Mexican Batman, Britain’s Downfall, Mr Bean’s Comeback & Jimmy Carr - Rabbit Hole #5 - #1143

In the fifth installment of this new experimental format, we explore: - Inside the antics of a real-life Mexican Batman. - Why George chooses to wear AirPods during his massages. - If Jimmy Carr will run for Prime Minister of the UK. - and much more… Guests: - Jimmy Carr is a comedian, television host and an author. - George Mack is a writer, marketer, and entrepreneur. - Harry Dry is a marketer, copywriter and writer Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline’s leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Who Is the Batman of Lagos De Moreno? (02:17) Is the British Pound Overvalued? (06:32) Jimmy Carr for Prime Minister? (08:30) Can You Guess This Victorian Slang? (12:40) Why Word Choice Makes or Breaks a Joke (17:47) Are All Relationships Transactional? (33:42) The Unexpected Upside of Being Cancelled (36:21) Why We’ve Forgotten How to Build Friendships (42:18) Why Are Americans More Optimistic Than Brits? (44:41) The Secret to Truly Original Writing (54:28) Which Industry Will Disappear Next? (59:36) Is AI Killing Conspiracy Theories? (01:06:02) Are Smartphones the Real Epidemic? (01:08:26) Why We Need to Learn to Be Bored Again (01:11:49) Do Meditation Retreats Need AI Chatbots? (01:17:01) Are Mental Health Problems Really Societal Problems? (01:20:03) Is Gambling More Popular Than Reading? (01:31:18) Is Belief the Secret to Great Writing? (01:37:44) How GLP-1s Are Killing Gastric Band Surgery (01:38:46) Is Mr Bean the World’s Biggest Comedy Star? (01:45:17) When Did Criticism Replace Encouragement? (01:52:15) The Best Rules of Great Communication (01:55:36) Is Living Longer Actually a Good Thing? (02:05:22) Who Should Be Britain’s Next Prime Minister? Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  A vigilante known as the Batman of Lagos de Moreno has gone viral after catching alleged motorcycle thieves and duct taking them to lampposts across Lagos de Moreno in Jalisco. At least five suspected thieves have been found restrained to poles over the past 10 days, some with their mouths taped and signs labelling them as thieves. Authorities are investigating and say those found tied up are being treated as victims. Police have added the vigilante to a wanted list and are also looking into whether multiple people are behind the incidents. We've got some pictures of what these people look like. It's like a real, the guy's a real life Mexican Batman that appears to be getting motorcycle thieves and duct tape. People are also calling him duct tape man, which is, but he's, he's really doing it.

• 0:43Jimmy Carr?

  Oh, that is, I mean, that's a, yeah, okay. Sorry. So you hear duct tape and you think, I could get myself out of duct tape.

• 0:49Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 0:49Jimmy Carr?

  That is, okay. I noticed he's left the motorcycle with them. That seems.

• 0:54Chris Williamson?

  There's the evidence.

• 0:55Jimmy Carr?

  That seems bad because someone's going to cut them free and they're going to disappear on the motorcycle.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  There it is. Duct tape man.

• 1:01Jimmy Carr?

  Okay. That seems, that's kind of great because normally if you see a story about crime in Mexico, you go, oh, this is going to be, this is going to be eye bleach.

• 1:10Chris Williamson?

  This is the, this is a very fluffy way to deal with crime in Mexico, it seems.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  How has he taken down two in one? I mean.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  I mean, they don't look particularly physically intimidating.

• 1:20Jimmy Carr?

  They look 14 and terrified. Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, don't steal motorcycles. There's a message there.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  You would be too if you'd been taped to a lamppost.

• 1:29George Mack?

  The rise and fall of civilizations and the rise, duct tape man brings back law and order.

• 1:34Chris Williamson?

  That's, are we talking about a strong man make good times? They, that is the strong man that uses duct tape.

• 1:40George Mack?

  There was the case about seven months ago in the UK where a guy purposely left his bike, I think outside of the HMP in London, where all the police are based and put like an Apple AirTag on it. And it got lost. He calls up the police and it's like, we have the AirTag. I have the address. There's nothing we can do. There's nothing we can do. All of a sudden, he then takes this to the Telegraph, the Times, it becomes this huge story. And then the police go, we're looking into it. So even when you have the GPS coordinates, they don't take it seriously.

• 2:11Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's good. I think it's a crime I could get behind though. The vigilante, it's like, it's nice. You don't hear a lot about it these days.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  What was the last crime you committed? The last?

• 2:21Jimmy Carr?

  I would say probably, um, probably some sort of tax avoidance was the last big one. I don't know. When that whole thing happened, this is years ago now, like 12, 13 years ago. When it was all going on, I was like front of the papers and the Prime Minister was David Cameron at the time. He broke off from the G20 summit to comment on my personal tax affairs. That is a red flag. But it was all going on. I never once mentioned the millions that I've given to charity because I thought, well, at this point, line's not going to help.

• 2:51George Mack?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, because evasion is allowed, but avoidance is not.

• 2:57Jimmy Carr?

  No, avoidance is allowed. Evasion, there's a big difference. About 18 months in prison.

• 3:00George Mack?

  Right.

• 3:00Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Or if you ask Gary Stevenson, then, then there's a big difference.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  What was the document, you watched the new?

• 3:04George Mack?

  Have you watched Gary Stevenson's new documentary?

• 3:06Jimmy Carr?

  No, go on. What's the documentary?

• 3:08George Mack?

  I think he's wonderful. I think he's the best.

• 3:10Chris Williamson?

  I heard you laughing while you were watching it last night.

• 3:12George Mack?

  I think he's the best economist. I think he's the best economist of our times. And when the Soviet Great Britain becomes and you guys are fighting over a little bit of bread, me and Gary will throw you a strip. So I don't, I don't want to say anything bad about Gary at all.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 3:25George Mack?

  Because when the gulags come, Christopher, I'm going to be eating bread.

• 3:29Chris Williamson?

  This is the same as being kind to your AI in case an AI overload.

• 3:32Jimmy Carr?

  So is this guy a Marxist economist?

• 3:35George Mack?

  No, no, no. He's a, he's a pioneer. He's a genius, Jimmy. Um, he, his idea, uh, he wants to bring in a, I think, is it a two to 2% wealth tax on over 10 million per year inside of the UK is what the policy Gary's proposing.

• 3:49Chris Williamson?

  That's it. I thought there was more. The documentary's called How to Become Filthy Rich, right? So what's the thesis?

• 3:57George Mack?

  Tax, wealth, not work. Yeah. Tax, wealth, not work, which I actually think you'd like that from a copywriting perspective, Mr. Dry. Um, but his, yeah, his whole thesis is with rising inequality, if we can bring in a 2% wealth tax to the UK in particular, then that will raise, I think about 25 billion is Gary's thesis. But quite impressively, inside the documentary, they actually keep on, uh, actually a smart economist who argues a little bit back with him. And his whole thesis is, well, actually the GDP will probably go down by about four to 5% because if you're a foreign investor, why go, why not go to France? Why not go to Sweden? Why not go to United States of America?

• 4:35Jimmy Carr?

  I was, I was talking about this, we were chatting about it earlier, but I think like Britain needs to be more competitive. It's like that thing of like, we're competing with other nations. People have the ability to move anywhere they want to move now. And there's a lot of talk about billionaires and millionaires leaving the UK, whatever. Like you've just got to compete. So that idea of going, the big thing, the big kind of controversial thing is I think the currency is overvalued. I think if you, the, the great play every nation has when you print your own currency, you could devalue it. You could devalue the currency and make it very cheap to invest in Great Britain and just have all the money come to you. It's like you are, it's like a zero sum game in the world. You want people to come, people want to live there. There's good schools. It's a great place. Wonderful people, wonderful culture. You want more people to come there. So devaluing the currency has always been seen as a humiliation. But every time the currency's been devalued,

• 5:19Jimmy Carr?

  there's been 18 months of incredible growth.

• 5:21George Mack?

  But you don't have inflation as the currency gets devalued?

• 5:24Jimmy Carr?

  You could do. I mean, you've got to mitigate against that. But I mean, we've got massive inflation anyway. So what are you going to do?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  So we'd be weaker than the dollar. That's your, that's the car, the car mission statement.

• 5:32Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Super weak, super weak currency that, that attracts a lot of people. Well, China, China have been doing it for 20 years. They've massively devalued their currency artificially in order that people, Chinese goods are very cheap than the rest of the world. That's great. So they export a lot of stuff and they do very well as an economy. They've, they've brought more people out of poverty the last 20 years than, than you could dream of. It's incredible.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  I guess the idea is then that four British guys podcast back in London and not America. And I feel like this is living proof almost of some of the troubles.

• 6:02Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's that thing of like, you've just got to be better than other places, you know? So how do we compete? I thought when Brexit happened, I thought the next day we would have undercut Ireland. I carry an Irish passport. I love being Irish, but I thought we would have undercut Ireland. And Ireland had the, the corporation tax of like 12%. So that's why all the tech companies are based in Ireland. If you get your, um, uh, whatever bill from Anthropic, it comes from Dublin if you buy it in the UK, right? So, but we didn't undercut them. We just went, oh no, great. Let them do that.

• 6:32George Mack?

  If, if you're Prime Minister for the day, what are, what are some of your, not like less, uh, maybe less obvious policies that you do, roga policies that you implement?

• 6:39Jimmy Carr?

  Okay. Right. Okay. So devalue the currency would be the first thing.

• 6:42George Mack?

  The Zimbabwe mission?

• 6:43Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, quite.

• 6:43George Mack?

  Not, not that much.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Specifically how?

• 6:46Jimmy Carr?

  You, you could just talk it down. Honestly, you could talk it down in an afternoon. All the right people at the Bank of England, it's, it will go, it will, yeah, it will go down. I mean, it's going to happen anyway.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  But isn't that a bit an optics problem?

• 6:56Jimmy Carr?

  But if we went, if we went, yeah. But when, when the currency naturally devalues, when there's, when there's something, something bad happens, do you, do you go to the IMF and try and bail out the pound? Or just go, great, things are now cheap in the UK. Come the rest of the world, sails on.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  It's a bit like rope a dope, like Ali just sort of sitting on the ropes.

• 7:14Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you come out.

• 7:17Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to wait for that. I'm going to let him punch me in the face so much that he gets tired.

• 7:21George Mack?

  Until our labour's cheaper than China and Vietnam. Yeah.

• 7:23Jimmy Carr?

  But then invest in infrastructure and, you know, you have to, you have to have, you have to make it.

• 7:28George Mack?

  Yeah, it's a serious idea.

• 7:29Jimmy Carr?

  But then the other thing that you do is energy. Energy cost is four times higher in the UK than America. And every business has that as a factor, right? So things are very expensive to produce and it's expensive to even own an office in the UK because energy prices are very high. That affects everyone. That's a, that's got to be like 20, 25 year problem, right? So you've got to fix that. You've got to be as technologically advanced as 70s France, who built 56 nuclear power plants in 10 years. If you do that, you're off to the races.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  I've, I've got to say, Mr. Kai, you're, you're talking, reeducated young man. Well, you're talking like a man who might be having a bit of a prime ministerial run. Is that, is that on the cards?

• 8:07Jimmy Carr?

  I think, yeah, I think now, I believe the system in the UK now is seven prime ministers in 10 years. I think we now take a ticket like at a, like at a, um, delegate and you just, it comes up.

• 8:16Chris Williamson?

  So you're up at some point soon and you're saying that.

• 8:18Jimmy Carr?

  You wouldn't want to be, you wouldn't want to be Prime Minister because it'd be a big commitment. That always used to be the case. Now, what is it? Six months? I'll be gone for six months. It's going to be a shop, shop sign that you turn around, like, you know, back in five, Prime Minister.

• 8:30Chris Williamson?

  All right. Given that we're talking about the UK.

• 8:32Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Chris Williamson?

  Let's play a game of guess the Victorian slang word. So I'm going to say different words from Victorian era Britain and you're going to try and guess what they mean. Okay?

• 8:40Jimmy Carr?

  Okay. Yeah. Lovely.

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  All right. First one. Tickyty boo.

• 8:46Jimmy Carr?

  It just means good.

• 8:47Chris Williamson?

  Something that is in perfect order or a satisfactory condition. That's a, that's kind of.

• 8:51Jimmy Carr?

  Tickyty boo.

• 8:51Chris Williamson?

  Tickyty boo.

• 8:52Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, that's tickyty boo.

• 8:54Chris Williamson?

  Muffin wallopah.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Hmm. Sure sounded nice, right?

• 8:58Jimmy Carr?

  A muffin.

• 8:59Chris Williamson?

  Wallopah.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Uh, fat. I think it's a, I think it's a, it's a sort of, um, rather stout gentleman who enjoys muffins. Yeah.

• 9:07Chris Williamson?

  An idle person who sits at home.

• 9:09Jimmy Carr?

  We can't just kick on. You've got to tell us what a muffin woppler is.

• 9:12Chris Williamson?

  That's what I'm saying. I'm, I'm literally describing it to you.

• 9:15Jimmy Carr?

  Oh, I thought you'd move on to the next thing.

• 9:16Chris Williamson?

  No, it's an idle person who sits at home eating cakes and gossiping instead of cooking. Muffin wallopah. So you should be cooking, but instead you're sitting at home eating cakes and gossiping. Next one. Church bell.

• 9:34Jimmy Carr?

  A church bell would be my, would be my guess there.

• 9:37Chris Williamson?

  No, it's slang, George.

• 9:39Jimmy Carr?

  Okay.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Is it, would it be an ugly person? Like you've been hit by the church bell, like a Quasimodo reference?

• 9:44Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's clever, but no.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  I think it's, this sounds, I think it's a young virgin.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  A may, a young male virgin, yeah.

• 9:56Chris Williamson?

  Harry's just gonna answer Young Virgin for all of us.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:59Chris Williamson?

  When do the young virgins come out?

• 10:01Jimmy Carr?

  Paul Pilkington has that great bit, which was when he's watching university challenge, because he can never guess the answer. He just says egg each time, because statistically, at some point, he's gonna be right. He has a better chance of just saying egg.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Gentlemen, gentlemen, I think we've, there's method to the madness.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Church bell, I'm thinking a young, sort of, like, to the left of the organ master, there's the man who rings the church bell, a young 14 year old.

• 10:24Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay, that's actually probably way too clever. A woman who talks so much, her voice is reminiscent of the ringing of a church bell.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 10:31Jimmy Carr?

  Okay.

• 10:32Chris Williamson?

  Next one, butter upon bacon.

• 10:35Jimmy Carr?

  Uh, it's, uh, is it like a hat on a hat? It's too, too much of a good thing?

• 10:39Chris Williamson?

  Yes. She's doing too much.

• 10:42Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Chris Williamson?

  Butter on bacon.

• 10:44Jimmy Carr?

  It's butter on bacon, yeah.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  Uh, mathicking. Mathicking. Know what mathicking is?

• 10:48Jimmy Carr?

  It sounds northern. It sounds northern. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with.

• 10:52Chris Williamson?

  You're really good at this.

• 10:53Jimmy Carr?

  Some, some level of incest?

• 10:55Chris Williamson?

  Uh, it could result in, it could result in incest. A term for getting wildly rowdy out in the streets.

• 11:04Jimmy Carr?

  Oh, I mean, that's just good.

• 11:04Chris Williamson?

  Mathicking in Newcastle, mathicking on the big market.

• 11:07Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I love the jump from it sounds northern to some level of incest.

• 11:11Chris Williamson?

  Could be incest. Uh, afternoonified.

• 11:15Jimmy Carr?

  Afternoonified? You're slacking off, you're no longer taking things seriously. Yeah, exhausted.

• 11:21Chris Williamson?

  Someone or something that is highly fashionable. Afternoonified, I have to assume that that's because you only dress up in the afternoon, right? You're afternoonify.

• 11:30Jimmy Carr?

  Right.

• 11:31Chris Williamson?

  You wouldn't dress that way in the morning. You wouldn't just walk enough. Uh, chuckaboo.

• 11:37Chris Williamson?

  Chuckaboo, a dear friend. Dear friend, chuckaboo. Uh, giggle mug, someone who's always smiling. Uh, half rats. Bit drunk.

• 11:48Jimmy Carr?

  Half rats, okay.

• 11:49Chris Williamson?

  Half rats.

• 11:50Jimmy Carr?

  Not rat ass, just half, half rats.

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  Uh, evening wheezes. This should be brought back. Evening wheezes should be brought back. Means fake news.

• 11:57Jimmy Carr?

  Ah.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  It's evening wheezes. Uh, and apparently, it's champagne weather, means it's pouring or raining.

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  Coffee sisters mean besties. So there we go. Some Victorian slang for you.

• 12:09Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it is interesting, like, language, like, to talk about this, because that's the same language, that's the English language that we still use. And those words have gone. You never notice when something disappears, because it disappears, kind of becomes forgotten. But the idea that it's the best example of anarchy, the political system of anarchy, is the English language. There's no central system for it. No one sits down and goes, that's a word, that's not a word, we're changing the meaning of that. It just organically, sort of emergent from the group. It's kind of perfect. And I think a lot of solutions are like that. You can't, you can't do it from top down. It just has to, sort of, let it happen.

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  What do you, I mean, you spend your entire time playing with the English language. What have you come to think about, sort of, how it's developed recently?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  How it's developed? I don't, I don't, I don't like new words. I mean, this is slightly tangential to the question, but if I, if I was on a date, for example, and someone was using lots of new vernacular and new words, I would say, it's been a great night, you know? That's what I'd say. I, I think, um, simple words are the best words, best, but, what's the, what's the phrase? Um, big things are best said in small words.

• 13:11Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it might be like a, a mark of intelligence. Like, if you can get across a complex idea to a five year old, great. And if, if you need incredibly complex language, you're some kind of huckster.

• 13:21Chris Williamson?

  You're selling some bullshit. You've got an issue with, like, lead speak, 21st century lead speak, and that would be if a lady wants to bag Harry Rye,

• 13:30Chris Williamson?

  she can't use too much modern slang.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  I think.

• 13:34Chris Williamson?

  So if she came out and started talking tickety-boo, that'd, that'd really get you going.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, I've watched Peep Show, so for any fans of that show, they know that word's a bit of a, bit of a turn off, but I, I think, I read once that the French started a revolution with free words, which are quite big words, but what was it? Egalité, liberté, fraternity, you know? And I, I don't think you need much more than that. You don't need much more than that to sell soap if the French are starting a revolution with, with just free words.

• 13:58Jimmy Carr?

  What's the best example of, um, compression? Or it's like the most simplest?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Jeez. Um.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  The best, the best example of compression?

• 14:09Jimmy Carr?

  Well, there's like a two word joke, dwarf shortage.

• 14:13Jimmy Carr?

  And I had a three word joke, which was stationary stall moves.

• 14:18Chris Williamson?

  He had the six word story.

• 14:19Jimmy Carr?

  Oh, yeah. For sale.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:21Jimmy Carr?

  Children's shoes, never worn.

• 14:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 14:24Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, brilliant.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  How do you think about words, Jimmy, in comedy? Do you think some words are just funny? Or do you obsess about word choice when you're writing a joke?

• 14:32Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I really do. I really think it's, it's kind of, uh, the phrasing, it's more the rhythm of it, but sometimes it's the, um, uh, the phrasing, like, having the right word for the thing and, and conjuring up an image is very important in people's heads. So you've got the kind of concept that you, you kind of, oh, I know this thing's funny, how do I get that across to someone else? So it's about that language, the, the, the purpose of language, of like conveying, like, getting space in their head. Getting into their head and making them kind of, making them draw the cartoon.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you have stepdads? Motherfuckers.

• 15:04Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Chris Williamson?

  That's good.

• 15:06Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Stepdad, I like the term stepdad, I prefer to say motherfucker. Yeah. It's nice. Just take a moment to sort of step back from it and go, yes. It was right there. It was right there the whole time. I had a thing the other day that I just thought, how's no one got to this before? We're talking about that Donald Trump came up. I said, yeah, they tried to assassinate him. And, and they very nearly did kill him, because no one could warn him, because no one wanted to sound stupid. No one wanted to shout, Donald, duck.

• 15:29Chris Williamson?

  Very good. That's good.

• 15:30Jimmy Carr?

  It was right there, but you go, how did no one?

• 15:32Chris Williamson?

  Palm of everyone's hands.

• 15:33Jimmy Carr?

  How did no one see that?

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:35Jimmy Carr?

  Sometimes, sometimes it feels like the joke is there, you're just like, getting, getting rid of everything else.

• 15:39Chris Williamson?

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• 16:23Chris Williamson?

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• 16:34Jimmy Carr?

  It's interesting how you have these, you can even explain some of these techniques, yet they still work. So one we discussed is the A B B A. So it'll be, it's not about the, uh, days in your life, it's the life in your days. Or Churchill's, um, yes, alcohol's taken a lot out of me, but I've taken more out of alcohol. Or you have JFKs, don't ask what, uh, your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. And you'll see this A B B A pattern, and it still works, even when you know it, even when you know it's coming, it still works.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  There's one in advertising, like, everyone will know it, just beans means heightened, but just changing all of the last letters to be a Z was just the most genius.

• 17:16Jimmy Carr?

  But that's, that's another example, when you do things in threes. So again, another one, you ever heard the, uh, Winston Churchill speech during World War II where he talks about, this is when he comes in, and he refers to, I have nothing to give but blood, sweat and tears. What's interesting is he didn't say that. He said, I have nothing to give but blood, sweat, toil and tears. But because we like threes, it just, it disappears. And you constantly see this, whenever anybody actually makes a four way statement. Although, you look at the unit, you go, he didn't toil much, did he? Big, big fellow.

• 17:46Chris Williamson?

  Big old boy. What have you got? Do you bring something from?

• 17:48Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I've got some stuff from home. Were we meant to bring stuff?

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 17:53Jimmy Carr?

  I'm so sorry.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  No, I'm joking.

• 17:54Jimmy Carr?

  Okay, what have you got? So, we've, do you, do you recognize what this is?

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna have to lift it. Put it on the table for the class, guys.

• 18:03Jimmy Carr?

  Okay.

• 18:03Chris Williamson?

  What, do you want it here?

• 18:04Jimmy Carr?

  So this is.

• 18:04Chris Williamson?

  Just, uh, yeah, that looks perfect. That's lovely. Thank you.

• 18:08Jimmy Carr?

  Do you recognize what this is? Yes, it's, I would say it's the woods.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Some woods, British woods.

• 18:13Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, Britain. So this is Charles Darwin's thinking path that he built around his house. So whenever Darwin was stuck on a problem, he would go on a walk around his thinking path, and he would collect, he'd have stones, uh, like racked up that he would knock off to kind of figure out how many rounds that he's done. His kids would sometimes fuck with him and like put the stones back on whilst he was walking around. So Darwin used to use this thinking path regularly.

• 18:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay, he had 10 kids as well, so there's a lot of ass, a lot of kids to.

• 18:43Jimmy Carr?

  Do we know what this is?

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

  So say Yusef, Yusef kidnapped Chase, Arthur Eames, Lim Cup. Oh, it's Christopher Nolan's Inception.

• 18:54George Mack?

  Correct. This is, so Christopher Nolan was working on Inception for 10 years. And one of the things he did was to actually draw the plot down. So you see the five part dream plot that he visualized here. Do you know what this is? Yes, but I'm not going to say it. Do you guys know what it is?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Um, it looks like my, uh, my diary when I was in school, almost, you know, it's, I don't know.

• 19:17Jimmy Carr?

  Uh, no idea.

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that J K Rowling's?

• 19:19George Mack?

  When J K Rowling was stuck on Harry Potter, she, uh, turned it into a spreadsheet. This is the fifth Harry Potter, like the entire storytelling sequence into a spreadsheet.

• 19:27Jimmy Carr?

  Is that, and how did that work out? Was it, is it?

• 19:30George Mack?

  All right.

• 19:31Jimmy Carr?

  Cool.

• 19:31George Mack?

  This.

• 19:33Chris Williamson?

  I think, does that say at the top?

• 19:35George Mack?

  Yeah, it says, I think, and then it has a little diagram.

• 19:37Chris Williamson?

  Therefore I am.

• 19:39George Mack?

  Back, no, back to, uh, Mr. Charles Darwin earlier. This is when he opened his red notebook and drew out kind of his first thoughts around what evolution is, like the family trees or how it all interconnects.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 19:53George Mack?

  And then. Anybody know what this pub is? Jimmy, this looks like one of yours. Yeah, I know. This looks like.

• 19:58Jimmy Carr?

  The Eagle and Child.

• 19:59Chris Williamson?

  It's not the pub in Oxford, is it?

• 20:01George Mack?

  Yes, it is.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  Is it the pub in Oxford?

• 20:02George Mack?

  Yes, correct.

• 20:03Jimmy Carr?

  Where all the great myths of the 20th century were written.

• 20:06George Mack?

  Pretty much. So.

• 20:07Jimmy Carr?

  So it's Lord of the Rings, um, C S Lewis.

• 20:10George Mack?

  Yes. It's where J R Tolkien and C S Lewis used to meet up, have a pint. Tolkien would give C S Lewis his draft of the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. C S Lewis would give Tolkien his draft of, of Narnia or whatever he was working on. They would both read it out loud and then roast one another over a pint.

• 20:27Jimmy Carr?

  Hey, do you want to know an interesting, here's an interesting tangential factor there? So I only found this out recently. So Finnegan's Wake is a book that I've read around a lot. I haven't read Finnegan's Wake, but I read about it a lot. It's kind of the great work of literature. It's, uh, well, James Joyce, obviously. So I didn't realize that Finnegan's Wake is Star Wars.

• 20:47Jimmy Carr?

  So, uh, Joseph Campbell, you've heard of Joseph Campbell, The Hero Has A Thousand Faces, uh, The Hero's Journey, all of those kind of great books that informed Star Wars. Basically, Star Wars is a sort of dumbed down version of those books. Well, before Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero's Journey, his thesis was on the myths within James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

• 21:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 21:08Jimmy Carr?

  So he basically wrote that first and then he, he thought, oh, this is really good, this thesis. I'm going to make this into a book about the heroes that are in all stories. And so it's kind of James Joyce and then it's, uh, Joseph Campbell and then it's George Lucas.

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  So James Joyce is actually the root of this.

• 21:25Jimmy Carr?

  Yes, it's a distilled version of these things.

• 21:27Chris Williamson?

  That's brilliant. I had Alex Petkus on the show and he did a breakdown of The Odyssey, but because he can read the original Greek, he's able to get much, uh, more, a rich explanation of what's going on because sometimes words have multiple different meanings.

• 21:42Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Chris Williamson?

  And he's digging into that. It was so good, so fantastic. And you see even in that there's turns, there's a descent and I'm asking him at each point, okay, so using, you know, Campbell's idea, which was like 2000, 3000, two and a half thousand years later, something like that, uh, at what point on the clock face are we here? As he goes around and sure enough, even back then, even the first book ever written, the first thing ever written down, before that it was all verbal story writing.

• 22:09Jimmy Carr?

  Gilgamesh, wasn't it? It's the myth of Gilgamesh is a bit older.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  Maybe.

• 22:13Jimmy Carr?

  Slightly. Not to contradict you on your own podcast, but you know.

• 22:15Chris Williamson?

  I mean, feel free. Uh, just to go back to that, isn't it interesting, just hold this up for a second? Um, The Eagle and Child, pub in Oxford, where C S Lewis and Tolkien would meet up to roast each other about their fiction. Meanwhile, you two nerds at fucking Lifetime, over a smoothie, over a honey berry smoothie. English have lost their way.

• 22:37George Mack?

  My point of bringing these is I'm working on a, a chapter called, um, it's around of thinking, uh, we've discussed it before. Essentially the premise is, uh, don't think with your head, think with your, uh, feet, your hands or your mouth. So a few different premises on that. There's a few, I didn't include that. So Dickens would, when he was struggling with insomnia and writer's block, would do what his friends described as violent walking. He would walk 20 to 30 miles. Uh, Travis Kalanick, when he was creating Uber, he had a, um, a racing track built in the office. They would do walking meetings and be constantly walking around, which is 60 miles a week.

• 23:12Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, you can't get a car.

• 23:13George Mack?

  There we go. Um, and then, uh, going back to thinking with your math, uh, if you go to the bottom of, uh, Mike, uh, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, the paper he published about 25 pages, he credits nobody, but he says thank you to one person, which is, uh, Michael Besso, who was his friend that he would walk around and talk with. One day as he's talking it out loud, his friend, he comes up with this idea. That's why Harry's like, I call him my Besso as a result, because you having those people to talk to. But I wanted to kind of, uh, maybe explain like, why do I think this is going on? I think you might be the Einstein. He might be.

• 23:51George Mack?

  Jury's out. Don't take that. I'll take it. I'll, I'll be a Besso. I'll be a Besso. So, um, I went to visualize something that's under discussed.

• 24:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 24:01George Mack?

  Right. Which is.

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  Spend that a little more for me?

• 24:03George Mack?

  This idea here, um, which is kind of human step count throughout, like your great, great, great N times 100, just goes like this. And then suddenly you have kind of the agricultural revolution here and it just completely plummets. Like, and then you kind of go down to 10,000 and I, we're currently, the average is around about 5,000. What's interesting, 18,000 for men was the like average step count for hunter gatherers. We estimate about 15,000 for women. Interestingly, they said, how do you get that data? One way you can look at it is with, um, uh, what's the, um, the current people that are rejecting technology that forgot? Amish, Amish. So the Amish, they look at the number of steps the Amish do per day to kind of.

• 24:44Chris Williamson?

  Surely Amish life is slightly different to 300, 300,000 B C.

• 24:48George Mack?

  Hunter gatherer. They look at a few different things in terms of like walking distances, but that's one of the, uh, the gauges that.

• 24:54Jimmy Carr?

  Do you think it might be the same amount of steps in a lifetime? But they're getting them in early because they die at 35.

• 25:01Jimmy Carr?

  Cause they're all.

• 25:02Chris Williamson?

  It does net down to the same number of steps overall.

• 25:05Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, you've got a certain amount of steps in you and that's it.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  That's Roger Federer's got this canister theory, which was, cause he had a couple of years out. Basically it's like, he got interviewed, I think it was more than 2019 and he was like, like, I still got stuff in the canister. Cause he didn't play, no, he didn't play in 18, I don't think. And it was this idea that a tennis player just has a canister, which they can either burn it out like Nick Kyrgios and just actually he didn't play much, but like more like in the dark. And then the canister, here at the end of the game.

• 25:29Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I, I like that idea of like in relationships, thinking about reservoir of goodwill. So you build up a reservoir of goodwill early in a relationship in the kind of honeymoon period, and then you can spend it later on. So like, how many, how many fights could a friendship survive? Could a relationship survive? And it's all about how much you've stacked up. So you're stacking up those good memories, those good times, and then you've got that reserve that you kind of eat into in the relationship. It's quite a nice way to think about it. Cause you kind of go through hard times with someone and you go, actually it's all right, because we've done a lot of stuff in the past. Whereas if it's someone you've just met, you go, fuck this noise.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah. It's like paying into a bank account.

• 26:02Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  If you haven't deposited much and you can't withdraw much before it goes into the bank.

• 26:05Jimmy Carr?

  But I think people think about friendships in that way, whereas you go, kind of friendships are, they're incredibly important. I, I sort of think every argument between a couple is one person saying to another person, you are not enough people. The best relationship advice is invest in your friends. Your partner will be fine. Go out and talk to your friends and then come home and listen.

• 26:24Jimmy Carr?

  But people don't have that. They think one person's going to be there everything.

• 26:26Chris Williamson?

  I think one of the problems of talking about friendships like that is it makes it sound quite transactional and it gives people a little bit of an ick.

• 26:34Jimmy Carr?

  A hundred percent.

• 26:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, you, there's supposed to be something, loyalty is not just if this person can add to my life. Alex had this line where he imagined that one of his friends asked him, he'd, he'd broken down his car, he got a flat tire in his car. He was five blocks away. Will you come and help me? And Alex would just ring a roadside assistant to go and see him. And he was like, well, that means that I can do what I want to do. My friend gets a better quality of service. But what it forgets is that he's not just saying, can you fix my tire? It's will you give me your time and your support? But Alex sort of remained staunch. He's like the, the most like utilitarian when it comes to a friend.

• 27:14Jimmy Carr?

  I've been thinking about this recently, like, cause so much education is now done by YouTube, right? So if you learn how to shave, and we've all got differing abilities here, um, but you learn how to shave, you do it with a YouTube tutorial now, but you miss the intimacy of going to a father or, uh, you know, an older friend and go, how do I actually do this thing? And I don't know what's lost there, but like you would think that the aim is to shave.

• 27:37George Mack?

  But it isn't.

• 27:38Jimmy Carr?

  It's like a little communal moment.

• 27:39George Mack?

  It's not. Sean has this wonderful idea and I tried, you know, we was talking, uh, last time around what we call like hyper meta, which is this idea that the ancient Greeks or Romans, rather than scroll a news feed every day or read a new book or listen to a new audio book, they would have principles that they want to take seriously. So they'd go back and review them way more versus forgetting everything. And one of mine would be from Sean, which is that idea he talks about, just delete the scoreboard. So like, a lot of people go into the start of a relationship, kind of game theory 101, where it's like, I'm at zero, Christopher is at zero and I wait, wait, wait, Chris, Chris will do something. Tick, tack.

• 28:14Chris Williamson?

  But you understand, you understand why this, the scoreboard is there to measure an imbalance and injustice and.

• 28:21George Mack?

  Delete the scoreboard. Just give, give.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 28:23George Mack?

  Okay. You get taken advantage by a few sociopaths.

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  I don't think you're even going to get taken advantage. I don't think you need to be a sociopath to take advantage of somebody inside of a relationship. Like, let's say you can get into a relationship with somebody and like an intimate relationship, this is maybe going to be your new wife for the rest of time. And she keeps on turning up late. She keeps on disrespecting you and you're like, no, just give, give, give, give, give, continue. Right. But within reason completely defeats.

• 28:47George Mack?

  Like when I say, but no decisions rather than experiments. And somebody's like, well, I'm going to shoot up a load of heroin and I'm going to punch a police officer in the face within reason. And I'm talking about people that air one way. So if you air naturally towards the, I'm going to wait for this person, then I'm going to mirror and then I'm going to mirror.

• 29:01Jimmy Carr?

  I, I think I'm with you. I think it's the, you can't win an argument with your wife.

• 29:06Chris Williamson?

  Everybody loses.

• 29:06Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, because if you win, you lose. Everyone's in a bad mood. So that thing of like going and relationships are transactional, right? There is a, there's, there's like codes of conduct that you, you expect within it. And that's, that's kind of, that's okay.

• 29:18George Mack?

  But then I think if you just get, if you enjoy the act of giving, then just, just give, give, give. And I do think you end up way, you end up, the other person ends up giving way more because you just push it so far. And listen, if you're fifty nil up, then yeah, walk away. But until you get to fifty nil, just keep giving. It's a way better way to live.

• 29:34Jimmy Carr?

  I think it is more, yeah, it's more enjoyable.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  But there is also, there is also no fifty nil. Like I, there is no fifty nil.

• 29:40George Mack?

  Exactly.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  You know, as soon as, yeah, I, I agree with you as well. I think once you decide, I think you have to make a decision in life. And then once you've, once you've made a decision, then you've got to make that decision right. And I think people kind of sort of waste a lot of time in this space of like, I can't decide, I can't decide. And that's when maybe the scoreboard is pinging off, pinging off. But once you've decided, then you're the same, like you're the same person.

• 30:00Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, the, I, I saw Alex Hormozi, he's up on the wall there. On, we met for the first time this weekend. I was in Las Vegas and I kind of know him, like we've spoken on Zoom and I, I know a lot of his work. But I met him for the first time and it was that, that kind of thing that he has this, this sort of theory on, like that, that thing about, his, his new theory is about optionality. And the idea that people are, are getting all the options they can. They want, they want optionality on everything. So they, they get five degrees and they train and they're ready for everything. They're ready for options. But until you cash in those options, it's meaningless.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:31Jimmy Carr?

  I think it's kind of a genius idea of like, at some stage, you, you, you go with what you've got now, or you don't go at all. Do what you can with what you've got where you are.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:39Jimmy Carr?

  Or you just, it's like, otherwise you're like forty and waiting for something to happen.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  So, so George kind of decided at one point in our, in our interactions that we were friends. I don't know when it happened, but at one point George just decided that we were friends. And then he started, he started just, I mean, I, I, I would say you're, I would say if I was to describe you, I would talk about your generosity. And it feels kind of weird to, to speak highly of you because I've been abusing you a week. But you're, I like you're an incredibly generous guy. And I think that like, you know, I don't think there's any expectation of, of anything which comes with that. You just kind of, like I touched down in Austin, Airbnb sorted, you know, I touched down, it's just, I think it's a lovely way to live. And I do think there is a point where it's Chris is like, yeah, if someone, if you, it's a feeling, as soon as the feeling goes.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

  So that's my, that's my point on the, not needing to turn it into the metric. Why is it that we like to hang around with some people and we don't like to hang around with others? It's that there is some form, and this would be Alex's argument. And I'm, if you're on one end and Alex is on the other, I'm somewhere in the middle. Alex's point would be, you are tracking a scoreboard, whether you're doing it mentally or not. And the scoreboard is the vibe of how you feel around somebody. We have friends that we've stopped hanging out with because we're like, I just don't feel like this vibe is,

• 31:55Chris Williamson?

  the scales don't feel like they're balanced, regardless of whether or not you're keeping count. And I do think that that's true.

• 32:00George Mack?

  My, my rule of thumb is that awful line of like, you're the average of the five people you hang around with.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  Incredible.

• 32:07George Mack?

  I think in essence.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  Average of the five podcasts you listen to the most.

• 32:11George Mack?

  Then what ends up happening is you have this, you're always trying to fuck upwards if you follow that approach anyway. Which means that by definition, that why, why should those people hang out with you? I think a better rule of thumb is forget how much money they have, forget what they've achieved. I, surround yourself with who you feel most alive with. So I don't care if, if someone's a poet that's broken, if I hang out with them and I feel alive. It's way more interesting than a billionaire where you feel dead behind the eyes after hanging out, but a lifeless is probably the best metric.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  So I still think that you are the average, you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with is fine. It's just what is the metric that you're optimizing for? Because some people might want to be in a room with people that have got the highest net worth or are the most well-known and highest status, whatever. But it can just be, and ultimately what it comes back to is if you ask enough why questions, I just want to feel good. I want to feel good around these people.

• 33:00Jimmy Carr?

  I don't know. It's a, it's a weird thing on what a friendship's for. And I don't think friendships really pay out until the bad days, right? So you, you have a really bad day before you know what a friend is. Because on good days, it's fine. Everything's fine. We can hang out with anyone. It doesn't matter. They're giving, they're taking. It doesn't matter. When you have a bad day, like if you get cancelled, which I have been a number of times, like it's a filter. It's such a great filter. It's like a gift being cancelled because at the end of it, you end up with fewer friends, but much better ones. And it's the foul weather, friends. It's the guys that call on the bad day.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:32Jimmy Carr?

  That's what really matters. And that's what you, ultimately, I think somewhere at a deeper level, we're solving for that. We're solving for, well, if things get bad, who could I actually rely on?

• 33:40Chris Williamson?

  This person stay with me in the trenches.

• 33:42Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 33:42George Mack?

  What's the, when it comes to like cancellation or public criticism, what's the idea that's kind of non-obvious that you only appreciate? Apart from that, once you've gone further, that most people wouldn't understand.

• 33:53Jimmy Carr?

  Uh, I think it's, the, the impermanence of it is, is interesting. And the, the idea that you go, is anyone going to care about this in a month or a year? Or, and if no one's going to care in a year, why do you care now?

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Jose's got this line, he says, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. And I quite like it.

• 34:11Chris Williamson?

  Mourinho.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  You just quoted, that's the first ever Jose Mourinho quote.

• 34:18Jimmy Carr?

  It's good though, isn't it? It's like, it's, it is, it's that thing where you go, it's, it's a real sort of test. It's character versus reputation, because your reputation is being destroyed and your character is who you know you are.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  What was the, what was the loveliest text or call you had? Like who was there for you?

• 34:33Jimmy Carr?

  Uh, there was a few. There was, James Corden would really stand out. So when I got, it was the tax thing actually, and, and he was in Broadway. He was busy winning a, a Tony for his performance in One Man Two Governors. And he called me every night on, in his interval of his show. And he just called me and then he called me and I said, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, but, and then he called me the next night. Cause he knew it wasn't. And then he called me the next night because he knew it wasn't. And he just kept on calling.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 34:54Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. It's a, it's a lovely thing. And when you've sort of, it just, and all it teaches you is like, I can't do that for him, but I could do that for someone else. And, and when it comes along, that thing of like being the person that calls when something awkward happens, or when something terrible happens. Phoning and saying, I don't know what to say, but I thought I'd call. Because no one remembers what you're saying.

• 35:13Chris Williamson?

  I think it's a.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Remember you with that.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

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• 35:56Chris Williamson?

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• 36:21Speaker 02

  I, I think it's just a lovely thing when people do stuff for you, which there can be zero ulterior motive. There, there literally can be. I'm trying to think of a good.

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  I'll give you, I can give you one from my life. So this was the moment that I became like properly, properly good friends with Youssef. So, um, for the people that are within the last 600 episodes of the show, he only appears once a year. But he was most of the episodes for the first 400 with Johnny. And, um, he had hurt his back. He has a, like a bulging disc. He'd hurt his back in the gym doing flips or deadlifting or whatever he was doing at the time. And I was on my way to drive to one of our club nights. And his house was like kind of out of the way, but not a million miles off. So I was like, I'll, I'll, I'll come over and I'll bring you something. Cause I know what it's like debilitating back pain. You're sort of laid up and he's like, no, no, you don't need to come and see me. Anyway, I managed to get into his house and brought him a loaf of saurine, some Ibiliv, some Neuraphen.

• 37:14Chris Williamson?

  And like went and got a hot water bottle for him and like, he couldn't move. But he just, the classic male denial of medical problems or whatever. And he's 25, right? He's made of rubber and magic. He'll bounce back. He'll be fine. But he was just miserable and it felt like it sucked. And that was a palpable moment when our friendship changed. And that, even though we were really good friends before, I could just tell that there was something that happened at that moment. When I decided to go around with some malt loaf and pain relievers and a hot water bottle and was like, all right, man, I gotta go. And be in a nightclub with a thousand 18 year olds. Like I'll, I, I hope you're all right. And then he messaged, he sent me this text afterwards, like being teary and being like, man, that was just how wonderful, like what a lovely thing to do.

• 37:55Chris Williamson?

  You are right. Like especially in a world where everybody is looking out for the transaction, where, uh, effort can be so low effort. Right? Like just sending a text. I think the bar has been lowered for what constitutes becoming a very good friend. Like you got me for my birthday one time, you got me a newspaper from the day that I was born. And a printed off graph of the first episode and the biggest episode with the play count in between it. And I was never, I couldn't even take, it was left in Mike Thurston's apartment in Dubai for like two years. Cause I couldn't fly back with it because it was so big. Um, but like stuff like that, you know, it's just, it's, it's really.

• 38:31George Mack?

  Being, yeah, being better at just aggressively going, give, give, give and figure out the next life.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

  Aggressive friendship.

• 38:37George Mack?

  And figure out the next life.

• 38:38Chris Williamson?

  But isn't this a BDSM friendship?

• 38:40Jimmy Carr?

  You're often very good on this kind of stuff, right? You pointed out this, I thought about this a lot, right? There's a lot of books about being a good parent, but there's no books about being a good kid. Right? Which is kind of interesting, right? And there's, and really it should be a book about being a family. But it's interesting. There's loads of books. There's, you know, kind of the game and stuff about pickup culture. And finding women and getting women, great. But there's very little about friendship. And actually that seems to be the thing that I think friendship is upstream of having a relationship. I think it's not gay to practice on your friends. But that thing of like building friendships and building kind of, and that's kind of what's missing from, you know, rough and tumble play has been replaced by video games. And it's, it, it doesn't work in the same way. Like there's something about like that male friendship thing and building that up.

• 39:24Jimmy Carr?

  Over years, having your boys, having your guys that you're with, that's really incredibly valuable. And we, we don't do enough of it.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  Robin Dunbar's got this insight. See, he was the guy that came up with the 150 number.

• 39:33Jimmy Carr?

  I interviewed him once. He's brilliant.

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  He's fantastic. And, uh, he says that you have your close group of friends, which is five, in a slot, five very close friends. But a relationship takes up two.

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  Relationship takes a two of the slot of five. And that would also mean that if you lose the relationship and you want to keep that same level of connection, you can't just replace your chick with a new friend, you probably need to replace them with two.

• 39:58Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, well, it's also that thing of like, men tend not to do very well post divorce because they outsource their social life to their other half.

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 40:05Jimmy Carr?

  So then it's

• 40:05Chris Williamson?

  The wife and the friend.

• 40:06Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, they're entirely isolated afterwards, which is a terrible way to be. Robert Dunbar, we hit. Go on, you were gonna say something there.

• 40:13George Mack?

  I've lost my train of thought now, but I think, you know, I always think of, I think a lot of what we're discussing as well, I wonder if the American audience appreciates it as much as the British.

• 40:24Chris Williamson?

  Because they're so giving, dude. They're so, Americans don't understand just how pro-social they are. Like, you can be on the side of the lake. This happened, this happened the other week when we went to the Jasper Mike's house, and I was on the side of the lake and a boat just went by. Well, do you want to come wake surfing? Like, they didn't know me. Like, yeah, sure. Went wake surfing. Like, that just, you would need, in order to get to that level of friendliness, that would be a three-year project in the UK in order to warrant being invited on to this thing that was part and back. I don't know, maybe it's because everyone's a, it might be an Austin thing, because everyone's kind of a social transplant from somewhere else, or it might be an America thing, because

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  everyone's a cultural transplant, you know, sort of historically from somewhere else. But I don't know.

• 41:13George Mack?

  I notice there's three types of interactions I'd have with strangers. So, interaction one would be stranger would just not look at me. Interaction two would be, we'd mirror one of others' energies, or you give a nod. And then you'd have somebody who actually says something. I realised, a lot of the time, I'd just like mirror. So somebody, I'd kind of head down. Somebody says hello and I'll say hello back. Somebody gives me a nod, I'll give them a nod back. And if they have their head down, I'll have my head down. Versus, oh, you can just, you can just do things.

• 41:41Chris Williamson?

  You can be the leader. You're using the proportionate force of like, being in a fight. So, well, if he's got a knife, I can use a knife. But you just always use a gun.

• 41:50George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do wonder if, we're trying to coin this

• 41:54Jimmy Carr?

  Welcome to Texas.

• 41:56George Mack?

  Coin this term, which is a British syndrome. And America syndrome's another thing. But British syndrome, I was out for dinner the other night with a friend of mine, and he's had this employee that he's kind of complained about for the last six weeks, like issues he's trying to get him to do. When he finally sits down at dinner, he goes, I've realised he's not low agency, he's just British.

• 42:18Jimmy Carr?

  Well, you had that, you had a great razor for that on, I think it was you. Yeah, it was. Like, British versus America. So you go, the British disease is cynicism, and the American disease is bullshit. Yeah, which is, I mean, it's great. There's a great comic, Jeff Green. Do you have no Jeff Green? Great observational comic.

• 42:33George Mack?

  Not sure.

• 42:33Jimmy Carr?

  He said, I prefer America to Britain. I'd rather be told to have a nice day, but by someone that doesn't mean it, than told to fuck off by someone that does.

• 42:41Jimmy Carr?

  Jeff Green. Great, great comic.

• 42:44George Mack?

  So, I have a whole of them, which is whenever I criticize Britain, but criticize America as a return, or compliment Britain.

• 42:49Chris Williamson?

  Sounds like you're keeping score.

• 42:51George Mack?

  I was thinking, do we, have we ever had like an Elizabeth Holmes, a Sam Bankman-Friedman?

• 42:58Speaker 02

  I think we're just not playing at that level. I think that's the reason why.

• 43:02Chris Williamson?

  The level of brazenness that you need

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:05Chris Williamson?

  to pull that off. I don't think any British person, except maybe Gary Stevenson, has enough self-belief to be able to drive that home.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  You need to have banks to rob them.

• 43:16Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's a good point. Just trying to give it like a great huckster in the UK.

• 43:22George Mack?

  That's what I mean.

• 43:24Chris Williamson?

  A great

• 43:24Jimmy Carr?

  Daff in the market. We should do it.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  I feel like Andrew's kind of hovering over that area, but that's the British huckster.

• 43:31George Mack?

  Who?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Andrew, Prince Andrew.

• 43:33George Mack?

  Oh, the OG Andrew.

• 43:35Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Mountbatten.

• 43:37George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  I got in a lift in, I was in Austin last year and I started, I got, I got in lifts, they call them elevators. Or, do we call them elevators? One of us calls them elevators.

• 43:46Chris Williamson?

  We call it a lift, they call it

• 43:47Speaker 02

  They call them elevators. Getting in these elevators or lifts, and I'd say, people started asking me what number I was on the elevator. Six, I'd say, punching six. And I thought, I'll come back to England and I'll, I'll try this out. So, two Marine Road, probably shouldn't have said that. Into the elevator I go, the lift I go, I say, hey, what, what, what number, what number would you like? And I say, number? I say, yeah. Some people say number, some people, it's headphones on, and it's a, it's a starkly different experience. Having said that, I also learnt about the Californian lunch. Well, I've never been to California, but apparently if you go to California, everyone says they want to have lunch with you.

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  But they don't actually want to have lunch with you.

• 44:30Jimmy Carr?

  Right, yeah. I remember a friend of mine saying to me, you know, I was in Hollywood and they said, be careful, you could die of encouragement.

• 44:39Jimmy Carr?

  It's just, everything's very positive.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Jimmy, how do you, is this, how do you, I feel like there's two different ways into, like, creating stuff.

• 44:47Jimmy Carr?

  Right.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  And I feel like there's the volume method, which is like, I'm just gonna write a lot of jokes, and some of them are gonna be good. And that's sort of Prince, when he was recording music, would just make a lot of, he'd record a song a day, you know. And then there's like, the Leonard Cohen approach, if I'm gonna spend five years on Hallelujah, I'm gonna write 80 verses. And I wonder in comedy, are you more like, I'm just gonna write, write, write, and some jokes are gonna stick? Or I'm gonna, I'm gonna work on one joke for a good, for a good couple of days?

• 45:17Jimmy Carr?

  No, I find, I don't find working on them really helps. It's like, they come out pretty much fully formed. And then I just, it's, it's iteration, it's just trying new things, and the audience tell you what's gonna work. So the audience feedback, the audience is a genius. They tell you what is and what isn't funny, and what is and what isn't acceptable. And you just go back to them time and time again. So at the end of the show, I still got it on me from last night, you got new jokes, and then you just try the new things and

• 45:40Speaker 02

  That's like how you're writing your book, George, almost.

• 45:42George Mack?

  Yeah. Do you set yourself a number of jokes to write? Is it like that, or?

• 45:46Jimmy Carr?

  Not really. I mean, there's always like, there's always new stuff to try. There's always like, I've got a file, it's huge. They're like, okay, and a print off, okay, I'll try 10 tonight. And then the next 10. And then you sort of, maybe you tweak them a little bit, but it's not a full kind of rewrite. You might tweak it a little bit. If you go, I didn't really got that at all, and that wasn't clear enough. But it's very rare that you tell a joke and it doesn't work, and you can rescue it with a rewrite. It tends to be just, the idea's just not there. And if they're immediate, then that's, and you're looking for the triple As. You're looking for the ones that are gonna work every single time, no matter how you deliver them. You're looking for that kind of quality. So the idea of like, polishing something's kind of a different, sometimes it's like, you change the wording a little bit and it perfects it.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember Jason Fried said this about writing. He said, if I write, if I write it down and it just doesn't, it's not feeling right, he said, I'm not, I'm not gonna come back to it, I'm not gonna rewrite it, I'm just gonna leave it, start again the next day. And it's like a different route in, which is funny, because I have a very different, I don't particularly work like that.

• 46:41Jimmy Carr?

  Did you ever hear the Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen story? When they met up, they met up for lunch, and they, he talked about

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Hallelujah, 80 verses, four years or whatever.

• 46:51Jimmy Carr?

  No, no, it was like, it was, Bob Dylan went, I think he said, he said, how long did it take you to write All Along the Watchtower? And Bob Dylan said, 20 minutes. And he said, how long did it take you to write Hallelujah? And he said, 12 years, because he was embarrassed that it had been 20. But it was like, it's a long time.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:09Jimmy Carr?

  So what's your process? Do you, you sit and?

• 47:12Speaker 02

  I like writing. I think that you can't really write, you can only rewrite. So I, I guess I'm not writing jokes, you know.

• 47:18Jimmy Carr?

  But is that, but that thing of like, you can't write, you can only rewrite, like, I think the idea of doing, you do masses of stuff. I think the reason most people don't succeed in the arts is because they get into it because they like really good stuff. They've got great taste. But then they don't stick around long enough to be able to produce good stuff.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  If I was

• 47:33Jimmy Carr?

  It's like, you start bad and then you get, you get good over time.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  If I was gonna give one piece of advice to anyone trying to learn to write, I would say, honestly, I would, I would forget quantity, and I would think about trying to genuinely write one good sentence, or maybe even two, and then maybe just a good paragraph. And I feel like the real problem is, people can go their whole careers without actually writing anything good. And what you really need to do is you need to understand what it's like to write just one thing really good. Because a great book is just like, it's a lot of great sentences, which then form paragraphs and whatnot. And I remember, who was it?

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Hunter S. Thompson, he rewrote The Great Gatsby. Just, just to know what it felt like to write a good book. And I do think there's something in there.

• 48:11George Mack?

  But if he rewrote

• 48:12Speaker 02

  But by hand, yeah. Just to get the feeling of extraordinary.

• 48:16George Mack?

  I have a collection of, you've seen it, the folder of what I like about what I like, and I've turned it into an app as well, where it's like, starts, intros, middles, ends, quotes, reference setups. What was the Orwell's five rules that you keep banging on about?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  I only bang on about them when I read yours.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  I can't remember them. I think number one, actually, number one, I love, it's never put, never, actually, can we get on the internet? Can we click it up? First one is, I think the first one is just basically never put something in print which you've seen in print is the idea. So essentially, just avoid cliched all times. And I think, if you want to, if you want to quickly improve any essay, I would just, you could drop it into Claude, or you could just look at yourself and say, have I, have I seen this sentence been written down before? Well, like, I pulled you up, because you said, you said yesterday, I was editing your writing, and you said, what did you say about Churchill?

• 49:05George Mack?

  Something like during his darkest

• 49:06Speaker 02

  During his darkest days is a really great example of this. It's just been said, if you go to Google search and you put it in quotation marks, during his darkest days will have been said millions and millions of times. And it's, it's the debris of someone else's thinking. That's what a cliche is. And you really want to just write original sentences. If you read East of Eden by Steinbeck, it's the last sort of big book I read, and you drop his sentences into Google, no one said sentences like that, like the whole book. And I looked at the chapter you had, and you drop a couple of things into Google search, direct quotes, and it's just been said before.

• 49:35George Mack?

  Yes.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  It's a very good proxy for like, average writing, which your book's definitely not, but

• 49:39George Mack?

  Talking nervous, baby. What's the, drop it on the, this was one of the best ones you give me, the drop it on your foot idea?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Okay, so, this is really about going from abstract to, to concrete writing. So essentially, anything abstract, I'm trying to think of an example, is, yeah, so, let's say someone's writing, trying to come up with an app for, for fitness. And they said, I got an app, the idea is to regain your fitness. You can't, you can't really visualize regaining your fitness. And what you want to do is you want to take that and sort of convert it into objects, physical objects, which you can drop on your foot. So Chris, let's see how we go. Regain fitness. Drill into that, like, what, drill into regain, what, what do we mean? What could we mean by regain fitness? Give me an object. A start, give me a starting point and then, and an end point for regaining fitness.

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  Not loving your body to loving your body.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  You could drop a body on your foot, so that would be closer. What you could also drop on your foot would be a couch.

• 50:38Jimmy Carr?

  Well, so this is, yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  A couch.

• 50:40Jimmy Carr?

  Couch to five K.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Couch to five K, you know where this is going.

• 50:42Jimmy Carr?

  It's huge. That's the Nike thing, right? The, yeah, because it, it makes it real. You know, if you can, and, and people think in, um, uh, analogies, really, they, they can, you know, it's like that.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  If you can't see it, it's not there yet, is, is really good writing advice. So if you can't visualize it, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's not there yet.

• 51:01Jimmy Carr?

  That's a great kind of, I mean, that kind of ad copy as well, that you've kind of got that thing where it just feels like that was always going to be a hit. But it, but it wasn't, of course, they could have just called it the app.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  So Couch to Five K was done by a guy in, a guy in New York. I forgot his name, but he was living with his mum at the time. Like it was, it was sort of this crazy breakout application, which had no right to be. And I think then it got bought by the BBC and it's the most downloaded fitness app of all time. And that's like the, the, I think ideas are, but I, I feel like even ideas are somewhat underrated. Like you really just need the conviction to, to, to, to do them. And those two things together.

• 51:32Chris Williamson?

  There was a Nike advert, or Nike or an ad, I think Nike, uh, during the Boston Marathon. And it said, um, runners welcome, walkers tolerated.

• 51:48Chris Williamson?

  And it wa, it was great, but it was, the, the, uh, difference here was the taste of the direction it was going in. It was so effective and catchy. That all of the people who walked during the marathon, which is probably most people, most people are going to walk at some point. Uh, and I got into a lift, fuck me, in LA at the start of the year. And there was a woman wearing Hoka, uh, mid fifties, something like that. Nicely dressed, like fit mum women, like off to the gym or do whatever. And both of them were talking about how much they dislike Nike. Because, and both of them referenced that campaign. One of them was wearing Hoka's, the other was wearing Rads or something. And they said, oh yeah, that, that campaign was good. Runners welcome, walkers tolerated. They do, they're so, they're so out of touch now in any case.

• 52:31Chris Williamson?

  And they had this, everyone has a degree of, um, distaste for the top dog. I can't wait for that to, that, that fall to happen. And especially if you play the out of touch, I don't care about the everyman game. Like there's two things that are cohesing together there to like really move in the same direction. They've gotten so big, they've forgotten their roots. Right? It's like, it's a cliche. You're playing into a trope that makes it very easy for somebody to attack you. So, yeah, um, I think they put their.

• 52:59Jimmy Carr?

  There's like, there's, there's a few of those, aren't there? Kind of examples in marketing where people have absolutely shit the bed, like done really badly. Was, uh, was it Ratner, the jeweler in, in the UK? Was a guy called, who gave a speech where he said, oh, we just sell fucking tat. And it just shut down.

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Just in a single, in a single tweet. Keep going.

• 53:21Jimmy Carr?

  It was like, it wasn't a tweet even. It was like pre that. It was like an after dinner speech where it's just, that's just fucking shit that we sell.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it, you know, like, i- i- it's funny because let's say you have Ron Seal, the, um, the fence painter and they say, what do they say?

• 53:33Jimmy Carr?

  It does exactly what it says on the test.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  And that's, that's, it's different to just still in tat, but like, that's because the language of fence painters, that's, that's how they talk. Whereas jewelers, you know, they probably don't want, that don't want the word tat to be used as they look at their Rolex.

• 53:45Jimmy Carr?

  Doesn't this all just come down to your favorite word of position?

• 53:48Speaker 02

  A position.

• 53:49Chris Williamson?

  Here it is. Uh, the most famous UK example of a jewelry store saying their own product is bad is Gerald Ratner, CEO of Ratner's Group, who in nineteen ninety one, described his company's products as total crap. This caused a five hundred million pound loss in value and forced a rebranding to Signet Group. Another recent instance is complaints regarding the website Scarlet Jewels, which distinct from genuine Scarlet Jewelry, has received poor reviews. Yeah. Well, uh, his infamous speech stated that some of his earrings were cheaper than a prawn sandwich, but probably wouldn't last as long.

• 54:21Jimmy Carr?

  Pretty good, right?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  You've got one job, mate. That's really, you know.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Sell your tat.

• 54:26Jimmy Carr?

  That's gone, that's gone very badly.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Sell your tat.

• 54:28Jimmy Carr?

  It's interesting that thing of like industries that are like businesses, industries that disappear overnight. Like nineteen, I love the fact nineteen oh one, biggest industry in the world was, uh, whaling.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Whaling.

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Whale oil to light.

• 54:40Jimmy Carr?

  Whaling, catching whales. What's whaling? Catching whales.

• 54:44Chris Williamson?

  Selling the.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  They needed the oil in order to put the lamps, right? To, and then the light bulb comes along.

• 54:48Jimmy Carr?

  Whaling was the biggest industry in nineteen oh one and it had fully disappeared by nineteen oh three.

• 54:54Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, like there's whole towns and kind of just like shut down.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Well, fax machines are kind of like that. Fax machines go from everywhere to now and just the running the NHS and the trades.

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  Horses in New York, in Manhattan.

• 55:05Jimmy Carr?

  Horses in New York, yeah. And it's always the technology that's the, because they, they brought in so many laws to get rid of horses in New York. Cause the horse manure problem. You know, the reason there's steps up to brownstones in New York is because the horse shit was that high. And there's the whole thing of like smelling salts like people, because the whole place smelt horrific. It was just horse shit. And if the horses died, they had to chop them up, wait for them to atrophy, chop them up in the street and then cart them off using other horses who then died on the way. So the whole thing was just, it was a, an absolute mess. And they kept on bringing in new laws, new laws, new laws to try and get, you know, a tax on horses and other tax on horses. And then Henry Ford comes along, invents the motorcar and people go, yeah, we don't need horses.

• 55:42Chris Williamson?

  What, what do, what do you think's that now? What do you think five years, fifty years, a hundred years will be like, oh, it's gone?

• 55:49Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I think it's, it's a very interesting question because obviously the AI thing, we can see the jobs it's going to take, but we can't see the jobs it will create. But I, I, I wonder without whether.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  I think talk shows would be quite obvious point. I, I, is there still?

• 56:06Chris Williamson?

  Close to Jimmy's heart, careful.

• 56:07Jimmy Carr?

  No, no, I mean, that, that, I think you're, I think you're like the, from old media to, to new media. I think the, the idea that something like, you know, I love Saturday Night Live, but I can't see it being around in 10 years. Like the, I remember going to see a recording, uh, last year and just thought, wow, this is incredible. The amount of people to put this show on to make this happen. It was like, it was incre, really genuinely like spectacular. And then you just go, well, I can't imagine this being, they can't compete with people just doing funny sketches on their phone. Because the, the size of the screen seems to be inversely proportionate to the amount of money you can make. Hmm. So the movie business might not last.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  I think what's funny though is all the sketches on the phone, I, I can never, I can't really recall one. Whereas I think of carrot in the box, like A R ten cats, um, Sean Locke and I, I, I, I, you know, it's, it's, I, I think TV weirdly sticks. Like I, I can't remember.

• 56:56Jimmy Carr?

  Well, there's a great essay by, um, oh, who's the guy that wrote Abundance with, um?

• 57:00Chris Williamson?

  As reclined Derek Thompson.

• 57:01Jimmy Carr?

  Derek Thompson has a great podcast and he did this episode called, he wrote this essay called Everything is Television. And his argument was everything is television. Television won't disappear because, uh, TikTok is television. You don't, don't think of it in that way because it's streaming. YouTube is the biggest TV channel in the world. Uh, it's, of course it is. It's, it's television. Facebook is, Facebook isn't social media. People think it's like, but that would be for us to know each other and be sending videos to our family and sharing them with friends. That's kind of the, that's the idea. But the, the reality is people watching videos that other people have made that they don't know. That's television.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  It's a bit, it's a bit of a shame because Gavin and Stacy Christmas special was sort of, in my opinion, probably actually the World Cup somewhere right now. But the, the last time like the UK came together for, for a thing.

• 57:44Jimmy Carr?

  Why Christmas TV is such a big deal in the UK. I'm not sure what it's like in the States, but Christmas TV is a big deal. Not because it's better than the TV the rest of the year, but because people sit down as a family and want the big, watch the big fat quiz. And watching it together, it's just nicer to do things in a communal way. Like people used to gather around a fire and then around the radio and then around the TV. And it was all great. And then we went off to our bedrooms with our phones.

• 58:06Chris Williamson?

  A more, a more communal time if you're generally, right? Where you're back in your old childhood bedroom or your old childhood house or whatever, you're with the families coming over to you and it's a meaningful, slightly slower paced, sedate moment there. So I think, yeah, I, if you could own anything, I mean, that has to be why Harry Potter just keeps on getting run back over and over again, right? It's the thing that you watched when you were a kid. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be. And Whoop tracks all of it. Sleep, strain, heart rate, recovery. It's like Dog the Bounty Hunter, but instead of criminals, it's tracking down your bad habits.

• 58:50Chris Williamson?

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• 59:32Chris Williamson?

  That's join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. Speaking of technology, a new study claims that an eight minute conversation with chat G P T can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about twenty percent and these effects last at least two months. I'm always wary of tiny interventions that purport to have large and long lasting effects, but I don't see anything immediately fishy about this study and the mechanism is plausible. I bet most nine eleven truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously and who knew a lot about nine eleven. And I think this is an underrated and positive aspect of AI. People are worried about the hallucinations and AI psychosis and rightfully so. But keep in mind that many people do not know basic uncontroversial truths about their world.

• 1:00:14Chris Williamson?

  Thirty seven percent of Americans, a plurality, believe that God created humans in their present form within the last ten thousand years. Forty percent don't understand how a control group works. Twenty six percent think that the sun goes around the earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality.

• 1:00:31Jimmy Carr?

  I think it's an interesting point because conspiracy theories for me are a symptom of a much larger problem. Which is we've lost, lost sort of trust in institutions. But I, I think that's, they kind of, they bubble up when you have no, no faith in institutions because you desperately want to believe in something. You desperately want to kind of trust someone, but you don't trust the government anymore and you don't trust the medical profession and you don't trust, um, academics anymore. So you kind of, you, you're desperately searching. So these kind of more and more kind of incredible theories come to the fore. I mean, not to say that people do conspire to do things. That's a different thing. I mean, like conspiracy theories in their traditional form, like an unforce viable sort of theory.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  You throw this, let's say, for example, the coronavirus pandemic happened. Like it never happened and it happens in twenty twenty six, which are in.

• 1:01:17Jimmy Carr?

  Right.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  I, I wonder what the AI bots would be saying about the coronavirus.

• 1:01:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's fascinating. Because people would be arguing. Online with other people based on what their bot had told them to derive from the fact.

• 1:01:30George Mack?

  As well as you would have the Fable model, for example, wouldn't reply because it'd be around biology. You can't ask any basic questions to Fable right now around biology because they might be thinking you're printing a 3D virus.

• 1:01:40Chris Williamson?

  So everyone would be asking Pimi and.

• 1:01:42George Mack?

  Oh yeah, you'd be getting, you'd be getting like.

• 1:01:44Chris Williamson?

  The Chinese models, which would be interesting, the cause and effect, the full circle.

• 1:01:48Jimmy Carr?

  How long, how long do you think, I mean, I'm not, who's to say AI didn't create COVID? Who's to say that it wasn't, I mean, it was, it seems to be now, people are saying it was created in a lab. Do you think this technology arrived when we think it arrived? Or do you think it's been around for 10 years?

• 1:02:02George Mack?

  I think it's arrived when we, when it arrived.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because the transformer technology that you need.

• 1:02:07George Mack?

  Here's my, you're a good one.

• 1:02:08Jimmy Carr?

  My favorite, my favorite, do you want to hear my favorite conspiracy theory at the moment? Okay, so there's a, two terrifying scenarios. One is there's a Manhattan project currently underway in America and they're working on a AGI. It's the, it's the, it's the big thing. It's the doomsday weapon is the AGI and they're working on it and it's called Solstice. And it's somewhere in America, we don't know where, but that's been worked on, right? Second terrifying scenario, they're not.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  Jimmy, when do you, when do you think of all your ideas?

• 1:02:43Jimmy Carr?

  Hmm, I've got the days free.

• 1:02:47Jimmy Carr?

  But that is, that's a, it's a, it's an interesting kind of weird thought, right?

• 1:02:50Chris Williamson?

  Which would you rather?

• 1:02:51Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I'd rather they were working on it. I think that it's, it's kind of happening, right? They're, they're putting ever more powerful computers together and people are worried about the wrong thing. I think people are worried about losing their jobs. But I think if you point AGI at the environment, it might be able to solve the problem of net zero. Might get to that much quicker. And if you point it at physics, who knows? I mean, the great, you know, physics is real power in a way that nothing else is. Everything, every other science is stamp collecting. Physics really changes the world and there's been no, you know, Eric Weinstein and.

• 1:03:28Chris Williamson?

  60 years.

• 1:03:29Jimmy Carr?

  Peel was always saying there's, nothing's happened for 50 years. String theory has just kind of gone a different way. But if there, if there was a unifying theory of physics, I mean, if that could happen, that'd be extraordinary. And whoever had that would have some power.

• 1:03:43George Mack?

  But if you saw it, so Cord released Fable and then they put, they had the issues with the government and then Fables come back. And then you had this kind of cock tease, shall we say, where they would say, you've got access to it until the 5th of July. And then ChatGPT's released their new model. So Cord have now gone, well, you've now got access to it to 12th of July and it moved it again. And what you're actually seeing is because there's so much competition right now, it's so hard for any of them to run away or create any form of monopoly. So if you're onto it being a Manhattan project, it feels way more like there's going to be 15 at once.

• 1:04:23Chris Williamson?

  I get the sense that the COVID thing, I, I certainly don't think the AI would have had that much to do with it. I had Annie Jacobson on the show who wrote Nuclear War, a countdown scenario and.

• 1:04:35Jimmy Carr?

  Oh yeah, that was a fun episode.

• 1:04:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, her new one is, is about bioweapons. It's, it's about a lab leak and she said, the Russians during the eighties, when we are not working on enhancing weapons to make them, bioweapons to make them more transmittable, they had programmed into the virus, they programmed euphoria in. That's how pernicious this plague was, it was called a super plague. And they'd programmed euphoria in as one of the side effects, because if people felt euphoric, they would go out and dance.

• 1:05:13Jimmy Carr?

  Right.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  And then they would become their own super spreaders. So they'd even put a behavioral modifier into this super plague. And apparently this thing, this existed but never got out, was never used, but probably sits in some bank, some frozen like virus bank somewhere.

• 1:05:31Jimmy Carr?

  Here's a hot take, right? So in the, in the late eighties, there was a thing called mad cow disease. Do you remember this?

• 1:05:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Jimmy Carr?

  They thought everyone was going to go crazy that.

• 1:05:38Chris Williamson?

  BS40 or whatever it was called.

• 1:05:40Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Maybe it happened. The guy that hosts The Apprentice is president now. Maybe we all went crazy.

• 1:05:46Chris Williamson?

  Everyone has got mad cow disease.

• 1:05:48Jimmy Carr?

  Maybe we all went crazy and just no one noticed because we all went crazy.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  I, I tell you what, the amount of phones I've seen in saunas, it wouldn't, it wouldn't shock me.

• 1:05:57George Mack?

  You've got.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  That's the real.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  I don't have my phone on me.

• 1:06:02George Mack?

  Describe your phone.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  I, I could, I could sell my phone. It's a Quinn F22 Pro. It's, it's, it has applications, but it's too useless to, to get addicted to.

• 1:06:13Jimmy Carr?

  Great.

• 1:06:14Chris Williamson?

  You purposely dumbfounded yourself.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  No, genuinely, like it's, actually I, I don't really like talking about it because I got it. Cause I hate these people who get their new phones and it's all stupid phones and they're like, they, they, they make it their thing. So I feel kind of self-conscious talking about it on the show, but my younger brother, Jack, had this phone and he got the non-pro version, which is a bit of a mistake because it's actually just too useless to text on. But I got the Pro Quinn F22 Pro and, and I, but, but I loved, I loved Jack because I was on holiday with him and, and he didn't mention it once. And I was like, Jack, what's this, what's this phone? And I feel like the way to get people onto these phones is to not ram it down people's throats.

• 1:06:46George Mack?

  Sometimes you've got to let them know because Harry came up for Austin for my birthday, said goodbye to him. I don't hear anything for a few days, I'm like, what's happened to him? And then he finally gets back in touch via WhatsApp on his desktop and he's like, what did you do to your phone again? You threw it in the river?

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  I threw it in, I threw, I threw it into the car. I didn't, I didn't throw it into the river because that would have been disrespectful to the fishes. I threw it into the bin by the river. And then I switched out. I, I really, i- i- if I come, come across a lot of money, I think it's what I would like try and change in the world. Like I just, I do feel it really depressing, like you, you walk into a sauna in Austin and it's an epidemic of people with AirPods in.

• 1:07:20George Mack?

  I'll take you to a sauna in Austin where there's this.

• 1:07:23Chris Williamson?

  Man, with something else, man.

• 1:07:24Jimmy Carr?

  There is someone in the sauna right now listening to this.

• 1:07:28Jimmy Carr?

  Why are they shaming me?

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Genuinely, look, look at your life if you were doing that. I feel like you might feel like you've got it all worked out. If, if you have that one step, you are doing it, you haven't got nothing worked out.

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  Wait there for a second. How do you feel about people that wear AirPods during massages?

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Sorry, Chris, how do I feel about people wearing AirPods? Full stop, you're done.

• 1:07:49Chris Williamson?

  Right, but okay, let's.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  During massage, you're also done. It doesn't change the question.

• 1:07:56George Mack?

  I would listen to audiobooks during a massage, yes.

• 1:07:58Chris Williamson?

  All the time, no, no, no, no, no, this, you're being very diplomatic about.

• 1:08:02Jimmy Carr?

  Even during the happy ending?

• 1:08:04Chris Williamson?

  That's, he speeds it up, he speeds it up.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, my, my, my younger brother works in politics and his, his, his idea is to understand what real people think. And he, he does a bloody good job of that. But I said to him, well, what do real people think? And I'm in a taxi with him and he's got his damn AirPods in, trying to listen to what real people think. I said, Will, as a taxi driver, that, right, why, why don't you ask the taxi driver what real people think? I think it's bonkers.

• 1:08:25Chris Williamson?

  Was he getting a massage at the same time? You need to stop wearing AirPods during massages.

• 1:08:30George Mack?

  Why?

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  I, I just, it is the perfect.

• 1:08:33Jimmy Carr?

  Wait, is he massaging you?

• 1:08:35Chris Williamson?

  That's true. It's, it's more a client. It's, it's a client service worker dispute here.

• 1:08:41Jimmy Carr?

  This guy's not even paying attention.

• 1:08:43George Mack?

  Listen to this gibberish as he talks on, go on.

• 1:08:45Chris Williamson?

  I, I just, it is the perfect time to be with your thoughts, to do some good thinking without feeling like you're wasting time, you're falling behind, being in the dark playground, being in a reverse version of it.

• 1:08:57Jimmy Carr?

  We talked about that earlier. I think boredom is unappreciated serenity and allowing yourself to be bored, like, like planning it is quite a good idea. Like train travel, it's quite good to be on a train, be bored, be in an airport, be bored.

• 1:09:10George Mack?

  I'm bored enough. I'm bored enough, I do, I do enough time alone, my own thoughts. When I'm having a massage, I want to, I want to have Napoleon.

• 1:09:16Chris Williamson?

  Speed lesson, speed lesson.

• 1:09:17George Mack?

  Andrew Roberts 40 hours.

• 1:09:19Jimmy Carr?

  I didn't realise Napoleon even recorded an audiobook, this is tremendous.

• 1:09:23George Mack?

  Yeah, I, I slightly disagree. To play, to play devil's advocate, how do you know you're not in the mass hysteria of TV's going to give you square eyes? Like calculate should be banned.

• 1:09:34Chris Williamson?

  Luddite syndrome.

• 1:09:35George Mack?

  Yeah, Luddite syndrome. How do you know when you're going against smoking versus being a Luddite?

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  I don't know when I'm going against smoking.

• 1:09:44Chris Williamson?

  Because like, how do you know you're pushing back against something?

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Because I'll, I'll, I'll tell you what, I will tell you why. I will tell you why, because my, my, what I'm doing is I'm doing nothing. So you can't, it's not like, I mean, it's not like I'm smoking cigarettes here. My, my idea of where I'm trying to move the needle is just less, less, less, less, less. So if you're smoking, you're doing something. If you're, if you're going skiing, you're doing something. What's, what's a different example? If you're, if you're say, if, if you're saying like having energy drinks, that's, you, you, you, what did Taleb say? Subtract. So if you're subtracting, you can't go, you can't go wrong if you're subtracting, that's.

• 1:10:16Jimmy Carr?

  I think there's, I think there's something to this. I think the, that whole anxious generation Jonathan Haidt thing of like, it's not good for kids. And there's this kind of, you know, they think it's, social media is as harmful as cigarettes for kids. But I think, I think what we need to do then is give kids cigarettes.

• 1:10:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:10:31Jimmy Carr?

  You know, the idea of like, and this kind of a joke on the language, but you go, actually it's the, the point that he makes in that book is not just ban social media. It's ban social media and let kids play outside. Cause they can't have infinite freedom online and then no freedom in the real world. And really it's the freedom in the real world that we haven't quite, everyone's kind of on this idea of like, oh yeah, we'll take away the phones from the kids. But actually what else do they get to do?

• 1:10:54Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that what the average person spends six hours a day on screens. We haven't gained six hours, days aren't now 30 hours long. So of the time that we had previously, that's had to get squeezed from somewhere.

• 1:11:05Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  Which means that you've lost time doing other things.

• 1:11:08Jimmy Carr?

  But certain smart people are getting massages while listening to stuff. So there's certain, there's outliers out there that have gained the system, they're geniuses.

• 1:11:14George Mack?

  Outing me publicly for my, my audio, but during massage, you've got a worse phone addiction than me, my friend.

• 1:11:19Jimmy Carr?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:11:20Chris Williamson?

  I, I don't disagree, I've got, I've got, I'm horrendous with my phone. I'm saying that the massage is not the place to have your AirPods.

• 1:11:28Jimmy Carr?

  It is weird now that the technology, it was kind of the thing of like, I've got the new, the new phone, the new thing 10 years ago. Now the most opulent thing you could do is say, oh, we went to a cabin and there was no wifi and we just put away our things. It's the most opulent thing in the world.

• 1:11:41Chris Williamson?

  Seven day meditation retreat with no screens.

• 1:11:43Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, what are the, what are the, the wealthy well doing now? What are the billionaires doing now? They're trying to live without that social media, without those screens. How was the retreat?

• 1:11:52Chris Williamson?

  It was intense, yeah, to do seven days. I mean, it'll be the longest time since I was probably a child, there would have even been a TV in the room, right? One of the guys, there was an AI interface that could help you with your practice and.

• 1:12:08Jimmy Carr?

  What? That sounds like absolutely defeating the purpose.

• 1:12:12Chris Williamson?

  Look, I, I didn't use it, I didn't use it. If, if none of the facilitators were available and you were coming up against some blocks in your practice, there was a chatbot that had, was on it, was on laptop and had been sort of imbued with all of the principles of the thing. But the interesting thing, this was Timo, who was one of the.

• 1:12:27Jimmy Carr?

  They have, they have, they have fucked up so hard there.

• 1:12:30Chris Williamson?

  I didn't go into that, I didn't go into that room, I didn't use that. However, he thought, am I able to find out the England score by messaging the, the meditation chatbot? So he's.

• 1:12:45Chris Williamson?

  Every time that I sit down to meditate, I keep being distracted by wondering what the England score was. Would it be possible for me to find out so that I can get back to my practice, please? But no, fascinating, Northern California, it was Jhana practice, J H A N A. It was also OpenAI's Global Reset Week. So a lot of the engineers were off from work. They have two Global Reset Weeks, which is basically enforced holiday. But yeah, it is a way to try and sort of front run people not getting burnt out by saying, hey, you've got you, you can't come into work essentially. So I go and there's all of the guy, a bunch of the guys from OpenAI, but there's also all of their main competitors from Anthropic, and a bunch of other guys that are in there from Google as well. So there was kind of like low key silent meditation retreat turf wars going

• 1:13:30Chris Williamson?

  on between people at the forefront of AI development. That was kind of interesting. And yeah, like you, you kind of learn, the particular school of meditation I was doing, which was Jhana, you're learning to allow conductivity through your emotions, and that is to allow them to move freely without any constriction. So you're noticing and releasing mental tension. It's like primarily what you're doing, but that drops down into emotional tension. What you realize when you come back into the world is how much of your life is spent constricting emotional tension, because there's times when emotions come up, but it's not appropriate for it. You might feel a little overwhelmed as you're walking through the airport, which everybody did as we went reintegrated back into society. Well, that's

• 1:14:15Chris Williamson?

  not the time for you to talk about how I'm feel so scared and awkward and this is too much. It's like, no, you, you swallow down the overwhelming wildfires in Europe and the fat guy presenting the football on the, on the screens and you just sort of move past it. Also, it's very difficult to hear what your soul is whispering to you when the world's shouting at the same time. So you start to hear far more fleeting thoughts that come up. A lot of the thoughts that you wouldn't have been able to pay attention to if you were regularly even talking to people, let alone being on screens. So that was kind of interesting.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  What was your soul whispering to you, Chris?

• 1:14:52Chris Williamson?

  My soul whispering to me, probably fucking spend more time in silence, I think. Like it was quite meta. It's vegetarian, which meant that almost everybody's digestion was ruined for the first three or four days. Lots of beans, lots of tofu, but trying to do group meditation with 40 people in a room while there's farting going on is relatively interesting. Some guy, I have no idea how, but entered the retreat single and left the retreat with a girlfriend. So that is the level of game.

• 1:15:21Jimmy Carr?

  That boy's got game.

• 1:15:22Chris Williamson?

  Mate, that's the level of game. None of us could poll at the silent meditation retreat.

• 1:15:26Jimmy Carr?

  How did the guy?

• 1:15:27Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. Honestly, just sheer frame, I think, just straight up frame.

• 1:15:31Jimmy Carr?

  Oh yeah, not like you, your tiny little forearms.

• 1:15:34Chris Williamson?

  That's true. Anyway, he was, it was, it was really good. Enjoyed it very intense. The most interesting thing is then coming back and like having your old patterns come into conflict with your sort of new system, new worldview. And it takes a good bit of time. You have to like titrate. I couldn't use my phone. I just simply cut. It was, I know it felt very icky, very sterile. After just staring at like trees, the only thing that I was looking at was trees.

• 1:16:03George Mack?

  Good question. Yeah, a few points. I was saying this, that it's the most Chris Williamson thing ever, that I've been trying to get this man to take a holiday for, he's not been on, I call it proper holiday for five years. So then he goes and does a Jhana Saturday time meditation retreat. Like even Gopin's is his own holiday. I think, an interesting question I have around the phone stuff.

• 1:16:22Jimmy Carr?

  Question, question.

• 1:16:23George Mack?

  There's a great guy on Twitter called Chris Lakin, and his whole idea is that the phone itself might be Chesterton's fence. Chesterton's fence?

• 1:16:34Jimmy Carr?

  Yes.

• 1:16:35George Mack?

  Yeah. So it's this idea of if you see a fence, don't take it, don't take it down until you understand why it's there. And he helps a lot of people with the phone addiction. And then we'll often discover two days later, they've got a bacon problem, or they've got a porn problem. And actually, the phone was never the problem. The phone was the solution. And if you actually get a little bit deeper, the phone addiction goes away. And I do wonder how much of the, the phone addiction is actually a solution to a much greater problem.

• 1:17:01Jimmy Carr?

  I think it might be that the, we've, we spoke about this, Mark Fisher talked about this before he died, about the, the idea that we've privatized mental health problems. We sort of think it's a personal failing for people to be depressed or anxious. And actually, I think it's a societal problem. We're not organizing our society correctly for people to flourish. I think it's like, the phones are kind of a symptom of a much larger problem within our society that we're quite sort of isolated. We're kind of looking for something to do. We're not in groups, we're not with other people.

• 1:17:33George Mack?

  We'll go back to the thinking of your hands, mouth, feet. Feet, step count massively down. Hands, you almost, you're using your hands on your phone, but you're not using your hands like how most humans used to throughout history. You wasn't.

• 1:17:45Jimmy Carr?

  Tell you what.

• 1:17:46George Mack?

  This what?

• 1:17:47Jimmy Carr?

  Go on, which you know.

• 1:17:48George Mack?

  When Winston Churchill was going through.

• 1:17:52Jimmy Carr?

  The Black Dog.

• 1:17:53George Mack?

  The Black Dog.

• 1:17:54Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55George Mack?

  He would put up 200 bricks a day. Patrick is actually a terrible bricklayer. The bricklayers had to go in afterwards and do it.

• 1:18:01Jimmy Carr?

  Fix it.

• 1:18:02George Mack?

  But Churchill, just to keep his mind at bay, he would do something with his hands every single day. So when you lose the lack of feet, hands and mouth, I do think that can be not necessarily a full explain of mental health problems, but it definitely contributes.

• 1:18:17Jimmy Carr?

  What's interesting, that thing of like, how much is a hardware problem? How much is a software problem? Like how much of like, if you meet someone that's, if you've got a friend really going through a tough time, it's like, well, are they sleeping eight hours? Are they eating well? Are they exercising? Are they walking in nature? Are they seeing their friends? Like you cover that, that sort of simple stuff. But it's very difficult to regulate that stuff when you're feeling terrible. It's like you get into a spiral.

• 1:18:38George Mack?

  Well, the most absurd one was when, it was a study that came out. It's like a meta-analysis of all the causes of depression or the biggest treatments that have an impact on it. And the big headline was exercise beats SSRIs. And that was the huge thing that made like global news. Because if you actually go into the meta-analysis, exercise is like number five on the list. Now, SSRIs are further down. Number one on the list is just an absolute sleeper that nobody talks about. Dance therapy. Dance therapy outperformed exercise. And it's interesting, one of, you have a lot of the benefits of exercise, but you're with people and you're out of your own head with music.

• 1:19:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, also, you haven't got, you haven't got headphones on when you're dancing. Whereas if you're exercising, you have headphones. It makes me think, when did we get evolved enough to be depressed?

• 1:19:26Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I guess that there's kind of, it's like we're busy, busy fighting sober tigers for a while, like too busy. I think it's that thing where we have a, but if you really want to know how privileged you are, how far into the future are you planning? Because I think poor people have no future. And I mean that literally. Like people, if you're living hand to mouth and you're thinking about the next meal, well, you're not even thinking about what you're doing tomorrow. You're just trying to get through the day. And then really wealthy people think on like, oh, I wonder my grandkids, I need to make sure they're okay. It's like it's a different timeframe. But I think that thing about having, having too much time.

• 1:20:03Chris Williamson?

  We, my dad, I've got three brothers and my dad would, he was a radio presenter back in the day and he'd, he'd work a night shift in radio and then he'd work a day shift teaching radio. And he just didn't, he slept in the car for a couple of years. He just didn't have enough time to, to get down, you know, when you've got kids to feed, it's.

• 1:20:20Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Chris Williamson?

  That is a hell of a double shift. Radio by night and teaching radio by day.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, my dad's great. He was, he was an electrician. He really wanted to, this is kind of a story, a little story about like the power of teacher, because he was kind of, he wasn't the smartest cookie in the shed. And when he was from, he was from Hull. And he was, he was.

• 1:20:40Chris Williamson?

  Disadvantaged right there.

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  He was in a, his, his, his great grandpa built Hull Prison. And he's in this little classroom and he's, he's listened to Noel Edmonds' Last Ever Radio Show, because his, his big dream was to be a radio star. And, and he had this teacher, I can't remember the teacher's name, but like he thought he was going to be told off, wearing a cap to cover the, you know, the big old headphones he'd used to use. And he says, what dry? What are you doing dry? And he says, Noel Edmonds' Last Ever Radio Show, I'm listening to it. And teacher goes, carry on dry. And he went on to, he won a Sony Award. He was, his career was very up and down, but you know, and it's just an example of like, I don't know. I love it when teachers just, just acknowledge actually what's important in, in, in kids', you know, upbringing.

• 1:21:24Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's lovely. It's lovely. Is your father still with us? Is he still knocking around?

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  He's still knocking around. Thinking of radio, and I don't think you'd mind me saying this now, you get fired a lot. It's show business. Like, you're in one, you're in one show, you're out the next. So we play Articulate. As a fact, you all know Articulate. The game where you have to describe individuals. And my dad would just, he infuriates us because he'll constantly just say, interviewed him. And we'll go, come on, dad. And he goes, Joe, I think he was trying to describe Joe Nama trading once. And he said, and he shouts at my mother, sang, drop the pilot, interviewed him in a way. And mum was just like, I don't know.

• 1:21:56Jimmy Carr?

  It's kind of a great thing now because radio is about, I always think like old school showbiz, like being an actor or being a presenter, you're waiting for someone to bring you flowers. You're waiting for someone to come along and give you permission to do the thing that you really want to do. And now with new media, it feels like that permission is already, you give it to yourself. You go, well, no one's stopping me. I could just start a podcast and interview people and do whatever. I mean, it's what you did in a bedroom in Middlesbrough.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:23Jimmy Carr?

  And it's, and it's just kind of, you know, you give yourself permission as long as you keep doing the thing, kind of it happens.

• 1:22:30Chris Williamson?

  Substack has done the same thing for writing that YouTube did for video and that Apple Podcasts and Spotify did for audio. It's the same thing.

• 1:22:38George Mack?

  Yeah, Substack is, I used to have this joke that if aliens looked at human reading and writing data, it's going up. But then as soon as you zoomed in, it's just subtitles and text messages. Everything else is collapsing.

• 1:22:57Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, they do. They do talk about people being kind of post-literate now, like not, they're not, people aren't reading books.

• 1:23:03George Mack?

  Well, I had this realisation this week, what we were talking about earlier around the whaling going out from 1901 and then, sorry, being the number one and going out. Have you used Whisperflow much yet?

• 1:23:13Chris Williamson?

  I've been told to.

• 1:23:14George Mack?

  It's, but yeah, from a transcription perspective, I, because I realised I write so much that that muscle, and it's, you'll know that in anyone, Harry, it's quite a, it's an arduous task, or there's only so much writing you can do per day until you're exhausted. And as a result of writing so much, I'd struggle to reply to text messages. Because it'd be using the same, it's like I've trained my triceps all day. Now someone's asking me to do dips in a gym, I'll go, for fuck's sake. And with Whisperflow, I'm now suddenly getting so much out there. And I was like, oh, people are going to stop writing. This is going to become a bigger and bigger trend. People will be writing.

• 1:23:47Chris Williamson?

  We think speech to text.

• 1:23:49George Mack?

  And reading as well. I think both of those two things unfortunately be short.

• 1:23:52Chris Williamson?

  So Americans are more likely to place a gambling bet than read a single book. Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38% read a novel or short story. Study analysing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day, from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book, with 57% of Americans placing a bet last year, but only less than half reporting reading a book of any kind. And this included audiobooks. They included audiobooks in that.

• 1:24:32Jimmy Carr?

  I wonder, is there, I've got, okay, my theory at the moment, here's my, here's my big theory. Friction is very good in life, right? All the best things involve friction. So if you look at a TikTok, it's very low friction, right? But then you look at a YouTube video for five minutes, there's a bit more friction. A TV show, that's half an hour, I guess it's a bit of an effort. A movie, a lot of friction. You read a book.

• 1:24:57Jimmy Carr?

  I mean, come on, this is arduous. But you get so much more out of the thing, the more friction there is. Like the TikTok video, you can't remember. No one ever says, oh, man, you've got to see my favourite TikTok video from 2025. It's awesome. But it's just, it's nothing. It's gone. And the things that involve friction seem to, seem to be better, but in all areas of life, like the exercise, sports, arts, anything, more friction is better.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  I also feel like it's just a little bit about the story you tell yourself. So if I was, when I personally watched a lot of TikToks and Instagram and whatnot, I would just tell myself that I was a bit of a loser. And I walked around thinking that. And then when I, when I read a full book, you know, I'm like, bloody hell, like I can do things here. And I think you really transmit it into the day.

• 1:25:37George Mack?

  You put me onto Stoner. That was a wonderful book.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  It is a wonderful book.

• 1:25:42Chris Williamson?

  What's it about?

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  It's about a, it's about a guy called William Stoner, who lives on a farm with his parents. And he says, he says to his dad, dad, I want to go to university and learn about farming. And his dad doesn't say many words to him. So his dad said, okay, whatever. Pops off to, I can't remember which university, Mississippi maybe. And he, and he starts his farming course. And after about a semester, he flips into English. And he starts learning about books for the first time. There's a professor and then the war starts and the professor sort of gets.

• 1:26:14Jimmy Carr?

  There's that amazing sequence as well, where he doesn't understand. He's like, he's reading Shakespeare and he doesn't understand what it means. And he goes to his professor and goes, I don't know what this means. But he's like, interested in it in a way that no one else is. He's like so excited by it. Like, I've got to know what this means. I don't know what it means. It's like, that's kind of the pivotal bit. It's a.

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  The thing I, I'm amazed you read it. The thing I took from it is he marries, essentially marries the wrong woman. And I think it's, it's, it's a, I do think it's a book. It's about so many things, but one thing is about picking the person you marry, to be honest, because this, this one woman he marries really, in a sort of, sort of, there's no, there's no grand moment where she, where she screws up his life. It's just sort of, it's a thousand cuts, a thousand paper cuts. And his life kind of just sort of becomes subservient to this lady.

• 1:27:00Jimmy Carr?

  By her father? That's the.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  She was abused by.

• 1:27:02Jimmy Carr?

  Well, no, but that's like, it's never explicitly said, but it's kind of implied. There's kind of a weird.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Her father commits suicide randomly on, on one sort of Tuesday because there was a bank run.

• 1:27:12George Mack?

  The real advert is like the opening couple of pages of the book where it starts with his death and he works at this university and nobody really noticed. And it's such a flip of a book because most books you have the giant hero, you have the Joseph Campbell, whereas this is a man who lives such a mundane life, that that's actually interesting, that you see yourself or you see your potential worst self in them. One of my favourite songs ever, it's like low agency in a song. Have you ever heard Pearl Jam?

• 1:27:42George Mack?

  It's called Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town. Long, long song title. And it's just a point of view of this 80-year-old woman who's never left her hometown, wishes she did. And the guy who was her teenage sweetheart comes into the shop that she's in. And she recognizes him and he no longer recognizes her. There's this beautiful line of, I changed by not changing at all. Small town predicts my fate. And every time I listen to that song, it's actually way more inspirational than the hero's journey. And Stoner's another.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  So how Stoner ends is the bit I'll always remember from it is he's on his deathbed. And before I tell you the, the four sentence question, which I like stuck with me, the author of the book has a really different interpretation to everyone who read the book. It's also kind of weird. The author of the book's like, actually, no, he lived a pretty good life and he taught and he really loved English.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  But book, book ends and William Stoner is, he's got his wife behind him and his, his one kid who's sort of become an alcoholic. And he says, he just starts saying this question over and over again. He says, what did you expect? What did, what did you expect? What did you expect? And I think what he's kind of referring to is like, like if you actually, if you fast forwarded your life, William, when you were 20, this was always going to happen. You were going to die in like a little, small old room with your wife who doesn't love you sitting by you. And, and, and he wrote one book which he wasn't particularly proud of. And he had a lovely affair, which actually kind of sounds bad, but actually wasn't bad because his, his marriage was so screwed up. And he just says, what did you expect? And it was kind of thinking like, yeah, like God, like if you don't change, you know, that, that's how I'll die. What did you expect, Harry?

• 1:29:15Jimmy Carr?

  But he did, I mean, for me, I think he changed massively. Because there was a guy that was toiling the land for the first 16 years. He was like working the land really hard. And then he made it to a university and he spent the rest of his life reading books and teaching other people about his passion for books. It's beautiful. He achieved so much. But it's like, you're compared to what? Well, compared to the life his parents expected, which was just physical toil and putting food on the table. And he, like, that was all factored in. And it's like, what did he accomplish beyond that? Well, no, that's enough. It's enough. And it's, it kind of goes to that Morgan Housel line of, he talks about like happiness being your current experience.

• 1:29:53Chris Williamson?

  Reality minus expectation.

• 1:29:54Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Which is like, what did you expect? Well, maybe you expected too much.

• 1:29:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, that's the thing, because he's outstripped his parents' expectations of him, but underperformed on his own expectations of himself, maybe.

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  Not in the bedroom. He, he found a lovely young, young woman who was, well, not young, she was actually quite old, relatively speaking. And I think.

• 1:30:14Chris Williamson?

  What is it about young women today?

• 1:30:17Jimmy Carr?

  What is it about young women today?

• 1:30:19Chris Williamson?

  What is it about young women?

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  That'll be clipped.

• 1:30:20Chris Williamson?

  That's a question.

• 1:30:21Chris Williamson?

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• 1:31:13Chris Williamson?

  That's rpstrength.com-modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout.

• 1:31:21Jimmy Carr?

  The last one that worked. I mean, it'll literally be the last. I try not to get attached to them. So it's that thing where you go, well, I like the thing that worked the other night that worked for the first time. You go, great, that's, that'll do. So you rip them up, rip them up, rip them up. Yeah, it's like the new thing, the new thing, the new thing. And then you're kind of putting a show together. And that's kind of an exciting phase, but just whatever the latest thing is.

• 1:31:40George Mack?

  It's interesting, the, the good and the bad of any industry. Cause the good thing for you, I guess, that you get to constantly come up with new material. But it's also like, if you're a Noel Gallagher and has a two year stretch and does those songs. Like the leverage of that exists forever.

• 1:31:57Jimmy Carr?

  A lot of musicians kind of like they, they, uh, they don't want to end up in Las Vegas being a covers band of themselves. You know, so it's that thing where you go, be careful what you wish for. Like, I've constantly got to come up with new stuff, but that's also the fun bit is coming up with the new stuff.

• 1:32:10George Mack?

  Well, we was debating this once of if you could imagine, uh, impact and then doing it over time, you've done an incredible job of like doing it over multiple decades. But a lot of musicians, they'll have that one album and then they can't repeat it ever again. Whereas some people like Christopher Nolan's probably, in my, my opinion, one of the best who's managed to keep going.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  Kanye, by the way, Kanye, like is the best, like college dropout. He is.

• 1:32:36George Mack?

  Recent stuff's a little bit.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  His recent stuff, college dropout, late registration, eight oh eights and heartbreak, Jesus. My Beautiful Thoughts is to fantasy, life of Pablo are just completely different albums.

• 1:32:46George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:49George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  But they're completely different albums.

• 1:32:50George Mack?

  Like it's, that's very rare.

• 1:32:52Jimmy Carr?

  It is. It's very interesting. I think it's a very, very interesting, that thing of like genius. People often talk about genius, but they, they don't, what they're talking about is like, um, hyper accelerated rationality, not genius. I think genius is a different thing.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  That's a big word, Jimmy, can you?

• 1:33:07Jimmy Carr?

  Well, once he has that kind of level of, he's got a level of genius where you go, he does all the crazy stuff that he does. That's part of it. But it's like, it's almost like there's a, there's a mental health thing going on. It's a cross to bear to be.

• 1:33:19George Mack?

  Beautiful line of genius and sanity and next door neighbors. And then they sometimes borrow one another's sugar. And it's, it's one of the thoughts I've had about L L M's that you, an L L M can write good. And this may change, but right now it can write good, but it can't write great. And I think there's a little bit of a horseshoe theory with great writing. What great writing is kind of like next door neighbors to terrible writing. You've got to take risks. When you have something that's trained on the averages, it doesn't take risks. Like some of my worst ever pieces are quietly linked to my best ever writing.

• 1:33:49Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, I, I, I think that thing of like the average will be free. In the world of A I, average will be free and the very good will be very expensive. Like excellent will be very expensive.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  I, I think there's a sort of weird texture to when you believe in something. You, you, no one can see your belief in it, especially if it's words written down on a page. But I think you can feel when someone really believes in something. I think the problem with artificial writing or A I writing is like, you don't actually believe it. You've got it kind of from, from, from the robot. And I think there's just a weird, you can tell when you read something. And you just know that the person really, really, really believes about, believes it. I think of a, I think of an advert. Um, I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he, he basically has this idea. I'm going to suspend a car above, um, above, the, uh, uh, the chap who made the car to prove how good the suspension is of, of, I think it was a Volvo. And they say, we can't get that past legal.

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  So he says, oh, it's going to be me then. So anyway, the writer of the ad suspends him, suspends this big car with wires just above, above himself. And it's one of the most famous ads of all time. And it's like, that only got across the line because he just really believed in it. And I, I think your conviction in an idea i- is more important than the idea in, in so many cases.

• 1:35:00Jimmy Carr?

  It's often the way with comedy, especially with la- edgy jokes. Intent is much more important than content and people intuit the intent. They just know.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  I think a Norm MacDonald, like you give his material to someone else and he's going to bomb. But because Norm had this weird like belief in a bad joke, it would become a good joke.

• 1:35:18Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. What, what could you say that no one else could say? That's his whole career. It's like he, only he could do that. Just, just a, a properly non-fungible human.

• 1:35:28Chris Williamson?

  One of the reasons that A I uses very strange tropes, I told George about, George about this the other week.

• 1:35:35Chris Williamson?

  Most writing that A I's trained on, the corpus of writing that it's trained on is not good books. Because most writing is not good, but it's not distinguished between the hundred greatest novels of all time. And the millions and millions and millions of pages of anime fanfiction that it's been trained on.

• 1:35:53Jimmy Carr?

  Hmm. So is there no waiting given? Is it, does it give waiting to?

• 1:35:57Chris Williamson?

  No, I don't think so.

• 1:35:58Jimmy Carr?

  This is Dostoevsky.

• 1:35:58Chris Williamson?

  And even if it did, it would have to be so overly weighted, right? Some fourteen year olds, seven sequel to the Twilight series or something that they're just putting out on their, their like, like Tumblr account that should not, it would, it would require so, it would basically not exist. But it has been trained on it anyway. And what they did was they looked at a bunch of short stories that won a bunch of awards recently. And there was some very obscure analogies that were used, talking about his stomach swallowing a shout. Uh, which sounds like kind of evocative, but in the, uh, flow of the story felt a little bit clunky. And it was a bit harsh and it didn't seem to be quite necessary so much.

• 1:36:41Chris Williamson?

  And they use this A I to trace where on the internet that piece of writing has been seen before. You know, you were talking about analogy being quite tried or it, it sounds, this sentence sounds like I've heard it before. It sounds like something that you could have. And they go and they actually find it. And they found so many of the source material pieces were random anime fan fiction websites. So that is all writing of all time, right? Lots of it is good. Most of it's not.

• 1:37:09Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  And the total world that has, uh, A I's have been trained on includes this like just endless dross.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  It's going to end up also, I think Taleb said this, it ends up being trained on itself a lot of the time now.

• 1:37:22Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  And it, it's, there's nowhere to go, you know?

• 1:37:24Jimmy Carr?

  I think there's going to be a big, um, sort of premium on books pre two thousand and twenty two.

• 1:37:31Chris Williamson?

  Because you know that they've not been written by A I.

• 1:37:32Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Cause you know that, you know, there's kind of no help given as well. There's no editing. There's no, they, they did that in the old fashioned way.

• 1:37:39Chris Williamson?

  It's like losing weight before a Zen pick.

• 1:37:41Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, there's, there's an extra kind of flex on it. Yeah.

• 1:37:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The, uh, it was interesting. You were talking about how coping mechanisms. After gastric band surgery, people, uh, sometimes commit suicide. And gastric band surgery is quite traumatic. Sometimes the surgeons make really silly errors, like leave utensils inside of people and sew them back up or bits of gauze. And, but the big reason that people commit suicide after gastric band surgery is that the reason they were overeating was probably because of an underlying emotional issue.

• 1:38:14Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, that's how they were, they were using the food as, as medicine.

• 1:38:17Chris Williamson?

  Bingo. And they still have the underlying issue, but they're no longer able to use the food.

• 1:38:21Jimmy Carr?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 1:38:22Speaker 02

  So yeah, crazy. And the same thing with the phone, right? What is the phone using?

• 1:38:26George Mack?

  The chest and spuds, maybe.

• 1:38:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Being there to distract you from what? So you shouldn't get a gastric band fitted. I guess, I wonder what, surely, can you chat G P T, Jared? Gastric band surgery, what's been the impact of G L Ps on gastric band surgery?

• 1:38:39Jimmy Carr?

  That is, that's, that's the whaling industry, literally.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  Yes. Hey, very good.

• 1:38:44Jimmy Carr?

  That's gone.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  Very good.

• 1:38:45Jimmy Carr?

  That's gone. Yeah.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  Jimmy, when you're so quick, is it algorithmic? Or is it like, is it like a sort of algorithm in your brain, which insert topic, you know where to go? Or is it intuitive? What's the, say you're, say you're roasting somebody, you don't even know.

• 1:39:00Jimmy Carr?

  No, I, I don't even think of it as being quick. It's often that thing of like, I'll, I'll feel like I'm sitting on it for ten seconds before I say it. And the worst person for this is Lee Mack. Do you know Lee Mack?

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Jimmy Carr?

  Lee Mack, they often have to put a thing into the edit and add a pause before he says the line. Because he's just like.

• 1:39:18Chris Williamson?

  Plows through it.

• 1:39:19Jimmy Carr?

  He's like, it's so quick. It's, it's, yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  I had a question. Uh, I had a question. It's actually, it's about, do you know who the biggest comedian on YouTube is? And I'll give you, I, I won't give you a clue. He's actually four times bigger than every single other comedian.

• 1:39:35Jimmy Carr?

  Well, it ain't me.

• 1:39:37Chris Williamson?

  Is it Matt Rife?

• 1:39:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:39:39Chris Williamson?

  Right. I'm trying to think about.

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  Forty million, forty million subscribers. You'll all know him.

• 1:39:44Chris Williamson?

  Are they digital first?

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  I don't understand the question. No.

• 1:39:48Jimmy Carr?

  No, I, I'd go Rowan Atkinson.

• 1:39:51Speaker 02

  I'd say Rowan Atkinson, bang on.

• 1:39:52Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  Mr. Bean.

• 1:39:54Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, much bigger, yeah.

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  And I, I feel like there's, so I teach, I teach advertising and they're like, within Mr. Bean is the, the silent comic of say twenty first century. And I think, um, he has, he has the best position. This is like the Charlie Chaplin of his day. If, if you want, if you want to get stuck in the mind, you want to get an idea stuck in the mind.

• 1:40:14George Mack?

  What is positioning? Like, what do you mean?

• 1:40:15Speaker 02

  A position I would say is the space you own in the customer's mind, like real estate. So say you've, picture like, um, picture like one hundred filing cabinets or hundreds of thousands of filing cabinets in, in your head. And they've all got labels written on them. So if we were playing this with chocolate bars, like a chocolate bar for when you're hungry. Best selling chocolate bar in the world would be.

• 1:40:37George Mack?

  Snickers?

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  Snickers.

• 1:40:39Chris Williamson?

  It's the best selling chocolate bar in the world.

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, for a break would be Kit Kat.

• 1:40:42Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  And then you go, you take this to comedy, um, a, a good example would be like. English, family-friendly comedian, bring the whole family.

• 1:40:51Jimmy Carr?

  Peter Kay.

• 1:40:52Speaker 02

  K. MacIntyre, they own that space. And then you've got like, don't take the whole family. Don't sit in the front row, especially if you're English.

• 1:40:59Jimmy Carr?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Um, I was thinking Frankie Boyle. Or you've got read by Guardian readers. Um, almost too clever for punchlines.

• 1:41:08Jimmy Carr?

  Go on. Stuart Lee.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Stuart Lee.

• 1:41:10Jimmy Carr?

  Great.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  Bang, bang on. It's like, it's the real estate you own. And I, I, I think it's, sorry, to, to take Mr. Beast. He is the, the only, like, most famous silent comedian and.

• 1:41:21Jimmy Carr?

  Oh, sorry, Mr. Bean.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  Mr. Bean, very, very different people.

• 1:41:27Jimmy Carr?

  You know the Rowan Atkinson story about Italy?

• 1:41:29Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:41:29Jimmy Carr?

  So when Rowan was first doing, um, uh, Mr. Bean, he, uh, he's a big car enthusiast and he likes to take a holiday. So he basically carved out Italy on the sales of Mr. Bean and said, don't sell it in Italy. And then what's crazy, we sell it to TV channels all over Italy and went, no, no, I don't want to sell it to Italy. And then why not? And he went, so I'll go on holiday. So for the first 10, for the first 10 years of Mr. Bean, it wasn't available in Italy.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  That's greatness.

• 1:41:55Jimmy Carr?

  And then, and then after like 10 years, there was some offer or something, whatever. And they translated it and they put it on in Italy and it's the biggest show in Italy.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  Ruined his holidays.

• 1:42:03Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, it's ruined his holidays. Really ruined his holidays.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  Must have been fascinating. I, I wonder how many Americans know what Mr. Bean, he did a movie, right, Mr. Bean, Rowan Atkinson did.

• 1:42:10Jimmy Carr?

  I think people do know. I think kids know and it's, it's that silent comedy thing, it like shines through.

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  That must be great for an international audience.

• 1:42:17Jimmy Carr?

  Exactly.

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  I think, I think that is the point in one. It's why Charlie Chaplin was so universal, because you didn't, he, he didn't speak. He, he, and then, so I think movies started, movies then had sound again. And Chaplin was at this kind of crossover period of like, I can now talk, but if I talk, I've kind of ruined what I've done for all these years. So I can't remember the film. I think it's called The, The Something or Other. And it ends and the only words Charlie Chaplin ever has is gibberish. And that's kind of how like his final silent movie ends. And it's just this perfect end to it, to it, to a film.

• 1:42:47George Mack?

  How would you fix, uh, like, how, how do you go about fixing your position? What do you make?

• 1:42:52Speaker 02

  Well, I, I, so there's, there's, there's two things here. There's like, a position is the space you own in the, in the customer's mind. So Jimmy's got a pretty like, you know, you go to a Jimmy Carr gig, you're going to get roasted, there's going to be stag do's. And now it's a little bit deeper, but you, you know what you get. There's like a situation which you, you would attend a, a, a, a gig for. I suppose then there's something called positioning, which is how you organize the customer's mind. So I think Stuart Lee's a funny example of this. Like when Stuart Lee, I think he retired from comedy in 1999. And he had a good career. He was a very good career. He won an award, Hackney Prize or something like this. And then he starts writing, uh, on, on TV shows like Radio Four and whatnot. And he returns to comedy in 2001. And then I, I, I saw Stuart Lee, um, live like four years ago and it was really good.

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  And Stuart Lee's kind of repositioned to the competition and like, very implicitly, well, actually not so implicitly. His set design was, was 1P DVDs from like modern English comics. And he did lots of impressions of Russell Howard. And I think basically Lee's repositioning is like, is like very much us versus them. So there's three ways to get a space in the mind. You can be first, you can be only, or you can be against. And, and Stuart Lee is very much against. Like he kind of pops like Michael McIntyre, Peter Kay, Russell Howard, James Corden in this little box. You picture that being the mind and then, and then that's mainstream or that's like laugh a minute. And then there's Stuart Lee who, and he, and he isn't punchline. He's like, you know, almost too clever for the punchline.

• 1:44:18George Mack?

  Who else does like against? Like who, who else has positioned themselves or what else has positioned themselves against?

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  So I think, I think Trump's a pretty obvious example of that. But also even like Coca-Cola launched in, I, 886.

• 1:44:29Chris Williamson?

  Liquid Death.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, Liquid Death. I would, yeah, Liquid Death, Pepsi versus Coke.

• 1:44:34George Mack?

  It's interesting because you almost create, uh, you almost create the, you know, the David Foster Wallace line of the fish can't see the water. With like Liquid Death, you almost didn't even think about plastic water bottles because everything was plastic. And then you suddenly create, oh no, here's the water and here's the lamp. Like you're creating something against that people don't even realise you could be against.

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think, I, what do I think? Um, I think be against is, you probably see it more and more these days as the world gets slightly more polarised. I don't know.

• 1:45:02Jimmy Carr?

  I don't know. I, I mean, I don't love it in comedy because I think it's kind of the narcissism of small differences. We're all doing the same job, all trying to make people laugh. And it seems that there's, there's a, there's a lovely camaraderie in that. That's, that you're kind of missing out on. You're kind of punching against. I mean.

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  Does jealousy come up a lot in, in comedy?

• 1:45:20Jimmy Carr?

  I don't think it should, but I think it does occasionally. I think there's that thing where, for me, comedy has never been about that. Because it's not like being an actor where you go, look, there's one guy's going to be Bond, right? There's one actor that's going to be announced as the new James Bond and none of the others are going to be. And that's, that must be heartbreaking for them.

• 1:45:36Chris Williamson?

  You can do the stand on Monday. It doesn't mean that the other guy can't do the stand on Thursday.

• 1:45:40Jimmy Carr?

  Like you can play the theatre, you, you can pack out the O2 for five nights, but the venue's still there. Someone else can play it the next night. And it's, it's also that thing of like, the more people that go and see live comedy and enjoy the experience. It's like, it's kind of like the early days of rock and roll. You go, yeah, the more people that go, the more people that want to go. And if they have a great experience, then they want to go more.

• 1:45:58Speaker 02

  Grow, grow the pie.

• 1:45:59Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, you want to grow the pine. You want to be, and the idea that you go, well, there's different people that you like more or less. But everyone's kind of doing the same. It's the same intention.

• 1:46:07Chris Williamson?

  Certainly when it comes to content online, I think that the, uh, against, for balance is actually skewed in against. I think there are more people producing critiques via content about for content than there is for content. Like, which we relatively, I mean, you know, in some industries, there's probably more people writing about football than there are people playing football. But there's far more people paying attention to the playing of the football than the critique of the football.

• 1:46:37George Mack?

  It spreads so much more, uh, fast. Like being critical of something is incredibly memetic. Being for something is actually quite anti-memetic. So James, Adam James, what was the company that was slandering? Adam, do you remember? Um, that James is doing the lawsuit against?

• 1:46:53Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, not Tides. Yeah. Uh, the AI health checking app. Yeah, like Waves or something.

• 1:47:00George Mack?

  That was slandering them with a load of fake information. They got millions of views. It was completely like, the guy's butchered all of the studies, all the claims he was making. But then the apology gets like a few thousand views.

• 1:47:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:13George Mack?

  And it's like the disparity between that. We was looking at somebody where there was this essay writer. And you can see this a lot with people that become these professional critics, where they'll have a piece that attacks a Chris or attacks somebody. And he goes super viral. And then you click on it and you scroll back and you go, oh, they've been doing this critique thing for a while. And you go, you see when the moment they once did it, everything spiked. But if you go back further, it was just in the void. It was always optimistic or, or slightly creative content that wasn't working. And then this thing started to work. It's quite sad.

• 1:47:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, everybody against something is once a hopeless romantic for a person that was for something.

• 1:47:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like in politics, I'm really frustrated with political, political opinions just constantly being against things. I think in, in UK politics right now, like what are you actually for? I think is a really, it's an unanswered question. Like you look at all the parties and they, they just love to sort of disagree with each other. And they don't love to actually stand on a, you know, a table and, and have their own opinion.

• 1:48:12Chris Williamson?

  But 2012 was the year where most people voted not for the opposition as opposed to for their own party. That was the year in America where most votes were protest votes. I am not voting for the person I don't like as opposed to I am voting for the person that I do like.

• 1:48:26George Mack?

  Yeah, I've been creating bots before bots were controversial. And one of the bots I wanted to create on Twitter is whenever you have like a cynic or somebody where it's just quote tweaking, having a go at, applying everything. It's just this dossier thing that then recovers them of, you sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one. You felt that you were destined for other things, but you had no idea how to achieve them. And in your misery, you began to hate everything around you. And that's some, like, it's the perfect cynical line for the saying.

• 1:48:59Chris Williamson?

  That's heavy. Yeah, I didn't, it feels to me like there's a kind of bank account that you're supposed to pay into or withdraw from. And if you find that you're critiquing more than creating, you're kind of in negative equity. You're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're putting things into it. I've had this conversation with, uh, Eric Weinstein about how like an experts only mentality, where a lot of people believe, oh, the only way that you're allowed to talk on this topic is if you're somebody that has all of the requisite qualifications and this sort of esteemed history behind you. But the reason, the enforcement mechanism of that is people on the internet that are going to call you out.

• 1:49:38Chris Williamson?

  See, he doesn't actually fully understand what he means by DNA, recomment it. You're like, all right, well, that, that just means that nobody can ever get to play with ideas publicly. And everyone begins to be on tenterhooks and they're worried about, maybe I'm going to say something that's going to get me rumbled. Like, I, I don't know. I, it doesn't create the, what is it? The, the Oxford manner, the ability to play gracefully with ideas. We've very much lost the Oxford manner, the ability to say, ah, like, I, I see, I see what you were trying to get at there. And you look, you've made some, some errors of this side, but I think it's, it's, it's interesting. Even if you're wrong about what you talked about, it's, it's cool that you're trying to apply something from your industry to one that is new or is novel to you. So, yeah.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  I think that's your podcast though, Chris, like why it works is because it genuinely seems to fill that space of like, it's okay to not have things completely worked out and we're going to work it out together. Like that's what I think a lot of your conversations are.

• 1:50:34Chris Williamson?

  I think that's a good summary. Yeah. How to understand yourself and the world around you has kind of always been the summary. And also to have, there's a person in front of me or a bunch of people in front of me, like, how do I make them look as good as possible? How can I try and draw out of them the best version of them as opposed to the opposite? There's far more people on the internet that are good at doing critique, mm, takedowns and breakdowns than I am. But I'm pretty good at going, okay, what, where's some, as my dad would say, a streak of piss and a pile of shit sometimes. Or, you know, like silver lining on a.

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  And how, how do you do that? Like, how do you?

• 1:51:08Jimmy Carr?

  I think silver lining is maybe a nicer expression.

• 1:51:12Jimmy Carr?

  I think, I think like, I think we're workshopping writing today. I think maybe.

• 1:51:16Chris Williamson?

  Dad, you didn't win that one. Um, I don't know, just, look, I, I, I understand, I think I tend to try and give people the benefit of the doubt as best I can. I tend to try and yes, and their ideas as opposed to no, but their ideas, stress test them in a way, as you were talking about intent versus content. You're like, hey, what, what do you mean by that? I'm not saying it because I'm trying to trip you up. I'm trying to be, I'm trying to get you to strengthen your own argument by drawing out an area. It feels a little bit, sometimes you're having a really good conversation. It feels like running your hand across the top of a membrane and everything's kind of smooth. And then you feel a little divot in something and you're like, huh, the flow of what was being said there just felt a little bit off.

• 1:51:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's because there's a, you, you made it, you said a word that I didn't understand, or there's a premise that I didn't feel was fully fleshed out. You made this claim and I didn't really understand how it linked back to what we were talking about before. And that's the moment where it kind of breaches the threshold of me just sitting and nodding along and listening. And then we go, oh, can I just, what do you mean by that?

• 1:52:15Jimmy Carr?

  Can I ask you, it's quite a hard question, but we had always five rules of writing. What would your five rules of communication be?

• 1:52:23Chris Williamson?

  That's good. Um, speak precisely whenever possible, which is not using more or fewer words than are needed.

• 1:52:35Chris Williamson?

  It's never bad to ask the question, why? Then sort of, what do you mean by that? Why? What do you mean? Like those little moments, I think allow people to dig deeper. Um.

• 1:52:47Jimmy Carr?

  I like it when you say, you say like, it's very, quite infrequent, but you go, say more.

• 1:52:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:53Jimmy Carr?

  Say more, like just to give someone and you know that they've got more.

• 1:52:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just give them a little, a little.

• 1:52:58Jimmy Carr?

  It's permission. They're being polite in the podcast and going, I don't want to say too much here. I feel like I'm, I'm monologuing and you go, no, no.

• 1:53:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:04Jimmy Carr?

  And you, that permission is great.

• 1:53:06Chris Williamson?

  So that's yes, ending. Uh, what else would I say?

• 1:53:11Chris Williamson?

  Using silence is probably one of the best tools. So just shutting the fuck up and giving the room space to breathe. And, okay. Well, actually, and you're, oh, there we go. It was just a half step off from the next insight that you wanted to give out there. And you're not making somebody rush, you know, you're not sort of driving them through it. Uh, those would be some, those would be some.

• 1:53:30George Mack?

  I think that talking is the best example, that the 10,000 hour rule is a load of nonsense. Cause everybody has done 10,000 hours, yet it doesn't seem to.

• 1:53:43Chris Williamson?

  Not everybody's a world-class conversationalist. But again, very, very, um, precise practice. I mean, me and you had this idea a long time ago. One of our prescriptions was if you want to get better at communication, have a fake podcast with a friend where you put your phone down on record once a week for half an hour. Phones out of the room. You don't need to publish it. You don't need to put it anywhere. Listen back to it and listen to your verbal takes and the flow of your conversation and how you talk over each other. Or how you actually give them a little, oh, I quite like the way that, if you really, really, really want to do it. But the easiest way to do it is to actually have a project, like somebody who thinks I want to become funnier will take so much longer to become funny than somebody who has to step on stage and have all of the pressure of an audience. Someone that goes, I really want to improve my writing. You're so good at writing. How do I improve my writing?

• 1:54:27Chris Williamson?

  You go, are you writing for anything? Are you publishing anything at the moment? No. Well, you don't have the pressure of developing your writing skill. Oh, you, you've done really well with your communication. Are you, are you part of a project that requires you to communicate? With enough pressure and scrutiny that means that you need to hone the skill. And if not.

• 1:54:48Jimmy Carr?

  I think this is like, it's the Hormoz's thing of like going, it's the optionality. People want to get like, the action perfection ratio is all wrong. People want to get kind of brilliant at something before they even start and to have a perfect record. And I love the idea of like, just being messy, just having a messy start, trying something. Like you don't talk about jokes, you just try them.

• 1:55:05Chris Williamson?

  That's the problem though, what we were talking about while you were out of the room, uh, the experts only idea that Eric Weinstein has an issue with. And I, I think I agree with too, which is if you're not allowed to use the Oxford manner to play gracefully with ideas, you're always going to get sniped at, especially early on. Well, that's, you know, that's stupid. How can you, the early stages of anybody's work tend to be scrutinized. Not with the amount of discount that it should have. And I think it causes people to, they get worried. They're like, fuck, like, what if I?

• 1:55:36George Mack?

  And isn't it ironic that a lot of the current, uh, expert classes built off some anti-expert at one point that went against it?

• 1:55:44Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 1:55:44George Mack?

  Well, if you go back through most of science, um, a lot of, Galileo going against the Catholic Church, who were the expertise at the time, was remarkably unpopular.

• 1:55:56Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Conformity is a coffin and heresy is a cradle.

• 1:56:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, hmm.

• 1:56:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I've told you that story about Copernicus, right? About the fact that he had the same insight as, uh, Galileo a hundred years earlier and sort of squeaked it out on his deathbed. He had this great work, De Revolutionibus. And, uh, he was worried about Aya from the church. So had the same heliocentric, like, learning. It took a full century to do the next one. And you might say, well, you know, stupid Copernicus. He should have said it. He should have shouted it from the rooftops. But Galileo was forced to recant, kept under house, house arrest for the rest of his life, like nearly killed. His treatment justifies the silence of the guy that came a hundred years before him.

• 1:56:40Jimmy Carr?

  It's the first, uh, the first humiliation. You familiar with that? Three humiliations. So Copernicus was the first. We're not the center of the universe. Darwin was the second. We're no different to the animals. And then, um, Freud was the third. We're not even in control of our minds. And then the fourth is AI. We're no longer the smartest thing. Just kind of.

• 1:57:05Jimmy Carr?

  I mean, it's not that humiliating. I can live with it.

• 1:57:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, when we, when you've created it, I think there's a, a degree of all of us feeling like we can't, that's why people have.

• 1:57:13Jimmy Carr?

  We did it. We did it, guys. We did it.

• 1:57:16Chris Williamson?

  Some Jimmy Carr bullshit will be in the corpus that it's been trained on, right?

• 1:57:21Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's interesting, that thing of the, um, yeah, that kind of next step, if we get to it, if there's a abundance in the future, it'd be amazing.

• 1:57:30George Mack?

  We're already there. We're already here, right? It's already pretty bloody abundant.

• 1:57:35Chris Williamson?

  This is your indomitable optimism coming through.

• 1:57:39Jimmy Carr?

  I'm a very optimistic, long-term, short-term, there will be problems.

• 1:57:44George Mack?

  Well, we, I always use the example of my morning routine. So my morning routine, which everyone's dying to know, it's going to get a chance to have a morning routine.

• 1:57:53Jimmy Carr?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:57:54George Mack?

  Um, I know you had your, one with bike first and then go.

• 1:57:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh yeah. My four-year-old clip about a four-year-old's morning routine.

• 1:58:00George Mack?

  Yeah. Um, my morning routine is, I woke up this morning on a bed. I had a hot shower and I brushed my teeth. Okay. Which sounds not that impressive, but, uh, it's Emperor Augustus, the Emperor of Rome, slept on a sack of straw. Mary Antoinette, who was going to be the future queen of France at the time, as she was wandering around her palace of Versailles. They, they used to throw their sewage out of windows because they didn't have toilets. It landed on her head. It's even like the air conditioning, which they think about, President Garfield, who was the president in the late 1800s.

• 1:58:40George Mack?

  When he got shot because his body was overheating, they had to get 500,000 cubes of ice to blow over him because they didn't have anything near air conditioning. I think King Louis' mouth rotted from the inside as well because he couldn't brush his teeth. So even you look at, it's the David Foster Wallace thing, we're already in, we're already in post-abundance. It's just gonna potentially keep accelerating more and more. But when people get there, they won't think about it. And we were having this argument the other day. You was trying to talk about how, uh, we should de-accelerate or potentially pause things. And it's that Deutsch line of even the United Kingdom is a, uh, artificial concept. When you think about it.

• 1:59:18George Mack?

  Like the hunter gatherers wouldn't have been able to live in the United Kingdom. It would have died on a cold winter night from, uh, uh, from the cop, from the cop. So we're already living on Mars.

• 1:59:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Mate, you're, we're already living on Mars. It's.

• 1:59:33George Mack?

  But what I mean is when people talk about terraforming Mars, we've already terraformed the earth. We're already living in unlivable places. That's the human thing today.

• 1:59:39Chris Williamson?

  Wander around Bauton, man.

• 1:59:44Chris Williamson?

  How do you feel about that, Harry?

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  I, I feel like me and George disagree on most things in life.

• 1:59:50George Mack?

  Agree on the most important stuff, but I'm disagreeing on everything else.

• 1:59:53Speaker 02

  We were talking about death the other day. George is very pro living for a long time and I don't, I'm not pro living for that long time.

• 1:59:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we had this, we had this debate while watching the England game.

• 2:00:02Jimmy Carr?

  Was this the, the, who's the guy, Brian Johnson, that wants to live forever?

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  Kind of, yeah. Jimmy, what's a good age?

• 2:00:08Jimmy Carr?

  Well, I think, I think it's that thing where you've got, you've got problems to solve and you have

• 2:00:14Jimmy Carr?

  dilemmas that you just have to live with and death is the big one, right? Death is in the, in the, the Muslims, what do they call it, the certainty. And I think you have to just make peace with it. Like, it's going to happen at some stage. You don't get to choose when, you just, you don't get to choose how long your life is. But the, but the depth, the quality, you can have a big effect on. And that's, that's where you should spend your time. I mean, I think that thing about it's, it's absolutely inevitable. And the idea that these crazy, whatever, this guy trying to live forever.

• 2:00:44Chris Williamson?

  George wants to live until the heat death of the universe.

• 2:00:45George Mack?

  Yeah, I want to keep going, baby. Well, there's the live forever or immortal, which is just ridiculous. Because at a certain point, you have the heat death of the universe. But living to 150, that much significantly different than living to 80. Did this research once with Claude, where I was looking at, if you have everybody ever to live today, the average age, and then you had everybody ever to live ever, the average age when they died, the average age of that room would be 15. So we're already way past. And I used the example, the example I thought of the other day was my dog, this beautiful little Bernadette called Barclay, parents do. It makes me sad that 10 years from now, he's probably going to die.

• 2:01:30George Mack?

  If I can take a dog's life from 12 to 24, is that bad? Sounds like a terrific thing. So what's the problem with going from 80 to 160 years old for a human? I agree forever is a completely different concept and that's a very vague amount of language. But is 150 or 200 a necessarily bad idea? Because we're already not dying at 15.

• 2:01:48Speaker 02

  We're all dying with the devil and it just depends how long your spoon is. So like, I'm not saying 120, whatnot, but like, where does this, where, where does this end? I also don't feel like it's our universe to roam for that long, you know? I feel like, I feel like the old must make way for the new, man. Like, there should be a, there should be a new George Mack sat in that seat. I, you've got 10 more years of podcasting. And I think bring in a new George Mack, let's get some, let's get some new insights. Like, there should be a new Jimmy Carter.

• 2:02:14Chris Williamson?

  We should be taken out the back of the shed.

• 2:02:15Jimmy Carr?

  Well, there is that thing where you go, people are very scared of death. There's a, there's a great, Mark Twain said, "I wasn't alive for 10 billion years before my birth and it didn't inconvenience me in the least." Kind of go, yeah, it's just, you go back to the same thing. We're in this brief shaft of light between two oceans of darkness. And you've got 4,000 weeks, what are you going to do with it? You, you know, I think that thing about, it is kind of a, it does set the clock of going, hey, what am I going to do? And I think if you live, if you're talking about 160 years, I think there's a, there's a mañana to that of kind of going, well, you don't have to do anything now. And actually, the, the sense of urgency that you have, I think it's quite, it's kind of a rush of blood to the head.

• 2:02:54Speaker 02

  Hundred, so, so right now, I, I, I don't even know where to start. Like, I think, I think you live to 100, I mean, 160, you live to 260. How, that's how many wives you have, sorry? And just, just, let's just get down to the topic.

• 2:03:07Chris Williamson?

  Great, that's the first place that you go to.

• 2:03:09Speaker 02

  But it's, it's also, it's also how many kids, like, you have your kids, they have their kids. And at some point, there's like a deep heartbreak is going to, it's a really deep heartbreak.

• 2:03:17George Mack?

  Go back to the dog argument and talk about why going from 12 to 24 would be the worst thing for a dog.

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  But you're not trying to extend the dog's life, you're trying to extend your own life. And I do feel like, like, like, what about the lions out here? Are we still going to be killing the cows? You know, is there going to be enough meat to feed all these new humans who are just now powering on to 500?

• 2:03:33Jimmy Carr?

  Well, that's kind of interesting when you talk about, like, you know, we're chatting about problems in the world and you talk about the environmental crisis that's going on now. Are you aware of like the, the late 60s, there was a, a book written that was about how overpopulation, everyone was going to starve and it was going to be kind of a Mad Max scenario.

• 2:03:52Speaker 02

  Is that Malthusian, I've got that wrong.

• 2:03:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Malthusian trap is when you have a growing population without resources that can support.

• 2:04:00Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, so they, they thought that we were going to run out of food. And basically, two bits of technology happened at the same time. So they figured out how to kind of GM wheat and grain. And they also found out how to do it with rice as well. And they, they increased productivity by like 4X in that time. And basically, we can sustain a huge number of people. Because they worked out, basically, there's not enough land to support 4 billion people. And now we're 8 billion and we're fine. It's really interesting like how problems change. They also thought there was going to be a new ice age in the 70s. It's not that long ago, the 70s. And, and now it's kind of all worried about the heat. It's weird how it kind of changes over time. Well, hopefully, we're sort of one step ahead and we solve it.

• 2:04:37Chris Williamson?

  Isn't there a, a Roman port that's like 100 miles off the coast from where the, the coast used to be? I'm pretty sure that because there was an ice age not that long ago and during the Roman Empire, the entire climate was, was significantly different, that their ability to invade the UK was facilitated by the fact that, here it is. "Once a major coastal port and likely the landing area for the Roman invasion of AD 43 is now about two miles inland because the Wansum Channel sweated up or silted up." Interesting. Anyway, Romans, mate.

• 2:05:15Jimmy Carr?

  We're going to the Romans. This is what men are meant to do every two hours. Reference the Romans.

• 2:05:20Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking about it the whole time, that being.

• 2:05:21Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:05:22Speaker 02

  Simple question, who do you want to be the next Prime Minister of England?

• 2:05:25Jimmy Carr?

  Assuming there's no, like, they can be, they want to be.

• 2:05:28Speaker 02

  Anyone in the world, you could, you could, you could ship them in at a Alafetex.

• 2:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Dominic Cummings.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  He had a go, he had a go. And, and I think the thing with DC.

• 2:05:38Chris Williamson?

  You didn't ask who do I think could get elected?

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  Okay, my, I'm going to, you got me talking, right? Mr. Cummings, I think he's really competent and, and not that likeable. And I feel like there's a real kind of like, what you want in, in a leader is really competent while also being kind of likeable.

• 2:05:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay, what was Keir Starmer?

• 2:06:00Speaker 02

  Neither, man.

• 2:06:03Jimmy Carr?

  I mean, he's gone now, but I don't think anyone's going to forget Keith Starmer and Harry.

• 2:06:10Chris Williamson?

  Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Kuan Yew would be good.

• 2:06:12Jimmy Carr?

  Yeah, Drew Bentley. Lee Kuan Yew is really interesting because that, that kind of Singapore example. There's a guy called Roger Bootle, who's a brilliant economist and a great writer. I know him a little bit. And I think if you look at Roger Bootle's kind of assessment of what Britain needs, it's a really good checklist of what, like, he says, there's no silver bullet. There's no big solution that changes everything. And he gives these eight examples from around the world of like, where extraordinary things have happened and countries have turned themselves around. So from post-war Germany to post-war France, to South Korea, North Korea, Singapore, all of these different examples of like, how did those economic miracles happen? How did people get from a relatively poor circumstance to abundance?

• 2:06:55Jimmy Carr?

  And it's, it's brilliant because it's like, it's lots of little things done right. I think he'd be a great guy to have in charge.

• 2:07:01Speaker 02

  And can he talk? Does it matter if he can talk?

• 2:07:03Jimmy Carr?

  He's, he's very likeable and his thing is like, it's not really about the, he's a big fan of the, the Singaporean dude. But he's not really about like charisma in the leader. It's more about, okay, these are the things that you need to do. These are the priorities that a country needs to have. And you need to know what, what GDP is for. You need to know what, what are you doing this for? Why do you need this to be? What's, what's the purpose of this nation? What's the point of it? And that's, he's very good on that stuff.

• 2:07:33Chris Williamson?

  Who do you want, Harry?

• 2:07:35Speaker 02

  My, so I told him yesterday, I genuinely, the girl I'm dating, I think would be a good pick.

• 2:07:40Jimmy Carr?

  Keep her busy, right?

• 2:07:41Chris Williamson?

  Bro, bring your fucking chick to work day.

• 2:07:44Speaker 02

  That's who I'd pick, right, right here, right now, I'd bet she's American, so I'm not sure how it would go down.

• 2:07:48Chris Williamson?

  Bring your chick to work day, this is, this is what's happening. You're going to implant your lady at the top of the country.

• 2:07:56Jimmy Carr?

  What, what is she doing currently?

• 2:07:57Speaker 02

  Applied theatre.

• 2:07:59Jimmy Carr?

  Applied theatre, yep, she's the one for the job. It's got to be, hasn't it, yeah? Fine, solved.

• 2:08:04Speaker 02

  George?

• 2:08:06Chris Williamson?

  Don't Dominic Cummings.

• 2:08:07George Mack?

  Are you in cards?

• 2:08:08Jimmy Carr?

  Okay.

• 2:08:11Chris Williamson?

  Who do you want?

• 2:08:12Speaker 02

  He's an old, he's an old, like, Cummings is like that old Labrador, you know, he's been around the track. Like, I, I think fresh energy.

• 2:08:20Speaker 02

  Jimmy?

• 2:08:22Jimmy Carr?

  What?

• 2:08:23Speaker 02

  If I, if I said I'd let Mr. Carr to lead us into the next century, what would you say?

• 2:08:29Jimmy Carr?

  I, I'd say that we've, we made a mistake in the early 80s and we shut down all of the asylums. And now the crazy people are just wandering around.

• 2:08:40Jimmy Carr?

  No, I think, I, I, I don't know if you're familiar with recent American history, but game show hosts have become politicians recently and not always with stellar results.

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  Tusha, give it, give it to you.

• 2:08:55Chris Williamson?

  You give it to the England manager.

• 2:08:57George Mack?

  It seems to be working at the national team level currently as we're recording this.

• 2:09:00Chris Williamson?

  That's not a bad shot. Or you could put Gareth Southgate in, given that he's got, given that he's got the job free. All right, boys.

• 2:09:05Speaker 02

  Give it to the end of the season, give it to the gigsy.

• 2:09:07Chris Williamson?

  Let's bring this one home. I appreciate you all. Thank you for joining us.

• 2:09:09George Mack?

  Thank you, it was really fun.

• 2:09:11Chris Williamson?

  Goodbye, my beauties. See you.

• 2:09:16Speaker 04

  Did you know that mosquitoes have killed almost half of all people who have ever lived? Today, people are fighting back. With support from the Gates Foundation, American scientists and partners around the world have developed a new generation of bed nets that can kill up to 90% of mosquitoes exposed to them, helping cut malaria rates in half. The result? A safer, healthier future for everyone. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.