Venezuela?

• 32:34Jimmy Carr?

  It's, you know, the stories I'm hearing is, you know, teenagers are hunting cats in the street.

• 32:40Chris Williamson?

  And people are dying of malnutrition.

• 32:43Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. It's like, it's, it's hell on earth. That thing of like, you know, the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed. It goes back as well. You can go back in time.

• 32:52Chris Williamson?

  The past is still here, it just hasn't caught up yet.

• 32:54Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's, it's, you know, there's not everyone is kind of running on the same system. And maybe we should be, maybe, you know. I mean, we we live in an incredibly privileged time and I'm big on gratitude of like the the opposite of kind of bitterness and resentment, that idea of just going, well, what are you grateful about? And it's you can kind of it's ever expanding. The idea that like if I'd been born in North Korea today, never mind four hundred years ago, but today, it's really funny, he's really good at saying, you know, offensive things.

• 33:31Jimmy Carr?

  I wouldn't have lived.

• 33:31Chris Williamson?

  He made it to six and a half years old.

• 33:33Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's gone. It's gone. That's not.

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  Given your penchant for being positive and for gratitude, what do you make of this culture of cynicism that we see on the internet? Fatalism, nihilism, despondency?

• 33:50Jimmy Carr?

  Um, I mean, it's it the internet's a problem for me because the anonymity is is an issue.

• 33:57Chris Williamson?

  Are you with Jordan Peterson on this?

• 33:59Jimmy Carr?

  What on the?

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  He says that no one, no one should have a Twitter account that hasn't uploaded a photo of their ID.

• 34:05Jimmy Carr?

  I I I kind of would think that's be an interesting thing to try. I mean, what's the argument against that? That the whistleblowers couldn't operate? Well, I guess whistleblowers existed before Twitter and they used to have to go to a paper and the paper would then print the story. That doesn't seem like a terrible system. So we go back to that and everyone has to upload. And then you go, well, you can still shitpost, you can still do all that stuff. It's just it has to be traceable to you because we are who we are when nobody's watching. If you want to know who you really are, be on your own, go somewhere on your own, on holiday, whatever, and you that's who you are. If you're driving along and you throw the soda can out of the window of the car, that's who you really are. No

• 34:47Jimmy Carr?

  one does that with kids in the back. Monster. But if that's if that if you do that, if that's who you that's it's interesting to kind of note that. You know, it's the difference between character and reputation. You know, you really know who you are. Reputation is what everyone else thinks about you. You know who you are in yourself.

• 35:06Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to me to think about how

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

  the way that we, the way that we act when nobody is looking tells us an awful lot about ourselves. It's that adage about um listen to how he talks about his mother and how he treats the serving staff at the restaurants when you're on dates. It's like a good litmus test for the guy that you're dating.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  Because that shows kind of who, when the stakes are incredibly low.

• 35:36Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Chris Williamson?

  How do you show up as a person? But yeah, go back to the cynicism angle. What do you think's going on?

• 35:44Jimmy Carr?

  I don't know. I suppose it's easy. It's easy to be kind of cynical about stuff. It's also, do people not feel like they don't have agency? You know, if we, as we learn more about what's going on in the world, as we, you know, you're surrounded by news stories that you can do nothing about. You know, COVID was very interesting for that because it actually affected us. But normally you're reading about an earthquake happening and you go, well, this, what can I do? What difference does it make? It's, it's beyond my control. Or they're fracking for oil in Alaska. Okay, well, no one's listening to me. Or they're going to war in this. Okay, well, I'm not sure I've got a dog in that race. But and you feel very, so it's, you, you, you kind of get cynical about it.

• 36:28Jimmy Carr?

  I think people have got cynical about politics. It feels like they need big, new, exciting ideas that people can get behind. And it feels like a lot of politics is like talking about changing this thing a tiny little bit and changing that. And it's, people are kind of in one camp or the other.

• 36:44Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether the skepticism around the legitimacy of elections is born out of this sort of sensation people have that they don't really have any, that they can't contribute and what they do doesn't matter. Because that's, that's the most extreme version of it, right? Even my vote didn't matter. Even my legitimate vote didn't matter.

• 37:09Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Chris Williamson?

  So regardless of whether or not you think that the voting machines are hacked or whether or not it's, it's part of some big conspiracy, which it very well may be.

• 37:18Chris Williamson?

  It definitely seems like you could sort of extrapolate forward. Oh, well, if what I do doesn't matter at all, this is a perfectly designed continuation of that narrative as well. So maybe people were, were primed to believe that a little bit more.

• 37:35Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's a it's a very interesting point to kind of go, well, if people don't even think their vote counts, then what can you do? But but I guess if you're if you're pinning your hopes for um self actualization on your party getting in, it's like following a football team. It's like it's a fun thing to do, but don't don't let it take over your life. You know, these are eleven guys that don't give a fuck about you, and they're kicking a ball around. It can't be everything. It can't be the whole of your life. Politics as well can't be the whole of your life. You can't hope that that's going to bring you everything.

• 38:09Jimmy Carr?

  It's you want a you want a uh a better world, but how are we going to get, you know, but it's a good question to ask, like, how do we get a better world? Um, how do we? How do we bring the standard of living up? What do we actually want for the world? Because it's not just more money. Can you see what happens when people get more money? There's just more inflation. That's what that hidden tax kicks in. So what do we want? We want better education, better chances for everyone, better opportunities, I guess. It's pretty like there's a lot of stuff that everyone kind of agrees on, right? Why do you think we think about luck incorrectly? My thing on luck is like, we're we're incredibly lucky. There's certain things that we devalue, right?

• 38:52Jimmy Carr?

  So so um looks is a really good example. Like, if someone's a a model and they're they're gorgeous and they're photographed, lucky, people are kind of a bit dismissive of that. If someone's born really smart, you you never go, oh, you're lucky. You're born with an IQ of one hundred and sixty two, hmm, bit of luck. No one thinks that. We sort of, the two great myths in our society are um

• 39:18Jimmy Carr?

  it's hard work and talent, aren't they? And it's always total bullshit. It's always a mix of the two and finding the right medium, the right edge for you, the right thing to be doing. So you go, people think, oh, you know, Bill Gates, oh, he worked so hard. He used to work eighteen hours a day. He slept at the office. He worked so hard to build that company. No, he's incredibly bright. He had, you know, it's it's always, you know, the talent and the hard work. You know, Michael Jordan, if he hadn't shown up to practice, would be just a guy. Um. And also, if he was living two hundred years ago, pre basketball, I don't know. I don't know, you know, that skill set is very particular.

• 40:00Jimmy Carr?

  So you, what's, what's, what's, what's luck? That everyone's incredibly lucky. I mean, just to be here is, it's beyond, right? I don't know, I kind of, I like the idea of just going, okay, look, we're very lucky, we've got what we've got. Run with it. Also, you're not going to change it. You, you might, that thing of like acceptance being kind of that first step in therapy.

• 40:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 40:22Jimmy Carr?

  Strikes me as really sensible. Just looking at what you've got and go, right, this is it. This is it for the whole journey. I can work on this. It's like nature nurture. Obviously, nature has got a bigger effect than nurture. But nurture is the only bit anyone gives a fuck about because it's the only bit you can play with.

• 40:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:38Jimmy Carr?

  Until I can start fiddling with my DNA sensibly, then I'm gonna be, I'll be nurturing. And nurture, people seem to think nurture stops. You know, people seem to think nurture and environment is the thing for kids.

• 40:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Jimmy Carr?

  And the right school. But really, look at you as a shining example of environment. So you've, you've put yourself in the micro and the macro in a better environment than you were in five years ago. You're not surrounded by people on Love Island, you're surrounded by these incredible intellects. And you've taken yourself out of your, where you grew up and went to university and you've taken yourself to, to Austin. Because there's this kind of energy there and there's other people that are trying to do the same thing as you. And you put yourself in that environment. That strikes me as, as incredibly kind of powerful. But the idea that, you know, if you're still hanging around with the people you hung around with twenty five years ago and they're not adding value, then what are you doing?

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, me and George had this idea that we're gonna write a, an essay on together. So I'm gonna try and explain it to you now. It's not fully thought out, but we'll see if we can get there. The difference between observable and hidden metrics and how they influence our motivation. So a lot of the time, people will trade a hidden metric for an observable metric. Good example of a hidden metric would be something like peace of mind.

• 41:55Jimmy Carr?

  Okay.

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  And something like an observable metric would be money. People will happily trade something which may be more valuable ultimately for something which is less valuable, simply because they can measure it more effectively.

• 42:09Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Chris Williamson?

  Like time's an interesting one because.

• 42:11Jimmy Carr?

  John Lennon lyric, isn't it? I give you everything I got for a little peace of mind.

• 42:16Chris Williamson?

  There we go.

• 42:16Jimmy Carr?

  But that it's a very interesting point because that idea of going, you know, if you can't measure it, we tend to go to what's measured.

• 42:22Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 42:23Jimmy Carr?

  And so the idea of going these and but actually what matters is it's, you know, emotional.

• 42:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And there's no dashboard. This is why George tries to have a dashboard for all of the things that he does. He's got this end of day assessment type form, custom type form he's made himself that auto populates to a Google sheet. And at the end of, yeah, I, yeah, he's, he was born an incel, but managed to ascend out of it. He has got himself to the stage where he's tracking, what were the three things that I did today? What was my sense of presence? How connected was I? Da, da, da, da, da, all the way down. And his goal is to track this over time, right? To see what are the correlations between my actions and the way that I felt. So he's trying to make the hidden observable. And the problem that we have is that things that really, really matter to us, like connection and peace of mind and,

• 43:14Chris Williamson?

  you know, dopamine and serotonin balance throughout the day, like how content and fulfilled did I feel? All of these things, they're just fucking words. There's this nebulous, ephemeral, wishy was, trying to hold smoke, right? To try and work out what this is. But money, my bank account, it's a fucking good game. The number of followers I've got on social media, it's a really fucking good game. So I'll chase down the observable.

• 43:39Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it gets back to that story of like, what's the most successful story in human history? Money. Money's the greatest story ever told. Because what even is it? Really? When you break it down, it's kind of, it's not anything. And yet everyone believes in it. Everyone believes in that story. And what you're getting to is what's really important in life. And the stuff that maybe you can't measure is kind of what matters, right?

• 44:06Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if there's the this hidden observable framework that we've got here. I wonder if there's an equivalent to do with luck. So what you were talking about is that the actual chance of us all being here, which I did for my TEDx talk, I actually looked at this, it's the same likelihood as all seven million people in Ireland rolling a trillion sided dice and all of them coming up with the same number. It's astronomical. It's way, way, way, way, way more than all of the particles in the observable universe. Because you're

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  Parents had to meet at that particular ovulation cycle with that particular sperm, all the way back. Forget surviving and all of the rest of it.

• 44:46Jimmy Carr?

  To pre-humanity.

• 44:47Chris Williamson?

  Correct. All of the way. The only way that you're here is with the exact, precise combination of each different iteration that goes all the way back of how to be that sperm.

• 44:56Jimmy Carr?

  I find that slightly makes my head hurt. You know, that thing of Sam Harris was talking about this recently, the idea that maybe there's no free will. Maybe we have to be having this conversation now because when the big bang happened, everything rolled out.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  This was ordained.

• 45:11Jimmy Carr?

  Of course.

• 45:12Chris Williamson?

  Robert Sapolsky's got a new book coming out called Determined. You know, Robert Sapolsky, Harvard's evolutionary biologist, he's coming on in a month and a bit, and his new book's called Determined. And it's like how to find happiness in a life with no free will. So it'll be interesting. I think one of the things that Sam failed at doing, I'm still like, some people I speak to talk about like ways that free will kind of does come through and all the rest of it. But one of the things that I think Sam has at least not instructed me, who has listened to a lot of him, in is tactically, how do I use the information of a deterministic universe to feel more fulfilled? Given the fact that both of us are such massive fans of agency and everyone that's listening to this podcast

• 45:55Chris Williamson?

  will be as well, they want to feel like they're the architect of their own life, right? That they are actually able to make some sort of imposition on the world. It's very disempowering to find that, oh, I'm just domino number 48 million out of today's fucking bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. It doesn't, it doesn't make me feel very empowered. So I want, I want someone to come in and tactically tell me if this is the case.

• 46:20Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  How should I live?

• 46:23Jimmy Carr?

  It's interesting, that thing of like, the, the time scales kind of comes up and also the idea of like, what? What are we, what's important here? You sent out a thing recently about fuck you money.

• 46:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Jimmy Carr?

  Which I thought was really interesting. The idea of like the meme of fuck you money. The idea that you could have enough that you could tell people to fuck off. If that's particularly something that, you know, you want to tell people to fuck off. In my experience, you can tell people to fuck off with no money. Good luck. But then there's, there's fuck you freedom was the next iteration. And then you got to fuck you family. The idea that actually what really matters is having a unit. And, and family, I would take in a broader sense of friends and family having like a, a coterie around you. Your tribe, if you will, around you. That's really, it's very interesting to me of like where you're going to play that game. Where you have agency in the world.

• 47:15Jimmy Carr?

  And the idea of going, okay, well, there's certain players, you know, Elon Musk has got agency at a ludicrous global level. But, you know, and the global leaders, great. But on an individual level, we all have agency. We can all, we can all be, you know, we can all make a difference.

• 47:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I really wish, I really wish I could give the gift of sort of higher agency to a lot of people. I think it's such a, the lack of.

• 47:44Jimmy Carr?

  No, I think sort of the greatest gift, like if you could give your child any gift, likability.

• 47:51Jimmy Carr?

  Likability goes a long way.

• 47:52Chris Williamson?

  That's Peterson's thing. Do not let your children do anything that makes you not like them. Like a likable child, I think I was, I think I fear, I may need to ask my mom, and I fear I was an incredibly unlikable child. And I think that that shaped, that was probably quite formative in a lot of my experiences with other parents, with other kids.

• 48:11Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, but do you not think that, I mean, I know a little bit about your childhood and kind of what you went through as an only child and feeling slightly isolated. But is that not the thing that untethered you and allowed you to sort of fly free?

• 48:24Chris Williamson?

  So true. So I, I spoke about this yesterday with Stephen Bartlett that.

• 48:29Chris Williamson?

  There's layers to unpacking the things that you went through and the formative experiences that you've had. So the first layer is, you know, a chip on your shoulder about whatever it is that happened to you. So for me, you know, being bullied in school, being ostracized, not feeling like I was part of a group. Then the second layer is alchemizing that into something that you really care about. So saying, okay, the skills that I got and the resilience that I developed from spending so much time on my own, I've turned something that was toxic into something which is valuable. Then the layer after that is I get to use the chip on my shoulder and the resentment for the people that came before me and that

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  caused this problem as the activation energy to now deploy this skill set. Okay, so there, now I'm not only, not only have I made lead into gold, but I've now turned this gold into something that's useful. I've formed it into something that I can move forward with. But then the final one, and this is the really fucking difficult one, is to realize that if the people who tormented you are the reason that you've developed the skill sets that you care about, then you can't resent them, you should thank them. That you genuinely should look back at most of the things that you were ashamed of or guilty about or fearful of in your past and realize that that's the dark side of one of the lightest and most

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  proud things that you've got. So overall, if the challenges that you went through formed a person that you like, those bullies in school, I should sit down with all of them and say, yeah, thanks, mate.

• 50:07Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, that's, it's very interesting to listen to because when you, when you go, you know, to go through that experience, it's kind of easy now. You're 35, you're a grown man and you're doing great. But to sort of think back to, you are still that child.

• 50:22Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 50:22Jimmy Carr?

  You're still that lonely kid searching for connection. But is that not the whole of the show? Like every episode I listen to, you're sort of there, kind of looking for a hug. You're sort of, your whole demeanor is, I want to connect with this person, I want to know what they know, and I want to have a friendship. And it's incredibly healthy. It just seems like it's, it's, yeah, everything that happened, absolutely worth it. And also, ah, what are you gonna do? You can forgive them and move on, or you can hold resentment. But it's ultimately, that's, you know, what's, what's the important thing? We can't measure that metric.

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Jimmy Carr?

  Of what that forgiveness gives you as to what that resentment gives you. But I would, I'd bet the house on the fact that the forgiveness is lighter and breeds more activity.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've been thinking recently about the idea of, um, we can't know the future and we don't fully know ourselves and we don't fully know the present. We don't fully know everybody else. So we have to concede that some huge proportion of our worldview is a delusion.

• 51:30Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, isn't it? Doesn't someone talk about the three humiliations? You've heard of that?

• 51:34Chris Williamson?

  No, it's that.

• 51:35Jimmy Carr?

  The three humiliations of humanity. So it was Copernicus, we're not the centre of the universe. And then it was Darwin, we're, we're descended from animals, we're not special. Oh, Jesus. All right. And then the third one, Freud, our self-conscious is running the show. We don't even know ourselves. Ah, fucking hell. Fucking hell. It's like humanity's really taken a combination.

• 51:58Chris Williamson?

  One big hit after another.

• 51:59Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a big hit. And you go, yeah, we don't really know ourselves. But that's kind of the journey and that's the, the whole thing. I mean, that's why I think, not to bring it all back to stand up comedy, but I do think there's something magnificent about doing a bit of stand up, you know, going and finding your voice and what you find funny and your sense of humour. Because everyone's kind of got one, right?

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

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• 53:05Chris Williamson?

  for work, for travel or for anything else, the first place to go is Nomatic. Head to the link in the description below or go to nomatic.com slash modern wisdom and use the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout for 20% off everything site wide. That's nomatic.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom.

• 53:22Jimmy Carr?

  A check out.

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I uh, so this delusion thing, people, people don't fully know themselves or the world around them, or what's going to happen, or all of the rest of it. Given the fact that you don't know yourself and you're deluded in some way. Why not pick a delusion that is useful to you?

• 53:42Jimmy Carr?

  Well, this is what NLP gets you neuro linguistic programming talks a lot about presuppositions. Because you can't know, you don't know it for a fact, it's kind of, you know, all a bit of a pseudoscience. So what's useful, rather than think about what's correct, what's useful, what makes a difference? If I believe I can do that, I can do that. The belief is often the thing that makes the difference.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Did I do that bit, did I tell you about the uh symbolic truth, but literal falsehood framework?

• 54:14Jimmy Carr?

  No.

• 54:14Chris Williamson?

  This is fucking cool. Okay, so things can be symbolically true, but literally false. And this is most religious stories. So the belief that porcupines can throw their quills, right? Literally untrue. Porcupine can't throw its quills, like it's not a fucking, it's not Phil, the power fucking Taylor.

• 54:35Jimmy Carr?

  Good luck, American listeners without reference.

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  Phil Taylor is a.

• 54:39Jimmy Carr?

  Fat Nakka darts player.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  Legendary darts player from, from England.

• 54:44Jimmy Carr?

  You say legendary, I say fat Nakka, but you know, potato, potato.

• 54:47Chris Williamson?

  Yep, you can throw a, a sharp thing.

• 54:48Jimmy Carr?

  So they can't do that.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  They can't throw their quills.

• 54:51Jimmy Carr?

  It's a useful thing to believe.

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because they're barbed and if they get in you, you're fucked. So not good. The belief that porcupines can throw their quills is symbolically true in that it's adaptive for you to believe it. Another one would be that pigs are uniquely dirty animals. Ever seen a cow, cow's pretty dirty as well. So all of the religious traditions that said, we don't eat pigs because pigs are uniquely dirty animals. Literally false. Figuratively, pigs do carry a higher pathogen load typically than other animals in their meat. So by believing that that's the case, it's an adaptive outcome for you. Now, I, I learned this from Brett Weinstein six or seven years ago, right? Then I've been playing with it for ages and ages to try and think of something which is

• 55:36Chris Williamson?

  literally true, but figuratively false. So what's the opposite of this? Right? So I was trying to think about something which is might be accurate to know, but unadaptive to believe. And I think that free will is one of these. I think that even if we do live in a deterministic universe, even if that is literally what is true, figuratively, it's an information hazard. I don't think that it really, unless you go full like Sam Harris enlightenment mode and get out the other side to no one is the architect of their own decisions, therefore empathy and forgiveness are much easier to come by. Which I don't think like practically is is that easy for most people to do. I I don't think that that the same as the behavioral genetics red pill.

• 56:18Chris Williamson?

  If you believe that almost more than 50% of what you are psychologically is locked in. And you only get to play with this tiny little sort of cake dressing on the top of it. How many cherries do I want to put on top of this cake?

• 56:32Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 56:33Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't feel, it it's not very supportive in terms of how you show up in the world, even if it's true. So that's something that might be literally true, but figuratively false. And the porcupine throwing their quills is the other way.

• 56:45Jimmy Carr?

  Certainly think it's a very interesting area to sort of talk about because it's about belief makes such a huge difference. If you believe in something, you can kind of you do, it gives you the kind of the will to do it, to give it a go. About what you think is possible, what your dream is going to be. I mean, when you started this podcast, presumably you didn't think I'll be in Austin, Texas, talking to the great and the good and trying to figure things out. It's like, that's why I think the book thing is really interesting for you now of like trying to, rather than just at the level of, okay, trying to figure this thing out. And it's kind of interesting to chat about. It's like putting down these thoughts and going, you know, does it, does it grow corn? What what are the bits of wisdom that are most affected how you live day to day? It's why I think that the next twenty four hours is really interesting.

• 57:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Jimmy Carr?

  Of like, what could you do that adds value to you tomorrow?

• 57:33Chris Williamson?

  Such a lovely frame, such a lovely frame. You you talk about disposition being more important than position.

• 57:41Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 57:42Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by that?

• 57:43Jimmy Carr?

  Well, listen, I know some billionaires that are pretty miserable and I know some guys with boring office jobs that are very happy. I think your disposition is it's very difficult to change, but it's often easier than changing the world. You know, you are you're in your head on your own an awful lot of the time, no matter how connected you are, no matter how great your family. You're you you are you and you know, the acceptance of that and the way that you see the world, the rose tinted glasses of looking at the world, looking for jokes is pretty tremendous. I think the thing that makes a difference to people on disposition is

• 58:20Jimmy Carr?

  in the most part, it's gratitude can kind of move the dial. That's the thing that seems to make a difference because it's that thing of like, if you're if you're in a bad mood all the time, you're not in a bad mood, you're an asshole.

• 58:34Jimmy Carr?

  It's the truth of it. So it's go, yeah, how are you most of the time? How you treat a waiter or a waitress or how you react when you get a speeding ticket or any of those little things that because life is going to throw lots of that stuff at you. How do you react to it? How how are you in the world? What's your is it sunny disposition or are you kind of? You know, are you are you are you boring?

• 58:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've been through bouts of depression as as I have. I actually thought throughout all of my twenties that I was depressed. I thought that that was the texture of my mind. I thought it was locked in like the worst weed trip that you've ever had. This is me for the rest of my life.

• 59:07Jimmy Carr?

  Okay, so I'm interested in conflated words. I often think depression is conflated with sadness. And sadness is much more difficult to admit and it's much more. There's more of a stigma around being depressed. There's a certain glamour to being depressed.

• 59:24Chris Williamson?

  Loof, it's sort of this mysterious thing, it's pathologized.

• 59:27Jimmy Carr?

  It suggests depth.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Jimmy Carr?

  And we're sad, this is just all you sad fuck. You're sad. What do you do? You've got a surface level life. You run clubs. I'm sure you're having a nice time, whatever. But it's it's surface level. So that depression was maybe sadness. But I think if it's environmental, if you could change it, if it's not to do with the serotonin levels in your head and the chemical imbalance, then it's if you can do something about it, it's sadness. So assuming it's sadness and that you can do something about it. I mean, it's people with real mental health problems and my heart goes out to them. But for a lot of people, it's just that it's circumstantial.

• 1:00:04Chris Williamson?

  You went through periods of acute sadness or depression, however you want to label it. And yet you've managed to get yourself to a stage largely.

• 1:00:15Jimmy Carr?

  Anxiety has been the big, is really my.

• 1:00:19Chris Williamson?

  Drug of choice.

• 1:00:20Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. And anxiety, I think, Scott, I think there's a gift in there. I think the gratitude that I have for anxiety is it's the flip side of creativity.

• 1:00:27Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:00:27Jimmy Carr?

  That your mind is racing and sometimes you're trying to solve a problem in the future because you don't have anything to do now. It's why people talk about, you know, I'm so happy when I exercise, because you're giving yourself a problem right now. And your mind is dealing with whatever, lifting that up and putting it down.

• 1:00:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you put a hundred and twenty kilos on a on a bar, you're not thinking about much else other than I really need to get this off me.

• 1:00:49Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, that that thing of like, that simple thing of going, you probably don't have enough to do. If you're anxious about silly things in the future, or the, I mean, I'm, I get very tied up with counterfactuals and wondering about what might have been and what should I have done.

• 1:01:07Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:09Jimmy Carr?

  And, you know, it it kind of links to me to that weird thing of like, no one's scared of falling off a cliff, worried about jumping. There's a there's a there's kind of a weird thing of going, well, what if I'd done something different? What if I'd?

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  I told you that you've heard that Douglas Murray thing about in life, we must choose our regrets, right?

• 1:01:28Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I mean, you can have anything. You can't have everything.

• 1:01:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that what could have been, we can't split test life, we can't go back.

• 1:01:38Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Chris Williamson?

  And give this another crack.

• 1:01:40Jimmy Carr?

  I tell you, for a guy with a sunny disposition, it's a very serious conversation, isn't it?

• 1:01:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Jimmy Carr?

  I quite like this. I feel this is very, I feel like in the moment to call it, it feels very revealing to have this conversation. Because it doesn't feel unlike the conversation we had at dinner the other day, but it is that thing of you go, it's kind of showing more of yourself than you, you know, normally it's just dick jokes.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  Wait until people see you haven't got pants on underneath.

• 1:02:01Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Cut to the wide.

• 1:02:07Chris Williamson?

  It needs to be very wide. Um, yeah, I, so I'm interested in this, if anxiety is your malady, your mental malady of choice.

• 1:02:17Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Chris Williamson?

  And yet you've managed to get yourself to a state where you are in a sunny disposition, at least some non-zero amount of the time.

• 1:02:27Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, sorry, just to go back to, because I'm still thinking about disposition, position. Because people climb to a position and they think happiness is going to live there. And I think you'd be better served trying to make yourself happy and then worrying about where you're going.

• 1:02:43Jimmy Carr?

  That your happiness, your emotional wellbeing, working on that first seems to be a very sensible thing. Because it doesn't live down the road. It doesn't, you know, you put a million dollars in the bank, it won't, it won't make you less insecure. That kind of scarcity mindset is kind of poison.

• 1:03:04Chris Williamson?

  Is that a lesson that can be learned without going and seeing the top of the mountain yourself? Because there will be a lot of people that could say, Jimmy, easy for you to say about fame isn't going to fix your problems, money isn't going to fix your problems, you've achieved both.

• 1:03:18Jimmy Carr?

  Well, fame, fame, I think has replaced heaven in a secular world.

• 1:03:24Jimmy Carr?

  Fame is the land of milk and honey, where everything is okay and you're looked after and it's perfect. And let, I'm not knocking it, I love being famous, but it's not the be all and end all. And actually, again, you can, you can kind of split test that because I can go to a country where I'm not known. Not many, but there's a few.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  You talk about why trajectory is so important as well, and I think that this ties in here.

• 1:03:50Jimmy Carr?

  It's all people see, isn't it? Like, people aren't interested in how, you know, if you're playing 250 shows a year, like, I've been doing that for years. It's not exciting. It's not news. It's news when people arrive and they're new. So on something, you know, in, I think, film and TV and comedy and kind of entertainment, it's, it's like, it's all about where were they last year? Where are they this year? Just maintaining. No one seems to care. Although comics aren't entertainers in the true sense. The true definition of an entertainer is if you don't like me, I don't like me.

• 1:04:27Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:04:29Jimmy Carr?

  That's a real entertainer.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  You've outsourced your self-worth to the crowd.

• 1:04:33Jimmy Carr?

  Of course, that's what an entertainer is. And there's, I know guys that entertain, so a friend said that to me and it was like, oh, man, that is, that is your journey. Good luck. That's hard. Comedians desperately want to be loved, but entirely on their own terms. It's a lovely paradox.

• 1:04:47Chris Williamson?

  Do you see that in yourself? What, what, what's the, the lesson here between

• 1:04:53Chris Williamson?

  the desire to make people happy and laugh and being this, uh, how would you say? Like intrinsic drug dealer?

• 1:05:02Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  And the fact that you need to be able to

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  go home at night and put your head on the pillow without having, you know, if,

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  if your self-worth is inflated by the crowd, then it can be deflated by the criticism.

• 1:05:20Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. I mean, listen, that's the, if, if something, if something out there makes you happy, losing it's going to make you sad. So it, it matters. I think putting on a good show, though, is about going, do I think it's funny? You know, there's certain things that I write and I go, ah, it feels a bit, doesn't feel quite, hasn't got a great structure to it. It's not quite the right sort of joke for me. I'm gonna leave it. It's, it's not great. And then the stuff that I like more than the crowd. And it's finding a balance where you go, look, I know what you paid to see. I know why you're here and the, you know, the world ordered a stand-up comedian and I'm going to honor that. I'm going to be as good at this as I can be. And, you know, it's, it's kind of a mediation, but it's very much on my terms.

• 1:06:05Jimmy Carr?

  And these are the jokes that I tell.

• 1:06:07Chris Williamson?

  We spoke about that trajectory thing over dinner and it's really interesting because.

• 1:06:13Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Tate, someone you might not have thought wisdom from this area of the world would have would have applied, but he says, having things isn't fun, getting things is fun. And

• 1:06:25Jimmy Carr?

  Well, a stopped a stopped clock is right twice a day.

• 1:06:30Jimmy Carr?

  I mean, he says a lot of things. He's bound to get some stuff right. He's kind of an interesting cultural phenomenon because I think the

• 1:06:35Chris Williamson?

  What do you think happened with with Tate? Have you done a post mortem on his ascendancy to?

• 1:06:40Jimmy Carr?

  No, I mean, the only thing I would say is that, you know, young men, I feel are in crisis. And not that young women aren't in crisis, they are as well. I mean, young people generally. But it feels like young men are having a silent crisis. You know, we talk about certain things and we don't talk about other things and, you know, young men committing suicide seems to be a it's a huge problem at the moment. And a lack of purpose and agency is a huge, you know, why video games so popular? You know, especially with young men. And it's a facsimile of career and purpose and drive and different levels. And there's something in us, not that men and women are so very different.

• 1:07:26Jimmy Carr?

  I always think like the big difference gender wise is men are all taking a performance enhancing drug every single day. And that drug is testosterone. And really, if you had to talk about what testosterone does for men, it's risk taking. So, and we talk a lot about all the CEOs, all the big CEOs are men and it's very unfair. But also prisons are full of men because men take ludicrous risks. So I think if you were going to life hack for, I mean, I've got a daughter. And the advice I'll give her is take more risks. And you can, because you're making it a conscious decision, it's not a hormonal decision. Then maybe you can actually do better because you can not do the dumb shit.

• 1:08:07Jimmy Carr?

  You don't need to jump from the high board, but you can move to a city where there's more opportunities, taking those risks that, that, you know, the average man takes. Like, I kind of look back and it seems so easy that I left my job. And became a comic because I did it. The idea that that was preordained, so fucking stupid. Such a ludicrous mid twenties hail Mary catch of a ah, this life's boring. I'm gonna go and do something more fun. Crazy. So I think that's it's kind of, that's kind of an interesting point of going the.

• 1:08:49Jimmy Carr?

  How do we, how do we make things more equal between men and women in our society? And I think encouraging greater risk in young women is, is a really sensible hack. Cause that's what, that's what guys have got. They're, they're taking crazy chances. I mean, you, you, you leaving, you had a very comfortable life and a good living and a good career. And you traded it in for madness for like, oh, well, I'm just gonna be, you know, and is auto dictat. You know, it's like you're self educated. You seem to be, you should have this kind of thirst for knowledge. They go, yeah, well, maybe I'll just do that. Just doing the thing that you love.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  It's one of the reasons why I had such a problem with the term it was meant to be. So the reason I hate this. Post hoc rationalization of how a bad situation became a good situation because it was meant to be in the end.

• 1:09:49Chris Williamson?

  It completely removes all of the agency that you had overturning that shit situation into something that was good. Let's say that you lose a leg in a car crash and you're in a hospital bed. And while you're there, you begin watching. History YouTube videos about ancient Rome. And you realize that you're really interested in it. And 10 years later, you are now the biggest ancient Rome historian presenting shows for your own channel. Maybe you're on the BBC, you've written books, you're bestselling, you've only got one leg, but it doesn't matter. Saying it was meant to be. I got in that car crash for a reason so that I would spend enough time in a hospital bed.

• 1:10:30Chris Williamson?

  So that I would find the videos about the Roman Empire, so that I could have this career.

• 1:10:37Chris Williamson?

  Ultimately nets out at taking away all of the alchemy that you had.

• 1:10:41Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Chris Williamson?

  That turned this, hang on, let's do it in a reverse way. You had, you got dealt a really unfortunate card and managed to, there we go, that's blackjack.

• 1:10:53Jimmy Carr?

  But the, the cards you got dealt are the cards you got dealt. I really like that thing of like, at some point, you've got to go with what you got, or you're not going to go. So you just, you do what you need to do. I like, it's interesting now, the, like, the, the educational bit of this, the idea that you're going, look, it's, it's, uh, you're educating yourself now to what end, to what purpose. Well, you're making it easier for, for other people down the line. And I'm working on a thing at the moment where I'm trying to write a, um, a language for comedy. I'm trying to write.

• 1:11:26Chris Williamson?

  I'm excited for this.

• 1:11:27Jimmy Carr?

  Trying to write a comedy course, a book. I'm not quite sure what it's going to be, but the idea of going, I think there's too much mysticism about writing jokes. I think even professionals, even some of the goats, uh, they kind of write it on stage and they embody a, um, a part of their persona on stage and they can conjure up these funny things and there's alchemy. I go, yeah, maybe, but actually you can break it down. You can break down what you're doing there and, and it can be taught. The idea that it can't be taught is to me so incredibly limiting. The idea that comedy can't be taught is like, it's like going, well, music can't be taught, of course.

• 1:12:06Chris Williamson?

  He's saying that the comedy industry has a disproportionate number of narcissists in it, Jimmy. That would be a surprise.

• 1:12:12Jimmy Carr?

  How dare you. Um, yeah, I've got a good line on narcissism. I think I've got a couple of narcissists in my life. So my line is a narcissist, they've got the disease and you've got the symptoms.

• 1:12:27Jimmy Carr?

  Pretty much sort of sums it up, doesn't it? Hey, it's it's an issue. If you've got one in your life, you know about it. Um, yeah, I think it's really interesting that thing of going, if it was like music, more like music. And people could sort of discover themselves. Because really, what are the teenage years about? You you it's uncomfortable being a teenager. It's uncomfortable like and and the and we're all, you know, growing. It doesn't really stop. But that idea of going, well, who am I? If you're the person you were ten years ago, then you fucked up. If there's no growth in it, i- i- if you haven't progressed. But it's constantly asking yourselves kind of the the right questions and and and finding a bit of humor in that is just makes. It just makes the the journey a little bit easier, doesn't it?

• 1:13:09Chris Williamson?

  Talking about that trajectory and how.

• 1:13:15Chris Williamson?

  It's important to think about where you're going and other people respond to the rising or falling of your stock in kind. There's an argument.

• 1:13:23Jimmy Carr?

  But that's that's character versus reputation. So character is what you know about yourself. If you have a crisis and you're getting cancelled, um, your reputation is in the toilet. But you still know who you are. You you know, you still you you know who you are. And it's that the fundamental question when you're in the middle of a cancellation crisis is, who are you?

• 1:13:46Jimmy Carr?

  Oh, Jimmy, I'm a stand up comedian. I tell edgy jokes. Oh, okay.

• 1:13:52Jimmy Carr?

  That's fine. This seems appropriate. There's no problem. You know who you are. You know what you're about. It's it's uh, it's it ultimately, it's about that kind of thing. Just go, okay, this is this is fine. And also, where's your, where does your happiness lie? If it's outside of you, if in that true entertainer self, if you don't love me, then I don't love me.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  What's it feel like to be cancelled or attempted cancelled?

• 1:14:15Jimmy Carr?

  Um, it's interesting like what the term means now. I don't think it's um, you call it cancellation, I call it free publicity. It's it hasn't really had, I don't know whether it really exists. Uh, I think it does. I think like there's extreme cases where people are can no longer work and um, are shunned. But hasn't there always been cancellation? It's kind of a new new word for something that we've always had. There were always people that were um. Uh, you know, you've said something unsayable. I mean, you've got to right size it as well. The things I've been cancelled for, I told a joke and some people didn't like it.

• 1:14:54Jimmy Carr?

  We've got to right size that. That's that's not that bad. I got cancelled once over tax avoidance, not tax evasion. You know the difference?

• 1:15:02Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:15:03Jimmy Carr?

  It's about eighteen months in prison.

• 1:15:06Jimmy Carr?

  You know, that thing of going, you, you, that was very easy. Because if you get cancelled for tax evasion and you say, well, I'm going to pay the money back. Great. We cannot forgive what we cannot punish. There's certain things that religion does better than a secular society. Where we cannot forgive what we cannot punish. So certain crimes, like no law's been broken. But ah, that guy now gives me the ick.

• 1:15:37Jimmy Carr?

  Okay, well, should he never be allowed to work again? Is, what did he do? What did he do? Are there criminal charges? What's going on here? What's what's actually happening? And the the reputational damage and what could be done online in a day? I mean, you can tear something down pretty quick. And it's, it happens every week. It happens to regular people. It's, there's a lack of, I suppose, because we live online. And we're not seeing the whites of each other's eyes. Kindness, compassion, forgiveness.

• 1:16:11Chris Williamson?

  Very dehumanising, especially when you get to a certain level of of fame.

• 1:16:17Chris Williamson?

  People no longer see very famous people as people. They see them as a representation of an ideology. They're a conglomeration of ideas sat behind an at symbol on some form of social media, which is why they're prepared to say completely reprehensible things that they wouldn't say to someone who was much smaller. But they would even say much more reprehensible things to the person that's much smaller on social media than they would say to them face to face. Or they would even say to them fucking written out.

• 1:16:44Jimmy Carr?

  Is that a weird thing as well with the cancellation?

• 1:16:48Jimmy Carr?

  The press would have you believe press opinion, public opinion and Twitter, X are the same thing. And they're all very different.

• 1:16:58Chris Williamson?

  Well, they want to be the arbiters, the gatekeepers of true public opinion. They're not. The news aren't in the news business. They're in the clickbait business. Clickbait is their product.

• 1:17:11Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's, I wonder what news looks like without that. I mean, it's.

• 1:17:16Chris Williamson?

  You, what was your idea? You wanted news without the, without the, the video or the sound?

• 1:17:22Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, news without, news without opinion would be, I think, very interesting.

• 1:17:27Jimmy Carr?

  There's a, there's a website at the moment, like an app called The Knowledge, which gives you all the day's news. And it comes out about noon. Great. Not first thing. Have a cup of tea and relax first. But it's like five sentences tells you all the news you need to know for the day. Kind of great. Yeah, it was an interesting idea. I think, well, do you need all the commentary? Do you need to know what they think about it?

• 1:17:52Jimmy Carr?

  It's like, it's a weird thing. There's a great book called, by Neil Postman, called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And it came out in 1984 and it's him kind of railing against, they put music on the news. It's a show now. This, that's, that's the beginning of the end for him. They put music on the news. And you go, yeah, this is, it's entertainment. I really enjoyed that What's Our Problem book by Tim Urban.

• 1:18:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:18:20Jimmy Carr?

  I thought it was absolutely fantastic. Just the idea of going, you know, you kind of follow politics like you're following a, a team. You know, people are, they're just, they're one or the other and they're following, and they're not really watching politics. They're watching the real politicians of Washington DC, where they've picked seven great characters to follow.

• 1:18:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Jimmy Carr?

  Like Real Housewives, you know, reality is boring. Reality TV is great. Well, the news is the same. It's a great book. I really, I would, I think that's the book that's changed. The way I think about things more than anything else the last sort of 12 months.

• 1:18:51Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 1:18:52Jimmy Carr?

  Great book.

• 1:18:52Chris Williamson?

  You wish you'd read that 10 years ago before you went through a bunch of.

• 1:18:56Jimmy Carr?

  I wish I'd read it when I was at college. I think that's, it's a weird thing where, you know, the stuff I was reading at college was, was sort of nonsense.

• 1:19:05Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. We have decided to land in the UK during a heatwave and every hotel I've stayed in, their aircon has broken. I thought I'd left Austin so I could escape the heat. Turns out I haven't and the pod cover from Eight Sleep would have been a lifesaver. The pod cover sits over the top of your existing mattress, just like a normal mattress topper, and actively cools and heats each different side of the bed based on yours and your partner's sleeping preferences. As you move through sleep stages, it'll change the temperature to ensure that you stay in deep sleep. It is the biggest game changer to sleep that I think I've ever found. The pod cover even tracks your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, your sleep stages, your sleep consistency. It's like having a wearable built into your bed.

• 1:19:46Chris Williamson?

  They also deliver internationally and if you are not happy with your pod cover within 90 days, for any reason, they will give you a full refund. You can get a $150 discount plus that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com/ModernWisdom. That's E I G H T sleep.com/ModernWisdom. But yeah, go back, you know, regardless of character and reputation and how much you've tried to bifurcate the two and silo them off from each other.

• 1:20:17Chris Williamson?

  There must be a felt sense of fear. There must be a felt sense of, ah, like this is happening. And largely I'm being, I'm being.

• 1:20:24Jimmy Carr?

  No, it's the worst breakup you've ever, being cancelled is the worst breakup you've ever had. Because you, you're losing the person you love the most. You're losing you because you've created and this curated and curated this person, this, this thing, and you have a reputation, which is your, your brand is sort of a decentralized opinion on who you are living in other people's heads. And in a day it's gone or changed or, you know, ruined, but it's, you know, it's all right. I think it makes you more, the good to take from it is the empathy it gives you. I always call on the day.

• 1:21:04Chris Williamson?

  What do you think people who aren't famous don't know about fame?

• 1:21:09Jimmy Carr?

  Um, I don't know. I mean, I'd sort of stand by that idea. It's the land of milk and honey. It's kind of a secular heaven. It's it's kind of my view is it's the natural state to be. Because we're meant to live in tribes, right? For the longest time we lived in tribes. And let's say there was sixty, eighty people in the tribe. And everyone knew everyone and meeting a stranger was weird. What being famous is like is it's like you live in one of those tribes, but you've got Alzheimer's. So I don't know anyone, but they all know me. So people come out. It makes the world a very friendly place. So I go into a coffee shop and get a coffee. And people go, you're the guy from the thing. And you immediately, there's no small talk. You're into talking about your career and your life and what's going on with them. And you have a connection with people.

• 1:21:53Jimmy Carr?

  And sometimes people don't like you. Those people ignore you. And that is just a regular stranger.

• 1:22:00Jimmy Carr?

  It's great. People don't bother having a negative interaction with you. So they just come up and say something nice if they're going to say something nice, or they don't say anything.

• 1:22:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so it's like a selection effect. The only people that do bother coming up to you are the people that like you. The people that don't like you just ignore you.

• 1:22:13Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Or they just don't know who the hell I am. You know, I think I came up, I'm one of the last guys, I think, to come up and be famous in, certainly in the UK. In that sense of, you know, mass media. I'm telly famous.

• 1:22:28Jimmy Carr?

  And now I think increasingly we're going to have people that are famous, but in a very limited way.

• 1:22:34Jimmy Carr?

  So if you think about musicians, there's very few musicians now that your mum's heard of, right? If your mum's heard of them, they are massive, right? Same amount of records were sold in the nineteen eighties as today. But by it used to be sold by five hundred artists, now sold by ten. Same thing's happened with books. Used to be five hundred authors brought out novels. They all did pretty well. Now it's like four a year and they sell incredible numbers. But music and books and if you're into something now, it seems like it's marrow casting. So it's interesting that the other night we went out for a drink, someone came up and said, oh, hey, how are you? Someone came up to you. And was so into it. It's like, oh, this is my guy. This is my guy. But it's probably fewer, but much more intense.

• 1:23:20Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's interesting. It's just, I know.

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  We're often told about the perils of fame, right? That it's reality warping and that your privacy gets lost and all the rest of it.

• 1:23:34Jimmy Carr?

  There's a great line, I remember watching Breaking Bad and my, my girl said, I was talking about it and going, well, you know, power, power corrupts. And she went, no, power reveals. It's like reveals who you really are. Like the more, it, it is kind of a revealing thing, I think.

• 1:23:56Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 1:23:57Jimmy Carr?

  I think you, you become, you, you're allowed to be, you know, do you live in someone else's world or do they live in yours? It kind of gets to that, you know, did we cover that charm charisma?

• 1:24:09Jimmy Carr?

  Thing, I've got a real sort of thing on charm and charisma being very different and they're, they're conflated words. They sort of mean the same thing in conversation, but I think they're very different. I think charm isn't someone you like, it's someone you think would like you.

• 1:24:28Jimmy Carr?

  Charisma is you come to me. Charm is I come to you. Obama incredibly charming, look at his speech patterns, look at the way he howls himself. He's like, he's mediating the situation, it's so damn charming. Trump is charismatic, you come to me. One isn't better than the other particularly, I mean, there's a, you know, example, there's one that I prefer there, but as an individual, Jennifer Aniston is charming. Angelina Jolie is charismatic. Now, you, you both get to fuck Brad Pitt. That's the good news, but it's a very different skill set. And I think knowing yourself, knowing which one you are is very valuable.

• 1:25:10Chris Williamson?

  Which do you think you are?

• 1:25:12Jimmy Carr?

  All charisma, zero fucking charm. Like zero charm.

• 1:25:18Jimmy Carr?

  Of course, but that's what it sounds very arrogant. I'm all charisma, but you but that's what I'm working with. That's the thing of like, like, so someone charismatic, trying to be charming, smarmy.

• 1:25:34Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, falsely disingenuous.

• 1:25:36Jimmy Carr?

  It doesn't doesn't come across. It doesn't read. So you've got to know know what you're dealing with, know what you're playing with. And there's no judgment particularly on which one it is. But it's very sort of interesting thinking about what what you are, how people perceive you.

• 1:25:53Jimmy Carr?

  Because how you're perceived, sorry, but how you're perceived is so important in our world. And it's useful to know, because when people meet me, and when people see me on TV, they have a perception of me. Now, is it true? No, there's more to me than that. You know, I I'd suffer a bit with the anxiety. I'm very dyslexic, not very good at writing. I read quite slowly. None of that comes across. People just go, he's all right. He's look at him in a sharp suit. He's really cutting and sardonic. He's probably unthinking and whatever. But knowing that is

• 1:26:33Jimmy Carr?

  really useful. You don't have to be that person. But, you know, it's good to know what others think about you. I mean, there is the thing about fame where if you wear the mask for long enough, the mask becomes the face.

• 1:26:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you told me that line the other night. That took a

• 1:26:48Jimmy Carr?

  Right, right.

• 1:26:49Chris Williamson?

  Good chunk in my twenties to to realize that. And Aubrey Marcus taught me that the persona is incapable of receiving love. It can only receive praise. What he means by that. Yeah, fucking.

• 1:27:02Jimmy Carr?

  That's very good, isn't it?

• 1:27:04Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah, that was like, because this was when I was probably twenty. No, it must have been thirty one, I think, when he said that to me for the first time. So like, two thousand nineteen. So only, you know, only four years ago. And I'm still kind of. This big name on campus, party boy ish, but I'm also not, and I'm feeling this pain. So I've got enough distance, I think, had I have learned it when I needed to hear it, I wouldn't have had the perspective to be able to understand it.

• 1:27:28Jimmy Carr?

  Well, isn't that the kind of the thing with wisdom is it's, you could tell any 18 year old, all of this stuff.

• 1:27:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Jimmy Carr?

  And it will just, different things will resonate at different times. So you can't read the same book twice. Yeah, we talked the other night about Lindy Books as one of the things I got from this podcast, which I love. I got, I was listening to this and I was reading Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation. I just want, why am I watching new stuff?

• 1:27:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:54Jimmy Carr?

  Who gives a fuck about new stuff? I want the best stuff. So you go back to 1970s cinema and books that you read years ago that meant something to you and read them again.

• 1:28:04Chris Williamson?

  It's that, like, no man steps in the same river twice because he's not the same, it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

• 1:28:09Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the, um, so this, like, strange idea around the persona is incapable of receiving love, it can only receive praise.

• 1:28:22Chris Williamson?

  Was really important to me because I realised that I hadn't necessarily felt particularly connected to a lot of the successes in my life. I hadn't felt like they really got me, right? And the reason being that if you are only playing a role,

• 1:28:43Chris Williamson?

  everyone's support and adoration of you

• 1:28:48Chris Williamson?

  will feel in some ways hollow and shallow. Because people aren't in love with you, they're applauding the role that you play.

• 1:28:57Chris Williamson?

  You know, we don't love Russell Crowe, we love Gladiator, we don't love Chris.

• 1:29:03Jimmy Carr?

  I love Russell, he might be listening to this.

• 1:29:04Chris Williamson?

  You're his mate, so that's different.

• 1:29:06Jimmy Carr?

  But, you know, that, yeah, that thing of, um, I suppose it is the actor. It's that we're playing a role and that role is, yeah, you, you, you kind of don't love someone at work. They're in a chair, they're the boss, they're whatever they're doing. It's not, it's, it's a part of them, but it's not authentically them. And that's why, you know, finding that work-life balance where you go, you have a place where you can totally be your, yourself and be open to love.

• 1:29:35Jimmy Carr?

  But also the- It's interesting, the love thing is interesting to me, just as a sidebar. Every song for four hundred years was about God. And every song is about love.

• 1:29:48Jimmy Carr?

  How do you mean? Every song is about love, right? Every song used to be about God. Everything used to, every, every piece of music pre nineteen hundred was about God. Everything. And now it's about love. I mean, you could make an argument to say it's the same thing, but it's, it's just interesting to me that that culturally, that's kind of what we- The love of the gaps. Well, love, love as well has slightly taken over now. The love song has, you know, it feels to me like comedy is having a moment because there, it's reflecting back the world in a very interesting way. It feels like comedy is having the moment that music maybe had in the sixties and seventies and cinema had in the seventies, where it really connected with people. People are connecting with comedians in a way that's, I mean, listen, I'm, I'm part of this,

• 1:30:32Jimmy Carr?

  but I feel like I'm, I'm in at the ground level. Like podcasts are new and we can see podcasts are new because it's like less than five years. But really comedy's only existed in the current format since, I mean, who are the, who's the John the Baptist, you know, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Richard Pryor, right? These guys standing on stage, talking for an hour and people just came to see them. And that really happened before. There's, you can trace it back, there's never a first, but you can trace it back to whenever, to, to shamanistic, um, skunk and antsy. But really it's a very modern thing, stand-up comedy, this way of, it's an American medium. And it feels incredible to be kind of part of that as it, and it's rising.

• 1:31:17Jimmy Carr?

  It feels like it's rising and becoming more important. And I don't know. I don't know who the, the goats are, but I kind of, I like to think they're in the future. I like to think the goats are-

• 1:31:31Jimmy Carr?

  You know, twelve years old now, going through high school, like, and they're gonna be, they're gonna grow up with this language around them.

• 1:31:37Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I came up with an interesting idea the other day. So I was in Brighton, uh, giving that live talk. And then James, one of my friends, got up on stage and it was packed, sixteen hundred people, wall to wall in this massive auditorium in Brighton somewhere. And I just wanted to watch his show from the front. So he's done what I'm about to start doing a lot. He's sold out Sydney Opera House. He's sold out the Roundhouse in London. He's sold out the Palladium. So he's done the thing that I'm about to begin doing with my live show. And I was like, I'm gonna watch the guy, not from side stage, not from backstage, I'm gonna fucking observe it. I'm gonna be out, out there with the peasants. So descend into the muck and the mire and the feces and the blood.

• 1:32:18Chris Williamson?

  Sit down. During the interval, this guy comes over, sits in front of me and we, we get talking and he was, uh, discussing about how he has changed the way that he sees himself, about how he has what I called, uh, personal growth guilt. So survivor guilt. Someone goes away to war, their truck gets blown up, all of their friends die. He gets stuck in the back, but somehow you survive, right? You maybe you're injured, maybe you're not, but you get to come home. And there's a very specific type of guilt that's associated with that, which is his,

• 1:33:00Chris Williamson?

  his belief that he should have gone with his friends, right? That he should have been killed along with them. I think this is relatively common amongst soldiers that come back from war.

• 1:33:09Chris Williamson?

  He was talking to me about one of the things that he feels, which is like a personal growth guilt. That as he begins to pull himself away from these beliefs and insights and lifestyles that no longer serve him.

• 1:33:25Chris Williamson?

  He was starting to feel this degree of guilt for leaving his friends behind in some regard. And I thought that was very interesting. I think that this is one of the draws that pulls people back into old habits and old patterns that they almost don't believe that they are worthy.

• 1:33:42Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it's it's interesting the move to Austin that you've made because that thing of like you can't beat your environment. And that idea of I made a move quite early in life. I was sixteen and I moved schools. And it was the first kind of that that sort of discovery that you are who you say you are. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, you'll be judged on what you do, not what you say. But it was interesting to kind of be able to reinvent myself quite early in life. And go, well, I'm not going to just mess around and uh and, you know, act crazy at school. I'm gonna work really hard and go to Cambridge and really apply myself. And no one thought it was crazy because I could just turn up in this new place and go,

• 1:34:25Jimmy Carr?

  hey, I'm, you know, I'm smart enough and I'm gonna go to Cambridge and everyone, okay, great. It's interesting now with things like Facebook where I think it's becoming increasingly difficult to distance yourself from the past. You're tethered to your past. There's there's there's memories and those photos and those and the friendships and the connections. It's just difficult to let go. There used to be a high school reunion and you'd meet someone fifteen years after you left school and go, what have you been up to?

• 1:34:55Chris Williamson?

  Now you already know.

• 1:34:57Jimmy Carr?

  It's never gonna happen again, right? Because if you're interested, you're gonna know, or you're still connected to them. They're following you. They're they're they're still part of your life. So you don't get to kind of reinvent yourself. And I think it's quite a healthy thing. I mean, it depends. You might have just come out fully formed and be great. But I think for a lot of us, it did involve going, well, look, this is what I am now. This is what I want to be. And I've got a bit of ambition as opposed to entitlement, and I'm gonna work hard to get to there. And sometimes you can be kind of dragged back by friends and family can be incredibly supportive. But they can also kind of drag you back. There was, I had a weird thing. A lot of comics have spoken about this, the idea of

• 1:35:33Jimmy Carr?

  when you start out, you don't really tell your friends. You just go and do it. And like after, I don't know, ten or twenty or thirty gigs, whatever, you tell people you're doing this new thing. But by then you're off, you you've joined the circus.

• 1:35:45Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends has a quote, we're not afraid of failure, we're afraid of what other people will think of us if we fail.

• 1:35:52Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  Which I think is a nice reframe, you know, I I've never understood the quote about you're not afraid of failing, you're afraid of what will happen if you succeed. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. That's what I'm aiming for. I'm afraid of what will happen if I succeed. That's what I'm, that's literally what I'm trying to do. But I think we're afraid of the judgment of other people. If we do fail, oh, that feels pretty on the money to me.

• 1:36:15Jimmy Carr?

  The, and you could live a very, you know, contained life. You're scared of being ridiculed. You're scared of humiliation. You're scared of saying, I want to do great things and then not doing great things. But I would argue saying you want to do great things and not doing great things is better than just not doing anything, not saying anything. Give it a crack.

• 1:36:37Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about that, that ability to deal with failure, that ability to sort of face up to things not going so well. And also this.

• 1:36:49Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it's, it, there's different failures, aren't there? There's kind of, there's, there's recoverable and non-recoverable failures. So you tell a joke and it doesn't work. Very recoverable. You've got another line straight away, locked and loaded. We'll try something else. And then if they all don't work, all the new lines, then you've got the old lines that you know do work. So you're sort of, you're okay. And then there's, there's, there's proper, you know, kite surfing failures where you drown.

• 1:37:15Jimmy Carr?

  There's different failures, right? There's different levels of risk and different tolerance for risk. So making sensible choices on what could you risk?

• 1:37:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:23Jimmy Carr?

  Is, that seems very sensible.

• 1:37:25Chris Williamson?

  George reminded me, I, I was lamenting about two years ago to George about whether or not, George Mack, for the people that don't know the mutual George friend, about whether or not I should move to Austin. And he gave me a frame that was very instructive, which is it's a reversible decision. You go out there, it doesn't work, you come back with your tail between your legs. Maybe you're gonna look a little bit silly, but it's hardly the end of the world. Reversible and irreversible decisions, I think it's such a lovely.

• 1:37:55Jimmy Carr?

  I should go to, so if you're looking at something and you're saying, well, should I, should I have these kids?

• 1:38:02Jimmy Carr?

  That's a big, that's a big decision.

• 1:38:03Chris Williamson?

  Really hard to put them back in, I've heard.

• 1:38:06Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I mean, even, and there's a so, there's this real stigma to putting them up for adoption. And as a parent, there'll be days when you go, oh, that might be an angle. But you, you go, that's irreversible, that's forever.

• 1:38:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:18Jimmy Carr?

  Whereas other things are, you know, pretty easy to reverse, so take those risks. And, you know, even, but there's certain things I think we're set up to think, or the, our society's set up to tell us, losing your job is the worst thing that can happen. You can, you'll find another job. Your skill set is the thing that's interesting. Add to that.

• 1:38:40Chris Williamson?

  There's this lovely idea that the skills that you develop along the way are what you are working toward in any case. So whatever pursuit it is that you're going through, whatever challenges are placed in front of you, what you are working toward is not the end goal. It is not necessarily even the outcome. Because whether it fails or whether you succeed, the skills that you developed while you were doing this. It's kind of analogous to that.

• 1:39:07Jimmy Carr?

  It's correct, kid, wipe on, wipe off.

• 1:39:09Chris Williamson?

  It's also analogous to Man's Search for Meaning, right? Viktor Frankl. But ultimately, your ability to respond in any situation is the thing that can never be taken away from you.

• 1:39:20Jimmy Carr?

  Is that not, disposition is more important than position?

• 1:39:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:39:24Jimmy Carr?

  You know, writ large.

• 1:39:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:39:26Jimmy Carr?

  You go, people went through, that Life is Beautiful movie. The idea that you go, people went through the worst things in the world, they came out. There's, I, I heard an interview with Esther Peral, and she said this thing that really kind of shook me. And she was talking about her parents were in the death camps in Germany. And she said, some people didn't die and some people lived. And she talked about like, people that have plastic furniture, plastic coverings on the furniture.

• 1:39:54Jimmy Carr?

  They're waiting to live, but they're not living now. They're sort of, it's a really interesting analogy because I think we all know those people that are saving that room for special.

• 1:40:04Jimmy Carr?

  But special every day. This is it. This is, you know.

• 1:40:07Chris Williamson?

  This is a lovely frame. The original name for this podcast before I woke up at three AM with modern wisdom six years ago was crushing a Tuesday and it's a sentence from

• 1:40:17Jimmy Carr?

  I quite like it.

• 1:40:18Chris Williamson?

  Sentence from Tim Ferriss and he talks about you want to design your life so that the average Tuesday is pretty fucking good.

• 1:40:27Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I think so because it's you're like the, the idea of the mountain, the idea that you're aiming towards something where you will be satisfied. There's always going to be someone that's got it better than you somehow. The idea that you're, you know, comparison is the thief of joy. Is one of my favorite quotes. You just, because you're constantly, I've sort of got a holistic theory of jealousy where you, you know, if you're comparing yourself to someone else, you might look at their career and go, oh my God, they're playing fifteen sold out nights at the O2 Arena. Oh my God, they, they must be making bank. Incredible. No, you have to be jealous of the whole thing. Take the whole thing.

• 1:41:04Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:41:04Jimmy Carr?

  You need their wife, their kids, their car, their house, their life. Who would you actually swap lives with? Like this, like, I feel like there's no one because you go, well, this is my, I like the adventure I'm on.

• 1:41:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Jimmy Carr?

  I want to see how this turns out. It's like my favorite show.

• 1:41:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I, I mean, that frame changed an awful lot about jealousy for me as well. You don't know what the inner texture of Elon Musk or Conor McGregor or Kim Kardashian's mind is.

• 1:41:38Jimmy Carr?

  It's that thing of like, especially with people closer to you than those kind of the, the icons, the icons are very useful, I think. Um, to, to really admire people that are doing fabulous things in the world. Great. But that kind of close, when you've got someone close to you, is, is it a real friend? Or a frenemy? So if their success is your success. If my friend gets a show, sells out a tour and gets a big break and he's in a movie. If I'm, ah, I wish it was me. I can't hang out with that person.

• 1:42:11Jimmy Carr?

  I can't. It's like that would be, that's, it's poison.

• 1:42:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:14Jimmy Carr?

  But if you, if you're friends with someone, their win is your win.

• 1:42:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:18Jimmy Carr?

  Like when they get the thing, you're like, ah, incre- even if it's a thing you really would aspire to and think was amazing. I remember when James Colton got the show in the States, just thinking, this is so cool. This is like. And then you, you know, you, and you can compare yourself to your friends, but you go, yeah, but he's, he's got charm for days and he's got skills I don't have. What are you, what are you gonna do?

• 1:42:44Chris Williamson?

  What's your theory on kindness?

• 1:42:47Jimmy Carr?

  Well, my theory on kindness would be that we have maybe, everyone's very, everyone wants to be kind. And the problem is the marshmallow test. You can have one kindness now or two kindness later. And we have to, I think, as a society, as people, I think it's the thing that sort of parenting has kind of taught me. But just life in general, like be kind to yourself, be kind to others later. Uh, you know, and, and, and I think we all know that thing of like, the kind thing to do now is to go to Greg's and buy some doughnuts and smash them. Great. Get that sugar hit right now. And the kinder thing to do is to have a salad and feel good tomorrow.

• 1:43:29Jimmy Carr?

  And with yourself, with others, just delay it. Delay it. Do, do the kind, it's easy to give in now to whims and desires. But actually, if you hold back, it's better.

• 1:43:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, kindness is kind of like an unsexy thing. It feels almost like

• 1:43:56Chris Williamson?

  the sort of thing that's very hard to justify in a capitalistic world. One where everyone's striving.

• 1:44:01Jimmy Carr?

  Here we are, you know, you've got, you've got a non-measurable metric.

• 1:44:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:44:06Jimmy Carr?

  That is incredibly important, you know, so we talk about disposition. Tough to measure. Position? Oh my God, so easy to measure. How are you doing? How many downloads this month? How many people listening? How many people tweeting? What do they say? Easy. Disposition, not, it's about you. How are you feeling?

• 1:44:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:25Jimmy Carr?

  That kindness is, is, uh, and it, it comes, you're not being kind. It's, it's ultimately it's for you. It's just a nicer way to live.

• 1:44:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I love this position disposition, hidden observable metric frame. I really think there's something in there.

• 1:44:42Jimmy Carr?

  I think the hidden observable, I think maybe we could apply that to everything.

• 1:44:48Jimmy Carr?

  You know, because what's the the successful show is it's sold out. Does that make it successful? You could fill the room, but can you fill it with laughter? You know, it's how are you viewing things like the it's the wrong time scale often. People often think of the show as being the show tonight. All my show is is a sales pitch for next time. That's all it is. All the podcast is today is a comeback next week. There's more of this. It's great. And he's chatting to people. And this is the kind of conversation he has. Great.

• 1:45:23Jimmy Carr?

  It's just doing more. It's process driven, not outcomes driven.

• 1:45:26Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what Goodhart's Law is?

• 1:45:28Jimmy Carr?

  Goodhart's Law?

• 1:45:29Chris Williamson?

  Goodhart's Law.

• 1:45:30Jimmy Carr?

  It sounds like a sequel to a movie.

• 1:45:33Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of like.

• 1:45:34Jimmy Carr?

  People that brought you, how'd you let them apple?

• 1:45:36Chris Williamson?

  Kind of kind of like Parkinson's Law. So Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the time given for it.

• 1:45:42Jimmy Carr?

  Okay.

• 1:45:43Chris Williamson?

  Fundamentally, the it's the justification for time blocking and productivity strategy. It's why you completed your university assignments the night before they were due in, or sometimes if you were me, throughout the entire night before they were due in.

• 1:45:56Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. What's that great line? The I think it's Dickens said, I would I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time.

• 1:46:05Chris Williamson?

  So that's Parkinson's Law. Goodhart's Law says when a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good measure. So when it's the over reliance on dashboards for everything, right?

• 1:46:18Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Chris Williamson?

  If I was to optimize on the podcast for plays, right? That's a measure. Plays are a measure of the success of the podcast. If I begin to use that measure as an outcome, it no longer is a good measure because it doesn't measure the thing that it's supposed to measure. Right? I could get lots and lots of email addresses by posting all over the internet, sign up to my mailing list and every single person that signs up will get a thousand pounds, right? People will then sign up and I won't give them a thousand pounds because I'm not going to do that. So the metric of acquire as many email addresses as I can, good, did that.

• 1:46:54Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Chris Williamson?

  But the actual outcome I wanted was accumulate lots of people on a mailing list who actually want to hear from me, who trust in me and are going to click on links and are going to care about what I've got to say. Like, that's the actual outcome.

• 1:47:08Jimmy Carr?

  Can I ask about that? Like a sidebar, but the, I like the email that you sent. I, I'd rather you said it.

• 1:47:16Chris Williamson?

  You want me to dictate it, don't you?

• 1:47:17Jimmy Carr?

  I'd rather that was a mini podcast that came at the beginning of the show. Here's what I've been thinking about. I'd rather it was just a, because it's often that thing. If you go, I'm listening to it. I, I kind of, uh, I, you know, I like it. I like those things, those thoughts, but for me, it's the, the medium is the message. And for you, it seems to be podcasts are, and I think actually if you put those together, I think maybe that's the book.

• 1:47:44Jimmy Carr?

  That's, it's, it's taking these little things. So you're, you're sort of, the process is you're writing it as you kind of go along and you're taking those, those things that really resonate with people and.

• 1:47:52Chris Williamson?

  I don't disagree. I mean, it's, it's the thing that fires me up the most to do this, like whatever we want to call it, bro philosophy, like common guy life insight stuff. I just really like it. I like bringing those two things together. But have you seen, you know, Jonathan Haidt, right? Haidt, Haidt. Uh, he's writing his next book in public. It's really interesting.

• 1:48:13Jimmy Carr?

  See the Coddling of the American Mind? That, yeah, that's a great book.

• 1:48:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fantastic. And then he wrote, he wrote this, uh, great essay for the Washington Post, I think called The Tower of Babel. And it's kind of a development on from where he was, Coddling of the American Mind. He's sort of big into this antisocial media thing. He's concerned about what it's doing to especially young girls' sense of self and anxiety and so on and so forth. However, what he's doing on his, maybe Substack, maybe something else, he's writing the book chapter by chapter, publishing it, maybe just to paying members or maybe for free to everybody.

• 1:48:48Jimmy Carr?

  And then just getting feedback on.

• 1:48:49Chris Williamson?

  Getting feedback and iterating. So he will have released every single chapter of his book's first draft for largely free.

• 1:48:58Chris Williamson?

  Over the space of a year or eighteen months.

• 1:49:00Jimmy Carr?

  It's a great idea. I mean, it's kind of the wisdom of crowds. If you think about music as well, like the great bands often go out and play it first before they finish the album. They go and play it and see what the reaction is. It's it's interesting. Like, you know, it's I suppose the not looking behind the wizard's curtain, but like with great stand up comedians, like when you see Chris Rock do an hour, you go, yeah, well, he wrote probably two thousand jokes in order to do those seventy that worked brilliantly. And in order to do those, he put how much time in and he, you know, you want to road test it.

• 1:49:37Jimmy Carr?

  You don't want to do all new material.

• 1:49:40Chris Williamson?

  I came up with an idea, which is similar to something you talk about a lot. You call it the quarter life crisis, and I called it the manopole.

• 1:49:48Jimmy Carr?

  Manopole is nice.

• 1:49:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:50Jimmy Carr?

  It's nice, but it's the it's it's early, right? It's that mid twenties. I think it's when you start to make your first decision in life. So pretty much on a treadmill, if you think about it from the age of five, you go into the education system, and it was great when we had an empire because we needed people that went through the education system to go and run the empire. That was what it was for. That's what the education system in Britain that's kind of gone out to the Western world was for. Now, not so much. So this idea that it's exams at all these stages, and you know what the metric is, you know what the measurable is. So the measurable isn't what you found now, which is the joy of learning, the joy of reading, the joy of ideas. That's what school should be about,

• 1:50:33Jimmy Carr?

  but it isn't. It's about passing exams and get to, did I choose to stay on and do A levels? No. No, the obvious thing to do after you're sixteen, you do stay on, and everyone goes to university. I mean, everyone goes to university now, and you go to the best one you can. So I went to Cambridge, and then after Cambridge, what do you do? Well, everyone's getting a job now. I've got to get a job. Well, who do I get a job with? Well, the biggest blue chip company I can find. Yay. So you get a job. And then you kind of turn around, what, a year, two years, depending on how bright you are. I'm not that bright. About two years in, I kind of went, the fuck am I doing? You know that great quote of every man's got two lives, and the second begins when he realizes he's only got one?

• 1:51:15Jimmy Carr?

  And fuck that. So you get off the treadmill and go, well, and then it's very, it's the, there's a book called, um, what color is your parachute, which I read at the time, which is kind of a asking questions that lead you to that. What are you going to do? There's loads of that kind of self authoring stuff on the internet now, which is, I always think it's like, uh, it's horoscopes for people with A levels.

• 1:51:38Jimmy Carr?

  You know, the kind of it, whether it's Myers-Briggs or whatever, but those are fascinating because you kind of go, why do people like horoscopes? I just want to read about myself.

• 1:51:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:46Jimmy Carr?

  Just, yeah, I'm, I'm a little bit self obsessed and narcissistic. But doing those personality tests, actually, if you do them seriously and the self authoring sort of things, it's fantastic. For kind of, well, who am I? Am I charismatic? Am I charming? Am I, what's my edge? What's the thing that I do that I find easy that other people find difficult? And there's a little bit of gold there and I could pursue that. That would be a, that would be a purpose. That would be something, that's a true north. And, um, is it, uh, telic and anti telic? You pronounce it differently to me. I don't know.

• 1:52:15Chris Williamson?

  Telic and exotelic.

• 1:52:17Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I've only ever seen it written down. I, uh, it, it, I kind of like that when you don't know.

• 1:52:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:23Jimmy Carr?

  But the, but that idea of like tasks without end will make you happy. Tasks with an end can be a bit depressing. If you get to the end of a project and it's done, huh?

• 1:52:33Chris Williamson?

  Finite and infinite games, isn't it?

• 1:52:34Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I, uh, that menopause thing, it came about, I first called it the fitness menopause. So I noticed around about 20, 27, 26, 27, that I was, all of the training strategies that I'd been relying on, like push, pull legs and bro split. And I was, looked fantastic, but kind of got out of breath going up a set of stairs and I couldn't bend over and touch my toes and all the rest of it.

• 1:53:03Chris Williamson?

  So what I realized was I probably should try and pivot my training and I saw it with a lot of my friends. A lot of the guys that are listening to this podcast will feel this as well. The training protocol that you followed, especially if it's a bro split through your twenties, you get toward the end of your twenties and I'm like, am I steeping in my own neurosis powered by 500 milligrams of caffeine, looking at myself in the mirror? I'm kind of done with this. And then people pivot and they start doing yoga or they do Brazilian jiu jitsu or they do kickboxing and they go and try CrossFit. They do whatever. And I noticed that first, but it was actually the lead measure of a whole bunch of other changes, which was the things that I thought served me.

• 1:53:42Chris Williamson?

  In my twenties, weren't self authored. The things that I thought I wanted and the things that I wanted to want had diverged. I didn't want the things that I wanted, right? I actually, when I looked sufficiently deep.

• 1:53:59Jimmy Carr?

  Well, is that, I mean, the, what do you want to want as a question is, I mean, that should be the name of the book. It's so good. It's so fucking good. But that thing of, I didn't want what I wanted is dopamine. That's just dopamine. It's the idea of going, no, the chase was the thing. The chase was your award. So when you go shopping and you buy the, the watch, the car, the, whatever the, the trinket is that you thought you wanted, that represented something, and then you get it into a bit blah. It's that, how many times do you have to do that before you realise, okay, trinkets aren't for me? There's nothing in trinkets. You're, you're, the ambition should be emotions.

• 1:54:40Chris Williamson?

  Can I spin you a yarn about the pineapple?

• 1:54:43Jimmy Carr?

  The pineapple?

• 1:54:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:54:44Jimmy Carr?

  Not that you can tell me about pineapples, but yeah, sure.

• 1:54:47Chris Williamson?

  Very important fruit. Let me show you that you're wrong. So fourteen ninety two, Christopher Columbus lands on the island of Guadalupe. And for the first time ever, Western person discovers the pineapple. Kind of looks like a royal fruit, right? It's got a little crown.

• 1:55:01Jimmy Carr?

  Sure.

• 1:55:01Chris Williamson?

  On its head. And he describes in his journal, eating it. If you've never had a pineapple before and you hadn't had other fruits that were sort of created outside of the UK, stuff like apples and stuff, the pineapple's overpowered as fuck. Like it's a super fruit, right? It's so sweet and juicy, nice. Anyway, describes it, brings it back, right? Prince or King Ferdinand the second of Aragon, King of Spain, I think he takes it back to first. And they take a fucking, literally boatload. Take all of these ones back. One isn't rotten. When he brings it back, it gets given to the king. So the first pineapple that's ever eaten by somebody who's a Westerner is it's done in a very sort of ceremonial fashion.

• 1:55:42Chris Williamson?

  This myth about the pineapple propagates and after a little while, trade begins to improve a little bit. The pineapple becomes one of the most ostentatious displays of wealth that anybody in the British aristocracy can rely on for about 300 years.

• 1:55:57Jimmy Carr?

  You know, you know, on the strand in London.

• 1:55:59Chris Williamson?

  Is there a pineapple?

• 1:56:00Jimmy Carr?

  It used to be able to rent pineapples.

• 1:56:03Chris Williamson?

  Eight thousand dollars, eight thousand pounds is the equivalent of what it would cost, but people would rent them for dinner parties and they would parade them round. Look, yeah, look at this. And they would have statues out front of the estate as if to say.

• 1:56:16Jimmy Carr?

  You know what the gag is on the statue? So the pineapple, um, I'll go toe to toe on pineapples.

• 1:56:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:21Jimmy Carr?

  So on stately homes, they'll often have a stone pineapple out the front.

• 1:56:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:26Jimmy Carr?

  And it's a gag. So the gag is when sailors would come back from the West Indies, they'd often bring a pineapple.

• 1:56:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:56:34Jimmy Carr?

  And they would put the pineapple in the window. The girls would put the pineapple and the pineapple kind of meant no gentleman callers, my husband's home.

• 1:56:43Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and he's a sailor.

• 1:56:44Jimmy Carr?

  And that gag, that gag's been lost in the, in the mid, but the, the aristocracy put a pineapple at the front of their house. It was kind of a joke. It was a reference to that, but the joke got lost.

• 1:56:55Chris Williamson?

  So that's interesting. I didn't know that. You're teaching me things about pineapples here.

• 1:56:59Jimmy Carr?

  I read a book about pineapples once, but the, uh, my friend wrote a book about pineapples. Uh, but that thing in the strand, you could, yeah, you could rent pineapples and you would show them off and then, and then suddenly that thing that they was the most lauded, special thing, ain't nothing. And.

• 1:57:16Chris Williamson?

  See where I'm going.

• 1:57:16Jimmy Carr?

  You look at it now and you go, what's the thing? There's nothing you can buy in a shopping mall that you will give a fuck about in 10 years. Nothing. There's nothing for you there. Fast forward, do something for you in five years' time. Don't buy the thing. You don't need it.

• 1:57:32Chris Williamson?

  So that story about the pineapple and its subsequent demise when the French invent greenhouses and you can grow fruits from much more tropical climates where we are.

• 1:57:44Chris Williamson?

  Related to a lesson that Rogan taught me when I went on his show last year. And I called it Rogan's value difficulty conflation. Look at the car he's driving, look at the watch he's wearing, look at the girl he's with. That's unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable. But then you attained it and then you realized, oh, this isn't valuable. This is just difficult to get. And there's a difference, there's a big difference. What's valuable is something that fulfills you intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and lovingly. Most smart people realize that there is value in stepping outside of their comfort, that on the other side of discomfort is something valuable. We're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain because if they weren't difficult to attain, they wouldn't be worthwhile.

• 1:58:26Chris Williamson?

  This is how non-valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without us noticing. Attaining something worthwhile is often going to be difficult, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's worthwhile. We use the challenge as a proxy for virtue or value or alignment or integrity. There's some signaling going on here, too. Difficult things by design will be attained by a small number of people, which makes them desirable, simply because it's an easy way to stand out from the crowd. But just because it's difficult to attain does not mean that it's valuable.

• 1:58:55Jimmy Carr?

  I mean, that's great. The only thing I would take issue with there is most smart people realize, no, no, they fucking don't. And I can prove it. Yachts. Fucking yachts. Someone's bought a yacht, someone's buying a yacht today. Yachts. Great. There's a level at which people are just, okay, maybe, okay. If you don't enjoy a conversation with a friend, you're not going to enjoy a yacht. What do you think you're doing on the yacht?

• 1:59:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, that Naval quote, if you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy on a yacht.

• 1:59:34Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's perfect, right?

• 1:59:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:37Jimmy Carr?

  It's perfect. It because you you go, that is, it's so true. How early in life can you know that? How, what age do you have to be before you can go, ah, you're chasing rainbows? This is, there's nothing, that external stuff isn't going to bring you the thing that you want. But how much of a quest do you need to go on? Before you can sort of realize that?

• 2:00:02Chris Williamson?

  But that's the, you know, that's been a repeating theme throughout today about you can bestow all of these insights. But the 18 year old version of me wouldn't have listened to this in any case. And it seems like even if someone shows you a photo of the top of the mountain, this is what it looks like. This was the route that I took to get there here with the pitfalls that you should avoid. Ultimately, it takes a very singular person to be able to learn from the mistakes of others rather than the mistakes of ourselves.

• 2:00:30Jimmy Carr?

  Who had that line about it was climbing Everest or whatever and someone someone choppered up there. It wasn't Everest, it was another mountain, but like they didn't climb up, they got a chopper up, took some photos and went.

• 2:00:44Jimmy Carr?

  It's a nothing experience. Now, who cares? Most would just get, you can get sent some photos, like there's nothing in that. Like doing the arm, well, I wanted to do that pilgrimage, but I thought I'll do it real quick. So I did it on a jet ski. It's not anything. If you're if you're not willing to take the journey yourself, it's, you've got nothing. It's interesting, that thing of the manopause that you had 26, 27, that leaks links to the um. The developmental kind of biology of the eye, when's the brain finished?

• 2:01:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Jimmy Carr?

  It's interesting, your brain was just finished.

• 2:01:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:17Jimmy Carr?

  What do they think about 25 for guys? Does it 24 for women? It's like, but it's that old that we're fully integrated, ready to go.

• 2:01:29Jimmy Carr?

  And and then at that age, miraculously, about 12 months in, you went, well, this is nonsense. I've got to do something else.

• 2:01:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I I see it. I see it in a lot of people. We spoke the other night about inner critics. What do you think's the relationship that we should have with our inner critic?

• 2:01:46Jimmy Carr?

  I mean, I think it's it's interesting. Walt Disney had three different rooms. So he had a room to be creative, like just come up with ideas, no bad ideas. Great. Other than some of the antisemitism, anyway. So he's got his ideas room and then he's got his um, he's got his management room. Well, how how do we make those room? How do we make those ideas happen? How are we going to make that stuff happen? And then you had another room for criticism. And I think we should sort of think about the inner critic like that. The idea of going, if you're trying to do something creative, don't let the critic in too soon. Wait until you've had the whole idea. Wait until you've let the management get involved a little bit. Wait until you've tried to write the whole joke and come at it from a few different angles and tried it twice.

• 2:02:32Jimmy Carr?

  Before you critic, you criticize it. And outsourcing your critic, I think, is is smart. I mean, comedy does it with the audience. Really, they make the decision as to what the show is. They do the editing for me.

• 2:02:45Chris Williamson?

  So you got a much better relationship with failure with that. It it engenders a much better relationship with failure.

• 2:02:52Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, because it's not identity level.

• 2:02:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:55Jimmy Carr?

  The jokes are the bullets, I'm the gun.

• 2:02:57Chris Williamson?

  Easy come, easy go.

• 2:02:59Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, so you let go of it, you know. But also, when you're doing something creative, you've got to kill a lot of babies. You they're all very precious to you and you think they're fabulous. It's a fabulous little idea and it's nothing. Audience just stared at you. Okay.

• 2:03:13Jimmy Carr?

  All right, well.

• 2:03:14Chris Williamson?

  Under the next one. Yeah, that was swing and a miss.

• 2:03:16Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, great. But isn't that kind of a nice attitude for? It's hard, though, when you've made something that's, you know, if it's a movie or a a book that you've worked on for years. But that's super smart. Uh, guy trying every chapter as he goes along.

• 2:03:32Jimmy Carr?

  That's super smart.

• 2:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, low stakes, low pressure creativity is something I wonder whether it's played into by this sort of concretizing of everything that you've ever said throughout all of time being there, that it doesn't feel like the ephemeral can be ephemeral anymore. You can't just blast it out.

• 2:03:52Jimmy Carr?

  iPhones at a comedy show are kind of the enemy of creativity. Censorship is not a problem in comedy. Self censorship is a huge problem. People not saying the unsayable, risky thing that could be the funniest fucking shit because they're worried, well, if that's taken out of context, what if people don't understand? I mean, like, why do people like comedy? It's a lot of nuance in comedy, isn't there? There's no nuance in the modern world. There's no nuance in, in, you know, what's reported in the media. It's all a weird newspeak. And then in comedy, like you can say the craziest shit and people know, it's not, there's no hate in his heart. That's just fun.

• 2:04:31Chris Williamson?

  Did you see Roseanne get popped for that little bit she did with Theo Von? She was making a joke about the Jews and she basically said that not enough of them were, she, she was, it was the most probably, the most egregious clipping of a bit.

• 2:04:50Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I didn't see it, so I can't really comment. But the idea of like, the bad faith argument that journalists make of going, I know it's a joke. It was in a comedy show at a comedy club. That's the context. It was a joke. And they go, okay, well, let's report it as if it was a statement that was made. Ladies and gentlemen, can I get your attention? I'm gonna make a comment here about, no, no one said that.

• 2:05:16Chris Williamson?

  She'd made a bunch of obviously sarcastic, very over the top.

• 2:05:25Chris Williamson?

  Opposite statements. It was like, and the pigs will fly and the sky is green and the da, da, da, da, da, basically for ages and ages and ages and ages and ages. And then at the very end said like, and not enough Jews, something, something, something. It was part of, it was an ever escalating statement about the ridiculousness of some of the claims that were being made with some, some, something. And they just took the bit at the end.

• 2:05:50Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:50Chris Williamson?

  I was like, come on, you know, I'm all for saying, you know, this needs to be able to stand up on its own. Like you, we, things can be taken in a little bit of isolation, but not that much isolation.

• 2:06:03Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it is interesting though, isn't it? The idea of you go, well, you could take anything out of context and someone's going to be upset as well. Also, you've got how much access to people now. Everyone's got a say. It used to be that would have been an eye roll and a touch from someone.

• 2:06:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:17Jimmy Carr?

  All right, someone said that. Not for me. Thank you. Won't be buying a ticket. I won't go. And now it's the, the idea of saying, I don't like that seems very reasonable to me. No one should have access to that. Seems like a different thing. So, you know, the free speech thing is you go, well, until we find a better system, we have to have free speech.

• 2:06:37Chris Williamson?

  What about the Chinese system? That's a good system.

• 2:06:39Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, that's the world we could be living in, you know, where, I mean, it's, you know, Charlie Brook is a mate of mine and those kind of black mirrors where people are getting so, so, social points and then it's happened. It's happening right now. It's unbelievable. It's like 1984 is happening right now.

• 2:06:58Chris Williamson?

  You know that they've got in China, gate analysis that can work out even face covered, wearing clothes can work out who someone is with about 90% plus accuracy just from the way that they walk. So hiding your face, hiding everything, dressing differently, doing whatever, isn't sufficient to protect you now. They've fingerprinted your

• 2:07:23Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:24Chris Williamson?

  movement.

• 2:07:25Jimmy Carr?

  It's interesting, that thing of like the micro, the macro. So you can't move.

• 2:07:31Jimmy Carr?

  Privately, but I think maybe with social media now, you can't think privately. Because everything's um it becomes slightly performative and there's no boredom. You're constantly stimulated. I think we're slightly overstimulated as a society. Like being bored is really good for creativity. Being a bit bored and a bit like listless, you know.

• 2:07:55Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes I look, even now it happens, but it used to happen more previously. At how many things I'll be doing at once. So I'll be replying to an email whilst I'm waiting for the kettle to boil. I'll be setting the dishwasher away whilst listening to a podcast at two times speed. And I'll be waiting for somebody to, I'm like, I've got like, I'm literally waiting for five things to happen whilst doing three.

• 2:08:18Jimmy Carr?

  That's the modern condition though, isn't it, that you're you're so addicted to activity. Doing something and feeling like you're being productive and actually just letting yourself kind of having some time just to think. It's the Charlie Munger thing, isn't it, the idea of waiting and just having time just to think and do nothing. Read stuff.

• 2:08:42Chris Williamson?

  What's your theory? You've got a theory on the Chinese. What's your theory about the Chinese?

• 2:08:45Jimmy Carr?

  My theory on the Chinese, the same theory as uh um well, my theory on the Chinese. We don't need to worry, there are covers banned. The Rolling Stones are not worried about the bootleg Rolling Stones, right? Because they're the Rolling Stones. They're coming up with this shit and playing it. And someone's doing a cover version. China at the moment is a is a is a covers band. And there's something, there's some sweet sauce in our system where innovation is created. And we're coming up with stuff. And you look at the five biggest companies in the world and they're all tech companies. That came up in the last ten years, fifteen years, whatever it is. It's incredible, the innovation that we have. You don't need to to worry about it. It's like AI, I'm not worried about AI.

• 2:09:30Jimmy Carr?

  It's artificial intelligence. As soon as it's artificial consciousness. Great, I'll be concerned. Can computers write jokes? Yeah, when they start laughing at jokes, that's when there'll be a problem.

• 2:09:44Chris Williamson?

  There was this, I think it was George that taught me this one as well. A really good measure of AI will be, I think it's called stairway wit. You heard of this?

• 2:09:55Jimmy Carr?

  Stairway wit?

• 2:09:56Chris Williamson?

  Stairway wit or stairwell wit, so.

• 2:09:59Jimmy Carr?

  There's spirit de scalier, the French term for, you know, when you have a dinner with someone and you're walking down the stairs from the restaurant and you think, I wish I'd said that.

• 2:10:07Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:10:08Jimmy Carr?

  Is that the?

• 2:10:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes. What's that called?

• 2:10:11Jimmy Carr?

  Spirit de scalier.

• 2:10:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to guess that means the spirit of the staircase.

• 2:10:16Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, there you go. There you go.

• 2:10:18Chris Williamson?

  The French, they've always got to make everything so much more.

• 2:10:20Jimmy Carr?

  But I think it's because the restaurants were often on the first floor, upper floor, and you'd walk down the steps.

• 2:10:26Chris Williamson?

  That's cool.

• 2:10:27Jimmy Carr?

  So that was their, it's a French thing.

• 2:10:30Chris Williamson?

  And the French are genetically not very funny, so presumably.

• 2:10:36Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, they are.

• 2:10:37Chris Williamson?

  Who's funny?

• 2:10:39Jimmy Carr?

  Gad, there's a guy called Gad, it's very funny. There's a girl called, oh, what's she called? Come back to me in one second.

• 2:10:48Jimmy Carr?

  Oh, I'm blanking on her name.

• 2:10:52Chris Williamson?

  Because the French.

• 2:10:53Jimmy Carr?

  Used to date, Blanche Gardin is, I watched it.

• 2:10:56Chris Williamson?

  That's a fucking French name.

• 2:10:58Jimmy Carr?

  I don't speak French. I watched it in French with subtitles. Blanche Gardin special. Blew my fucking mind.

• 2:11:04Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 2:11:04Jimmy Carr?

  It's so fucking funny.

• 2:11:05Chris Williamson?

  I've spoken too soon.

• 2:11:06Jimmy Carr?

  No, there's incredible funny, funny people everywhere, but that, it's weird, the stairs thing, this is very, on a tangent, but it's interesting. Let's talk about the environment again. Okay, so are you aware of New York at the turn of the century? Okay, so New York, turn of the century, incredibly loud. Every street is cobbled. Seen gangs in New York, you get the visual, right? Every street is cobbled, horse and carts everywhere and people on horseback, right? Because you've got to get around. The horse shit is yadeep. Okay, when horses die, they die in the street and they have to wait for them to atrophy slightly before they cut them up manually. And cart them off. So you know that kind of trope about you've heard about smelling salts and people talk about it's fetch the smelling salts. It's from that era.

• 2:11:52Jimmy Carr?

  London was the same, but New York had it really bad because it's an island. So you know, there's the steps going up to the brownstones, the steps going up to the brownstone buildings with a little metal scraper. And that was so you could walk out of the shit and scrape it off your feet before you went into the house.

• 2:12:10Jimmy Carr?

  Covered in shit, the whole of New York was covered in shit and they they had a law and they wrote a law about it and then another law and then they brought in a tax and then they brought in another tax and another law and another law, ba ba ba ba ba, or that and nothing changed. It was covered in shit and it smelled awful and it was hell.

• 2:12:27Jimmy Carr?

  And then Henry Ford came along.

• 2:12:31Jimmy Carr?

  And horses went from a million horses to six of them now in Central Park, taking tourists around and no more horse shit problem. And I kind of, I kind of think things can change very quickly.

• 2:12:48Jimmy Carr?

  I mean, maybe that's a ludicrously optimistic view of the world because the biggest industry in the world in 1902 was whaling.

• 2:12:57Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding?

• 2:12:58Jimmy Carr?

  No, biggest industry in the world was whaling.

• 2:13:00Chris Williamson?

  Because they would need the blubber and the oil for lamps.

• 2:13:04Jimmy Carr?

  The oil was everything.

• 2:13:06Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:13:07Jimmy Carr?

  You know, what's a resource is a really interesting question. So you go that that oil from Wales was a resource and we didn't wipe out the Wales, but we came as close as you'd ever want to get. And then suddenly a bit of tech came along and and save them.

• 2:13:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:20Jimmy Carr?

  Um.

• 2:13:21Chris Williamson?

  I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a little bit tropey, but one of the best ways to ensure that people pivot from a behavior that they do to a behavior that you want is to make the behavior that you want more attractive than the behavior that they do. It's the way that Elon Musk managed to do what the Prius never did because he made an electric car that was cooler than a normal car.

• 2:13:41Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. It's, uh, yeah, it's interesting that thing of like, whenever you look at society, wherever you're calling from in this moment, we imagine it's finished.

• 2:13:52Jimmy Carr?

  We imagine this is the last iteration of humanity, all the technology up to now, but that's pretty much it, right? We're never going to get beyond this, right? Because computers don't get better than this, phones don't get better than this. We don't have better medicine than we do today. This is it. We've reached the pinnacle, right? Look around. It's never going to get any better. We somehow can never factor in that's never, ever been the case. But we can't in our heads, we can't get our head around the idea, things are going to get better.

• 2:14:23Chris Williamson?

  Tell you what else I loved. I learned this term from a historian of existential risk. So I'm big into X risk and trying to avoid it and learning about.

• 2:14:34Jimmy Carr?

  Personally, you're trying to avoid it because that's.

• 2:14:36Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't work that way.

• 2:14:37Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's difficult to do.

• 2:14:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but I don't want humanity to go extinct. And I think that our.

• 2:14:43Jimmy Carr?

  Someone write that down. That's a lovely thought.

• 2:14:45Chris Williamson?

  Efforts are placed in the wrong direction. They're placed in the wrong place, which is, you know, Bjorn Lomborg's kind of like fundamentally his thesis within human flourishing, but I think you could even spread it out further than that. This is William McCaskill from the Future of Humanities Institute. This is Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord's work, again, from Oxford.

• 2:15:05Chris Williamson?

  Thirty thousand foot view, all of our attention is currently paid, or the vast majority of our attention in terms of existential risks are paid on things that are not existential risk. There is almost zero percent chance that the next thousand years humanity is going to be wiped out by climate change, but.

• 2:15:22Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I don't know, because I think, A, like, what do you consider climate change? Because, you know, the supervolcano, if that goes, that could, you know, are you familiar with this? The theory of, I think it's called Baduca's, Baduca's blanket? You've ever heard of this? So it's the idea that if you put coal in coal fired, you know, power plants into the atmosphere, it's, it causes warming. It's terrible. We should stop doing it. But if you go high enough with the chimney into the stratosphere, if you go high enough, those particles reflect light and it cools the earth. The stratosphere reflects light from the sun. The sun's the only thing heating us.

• 2:16:08Jimmy Carr?

  We cool down. It's a thermostat on the globe.

• 2:16:11Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 2:16:12Jimmy Carr?

  And here's the thing, here's the kicker, it's been tried.

• 2:16:16Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:16:17Jimmy Carr?

  When Krakatoa went off, such a huge volcano, it put so much ash into the upper atmosphere, the earth cooled by, I think, I think it was two degrees, I could be wrong about the amount, and there was no summer in Europe the next year.

• 2:16:30Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 2:16:31Jimmy Carr?

  So it's, it's kind of, we know we could do it, but I mean, the amount of, how bad does it need to get before we do that? How bad does it need to get before we harness the atom? You know, the, the idea that you go, all of the existential risk of nuclear power is there because we have weapons, but we're not really using the power as much as we could be.

• 2:16:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:52Jimmy Carr?

  And that seems to be the, why not take that? And people go, well, what about safety? Well, okay.

• 2:16:58Jimmy Carr?

  We'll put some more safety on it then.

• 2:17:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the, the conversation around X risk is what's called anthropogenic risk. So our risk, human created versus natural risk, supervolcanoes, asteroids, Godzilla coming up from underneath the ocean.

• 2:17:16Jimmy Carr?

  I mean, the idea is a supervolcano goes off as an asteroid lands on it.

• 2:17:20Chris Williamson?

  Plugs the hole.

• 2:17:22Jimmy Carr?

  Perfect.

• 2:17:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:23Jimmy Carr?

  We might get lucky. We might get lucky. Let's just, let's try and focus on that. Let's try and focus on.

• 2:17:30Chris Williamson?

  That's your positivity coming in again. So.

• 2:17:32Jimmy Carr?

  So what's the other ones? What's the other big existential risks?

• 2:17:34Chris Williamson?

  So the most likely one is AI, right? And this book, the, the original conception by Toby Ord and The Precipice was written probably about six years ago, maybe, maybe four years ago. So this is before ChatGPT, and I'm going to guess that he would have increased his, his, uh.

• 2:17:48Jimmy Carr?

  So he thinks AI is going to wipe us out?

• 2:17:49Chris Williamson?

  AI is, it's the most likely. So he says that there's a.

• 2:17:51Jimmy Carr?

  What pathogens, AI?

• 2:17:53Chris Williamson?

  So natural pandemics, engineered pandemics, AI, nanotechnology, they're the big movers, right? We all get turned into gray goo. We have unaligned AI. We have an engineered pandemic from some bastard in the lab or some gain of function research that accidentally gets released, or we have a natural pandemic that fucks everybody. Now, the reason, there's very specific way that there's word input for existential risk, it's total unrecoverable collapse, right?

• 2:18:22Jimmy Carr?

  When, sorry, when do I plug my show in this? Because I feel like people need to buy tickets for a comedy show at this point, in this point in the conversation. Like, I mean, you'll watch more of this, but. This is, this is bad, right? So unrecoverable.

• 2:18:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, permanent, sorry, not total, permanent unrecoverable collapse. And the problem with almost everything, including nuclear weapons, you'll notice that nuclear weapons weren't in there. Nuclear weapons, all of them go off at the same time. It's catastrophic, it's hell on earth, but it's not permanent unrecoverable collapse. The difference between, there's a really great thought experiment where what is the greater difference between 0% and 99% of humanity being killed, or between 99% and 100% being killed? And when you look at it with a long-termism lens, it's the 99 to 100.

• 2:19:11Jimmy Carr?

  Also, you're looking at the wrong thing.

• 2:19:14Jimmy Carr?

  You've read The Selfish Gene, you're looking at humanity, you should be looking at DNA. That's, I mean, listen, we're just, we're just meat puppets getting the stuff to the future, right? That's.

• 2:19:24Chris Williamson?

  Alvy Loeb, Alvy Loeb had this idea, I had him on, this dude who's looking, he's going to fire a light sail, fire a laser from the earth at a light sail and try and propel a craft up to about 20% the speed of light, send it towards Alpha Centauri, that's going to happen within the next decade, something like that.

• 2:19:43Jimmy Carr?

  And the message is going to read?

• 2:19:46Chris Williamson?

  It's just a very thin piece of like reflective foil, I think. In fact, I don't know how much.

• 2:19:51Jimmy Carr?

  Does it say help?

• 2:19:53Chris Williamson?

  Maybe, send help, SOS. But I asked him, do you ever think that we'll send generation ships to other planets? Do you ever think that we will have, you know?

• 2:20:03Jimmy Carr?

  All aboard the SS.

• 2:20:05Chris Williamson?

  Bukkake.

• 2:20:06Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, well, I don't know, I mean, presumably the SS Inbred is going to be the name of the ship.

• 2:20:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 2:20:12Jimmy Carr?

  It's the, yeah, all aboard the SS Norfolk.

• 2:20:18Jimmy Carr?

  Get on board, intergenerationally marrying, what?

• 2:20:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:23Jimmy Carr?

  It's, yeah.

• 2:20:24Chris Williamson?

  His argument is the best way.

• 2:20:25Jimmy Carr?

  Your half of the ship can't meet that half of the ship for 20 generations or we're all fucked.

• 2:20:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. His argument is that you get to, um, the best way would be desktop DNA synthesizer, attached to one of these ships, keep everything frozen, get it over there, drop it down, artificial wombs. Away you go.

• 2:20:45Jimmy Carr?

  Is this not, okay, your worry about this is not, we talked about anxiety earlier, right? And anxiety, if you were going to sum it up, is it's a restless mind and you're problem solving for the future because there's not enough going on now. I would argue there's quite a lot going on now that we could nail here. And that as a byproduct of that, like, like the idea of intergenerational ships travelling at light speed.

• 2:21:15Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:21:16Jimmy Carr?

  Ah, I don't think it gets us anywhere. I think I'd be with Eric Weinstein on like a new physics might be the thing that gets us somewhere. And if you think about where we were, isn't there some weird fact about from the Wright Brothers to um landing on the moon is, is it sixty seven years or something? Yeah, we've, we've done it before, although you know how NASA did it? Someone told me this recently, talking about NASA, went, did they put a man on the moon? Yeah, absolutely, they put a man on the moon. How did they do it? And my mate went, we know what the budget was. Unlimited. They had an unlimited budget. You can have anything you want and anyone you want.

• 2:22:00Jimmy Carr?

  I'll put a man on the moon with that. I mean, oh, honestly.

• 2:22:05Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 2:22:05Jimmy Carr?

  How tough could it be?

• 2:22:06Chris Williamson?

  Unlimited, uh, you can have anyone you want and it can cost anything you want, but it can't take as long as you want as well. So remember we learned about Parkinson's law just before? The task will expand to fill the time given for it. That was not, it was before, dot, dot, dot, before the Russians.

• 2:22:23Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, well, it was the, that thing of like, you don't, there's a great Lorne Michaels quote about Saturday Night Live, where he says, the show doesn't start at eleven on a Saturday because it's ready. It's, it goes on because it's eleven o'clock on a Saturday. Sometimes you've got to go with what you've got, right?

• 2:22:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:42Jimmy Carr?

  The before the Russians thing of like, what did we, you know, wars are great apart from war. If you could take the war bit out of war, but like the innovation that comes of that.

• 2:22:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:22:51Jimmy Carr?

  Because in those desperate times and now, you know, I don't know what's going on with the, you know, we're fighting these proxy wars and the, the human suffering and the devastation and for what?

• 2:23:03Jimmy Carr?

  I can't see what happens.

• 2:23:06Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, man. I mean, it's, there is a degree to which there's an ever increasing velocity of the spiral of ping ponging between this thing and the next thing and what's it going to be. And I understand why people feel overwhelmed. I, I, I get it too. But I don't know. The last few years, I've, since being around more smart people and more hopeful people.

• 2:23:32Chris Williamson?

  I just, I've got faith for some reason that everything is going to be fine.

• 2:23:36Jimmy Carr?

  I, I, listen, that thing that we were talking about earlier about like, what's your belief? Is that the truth? Doesn't matter. It's a useful belief, very useful belief to think that things will be okay. And that maybe in some small part way, uh, some small way, we could play a part in that. That would, that would be huge. You know, so that thing of going, well, what, what are you going to do? Well, if you have an aptitude for physics, go and study physics or chemistry or maths, whatever you're doing, do more of that.

• 2:24:06Chris Williamson?

  You spoke earlier on about your kids and you said about how, we, we, we mentioned the other night, I think you identified the difference between life on easy mode or life with low stakes.

• 2:24:17Jimmy Carr?

  This is, yeah. So this was my theory on life was I have a partner I've been with for many, many years and we get on great. And it struck me that not having kids was like, we didn't want kids. And it was living life on, with a cheat on the video going, this is super easy.

• 2:24:35Chris Williamson?

  Why was it easy?

• 2:24:35Jimmy Carr?

  Because the, the, what I didn't realize, you think you have skin in the game, but you don't have skin in the game until you have kids, because it's, it's a medical procedure where your heart now lives outside your body. That's what it is. You know, so you go now, you, you feel invested in the future and, and, and you're, you're more worried, you're worrying more about your mortality. Now you've got kids. Because it's, you know, what's the worst that could happen? You could die. Well, now it's much worse.

• 2:25:09Jimmy Carr?

  There might be a saying goodbye. So I think it was, I thought I was living life on easy settings and actually I was playing a very low stakes table. And now I feel like I'm playing in a higher stakes table. And it's, it's very joyful.

• 2:25:21Chris Williamson?

  Is it also terrifying though? You've got this heart that lives outside of your body.

• 2:25:25Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I think so. I think I spend a lot of time with the, um, uh, you know, thinking about what could, what could happen and anxiety, you know, if I let myself, there's kind of a, um, there's a, there's a tendency towards counterfactuals and what, what could happen? What if he, what if he walks into the road? What if something awful happens? But I read that, um, uh, the coddling of the American mind book and it really kind of made me think, yeah, childhood is about experimentation and risk and letting kids be kids. Let them, let them do their thing.

• 2:26:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, it's interesting to think about

• 2:26:08Chris Williamson?

  the protective motivation that a lot of people have, myself included. You know, you hear about this Sound of Freedom film that just came out recently and I had one of the guys who was a part of it on the show, he's telling me about these kids that are being trafficked and you know, it's like a fucking like visceral compulsion that you have to make it stop and to help them and to do all.

• 2:26:28Jimmy Carr?

  I didn't see, I didn't see the, the movie, but is that how he made his money?

• 2:26:31Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 2:26:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, ruined his business.

• 2:26:35Jimmy Carr?

  God, you've got really interesting guests on this show.

• 2:26:37Chris Williamson?

  Ruined his business. And, uh,

• 2:26:40Chris Williamson?

  there's something about that, you know, this sort of desire to protect. But for me, it's largely abstract, right? Like I know that it's an ethical thing to protect a child, right? It's the same for me, it's the exact same for me as thinking about fucking a sister, right? Incest aversion for me is not an emotion that I have.

• 2:27:03Chris Williamson?

  I don't, I don't feel incest aversion.

• 2:27:05Jimmy Carr?

  Because your sister's fat.

• 2:27:07Chris Williamson?

  Because I'm an only child.

• 2:27:08Jimmy Carr?

  Oh, right, that too.

• 2:27:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:10Jimmy Carr?

  Sure. Fucking with you, but the, uh, the.

• 2:27:14Chris Williamson?

  So when people talk about like incest, I can make like, would you fuck your sister jokes all day long?

• 2:27:20Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:20Chris Williamson?

  Because for me, it doesn't, there's nothing visceral. I understand, I understand. And I'm sure that if I had a sister, I wouldn't fuck her much, but.

• 2:27:29Jimmy Carr?

  Right, the bare minimum.

• 2:27:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:31Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:27:33Chris Williamson?

  And it's the same, I think, a little bit with this, and I'm interested to work it because you, you've got a good example of long enough life without kids to then have them. Do you? Is it like a global cartel of parents that become extra protective and more invested in the wellbeing of all children?

• 2:27:53Jimmy Carr?

  I always found it very annoying pre having kids that like that can, oh, you wouldn't understand.

• 2:27:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:58Jimmy Carr?

  Because you haven't got kids. Yeah, you do. If you're a person in the world, you don't change entirely when you have kids. It's, it's a, it's a lovely thing to do. And I think it, um, I think there's, it's kind of a final, it feels like it's another bit of growing up. It's another bit of growth where you kind of go, oh, well, you know, especially in my business where you are a bit self obsessed at show business. You go, well, there's someone else to worry about now. Don't, you know, and it's, it's fun for me and I kind of, you know, because you're kind of in play mode with kids. And my job is kind of play mode. It's good to anchor myself in that. It's, um, yeah, it's, it's joyful. It really is joyful. It's lovely. I mean, it's a weird thing of like, you know, it's, it's, I think parents kind of can sometimes.

• 2:28:42Jimmy Carr?

  They're either going desperately, you've got to have kids. Oh my God, it's ruined my life. And it's, you can find people in both camps. And I think again, it's, it's, uh, it's this position. They're all parents. There's some very happy parents and some not very happy parents. And I think it's about expectations. What did you think it was going to be like? Well, what's happiness? It's expectations exceeded. Right. Then why is New Year's terrible? Why are birthdays boring? Because you're expecting it's going to be the best night ever. And then it was okay. Or even if it is the best night ever, you go, yeah, well, I was expecting that. And somehow crushing a Tuesday, sometimes having a great time when it was unexpected is the most joyful thing.

• 2:29:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:24Jimmy Carr?

  So having kids, what do you, what do you think it was going to be like? How do you think it was going to be?

• 2:29:29Chris Williamson?

  To think it's going to be terrible.

• 2:29:30Jimmy Carr?

  Not even think it's going to be terrible, just like being realistic about it, going, you know, it's going to be, it's going to be, there's lovely moments. And you're very present with, I don't really, I always want to meditate and I never really find the time to meditate and I'm, I think I'm terrible at it. But I'm good at going on walks and I'm good at playing with kids. And when you're with a kid, playing with a kid, you, you're in the moment. You're just there, there's nothing else. It's lovely.

• 2:29:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, uh.

• 2:29:57Chris Williamson?

  I think that there's a few decisions that you can make in life downstream from them. There, it's an entire lifestyle change. So buying a dog would be one, right? That especially because dogs are usually a precursor to kids in some form.

• 2:30:10Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, fur babies.

• 2:30:12Chris Williamson?

  And downstream from that, you have something else that you're responsible for. You need to get up at the time. It needs to be fed and watered and walked.

• 2:30:18Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's often my thing of the cure for depressed friends is to encourage them to get a dog.

• 2:30:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 2:30:24Jimmy Carr?

  Because you might not need to get out of bed till noon, but the dog needs to poop. So.

• 2:30:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:28Jimmy Carr?

  You've got, you've got to get up and out and put something on and go to the shop and buy some food and taking care of someone else. It's often like, if you're having a really tough time, finding someone who's worse off and calling them and checking in is really valuable.

• 2:30:42Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that strange?

• 2:30:42Jimmy Carr?

  It's odd, but it really helps. You know, it's that thing of, you know, if you're going through something, reach out and try and help someone. And it just puts you in a different position with, with the, you know, your problem.

• 2:30:54Chris Williamson?

  One trend that I see amongst some of my friends who are more resilient or capable is sometimes they

• 2:31:09Chris Williamson?

  allow themselves to be relied on and allow themselves to serve others. And a lot of the time end up not being served themselves. So it's that guardian rather than dependent dynamic continues to just get flipped with them always being the person that's the one that's helping.

• 2:31:26Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it's interesting that, that internal critic, the idea that you, sometimes the circle of compassion, you, you're not in the circle. It's everyone else around you and then you're not in it and you're, you know, you meet a lot of people that aren't very good to themselves. They're very generous with everyone else and then they're not very good to themselves. It's a strange thing. I don't know what's going on there, but it's it seems.

• 2:31:45Chris Williamson?

  Is that something you ever encountered?

• 2:31:47Jimmy Carr?

  No, I'm pretty good to myself. I think, no, it's not really a.

• 2:31:51Chris Williamson?

  That's something I had, not less so now, but it's something I had.

• 2:31:56Jimmy Carr?

  It strikes me, it's an interesting thing to talk about because it strikes me that your journey will be. The worst bit will be when you've got one kid.

• 2:32:04Chris Williamson?

  Why do you?

• 2:32:05Jimmy Carr?

  You almost want twins off the bat.

• 2:32:06Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 2:32:07Jimmy Carr?

  Because your story is an only child.

• 2:32:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:32:10Jimmy Carr?

  That needs to connect.

• 2:32:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:11Jimmy Carr?

  So it's a weird thing when you have two, the dark thought you have when you have two is, well, if anything happens to us, at least they got each other.

• 2:32:18Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:32:19Jimmy Carr?

  And you don't even have a sister to fuck. We've established this.

• 2:32:22Chris Williamson?

  Tried, tried. I've been, yeah.

• 2:32:26Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's I I kind of think that's, is that not the journey though? Is that not the thing of going? And the the quiet, the the kind of the listening that you've done for the first five, six years of this podcast? I feel like that's going to remain and then there'll be another gear where you're on scent.

• 2:32:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:48Jimmy Carr?

  I feel like that, you know, it's often easier to see it in other people like of what the trajectory of their career will be.

• 2:32:56Jimmy Carr?

  Because it's like, it's kind of your, you're in training to be a wise man. You're a bit young.

• 2:33:02Chris Williamson?

  Wise man in training.

• 2:33:03Jimmy Carr?

  But you're a bit young to be a wise man, right? But that's kind of where it's.

• 2:33:07Chris Williamson?

  I have a friend, you know, David Perel, really good follow on Twitter if no one, if people aren't following him. Um, he was the one that wrote the the article, uh, Think Like An Athlete, which in classic Twitter fashion, I didn't read, read the headline, made up my own idea about what the article was about. And then that ended up being really formative. So he didn't write an article that ended up being very formative to me. Uh, what I ended up.

• 2:33:32Jimmy Carr?

  Hang on, what's what's untrue, but.

• 2:33:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, figuratively false, but literally true or the reverse. Yeah. So.

• 2:33:41Chris Williamson?

  He uh, first off, he was one of the people that poked me toward turning pro with the show. What would happen if I treated the pursuit of being a podcaster like athletes do, where I review game tape and I get a speech coach and addiction coach and a comedy coach and I do improv and I go to bed on time and I'm hydrated and I learn how the mouth moves and all of these things. What would happen if I did that? And it worked out to be really great. From one sentence, think like an athlete, which wasn't what the fucking article was about.

• 2:34:06Jimmy Carr?

  Right.

• 2:34:07Chris Williamson?

  But he is in this great relationship. He lives in Austin and he, we had a phone call before I even moved to Austin. He told me this really beautiful sentiment. You know, he's worked an awful lot throughout his twenties, very successful, spent a lot of time thinking and being around people and networking and doing self-work and meditation and you know, he's got a fucking rabbi that he goes and sees at 6am every Saturday because he wants to learn about Jewish canon. And he said, everything I've done in my twenties was preparing me to be the dad that I wanted to be. You know, you've got this guy who's got a million dollars and million, million, million people business, all this stuff. And he was like, yeah, it's just in service of becoming the dad that I wanted to be. And I thought that

• 2:34:49Chris Williamson?

  was a really beautiful sentiment. I've always known, I haven't always known that I wanted to be a dad. I always had a sense that I wanted to be a dad. And then definitely the last five years, I just, I can't wait to be a dad. So yeah, it's nice. It's nice to know that even though the kid isn't there, ready for you to bestow the hard work and the fruit of your labor internally, externally, on.

• 2:35:12Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:13Chris Williamson?

  You're kind of, you're kind of doing it for them in a way.

• 2:35:16Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I could see that. I could, I mean, it's also that thing. If you go, it's the, it's the role that you want to play and you don't know yourself yet. The interesting thing is like, it's interesting to think about getting to know your kid because you kid, the kid arrives and they go, I haven't really met them yet. But you want to, you're going to meet them at some point, you know, meet them and connect with them and you know, great. And you get a sense of who they are, but it's, it's bit by bit. But you haven't had, you don't have a sense of who you are as a dad.

• 2:35:46Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 2:35:47Jimmy Carr?

  And it's interesting. What would you be like?

• 2:35:51Chris Williamson?

  Fritzl.

• 2:35:53Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, very good at DIY. No one talks about that. I can't put a shelf up. I can't put a shelf up. Built a house under his house. Props.

• 2:36:02Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you talk about enjoying the passage of time as a good synopsis.

• 2:36:07Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I think anything where you're in a flow state seems to be a magical time. So what, you know, you're, whether it's a hobby or a, or your job ideally, but something where you're in a, in a flow state. So good conversation is kind of flow state, right? So I'm not quite sure how long we've been talking. I'm sure listeners are going, oh, too long, frankly. But it's, you're kind of in a flow. You're, you're in a flow. You're enjoying it. You're not looking at the clock. You're not conscious of other things. You're just where you are.

• 2:36:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:34Jimmy Carr?

  And focused. So on stage, I find that's a flow state. Playing tennis, I really like. I'm not that good at tennis, but I really like playing it. And that thing of like, when you're doing sports, I suppose it lifts the anxiety because the thing that we talked about, anxiety is solving future problems ahead of time. And when you're doing something in a flow state, you're in it, you're dealing with that thing. You've, your conscious mind is busy.

• 2:36:57Chris Williamson?

  And it's just for the purpose of that as well. You know, going back to the telek and anti-telek, telek and anti-telek stuff.

• 2:37:02Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:03Chris Williamson?

  Pickleball for me is my, it's just, it's so rapid and so all consuming that I can't, I can't think about anything else. And, you know.

• 2:37:14Jimmy Carr?

  So that's switching off.

• 2:37:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:16Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, great. I think some, I think you need something like that as well. Something that's a low stakes. A flow state that's low stakes in life. You, you're not bothered about the outcome.

• 2:37:27Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 2:37:28Jimmy Carr?

  You're not becoming a professional pickleball player. You are a professional podcaster. This is a flow state, but it's high stakes. This matters to you greatly. But to have something where you go, it's really just for fun. I'm not trying to get better at this. Like you in the gym, you're trying to achieve something aesthetically, physically, health-wise. Probably less health-wise and more aesthetically in your twenties. And as you get older, it'll be more health. But that idea of going, what's something you could enjoy being a flow state? And it's just fun.

• 2:37:57Chris Williamson?

  Low stakes flow state is a lovely framework that I haven't thought about before, that

• 2:38:05Chris Williamson?

  a lot of people will continue to pile high stakes onto the thing that they choose to do.

• 2:38:09Jimmy Carr?

  Hmm.

• 2:38:11Chris Williamson?

  And I don't know if that fully encapsulates the relaxation that you have. You know, it may be able to drill your focus even more. You may be completely dialed in and very, very concerned about the outcome. But I don't know if it achieves everything that you could from this variety, this sort of relaxation, this very sort of parasympathetic, I'm just at ease here. I lose the game of pickleball. My friend Aaron calls me a pussy. So what? Like it's, you know, it is what it is.

• 2:38:44Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:46Jimmy Carr?

  But his parents never loved him anymore. Look how far they got in the book of boys' names.

• 2:38:54Jimmy Carr?

  That'll do.

• 2:38:57Chris Williamson?

  He is currently in New York and he's become the director of, director of physical therapy for the Aaron Rodgers, the current best living quarterback in all of the NFL. He plays for the New York Jets.

• 2:39:16Jimmy Carr?

  Right.

• 2:39:16Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I think, and.

• 2:39:18Jimmy Carr?

  Probably just easier if everyone, the team's called Aaron.

• 2:39:22Jimmy Carr?

  Just, it's honestly, he's not the best. He's just, it's less fuss. Aaron, Aaron has been hit in the head too many times. He can only remember the name Aaron. So we have to hire an Aaron.

• 2:39:32Chris Williamson?

  If you shout Aaron, 50 people turn around.

• 2:39:35Jimmy Carr?

  Well, the quarterback doesn't, he just sort of has to.

• 2:39:38Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But no, he's a, he's over there. But yeah, doing something that's, that's low stakes, that's flow state. I, I think that that's a really nice conception and

• 2:39:49Chris Williamson?

  it's like a good justification for having hobbies, you know?

• 2:39:53Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. I mean, that, that we need a justification is really speaks to our, the, the activity. I mean, I, I really guilty of this. Like even when you go on holiday, you make a list of books to read when you're away to relax, like it's homework. But that's, you know, really the only thing I got from my education was work ethic. You know, you, you find what your work ethic is when you find what you love doing, but then it's, it's hard not to replicate that in all areas of your life.

• 2:40:22Chris Williamson?

  Productivity purgatory was what I called it, that even when you're supposed to be doing something for leisure, it's still in service of the outcomes that you're going to get at work. So it's the walk that you take on a morning, not because you get to relax and spend time in nature, but because you heard an Andrew Huberman episode about how it improves dopamine, the dopaminergic seesaw, so you can focus better.

• 2:40:45Jimmy Carr?

  The wonderful thing about being a comedian, I mean, I could be getting a colonoscopy and thinking, well, there might be some material in this. You never know.

• 2:40:52Chris Williamson?

  Literally.

• 2:40:53Jimmy Carr?

  You never know. A virtual colonoscopy? I mean, they're the future.

• 2:40:57Chris Williamson?

  Maybe a VR one where they fly a tiny little micro drone up.

• 2:41:00Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. That's what he told me anyway. We were in a park.

• 2:41:06Chris Williamson?

  What have you got coming up next? What can people expect from you?

• 2:41:08Jimmy Carr?

  I've got a new tour. I'm going to go out on the road again. I'm touring slightly differently. Just I'm hope it works. I think it will, but certainly around the UK, I'm going to do two shows a night, every night, Wednesday to Saturday. So work less and more than I've worked before. I'm going to do more shows, but more compacted. And I'm going to do a show at seven and a show at nine thirty.

• 2:41:31Chris Williamson?

  I'm a big show at seven fan, by the way.

• 2:41:33Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it's that thing of you either have dinner afterwards or before, you either have drinks after or before, but you go, it's not a big with an interval. It's like you pack the stuff in, you know, give maybe a hundred minutes, got time to a hundred, maybe even two hours, sort of straight through. And that's a, it's a great show to hold people for that long. It's great. You don't, because they break and then you build it again. And with the bigger shows, sometimes you just do it with a regular interval. But I'm, you know, putting that tour on, I'm working on a book at the moment. It's probably the easiest conception of it, about how to write jokes. I've had a really great run in comedy. And what am I leaving for posterity? Some dick jokes, right? I write lovely jokes. I've done a bunch of specials. I'll record a new one next month. I don't know when it'll be

• 2:42:18Jimmy Carr?

  out. But I want to leave something behind to the community because it's done an awful lot for me. So I'm, I'm working on this thing and hopefully it'll become something for, you know. Other comedians.

• 2:42:30Chris Williamson?

  America, you doing America?

• 2:42:32Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, doing a tour in America, sort of gigging around the place. I mean, it's quite nice. It's not, I can play quite big rooms. It turns out that because of the, one of the major benefits of the biggest TV channel in the world is YouTube and no one noticed in mainstream media, no one noticed, oh, that's the biggest TV channel in the world. So your Netflix and your YouTube, the global entities mean you can play anywhere in the world, which is fantastic. I do about 40 countries. And I'll do America and I'll play cities I've never been to and 2000 people will turn up. It's amazing.

• 2:43:04Chris Williamson?

  I'm looking forward to Austin, Sunday, the something of October, Sunday, maybe the 17th of October, it's somewhere in there. Jimmy, I really appreciate you. I, we got introduced by a mutual friend.

• 2:43:16Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:17Chris Williamson?

  And I feel like uh it's a real flourishing, blossoming.

• 2:43:22Jimmy Carr?

  It's lovely. I'm a huge fan of this. Please don't stop and please do more. I think more conversations and more, more learning and it, yeah, it grows corn. It's a great show.

• 2:43:33Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.

• 2:43:34Jimmy Carr?

  Thanks.