Jimmy Carr: "I Was Laughing & Crying When He Died". Jimmy Opens Up About Being Cancelled & How Anxiety Is The Flip Side Of Creativity!

Learn the lessons behind the laughter, learned from over 20 years in the world of comedy. Jimmy Carr is an award-winning comedian, writer and TV host for shows including, ‘8 Out Of 10 Cats’, ‘Roast Battle’, and ‘Big Fat Quiz Of The Year’. In this conversation Jimmy and Steven discuss topics such as, why we don’t think about death enough, how to speak so people listen, the power of imposter syndrome, and how to find out what you want to do in life. 00:00 Intro 01:01 How Are You, Jimmy? 02:07 Every Single Person Has Life Dysmorphia 07:59 What Is the Point of All This Work? 11:35 What Is Our End Goal? 13:08 People Crave the Success Not the Journey 15:47 You Should Be Feeling Imposter Syndrome 17:45 I Entertained My Sick Mother 18:54 The Unmeasurable Stuff Is the Important One 23:29 Depression 24:46 Men's Mental Health 26:30 What Is It to Be a Man 32:25 Losing My Religion 32:52 How Do You Deal with Grief in Your Life? 34:19 The Passing of Sean Lock 37:27 Business Is Life 38:12 The Issue Is Young People Are Not Given Enough Agency 40:52 How Comedy Teaches You to Be a Good Communicator 44:06 The Importance of Taking Risks 51:38 How To Deal with Rejection 54:31 Knowing Who You Are & What You Want to Do 57:44 Is It Motivation, Luck or Talent? 01:01:14 Being Cancelled 01:05:12 Would You Erase Your Worst Moments? 01:14:26 Artificial Intelligence 01:25:37 Self Expression 01:29:51 Jimmy's Eating Disorder 01:34:31 Advice to Younger People 01:37:25 Why You Should Sweat the Small Stuff 01:41:45 Having Confidence 01:42:40 Netflix Special 01:45:09 Dave Chapelle Attack 01:49:38 What Would You Tell Your Kids? You can watch Jimmy’s new Netflix stand-up special, ’Jimmy Carr: Natural Born Killer’, out on the 16th April 2024. You can purchase tickets for Jimmy’s brand-new international tour, ’Jimmy Carr: Laughs Funny’, here: https://bit.ly/49u9iex Follow Jimmy: Twitter - https://bit.ly/4awtUEe Instagram - https://bit.ly/3PULKbt YouTube - https://bit.ly/3xrXsEc Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I remember the day, I remember being at home and getting the news and laughing and crying. And then it hits you. I was very, uh, very upset by it. And he was just, just so funny.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  You're the fantastic crowd. Thank you very much. I did not, thank you.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Would you please welcome Jimmy Carr.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  One of the most respected and best loved comedians in the world. The king of one-liners.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Okay, strap in everyone, you ready? I'm gonna start teaching comedy because it teaches you how to come up with original thoughts, to find your voice. You'll be chasing imposter syndrome and it's great, you should feel it every 18 months. You learn that failure is one of the great gifts of stand-up comedy. And to learn how to lose gracefully, it's a good test of how much you want something.

• 0:50Steven Bartlett?

  How do we know what we actually want? I love what I do now, but often question whether I should go be like a DJ.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Do what? I can answer that question for you. No, you shouldn't. I know everything you do, you think, oh, maybe we could make a few quid out of this. No!

• 1:03Steven Bartlett?

  As a guy that's touring the world 300 days a year, what advice would you give me on how to be a better communicator?

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Speak at 92 beats a minute. When you look at the great public speakers, they all seem to be hitting that rhythm of 92 beats a minute.

• 1:14Steven Bartlett?

  Anxiety.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  It's the flip side of creativity. So I think the cure for managing my anxiety is... Hang on, the Netflix special drops today, so I imagine I'm being cancelled right now.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  How have you come to deal with that?

• 1:25Speaker 00

  So the next time I get cancelled, I've got a plan, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna say...

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Jimmy, it's great to be back.

• 1:36Steven Bartlett?

  What have you been up to?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  I've been, you know, I've been around, I've been working. I very much enjoyed this last time and I'm kind of, I was a bit nervous coming back. Because it's a big show and I really enjoy it, I really enjoy listening. So I've given it quite a lot of thought, I've kind of made loads of notes. And, uh, you know, here's what I'll kick off with. I've been thinking a lot about gratitude as the mother of all virtues. And I think I'm right in saying this. I think you would give me everything you own in 25 years' time to be the age you are now and as healthy as you are right now. And I think it's a really interesting meditation to think about,

• 2:20Speaker 00

  right, if you had a time machine, if you were 30 years in the future, if you could be this healthy and feel this good. And be this age, you give everything materially that you own in thirty years' time to be back here. And just that, just to take that in for a minute, just to take a moment to think about, wow, this is amazing.

• 2:41Steven Bartlett?

  What does that inspire in terms of behavioural change in the moment?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's that thing of like, I try and, I think gratitude is such an important virtue. And it's, people talk about gratitude practice, and it does take some practice. And it often takes like, it's a way of reframing the way that you see the world. So I think that we suffer in the West a little bit from life dysmorphia. You hear a lot about body dysmorphia, gender dysmorphia. We've got life dysmorphia. A lot of people think their life is terrible because there's kind of the hedonic treadmill. You get used to how great your life is. No one had a hot shower until fifty years ago. So I try and do this thing when you stand in a hot shower. George Mack, my friend, pointed this out to me, went, well, look, when you stand in a hot shower, just for a moment, just go, well, no one that you admire from a hundred

• 3:28Speaker 00

  years ago had this simple pleasure in life. And when you look at the world that we live in, we're like, you're doing, there's been a hundred billion people ever, right? We are in the top, top percentile in terms of the luck that we have had, the lives, like the calorific intake that we just take for granted, the fact that our children don't die, you know, in the first year, the modern medicine and our lives and the entertainment that we get, we're living like kings. And yet, life has never been objectively better and subjectively worse because the nature of humanity is our desires are memetic. So we've got this thing where we sort of, you know, how happy are you?

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's your quality of life minus envy. That's how happy you are. And it's easy to look at everyone else and how they're doing and, and not take pleasure in what you have.

• 4:27Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny because there's a cost to a hot shower, isn't there? And that's exactly what you're describing there because subjectively, I think a lot of people don't feel like they are very happy. And I think objectively, if you look at some of the stats around suicidality and depression and mental health, it doesn't appear that people are any happier. So even though we have sort of materially improved our lives, we have hot showers now. There's a cost to the hot shower in the sense that maybe it's made life too easy. Maybe it's made life too comfortable. Maybe we're in a comfort crisis.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot to be said on that. I mean, it's very, I suppose it's very tough love, but you can't have an easy life and a great character. Show me a trust fund kid that inherited a bunch of money and I'll show you someone mentally tortured. It's, it's true, right? Everyone's like, your, your struggle, what, where you've come from in Plymouth, you know, in, living in poverty to now. Having stuff isn't fun. Getting stuff is fun. Right? It's not the pursuit of happiness. It's the happiness of the pursuit. Right? It's, it's just, it's that thing. And it's not like, you know, the, the self-help, it's not the journey, it's the destination. It's not either the journey or the destination. It's who you become on the journey.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  And here's the terrible thing about life. It's self-assignment. Like, you know, there's school and college, and then you get dropped into the, the real world at some point. And, and you go, well, you, you have to decide what you're going to do. And you can take an easy path. And it's, it's ultimately less fun. It's short money. Or you take a hard path and you give yourself a challenge and it's great. And I think, you know, a lot of the times it's that thing of like, it's hard to do. That's, it's, it's, life is, life is really, really tough. Those are tough things to hear. And it's, it's easy for us because we're sort of on that road. But then, you know, the thing I love about this podcast is you're sort of trying to, there's so much kind of wisdom in it.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  So many stories that you're sort of, you're giving people this kind of roadmap for, okay, well, make your life a little bit harder in the short term and, and, and get somewhere. I mean, it's really, I, I didn't really get what religion was until comparatively late in life. Like the idea that God is a proxy for the future.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Right, so God represents the future, so work hard now for a better life in heaven. Right, so that's, it's kind of, it's the same as all self-help. Like, okay, so sacrifice the present for the future. Work is kind of the same. It's a sacrifice of the present for something better in the future. That's like, it's a, it's an interesting thing to sort of think around, isn't it? That like, what are you gonna do now? So I've got this, Chris Williamson, you know Chris from Modern Warfare? He's a really good friend of mine, he's a lovely guy. And we came up with this idea, so me, him and George Mack were chatting about, what should you do today that you tomorrow would be happy you did? So sort of 24 hours in the future, how best to live?

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Because people sort of said like, oh, well, I'm gonna do something for five years, you know, so it's this huge goal. But you won't rise to your goals, you'll fall to your systems. Right, so that thing of like, what could you do tomorrow? What could you do today, rather, that you'd be happy you did tomorrow? Whether it's the food you eat, the exercise you take, the work you do. What do you do that, oh, right, I went to the gym yesterday. I feel great, like a little bit of Dom's. Or, oh, I wrote 10 jokes and tonight I'm on stage trying those jokes. Oh, well, I'm, thanks, me yesterday. You know, I did something that was good. So you can kind of, time's gonna pass, whatever you do. And you can give yourself gifts in the future. You can be rich and you can have a six-pack and you can be successful

• 8:11Speaker 00

  and you can be in a happy, long-term relationship with a beautiful family. You can give yourself those gifts. But there's some tough times in the present to give yourself that gift in the future.

• 8:21Steven Bartlett?

  Something I really wanted to ask you about is you've climbed to the very peak of your profession. Like, you really are.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  Generational talent, this guy.

• 8:28Steven Bartlett?

  That's what, it's true, it's true. You really are, you really have. You think about where you started off at sort of 25 years old in your mid twenties, when you decided to leave that, I think, advertising business and pursue comedy. Where you are now really is, must be, a dream you like, never really imagined could come true. You're at the very peak of your profession. And I think at the peak of your profession, I wonder sometimes, if you wonder more than other people who are still on their journey up the mountain, what the point in all of this is?

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Well, I think that's incredibly interesting. Okay, so there's a couple of things to unpick there. So you never feel like you're at the top of your profession. Because you're, A, you're standing on the shoulders of giants in whatever industry you're in. So you might think, oh, he's doing very well. You know, he's got a Netflix special and a new tour and da, da, da, all of the, you know, all of the things. But then inside you're going, well, I'm as good as the next joke I write. So the thing that I try and do is be quite stoic. I'm trying to be, I'm trying to do less better. I'm trying to just be a stand-up comedian. The world ordered a stand-up comedian and I'm trying to honor that. Right, that's what people want, right? Go out, write jokes, tell jokes, push the boundaries. Great, that's your little role in the world. Do that. So the more I focus on that, the better it gets.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  More people come to the show. It's that thing of like, I suppose, the whole of the world is built on incentives, right? So you, you put down sugar, you get ants. You tell jokes, you deliver on a show and people come and they enjoy it. And then they come back next time.

• 9:59Steven Bartlett?

  What'd you get out of that?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  I mean, the self-actualization, I suppose. The idea of going, well, I do this thing that I very much enjoy comedy. Because it's an immediate feedback loop. It's a very lucky business to be in. Because I don't have to wait, like, I don't have to discuss with someone, ah, do you think this joke's gonna work or not? Or what do you think, do you think it's too offensive? Or do you think, ah, tell it, test it. It's kind of, it's the Silicon Valley, the, you know, the dual testing. Is this better than this? This or this? I'm like an optician, like, just is this, this or this? Or this or this? This wording or this wording? And the audience is a genius. The audience tell me what works.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  So it's, it's kind of, yeah, it's, it's a joyful thing to kind of, to write a new show. And then to put something on the, on the shelf, like the new Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, now streaming on Netflix, is like, it feels like I've given people irrefutable proof I am who I say I am. And that feels really good. Like, that's what I do. That's better than the last one. And last time I was on the show, I talked about wanting to write longer bits, longer form. Like, I've got a great fastball, but I haven't got a knuckleball. And I wanted to try and write some different bits that maybe made some points. And I went away and I did it. And for better, for worse, it's there and I gave it a shot.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  And I think it's a better, more rounded comedy special than the previous one. And I don't hate the previous one. It's got really good jokes in it. It's really funny. I like it. And then the new tour, I think, will be better again. I think you can see, you see progress.

• 11:35Steven Bartlett?

  And what are you chasing?

• 11:37Speaker 00

  You're not chasing the thing. It's you're enjoying the process. It's being. So I don't think you get self-esteem from the six-pack you get at the gym. I think you get self-esteem from being the kind of person that goes to the gym every day. And I don't think you get anything from the show, from having done the Netflix special, but being the person that put that together is the, that's the enjoyable thing. And you get, you get kind of better at it. You know, the light, the weight doesn't get lighter. Your back gets stronger.

• 12:09Steven Bartlett?

  I think about this with myself a lot. I look at what I'm doing in business and stuff and with the podcast and other things. And I go, there are moments where my brain will ask myself the question, like, what's the end goal here? Because I've got the things that I materially need to be happy. I could retire and just go chill on a boat. But for some reason, I'm sort of torturing myself in many respects.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Torturing yourself?

• 12:30Steven Bartlett?

  But sometimes it's very hard.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  You're giving yourself a better character because you're giving yourself a challenge, right? We all need the challenge. So it's like, you know, with any kind of mythological story, it's the hero's journey and you're on a journey to do something, to become something, right? And you're, what's your, what are you doing here? What's your role in the world? Well, going and sitting on a beach isn't anything. Like, you know, there's a reason holidays are two weeks. It's so you have three days of going, ah, we should get back. Like, a holiday should be ten days. But somehow, we made it two weeks and that's great. Because it allows people sort of three days of going, do you know what? I've got to get back to work. I've got to do something. I like that thing of like, the top of your profession. Well, you'll always be looking ahead, right?

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Someone that's, you know, if it's, for you, probably Joe Rogan. You go, well, Joe's got the biggest podcast in the world. And what are you, number two? And you're, and so you're, you've got something to aim at. And even if you're number one, then you're going to go, yeah, but radio's still bigger. So, huh? Like, that thing of you'll be chasing something, giving yourself maybe an artificial goal in the future. But it's a, it's a, it's just a, something to point you in the right direction.

• 13:42Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a little bit of unhappiness? A sort of voluntary unhappiness involved in wanting to that thing off in the future, do you think? You know, because if there's, I sat with a psychologist, a psychiatrist the other day, who was on the podcast, and he said, if you live your life continually wanting, you're essentially deferring your happiness and replacing it with sort of discontent in the moment.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Well, this is, I mean, listen, even the worst people say great things. Chairman Mao said, you can't smell the roses from a galloping horse. So, when you're moving at that kind of speed, you don't take any time to enjoy life, right? So, you have to just, just enjoy the moment. But you enjoy these conversations. You enjoy the thing that you do. Now, the hard work is a lot of the stuff around it. You know, the travel and the admin or whatever. But you have to love the whole job. You can't just go, well, I want that bit. Because in the same way that people are jealous of you, there'll be other podcasters that are very jealous of what you've got. But they're jealous of what you've got. They're not jealous of how you got it. No comedians are jealous of how I got it. No one sits there and goes, oh, I wish I could sit for ten hours a day and write jokes. Oh!

• 14:45Speaker 00

  They think, I want to play that venue, or I'd love to have that Netflix special. But they don't sit there going, well, what pathology would you need in your head to write that many one-liners? And to care that much about it? Who would you have to be to do that? And we're all chasing something, right? I think we're chasing imposter syndrome. I think imposter syndrome's got a bad reputation and it's great. You should feel it every eighteen months.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  As you level up, you should feel like, do I belong here? Right? This show is much bigger than it was when I was last on. Congratulations, you. Why is it bigger? Well, because you pushed yourself and you worked harder, right? And now, sometimes you feel like, oh my god, I'm interviewing this person. Huh huh huh. Great. Don't feel comfortable. Lovely. As soon as you start to feel comfortable, you need to push yourself a little bit further. There's a great story my friend told me, it's a very name-droppy story. You mind?

• 15:36Steven Bartlett?

  Good.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  All right. Brandon Flowers told me this story. So he's filming a video with Lou Reed, like 10 years ago. They did a song with Lou Reed, which is pretty cool for the Killers. And they're filming this video, and they're backstage, they're in the, they're in the, uh, the, the green room. And Lou Reed's there, he's got leather trousers on, he's got a leather jacket and a vest, he's got mirrored sunglasses. He's Lou Reed. And he looks in the mirror, and Brandon sort of sees him just like checking himself out. And Lou Reed just goes, I wish I was that guy.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Lou Reed's got imposter syndrome, and he's Lou Reed. There's nothing the matter with it. You know, a guy that's been a rock star and a legend for 40 years is still feeling that thing of like going, I don't feel like I'm that guy. Great, that's how you should feel.

• 16:21Steven Bartlett?

  So if you haven't felt imposter syndrome in the last 12, 18 months, you think there's something probably...

• 16:26Speaker 00

  What, push yourself a little bit harder? I mean, it depends, it depends what you want to do. You can have an easy life. Some people, you know, work to live, some people live to work. It's, it's, there's different ways of doing things. It's not necessarily, you don't necessarily need to push yourself in that way. Like, you're listening to us and, and, you know, there might be a psychiatrist listening going, well, these guys are pathologically ambitious, this isn't healthy, they should just be, you know, chilling out. And maybe they have a good point.

• 16:55Steven Bartlett?

  I look at your work ethic, and I just feel like I've never seen anything like it, for someone who is incredibly successful. I look at your tour dates, and I'm like, this guy spends how many dates a year on stage?

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Maybe 300 shows a year, something like that?

• 17:08Steven Bartlett?

  300 shows a year?

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Well, most people turn up to work every day, don't they? I mean... You know, it's also, most people like, get your average listener to this show and go, "Okay, do you wanna swap lives? You have to work for two hours a day, but you'll be telling jokes to people and it's joyful." It's what, what looks like work to other people and feels like play to you. There you go. There's, there's like, it's a really happy life that people go, "Oh my God, he worked so hard." And I'm going, "You're joking, aren't you? You are literally joking." And then you go, "Oh, the tour dates." Like this last week I was in, I don't know what, South Africa, Paris, Istanbul, Budapest, Vienna. What a life. What a, because really, that's the other thing about life. People don't wanna live longer. They want more memories.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And, and really, how do you get more memories? Well, it's, it's doing novel, interesting things. So if you commute to work every day, the same commute for a year, you don't have 300 memories of that commute. You've got one memory, right? But if you do different things every day, you go to different places, you talk to different people, you, you experience the world, that's fantastic. That variety in life gives you more memories, more life.

• 18:19Steven Bartlett?

  You pointed at your head a second ago and said, "We must be pathological in some way."

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:24Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think you are?

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm the, I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure, I'm not entirely sure if comedy isn't a, uh, some sort of low-level mental health issue that you can turn into a career. I mean, it's, you know, it's like, for most people, it seems quite strange to wanna stand on stage and, uh, and tell jokes. I think it's, it sounds terrifying to a lot of people, but I find it very, very fun.

• 18:45Steven Bartlett?

  Have you ever figured out why you are wide in such a way?

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Not really. I mean, I suppose that thing of, it goes back to childhood. It goes back to, uh, my mother was an incredibly funny, larger-than-life Irish woman. I was very, very close to her. I believe they call it enmeshed, when you have like a very close relationship with your mother. Uh, and she suffered with, uh, depression. And I didn't know. You don't know as a kid. Your house is just your house. You think it's normal, right? So if your mom's in a dressing gown when you get home from school and she hasn't got herself together, you just think, "Well, that's what moms are like." So my whole childhood was aimed at making her laugh, especially when driving.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Fun thing to do, make your mum laugh, grab the steering wheel, try and, you know.

• 19:27Steven Bartlett?

  Have you had to unpack that to stop that getting in the way, whatever that driving force is, getting in the way of your adult life? Because I've thought about that a lot myself. I think the things that have driven me here aren't necessarily the same things that are going to help me succeed in the next phase of life, whether it's being a father. Like, I know you're, you know, you've had a kid, I think, in 2019, or whether it's being in a romantic relationship. I've had to kind of really work hard to unpack things so that I can succeed in a new season.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Listen, I'm not a therapist, but here's what I would say. I think you're going to have to make a transition from looking at measurable metrics to immeasurable metrics. I think you've got an amazing resume. You've got an incredible CV of stuff you've done and achievements and stuff you can point out and, and the, the amount of views on the website and the money that you've made and the businesses you've started. Great. And I think the immeasurable stuff is going to become much more important. So George Mack has this kind of theory on we trade in life the measurable for the immeasurable. So you trade work for, I don't know, time with parents. Can't really measure time with parents. And it's kind of, eh, it's tough to lunch with your parents as opposed to the job and the

• 20:40Speaker 00

  thing and the work and the, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. And you only notice it when it goes to zero. So mum dies and you go, well, I'll never see her again. What wouldn't you give now for another meal, another time, another thing? So you go trying to find that balance in life. And I think parenting and being a father is about that, isn't it? It's about that. It's about trading the, the measurable for the immeasurable. Warren Farrell tells a great story. Do you know Warren Farrell? It's like the myth of male power. I think a lot of his writings been used by nefariously by people sort of that are a bit, anyway, he, he's a very interesting guy and he's, he's very authentic. And he

• 21:21Speaker 00

  told this story. I heard him tell the story. He said, so this guy came to me and very successful man, you know, head of, head of a business that makes millions, really doing very well. And he said he was unhappy because he had worked all the way through his son's childhood and he didn't, he hadn't bonded with his son because he'd just been away at work. And he went to see Warren Farrell and he's a psychiatrist or whatever. And he says, it's okay, what are you gonna do? He said, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give up my job for five years and I'm gonna be at home with my kid. I'm gonna get, I'm, fuck it, I'm not doing any of that.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  I'm gonna be with my kid for five years, just be in that moment. And he did it. And he was very happy that he did it.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  It was John Lennon.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  And no matter how important you think your job is, you're not John Lennon.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  You know, I'm sure he could have done great things in those five years, but you think, oh, my God, I'm so glad he did that. I'm so glad, because of what incredible artist he was. He'd given us so much and that he had those years for himself. And that's for him. I mean, I imagine he's kidding. I imagine Sean Lennon is very glad he did that. But he got that time.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  And I imagine he didn't regret it.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  And his life was cut short tragically. And you think it's even more powerful when you consider that, that he didn't put it off. He didn't go, well, I'll do that. I'll get to, I'll get to a million subscribers and then I'll do that. I'll sell a few more records and then one more tour and then I'll spend time with the family. He did it. Isn't that beautiful?

• 23:12Steven Bartlett?

  There's a lot of emotion in your face when you tell that story.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Beautiful story, isn't it? I mean, I, when you think about it, you go, that's kind of, that's life, isn't it? And the, and mortality, I think, is something we don't think about enough. I love that, the Muslim phrase for death, the certainty.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  You know, we're in this brief shaft of light between two oceans of darkness. Everyone always thinks about the tail end, right? And thinks about what happens after you die. Mark Twain had this great quote, you know, we, he said, he said, I wasn't alive for billions of years before my birth and it didn't inconvenience me in the least.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  This brief shaft of light is magnificent, isn't it?

• 24:00Steven Bartlett?

  I think so. I think it can be. This idea of, you know, depression is essentially thinking about yourself too much. You, last time we spoke on the podcast, you talked about.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  I would say, yeah, sorry, that feels to me maybe a little bit too harsh. Because I think people suffer with depression and that's a, it's a disease. And it's incredibly serious. And we think of suicide as being something that stands alone. It's not, it's a symptom of a disease called depression, right? So it's the, it's the permanent solution to a temporary problem. You don't want to feel this way anymore. But actually, you don't want to feel nothing anymore. You'd like to feel better. So it's that thing of like, I don't think we talk about it enough, but I think that thing of, you know, thinking about yourself all the time, I think it just leads to a, can lead to a melancholy, a sadness. I think depression is maybe a slightly separate thing, not to. But it feels like, it feels like that's a disease.

• 24:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  And there's also a lot of sadness in the world. And you're lucky if you're sad. Because if you're sad, it's circumstantial. And you can do something about it. You know, are you depressed because you have serotonin imbalance in your head? And it's a heritable trait? Or are you sad because your life hasn't worked out the way you want it to work out? Well, if that's the case, the latter, you're in luck because you can change that.

• 25:20Steven Bartlett?

  It does feel like there's a bit of a crisis going on within young men at the moment. And I think your new show on Netflix shines a light on many of the difficulties that young men are facing. I was really excited to talk to you about this particular topic because I've been trying to arrive at a position myself on why so many young men appear to be lost and suicidality has increased. And there's, you know, these new masculine influences or masculine influencers that are really rounding up this cohort of young men.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Who are we talking about? Andrew Tate?

• 25:52Steven Bartlett?

  Andrew Tate's of the world.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Well, Andrew Tate's interesting, isn't he? Because who made the, I think John Mulaney made the observation, Trump is a poor person's idea of what a rich person looks like. Yeah, I've got gold taps. And I think sort of Andrew Tate is like a fourteen year old boy's idea of what masculinity might look like. Like, it's really, it's, and of course, nature abhors a vacuum, and there's a real vacuum for elders. Like, we now, we don't learn how to shave from our fathers. It's a YouTube video. And so you lose something in that, in that bonding. So there's a big bit in the new show where I give a young guy, an audience member, a pretty tough time. Like, we have the talk, and I give them advice

• 26:35Speaker 00

  on how to be with a woman. And it's, I'm not wrong about anything. It's really funny, and it's really rude, but I'm not wrong about stuff. It's like, it's about consent, and it's, I think it's really, it's really good, because it's, I've sugared the pill of the message, because people don't want to talk about it. People go, it's obvious what consent is. Yeah, not to seventeen year old boys, or girls. It's like, actually, what, what does that look like? And how should that be? So it's, yeah, it's a, it's a really fun routine, it's a really fun routine to perform, right?

• 27:03Steven Bartlett?

  What is it to be a man these days? Because it's quite confusing, in terms, even the conversation around like chivalry, and understanding, you know?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Well, people talk about toxic masculinity, and easy fix, be a gentleman, be a mensch. That's it. This is done. Be a gentleman, be a mensch. You know, a gentleman is never rude by accident. It's Christopher Hitchens' line. Great. I, I don't know. I mean, my thing about young men today, if I was going to give young men advice, it would be, get the right drugs, and the real thing, right? In real life. Live in real life, right? So why, young men are obsessed by video games, right? Obsessed. They're spending hours and hours and hours, online, playing video games. Why? Well, that's a proxy for career. Right? Video games, you think about the levels of video games, and what people do on video

• 27:54Speaker 00

  games, it's, that's a proxy. That's like a, it's a, it's a substitute for the career that they're not having. And then they spend a lot of time, you know, fapping to Pornhub, or YouPorn, or whatever. And that's a proxy for sex. And my thing would be, George Orwell wasn't right. Our power won't be taken away from us by some authoritarian master. We're gonna give it away for cheap dopamine. And the cheap dopamine of video games and online porn and living online is getting in the way of real life. So it's risk, right? That's what we're not allowing young people to do because we're saying to young people,

• 28:38Speaker 00

  you can't take risks in real life. We're helicopter parenting. We're not giving them the freedom. How much freedom should you give a kid? As much as they can cope with, right? 14 year olds used to be babysitters. They now need babysitters. That's not good, right? So you should allow them more freedom in the real world. Because otherwise, the only place they get freedom is online. And no freedom in the real world. You're not allowed to go to the park and hang out, but you're allowed to do whatever you want online. Well, that feels like a very bad social experiment. That feels like a bad idea. Yeah, it feels like we've inverted, you know, Maslow, this pyramid, the hierarchy of needs.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  And you go, well, food and shelter and warmth and all that. We've got all the bottom stuff worked out in our society, right? We kind of can't see it. We're not grateful for that because we can't see. The hot shower. The hot shower. We can't see the third world and we can't see the people in the past having a tougher time than us. So we take it for granted. But we've worked out that stuff. They hadn't worked that stuff out 200 years ago. But they had the top of the pyramid sorted. Everyone knew who they were. They had their identity and they knew what their purpose was. Everyone knew who they were, what they were about, and they were connected to the others in the group. And now we're kind of free-floating individuals. We kind of worship the individual as if we can survive as individuals. I always think of that thing of like, there's no such thing as a baby.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  There's a baby and a mother, there's a baby and a father, baby and an auntie, but there's no such thing as a baby because a baby on its own isn't anything. It's dead, it needs taking care of. We're all still babies. We all need the connections. Yourself, sure, there's a lot of yourself that's within you, but a lot of it is out in the world. It's connected to other people and it kind of mediates who you think you are. And that's, you know, that's slightly missing from society where you kind of live online and you're kind of a self-authored thing, you're just on the computer on the screen and you're not connected and you're not taking risks. Taking risks is really important.

• 30:49Steven Bartlett?

  Is this in part due to the rise in atheism and agnosticism? I think we both, me and you, lost our sort of religious faith around the same age.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  I think sort of early... Mid twenties. I think it's a weird thing where you go, you can lose your, I certainly don't believe in the stories. There's two types of fools, right? There's people that take religion literally and there's people that think it has no value.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Okay? Both idiots for different reasons. Like, it works as a thing, religion. I quite, I miss it because the reason the ceremony works isn't because God's pleased, it's because the people came together. And so I think we look for things that are proxies for religion. And sometimes that's...

• 31:29Steven Bartlett?

  Football.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Football, it could be environmentalism, you know, because you go, well, I need something, I need purpose in my life, I need to feel like I'm adding value and what a great cause, I'm gonna save the planet. It's a big thing to think about, it's got a religiosity to it. But I don't think that's the, you know, I don't think that's necessarily the answer. You know, some people do it with politics, they think politics is gonna, is gonna be heaven, they're gonna, they're gonna come up with some perfect system. I think you're putting too much pressure on politics.

• 31:59Steven Bartlett?

  First time I've ever said this, actually, but when you just said, I think I miss religion, I think I miss religion.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  It's nice, wasn't it? It's a lovely thought as well when you lose someone that you love very much. It's a lovely thought. I mean, heaven is just, it's a lovely thought. And I think in a way, in our culture, fame and fortune has replaced heaven. It's the land of milk and honey and where you can feel like you're, everything's okay, everything's taken care of. And it is good.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  But it's not heaven. I don't believe in an afterlife. I believe in a next life.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  So I don't think anything happens after you die, but I think you can have a next life, a very different life. So it's interesting, you're at this point of your life when you're thinking about, well, I might start a family. It's a whole other life. It's a whole other, you'll hardly recognise yourself. You and your partner will be saying, what did we do? What did we do all day? Now, we're not a Peppa Pig world or wherever you find yourselves.

• 32:59Steven Bartlett?

  It's really just struck me that I do kind of miss religion, but it feels like when I lost my religion, I put a backpack on, a backpack full of weights on. And I think that's what the responsibility and individualism is.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  I mean, for me, the loss of religion was a rush of blood to the head. It was like, oh, I, this is my life and I need to make good on this and I need to live it. The tragedy is most people don't have that kind of, they don't get to kind of follow their dream.

• 33:26Steven Bartlett?

  When you were 28 years old, your mother died, who had a profound influence on you for many reasons, but also is very much the inspiration, or at least the singular biggest causal factor of your career. When I read through your story even more recently, you've undergone quite a lot of grief, even the loss of your dog, I believe, which had a pretty large impact on you.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  I think grief is cumulative. So every time you lose someone or something, and actually losing a pet can be, it's a weird thing because people lose pets and it's like, I don't know, the other people in the office can be a bit, oh, okay. Oh, well, what are we doing for lunch? It's like, it can be a really affecting thing because it's not just everyone you've lost and you think about mortality, but you think about your own mortality and you think about, you know, you kind of think about, it takes you to a very melancholy place of like, at some point, you've got to say goodbye. And I guess you think about those things of going, what are the, you know, in life, as we were talking about, the great, you can have a great resume, great CV, loads of stuff on it, but what are people going to say at your eulogy? That's the important thing.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  That's the stuff that really matters. And it's a very different, it's again, it's the, it's the, it's a hidden metric of what are people going to say at your funeral? What are people going to say when you, when you pass? I don't know. I think grief's, it's a, it's very interesting. It's very, it is that thing of, you know, kind of comes in waves and, you know, think about it for a long time and then it, and then it hits you.

• 34:53Steven Bartlett?

  How have you dealt with grief in your life?

• 34:56Speaker 00

  I mean, I, I think when my, uh, I don't know, I think, I think I'm slightly guilty of, you know, suppressing it a little bit. I think when, uh, I think when Sean Locke died, I was very, uh,

• 35:10Speaker 00

  very upset by it. And you just go to work. You just kind of go, well, I'll, I'll put myself in this joyful place of laughter and maybe not have to think about it as much. But it's a, yeah, it's, you know, they're gone forever. And there was something really amazing about when Sean died, because people shared so much online. So you had these clips of like, I remember the day, I remember being at home and, and getting the news and laughing and crying, kind of a real kind of, um, cognitive dissonance of like feeling really upset. And then they played just all the funniest clips of Sean,

• 35:49Speaker 00

  like people just sending me clips, clips, clips. And he was just so funny. And that joy is kind of there. It's, it's, it's really lovely. It's really like for all of social media's ills on that day, my God, it made a difference.

• 36:07Steven Bartlett?

  What did it make you realise about both Sean and life when he passed?

• 36:12Speaker 00

  I, I don't know whether there's any great revelation in it. I think it's that thing of just, you know, enjoy, you know, enjoy your time, enjoy the, enjoy this because it's fleeting. I mean, all too fleeting for, for Sean, who's very young. Uh, but it's, you know, I think that, that thing of,

• 36:36Speaker 00

  you know, family and, and, you know, spending time with the people that you love and, and doing what you love. I think prioritising that. It's, if you want to meet someone high agency, meet someone that's got six months to live. I'd say their tolerance for bullshit is, is about as low as it gets.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  I think living your life like that, it's not a bad idea. It really shows you what your priorities would be. Someone said you had six months to live, well, what would you do? That's what you should be doing anyway.

• 37:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's really what I'm what I'm getting at is there's something that facing our own mortality teaches us. But unfortunately, we have to, we often learn that when we haven't got a lot of time to implement it. And sometimes when we, when someone close to us passes away, we can vicariously learn that message about our immortality and what really what our priorities should be and really how we should be living our life and really what mattered the most. And I imagine losing someone that was as close to you as Shaun was sends you some kind of message about priorities and life and gratitude and all these things we talked about.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it's, yeah, I think gratitude's a big part of it as well. That idea of kind of going, wow, that was, that was pretty special.

• 37:49Steven Bartlett?

  You were, you were sort of.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  I might grab, I might grab another coffee. Can I grab the rest of my coffee?

• 37:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Is that all right? Am I allowed?

• 37:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  He said, breaking with the format. I might shuffle my notes as well. I'm gonna shuffle my notes.

• 38:02Steven Bartlett?

  This is a business podcast, or at least that's how it started. And.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  Is it? Have you, have you listened back? Because I don't think it is.

• 38:10Steven Bartlett?

  No, that's how you know.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  I'll be honest with you. It's, it's not. This is.

• 38:14Steven Bartlett?

  But business is life. You know what I mean? And they're the same thing. This is communication, mental health, striving, progress, people, relationships. It's all business at the end of the day.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  I mean, you are, I mean, I mean, I know it's still called Darian's Neo, but I don't think you've talked about business on this for like three years. And even then, it was like a passing. So when you started your business, how did that make you feel? This isn't, you're an old hippie is what you are. You love, this is a great podcast, but this is a storytelling podcast.

• 38:46Steven Bartlett?

  So many of, so many entrepreneurs are old hippies. I think of Steve Jobs, he was an old hippie.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:51Steven Bartlett?

  You know, and.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  It's interesting. I think that thing of like, what does business teach people? Like, we're talking about like, young men and, and kind of, there's a bit of a crisis going on out there with young men. And, and listen, young women are not having an easy time either. But it's that thing of like, the, the suicide rate, whatever, is horrific with young men. And you go, well, what's going on? And it's agency. I don't think we're giving young people enough agency so they don't feel like they have, they have control. And really, I think the thing of like, serial entrepreneurs, like, no one ever seems to hit on their first company. But it's the second and third and fourth, but they just keep going. And they go, well, I'm never going to work for anyone. I'm going to do it myself. That's kind of, I don't think we're teaching enough of that. It's a weird thing, because like, teaching someone to be a self-starter is kind of a contradiction

• 39:36Speaker 00

  in terms, but it's, it kind of works, right? I think we're teaching the wrong things. I've got a theory. I think I'm going to start teaching comedy. Okay, so comedy is very new. It really, you could trace its roots back to George Carlin and Richard Pryor in the early seventies as like, one guy on stage in a big theatre and he's selling tickets and people are just seeing him, right? You can trace it back to the dawn of time, but really, the modern stand-up, early seventies is a good, good starting point. So it's a very new medium compared to music and film, right? It's very new. So I sort of view George Carlin and Richard Pryor as, they're John the Baptist, right? And, and Jesus isn't here yet. And it's this new evolving medium.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  And unlike music, we don't have a language yet. So we need a language of like, okay, what are the joke types? And how could you, how do you, how do you write that down? How do you configure it? There's too much magical thinking around stand-up comedy. You know, the idea that, oh, I just, I just came up with it. It's just, yeah, I just, but actually, learning how jokes work and systematizing and analyzing them, I think really helps. So I've been working on a book with Amanda Baker, who helped me on my first book. We've been working on a thing together for the last couple of years, trying to teach comedy. And I think, I think there's a real benefit to it. Because if you think about music in schools, right? We'd all argue, learning music's great, right? It's a great idea. Teach a kid the piano, grade three, they learn something about music and they'll appreciate music much more in life.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  I think comedy is much more relevant, right? What does comedy teach you, right? It teaches you, you would, you learn to kind of, you find yourself and you find your voice and you learn to communicate your ideas and to order them and write them down and to communicate. It's very valuable. Like, the great tragedy of life is most people live and die and never hear their own voice.

• 41:26Steven Bartlett?

  Everybody wants to be a better speaker, a better communicator. You know, it's funny, because I sat with a guy called Julian Treasure, who has, I think, a TED Talk on communication and speaking that did, I don't know, thirty, forty million views. And he said, I also did a TED Talk on listening. I can now listen to it. Everyone listened to the talk about being a better speaker.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  That's pretty funny. Yeah, no, I can imagine that.

• 41:51Steven Bartlett?

  As a guy that's touring the world 300 days a year, you must have really been able to break down the science of communication and being a good speaker. That's transferable to business, public speaking, life, sales, etc. What advice would you give me on how to be a better speaker, communicator?

• 42:10Speaker 00

  All right, okay. 92 beats a minute.

• 42:15Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Speaking at 92 beats a minute. There you go. I mean, there's kind of a science behind it, and I've looked into it. But most great public speakers sort of speak in a rhythm. It doesn't matter how fast they're speaking, but they're kind of hitting 92 beats a minute. So I tend to listen to a playlist of songs that are all 92 beats a minute before going on stage. I know that sounds like madness, and maybe it is. But I think there's something about that rhythm, that just the audience, that kind of the proximal speed of cognition, that idea, everyone kind of gets into that rhythm. And when you look at the great public speakers, they all seem to be hitting that rhythm of 92 beats a minute.

• 42:56Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think Trump's a good public speaker?

• 42:57Speaker 00

  He's an excellent public speaker, of course. I don't know why people would have a problem admitting that. I mean, and he's freestyling. There's nothing planned. This is insane.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:13Steven Bartlett?

  Because he really leads into sort of exaggerated storytelling and emotion much more than facts and figures than most politicians.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  I mean, it's a... You know, there's a theory that this is all Gwen Stefani's fault.

• 43:27Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean?

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so Donald Trump was hosting The Apprentice. And Gwen Stefani was on America's Got Talent, or one of the singing shows. Maybe it was X Factor, anyone, one of those big singing shows. He found out she was getting paid more than him. And so he wanted to build his relevance, right? So he decided, well, I know, I'll run for president. I'll become incredibly relevant for like three months. He's a contender, he's whatever, and then you drop out of the race, no problem at all. So he hires all those people in Trump Plaza, and he comes down the gold escalator and he does the speech. And great, okay, nothing. He then goes, and there's footage of this, he then goes and does... The first Make America Great Again rally.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  And they've got footage of him walking up the steps and he sees like 10,000 people all chanting. And there's the realisation, oh, oh, this could be real. It's kind of a, yeah.

• 44:29Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's, I think that's.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Gwen Stefani did it. Get her.

• 44:34Steven Bartlett?

  I was, the reason I was, I was talking about business is because.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Because this is not even a CEO. It's a podcast about business.

• 44:40Steven Bartlett?

  No, it's, it's because you taught me last time, sort of indirectly about something that I've now developed and I call to myself no man's land, which is that moment when you make a decision to leave the comfort and security of your identity, your professional, you know, endeavour, whatever it is, you were working in marketing. And then like I always reference how objectively insane it was for you to leave that and go and become a comedian. And I've, I've dubbed that no man's land, that sort of six to 12 months of looking a bit stupid, of losing your friends, losing, you know, I refer to these five buckets in life. You have your knowledge, skills, your network, your resources and your reputation.

• 45:20Steven Bartlett?

  And when you go into no man's land, you fill the first two buckets of your knowledge and skills, but you empty the last three, you lose your network, you lose your resources often, you lose your reputation, whatever that was at the time. But you fill these first two buckets, you made that for whatever reason, decision to leave a normal life and go and tell jokes for no money. Some people, for some reason, and I've seen consistently on this podcast, like Darren Brown, he was, had a great professional life ahead of him and decided to go do card tricks on tables in Bristol's for 10 years. I go, what is it about these people that's making them?

• 45:53Speaker 00

  I think they've had the realisation, right? They've, they've had the Confucius moment. Every man has two lives and his second begins when he realises he only has one. And the good is the enemy of the best.

• 46:08Steven Bartlett?

  Because you know when people are on podcasts like this, that moment looks like bravery. But I, I wonder if to you in, when you quit your sort of marketing job.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  No, there's plenty of four o'clock in the morning, ah, what have I done? This seems, this seems crazy, especially when you really kind of, when you break. Because when you leave as well, you don't have like an hour of great stuff of like, that you've written. You've got like 20 minutes of stuff that you kind of look back on and go, oh, that's kind of joke shaped. There's something there, but really it's, it's insane. Yeah, but I think that's great. I think failure is one of the great gifts of standup comedy.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  You, you sort of make friends with failure as a standup because you write so many things that don't work. You write so many jokes that you think, oh, this is going to be great. And then you tell it and the audience go, no, that isn't anything. Guess again. And that idea of going, yeah, failure, failure is kind of frowned upon in our society. We don't let kids fail. We don't let kids lose at sports. We don't let, you know, that it's, it's really silly because you're sort of teaching them. If you, if everyone's a winner, then you don't learn how to lose. And to learn how to lose gracefully is, that's a great skill to have, isn't it? And, and you kind of, you know, it checks your ego and you, you, not everything in life is going to work out for you. And it's, okay, so you, you test it and it's a good test of how much you want something.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  You go and have, you have a terrible gig and you're, well, I'm never doing that again. Or you have a terrible gig and go, well, you know, you, you lose or you learn.

• 47:41Steven Bartlett?

  You develop your relationship with no. I've, someone said this to me the other day and it really stuck with me that you need, you know, I worked in telesales for a couple of years. And it really helped me develop my relationship with the answer no. And so now in life, I've, I think I have a much healthier relationship with the word no. Because for me in call center, in, it's that, the law of averages where in the call center, all it meant was that I was one step closer to getting the yes. So I'd get, you know, you get loads of no's in a row and you sit there and go, fuck, no, this next guy's going to buy these fucking double glazing. And I think at a 16 years old, I developed that relationship with no, which meant in my head that it was getting me closer to a positive outcome. Lots of kids don't have that these, these days because we shield them from no. No is, you know, seen as a self-esteem hit. For me, it was building some kind of muscle in me.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  I don't, I, but self-esteem on its own, like confidence without competence is madness.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  It's madness. You have to give the world irrefutable proof you are who you say you are. Right? So you release a comedy special, whatever, you go, yeah, that's me. That's what I do. The new tour, that's me, that's what I do. It's irrefutable evidence, right? I am who I say I am. And I think that idea of going, taking away the negatives, you can't just, I mean, I mean, you can, but then I think we're, I think it's very cruel. I think we're being kind on the wrong timescale to people. If you're kind, you want to be kind to your kids, right? I want to be kind to my kids. What do my kids want? Well, they want McDonald's and they want ice cream and they want to watch TV and play video games. Well, okay, downstream are some fat, stupid kids.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Who wants fat, stupid kids? No one. So you have to be kind to their potential, to who they're gonna be. Right? And that involves, you know, broccoli and homework. Yeah. Boring. Going on a walk, doing some exercise. Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Okay, but but you're being kind later. And I think that it's very easy to see that when you're a parent. And it's hard to see that with an 18 year old that's maybe struggling.

• 49:42Steven Bartlett?

  It ties to your point about being kind to you in 24 hours, I guess. It's a similar thing, right?

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Like, like seeing the potential in someone, seeing the potential in yourself, in a child, in anyone. But in yourself, that's kind of the thing of going, well, you could be incredible in 20 years' time. Because really, that thing of like, it's, it's the, I suppose, what's the, it's the opposite of gratitude. It's resentment. And who had the great line? Nietzsche had the great line on resentment. He said, if you think someone's ruined your life, you're right. It's you.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Like, that's a mic drop, isn't it? That's such a great line. And, you know, gratitude is the cure for that. There's a, there's a great definition of entitlement.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Which is where you are now and where you want to be. If you want to do something about it, that's ambition.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Where you are now, where you want to be, if you think that's someone else's problem,

• 50:44Speaker 00

  that's entitlement.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  And I think if we're honest, there's always a little bit of that going on. Like, there's a lot of people in my industry that would, you know, their career isn't where they think it should be. And, ah, I need to get a new agent.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Really? You think that might be the problem? I remember there's a great story of, I wasn't there, but David Tell is sort of the comedian's comedian, is, works out in New York, late night. He's, I mean, really one of the greats, one of the, one of the most influential voices in comedy. And these guys backstage were like, moaning about their management. And he's kind of overhearing this conversation that's going on for far too long. And he just, he went, oh, be funnier.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  It's often very simple, that stoic thing of going, what's the thing you're meant to be doing? Just do that. I'm not sure I approve of portfolio sort of working. The idea of having lots of different things that you do, because really, you're gonna do comedy part-time? What, you're gonna do half comedy and half novel writing? Oh, so you're gonna compete? I'm doing it a hundred percent of the time, and you think you can compete fifty percent of the time? All the best. Let's see how you do.

• 52:02Steven Bartlett?

  You're never gonna get to the top of the pyramid, doing it fifty percent of the time, right?

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:06Steven Bartlett?

  And there'll probably be a lot of resentment, as you say, and entitlement.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  Be, you know, be a, be a specialist.

• 52:13Steven Bartlett?

  It's one of the favorite parts of my previous conversation that I had with you, where you, where you talk about the world doesn't need more people that are shit in physics. And it really helped me understand a lot of things. I also then, shortly after, met Richard Branson in New York, and he's the most, you know, incredible delegator. He's not trying to get good at things that he's not good at. He's built his whole business and life on realizing what he's shit at, and just handing that over to other people, whereas so many people are fighting to polish something that they're not so good at.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think knowing who you are is quite important for that, isn't it? It's like, being honest about it, like, well, I'm not good at that, but I can do this.

• 52:45Steven Bartlett?

  It's hard to know who you are, though. Clouded by who you wanna be.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, well, yeah, it's, it's also that thing of, it takes a bit of time.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  I'm not sure whether we're not kind of rushing people on that a little bit. I would sort of often think of like the listeners to this show, right? So like certainly the younger ones of kind of going, well, do I need to know now? Who I am and what I want to do exactly. It's like, no, you could, you know, try a few different things, see what you like. Cause I think that thing, when you get into the stream that you're meant to be in, it just feels very easy. It's like you're not, you're not, you know, swimming against the tide. Just feels like it's carrying you along.

• 53:22Steven Bartlett?

  I love what I do now, but I also often question whether I should go be like a DJ or do musical theatre or something.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  What's right? Do what? I can answer that question for you. That's a bit of luck. No, no, you fucking shouldn't. What, what? You think you maybe should do musical theatre? What? Are you having a panic attack? What's, what are you talking about? What would make you think that?

• 53:50Steven Bartlett?

  I, I bought some DJ equipment and I spent about a year learning and I thought I fucking love doing this.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Great, you've got a hobby. You've got a hobby, not everything's a business. I know it's diary of a CEO and everything you do, you think, oh, maybe we can make a few quid out of this. No, stop it. What are you talking about? You know who's, you know who's being a DJ right now? There's someone right now in their bedroom, they've been there for 12 hours already today and they're just loving it and they're putting everything into it. They're putting the work you put into the podcast into DJing. Let them have that. It's nice to have stuff where you're in a flow state in life and for some people that's work and for some people that's a hobby. And, and some, some of us are very lucky and we get to do it in a few different things. So I play a little bit tennis.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  I don't think I'm going to get the wild card at Wimbledon this year. There, I've given up on that. It's just a hobby. And listen, I mean, you might be the next Calvin Harris. I might be steering you in the wrong direction. You might be incredible, but stop it. Stop it, just do this. This is great, this is enough. It's just lovely. You're talking to the most interesting people. I mean, present company accepted, but you, you know, you speak to all these different people from different worlds and it's, it's, this is enough, right?

• 55:05Steven Bartlett?

  How do you know if it isn't enough?

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Well.

• 55:07Steven Bartlett?

  I want to talk to you about quitting because there's going to be a cohort of people that listen to them. I meet them. I met a lot of them last night at a show I was doing and they are working in finance and they'll tell me their job, then they'll show me their hobby on their phone and their face lights up when they show me their, I don't know, their papier mâché business or whatever it is on their phone.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  What's the great line? It's the, you know, if you, if you want to find out what you should do in life.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  What do you think about all the time? That's your god.

• 55:35Steven Bartlett?

  Working in the city with a shirt and tie on it, J K Morgan or something.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  No, but no one's thinking about that all the time, you know. So what, what do you, what do you think about all the time? What are you, what are you engaged in all the time? Like if it's, if it's football, if you're absolutely obsessed by football, well, something in that industry is going to be the job for you because you're obsessed by that and that's what you think about all the time. So the, the idea of quitting, quitting is quite interesting because, oh, the things that you won't do. Like if you're going to have an interesting life, you can't have all the other interesting lives you would have had, right? So there's all the counterfactuals of the different sliding doors that you could have done. Like, well, you know, if you're going to be an Olympian, you're going to have to give up an awful lot of stuff. Like you're not really going to have a childhood

• 56:19Speaker 00

  in the traditional sense, but you're going to be an Olympian. Great. And if you're, if you're going to be an academic, then you're probably not going to be, have to go to as many parties. Okay. Well, that's, you know, there's, there's no solutions, only tradeoffs. You know, Thomas Sowell, isn't it?

• 56:36Steven Bartlett?

  You have to make a lot of tradeoffs because not only, you know, are you on the road 300 days a year, but you have so much opportunity. There's so many things being offered to you to do movies. Why don't you try and be an actor? Or why don't you write five more books? Or why don't you do, I don't know, a comical musical or whatever it might be? Why don't you become a DJ?

• 56:53Speaker 00

  DJ and musical theatre, those are my two prime loves. Um, yeah. I mean, there's, there's a few, there's not as many as you would think. I don't, no one's banging down my door saying, do you want to be in a movie? Um, and I don't know if I'd be, I don't know if I'd be great at that. I don't know. I mean, listen, I like getting out of my comfort zone and, you know, opportunities come along and sometimes, you know, you get offered a TV show that you go, oh, I'll give it a go. Why not? Um, but I think sticking to what you do, that stoic thing is really. Paid dividends. That really has paid off. And I think you have to listen to that. You know, and I see other comics, you know, mentioning no names. There's some great stand up comics that were like absolutely amazing. And they're doing five other things now. And they've lost a yard of pace.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  And for me, that feels crazy. Like you've, because I'm looking at it going, you've got the best job in the world. Why are you allowing yourself to be distracted?

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Because ultimately, it's going to be hard work. You know, ultimately, I mean, people can see it, I suppose. That the, you know, something costs more, like a Ferrari costs a lot of money because a lot of work goes into it, right? There's a lot of work goes into that thing. That's a beautiful handmade Louvettin thing is going to be expensive because a lot of work went into it. People understand that. I sort of feel the same about shows. You go see a show and you go, wow, that really took some time. Every single line in that is brilliant. He's not wasting any time. There's no fat. It's just, it's a lot of work.

• 58:18Steven Bartlett?

  When people look at you and they look at successful individuals, they think, oh, they just must be innately motivated in some way that I'm not.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Well, I do think that's, it's slightly unfair that we think about luck in a very fixed way, right? So Barbie and Oppenheimer are great to talk about this, right? So people see Margot Robbie and they go, well, she's just lucky, right? She was born, she's that beautiful, right? She's so beautiful, people can't see how good an actress she is, right? People just can't, because she's just like sort of this stunning thing. And you look Oppenheimer, right? No one thinks, oh, he's so lucky, born with an IQ of 170. And born with a work ethic. Because a work ethic is heritable, right? So he was born incredibly clever and an incredible work ethic, right? And no one thinks of him as being lucky, but they think of her as being lucky.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Weird thing, right? That's odd in our perception of luck and how much is, how much is your factory settings? You know, this, it's always, I've talked to you about this before, but it's always like some, some bullshit. If someone's very successful, you either go, wow, incredible talent. Or, oh, he worked so hard. No, always both together.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  Always both together.

• 59:37Steven Bartlett?

  And or like you said earlier, maybe a bit pathological in some way, which I don't know whether you put in the talent bucket.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Again, you put the pathological, the work ethic, the striving, a lot of that is heritable. You know, so what are you gonna do? I think when you when you see luck in that way, I think you become much more forgiving of, okay.

• 59:58Steven Bartlett?

  Quite crazy, this idea of luck. I've been thinking a lot about it lately. I was reading some stories about even the asteroid hitting Earth. If it had been a minute later, then the dinosaurs would still be here. And the story of Nagasaki and Hiroshima being bombed because one guy went to Kyoto 20 years earlier and he really liked it. So he told President Truman not to bomb it. And if he hadn't been on holiday there with his wife, then Kyoto would have been hit by the nuclear bomb. And then they went over Kikuru, I think, a city in Japan, and that had a cloud. So they thought, fuck it, we'll go bomb Hiroshima. And 100,000 people over there lost their lives in every generation that would have come, lost. You think these tiny little things that are going on in the world at all times, kind of like this idea of the butterfly effect, are shaping our world. And it can make you feel a little bit powerless in some way.

• 1:00:40Steven Bartlett?

  Because if I'm the, you know, if someone's holiday can be the difference between me being alive or dead.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Steven Bartlett?

  It's, you know.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Well, it's very difficult to, you know, we always, you know, think about the first order effects of what we do, not the second and third order effects.

• 1:00:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a lot to, that's a lot to take in.

• 1:00:59Steven Bartlett?

  With this idea of luck in mind, personal responsibility seems to sit on the other side of the conversation of luck, which is, how much can I control where I'm going in my life? How much control do I have? How much should I show up and fucking fight for positive outcomes?

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's agency. You should, you should strive to have the locus of control within yourself. Like, so there's, there's character and there's reputation. And reputation is what the world thinks of you, and character is what you know about yourself. And your self-esteem should be largely based on your character and a little bit based on reputation. Because reputations, you could, you could take a hit every now and then. You get cancelled once in a while. Well, once every 18 months. Why, hang on, the Netflix special drops today, so I imagine I'm being cancelled right now somewhere.

• 1:01:48Steven Bartlett?

  How have you come to deal with that? Because as a comedian, you guys get it worse than anybody.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  I don't know if we get it worse than anyone. I think we're sort of the canary in the mine. It's, it's, I don't know, I sort of view it as respectability is a prison and the gates are open and people are desperate to be inside. Right, I'm not a respectable guy. I tell very edgy, out there jokes. And jokes are like magnets. They attract some people. I've got a big following. I've got a lot of people that watch my shows and they really enjoy it. And like magnets, the jokes attract people and they repel people. Some people are repelled by my jokes and they think they're terrible. I'm not for everyone. I think you have to accept that. And, you know, it's when it comes out on Netflix, when it drops, that's when it kind of, the pathogen escapes the lab. Because people that didn't pay to see this are suddenly exposed to it.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Someone puts a clip somewhere and goes, "Ban this filth." Okay. Banning stuff is like, I sort of view cancel culture as the new, and this isn't saying criticism isn't valid. You can criticize ideas, but you cancel people. And I think the cancel culture thing, I think it's the new book burning. It's no different. The people that burnt the Beatles records in the 60s. How do they feel now? You feel like a dummy? I bet they feel like dummies. It's like, and obviously the basket of things that are acceptable and unacceptable change and ebb and flow through time. But really, it's, you know, I'm a creature of my time. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell these jokes and if they get big laughs, then, then great.

• 1:03:17Steven Bartlett?

  Have you always had this perspective, or is this something that's developed like a muscle over time?

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  No, I think, I think there's, I think that adversity, I've been canceled quite a few times. And there's, I try and see the positives in life, right? So adversity is a filter. And you find out who your friends are. And who stands by you. And who's, you know, who's ride or die. Great. Turns out I've got loads of great friends. And a couple of people fell by the wayside. And great. I don't have to waste any time on them. Because everyone loves you when you're throwing a party. But in the tough times, you're a bit more difficult to love. And if people stand by you then, then they're friends. That's, that's, that's what it is. Friendship's such an important thing. It's something that we don't really think about. We think about, a lot about our partners in life and our children and that side of family.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Friendship for me is such an important thing. It's such a huge part of my life. And really, when you think about it, why, why is comedy having this moment? Well, because comedians, it's a little bit like a friendship, right? There's, there's, there's no filter. And really, your best friend is the person you have the least filter with. You're deepest, darkest, you share, you're open. And a colleague, you know, quite a lot of filter. And someone you meet at the bus stop, tons of filter, right? Comics, currently, there's no, there's no filter. You see Chappelle on stage, he's, it's him. Great. You see Chris Rock on stage, that's him. It's like, you feel connected. Lovely.

• 1:04:46Steven Bartlett?

  There's really something in that idea of, as you're saying there, that there's so little authenticity and vulnerability and openness in the world that when we encounter it, we feel so connected to it because it caters to the demand that we have that's not being met with supply. There's so much supply of like, filter, girl on holiday in Hawaii drinking cocktail. But, but in our sort of private and our secret lives, there's very little

• 1:05:12Steven Bartlett?

  reflection of what we think about in our private and secret lives in the world. So when we hear someone talking about their depression or their mental health, we go, oh my God, that, you know, I can resonate or.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Is this not why the podcast is so big, why comedy is so big at the moment? Because the, the gap between public and private discourse has never been wider. And we both, we're both living in that space. We go, yeah, have a, have a real conversation with someone. Great. And the, you know, the, the cancelling thing is, is great, but really, what happens? I mean, you could, you can recalibrate it and just call it free publicity. Like, people are talking about you. Well, great. Okay.

• 1:05:46Steven Bartlett?

  There's this thing called the eraser test, which one of my guests talked to me about before, Mo Gourdatt, where he said, if you could go back and he asked, I think he asked, or there was a study done, where they asked people if they could go back in time and erase their most difficult moment, would you press the button and erase it? And like nine, these are like really traumatic events. About 95% of people said they wouldn't. When you think about your most traumatic moments of sort of being cancelled or something like that.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  The best, best advice I got, um, actually, the last time I got cancelled, I found a friend of mine who's been cancelled. And he said, you've only got, you've only got to answer one question.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  Who's Jimmy Carr?

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  And he went, no, who's Jimmy Carr? Well, I'm an edgy stand-up comedian. Okay.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Fine then. You haven't got a problem.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  It's great. And then another friend of mine just went, well, you need to just right size this. And I'm like, what? And she went, you've got to right size it. She said, what's happened here? You told a joke and some people didn't like it. Yeah, that's what happened. It didn't seem like that big a deal when you put it like that. And yet in the moment, sometimes it feels catastrophic. But those hard times, you know, you wouldn't erase the hard times because again, I would say, and it's a, it's a, you can't have an easy life and a great character. And what they're saying there by not erasing that moment is, I'll keep my character, thanks.

• 1:07:19Steven Bartlett?

  Anxiety. We talked about this last time.

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  Anxiety is, it's a very interesting thing. I mean, my kind of original thought on anxiety was the, it's the flip side of creativity. So you have a mind that is whirring and that's given me every gift I've ever received, right? The ability to write jokes and to be funny, whatever, is from that, I can't turn it off mind. And sometimes at four in the morning, when you've got nothing to do, that mind is still whirring. So you get involved in counterfactuals. You start to think of all the other things that could have happened, that haven't happened in life. And, you know, people are not worried about falling off a cliff. They're worried about jumping. It's the madness within all of us of like, well, what could happen? And the worst case scenario and these terrible things. And you allow that to get ahead of you.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  I think the cure for it for me at the moment, how I'm managing my anxiety, is giving myself more to do. Because I think anxiety, you're trying to solve a problem in the future now, and you can't. Because there's no problem in the now, the problem is in the future. So you're, you're kind of ahead there, trying to, trying to figure out something because you, there's a demand for, for problem solving in the moment and you don't have a problem. That thing of like, people don't get depressed when they go to the gym, right? If you're in the gym, you can't be anxious while you're working out because you have an immediate problem. Lift this damn thing off my chest. You've got an immediate thing to deal with. You're in that moment, so it's hard to be anxious because you've got something to do

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  right now. So give yourself something to do right now if you're suffering with anxiety and don't let your mind kind of drift into the future. I suppose it's quite sort of Buddhist in a way.

• 1:09:02Steven Bartlett?

  Is your anxiety triggered by anything? Or is it just kind of a noise in the background?

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  I don't think it is. I think you often, I think I, I think there's an illusion that when you feel anxiety, it's about this thing. I think actually you've just got a level of anxiety and you will, you know, so if I've got nothing to worry about career wise or show wise, or I'm not currently being cancelled, you might worry about the environment, or you worry about your kids, or you worry about, you know, you'll worry about something else. So I think you just, it just, it attaches on to whatever's front of mind and you logically go, oh, it's anxiety about this. It isn't. It's just anxiety.

• 1:09:42Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think people know who you are? Truly. You know, I met with a CIA agent a couple of weeks ago and he said, we have three lives. We have our, our secret life. We have our private life and then we have our public life. Public life is, you know, the guy in the suit on camera. Your private life might be what your wife knows, but then maybe your secret life is who you are when there's like absolutely nobody there in your mind and in your own space. Do you think people know who you are?

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  I think so. I think actually weirdly, um, this podcast is quite important in that. You know, going on this, going on Joe Rogan, going on Modern Wisdom and talking as myself is very exposing. Uh, and writing the book Before and Laughter, which is kind of a autobiography, but also a bit self-helpy, uh, is very much authentically who I am. So I think reading the book, listening to this, this is kind of what it would be like if we knew each other, if we were having lunch, you know, for the listeners, it's like, this is, yeah, it's kind of what I'm like. And then I've got an ability to be funny on stage, which is another side of me. So I think that's like, it's not, it's not inauthentic what I do on stage. It's just like, that's who I am in front of 3,000 people that have all paid £30 to be entertained. Here we go.

• 1:10:47Steven Bartlett?

  What's the side of you that your wife might know, but we don't?

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  Well, this.

• 1:10:52Steven Bartlett?

  This?

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  This is, yeah, you know, you're slightly more, um, I think on this, it's, it's very much you take down the, uh, it's not like doing a TV show to publicize something. So if you go on, you know, Graham, you're very much like, okay, well, I've got three anecdotes and I'll get them out and I'll try and get four laughs and then I'll try and sniper in on the other guests and be funny. And it's a, it's very performative. Whereas this is performative, but in a slightly different way where you're kind of going, well, this is kind of what I think about the world and this is, this is what it's like inside my head. And it's quite, I don't know, I suppose when you step back from it's kind of, okay, well, a lot of self-help, a lot of, uh, a lot of, uh,

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  I guess, therapy, you know, that's what I'm like.

• 1:11:39Steven Bartlett?

  Since we spoke last time, is there anything you thought then that you no longer believe? I'm interested, I'm asking that question because-

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  My favorite question, what was the last thing you changed your mind about? I think I've changed my mind about environmentalism a little bit. I think I'm, I absolutely acknowledge the problem. And I think the solution is just there. I think it's, I think it's splitting the atom. I think we should all be, I think nuclear is kind of the, is the future. That's what we should be investing in. That's, we've got an issue that we have a system that is full of politicians and we, we haven't got statesmen.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  We need longer terms.

• 1:12:19Steven Bartlett?

  Longer terms?

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  We need longer terms because we need people to make decisions. Like, everything's about, about rewards, right? So what do we reward? It's on a five-year cycle. So no one's ever going to invest in nuclear because it's going to take 20 years to pay off. But they should be rewarded for that. Somehow, we need to find a way to reward politicians for what they did 20 years ago. Because if we do that, it's, there's a better future, right? And I, I don't know if Britain doing it makes any difference. Like, people often say, well, if Britain does it, it doesn't make any difference because, well, China's not going to do it, or India's not going to do it. But you go, well, actually, if we did it, if we did something radical and went all nuclear,

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  it'd be incredible examples to set to the rest of the world. Here's what I do, here's my, you want to hear my pitch? All right, here's my political pitch, right? Nuclear submarines have been testing this for 50 years. They're perfectly safe, right? People are going to live in a nuclear sub next to the reactor, they're fine, right? So we built one of those, there's no, not in my backyard, we put it in everyone's backyard. There's a nuclear reactor like a submarine in every city. Bury it, have a small power unit in every city and town in Britain, okay? And then, it's quite expensive, so you pay your fuel bill. And in 20 years' time, we don't worry about COP23. We, we burn all the fossil fuels we want for 20 years. And then in one day, we go totally green, right? No more fossil fuels. Well, a little bit for fertilizers and stuff, but no more, essentially.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  And then, fuel, over the next 10 years, uh, power becomes free. So we say to businesses around the world, do you want to set up a business in Britain? It's quite expensive to employ people, but energy's free. Do you think we live in a world where energy will be of value in 20 years' time?

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  Is it going to be the thing? Yes. So you say to your Amazons and your Googles, do you want to set up the place here? Yeah, great. If I rule the world, that's what I would do.

• 1:14:13Steven Bartlett?

  Trump's probably going to come back into power, isn't he? By the looks of things. Biden doesn't seem to be very compelling to people, according to some of the polls.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  I mean, a week is a long time in politics. Who knows? Who knows what will happen? I think America will be fine regardless. America is geographically, economically, it's a net exporter of fuel and of food. It's got incredible neighbors in Canada and Mexico. It is, it's going to have the most incredible 20 years, regardless of who gets in. They're going to double their industrial base in the next 20 years because everything that was globalized is becoming more insular, which isn't necessarily good for the world, but very good for America. America can afford to have a terrible political system because it is so blessed.

• 1:15:00Steven Bartlett?

  They're going to own much of the AI race as well. All the big AI companies seem to be based in America and that feels like that's going to really.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  I'm not worried about AI.

• 1:15:07Steven Bartlett?

  No?

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  AI is a covers band. It's, it's artificial intelligence. It's not artificial consciousness, right? So if you tell it to write a joke, it can spit back stuff that you've already written and reorder it slightly, but meh, don't worry about it.

• 1:15:22Steven Bartlett?

  But if you imagine-

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  The Beatles aren't worried about the bootleg Beatles.

• 1:15:25Steven Bartlett?

  But if you imagine it's sort of even a 20% rate of improvement every year, it's only going to take, and you know, that compounds, it's only going to take us five or 10 years before there's a fucking AI that can crack a joke really, really fucking well.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  Great.

• 1:15:38Steven Bartlett?

  And an original joke.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  I don't know whether it's going to be original. I think there is something about, I mean, you know, I don't know, genius is an overused term, right? So there's, there's, there's two types of genius, right? There's, there's, there's innate actual genius. There's, you know, Bach or Beethoven or whatever, you know, genius. And then there's hyper accelerated rationality. And it's kind of what, you know, people talk about comedy genius and they go, that's what they're talking about, hyper accelerated rationality. And I think AI is a long way from either of them, like of coming up, generating something that's genuinely original.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  No, it's a covers band. It can, it can, it can go, well, that's the genre and I can do something that's a bit similar. But there's something about human creativity that I don't think it's getting close to. And maybe I'm being naive, but I think it'll be an incredible thing for the world because I think new jobs will come along. This wasn't a job 10 years ago, right? Being a podcaster. Because I'm going to do, I'm going to do sort of a long radio show, but people, but it's an individual thing. You'd have to explain it, you know, it, things change. And it's only when you sort of look back, you go, oh, wow, that's interesting. The biggest TV channel in the world is YouTube and no one noticed.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  The BBC were battling with ITV about who's going to get the higher ratings on a Saturday night. And YouTube stole their lunch because they weren't paying attention.

• 1:17:10Steven Bartlett?

  Is that not AI?

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Well, it's the world, it's the world progresses and things move on and it's always been fine. I think people worrying about AI, it really strikes me, it's the people going, well, these, we've got to smash up these, these cotton making machines. Because this is, this is, this can't happen. There'll be no new jobs. There'll just be different jobs.

• 1:17:29Steven Bartlett?

  I read a book called The Innovator's Dilemma and it really changed my mind on a few things. They go back through history and they look at all of the big steps forward in innovation. And they basically categorize two types of innovation. I'll call it the upward opportunity and the downward opportunity. So if you're selling horses back in the 1880s, the upward opportunity is the thing that all your customers are asking for. It is the thing that you know how to do. It is the thing that you have your supply chain set up to deliver on, which is faster and better horses. You know, you can imagine the meeting that you're the CEO of a horse company. I come in and I go, listen, boss, got an idea. They go, what is that? I go faster horses. You go, people asking for it? I go, yeah. Do we know how to do it? Yeah. Do we have a customer? But yeah, let's do that then. Then another guy comes in and says, Jimmy, I've got an idea.

• 1:18:11Steven Bartlett?

  Cars, are they better? No. You have to walk in front of it with a red, red flag and it goes 10 miles an hour. Do we know how to do it? No. Is anyone asking for it? No one. None of our customers have asked for a horse. That is the downward opportunity. And throughout history, the incumbents always ignore the downward opportunity because their incentives, as you said, their incentives are set up to pursue what we call the sustaining innovation. The obvious thing in front of them, become a better comedian or become a better podcaster, get another camera. The downward opportunity, I asked myself, what is the downward opportunity in podcasting?

• 1:18:43Speaker 00

  Listen, you should ask, you should ask comedians. Comedians got an interesting way of thinking. I think we're very similar to detectives. Because we think backwards. Most people think about what's next, right? Which is what you're talking about there is the what's next? What's the next thing? What's the next thing? And we go, well, this is the state of affairs. How did this happen? And it's the same as it's like being Sherlock Holmes. You go, well, how the hell did that? You kind of you're reverse engineering a lot of the time. It's very interesting that this is this may yet be a business podcast.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  I think I honestly think with the right amount of work, if you really put yourself into this, I genuinely think you can occasionally talk about business.

• 1:19:21Steven Bartlett?

  I try to, I try and weave it where I can.

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's interesting that the podcast thing of going, no one saw podcasts coming.

• 1:19:29Steven Bartlett?

  Nobody.

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  Like this. And yet what's missing from our lives, right? What's what's missing? What's the nature of balls of vacuum? Well, people aren't having conversations. People are, when you look around the world, all those people that live to 100, all of those zones. And people go, oh, yeah, they eat loads of olive oil and fish. Maybe that's the answer. No, it isn't. They eat with other people. They have a conversation. They're part of a community. That's the difference. They've got something to live for. The olive oil isn't making any fucking difference. The connection to other human beings is, what are you doing here? You're connecting to people. You're having a conversation. So people are eavesdropping on a conversation. But in their heads, they're having a conversation and they're with the stuff we're talking about, they're relating to their lives. Great.

• 1:20:11Steven Bartlett?

  Nobody was asking for this, though. Nobody was saying, do you know what I want? Three hours of Jimmy Carr talking about life. No one was like demanding that in the like BBC era.

• 1:20:20Speaker 00

  You know, someone rolling their eyes as they listen to this. Yeah, and I'm turning off now.

• 1:20:25Steven Bartlett?

  But in that industry, they probably thought people want bigger TVs and thinner TVs. That's what they want. They want to watch the BBC on a thinner, bigger television. So we're going to deliver it to them. Whereas the downward opportunity was, in fact, they wanted connection. They wanted it to be longer form. They didn't want loads of ads every six seconds inside of it.

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  Is this not the great sort of, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, right, what am I going to do? It's not like someone has spotted the gap in the market. You could be the person. You know, and it's that thing of like, do what you do authentically. I always think like Joe Rogan's a really interesting example of that, of someone that's entirely authentic. What's he talk about? Comedy and MMA and life and slightly kind of, you know, philosophy, stuff that he's interested in. He's exactly the same guy he was 20 years in the Comedy Store, 20 years ago in the Comedy Store backstage chatting. He's exactly that guy, totally authentic. People just, yeah, great. I'll listen to that all day. You're exactly who you are.

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  I mean, I love the idea that you think, there's still a bit of you that thinks this is a business podcast. It's not. It's not. You have a thing where you love stories and you love chatting to people and you love learning. And that's what it is. This is just, it's the, this should be called the education of Stephen Butler.

• 1:21:43Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I, the reason I think this is a business podcast is because of what I said. I think business is mental. Like, this is called the diary of a CEO, right? What would you find in the diary of a CEO? You wouldn't find fucking forecasts and P and Ls, would you? You'd find problems with his wife and you'd find that he's having anxiety attacks and you'd find that he's, doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. So the whole point of this was to go into the diary of a CEO, the things you.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  Just, that's not business. That's the rest of his life. This is about life. I mean, I love it. I absolutely love it. I'm not breaking your balls, but it's like, it's, it's, it's great the way that it's kind of developed, I think.

• 1:22:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's been led by, as you say, curiosity. I get people all the time will say, Steve, we want the fucking CEOs back. We want to listen to the business people or whatever. And I just go, Joe, I can't do that for a decade. What I can do for a decade is follow my curiosity. Like, I could do that for the next 30, 40 years. And at some point, I'm going to care about ZenPEC and I cared about psychedelics. And so that's what I'm going to talk about. And if you don't like it, then there are three other million other options.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that thing about that's, going with your gut is going to be the way to go. Because if you like the show and if you're having interesting conversations, I think the listener will go with that. And if you try and give them what they wanted, I think, again, it's exactly that thing of going, we need better, faster horses, not a car. And you're going, well, you need a car. Because whatever this is in 10 years' time, it's gonna be different, right?

• 1:23:07Steven Bartlett?

  I'll be a dad and I'll be thinking about a different set of problems and I'll be speaking to parental psychologists about what to do with my kids and stuff.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:16Steven Bartlett?

  But Rogan was the blue, I have to say it, and I think I've DM'd him, I don't think he replied, but I just said to him one day that the blueprint he set about authenticity and following whatever it is you're interested in has helped me so much because there's more pressure to change when there's more people watching. And they can, I've seen petitions and I've seen little movements on LinkedIn trying to get me to have more of these kind of people on. The single biggest request I have on this podcast is to quote, "interview normal people" that are at the start of their journey. That's the quote, that's what they say to me. And I go, well, if you'd interviewed Stephen at 18, not a lot to talk about, you know, so it'd really be them interviewing me, maybe. That tends

• 1:24:01Steven Bartlett?

  to what happens. He would be the student in that situation. But that's the most popular request I get, is to go and interview, quote unquote, "normal people."

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  So, ignoring that, I mean, as you must have been able, had to ignore the external pressure of changing or telling a certain type of joke or being a certain type of person. No, I think, I think the audience, though, for me, because of that immediate feedback loop, they do tell me what they find funny. And that kind of leads you down a road of going, well, that's interesting. People want to hear this. I think the reason people are drawn to my comedy is partly because there's not a lot of censorship in our society. There's quite a lot of self censorship. So people aren't speaking freely in the office or even at home. They're not saying what they really think. Have you noticed this thing? Opinion polls don't seem as accurate as they once were. And that's because people don't feel

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  like, they don't vote in the same way as they, as they, as they express themselves in the world. So they come and see me live and there's no filter and this guy's saying whatever he wants. This guy doesn't seem to give a fuck. Very cathartic. If you're spending your days going, well, I know what the right thing to say is, so I'll say the right thing, you know? If you want to see who has power in a society, who can't you criticize?

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  And making jokes and making light of all of that stuff is powerful. Because it it it's about free speech. And it's about the overton window. You know, that overton window of what is and what isn't acceptable to speak about. You know, so there's an overton window in politics of what what is and what isn't acceptable policy. And then there's an overton window of what isn't what isn't acceptable to talk about in polite society. And I think comedy has a really valuable role in moving that overton window. In what what people can discuss, what people can talk about. I'm always very interested in like occasionally it happens where you'll overhear the audience leaving a comedy show. And they have such great conversations. It's really interesting how it like just taps into they just feel a bit freer and looser.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  Because they've listened to someone on stage being very loose. And they're not buttoned down, they're not trying to self censor or say the right thing.

• 1:26:10Steven Bartlett?

  Self expression and expression generally has just been on such a journey. Like, you know, this whole idea of wokeism and what you can and can't say. It's really accelerated in the last 10 years. To the point that it's it's quite, you know, it's quite, if I look back at comedy videos from 20 years ago. They really seem to just be able to say whatever the fuck they wanted to say. And then we went through this era of like censorship and cancellation and.

• 1:26:33Speaker 00

  There's no time in human history where the good guys have censored stuff. It's never happened. So wherever that's coming from, whether it's the right, you know, the merry white house ban this filth, which used to be the case. Or the left, the idea that the there's, you know, hate speech or or the the idea that something can be, words can be violence. Which is, you know, what people say when they've never experienced real violence, I guess.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  There's such demand for violence, we had to, we had to co-opt words into it. But the idea of going that this, you're trying to censor stuff is is a bad idea. Free speech is a very good idea because those thoughts don't go away. If people don't express themselves, they just get, they get suppressed. And and actually just speaking freely about stuff and talking about it is is very, very valuable.

• 1:27:24Steven Bartlett?

  If you were a podcaster, would you have anyone on the podcast? Would there be any limits you would set? That's something I think about a lot. Where are my limits? Because I get a lot of messages saying, would you have this person on? Would you speak to Trump? Would you speak to Vladimir Putin? Would you speak to, you know?

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think you're, I think you have to speak to everyone. I think the idea of going that there's, there's people that are beyond the pale. People have got like, there's people with bad ideas, right? I don't know if there's that many bad people, but there's bad incentives and people that follow them. And talking to everyone seems incredibly valuable to me. And the idea that you go, yeah, that's how life moves forward. You know, there's, you know, even if you want to be a Marxist, it's a dialectic of going, well, this person I don't agree with, and you have the conversation. And with an open mind and an open heart, and maybe you change their mind. And how do you move the conversation forward? I mean, the great mystery for me in politics is the idea that people talk about hypocrites in politics, changing their mind about things. Of course, he changed his mind.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  The facts have changed. The world's changed. You move on. Obama ran on an anti-gay marriage ticket. But the world moves on and things progress. And, you know, I'm, you know, a progressive. But I think the idea of not listening to people is poison. You know, if you think about why Hillary lost the election, right? It was that deplorables thing. Remember when she talked about the deplorables? And that you can't talk to those people. And it was like, no, those are, those are just working class people and they've got, they've got worries. And you need to talk to them about those worries. You can't just write them all off and go, well, they're despicable people. You know, that urban elite kind of thing.

• 1:29:07Speaker 00

  You've got to bring them in, have the conversation. You'll get someone with it. You know, you have to listen to that. You have to listen to all the different sides of the argument. Otherwise, we're entrenched, we're just in these little, you know, and it's, it's that thing of like, it becomes identity, you know, which party that you follow.

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 1:29:27Steven Bartlett?

  People don't like to follow people that they disagree with online in particular because that's creating cognitive dissonance, isn't it? It's the constant confrontation of a set of ideas that threaten or challenge you in some way. So we'd rather just create this little echo chamber of individuals that will confirm my set of existing beliefs. And that's what, you know, one of the things I made the decision to do about two, three years ago was just to follow everyone that I am viscerally sort of repulsed by, should I say.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. And if you had them on the show, if you had people on the show that you go, well, I don't really agree with what they say, but.

• 1:29:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:59Steven Bartlett?

  I feel like I'm quite.

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  It was great to be back.

• 1:30:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  The, that's interesting. I think that's really, I think that's really valuable. I think that's a more interesting conversation as well. Because if you're just gonna nod along with someone and go, well, he's talking sense, that's great. It's like, you know, and I think to have those kind of difficult conversations, it's really, it's a valuable thing.

• 1:30:20Steven Bartlett?

  One thing you said which surprised me because it didn't come at all, up at all in our previous conversation at all, and even in my prior research was you said that you feel like you have a low level eating disorder.

• 1:30:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think I'm very, very conscious of my weight and my appearance. And I think that's maybe, eating disorders are very, they're very, very serious things. And I'm not, I'm not really in that category, but I'm very aware of it. Like as a, as a man as well, I was chatting to Chris Williamson about this on Modern Wisdom. I think, I think he was like quoting the stat of saying men's body dysmorphia overtakes women's, I think in the next year. In terms of kind of young men looking at Instagram, wanting to look a certain way and presenting themselves a certain way. I think that there is kind of an issue around it. I think that weird thing about like, I've had a bit of work done, you know, and I've had my teeth done and my hair done.

• 1:31:17Speaker 00

  And I think there is kind of a, there's something about being on screen all the time that you get very conscious of kind of, and maybe it's slightly a control thing.

• 1:31:27Steven Bartlett?

  Have you always had that? Or has it developed?

• 1:31:30Speaker 00

  I think it's, I think it's slightly developed through sort of, you know, I think if I wasn't on TV or on Netflix or whatever, I think you probably wouldn't be as aware of how you, how you present yourself. So it's, it's slightly odd, I think, slightly odd relationship with, I mean, I, I have kind of a theory around.

• 1:31:52Speaker 00

  Around drugs, right? Drugs and alcohol. So I think marijuana, when you think about it, like weed, is, people are very carefree about, oh, that's just a bit of weed, fine. But think about what it is, right? It's not a performance enhancing drug. It's a performance inhibiting drug, right? It takes away your ambition and agency and it just makes you very chilled and relaxed. And I don't think that's appropriate for men in their twenties or teenagers, right? Actually, what you want is the performance enhancing. And I think what we should be sort of promoting is almost like prohibition. I mean, I did it kind of organically. I found comedy and I gave up drinking for 12 years.

• 1:32:38Speaker 00

  I didn't touch a drop. And that was mainly because of lifestyle, because I was driving to gigs and driving back. And then I didn't want to hang over the next day because I wanted to, and everyone was trying to buy you drinks all the time. And it just felt like it was like enough already. I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be straight edge, which I always liked the term straight edge. It's a punk rock term for being teetotal. Straight edge, cooler, right?

• 1:33:02Speaker 00

  But I like the idea of going, right, I'm gonna control that. I mean, I drink a little bit now, kind of socially, but not in a problem way. But giving up was quite an important thing.

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  Because it was also the focus that it gives you. So I don't know, I kind of, I'm slightly, slightly anti-drugs for young people. I slightly think men in their 50s and 60s that are workaholics, maybe some marijuana wouldn't be a bad idea. But it's the, it's the idea of kind of young people taking it and not having, what does it take from you?

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  Takes away that kind of that, that raw ambition. And that's such a sort of valuable thing in those years. It's almost like that advantage that young people can't see the advantage that they have. They see the, the, the wealth and the, you know, the financial security of being 50. And when you're 20, what you don't recognize is the energy that you have when you're 20. That incredible advantage you have over everyone else in the office in that you're just. You're just full of energy.

• 1:34:07Steven Bartlett?

  You're 20 years older than me exactly. What advice would you give to me that's unobvious as a 31 year old, you're 51, I believe?

• 1:34:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Steven Bartlett?

  What advice would you give to me that would be probably quite unobvious to me at my age? About the next sort of 20 years of my life?

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  Stay out the sun. Stay out the sun. Sun damage is 90% of aging. Stay out the sun. Honestly, you'll save a fortune on plastic surgeon.

• 1:34:33Speaker 00

  The, I don't know. I mean, I think that, you know, I don't know if you could be in a better place right now than you are, but you can certainly give yourself gifts when you're 50. What gifts do you want to give yourself? Let's talk about what gifts you would like to receive on your 51st birthday from you.

• 1:34:54Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  What would you like to have?

• 1:34:56Steven Bartlett?

  I'd like to be physically fit.

• 1:34:59Speaker 00

  Done. No problem at all. You will need to go to the gym three times a week. And 80% of it is going to be diet, not exercise. Okay, so you're going to need to do that, but no problem at all. I'm the genie. You got it. What else would you like?

• 1:35:15Steven Bartlett?

  I would like a happy, healthy family and relationship with my partner. I'd like to be married and I'd like her to be happy and I'd like my kids to be happy.

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:35:27Speaker 00

  That's great. I don't think you get to call that. I think you get to be happy and you're in charge of that. And their happiness is maybe a byproduct of that. But you need, my perception would be you need the locus of control to be within you. You could be happy, make yourself happy, and that's good for the people around you. But I don't think someone else's happiness can be your responsibility. I think you can set up all the conditions and you can, you can make it as easy as you can, but. You know, that's, that's, that's a lot, but, but I get the idea of it. The, how many kids?

• 1:36:01Steven Bartlett?

  Four.

• 1:36:02Speaker 00

  Four? Jesus Christ. All right, so four, four kids. So you're, you're in minivan territory already. You can't even drive a regular car. This is crazy. This is madness. Four kids, so one of each.

• 1:36:15Steven Bartlett?

  One of each, yeah.

• 1:36:15Speaker 00

  It's a modern world.

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  I love that. All right, what else would you, what else would you want in 20 years' time?

• 1:36:21Steven Bartlett?

  I'd like to still be doing a business podcast.

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  You're not doing a business podcast now. Very little business in this. No one ever talks about supply and demand. Nonsense.

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  I think, yeah, the, the, that stoic thing of like, you still doing this in 20 years' time? What a journey that will be.

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  Like, think about the people that... I've got a new show. And it was so easy to put together. Because it was just like, every night, you're, you're, you're trying new, new, new, new. And it forces you into that space of writing more and more, more and more. And I feel like I'm getting better. You know, a year on, you go, oh, yeah, that was, that was easy. And it was just little and often.

• 1:37:06Steven Bartlett?

  How important is that? The, the routines? You know, the small things? Because I think there's kind of two camps of people typically. There's those that think sweating the small stuff matters. And there's those that think sweating the small stuff is inconsequential. And it's, you know, meh. But it seems that, you know, the people that I seem to sit here with that are really successful at what they do have a real obsession with the detail. I remember Walter...

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  I don't know if it's the small stuff. I think it's the important stuff. So I wouldn't sweat anything other than the joke writing and the performing on stage. Everything else, it's all small stuff. That's the important stuff. And focusing on that, like, knowing what's important, I guess, would be the first stage there. But then, yeah, that's, that seemed absolutely critical.

• 1:37:49Steven Bartlett?

  Remember, I sat here with Walter Isaacson, who followed Elon Musk for two years and followed Steve Jobs for two years before Steve Jobs died. Both two business people.

• 1:37:57Speaker 00

  He's not connected, though. No one thinks it's his fault. No, you're not casting any.

• 1:38:01Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, I'm not saying he did it.

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Steven Bartlett?

  I'm not saying he did it. But he said something to me about how Steve Jobs would even make the circuit board inside the iPhone look beautiful. And this came from Steve Jobs' father, who told him that he had to paint the back of the fence as well, even though no one would ever see the back of the fence because it was covered. But he said that truly great individuals care equally about the parts that are unseen. You know, the things you'll never see. And I always thought, that's incredible that Steve Jobs would care so much about making the circuit board inside this iPhone look beautiful. And why is he doing that? Well, is he doing that because he will know? You know, and that made me think about this concept of your self-story. We have, you said reputation earlier, which is the external story of what people think of you. But everything we do writes this self-story about who I am. Like, when you leave this room.

• 1:38:48Speaker 00

  I love this concept, the idea that we are a story we tell ourselves.

• 1:38:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and everything I'm doing is telling me who I am. So Chris Eubank Jr., the son of the famous boxer, great boxer himself, says that if he's on a treadmill and he gets cramp in his leg, like really painful cramp in his leg, no one's in the gym, but he told himself he was going to do 20 kilometers. He says, I will physically limp the last 8K.

• 1:39:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Steven Bartlett?

  Even though no one's there.

• 1:39:12Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:39:13Steven Bartlett?

  Why, of course?

• 1:39:14Speaker 00

  Because you are who you are. Like, that's how you do anything is how you do everything. So he's all in. He's that guy. Great. That's great. That's a good, that's a great story. Because you go, yes, well, of course. If you say you're going to do it, and then you're the kind of person that does the thing you say, it's powerful, right? If you keep a little promise to yourself, that's powerful. That changes your sort of perception of self. You can trust yourself a little bit more.

• 1:39:47Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of us pathologically let ourselves down in small ways and don't really think those promises matter. We break commitments to ourselves pathologically.

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  Okay, but you can change that, right? You can build that up a little bit, and we'll see the results in 20 years' time. You're fit and healthy, and you've got a family and kids, and you're doing great. You're still doing this. It's great. We'll see it. I think you probably, you can't beat yourself up over everything, right? You have to choose where to suffer. You have to choose what's the thing that matters to you, and don't let yourself down on that. So maybe you're not going to do everything, okay? Fine.

• 1:40:24Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think that's what confidence is? Confidence in, yeah, confidence in yourself is just a combination and a culmination of the commitments you kept to yourself and what you proved to yourself about yourself.

• 1:40:37Speaker 00

  I think that's a, I haven't thought about it like that, but that seems like a very logical conclusion. You know, it's that thing of you want to give the world irrefutable proof you are who you say you are. Well, the world and yourself, there's a mirror up as well. Are you who you say you are? Yeah. Well, great. That's a, that's a lovely thing to be. And to build that up in small ways, I mean, that's really, you're talking about building character of going, well, I'm going to make that promise to myself and then I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it. So you don't make bullshit promises to yourself. You know, news resolutions are not a good idea because if you're gonna let yourself down, that's more damaging. Pick something that you can do.

• 1:41:17Speaker 00

  Pick something small.

• 1:41:19Steven Bartlett?

  Last time we spoke, you expressed an aspiration, an ambition you had. You said, I think we were talking about Dave Chapelle and you said you wanted to do longer form jokes.

• 1:41:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there's, there's some stuff in the new show. So there's like 20 minutes on being a dad that I think is really funny. And I wanted it to fit within my persona as well because a lot of people sort of become fathers and they get a bit sentimental and they lose some of their edge. So the stuff that I've got about being a father is, is brutal, but it's funny. It's funny. It's a funny thing to, to kind of experience as well. Something kind of new to talk about.

• 1:41:54Steven Bartlett?

  Who's your favorite comic of all time?

• 1:41:56Speaker 00

  Chris Rock.

• 1:41:56Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:41:57Speaker 00

  Chris Rock by, yeah, Chris Rock, I think. The, the, I've had the great pleasure of working with Chris as well, and he's an extraordinary talent. The, the rhythm and cadence and the points that he makes and the way that he sets up material, the way that he delivers a punchline, that just everything about it from sort of a technical point of view, I admire. And I love what he says. I, I just think he's, he's, he's just fucking hilarious. And I see the work. I see what he does. I see the work that he does now. He's, he's been a legendary next level performer for 30 years and he's still working just as hard. And you gotta love that.

• 1:42:42Steven Bartlett?

  What did you make of the slap?

• 1:42:44Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, obviously, it's just, I mean, it's, there's no, there's no, um, there's no argument. That's, it's a, it's a, uh, I was, I was shocked, you know? It, it strikes me that Will Smith may be the greatest actor of his generation.

• 1:43:05Speaker 00

  Because he was pretending to be an entirely different human being for the last forty years.

• 1:43:10Speaker 00

  And the mask slipped.

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  And we saw, uh, uh, yeah, a different side.

• 1:43:18Speaker 00

  And I think Chris, really the extraordinary thing about that moment was Chris Rock got slapped in the face. His level of composure was, he was like a Hindu cow. Get slapped in the face by a big dude, right, hard.

• 1:43:35Speaker 00

  I just got slapped in the face, that's gonna be a huge TV moment, here's the award.

• 1:43:43Speaker 00

  He's to be admired, incredible man.

• 1:43:48Steven Bartlett?

  You were on stage as well, you know, a couple of months after when Dave Chapelle was attacked. I actually saw you in the back, I remember seeing you sort of come out and just, you kind of looked a little bit like security, but maybe not the most.

• 1:44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, me and, me and, well, security, so when, when Dave got rushed, uh, I mean, it's very scary, because, you know, it could have gone another way. Um, you know, the guy had a knife, albeit a knife in a gun. It was, it was, it was a kind of a fake gun that pressed a button and a knife came out. It was a, it was a, um, yes, it was a, it was, it was a knife that identified as a gun, maybe, I don't know, anyway, so, um, yeah, I remember, I was standing with Jeff Ross on the side of the stage and then, and then this, this thing happened and it was, yeah, it was crazy, crazy, scary.

• 1:44:37Steven Bartlett?

  Had he got his ass beat, the person that ran out and was stomped out by like?

• 1:44:42Speaker 00

  Well, he got, the reason he got stomped out wasn't, it wasn't um uh malice. It was he wouldn't let go of the gun knife.

• 1:44:50Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 1:44:50Speaker 00

  The guy had a gun, what looked like a gun, I mean, it was a gun and he wouldn't let go of it. And they, I think, um, the security guys, um, uh, broke his arm trying to get, getting the, getting the gun off him. Yeah, but um, what are you gonna do? Let the guy have the gun? Like, it's a, it's, you know, it's very, yeah, pretty scary, uh, scary thing.

• 1:45:13Steven Bartlett?

  Uh, uh, time, time is changing in terms of violence towards comedians, is it?

• 1:45:17Speaker 00

  No, I think so. I think they're.

• 1:45:19Steven Bartlett?

  They're isolated in.

• 1:45:19Speaker 00

  Uh, Eddie Murphy had the best line on it. Eddie Murphy said, uh, he said, Will Smith, when he slapped Chris Rock, rang the dylan bell for crazy.

• 1:45:30Speaker 00

  All the crazies came out for a couple of, couple of weeks. The guy rushes, um, Chappelle, it's not, it's not a great situation. I mean, it's like, it's, it's a scary thing when you think, you know, friends getting rushed by someone with a knife. And you sort of think of, well, what could have happened? But he was fine and obviously, you know, he was shaken in the moment, but he was pretty, pretty philosophical about it.

• 1:45:53Steven Bartlett?

  Anyone ever attacked you on stage?

• 1:45:55Speaker 00

  No, I mean.

• 1:45:56Steven Bartlett?

  Threatened you?

• 1:45:57Speaker 00

  I, yeah, I've been, I've been threatened a little bit, but okay.

• 1:46:03Speaker 00

  Part of the game, I guess. I mean, it's like, it's that weird thing of like, when you, there's a, there's a routine in it. I talk a little bit about, uh, being cancelled on the, on the special. And you talk about, like, what I'm gonna do next time, because it's gonna happen again, right? So the next time I get cancelled, I've got a plan, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna say, I've rehearsed this, I'm gonna make a public statement on the day the news story breaks. I'm gonna say, I'm sorry. And the people that are offended will say, you don't really mean that apology. And I'll say, so you're saying I could say something and not mean it? Now you're getting it.

• 1:46:37Speaker 00

  Ah, smart.

• 1:46:40Speaker 00

  But it's that it's they're jokes. You can't go around apologising for jokes.

• 1:46:45Steven Bartlett?

  I'm exceptionally excited to sit down and watch your Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, which came out on April 16th. There's been a lot of conversation around it because I think a lot of people are acknowledging that you've adopted a slightly different style to the past and everyone's excited to see this this newer Jimmy, this this heavily iterated, optimised version of Jimmy that's taken 51 years to produce. And I always talk to people about our last conversation, you telling me that even you at the peak of the mountain in many people's eyes are still trying to find small marginal gains and challenge yourself and come out of your comfort zone. And I think that's exactly what you do in this special. I've been fortunate enough to see some of the jokes and the angles in this special.

• 1:47:27Steven Bartlett?

  And I think for some reason, it feels to me like society needs to have some of these conversations as well. So what even though there is humour there underneath the jokes you tell, there's um, I think there's an underlying important message that's greeting society at the right moment.

• 1:47:42Speaker 00

  I very much appreciate that.

• 1:47:43Steven Bartlett?

  Is that accurate? Is that an accurate assessment?

• 1:47:45Speaker 00

  I think it is. I think it's I it has it is different to the last special and it's got more of me in it. And it's like, I'm in a very privileged position where people, you know, some people listen to me and I have my audience, I know what my audience are. So I can I can get a message in under the wire that other people can't really talk about. And so that thing of going, if I'm doing sex ed, I do sex ed in my way and it's very funny, but it's getting a message across to young men that I think is very valuable.

• 1:48:17Steven Bartlett?

  I'm excited to listen, specifically about the stuff about consent, very, very excited. Jimmy, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.

• 1:48:27Speaker 00

  Oh, well, I've given this literally no thought, so right, okay.

• 1:48:32Steven Bartlett?

  I don't get to see it either, which is funny. People don't believe me when I say that.

• 1:48:34Speaker 00

  Okay, what's the have I got a question?

• 1:48:37Steven Bartlett?

  You have got a question that's been left for you. The question that's been left for you is, what would you tell your 20 year old self that you wish you knew and that would have positively impacted your life and helped you to avoid unnecessary pain?

• 1:48:56Speaker 00

  I think I would have said enjoy yourself more.

• 1:49:02Speaker 00

  Try and be more present. I think I was, uh, I think I was worried about the results and not the process at that age. I think I was worried about what kind of degree I would get and working hard and I should have been worried about having more fun.

• 1:49:17Steven Bartlett?

  What's telling you in hindsight that that's the important thing you needed to hear at that point? What was the symptom of not hearing that?

• 1:49:24Speaker 00

  I think it was, I think there's a, there's a weird thing in, uh, if you're in academia and you have that imposter syndrome and you feel like, oh, oh God, uh, what's, what's, I don't belong here. I'm not bright enough. I need to work harder. That's valuable in one sense. It makes you kind of work harder, but actually, you know, I should have, what's, what's, what's college for? It's for growing up. Be in the moment.

• 1:49:50Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think of university?

• 1:49:52Speaker 00

  I think university is a luxury item. I think the intrinsic value of university is less important than the, what it signals about you. So I think a degree from Cambridge is a Louis Vuitton bag. It's a luxury item that says, oh, I have this. Um, you can just get the reading list and read the books. I'm not sure whether, whether academia is, you know, I don't know. I've got strong views on academia because I was, when I went to university, it was free, right? It was very difficult to get in, but it was free. And I think we should bring that back. I think if you're doing, let's say STEM, right? So you're studying any STEM subject, university should be free in the UK. And if you get a

• 1:50:35Speaker 00

  STEM degree from anywhere else in the world, it should come with a British passport attached.

• 1:50:44Speaker 00

  Come, spend some time here. Great. It's not a bad policy.

• 1:50:49Steven Bartlett?

  Your kid turns to you one day and says, Daddy, I'm, I want to be a magician.

• 1:50:58Steven Bartlett?

  What do you say to your kid? They want to be a magician? Or they say that I want to be an NBA player? Let's do that one. What do you say to your kid?

• 1:51:05Speaker 00

  Wait, go back. Become a magician. I don't know. I mean, listen, it's, it's, uh. I suppose it's that thing of like, follow your dreams. If they're hiring. It's Chris Rock's line, isn't it? Yeah, follow your passion if they're hiring. If you, if, if you're good at that. If you're, I don't know. If my kid winds up being seven, I'd be surprised. But if he is, then maybe, then, you know, maybe there's, maybe there's a future in it. But the, yeah, pick something that seems realistic to you.

• 1:51:39Steven Bartlett?

  Have you got a bias about what you'd want your son to do?

• 1:51:41Speaker 00

  Uh.

• 1:51:42Steven Bartlett?

  Honestly? Because we all have. I would have a, I would have a bit of a bias.

• 1:51:47Speaker 00

  I, I mean, I don't know. I don't know what jobs are going to be in 30 years' time. Right? You, you want your kid to be happy and maybe, maybe to have some sort of grounding in critical thinking. And beyond that, I don't know. Good luck.

• 1:52:04Steven Bartlett?

  Jimmy, thank you. Our first conversation really blew me away. And it, it taught me something about, actually about this podcast. You're one of the real defining conversations I had that taught me that everyone is much more than the surface that you see. And it's funny because when, last time when we recorded, it was upstairs in my kitchen, my previous kitchen. And the team texted me when you arrived and they said, oh, Jimmy Carr's just arrived. I think you arrived on your bicycle or something. And I'm like, oh, God, he's just cracked a joke about someone's mum downstairs. And I thought, oh, this is, this is Jimmy Carr. The Jimmy Carr I've seen on Nine Out of Ten Cats. And then we went upstairs and had that conversation. And it just blew my mind. It just absolutely blew my mind.

• 1:52:42Speaker 00

  Well, this is the difficult second album. How did I do?

• 1:52:45Steven Bartlett?

  Fantastic.

• 1:52:46Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 1:52:47Steven Bartlett?

  Fantastic, absolutely. But no, it really blew, it taught me that people are much more than. Than just the mask that we wear, and we all wear a mask. You know, persona to get through life and we find it easier sometimes to wear the mask than to confront who we actually are. But in that conversation, I feel like I got to meet the man behind the mask, per se.

• 1:53:04Speaker 00

  Well, I really liked sharing that side of myself. I really enjoyed this. I really enjoyed the show. I wish you every success.

• 1:53:11Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much, Jimmy. Thank you for everything and I highly recommend everybody go and see Natural Born Killer, which is on Netflix right now. I'm gonna put the link to the Netflix special in the description below.