#953 - Jimmy Carr - Decoding The Secrets Of A Meaningful Life

This is a big deal for me because I listen to the show so much.

I absolutely love it.

I slightly could fanboy about the whole thing.

I really love it.

I love what you do.

I love this show.

I'm nervous about it because I kind of go, well, normally it's an expert with something to say.

And I'm like, oh, I've got dick jokes if you need them.

Will that do?

Why are you such a fan of it?

I don't know.

I think the breadth of the subject matter.

And I think that thing of going, it's in a, there's a lot of, it's that signal and noise.

There's a lot of noise out there.

And I love the idea that I listen to this show and even stuff that I'm, oh, well, maybe I wouldn't read that book, but I'm interested in listening to them for an hour and a half or two hours.

And then oftentimes it is something where someone says something and you go, Wow, that's brilliant.

I've got to go and look at their channel or I'm going to go and find something.

So I'm using it almost kind of as a your research as a resource for me.

And I think a lot of people talk about diet and exercise.

And they talk about how it makes them feel and they're eating right and they're staying away from processed foods and they look fantastic.

And then you ask them what they're watching and they go, yeah, I'm watching Love Island, but like, but old series, and I'm smashing through it.

And I don't know if you're aware of Love Island, but it's, it's for, it's for, it's for terrible people doing terrible things.

And the idea that you go, that information diet is such an important thing of like, I think you said it here where you're sort of a,

if you tell someone the last five podcasts they listened to, it's a pretty good read on who they are and what they want to do.

And I love, the other thing I love about this show is I think it's got, it's aiming up.

Everything seems to be like the way that you conduct interviews and the way that you engage with people, it seems to be you're trying to bring the best out of them.

which which I like anyway.

It's very positive to listen to.

But it's also like everyone you have on is trying to make your life better.

It's very well-intentioned as a as a show.

I think it's terrific.

And the transformation in you, I think, has been

sort of extraordinary.

The journey to this is just kind of amazing.

When I see you, I mean, I genuinely got quite emotional with the Naval Ravikant

thing because I knew what that meant to you.

And as someone who's a big fan of podcasts and a big fan of, I suppose, modern wisdom in the broader sense as well, but someone like Naval, who's done maybe five or six podcasts ever and one incredible burst of wisdom on Twitter, you go, it's Slim Pickings, if you're a fan.

He's the J.D.

Salinger of the podcast world.

And then you get him on the show.

And it's like, I felt like that was the, is that your Mount Rushmore completed?

One more, Rogan.

So it was a Mount Rushmore, but then I realized there was five.

So it's more like Thanos' glove with the different infinity stones.

So it was before I started, Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Alanda Boton, and Naval Ravicant.

That was before I started the show.

Those were the five I wanted.

And I've got four.

And after the last episode with Rogan, I woke up the next day, as you have today, with still the anxiety of,

well, and I hope, you know, I hope I didn't put my foot in my mouth too many times and so on and so forth.

And he texted me and was like, love the show yesterday, man.

Like, always a pleasure to sit down.

By the way, we still need to get a bucket in to bring me on the show.

Him on.

So he's self-invited.

So I was like, Joe, give over.

You know, I've got so many other people to speak to.

But yeah,

there's definitely a little bit of a sense of like gold medalist syndrome where I think, fuck.

Like, what do you do when you've completed the things that you said that you were here to do?

And I imagine that that must be the same.

in your industry as well.

You know, when, when I can start selling out theaters, when I can start selling out arenas, when I can start selling out stadium, when I get the Amazon Prime deal, when I, well, we've got to run it back for season two.

I've got to ensure that it wasn't a fluke.

I've got to do it twice.

That's the problem.

Is it not Morgan Hausel,

the genius that is Morgan Hausel that said it's that like success is not moving the goalposts?

It's that thing, if you constantly like that, that

hedonic treadmill of like, as soon as something good happens, you go, yeah, but what about the next thing?

And yeah, I said it was that amount of money, but now it's this amount of money.

And I think the

most ambitions should be

internal.

They should be, you should be heading for a feeling.

And if it's process driven, because kind of success is

a moment.

You know, even if you get the big thing, whatever it is, and there's lots of those markers along the way.

And I've kind of

trying to think about celebration in a different way.

I'm trying to think about like celebrating those moments.

Like the equivalent of Naval Ravakant comes on your podcast.

You do a co-headliner with

whatever the thing is that you go, oh, that's cool.

Celebrating that as being like celebration is gratitude in action.

And that thing of like gratitude being the mother of all virtues.

Because if you if you kind of track it back to that, my kind of fundamental belief is that disposition is more important than position.

So where you are in the world,

you could be miserable or you could be

entirely at ease.

And it's kind of dependent on your disposition.

Are you looking at the donut or the whole?

Because you could always look at what you don't have.

You could always look at what's missing, or who's doing better, or the other thing.

But, you know, kind of being grateful in the moment.

And the thing that seems to shift that is kind of

gratitude and celebration as a form of gratitude.

Like I'm trying to reframe a lot of stuff in my life in a positive light.

So that thing of like, I travel constantly,

which is an incredible sort of privilege, but also incredibly boring a lot of the time.

It is, right?

Travel is boring, but

going places is fun and you're seeing new things.

And it's this idea of like boredom as

unappreciated serenity.

There's guys up mountains in Tibet for 30 years trying to get to where I get to in Denver airport.

I've like, ugh.

And slightly like not being overstimulated like like allowing yourself to be bored seems to be the that's kind of where creativity bubbles up

right you kind of allow yourself to be bored and you allow yourself to kind of just have have that kind of um

space i think it's very difficult to white knuckle creativity i'm aware that you as someone who has quite a sort of uh

structured creative process, but I would imagine that if you look at the absolute big winners that you've come up with, they've probably kind of been bestowed from above in a, oh, motherfucker, that's it.

It's that thing.

It's sort of almost divine inspiration that then gets refined in the process.

Yeah, I think there's something about, yeah, I don't know about the refining, really.

I mean, often it's that thing of like you're writing on stage because you're in a flow state.

So I started doing a thing a couple of years ago where actually it was, I mean, jealousy, really.

I was looking at Andrew Schultz and I was looking at Matt Reif selling out arenas across America.

And I was, how are they, what's going on here?

And then, and I know those guys a little bit and I like them a lot.

And it's come on, it's happening.

And they're putting out crowdwork.

I was thinking, well, I do a lot of crowd work.

But what?

Oh, I should do that.

Oh, dummy, every day is a school day.

So I kind of watched it and started putting out these crowdwork videos.

And it has grown.

I mean,

and it's also that weird thing of like going, I hadn't realized how much improv I was doing in a show.

It's like 20 minutes a show of stuff we can put out that's unique to that show.

And doesn't kill the sad, doesn't it?

No, no, it just doesn't doesn't touch the written material.

And it's a lovely thing where as a comedian, you want to kind of,

I think I'm in the service industry, right?

And I'm going to be fine because I make something people want.

I make them happy.

No one remembers what I say, but they remember how I made them feel.

And I tell jokes and I want to turn up suited and booted because it's a proxy for respect, right?

I respect you.

You've paid money.

You've come out.

You've given me your time and attention.

There's not, there's nothing else.

All that we have in life is time and attention.

And they give me that.

So I want to prepare a show and make sure there's like 150 incredible banging lines that are like, and they've been filtered from

a thousand lines that were okay, but not, didn't quite make the cut.

And then it's that thing where you go, and also I need to hold that space where, okay, perform those jokes.

And then,

okay, what do we got?

Shout out.

Anyone got anything?

Join in.

And it's like, I suppose the analogy would be, it's like doing that kind of improv.

It's like watching a magician do real magic because you're doing the thing in real time.

And it's freestyle rapping.

Yeah.

And it's the, I wonder how much of, Chappelle said this thing a while ago, and it really struck with me of like, he was talking about a bad gig that he had.

And Dave does not have many bad gigs, but he was talking about Evil Knievel.

He said, Evil Knievel wasn't paid for the jump.

He's He's paid for the attempt.

And I was thinking, that's a brilliant way of looking at it, because actually, how much of what we do as comedians is bravery?

How much of it is being paid to, yeah, there's freedom of speech, but it isn't freedom of consequence.

And

this fucking lunatic is saying anything.

This guy's, I'm taking all the filters away.

And if you think about what friendship is, for me, it's the person you have the least filter with.

Again, another thing I got from Modern Wisdom.

I was like,

the least filter.

I was going to ask this.

This is like a best of episode of Modern Wisdom.

I know.

It's really lovely to hear you on other shows.

And I wonder how many other people pick up on it.

I'm not to say that I'm your intellectual daddy or that the people on the show are,

but it's so nice to hear your interpretation of ideas that really mean a lot to me that have maybe the inspiration consciously or subconsciously has percolated through.

So I'm like, fuck, that sounds familiar.

Fuck, that's like, that's like a, that's a, that's a work on a Hormosey quote from

2023.

Yeah.

And I try and give you props.

Oh, you do.

All the time.

Because, yeah, but it is that thing where you go, it's your, your, your friendship group and your, the things that you're taking in.

I think also, like, for a lot of people, right, I'm in a very privileged position.

I'm fully aware of that.

I get to know you.

We get to be friends.

as well.

If there's a question you want to bring up, we can WhatsApp each other.

And we get to be friends with George Mayacom.

There's a coterie of people that, you know, we know each other and there's a lot of mutual respect there.

And I feel that, and it's, it's lovely.

But I think really the sweet source of this show is, I think most people that listen to this show have that relationship with you as well.

It's just they, they didn't get to go first state last night, but they kind of go, you know, I think it's the same thing of going.

I think probably most people listening to the show are like low level, a bit concerned about your health at the moment.

Like, because you, you sort of, you don't really talk about yourself that much.

I think the other thing about the show is it's very much about it's kind of idea, it's very dense compared to other podcasts.

I wanted to, that was the point I was about to make with regards to your set.

And I saw you in Wembley at the second of a matinee, I think, on that evening.

I think you'd done two in Wembley.

Oh, yeah, one at seven, one at nine: thirty.

Yeah.

One for me, one for the tax man.

That's how, that's how I operate my touring system.

Two shows a night.

Very good.

Um, and it your set is incredibly lean.

There is very little wasted time, including in the warm-up, which doesn't exist.

And

I realized that if you were to have, when I first started the show, and still now, just because of my disposition, if you were to have Rogan at one end, which is

information dense, but can meander because he likes to vamp and chat shit.

And then if you were to have Tim Ferriss at the other end, which is

very sort of structured, it's almost like a blinkist sort of cut down.

Well, I'd even go further.

I'd say

to the other absolute extreme.

Morgan Housel has a 15-minute podcast that you listen to and go,

all right, I need half an hour to process that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it's so dense.

Yes.

Yeah, it's the Alaman Active Noval Ravicant of podcasts.

Yes, you did one the other day, which was like, oh, just like 15 things I've been thinking about.

And after each one, you had to kind of pause it and go, I need a day.

Right, okay.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, I mean, he's fucking brilliant.

So I think that I sit, you know, I'm a bit more Ferris-pilled than Rogan-pilled, but I like people feeling like, huh, I really got a lot out of that.

I feel like it's, I think it's really true of comedians, and I think it's increasingly true

in this world, the podcast world, of like you leak.

You don't say a lot about yourself on the podcast, but you leak.

Like

who you are sort of, oh, okay, there's like clues.

Yeah, there's there's little clues, and it's you can't hide who you are in this kind of long form for long.

You know, there's no pretense.

It's really, it's great.

Just on your idea around uh, boredom being an

insights, uh, creator, this beautiful work on uh, the magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding.

There's a twist on that.

The answers you are looking for is in the silence you're avoiding.

Yeah, I fucking love that.

The answers you are looking for is in the silence you're avoiding.

You need fewer inputs, not more.

I'd agree with that.

Yeah, that's really uh, it's very, it's, it's interesting that thing of like, because it's two British guys, so we feel like we should apologize for saying anything deep.

There's there's like there's a natural uh don't get ahead of yourself.

George Mack had a great line yesterday.

I went for a walk with George and he was talking about you know, Britain's very cynical.

Uh America's full of bullshit.

Which I thought such a great kind of it is.

Yeah.

Okay.

In England you need to be aware of the cynics and avoid them.

And in America you need to be aware of the bullshit artists and avoid them.

And both of them are applauded.

The cynics are praised by most of British culture and the bullshit artists are praised by most of American culture.

But yeah,

I think I've realized the sort of people that I like.

And I think it's why me and you have become friends.

I think it's why George is friends.

Mosey, Brian Callan, you know, like this little whatever we want to call it, squad of degenerate people trying to work out how the world works.

I like earnest people, like people that are earnest.

And my working definition of earnest is the bravery to take your emotions seriously.

Yeah, I think you can be.

I think there's a sweet spot between being very sincere, but you don't need to be serious.

You could, you, you kind of, you're real, but it's not, you know, and it's very, I always think that thing of like, it's very easy live as well to switch.

You know, because there's slightly a code switch thing going on where you go, well, on stage, I'm there to do a job.

We're in a theater.

This is the space.

You're there to be funny.

But occasionally now, and I'll allow myself to put it out on social media as well.

If something comes up that's heartfelt or

beautiful, sometimes you answer a question seriously sometimes you just go so oh someone needs it uh and so there's a few of those there's a couple of those moments like in a show where i feel like i need to earn it i feel like yeah if i do 20 minutes of fastballs then i can there could be one nice moment where you make a point but i but no one wants that no one wants to come to a comedy show and have someone uh wag a finger at them and talk about you know being progressive it's it's that thing where you go okay i'll be super funny and then i feel like my audience will go okay he's made a good point there.

And nothing overly controversial.

You know, it's not like, but it's like that thing.

It's really interesting, that thing of,

I don't know whether it's an age thing, but feeling like I can do that a little bit more now.

Yeah, there's certainly an extra kind of credibility that comes with age that I'm feeling too.

You look at Peterson and he's got this sort of patriarch persona, right?

He's got sort of the grey hair.

He's got the wizened fingers that look like a fucking druid.

And you think, yeah, he's able to, you know, talk to you about the deeper meaning of life and stuff like that.

But if you wear your cap backwards and walk in in crocs, really, you've capped your upper bound on how much of this you can be taken seriously when you talk about, you know what I mean?

So I think...

I don't know, because I think it's much more,

it's much more relatable.

What will people listen to?

Like, it's always that thing of like, I wrote a book a couple of years ago, which kind of a biography slash self-help.

And it was like, it's that thing of going, it's

Eckhart Tole for dummies.

It's, it's, because there's a lot of people that love that kind of stuff or would love that kind of stuff, but they're not going to read that kind of stuff.

It's like there's not going to find time in their day.

It's not sufficiently accessible.

Yeah.

And it is, it's tough.

It's tough to kind of get through.

Because that stuff is actually, it's, um, it's

sincere and it's very serious.

And I think actually you sometimes do need to sugar that pill.

I think comedy does that.

I mean, Peter McGraw, who I think you've had, have you had it on the show?

Peter McGraw?

So he's got the theory of benign violation.

I I was chatting to Joe about this yesterday, the idea of like

violations being anything that messes with the norm, what you were expectations of life.

Pattern interruption.

So something terrible happens in the world, and you make it benign by making a joke about it.

And so this idea that jokes cannot be offensive because there's a...

there's a by making it a joke you're putting it in this kind of sacred space where you're kind of kind of like alchemy yeah you're your your process well i often think like if someone's offended by a joke i i i i up my i didn't use strong enough juju there not enough magic on that was that wasn't funny enough to make it worthwhile for them to go to that place i asked schultz this same question i said are there any jokes that shouldn't be told like is there can you think of a joke that shouldn't be told

saying saying something is too serious to joke about is like saying oh that that disease is actually too serious to treat or saying to a journalist oh we can't report on this story it's horrible Like, you'd never dream of saying that.

And you go, well, I feel sort of the same way about comedy.

It's all sort of fair game.

It's a question of how funny could you be.

Well, that was how skilled could you be in doing that.

Andrew's response was when I said, is there anything, is there a joke so abhorrent that you shouldn't make it?

And his immediate response was, is it funny?

Yeah.

And he's like, if it's funny, you can get away with whatever you want.

Yeah, I think so.

It's not even getting away with it, though.

The idea of like, I don't buy into the get away with, yeah, and the punching up, punching down.

I don't buy into that because in order to buy into that, you have to buy into

the Frankfurt School and

Foucault and Derrida and Liotard and all of that.

And the idea that power dynamics and that cultural, any cultural work is a demonstration of power.

And I...

frankly, I don't, I mean, I was kind of brought up in that.

That's when I was at university.

That was all

postmodernism was thriving.

Sexy the first time around.

Yeah.

And it was, well, it was very, very interesting and valuable in the lab.

And very much like COVID, it escaped the lab.

Great in theory, horrible in practice.

And has had horrific effects.

Ah, it's out of the lab.

And the R0 number keeps on rising.

It's 28 days later,

but with a meme,

an idea.

And I don't buy into that punching up, punching down, because it's a,

in order to be punching down, you'll be looking down on someone.

I'm not looking down on anyone.

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modern wisdom.

I heard a quote of yours: if you're going to have an interesting life, you can't have all of the other interesting lives you would have had.

What's that mean to you?

Well, I suppose it's that thing of like, it's incredible the things you won't do.

Like when you think about like the potential that we all have, like we've all, we're all privileged in a sense, right?

Because we all get one life.

And then we get given, you know, different gifts.

Right.

So there's no, there can be no equality because we're all born different, right?

So it's that thing of going, and it's not better, worse,

or the same.

It's just different.

Everyone's kind of different.

And I think that for me, that

the idea of going,

you can, you can't have an easy life and a great character.

You can't, you've got to kind of go out there and decide what you want.

That's the first great adventure.

And then getting it is the second great adventure.

So it sort of speaks to that thing of like wishing wells work,

But they don't work when it's not the magic.

The magic is you going, oh, what would I wish for?

What do I want being the fundamental?

Like if you know what you want, that's incredibly powerful.

Most people don't.

Most desires are mimetic desires.

And you get into Rennie Girard and the idea of going, well, I want that watch because he's got that watch.

And I want that car because he's got that car.

And I'd love that girlfriend.

It's like, how many guys are dating girls?

Incredibly hot.

They look amazing, very impressive.

They don't even like the guy.

It's like, it's a weird flex yeah they're they're in love with what other people think about them

not having that it's that will store thing that status game book which is again i mean it's just he's such a genius writer uh i love him he's got a new sub stack by the way all about storytelling his wonderful book he's got him out he comes out this week on the show there's always uh a story is a deal yeah

he's outstanding outstanding human but that idea of like you choose what status game you play you know so so what status game and again, another thing for modern wisdom, that idea of going, well, there's, there's fuck you money and there's fuck you freedom and there's fuck you family.

I really, I mean, that really, I took to heart as going, oh, that's very interesting.

And the idea of going, what are the things that you're not going to do?

Because we live in a world that rewards specialization.

And it strikes me that our whole school system is like geared wrong to get you to do all the different things.

You know, and

really, you know, young kids are like, what are you going to get from being, okay, you're terrible at maths, but we're going to get you up to a secret.

Yeah.

Because what the world needs is someone who's all right at maths.

No,

no, but you're brilliant at English.

Well, fucking lean into that.

Spend all your time doing that.

You know, specialize, especially as the world changes.

I think leaning into, you know, what it's that you often get, I don't know what it is about age or my position in life, but I often get asked like, oh,

what do you think I should do?

And it's that thing of like, what do you think about all the time?

That's the best indicator.

There's a, at George's birthday this year in Austin, Dickie, one of the guys, came up with a fucking wonderful, I haven't written about it yet, but it'll be in a newsletter soon.

It's a great idea.

He calls them shower thoughts.

And the shower being one of the very few places reliably that people don't have some sort of external input going on.

Right.

And he said, you can tell what you care about by what you think about in the shower.

Tell what you care about by what you think about in the shower when there's no other inputs going on and you're in this liminal space between being unclean and then drying yourself off with a towel,

what do you think about?

Where does your mind go?

It's like that's what you care about.

Yeah, I think expanding that space

to 20 minutes, an hour.

The answers you're looking for in the silence you're avoiding.

That kind of being alone with your thoughts is

a lovely thing.

How do you think about that?

Because

you're spending all of this time on the road, airports,

could watch a video, can listen to a podcast, can do the whatever thing.

How do you try and purposefully

create that space when you're busy all the time?

I suppose that thing of like going, if I do eight shows a week or it'd be more than that on the American tour, but it's normally eight shows a week.

So it's that thing of like going, well, I want to try new jokes at every show.

It's quite sort of stoic, really.

I mean, it's just like that thing of like going, well, there's, I always think how hard you work is important, but what you work on

is

essential.

Like, that's the key thing.

You could work so hard on bullshit and distract yourself with it.

And, like, my job's quite easy because it's easy to analyze and to pinpoint what's the thing that makes a difference.

And it's, for me, it's jokes.

It's the love language.

It's the model.

And the more that I spend time with them, you sort of go, it's sort of like time in the gym, I suppose.

So when you're

thinking about nothing and letting your mind wander,

that's when it comes up.

Or you're listening to something and it's outside of your purview.

You're not listening to comedy.

You're listening to someone talk about economics or politics or philosophy.

And

you're then thinking, well, could I make a joke of that?

So everything's within, you're seeing it through that, the lens of...

You've got to be very careful.

If you are the average of the five podcasts you listen to the most, you've got to be careful because that's going to shape your, if you listen to too much Gary Stevenson, you're going to be talking about Marxist economics and stuff like that.

Be very careful what sort of algorithm holes you fall down in particular.

Yeah, good, right?

Good.

Good.

Be careful.

How do people know what they should be doing with their lives?

People coming up to you and asking you for earnest, you know, sincere life advice.

How do you work out what someone should be doing with their life?

I don't know.

I mean, it's a

it's very odd to be like, I'm quite

taken with simulation theory

because I don't think it's true.

I don't think we are in a matrix and this is a video game.

But if we are,

I've definitely got a cheat code, right?

Where I get to be a touring international comedian with

lovely kids and a great life and great friends.

Like that's an incredibly sort of privileged position.

I think thinking about the world as if simulation theory is real and this is all a simulation is very interesting.

Because if you imagine life as a game, what are you solving for?

What are your metrics?

And I think when you really kind of analyze it and went, well, if this was going to be a scoreboard at the end and you're only really competing with yourself, there's nothing in being better than anyone else.

There's only honor in being better than yourself last year.

So the idea of going, well, what would be the important things?

What would be the, you know, it's, and it's that thing of you go, it's not the

achievement so much as the

process, like enjoying the process seems to be it.

So that thing of like, I don't, you know, what, what should people be doing?

It's not for me to say.

It's all life is self-assignment.

It's that thing of like, what are you happy doing?

Where's the flow state for you?

What's the thing that brings you joy?

It's not even like the 10,000 hours, I slightly think misses a trick.

Because although I buy, yeah, you've got to work really hard and really long to get good at anything, to get competent at anything is hard.

But what could you stand to do for that long?

Because if it's, I mean, it's Naval, if it's play to you and work to them, you're going to win 100% of the time.

Yeah, a much better question.

To build on that, what looks like play to you, but looks like work to everybody else, is what pain do you want in your life?

This is Mark Manson's twist on it.

He says any pursuit, no matter how existentially aligned, will regularly come with a huge side order of pain.

It doesn't matter how much you love doing comedy.

If you want to be a comedian, that means that you need to spend an awfully long time writing jokes that never see the light of day, apart from one set where no one laughs.

You go,

fuck, I spent ages on that.

No, no,

forget that.

You've got to enjoy taxi rides to the airport.

Correct.

Yeah.

You have to enjoy the whole thing.

Correct.

Correct.

And as soon as you go, oh, no, no, I just like the bit where I'm on stage.

No, it's not.

That's not how life is.

You have to take the whole package.

Yeah.

James Clear has a fucking unbelievable take where he talks about if you want the life but not the lifestyle, you guarantee disappointment.

Like if you're going to pursue this outcome, but you're not prepared to do what it takes to get it.

Okay, you want to be a touring musician.

Sounds fantastic.

You need to spend probably between five and 10 years just learning the instrument.

This is before you get to perform.

You don't really get to perform on stage for that long.

And then when you start doing that, the first...

10 tours that you do are maybe going to be in someone's borrowed van in the back of a van.

You're not going to have enough money for hotels.

You're going to be playing to 100 people.

No one's going to care about you.

You're not going to have any money.

You're not going to know if it's going to work.

You have no promise of glory on the other side.

You're going to be racked with self-doubt, constantly uncertain.

The whole experience is going to be tarnished in this like

weird, liminal, like discontent about whether this is actually the right path to be on.

And then maybe you reach a tiny bit of escape velocity and perhaps get toward

micro-notoriety.

Okay.

And then we maybe get a tour manager, and then we start to get looked after.

That is the process of becoming remotely great at anything.

Yeah, I always think that thing of like with young comics, it's quite easy because you go, if you're going out 300 nights a year to do open mics, it's kind of the same life as playing arenas.

It's not vastly different.

You're sort of going out telling jokes, you go out and do a show, like where you go to and how whether it's an audience of 50 people or 15,000, it really is a very similar process.

So

if you enjoy that, if you love it, then great.

Good question on

what should I be doing with my life, you said before.

If people were making a movie about your life, what would the key scenes be?

Well, it's a weird thing actually where like

the cancellation episode, I always think like whenever you get cancelled or not cancelled, dragged, whenever you get like a tough time, it's like, well, if my life was a movie, this would be the best episode.

If my, if my life was a like a 10-part on HBO, they'd

dedicate an entire episode to that.

I saw the episode where he said the terrible thing, and people got very upset.

I mean, I always think you've got to right-size it with,

you know, there's different types of cancellation.

Like, oftentimes, it's, I told a joke and some people didn't like it.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's like,

who cares?

There's a the patron saint of comedy is St.

Lawrence.

And St.

Lawrence.

So your industry has a patron saint.

Yeah.

And he's a third century martyr.

And he was an early Christian, obviously.

And St.

Lawrence was condemned to death, and they burnt him alive.

So they put him on like a

metal

kind of, I don't know, like, I don't know what you would call it.

Like a fucking skillet.

Yeah, like a big skillet.

Skillet.

And

they cooked him.

Okay.

And he said, after 10 minutes of being burnt alive, turn me over, this side's done.

And

that level

of bravery and fuck you is very inspirational.

It's like that thing of like going,

it's almost like stoicism to the extreme.

Like

we can't control the world.

We can have a strong influence, but we can't control anything.

And shit is going to happen to you.

And how you react to that is life.

Was Plato the guy that was forced to be killed by the government?

Was that him?

What drank poison?

Yes.

I think that was Socrates, wasn't it?

Socrates.

Thank you.

There's a great story about him

apparently very

like big fuck you energy.

I think I need to channel my inner Socrates a little bit more.

And

the way that it worked when they condemned him during the trial, he was saying, you think that you're punishing me.

Like it was a jury of like 150 people.

This was how much.

And typically, what you're supposed to do is be grovelling.

Socrates is supposed to come up and, you know, bring the crying wife, bring the crying children.

He didn't do any of that.

And he started chastising the jury.

And he said, you all think that you're punishing me, but you know that I'm an innocent man.

So really,

you're punishing yourselves.

There's nothing that you can do to me because I know that I haven't done the things.

You're clearly, whatever it was, disturbing the youth, you know, the sort of frivolous claim, the accusation.

And he gets sentenced to death.

And he's supposed to drink

hemlock.

And he's back at the cell, and all of his family's around him, and his friends are around him.

And the way that it worked, there was not really a time limit on when you had to drink the hemlock.

His friend said to him, you know,

you don't need to.

You don't need to drink this.

You can spend some more time around your friends and your family.

You can, you can,

you can like play play the system and drag this out.

And he just drank it in front of them immediately.

I just love how much of a fuck you it was.

Like, you all think that you're condemning me, but really, you're condemning yourselves.

You think you're punishing me, but you're actually punishing yourselves.

There's nothing that you can do to me.

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modern wisdom.

Do people want more time or do people want more unique experiences?

I would argue that the great gift of being a comedian is you see stuff.

You see it when you've got kids, right?

Kids are seeing stuff for the first time and they're excited.

And what I think a lot of people are doing past a certain age, I don't know what the age is, but I'd say 40, you're remembering stuff.

You've made that drive before.

You've seen sunsets before.

You're kind of remembering stuff.

So your mind is kind of filling it in and you're not in wonder.

And I think a lot of of what comedy is certainly that kind of the observational element of it is whether it's linguistic or or uh observational more generally is you're you're really recognizing stuff you're really seeing things for you really sort of seeing things in a in a in a way that that uh an artist would you're you're trying to see it for what it is if i'd never observed this before what would i notice yeah yeah and also that unique experience of like touring around seeing different places it's such a literally you know when you

i've done 20 shows in my life life, 20, 30, 30 shows in my life.

I remember a bunch of different scenarios.

There was a nine-year-old girl sat in the fourth row of the show that we did in Sydney, and she asked this amazing question.

And James had been dropping the C-bomb throughout all of his warm-up act, and my mine was a little bit, you know, this fingering jokes and stuff like that.

And I, I was like, parents, I'm so sorry for like what's happened to your nine-year-old daughter.

She was like, it's all right, she's Australian, and everyone broke out laughing.

I'm like, I'm, I can't,

until Parkinson's comes and rips my fucking like consciousness out of my head, I'm not going to forget that.

So, you have, you're right.

The two ways that human memory works is novelty and intensity.

Yeah.

If it's something that's new or if it's something that's really emotionally salient, which you could just look at as another form of novelty, right?

The intensity thing.

So someone will make a drive to work.

They've been at this job for four years.

You're like, you've made that drive there a thousand times and back a thousand times.

No memory.

But it's been condensed down into one journey.

So apart from that time when it was icy and the guy next to you skidded and whoa nearly that's novelty and intensity.

And you go, fuck, I remember that one.

And I remember the first day I went to work.

Yes.

And I remember when the road was closed and I got in late and I did whatever.

But unless you purposefully inject novelty, and this is one of the sort of ruthless double-edged swords to routine, which is a lot of the gains in life are to be made through being structured and routinized.

What's interesting is finding that balance of going like, because that is that thing of like, you could go somewhere different on vacation every year or you go back to the same place.

Because what are you solving for?

Are you making new memories or do you want relaxation?

You know, what's the, what's the, what are you trying to get out of this?

What do you want?

You're back to that fundamental question.

I think this is one of the reasons why as people get older, their openness to experience goes down because the assumption is, I've been on loads of holidays.

I know where's good and I know where's bad.

And the likelihood as somebody that's been on lots of holidays of beating the best one or even getting into the top 10% is way tougher in my sixth decade than it is in my

am I reversing like that thing of like trying to go against the grain of what normally happens.

So serotonin and dopamine, right?

Both very important.

And we normally get our

serotonin from old music.

People listen to old music.

They listen to the stuff they like when they're in their teens and 20s.

And they listen to, and they watch new movies, Dopamine, new stories.

Where's this going?

What's going to happen?

I kind of changed it around.

I listened to that Quentin Tarantino book, the Cinema Speculation, and went, I haven't seen any of these 70s movies.

Or maybe I saw them when I was a kid, but I haven't seen them for years or whatever.

I'm going to watch 70s movies and listen to new music.

And it's a really, it's really fun.

It's a really fun way to kind of change the movie.

What's the same to you?

Well, I think that thing of like going, being slightly out of your, like new music's really interesting because it's, it's such a pleasurable thing to listen to new stuff.

And old movies, I think the 70s was the high point for movies.

I don't think movies got, because it was like, there was an industry there, but it wasn't fully, I don't know, like the,

it wasn't blockbusters yet.

Like, so it was.

It was experimental.

Yeah, there was, there was auteurs and the suits were giving the best directors the money to go and do the thing, go and do because we don't have an established process of how this should be done, so we can allow you to have a few more degrees of freedom.

Yeah, it was, it was, I don't know, it's just a wonderful time.

I kind of of feel like it's very analogous to how comedy is now.

Comedy is really having a moment culturally

that's very, very special.

And I don't know what that is.

Maybe it's authenticity or there's something about

people wanting to be part of a tribe.

I sort of think, right?

So in our culture, there was a fire and we gathered around the fire and we did this.

spoke right

and then there was the radio and we gathered around the radio and we listen to it and chatted and then there was the tv we gathered around we watched the shows and talked about the next day and then suddenly it was the phone and i'm over there and you're in your room and it's we're kind of isolated and i think that thing about coming out to comedy or going out to festivals or going and seeing stuff is it's my

i suppose

play

We are playing creatures.

Someone wrote a book about this in the, I think it was the late 30s, about human beings as the playing animal, like play

being upstream of cooperation and cooperation being the secret source of humanity and the idea of like, think about what people are interested in.

Anyone you know, anyone you speak to, like what you're excited about.

Oh, well, I'm watching the game on Saturday.

You're watching people play.

Oh, I'm going to go and see the concert.

The killers are playing live.

Oh, I'm going to go and see them play.

Oh, I'm going to go and see that comedian.

Okay, it's just a guy playing on stage.

I'm going to go and see a musical.

Whatever you're into,

you want to see people playing.

And what is this conversation?

It's kind of playing, right?

It's curiosity and it's, you know, we're sort of sorting out ideas and picking little things and strands.

And it's playful.

And

it's incredibly important.

I love that

George Bernard Shaw line that we don't.

stop playing because we grow old.

We grow old because we stop playing.

And there's a wonderful thing in

my privileged life as a comedian where I'm a grown man, but I also get to be in that mind space where I'm playing all the time.

And the audience came out and they bought a ticket.

And just, I mean, it's very self-selecting, the audience.

You'd have a tough time having a tough kick because a thousand people have bought a ticket to see you

came to play.

No, but there's an illusion, isn't there?

The illusion is.

And your ego could get taken away.

Like, oh, I'm on stage.

It's me.

I'm performing.

And you don't see the audience.

The audience are performing.

I saw it last year.

I went to see Taylor Swift live in Wembley last year, and it was transcendent.

And she was amazing, right?

Great songwriter, incredible musician, wonderful performer.

She was great.

The audience were

next level.

Like it was.

girls and their mums and their best friends, like quite a lot of this action.

They knew every word to every song.

They were, because I was watching it and I was also kind of watching the crowd and watching that.

It was performative.

And then you saw, I was kind of watching it and going, oh, yeah.

Well, in my audience, people don't, they wouldn't laugh if they saw the clip on their phone on the bus, you know, or with, you know, sometimes people will post under an Instagram, you know, you put out some heckle video.

I think, I'm not funny.

Yeah, but you watched it with the sound off and the subtitles.

So I taking a shot.

I saw a clip of Taylor Swift live and I didn't sing along.

Yeah.

Well, you're not singing along when you see the clip, but when you're there, it's permission.

It's the, I suppose that thing was like,

you see Bruce Springsteen live.

How are you doing?

Yeah.

If you, someone in Starbucks says it, you sound psychotic.

It's, it's great.

You allow yourself permission to be in that space where you can perform.

It's wonderful.

Collective effervescence is a wonderful way to get out of your own head.

And yeah, I think

to fly the flag for my old industry, the demise of...

nightclubs that don't require quite as much effort, that aren't as rare, that allow you to sort of be in that space and see a DJ.

There's just, you know, some local DJ that plays great songs and every songs that everybody knows and we get to dance together.

You think like, fuck, like, how increasingly rare is it that you're in a room with a bunch of people who you both do and don't know, all

feeling a kind of vibe that's together.

And yeah, maybe the

resurgence that you're seeing with comedy, with live stuff, even the sort of things that I do, or, you know, like more like a Petersonian-y style lecture come whatever with a few fingering jokes.

There's there's something going on there.

Well, I wonder what people are looking for when they,

our mutual friend, Alain de Botan, you know, he's got the School of Life, which is ultimately, they were running services on,

I think they still do, run services on a Sunday, which is sort of church for people that

they can't sort of believe in a deity, but they still want to go and because, you know, church works.

I don't believe in it.

Alain.

But church works not because God is happy, but because people are coming together.

And, you know, they're kind of there you've you have heard me talk about this Latin Mass thing which is kicking off at the moment yeah people going to Latin Mass well I've often said Vatican II was the the biggest mistake in in the church's history because what they did was they they translated it goes back to Ian McGilchrist you know have you read that the Masterini's Mystery the left brain right brain thing so the incredible thing about the left brain is it it it orders things and makes them uh makes lists and it's very uh we live in a left brain world procedurals and the only only thing more impressive than that is the right brain the idea that it can see the gestakt it can see the whole thing and you go the problem with vatican ii is they took religion and they they made it they translated it into your local language and you could just go oh yeah it doesn't make sense that can't happen you can't come back from the dead it's crazy but before that when it was all in latin and there was a lot of incense it was you were just in awe So I had the same effect of like standing in nature.

It just, do you know what it is?

I fucking wish it wasn't this, but the more that I think about what it is people want to take away from life, it's all just vibes.

It all just comes back to vibes.

So what's the vibe?

What was the vibe of his show?

Can you remember any of the one line?

I think he did a, I think he did a joke about Roadkill.

Yeah, no, can't remember anything.

He did, he definitely did, he gave this really nice answer.

He gave this earnest answer to this guy about this something, something, something, something.

And

but I remember the vibe.

Vibe was cool.

It was so relaxed.

It was like intense, actually.

It's kind of quick.

Is it my Angelou?

People don't remember what you say, but they remember how you feel.

Yeah, you make them feel.

I got to round out that movie thing.

You mentioned movies before.

And two questions about

people ask, what should I be doing with my life?

If your life was a movie, what would the key scenes be?

I think that's important when you're looking backward.

But a much better one: if your life was a movie and people were watching up to this point,

what would the audience be screaming at the screen, telling you to do with your life?

What would they be just it's fucking obvious leave the job leave the room you need to get like it's your brother.

It's the you know the the fucking killers hiding in the cupboard, whatever it might be

What would the audience watching the movie of your life be screaming at the screen telling you to do and I think it's

a very

orthogonal way to look at, huh?

I already know the answer of what I should be doing.

I'm just scared of making the commitment and having the conversation.

Yeah,

I waited a long time.

I didn't, I had kids very late in life, and it was because I was waiting to feel like a man.

And obviously, I had it just backwards.

It's a, it's because it's a, it's not a noun, it's a verb.

So you have kids, and then suddenly you feel, hold a kid, and you feel fucking manly.

This is fucking great.

And then you don't know who you're going to be as a, as a dad.

How has fatherhood changed you?

I don't know.

I think it's

about change.

I think it's like you sort of,

you know, that thing of like,

power corrupts?

I think it does.

I think power reveals.

And I would say sort of the same about sort of parenthood, like you don't change.

It just reveals who you are at a kind of a deeper level.

It's just like

there's a side of you that was always kind of waiting.

And

you come out and you don't get, it's almost like the kids come out with their factory settings, right?

Like how much of what they have is heritable.

And

they just come out and they are who they are.

And you watch these little creatures and you kind of go,

sort of got a personality.

I don't know where that happened.

And then the other one's got a totally different personality.

Oh, because I think everyone with one kid.

is nurture.

Oh, well, we gave them this.

So they've done that.

And we were always, we read books like that.

So they did this.

Because you haven't got to run the experiment a second time.

And then as soon as you get the second one, you go, oh, I don't know.

I don't know.

Yeah, they just,

she likes that.

So what are you going to do?

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's lovely.

And I think it's the same with parenting.

I think you don't know who you're going to be as a parent.

And it's a, it's a revealing thing.

It's, it's, you, you kind of go, oh, I'm, oh, I'm that kind of.

Okay.

That's fun.

Great.

Did it teach you much about yourself?

I don't know.

I don't know what the, I suppose it's that thing of like it's a

it's a feeling that's very difficult to put into words without, you know, it's a sort of cliched thing, but it does feel like it's,

I suppose it's, it's closed off

an existential

angst that I always had

of, like, since losing my religion, I lost my religion in my mid-twenties, quite sort of late.

I was a Catholic, and I lost my faith and was an atheist.

And not having an afterlife is,

it's a rush of blood to the head, right?

So I've got to do something with this life.

I've got to take opportunities and risks and have fun now.

because

a random collection of atoms coalesced into a form that can contemplate its own consciousness for 4,000 weeks and then disappears again.

That's it.

We're in this brief shaft of light between two oceans of darkness.

And then suddenly you have kids and you go, oh, there is a next life.

It's them.

It's the DNA.

Dawkins was right.

It's the gene.

I'm just the vessel.

And that's, I found that very,

I found that incredibly comforting.

Oh, so you're saying that the denial of death and the death anxiety can be assuaged, at least in part, by making more of you?

Yeah, I think the

death anxiety, the death is the

certainty.

But it's coming for all of us.

I think the more that we talk about it and acknowledge it,

the better.

That idea around I will become a dad when I become a man.

I will

that's clearly like the movie of your life, the guys listening to the podcast, the girls listening to the podcast, the whole thing.

I mean, we're all screaming at the podcast.

Go and

like use the genes, use the.

We sort of want you to be happy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I can't wait.

You know, I keep on saying it.

I really, really do look forward to becoming a dad.

Like, I think it's going to be.

I hope

that becoming a father makes all of the things that I've done up to now feel like shallow, vapid attempts to get recognition from the world.

Your club promoter, Love Island?

Shallow and vapid?

Yeah, I know.

Shallow, vapid.

How dare you?

What can I say?

It's a wonderful industry.

Very insightful, incisive.

My prediction is you should.

not my prediction, my, my, uh, dream for you is that you have uh a big family because I think there's a um there's an only child that sounds terrifying, but there's a there's a theme in the the only child thing comes up a lot for you.

Like it's a it's a recurring theme.

And I think what you need is a really loud, messy house.

Let's go back to Plato, right?

So my issue with Plato, obviously,

you know, the birth of the, you know, it's Plato to NATO.

That's Western civilization, right?

Incredibly important figure.

But I got issues with Plato.

If he was here, and I'd tell him, it's Plato and the Zarathustrans.

And they both independently came up with the idea of perfection.

So the Zarathustra's first religion, I believe, to come up with the idea of heaven,

perfection, and the Platonic ideals of Plato.

And I think in our heads, we think of perfection as

an ideal,

obviously, a lot.

And I think it gets in our heads like well if it can't be perfect I don't want to I want to get to the bottom of my list I want to cross everything off I want to deal with all these problems and then move on you go well problems are

all a problem is

is it's something that needs your attention

that's great and there's no such thing as no problems it's just different problems higher higher order problems if it helps call it a puzzle not a problem like just it's there's there's going to be problems it's going to be messy and like nietzsche had this great line which that embraced the chaos.

Like, it's quite chaotic life.

And it's not terribly orderly.

And it's never going to be orderly.

And I think there's something about having kids kind of lets you just kind of lean into that a little bit.

The illusion of control really disappears.

You've got influence, but very little control.

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That's interesting.

I

learned this idea called Deferred Happiness Syndrome from Gwinda Bogle.

The common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future.

This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through is in fact the one to your death.

It's this strange.

Is that not John Lennon?

Life is what happens while we're making other plans.

Like it's, it's, yeah, it's a brilliant piece of, it's a brilliant observation.

Oh, once I've got this done, once I get my degree, then life will begin.

Once I've, I've just got to pass these exams and get to that thing and buy that house, and then I've just got to pay this off, and then I've got to do it, and then we can start.

It's a very instrumental view of life that everything is done in order to achieve the next thing.

So at no point do you actually arrive?

It's a great question.

Okay, when are you going to arrive?

Tell me, tell me when you're going to arrive at life.

When are you going to feel like you've actually got there?

Well, we're going to end up being Buddhists, aren't we?

Because it's like,

I do slightly disagree with the over-pathologizing life, but depression and anxiety, which I would rather call sadness and worry, but you know, it's very serious for some people, right?

And depression is always about the past, and anxiety is about the future.

And in the more you can just be in the moment, you're kind of, you're sort of all right.

You're sort of okay,

you know, today, enjoying that thing of like,

enjoying this bit of the process.

But it is that thing of like, it's very, it's kind of easy.

It's easy to say.

I mean, I love that thing as well.

I'm such a fanboy of the show, but the

2D and 3D lessons.

Oh, God.

But it's so true in terms of like, you can't say to a young person, like, the material possessions, they're not going to bring you happiness.

Because actually, they kind of will.

But not

having the watch won't make you happy.

Getting the watch.

Getting it is fun.

Having stuff isn't fun.

Getting stuff is fun.

The journey is

so fun.

Like that, that thing of like, and it's partly the dopamine of like, it's, it's the, uh, the, the thrill of the acquisition, but the stuff that gives you pleasure long term it's like it's it's um it's feelings yeah having things isn't fun getting things is fun that's Andrew Tate by the way but you have this is it yeah that's Andrew Tate yeah like you weren't expecting that well a stopped clock is drives twice a day that's true

but you had the you had the inverse of this when it comes to work rate which I think probably classes as one of the best insights over the last few years.

Everyone is jealous of what you've got.

No one is jealous of how you got it.

Yeah, I think that thing of like, but it is that thing where you go when people say,

I want to be famous,

but they don't have a thing.

It is like, I don't know what for, but it's the, but fame and

fortune is the, a secular heaven.

For fame, read heaven.

It's the land of milk and honey.

Everything's going to be okay.

And then when you, it's kind of annoying when famous people complain about stuff because you're going, but you've got everything.

No, you just got different problems.

It's again, it's problems as a feature, not a bug.

The issue you have, the issue that I think a lot of famous people have, is

I am certain that my inner void will be filled when I,

and the benefit that people who are not yet as rich or as famous as they want to be is that they still have the potential panacea for them to get to.

What's that great Will Smith line?

I'm not the biggest Will Smith fan in the world.

Yeah.

But the idea that he went,

I was poor and miserable and it was okay because I thought, well, I'll just get some money and then I'll be all right.

And then I was rich and miserable.

It was like, despondent.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

Yeah, that's Mark Manson's.

There's nothing else to do.

Yeah, yeah.

Originally, that was going to be a two-part series.

Mark was going to write because the first book's called Will.

He wrote that with Will Smith.

And the second book was going to be called Power.

Should have been called I Am.

That would have been a good idea.

Very good.

A copyright issue.

Which way around does it work?

Interesting, when it comes to trademark, I'm going to get this the wrong way around, but Europe and the US have different laws when it comes to how words can be trademarked.

My mind is stuck on a joke.

Okay, so when the Will Smith and Chris Rock thing happened, okay, obviously, it's Chris Rock is like, for me, a godlike figure.

I've met him a couple of times and I just

I'm so in awe of his skill and

work touch our profit, okay?

Work ethic.

And like, I was so annoyed.

So I, I, I was uh

chatting about it a couple of weeks ago with a friend and

said, oh,

somehow it came up.

And I said, oh, Chris Rock,

he was at the Oscars.

Yeah, he was really starstruck.

Like three years too late.

If I thought of that on the day, I was genuinely annoyed with myself.

Like, oh, come on.

Come on, brain.

Think about it on the day.

No use now.

But there is this sense of.

What happens if you achieve the things that you say that you want?

What happens if you get there?

Just imagine for a second, the perennial insecure, overachiever, optimizer people.

What happens if you get there and you still have the same problems?

Then what do you do?

That's a difficult question.

Yeah, but I think it's answered by,

you know,

there's other people on the same road and it can feel sometimes quite sort of, I don't know, you're sort of...

you're out there battling, trying to achieve whatever you're trying to achieve.

And you kind of do it and look around and you go well there's other people i think having friends in other fields is really helpful and you because that thing of like if if it's too close to your industry it can sometimes be a little bit kind of for enemies

um but i think that thing of like well comedy is really good for that because it's kind of we're out for ourselves but in it together

there's a lovely thing about sense of camaraderie yeah and it's not like we're actors it's not like we're you know it was there's only one role for the next marvel movie there's only one james bond and i'm afraid you didn't get the the part, but he did.

Ah, his life's amazing.

Yours is shit.

Whatever that thing is.

With comedy, it seems to be that there's a camaraderie and a...

It's also comes back to that thing of like, don't be the best, be the only.

Like, if you're a non-fungible human and someone goes, well, no one else is doing what he does.

But other people are in the same

industry.

It's like Iron Maiden had a great line about this.

The Iron Maiden was like, I think they did an interview with

their manager, and he went, Well, we're not in the music industry,

we're in the Iron Maiden industry.

That's a fucking slammer.

And they, and they went, he went,

I don't care what's happening in that field, we can only plow this field.

And like, it's just you go, yeah.

I mean, they had so many great lines, actually, but I think Bruce Dickinson was sort of saying fame is

it's it's a

byproduct of what we do.

do.

It's the

excrement.

Fame is the excrement of creativity.

Like something that you need to deal with, but sometimes can be enjoyable.

It's like, eh, yeah, okay.

Well, it's interesting when people pursue fame for fame's sake.

I don't want to be famous.

No.

Sorry, you were on Love Island when?

Sorry?

That's true.

Yeah.

Look,

I'm allowed to talk about this because I went up the mountain mountain and came back down.

Well, I think it is that thing of like the, I don't think that story's been told properly.

We chatted about this last night at dinner, but I think to tell that story fully, I think is very inspirational.

Because you go, it's the, you've worked on something that is a

like any other muscle.

You know, we were going into Love Island and okay, you've got great forearms.

Wonderful.

Good luck.

God bless.

And then you've worked on that for how many years now?

Six, seven?

This is year eight.

Yeah, seven and a half now.

Yeah.

Okay.

Wow.

The results.

Like

you're an advert for, it's not even work ethic.

It's just, it's, it's, it's not like ambition.

It's systems.

It's like three shows a week, every week.

I know what a tough year you've had.

And the idea that you just keep on showing.

Come on, come on.

To mutually fallate each other.

You are

by a margin the hardest working comedian on the planet.

I don't think that...

It's funny I had a bit more talent.

Take a weekend off.

I'm blown away by the schedule that you have.

I did actually want to read you an essay of mine based on people that work very hard.

The gastric band surgery of being busy.

After undergoing gastric band surgery, people's risk of suicide goes up.

That's perhaps unsurprising.

Gastric band surgery is a big deal and can sometimes have complications, infections and painful outcomes.

But one of the unseen reasons for the increased suicide risk is actually due to the surgery going right, not it going wrong.

Many patients used food as a way to deal with issues in their lives, emotional challenges, loneliness, anxiety.

After having their stomach shrunk, the ability to use food as a comforting crutch has been removed, but the emotional challenges still remain.

So...

The coping mechanism has been taken away, forcing patients to face their issues without a release valve.

I think there is an equivalent dynamic happening when you try to elevate your life to take your sense of self-worth from things other than your work and your level of busyness.

Let's say that in the past you used busyness as a chaos and as a way to distract yourself from feeling unwanted emotions.

It meant that you didn't need to reflect on your decisions or sit in discomfort, that you're moving so quickly that you never fully connect with the things that are happening in your life.

Lost relationships, disconnected friends, poor decisions and accumulated negative character traits are all swept away so quickly that you didn't even have time to consider them by manic work rate.

Eventually, you realize that chaotic busyness is not your highest calling in life.

Maybe you value different things now.

Maybe you've outgrown that phase of your life.

Maybe you realize that busyness for busyness's sake is detaching you from connecting to your existence.

So

what happens when this coping mechanism gets taken away?

You're forced to face your issues without the highly distracting release valve that you're used to.

The busyness anesthetic that you've used to previously rely on has now been removed, leaving you with two choices.

Number one, ignore the lesson that chaos is not fulfillment and go back down this road that you just escaped from by force-feeding your way through this figurative gastric band.

Number two, actually learn to handle emotional discomfort without distracting yourself with work.

Yeah, that's beautiful.

It really reminds me of that.

Um, Milan Kundra wrote this short book called Slowness.

And kind of the nub of the book, the message,

is that memory and speed are inversely proportional.

So, the idea, like the best example I can think of is when COVID hit and the world slowed.

You kind of took stock and remembered stuff and sort of

had time to contemplate.

Like in that boredom, I guess, of

not being busy, not being chaotic.

There was a real, oh, can I look around?

I don't know.

Didn't you have a Chairman Mao quote that was similar to this?

What was the Chairman Mao quote?

I don't know.

You can't smell the roses from a galloping horse.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's a good that's Mao.

What?

Who do you?

Look, we can take good shit.

We can take good shit from Andrew Tate and Chairman Mao.

As long as it's good shit.

Because that's really who you need to be associated with right now to help rehabilitate your publications.

Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, but it's that the uh it's

it's true, like slowing down once in a while is uh is is is very good for you and and finding that balance in life.

But I think, um,

I don't know, I think working hard's not,

it's also

like I know people that really work hard.

Like, I work it hard in showbiz,

like are the hardest working man in comedy.

Yeah, it's like being the best looking guy in the Burns unit,

right?

It's not, it's not really a flex because even if I do two shows a night, oh my God, sometimes I have to work for four hours.

I'm not sure I'm going going to be okay.

It's nothing.

But there's people with real jobs that work really hard.

And there's people actually that don't love their job.

They work in order to facilitate a life that they love.

Well, great.

Good on them.

There's an honor and there's a worth in that.

I think we've slightly lost that in our society, if I'm honest with you.

Like the hero of the working man that provides for his family, puts food on the table and a roof over their head.

But I think

that's a good point that we've sort of pedestrianized passion so much that we assume the only reason that anybody does a job is because they want to do it.

And there is an additional type of nobility that comes along with drudgery.

You think, well, not only do you do this thing, which is maybe hard, but you don't want to do it, but you do it anyway.

Yeah.

I know being

a provider,

taking care of, I mean, yourself.

and the people that you love, just doing that and working hard, it's not like something shifted in our culture where that isn't um

those those people are seen as being chumps or you know a mark

oh they've they haven't got a

signed by the man yeah they haven't got a side hustle and a grift and you go no that's some people work like that and they work really hard and they provide for their families and they they are doing great

and they're taking pleasure from their hobbies and their interests.

And they're actually a friend of mine was talking about this because his father had quite a boring job, but he was so passionate about his hobbies.

And it was really, it was really interesting that he was like, he didn't like the term hobbies even because he was going, that's what brought him joy in life.

That was the thing for him.

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There's a

line from Visakhand Varasmi.

He says, I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things.

And this is an idea I've been thinking about recently.

There is a kind of embarrassment in the modern world at taking pleasure from ordinary pursuits.

This sort of sense that

the things that I feel particularly proud about and that I take a sense of self-worth from and fulfillment, they should be grand.

Because how feeble, how shallow, how unimpressive a life it is that that lying in a hammock for a couple of hours can be one of the greatest sources of joy.

No, no, no, no, you're supposed to be base jumping from the edge of a skyscraper, you know, just off the back end of some VIP trip to Abiza to go and watch.

You know, it's supposed to be this grand thing.

And that line, I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things, I think is a pathology of the modern world.

Should we quote Naval?

I mean, he's the best of us.

If you're not happy having a coffee with a friend, you won't won't be happy on a yacht.

I did have coffee with a friend on a yacht recently and went,

this is good.

It's enjoying better.

I'm enjoying all of it.

Yeah.

This is great.

It is better.

It's a big boat.

Yeah.

But no, there's an interesting

challenge there, I think, for people that are perennial overthinkers because a lot of them will feel things more deeply than they should do, including the shame of feeling things more deeply than they should do.

It's this odd sort of recursive loop.

Yeah.

Are you allowing yourself enjoy anything at the moment?

I'm trying to as much as I can.

I mean, look, some of the things that I've learned, the celebration thing is gratitude and action, I think is a beautiful way to summarize something that I've kind of been floating around.

I'm trying to get, I'm trying to build a studio and an office here in Austin because I basically took the working from home pill during COVID and then never realized that COVID had finished.

Just thought I'm just going to, you know, solo preneur, degenerate, lone ranger my way through this thing.

But we hit a million subs and I got to ring Dean.

We hit two million subs and I think I broke off from work for a little while.

I hit three million subs on a plane.

And I just didn't, you know, it's just another thing that happens despite it being something that we work toward for a long time.

And you might go, well, you're not doing it for the subscriber count.

You go, okay.

So at what point are you going to allow yourself to arrive?

When are you actually going to celebrate this sort of a thing?

Well, it's interesting.

You know, that thing of like, when it gets to a certain number of subscribers, you do a QA.

I think the Q ⁇ A should just be a regular thing

because i think it's like it's a bit like the newsletter it's like just it's sort of almost allowing people check in with you on a regular basis and i i think you don't allow yourself do that

because like if your whole interviewing style is about the guest yeah you're very much in service of the of the guest and my goal is to make you or whoever's sat in front of me look as good as possible okay

well when's that going to shift when's it going to shift because how many books do you need to read?

How many people do you need to sit with and talk to and add value to?

How many quotes do you need before you go, I'm enough.

I've arrived.

I can just talk.

I can just

talk about life and what I think.

And it's, I'm enough.

It's a good question.

There is definitely still a kind of imposter syndrome, not around what I do, but around stepping into the more sort of guru side of this stuff.

And I think that in some ways that's healthy because there's certainly a lot of people who completely bypass the learning thing and go straight into the proselytizing thing without having done any of the work to get up there.

I mean, I'm a big fan of imposter syndrome.

I sort of think if you're not feeling it every 18 months, you're not pushing yourself.

So that thing of like doing things that you're not quite comfortable with

on a regular basis is it's it's a pretty good sign you're moving, you're making some progress.

Is that difficult for you, given that kind of all of the things that you sort of can do now like what yeah no I like I put arenas in in the UK so I'm playing arenas at the end of the year no way and it's like that's a that's a like because I'm used to playing theaters and I do arenas in different markets in the world like in Australia and New Zealand I'm playing arenas next year but in the UK I kind of haven't been playing

like 10 cities around the UK and then I you know in Australia and New Zealand what do you know everywhere yeah do you know what dates you're doing in the UK when I'm doing like it's November and December.

But I'm playing in the round

because it's that thing where

I did a gig.

I was in Melbourne

had one night off in the tour and Chappelle was in town.

And he called and said, you know, what's popping?

And I said, oh, are you doing a show?

I said, oh, I'll come down and play.

And he played it in the round and it was like being a boxer.

And you sort of realized there was like 14,000 people in there, but no one had a bad seat because there's screens above and you're just kind of gently rotating and delivering together.

You're like the lazy Susan of the comic world.

Yeah.

But it was literally so exciting there walking on.

And it was that thing and it was outside.

And I loved how nervous I was walking on.

Also, you did a little warm-up boy for him?

Oh, yeah, like a half hour or whatever.

Only a half hour for the future.

Yeah, but it was

so fun.

And then I kind of felt refreshing.

It was so sick.

I love being friends with you.

I think it's so cool to watch you do this stuff.

But pushing yourself and getting to that space is

really exciting.

And then playing America, like playing, I'm sort of traveling across America and

really trying to, I suppose it's that thing of the, it's the same as the Beatles.

You know, you're taking something that is, stand-up is an American medium, really.

If you think about what America's given the world culturally, it's the Western jazz music and stand-up comedy.

But

this is a George take where he says Britain has some of the funniest people, some of the funniest comedians, but so few of the world's biggest comedians.

What do you think is going on there?

Why is it that the UK is able to reliably produce a Jimmy Carr or Ricky Gervais,

but most of the big names come out of the States?

I think that might change over time.

I think the club culture here is very, very healthy.

If you think about the comedy cellar and the comedy store in LA and the communities that they've engendered, and then latterly, the mothership in Austin that Joe set up.

And, you know, I'm not, you know, Yellow Springs is

Dave Chappelle's new thing as well, which is an amazing space.

I think that thing of like, you can't beat your environment and the being around other people and coming on, like it's, it's, it's scenes, it's groups of comedians that come up sort of together.

So if you think about

Jerry Seinfeld and then,

you know, Bagat, Chris Rock, Bagat, Louis C.K., all out of the same kind of comedy seller crew, and they're all around each other all the time.

I think that really helps to be part of that

group.

I wonder whether the classic British aversion to aiming too high or doing something too different is causing that scene to just stutter a little bit as it grows.

Because when I look at the best, for me, when I look at the best scene in the UK for comedy right now, I'm thinking about guys like Adam Rowe, Finn Taylor,

Vittorio,

the screen rock guys, Jacob and Jake.

Like, this is kind of the equivalent of the D-Gen Podcast Bro circuit from the US

over in the UK.

I wonder with the UK as well.

It is a great comedy market.

Like, the UK, there's a lot.

You could busy yourself very happily for two years touring the UK.

And not have to drive far.

And be home in your own bed every night and then write a new show and go again.

So the wonder loss that I have to go out to 47 countries on tour is maybe slightly unusual.

But I think as the comedy's gone global relatively recently, right?

It was Netflix decided to, and obviously Netflix is based in America, so it's going to lead with the American comics.

And then I think it will gradually go out around the world.

And

well, I'm hoping.

that it just becomes a bigger and bigger thing because comedy is such a

broad church.

It's kind of wonderful.

I mean, I kind of get annoyed when if ever I see a comic slag off another comic, I'm always like, ah, that narcissism of small differences.

We sort of go, really?

We're doing exactly the same job, doing the same thing.

This is different stylistically.

What do you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love that.

I love that Iron Maiden line.

You know, don't try to be the best, try to be the only.

I suppose that really only works if you're actually good at what you do.

Because

if you're not good at what you do, you're like, yeah, I mean, it's awesome that you've created your own unique brand of World of Warcraft stand-up comedy it's a shame that nobody except for you is into it so but I you know I do think that thing of like there's a with comedy you find your your audience you can joke about anything but not with anyone and that kind of goes both ways it's like you you go your audience is kind of it's cool with this stuff and maybe other people wouldn't be but it's that you you attract your crowd and you get the audience you deserve ultimately it's I mean if you if you look out and you don't like your audience you fucked up yeah I mean that is one of the most fortunate things, I think, about

doing work that is interesting to you is that you will accumulate an audience of people that you would happily hang out with.

I look out at the audience at any of the live shows, the one we did in London last year,

sold out the event of Apollo, which was fucking mind-blowing.

I'm like, there's 7,000 eyes looking at me.

And I would happily go for a coffee with like any person in the room.

That is such a weird way to think of and a half thousand people seven thousand eyes yes well you see them in no one is no one thinks like that that's a bizarre way to think about it's a good way to artificially inflate numbers though do you mean i

you're talking to a club promoter who used to inflate numbers for a very very long time turning 3 500 people into 7 000 eyes it's packed in there mate yeah it's packed in 400 eyes yeah uh

but um yeah and i would happily go for a

coffee with any one of them and i know for a fact that there are fucking tons of people in my industry that couldn't say the same.

Yes, I think that definition of a grifter is really powerful.

Somebody who is selling a product they wouldn't use themselves.

That's it.

So I and we've had a conversation.

It's such a great thing.

We've had a fucking conversation about this.

I have an issue because I think it's kind of like the racism concept creep of the online course bro and influencer world that if grifter and shill means everything, it means nothing.

And it's just an

insult that gets thrown around to anybody that seems to be kind of commercializing.

It's like if you're selling anything at all that isn't just yourself or Patreon access, this is some sort of a grift.

And what they basically mean is you are monetizing in a manner that I'm uncomfortable with.

I think it's very different for different people.

Like I did Kill Tony the other night, Tony Hitchcliffe, and they got a ton of merch.

It's like a merch table out the front.

And I saw lots of people buying it and they're big fans of the show and they love it.

And I sell books at the tour shows and that's it.

And I don't sell t-shirts.

I don't sell pens.

I don't sell mugs because I wouldn't buy it.

That's not to say that other comics can't do that because for them, they'd go, yeah, no, 100%.

I would wear that.

I would have that mug.

I would wear that hoodie.

I would wear that t-shirt.

What am I going to do?

That's why you've got shares in a menswear

company in Savile Row.

Sure.

So, yeah, go and I'm going to sell Tom Sweeney suits.

I'm going to have Taylors on standby in the lobby.

Yeah.

But I asked on Twitter, I was like, for the people who use the word grifter or shill, give me your best working definition of what that actually means.

Like, what is a grifter or a shill?

And I was kind of, it was a little bit of a

red herring question because I just assumed that nobody would be able to come up with a good definition.

It's a great definition, isn't it?

You would sell something you wouldn't buy yourself is so fucking kind of

QVC from the 80s.

It slices, it dices.

You're going to have one of these in your life.

Yeah.

Well, I just think, okay, that's cool.

But in that case, if you have this functional definition, it's pretty easy to work out whether somebody

have a neutronic,

Jimmy.

There's no R in it.

All right.

I came here with a, I came here with a fucking,

what's the make of the bag?

You've got to put me onto nomadic.

The nomadic like the

fully wisdom pilled.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

But I did think sometimes you have a

L M T

in the morning in the cold plunge.

I got the new brass monkey cold plunge.

Jesus wept.

So it's the one, it's the lie down one and it has ice that you break through at the top.

So you feel like it will throw up ice

in the morning.

So no, it's just it just feels better.

I mean, I can't do as long in there, obviously, because it's really cold, but it's so good.

I love how we've slowly sort of re-broad you as somebody that sort of turns up in the three-piece suit and all the rest of it.

But behind the scenes,

it's crocs and socks and cold plunges is an element and nomadic and fucking Newtonic.

I tell you my, my,

let me tell you the story.

So I was in, I now stay in hotels based on sauna cold plunge, right?

If they've got a sauna and cold plunge, I'll stay in that one because I like to do it every day.

I find it very energizing.

I'm not great with meditation, but I think there's a lot of people like me that aren't great with meditation.

But I mean, I love Sam Harris's Out, Waking Up.

Fantastic.

I do my best.

I'm better at listening to talks about it than I am at doing it.

Okay, that's fine.

But then I find I can sauna and cold plunge, and that's sort of the same thing, right?

It's the same vibe of like, just take some time.

So, staying in these places, and I'm staying in this place in Austria.

They've got an amazing sauna, cold plunge, right?

So, I go into the sauna.

It's like a beautiful facility, huge, like 95 degrees in there, properly hot.

So, I'm in there

and the guy goes,

I don't speak German, but

shorts,

shorts.

We weren't supposed to be dressed.

Oh, you can't.

Okay, well, I'll take my shorts off.

And it's fine.

There's like three guys in the sauna.

Everyone's naked.

Fine.

We've got towels.

Great.

Then I do the cold plunge.

And I come out of the cold plunge.

And I don't know if you've done, you know, it's like five minutes in six degree water.

And there's some baby dick going on, right?

There's some baby dick.

And then another guy comes into the sauna.

As I get out of the cold plunge, he has no evidence I've been in the cold plunge.

I'm just walking around.

And I'm like.

I need a disclaimer.

Could you come into the sauna with me for a couple of minutes until this?

And then.

So, Skye that you've just met.

Very odd.

We went to his bachelor party in Houston, and he likes Asian things, which is why the office looks like that next door.

This is not great for him at the moment if he's listening out there and I've just said, baby dick, and you've gone, oh, I've got a story about Sky.

I've got a story about Skye.

Yeah.

He made us go to, I think it's called the Golden Temple or something.

It's the biggest Asian spa in Texas.

And this thing has five, nine different sauna rooms and a

fucking snow room and this weird hut thing that you've got to clamber into and the floor's heated and it's insanely hot.

And through the back of the gents, kind of classic Asian spa approach, is a load of

unisex cold plungers and saunas, but you've got to everyone's dick out.

So first off, I was the only person in there with a foreskin.

That was interesting.

But I walked in to see Skye laid down on a bed with this small Asian man and a loofah.

And he just had a towel covering his junk.

And this guy, you know, how people plane the top of varnished tables?

Like, we're going to get the varnish off the top of this table.

We're going to retreat it.

Then we're going to revarnish it again.

This guy had a loofah.

And I was watching him

scrub very aggressively.

Like,

I get that this might be a cultural thing.

Everyone in here is naked.

The guys getting out of the sauna, per you,

sort of hands are open.

I've got no problem with my manhood.

Everybody getting out of the coal plunge was a little bit more sheepish about the way that they walked around.

Oh, yeah.

This is, I tell you, you've come a long way.

Is it Middlesbrough you're from?

Stockton, yeah, the shit.

State of Middlesbrough, yeah.

Stockton.

Stockton aunties.

And that's your idea of a stagdo now.

That was skyshop.

Shame on you.

I know.

Shame on you.

You should have been in Benedorm.

You should now have some kind of antibiotic-resistant STI.

You went to a sauna.

Not even that kind of sauna.

We had a Jeffersonian dinner that weekend as well.

And followed Shabbat at the same time.

Yeah.

No, my friends are unbelievably weird.

I have some of the strangest friends in the world.

I mean, you were at dinner with us last night.

You rocked up to dinner, and we've got Craig Jones, second best grappler in the world, maybe the best troll on the planet.

Seth Belisle, who is his handler, I suppose.

George Mack,

your handler, soon to be one of the best writers on the planet.

Zach Talander, signed to Connor McGregor's record label, but an ex-weightlifter.

Your videographer, me, ex-fucking reality TV turned podcaster person, Brian Callan, and you.

And I'm like, this is the shittest version of the Avengers that I've ever seen.

But what an eclectic mix.

Yeah, I don't know what crime we were planning, but

it wasn't going to go well.

Yeah, fuck.

I I don't know, man.

I really like,

I've liked breaking out of whatever

format the UK

or whatever life it was that I was supposed to lead, I think, because I don't think I was supposed to lead this one.

I feel like this was kind of you talk about self-authoring and agency.

I think this was something that kind of wasn't written in the stars all that much.

I don't know whether you feel that way.

You started your own.

No, I think you made a very big move, like a physical move.

But I think you could have done this in the UK.

I think it's the, um,

it's not so much the physical location, it's the, it's where you chose to go.

I think you, you know, you made the move seven years ago.

You made the move seven years ago to sit in your bedroom and to go, well, I'm going to talk to interesting people about interesting stuff.

That's what happened.

Like everything, the fact now that it's on a grander scale, neither here nor there.

Process-wise, it's the same thing.

You're as inquisitive as you were early on.

Unfortunately, even more, actually, I think.

Yeah, I don't know.

Look, it's one of the things I have two tensions, right?

I have a tension between two different poles.

One is

I don't like to get too big for my boots.

I know that it is a bit of a turn off to people to see someone who seems to be too full of himself, especially someone that like presents in the way that I do, especially someone that's doing it.

through an art form that on the surface anybody can do and lots of people do do.

It's slightly different if you see somebody that plays an instrument because you think, well, as much as I might not like the fact that they're successful at the saxophone, I can't fucking play the saxophone, right?

So there is a kind of hurdle that you need to get over.

So the narcissism of small differences.

I think that the differences are much smaller when it comes to the art form of podcasting.

Because let's, you know, it's having a chat.

It's just having a chat well, hopefully, when you do it effectively.

I don't think

anyone thinks that.

I mean, I think you'd have to be insane to think that.

It's, you know, if I look at the work that goes into it if i give it just a the briefest thought a cursory glance a cursory glance at like the questions you asked the reading that you've done the research the amount of books you have to get through the

the the way that you you need to kind of go okay so they've written a book it's whether it's really good or really bad you you you kind of have to get them to present their whole thing it's like the presentation it's it's a phenomenal skill set i appreciate that so that that's on but sorry your perception is that you shouldn't appear too successful.

Because not only appear too successful, just appear too full of yourself.

It's like, oh, you're not that special.

Again, it's that British working-class mindset that I'm trying to rid myself of.

It's why being around people like George, like Zach, like Brian, like yourself, people who've got big dreams and sort of blue sky vision.

I refer to myself as a criticism hyper-responder.

I over-index on

the criticism of others.

But so that's one end, right?

That is one end.

But the other end is

if

somebody that comes from the most backwater working-class bullshit town, three people living on one person's wage in the northeast of the UK, goes to a school where your entire 200-person yogurt has maybe one other person that goes to university out of it.

Everybody is born, lives, and dies within a 20-mile radius for the most part, is able to kind of rip some fucking project off the launch pad and get themselves out to escape velocity in orbit.

That should be a really relatable story for most people because it's this

pretty accessible combination of

effort,

curiosity, and stubbornness to not stop.

I think it's,

I think you're very working class in the best possible way.

And you don't waste anyone's time.

Remember, like seeing the, you know, that kind of inside the actor studio thing, the masterclass, there's a masterclass thing.

And Michael Kaine did it.

Lots of actors have done it.

And most actors do it and they tell their life story.

And I did this and then I did this and then I did this.

And Michael Kane did it.

And Michael Kaine's working class.

And Michael Kane goes, when you look in the camera, I can't do it, Michael Kane, but when you look in the camera, have one eye,

look at someone in the eye, but look at their

left eye and cheat it, and then look the other side.

So you just look at one of their eyes, and in the camera, it'll look as if you're looking directly down the lens, but also looking at them.

And it's like a practical tip.

He's not wasting anyone's time.

It's very spit in sawdust.

He's a working-class guy.

He's telling you how to do the functional thing.

Weirdly,

I'm more working-class than you think because I'm from Slough and from the Farn Road in Slough, next to the Miles Factory.

I grew up on the biggest.

You forget the education and the current

thing of like, you go, I'm very aware of like,

there's reputation in this character.

There's how you are perceived.

It's very important to know how you're perceived.

You're very aware of how you're perceived.

There's also character.

There's who you know you are.

That thing within you and like where you've come from.

And the idea of like, I think people assume I went to private school.

People just go, well, yeah, probably.

No,

of course not.

But I kind of know that, but you go, you can't change how people, people just have this perception.

Yeah, but it's okay to lean into that.

I think as long as you know.

Yeah, reputation management is an interesting one that people have.

I think so many people are concerned about what other people think of them, not who they are.

And I had

Dry Creek Dwayne.

Did you watch that one?

The guy with the

Wrangler horse dude with the big beard.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And he just had this fucking lovely line where he said, I like me.

I'd buy me a beer.

I thought, what a fucking beautiful self-assessment.

I like me.

I'd buy me a beer.

But he hadn't arrived there overnight.

It took him a long time to become the sort of person that he liked.

And I guess some people start further off.

Maybe some people are more scrutinizing around who it is that they feel they need to become before they would buy them a beer.

But I thought that was a lovely

internal metric of a place that we should all want to get to.

I want to like me.

I want to be the sort of person that I'd buy a beer.

Yeah.

I'd buy you a beer.

This has been great.

I want to know what relationship people should have with their inner critic.

I think it's, I don't know.

I think it's very healthy, isn't it?

It's very healthy to have

an inner critic, but it's also,

there's the golden rule, and then there's the, there's the platinum rule, right?

There's the treat others as you want to be treated.

And then there's the treat yourself as you treat others.

Most people are very kind.

Like you're nicer to me than you are to yourself.

Like

if you said the shit you say to yourself, to me, we wouldn't be friends.

And I think that thing of like the inner critic has to be, it's,

as long as it's process driven, i think it's it's very very healthy yeah it's like imposter syndrome it's okay feel like an imposter for a while as long as it gives you as long as you can get that to a granular level where it gives you something to work on like the inner critic can't just be it can't just be like that's bad it's got to be oh that that didn't work so we need to change it or that one's that one's not going to work so we're going to write something new it's got to be something that's like uh

you're working towards something you're aiming up yeah and And I think criticism is very important.

I mean, Walt Disney used to do this thing where he had like the, he had three rooms.

You know, this thing of like one for creativity,

one for sort of

management, like how would you do the idea?

And then it was only in the third room that you were allowed to be critical.

It's kind of fun idea of like going to sort of

compartmentalize.

Well, I do think that thing of like, never refuse the muse.

If you're working in anything creative, just write it down.

If something comes to you, you just

inspiration is perishable.

Act on it immediately.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a Tim Ferriss says the world rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

And I think that sort of inner critic voice can expand out into, I don't feel good about the thing I did.

Okay.

Well, that's probably the first place that everybody gets to.

I'm not really too sure about why, but there's some sense

of discontent about something that just happened or something that I'm about to do.

Probably very normal.

You don't know where it's coming from.

You don't know what it's about and you don't know what to do to fix it.

Okay, so how about we get away from the vague critic and we move toward the specific coach with regards to this?

Okay, so what precisely is it that you're concerned about?

Well, I don't feel fully prepared for the presentation I've got to give tomorrow.

Okay, is that fair?

Do you know that it's true?

Do you think that you haven't prepared enough?

Oh, I actually, I have prepared quite a lot, to be honest.

I think this is probably just my fear trying to be sneaky and sort of turn itself into a way that I'm going to believe it.

All right.

Well, what are you going to do about it?

Well, I'll just check my notes a few more times.

And actually, huh, it seems like I do know this pretty well.

The inner critic, it's not often wrong.

Just you can say it in a nice way.

You know, it's, it, it, sometimes it's right.

Sometimes you fuck up.

Sometimes it's not, it's not, it wasn't good enough.

yeah and that's okay it's like it's the um it's the idea of like going um it's not repetition it's iteration yeah it's like lots of different you know doing the same thing again and again doesn't make you better like tweaking it and knowing what to tweak is that that you have to listen to an inner critic I think the the

is it hormosey uh it's hormosey is so good for quotes but it's I think it was um

uh

self-confidence without evidence is delusion.

Some version of that.

Confidence without competence is delusion.

Yeah.

It's so true.

And you do meet people along the way that have that incredible confidence or they sort of exude that and then they don't have the confidence.

You need to back it up.

And you go, well, no, no, you need to be able to.

So finding that, I think it's very, I think without that inner critic, I think we would all be kind of delusional wandering around going, yeah, you know.

Yeah, George says, does someone with half half your talent, but five times your self-belief making 10 times the money.

Yes.

And that's true for every British person.

There's an American.

Exactly.

Well, I mean, look, I think for the

perennial overthinkers,

reframing this

very well-trodden landscape of inner criticism,

a lot of the way that you can look at that is I'm fragile.

You know, my self-belief exists on a knife edge.

It feels like I'm tightrope walking confidence, perhaps.

I think a better way to look at it is you're not fragile, you're just finely tuned.

And in the same way as a Ferrari can go really, really fast, especially around a track.

But if you don't treat it very well, it's probably going to break down quite a lot, actually.

And if you treat it really well, it's still going to have a couple of hiccups and days where it doesn't fully operate rightly.

But yeah, you're not fragile.

You're finely tuned is a nice reframe.

It's so easy to be kind to other people and sometimes so difficult to be kind to yourself.

It's like you wouldn't let someone else speak to a friend like that.

You just wouldn't stand for it.

And yet you're innocent.

You're just like, yeah, yeah, say terrible things to me.

Just accept it as it comes.

Yeah.

That idea on you had position and disposition.

This has happened a couple of times.

I misremember things that guests tell me and then I write about the thing that I misremembered.

And what you realize is that you've actually built on something that they didn't mean.

And I think I told you about this before, but I'm going to, I'm going to tell you about it again.

So

this is after our first episode, 18 months ago, something like that.

My chat with Jimmy Carr a few weeks ago inspired an idea.

I've been reflecting on how your trajectory is way more important than your position.

If you're number two in the world, but last year you were number one, that is way worse than sitting at number 150, but being on a huge upward slope from 300 12 months ago.

There's a few reasons for this.

Recency bias.

If your value is increasing right now, that means you have to be popular at the moment.

By looking at recent trajectory, you are selecting for only the few people who are trendy right now, which is really all that we can remember.

We can also romanticize where someone will be in the future if they're currently hot stuff.

How high might they climb?

Who knows?

Maybe to the top, maybe even beyond the top.

Humans struggle to realize that everything is temporary, including growth and decline.

Instead, it's easier to label people as heroes and losers based on what we know of them right now, so we don't have to predict a messy future.

There's an old saying saying that there's three types of people on the ladder: one at the bottom, one at the middle, and one at the top.

Which one is the best to be?

The one that's still climbing.

Yeah.

No, I think it's fantastic.

It's very well put.

Yeah, I think that, especially in show business, trajectory really seems to be such an important metric.

And it's like you could be half the size of

some other comic, but they've been around 20 years and they always sell out the arena.

So who cares?

it's like it's novelty dopamine this is new recency buyers yeah i think there's a there's a thing this year where um

oasis applying

uh and it's a big deal people are very excited about it and i think cold player doing i think it's 10 or 11 nights at wembley stadium

everyone's like chris martin bored of you been around for ages yeah well of course you are yeah you're a big band but it's like but it's not like uh an event culturally in the same way the Oasis coming together is.

There's a narrative to that and a trajectory of kind of where they are that's and Coldplay have just been steadily

listen.

And if Taylor Swift does 15 Nights Next Year, it'll be a, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Of course.

Accepted.

Yeah.

So that thing of like other people getting excited about it.

And I think, I don't know what it feels like to be,

you know, in Coldplay at the moment and maybe people aren't making as much fuss.

I hope they're celebrating.

I hope they're taking time to go.

This is fantastic.

It's a question again of what happens when you arrive.

Let's say that the things that you want to have happen happen.

What then?

Okay, I will be happy when I get to do Wembley.

Ah, but no, I need to run it back because I need to prove that it wasn't a fluke.

It's got to be two nights at Wembley because, you know,

that's the reason the gold medal didn't feel right because it could have been a fluke.

So I need to do it twice to prove that the first one wasn't a fluke.

And oh, I well, no, because the three, because this, or is it a process thing?

Well, they just go, yeah, keep doing what you're doing.

Keep doing what you're doing.

Keep, you know, if it's, you know, however you want to frame it, you know, if you're hard charging, if you're like, if you're working hard because you go, well, this is, this is an opportunity.

It's what I like to do.

Yeah.

I, you know, as I've reached whatever level of

micro-niche degenerate fame success thing that I have done,

I think it's okay not to do the throat clearing on that.

So, the British person in me as I've reached this level of success.

It's okay to say that.

Thank you.

As I've reached this level of success.

Yeah.

The thing that I've realized is

if you

create all of the external accolades that are associated with success, but the thing that you have done to get that is not fully aligned,

the success feels unbelievably hollow.

And this is not something that I've done with the show, but you see it in micro wobbles when episodes that are, I'm really passionate about, it's someone that I wake up on the morning and I'm like, I cannot wait to speak to this person.

This is going to be so fucking cool.

Today was one of those days.

And then there's other ones where I go, yeah, it's like I'm going to be, I'm going to be interested in talking to this person, but I'm not like super fired up.

Even if...

The other episode that I wasn't super fired up about does 10 times the plays or 100 times the players.

It's number one on Spotify and it does all of this stuff.

Like,

it was okay, I guess.

Like, it was fine-ish.

But it doesn't feel the same as something that's 1%

as successful, but much more existentially aligned.

And again, this is another unteachable lesson that success derived from something that isn't authentic doesn't feel like success.

Well, it's slightly that thing of like, what's the, you know,

money, money won't give you happiness unless you earned it.

Like a lottery win doesn't mean anything.

It tends not to bring people happiness because they didn't earn it.

But if you earn it, then it's got a meaning.

It's like there's no benefit.

I'm sure I could get some kind of helicopter to fly me to the top of Everest and have a look around.

No one does that because there's nothing in it.

The view isn't.

I'm sure the view's great, but

it's the climb is the thing.

And the idea of going, the episodes episodes that really resonate with you and are important to you.

And you go, well, that's just, that's giving you direction.

That's the gift of going, oh, more guests like that.

Less guests like that.

And then you're not looking, and the metric that you're using is the feeling.

Fulfillment.

Vibe.

So it's the vibe.

And it's you're not looking at the figures and going, well, that went through the roof, but it's not,

I didn't want to talk to that person.

It doesn't resonate in the same sort of way.

Yeah.

And I think actually,

for your listeners as well, I think it's actually very important to have the balance.

I think it's what you don't want to do is

it's not audience capture, but it's

you're feeling a certain way at the moment and you go, right, well, I want to talk to these people.

And you could be siloed.

into just, okay, well, I just talked to these guys.

And it could just be health and fitness.

And then someone comes on and talks about economics.

So you go, well, this is boring.

I'm not really interested in money in that way.

So whatever.

But the audience might be.

And then it might awaken something in you.

And you'll ask more interesting questions of that person than they would have got somewhere else.

So it is that thing of like going, actually,

for me, certainly the idea of this show is that it's quite a broad church.

And if you don't keep on split testing guests.

That are, oh, well, yeah, no, maybe I'll chat to them.

I might be, that might be something.

You're not necessarily the best judge of what you're going to enjoy.

Right.

It's, I, I kind of think, and maybe this is the same when it comes to the comedy stuff too, to avoid being too stagnant.

I think there's been a bunch of specials that I've seen recently, some of which have been, wow, that's like, that's really, really good.

Others where you go, kind of feel like this guy did this thing before, and

maybe this is a bit repetitive.

Well, there's a, there's a balance, isn't it?

Of like, it's, it's growth, uh, but also in service.

So you go, I always think, you know, comedy specials,

you go, yeah, but it's, it's

all my comedy specials are exactly the same and totally different.

It's me, and it's 200 jokes in a row.

And that's the thing.

I like, you know, how much crowd work you put in there and, you know, what kind of jokes.

It's as funny as I can be.

And I think if I released one and it was a

heartfelt story about love, people go, well, that's not, no, I didn't.

Too much of a departure.

You could, yeah, yeah.

And you can do a little bit of that.

You can do a little bit of talking about about stuff that is meaningful to you within that, but you've you've got to serve as well.

So it's not all, it's not all for you, it's for the audience.

Yeah, it's an interesting one.

I

certainly think that if you feel existentially aligned with stuff, the more that you do that, the less you're going to feel like,

the more you're going to feel connected to the successes that come along with it.

I just think that there is that thing of like the success, in whatever term that is, whether it's

a financial lifestyle, feeling, whatever,

it's a lagging indicator of good decisions you made.

A long time ago.

Seven years ago.

Oh, I'll do three shows a week.

I don't know when you made that decision.

COVID.

Yeah, it's insane.

It's an insane work ethic.

And that's me saying this.

It's like, it's a lot of prep to have to do.

It's a lot of work to put in.

It's a lot of reps.

But my God, it's paying off.

Yeah, stubbornness is consistency, stubbornness or consistency, is a hell of a performance enhancer.

Just

it's the one,

the one way, and you've spoken about this too.

How are you presuming that you're going to be able to beat somebody who does one thing if you're doing two things?

At the very least, you need to be twice as good.

Yeah.

In order to be able to keep up just with where they're at.

In order to be able to beat them, you need to be like two and a half times as good.

Yeah.

And you see people that are spreading themselves incredibly thinly and they're taking I suppose it's that thing of like the things you won't do coming back to that the opportunities that are presented to you in show business the things that you could be distracted by the invites you get the stuff you could go to and you go yeah, but I've got to work this is another one of those insights that I think people early in the journey need to be aware of Essentialism by Greg McEwen was a huge influence on me.

Okay, doing less but better, you know, the highest point of contribution.

What is that?

And get, you know, very, very offensively get rid of all of the rest of the things.

But

if person watching this who is trying to get more clients than they have now as a personal trainer, or a person that's writing on the internet and wants to get more opportunities to go and do live speaking or whatever it is that your goal is,

as you continue to get better and better and better at the thing that you do, more opportunities are going to come along, which means that your nose needs to be more discerning, not less.

So you have this weird inversion where as more opportunities come along that are better,

that only 18 months ago you would have begged to have had the opportunity to be in the room, to have pitched, to have been able to say yes to, you now need to be able to say no.

Dave Chappelle had a great line on this.

I think someone told him very early on, your only power in show business is no.

He did a thing on series two of the Chappelle show.

I'm not sure if this is a known thing.

I'm sure I can talk about this.

On the second series of the Chappelle Chappelle show, they were in negotiations and he said,

make me an offer.

And if I don't like your opening offer, I'm walking.

It's great.

Someone gave me that advice years ago, like when I had a proper job.

They said, if you get offered

an amount of money for a job, whatever it is, don't even look at it.

Just write back and go, I'm a little bit disappointed.

Don't even look at what the offer is.

Just go, I'm a little bit disappointed.

Doesn't matter what the number.

It helps if you don't look

because you think, I can't say I'm a little bit disappointed, but it kind of works.

Jimmy Carr, ladies and gentlemen, Jimmy, you're awesome, man.

I love you.

And thank you for coming to see me.

Thank you for staying for an extra day.

So I know you've got somewhere to go to.

That's great.

I think you know, I like the show.

Proud to be a small part of it.

I appreciate you, man.

Until next time.

Lovely.

Take care.