Jimmy Carr: "I Was Laughing & Crying When He Died". Jimmy Opens Up About Being Cancelled & How Anxiety Is The Flip Side Of Creativity! | The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

I remember being at home and getting the news and laughing and crying and then it hits you.

I was very uh very upset by it and he was just just so funny.

You're a fantastic crowd, thank you very much.

I did not, thank you.

Would you please welcome Jimmy Carr.

One of the most respected invessel of comedian in the world, the king of one -liners.

Okay strap in everyone, you ready?

I'm going to start teaching comedy because it teaches you how to come up with original thoughts to find your voice.

You'll be chasing imposter syndrome and it's great you should feel it every 18 months.

You learned that failure is one of the great gifts of stand -up comedy and to learn how to lose gracefully.

It's a good test of how much you want something.

How do we know what we actually want?

I love what I do now but I often question whether I should go be like a DJ.

Do what? I can answer that question for you.

No you f****** shouldn't.

I know everything you do, you think oh maybe we could make a few quid out of this.

No! As a guy that's touring the world 300 days a year, what advice would you give me on how to be a better communicator?

Speak at 92 beats a minute.

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

Anxiety. It's the flip side of creativity.

So I think the cure for managing my anxiety is...

hang on, the Netflix special drops today so I imagine I'm being cancelled right now.

How have you come to deal with that?

So the next time I get cancelled I've got a plan.

Here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to say...

Congratulations Diavosio gang, we've made some progress.

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Our goal is 50%. So if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel can you do me a quick favour and hit the subscribe button.

It helps this channel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get.

Thank you and enjoy this episode.

Jimmy. It's great to be back.

What have you been up to?

I've been, you know, I've been around.

I've been working. I very much enjoyed this last time and I'm kind of, I was a bit nervous coming back because it's a big show and I really enjoy it.

I really enjoy listening so I've given it quite a lot of thought.

I've kind of made loads of notes and you know here's what I'll kick off with.

I've been thinking a lot about gratitude as the mother of all virtues and I think, I'm right in saying this, I think you would give me everything you own in 25 years time to be the age you are now and as healthy as you are right now and I think it's a really interesting meditation to think about, right,

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

this is amazing. What does that inspire in terms of behavioral change in the moment?

Well I think it's that thing of like I try and I think gratitude is such an important virtue and it's, people talk about gratitude practice and it does take some practice and it often takes like, it's like a way of reframing the way that you see the world.

So I think that we suffer in the West a little bit from life dysmorphia.

You hear a lot about body dysmorphia, which ended dysmorphia, we've got life dysmorphia.

A lot of people think their life is terrible because there's kind of the hedonic treadmill.

You get used to how great your life is.

No one had a hot shower until 50 years ago so I try and do this thing when you stand in a hot shower.

George Mack, my friend pointed this out to me, went, well look, when you stand in a hot shower, just for a moment, just go, well no one that you admire from 100 years ago had this simple pleasure in life and when you look at the world that we live in, we're like, you're doing, there's been a hundred

billion people ever, right?

We are in the top, top percentile in terms of the luck that we have had, but the lives, like the calorific intake that we just take for granted, the fact that our children don't die, you know, in the first year, the modern medicine and our lives and the entertainment that we get, we're living like kings.

And yet, life has never been objectively better and subjectively worse because the nature of humanity is our desires are mimetic.

So we've got this thing where we sort of, you know, how happy are you?

Well, it's your quality of life minus envy.

That's how happy you are.

And it's easy to look at everyone else and how they're doing and not take pleasure in what you have.

It's funny because there's a cost to a hot shower, isn't there?

And that's exactly what you're describing there because subjectively, I think a lot of people don't feel like they are very happy.

And I think objectively, if you look at some of the stats around suicidality and depression and mental health, it doesn't appear that people are any happier.

So even though we have sort of materially improved our lives, we have hot showers now, there's a cost to the hot shower in the sense that maybe it's made life too easy.

Maybe it's made life too comfortable.

Maybe we're in a comfort crisis.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be said on that.

I mean, it's very, I suppose it's very tough love, but you can't have an easy life and a great character.

Show me a trust fund kid that inherited a bunch of money.

And I'll show you someone mentally tortured.

It's true, right. Everyone's like your struggle, where you've come from in Plymouth, in living in poverty to now.

Having stuff isn't fun, getting stuff is fun, right.

It's not the pursuit of happiness.

It's the happiness of the pursuit.

Right. It's just, it's that thing.

And it's not like the self -help, it's not the journey, it's the destination.

It's not either the journey or the destination.

It's who you become on the journey.

And here's the terrible thing about life.

It's self assignment.

Like, you know, there's school and college, and then you get dropped into the real world at some point, and you go, would you, you have to decide what you're going to do, and you can take an easy path.

And it's, it's ultimately less fun.

It's short money. Or you take a hard path and you give yourself a challenge.

And it's great. And I think, you know, a lot of the times it's that thing of like, it's hard to do.

Life is, life is really, really tough.

Those are tough things to hear.

And it's, it's easy for us, because we're sort of on that road.

But then, you know, the thing I love about this podcast is you're sort of trying to, there's so much kind of wisdom in it, so many stories that you're sort of, you're giving people this kind of roadmap for, okay, well, make your life a little bit harder in the short term, and, and get somewhere.

And it's really, I didn't really get what religion was until comparatively late in life.

Like the idea that God is a proxy for the future.

Right, so, so, so God represents the future.

So work hard now for a better life in heaven, right?

So that's, it's kind of, it's the same as all self -help.

Like, okay, so, so sacrifice, the present for the future work is kind of the same.

It's a sacrifice of the present for something better in the future.

That's like, it's a, it's an interesting thing to sort of think around, isn't it?

About like, what are you going to do now?

So I've got this, Chris Williamson, you know, Chris from modern mission.

He's a really good friend of mine.

He's a lovely guy. And we came up with this idea.

So me, him and George Mack were chatting about what, what should you do today that you tomorrow would be happy you did?

So sort of 24 hours in the future, how best to live, because people sort of set like, Oh, well, I'm going to do something for five years, you know, so it's this huge goal.

But you won't rise to your goals, you'll fall to your systems, right?

So that thing of like, what could you do tomorrow?

Oh, what could you do today?

Rather, that you'd be happy you did tomorrow, whether it's the food, you eat, the exercise you take, the work you do.

Would you do that? Oh, right.

I went to the gym yesterday.

I feel great, like a little bit of doms or I wrote 10 jokes.

And tonight I'm on stage trying those jokes.

Oh, well, I'm, thanks me yesterday.

You know, I did something that was good.

So you can kind of time's gonna pass whatever you do.

And you can give yourself gifts in the future.

You can be rich, and you can have a six pack.

And you can be successful.

And you can be in a happy long term relationship with a beautiful family.

You can give yourself those those gifts.

But there's some tough times in the present to give yourself that gift in the future.

Something I really wanted to ask you about is you've climbed to the very peak of your profession, like you really are generational talent, this guy, that's what it's true.

You really have you think about where you started off at sort of 25 years old in your mid 20s, when you decided to leave that I think advertising business and pursue comedy.

Where you are now really is must be the a dream you like never really imagined could come true.

You're at the very peak of your profession.

And I think at the peak of your profession.

I wonder sometimes if you wonder more than other people who are still on their journey up the mountain, what the point in all of this is?

Well, I think that's that's incredibly interesting.

Okay, so there's a couple of things to unpick there.

So you never feel like you're at the top of your profession.

Because you're a you're standing on the shoulders of giants in whatever industry you're in.

So you might think, oh, he's doing he's doing very well.

You know, he's got a Netflix special and a new tour and all of the, you know, all of the things.

But then inside, you're going, well, I'm as good as the next joke I write.

So the thing that I try and do is be quite stoic.

I'm trying to be I'm trying to do less better.

I'm trying to just be a standup comedian, the world ordered a standup comedian.

And I'm trying to honor that.

Right? That's what people want, right?

Go out, write jokes, tell jokes, push the boundaries, great, that's your little role in the world.

Do that. So the more I focus on that, the better it gets, more people come to the show.

It's that thing of like, I suppose, the whole of the world is built on incentives, right?

So you you you put down sugar, you get ants.

He tell jokes, you deliver on a show.

And people come and they enjoy it and then they come back next time.

What'd you get out of that?

I mean, the self actualization, I suppose the idea of going, well, I do this thing that I very much enjoy comedy, because it's an immediate feedback loop.

It's a very lucky business to be in.

Because I don't have to wait, like, I don't have to discuss with someone, oh, do you think this joke's gonna work or not?

What do you think? Do you think it's too offensive?

What do you think? Ah, tell it, test it.

It's kind of it's the Silicon Valley, the, you know, the dual testing is this better than this, this or this?

I'm like an optician, like, just is this this or this or this, or this, this wording or this wording?

And the audience is a genius.

The audience tell me what works.

So it's, it's kind of, yeah, it's, it's, it's a joyful thing to kind of to write a new show.

And then to put something on the, on the shelf, like the new Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, now streaming on Netflix, is like, it feels like I've given people irrefutable proof, I am who I say I am.

And that feels really good.

Like, that's what I do.

That's better than the last one.

And last time I was on the show, I talked about wanting to write longer bits, longer form, I've got a great fastball, but I haven't got a knuckleball.

And I wanted to try and write some different bits that maybe made some points.

And I went away and I did it.

And for better, for worse, it's there.

And I gave it a shot.

And I think it's a better, more rounded comedy special than the previous one.

And I, and I don't hate the previous one.

But it's got really good jokes in it.

It's really funny. I like it.

And then the new tour, I think will be better again.

I think you can see, you see progress.

And what are you chasing?

You're not chasing the thing.

It's your enjoying the process.

It's being. So I don't think you get self -esteem from the six pack you get at the gym.

I think you get self -esteem from being the kind of person that goes to the gym every day.

And I don't think you get anything from the show, from having done the Netflix special, but being the person that put that together is the, that's the enjoyable thing.

And you get, you get kind of better at it.

You know, the light, the weight doesn't get lighter.

Your back gets stronger.

I think about this with myself a lot.

I look at what I'm doing in business and stuff and with the podcast and other things.

And I go, there are moments where my brain will ask myself the question, like what's the end goal here?

Because I've got the things that I materially need to be happy.

I could retire and just go chill on a boat.

But for some reason, I'm sort of torturing myself in many respects.

Torturing yourself?

But sometimes it's very hard.

You're giving yourself a better character because you're giving yourself a challenge, right?

We all need the challenge.

So it's like, you know, with any kind of mythological story, it's the hero's journey.

And you're on a journey to do something to become something right.

And you're, what's your, what are you doing here?

What's your role in the world?

But going and sitting on a beach isn't anything, like, yeah, there's a reason holidays are two weeks.

It's so you have three days of going, Ah, we should get back.

Like holiday should be 10 days, but somehow we've made it two weeks.

And that's great. Because it allows people sort of three days of going, you know, I've got to get back to work.

I've got to do something.

I like that thing of like the top of your profession, when you'll always be looking ahead, right?

Someone that's, you know, if it's for you, probably Joe Rogan, you go, well, Joe's got the biggest podcast in the world.

And what are you number two?

And you're, and so you're, you've got something to aim at.

And even if you're number one, then you're going to go, Yeah, but radio's still bigger.

So huh. Like that thing of you'll be chasing something giving yourself maybe an artificial goal in the future.

But it's a it's a it's just a something to point you in the right direction.

Is there a little bit of unhappiness as sort of voluntary unhappiness involved in wanting to that thing off in the future, do you think?

You know, because if there's I sat with a psychologist, a psychiatrist the other day who was on the podcast, and he said, if you live your life continually wanting, you're essentially deferring your happiness and replacing it with sort of discontent in the moment.

Well, this is, I mean, listen, even the worst people say great things.

Chairman Mao said, you can't smell the roses from a galloping horse.

So when you're moving at that kind of speed, you don't take any time to enjoy life, right?

So you have to just just enjoy the moment, but you enjoy these conversations.

You enjoy the thing that you do.

Now, the hard work is a lot of the stuff around it, you know, the travel and the admin or whatever, but you have to love the whole job.

You can't just go, well, I want that bit.

Because in the same way that people are jealous of you, there'll be other podcasters that are very jealous of what you've got.

But they're jealous of what you've got.

They're not jealous of how you got it.

No comedians are jealous of how I got it.

No one sits there and goes, Oh, I wish I could sit for 10 hours a day and write jokes.

Oh, they think I want to play that venue, or I'd love to have that Netflix special.

But they don't sit there going, well, what pathology would you need in your head to write that many one liners and to care that much about it?

Who would you have to be to do that?

And we're all chasing something, right?

I think we're chasing imposter syndrome.

I think imposter syndrome has got a bad reputation, and it's great, you should feel it every 18 months.

As you level up, you should feel like do I belong here?

Right? This show is much bigger than it was when I was last on.

Congratulations, you.

Why is it bigger? Well, because you pushed yourself and you worked harder, right?

And now, sometimes you feel like, Oh, my god, I'm interviewing this person.

Great. Don't feel comfortable.

Lovely. As soon as you start to feel comfortable, you need to push yourself a little bit further.

There's a great story in my friend Tom, it's very name droppy story.

Do you mind? Alright, Brandon Flowers told me this story.

So he's filming a video with Lou Reed, like 10 years ago, they did a song with Lou Reed, which is pretty cool for the killers.

And they're filming this video, when they're backstage, they're in the they're in the the the green room.

And Lou Reed's there, he's got leather trousers on, he's got a leather jacket, and a vest.

He's got mirrored sunglasses.

He's Lou Reed. And he looks in the mirror, and Brandon sort of sees him just like checking himself out.

And Lou Reed just goes, I wish I was that guy.

Lou Reed's got imposter syndrome.

And he's Lou Reed. There's nothing the matter with it.

You know, a guy that's been a rock star and a legend for 40 years is still feeling that thing of like going, I don't feel like I'm that guy.

Great, that's how you should feel.

So if you haven't felt imposter syndrome in the last 12, 18 months, you think there's something probably what push yourself a little bit hard?

I mean, it depends, it depends what you want to do, you can have an easy life.

Some people, you know, work to live, some people live to work.

It's it's there's different ways of doing things.

It's not necessarily, you don't necessarily need to push yourself in that way.

Like you're listening to us and you know, there might be a psychiatrist listening going with these guys are pathologically ambitious, this isn't healthy, they should just be, you know, chilling out.

And maybe they have a good point.

I look at your work ethic.

And I just feel like I've never seen anything like it for someone who is incredibly successful.

I look at your tour dates.

And I'm like, this guy spends how many dates a year on stage, maybe 300 shows a year, something like 300 shows a year.

Well, most people turn up to work every day.

Don't they? I mean, you know, it's also most people like get your average listening to the show and go, okay, do you want to swap lives?

You have to work for two hours a day, but you'd be telling jokes to people and it's joyful.

It's what what looks like work to other people and feels like play to you.

There you go. There's there's like as a really happy life that people go, Oh my God, he worked so hard.

And I'm going, you're joking on you.

You are literally joking.

And they go, oh, the tour dates like this last week, I was in, I don't know what, South Africa, Paris, Istanbul, Budapest Vienna.

What a life. What? Because really, that's the other thing about life.

People don't want to live longer.

They want more memories.

And really, how do you get more memories?

Well, if you commute to work every day, the same commute for a year, you don't have 300 memories of that commute.

You've got one memory, right?

But if you do different things every day, you go to different places, you talk to different people, you experience the world.

That's fantastic. That variety in life gives you more memories, more life.

You pointed to your head a second ago and said, we must be pathological in some way.

Yeah. Do you think you are?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure I'm the, I don't know, I mean, I'm not sure if I'm not entirely sure if comedy isn't a some sort of low level mental health issue that you can turn into a career.

I mean, it's, you know, it's like for most people, it seems quite strange to want to stand on stage and, uh, and tell jokes.

I think it sounds terrifying to a lot of people, but I find it very, very fun.

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

Not really. I mean, I suppose that thing of it goes back to childhood.

It goes back to, um, my mother was an incredibly funny, larger than life Irish woman.

I was very, very close to her.

I believe they call it enmeshed when you have like a very close relationship with your mother.

Uh, and she suffered with depression and I didn't know, you don't know as a kid, your house is just your house.

You think it's normal, right?

So if your mom's in a dressing gown, when you get home from school and she hasn't got herself together, you just think, well, that's what mom's are like.

So my whole childhood was aimed at making her laugh, especially when driving.

Fun thing to do, make your mom laugh, grab the steering wheel trying, you know, have you had to unpack that to stop that getting in the way, whatever that driving force is getting in the way of your adult life?

Because I've thought about that a lot myself.

I think the things that have driven me here aren't necessarily the same things that are going to help me succeed in the next phase of life, whether it's being a father, like I know you're, you know, you've had a killer thing in 2019, um, or whether it's being in a romantic relationship.

I've had to kind of really work hard to unpack things so that I can succeed in a new season.

Listen, I'm not a therapist, but here's what I would say.

I think you're going to have to make a transition from looking at, uh, measurable metrics to immeasurable metrics.

I think you've got an amazing resume.

You've got an incredible CV of stuff you've done and achievements and stuff you can point out and, and the, the amount of views on the website and the money that you've made and the businesses you started, great.

And I think the immeasurable stuff is going to become much more important.

So George Mac has this kind of theory on, we trade in life, the measurable for the immeasurable.

So you trade work for kind of time with parents.

Can't really measure time with parents.

And it's kind of, it's tough to lunch with your parents as opposed to the job and the thing and the work and that I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy.

And you only notice it when it goes to zero.

So mum dies and you go, well, I'll never see her again.

What wouldn't you give now for another meal, another time, another thing?

So you go trying to find that balance in life.

And I think parenting and being a father is about that, isn't it?

It's about that. It's about trading the measurable for the immeasurable.

Warren Farrell tells a great story.

You know, Warren Farrell, it's like the myth of male power.

I think a lot of these writings being used by, nefarious by people sort of that are a bit, anyway, he's a very interesting guy and he's very authentic.

And he told this story.

I had him tell the story, he said, this guy came to me and very successful man, you know, head of a business that makes millions, really doing very well.

And he said he was unhappy because he had worked all the way through his son's childhood.

And he didn't, he hadn't bonded with his son because he'd just been away at work.

And he went to see Warren Farrell and he's a, you know, psychiatrist or whatever.

And he says, it's okay, what are you going to do?

He said, well, I'm gonna, I'm going to give up my job for five years and I'm going to be at home with my kid.

I'm gonna get, I'm fuck it.

I'm not doing any of that.

I'm going to be with my kid for five years.

Just be in that moment and he did it.

And he was very happy that he did it.

It was John Lennon.

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

You know, I'm sure he could have done great things in those five years, but you think, Oh my God, I'm so glad he did that.

I'm so glad because of what incredible artists he was.

He's given us so much and that he had those years for himself.

And that's for him.

I mean, I imagine he's kidding.

I imagine Sean Lennon is very glad he did that, but he got that time and I imagine he didn't regret it.

And his life was cut short tragically.

And you think it's even more powerful when you consider that that he didn't put it off.

He didn't go, well, I'll do that.

I'll do, I'll get to, I'll get to a million subscribers and then I'll do that.

I'll sell a few more records and then one more tour and then I'll spend time with the family.

He did it. Isn't that beautiful?

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

It's a beautiful story, isn't it?

I mean, I could, when you think about it, you go, that's kind of, that's life, isn't it?

And the, and mortality, I think is something we don't think about enough.

Right. I love that the Muslim phrase for death, the certainty.

You know, we're in this brief shaft of light between two oceans of darkness.

Everyone always thinks about the tail end, right?

And thinks about what happens after you die.

Mark Twain had this great quote, you know, we, we, he said, he said, I wasn't alive for billions of years before my birth.

And it didn't inconvenience me in the least.

But this brief shaft of light is kind of magnificent, isn't it?

I think so. I think it can be this idea of, you know, depression is essentially thinking about yourself too much.

You last time we spoke on the podcast, you talked about, I would say, yeah, sorry, that, that feels to me maybe a little bit too harsh, because I think people suffer with depression and that's a, it's a disease and it's incredibly serious.

And we think of suicide as being something that stands alone.

It's not, it's a symptom of a disease called depression, right?

So it's the, it's the permanent solution to a temporary problem.

You don't want to feel this way anymore, but actually you don't want to feel nothing anymore.

You like to feel better.

So it's that thing of like, I don't think we talk about enough, but I think that thing of, you know, thinking about yourself all the time, I think just deletes to a, can lead to a melancholy, a sadness.

I think depression is maybe a slightly separate thing, not to nick, but it feels like that's a disease.

And there's also a lot of sadness in the world.

And you're lucky if you're sad, because if you're, if you're sad, it's circumstantial and you can do something about it.

You know, are you depressed because you have a serotonin imbalance in your head and it's a heritable trait?

Or are you sad because your life hasn't worked out the way you want it to work out?

Well, if that's the case, the latter, you're in luck because you can change that.

It does feel like there's a bit of a crisis going on within young men at the moment.

And I think your new show on Netflix shines a light on many of the difficulties that young men are facing.

I was really excited to talk to you about this particular topic because I've been trying to arrive at a position myself on why so many young men appear to be lost and suicidality has increased.

And there's these new masculine influences or masculine influencers that are really rounding up this cohort of young men.

Who are we talking about?

Andrew Tate? Andrew Tate of the world.

Well Andrew Tate's interesting, isn't he?

Because who made the, I think John Mulaney made the observation, Trump is a poor person's idea of what a rich person looks like.

Yeah, I've got goal taps.

And I think Andrew Tate is like a 14 year old boy's idea of what masculinity might look like.

And of course, nature abhors a vacuum and there's a real vacuum for elders.

We now, we don't learn how to shave from our fathers.

It's a YouTube video.

And so you lose something in that bonding.

So there's a big bit in the new show where I give a young guy, an audience member, a pretty tough time.

We have the talk and I give them advice on how to be with a woman.

And I'm not wrong about anything.

It's really funny and it's really rude.

But I'm not wrong about stuff.

It's about consent.

And I think it's really good because I've sugared the pill of the message because people don't want to talk about it.

People go, it's obvious what consent is.

Yeah, not to 17 year old boys or girls.

It's like, actually what does that look like?

And how should that be?

So it's a really fun routine, it's a really fun routine to perform in.

What is it to be a man these days?

Because it's quite confusing in terms of even the conversation around chivalry and understanding.

Well, people talk about toxic masculinity and easy fix.

Be a gentleman, be a mensch.

That's it. This is done.

Be a gentleman, be a mensch.

A gentleman is never rude by accident.

It's Christopher Hitchens line.

Great. I don't know.

I mean, my thing about young men today, if I was going to give young men advice, it would be get the right drugs and the real thing, in real life.

Live in real life. So young men are obsessed by video games.

Obsessed. They're spending hours and hours and hours online playing video games.

Why? Well, that's a proxy for career.

Video games, you think about the levels of video games and what people do on video games.

That's a proxy. It's a substitute for the career that they're not having.

Then they spend a lot of time fapping to Pornhub or U -Porn or whatever.

That's a proxy for sex.

My thing would be George Orwell wasn't right.

Our power won't be taken away from us by some authoritarian master.

We're going to give it away for cheap dopamine.

The cheap dopamine of video games and online porn and living online is getting in the way of real life.

So it's risk. That's what we're not allowing young people to do because we're saying to young people, you can't take risks in real life.

We're helicopter parenting.

We're not giving them the freedom.

How much freedom should you give a kid?

As much as they can cope with.

14 -year -olds used to be babysitters.

They now need babysitters.

That's not good. So you should allow them more freedom in the real world.

Because otherwise, the only place they get freedom is online.

No freedom in the real world.

You're not allowed to go to the park and hang out, but you're allowed to do whatever you want online.

That feels like a very bad social experiment.

That feels like a bad idea.

It feels like we've inverted Maslov, this pyramid, the hierarchy of needs.

And you go, well, food and shelter and warmth.

We've got all the bottom stuff worked out in our society.

We kind of can't see it.

We're not grateful for that because we can't see the hot shower.

We can't see the third world and we can't see the people in the past having a tougher time than us.

So we take it for granted.

But we've worked out that stuff.

They hadn't worked that stuff out 200 years ago.

But they had the top of the pyramid sorted.

Everyone knew who they were, they had their identity, and they knew what their purpose was.

Everyone knew who they were, what they were about, and they were connected to the others in the group.

And now we're kind of free floating individuals, we kind of worship the individual as if we can survive as individuals.

I always think of that thing of like there's no but there's no such thing as a baby because a baby on its own isn't anything.

It's dead. It needs taking care of.

We're all still babies.

We all need the connections.

Sure, there's a lot of yourself that's within you, but a lot of it is out in the world.

It's connected to other people.

And it kind of mediates who you think you are.

And that's slightly missing from society where you kind of live online and you're kind of a self -authored thing.

You're just on the computer on the screen and you're not connected and you're not taking risks.

Taking risks is really important.

Is this in part due to the rise in atheism and agnosticism?

I think we both, me and you, lost our sort of religious faith around the same age.

I think it's a weird thing where you go, you can lose your, I certainly don't believe in the story.

There's two types of rules.

There's people that take religion literally and there's people that think it has no value.

Both idiots for different reasons.

It works as a thing, religion.

I miss it because the reason the ceremony works isn't because God's pleased, it's because the people came together.

And so I think we look for things that are proxies for religion.

And sometimes that's football.

It could be environmentalism because you go, well, I need something, I need purpose in my life.

I need to feel like I'm adding value and what a great cause I'm going to save the planet.

It's a big thing to think about.

It's got a religiosity to it, but I don't think that's necessarily the answer.

Some people do it with politics.

They think politics is going to be heaven.

They're going to come up with some perfect system.

I think you're putting too much pressure on politics.

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

It's nice, wasn't it?

It's a lovely thought as well.

When you lose someone that you love very much, it's a lovely thought.

I mean, heaven is just, it's a lovely thought.

And I think in a way, in our culture, fame and fortune has replaced heaven.

It's the land of milk and honey and where you can feel like everything's okay.

Everything's taken care of.

And it is good, but it's not heaven.

I don't believe in an afterlife.

I believe in the next life.

So I don't think anything happens after you die, but I think you can have a next life, in a very different life.

So it's interesting you're at this point of your life when you're thinking about, we might start a family.

It's a whole other life.

It's a whole other, you'll hardly recognize yourself.

You and your partner will be saying, what did we do?

What did we do all day?

Now, we're not a Peppa Pig world or wherever you find yourselves.

This really just struck me that I do kind of miss religion.

But it feels like when I lost my religion, I put a backpack on, a backpack full of weights on.

And I think that's what the responsibility and individualism is.

I mean, for me, the loss of religion was a rush of blood to the head.

It was like, oh, this is my life.

And I need to make good on this.

And I need to live it.

The tragedy is most people don't have that kind of...

They don't get to kind of follow their dream.

When you were 28 years old, your mother died who had a profound influence on you for many reasons, but also has very much the inspiration or at least the singular biggest causal factor of your career.

When I read through your story even more recently, you've undergone quite a lot of grief, even the loss of your dog, I believe, which had a pretty large impact on you.

I think grief is cumulative.

So every time you lose someone or something and actually losing a pet can be...

It's a weird thing because people lose pets and it's like, I don't know, the other people in the office can be a bit, okay, oh well, what are we doing for lunch?

It can be a really affecting thing because it's not just everyone you've lost and you think about mortality, but you think about your own mortality and you think about...

It takes you to a very melancholy place of like, at some point you've got to say goodbye.

And I guess you think about those things of going, what are the...

In life, as we were talking about, you can have a great resume, great CV, loads of stuff on it, but what are people going to say at your eulogy?

That's the important thing.

That's the stuff that really matters.

And it's a very different...

Again, it's a hidden metric of what are people going to say at your funeral?

What are people going to say when you pass?

I don't know. I think grief...

It's very interesting.

It is that thing of...

It kind of comes in waves and think about it for a long time and then it hits you.

How have you dealt with grief in your life?

I mean, I think when my...

I don't know. I think I'm slightly guilty of suppressing it a little bit.

I think when Sean Locke died, I was very upset by it and you just go to work.

You just kind of go, well, I'll put myself in this joyful place of laughter and maybe not have to think about it as much.

But it's... They're gone forever.

And there was something really amazing about when Sean died because people shared so much online.

So you had these clips of like...

I remember being at home and getting the news and laughing and crying, real cognitive dissonance of feeling really upset.

And then they played just all the funniest clips of Sean.

Like people just sending me clips, clips, clips.

And he was just so funny.

And that joy is kind of there.

It's really lovely.

It's a really... Like for all of social media's ills on that day, my God, it made a difference.

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

I don't know whether there's any great revelation in it.

I think it's that thing of just enjoy your time.

Enjoy this because it's fleeting.

All too fleeting for Sean, who's very young.

But I think that thing of...

...family and spending time with the people that you love and doing what you love.

I think prioritizing that.

If you want to meet someone high agency, meet someone that's got six months to live.

I'd say their tolerance for bullshit is about as low as it gets.

I think living your life like that, it's not a bad idea.

It really shows you what your priorities would be.

Someone said, you had six months to live.

Well, what would you do?

That's what you should be doing anyway.

Yeah, that's really what I'm getting at is there's something that facing our own mortality teaches us.

But unfortunately, we often learn that when we haven't got a lot of time to implement it.

And sometimes when someone close to us passes away, we can vicariously learn that message about our own mortality and really what our priorities should be and really how we should be living our life and really what mattered the most.

And I imagine losing someone that was as close to you as Sean was sends you some kind of message about priorities and life and gratitude and all these things we talked about.

Yeah. I think you see, I think gratitude is a big part of it as well, that idea of kind of going, wow, that was that was pretty special.

You were sort of I might grab another coffee.

Can I grab the rest of my coffee?

Is that all right? Am I allowed?

Yeah. He said breaking with the format.

I might shuffle my notes as well.

I want to shuffle my notes.

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

And it's it. Have you have you listened back?

Because I don't think it is.

No, I'll be honest with you.

It's not this is. But businesses life, you know what I mean?

And they're the same thing.

This is communication, mental health, striving progress, people, relationships.

It's still called diary to CEO.

But I don't think you've talked about business on this for like three years.

And even then it was like a passing.

So when you started your business, how did that make you feel?

This isn't you're an old hippie is what you are.

You love this is a great podcast.

But this is a storytelling podcast.

So many of so many entrepreneurs are old hippies.

I think Steve Jobs, he was an old hippie.

Yeah. You know, and it's interesting.

I think that thing of like, what does business teach people, like we're talking about like young men and and kind of there's a bit of a crisis going on out there with young men.

And listen, young women are not having an easy time either.

But it's that thing of like the suicide rate, whatever is horrific with young men.

And you go, well, what's going on?

And it's agency. I don't think we're giving young people enough agency.

So they don't feel like they have they have control.

And really, I think the thing of like serial entrepreneurs, like no one ever seems to hit on their first company.

But it's the second and third and fourth.

And but they just keep going and they go, well, I'm never going to work for anyone, I'm going to do it myself.

That's kind of I don't think we're teaching enough of that.

It's a weird thing, because like teaching someone to be a self starter is kind of a contradiction in terms.

But it's it kind of works, right?

There's I think we're teaching the wrong things.

I've got a theory, I think I'm going to start teaching comedy.

Okay, so comedy is very new.

It really you could trace its roots back to George Carlin and Richard Pryor in the early 70s, as like one guy on stage in a big theater, and he's selling tickets and people are just seeing him, right?

You can trace it back to the dawn of time.

But really, the modern stand up early 70s is a good good starting point.

It's very new medium compared to music and film, right?

It's very new. So I sort of view George Carlin and Richard Pryor as John the Baptist, right?

And Jesus isn't here yet.

And it's this new evolving medium.

And unlike music, we don't have a language yet.

So we need a language of like, okay, what are the joke types?

And how could you, how do you, how do you write that down?

How do you configure it?

There's too much magical thinking around stand up comedy.

You know, that idea that I just I just came up with it.

It's just, yeah, I just, but actually, learning how jokes work and systematizing and analyzing them, I think really helps.

So we've been working on a book with Amanda Baker, who helped me on my first book, we've been working on a thing together for the last couple of years, trying to teach comedy.

And I think I think there's a real benefit to it.

Because if you think about music in schools, right, we'd all argue learning music's great, right?

It's great idea teach kid, the piano, grade three, they learn something about music, and they'll appreciate music much more in life.

I think comedy is much more relevant, right?

What's comedy teach you, right?

It teaches you, you would, you learn to kind of you find yourself, and you find your voice, and you learn to communicate your ideas and to order them and write them down and to communicate.

It's very valuable.

Like the great tragedy of life is most people live and die and never hear their own voice.

Everybody wants to be a better speaker, a better communicator.

You know, it's funny, because I sat with a guy called Julian treasure, who has, I think, TED Talk on communication and speaking that did I don't know, 30, 40 million views.

And he said, I also did a TED Talk on listening.

I can no one listen to it.

Everyone listened to the talk about being a better speaker.

That's pretty funny.

Yeah, I can imagine that.

As a guy that's touring the world 300 days a year, you must have really been able to break down the science of communication and being a good speaker that's transferable to business, public speaking, life, sales, etc.

What advice would you give me on how to be a better speaker, communicator?

Alright. Okay. 92 beats a minute.

What does that mean?

Speak at 92 beats a minute.

That's, there you go.

I mean, there's kind of a science behind it, and I've looked into it, but most great public speakers sort of speak in a rhythm.

It doesn't matter how fast they're speaking, but they're kind of hitting 92 beats a minute.

So I tend to listen to a playlist of songs that are all 92 beats a minute before going on stage.

I know that sounds like madness, and maybe it is, but I think there's something about that rhythm that just the audience, that kind of the proximal speed of cognition, that idea, everyone kind of gets into that rhythm.

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

Do you think Trump's a good public speaker?

He's an excellent public speaker.

Of course. I don't know why people would have a problem admitting that.

I mean, he's kind of, and he's freestyling.

He's like, there's nothing planned.

This is insane. Yeah.

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

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

What do you mean? Okay.

So Donald Trump was posting The Apprentice and Gwen Stefani was on America's Got Talent or one of the singing shows.

Maybe it was X -Factor.

Anyway, one of those big singing shows.

He found out she was getting paid more than him.

And so he wanted to build his relevance, right?

So he decided, well, I know I'll run for president.

I'll become incredibly relevant for like three months.

He's a contender. He's whatever.

And then you drop out the race, no problem at all.

So he hires all those people in Trump Plaza and he comes down the gold escalator and he does the speech and great.

Okay. Nothing. He then goes and there's footage of this.

He then goes and does the first Make America Great Again rally.

And they've got footage of him walking up the steps and he sees like 10 ,000 people all chanting.

And there's the realization.

Oh, oh, this could be real.

It's kind of a yeah.

I think that's Gwen Stefani did it.

Get her. I was the reason I was talking about business is because.

Because this is done over CEO.

It's a podcast about business.

Is because you taught me last time.

Sort of indirectly about something that I've now developed and I called myself No Man's Land, which is that moment when you make a decision to leave the comfort and security of your identity, your professional endeavor, whatever it is, you're working in marketing.

And then I always reference how objectively insane it was for you to leave that and go and become a comedian.

And I've dubbed that No Man's Land that sort of six to 12 months of looking a bit stupid, of losing your friends, losing refer to these five buckets in life.

You have your knowledge, skills, your network, your resources, and your reputation.

And when you go into No Man's Land, you fill the first two buckets of your knowledge and skills, but you empty the last three.

You lose your network, you lose your resources often, you lose your reputation, whatever that was at the time.

But you fill these first two buckets, you made that for whatever reason, decision to leave a normal life and go and tell jokes for no money.

Some people for some reason, and I've seen consistent on this podcast, like Darren Brown, he was had a great professional life ahead of him and decided to go do card tricks on tables in Bristol's for 10 years.

I know what is it about these people that's making them I think they've had the realization, right?

They've they've had the Confucius moment.

Every man has two lives.

And he second begins when he realizes he only has one.

And the good is the enemy of the best.

Because you know, when people are on podcasts like this, that moment looks like bravery.

But I, I wonder if to you in when you quit your sort of marketing job, There's plenty of four o 'clock in the morning.

Oh, what have I done?

This seems, this seems crazy.

Especially when you really kind of when you break because when you leave as well, you don't have like an hour of great stuff of like that you've written, you've got like 20 minutes of stuff that you kind of look back on and go, oh, that's kind of joke shapes.

There's something there.

But really, it's, it's insane.

Yeah, but I think that's great.

I think failure is one of the great gifts of stand up comedy.

You sort of make friends with failure as a stand up, because you write so many things that don't work.

You write so many jokes that you think this can be great.

And then you tell that in the audience going no, that isn't anything.

Guess again. And that idea of going failure, failure is kind of frowned upon in our society.

We don't let kids fail.

We don't let kids lose at sports.

We don't let you know that it's it's really silly because you're sort of teaching them if you if everyone's a winner, then you don't learn how to lose.

And to learn how to lose gracefully is that's a great skill to have.

And you kind of, you know, it checks your ego and you you sometimes not everything in life is going to work out for you.

And it's in case you you test it and it's a good test of how much you want something.

You don't have you have a terrible gig and you're well, I'm never doing that again.

Or you have a terrible gig and go well, you know, you lose or you learn.

You develop your relationship with no.

Someone said this to me the other day, and it really stuck with me that you need you know, I worked in tele sales for a couple of years, and it really helped me develop my relationship with the answer.

No. And so now in life, I think I have a much healthier relationship with the word no.

Because for me, in call.

And it's that the law of averages where in the call center, all it meant was that I was one step closer to getting the yes.

So I get it, you know, you get loads of notes in a row, you sit down and go, this next guy's going to buy these fucking double glazing.

And I think at a 16 years old, I developed that relationship with no, which meant in my head, that it was getting me closer to a positive outcome.

Lots of kids don't have that these these days, because we shield them from that.

No is, you know, seen as a self esteem hit.

For me, it was building some kind of muscle in me.

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

It's madness. You have to give the world irrefutable proof.

You are who you say you are.

Right? So you, you release a comedy special, whatever you go, yeah, that's me.

That's what I do the new tour.

That's me. That's what I do.

It's irrefutable evidence, right?

I am who I say am. And I think that idea of going taking away the negatives, you can't just, I mean, I mean, you can, but then I think we're I think it's very cruel.

I think we're being kind on the wrong time scale to people.

If you're kind, you want to be kind to your kids, right?

I want to be kind to my kids.

What do my kids want?

Well, they want McDonald's and they want ice cream and they want to watch TV and play video games.

Well, okay, downstream are some fat stupid kids.

Who wants fat stupid kids?

No one. So you have to be kind to their potential to who they're going to be, right?

And that involves, you know, broccoli and homework and they're boring, going on a walk, doing some exercise.

But you're being kind later.

And I think that it's very easy to see that when you're a parent.

And it's hard to see that with an 18 year old that's maybe struggling.

Tell us your point about being kind to you in 24 hours, I guess.

It's a similar thing, like seeing the potential in someone, seeing the potential in yourself, in a child, in anyone.

But in yourself, that's kind of the thing of going where you could be incredible in 20 years time.

Because really that thing of like, it's the, I suppose, what's the opposite of gratitude?

It's resentment. And who had the great line?

Nietzsche had the great line on resentment.

He said, if you think someone's ruined your life, you're right.

It's you. Like, that's a mic drop, isn't it?

That's such a great line.

And, you know, gratitude is the cure for that.

There's a there's a great definition of entitlement.

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

Where you are now, where you want to be.

If you think that someone else's problem, that's entitlement.

And I think if we're honest, there's always a little bit of that going on.

Like, there's a lot of people in my industry that would, you know, their career isn't where they think it should be.

And, oh, I need to get a new agent.

Really? You think that might be the problem?

Remember, there's a great story of I wasn't there, but David Tell is sort of the comedian's comedian is works out in New York late night.

He's, I mean, really one of the greats, one of the one of the most influential voices in comedy.

And these guys backstage were like moaning about their management.

And he's kind of overhearing this conversation that's going on for far too long.

And he just, he's going, Oh, be funnier.

It's often very simple, that stoic thing of going, what's the thing you're meant to be doing?

Just do that. I'm not sure I approve of portfolio, sort of working.

The idea of having lots of different things that you do, because really, you're going to do comedy part time, what you're going to do half comedy and half novel writing.

Oh, so you're going to compete.

I'm doing it 100 % of the time.

And you think you can compete 50 % of the time.

All the best. Let's see how you do.

You're never going to get to the top of the pyramid doing a 50 % of the time, right?

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

You know, be a specialist.

It's one of the favorite parts of my previous conversation that I had with you, where you, where you talk about the world doesn't need more people that are shitting in physics.

And it really helped me understand a lot of things.

I also then shortly after met Richard Branson in New York, and he's the most incredible delegator.

He's not trying to get good at things that he's not good at.

He's built his whole business in life on realizing what he's shit at, and just handing that over to other people.

Whereas so many people are fighting to polish something that they're not so good at.

Yeah. I think knowing who you are is quite important for that, isn't it?

It's like being honest about it.

Like, well, I'm not good at that, but I can do this.

It's hard to know who you are, though.

Clouded by who you want to be.

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

I'm not sure whether we're not kind of rushing people on that a little bit.

I would often think of the listeners to this show, right?

So it's certainly the younger ones of kind of going, well, do I need to know now who I am and what I want to do?

Exactly. It's like, no, you could try a few different things if you like.

Because I think that thing, when you get into the stream that you're meant to be in, it just feels very easy.

It's like you're not swimming against the tide.

Just feels like it's carrying you along.

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

What's me? What? I can answer that question for you.

That's a bit of luck.

No, no, you fucking shouldn't.

What? What? You think you maybe should do musical theater?

What? Are you having a panic attack?

What are you talking about?

What would make you think that?

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

Great. You've got a hobby.

You've got a hobby, not everything's a business.

I know it's diary of a CEO and everything you do, you think, oh, maybe we can make a few quid, Alice.

No, stop it. What are you talking about?

You know who's being a DJ right now?

There's someone right now in their bedroom, they've been there for 12 hours already today and they're just loving it and they're putting everything into it.

They're putting the work you put into the podcast into DJing.

Let them have that.

It's nice to have stuff where you're in a flow state in life.

And for some people, that's work.

And for some people, that's a hobby.

Some of us are very lucky and we get to do it in a few different things.

So I play a little bit tennis.

I don't think I'm going to get the wildcard at Wimbledon this year.

There, I've given up on that.

It's just a hobby. And listen, I mean, you might be the next Calvin Harris.

I might be steering you in the wrong direction.

You might be incredible, but stop it.

Stop it. Just do this.

This is great. This is enough.

This is loving. You're talking to the most interesting people.

I mean, present company accepted, but you speak to all these different people from different worlds and this is enough, right?

How do you know if it isn't enough?

Well, I want to talk to you about quitting because there's going to be a cohort of people that listen to them.

I met a lot of them last night at a show I was doing and they are working in finance and they'll tell me their job, then they'll show me their hobby on their phone and their face lights up when they show me their papier -mâché business or whatever it is.

What's the great line?

If you want to find out what you should do in life, what do you think about all the time?

That's your God. You're working in the city with a shirt and tie on it.

JP Morgan or something.

No, but no one's thinking about that all the time.

So what do you think about all the time?

What are you engaged in all the time?

If it's football, if you're absolutely obsessed by football, well, something in that industry is going to be the job for you because you're obsessed by that and that's what you think about all the time.

So the idea of quitting.

Quitting is quite interesting because, oh, the things that you won't do.

Like if you're going to have an interesting life, you can't have all the other interesting lives you would have had, right?

So there's all the counterfactuals of the different sliding doors that you could have done.

Well, if you're going to be an Olympian, you're going to have to give up an awful lot of stuff.

You're not really going to have a childhood in the traditional sense, but you're going to be an Olympian.

Great. And if you're going to be an academic, then you're probably not going to be having to go to as many parties.

Okay, well, there's no solutions, only trade -offs.

You know, Thomas Sowell, isn't it?

You have to make a lot of trade -offs because not only are you on the road 300 days a year, but you have so much opportunity.

There's so many things being offered to you to do movies.

Why don't you try and be an actor or why don't you write five more books or why don't you do, I don't know, a comic, comical musical or whatever it might be.

Why don't you become a DJ?

DJ and musical theatre.

Those are my two prime loves.

Yeah. I mean, there's not as many as you would think.

No one's banging down my door saying, do you want to be in a movie?

And I don't know if I'd be great at that.

I don't know. I mean, listen, I like getting out of my comfort zone and, you know, opportunities come along and sometimes, you know, get offered a TV show, you go, oh, give it a go.

Why not? I think sticking to what you do, that stoic thing is really paid dividends.

That really has paid off.

And I think you have to listen to that.

You know, and I see other comics, you know, mentioning no names, there's some great stand -up comics that were like, absolutely amazing.

And they're doing five other things now.

And they've lost a yard of pace.

And for me, that feels crazy.

Because I'm looking at it going, you've got the best job in the world.

Why are you allowing yourself to be distracted?

Because ultimately, it's going to be hard work.

You know, ultimately, I mean, people can see, I suppose, that the, you know, something costs more, like a Ferrari costs a lot of money because a lot of work goes into it, right?

There's a lot of work goes into that thing.

The beautiful handmade Louvoutin thing is going to be expensive because a lot of work went into it.

People understand that.

I sort of feel the same about shows.

You're going to see a show and you go, wow, that really took some time.

Every single line in that is brilliant.

He's not wasting any time.

There's no fat. It's just a lot of work.

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

Well, I do think that's, it's slightly unfair that we think about luck in a very fixed way.

So a Barbie and Oppenheimer are great to talk about this, right?

So people see Margot Robbie and they go, well, she's just lucky, right?

She was born. She's that beautiful, right?

She's so beautiful.

People can't see how good an actress she is, right?

People just can't, because she's just like sort of this stunning thing.

And you look Oppenheimer, right?

No one thinks, oh, you're so lucky.

Born with an IQ of 170.

And born with a work ethic, because a work ethic is heritable, right?

So he was born incredibly clever and an incredible work ethic, right?

And no one thinks of him as being lucky, but they think of her as being lucky.

That's a weird thing, right?

That's odd in our perception of luck and how much is your factory settings.

You know, I've talked to you about this before, but it's always like some bullshit.

If someone's very successful, you either go, wow, incredible talent.

Or I work so hard. No, always both together.

Always both together.

And or like you said earlier, maybe a bit pathological in some way.

Which I don't know whether you'd put in a talent bucket or what.

Again, the pathological, the work ethic, the striving, a lot of that is heritable.

You know, so what are you going to do?

I think when you see luck in that way, I think you become much more forgiving.

Of, okay. Quite crazy, this idea of luck.

I've been thinking a lot about it lately.

I was reading some stories about even the asteroid hitting Earth.

If it had been a minute later, then the dinosaurs would still be here.

And the story of Nagasaki and Hiroshima being bombed, because one guy went to Kyoto 20 years earlier and he really liked it.

So he told President Truman not to bomb it.

And if he hadn't been on holiday there with his wife, then Kyoto would have been hit by the nuclear bomb.

And then they went over Kokuru, I think, city in Japan and that had a cloud.

So they thought, fuck it, we'll go bomb Hiroshima.

And 100 ,000 people over there lost their lives in every generation that would have come.

You just think these tiny little things that are going on in the world at all times, kind of like this idea of the butterfly effect, shaping our world.

And it can make you feel a little bit powerless in some way.

Because if someone's holiday can be the difference between me being alive or dead, yeah, it's very difficult to, you know, we always think about the first order effects of what we do, not the second and third order effects.

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

With this idea of luck in mind, personal responsibility seems to sit on the other side of the conversation of luck, which is how much can I control where I'm going in my life?

How much control do I have?

How much should I show up and fucking fight for positive outcomes?

Yeah, well, that's agency.

Yeah. You should strive to have the locus of control within yourself.

So, there's character and there's reputation.

And reputation is what the world thinks of you, and character is what you know about yourself.

And your self -esteem should be largely based on your character and a little bit based on reputation.

Because reputation, you could take a hit every now and then.

You get cancelled once in a while.

Well, once every 18 months.

Well, hang on, the Netflix special drops today.

So, I imagine I'm being cancelled right now, somewhere.

How have you come to deal with that?

Because as a comedian, you guys get it worse than anybody.

I don't know if we get it worse than anyone.

I think we're sort of the canary in the mind.

It's, I don't know, I sort of view it as respectability is a prison, and the gates are open, and people are desperate to be inside.

Right? I'm not a respectable guy.

I tell very edgy out there jokes.

And jokes are like magnets.

They attract some people.

I've got a big following.

I've got a lot of people who watch my shows and they really enjoy it.

And like magnets, the jokes attract people and they repel people.

Some people are repelled by my jokes and they think they're terrible.

I'm not for everyone.

I think you have to accept that.

And, you know, when it comes out on Netflix, when it drops, that's when it kind of, the pathogen escapes the lab.

Because people that didn't pay to see this are suddenly exposed to it.

Someone puts a clip somewhere and goes, this is, man, this filth.

I mean, banning stuff.

It's like, I sort of view cancel culture as the new.

And this isn't saying criticism isn't valid.

You criticize ideas, but you cancel people.

And I think the cancel culture thing, I think it's the new book burning.

It's no different. The people that burned the Beatles records in the 60s, how did they feel now?

You feel like a dummy?

I bet they feel like dummies.

It's like, and obviously the basket of things that are acceptable and unacceptable change and ebb and flow through time.

But really, it's, you know, I'm a creature of my time.

I'm going to tell these jokes.

And if they get big laughs, then great.

Have you always had this perspective?

Or is this something that's developed like a muscle over time?

No, I think there's, I think that adversity, I've been cancelled quite a few times.

And there's, I try and see the positives in life, right?

So adversity is a filter.

And you find out who your friends are.

And who stands by you.

And who's, you know, who's ride or die.

Great. Turns out I've got loads of great friends.

And a couple of people fell by the wayside and great.

Have to waste any time on them, because everyone loves you when you're throwing a party.

But in the tough times, you're a bit more difficult to love.

And if people stand by you then, then they're friends.

That's, that's, that's what it is.

And your friendship is such an important thing.

It's something that we don't really think about.

We think about a lot about our partners in life and our children and that side of family.

Friendship for me is, it's such an important thing.

It's such a huge part of my life.

Really, when you think about it, why, why is comedy having this moment?

Well, because comedians, it's a little bit like a friendship, right?

There's, there's a, there's no filter.

And really your best friend is the person you have the least filter with.

Your deepest, darkest, you share, you're open.

And a colleague, you know, quite a lot of filter.

And someone you meet at the bus stop, tons of filter, right?

Comics, currently there's no, there's no filter.

You see Chappelle on stage.

He's, it's him. Great.

You see Chris Rock on stage.

That's him. It's like you feel connected.

Lovely. There's really something in that idea of, as you were saying there, that there's so little authenticity and vulnerability and openness in the world that when we encounter it, we feel so connected to it.

Because it caters to the demand that we have that's not being met with supply.

There's so much supply of like filter girl on holiday in Hawaii drinking cocktail.

But in our sort of private and our secret lives, there's very little reflection of what we think about in our private and secret lives in the world.

So when we hear someone talking about their depression or their mental health, we go, Oh my God that, you know, I can resonate or.

Is this not why the podcast is so big?

Why comedy is so big at the moment?

Because the, the gap between public and private discourse has never been wider.

And we both, we're both living in that space.

We go, yeah, have a, have a real conversation with someone.

Great. And the, you know, the, the counseling thing is, is great, but really what happens?

I mean, you could, you can recalibrate it and just call it free publicity.

Like people are talking about you.

Well, great. There's this thing called the eraser test, which one of my guests talked to me about before, Mo Gordat, where he said, if you could go back and he asked, I think he asked, or there was a study done where they asked people if they could go back in time and raise their most difficult moment,

would you press the button and raise it?

And like nine, these are like really traumatic events, about 95 % of people said they wouldn't.

When you think about your most traumatic moments of sort of being canceled or something like that.

The best, best advice I got.

Actually, the last time I got canceled, I found a friend of mine who's being canceled.

And he said, do you want to go?

You've only got to answer one question.

Who's Jimmy Carr? Anyone know who's Jimmy Carr?

Well, I'm an edgy standup comedian.

Okay. Fine then. You haven't got a problem.

It's great. And then another friend of mine just went, well, you need to just right size this.

And I'm like, what?

You've got a right size.

She said, what's happened here?

You told a joke and some people didn't like it.

Yeah, that's what happened.

I didn't seem like that big a deal when you put it like that.

And yet in the moment, sometimes it feels, you know, catastrophic.

But those hard times, you know, you wouldn't erase the hard times because again, I would say, and it's a, it's a, you can't have an easy life and a great character.

And what they're saying there by not erasing that moment is, I'll keep my character.

Thanks. Anxiety. We talked about this last time.

Anxiety is, it's a very interesting thing.

I mean, my kind of original thought on anxiety was the it's the flip side of creativity.

So you have a mind that is whirring and that's given me every gift I've ever received.

Right. The ability to write jokes and to be funny, whatever is from that.

I can't turn it off mind.

And sometimes at four in the morning, when you've got nothing to do, that mind is still whirring.

So you get involved in counterfactuals.

You start to think of all the other things that could have happened that haven't happened in life.

And, you know, people are not worried about falling off a cliff.

They're worried about jumping.

It's the madness within all of us of what could happen and the worst case scenario and these terrible things.

And you allow that to get ahead of you.

I think the cure for it for me at the moment, how I'm managing my anxiety, is giving myself more to do.

Because I think anxiety, you're trying to solve a problem in the future now.

And you can't. Because there's no problem in the now.

The problem is in the future.

So you're kind of ahead there trying to figure out something because there's a demand for problem solving in the moment and you don't have a problem.

In fact, think of people don't get depressed when they go to the gym.

If you're in the gym, you can't be anxious while you're working out because you have an immediate problem.

Lift this damn thing off my chest.

You've got an immediate thing to deal with.

You're in that moment.

So it's hard to be anxious because you've got something to do right now.

So give yourself something to do right now.

If you're suffering with anxiety and don't let your mind drift into the future.

I suppose it's quite sort of Buddhist in a way.

Is your anxiety triggered by anything?

Or is it just kind of a noise in the background?

I don't think it is.

I think you often, I think there's an illusion that when you feel anxiety, it's about this thing.

I think actually, you've just got a level of anxiety and you will, if I've got nothing to worry about career -wise or show -wise or I'm not currently being cancelled, you might worry about the environment or you worry about your kids or you worry about something else.

So I think it just attaches onto whatever's front of mind and you logically go, oh, it's anxiety about this.

It isn't, it's just anxiety.

Do you think people know who you are?

Truly. You know, I met with a CIA agent a couple of weeks ago and he said we have three lives.

We have our secret life.

We have our private life and then we have our public life.

Public life is the guy in the suit on camera.

Your private life might be what your wife knows, but then maybe your secret life is who you are when there's absolutely nobody there in your mind and in your own space.

Do you think people know who you are?

I think actually, weirdly, this podcast is quite important in that.

You know, going on this, going on Joe Rogan, going on Modern Wisdom and talking as myself is very exposing.

And writing the book Before and Laughter, which is kind of a autobiography but also a bit self -help -y is very much authentically who I am.

So I think reading the book, listening to this, this is kind of what it would be like if we knew each other, if we were having lunch, you know, for the listeners.

It's like, this is kind of what I'm like.

And then I've got an ability to be funny on stage, which is another side of me.

So I think that's like, it's not inauthentic what I do on stage.

It's just like, that's who I am in front of 3 ,000 people that have all paid £30 to be entertained.

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

This. This. This is, yeah, you know, you're slightly more...

I think on this, it's very much you take down the...

It's not like doing a TV show to publicise something.

So if you go on, you know, Graham, you're very much like, okay, well, I've got three anecdotes and I'll get them out and I'll try and get four laughs and then I'll try and sniper in on the other guests and it'd be funny.

And it's very performative.

Whereas, this is performative in a slightly different way where you're kind of going, well, this is kind of what I think about the world and this is what it's like inside my head.

And it's quite, I don't know, I suppose when you step back from it, it's kind of, okay, well, a lot of self -help, a lot of, I guess, therapy, you know, that's what I'm like.

Since we spoke last time, is there anything you thought then that you no longer believe?

I'm interested, I'm asking that question because...

My favourite question.

What was the last thing you changed your mind about?

I think I've changed my mind about environmentalism a little bit.

I think I absolutely acknowledge the problem and I think the solution is just there.

I think it's splitting the atom.

I think we should all be, I think nuclear is the future.

That's what we should be investing in.

We've gotten an issue that we have a system that is full of politicians and we haven't got statesmen.

We need longer terms.

Longer terms? We need longer terms because we need people to make decisions.

Like, everything's about rewards, right?

So what do we reward?

It's on a five -year cycle.

So no one's ever going to invest in nuclear because it's going to take 20 years to pay off.

But they should be rewarded for that.

Somehow we need to find a way to reward politicians for what they did 20 years ago.

Because if we do that, there's a better future, right?

And I don't know if Britain doing it makes any difference.

Like people often say, well if Britain does it, it doesn't make any difference because China's not going to do it or India's not going to do it.

But you go, well actually if we did it, if we did something radical and went all nuclear.

There have been incredible examples to set to the rest of the world.

Here's what I do. Here's my, do you want to hear my pitch?

All right, here's my political pitch, right?

Nuclear submarines have been testing this for 50 years, they're perfectly safe, right?

People are going to live in a nuclear sub next to the reactor, they're fine, right?

So we build one of those.

There's no, not in my backyard.

We put it in everyone's backyard.

There's a nuclear reactor like a submarine in every city, bury it, have a small power unit in every city and town in Britain, okay?

And then it's quite expensive.

So you pay your fuel bill.

And in 20 years' time, we don't worry about COP 23.

We burn all the fossil fuels we want for 20 years.

And then in one day, we go totally green, right?

No more fossil fuels.

Well, a little bit for fertilizers and stuff, but no more essentially.

And then fuel over the next 10 years, power becomes free.

So we say to businesses around the world, do you want to set up a business in Britain?

It's quite expensive to employ people, but energy's free.

Do you think we live in a world where energy will be a value in 20 years' time?

Is it going to be the thing?

Yes. So you say to your Amazons and your Googles, do you want to set up the place here?

Yeah, great. If I rule the world, that's what I would do.

Trump's probably going to come back into power, isn't he, for the looks of things?

Biden doesn't seem to be very compelling to people, according to some of the polls.

I mean, a week is a long time in politics.

Who knows what will happen?

I think America will be fine regardless.

America is geographically, economically.

It's a net exporter of fuel and of food.

It's got incredible neighbours in Canada and Mexico.

It's going to have the most incredible 20 years, regardless of who gets in.

They're going to double their industrial base in the next 20 years, because everything that was globalised is becoming more insular, which isn't necessarily good for the world, but very good for America.

America can afford to have a terrible political system because it is so blessed.

They're going to own much of the AI race as well.

All the big AI companies seem to be based in America and that feels like that's going to really...

I'm not worried about AI.

No? AI is a covers band.

It's artificial intelligence.

It's not artificial consciousness.

So if you tell it to write a joke, it can spit back stuff that you've already written and reorder it slightly.

But don't worry about it.

The Beatles aren't worried about the bootleg Beatles.

But if you imagine even a 20 % rate of improvement every year, it's only going to take...

That compounds. It's only going to take us five or 10 years before there's a fucking AI that can crack a joke really, really fucking well and an original joke.

I don't know whether it's going to be original.

I think there was something about...

I don't know... Genius is an overused term.

There's two types of genius.

There's innate actual genius.

Bark or Beethoven or whatever.

Genius. And then there's hyper -accelerated rationality.

And that's kind of what...

People talk about comic genius and they go, that's what they're talking about.

Hyper -accelerated rationality.

And I think AI is a long way from either of them.

Like, of coming up generating something that's genuinely original.

No, it's a covers band.

It can go, well, that's the genre and I can do something that's a bit similar.

But there's something about human creativity that I don't think it's getting close to.

And maybe I'm being naive, but I think it'll be an incredible thing for the world because I think new jobs will come along.

This wasn't a job 10 years ago, right?

Being a podcaster. If you tell someone I'm going to do...

I'm going to do sort of a long radio show, but people...

But it's an individual thing.

You'd have to explain it.

Things change. And it's only when you sort of look back, you go, oh, wow, that's interesting.

The biggest TV channel in the world is YouTube and no one noticed.

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

Is that not AI? Well, it's the world.

It's the world progresses and things move on and it's always been fine.

I think people worrying about AI, it really strikes me it's the people going, well, we've got to smash up these cotton making machines because this can't happen.

There'll be no new jobs.

There'll just be different jobs.

I read a book called The Innovator's Dilemma and it really changed my mind on a few things.

They go back through history and they look at all of the big steps forward in innovation and they basically categorise two types of innovation.

I'll call it the upward opportunity and the downward opportunity.

So if you're selling horses back in the 1880s, the upward opportunity is the thing that all your customers are asking for.

It is the thing that you know how to do.

It is the thing that you have your supply chain set up to deliver on which is faster and better horses.

You can imagine the meeting that you're the CEO of a horse company.

I come and I go, listen, boss, I've got an idea.

They go, what is it?

I go, faster horses.

You go, are people asking for it?

I go, yeah. Do we know how to do it?

Do we have a customer?

Yeah. Let's do that then.

Then another guy comes in and says, Jimmy, I've got an idea.

Cars. Are they better?

No. You have to walk in front of it with a red flag and it goes 10 miles an hour.

Do we know how to do it?

No. Is anyone asking for it?

No. None of our customers have asked for a horse.

That is the downward opportunity.

And throughout history, the incumbents always ignore the downward opportunity because their incentives, as you said, their incentives are set up to pursue what we call the sustaining innovation, the obvious thing in front of them.

Become a better comedian or become a better podcaster.

Get another camera.

The downward opportunity.

I asked myself, what is the downward opportunity in podcasting?

Listen, you should ask comedians.

Comedians got an interesting way of thinking.

I think we're very similar to detectives because we think backwards.

Most people think about what's next, which is what you're talking about there, what's next, what's the next thing, what's the next thing.

And we go, well, this is the state of affairs.

How did this happen?

And it's the same as it's like being Sherlock Holmes.

You go, how the hell did that?

You kind of, you're reverse engineering a lot of the time.

It's very interesting that.

This may yet be a business podcast.

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

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

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

And yet what's missing from our lives?

What's missing? What's the nature of balls of vacuum?

Well, people aren't having conversations.

When you look around the world, all those people that live to a hundred, all of those zones and people go, oh yeah, they eat loads of olive oil and fish.

Maybe that's the answer.

No, it isn't. They eat with other people.

They have a conversation.

They're part of a community.

That's the difference.

They've got something to live for.

The olive oil isn't making any fucking difference.

The connection to other human beings is, what are you doing here?

You're connecting to people.

You're having a conversation.

So people are eavesdropping on a conversation, but in the heads, they're having a conversation.

And the stuff we're talking about, they're relating to their lives.

Great. Nobody was asking for this though.

Nobody was saying, do you know what I want?

Three hours of Jimmy Carr talking about life.

No one was like demanding that in the like BBC era.

You know someone rolling their eyes as they listen to this.

Yeah, and I'm turning off now.

But in that industry, they probably thought people want bigger TVs and thinner TVs.

That's what they want.

They want to watch the BBC on a thinner, bigger television.

So we're going to deliver it to them.

Whereas the downward opportunity was, in fact, they wanted connection.

They wanted it to be longer form.

They didn't want loads of ads every six seconds inside of it.

Is this not the great sort of, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, what am I going to do?

It's not like someone has spotted the gap in the market.

You could be the person.

And it's that thing of do what you do authentically.

I always think like Joe Rogan is a really interesting example of that.

Of someone that's entirely authentic.

What did you talk about?

Comedy and MMA and life and slightly kind of philosophy.

Stuff that he's interested in.

He's exactly the same guy he was 20 years in the comedy store, 20 years ago in the comedy store backstage, chatting.

He's exactly that guy.

Totally authentic. People just, yeah, great.

I listen to that all day.

You're exactly who you are.

I mean, I love the idea that you think there's still a bit of you that thinks it's a business podcast.

It's not. It's not you have a thing where you love stories and you love chatting to people and you love learning.

And that's what it is.

This should be called the education of Stephen Butler.

Well, I, the reason I think this is a business podcast is because of what I said.

I think business is mental.

This is called the diary of a CEO, right?

What would you find in the diary of a CEO?

You wouldn't find fucking forecasts and P &Ls, would you?

You'd find problems with his wife and you'd find that he's having anxiety attacks and you'd find that he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.

So the whole point of this was to go into the diary of a CEO.

The things you - Just that's not business.

That's the rest of his life.

This is about life.

I mean, I love it. I absolutely love it.

I'm not breaking your balls, but it's great the way that it's kind of developed, I think.

Yeah. It's been led by, as you say, curiosity.

I get people all the time will say, Steve, we want the fucking CEOs back.

We want them to listen to the business people or whatever.

And I just go, Joe, I can't do that for a decade.

What I can do for a decade is follow my curiosity.

Like I could do that for the next 30, 40 years.

And at some point, I'm going to care about a zempek and I cared about psychedelics.

And so that's what I'm going to talk about.

And if you don't like it, then there are three million other options.

Yeah. I think that thing about that, going with your gut is going to be the way to go.

Because if you like the show and if you're having interesting conversations, I think the listener will go with that.

And if you try and give them what they wanted, I think, again, it's exactly that thing of going, we need better, faster horses, not a car.

And you're going where you need a car.

Because whatever this is in 10 years time, it's going to be different, right?

It'll be something else.

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

But Rogan was the blue.

I have to say it. And I think I've DM'd him.

I don't think he replied, but I just said to him one day that the blueprint he set about authenticity and following whatever it is you're interested in has helped me so much, because there's more pressure to change when there's more people watching.

And they can... I've seen petitions and I've seen little movements on LinkedIn trying to get me to have more of these kind of people on.

The single biggest request I have on this podcast is to quote interview normal people that are at the start of their journey.

That's the quote. That's what they say to me.

And I go, well, if you had interviewed Stephen at 18, not a lot to talk about.

So it'd really be them interviewing me, maybe.

That tends to what happens.

He would be the student in that situation.

But that's the most popular request I get is to go and interview quote -unquote normal people.

So ignoring that, I mean, as you must have been able had to ignore the external pressure of changing or telling a certain type of joke or being a certain type of person.

No, I think the audience, for me, because of that immediate feedback loop, they just tell me what they find funny.

And that kind of leads you down the road of going, well, that's interesting.

People want to hear this.

I think the reason people are drawn to my comedy is partly because there's not a lot of censorship in our society.

There's quite a lot of self -censorship.

So people aren't speaking freely in the office or even at home.

They're not saying what they really think.

If you notice this thing, opinion polls don't seem as accurate as they once were.

And that's because people don't feel like they don't vote in the same way as they express themselves in the world.

So they come and see me live and there's no filter.

And this guy's saying whatever he wants.

This guy doesn't seem to give a fuck.

Very cathartic. If you're spending your days going, well, I know what the right thing to say is, so I'll say the right thing.

If you want to see who has power in a society, who can't you criticize?

And making jokes and making light of all of that stuff is powerful because it's about free speech.

And it's about the Overton window, that Overton window of what is and what isn't acceptable to speak about.

So there's an Overton window in politics of what is and what isn't acceptable policy.

And then there's an Overton window of what is and what isn't acceptable to talk about in polite society.

And I think comedy has a really valuable role in moving that Overton window in what people can discuss, what people can talk about.

I'm always very interested in like, occasionally it happens where you'll overhear the audience leaving a comedy show and have such great conversations.

It's really interesting how it like just taps into, they just feel a bit freer and looser because they've listened to someone on stage being very loose.

And they're not buttoned down.

They're not trying to self -censor or say the right thing.

Self -expression and expression generally has just been on such a journey.

Like, you know, this whole idea of woke -ism and what you can and can't say.

I mean, it really accelerated in the last 10 years to the point that it's quite, you know, it's quite...

If I look back at comedy videos from 20 years ago, they really seem to just be able to say whatever the fuck they wanted to say.

And then we went through this era of like censorship and cancellation.

There's no time in human history.

Where the good guys have censored stuff.

It's never happened.

So, wherever that's coming from, whether it's the right, you know, the merry white house, bam, this filth, which used to be the case or the left, the idea that there's, you know, a hate speech or the idea that something could be, words could be violence, which is, you know, what people say when they've

never experienced real violence, I guess.

There's such demand for violence.

We had to co -opt words into it.

But the idea of going, trying to censor stuff is a bad idea.

Free speech is a very good idea.

Because those thoughts don't go away if people don't express themselves.

They just get suppressed.

And actually just speaking freely about stuff and talking about it is very, very valuable.

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So what are you waiting for?

If you're a podcaster, would you have anyone on the podcast?

Would there be any limits you would set?

That's something I think about a lot where are my limits?

Because I get a lot of messages saying, would you have this person on?

Would you speak to Trump?

Would you speak to Vladimir Putin?

Would you speak to a, you know?

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to speak to everyone.

I think the idea of going that there's people that are beyond the pale.

People have got like, there's people with bad ideas.

Right? I don't know if there's that many bad people, but there's bad incentives and people that follow them.

And talking to everyone seems incredibly valuable to me.

And the idea that you go, yeah, that's how life moves forward.

You know, there's, you know, you want to be a Marxist.

It's a dialectic of going, well, this person I don't agree with, you have the conversation.

And with an open mind and an open heart, and maybe you change their mind, and how do you move the conversation forward?

I mean, the great mystery for me in politics is the idea that people talk about hypocrites in politics, changing their mind about things.

Of course, he changed his mind.

The facts have changed.

The world's changed.

You move on. Obama ran on an anti -gay marriage ticket, but the world moves on and things progress.

I'm a progressive, but I think the idea of not listening to people is poison.

You think about why Hillary lost the election, right?

It was that deplorables thing.

Remember when she talked about the deplorables?

And you can't talk to those people.

And it was like, no, this is just working class people and they've got worries.

And you need to talk to them about those worries.

You can't just write them all off and go, well, they're despicable people.

That urban elite kind of thing.

You've got to bring them in, have the conversation.

You'll get somewhere with it.

You have to listen to that.

You have to listen to all the different sides of the argument.

Otherwise we're entrenched.

We're just in these little...

And it's that thing of like, it becomes identity, which party that you follow.

Crazy. People don't like to follow people that they disagree with online in particular because that's creating cognitive dissonance, isn't it?

It's the constant confrontation of a set of ideas that threaten or challenge you in some way.

So we'd rather just create this little echo chamber of individuals that will confirm my set of existing beliefs.

And that's what, you know, one of the things I made the decision to do about two, three years ago was just to follow everyone that I viscerally repulsed by, should I say.

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

Yes. Yeah. I feel like...

It's great to be back.

That's interesting.

I think that's really valuable.

I think that's a more interesting conversation as well.

Because if you're just going to nod along with someone and go, what, is talking sense, that's great.

It's like, you know, and I think to have those kind of difficult conversations, it's really, it's a valuable thing.

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

Yeah. I think I'm very, very conscious of my weight and my appearance.

And I think that's maybe...

Eating disorders are very, they're very, very serious things.

And I'm not really in that category.

But I'm very aware of it.

Like, as a man as well, I was chatting to Chris Williamson about this on Modern Wisdom.

I think he was like quoting the stat of saying men's body dysmorphia overtakes women's I think in the next year in terms of kind of young men looking at Instagram, wanting to look a certain way and presenting themselves a certain way.

I think there is kind of an issue around it.

I think that weird thing about, like, I've had a bit of work done, you know, and I've had my teeth done and my hair done.

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

Have you always had that?

Or is it developed?

I think it's slightly developed through sort of, you know, I think if I wasn't on TV or on Netflix or whatever, I think you probably wouldn't be as aware of how you present yourself.

So it's slightly odd, I think, slightly odd relationship with, I mean, I've kind of a theory around around drugs, right?

Drugs and alcohol. So I think marijuana, when you think about it, like weed is people are very carefree about, oh, that's just a bit of weed, fine.

But think about what it is, right?

It's not a performance enhancing drug.

It's a performance inhibiting drug, right?

It takes away your ambition and agency and it just makes you very chilled and relaxed.

And I don't think that's appropriate for men in their 20s or teenagers.

Actually, what you want is the performance enhancing.

And I think what we should be promoting is almost like prohibition.

I mean, I did it kind of organic.

I found comedy and I gave up drinking for 12 years.

I didn't touch a drop.

And that was mainly because of lifestyle because I was driving to gigs and driving back.

And then I didn't want to hang over the next day because I wanted to, and everyone was trying to buy you drinks all the time and it just felt like it was like enough already.

I'm going to be straight edge, which I always liked the term straight edge.

It's a punk rock term for being teetotal.

Straight edge, it's cooler, right?

I like the idea of going, right, I'm going to control that.

I mean, I drink a little bit now kind of socially, but not in a problem way, but giving up was quite an important thing because it was also the focus that it gives you.

So I don't know, I'm slightly anti -drugs for young people.

I slightly think men in their 50s and 60s, that are workaholics, maybe some marijuana wouldn't be a bad idea.

But it's the idea of kind of young people taking it and not having, what does it take from you?

Takes away that kind of that raw ambition.

And that's such a sort of valuable thing in those years.

It's almost like that advantage.

The young people can't see the advantage that they have.

They see the wealth and the financial security of being 50.

And when you're 20, what you don't recognize is the energy that you have when you're 20.

That incredible advantage you have over everyone else in the office in that you're just full of energy.

You're 20 years older than me, exactly.

What advice would you give to me that's unobvious as a 31 -year -old to a 51, I believe?

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

Stay out the sun. Stay out the sun.

Sun damage is 90 % of aging.

Stay out the sun. Honestly, you'll save a fortune on plastic surgeon.

I don't know. I don't know if you could be in a better place right now than you are.

But you can certainly give yourself gifts when you're 50.

What gifts do you want to give yourself?

Let's talk about what gifts you would like to receive on your 51st birthday from you.

Interesting. What would you like to have?

I'd like to be physically fit.

Done. No problem at all.

You will need to go to the gym three times a week.

And 80 % of it is going to be diet, not exercise.

Okay? So you're going to need to do that, but no problem at all.

I'm the genie. You got it.

What else would you like?

I would like a happy, healthy family and relationship with my partner.

I'd like to be married, and I'd like her to be happy, and I'd like my kids to be happy.

Okay. That's great.

I don't think you get to call that.

I think you get to be happy, and you're in charge of that.

And their happiness is maybe a byproduct of that.

But you need to... You could be happy, make yourself happy, and that's good for the people around you.

But I don't think someone else's happiness can be your responsibility.

I think you can set up all the conditions, and you can make it as easy as you can.

But, you know, that's a lot.

But I get the idea of it.

How many kids? Four.

Jesus Christ! All right.

So four kids. So you're in minivan territory already.

You can't even drive a regular car.

This is crazy. This is madness.

Four kids, so one of each.

One of each, yeah. It's a modern world.

Oh, I love that. All right.

What else would you want in 20 years' time?

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

You're not doing a business podcast now.

Very little business in this.

No one ever talks about supply and demand.

No one thinks. I think, yeah, that stoic thing of like, you still doing this in 20 years' time, what a journey that will be.

Like, think about the people that you will speak to.

Think about the things that you will learn.

Think about the road that you're on.

And actually, if you're open to speaking to everyone, then the lines of communication are kept open.

And that's incredibly important in the modern world, where people are in these divided camps.

It's important. What gifts were most important for you when you turned 50?

That you either had or hadn't given yourself when you turned 50?

You know, you look around on your 50th birthday about the gifts that you either have, or that you wish you had.

What are those things?

I was in Australia last year on tour.

And I, fairly arbitrarily, I mean, I was always very good at trying new material and doing sort of warm up gigs.

And I just went, oh, I'm going to try something new.

I'm going to do new shit at every show.

I'm going to try. I'm going to write jokes during the day and then I'll try them that night at every single show.

And a year later, I've got a new show.

And it was so easy to put together, because it was just like every night you're trying new, new, new, new.

And it forces you into that space of writing more and more and more and more.

And I feel like I'm getting better.

You know, a year on, you go, yeah, that was easy.

And it was just little and often.

How important is that, the routines?

You know, the small things, because I think there's kind of two camps of people typically.

There's those that think sweating the small stuff matters.

And there's those that think sweating the small stuff is inconsequential.

And it's, you know, meh.

But it seems that, you know, the people that I seem to sit here with that are really successful at what they do have a real obsession with the detail.

I don't know if it's the small stuff.

I think it's the important stuff.

So I wouldn't sweat anything other than the joke writing and the performing on stage.

Everything else, it's all small stuff.

That's the important stuff.

And focusing on that, like knowing what's important, I guess would be the first stage there.

But then, yeah, that seemed absolutely critical.

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

He's not connected though.

No one thinks it's his fault.

No, you're not casting any of that.

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

I'm not saying he did it.

But he said something to me about how Steve Jobs would even make the circuit board inside the iPhone look beautiful.

And this came from Steve Jobs' father, who told him that he had to paint the back of the fence as well, even though no one would ever see the back of the fence because it was covered.

But he said that truly great individuals care equally about the parts that are unseen, the things you'll never see.

And that's incredible that Steve Jobs would care so much about making the circuit board inside this iPhone look beautiful.

And why is he doing that?

Well, is he doing that?

Because he will know.

And that made me think about this concept of your self -story.

You said reputation earlier, which is the external story of what people think of you.

But everything we do writes this self -story about who I am.

Like when you leave this - I love this concept.

The idea that we are a story we tell ourselves.

Yeah. And everything I'm doing is telling me who I am.

So Chris Eubank Jr., the son of the famous boxer, great boxer himself, says that if he's on a treadmill and he gets cramp in his leg, like really painful cramp in his leg, no one's in the gym, but he told himself he was going to do 20 kilometers.

He says, I will physically limp the last 8k.

Yeah. Even though no one's there.

Of course. Why, of course?

Because you are who you are.

That's how you do anything is how you do everything.

So he's all in. He's that guy.

Great. That's great.

It's a great story, because you go, yes, well, of course.

If you say you're going to do it, and then you're the kind of person that does the thing you say, it's powerful, right?

If you keep a little promise to yourself, that's powerful.

That changes your sort of perception of self.

You can trust yourself a little bit more.

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

We break commitments to ourself pathologically.

Okay, but you can change that, right?

You can build that up a little bit.

And we'll see the results in 20 years time.

Fit and healthy and you've got a family and kids and you're doing great.

You're still doing this?

It's great. We'll see.

I think you probably, you can't beat yourself up over everything, right?

You have to choose where to suffer.

You have to choose what's the thing that matters to you and don't just let yourself down on that.

So maybe you're not going to do everything, okay?

Fine. Do you think that's what confidence is?

Confidence in, yeah, confidence in yourself is just a combination and a culmination of the commitments you kept to yourself.

And what you proved to yourself about yourself.

I think that's, I haven't thought about it like that but that seems like a very logical conclusion.

You know, it's that thing, you want to give the world irrefutable proof you are who you say you are.

Well, the world and yourself, there's a mirror up as well.

Are you who you say you are?

Yeah. Well, great. That's a lovely thing to be.

And to build it up in small ways.

I mean, that's really, you're talking about building character.

I'm going, well, I'm going to make that promise to myself and then I'm going to do it.

So you don't make bullshit promises to yourself.

News resolutions are not a good idea because if you're going to let yourself down, that's more damaging.

Pick something that you can do.

Pick something small.

Last time we spoke, you expressed an aspiration, an ambition you had.

I think we were talking about Dave Chappelle and you said you wanted to do longer form jokes.

Yeah. So there's some stuff in the news show.

So there's like 20 minutes on being a dad, that I think is really funny.

And I wanted it to fit within my persona as well, because a lot of people sort of become fathers and they get a bit sentimental and they lose some of their age.

So the stuff that I've got about being a father is brutal, but it's funny.

It's funny. It's a funny thing to kind of experience as well.

Something kind of new to talk about.

Who's your favorite comic of all time?

Chris Rock. Really?

Chris Rock by Chris Rock, I think.

I mean, I've had the great pleasure of working with Chris as well and he's an extraordinary talent.

The rhythm and cadence and the points that he makes and the way that he sets up material, the way that he delivers a punchline, just everything about it from sort of a technical point of view.

I admire and I love what he says.

I just think he's just fucking hilarious.

And I see the work.

I see what he does.

I see the work that he does now.

He's been a legendary next level performer for 30 years and he's still working just as hard.

And you got to love that.

What did you make of this lap?

Well, I mean, obviously, there's no argument.

I was shocked. It strikes me that Will Smith may be the greatest actor of his generation because he was pretending to be an entirely different human being for the last 40 years and the mask slipped and we saw a different side.

And I think Chris, really, the extraordinary thing about that moment was Chris Rock got slapped in the face.

His level of composure was, he was like a Hindu cow.

Get slapped in the face by a big dude right hard.

I just got slapped in the face.

That's going to be a huge TV moment.

Here's the award. He's to be admired.

Incredible man. You were on stage as well a couple of months after when Dave Chappelle was attacked.

I actually saw you in the back.

I remember seeing you sort of come out and just, you kind of looked a little bit like security, but maybe not the most.

Yeah, me and, well, security.

So when Dave got rushed, I mean, it's very scary because, you know, it could have gone another way.

You know, the guy had a knife, albeit a knife in a gun.

It was a kind of a fake gun that pressed a button and a knife came out.

It was a knife that identified as a gun, maybe.

I don't know. Anyway, so yeah, I remember I was standing with Jeff Ross on the side of the stage and then this thing happened.

And it was crazy. Crazy.

Scary. Had he got his ass beat, the person that ran out and was stomped out by like, The reason he got stomped out wasn't, it wasn't Malice, it was he wouldn't let go of the gun knife.

So the guy had a gun, what looked like a gun.

I mean, it was a gun and he wouldn't let go of it.

And they, I think the security guys broke his arm trying to get the gun off him.

Yeah, but what are you gonna do?

Let the guy have the gun?

Like it's a, you know, it's a pretty scary thing.

Time's changing in terms of violence towards comedians.

No, I think so. I think they're isolated in terms of.

Eddie Murphy had the best line on it.

Eddie Murphy said, he said Will Smith, when he slapped Chris Rock rang the Dilla Bell for crazy.

All the crazies came out for a couple of weeks.

The guy rushes Chappelle.

It's not a great situation.

I mean, it's like, it's a scary thing when you think, you know, friends getting rushed by someone with a knife and you sort of think of what could have happened.

But he was fine. And obviously, you know, he was shaking in the moment, but he was pretty philosophical about it.

Anyone ever attacked you on stage?

No, I mean. Threatened you?

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

Part of the game, I guess.

I mean, it's like, it's that weird thing of like, when you, there's a routine in it.

I talk a little bit about being cancelled on the special.

And you talk about like, what I'm going to do next time.

Because it's going to happen again, right?

So the next time I get cancelled, I've got a plan.

Here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to say, I've rehearsed this.

I'm going to make a public statement on the day the new story breaks.

I'm going to say, I'm sorry.

And the people that are offended will say, you don't really mean that apology.

And I'll say, so you're saying I could say something and not mean it.

Now you're getting it.

But it's that, it's, they're jokes.

You can't go around apologizing for jokes.

I'm exceptionally excited to sit down and watch your Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, which came out on April 16th.

There's been a lot of conversation around it because I think a lot of people are acknowledging that you've adopted a slightly different style to the past.

And everyone's excited to see this newer Jimmy, this heavily iterated optimized version of Jimmy that's taken 51 years to produce.

And I always talk to people about our last conversation and you telling me that even you, at the peak of the mountain in many people's eyes, are still trying to find small marginal gains and challenge yourself and come out of your comfort zone.

And I think that's exactly what you do in this special.

I've been fortunate enough to see some of the jokes and the angles in the special.

And I think for some reason, it feels to me like society needs to have some of these conversations as well.

So what, even though there is humor there, underneath the jokes you tell, there's I think there's an underlying important message that's greeting society at the right moment.

I very much appreciate that.

Is that accurate? Is that an accurate assessment?

I think it is. I think it is.

It is different to the last special and it's got more of me in it.

And it's like I'm in a very privileged position where some people listen to me and I have my audience, I know what my audience are.

So I can get a message in under the wire that other people can't really talk about.

And so that thing of going, if I'm doing sex ed, I do sex ed in my way.

And it's very funny, but it's getting a message across to young men that I think is very valuable.

I'm excited to listen specifically about the stuff about consent.

Very, very excited.

Jimmy, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.

Well, I've given this literally no thought.

So right. I don't get to see it either, which is funny.

People don't believe me when I say that.

Okay. What's the, have I got a question?

You have got a question that's been left for you.

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

I think I would have said enjoy yourself more.

Try and be more present.

I think I was, I think I was worried about the results and not the process at that age.

I think I was worried about what kind of degree I would get and working hard.

And I should have been worried about having more fun.

What's telling you in hindsight that that's the important thing you needed to hear at that point?

What was the symptom of not hearing that?

I think it was, I think there's a weird thing in, if you're in academia and you have that imposter syndrome and you feel like, oh, oh God, what's, I don't belong here.

I'm not right enough.

I need to work harder.

That's valuable in one sense.

It makes you kind of work harder, but actually, you know, I should have, what's college for?

It's for growing up, being the moment.

What do you think the university?

I think university is a luxury item now.

I think the intrinsic value of university is less important than what it signals about you.

So I think a degree from Cambridge is a Louis Vuitton bag.

It's a luxury item that says, oh, I have this.

You can just get the reading list and read the books.

I'm not sure whether academia is, you know, I don't know, I've got strong views on academia because I was, when I went to university, it was free, right?

It was very difficult to get in, but it was free.

And I think we should bring that back.

I think if you're doing, let's say STEM, right?

So you're studying any STEM subject, university should be free in the UK.

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

Come, spend some time here.

Great. It's not a bad policy.

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

What do you say to your kid?

They want to be a magician.

Or they say that I want to be an NBA player.

Let's do that one. What do you say to your kid?

Wait, go back, become a magician.

I don't know. I mean, listen, it's, I suppose it's that thing of like, follow your dreams if they're hiring.

It's Chris Rock's line, isn't it?

Yeah, follow your passion if they're hiring.

If you're good at that, if your, I don't know, if my kid winds up being seven foot, I'd be surprised.

But if he is, then maybe then, you know, maybe there's a future in it.

But the, yeah, pick something that seems realistic to you.

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

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

I mean, I don't know.

I don't know what jobs are going to be in 30 years time, right?

You want your kid to be happy and maybe to have some sort of grounding in critical thinking and beyond that.

Good luck. Jimmy, thank you.

Our first conversation really blew me away.

And it taught me something about, actually about this podcast, you're one of the real defining conversations I had that taught me that everyone is much more than the surface that you see.

And it's funny, because when last time when we recorded, it was upstairs in my kitchen, my previous kitchen, and the team texted me when you arrived and they said, Oh, Jimmy Carr's just arrived.

I think you arrived on your bicycle or something.

And they're like, oh god, he's just cracked a joke about someone's mum downstairs.

And I said, Oh, this is, this is Jimmy Carr.

The Jimmy Carr I've seen on Nine Out of Ten Cats.

And then we went upstairs and had that conversation and it just blew my mind.

It just absolutely blew my mind.

Well, this is the difficult second album.

How did I do? Fantastic.

Oh, great. Absolutely.

But no, it really taught me that people are much more than, than just the mask that we wear.

And we all wear a mask, you know, the persona to get through life.

And we find it easier sometimes to wear the mask than to confront who we actually are.

But in that conversation, I feel like I got to meet the man behind the mask, per se.

I really like sharing that side of myself.

I really enjoy this.

I really enjoy the show.

I wish you every success.

Thank you so much, Jimmy.

Thank you for everything.

And I highly recommend everybody go and see Natural Born Killer, which is on Netflix right now.

I'm going to put the link to the Netflix special in the description below.

[Jimmy Carr: Life Dysmorphia, the Comfort Crisis, and Finding Meaning Through Suffering]-[Jimmy Carr: "I Was Laughing & Crying When He Died". Jimmy Opens Up About Being Cancelled & How Anxiety Is The Flip Side Of Creativity!]

📋 Summary

The Philosophy of Comedy, Suffering, and Human Potential

Life Dysmorphia and the Comfort Crisis

The Utility of Voluntary Suffering

The Role of Comedy and Authenticity

Chasing Imposter Syndrome

Communication and the 92 Beats Rule

Mortality and the Search for Meaning

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript