Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Jimmy Carr: "The World is Being Rebuilt from Scratch"

Transcript

Jimmy Carr: "The World is Being Rebuilt from Scratch" · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:06
  What a treat we have for you today.
• 0:08
  One of the biggest stand-up comics in the world, Jimmy Carr joins us once again, one of our
• 0:13
  favorite recurring guests on the show.
• 0:16
  His brutal and hilarious crowdwork has become the viral video sensation of the 2020s, but
• 0:22
  long before that, he was a staple of British television.
• 0:25
  You want to read this out?
• 0:26
  I will read this out just to give you an impression if you're not in the UK of how you
• 0:29
  ubiquitous Jimmy is.
• 0:32
  He hosts eight out of ten cats, a long-running panel comedy show, eight out of ten cats
• 0:37
  does count down, obviously.
• 0:39
  Channel four is Big Fat Quiz of the Year and Big Fat Quiz of everything.
• 0:43
  He also hosts roast battle on Comedy Central and the fix on Netflix.
• 0:49
  Speaking of Netflix, Jimmy was the first British comedian to sign a stand-up comedy special
• 0:54
  deal with the US streaming outlet, and his Netflix stand-up specials are funny business
• 1:00
  in 2016, the best of ultimate gold greatest hits in 2019, his dark material in 2021 and
• 1:07
  natural born killer in 2024.
• 1:10
  Jimmy is currently touring Australia on a massive multi-month long tour.
• 1:14
  It's just lovely to have him around.
• 1:17
  Quick thought before we continue and get into things, if you are not yet a paid subscriber
• 1:21
  on Substack, we're about to launch some additional benefits for paid Substack subscribers.
• 1:26
  We're going to have a kind of golf of Hormuz petrol pump price extravaganza, a Substack
• 1:32
  subscriber drive, in which we offer even more benefits to subscribers.
• 1:36
  A big thank you to everyone who does pay for the show.
• 1:38
  It's the only reason why the show is financially viable in the first place and we're able
• 1:41
  to bring you guests like Jimmy.
• 1:43
  It's a great honor and an enormous joy to sit down once again with the one, the only Jimmy
• 1:48
  car.
• 1:49
  I mean, firstly, thank you for being in our fine country.
• 2:00
  I've been everywhere in Australia as well.
• 2:03
  This is what I want to talk about.
• 2:04
  Well, I hate that thing where you sometimes I'll talk to comedians and they go, I did
• 2:09
  Australia.
• 2:10
  Yeah.
• 2:11
  And I go, all right, where'd you go?
• 2:12
  And they go, oh, both cities, Sydney, I'm Melbourne.
• 2:15
  And you, what do you miss the whole thing?
• 2:18
  It's like, and actually the reaction is great in Melbourne and Sydney and I play these
• 2:22
  big rooms and I do them sort of in the round and it's pretty much kind of an occasion.
• 2:26
  It's great.
• 2:27
  They're great.
• 2:28
  Yeah.
• 2:29
  But actually, you want to be in Rootie Hill.
• 2:30
  I mean, do you that?
• 2:31
  What do you do?
• 2:32
  Rootie Hill, just to say people are aware, is it's not a town so much as a suburb on the
• 2:39
  far fringe of the Sydney Greater Metropolitan area.
• 2:43
  Yes.
• 2:44
  For those places, the town's outside the town.
• 2:46
  It's nice to go to those towns.
• 2:47
  It's also like, I'm not tell a swift and or Harry Styles.
• 2:50
  I know it's shocking.
• 2:51
  A little from Colomand or a little from Colombe.
• 2:53
  But the idea that you would go, you would fly to a city and book a hotel to see me seems
• 3:01
  slightly ridiculous.
• 3:02
  I'll come to you.
• 3:03
  I'll make it easy.
• 3:04
  That's nice.
• 3:05
  I think it's a nice thing.
• 3:06
  I thought you were going to say the idea that you would fly to the arsend of the world
• 3:09
  and only go to the big cities and then require everyone else in the small towns to come
• 3:13
  to you.
• 3:14
  No, I'll travel around.
• 3:15
  You'll go.
• 3:16
  And just so people don't know, if people don't know, you're going to quite small and quite
• 3:21
  remote, I mean, cities as a generous word, rockhampton, you know, what, I mean, name some
• 3:28
  others.
• 3:29
  I mean, yeah.
• 3:30
  I've been every man.
• 3:31
  You've been everywhere.
• 3:32
  Yeah.
• 3:33
  Oh, what Darwin is.
• 3:34
  Darwin I enjoyed because Darwin's completely untouched by anything to do.
• 3:38
  In a sense, ahead of the rest of Australia, because it is post-apocalyptic, so you get there
• 3:42
  and go, oh, man, Max was a documentary.
• 3:44
  Oh, I get it.
• 3:45
  Right.
• 3:46
  I see.
• 3:47
  And that to be fair to Darwin is the largest metropolitan center for about a thousand and a half
• 3:53
  miles.
• 3:54
  I really.
• 3:55
  I got there and someone said, oh, you know, this is the most violent town in Australia.
• 3:59
  Be careful walking around.
• 4:00
  And I went, where's the second most violent, they said, and what, where's the most violent?
• 4:05
  I mean, I was like a suburb 20 minutes away.
• 4:07
  Okay.
• 4:08
  Well, let's agree.
• 4:10
  As far as I'm concerned, there's Darwin.
• 4:11
  Then there's that violent suburb.
• 4:13
  Then there's like Singapore, right, just geographically speaking, like if you're moving
• 4:19
  around that area, you've gone from Darwin, you might, you might hit Port Morsby, you
• 4:24
  might hit Den Pasar, and Singapore, it's a long way to get to Sydney or Melbourne.
• 4:30
  It's interesting.
• 4:31
  It's an interesting thing with Australia, where you're absolutely in denial about where
• 4:34
  you are geographically.
• 4:35
  Yeah.
• 4:36
  And you sort of think you're the Isle of White.
• 4:37
  Yeah.
• 4:38
  And so logically, you think you're, we're just off the coast of a bridge now and we're
• 4:42
  basically.
• 4:43
  Yeah.
• 4:44
  We're sort of, yeah, we're sort of it's us and then Ireland and then Australia, New Zealand.
• 4:46
  Yeah.
• 4:47
  We're just off the coast there.
• 4:48
  People sometimes say we should be in NATO because, you know, we're, we're, you know,
• 4:52
  North Atlantic.
• 4:53
  It's because it's basically, I think I was swimming in it this morning.
• 4:56
  Exactly.
• 4:57
  It's the, my treaty organization.
• 4:59
  Yeah.
• 5:00
  It's the not like treaty organization.
• 5:01
  I think the, I think that's all gone now.
• 5:04
  I think the, I think genuinely we are in a revolution.
• 5:08
  I think if you think about what revolution really means, it's the replacement of elites.
• 5:12
  And it's, there's nothing particularly to be scared of.
• 5:14
  I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's part of history.
• 5:17
  Every 80 to 100 years, everything gets knocked down and then rebuilt again.
• 5:22
  It's, uh, Neil, Neil Howe's work.
• 5:23
  I mean, I really enjoy that.
• 5:25
  Have you read that fourth turning book?
• 5:26
  No, but you told me overlapped that I should and then I feel bad that you're
• 5:29
  impressing me in front of millions of people.
• 5:31
  No, no, but it's really, it's really interesting.
• 5:33
  That thing if you go, well, if you think about what elites are, like, why are we sitting
• 5:36
  here doing this and not on ABC radio or TV?
• 5:40
  Well, because it's a replacement of the elites, the media elites have gone.
• 5:43
  Like it was, it used to be NBC versus ABC in America or in the UK, BBC versus ITV.
• 5:49
  Now the biggest television channel in the world is YouTube.
• 5:53
  And their competition is TikTok or Facebook.
• 5:56
  Facebook is not a social media company anymore.
• 5:59
  It is a television company.
• 6:01
  Yeah.
• 6:01
  They make videos made by people you don't know when you watch them on your stream.
• 6:05
  You dip in and out.
• 6:06
  Everything's kind of, everything goes to the mean.
• 6:09
  It's, I mean, if TV is like irresistible, if the version of the revolution and the destruction
• 6:14
  of the elites is that the Josh Sepsis of the world get pissed off at being constrained
• 6:19
  by what they regard as being an overly stuffy elite consensus and not doing our own thing.
• 6:25
  That's fine.
• 6:26
  Well, it's great, but it's also the academia falls.
• 6:28
  What about the beheadings and the, like, I don't like, I don't want to be beheaded.
• 6:32
  What in the, in revolutions?
• 6:34
  What the French revolution?
• 6:35
  There are violent revolutions and there are very peaceful revolutions.
• 6:39
  And sometimes, sometimes these, these things happen quite sort of organically.
• 6:42
  I mean, there's, there's a theory that so if you look at 1929 and you look at the financial
• 6:47
  crash and, and the idea that that led to that was the starting gun and it led to World
• 6:53
  War II.
• 6:54
  And why, and then if you look at 2008 and the financial crash there and it's led to these
• 7:00
  times now where we're fighting these global wars, we're either in what cold war two
• 7:04
  or World War three, depending on your point of view.
• 7:07
  But even to the extent that the Spanish flu was COVID and the dust bowl was the environmental
• 7:15
  crisis.
• 7:16
  So you go, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes and we're going through these incredibly
• 7:20
  tumultuous times.
• 7:21
  I mean, you know, decades are happening in weeks.
• 7:24
  It's like, it's the tectonic plates of the world are shifting.
• 7:28
  And I think it's, I mean, for me, it's like this started much earlier.
• 7:31
  This is the, the upshot of having a unipolar world for 30 years, which was incredible.
• 7:37
  We had this, I mean, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 89 or 91, wherever you draw it and you
• 7:42
  go, America became the power.
• 7:45
  But every year drip, drip, drip, tax Americana became smaller and less powerful and the Americans
• 7:52
  invested less in their navy.
• 7:54
  And now we live in a multipolar world and it's, it takes a lot of getting used to, right?
• 7:59
  It does.
• 8:00
  I mean, what's the news?
• 8:01
  It's fascinating times to be, to be sort of traveling around them, I'm working, but it
• 8:05
  feels like at the moment everyone's living in a dream world that we're about to have a,
• 8:09
  like lines are moving on maps and people seem to think that lines won't move on screens.
• 8:15
  And I don't want to be a Cassandra, but I think lines are about to move on screens in
• 8:19
  a way that we haven't seen since 2008.
• 8:21
  What does that mean?
• 8:22
  I think there's lines moving on screens.
• 8:23
  I think there'll be a financial crash.
• 8:26
  I think there'll be a lot of disruption.
• 8:28
  It's impossible to predict how, and yeah, I'm sure brighter men than me are trying to
• 8:32
  do it, but I don't know how that's going to sort of fall out, but it strikes me that
• 8:36
  these are very uncertain times, you know, because you go, well, fuel is, it's factored into
• 8:41
  everything.
• 8:42
  So we know there's going to be inflation.
• 8:43
  That's just in the post fuel prices are going up and something weird is happening with
• 8:47
  the market in that you can buy oil futures and it's $100 a barrel, $90 a barrel, whatever
• 8:53
  it is today, but if you actually have to buy a barrel of oil in Singapore to power something,
• 8:59
  it's $140 a barrel.
• 9:01
  So the make believe has sheared away from reality.
• 9:05
  Yes.
• 9:06
  Plus crypto, plus the valuations of AI company.
• 9:10
  Crypto fell out of 2008, fell out of the financial crash.
• 9:13
  It was a lack of trust in elite institutions.
• 9:19
  And really, I mean, think about like one of the main things we could talk about today
• 9:22
  is conspiracy theories, right?
• 9:24
  There's so many conspiracy theories out there, but conspiracy theories are in a, in and
• 9:27
  of themselves a symptom of a larger problem, which is we don't trust the elites anymore.
• 9:33
  We don't trust the narrative from academia or from media.
• 9:36
  We don't trust it.
• 9:37
  So we're looking for solutions and conspiracy theories for me, it's their simple solutions
• 9:42
  to incredibly complex problems in the same way as strong men, whether it's Trump or
• 9:48
  Putin or Netanyahu, like the strong man leader, that archetype is a simple solution to
• 9:55
  a complex problem.
• 9:56
  Yes.
• 9:57
  It's daddy politics.
• 9:58
  And there were two, in fact, there were two prerequisites for the conspiracy theories
• 10:00
  that I was reading about.
• 10:01
  One is high anxiety, and the other is low trust, which is what you're talking about.
• 10:06
  High anxiety low trust.
• 10:08
  And high de-sabilization.
• 10:09
  People cling for conspiracy theories.
• 10:11
  They're already talking about the shooting in the White House Correspondence dinner as being
• 10:15
  a false flag operation.
• 10:16
  Right.
• 10:17
  Of course, but I suppose that idea of going, it would have been that we had one narrative
• 10:22
  from mainstream media and we all followed that, and now different people have different
• 10:26
  opinions.
• 10:27
  Yes.
• 10:28
  And everyone's opinion is kind of out there.
• 10:29
  So of course, someone's going to say, I mean, it's, it strikes me as, the thing that
• 10:33
  muses me is the same people that think Diana was killed by the royal family, also believe
• 10:38
  Diana's still alive.
• 10:40
  It's like, it's such a weird thing.
• 10:44
  The people that denied the Holocaust happened are the same people that think we should have
• 10:49
  killed 6 million Jews.
• 10:50
  Right, right.
• 10:51
  It goes, 6 million Jews died and they go, oh, I wish.
• 10:53
  It's like, it's like such a weird, topsy-turvy, and it's also that weird, like it's cognitive
• 10:59
  distance because you have to believe there's a government, they're controlling everything,
• 11:04
  they're incredible.
• 11:05
  And yet, the government are awful and can't organize anything.
• 11:10
  Yes.
• 11:11
  So can't we get the guys that created COVID in a lab and disseminated it and never would
• 11:17
  discovered and fake the moon landing?
• 11:20
  Can we get that team of guys on the railways for two weeks?
• 11:24
  Yes.
• 11:25
  Can we not get them like succumbed to do, they're going to do the health service for a fortnight
• 11:29
  and then go back to dark arts.
• 11:31
  This is why I think it's somewhat reassuring as well for people conspiracy theories.
• 11:34
  It's not just that they're seeing ghosts and shadows behind every corner and that they're
• 11:41
  getting into some kind of paranoid delusion that makes them feel important or like they're
• 11:44
  they've caught them down to something that's deeply significant.
• 11:47
  It's also that that worldview I think reassures them that there is a meaning and a purpose
• 11:51
  behind things, even if it's a nefarious one.
• 11:54
  But some of them, that's easier than chaos.
• 11:56
  Yes.
• 11:57
  Some of them are.
• 11:58
  I was a kid.
• 11:59
  The big conspiracy theory I remember was like, oh, the priests, watch out for the priests.
• 12:06
  It was true.
• 12:08
  It turned out to be true.
• 12:10
  It was that's like, okay, and that's pretty shocking.
• 12:13
  But again, that's maybe one of the big institutions that we lost.
• 12:17
  I'm not sure whether the world is as secular as it believes it is.
• 12:20
  I mean, even the term secular is a Christian term.
• 12:23
  The idea of given to Caesar in the Bible is what created the secular world.
• 12:28
  It's impossible in most religions to separate the secular world from the spiritual world.
• 12:34
  It's a very Christian idea.
• 12:35
  But the idea of that kind of separation is very kind of, I don't know.
• 12:41
  It's interesting.
• 12:42
  I don't think we've lost religion.
• 12:43
  I don't think people have lost religion.
• 12:45
  I think they have replaced it.
• 12:46
  They're not truly atheists.
• 12:48
  It's like the opposite of faith is certainty.
• 12:53
  So I'm not sure I'm as atheist as I thought I was.
• 12:56
  I don't think I'm certain about much.
• 12:58
  What do you think they've replaced it with?
• 13:00
  Well, it's like, it's other kind of, you know, the belief structures.
• 13:04
  The idea that politics now, for many people, I think has replaced religious belief.
• 13:10
  It's at an identity level and they care about much, which maybe isn't the healthiest.
• 13:15
  No.
• 13:16
  And certainly the case has been made by people like John McWater that the left's move
• 13:21
  away from universalism and towards identitarianism over the past decade or decade and a half
• 13:26
  is a form of religion that people, people talk about sinfulness and you can talk about.
• 13:31
  Yeah, people and shabberlefs and people talk about gentrification of a neighborhood.
• 13:35
  I had this neighborhood used to be working class and now these people are moved in and
• 13:39
  we've got coffee shops and bagels, but it's not as nice as it was when it was the working
• 13:43
  class neighborhood.
• 13:44
  I couldn't give a fuck about that.
• 13:46
  I care much more about the gentrification of the left.
• 13:49
  The left when I was growing up or when I was voting for it was the party of the working
• 13:53
  man and a switch was made somewhere, I don't know, maybe around Hillary's deplorable
• 13:58
  speech that often gets cited, but a switch was made where suddenly the right are now
• 14:05
  the party of the working classes in America, which is, you know, I mean, we, we met in
• 14:10
  the UK.
• 14:11
  Well, the UK by election in Greater Manchester a month ago where like this new green party
• 14:17
  leader and you know, he got a whole bunch of Muslim votes and he won, he beat Labour in
• 14:25
  a seat that had held for over a hundred years or something.
• 14:28
  Yeah.
• 14:29
  I think the idea of the, again, the idea of revolution, the idea that Labour or Tory would
• 14:33
  win the next election.
• 14:34
  I mean, three years is a long time, but I'm not sure.
• 14:37
  I think maybe it'll be a new party.
• 14:39
  I think again, that reform reform was number two in it.
• 14:42
  So that was what I was remembering.
• 14:43
  What was weird about it was that the far left and sort of pro-Palestine wing won the seat
• 14:50
  and number two was reform and three was Labour and four was the Tories, which is wild that
• 14:56
  the top two parties would be, you know, one far left and one far right.
• 15:00
  Well, I guess it kind of makes sense to me.
• 15:04
  The weird thing is that we have like in our heads, oh yeah, well, it's going to be Labour
• 15:09
  or Tory always.
• 15:10
  It's a choice between those two or Democrats and Republicans in the States.
• 15:14
  I mean, the idea that, you know, things do sort of change and it's not immediately obvious
• 15:18
  but kind of looking back at it, you go, well, the Republican party isn't what it was.
• 15:22
  No, you Trump.
• 15:23
  It was the Tea Party movement was incredibly successful and led to Trump.
• 15:26
  Yeah.
• 15:27
  And in fact, Trump has basically turned the American Tories into reform.
• 15:33
  Like he's transformed the centre-right party in the United States from the party of
• 15:38
  George H. W. Bush to the party, a party that's much closer than Nigel Farage.
• 15:43
  Yeah.
• 15:44
  In a presidential system, you sort of have to do it that way because you don't have a parliamentary
• 15:47
  system in order for a smaller party to win seats.
• 15:51
  So we've actually seen it sort of in the States.
• 15:54
  We've seen the takeover of one of the large parties by an insurgent, populist movement.
• 15:58
  It's weird.
• 15:59
  I did sort of politics back in the 90s at university like studying politics.
• 16:05
  My god, it was boring.
• 16:06
  Early 90s was so boring, like nothing happened.
• 16:09
  And now you've got, you're not reminiscing, saying, you say it's a very interesting traveling
• 16:15
  around at a time of sort of, you know, image revolution.
• 16:17
  I'm not sure whether traveling rail is going to be a big thing in real life.
• 16:21
  No.
• 16:22
  Like jet fuel, they seem to be running out of jet fuel.
• 16:24
  Yes.
• 16:25
  Same to be.
• 16:26
  I mean, the 70s was a, people won't remember the 70s, but I vaguely remember as a child,
• 16:31
  like it was Operation Class to fuck.
• 16:33
  I mean, it was like there was a three-day working week in the UK because we couldn't afford
• 16:36
  to keep the lights up.
• 16:37
  It was like unbelievably.
• 16:39
  Yeah.
• 16:40
  That was 7% of the world's oil supply was cut off by OPEC.
• 16:47
  And now we're talking about 20%.
• 16:48
  Yes.
• 16:49
  And 25% of liquid, fire, and natural gas.
• 16:52
  But jet fuel, maybe all of it, I mean, it doesn't look great.
• 16:56
  And like people sort of go, you know, America would be fine.
• 17:00
  It's that thing of like, in history, what does that cause?
• 17:04
  People think Pearl Harbor came out of the blue.
• 17:06
  The Japanese just did that.
• 17:09
  Their fuel supply had been cut by America.
• 17:12
  Imperial Japan's fuel supply.
• 17:13
  Yes.
• 17:14
  So they either had to admit strategic defeat or they had to do the suicide mission that
• 17:17
  was Pearl Harbor.
• 17:18
  Well, you know, in their heads, those were the options.
• 17:22
  You say they didn't have to do that, but they did.
• 17:25
  But the idea of what are the second-order effects?
• 17:29
  And really it's the difference between, you know, kind of knowledge and wisdom, it's
• 17:32
  knowing the second-order effects.
• 17:34
  It's very hard to know what's going to happen next.
• 17:36
  Well, I mean, I certainly think it's going to be harder, whatever happens next, than
• 17:40
  people are giving it credit for.
• 17:41
  As you say, I just had a column.
• 17:43
  I'm a columnist now.
• 17:44
  I don't think I told you.
• 17:45
  But I am a columnist.
• 17:46
  Columnist.
• 17:47
  Columnist.
• 17:48
  Columnist.
• 17:49
  It feels like you're putting more syllables in that than is strictly necessary.
• 17:52
  Well, you look at me.
• 17:53
  Oh, right.
• 17:54
  For the paper.
• 17:55
  You're looking at me with a certain scent of certain innocent bafflement about the
• 18:00
  word columnist.
• 18:01
  Sometimes I read a newspaper because I love to know what happened yesterday.
• 18:07
  I love to just check in what happened yesterday.
• 18:10
  It's such a bizarre idea.
• 18:11
  It's like, I love history, but I like quite recent history.
• 18:14
  I'll find out what happened yesterday, possibly the day before yesterday, because they wrote
• 18:18
  it yesterday about the day before.
• 18:20
  It is true that I like, you know, I submit on a Thursday lunchtime for the Saturday
• 18:24
  paper.
• 18:25
  It's like, but as a columnist, as a columnist, right.
• 18:30
  Columnist.
• 18:31
  Three syllables.
• 18:32
  I feel like whoever heard you should have checked, you could pronounce that before we gave
• 18:36
  you the job.
• 18:37
  They'd only heard me on the podcast, and so I assume that they wanted me for my incredible
• 18:42
  verbosity and eloquence.
• 18:43
  Yes.
• 18:44
  I presume this guy can write, no, no, no, no, no, can you spell the word column?
• 18:49
  No.
• 18:50
  I don't think you can spell it.
• 18:51
  So what did you write about this?
• 18:52
  Anyway, it was, this week was about exactly what you're saying in terms of homos.
• 18:59
  The article was entitled, we sure are lucky, the Iranians don't know about the midterms.
• 19:03
  Yeah.
• 19:04
  And the argument was basically, if you're in a standoff with someone and you're waiting
• 19:08
  for the other one to blink, knowing when they have to blink by and to get fuel prices
• 19:14
  down is almost as good as them actually caving in tomorrow.
• 19:18
  Well, Moose, for me, was like, I'd never gone from never having heard a word to using
• 19:24
  it constantly.
• 19:25
  Yes.
• 19:26
  It's the new air fryer.
• 19:27
  Yes.
• 19:29
  It's just out of nowhere, we just went, let's just say homos a lot.
• 19:32
  Yeah.
• 19:33
  This is, I mean, it harked back to, it's, it's the Dardanelles and we just had the
• 19:40
  Remembrance Day.
• 19:41
  Anzac Day.
• 19:42
  Anzac Day.
• 19:43
  And you remember, you know, Winston Churchill's great mistake in the Dardanelles, that was
• 19:47
  the same thing.
• 19:48
  They were cutting off.
• 19:49
  There's, there's these little choke points around the world that you remember Suez
• 19:54
  was the end of the British Empire and the, the French really.
• 19:58
  We had Suez and it collapsed and people are comparing this moment to the Americans and
• 20:03
  homers, can they, can they, can they control it?
• 20:06
  Can they make this happen?
• 20:07
  I mean, obviously, I mean, if he, if he, we don't know what's going to happen.
• 20:09
  So if he wins, this would be huge.
• 20:13
  What is winning, man?
• 20:15
  Well, I think are we in Cold War two?
• 20:17
  So for me, Cold War one ended when it became abundantly clear, just obvious to everyone
• 20:25
  that life in the West was better than life in the USSR.
• 20:30
  And I wouldn't bet the House on that these days.
• 20:34
  Like if you go to China, if you've got friends that've been to China, China is, it's covering
• 20:38
  itself in high speed rail and in the West, we're covering our countries in planning applications
• 20:44
  and environmental reports.
• 20:45
  A lot of Chinese people still want to come to the West.
• 20:48
  Sure.
• 20:49
  I mean, you know, that's a, I think we have, for me, it's the institutions are more important
• 20:57
  than culture.
• 20:58
  I think in the two great examples of this are East and West Germany and North and South
• 21:04
  Korea.
• 21:05
  You take, you know, the same people, non, non-fungible people, same group of people, you know,
• 21:12
  in their hearts and then you have one system, another system and you, you would imagine
• 21:16
  culture is the important thing, but actually 20 years down the line, it's like one place
• 21:19
  is unlivable and the other place is fantastic.
• 21:23
  What either we import huge numbers of people from the rest of the world or we export our
• 21:30
  institutions, that seems to be the choice, right?
• 21:34
  How do we get what we have here over there?
• 21:37
  Exporting institutions was the basic framework of the post-World War II order, wasn't it?
• 21:41
  I mean, let's set up all of these institutions, NATO, the United Nations, World Health
• 21:46
  Organization, all of that, all that stuff and even the IMF and these financial institutions
• 21:52
  that could assist, you know, fledgling countries to getting out of debt traps and trying
• 21:56
  to set up.
• 21:57
  Didn't anything, you know, there's going to be there in 10 years time?
• 21:59
  No, I don't think any of this funnel is going to be there.
• 22:01
  Do you, you end up with a bit like the League of Nations, the League of Nations was the
• 22:06
  thing.
• 22:07
  That's what I'm saying.
• 22:08
  It is a bit depressing.
• 22:09
  How does India not have a seat at that table?
• 22:11
  Almost security council.
• 22:12
  The fuck is going on?
• 22:13
  Yeah.
• 22:14
  Because we're huge.
• 22:16
  We're superimposed.
• 22:18
  Where was bigger?
• 22:19
  Poland.
• 22:20
  I know.
• 22:21
  I know.
• 22:22
  I have been.
• 22:23
  We have such a weird view of who we are.
• 22:24
  There have been suggestions that the security council could be expanded to have a revolving
• 22:28
  series of five seats that get occupied by, at any given time, Brazil, India, Australia,
• 22:37
  Canada, Japan, you know, a bunch of countries that you sort of, whose voices deserve to be
• 22:42
  heard.
• 22:43
  But I mean, how do you decide who's in and who's out?
• 22:45
  I think population would be a great way to get out and like that one because I want power
• 22:49
  and I'm in Australia.
• 22:50
  Right.
• 22:51
  I don't have a huge population.
• 22:52
  Yeah, you do.
• 22:53
  Well, so what about basket case?
• 22:54
  What about big basket case countries?
• 22:56
  What like?
• 22:57
  Bangladesh.
• 22:58
  You don't want them in there and not Australia.
• 23:01
  Don't we?
• 23:02
  I don't think so.
• 23:03
  No, I don't know.
• 23:04
  They seem.
• 23:05
  They seem cool.
• 23:06
  No offense.
• 23:07
  I mean, you know, we've got lots of good ideas doing here.
• 23:08
  We came up with the hats that have the little corks hanging off them so the eyes can't
• 23:11
  get in your face.
• 23:12
  We've got lots of great ideas.
• 23:14
  What's been, what's ever done for the world?
• 23:15
  I think Australia is going to have a boom couple of years now.
• 23:19
  Really?
• 23:20
  Yeah, because I think it'll be about spheres of influence and I think it'll be about
• 23:23
  rare metal, rare earths, which isn't really about, they're not rare, they're everywhere.
• 23:28
  But we exported our guilt the last 30 years.
• 23:35
  We want to go green.
• 23:37
  So what we're going to do?
• 23:38
  Well, we'll get China to make the rare earths because it's messy and awful and we'll
• 23:42
  get them to do it and then we'll just import the clean product as if that makes a difference.
• 23:46
  I mean, it just struck me as madness.
• 23:49
  But now we're trying to ensure all of that stuff.
• 23:50
  So I imagine a lot of that will come to, you know, the FIFO's in Perth.
• 23:56
  The fly and fly out.
• 23:57
  Yeah, we've got all the photos.
• 23:58
  It's amazing.
• 23:59
  It was in FIFO.
• 24:00
  Yeah.
• 24:01
  Incredible.
• 24:02
  I mean, you've just been in West Australia, right?
• 24:03
  Yeah.
• 24:04
  I mean, I've been in Port Lounge.
• 24:05
  It's just 90% tradies in high viz gear.
• 24:10
  Great.
• 24:11
  Nice.
• 24:12
  I love the idea.
• 24:13
  Like, that for me is what it should be.
• 24:15
  It should be that the, you know, working man can make a great living.
• 24:18
  They certainly can in mining.
• 24:19
  Great.
• 24:20
  Absolutely.
• 24:21
  Yeah.
• 24:22
  Unfortunately, the people who own the mines are usually foreign corporations and we don't
• 24:25
  tax them to keep any of the revenue here the way that you can Norway do for their oil.
• 24:29
  Yeah.
• 24:30
  Norway seemed to have, Norway pretty much nailing it.
• 24:33
  I think the UK, not so much.
• 24:35
  Not so much.
• 24:36
  Not nailing it.
• 24:37
  Just not, you listen, we're not, um, I think nations for me, like the UK, if I was in charge,
• 24:43
  I think we've got to be more, um, I think we've got to be more competitive.
• 24:50
  What's going on with the UK?
• 24:51
  I get the sense not all is well, but I don't know why.
• 24:56
  What the UK?
• 24:57
  Yeah.
• 24:58
  I think it's like much bigger than, um, just a circumstance of government.
• 25:02
  I think it's the, our foundation myth is fading from view, uh, who we think we are in
• 25:07
  the world.
• 25:08
  We, we don't know what we're doing.
• 25:10
  It's like, we, we just, like, and there's a lot of kind of, I would describe it as, um,
• 25:15
  very unsurious people in charge, playing politics and it's kind of fantasy politics.
• 25:20
  The idea that we, we don't know our place in the world.
• 25:23
  We don't know how much money we can spend.
• 25:25
  So we're, you know, overspending and overreaching on foreign policy and on our financial policies.
• 25:32
  And it strikes me that we're, uh, we're not going to get out this with the death spiral
• 25:37
  of, you know, higher taxes and maybe that, maybe that'll work.
• 25:41
  The people will move, um, people will move.
• 25:44
  The corporations will move.
• 25:46
  I really like what Ireland did.
• 25:47
  I thought Ireland was so smart, like in the EU, not in NATO, and they weren't right.
• 25:52
  We're going to have really low corporation taxes for, uh, specifically for IT, right?
• 25:57
  For IT for the big IT companies in America.
• 25:59
  And they, and big pharmaceutical companies were a lot of big pharma in Ireland.
• 26:03
  They'd run it so well and you go, that's, you've got to be competitive.
• 26:07
  You've got it, what's our competitive advantage is the UK.
• 26:10
  I think it's like, well, we're not in the EU, but we're seen as a very safe haven
• 26:14
  and a nice place to live.
• 26:16
  And, you know, we've, we've got a lot of, um, uh, soft power in the world.
• 26:20
  So we could be doing really well, but we're not willing to pull any of the levers
• 26:24
  that would make us competitive.
• 26:26
  Right.
• 26:26
  And really those levers are, I mean, it's quite simplistic what the levers are.
• 26:30
  There's, there's, you know, you, you've got your taxation system.
• 26:33
  It's got the most simplistic.
• 26:34
  You've got your currency, which our currency is overvalued.
• 26:38
  And then you've got your regulations and your, um, your tax system.
• 26:43
  We could, we could, all of those could be changed pretty easy.
• 26:45
  You are.
• 26:46
  I mean, you can't lower taxes without cutting services because you're already in the black.
• 26:50
  You could simplify regulation.
• 26:51
  Wait a second.
• 26:53
  I think the Eastern European system,
• 26:55
  the post-Soviet Eastern European system was really sensible.
• 26:58
  Well, they just went, okay, we need a new tax code.
• 27:00
  We're going to make it super simple for people and they had a flat tax.
• 27:04
  And it was, for me, it comes down to the absolutely fundamental question
• 27:08
  about politics is like, what's the point of GDP?
• 27:11
  What's the point of all this?
• 27:13
  And if you think the point is equality, I think you're missing a trick.
• 27:18
  I think the, the point is abundance.
• 27:21
  You want abundance.
• 27:22
  You want like a, you want the, the base level for everyone to be great.
• 27:27
  Like, I would love to run for office, but I'd love to run for office in 1901.
• 27:35
  I'd like with today, with today's, no, but in 1901,
• 27:38
  I'd bring a machine gun with today's, with today's, with today's,
• 27:44
  life.
• 27:45
  Like, because we get, we factor in the, Hedonic treadmill is so great.
• 27:47
  We factor in how great things are.
• 27:50
  The problem is we keep on moving the goalposts.
• 27:52
  Not everyone could be rich because rich is relative,
• 27:55
  but everyone could have enough.
• 27:58
  Everyone could, like, we need to deal the young people in.
• 28:02
  Like, the idea that, like, people in their 20s, I would, I would run on
• 28:06
  no one in their 20s has to pay any tax.
• 28:08
  I think we need to deal that generation in, because we've all done so
• 28:13
  while out of it, you know, if you bought a house in the 1970s or 80s,
• 28:17
  you look like a genius now.
• 28:18
  I mean, that's what people would say about a flat tax as well.
• 28:20
  Of course, multi-millionaire Jimmy Carr wants a flat tax,
• 28:23
  because that massively benefits the world.
• 28:24
  No, but also I want the, the tax revenue of the nation to be higher.
• 28:29
  So I want the net amount of money coming in to be greater than it is now.
• 28:34
  Right.
• 28:34
  Okay, so you say, well, but I want it to be fair.
• 28:38
  Well, there's a full, you know, there's a just world fallacy,
• 28:41
  that the world's going to be fair.
• 28:42
  It's never going to be fair.
• 28:43
  Even if there's equality of opportunity, which you would want,
• 28:46
  there won't be equality of outcome.
• 28:48
  No, different people have different abilities,
• 28:49
  and different people work harder than other people.
• 28:51
  So the idea of just going, well, actually, if we had a flat tax way,
• 28:54
  right, we might increase our tax revenues,
• 28:58
  because you might encourage huge corporations like Ireland did
• 29:01
  to come in and set up in the UK.
• 29:04
  They say, well, we're not going.
• 29:05
  Why do we tax anyone on money reinvested in the company?
• 29:09
  Maybe we shouldn't.
• 29:10
  And encourage companies to build in the UK.
• 29:12
  What, you know, we should start making things.
• 29:14
  Also, I mean, bootle is the guy.
• 29:16
  Bootle is the academic that came up with us.
• 29:18
  He's been talking about it for 20 years,
• 29:20
  but the idea that the pound is artificially high.
• 29:24
  If you lower the currency,
• 29:25
  you've become much more competitive overnight.
• 29:28
  Why is it high?
• 29:29
  It's the city of London.
• 29:30
  I mean, it's really it's a, I think it's a weird ego.
• 29:34
  We don't respect our place in the world.
• 29:36
  We don't know where we stand in the world.
• 29:37
  Right, but I mean, the currency floats.
• 29:39
  So no one's deciding that it should be high.
• 29:41
  Right. I mean, it's just, it's just sold on,
• 29:43
  it's just traded on international markets.
• 29:45
  The government doesn't set the price of the currency.
• 29:47
  Yeah, it's a, it kind of does, though.
• 29:49
  I think there's, there's kind of, you know,
• 29:50
  the bank of England and there's interest rates and interest rates.
• 29:53
  There's, there's, there's, there's mass donations.
• 29:55
  There's way of sort of ways of doing that.
• 29:57
  But strikes me is quite an interesting, certainly an interesting
• 29:59
  discussion point to go, well, how do you become more competitive
• 30:03
  as a nation?
• 30:04
  Because you aren't having a cheaper currency is one way, certainly.
• 30:07
  Yeah. And what about, you know, less regulation is obviously the dream.
• 30:11
  And that can end in disaster.
• 30:13
  That can end with people cutting things that don't need to be cut.
• 30:15
  I mean, on the spiritual question of what of Britain's sort of malaise,
• 30:20
  which you alluded to, like, what is Britain in the 21st century,
• 30:23
  there are two possible answers to that.
• 30:25
  One is a kind of a sort of blareight, cool Britannia kind of,
• 30:30
  like Boris Johnson pre 2012 vision of like,
• 30:34
  where this dynamic country that is like the coolest place in Europe
• 30:38
  and where you're going to be like, the, where the,
• 30:41
  we're really edgy and new and where the England of the 21st century.
• 30:44
  But okay, but that, but that all centers around London.
• 30:48
  But just a lot of politicians took it out.
• 30:50
  I just want to contrast that with the alternative worldview,
• 30:53
  which is the Farage, I suppose, Brexit worldview,
• 30:55
  which is Britain is tradition.
• 30:58
  It is the British people, the English people.
• 31:00
  It is this ancient sort of civilisation.
• 31:02
  It is the, you know, it's the Fishing Chip shop.
• 31:05
  It's the, it's all of these kind of iconic things.
• 31:07
  It's the two runnies and it's like, you know, it's the BBC.
• 31:10
  It's these, it's a harkening back to a greater time for Britain
• 31:15
  and that we need to reclaim that.
• 31:16
  And that then teeters on the brink of like,
• 31:19
  why are we bringing in all of these foreigners?
• 31:21
  Why are there so many darts against people here?
• 31:22
  Like why are we targeting Britishness so much?
• 31:26
  Times are big factor there, isn't it?
• 31:27
  Because you go the, on the, on the right,
• 31:30
  it's people going, make Britain great again.
• 31:33
  It's kind of harking back to a past that never existed.
• 31:36
  By every metric, things are better today than they were 50 years ago.
• 31:40
  Anything you look at, the Stephen Pinker kind of thing,
• 31:42
  rings better than it was.
• 31:43
  And then there's a, a left view that goes right we want progress.
• 31:47
  And actually what you want is kind of a mix of the two.
• 31:50
  Traditions, what are they?
• 31:52
  Well, they, they were incredibly, they were experiments that worked.
• 31:56
  Right? So you want to keep all the experiments that worked.
• 31:58
  And then you want to move forward with, with, with progress.
• 32:02
  You, you definitely want to move in a direction.
• 32:04
  Yes. But no one's got a clear kind of vision
• 32:06
  of what that direction is.
• 32:07
  And I think we could be, we voted for Brexit.
• 32:09
  And whatever you think about, we did and we're out of Europe.
• 32:13
  And Europe were really worried.
• 32:15
  We were going to undercut them and compete.
• 32:17
  And, and, and the city of London would just sort of take over
• 32:20
  and take who we didn't know any of that.
• 32:23
  Crazy.
• 32:25
  We sort of that vision of kind of,
• 32:26
  we could have been sort of Singapore of Europe.
• 32:28
  No, no, we absolutely fucked it.
• 32:32
  I could have been a contender, baby.
• 32:34
  Yeah, I think people were so upset that it happened.
• 32:37
  There was, there was a lack of that thing of like in sort of therapy speak.
• 32:40
  We just, we didn't accept what had happened.
• 32:42
  We didn't accept the new reality.
• 32:44
  And, and now what we're doing is just kind of flailing around.
• 32:47
  Oh, poor old Britain.
• 32:49
  All right, America then.
• 32:50
  Let's talk what, so we just touched briefly on Iran and Hormuz.
• 32:54
  And like the fact that we are currently in a lull,
• 32:57
  we're like two weeks ago, the last tank has left the straight up.
• 33:01
  Oh, sorry, the tankers that had left Hormuz,
• 33:03
  the final tankers reached their destinations two weeks ago.
• 33:06
  Right, that only two weeks.
• 33:08
  So the processing is nearly finished.
• 33:09
  So we are at that, we're in that kind of immediate post Brexit moment
• 33:14
  or like the beginning of COVID moment, where we're like,
• 33:17
  it's everything's in a state of hiatus was sort of okay still.
• 33:22
  But assuming this goes on for a while,
• 33:25
  which I think it sort of has to because why would the Iranians
• 33:29
  give anything up yet when they know that Donald Trump's here
• 33:32
  is going to be the classic, the classic line, the guys I love.
• 33:36
  You ever listen to multi polarity?
• 33:38
  Those guys, yeah, yeah, you could be on top.
• 33:39
  But that, that thing of like they were on the other day
• 33:42
  and they were saying, well, can you make a fish at a fish soup?
• 33:47
  No, no, you can't.
• 33:49
  Some things are unfuckable once you've done it.
• 33:52
  Like day one on the war, if you're fighting,
• 33:55
  if you ever get into this scrape and you might,
• 33:57
  I know what you're like, but if you ever start in a war with it,
• 33:59
  with a nation, yes, that has a tradition of dayifying martyrs,
• 34:09
  maybe don't kill this spiritual leader on day one.
• 34:12
  I know you think it's a flex, but maybe that didn't go well.
• 34:16
  Yes, also, here's a tip.
• 34:19
  If you're, if the people who you've declared war with and you are
• 34:24
  entering a stalemate with and who you are daring to back down,
• 34:28
  have pegged their national identity since 1979 to being
• 34:34
  tenacious and grinning and bearing it and suffering all of the
• 34:39
  indignities that you can throw at them as part of their core thesis
• 34:42
  of their polity.
• 34:44
  Yeah, don't expect to go into a staring competition with them
• 34:47
  and have them instantly blink.
• 34:48
  Well, it's, it's the difference between tactics and strategy,
• 34:51
  which people don't seem to understand.
• 34:53
  And it's the, it's the inability for us to, we want to,
• 34:57
  we can inflict a lot of pain, but we can't take any pain.
• 35:01
  And that's what they're gambling on and they're right.
• 35:04
  They're right.
• 35:04
  They will put up with any pain they have to for six months,
• 35:08
  because they know that the Republican party will not allow Donald Trump
• 35:11
  to go to the November elections with pump prices at $5.
• 35:17
  And I'm not sure what we're, I'm not sure what we're even.
• 35:20
  Yeah, I'm skeptical of the narrative.
• 35:23
  Right.
• 35:23
  On some of these things, like what do you suspect?
• 35:26
  Venezuela, what do you think happened in Venezuela?
• 35:27
  I don't feel well informed enough to know, but I guess I take the standard.
• 35:33
  You think description.
• 35:34
  You think some choppers flew over Caracas with some soldiers in.
• 35:39
  They landed the choppers.
• 35:41
  The guys got out of the planes.
• 35:42
  They killed 32 Cuban guys, no Venezuelans.
• 35:46
  They got the Venezuelan guys with discombobulators,
• 35:50
  which they're not keen on telling us what they are, but they're discombobulators.
• 35:53
  And then the Cuban guys were cremated that day, set back to Cuba in shoeboxes.
• 35:58
  And they got the one guy and he's wife out with no resistance and got him back to the states.
• 36:05
  That's, that feels like a fairytale.
• 36:08
  Right, this is what I've been told.
• 36:10
  It feels like Jimmy Carter.
• 36:11
  This is what I've been told I wasn't there.
• 36:14
  I didn't intercept the comms.
• 36:15
  I mean, listen, I think Delta Force are, I mean, they are an awesome force.
• 36:19
  There's no getting away from that.
• 36:20
  The tactics of those guys, the abilities of those guys, I'm not denigrating that for one second.
• 36:26
  I just think the narrative and what happened is, it's a very strange thing happened.
• 36:33
  I don't know.
• 36:33
  I think it was maybe spill the beans.
• 36:35
  Well, what's that brilliant essay?
• 36:38
  Is it Bontaria?
• 36:39
  Someone can look it up, but the Gulf will never happen.
• 36:42
  Yeah, no, it wasn't Bontaria.
• 36:43
  But it was a, it's kind of a reason.
• 36:46
  But that, that, that, no, no, there was about 9.11.
• 36:50
  Oh, it might be Bontaria.
• 36:51
  Yeah, Bontaria.
• 36:51
  I bet it was that thing of like going, it this never happened.
• 36:54
  They called the generals and said, get out the way we're coming through.
• 36:57
  We would just get inside and we don't want to kill your guys.
• 36:59
  We're just going to, it's not really, it's not what's going on.
• 37:01
  So it's interesting that the, the, the narrative is kind of, it's what it seems to be about
• 37:07
  the narrative now of going.
• 37:09
  The oil markets seem to, don't seem to be reacting in a way that I would have thought.
• 37:14
  I'd be very bad at inside of trading, because if I've known that they were going to,
• 37:18
  this was going to happen, I would have thought oil's going to be $200 a barrel.
• 37:21
  Yes.
• 37:22
  And somehow it isn't.
• 37:23
  Yes.
• 37:24
  Yes.
• 37:25
  I don't know.
• 37:26
  What's going on?
• 37:27
  Well, I don't think they understand geopolitics that well.
• 37:30
  I just think they think that Trump has shaken out before and so he'll trick, chicken out
• 37:34
  again, which may well be true.
• 37:36
  He's not going to chicken out in a way that compels the Iranians to hand over the keys
• 37:39
  to the strait.
• 37:40
  I mean, why worry is that the Iranians give him a face-saving way of getting out by making
• 37:46
  some compromise on the nuclear program and, you know, calling it 10 or 15 years instead
• 37:50
  of five years or 20 years or whatever, and he can go home and declare victory without
• 37:54
  a way to properly police the strait.
• 37:56
  And Iran will, we'll write a piece of paper, we'll sign a piece of paper saying that
• 37:59
  the strage is back into international waters.
• 38:03
  In the future, now they know what they can do.
• 38:06
  Countries like the UK, Australia and Japan and European countries could just be bribed
• 38:12
  by Iran to, for example, relief sanctions on them.
• 38:18
  That's not the only choke point in the world.
• 38:20
  Like the idea that whoever's holding the Suez Canal goes, hang on a second, we've got
• 38:25
  a play here.
• 38:26
  Whoever's got the Panama Canal goes, oh, hang on, we could do something.
• 38:30
  This is true.
• 38:32
  This is the most consequential one.
• 38:33
  Yeah.
• 38:34
  And we've just given it up.
• 38:35
  Is it the Straits of Malacca that the Chinese since the 1950s have planned for?
• 38:40
  Yes.
• 38:41
  Because they go, well, we don't want to be a hostages to that.
• 38:43
  That's the body of water just below Singapore for people who don't know.
• 38:46
  And it's vital for getting stuff to China from India, Europe and Africa.
• 38:53
  And so, yes, the, I mean, the Chinese are also looking at this very closely because if
• 38:59
  they were a conflict over Taiwan, then blockading the Straits of Malacca would be a thing
• 39:04
  that we would, I wouldn't want to be in Vladivostok now.
• 39:08
  You know, they've changed all the maps in China.
• 39:11
  No.
• 39:12
  Vladivostok's got its original name.
• 39:13
  It's like, it's Chinese name.
• 39:15
  Get out.
• 39:16
  Yeah.
• 39:17
  So they're like, they're like that because it's on the Russian coast above China.
• 39:20
  They've got, they've got some patience to brush those guys.
• 39:23
  Wow.
• 39:24
  They've got some patience.
• 39:25
  They're going to, they're going to wait around.
• 39:29
  What do you feel about like your kids and like, you know, the future and I think it'd
• 39:33
  be incredible.
• 39:34
  I think it's, I'm such a, a glass half full person.
• 39:38
  Clearly.
• 39:39
  I kind of look at the world and I think, okay, well, this is a very tumultuous time.
• 39:43
  But we've been through worse and you look at what happened after World War II.
• 39:49
  You look at, you know, you go, America, look at, look at Iraq and I've looked at Afghanistan,
• 39:54
  what an absolute disaster.
• 39:55
  Yeah.
• 39:56
  But look at Germany and Japan post war.
• 39:59
  Unbelievable success.
• 40:01
  They did so incredibly well and we'll, like, it's Robert Frost, civilization is a clearing
• 40:08
  in the forest and we're going to have to relitigate everything and rebuild and, you know, it's
• 40:14
  that thing of like a good times, create weak men.
• 40:18
  That's what we're looking at now on weak men create bad times and bad times create strong
• 40:23
  men and round it, round it goes and I think the future will be incredible because I think
• 40:29
  there's a generation of people coming up that will just step up to the plate and do great
• 40:33
  things.
• 40:34
  I think it's entirely possible that the future will be incredible but it depends on the
• 40:38
  timeline and what we have to endure in order to get there.
• 40:40
  I don't want to live through the, I like the clearing in the forest that is civilization
• 40:45
  and I don't want the forest to encroach before we have to beat back the vines again and
• 40:49
  create a new clearing.
• 40:51
  Yeah, but then it's that thing where we've kind of forgotten what we were protecting.
• 40:54
  I think there's, I think there's a little bit of, I think it's oinkophobia is the fancy
• 40:59
  term.
• 41:00
  Oinkophobia is the hatred of one's own culture.
• 41:04
  I see a lot of that in the West now.
• 41:06
  I see a lot of that kind of thing with, it's Thomas Sal, he's great line on like multiculturalism
• 41:13
  seems to boil down to you can love every culture apart from your own.
• 41:17
  And it's like that thing of like the West is incredible.
• 41:19
  The West makes something that everyone wants, progress.
• 41:23
  And you know, why do people want to come and live in these great, great countries?
• 41:27
  Yeah, I mean, I guess my concern would be that in the revolution and the re litigation,
• 41:34
  there's a chance that we won't be able to re-articulate what was good about the West
• 41:38
  and that even if we can, it is such a delicate balance of different things that have given
• 41:44
  rise to the prosperity of the West, especially in the post-war war two period, that reconstructing
• 41:50
  that general puzzle.
• 41:53
  When you get to that, you get to, is it popper, car popper, the, if you tolerate, ultimately
• 42:01
  if tolerance leads to tolerating the intolerant, and then you can tolerate too much intolerant
• 42:06
  tolerance.
• 42:07
  So that's kind of the rubber, the rubber hits the road and you've got to sort of find
• 42:09
  a balance there.
• 42:10
  But it's, I think we're more than capable of doing that again.
• 42:14
  I just think it's that thing where you go, you have to be kind of practical about this
• 42:17
  and think about, well, what's going to, what's going to lead to human flourishing?
• 42:22
  You said you, you have sort of faith in it, you're not quite as much an atheist as you
• 42:27
  say that you are.
• 42:28
  I mean, I don't believe in God, but I think that thing about going, I'm with, I mean,
• 42:34
  it's weird, but I'm with Hegel and Nietzsche on this.
• 42:38
  I don't think God was there at the big bang.
• 42:40
  I think the universe is a device for creating God and where 12.5 billion years into the project,
• 42:48
  we're doing great.
• 42:49
  But yeah, a lot of people sort of have that view of AI, I'm not sure where the AI is
• 42:53
  that, but AI is, I think, the fourth humiliation, you familiar with this idea of the humiliation
• 42:58
  as a man?
• 42:59
  Tell me.
• 43:00
  What?
• 43:01
  So it's the idea that Copernicus said we're not the centre of the universe, okay?
• 43:03
  And then Darwin said we're no different from the animals.
• 43:07
  And then Freud said we're not even in charge of our own mind, it's basically our subconscious
• 43:10
  running the show.
• 43:11
  And then AI comes along and we're not even the smartest thing in the room anymore.
• 43:16
  We could, we could always like rest on, oh, yeah, but we are the smartest thing in
• 43:19
  universe.
• 43:20
  And now we're like, what's it if we are?
• 43:22
  Pretty soon, baby.
• 43:23
  Pretty soon.
• 43:24
  Will I be?
• 43:25
  Any day now?
• 43:26
  Do you worry about that?
• 43:27
  No.
• 43:28
  What about the alignment problem?
• 43:29
  What about making sure that, you know, the claims of some AI rumors, which is that it's
• 43:34
  just naive for any more stupid species or civilization to think that it can, in perpetuity,
• 43:43
  control the interests of a smarter species or civilization.
• 43:47
  And that once it's smarter, we're just going to get left behind, it's going to go off
• 43:50
  and do things that we can't even understand why it's doing because it's so much smarter
• 43:53
  than us that we can't understand why it's doing them.
• 43:56
  And we will become, I view, I think it's a tool and it'll be used by humans.
• 44:03
  And if it can take away drudgery and people talk about, it's, it might take away jobs.
• 44:09
  You go, will it take away the need for jobs?
• 44:11
  We didn't used to have a weekend, right?
• 44:13
  No one, no one respects the unions properly that you sometimes see a bumper sticker in America
• 44:18
  saying the unions gave us the weekend.
• 44:20
  They did.
• 44:21
  The unions, they went out and they got weekends and eight hour working days for people.
• 44:25
  We used to work like 16 hours a day, seven days a week, or maybe they got Sunday off,
• 44:31
  yeah.
• 44:32
  It was crazy.
• 44:33
  So you go, the idea that what could progress look like?
• 44:35
  Now, like, all right, so what's your vision of the future?
• 44:38
  Do you think we're going to live in Star Trek or Star Wars?
• 44:42
  So it's a bit Star Wars at the moment, right?
• 44:44
  Everyone's competing over resources and we're trying to get stuff.
• 44:48
  And maybe it'll be Star Trek.
• 44:52
  Maybe they'll be abundance and we'll just go off this, this could be the beginning of
• 44:56
  infinity.
• 44:57
  It's 100 billion people have lived so far.
• 45:00
  There could be trillions of people in the future.
• 45:02
  We might go off planet.
• 45:03
  We might do incredible things, but it depends how this goes.
• 45:07
  So the idea that AI is very scary, but could it cure cancer?
• 45:11
  Well, maybe if we, like everything in the world, I think that we in modern society that
• 45:17
  we hold here comes from physics.
• 45:19
  And physics has stalled since 1972.
• 45:21
  Nothing has happened in physics since 1972.
• 45:24
  Peter Tiel and Eric Weinstein are always saying this whenever I say it, like it's the minus
• 45:29
  the screens were in the same rooms we were in the early 70s.
• 45:33
  There hasn't been progress in that way.
• 45:35
  Maybe there'll be a great leap forward in progress.
• 45:38
  There may well be.
• 45:39
  I mean, it may cure cancer.
• 45:40
  It may, you know, solve physics for us.
• 45:44
  It may also become so sophisticated that it ceases to take orders from an inferior species
• 45:53
  that doesn't understand what it's doing.
• 45:55
  Yeah.
• 45:56
  I mean, you can, you can always, you know, be a doom.
• 45:58
  I think, you know, I mean, listen, there's going to be, there's going to be a huge amount
• 46:03
  of nuclear purification.
• 46:04
  There's going to be, there's environmental problems that people are unwilling to grasp
• 46:09
  the nettle.
• 46:10
  And I absolutely agree with the environmental, the idea that we have what the problem is,
• 46:15
  and the idea of the solution.
• 46:16
  I think AI, small nuclear reactors might have a bigger role to play in solving the climate
• 46:23
  crisis than someone throwing paint at a vangoff.
• 46:26
  I'm not sure whether the guy, I mean, maybe I'm wrong.
• 46:32
  Maybe small nuclear reactors and AI sort of driven technology won't do it.
• 46:37
  Maybe a guy gluing himself to a car on the M25 will actually be the thing that turns
• 46:42
  the corner.
• 46:43
  But it's the idea that you, their basic thing seems to be we need to consume less.
• 46:47
  And I don't see that.
• 46:48
  I think like energy is, it's why this thing in Hormuz and Iran is so detrimental to the
• 46:54
  world because you go, well, actually, everything, energy is, it's human-pharasing.
• 47:01
  It's, it's what we're looking for.
• 47:03
  No, I mean, I think it's more of, more, more good stuff.
• 47:07
  Is, is something that I can sign up for.
• 47:09
  And it's a funny thing that sort of happened to environmentalism and even to the left more
• 47:14
  broadly in the 70s.
• 47:15
  I had someone on the show who was talking about this.
• 47:16
  I can't remember who, my apologies to whoever that was, who was saying that, you know,
• 47:22
  pre-1970s, the left was quite cool with progress and abundance and, you know, making
• 47:30
  as much as having as many material benefits for as many people as possible.
• 47:35
  And then in the 70s, materialism got associated with big corporations and the kind of Ralph
• 47:41
  Nader sort of consumer advocacy movement grew and was coupled to the environmental movement.
• 47:48
  And their answer to everything seemed to be put as many roadblocks as possible so that
• 47:52
  people can't do all kinds of hair-brained things that disregard communities and let's put
• 47:58
  in, especially in the States, lots of ability for the community to leverage its influence
• 48:02
  through consultation and through lawsuits and through, you know.
• 48:06
  And as a result, the whole system sort of has grounds to a halt and it's become very,
• 48:10
  very difficult.
• 48:11
  No, you can't.
• 48:12
  It's like the practical where the rubber hits the road now in Australia.
• 48:15
  The problem, I mean, lots of young people at the shows, they can't afford to buy houses.
• 48:19
  Yes.
• 48:20
  It's not complicated to build a house.
• 48:21
  Yeah.
• 48:22
  It's not a complicated thing, but you're making it difficult.
• 48:24
  Yes.
• 48:25
  You're making, you know, the amount of regulation becomes a problem.
• 48:29
  And I think you have to be cool with going, well, it's, you know, maybe we need to build
• 48:32
  some new towns.
• 48:33
  Hmm.
• 48:34
  I'd love new towns.
• 48:35
  You wouldn't have to keep traveling around to all of these ridiculous places, which
• 48:38
  doesn't really exist.
• 48:39
  I should go to the new towns.
• 48:40
  Yeah, you go to new towns, but they'd be nice and sparkling.
• 48:41
  They'd be Jetsons and Star Trek, not, you know, no offense to real Hampton, but maybe
• 48:47
  we can do that.
• 48:48
  It's a good show.
• 48:49
  Maybe was it?
• 48:50
  Yeah.
• 48:51
  How are the shows in those regional towns in comparison to…
• 48:52
  I believe she shard a nice, swilling latte souping at me to speak to us.
• 48:55
  Well, I like it.
• 48:56
  You know, you, you saw my show, like half an hour of it, or 45 minutes, it's people
• 49:01
  joining in.
• 49:02
  Yes.
• 49:03
  It's the best part, obviously.
• 49:04
  It's, well, look, I spent a lot of time writing the jokes and making sure that the show
• 49:07
  is there.
• 49:08
  They're great.
• 49:09
  And then, but it's that thing of like, you want people to see you shooting the gift.
• 49:13
  You want people to go, oh, yeah, okay, this guy can just sort of, off the top of his head,
• 49:17
  be funny about stuff.
• 49:18
  And it's also the light in the shade is the important thing.
• 49:21
  So if there's a little poignant moment in there as well, it's kind of, because that's
• 49:24
  what life's like.
• 49:25
  It's funny, and it's tragic, and it's sad, and it's beautiful, and it seems to be that
• 49:29
  it's, um, people are coming out and they want all of those experiences in a, in a night.
• 49:34
  And so when you're doing crowd work in a regional town, as opposed to, uh, you know, an elite
• 49:39
  city, how does it differ?
• 49:41
  Well, I suppose it's that thing where you get into sort of longer conversations about
• 49:45
  stuff.
• 49:46
  So if you play, uh, you know, 15,000-seater, it's like, you're sort of looking for
• 49:50
  one word from the audience, like, oh, you know, talk about Trump or talk about, um, uh,
• 49:56
  you know, what do you think about?
• 49:57
  What's happening in the list?
• 49:58
  Whatever the thing is, and you can kind of talk on that, whereas you might get into someone
• 50:01
  specific issue in a smaller place.
• 50:04
  You might get into, okay, what's happening with you and what do you do?
• 50:07
  I mean, it's not just a smaller place, though.
• 50:08
  It's a different type of person.
• 50:09
  It's not, I mean, it's a person who is choosing to live in a remote regional community.
• 50:15
  Maybe I'm just dripping with elitism here by assuming that that person has different
• 50:18
  preferences than a person who lives in a big city.
• 50:21
  But do you not notice a different, not really?
• 50:23
  No, I, I know I would, I wouldn't notice a massive difference.
• 50:27
  I think people are, people are people and they get the thing, they get the thing that I
• 50:31
  do.
• 50:32
  Just, I mean, I suppose it's self-selecting at this point.
• 50:35
  Right.
• 50:36
  People come and see me.
• 50:37
  Come and see me.
• 50:38
  Yeah.
• 50:39
  So I rarely get anyone.
• 50:40
  I don't get many walkouts now, not because the stuff isn't energy or transgressive, but
• 50:44
  because walking out of my show, it's like going to see a horror movie and going, I'll
• 50:47
  let my money back, please, I'm scared.
• 50:49
  Okay, dummy.
• 50:51
  Yeah.
• 50:52
  Yeah.
• 50:53
  Do you need downtime?
• 50:55
  Yeah.
• 50:56
  I don't, I don't think there's any such thing as being overworked.
• 51:00
  I think there's, there's no, but underrested.
• 51:04
  So it's that thing of like going, how, if you want to function at that level, if you want
• 51:07
  a hard charge, what are you going to have to do in order to make that happen?
• 51:11
  How are you going to take care of yourself?
• 51:13
  So it's that thing of like, if I'm on the road like this, like I can't really drink when
• 51:17
  I'm on the road, like I like a drink, but I can't have a drink because you go, you're
• 51:21
  borrowing happiness from tomorrow.
• 51:24
  I can't be dehydrated tomorrow.
• 51:25
  I've got two shows in Rootie Hill.
• 51:27
  I could have, and those people have worked hard to buy the tickets.
• 51:30
  Yes.
• 51:31
  And I, I'm a, I need to be of service.
• 51:33
  I need to, so it's that thing of like sort of taking care of yourself is, I think a lot
• 51:37
  of it is, is, is that it's just the, uh, any you able to do that during the day?
• 51:41
  Do you actually?
• 51:42
  Yeah.
• 51:43
  I work hard like, you know, get up and start hammering out more jokes or, yeah, no, I write
• 51:47
  stuff every day.
• 51:48
  I always try not new bits every night.
• 51:49
  I think that thing about going comedy isn't repetition.
• 51:52
  It's iteration.
• 51:54
  It's like you, you just try, oration, iteration, or iteration, so you're, you're basically
• 52:00
  like every night, you maybe test 10 new jokes at the end of the show, right, then get
• 52:03
  a bit of paper out and try the new jokes.
• 52:05
  I've got them here.
• 52:06
  Did you write anything today?
• 52:07
  Yeah.
• 52:08
  Didn't this one?
• 52:09
  What have you written?
• 52:10
  Yeah.
• 52:11
  I don't think there's anything that'd be suitable for a family audience.
• 52:16
  I mean, really, there isn't this, this is, it doesn't have to be a family audience.
• 52:20
  What's the, what's the most recent joke idea?
• 52:24
  Okay.
• 52:25
  Um, I'm doing this tour to pay for my extension, not on the house, it's something else
• 52:29
  I'm having done.
• 52:30
  That's right.
• 52:31
  That's joke.
• 52:32
  That's good.
• 52:33
  Yeah, that's so shaped.
• 52:34
  I like it.
• 52:35
  A girl once told me having a small penis is nothing to be ashamed of, but I still wish
• 52:39
  she didn't have one.
• 52:42
  Whatever.
• 52:43
  There's like 20 of those.
• 52:44
  So you just write every day, and it's a bit, I got it really from British cycling.
• 52:49
  British cycling.
• 52:50
  I got obsessed by British cycling.
• 52:51
  I hate cycling.
• 52:52
  I've never watched a cycle race.
• 52:53
  Couldn't care less.
• 52:54
  But they did a thing.
• 52:55
  The guys that came in and took it over 20 years ago when we can't be 10% better.
• 53:00
  Why don't we get 0.1% better?
• 53:03
  Okay.
• 53:04
  We're going to shave our legs like this.
• 53:05
  So we're going to change the thing.
• 53:07
  We're going to heat our legs between the rounds.
• 53:10
  And they did loads of these tiny, tiny, incremental improvements.
• 53:14
  And then they ended up willing every gold medal just for 12 years.
• 53:17
  They just absolutely nailed it.
• 53:19
  But it was the incremental, tiny improvements.
• 53:21
  The Japanese have got some word for it.
• 53:23
  Case, and I think they call it something like that.
• 53:26
  And it's that thing of the pleasure in getting very slightly better at something.
• 53:31
  It's nice.
• 53:32
  It's something that you're kind of constantly working on.
• 53:35
  How do you then remember which jokes you're going to, I mean, there's a very basic question.
• 53:39
  But if you're writing every single day, and there's a bit in the show, which is where
• 53:42
  you're going to try out some new stuff, do you have to proactively, like, remember what
• 53:47
  you were writing that day?
• 53:49
  Literally.
• 53:50
  Or do you literally take a piece of paper out and a pen and go, I'm going to try some
• 53:53
  new jokes.
• 53:54
  I remember you doing that.
• 53:55
  I thought that was a bit.
• 53:56
  No, that's just the end of all the 90 true.
• 53:58
  That's just homework.
• 53:59
  I know.
• 54:00
  I thought you were just giving yourself a, I just think it's the thing where you go.
• 54:03
  If you do it every day or every single show, it becomes, like, it's odd to try new material
• 54:08
  in front of 15,000 people, but you go, look, it's fine, it's, you know, and if they don't
• 54:13
  work, it's like a really interesting thing of going, oh, okay.
• 54:16
  Yeah.
• 54:17
  And I've written more jokes that don't work than your average person.
• 54:19
  Well, you write a lot of jokes.
• 54:21
  Yeah, but I mean, it's my only job.
• 54:23
  Yeah, but I still know comics who don't.
• 54:26
  I still know comics who get up there, wing it, riff, you know, try to find the kernel
• 54:31
  of something in the, in the midst of all the other faff that they're doing.
• 54:36
  You're a very highly, I don't want to say mechanical because that sounds like pejorative,
• 54:41
  but craftsmen like medium.
• 54:45
  But I think that thing, I'm working on a book at the moment, actually.
• 54:48
  It's coming out in the, in the autumn with my friend Abby Grant and Amanda Baker.
• 54:53
  So we've written a book on jokes, which is about the how to write jokes and what, because
• 54:58
  I think there's too much magical thinking around comedy.
• 55:01
  Like if you think about, um, you've heard of Gregorian Chants, right?
• 55:04
  Yeah.
• 55:05
  Well, the reason you've heard of Gregorian Chants is because of Pope Gregory.
• 55:08
  The Pope Gregory was sitting around in, uh, the, you know, 1200s and he was, he went, he's
• 55:15
  traveling around from the Vatican to other churches are going to rockhamton.
• 55:19
  Everyone's singing these songs differently.
• 55:21
  This isn't bullshit.
• 55:22
  I want everyone to sing the same.
• 55:24
  And everyone said to him, we can't write down music.
• 55:27
  Music is ethereal.
• 55:28
  It comes from above.
• 55:29
  It's just like a, it's a vibe.
• 55:31
  It's a feel.
• 55:32
  It's a, uh, you can't write down music.
• 55:34
  And he went, I'm the Pope.
• 55:36
  Write down some music.
• 55:37
  And musical notation is from that.
• 55:40
  That's why we know what Gregorian Chants are.
• 55:43
  So, right, crash chart, 300 years later, you've got Bach and then you've got Mozart.
• 55:51
  And those couldn't have happened without the notation.
• 55:54
  So the idea that it goes, it doesn't take away to, to understand the structure of these
• 55:59
  things.
• 56:00
  So the idea of the book is, it's not really for, uh, general consumption.
• 56:03
  The idea is it's for comedians that want to get better, that want to, and people that
• 56:08
  want to get into it.
• 56:09
  I mean, I'm a big believer that comedy should be taught in schools because I think we
• 56:13
  teach music.
• 56:14
  Not enough of it.
• 56:15
  We teach music.
• 56:16
  We teach drama.
• 56:18
  We teach the arts and we don't give voice to comedy.
• 56:22
  And I think actually if you think about what comedy gives people, it forces them to order
• 56:28
  their thoughts, write down their thoughts and it forces them to find their own authentic
• 56:33
  voice.
• 56:34
  And the saddest thing is most people live and die and never hear their own authentic voice.
• 56:40
  And the idea of being able to joke and the idea of being able to filter life, I mean
• 56:46
  joking doesn't change reality, but it changes your perspective on reality.
• 56:50
  It puts, it's quite stoic, I think, jokes.
• 56:53
  It's not about what happens to you.
• 56:55
  It's about putting some distance between what happened and how you react to that.
• 57:00
  And the idea of going the worst day of your life, you're shit yourself on the train is
• 57:05
  your best story.
• 57:08
  And the idea of having that little bit of perspective is a very healthy thing.
• 57:11
  I think it's very healthy for kids.
• 57:13
  I would love to see that be.
• 57:15
  I mean, I think arts should be, we should double down on arts funding because we talk about
• 57:20
  the rise of AI and the idea of the drudgery and boring.
• 57:25
  It won't be manual labor versus, you know, this is brain work.
• 57:29
  It's going to be, AI is very good at doing things that are repetitive, right?
• 57:35
  So AI is coming for the NPCs.
• 57:39
  If you are a background character in life, what you want to be is silly generous.
• 57:44
  You want to be a non-fungible human being and no one compete, can compete with you
• 57:49
  at being you.
• 57:50
  So don't be the best, be the only and comedy kind of leans into that, like finding your
• 57:55
  voice and doing your thing and being funny and like, why does comedy have to be a career?
• 57:59
  It's like, right, it's my career, it doesn't have to be everyone's career.
• 58:03
  I'd love it if more people in the audience, like when I want to go and see a band, I can
• 58:06
  play the guitar badly.
• 58:08
  So when I go and see Radiohead, I'm blown away because I know enough to know this guy's
• 58:15
  a magician.
• 58:16
  He's incredible.
• 58:17
  Like I would love it if more people joined in, there was more grassroots comedy, there
• 58:22
  was more people like out there being able to do a little bit and I've written some jokes
• 58:27
  and oh, I didn't see that coming and I kind of knew, I know how he did that, to give
• 58:32
  it that language would be, that would be a misfit, that would be a great thing to do.
• 58:35
  I mean, it's lovely to hear you think, you talk about comedy as a way of articulating
• 58:39
  what is suy generous about oneself because there are a lot of comedians who use that, who
• 58:44
  take that in a much more extreme and literal direction than you do.
• 58:48
  I mean, in a sense that you really do do jokes.
• 58:51
  You craft the jokes, you have a set up and a punchline and you go and do your jokes and
• 58:55
  you make people laugh.
• 58:56
  There's a time movement in comedy which seems to have ballooned in the past 10 or 20 years
• 59:01
  of people telling anecdotes that give you some insight into them and their worldview.
• 59:07
  You know, this is the kind of comedian as a public intellectual sort of phenomenon and
• 59:11
  they might still be funny, they might still be intriguing, but it's not the strict craftsmanship
• 59:18
  of here is a joke that is going to make you laugh.
• 59:22
  Have you ever played with arcing out into more rambling?
• 59:27
  Yeah, I mean, occasionally, I mean, I think I do that in, like, there's another voice
• 59:31
  which is, you know, come and I'll podcast and talk about the world and that's, I love
• 59:35
  doing that and I love doing that within the show.
• 59:37
  But it's light and shade.
• 59:38
  I think I'm in the service industry, you know, I make something that people want, I make
• 59:42
  them happy.
• 59:44
  It's I'm a drug dealer, it's in dolphins and serotonin and people come and they've just
• 59:49
  been looking at the news and they've just had an argument at work and they're full of
• 59:53
  quarters old and I'll fix that for you for two hours.
• 59:56
  You won't remember a word I said, but you will laugh for two hours straight and you'll
• 1:00:03
  leave feeling just a little bit, just a little bit better, just everything's a bit easier
• 1:00:08
  when you've had a laugh.
• 1:00:09
  It's just a great, it's, it's magical.
• 1:00:12
  I, you know, I love that and I think the idea of storytelling is fantastic.
• 1:00:16
  I think there's like so many different types of comedians out there.
• 1:00:19
  But the first principle thinking of comedy is jokes.
• 1:00:23
  So even if you dress it up as a story, really show me any long, arching story, I'll show
• 1:00:28
  you the joke in it.
• 1:00:30
  If you're laughing, you're laughing at a joke.
• 1:00:32
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:34
  The structure is the same and really it moves from the way jokes work is it's kind of,
• 1:00:38
  it's, is it Cardamon?
• 1:00:40
  Remember, Cardamon, they think, what did he write?
• 1:00:44
  Thinking Fast and Slow?
• 1:00:46
  Oh, can I, yes.
• 1:00:47
  Can I?
• 1:00:48
  I got it so nearly right.
• 1:00:49
  It was so close, but it sounded like the first and second order thing.
• 1:00:52
  You can't even say columnist, that gave me a tough time.
• 1:00:55
  The columnist wrote about Cardamon.
• 1:00:57
  Yeah, they're not about Canamon.
• 1:01:01
  Yeah, first order and second order thinking.
• 1:01:03
  Yeah, it's like, so jokes kind of work in that way.
• 1:01:04
  It's like, you basically lead people to make an assumption.
• 1:01:07
  I know where this sentence is going.
• 1:01:08
  And just explain first and second order thinking.
• 1:01:10
  So it's the idea of like, first order thinking is like two plus two for driving a car.
• 1:01:14
  Yeah, you know what you're doing.
• 1:01:15
  Like, you get up your brush your teeth, you don't even think about it.
• 1:01:18
  Like, it's just, it's instinctive thinking.
• 1:01:21
  It's not really thinking.
• 1:01:23
  It's pattern recognition and just, you just do it.
• 1:01:26
  And then somehow, in the punch line of the joke,
• 1:01:29
  you go to second order thinking, which is 37 divided by 18 times 15.
• 1:01:34
  I don't have that pattern right.
• 1:01:36
  I don't have that pattern right.
• 1:01:37
  Okay, I didn't get the same order thinking.
• 1:01:39
  But the idea that you go, you have to really think about it.
• 1:01:42
  So yeah, it crashes in.
• 1:01:44
  I think it's quite childlike in a way, comedy,
• 1:01:46
  because children are seeing the world.
• 1:01:48
  That's why children are so incredible.
• 1:01:50
  They see the world.
• 1:01:51
  Mainly we, we just do pattern recognition and remember, right?
• 1:01:56
  So it's that thing of like actually seeing stuff for the first time is what is kind of the comics job.
• 1:01:59
  Yeah, this is weird.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:01
  So that's a weird thing.
• 1:02:02
  That's a weird tone of phrase.
• 1:02:03
  That's a hard thing.
• 1:02:04
  It's like really seeing it as the comics job.
• 1:02:06
  That's so true.
• 1:02:07
  That's so true.
• 1:02:08
  And that is part of what is so tickling about about helplessly laughing at a good joke.
• 1:02:13
  Where it's like, I've kind of,
• 1:02:16
  I mean, sometimes the best jokes are like,
• 1:02:17
  I've kind of maybe thought about that before,
• 1:02:21
  but it's never actually coalesced or crystallized the way that the comedian is doing.
• 1:02:24
  Well, that's not so much comedy,
• 1:02:26
  but like in the work of genius,
• 1:02:29
  we see our own neglected thoughts.
• 1:02:31
  Right.
• 1:02:32
  Sometimes when you see something really great, you go,
• 1:02:34
  Yes, I've always thought of that.
• 1:02:36
  I just, I couldn't, ah, yes.
• 1:02:39
  But it's taking the time to think about it and hone it.
• 1:02:41
  That's what I think doing comedy as a young person to really think about who you are,
• 1:02:47
  what you think, what your perspective is.
• 1:02:50
  Look at how it changes and actually writing from a different perspective
• 1:02:53
  or what's funny about that,
• 1:02:55
  because often starting from the opposite of the premise of what you think is really fun.
• 1:03:00
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:01
  Does a gag ever just stop working?
• 1:03:03
  Like, does it gradually, do you lose, do you lose it?
• 1:03:06
  Do you get rid of the gag?
• 1:03:08
  Because you're like,
• 1:03:08
  My issue is like,
• 1:03:10
  it's, there's stuff that you say and you go,
• 1:03:14
  okay, doesn't matter how I say it,
• 1:03:15
  that it's going to work 100% of the time.
• 1:03:17
  That's fine.
• 1:03:18
  My crowd will like that.
• 1:03:20
  The stuff that doesn't work, don't care.
• 1:03:22
  It's crossing out, who cares?
• 1:03:24
  Done.
• 1:03:25
  And then the stuff that lays,
• 1:03:26
  yeah, it's pretty good.
• 1:03:28
  This is fine.
• 1:03:30
  But it's never going to make the cut.
• 1:03:31
  It's never going to make the Netflix special.
• 1:03:33
  So you kind of go, there's just an ocean of those that you go,
• 1:03:37
  okay, that needs something else.
• 1:03:38
  It needs a bit of pepper, needs a bit of, you know.
• 1:03:40
  Right.
• 1:03:41
  And is that part of the writing process when you sit down,
• 1:03:42
  do you go, okay, there's that gag that I really think
• 1:03:45
  there's promise in, but it's just not quite.
• 1:03:47
  Yeah, but I can't deliver something like in good conscience.
• 1:03:51
  I can't deliver something more than three times.
• 1:03:53
  That's just for me.
• 1:03:56
  Oh, I think it's a really funny idea.
• 1:03:58
  Do you?
• 1:03:59
  No, what I mean is you might be able to edit it.
• 1:04:00
  You might be able to find another.
• 1:04:01
  Yeah, is there something else in it that I could do?
• 1:04:03
  Yes, but the feedback loop is like,
• 1:04:04
  you go, yes, you edit it.
• 1:04:06
  And then if it doesn't work, then you edit it again.
• 1:04:07
  If it doesn't work, you edit it again.
• 1:04:09
  Well, at the end of that process,
• 1:04:10
  you have a different joke.
• 1:04:11
  Yes.
• 1:04:12
  So it's like, so it's that thing of like,
• 1:04:13
  you can't hold on to it too tight.
• 1:04:15
  It's the ship of Thessia.
• 1:04:16
  So I don't know.
• 1:04:17
  I always think that thing of the,
• 1:04:18
  yeah, it's Trigger's broom is the only false
• 1:04:19
  and horses reference to the idea.
• 1:04:22
  But that idea of going, you need to respect the audience.
• 1:04:27
  They came to laugh.
• 1:04:28
  You've got to deliver that for them.
• 1:04:31
  Yeah, you know, because people work out.
• 1:04:33
  I just can't stop thinking of a bit
• 1:04:35
  that Jerry Seinfeld used to have about the,
• 1:04:38
  about toilet stalls,
• 1:04:40
  the indignity of the toilet stall
• 1:04:41
  not going all the way to the floor.
• 1:04:43
  Yeah, that's a very American thing.
• 1:04:45
  It's a very American thing,
• 1:04:46
  but like you're looking at the crumpled up trousers
• 1:04:49
  of someone sitting in the toilet stall, you know,
• 1:04:52
  he's like, why are they showing us this?
• 1:04:55
  And ever since then,
• 1:04:56
  every time I go into a public toilet stall
• 1:04:57
  and see some pathetic, you know, parachutes.
• 1:05:00
  Yeah, no one underpants on to that.
• 1:05:02
  No one looks great.
• 1:05:03
  You just think of him.
• 1:05:04
  And I think I was,
• 1:05:04
  I've met my whole life looking at it.
• 1:05:06
  And I never thought of it.
• 1:05:07
  Never crystallized until he pointed it out.
• 1:05:10
  And then I saw something.
• 1:05:11
  And he is magnificent, though, isn't he?
• 1:05:13
  Yeah.
• 1:05:14
  Like he's facility with the English language
• 1:05:16
  to find exactly the right word.
• 1:05:18
  Yeah.
• 1:05:19
  He was known, I believe, in, you know,
• 1:05:20
  before he, the sitcom fame
• 1:05:21
  as being the joke technician,
• 1:05:23
  as being the guy that could fix a bit for you
• 1:05:25
  because you're using the wrong word or beats are wrong
• 1:05:27
  or you're just, you're rhythmically, it's off.
• 1:05:30
  Yeah.
• 1:05:31
  He's just incredibly analytical.
• 1:05:33
  On the, on the question of babies
• 1:05:36
  and they're seeing the world,
• 1:05:37
  have you heard the theory that babies
• 1:05:39
  see the world basically like a person on the psychedelic
• 1:05:43
  data?
• 1:05:43
  Oh, no, yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:45
  In the sense that you need to know how to contextualize objects
• 1:05:49
  and name them and label them
• 1:05:51
  and think of them as being discrete categories of things
• 1:05:57
  in order to even see them as things.
• 1:06:00
  So it's a blur of, it's a kaleidoscope of colors.
• 1:06:04
  But it's also, you don't know for.
• 1:06:06
  You don't know what's you and what's them.
• 1:06:08
  That's right.
• 1:06:08
  You have no concept of yourself and other.
• 1:06:11
  Yes.
• 1:06:11
  In that time, it's like, it's a, yeah, it's really trippy.
• 1:06:14
  Yeah.
• 1:06:15
  But I mean, when, if you look at a six week old baby
• 1:06:18
  and you think that it's smiling at you,
• 1:06:20
  it's almost certainly not, it's farting or something
• 1:06:22
  because it doesn't even know that you,
• 1:06:25
  at that point, it's just, it hasn't yet learned
• 1:06:29
  that humans are even things.
• 1:06:31
  Yeah.
• 1:06:32
  So your face bleeds.
• 1:06:33
  Yeah, it's wild.
• 1:06:34
  Your face literally bleeds like an optical illusion.
• 1:06:36
  Your face just bleeds into the rest of the background.
• 1:06:38
  It could be, might as well be anything.
• 1:06:41
  I didn't use AI so that made me,
• 1:06:42
  that made me slightly less, less of an atheist.
• 1:06:46
  I mean, having kids like to see a child born,
• 1:06:49
  to have your own kids, it's like it's tough
• 1:06:52
  not to believe in God when you've seen that.
• 1:06:54
  But I managed it.
• 1:06:56
  But I was out to lunch with Eric Weinstein,
• 1:06:59
  who I often quote, because I think,
• 1:07:00
  I think he might be the smartest guy I've ever met.
• 1:07:02
  And he said to me, he's like, I was telling him
• 1:07:04
  how much I'm loving being a doubt.
• 1:07:06
  I just kind of grabbed my hand across the table and went,
• 1:07:09
  you will die and you will be reborn as someone else
• 1:07:14
  and you will love them.
• 1:07:16
  And I went, oh, oh, in like a sentence, yeah,
• 1:07:19
  I like now understand what reincarnation is.
• 1:07:22
  There's, there's a next life.
• 1:07:24
  But not for me.
• 1:07:25
  Is that a bit of God's part of them?
• 1:07:27
  No, that's just, Eric's doing being a...
• 1:07:29
  Just being a...
• 1:07:30
  You will die and you will be reborn as someone else
• 1:07:32
  and you will love them.
• 1:07:33
  You will love them.
• 1:07:34
  That's it, that's purpose, like there.
• 1:07:37
  Yeah.
• 1:07:37
  And that thing of like, you know, being a, you know,
• 1:07:40
  another point of phase,
• 1:07:41
  he was just going the best stuff in life
• 1:07:43
  is available to everyone.
• 1:07:45
  But having kids is the best.
• 1:07:46
  But it's one of those, it's a,
• 1:07:51
  Chris Williamson's always talking about this
• 1:07:53
  on modern wisdom, like,
• 1:07:55
  talks about like 3D and 2D lessons.
• 1:07:58
  And like a 2D lesson is like, don't go to that.
• 1:08:03
  The, the Korean restaurant over there.
• 1:08:05
  Terrible.
• 1:08:06
  I've got food poisoning.
• 1:08:07
  Go, I won't go.
• 1:08:09
  No problem at all.
• 1:08:09
  It's great information.
• 1:08:11
  You should have kids, it's great.
• 1:08:13
  Yeah, we'll see.
• 1:08:14
  I'm going to need to experience that.
• 1:08:16
  A Ferrari won't make you happy.
• 1:08:19
  Yeah, I'm going to buy one and just check it out about.
• 1:08:21
  Exactly.
• 1:08:22
  Things that you need to experience before you.
• 1:08:24
  Yes, but you heard the thing before.
• 1:08:25
  I need to see this for myself.
• 1:08:27
  This is what's so hard about teaching young people.
• 1:08:30
  I mean, it's like you'd actually do have to fall off the bicycle,
• 1:08:33
  you know, and graze your knee in order to know that it's not a good idea.
• 1:08:37
  The level is, isn't that that's the kind of the parenting thing
• 1:08:39
  you want kids to get bruises, not scars?
• 1:08:41
  Yes.
• 1:08:42
  But you don't want them to get no bruises.
• 1:08:44
  I mean, as long as I can hide the scars on my child,
• 1:08:46
  I think it's all right.
• 1:08:47
  Ha, ha.
• 1:08:48
  It's a little Jimmy car for you.
• 1:08:49
  You'd be right.
• 1:08:51
  Are you going to hear what the, what Google says I should ask you?
• 1:08:53
  Yeah, we don't want to cheat by going to an AI.
• 1:08:56
  Sure.
• 1:08:57
  And that would be too good.
• 1:08:58
  Yeah.
• 1:08:59
  So I just Googled Jimmy car.
• 1:09:00
  All right.
• 1:09:01
  Okay.
• 1:09:02
  And you know how it says others searched for?
• 1:09:03
  I'll tell you what other people searched for.
• 1:09:04
  The end of the sentence.
• 1:09:05
  All right.
• 1:09:06
  Yeah.
• 1:09:07
  Yeah, the end of the sentence.
• 1:09:08
  So I've only got four here.
• 1:09:11
  The top one when you Google Jimmy car, what other people searched for?
• 1:09:15
  Yeah.
• 1:09:16
  What happened to Jimmy car's hair?
• 1:09:17
  Oh, I had a hair transplant.
• 1:09:19
  What is, but why, but it's a very good one.
• 1:09:21
  So I don't know why I had a critical of it.
• 1:09:24
  Why I spoke about it openly.
• 1:09:25
  I don't, I kind of don't like it when anyone in the public eye gets work done
• 1:09:29
  and doesn't talk about it.
• 1:09:30
  Right.
• 1:09:31
  Because you go, you expect me to believe what?
• 1:09:33
  Why does everyone on TV look so much better?
• 1:09:36
  Yeah.
• 1:09:37
  Well, I got hair transplant.
• 1:09:38
  So the weird thing, I mean, I had a bit about this where I was talking about, look,
• 1:09:41
  if you have a hair transplant, the issue is the word hair transplant.
• 1:09:45
  You imagine there's a donor.
• 1:09:46
  There's no donor.
• 1:09:47
  Right.
• 1:09:48
  You're waiting by the phone for someone to have a motorcycle accident, so I could nick
• 1:09:51
  a quiff off a corpse.
• 1:09:53
  What they do is they take the hair from kind of round the back there where you've got loads
• 1:09:57
  of hair.
• 1:09:58
  They pluck it out individually and they replant it up the top.
• 1:10:00
  Right.
• 1:10:01
  I mean, it works.
• 1:10:02
  The downside is, you know that sensation you get with the hairs on the back ear next
• 1:10:04
  downed up?
• 1:10:05
  Well, now if I get that, this bit goes spiky.
• 1:10:07
  If I get creeped out, I look like tintin.
• 1:10:11
  Is it, people say I look like tintin.
• 1:10:13
  I could see that.
• 1:10:14
  I just, I have an haircut in a while.
• 1:10:16
  And does it still grow or is it, it just grows, yeah, it's not stuck in place this
• 1:10:20
  day.
• 1:10:21
  Right.
• 1:10:22
  That's all thing is.
• 1:10:23
  The whole thing to check it out.
• 1:10:24
  They replant it.
• 1:10:25
  It works.
• 1:10:26
  And so number two, where are Alan Carr's parents from?
• 1:10:29
  Alan Carr's parents.
• 1:10:30
  Alan Carr's parents.
• 1:10:31
  That's one.
• 1:10:32
  That's the number two search term about GP Carr.
• 1:10:35
  For me.
• 1:10:36
  Yeah.
• 1:10:37
  Alan did, he did last one laughing with us last year and was so funny.
• 1:10:39
  He's such a funny man.
• 1:10:41
  He's so funny.
• 1:10:42
  It's lovely.
• 1:10:43
  I don't know.
• 1:10:44
  Another great British comedian.
• 1:10:45
  Number three, others also search for when searching for Jimmy Carr.
• 1:10:49
  What is Alan Carr's real name?
• 1:10:52
  What is Alan Carr's real name?
• 1:10:54
  Yeah, it's weird.
• 1:10:55
  We get this a lot like it.
• 1:10:56
  Like the two of three.
• 1:10:57
  Great.
• 1:10:59
  And the fourth and last, most popular Google search, what happened to Jimmy Tarbuck?
• 1:11:07
  To Jimmy Tarbuck.
• 1:11:08
  He retired.
• 1:11:09
  He's a very, he's a Scouse comedian and a proper mention of a man.
• 1:11:14
  A really good guy.
• 1:11:16
  Very good guy.
• 1:11:17
  All right.
• 1:11:18
  Well, that's what people wanted to know from Jimmy Carr.
• 1:11:20
  Yeah.
• 1:11:21
  People worth wanted to know from Jimmy Carr.
• 1:11:24
  Alan Carr's real name.
• 1:11:25
  Basically, questions about other people in a hair transplant.
• 1:11:27
  Okay.
• 1:11:28
  Okay.
• 1:11:29
  You know, good to keep your ego in check, I think.
• 1:11:31
  You know, why not?
• 1:11:32
  Why not?
• 1:11:33
  I'm always interested when I'm talking to famous people about fame and like the sort of
• 1:11:41
  as one grows older and as I mature, I think about all the, you know, the branching, the
• 1:11:48
  branches of the tree of life that are no longer available to one as you get older.
• 1:11:52
  And I think about all the, the turns not taken and the sliding doors and all that sort
• 1:11:55
  of stuff.
• 1:11:56
  Yeah.
• 1:11:57
  Yeah.
• 1:11:58
  As a, as a person who has become successful in the career I wanted to become successful
• 1:12:02
  in, do you ever think about if you'd stayed, you were working in a corporate job where
• 1:12:08
  you had a shell and doing, you know, what the sliding doors moment if I hadn't done
• 1:12:13
  that.
• 1:12:14
  Yeah.
• 1:12:15
  Do you think that does the old you who now grew up in that world ever visit you?
• 1:12:18
  Yeah.
• 1:12:19
  I sort of think like I'm big on gratitude like gratitude is the mother of all virtue.
• 1:12:23
  So I do like boring gratitude practice all the time.
• 1:12:26
  And it's thinking about like not just what I'm grateful for like for me, but just like
• 1:12:31
  the world has conspired.
• 1:12:33
  I could really believe in simulation theory because I came into comedy when I left my job
• 1:12:38
  and said, yo, ho, ho, a pirate's life for me.
• 1:12:40
  I'm off to be a comedian above a pub telling jokes to 30 people, but I'll do okay.
• 1:12:45
  I'll live off my wits literally.
• 1:12:47
  When I came into comedy, it was field hockey.
• 1:12:52
  It was darts.
• 1:12:53
  It was a minority sport played by very few people known was that interested.
• 1:12:59
  Now, 25 years later, it's the premiership and you can play arenas and I do 48 countries
• 1:13:05
  on the top.
• 1:13:07
  That's that's a ludicrous bit of good fortune to ride that wave.
• 1:13:12
  And I've been lucky in so many respects along the way.
• 1:13:15
  What's been lucky with the people I worked with along the way, like the producers that
• 1:13:19
  I worked with were coming up at the same time and had ideas and we worked well together.
• 1:13:24
  My dear departed friend Sean Locke, I don't think I would have the career I have.
• 1:13:29
  If we did like 16 years of shows together, kind of TV shows, and then we didn't realize
• 1:13:34
  they were going around the world and then went kind of everywhere.
• 1:13:36
  I'm very grateful for the whole thing.
• 1:13:39
  What do you think you would be different as a person if it hadn't happened?
• 1:13:43
  I don't know.
• 1:13:44
  I mean, it's impossible to kind of the counterfactuals could kill you, I think.
• 1:13:50
  The idea of like how it might have been if you've gone on a game.
• 1:13:52
  They're an interesting parlor game though, aren't they?
• 1:13:54
  I love a counterfactual argument.
• 1:13:57
  But it feels like the world should only be this way, but actually it could totally be
• 1:14:03
  a different way.
• 1:14:04
  I mean, I often experience that sense of gratitude as well because my life could have
• 1:14:08
  gone in so many inferior ways and I also feel the opposite, which a lot of people feel,
• 1:14:13
  which is a sense of missed opportunity or things that I could have been that were passed
• 1:14:20
  that I didn't take or errors that I made or people who I've wronged or anything else
• 1:14:24
  like that.
• 1:14:25
  Well, I suppose it's that thing of like we're incredibly lucky to live now and maybe
• 1:14:29
  we're incredibly misfortune that we don't live in a hundred years' time.
• 1:14:33
  You know, it's all about that thing of like the perspective of it.
• 1:14:37
  It's just like, you know, you do what you can where you are with what you've got.
• 1:14:42
  Yes.
• 1:14:43
  I'm still hundreds in your faith.
• 1:14:46
  It's zero.
• 1:14:47
  Ah, you're pretty close to it.
• 1:14:48
  Because you were Catholic as a kid.
• 1:14:50
  Yeah, Catholic as a kid lost my kind of faith in that.
• 1:14:52
  But I think there's...
• 1:14:53
  How'd you lose that?
• 1:14:55
  It's like mid-20s.
• 1:14:56
  It was really that thing of like going, look, if I'm right about this, everyone else is wrong.
• 1:15:02
  And then if you've got like, you know, Hindu friends and Muslim friends and Jewish friends,
• 1:15:06
  you kind of go, but what, you're all going to hell and I'm not because I'm sure of the
• 1:15:13
  atheist though because most people are religious.
• 1:15:15
  Yeah, I only don't believe in one more God than the most religious person you know.
• 1:15:21
  Like the most religious person you know believes in one more God than me.
• 1:15:24
  Yes.
• 1:15:25
  But I find it hard, but it is that thing of like, it depends how you...
• 1:15:30
  But I think the big mistake with the church was...
• 1:15:34
  Right, I think all the kids.
• 1:15:36
  No, not that.
• 1:15:38
  But the...
• 1:15:39
  The Vatican too was what I was going to go with.
• 1:15:41
  Oh, okay.
• 1:15:42
  Let's do that too.
• 1:15:43
  But that thing of like, they took the mass out of Latin and the product was all.
• 1:15:49
  The product was church was standing in nature in awe and meditating for an hour and
• 1:15:55
  that was good for everyone.
• 1:15:56
  The church didn't work because God was happy.
• 1:15:58
  Church work because people came together.
• 1:16:00
  And in our culture, I think maybe we've oversolved the individual.
• 1:16:03
  Why do people want to come out to a comedy show?
• 1:16:06
  Why is it work live so much better than on a screen?
• 1:16:08
  Well, because people want to come out and feel part of something.
• 1:16:11
  They want to have...
• 1:16:13
  Like, my thing is like, the whole of human flourishing is from cooperation.
• 1:16:20
  And cooperation is downstream of play.
• 1:16:23
  We are the playing animal.
• 1:16:25
  It's a very good book about this, about how we learn to play first and play with others.
• 1:16:31
  And, you know, rough play and tickling and all of those things as kids.
• 1:16:35
  We learn how to play with others and where boundaries are and that leads to cooperation.
• 1:16:40
  Yes.
• 1:16:41
  And cooperation is where all of this comes from.
• 1:16:42
  You drop one man in the jungle.
• 1:16:45
  You fed the animals.
• 1:16:46
  You drop ten men, you have an apex predator, right?
• 1:16:49
  We're amazing, again, not with each other, but play is the thing.
• 1:16:53
  And when you think about what people care about in life,
• 1:16:56
  they care about things that are played.
• 1:16:59
  Sports, we watch people play.
• 1:17:00
  Theatre, you watch people play.
• 1:17:02
  Your favorite TV show is people playing, play acting, comedy, play.
• 1:17:06
  Everything's played.
• 1:17:07
  And there's an illusion, I think, with what I do that I stand in front of 10,000 people
• 1:17:12
  and I'm the only... I'm playing and they're watching.
• 1:17:15
  Being an audience is performative.
• 1:17:17
  It's a performance being a noise.
• 1:17:18
  You laugh because you're acknowledging that you get the joke with other people around you.
• 1:17:22
  You're playing along.
• 1:17:25
  I think you see them all clearly in music.
• 1:17:28
  Yeah, definitely.
• 1:17:29
  When Bruce Springsteen goes, how are you doing Sydney and everyone goes,
• 1:17:32
  Yeah!
• 1:17:34
  You know, do that in Starbucks?
• 1:17:35
  No.
• 1:17:36
  How are you doing this morning?
• 1:17:38
  Yeah. Get out.
• 1:17:39
  Yeah.
• 1:17:40
  I mean, there is something that we've lost there then in the...
• 1:17:43
  And by the way, just on the rapes, I kept thinking about the rapes thing
• 1:17:46
  because of Norm McDonald's amazing line.
• 1:17:50
  I don't know if you heard him.
• 1:17:51
  He was talking to Seinfeld on one of the comedians and cars getting coffees.
• 1:17:54
  It's the best ever episode.
• 1:17:56
  Yeah.
• 1:17:57
  You know, this guy, he's saying, you know, they say that Bill Cosby, you know,
• 1:18:06
  Patton Oswald said the worst thing about the Bill Cosby situation is his hypocrisy.
• 1:18:12
  His hypocrisy.
• 1:18:13
  I don't think that's true.
• 1:18:15
  And Jerry's turning a corner in the car.
• 1:18:17
  He's like, no, no, you don't.
• 1:18:18
  And he's like, no, Jerry's like, what do you think the worst thing was?
• 1:18:21
  I think it was the raping.
• 1:18:26
  Just a sidebar, but my favorite bit of Norm McDonald's.
• 1:18:28
  If you don't know Norm McDonald, by the way, take a moment, pause this.
• 1:18:31
  Go and search funniest Norm McDonald's.
• 1:18:33
  My favorite comic.
• 1:18:34
  He's extraordinary of my life.
• 1:18:36
  I mean, he's extraordinary.
• 1:18:37
  You're close, but he is.
• 1:18:38
  There's a moment in comedians and cars and they're sitting opposite each other and they're talking.
• 1:18:42
  And Norm McDonald says to Seinfeld,
• 1:18:46
  I have any kids.
• 1:18:48
  And Jerry Seinfeld goes, I've got three kids.
• 1:18:51
  And Norm McDonald goes, agreed to disagree.
• 1:18:55
  And they just move on with the conversation.
• 1:18:57
  It's like, oh my god, this guy.
• 1:19:00
  I love to that man.
• 1:19:01
  I love doing so much.
• 1:19:02
  Anyway, the lack of religion thing,
• 1:19:06
  we spoke earlier about it coming out in more perhaps perverted ways
• 1:19:10
  in finding political allegiances and finding tribes in other ways,
• 1:19:15
  and whether that's woken us or whatever.
• 1:19:17
  Or at least on the right.
• 1:19:18
  It's not just the woke.
• 1:19:19
  Yes, and that's not going to happen.
• 1:19:21
  No, it's tribalism.
• 1:19:22
  Yes, it's coming together.
• 1:19:23
  I mean, and do you think, so there is a religious critique of modernity,
• 1:19:29
  which says this kind of rationalist, materialist,
• 1:19:34
  atomized, reductionist worldview has led us into being
• 1:19:40
  individuals who are detached from each other.
• 1:19:42
  This is long to have the church and long to have community.
• 1:19:44
  Nietzsche predicted all of this.
• 1:19:45
  When people think he said God is dead triumphantly,
• 1:19:48
  he said it with his head in his hands.
• 1:19:50
  He was like, this is going to lead to he predicted the wars that would follow.
• 1:19:55
  And the idea that Marxism, in a sense, is religious.
• 1:20:00
  So religion promises a better life in the next life, right?
• 1:20:05
  So God is the future.
• 1:20:07
  Literally, you sacrifice now for a better future.
• 1:20:11
  So Marxism said, well, we can have heaven in this world if we follow this.
• 1:20:19
  Yes, follow me and we can have heaven in this world.
• 1:20:21
  But that very quickly leads to, by any means, necessary.
• 1:20:25
  Is it worth it?
• 1:20:27
  The famous Marxist historian, Erich's Hobbesbaum,
• 1:20:31
  was asked on his deathbed, they said,
• 1:20:33
  60 million people have died trying to get communism right.
• 1:20:36
  If another 60 million had to die, but we got it right,
• 1:20:39
  would it be worth it?
• 1:20:39
  Anyway, yeah.
• 1:20:41
  But that's madness.
• 1:20:43
  Yes, yes.
• 1:20:46
  But it is kind of, it's a secular happiness.
• 1:20:49
  It's the idea of, you know, perfection.
• 1:20:52
  I mean, like, yeah, I do worry about not having
• 1:20:56
  as a secular person myself.
• 1:20:58
  I just wonder how we reinstate the sense of community
• 1:21:03
  on our duty connectedness outside of a religious context.
• 1:21:06
  We need a foundation myth.
• 1:21:08
  The foundation myth for us was what I bought too.
• 1:21:11
  We just had the remembrance day here.
• 1:21:13
  I remember those soldiers and those men that died and fought
• 1:21:18
  so that we're not speaking German now.
• 1:21:22
  Like, we remember them, but that myth is fading.
• 1:21:25
  Yes.
• 1:21:25
  Like, you see that the statues of Winston Churchill get pulled down.
• 1:21:30
  We remember when the Taliban blow up those statues in the 90s,
• 1:21:33
  and the whole world went, this is absolutely shocking.
• 1:21:35
  This is disgusting.
• 1:21:36
  Yeah, because they were Buddhist statues or something.
• 1:21:38
  Yeah.
• 1:21:39
  But now we're pulling down statues of Winston Churchill,
• 1:21:41
  saying he's a problematic figure,
• 1:21:43
  because we're losing that foundation myth.
• 1:21:47
  We're going to create a new one.
• 1:21:49
  What will replace it?
• 1:21:51
  Well, that's very difficult.
• 1:21:52
  If I could predict that.
• 1:21:54
  But the idea that we won't replace it is, of course, we won't.
• 1:21:59
  The risk is that we replace it with hori-old myths that have served as poorly in the past,
• 1:22:04
  like secret cabals of financiers and Jews are running everything,
• 1:22:09
  or, you know, people of color are worth less than white people,
• 1:22:15
  and I can't see it's going down those roads.
• 1:22:18
  I think something will bring us together again.
• 1:22:21
  America was incredibly divided before the Second World War,
• 1:22:24
  and really the 40 years post-World War II of prosperity on an unequal level
• 1:22:33
  came from, it didn't matter whether you were on the left or the right.
• 1:22:36
  You'd warn the same uniform, fighting those guys overseas.
• 1:22:40
  So you just, so you need to get along.
• 1:22:42
  There was a lot of, there's a lot of debate in American politics at the moment,
• 1:22:46
  and I'm not such a big fan of debate.
• 1:22:48
  Huge fan of deliberation.
• 1:22:51
  People that disagree coming together and agreeing what the problem is and trying to solve it.
• 1:22:54
  That sounds great.
• 1:22:55
  But debate where you're trying to own the other person and win the debate.
• 1:22:59
  You lose what the purpose is.
• 1:23:01
  You're trying to fix something here.
• 1:23:03
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:23:04
  No, I completely agree.
• 1:23:06
  The idea that you're going to be able to resolve disagreements by owning each other,
• 1:23:12
  and like dunking on each other whilst alienating the other person emotionally is not great.
• 1:23:18
  That's why I'm a fan of uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:23:21
  Jimmy.
• 1:23:21
  Are we wrapping up? That feels like we're wrapping up.
• 1:23:23
  That's what I mean.
• 1:23:24
  What a probe.
• 1:23:25
  Tied up in a fiscan bow and put it in the mail.
• 1:23:27
  You're wasted being a column, columnist, a columnist, a columnist, a columnist who writes about
• 1:23:35
  cardamom, not Daniel Canemun.
• 1:23:39
  Jimmy, it's lovely to have you back.
• 1:23:41
  Thank you so much for stopping by.
• 1:23:43
  And now you're going off and you're doing a whole show.
• 1:23:45
  Yeah, I'm going to try to do a show.
• 1:23:47
  It's going to be fun.
• 1:23:48
  I mean, listen, the tool has been extraordinary.
• 1:23:51
  The amount of, it's a volume of people, but also how friendly it's been.
• 1:23:57
  It's been extraordinary traveling around Australia.
• 1:23:59
  Good.
• 1:24:00
  Lovely.
• 1:24:00
  Have you got another country after this?
• 1:24:02
  Yeah, I've got Canada late in the year and then I'll do the whole of Europe from this summer.
• 1:24:07
  Australia's better.
• 1:24:08
  No, I just wanted to say that.
• 1:24:09
  No, I think I do sell more tickets, sir.
• 1:24:12
  You're really?
• 1:24:13
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:24:14
  Excellent.
• 1:24:15
  Thank you, Jimmy.
• 1:24:16
  Thanks for having me.