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

A vigilante known as the Batman of Lagos de Moreno has gone viral after catching alleged motorcycle thieves and duct-taking them to lampposts across Lagos de Moreno in Jalisco. At least five suspected thieves have been found restrained to poles over the past 10 days, some with their mouths taped and signs labeling them as thieves. Authorities are investigating and say those found tied up are being treated as victims. Police have added the vigilante to a wanted list and are also looking into whether multiple people are behind the incident. We've got some pictures of what these people look like. It's like a real, the guy's a real life Mexican Batman that appears to be getting motorcycle thieves and duct-taking. People are also calling him duct-tape man. Oh, wow. But he's really doing it. Oh, that is, I mean, that's a, yeah, okay, sorry. So you hear duct-tape and you think, I could get myself out of duct-tape. No. That is, okay. I notice he's left the motorcycle with them. That seems. There's the evidence. That seems bad because someone's going to cut them free and they're going to disappear on the. See? Motorcycle. There it is. Duct-tape man. Duct-tape man. Okay. That seems, that's kind of great. Because normally, if you see a story about crime in Mexico, you go, oh, this is going to be, this is going to be eye bleach. This is the, this is a very fluffy way to deal with crime in Mexico, it seems. How has he taken down two in one? I mean. I mean, they don't look particularly physically intimidating. They look 14 and terrified. Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, don't steal motorcycles. There's a message there. You would be two if you'd been. Taped to a lamppost. The rise and fall of civilizations and the rise. Duct-tape man brings back law and order. That's true. You were talking about strong men make good times. They, that is the strong man that uses duct-tape. There was the case about seven months ago in the UK where a guy purposely left his bike, I think outside of the HMP in London, where all the police are based, and put like a Apple AirTag on it. And it got lost. He calls up the police and it's like, we have the AirTag. I have it. I have the address. There's nothing we can do. All of a sudden, he then takes it to the Telegraph, the Times. It becomes this huge story. And then the police go, we're looking into it. So even when you have the GPS coordinates, they don't take it seriously. Yeah. It's good. I think it's a crime I could get behind, though. The vigilante. It's like, it's nice. You don't hear a lot about it these days. What was the last crime you committed, Jim? The last crime? I would say probably, probably some sort of tax avoidance was the last big one. But when that whole thing happened, this is years ago now, like 12, 13 years ago. When it was all going on, I was like front of the papers. And the prime minister was David Cameron at the time. He broke off from the G20 summit to comment on my personal tax evades. That is a red flag. But it was all going on. I never once mentioned the millions that I've given to charity. Because I thought, well, at this point, lying's not going to help. Yeah. Because evasion is allowed, but avoidance is not. No, avoidance is allowed. Evasion, there's a big difference. About 18 months in prison. Right. Or if you ask Gary Stevenson, then there's a big difference there as well. What was the documentary? Have you watched Gary Stevenson's new documentary? No, go on. What's the documentary? I think he's wonderful. I think he's the best economist. I heard you laughing while you were watching it last night. I could hear you laughing. I think he's the best economist of our times. And when the Soviet Great Britain becomes, and you guys are fighting over a little bit of bread, me and Gary will throw you a strip. So I don't want to say anything bad about Gary at all. Right. Because when the gulags come, Christopher, I'm going to say, I'm going to be eating bread. This is the same as being kind to your AI in case an AI overlords. So is this guy a Marxist economist? No, no, no. He's a pioneer. He's a genius, Jimmy. His idea, he wants to bring in a, I think, is it a 2% wealth tax on over 10 million per year inside of the UK is what the policy Gary's proposing. That's it. I thought there was more. The documentary's called How to Become Filthy Rich. Yes. So what's the thesis? Tax wealth, not wealth. Yeah, tax wealth, not work, which I actually think you'd like that from a copy writing perspective, Mr. Dry. But his whole thesis is with rising inequality, if we can bring in a 2% wealth tax to the UK in particular, then that will raise, I think, about 25 billion is Gary's thesis. But quite impressively inside the documentary, they actually keep on, actually a smart economist who argues a little bit back with him. And his whole thesis is, well, actually the GDP will probably go down by about four to five percent. Because if you're a foreign investor, why not go to France? Why not go to Sweden? Why not go to United States of America? I was talking about this. We were chatting about it earlier, but I think like Britain needs to be more competitive. It's like that thing of like we're competing with other nations. People have the ability to move anywhere they want to move now. And there's a lot of talk about billionaires and millionaires leaving the UK, whatever. Like you just got to compete. So that idea of going, the big thing, the big kind of controversial thing is I think the currency is overvalued. I think if you, the great play, every nation has a great play. Every nation has when you print your own currency, you could devalue it. You could devalue the currency and make it very cheap to invest in Great Britain and just have all the money come to you. It's like you are, it's like a zero sum game in the world. You want people to come. People want to live there. There's good schools. It's a great place. Wonderful people, wonderful culture. You want more people to come there. So devaluing the currency has always been seen as a humiliation. But every time the currency has been devalued, there's been 18 months of incredible growth. But you don't have inflation as the currency gets devalued? You could do. I mean, you've got to mitigate against that. But I mean, we've got massive inflation anyway. So what do you do? What are you going to do? So we'd be weaker than the dollar. That's your, that's the car, the car mission statement. Yeah. Super weak. Super weak currency that attracts a lot of people. China have been doing it for 20 years. They've massively devalued their currency artificially in order that people, Chinese goods are very cheap in the rest of the world. That's great. So they export a lot of stuff and they do very well as an economy. They've brought more people out of poverty the last 20 years than you could dream of. It's incredible. I guess the idea is then that four British guys podcast back in London. And not America. You know, I feel like this is living proof almost of some of the troubles. Yeah. I mean, it's, it is that thing of like, you've just got to be better than other places, you know? So how do we compete? I thought when Brexit happened, I thought the next day we would have undercut Ireland. I carry an Irish passport. I love being Irish, but I thought we would have undercut Ireland. And Ireland had the corporation tax of like 12%. So that's why all the tech companies are based in Ireland. If you get your, um, uh, whatever bill from Anthropic, it comes from Dublin. If you buy it in the UK. Right. So, but we didn't undercut them. We just went, oh, no, great. Let them do that. If you're prime minister for the day, what are some of your, not like less, uh, maybe less obvious policies that you do, roguer policies that you'd implement? Okay. Right. Okay. Devalue the currency. Okay. That'd be the first thing. The Zimbabwe mission. Yeah. Quite. Not that much. Specifically how? You could just talk it down. Honestly, you could talk it down in an afternoon. Tell the right people at the bank of England. It's, it, it will go, it will, yeah, it will go down. I mean, it's going to happen anyway. But isn't that an optics problem? But if we went, if we went, yeah, but when, when the currency naturally devalues, when there's, when there's something, something bad happens, do you, do you go to the IMF and try and bail out the pound or just, just go, great. Things are now cheap in the UK, come the rest of the world, sales on. It's a bit like rope-a-dope, like Ali, just sort of sitting on the ropes. Yeah. And then you come out. I'm going to wait for them. I'm going to let him punch me in the face so much that he gets tired. It's a lot of labors cheaper than China and Vietnam. But then invest in infrastructure and, you know, you have to, you have to have, you have to make it, yeah, it's a serious idea. But then the other thing that you do is energy. Energy cost is four times higher in the UK than America. And every business has that as a factor, right? So things are very expensive to produce and it's expensive to even run an office in the UK because energy prices are very high. That affects everyone. That's a, that's got to be like 20, 25 year problem, right? So you've got to fix that. You've got to be as technologically advanced as 70s France, who built 56 nuclear power plants in 10 years. If you do that, you're, you're, I've got to say, Mr. Kai, you're, you're, you're talking very educated young man. You're talking like a man who might be having a bit of a prime ministerial run. Is that, is that on the cards? I think, yeah, I think now I believe the system in the UK now is seven prime ministers in 10 years. I think we now take a ticket like at a, like at a, and you just, it comes up. So you're up at some point soon. You wouldn't want to be, you wouldn't want to be prime minister because it'd be a big commitment. That always used to be the case. Now, what is it? Six months? I'll be gone for six months. It's going to be a shock. Shop sign that you turn around, like, you know, back in five prime minister. All right. Given that we're talking about the UK. Yeah. Let's play a game of guess the Victorian slang word. So I'm going to say different words from Victorian era Britain, and you're going to try and guess what they mean. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Lovely. All right. First one. Tickety-boo. It just means good. Something that is in perfect order or a satisfactory condition. That's kind of tickety-boo. Tickety-boo. Everything's tickety-boo. Muffin walloper. It's your Saturday night, right? A muffin. Walloper. Fat. I think it's a sort of rather stout gentleman who enjoys muffins. Yeah. An idle person who sits at home. We can't just kick on. You've got to tell us what a muffin walloper is. That's what I'm saying. I'm literally describing it to you. Oh, I thought you'd move on to the next thing. No. It's an idle person who sits at home eating cakes and gossiping instead of cooking. Muffin walloper. So you should be cooking, but instead you're sitting at home. Eating cakes and gossiping. Next one. Church bell. A church bell would be my guess there. No, it's slang, George. Oh, slang. Would it be an ugly person? Like you've been hit by the church bell, like a Quasimodo reference? Oh, that's clever, but no. I think it's a young virgin. Church bell. A male, young male virgin. Church bell. Church bell. Harry's just going to answer Young Virgin for all of them. the young virgins come on? Carl Pilkington has that great bit which was when he's watching University Challenge because he can never guess the answer. He just says egg each time because statistically at some point he's going to be right. There's a better chance of just an egg. Gentlemen, gentlemen, I think there's method to the madness. Right, okay. Church bell, I'm thinking a young sort of to the left of the organ master, there's the man who rings the church bell, a young 14-year-old. Oh, okay. That's actually probably way too clever. A woman who talks so much, her voice is reminiscent of the ringing of a church bell. Hmm, okay. Next one, butter upon bacon. It's, is it like a hat on a hat? It's too much of a good thing? Yes. She's doing too much. Yeah. Butter on bacon. It's butter on bacon, yeah. Mathicking. Mathicking. You know what mathicking is? It sounds northern. It sounds northern. I'm going to go with. You're really good at this. Some level of incest? It could result in incest. Incest. A term for getting wildly rowdy out in the streets. Oh, I mean, that's just. Mathicking in Newcastle. Mathicking on the big market. I love the jump from it sounds northern to some level of incest. It could be incest. Afternoonified. Afternoonified? You're slacking off. You're no longer taking things seriously. Yeah, exhausted. Someone or something that is highly fashionable. Afternoonified. I have to assume that that's because you only dress up in the afternoon. Right? You're afternoon. You're noonify. Right. You wouldn't dress that way in the morning. You wouldn't have just woken up. Chukaboo. Chukaboo. A dear friend. Dear friend. Chukaboo. Giggle mug. Someone who's always smiling. Half rats. Bit drunk. Half rats. That makes sense. Half rats. Not rat arse, just half rats. Evening wheezes. This should be brought back. Evening wheezes should be brought back. It means fake news. It's evening wheezes. Uh, and apparently it's champagne weather means it's pouring or raining. Coffee sisters mean besties. There we go. Some Victorian slang for you. Well, it's interesting like language, like to talk about this because that's the same language. That's the English language that we still use and those words have gone. You never notice when something disappears because it disappears, kind of becomes forgotten. But the idea that it's the best example of anarchy, the political system of anarchy is the English language. There's no central system for it. No one sits down and goes, that's a word. That's not a word we're changing. The meaning of that, it just organically sort of emergent from the group. It's kind of perfect. And I think a lot of solutions are like that. You can't, you can't do it from top down. It just has to sort of let it happen. What do you, I mean, you spend your entire time playing with the English language. What have you come to think about sort of how it's developed recently? How it's developed? I don't, I don't, I don't like new words. I mean, this is slightly tangential to the question, but if I, if I was on a date, for example, it's almost using lots of new vernacular, new words. I would say it's been a great night. You know, that's what I'd say. I, I think, um, simple words are the best words. Best bet. What's the, what's the phrase? Um, big things are best said in small words. Yeah, it might be like a, a mark of intelligence. Like if you can get across a complex idea to a five-year-old great. And if, if you need incredibly complex language, you're some kind of huckster, you're selling some bullshit. You've got an issue with like leet speak 21st century leet speak. And that would be if a lady wants to bag Harry dry. She can't use too much modern slang, but if she came out and started talking tickety boo, that'd, that'd really get you going. Unfortunately, I've watched peep show. So for any fans of that show, they know that word's a bit of a bit of a turnoff, but I, I think I read once that the French started a revolution with free words, which are quite big words, but what was it? Egalit, egalit, liberty, fraternity, you know, and I, I don't think you need much more than that. You don't need much more than that to sell soap. If the French are starting a revolution with, with just free words, what's the best. Example of, um, compression. That's like the most simplest. Oh, geez. Um, the best, the best example of compression. Well, there's like a two word joke, dwarf shortage and I had a three word joke, which was stationary store moves. He had the six word story. Oh yeah. For sale. Children's shoes. Never worn. Oh Jesus. Yeah. Brilliant. How do you think about words, Jimmy in comedy? Do you think some words are just. Funny or do you obsess about word choice when you're writing a joke? Yeah, I really do. I really think it's, it's kind of, uh, the phrasing, it's more the rhythm of it, but sometimes it's the, um, uh, the phrasing, like having the right word for the thing and, and conjuring up an image is very important in people's heads. So you've got the kind of concept that you, you kind of are, I know this thing's funny. How do I get that across to someone else? So it's about that language, the, the, the purpose of language of like conveying, like getting space in their head, getting into their head and making them kind of making. Them draw the cartoon. Didn't you have stepdads? Motherfuckers. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I don't like the term stepdad. I prefer to say motherfucker. Yeah. It's nice. Just take a moment to sort of step back from it and go. Yes. Yeah, it was right there. It was right there the whole time. I had a thing the other day that I just thought, how's no one got to this before we're talking about the Donald Trump came up. I said, yeah, they tried to assassinate him and they very nearly did kill him because no one could warn him because no one wanted to sound stupid. No one wanted to shout Donald duck. Very good. That's good. It was right there, but you go, how did no one, how did no one see that? Sometimes it feels like the joke is there and you're just like, getting, getting rid of everything else. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes, the easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not makes a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food sourced ingredients in a single day lunch. It's a daily drink, and that's why I've been taking it every single morning for nearly five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 NextGen backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat well. Plus, if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will give you all of your money back. Right now, you can get 20% off a welcome kit and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below, or going to drinkag1.com/modernwisdom, that's drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. It's interesting how you have these, you can even explain some of these techniques, yet they still work. So one we discussed is the A, B, B, A. So it'll be, it's not about the days in your life, it's the life in your days. Or Churchill's, yes, alcohol's taken a lot out of me, but I've taken more out of alcohol. Or you have JFK's, don't ask what, your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. And you'll see this A, B, B, A pattern, and it still works, even when you know it. Even when you know it's coming, it still works. It's one in advertising, like everyone will know it, just beans, means, heightens, but just changing all of the last letters to be a Z, was just the most genius. But that's another example when you do things in threes. So again, another one, you ever heard the Winston Churchill speech during World War II, where he talks about, this is when he comes in and he refers to, I have nothing to give, but blood, sweat, and tears. What's interesting, is he didn't say that. He said, I have nothing to give, but blood, sweat, toil, and tears. But because we like threes, it just, it disappears. And you constantly see this whenever anybody actually makes a four-way statement. Although you look at the unit, you go, he didn't toil much, did he? Big, big fella. Big old boy. What have you got? Do you bring something from home? Yeah, I've got some stuff from home. Were you meant to bring stuff? Yes. I'm so sorry. No, I'm joking. Okay, what have you got? So, we've. Do you recognize what this is? You're going to have to lift it. Put it on the table for the class, guys. Okay. Do you want it here? So, this is. Yeah, that looks perfect. That's lovely. Thank you. Yes, I would say it's the woods. Some woods? A park in the woods? Yeah, Britain. So, this is Charles Darwin's thinking path that he built around his house. So, whenever Darwin was stuck on a problem, he would go on a walk around his thinking path, and he would collect, he'd have stones, like racked up that he would knock off to kind of figure out how many rounds that he's done. His kids would sometimes fuck with him and like put the stones back on whilst he was walking around. So, Darwin used to use this thinking path regularly. Okay, he had 10 kids as well. So, there's a lot of paths, a lot of kids to. Do we know what this is? So, say Yusef. Yusef kidnapped Chase, Arthur, Eames, Lim. Oh, it's Christopher Nolan's Inception. Correct. This is. So, Christopher Nolan was working on Inception for 10 years. And one of the things he did was actually draw the plot down. So, you see the five-part dream plot that he visualized here? Do you know what this is? Yes, but I'm not going to say it. Do you guys know what it is? It looks like my diary when I was in school, but I don't know. No idea. Is that J.K. Rowling's? When J.K. Rowling was stuck on Harry Potter, she turned it into a spreadsheet. This is the fifth Harry Potter, like the entire storytelling sequence into a spreadsheet. Is that. And how did that work out? Was it a hit? All right. Cool. This. I think? Does that say at the top? Yeah. It says, "I think," and then it has a little diagram. Therefore I am? Back to Mr. Charles Darwin earlier. This is when he opened his red notebook and drew out kind of his first thoughts around what evolution is, like the family trees or how it all interconnects. Okay. And then. Anybody know what this pub is? Jimmy, this looks like one of yours. Yeah, I know. - The Eagle and Child. the pub in Oxford, is it? Yes, it is. Is it the pub in Oxford where all the great myths of the 20th century were written? Pretty much. So it's Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis. Yes. It's where J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used to meet up, have a pint. Tolkien would give C.S. Lewis his draft of The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. C.S. Lewis would give Tolkien his draft of Narnia or whatever he was working on. They would both read it out loud and then roast one another over a pint. Hey, do you want to know an interesting, here's a tangential fact to that. So I only found this out recently. So Finnegan's Wake is a book that I've read around a lot. I haven't read Finnegan's Wake, but I read about it a lot. It's kind of the great work of literature. It's James Joyce, obviously. So I didn't realize that Finnegan's Wake is Star Wars. So Joseph Campbell, you've heard of Joseph Campbell, The Hero Has a Thousand Faces, The Hero's Journey, all of those kind of informed Star Wars. Basically, Star Wars is a- It's sort of dumbed down version of those books. Well, before Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero's Journey, his thesis was on the myths within James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. So he basically wrote that first. And then he thought, oh, this is really good, this thesis. I'm going to make this into a book about the heroes that are in all stories. And so it's kind of James Joyce, and then it's Joseph Campbell, and then it's George Lucas. James Joyce is actually the root of this. Yes. It's a distilled version. That's brilliant. I had Alex Petkus on the show, and he did a breakdown of The Odyssey. But because he can read the original Greek, he's able to get a much more rich explanation of what's going on, because sometimes words have multiple different meanings. And he's digging into that. It was so good, so fantastic. And you see, even in that, there's turns, there's a descent. And I'm asking him at each point, okay, so using Campbell's idea, which was 2,000, 3,000, 2,500 years later, or something like that. And I'm asking him at each point, okay, so using Campbell's idea, at what point on the clock face are we here? Because he goes around, and sure enough, even back then, even the first book ever written, the first thing ever written down, before that, it was all verbal story writing. Gilgamesh, wasn't it? Oh, maybe. The myth of Gilgamesh is a bit older. Maybe. Slightly. Not to contradict you on your own podcast, but you know. I mean, feel free. Just to go back to that, isn't it interesting, just hold this up for a second. The Eagle and Child, pub in Oxford, where C.S. Lewis and Tolkien would meet up to roast each other. Meanwhile, you two nerds at fucking Lifetime, over a smoothie, over a honeyberry smoothie. English have lost their way. My point of bringing these is I'm working on a chapter called, it's a round of thinking. We've discussed it before. Essentially, the premise is, don't think with your head, think with your feet, your hands, or your mouth. So, a few different premises on that. There's a few I didn't include then. So, Dickens, when he was struggling with insomnia. And Writers' Block would do what his friends described as violent walking. He would walk 20 to 30 miles. Travis Kalanick, when he was creating Uber, he had a racing track built in the office. They would do walking meetings and be constantly walking around. It was just 60 miles a week. Yeah, you can't get a car. There we go. And then, going back to thinking with your mouth. If you go to the bottom of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, the paper he published, about 25 pages. He credits nobody. But he says thank you to one person, which is Michael Besso, who was his friend that he would walk around and talk with. One day, as he's talking it out loud, his friend, he comes up with this idea. That's why Harry's like, I call him my Besso, as a result. Because you're having those people to talk to. But I wanted to kind of maybe explain, like, why do I think this is going on? I think you might be the Einstein. He might be. Jory's out. Don't take that. I'll take it. I'll be the Besso. I'll be the best at it. So I went to visualize something that's under discussed. Okay. Right. Would you spin that a little more for me? This idea here, which is kind of human step count throughout your great, great, great N times 100 just goes like this. And then suddenly you have kind of the agricultural revolution here, and it just completely plummets. And then you kind of go down to 10,000. And currently the average is around about 5,000. What's interesting, 18,000 for men was the average step count for hunter-gatherers. We estimate about 15,000 for women. Interestingly, it's like, how do you get that data? One way you can look at it is with. What's the current people that reject technology that forgot? Amish. Amish. So the Amish, they look at the number of steps the Amish do per day to kind of. Surely Amish life is slightly different to 300,000 BC. Hunter-gatherer. They look at a few different things in terms of like walking distance. But that's one of the gauges. Do you think it might be the same amount of steps in a lifetime, but they're getting them in early because they die at 35? Because they're all. It doesn't net down to the same number of steps overall. Yeah. You've got a certain amount of steps in you and that's it. That's Roger Federer's got this canister theory, which was because he had a couple of years out, basically it's like he got interviewed, I think it was more than 2019. And he was like, like, I still got stuff in the canister because he didn't play. No, he didn't play in 18, I don't think. And it was this idea that a tennis, player just has a canister, which they can either burn it out like Nick Kyrgios and just, well, actually he didn't play much, but like more like in the dark. And then the canister, here at the end of the game. Well, I like that idea of like in relationships, thinking about a reservoir of goodwill. So you build up a reservoir of goodwill early in a relationship in the kind of honeymoon period, and then you can spend it later on. So like how many fights could a friendship survive? Could a relationship survive? And it's all about how much you've stacked up. So you're stacking up those good memories, those good times, and then you've got that reserve that you kind of eat into in the relationship. It's quite a nice way to think about it because you kind of go through hard times with someone and you go, actually, it's all right because we've done a lot of stuff in the past. Whereas if it's someone you've just met, you go, fuck this noise. Yes. Yeah. It's like paying into a bank account. Yeah. If you haven't deposited much in, you can't withdraw much before it goes into the bank. But I don't think people think about friendships in that way, whereas you go kind of friendships are, they're incredibly important. I sort of think every argument between a couple is one person saying to another person, you are not enough people. The best relationship advice is invest in your friends. Your partner will be fine. Go out and talk to your friends and then come home and listen. But people don't have that. They think one person's going to be their everything. I think one of the problems with talking about friendships like that is it makes it sound quite transactional and it gives people a little bit of an ick. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, there's supposed to be something. Loyalty is not just if this person can add to my life. Alex had this line where he imagined that one of his friends asked him, he'd broken down his car. He got a flat tire in his car. He was five blocks away. Will you come and help me? And Alex would just ring a roadside assistant to go and see him. And he was like, well, that means that I can do what I want to do. My friend gets a better quality of service. But what it forgets is that he's not just saying, can you fix my tire? It's, will you give me your time and your support? Alex sort of remained staunch. He's like the most like utilitarian when it comes to a friend. I've been thinking about this recently, because so much education is now done by YouTube, right? So if you learn how to shave, and we've all got differing abilities here, but you learn how to shave, you do it with a YouTube tutorial now, but you miss the intimacy of going to a father or an old friend and going, how do I actually do this thing? And I don't know what's lost there, but like you would think that the aim is to shave, but it isn't. It's like a little communal moment. Sean has this wonderful idea. We was talking last time around what we call like hyper meta, which is this idea to be Asian Greeks or Romans. Rather than scroll a newsfeed every day or read a new book or listen to a new audio book, they would have principles that they want to take seriously. So they'd go back and review them way more. This is forgetting everything. And one of mine would be from Sean, which is that idea he talks about, just delete the scoreboard. So like a lot of people go into the start of a relationship, kind of game theory 101, where it's like, I'm at zero, Christopher is at zero. And I'll wait, wait, wait, wait. Chris will do something, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. You understand why the scoreboard is there to measure an image. Yeah. There's an imbalance and injustice and. Delete the scoreboard. Just give, give, give. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You get taken advantage by a few sociopaths. I don't think you're even going to get taken advantage of. I don't think you need to be a sociopath to take advantage of somebody inside of a relationship. Like let's say that you get into a relationship with somebody and like an intimate relationship. This is maybe going to be your new wife for the rest of time. And she keeps on turning up late. She keeps on disrespecting you. And you're like, no, just give, give, give, give, give, continue. But within reason, completely defeats. It's almost like when I say. Decisions rather than experiments. And somebody's like, well, I'm going to shoot up a load of heroin and I'm going to punch a police officer in the face within reason. And I'm talking about people that air one way. So if you air naturally towards the, I'm going to wait for this person, then I'm going to mirror, and then I'm going to mirror. I think I'm with you. I think it's the, you can't win an argument with your wife. Everybody loses. Yeah. Cause if you win, you lose. Everyone's in a bad mood. So that thing of like going and relationships are transactional, right? There is a, there's, there's like codes of conduct that you, you expect within it. And that's, that's kind of, that's okay. But then I think if you just get, if you enjoy the act of giving and just, just give, give, give, and I do think you end up way, you end up, the other person ends up giving way more because you just push it so far. And listen, if you're 50 nil up, then yeah, walk away. But until you get to 50 nil, just keep giving. It's a way better way to live. I think it is more, yeah, it's more enjoyable. But there is also, there is also no 50 nil. Like I, there is no 50 nil. Exactly. You know, as soon as, yeah, I, I, I agree with you. I think once you decide, I think you have to make a decision in life. And then once you've, once you've made a decision, then you've got to make that decision right. And I think people kind of, sort of waste a lot of time in this space of like, I can't decide, I can't decide. And that's when maybe the scoreboard's pinging off, pinging off. But once you've decided, then you're the same, same person i saw alex homozy he's up on the wall there um on we met for the first time this weekend i was in las vegas and i kind of know him like we've spoken on zoom and i know a lot of his work but i met him for the first time and it was that that kind of thing that he has this this sort of theory on like that that thing about his his new theory is about optionality and the idea that people are getting all the options they can they want they want optionality on everything so they get five degrees and they train and they're ready for everything they're ready for options but until you cash in those options it's meaningless yeah i think it's kind of a genius idea of like at some stage you you go with what you've got now or you don't go at all do what you can with what you've got where you are yeah or you just it's like otherwise you're like 40 and waiting for something to happen so so george kind of decided at one point in our in our um interactions that we were friends uh i don't know when it happened but at one point george just decided that we were friends and then he started he started just i mean i i would say you're i would say if i was to describe i would talk about your general and it feels kind of weird to speak highly of you because i've been i've been abusing you a week but you're i think you're an incredibly generous guy and i think that like you know i don't think there's any expectation of anything which comes with that you just kind of like i touched down in austin airbnb sorted you know i touched down like it's just i think it's a lovely way to live and i do think there is a point where as chris is like yeah if someone if you it's a feeling as soon as the feeling goes so that's my that's my point on the not needing to turn it into the metric why is it that we like to hang around with some people and we don't like to hang around with others it's that there is some form and this would be alex's argument and i'm if you're on one end and alex is on the other i'm somewhere in the middle alex's point would be you are tracking a scoreboard whether you're doing it mentally or not and the scoreboard is the vibe of how you feel around somebody we have friends that we've stopped hanging out with because we're like i just don't feel like this vibe is the scales don't feel like they're balanced regardless of whether or not you're keeping count and i do think that that's true my my rule of thumb is that awful line of like you're the average of the five people you hang around with incorrect i think in essence average of the five podcasts you listen to yes then what ends up happening is you have this you're always trying to fuck upwards if you follow that approach anyway which means that by definition that why why should those people hang out with you i think a better rule of thumb is forget how much money they have forget what they've achieved i surround yourself with who you feel the most alive with so i don't care if someone's a poet that's broken if i hang out with them i feel alive it's way more interesting than some billionaire where you feel dead behind the eyes after hanging out with them a lot of this is probably the best metric so i still think that you are the average you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with it's fine it's just what is the metric that you're optimizing for because some people might want to be in a room with people that have got the highest net worth or the most well known and highest status whatever but it can just be and ultimately what it comes back to is if you ask enough why questions i just want to feel i want to feel good around these people i don't know it's a it's a weird thing on what a friendship's for and i don't think friendships really pay out until the bad days right so you're gonna have a really bad day before you know what a friend is because on good days it's fine everything's fine we can hang out with anyone it doesn't matter they're giving they're taking it doesn't matter when you have a bad day like if you get cancelled which i have been a number of times like it's a filter it's such a great filter it's like a gift being cancelled because at the end of it you end and it's the foul weather friends it's the guys that call on the bad day yeah that's what really matters and that's what you ultimately i think somewhere at a deeper level we're solving for that we're solving for well if things get bad who could i actually this person stay with me in the trenches yeah what's the when it comes to like cancellation or public criticism what's the idea that's kind of non-obvious that you only appreciate apart from that once you've gone further that most people wouldn't understand uh i think it's the the impermanence of it is is the the idea that you go is anyone going to care about this in a month or a year or you know and if no one's going to care in a year why do you care now jose's got this line he says the dogs bark and the caravan moves on and i quite like it marimio of course you just quoted that's the first ever jose marimio it's good though isn't it it's like it's it is it's that thing where you go it's it's a real sort of test it's character versus reputation because your reputation is being destroyed and your character is who you know you are what was the what was the loveliest text or call you had like who was there for you uh there was a few there was james corden would really stand out so when i got it was the tax thing actually and and he was in broadway he was busy winning a tony for his performance in one man two governors and he called me every night and his interval of his show and he just called me and then he called me and i said no i'm fine i'm fine and then he called me the next night because he knew it wasn't and then he called me the next one because he knew it wasn't and he just kept on calling that's amazing yeah it's a lovely thing and when you've sort of it just and all it teaches like i can't do that for him but i could do that for someone else yeah and when it comes along that thing of like being the person that calls when something awkward happens or when something terrible happens phoning and saying i don't know what to say but i thought i'd call just because no one remembers what you say i think it's remembering you with that somewhere along the way low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older turns out there's a reason for that as we age our mitochondria the parts of our cells that power us become weaker and make less energy which is why i'm such a huge fan of timeline they've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet this isn't just theory in clinical trials people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40 percent in just 16 weeks along with improvements in their overall energy i've been using it for over two years since my doctor recommended it to me way before i partnered with timeline and eat your heart out martin shkreli they've just dropped the price and it now starts at 99 best of all there is a 30-day money-back guarantee plus free shipping in the u.s plus they ship internationally and right now you can get that 99 price with an additional 20 off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's timeline.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout i think it's just a lovely thing when people do stuff for you which there can be zero ulterior motive there literally can be i'm trying to think of a good i'll give you i can give you one from my life so this was the moment i became like properly properly good friends with yusef so um for the people that within the last 600 episodes of the show he only appears once a year but he was most of the episodes for the first 400 with johnny and um he had hurt his back he has a uh like a bulging disc he'd hurt his back in the gym doing flips or deadlifting or whatever he was doing at the time and i was on my way to drive to one of kind of out of the way but not a million miles off so i was like i'll come over and i'll bring you something because i know what it's like debilitating back pain you sort of laid up and he's like no no you don't need to come and see me anyway i managed to get into his house and brought him a loaf of saurine some i believe some nirofen and like went and got a hot water bottle for him and like he couldn't move but he just the classic male denial of medical problems or whatever and he's 25 right he's made of rubber and magic he'll bounce back he'll be fine but he was just miserable and it felt like it sucked and that was a palpable moment when our friendship changed from that even though we were really good friends before i could just tell that there was something that happened at that moment when i decided to go around with some malt loaf and pain relievers and a hot water bottle and was like all right man i gotta go and be in a nightclub with a thousand 18 year olds like i'll i hope you're all right and then he messaged sent me the sex afterwards like being teary and being like man that was just how wonderful like what a lovely thing to do you are right like especially in a world where everybody is looking out for the transaction where you're not going to be able to uh effort can be so low effort right like just sending a text i think the bar has been lowered for what constitutes becoming a very good friend like you got me for my birthday one time you got me a newspaper from the day that i was born and a printed off graph of the first episode and the biggest episode with the play count in between it and i was never i couldn't even take it was left in mike thurston's apartment in dubai for like two years because i couldn't fly back with it because it was so big um but like stuff like that you know it's just it's just it's just it's it's it's really being yeah being better at just aggressively going give give give and figure out the next aggressive friendship and figure out the next life but isn't this bdsm friendship you're often very good on this kind of stuff right you pointed out this i thought about this a lot right there's a lot of books about being a good parent but there's no books about being a good kid right which is kind of interesting like and there's and really it should be a book about being a family but it's interesting there's loads of books there's you know kind of the game and stuff about pick up culture and finding women and getting women great but there's very little about friendship and actually that seems to be the thing that i think friendship is upstream of having a relationship i think it's not gay to practice on your friends but that thing of like building friendships and building kind of and that's kind of what's missing from you know rough and tumble play has been replaced by video games and it's it doesn't work in the same way like there's something about like that male friendship thing and building that up over years having your boys having your guys that you're with that's really incredibly valuable and we don't do enough of it robin dunbar's got this insight so he was the guy that came up with 150 number i interviewed him once he's brilliant he's fantastic and uh he says that you have your close group of friends which is five you have a slot five very close friends but a relationship takes up two relationship takes up two of the slot of five and that would also mean that if you lose the relationship and you want to keep that same level of connection you can't just replace your chick with a new friend you probably need to replace them with two Yeah, well, it's also that thing of like, tend not to do very well post-divorce because they outsource their social life to their other half. Right, thanks to the wife and the friends. Yeah, they're entirely isolated afterwards, which is a terrible way to be. Robert Dunbar we hear. Go on, you were going to say something there. I've lost my train of thought now, but I think, you know, I always think of, a lot of what we're discussing as well, I wonder if the American audience appreciates it as much as the British. Because they're so giving, dude. Americans don't understand just how pro-social they are. You can be on the side of the lake. This happened the other week when we went to the Jasper Mike's house and I was on the side of the lake and a boat just went by. We're like, "Do you want to come wake surfing?" They didn't know me. I'm like, "Yeah, sure." Went wake surfing. You would need, in order to get to that level of friendliness, that would be a three-year project in the UK in order to warrant being invited on to the lake. Yeah. This thing that was part of, I don't know, maybe it's because everyone's a, it might be an Austin thing because everyone's kind of a social transplant from somewhere else, or it might be an America thing because everyone's a cultural transplant, you know, sort of historically from somewhere else. But I don't know. I noticed there's three types of interactions I'd have with strangers. So interaction one would be, stranger would just not look at me. Interaction two would be, we'd mirror one another's energy, or you give a nod. And then you'd have somebody who actually says something. I'd be like, "Oh, that's weird." I'd be like, "No, that's not true." I'd be like, "Yeah, it's. " A lot of the time I'd just like mirror. So I'd kind of head down. Somebody says hello and I'll say hello back. Somebody gives me a nod, I'll give them a nod back. And if they have their head down, I'll have my head down. Versus, "Oh, you can just do things." You can be the leader. You're using the proportionate force of being in a fight. It's like, "Well, if he's got a knife, I can use a knife." But you just always use a gun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do wonder if we're trying to coin this- Welcome to Texas. Trying to coin this term, which is a British syndrome. And America syndrome is another thing. But British syndrome. I was out for dinner the other night with a friend of mine, and he's had this employee that he's kind of complained about for the last six weeks, issues he's trying to get him to do. When he finally sits down at dinner, he goes, "I've realized he's not no agency. He's just British." That's true. Well, you had a great razor for that on, I think it was you. Yeah, it was. Like, British versus America. So you go, "The British disease is cynicism, and the American disease is bullshit." Yeah. I mean, it's great. There's a great comic, Jeff Green. Do you ever know Jeff Green? Great observational comic. He said, "I prefer America to Britain. I'd rather be told to have a nice day by someone that doesn't mean it than told to fuck off by someone that does." Jeff Green, great comic. So I have a roll of thumb, which is whenever I criticize Britain, I'm going to criticize America as a return or compliment Britain. Yeah. Sounds like you're keeping score. I was thinking, have we ever had an Elizabeth Holmes, a Sam Backman-Friedman, I think that's just, we're just not playing at that level. I think that's the reason why. The level of brazenness that you need to pull that off. I don't think any British person, except maybe Gary Stevenson, has enough self-belief to be able to drive that home. You need to have banks to rob them. Yeah. That's a good point. I'm just trying to think of it like a great huckster in the UK. I don't know. That's what I mean. A great huckster. Gaffing the market. We should do it. I feel like Andrew's kind of hovering over that area, but that's the British huckster. Who? Andrew. Prince Andrew. Oh, the OG Andrew. Right. Okay. Mountbatten. Yeah. I got in a lift in, I was in Austin last year and I started, I got in lifts, they call them elevators, or do we call them elevators? One of us calls them elevators. We call it a lift. They call it an elevator. I was getting in these elevators or lifts, and I would say, people started asking me what number I was on the elevator. Six, I'd say, you know, punching six. And I thought I'll come back to England and I'll try this out. So to Moraine Road, probably shouldn't have said that. Into the elevator I go, the lift I go, I say, hey, what number would you like? And they say, number? I say, yeah. Some people say number, some people it's headphones on. And it's a starkly different experience. Having said that, I also learned about the Californian lunch. Well, I've never been to California, but apparently if you go to California, it's a different experience. It's a starkly different experience. Having said that, everyone says they want to have lunch with you, but they don't actually want to have lunch with you. Right. Yeah. I remember a friend of mine saying to me, you know, was in Hollywood and they said, to be careful, you could die of encouragement. It's just, everything's very positive. Jimmy, how do you, is this a, how do you, I feel like there's two different ways into like creating stuff. And I feel like there's the volume method, which is like, I'm just going to write a lot of jokes and some of them are going to be good. And that's sort of, I'm going to write 80 verses. And I wonder in comedy, are you more like I'm just going to write, write, write, and some jokes are going to stick, or I'm going to, I'm going to work on one joke for a good, for a good couple of days. No, I, I find that I don't find working on them really helps. It's like they come out pretty much fully formed. And then I just, it's, it's iteration. It's just trying new things. And the audience tell you, what's going to work. So the audience feedback, the audience is a genius. They tell you what is, and what isn't funny and what is, and what isn't acceptable. And you just go back to them time and time again. So at the end of the show, I still got it on me from last night, you got new jokes and then you just try the new things. And that's like how you're writing your book, George, almost. Yeah. Do you set yourself a number of jokes to write? Is it like that or? Not really. I mean, there's always like, there's always new stuff to try. There's always like a, uh, I've got a file. It's huge. I'm like, okay, the print off. Okay. I'll try 10 tonight. And then the next 10, and then you sort of, maybe you tweak them a little bit, but it's not a full kind of rewrite. You might tweak it a little bit. If you go, I didn't really got that at all. And that wasn't clear enough, but it's very rare that you tell a joke and it doesn't work and you can rescue it with a rewrite. It tends to be just, the idea is just not there. And if they're immediate, then that's, and you're looking for the triple A's. You're looking for the ones that are going to work every single time, no matter how you deliver them, you're looking for that kind of quality. So the idea of like polishing something's kind of a different, sometimes it's like you change the wording. a little bit and it perfects it. Yeah. I remember Jason Freed said this about writing. He said, if I write, if I write it down and it just doesn't, it's not feeling right. He said, I'm not, I'm not going to come back to it. I'm not going to rewrite it. I'm just going to leave it, start again the next day. And it's like a different route in, which is funny. Cause I have a very different, I don't particularly work like that. Do you ever hear the, um, uh, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen story when they met up, they met up for lunch and they, uh, he talked about, um, Hallelujah 80 verses four years or whatever. No, no. It was like, he, it was Bob Dylan went, I think he said, but he said, how long did it take you to write? Um, uh, all along the watch hour and Bob Dylan said 20 minutes. And he said, how long did it take you to write? Hallelujah. And he said 12 years because he was embarrassed that it had been 20, but it was like, it's a long time. Yeah. So what's your process? Do you, you sit and. Well, I, I like writing. I think that you can't really write, you can only rewrite. So I, I, I guess I'm not writing jokes, you know, But is that, but that thing of like, you can't write, you can only rewrite. Like, I think the idea of doing, you do masses of stuff. I think the reason most people don't succeed in the arts is because they get into it because they like really good stuff. They've got great taste, but then they don't stick around long enough to be able to produce good stuff. It's like you start bad and then you get, you get good over time. If I was going to give one piece of advice to anyone trying to learn to write, I would say, honestly, I would, I would forget quantity. And I would think about trying to genuinely write one good sentence or maybe even two, and then maybe just a good paragraph. And I feel like the real problem is people can go their whole careers without actually writing anything good. And what you really need to do is you need to understand what it's like to write just one thing really good because a great book is just like, it's a lot of great sentences, which then form paragraphs and whatnot. And I remember who was it? Um, um, Hunter S. Thompson. He rewrote the great Gatsby just, just to know what it felt like to write a good book. And I do think there's something in there, but by hand, yeah. Just to get the feeling of extraordinary. I have a collection of, uh, you've seen it, the folder of what I like about what I like. And I've turned it into an app as well, where it's like starts intros, middles, and ends quotes, reference setups. What was the, um, Orwell's five rules that you keep banging on about? Well, I only bang on about them when I read yours. I can't remember them. I think number one, actually number one, I, I love it's never put never actually, how can we get on the internet? First one is, I think the first one is just basically never put something in print, which you've seen in print is the idea. So essentially just avoid cliched all times. And I think if you want to, if you want to, um, quickly improve any essay, you, I would just. You could drop it into Claude or you could just look at it yourself and say, have I, have I seen this sentence been written down before? Well, like I pulled you up. Cause you said, you said yesterday I was editing your writing and you said, um, what did you say about church? Something like during his darkest, during his darkest days is a really great example of this. It's just been said, if you go to Google search and you put it in quotation marks during his darkest days will have been said millions and millions of times. And it's, it's the debris of someone else's thinking. That's what a cliche is. And you really want to just write original sentences. If you read east of Eden by Steinbeck, it's the last sort of big book I read and you drop his sentences into Google. No one said sentences like that, like the whole book. And I looked at the chapter you had in that you drop a couple of things into Google search direct quotes, and it's just been said before. It's a very good proxy for like average writing, which your book's definitely not, but. Tolkien nervous, baby. Um, what's the, uh, drop it on the, this is probably one of the best ones you've given me the drop it on your fur idea. Okay. So, um, this is really about going from abstract to, to concrete writing. So essentially anything abstract, I'm trying to think of an example is yes. So I let's say someone's writing, uh, trying to come up with an app for, for fitness. And they said, I got an app. The idea is to regain your fitness. You can't really visualize regaining your fitness. And what you want to do is you want to take that and sort of convert it into objects, physical objects, which you can drop on your foot. So Chris, let's see how we go. Regain fitness. Drill into that. Drill into regain. What do we mean? What could we mean by regain fitness? Give me an object. Give me a starting point and an end point for regaining fitness. Uh, not loving your body to loving your body. You could drop a body on your foot. So that would be closer. What you could also drop on your foot would be a couch. Well, so this is, yeah. A couch. Couch to 5k. Couch to 5k. You know where this is going. It's huge. That's the Nike thing, right? Yeah. Because it, it, it makes it real. You know, if you can, and, and people think in, um, uh, analogies really, they, they can, you know, it's like that. If you can't see it, it's not there yet is really good writing advice. So if you can't visualize it, you know, it's, it's, it's. It's not there yet. That's a great kind of, I mean, that kind of ad copy as well, the way that you've kind of got that thing where it just feels like that was always going to be a hit, but it, but it wasn't, of course they could have just called it the app. So couch to 5k was done by a guy in a guy in New York. I forgot his name, but he was living with his mom at the time. Like it was, it was sort of this crazy breakout application, which had no right to be. And I think then it got bought by the BBC and it's the most downloaded fitness app of all time. And that's like the, the, the, I think ideas are, but I feel like even ideas are somewhat underrated. Like you really just need the conviction. To, to, to, to do them. And those two things together. There was a Nike advert or Nike or an added, I think Nike, uh, during the Boston marathon and it said, um, runners welcome walkers tolerated. And it went, it was great, but it was the, the, uh, difference here was the taste of the direction it was going in. It was so effective and catchy that all of the people who walked during the marathon. Which is probably most people, most people are going to walk at some point. Uh, and I got into a lift. Fuck me in LA at the start of the year. And there was a woman wearing hokers, uh, mid fifties, something like that. Nicely dressed, like fit women, like off to the gym or do whatever. And both of them were talking about how much they dislike Nike because, and both of them referenced that campaign. One of them was wearing hokers. The other was wearing rads or something. And, uh, they said, oh yeah, that, that campaign was just right. Run is welcome walkers tolerated. They do. That's it. So they're so out of touch now in any case. And they had this, everyone has a degree of, um, distaste for the top dog. I can't wait for that to, so that, that, that fall to happen. And especially if you play the out of touch, I don't care about the every man game. Like there's two things that are cohesing together there to like really move in the same direction. They've gotten so big, they've forgotten their roots, right? It's like, it's a cliche. You're playing into a trope that makes it very easy for somebody to attack you. So, yeah. Um, I think they put their foot. There's like, there's, there's a few of those aren't they kind of examples in marketing where people have absolutely shat the bed, like done really badly. Was, uh, was it Ratner, the jeweler in, in the UK was a guy called, who gave a speech where he said, oh, we just sell fucking tat. And it just shut down. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Just in a single, in a single, uh, tweet. Keep going. It was like, it wasn't a tweet even. It was like pre that. It was like an after dinner speech where we just spent, it's just fucking shit that we sell. Yeah. But it, you know, like it's funny. Cause let's say you have Ron. Sealed the, um, the fence painter and they say, what do they say? It does exactly what it says on the table. So it says, and that's, that's, it's different to just still in tat, but like, that's cause the language of fence painters, that's, that's how they talk. Whereas jewelers, you know, they probably don't want that. Don't want the word tat to be used as they look at their Rolex. Doesn't this all just come down to your favorite word at position. A position here. It is, uh, the most famous UK example of a jewelry store saying their own product is bad is Gerald Ratner, CEO of Ratner's group, who in 1991 described his company's products as total crap. This caused a 500 million pound loss in value and forced a rebranding to signet group. Another recent instance is complaints regarding the website Scarlet jewels, which distinct from genuine Scarlet jewelry. It's received poor reviews. Yeah. Well, uh, his infamous speech stated that some of his earrings were cheaper than a prawn sandwich, but probably wouldn't last as long. Pretty good. Right. You've got one job, mate. That's really, you know, sell your tat that's gone. That's gone very badly. Sell your tat. It's interesting. That thing of like. Industries that are like businesses, industries that disappear overnight, like 19. I love the fact 1901 biggest industry in the world was, uh, whaling, whaling, whale oil to light whaling, catching whales. What's whaling catching whales selling the oil in order to put the lamps right to, and then the light bulb comes along. Whaling was the biggest industry in 1901 and it had fully disappeared by 1903. Yeah. Like there's whole towns and kind of just like shut down. Well, fax machines are kind of like that fax machines go from. Yeah. Everywhere to now and just the running the NHS and the traits of horses in New York and Manhattan. Horses in New York. Yeah. And it's always the technology that's the, because they, they brought in so many laws to get rid of horses in New York because the horse manure problem, you know, the reason there's steps up to brownstones. In New York is because the horse shit was that high. And there's the whole thing of like smelling salts, like people, because the whole place smelled horrific. It was just horse shit. And if the horses died, they had to chop them up, wait for them to add, chop them up in the street and then cart them off using other horses who then died. So the whole thing was just, it was a, an absolute mess and they kept on bringing in new laws, new laws, new laws to try and get the, you know, a tax on horses and other tax on horses. And then Henry Ford comes along and invents the motor car and people go, yeah, we don't need horses. Well, what do you, what do you think is that now? What do you think five years, 50 years, a hundred years will be like, oh, it's gone. Well, I think it's, it's a very interesting question because obviously the AI thing, we can see the jobs it's going to take, but we can't see the jobs it will create. But I, I, I wonder with that, whether I think talk shows would be quite obvious point. I, I, is there still close to Jimmy's heart? No, no. I mean, I think you're, I think you're like the, it's changed from old media to new media. I think the, the idea that something like, you know, I love Saturday night live, but I can't see it being around in 10 years. Like the, I remember going to see a recording last year and just thought, wow, this is incredible. The amount of people to put this show on, to make this happen. It was like, it was really genuinely like spectacular. And then you just go, well, I can't imagine this being, it can't compete with people just doing funny sketches on their phone because the, the size of the screen seems to be inversely proportionate to the amount of money you can make. So like the movie business might not last. I just think what's funny though, is all the sketches on the phone. I can never, I can't really recall one. Whereas I think of carrot in the box, like eight out of 10 cats, um, Sean Locke. And I, I, I, I, you know, it's, it's, I think TV weirdly sticks. Like I, I can't remember. Um, or who's the guy that wrote abundance with, um, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Derek Thompson has a great podcast and he did this episode called, he wrote this essay called everything is television. And his argument was everything is television. Television won't disappear because, uh, TikTok is television. You don't think of it in that way because it's streaming. YouTube is the biggest TV channel in the world. It's of course it is. It's, it's television. Um, Facebook is television. Facebook isn't social media. People think it's like, but that would be for us to know each other and be sending videos to our family and sharing them with friends. That's kind of. The, that's the idea, but the reality is people watching videos that other people have made that they don't know that's television. It's a bit of a shame because Gavin and Stacey Christmas special was sort of, in my opinion, probably actually the world cup summer right now, but the last time like the UK came together for a thing, why Christmas TV is such a big deal in the UK. I'm not sure what it's like in the States, but Christmas TV is a big deal, not because it's better than the TV the rest of the year, but because people sit down as a family and watch the big fat quiz and watching it together. It's just. It's just nicer to do things in a communal way. Like people used to gather around a fire and then around the radio and then around the TV and it was all great. And then we went off to our bedrooms with our phones. So a more, a more communal time if you're generally, but when you're back in your old childhood bedroom or your old childhood house or whatever, you're with the families coming over to you and it's meaningful, slightly slower paced sedate moment there. So I think, yeah, if you could own anything, I mean that. It has to be why Harry Potter just keeps on getting run back over and over again, right? It's the thing that you watched when you were a kid. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be. And Whoop tracks all of it. Sleep, strain, heart rate, recovery. It's like dog the bounty hunter, but instead of criminals, it's tracking down your bad habits. All of this data gets pulled into a dashboard that actually tells you what to do with the information. And now the brand new Whoop 5.0. It's 7% smaller. It's got two weeks of battery life. Shows you how fast you're actually aging. It comes with hormonal insights for women managing their cycle or pregnancy or men hiding from it. Once you see the patterns, you start making better decisions. It's that simple. Best of all, you can join for free, pay nothing for your Whoop 5.0 strap. Plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30-day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. Speaking of technology, a new study claims that an eight minute conversation with chat GPT can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about 20% and these effects last at least two months. I'm always wary of tiny interventions that purport to have large and long lasting effects, but I don't see anything immediately fishy about this study and the mechanism is plausible. I bet most 9-11 truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously. and who knew a lot about 9-11 and i think this is an underrated and positive aspect of ai people are worried about the hallucinations and ai psychosis and rightfully so but keep in mind that many people do not know basic uncontroversial truths about their world 37 percent of americans a plurality believe that god created humans in their present form within the last 10 000 years 40 percent don't understand how a control group works 26 percent think that the sun goes around the earth for these people talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality i think it's an interesting point because conspiracy theories for me are a symptom of a much larger problem which is we've lost lost sort of trust in institutions but i think that's they kind of they bubble up when you have no no faith in institutions because you desperately want to believe in something you desperately want to kind of trust someone but you don't trust the government anymore and you don't trust the medical profession and you don't trust um academics anymore so you kind of you you're desperately searching so these kind of more and more kind of incredible theories come to the fore i mean not to say that people do conspire to do things that's a different thing i mean like conspiracy theories in their traditional form like an unforceable sort of theory you throw this let's say for example the coronavirus pandemic happened like it never happened and it happens in 2026 which you're in right i i wonder what the ai bots would be saying about the coronavirus oh that's fascinating because people would be arguing online with other people based on what their bot had told them to derive from the fact as well as you would have the fable model for example would have replied because it'd be around biology that you can't ask any basic questions to fable right now around biology because they might be thinking you're printing the 3d virus so everyone would be asking kimmy and oh yeah you'd be getting you'd be getting like the chinese models which would be interesting the cause and effect the full circle how long how long do you think i mean i'm not who's to say ai didn't create covet who's to say that it wasn't i mean it was it seems to be now people are saying it was created in a lab do you think this technology arrived when we think it arrived or do you think it's been around for 10 years i think it's arrived when we when it arrived yeah yeah because the transformer technology that you need here's my you're my favorite my favorite here we go you want to hear my favorite conspiracy theory at the moment okay so there's a two terrifying scenarios one is there's a manhattan project currently underway in america and they're working on a agi it's the net it's the it's the big thing it's the doomsday weapon is the agi and they're working on it and it's called solstice and it's somewhere in america we don't know where but that's being worked on right second terrifying scenario they're not jimmy when do you when do you think of all your ideas i got the days free but that is that's a it's a it's an interesting kind of weird thought right which would you rather well i'd rather they were working i think that uh it's uh it's kind of happening right they're they're putting ever more powerful computers together and people are worried about the wrong thing i think people are worried about losing their jobs but i think if you point agi at um the environment it might be able to solve the problem of net zero might get to that much quicker and if you point it at physics who knows i mean that the great you know physics is real power in a way that nothing can do it's not a problem it's a problem it's a problem it's a problem nothing else is everything every other science is stamp collecting physics really changes the world and there's been no you know eric weinstein and 60 years was always saying there's nothing's happened for 50 years string theory's just kind of gone a different way but if there if there was a a unifying theory of physics i mean if that could happen that'd be extraordinary and whoever had that would have some power but if you saw it um so claude released fable and then they put they had the issues with the government and fables come back and then you had this kind of cock tease shall we say where they would say you've got access to it until the 5th of july and then chachi bt's released their new model so cord have now gone well you've now got access to it and 12th of july and they've moved it again and what you're actually seeing is because there's so much competition right now it's so hard for any of them to run away or create any form of monopoly so the ultimate being a manhattan project it feels way more like there's going to be 15 at once i get the sense that the covid thing i i certainly don't think the ai would have had that much to do with it had annie jacobson on the show who wrote nuclear war a countdown scenario and oh yeah that was a fun episode yeah well her new one is a minute is about uh bioweapons it's it's about elabley and she said the russians during the 80s when we are not working on enhancing what we're doing we're not working on enhancing what we're doing we're not weapons to make them more transmittable. They had programmed into the virus, they'd programmed euphoria in. That's how pernicious this plague was. It was called a super plague. And they'd programmed euphoria in as one of the side effects because if people felt euphoric, they would go out and dance. And then they would become their own super spreaders. So they'd even put a behavioral modifier into this super plague. And apparently this thing, this existed, but never got out, was never used, but probably sits in some bank, some frozen virus bank. Here's a hot tech, right? So in the late 80s, there was a thing called mad cow disease. Do you remember this? They thought everyone was going to go crazy at- BS40 or whatever it was called. Yeah. Maybe it happened. The guy that hosts The Apprentice is president now. Maybe we all went crazy. Everyone has got mad cow disease. Maybe. We all went crazy and just no one noticed because we all went crazy. I tell you what, the amount of phones I've seen in saunas, it wouldn't shock me. You've gone. That's the real- I don't have my phone on me. Describe your phone. I could sell my phone. It's a Quinn F22 Pro. It has applications, but it's too useless to get addicted to. Great. You purposefully dumb phoned yourself. No, genuinely. Like it's, actually, I don't really like talking about it because I got it because I hate these people who get their new phones and it's all stupid phones. They make it their thing. So I feel self-conscious talking about it on the show. But my younger brother, Jack, had this phone and he got the non-pro version, which is a bit of a mistake because it's actually just too useless to text on. But I got the Quinn F22 Pro. But I love Jack because I was on holiday with him and he didn't mention it once. And I was like, Jack, what's this phone? And I feel like the way to get people onto these phones is to not ram it down people's phones. It's true. Sometimes you got to let them know because Harry came out for Austin for my birthday. Say goodbye to him. I don't hear anything for a few days. I'm like, what's happened to him? And then he finally gets back in touch via WhatsApp on his desktop. And he's like, what did you do to your phone again? You threw it in the river? I threw it into the car. I didn't throw it into the river because that would have been disrespectful to the fishes. I threw it into the bin by the river. And then I switched out. If I come across a lot of money, I think it's what I would try and change in the world. I do feel it really depressing. You walk into a sauna in Austin and it's an epidemic of people with AirPods in. I'll take you to a sauna in Austin where there's people with something else in. There is someone in a sauna right now listening to this on AirPods going, why are they shaming me? Genuinely, look at your life if you are doing that. I feel like you might feel like you got it all worked out. If you have that one step, you are doing it. You haven't got nothing worked out. Wait there for a second. How do you feel about people that wear AirPods during massages? Sorry. Chris, how do I feel about people wearing AirPods? Full stop. You're done. Right. But okay. During massage, you're also done. It doesn't change the question. I listen to audiobooks during a massage. Yes. All the time. No, no, no, no, no. You're being very diplomatic about how- Even during the happy ending? He speeds it up. He speeds it up. That's where it gets Napoleon. My younger brother works in politics and his idea is to understand what real people think. And he does a bloody good job of that. But I said to him, well, what do real people think? And I'm in a taxi with him. And he's got his damn AirPods in, trying to listen to what real people think. I said, Will, there's a taxi driver that row. Why don't you ask the taxi driver what real people think? I think it's bonkers. Was he getting a massage at the same time? You need to stop wearing AirPods during massages. Why? I just, it is the perfect- Wait, is he massaging you? That's true. It's more a client- Why has he got this level of- It's a client service worker dispute. Ah, this guy's not even paying attention. Listen to this gibberish as he talks on Gua. I just, it is the perfect time to be with your thoughts, to do some good thinking without feeling like you're wasting time, you're falling behind, being in the dark playground, being in a reverse version of it. We talked about that earlier. I think boredom is unappreciated serenity and allowing yourself to be bored, like planning it is quite a good idea. Like train travel, it's quite good to be on a train, be bored, be in an airport, be bored. I'm bored enough. I'm bored enough. I do enough time alone in my own thoughts. When I'm out for a massage, I want to- I want to have Napoleon- Speed lesson, speed lesson. Andrew Roberts, 40 hours. I didn't realize Napoleon even recorded an audio book. This is tremendous. Yeah, I slightly disagree. To play a devil's advocate, how do you know you're not in the mass hysteria of TV's going to give you square eyes, like calculate should be balanced? Luddite syndrome. Yeah, Luddite syndrome. How do you know when you're going against smoking versus being a Luddite? I don't know when I'm going against smoking. Because like, how do you know you're pushing back again? Because I'll tell you what, I will tell you why. I will tell you why. Because what I'm doing is I'm doing nothing. So you can't, it's not like I'm, it's not like I'm smoking cigarettes here. My idea of where I'm trying to move the needle is just less, less, less, less, less. So if you're- smoking you're doing something if you're if you're going skiing you're doing something what's what's a different example if you're if you're say if you're saying like having energy drinks that's you you you what's what did talib say subtract so if you're subtracting you can't go you can't go wrong if you're subtracting that's i think there's i think there's something to this i think the that whole anxious generation jonathan height thing of like it's not good for kids and there's this kind of you know they think it's social media is as harmful as cigarettes for kids but i think i think what we need to do then is give kids cigarettes yes you know the idea of like and there's kind of a joke on the language but you go actually it's the the point that he makes in that book is not just banned social media it's banned social media and let kids play outside because they can't have infinite freedom online and then no freedom in the real world and really it's the freedom in the real world that we haven't quite everyone's kind of on this idea of like oh yeah we'll take away the phones from the kids but actually what else do they get to do it's interesting that what the average person spends six hours a day on screens we haven't gained six hours days aren't now 30 hours long so of the time that we had previously that's had to get squeezed from somewhere yeah which means that you've lost time doing other things certain smart people are getting massages while listening to stuff so there's certain there's outliers out there that have gained the system they're geniuses outing me publicly for my my audio but during massage you've got a worse phone addiction than me my friend oh yeah i don't disagree i've got it i've got i'm horrendous with my phone i'm saying that the massage is not the place to have your it is weird now that the technology it was kind of the thing of like i've got the new the new phone the new thing 10 years ago now the most opulent thing you could do is say oh we went to a cabin and there was no wi-fi and we just put away our things it's the most opulent thing in the world meditation retreat with no screens yeah what are they what are the the wealthy well doing now what are the billionaires doing now they're trying to live without that social media without those screens how was the retreat uh it was intense yeah to do seven days i mean it'll be the longest time but since i was probably a child there would have even been a tv in the room right uh one of the guys there was an ai uh interface that could help you with your practice and what that sounds like absolutely defeating the purpose look i didn't use it i didn't use it it was if if none of the facilitators were available and you were coming up against some blocks in your practice there was a chatbot that had was on it was on a laptop and had been sort of imbued with all of the principles of the thing but the interesting thing this was timo who was one of the facilitators they have they have they have fucked up so hard there i didn't go into that i didn't go into that room i didn't use that however yeah he thought am i able to find out the england score by messaging the the meditation chatbot so he's every time that i sit down to meditate i keep being distracted by wondering what the england score was would it be possible for me to find out so that i can get back to my practice please um but no fascinating northern california it was jana practice j-h-a-n-a um it was also open ai's global reset week so a lot of the engineers were off from work they have two global reset weeks which is basically enforced holiday for you as a way to try and sort of front run people not getting burnt out by saying hey you've got you you can't come into work essentially so i go and there's all of the guys a bunch of guys from open ai but there's also all of their main competitors from anthropic and a bunch of other guys that are there so there was kind of like low-key silent meditation retreat turf wars going on between people at the forefront of ai development that was kind of interesting and yeah like you you kind of learn the particular school of meditation i was doing which was jana you're learning to allow conductivity through your emotions and that is to allow them to move freely without any uh constriction so you're noticing and releasing mental tension it's like primarily what you're but that drops down into emotional tension what you realize when you come back into the world is how much of your life is spent constricting emotional tension because there's times when emotions come up well it's it's not appropriate for it you might feel a little overwhelmed as you're walking through the airport which everybody did as we went reintegrated back into society well that's not the time for you to talk about how i feel so scared and awkward and this is too much for me it's like no you you swallow down the overwhelming wildfires in europe and the fat guy presenting the football on the on the screens and you just sort of move past it also it's very difficult to hear what your soul is whispering to you when the world's shouting at the same time so you start to hear far more fleeting thoughts that come up a lot of the thoughts that you wouldn't have been able to pay attention to if you're regularly even talking to people let alone being on screens so that was kind of interesting what was your soul whispering to you chris my soul whispering to me probably fucking spend more time in silence i think like it was quite meta um it's vegetarian which meant that almost everybody's digestion was ruined for the first three or four days lots of beans lots of tofu trying to do group meditation with 40 people in a room while there's farting going on is relatively interesting um some guy i have no idea how but entered the retreat single and left the retreat with a girlfriend so that is the level of that boy's got game mate that's the level of game like none of us could pull it aside how did the guy i don't know did you honestly just he should be a guest on the show i think just straight up frame oh yeah not like you your tiny little forearms that's true um anyway he was it was it was really good uh enjoyed it very intense the most interesting thing is then coming back and like having your old patterns uh come into conflict with your sort of new system new worldview and it takes a good bit of time you have to like titrate your i couldn't use my phone i did just simply cut it was i know it felt very icky very sterile after just staring at like trees the only thing that i was looking at was trees yeah a few points by saying this uh it's the most chris williamson thing ever that i've been trying to get this man to take a holiday for he's not been around i call it proper holiday for five years so then he goes and does a john a seven day time the meditation retreat but even gopkins is his own holiday um i think an interesting question i have around the phone stuff question question there's a great guy on twitter called chris lakin and his whole idea is that the phone itself might be chesterton's fence show chesterton's fences yes yeah so it's this uh idea of if you see a fence don't take it don't take it down until you understand why it's there and he helps a lot of people with a phone addiction and then it will often discover two days later they've got a bacon problem or they've got a porn problem and actually the phone was never the problem the phone was never the problem it was never the problem it was never the problem was the solution and if you actually get a little bit deeper the phone addiction goes away and i do wonder how much of the uh the phone addiction is actually a solution to a much greater problem i think it might be that the we've we spoke about this um mark fisher talked about this before he died about the the idea that we've um uh privatized uh mental health problems we sort of think it's a personal failing for people to be depressed or anxious and actually i think it's a societal problem we're not organizing our society correctly for people to um flourish i think it's like the phones are kind of a symptom of a much larger problem within our society that we're quite sort of isolated we're kind of looking for something to do we're not in groups we're not with other people we'll go back to the thinking of your hands mouth feet uh feet step count massively down hands uh you almost you're using your hands on your phone but you're not using your hands like how most humans used to throughout history you wasn't say what it is what go on what you got uh when winston churchill was going through uh the black dog the black dog yeah he would put up 200 bricks a day apparently it's actually a terrible bricklayer the brick layers had to go in afterwards and do it fix it but churchill just to keep his mind at bay he would do something with his hands every single day so when you lose the lack of feet hands and mouth i do think that can be not necessarily a full explainer of mental health problems but it definitely contributes what's interesting that thing of like that how much is a hardware problem how much is a software problem like how much of like if you meet someone that's if you've got a friend really going through a tough time it's like well are they sleeping eight hours are they eating well are they exercising are they walking in nature are they seeing their friends like you cover that that sort of simple stuff but it's very difficult to regulate that stuff when you're feeling terrible it's like you get to aspire on but the most absurd one was when it was a study that came out it's like a meta-analysis of all the causes of depression or the biggest treatments that have an impact on it and the big thing is that if you think about it you've been to ssris and that was the huge thing that made like global news but if you actually go into the meta-analysis exercise is the number five on the list you know ssris are further down number one on the list it's just an absolute sleeper that nobody talks about dance therapy dance therapy outperformed exercise and it's interesting more than you have a lot of the benefits of exercise but you're with people and you're out of your own head with music well also you haven't got you haven't got headphones on when you're dancing whereas if you're exercising you have headphones it makes sense because you're not dancing you're it makes me think when did we get involved enough to be depressed yeah i guess that there's kind of it's like we're busy busy fighting sober tooth tigers for a while like too busy i think it's that thing where we have a but if you really want to know how privileged you are how far into the future are you planning because i think poor people have no future and i mean that literally like people if you're living hand to mouth and you're thinking about the next meal well you're not even thinking about what you're doing next you're thinking about what you're doing next you're just trying to get through the day and then really wealthy people think on like oh i wonder my grandkids i need to make sure they're okay it's like it's a different time frame i think that thing about having having too much time we have my dad i got three brothers and my dad would what he was a radio presenter back in the day and he'd he'd um work a night shift in radio and then he'd work a day shift teaching radio and he just didn't i slept in the car for a couple of years he just didn't have enough time to to get down you know when you've got kids to feed it's yeah that is a hell of a double shift radio by night and teaching radio by day yeah my dad's great he was uh he was an electrician he really wanted to this is kind of a story a little story about like the power teacher because he was kind of he wasn't the smartest cookie in the shed and when he was from he was from hull and he was he was disadvantaged right there he was in a um his great-grandfather built hull prison um and he's in this little classroom and he's listened to noel edmunds last ever radio show because his big dream was to be a radio star and um and he had this teacher i can't remember the teacher's name but like he thought he was going to be told off wearing a cap to cover the you know the big old headphones he used to use and says what dry what are you doing dry and he says noel edmunds last ever radio show i'm listening to it and teacher goes carry on dry and he went on to he won a sony award he was his career was very up and down but you know and it's just an example of like i don't know i love it when teachers just just acknowledge actually what's important in in in kids um you know upbringing yeah it's lovely it's lovely is your father still with us is he still still looking around he's still looking around thinking radio and i don't think you'd mind me saying this now you get fired a lot it's show business like you you're in one you're in one show you're out the next so um we play articulate as a you all know articulate um the the the game where you have to describe individuals and my dad would just he infuriates us because he'll constantly just say interviewed him and we'll go come on dad and he goes joan i think he was trying to describe joan armor trading once and he said and he he shouts at my mother sang drop the pilot interviewed him in a way and mom was just like but i i don't know it's kind of a great thing now because radio is about obviously like old school showbiz uh like being an actor or being a presenter you're waiting for someone to bring you flowers you're waiting you're waiting for someone to come along and give you permission to do the thing that you really want to do and now with new media it feels like that permission is already is you give it to yourself you go well no one's stopping me i could just start a podcast and interview people and do whatever i mean it's what you did in a bedroom in middlesbrough and it's and it's just kind of you know you can't you give yourself permission as long as you keep doing the thing kind of it happens and substack has done the same thing for writing that youtube did for video and that apple podcast and spotify did for audio it's the same thing yeah substack is uh i used to have this joke that if aliens looked at human reading and writing data well it's it's going up but then as soon as you zoomed in it's just subtitles and text messages everything else is like collapsing yeah they do they do talk about people being kind of um post-literate now like not they're not people aren't reading books i had this realization this week um what we're talking about earlier around the whaling going out from 1901 and then sorry being the number one and going out have you used much yet i've been told to it's but yeah from a transcription perspective i because i realized they write so much that that muscle and it's so you'll know that anyone harry it's quite a it's an arduous task or uh there's only so much writing you can do per day until you exhaust it and as a result of writing so much i'd struggle to reply to text messages because i'd be using the same it's like i've tried my triceps all day now someone's asking me to do dips and a for fuck's sake and with whisper flow i'm now suddenly getting so much out there and i was like oh people are going to stop writing this is going to become a bigger and bigger trend people would be right you think speech to text and read it as well i think both of those two things are unfortunately short so americans are more likely to place a gambling bet than read a single book fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022 only 38 percent read a novel or short story study analyzing 236 000 responses to the american time use survey found that the proportion of americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023 gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book with 57 percent of americans placing a bet last year but only less than half reporting reading a book of any kind and this included audiobooks they included audiobooks in that i wonder is there i've got okay my theory at the moment here's my here's my big theory friction is very good in life right all the best things involve friction so if you look at a tiktok it's very low friction right but then you look at a A YouTube video for five minutes is a bit more friction. A TV show, that's half an hour. Okay, it's a bit of an effort. A movie, a lot of friction. You read a book. I mean, come on, this is arduous. But you get so much more out of the thing, the more friction there is. Like the TikTok video, you can't remember. No one ever says, oh man, you got to see my favorite TikTok video from 2025. It's awesome. But it's just, it's nothing. It's gone. And the things that involve friction seem to be better. But in all areas of life, like the exercise, sports, arts, anything, more friction is better. I also feel like it's just a little bit about the story you tell yourself. So if I was, when I personally watched a lot of TikToks and Instagram and whatnot, I would just tell myself that I was a bit of a loser. And I walked around thinking that. And then when I read a full book, I'm like, bloody hell, I can do things here. And I think you really transmit it into the day. You put me on to Stoner. That was a wonderful book. It is a wonderful book. What's it about? It's about a guy called William Stoner who lives on a farm with his parents. And he says to his dad, dad, I want to go to university and learn about farming. And his dad doesn't say many words to him. So his dad said, okay, whatever. Pops off to, I can't remember which university, Mississippi maybe. And he starts his farming course. And after about a semester, he flips into English and he starts learning about books for the first time. There's a professor and then the war starts. There's that amazing sequence as well, where he doesn't understand. He's reading Shakespeare and he doesn't understand what it means. And he goes to his professor and goes, I don't know what this means. But he's interested in it in a way that no one else is. He's so excited by it. I've got to know what this means. I don't know what it means. That's kind of the pivotal bit. I'm amazed you read it. The thing I took from it is he essentially marries the wrong woman. It's, it's a, I do think it's a book. It's about so many things, but one thing is about picking the person you marry, to be honest, because this, this one woman he marries really in a sort of, sort of, there's no, there's no grand moment where she, where she screws up his life. It's just sort of, it's a thousand cuts, it's a thousand paper cuts and his life kind of just sort of becomes subservient to this lady. Was she abused by her father? She was abused by her father. Well, no, but that's like, it's never explicitly said, but it's kind of implied. There's kind of a weird. Her father committed suicide randomly on, on one sort of Tuesday because there was a bank run. The real advert is like the opening a couple pages of the book where it starts with his death and he works at this university and nobody really noticed. And it's such a flip of the book because most books you have the giant hero, you have the Joseph Campbell. Whereas this is a man who lived such a mundane life that that's actually interesting that you see yourself when you see your potential worst self in them. One of my favorite songs ever, it's like low agency in a song. Have you ever heard Pearl Jam? Um, it's called elderly woman behind a counter in a small town and long, long song title. And it's just the point of view of this 80 year old woman who's never left her hometown, which she, she, she did. And the guy who was her teenage sweetheart comes into the shop that she's in and she recognizes him and he no longer recognizes her. There's this beautiful line of, I changed by not changing at all. Small town predicts my fate. And every time I listen to that song, it's actually way more inspirational than the hero's journey and stoners and nothing. So how Stoner ends is the bit I'll always remember from it is he's on his death bed. And before I tell you that the four sentence question, which I like stuck with me, the author of the book has a really different interpretation to everyone who read the book. It's also kind of weird. The author of the book is like, actually, no, he lived a pretty good life and he taught and he really loved English, but book ends and William Stoner is, is he's got his wife behind him and is one kid who's sort of become an alcoholic. And he says, and this question over and over again, he says, what did you expect? What did you, what did you expect? What did you expect? And I think what he's kind of referring to is like, like, if you actually, if you fast forwarded your life, William, when you were 20, this was always going to happen. You were going to die in like a little small old room with your wife, who doesn't love you sitting by you. And, and, and he wrote one book, which he wasn't particularly proud of. And he had a lovely affair, which actually kind of sounds bad, but actually wasn't bad because his marriage was so screwed up. And he just says, what did you expect? And it was kind of thinking like, yeah, like God, like if you don't change. Well, you know, that that's how I'll die. What did you expect Harry? I mean, for me, I think he changed massively because there was a guy that was toiling land for the first 16 years. He was like working the land really hard. And then he made it to a university and he spent the rest of his life reading books and teaching other people about his passion for books. It's beautiful. He achieved so much, but it's like, you could compare to what, what compared to the life his parents expected, which was just physical toil and putting food on the table. And he like, that was all factored in. And then it's like, what did he accomplish beyond that? Well, no, that's enough. It's enough. And it's, it, it kind of goes to that Morgan Housel line of, uh, he talks about like happiness being, uh, your current, um, experience. Reality minus expectation. Yeah. Which is like, what did you expect? Well, maybe you expected too much. Yeah. Well, that's the thing because he's, he's uh outstripped his parents expectations of him but under performed on his own expectations of himself maybe not in the bedroom uh he he found a lovely young young woman who was um well not young she was actually quite old relatively speaking and i think what is it about young women today all right what is it about young women today what is it about young women that'll be clipped that's a question in other news if you're trying to go from joey chestnut to joey the rp strength app is the best place to start i've been in the gym for 20 years and it wasn't until the past few years that i had the best training sessions of my life and rp was a massive part of that actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain it tells you your exercises how many sets reps and weights that you need to do everything so all that you have to do is show up and lift if the rp app could wipe your ass for you it probably would and it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing for me following a evidence-based plan has made a massive difference and if you're serious about training it'll do the same for you too right now you can get up to 50 off the rp hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's rpstrength.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout what's your favorite the last one that worked i mean it'll literally be the last i try not to get attached to them so it's that thing where you go well i like the thing that worked the other night that worked for the first time you go great that's that'll do so you rip them up rip them up rip them up yeah it's like the new thing the new thing the new thing and then you're kind of putting a show together and that's kind of an exciting phase but just whatever the latest thing is it's interesting the the good and the bad of any industry because the good thing for you i guess that you get to constantly come up with new material but it's also like if you're a no gallant and does the songs like the leverage of that exists forever a lot of musicians kind of like they they uh they don't want to end up in las vegas being a covers band of themselves you know so it's that thing where you go be careful what you wish for like i've constantly got to come up with new stuff but that's also the fun bit is coming up with the new stuff well we was debating this once of if you could imagine uh impact and then doing it over time you've done an incredible job of like doing it over multiple decades but a lot of musicians they'll have that one album and then they can't repeat it ever again whereas some people like christopher nolan's probably it might my opinion one of the best who's managed to keep going kanye by the way kanye like is the best thing like college drop he is this stuff's a little bit his recent stuff college dropout late registration 808s and heartbreak jesus my beautiful thoughts into fantasy life of pablo are just completely different albums yeah yeah but they're completely different albums it's that's very rare it is it's very interesting i think it's very interesting that thing of like genius people often talk about genius but they they don't what they're talking about is like um hyper accelerated rationality not genius i think genius is a different thing that's a big word jimmy can you well once he has that kind of level of he's got a level of genius where you go he does all the crazy stuff that he does that's part of it that's it's like it's almost like there's a there's a mental health thing going on it's a cross to bear it's a beautiful line about genius and sanity are next door neighbors and they sometimes borrow one another's sugar and it's it's one of the thoughts i've had around llm's that you have to be careful about what you're doing you're not going to be able to write good and llm can write good and this may change but right now it can write good but it can't write great and i think there's a little bit of a horseshoe theory with great writing what the great writing is kind like next door neighbors to terrible writing you've got to take risks when you have something that's trained on the averages it doesn't take risks like some of my worst ever pieces are quietly linked to my best ever writing yeah i i think that thing of like the average will be free in the world of ai average will be free and the very good will be very expensive like excellent will be very excited i think there's a sort of weird texture to when you believe in something you no one can see your belief in it especially if it's words written down on a page but i think you can feel when someone really believes in something and i think the problem with artificial writing or ai writing is like you don't actually believe it you just got it kind of from the from the robot i think there's just a weird you can tell when you read something and you just know that the person really really really believes about what believes it and i i'm thinking of an advert um i can't remember the gentleman's name but he he basically has this idea i'm going to suspend a car above um above the the chap who made the car to prove how good the suspension is of i think it was a volvo and they say we can't get that past legal so he says oh it's going to be me then so anyway the writer of the ad suspends him spends this big car which wires just above above himself and it's one of the most famous ads of all time and it's like that only got across the line because he just really believed in it and i think your conviction idea is more important than the idea in in so many cases it's often the way with comedy especially with edgy jokes intent is much more important than content and people intuit the intent they just know i think a norm mcdonald's like you give his material to someone else and he's gonna bomb but because norm had this weird like belief in a bad joke it would become a good joke yeah what what could you say that no one else could say that's his whole career it's like he only he could do that just a a properly non-fungible human one of the reasons that ai uses very strange tropes i told george about george about this the other week most writing that ai is trained on the corpus of writing that it's trained on is not good books because most writing is not good but it's not distinguished between the hundred greatest novels of all time and the millions and millions and millions of pages of anime fan fiction that it's been trained on and there's no waiting given is it it doesn't give waiting no no i don't think so and even if it did it would have to be so overly weighted right some 14 year old's seventh sequel to the twilight series or something that they're just putting out on their their like like tumblr account that should not it would require some it basically not exist but it has been trained on it anyway and what they did was they looked at a bunch of short stories that won a bunch of awards recently and there was some very obscure analogies that we used talking about his stomach swallowing a shout which sounds like kind of evocative but in the uh flow of the story felt a little bit clunky and it was a bit harsh and it didn't seem to be quite necessary so much and they use this ai to trace where on the internet that piece of writing has been seen before you know you were talking about analogy being quite trite or it's not this sentence sounds like i've heard it before it sounds like something you could have and they go and they actually it and they found so many of the source material pieces were random anime fan fiction websites so that is all writing of all time right lots of it is good most of it's not yeah and the total world that has ais have been trained on includes this like just endless dross it's going to end up also i think talib said this it ends up being trained on itself a lot of the time now correct and it it's there's nowhere to go you know i think there's going to be a big um sort of premium on books pre-2022 because you know that they've not been written by ai yeah because you know that you know there's kind of no help given as well there's no editing there's no they they did that in the old-fashioned way it's like losing weight before a zampic yeah there's an extra kind of yeah flex on it yeah yeah the uh it was interesting you were talking about how coping mechanisms after gastric band surgery people uh sometimes commit suicide and gastric band surgery is quite traumatic sometimes the surgeons make really silly errors like leave utensils inside of people and sew them back up or bits of gauze and but the big reason that people commit suicide after gastric band surgery is that the reason they were overeating was probably because of an underlying emotional issue yeah that's how they were using the food as medicine bingo and they still have the underlying issue but they're no longer able to use the food yeah so yeah same thing with the phone right what is the phone using the chest and spreads baby yeah being there to distract you from what so you shouldn't get a gastric band fitted i guess i wonder what surely can you chat gpt jared gastric band surgery what's been the impact of glps on gastric band surgery that's the whaling industry literally yes hey very good that's gone very good that's gone yeah jimmy when you're so quick is it algorithmic or is it like is it like a sort of algorithm in your brain which insert topic you know where to go or is it intuitive what's the say you're say you're roasting somebody i mean you don't even know no i don't even think of it as being quick it's often that thing of like i'll i'll feel like i'm sitting on it for 10 seconds before i say it and the worst person for this is lee mac generally yeah maybe yeah lee mac they often have to put a thing into the edit and add a pause before he says the line because he's just like plows through it he's like it's so quick it's it's yeah it's amazing i had a question uh i had a question it's actually it's about position do you know who the biggest comedian on youtube is and i'll give you a i won't give you a clue he's actually four times bigger than every single other comedian well it ain't me is it matt rife no right i'm trying to think about 40 million 40 million subscribers you'll all know him are they very well first i don't understand the question no no i've i've i've done this little question no no i i'd go rowan atkinson bang on no way mr bean yeah much bigger and i feel like there's so i teach i teach advertising and they're like within the mr bean is the the silent comic of say 21st century and i think um he has he has the best position this is like the charlie chaplin of his day if you want if you want to get stuck in the mind you want to get an idea stuck in the mind what is positioning like what do you mean a position i would say is the space you own in the customer's mind like real estate so say you've a picture like um picture like 100 filing cabinets or hundreds of thousands of filing cabinets in your head and they've all got labels written on them so if we were playing this with chocolate bars like chocolate bar for when you're hungry best-selling chocolate bar in the world would be snickers snickers it's the best chocolate bar in the world yeah for a break would be kit kat yeah sure and then you'd go you take this to comedy um a good example would be like english family-friendly comedian bring the whole family see okay kakay mcintyre they own that space and then you've got like don't take the whole family don't sit in the front row especially if you're english right yeah um i was thinking frankie boyle or you've got read by guardian readers um almost too clever for punch lines go on steward lee steward lee great that kind of what bang on it's like it's the real estate you own and i i think it's so sorry to take mr beast he is the the only like most famous silent comedian and oh sorry mr bean mr bean very very different people um you know the rowan atkinson story about italy no so when rowan was first doing um uh mr bean he uh he's a big car enthusiast and he likes to take a holiday so he basically carved out italy on the sales of mr bean and said don't sell it in italy and then what's crazy we can sell it to tv channels all over italy he went no no i don't want to sell it to italy and then why not he went so i'll go on holiday so for the first 10 years of mr bean it wasn't available in italy that's greatness and then and then after like 10 years and they translated it and they put it on in italy and it's the biggest show in italy ruined his holidays yeah it's ruined his holidays really what must have been fascinating i wonder how many americans know what mr he did a movie right mr bean i think people do know i think kids know and it's a it's that silent comedy thing it like shines through that must be great for an international audience exactly i think that is the point in one it's why charlie chaplin was so universal because you didn't he didn't speak and then so i think movies started movies then had this kind of crossover period of like i can now talk but if i talk i've kind of ruined what i've done for all these years so i can't remember the film i think it's called the the something or other and it ends and the only words charlie chaplin ever asked is a gibberish and that's kind of how like his final silent movie ends and it's just this perfect end to it to a film um how would you say like how do you about fixing your position what do you mean well i i so there's there's two things here there's like a position is the space you own in the in the customer's mind so jimmy's pretty like you know you go to a jimmy car gig you're going to get roasted there's going to be stag do's and now it's a little bit deeper but you know what you get there's like a situation which you you would attend a a a gig for um i suppose then there's something called positioning which is how you organize the customer's mind so i think stewart lee is a funny example of this like when stewart lee i think he retired from comedy in 1999 and he had a good career he was a very good career he won an award at hackney prize or something like this and then he starts writing tv shows like radio 4 and whatnot and he returns to comedy in 2001 and then i i saw stewart lee um live like four years ago and it was really good and stewart lee's kind of repositioned to the competition and like very implicitly well actually not so implicitly his set design was was 1p um dvds from like modern english comics and he did lots of impressions of russell howard i think basically lee's repositioning is like is like very much us versus them so there's three different ways in which you can be first you can be only or you can be against and and stewart lee is very much against like he kind of pops like michael mcintyre peter k russell howard james corden in this little box uh you picture that being the mind and then and then that's mainstream or that's like laugh a minute and then there's stewart lee who and he and he isn't punchline he's like you know almost too clever for the punchline who else does like against like who else has positioned himself or what else has positioned himself against so i think i think trump's a pretty obvious example of that but also even like coca-cola launched in i think 1986 liquid death yeah liquid death i would yeah liquid death pepsi versus coke you know because you almost create uh you almost create the you know the dave foster wallace line of the fish can't see the water with like liquid death you almost didn't even think about plastic water bottles because everything was plastic and then you suddenly create oh no here's the water and here's the lap like you're creating something against that people don't even realize you could be against yeah i i think i what do i think um i think be against is probably see it more and more these days as the world gets slightly more polarized i don't know i don't know i i mean i don't love it in comedy because i think it's kind of the narcissism of small differences we're all doing the same job all trying to make people laugh and it seems that there's there's a there's a lovely camaraderie in that that's that you're kind of missing out on you're kind of punching against i mean does jealousy come with a lot in in comedy i don't think it should but i think it does occasionally i think there's that thing where for me comedy has never been about that because it's not like being an actor where you go look there's one guy bond right there's one actor that's going to be announced as the new james bond and none of the others are going to be and that's that must be heartbreaking for them you can do the stand on monday it doesn't mean that the other guy can't do the stand on thursday you can play the theater you can you can pack out the o2 for five nights but then you're still there someone else can play it the next night and it's it's also that thing of like the more people that go and see live comedy and enjoy the experience it's like it's kind of like the early days of rock and roll you go yeah the more people that go the more people that want to go and if they have a great experience yeah you want to grow the pie and you won't be and the idea that you go well there's different people that you like more or less but everyone's kind of doing the same it's the same intention certainly when it comes to content online i think that the uh against for balance is actually skewed in against i think there are more people producing critiques via content about for content than there is for content like which would be relatively right i mean you know in some industries there's more writing about football than there are people playing football but there's far more people paying attention to the playing of the football than the critique of the foot it spreads so much more uh fast like being critical of something is incredibly memetic being for something is actually quite anti-memetic so james element james what was the company that was slandering element do you remember um that james is doing the lawsuit against fuck not tides yeah uh the ai health checking app i don't know if you've heard of it i don't know if you've heard of it i don't know if you've heard of it i don't know if you've heard of it yeah like waves or something slandering them with a load of fake information they've got millions of views it was completely like the guys butchered all of the studies all the claims that he was making but then the apology gets like a few thousand views yeah and it's like the disparity between that we was looking at somebody where there's this essay writer and you can see this a lot with people that become these professional critics where they'll have a piece that attacks a chris or attacks somebody and he has to be a pirate but then you click on it and you scroll back and you go oh they've been doing this critique thing for a while and you go you see when the moment they once did it everything spiked but if you go back further it was just in the void it was always optimistic or or slightly creative content that wasn't working and then this thing started to work it's quite sad yeah everybody against something is once a hopeless romantic for a person that was for something yeah it's like in politics i'm really frustrated with political political opinions just constantly being these things i think in uk politics right now like what are you actually for i think is a really it's an unanswered question like you look at all the parties and they just love to sort of disagree with each other and they don't love to actually stand on a you know a table and have their own opinion but 2012 was the year where most people voted not for the opposition as opposed to for their own party that was the year in america where most votes were protest votes i am not voting for the person i don't like as opposed to anyone for the person that i do like yeah i've been creating a lot of the bots where controversial and one of the bots i want to create on twitter is whenever you have like a cynic or somebody where it's just quote tweaking having a go at playing everything it's just this dossier thing that then records them of you sense that you should be following a different path a more ambitious one you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you and that's some like it's the perfect cynical line for the same oh man that's heavy yeah i didn't it feels to me like there's a kind of bank account that you're supposed to pay into or withdraw from and if you find that you're critiquing more than creating you're kind of in negative equity you're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're putting things into it i've had this conversation with uh eric weinstein about like an experts only mentality where a lot of people believe oh the only way that you're allowed to talk on this topic is if you're of the requisite qualifications and this sort of esteemed history behind you but the reason the enforcement mechanism of that is people on the internet they're going to call you out for i see he doesn't actually fully understand what he means by dna are recombinant you're like i remember that that just means that nobody can ever get to play with ideas publicly and everyone begins to be on tenterhooks and they're worried about maybe i'm gonna say something that's going to get me rumbled like i don't know it doesn't create The, what is it? oxford manor the ability to play gracefully with ideas we've very much lost the oxford manor the ability to say ah like i i see i see what you were trying to get out there and you look you've made some some errors of this side but i think it's kind of it's interesting even if you're wrong about what you talked about it's it's cool that you're trying to apply something from your industry to one that is new or is novel to you so yeah i think that's your podcast though chris like why it works it's because it genuinely seems to fill that space of like it's okay to not have things completely worked out and we're going to work that out together like that's what i think a lot of your conversations are i think that's a good summary yeah how to understand yourself and the world around you has kind of always been the summer and also to have there's a person in front of me or a bunch of people in front of me like how do i make them look as good as possible i'm going to try and draw out of them the best version of them as opposed to the opposite there's far more people on the internet you're going to try and draw out of them the best version of them as opposed to the opposite that are good at doing critique take downs and breakdowns than i am but i'm pretty good at going okay what where's some as my dad would say a streak of piss in a pile of shit sometimes or you know like silver lining and how do you do that like how do you think silver lining is maybe a nicer expression i think i think like i think we're workshopping writing today i think maybe dad you didn't win that one um i don't know just look i i understand i think i tend to try and give it the doubt as best i can i tend to try and yes and their ideas as opposed to no but their ideas stress test them in a way as you were talking about intent versus content yeah hey what what do you mean by that i'm not saying it because i'm trying to trip you up i'm trying to be i'm trying to get you to strengthen your own argument by drawing out an area it feels a little bit sometimes you're having a really good conversation it feels like running your hand across the top of the membrane and everything's kind of smooth and then you feel a little divot in something and of what was being said there just felt a little bit off oh that's because there's a you you made it you said a word that i didn't understand or there's a premise that i didn't feel was fully fleshed out or you made this claim and i didn't really understand how it linked back to what we were talking about before and that's the moment where it kind of breaches the threshold of me just sitting and nodding along and listening and then we go oh can i just what do you mean by that can i ask you it's quite a hard question but we had always five rules of writing and i what would your five rules of communication be oh that's good um speak precisely whenever possible which is not using more or fewer words than are needed it's never bad to ask the question why then sort of what do you mean by that why what do you mean like those little moments i think allow people to dig deeper um i like it when you say you say like it's very quite infrequent but you go say more yeah say more like just dig give someone and you know that they've got more yeah just give them a little a little it's permission they're being polite in the podcast and going i don't want to say too much here i feel like i'm i'm monologuing and you go no no yeah yeah and you that permission is great um so that's yes ending uh what else would i say using silence is probably one of the best tools so just shutting the fuck up and giving the room space to breathe and okay well actually oh there we go it was just a half step off from the next insight that you wanted to give out there and you're not making somebody rush you know you're not sort of driving them through it uh those would be some those would be some i think that talking is the best example that the 10 000 hour rule is a load of nonsense because everybody has done 10 000 hours yet it doesn't seem to not everybody's a world-class conversationalist but again very very um precise practice i mean me and you had this idea a long time ago one of our prescriptions was if you want communication have a fake podcast with a friend where you put your phone down on record once a week for half an hour phones out of the room you don't need to publish it you don't need to put it anywhere listen back to it listen to your verbal takes and the flow of your conversation and how you talk over each other or how you actually give them a little bit oh i quite like the way that if you really really really want to do it but the easiest way to do it is to actually have a project like somebody who thinks i want to become funnier will take so much longer to become funny than somebody who has to step on stage and have all of the pressure of an audience someone that goes i improve my writing you're so good at writing how do i improve my writing you go are you writing for anything are you publishing anything at the moment no well you don't have the pressure of developing your writing skill oh you you've done really well with your communication are you part of a project that requires you to communicate with enough pressure and scrutiny that means that you need to hone the skill and if not i think this is like it's homozy's thing of like going it's the optionality people want to get like the action perfection ratio is all wrong people want to get kind of brilliant at something before they even start and to have a perfect record and i love the idea of like just being messy just having a messy start trying something like you don't talk about jokes you just try them that's the problem though what we were talking about while you're out of the room uh the experts own the idea that eric weinstein has an issue with and i think i agree with too which is if you're not allowed to use the oxford manner to play gracefully with ideas you're always going to get sniped at especially early on well that's you know that's stupid like how can you the early stages of anybody's work tend to be scrutinized not with the amount of discount that it should have and i think it causes people to they get worried they're like fuck like what if i and isn't it ironic that a lot of the current uh expert classes built off some anti-expert at one point that went against it how so well you go if you go back through most of science um a lot of galileo going against the catholic church who were the expertise at the time was uh remarkably unpopular yeah conformity is a coffin and heresy is a cradle yeah it's interesting i've told you that story about copernicus right about the fact that he had the same insight as uh galileo 100 years earlier and sort of squeaked it out on his deathbed he had this great work de la revolution of us and uh he was worried about ire from the church so i had the same heliocentric like learning it took a full century to do the next one and you might say well you know stupid copernicus he should have said he should have shouted from the rooftops but galileo was forced to recant kept under house arrest for the rest of his life like nearly killed it his treatment justifies the silence of the guy that came 100 years before it's the first uh the first humiliation you familiar with that three humiliations so copernicus was the first we're not the center of the universe darwin was the second we're no different to the animals and then um freud was the third we're not even in control of our minds and then the fourth is ai we're no longer the smartest thing just kind of i mean it's not that humiliating i can live with it well when we when you've created it i think there's a degree of all of us feeling like we can't that's why yeah we did it we did it guys we did it some jimmy car bullshit will be in the corpus that it's been dreamed of right yeah yeah it's it's it's interesting that thing of the um yeah that kind of next step if we get to it if there's a abundance in the future it'd be amazing we're already there we're already here right it's already pretty bloody abundant this is your indomitable optimism coming through i'm a very optimistic long term short term there will be problems well we i always use the example of my morning routine so right my morning routine which everyone's dying to know it's gonna get up to max morning routine sure sure um i don't you had your one with mike thirst in the gut oh yeah my four-year-old quick clip about a four-year-old's morning routine yeah um my morning routine is i woke up this morning on a bed i had a hot shower and i brushed my teeth okay which sounds not that impressive but uh it's emperor augustus the emperor of rome slept on a sack of straw um mary antoinette who was the going to be the future queen of france at the time as she was wandering around her palace of versailles they they used to throw their sewage out of windows because they didn't have toilets it landed on her head um it's even like the air conditioning which they think about president garfield who was the president in the late 1800s when he got shot because his body was overheating they had to get 500 000 cubes of ice to blow over him because they didn't have anything near air conditioning i think king gloomy's mouth rotted from the inside as well because he can so even when you look at it's the david foster wallace thing we're already in we're already in post-abundance he's just gonna potentially keep accelerating more and more but when people get there they won't think about it and we were having this argument the other day he was trying to talk about how uh we should de-accelerate or potentially pause things and it's that deutsch line of even the united kingdom is a uh artificial concept and you think about it like the hunter-gatherers wouldn't have been able to live in the united king who would have died on a cold winter night uh from the cop from the cop so we're already living on mars yeah mate you're we're already living on mars it's but what i mean is when people talk about terraforming mars we've already terraformed the earth we're already living in unlivable places that's the human thing today wander around bolton man like how do you feel about that harry i i feel like me and george disagree on most things in life agree on the most important stuff i'm disagreeing everything else we were talking about death the other day george is very pro living for a long time and i don't i'm not pro living for that oh yeah this whole we had this debate while watching the england game is this the the who's the guy brian johnson that wants to live forever kind of yeah if i tell me what's a good age well i think what's a good thing where you got you got problems to solve and you have um uh dilemmas that you just have to live with and death is the big one right death is in the in the muslims uh they call it the certainty and i think you have to just make peace with it like it's going to happen at some stage you don't get to choose when you just you don't get to uh choose how long your life is but the but the depth and quality you can have a big effect on uh and that's that's where you should spend your time i mean i think that thing about it's it's absolutely inevitable and the idea that these crazy whatever this guy trying to live forever george wants to live until the heat death of the universe yeah i want to keep going baby well there's the live forever or immortal which is just ridiculous because at a certain point you have the heat death of the universe but for living to 150 that much significantly different than living to 80 i did this uh research once with claude where i was looking at if you have everybody ever to live today the average age and then you had everybody ever to live ever the average age when they died the average age of that room would be 15 so we were already way past and i used the example the example i thought of the other day was my dog this beautiful little bernadette or barkley apparently it makes me sad that 10 years from now he's probably gonna die if i can take a dog's life from 12 to 24 is that bad it sounds like a terrific thing so what's the problem of going from 80 to 160 years old for a human i agree forever is a completely different concept and that's a very vague language but is 150 or 200 a necessary bad idea because we're already not dying at 15 we're all dining with the devil and it just depends how long you're sputness so like i'm not saying 120 whatnot but like where does this where where does this end i also don't feel like it's our universe to roam for that long you know i feel like i feel like the old must make way for the new man like there should be a there should be a new george mac sat in that seat i you got 10 more years of podcasting and i think bring in the new george mac let's get some let's get some new insights like there should be a new jimmy should be taken out the back of the shed well there is that thing where you go people are very scared of death there's a there's a great mark twain said i i wasn't alive for 10 billion years and i'm not going to die i'm not going to before my birth and it didn't inconvenience me in the least kind of go yeah it's just you go back to the same thing we're in this brief shaft of light between two oceans of darkness and you've got 4 000 weeks what are you going to do with it you know i think that thing about it is kind of a it does set the clock of going here what am i going to do and i think if you live if you're talking about 160 years i think there's a there's a manana to that of kind of going well you don't have to do anything now and actually the the sense of urgency that you have i think it's quite it's kind of a rush of blood to the head 100 so so right now i i i don't even know where to start like i think i think um you live to 100 i mean 160 you live to 260 how that's how many wives you haven't sorry just just be let's just get down to the great they're not living in the first place that you go to it's also it's also how many kids like you have your kids they have their kids and at some point there's like a deep heartbreak he's gonna it's a really deep heartbreak go back to the dog argument and talk about why going from 12 to 24 would be the worst thing for a dog you're not trying to extend the dog's life you're trying to extend your own life and i do feel like like like what about the lions out here are we still going to be killing the cows you know is there going to be enough meat to fill these new humans who are just now powering on to 500 well that's kind of interesting when you talk about like you know we're talking about problems in the world and you talk about uh the environmental crisis that's going on now are you aware of like the uh the late 60s there was a book written that was about how over population everyone was going to starve and it was going to be kind of a mad max scenario is that malfusiasm where i got that wrong yeah malfusian trap is when you have a growing population without resources that can support yeah so they they thought that we were going to run out of food and basically two bits of um technology happened at the same time so they figured out how to kind of uh gm wheat and grain and they also found out how to do it with rice as well and they they increased productivity by like 4x in that time and basically we can sustain a huge number of people because they worked out basically there's not enough land to support four billion people and now we're in a situation where we're in a situation where we're in a situation where we're eight billion and we're fine it's really interesting like how problems change they also thought there was going to be a new ice age in the 70s it's not that long ago the 70s and and now it's kind of all worried about the heat it's weird how it kind of changes over time well hopefully we're sort of one step ahead and we solve it isn't there a a roman port that's like a hundred miles off the coast from where the the coast used to be i'm pretty sure that because there was uh an ice age not that long ago and during the roman empire the entire climate was was significantly different but their ability to invade the uk was facilitated by the fact that here it is once a major coastal port and likely the landing area for the roman invasion of ad 43 is now about two miles inland because the wantson channel suited up or silted up interesting anyway romans mate we got to the romans this is what men are meant to do every two hours reference the romans i've been thinking about it the whole simple question who do you want to be the next prime minister of england assuming there's no like they can be they want to be anyone in the world you could you could you could ship them in at ala that's good dominic cummings he had to go he had to go and i think the thing would be you didn't ask who do i think could get elected okay but the mics i'm gonna you got me talking right mr cummings um i think he's really competent and and not that likable and i feel like there's a little kind of like what you want in in a leader is really competent while also being kind of likable okay what was kia starmer neither man i mean he's gone now but i don't think anyone's going to forget keith starmer in a hurry lee kuan yew lee kuan yew would be good lee kuan yew is really interesting because that that kind of singapore example there's a guy called roger bootle um who's a brilliant economist and a great writer uh he's a great economist and a i know him a little bit and i think if you look at roger bootle's kind of assessment of what britain needs it's a really good checklist of what like he says there's no silver bullet there's no big solution that changes everything and he gives these eight examples from around the world of like where extraordinary things have happened and countries have turned themselves around so from post-war germany to post-war france to south korea north korea uh singapore all of these different examples of that how did those economic miracles happen how did people get from uh the poor circumstance to abundance and it's it's brilliant because it's like it's lots of little things done right i think he'd be a great guy to have in charge and can he talk does he can talk he's he's uh very likable and his thing is like it's not really about the uh he's a big fan of the um the singaporean dude uh but he's not really about like uh charisma in the leader it's more about okay these are the things that you need to do these are the priorities that a country needs what gdp is for you need to know what what are you doing this for why do you need this to be what's the what's the purpose of this nation what's the point of it and that's he's very good on that stuff who do you want harry my so i talked about yesterday i genuinely the girl i'm dating i think would be a good pick um keep her busy right bro bring your fucking chick to work day that's who i'd pick right like right here right now i bet she's american so i'm not sure how they would go down bring your chick to work day this is this is what's happening you're gonna implant your lady at the top of the country what is she doing currently uh applied theater applied theater yep she's the one for the job it's gotta be isn't it yeah fine sold judge don't dominic cummings are you in cards okay who do you want he's an old he's an old like cummings is like that old labrador you know he's been around the track like i i think fresh energy jimmy my if i if i said i'd like mr car to lead us into the next century what would you say i i'd say that we've we made a mistake in the early 80s and we shut down all of the asylums and now the crazy people are just wandering around no i think i i i don't know if you're familiar with uh recent american history but game show hosts have become politicians recently i'm not always with stellar results so two shots you'd give it to the england manager it seems to be working at the national team level currently as we're recording this that's not a bad shot or you could put gareth given that he's got the given that he's got the job free all right boys let's bring this one home i appreciate you all thank you for joining us thank you it's really fun goodbye my beauties see ya