#500 — The Playing Animal

Sam Harris speaks with Jimmy Carr about comedy, culture, and the state of the West. They discuss Carr's new book on the craft of joke writing, why comedy should be taught, the ethics of crowd work, AI as a new god, cancel culture, attention and meditation, psychedelics, political violence and Italy's years of lead, immigration and unrest in Europe, Britain's economic decline, nuclear power, the case for educating for character, and other topics. In today's conversation, Sam and Jimmy discussed meditation and why it's worth practicing. If that piqued your interest, we'd love to get you started with a free trial of Waking Up. https://www.wakingup.com/makingsense If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Well, I love what you've done with the outfit today. I love it. It's really, yeah, it's beautiful.

• 0:29Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I got you.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Rickety Base School of Fashion.

• 0:32Sam Harris?

  Well, at least one of us dressed as a grown up.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm dressed appropriately. Obviously, this is my first time meeting you, but I've listened to the show religiously. I hope you don't find that offensive.

• 0:43Sam Harris?

  No, not at all.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  But this is my first time hearing you at regular speed. I've never heard your voice at regular speed.

• 0:52Sam Harris?

  This is gonna be a challenge for you.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Oh, this is gonna be.

• 0:54Sam Harris?

  Try to stay awake.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  This is gonna be a long couple of hours. You've got a beautiful voice.

• 0:59Sam Harris?

  Longest two hours of your life. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm told that I'm often on 2.0 or faster for some people. I mean, I'm a genuine slow talker.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  But you seem to speak in like, I mean, a lot of people, I can speak in full sentences. It's not word salad, but you speak in full paragraphs.

• 1:16Sam Harris?

  Well, I have more time. I'm a slow speaker.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Obviously, yes.

• 1:18Sam Harris?

  I'm taking my time.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's basically you are the linguistic equivalent of Neo in The Matrix.

• 1:26Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Just you've slowed down time so you can dodge the bullets because.

• 1:30Sam Harris?

  Yeah, but it's somehow less impressive for all that.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, the truth is, I mean, I feel like I'm just neurologically impaired. I could not speak as fast as you do, or, I mean, there are people like Ben Shapiro, who are just, you know, speaking literally twice as fast as I do. But even if you gave me my lines and I rehearsed them, I can't actually speak as fast as you could naturally speak.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55Sam Harris?

  So like my mouth just will not comply. It's like a Cirque du Soleil act that I can't perform.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, I think if you're neurologically impaired, we're all in trouble. Where should we begin? What should we talk about?

• 2:07Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, Jimmy Carr, let me just introduce you and thank you for being here. It's great to actually finally meet you in person.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Oh, well, thank you very much.

• 2:15Sam Harris?

  I'm a fan of both sides of your comedy. Like, I want to talk to you about your stand up and how you approach it. And you have this new book on jokes, which you wrote with two co-authors, Amanda Baker and Abby Grant. And it's this great study of comedy that I think many aspiring funny people wish they had 20 years ago. And I think it's very, it's very useful for people because you actually analyze the structure of what's funny in a way that's very digestible. And you'll be basically doing postmortems on many example jokes. And it's a good read.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully, it's more than just a dissection. The idea of the book is really to get more people involved. The idea is to kind of throw the rope ladder down and to help people up because I think we've made a huge error in our culture. I'm talking like on a big scale.

• 3:07Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  When we moved from the villages to the cities, everyone used to be in a choir, and everyone used to speak, and everyone used to dance. And then we moved to the cities, and everyone specializes. And we have ballerinas, and we have the opera, and we have these specialists, and we go and we watch them. And it's, we're in awe of how great they are.

• 3:26Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  And we're not, the opposite of a spectator is not a professional, it's a participant. I get asked a lot.

• 3:33Sam Harris?

  Or an amateur. An amateur is somebody who actually loves the thing.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't, and it's also that thing of like, I think it's Mark Fisher's point of like capitalist ontology. Everything's about like, well, can I make money doing this? People ask me, how do I get into comedy? And really, when you dig deeper, the question is, how can I make money doing comedy? Well, I don't know about that, but I know that you could do it. I know that you could do five minutes in a club, and you would enjoy it so much more. In the same way, it's very analogous to music comedy. Like, if you can play the guitar even just a little bit, play a couple of chords, then the next time you go and see Oasis live, you are so much more impressed by Noel's playing because you go, you can see how good this is.

• 4:12Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And I think comedy should be taught. I think it should be taught in schools because.

• 4:17Sam Harris?

  The point you make in the book is it's just so valuable in context that had nothing to do with aspiring to be a stand up. And it's just like.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 4:25Sam Harris?

  You're public speaking about anything.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  But first of all, you're writing down and ordering your thoughts, right? So the stage no one thinks about with comedy, because we sort of make it look as if we're making it up as we go along. But sitting down, writing down, ordering your thoughts, and then being able to communicate those to other people, and getting up and speaking in front of other people, getting over that, you know, it's that, it's that Thoreau, most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in their hearts. Like, most people never get to hear their own authentic voice. And I want that for more people. I think as, as our culture shifts and changes, I think as AI becomes more

• 5:06Speaker 01

  important, I think the things that it cannot do become more important. So being more human, connecting to other people. I thought my job for years was the proximate reason for my job. The proximate reason for comedy is laughter. But the ultimate reason is connection.

• 5:21Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Connecting to other people and people coming out in large groups, or small groups, like 50 people in a room, and audiences can be kind of as small as 30 people. And they'll tell you with the reliability with which they tell you what's funny and what isn't. And it's humbling. Like, I write the jokes, but I don't write the show. The jokes, you kind of write them, and then you try them, and the audience go, no, or change it, or write another one. I prefer to just start again, write another one. And then they tell you kind of what the show is going to be. And it's, you know, it's obviously my audience are fairly, it's self-selecting.

• 5:55Sam Harris?

  Yeah, they know what they're coming for.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Well, no one's offended at my show anymore, because being offended at my shows like being scared of a horror movie.

• 6:02Sam Harris?

  Is that the case? Because like you, well, first of all, you seem, you invite hecklers. I mean, that's part of your, your approach. I mean, you do a lot of crowd work, but.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think there's a big difference between someone, you know, shouting something abusive in the middle of a joke, and audience members joining in. I would sort of say that my audience interactions, it's much more like saying there's a sing-along section in the chorus of the Bruce Springsteen song.

• 6:25Sam Harris?

  So they're not real hecklers. They're not trying to disrupt.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  They're not disrupting at all. And even if they are, it's with a sense of service to the evening. So they could win. That's absolutely fine if they win, as long as we all know that we're in service of this larger thing. We're kind of connecting, and we can, you have to be able to kind of take a joke and, and thinking on your feet, being able to kind of perform that, that trick.

• 6:46Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  It's because I think, what does comedy do for society? Like, you know, the Overton window in politics, the most left wing, the most right wing thing you could say at a polite party, right? So, and that shifted massively recently.

• 6:58Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  But I think there's a conversational Overton window. There's an idea of a, the magic of comedy maybe happens the day afterwards, with your partner, with your, where you can talk about things a bit more freely, you have, you're more open to it. I think where.

• 7:13Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, the thing was said, the thing's been said already by the comic, and it's the fact that you all laughed proved that it was within the boundary of this, whether, even if it's a new boundary, right? You've discovered the boundary.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  You look at Lenny Bruce did, and then George Carlin and Richard Pryor, the only people talking about their lives, their personal lives in that way, made us feel all a little bit more human. Because we all went, oh, yeah. You know that lovely line of, not that I'm in any way suggesting I might be, but in the work of genius, we see our own neglected thoughts. I think it's often the way of like, Seinfeld will do a bit, and I'll go, I've seen it 100 times. How did I not see it? It's my job to see that, and I didn't see that. And it's so pleasing to us. The ha ha moment is so close to the.

• 7:59Sam Harris?

  Recognition.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Aha moment. I think it's Cardeman. I think it's system one to system two thinking. Your brain is designed to not think. Your brain is designed to avoid thinking and see patterns. And so we go from system one thinking, you've read that, Thinking Fast and Slow, the idea of going, it's two plus two equals four, driving the car, you have to think about that, it's easy, right? It's just, it's not thinking. But if I ask you a complex maths problem, divide 13 by, whatever it is, you have to actually think. And really thinking is, you're rewarded for it. Jokes are, Freud called them pleasure bribes, to think forbidden thoughts. I love that idea that you're, you're kind of pushing people's boundaries. And also, you're sort of showing where the boundary is, like you're crossing the line.

• 8:42Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Well, I want to talk about the ethics of all this. But I mean, you mentioned AI. It seems that you are as AI-proof as anyone can be, because, again, so much of the value you're offering is bringing people together in the real world to laugh, right? Like, it's part of the collective experience is intrinsic.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  I believe they say it's, you laugh 30 times more when you are with other people than on your own. Even at the funniest stuff you could imagine, your favorite show, but watching on your own. It's why in the UK, like, Christmas television is a real thing in the UK. It's not because the shows at Christmas are any better. I know, I make a lot of them. But it's because you watch them with family. You watch them together. And that experience of like, the other mistake we made, we gathered around the fire, and we spoke. And then we gathered around the wireless, and we listened to the radio as a family. And then we gathered around the TV, and we watched whatever was on. Like, when I was growing up, we watched, like, everything. We watched.

• 9:38Sam Harris?

  It's a way of socializing. It's a very, it's a completely low stakes.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  And it's a conversation.

• 9:43Sam Harris?

  And friction-free way to, yeah, it's a thing you're reacting to. Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, and then social media came along, and suddenly, we're siloed.

• 9:50Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  And it's, it's a poison on our, we are social creatures. We have a dispersed identity. And there's a sense in which people now feel sealed off.

• 10:02Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  If you think about the the ancient cultures, people were much more porous in terms of they, you know, spirits and beliefs and, you know, you could be possessed or whatever. And now people think of themselves as kind of hermetically sealed and not with a dispersed identity. I like to, you know, I think the the AI thing, there's different visions of this, aren't there? There's a, it feels like history really is repeating. It feels like this is the Manhattan Project once again. I mean, there's a, there's a, there's kind of a rumor. I mean, they're pushing through at such speed.

• 10:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Although the Manhattan Project, you you can't really imagine that moving forward if every time you asked one of the principals, you know, Leo Zillard or or Edward Teller or Oppenheimer, et cetera, what's the chance you're going to ignite the atmosphere and kill everyone? And they were putting the probability at 10% or 20% or 30%. You can't imagine them moving forward, right? But that's the situation we're in with AI. It's like you ask that, you ask the principals who are actually doing the work, no one, but with with with the exception of someone like Jensen Huang, and he's not, you know, he's not actually doing the work of, you know, building the model, he's just selling the chips. None of them say the chance of catastrophic outcome is one in a million or one in 10 million. That's just not a sentence any of them have spoken.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  It's a very odd thing. I think it's the, for me, so my my view on AI is quite sort of spiritual in a way. I I don't think we were made in God's image, but I think we so wanted there to be a God, we created one in our image. So we, I'll describe something to you. It's all powerful, all knowing, can perform miracles and lives in a cloud.

• 11:39Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. It's and it's the idea that we go, we are worshiping these things. Like, there's, there's a phone now asked for four hours a day, and we give it our offering, and we get a like. And the like is, it's the digital amen. Who's whose line is that? It's Byung-hun. I can never pronounce his name, but he's a brilliant philosopher.

• 12:01Sam Harris?

  Yeah, no.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Writes these brilliant short books. But the digital amen is such a great, like, it's, it becomes like a religion because people are giving it their attention. And for me, AI is impressive, but you know that thing of the fourth humiliation?

• 12:16Sam Harris?

  No.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  So there's been three, three humiliations of men.

• 12:19Sam Harris?

  Copernicus and Darwin.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Copernicus, Darwin, Freud. And then AI. We're, so we're not the center of the universe.

• 12:26Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  We're not the, we're no different to the animals. We're not even in charge of our minds. And now we're not the smartest thing in the room.

• 12:33Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  It's another humiliation. Is the future going to be Star Trek because of this or Star Wars?

• 12:39Sam Harris?

  Although ironically, this humiliation is, if the thesis in your book is correct, and comedy is a craft that is teachable, it should be teachable to the the L L Ms, and we should, at some point, get superhuman funny.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  But they won't know what's funny because they won't know how to laugh. It's the connection. It's a, it's a two-way piece of communication. I think, I'm with McGill Christ on the AI thing. I think, you know that the.

• 13:06Sam Harris?

  I actually haven't heard what he said about it.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if he said this, but I think it's, I think it's implicit in the master in his emissary. The idea that AI is left brain activity. It can do left brain complicated things incredibly well, but it cannot do right brain gestalt tasks at all. So.

• 13:24Sam Harris?

  Just give it time. I mean, you'd have to have some argument as to in principle, why what the right brain is doing is.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, right?

• 13:32Sam Harris?

  So isn't substrate independent.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so.

• 13:35Sam Harris?

  I mean, that's a heavy lift.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  The complicated stuff is easy. And the easy stuff is hard. Right? That's, that's the, broadly speaking.

• 13:44Sam Harris?

  But we get there eventually.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Playing chess is 4,000 years old.

• 13:46Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Okay? And walking and folding your shirt can't be done by AI because that's 40 million years old.

• 13:52Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  So it won't get to that in a hurry now.

• 13:55Sam Harris?

  But will it get to that? That's.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  But will it get to that? Well, well, sure, it'll get to that. We've been here before. There's been the Manhattan Project. We created something that can destroy the world, you know? And we've lived with it for 80 years now.

• 14:09Sam Harris?

  Yeah. And basically forgotten about it. I mean, most of us, most of the time, have have just forgotten that this.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Well, who wrote that incredible book about? I think you had her on here, the incredible book about.

• 14:17Sam Harris?

  No, Annie Jacobson.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Because you wrote the one about.

• 14:20Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I didn't have her on.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  A pandemic thing recently.

• 14:22Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Like the same.

• 14:23Sam Harris?

  I want to have her on, and she's written two terrifying books.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  I mean, really properly terrifying.

• 14:27Sam Harris?

  I've had other worried people on to talk about nuclear weapons.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Maybe this should be the Halloween episode. You get her on to talk about those two books because never mind Freddy Krueger, those are scary books.

• 14:36Sam Harris?

  Death by Ice or Death by Fire, yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. But the, but that thing of like going, the the idea, humanity has always been on the brink of these things, right? We, we push ourselves forward, and there's religious analogies in large language models to Towers of Babel. And the idea that we're, the history is sort of cyclical. We're going through something now, it's undeniable.

• 14:59Sam Harris?

  The cycles might be four hours long at this point. I mean, it's like, there's an acceleration that is undeniable in terms of cultural change and technological trend change.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Well, it does feel like that point that someone made about if if Watergate happened today, or.

• 15:11Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

• 15:13Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  I mean, it might get 48 hours. I don't think Monica Lewinsky would last 48 hours in a news cycle now.

• 15:17Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  There's, there's other stuff going on. It's, it's just.

• 15:20Sam Harris?

  The first time I noticed that, it just truly indelibly was when we had the the largest mass shooting in American history in Vegas. And it left the news cycle in like 48 hours. I mean, I don't even, I don't even remember the shooter's name. This is a measure of just how.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  It's good. I do like that thing. I really do like that New Zealand thing where they don't name the shooter.

• 15:41Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I love that. I think that's, that's very smart, because I think a lot of the time.

• 15:44Sam Harris?

  They named the shooter, but it just, it just, we never figured out his motive, and we moved on to whatever Trump said next, and it was gone. It was just incredible.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Well, that thing with the, okay, is Trump contingent or convergent? So I read a lot of that Neil How the Fourth Turning book, I really like, which is kind of a re, a rehash of Vico, which is kind of the basis for Finnegan's Wake.

• 16:08Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Well, I'm a little allergic to these notions of history having a, this hidden structure, but I mean, it's a little bit like a.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I like the, I like the.

• 16:17Sam Harris?

  I mean, I just.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  I think it's helpful to think about.

• 16:19Sam Harris?

  Unfalseable in some way.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it is unfalseable, but you go, we've been through very, very tough times before. Okay? And there's the end of history delusion. We all think we're living in the end of times. And maybe this time is different.

• 16:32Sam Harris?

  Somebody can, somebody's gonna be right.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  But everyone else. Well, are they, or is this the beginning of infinity? Are we going to get through this precipice?

• 16:40Sam Harris?

  It's this, it's an inflection point unlike an inflection point 500 years ago, where, you know, you, one person couldn't destroy the lives of millions in the, in the same way. It's like, like, we're living in a world now where it's, it's not only conceivable, but foreseeable that, you know, somebody, the wrong technology in the hands of some malicious person can create a civilizational problem.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Thinking about the things in, like, we're choosing what to think about, right? So if you point our attention at broken arrows, right? There's a missing nuclear warheads.

• 17:09Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Of which I think America has six, and the former Soviet Union has, eh, we don't know.

• 17:16Sam Harris?

  Well, they had some submarines went down and presumably we know where they are, but they, the warheads weren't recovered.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Presumably, sure, I'll just go and check with my people. I mean, no one knows. And you, we've chosen just not to worry about that thing.

• 17:28Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  We've chosen not to be concerned with that, and we're concerned with this now. So we're focusing our attention and saying, well, this could be the problem. But I think the thing about black swan events is they're black swan events. You know, that Taliban book I love, the idea that it's going to be a surprise, whatever happens next. No one really saw COVID coming. No one saw the pandemic coming. People had said, oh, a pandemic can.

• 17:51Sam Harris?

  Well, we knew, we knew a pandemic was guaranteed to come. I mean, that's just, that's just a, you keep rolling the same die again and again, you're going to get every conceivable number. And we know that, you know, this is having nothing to do with human engineered pandemics, which is an additional problem.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  But the idea that we're doing.

• 18:08Sam Harris?

  Naturally, yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Gain of function research.

• 18:10Sam Harris?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Just, I mean.

• 18:11Sam Harris?

  Insanity.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Looking for a gas leak with a lit match. It's just like, the the madness that that would, in anyone would think, oh, that's a good idea. But when they, when they, you know, wiped out polio and they kept some, that you go, who's in charge of this? What are you thinking?

• 18:26Sam Harris?

  Well, keeping, like, again, there are kind of gradations to the stupidity that you can see how virologists got there in their first steps, like, I mean, just going into caves, looking for bats that are carrying something that that has pandemic properties, and you think you're sort of getting ahead of the problem, right? Like, like, somebody analogized this to, you know, putting wanted posters out for, you know, the most dangerous criminals, right? Like, like, we want to figure out what the risks are so that we can understand them. But now that we can spin up a vaccine, now we can, we can sequence a whole genome in, you know, less than 24 hours and spin up a vaccine in a weekend. The head start is, is, is nothing now. We don't need a head start, and we certainly don't need to be grabbing these viruses, working with them, improving them, and then spilling them on our.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  And then it becomes, it becomes a, a weapon. It becomes a, you know, so that thing of like, will AI be like a, will it take away the drudgery? Will we look back and say, well, you know, work, in the same way we look back at slavery and go, oh, my God, how do we let that happen? How do we let people toil? 200 years ago, everyone worked on a farm, effectively, right? 98% of the population worked in agriculture, and we are the first people that have had to ask ourselves some questions, right? So will I get married? Shall I have kids? Do I believe in God? These are new questions for our culture. They're, you know, no wonder people are struggling, because we've privatized mental health problems.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  We've coded anxiety and depression as a personal failing rather than a structural problem, a collective action problem with the way that our society operates. And it strikes me that that's a mistake. That's like with actually, are we arranging our society in a way that is conducive to people feeling good?

• 20:14Sam Harris?

  Well, I think we've done both sides of this and neither have been the proper corrective. So on the one hand, yes, we've privatized mental health, but also we've de-stigmatized it significantly. And even among young people, you have these bizarre social contagions where they're acquiring conditions that they think are fun to have.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've pathologized perfectly normal human behavior.

• 20:42Sam Harris?

  And there's a cult of victimhood that gets.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no such thing as worry anymore. It's anxiety. There's no such thing as sadness. It's depression.

• 20:49Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And everyone has ADHD, which is horrific because the people that actually have it can't get the resource that they need because everyone is complaining of the same thing. So it's like you.

• 20:59Sam Harris?

  Or Tourette's. At one moment on TikTok, there were people complaining of Tourette's, you know, or claiming to have Tourette's.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  I naturally just swear a lot.

• 21:06Sam Harris?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:08Sam Harris?

  All right, hold on, Jimmy.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  It's kind of interesting, though, isn't it?

• 21:10Sam Harris?

  I want to see if I need to bend this conversation back to your book in any way that matters because I want people to read it. Well, I want to talk about big picture issues and I want to get your look on what's happening to culture. You know, I mean, you travel so much. I looked at your tour schedule. It's amazing.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  I think we're 50 countries now.

• 21:28Sam Harris?

  I mean, you're a masochist or you're Jesus. I don't know how to understand how you're spending your time, but how many dates a year are you doing?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Maybe 200 dates, maybe 300 shows. Because I'll do two a day.

• 21:40Sam Harris?

  Right. Incredible.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Which I don't know about that, but I love it. I think I'm the hardest working man in comedy, which is like being the best looking guy in the burns unit. Right? It's like, it's not really, everyone else is doing nothing.

• 21:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  But it's the, it's not like, with my job, it's not about repetition, it's about iteration. So it's about trying different things every night. Like you try new jokes, you try.

• 22:02Sam Harris?

  What percent would you say you're folding in new material each night?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Like at the end of the show, I'll literally get out a piece of paper and mark off new jokes at every show.

• 22:11Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  And some of those are like things you've tried a couple of times, you're like, you're going, okay, that's ready, I can bank that for the next show. And some of them, you're trying to reword or get right and see what the audience like. But it's really fun to do. And then sometimes it's the audience bits, something comes out of that.

• 22:24Sam Harris?

  Yeah, so I mean, you're doing your routine, which presumably you have worked out to the word, but then, then you're, again, as I said, you're inviting audience participation and you're doing crowd work, which is a very different kind of high wire act.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  It's become very different because it was for years, the heckling bit was just like heckle put downs and your mama jokes. And it was, it was very fun to do, but now it's become something slightly different. In the pandemic, I wrote a book, which was kind of an auto, we sold it to the publisher as an autobiography. And then we kind of, under the wire, we slipped in kind of a self-help book. And it's been very rewarding because it's kind of, I've kind of opened up a little bit more the last five years and started talking about authentically. And I think it's resonated with a certain cohort that, you know, want to talk. And they'll kind of, you know, they'll ask me, they kind of trust me a little bit. I think that thing about.

• 23:23Sam Harris?

  What's the, so, but that's somewhat paradoxical because you can be very mean too. So like, so where's the line here? Because you're, you're very compassionate and I'm thinking of your crowd work in particular. So you, you're responding to something that you're getting from the audience and you can go very hard against that person, you know, making fun of the way they look and, or, you know, making fun of the way their wife looks, or, I mean, every permutation of that. And yet you're successful. I mean, maybe there are moments where this totally fails and you lose the audience. But from everything I've seen, you're keeping the audience on side and there's this understanding that you're actually a good guy and there's like, you're not, you're not actually trying to hurt anybody.

• 24:07Sam Harris?

  And yet there's very, like, and so there's, I'm just wondering how you bound this game so that everyone plays it and enjoys it or, and what is its failure mode? Where you say something that you regret and someone is really offended or what happens?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  It's, it's friendship at scale is my job, right? So you get that thing of going, actually, you can be really funny with someone and a bit scathing and take the piss out of them, but that's kind of what friends do. And there's an intimacy to that. And it's also, what are we doing here? Well, we're having, this is kind of a weird, safe space. You're like a Loki, like a, like a trickster god. And the idea that you're allowed to say these unsayable things and we're all in this room where we're allowed to laugh at these things. So it's a filter. It's the inoculation. It's looking at the stake on the staff.

• 24:59Sam Harris?

  But in a different context, it would just be mean, right? It might be funny, but a joke that is so fully at some person's expense, it can't be exported to every other context, right? Like someone's coming there almost, it's almost like a religious ritual where your audience is coming, you're the priest and the audience, the audience is coming to have, like they're granting their attention to you in a way that allows for a ritual of, which would otherwise be a ritual of humiliation, be a humiliation.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:31Sam Harris?

  But here it's, everyone is enjoying it.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yes. So I think that thing about, if you take away anything that could be offensive to anyone, you are left with juggling and someone would complain that the balls are the wrong color. So you go, okay, so you can't, so you take that off the table to begin with, you just go, right. As long as I'm an equal opportunities offender, as long as I'm hitting everyone fairly equally, it feels like you're not loading onto, you don't have something that you're trying to push. Like it feels like they're just jokes. It's a category error for you to say, hey, sometimes your jokes aren't kind enough. No, no, no, I wasn't trying to be kind. I was trying to get massive laughs for a minute, for two hours. That's what I was trying to do. And it worked. And the idea of going, if it's not kind enough, then you're at the wrong kind of show.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  And yet you can have moments within that, which are incredibly touching.

• 26:21Sam Harris?

  It gets sharpened up when you're, again, your, your routine is what it is and it can be very edgy, very, you know, quote offensive, but when you're doing crowd work and you're talking to one person in the audience and so every, so you have thousands of people's attention on an ordinary civilian, right, that you're now talking to and you're commenting on the way he looks or the way she looks, right?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:45Sam Harris?

  It's obvious to see how that could go wrong, right? Like, I mean, like it could just be, like, have you ever done crowd work where you feel like you just objectively crossed the line and you just felt bad about how that all went or apologized from the stage?

• 26:58Speaker 00

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• 27:06Speaker 01

  There are worse things than war and one of them is believing there's nothing worth fighting for. And I think we're on track to be in a war. But are we pointing AI at the wrong thing? Leaders are going to come in now and they're going to, to quote Thomas Sowell, there's no solutions, only trade offs.

• 27:21Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  They're going to say, the world isn't safe. We're going to promise you safety and all it's going to cost you is your freedom.