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Joe Rogan podcast.
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Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.
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Train my day. Joe Rogan podcast.
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By night, all day. I'm. I'm rehydrating, having. Well, I think I got it from this show, the sauna cold plunge thing.
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I bet you did.
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I'm so into it.
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That's awesome.
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So addicted to it. I got, like, the.
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Changes your life.
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It really does. It's like. It's that dopamine for, like.
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You're changing my life by crushing this liquid IV in the most bizarre way possible.
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B
I don't know. It's like somehow it's all smushed up.
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A
Yeah, it's humidity.
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All right.
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Well, it probably got a little humidity in there. It needs one of them little packets you get in the chips that you always accidentally bite.
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B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
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You know those little things they put in there to, like, absorb humidity?
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Yeah.
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I don't know. I think that's what they're for, right?
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Yeah.
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They absorb humidity. Is that what they do? Maybe they provide it. Do they provide humidity? What are they doing?
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The. I did the. I'm now staying in. Not exclusively, but, like, I'm. My hotel choice. I'm solving for places with sauna cold plunge. So I can kind of do that in the morning and feel alive.
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There's a lot more of those now.
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Well, it's. It's great. And then. But you travel the world. I travel everywhere, yeah. So I was in, like, Vienna. They've got this incredible facility, and I went. And it's like, you know, it's an amazing sauna, amazing cold plunge. So I get in there. I'm having a great time. A guy walks in and I get told off for wearing shorts because I got swim shorts on, and it's Austria, and they like to sauna naked.
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They want to look at your.
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They want to check it out. Okay. And now I've got no problem with that in the sauna. I've got zero problem in the sauna. I tell you where the problem comes post cold plunge.
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Yeah.
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That is some baby dick.
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You know where the real problem comes? Aggressive gay men in saunas. Yeah.
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I mean, there was very little of that going on, I think.
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Well, most of the time.
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But that's. I think saunas had that reputation for.
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I've seen it, like, in. I've had a guy do it to me.
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Oh, really?
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Yeah. A guy looked me in the eye and take his robe and, like, open up his towel while he's staring at me.
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Is there more to this story? Where does this. No, that Feels like.
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No.
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Okay. Yeah.
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There's no more to the story.
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Is the guy okay, Joe?
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Yeah, I didn't hurt him. I don't think I even said anything to him. I just went like this and then just didn't look at him. And then within three minutes, he put his towel back on and walked out, left, like, so he was fishing. And that's how I met Line out there. That's how I met your mother.
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And that is how I met Tony Hinchcliffe. That's the origination story.
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Yeah, it was. It was insulting because he wasn't even a handsome gentleman, you know? Well, I mean, a good looking guy.
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You're not in that business.
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Not in that business.
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You're not in that business. You don't know.
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I don't know. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of bears out there. A lot of guys are into the big guys, you know, they're into big, big fat, hairy guys. That's a thing, right?
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Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.
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This guy wasn't even that. He wasn't even a bear.
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You see something? You're disappointed that the guy that hit on you wasn't attractive.
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I've only had a few times in my life where men have aggressively hit on me. And both of them have been disappointing. 2. Two ones in recent memory that I can remember. Not recent memory, like within, you know, as an adult.
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In. In saunas. In.
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Well, one in a bar and one in the sauna.
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Okay, so in the bar. So how did you know the guy was hitting on you?
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I knew the guy, he's a gay guy, and he just was getting drunk and then he started getting silly, but he got a little handsy, you know, like, kept touching me and I was like, you need to stop doing that or you're gonna get hurt. Stop touching me. It just makes you realize, like, what it's like to be a woman and. But way worse. I think it's way, way worse.
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I think it's very good for empathy to have that experience. To have a guy aggressively, drunkenly hit on you. Yeah. And to know what it's like. I often think, like, being a bit famous, you kind of know what it's like to be a very attractive woman.
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Yeah, but you don't, because you're not as vulnerable and no one's trying to stick their dick inside you.
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I mean, in terms of. You have predictable conversations.
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That's true.
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I think. I often think, like, bullshitted. Yeah. Super attractive women have the same conversation with people over and over again. And you blame them for being boring.
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Right.
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Where are you going?
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Hey, you come around here a lot. What's going on?
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Yeah, it's the same conversation again and again and again.
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Yeah, we think.
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Like, I always noticed that my friend Roisin Connaughty pointed this out to me. She said really, really attractive people, like gorgeous supermodels, speak very, very slowly because no one has ever interrupted them. Like, I speak quick because I'm rocking this. I go quick. Come on, let's get something going here. Come on.
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Yeah, that's actually a very good point. Right. And also, you probably value your opinion way too highly because no one would ever question your ability to form a sentence or to figure something out because they want to have sex with you.
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Yeah. So this is. This is how horoscopes got big. Incredibly attractive women spoke about their horoscope, and no one went, this sounds like some bullshit.
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A
It's interesting he burnt that up. Because I was just watching the Danny Jones podcast today, and he had my friend Hamilton Morris on, who's been on this podcast a few times, and they were talking about the Reagan administration and about how the war on drugs really got started. Like, this is your brain on drugs. All that stuff. Nancy Reagan's pet project. And it was. Cause Nancy Reagan, according to Hamilton. And he's got. He's very.
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B
I've heard this. She had, like, a guru, didn't she?
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Yes, but this is where it started. She was mocked for being, like, this frivolous person who was the wife of the president. And Hamilton sort of relates it to the way Melania Trump gets mocked. And, you know, she apparently famously spent, like, an insane amount of money on new China for the White House. Like, new silverware in China. And China.
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That's how we pronounce. Yeah, but that's how we pronounce it.
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China.
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China. In the Trump household. China.
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But it was. You know, it wasn't a Trump household back then. Reagan. That's a terrible Reagan impression. But so anyway, she went to her psychic, slash, whatever it is, astrologer, slash, whatever this kooky person is, and they gave good advice. They said, you got to do something to distract it, so you have to have a cause. And so her cause became the war on drugs. Her cause became just say no.
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Right. I mean, did that work out well? I forget. How'd the war on drugs go? How are we doing?
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Not just that well. Hamilton points out how many people were arrested and how many lives were destroyed because of this decision by this one woman who was the wife of the president who was trying to cover her ass. Cause she was looking silly in the press.
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I got crazy drug views. Do you want to hear my drug views?
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I would love to hear your drugs.
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Okay. Marijuana specifically. I think marijuana should be illegal for the under 30s. I think it should be legal 30 to 50, and then I think over 50 mandatory.
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That's not a bad. I don't like the under 30. But in all defense, I did not start smoking marijuana until I became 30.
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Well, I think it's that thing of like there's performance enhancing drugs, right? And then there's. And there's lots of them. I mean, testosterone is probably the biggest and the best, right?
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Oh, there's way better ones than testosterone.
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Well, but testosterone in terms of the world, like, if you look at the world like, people often quote the fact that most of the biggest CEOs in the world are male. Yeah. But also 95% of the prison population is male. Because what testosterone gives you is it's risk. It's the chemical for risk. So people take high risk, so they end up with all the rewards. But also destitute with how much your.
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B
I never knew that.
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Yeah. Women that are forced to take care of themselves and forced to make all the money and run the household and take care of the children, their testosterone naturally rises. Also, women have more testosterone than they do estrogen.
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B
That's interesting. Isn't it wild?
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Yeah. I never knew that until. I forget who, who said it. I was like, that's kind of crazy.
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B
But it's that thing of like, you know, for young women, if you're talking to young women, like, what would the advice be? And it's like, because young men take risks.
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Right?
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Right. But young women tend not to take the same risks. But maybe if you do more calculated risks, kind of levels the playing field a little bit.
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Playing field for what game?
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Well, I suppose career, for what choices you make in life.
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I think. I wonder how much crossover there is between women's decisions, career paths and men's. Like, how often are women actually competing with. Obviously they do, but how often? You know what I mean? Like, if. If there wasn't any societal pressure for a woman to be a career woman and a boss girl, you know, because there's a lot of that. There's like, pressure to like, show that you're as good as everyone else who's also doing this. And, you know, Sally is a CEO. You should be a CEO too. And there's a lot of pressure. But if you just let them decide their own path, how much crossover there would there be with men and women?
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I don't know. I mean, I read a lot of. It's like Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, these kind of great feminist writers, and they often sort of talk about this thing of like going. We talk about one stage of feminism above, and there's three. There's like, there's the. There's the maiden, which is, you know, the young woman out for a career who can do just as they can do anything a man can do. Right? Absolutely. And then there's motherhood, which a man cannot compete. But feminism doesn't really talk about motherhood that. That much. It's like it's become almost like a right wing thing to like celebrate motherhood. Right. And then there's the. What they call the crone, the older woman, postmenopausal, who's absolutely pivotal in our society. If you think about anyone having a crisis, just a woman comes from nowhere, in her 50s or 60s, and makes you a cup of tea and takes care of you. It's like, it's an incredibly. That grandmother figure is so important in our culture. In our society. And it's not celebrated enough, I don't think.
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No. Well, I had a bit in one of my specials back in the day about my mom. My mom actually did say this. She voted for Hillary Clinton because she said, you know, I just want a woman to be president. And I said, you already make all the people. Like, you make all the people. There's 8 billion people, all of them made by woman. I go, you want to be president, too, you fucking greedy bitch. I'm like, what else? You want all the money? You want all. You want a bigger dick? Like, what do you want? You want everything. We don't celebrate the craziest thing, which is women make human life. Without them, it is not possible for any of us to be here. And that is almost, like, inconsequential. It's like, you're not even.
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We don't even. We don't even talk about it. And the sacrifice made the.
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I know. Thank you for your service. We really should say that to every mom. Thank you for your service. You're making humans, especially if you're doing a great job.
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Yeah.
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If you're a solid mom. That's amazing. It's an amazing.
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If you're a solid mom. Think about it. The best dad in the world is what? It's a mediocre mom.
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Yeah.
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Like. Like, if I take my kids to the playground, it's like, oh, fantastic. If mom does it, it's kind of expected. It's already factored in.
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Yeah. It is a weird thing, right, that. That's not really celebrated in society because any of us that have had good moms, and not most importantly, if you have friends that have evil mothers. We were talking about a story we read on here the other day.
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Oh.
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Where this young girl was being, like, brutally stalked online and harassed, and it turned out it was her own mother that was doing it.
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Yeah. And it's you. You can't get over the.
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How do you. Psychically, how do you recover? How do you trust anyone for the rest of your life? Your own mother? So it's like there's so many people out there that are just going through so much just with family life that, like, a good mom, a mom that, like, takes care of you. Like, you know, you don't appreciate it because you think it's like, you're supposed to have that. But, my God, that's so important. It's so important.
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I think it's. I think it is.
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Like, we're more impressed with CEOs, which is hilarious.
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It's Nothing. Right. But that thing of, like, being loved unconditionally.
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A
Yeah.
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By your mother. And I was absolutely loved unconditionally by her in such a. A brilliant way. And you go that it kind of gets you to self confidence. Like, you know what self confidence is going to feel like because that's. It's sort of the same feeling.
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Right, right, right. Where you're just accepted. Yeah.
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You're enough. It's not about what you do, or.
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They'Re happy just to see you. Like, here's Jimmy, my Jimmy. Give me a hug. They're so happy to see you. Yeah. That's beautiful. I mean, that's what all human beings want from friendships, from everything. We all just want to be loved and accepted. And then all the other stuff is just lashing out because you weren't loved and accepted enough.
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B
Or it's trying to get that in a weird way.
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A weird way.
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So you're trying to be, you know, you're trying to collect stuff so you get respect and admiration rather than from what you do.
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And then it's like the mean people, like, mean people have always been hurt. There's no mean people that just had nothing but love. Right. Unless there's some. Something psychotic, something broken, like genetically broken.
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I think you get that from having kids as well. Like, when you have kids, you start to see everyone else's. Oh, you used to be a baby, right?
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Absolutely.
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What happened?
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Absolutely. Yeah. Well, some. You got bad information in a bad neighborhood with bad people around you and a lot of crime, and there you are. Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And that's what's always disturbed me the most about people that don't have people that have had good lives, who don't have empathy for the plight of people that are in, like, the total, like, economic, urban struggle.
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B
Wait, I mean, you're preaching to the choir here. I think that thing of, like, gratitude as the mother of all virtues and the idea of going. We don't see how lucky we are because we might see on a surface level, like, of going, oh, you know, I'm lucky because I was. I'm, you know, I'm healthy and, you know, I'm able to write jokes.
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Right.
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But then you don't see the kind of. The layer below that of going, well, I was born with. I think, like, beauty is a really interesting thing. Right. So you see someone and they're born beautiful. Margot Robbie. And what you might go, she's Barbie. She's gorgeous. It's easy for her. But when you look at Oppenheimer, you Don't see. Well, that guy was born with an IQ of 160 and a work ethic. Now, work ethic is heritable, largely heritable, like 70% heritable.
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A
Really?
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Yeah.
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And you don't just develop that?
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No, I don't think so. I think, like, it's. Well, I mean, you develop some of it and, you know, what, what you inherit, what you get in your, you know, your factory settings when you come out, that's what it is. You can only work with the other stuff, so that's the interesting stuff.
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A
But factory settings, you think involve work ethic?
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Yeah, I think so. We'll get. We'll get. He's on it.
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I don't think my own life is a different example.
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B
You think your work ethic is.
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A
I do think. It's just I developed it recognizing that it's valuable, and I think a lot of it I got from martial arts. Something like, my parents didn't have a work ethic. It just. It was. Especially the physical stuff. It was never. No one in my house did anything physical. They didn't know. Didn't do any sports, definitely didn't do any martial arts. It wasn't. Wasn't inherited at all. And then the idea of pushing yourself, well, just. I learned from a young age that if you work harder than everybody else, you get better. It was just like simple math. And then it was also like willpower, rather than. Your willpower is a funny word because it's really just knowing that there's a value in continuing to do things you don't want to do and that there's a process. And it's hard to see the process when you're in the middle of it because it sucks and you're tired and you don't want to keep doing this. It's hard to do. But if you recognize, oh, the more I do that, the better I get. If you're an intelligent person, if you're an objective person who analyzes all the factors that are at play, you go, okay, what is the major factor here in terms of, like, getting better at a thing? Well, the major factor is work. Like, the more work you do and the harder you work and the more intelligent you work, like, the more intensity and the more enthusiasm you have, you just get way better than everybody else.
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B
Well, I've always thought that that's a really interesting thing of how hard you work is important, but what you work on is the most important. Yeah, you know, it's that thing of, like, you were talking about horoscopes something you. It's amazing how much knowledge and information and expert someone can be in. Total horseshit.
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A
Total horseshit. But I think this is where we get back to the Danny Jane Jones podcast. I think there might be something to the original astrology. I think the people that were like really studying constellations and when people were born, I have a feeling that that is some like really ancient civilization knowledge that we just have like echoes of.
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B
You know, when it got. Got kind of famous in our culture was, I think it was a birth of a royal baby in about 1910, something like that.
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A
Really.
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B
And the London Evening Standard had. They'd ran out of things to say about a royal baby. It's cute. It's got, you know, it's got little baby fingers and baby tails.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And they did that. They got. Someone came in and went, oh, you know, it was born here and it's the year of the rat and it's a Virgo and that means with Sagittarius rising. And they wrote the thing and then they realized everyone is kind of self obsessed and wants to read about themselves. So that's. That's the one bit of the newspaper that's about you.
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A
Right.
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B
So naturally people are drawn to that. And it's like cold reading. It's like the way that they word these things. You go, well, that could apply to anyone.
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A
Right. But it does give you a nice chance to focus on you. What about what's gonna happen with me?
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Yes, but what about me?
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The news? Who cares about Beirut? What about me?
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B
Yeah, I think that's the. In the human condition that's going to be a big part.
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A
Of course. Of course. And that's how you sell newspapers. I think the newspaper version of the horoscope is obviously nonsense, at least partially. I shouldn't even say obviously, but I think I have not studied this and I am not committed to this, but I do think the origins, the original origins of astrology were probably based on some sort of an ancient understanding of the different effects that different stars when they're in alignment have on the universe. And I think it's partially. Look, we know that the moon literally makes the tide go in and out. The gravity of the moon affects the water. It makes the tide go in and out to the point where there's a high tide and a low tide mark at the beach.
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B
This is why I'm rehydrating now.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I realize I'm mainly water.
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A
Mainly water. So if we're mainly water, like, how is that not affecting us? Is it. Is it affecting us in some weird way that we don't totally understand?
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B
But the idea that a constellation 100 million light years away could be affecting us seems.
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A
I don't think that's what the idea is. The idea is that there is an infinite number of possibilities in terms of personalities and character traits, and there's an infinite number of factors, that there's genetic factors, there's environmental factors, there's all these different factors. There might be cosmic factors. I don't think it's the primary source of your personality or how you feel about the world, but I think it might be a factor. And I think it was probably much more of a factor when they didn't have light pollution.
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B
I wonder, is it one of these things where it's a really interesting way to think about yourself and analyze yourself? It's almost like I don't have religion, but I can see the benefits of it. I don't think religion works because, like, mass doesn't work because God is happy, but mass works because people come together as a group and they kind of. They meditate and take an hour off. And I sort of think the great mistake. The tradition I'm from is Catholicism.
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Me too.
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B
And the great mistake was, I think, a Vatican II they called it. So Vatican II is where they translated the Latin into whatever your local language was and made it more accessible.
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A
That was like the 1500s, right?
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B
Yeah. And it's such a huge mistake because the idea was to be in awe. It's like going to churches. That should be, like standing in nature, but I think in awe of something. As soon as you translate it and you go left brain and try and make it make sense, it all falls to pieces. But it's not a left brain. Our whole culture is left brain. But it should be about right brain. It should be about the. The. The. The gestalt. The whole thing. The idea of, like, there's a mystery here. And what's that great line? God. God is the name we give to the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it shape.
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A
Ooh, I like that.
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B
I think that's AC DC's roadie said that.
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A
Really?
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's amazing.
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B
But what a piece of wisdom.
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A
Because it's a genius piece of wisdom.
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B
But it is that thing of, like. You can call it whatever you want. You can attach it to, whether it's horoscopes or whatever your religion is. But the idea of going there is a mystery. And even when you get to, you know, physics at the. I mean, I Love it when you have physicists on here. I mean, Eric Weinstein's one of my favorite people in the world. I just think he's a.
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A
He's brilliant. He's a great, great guy too.
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B
Yeah, great guy. And. But you, you look at that and you go. And they get to the big bang and you go, yeah, but what happened four minutes before that? And they go, oh, we don't know. Well, we're back to the mystery then.
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A
Yeah, well, there's no escaping the mystery. Once you get into, like, subatomic particles, like what's going on there.
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B
It's also, do you need religion where you go, okay, a random selection of atoms coalesced into a form that can contemplate its own consciousness and existence for 4,000 weeks. Is that not enough? Will that not do?
- [24:18]
A
No, we need miracles, Jimmy. But when going back to the translation of the Bibles, one of the things I want to say, I think the reason why that was important at the time was because that power was being abused because most people couldn't read Latin.
- [24:32]
B
Most people couldn't read. I mean, really, when you think about reading.
- [24:35]
A
Yes, it was.
- [24:36]
B
The Bible was the reason. The Bible was the bestseller that people went, no, I've got to go out and read a book. I gotta check it out.
- [24:43]
A
It was pivotal event for the Catholic church convening from 1962-65. Oh, so we're talking about a different time. So we're thinking of the Second Vatican. Oh, no, Vatican ii. Is that what you were referring to? So that was 1962. What we're referring to is the 1500s. We're referring to like Martin Luther.
- [25:03]
B
Oh, no, that's the Protestantism. That's the idea of the.
- [25:06]
A
But with the translation of the Bibles into different languages. Yeah, well, the Bible, because it was originally in Latin. Well, it was originally probably in Aramaic.
- [25:16]
B
Yeah. And then the. But the idea of the Protestantism was the idea that you went, you've got your own relationship with God. So it went from being Catholics and Protestants to ultimately, every individual was their own church.
- [25:28]
A
Yeah. Martin Luther Luther's perspective was like, it's open to interpretation by you. You should develop this relationship with God through the word and that you should read. And it wasn't up to the priest to tell you what it meant.
- [25:43]
B
It's fascinating though. There's a law of history. There's one law in history which is unintended consequences. And the consequence of that, of course, is that we over solve for the individual in our culture. Now, Protestantism had Such a huge influence. That's all about the individual and less about the group. And it's got to be a balance of the two.
- [26:05]
A
But it's a response to the power structures that were really detrimental and the power structures of the church. I mean, there's a reason why the priests aren't allowed to have sex, because they were fucking everybody, because they had power.
- [26:16]
B
You know, what happened?
- [26:17]
A
What happened?
- [26:18]
B
Okay, the plague happened. So when the plague happened, it wiped out about a third of the population of Earth. Right. So the plague was huge. Now, it had a much worse effect on the priesthood because everyone got last rites. So when you were dying, you got last rites.
- [26:37]
A
Oh, wow.
- [26:38]
B
So the priesthood was knocked out, like 95% of priests died.
- [26:41]
A
Oh, my God, I didn't even think of that.
- [26:43]
B
The standards, pre the plague, the standards in the church were the smartest guy you've ever met. The smartest guy in the village, the town, the region, was the priest the smartest of the smartest guy, the most intelligent guy became the bishop. And the Pope was like, this guy's a genius. It was the best of the best. The creme de la creme, the standards for the priesthood post the plague. This guy's got all his own teeth. You're in. Like, it went down. And then all that thing of, like, the plenary indulgences where you could buy your way into heaven is all, you know, all of that came off the back of the thing. So the standards kind of went down and then it became kind of corrupted.
- [27:28]
A
How dirty, that one, the buying your way into heaven.
- [27:31]
B
Well, it's, I mean, so dirty. Well, people don't realize that. People often laugh at, like, the, you know, he's going to blow himself up to get 72 virgins. The Crusaders all got a fast track to heaven.
- [27:44]
A
Nice.
- [27:44]
B
Yeah.
- [27:48]
A
Some guy tells you.
- [27:49]
B
Yeah, I've just. I've just discovered this.
- [27:52]
A
Yeah.
- [27:52]
B
Yeah.
- [27:54]
A
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, and she was telling me that there's a list of human beings that are alive today that are being considered for priesthood. Like, they have to think, excuse me, for sainthood.
- [28:08]
B
For sainthood, yeah.
- [28:09]
A
So they have to, like, go over all these different religious figures that are alive currently and decide if they're going.
- [28:17]
B
To be a saint, who's going to be a saint. You know, Christopher Hitchens, the great Christopher Hitchens. Right. Christopher Hitchens, literally. Have you ever heard the phrase the devil's advocate?
- [28:26]
A
Of course.
- [28:27]
B
He had that job. So when Mother Teresa was made a saint by the Catholic Church. They bring someone in when they're making someone a saint in the Catholic Church, in the Vatican, to be the voice of the opposition. And he got the job. He played the devil's advocate for real on Mother Theresa. He wrote a book about it.
- [28:45]
A
I've always wondered about him. Loved the guy. Pissed off. A lot of people got cancer. I hate to be the conspiracy theorist, and at the time.
- [28:55]
B
You hate to be the conspiracy theorist. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with your brand, but you are the conspiracy theorist.
- [29:02]
A
At the time, I was like, wish you didn't smoke and wish you didn't drink. Now I'm like, God, I know a lot of people smoke and drink and they live forever. What the fuck's going on? Why. Why did Christopher Hitchin die so young? But then again, why did Hicks die so young? Hicks died at, like, pancreatic cancer, like 33 or something.
- [29:19]
B
Yeah, I don't think we can relate his death to pissing. No, no, no. Of course, but it's the.
- [29:23]
A
Of course not. But it's fun.
- [29:24]
B
Quite a writer.
- [29:25]
A
Oh, he's genius.
- [29:26]
B
He was so pitch 22. And there's a. There's a book that he wrote about politics. The Letters to a Young Contrarian. Oh, my God. It's like. It's. It's those bits of it's amazing things kind of books. When people write their autobiography and it's like it just. It's a gift. It's just you can. You can feel like you know them well.
- [29:47]
A
You can also, like, imagine what would you do if you were living this person's life. You're going through all the various stages of their life. You're empathizing with them, you're seeing their struggles, you're seeing, you know, their. Whatever they're going through. And you're like, wow, what would I do? Like, wow, that's crazy. Well, that's why he became this way. Oh, wow, that's amazing. And, you know, you learn a lot from other human beings. When they're really open, they really let you in, you know? Which is one of the things, I think, reasons why we detest people that are very manufactured and closed off. Like, you know, the newscaster that you're never gonna. You don't know a damn thing about those people.
- [30:27]
B
You know why this works?
- [30:29]
A
Yeah.
- [30:29]
B
Because you go this format, this. It's lot. There's nowhere to hide. Three hours of conversation. You're gonna talk about what you're going to talk about. It's going to come up and it's this thing of it's authentic, and authenticity is what people crave.
- [30:44]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [30:44]
B
And it's playful. And I think. I mean, okay, this is my big theory on life. I think play is like, we don't stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [30:58]
B
In our job as George Bernard Shaw, I think said it first anyway.
- [31:02]
A
But he's wrong. You get old no matter what. He's full of shit. You're gonna break a hip. Follow that guy's advice. You're gonna fucking roll your ankle for sure.
- [31:10]
B
Yeah. But maybe playing Twister when you're 70, great. That's a good way to break a hip. But that thing of, like, going play is sort of in short supply if you think about what anyone cares about, right? Like, people talk about sports all the time. People talk about concerts and going to see music. People love seeing comedy, and they love this kind of thing. But this is like play, right? We're playing and sports is playing and theater is playing and comedy's playing, and there's not enough play in life. And really, I always think of that thing, like, when I'm performing shows, like, there's an illusion that it's me performing on stage, but actually everyone in the room is performing. It's a performative thing, seeing a show. If you think about when you last saw, I don't know, Bruce Springsteen live, and Bruce Springsteen goes, how y' all doing? And the whole place goes, yeah. If in Starbucks someone goes, how you doing? Yeah, psychotic. You get kicked out, right?
- [32:10]
A
The audience is doing their part.
- [32:11]
B
They're doing their bit. And especially, like in our game, in comedy, it's a. Because the feedback loop, everything is split, tested. Everything is. How do you feel about that? And the. The one audience member know anything about comedy and jokes, get a hundred of them together, genius. They know exactly what's funny, what isn't funny, what's acceptable, where the line is. And you. You're getting that feedback the whole time. So, like, doing comedy, it's not. It's not repetition, it's iteration. It's just that you're getting a constant sort of feedback from these. These people.
- [32:42]
A
It's a magnificent meld, right?
- [32:45]
B
Yeah. And people want it because they want to come out because, you know, it was the. It used to be. Would gather around a fire and do this, right? And then we gathered around the wireless and we talked, and then we gathered around the tv.
- [32:59]
A
That's what you guys called the radio back in England. The wireless.
- [33:02]
B
The wireless that was what it was called.
- [33:03]
A
For real?
- [33:04]
B
Yeah, for real. That was called the wireless.
- [33:05]
A
Wow.
- [33:06]
B
Yeah. And then. You ever heard that? No, it's the wireless rko.
- [33:10]
A
The wireless cellular coverage.
- [33:13]
B
Yeah. And then it's the. But then it's cell phones now and we're alienated. We're more connected and less connected than ever. And then you go out. I was in the mothership last night doing Kill Tony and that audience were like church.
- [33:28]
A
Yeah. Their phone's in a bag. They're not constantly distracted. Yeah, yeah. It's so much better. It's. It's like a lot of people don't like it because they don't like to be disconnected from their. Their little fucking binky, their blanket, whatever it is, their pacifier that they have to carry around with them everywhere.
- [33:43]
B
We did it. We did a thing on holiday where we put our phones in the safe in the morning and then checked it, came back and checked them in the evening. It's getting more difficult because everything, you know, the podcast, you're listening to the music, everything's hooked up to this. The pictures, the camera, everything. But if you can.
- [33:59]
A
Yeah.
- [34:00]
B
Oh, my God, it's so relaxing.
- [34:01]
A
Yeah. I've talked about this before, but I broke my phone once when I was in Hawaii and I had. I was on Lanai, which is a very small island, so I had to order it from Apple and then have it delivered, and it took like three days. So for three glorious days, I had no phone. And it was amazing. I was like, why don't I do this all the time? And then right back to the phone.
- [34:22]
B
Hang on. You showed me just before the show. How many unanswered text messages do you have on your phone?
- [34:26]
A
I'll tell you right now.
- [34:27]
B
Yeah, I think you feel. It feels like you might be disconnected.
- [34:31]
A
Well, I have to be, otherwise I'll go crazy. 610 unanswered messages 610. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. It's important that you take care of yourself physically and mentally, because if you refuse to get help, you're not just hurting yourself, you're hurting the people around you. It can impact your family, friends, you, even your colleagues. And you know, mental health has come a long way. Despite all our progress, though, there's still a stigma. In a recent survey, 26% say they avoided seeking mental health support due to fear of judgment. This Mental Health Awareness month, let's change that. I'm encouraging everyone to take care of their well being and you should too. Therapy is an excellent tool that everyone can benefit from. It teaches valuable skills from how to be more self aware to healthier ways you can express emotions and, and more. If you want to be a better version of yourself, therapy is where it starts. And better help is a great way to get the therapy that you need. They have over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapist. Everything is also entirely online, so it's more affordable and convenient. And if that's still not enough to convince you, maybe this will. Over 5 million people worldwide use better help so you're not alone when it comes to seeking support. We're all better with help. Visit betterhelp.com jre to get 10 off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com jre so I, I just to keep going crazy, you have to be somewhat disconnected. I've gotten good at like compartmentalizing going, yeah, can't talk. Right. I don't want to talk to anybody right now. Just put it aside. And then that creates problems because then you get needy friends. Like everything okay. Like, how come you didn't respond? Like, I got a hundred messages, I can't respond.
- [36:29]
B
Well, you need, sometimes you need peace more than you need attention.
- [36:33]
A
You just gotta know your own brain. You gotta know when you're overloaded. And I know where it is. I know like my overheat switch. I start to sweat. All right, I'm too hot. Turn the AC on. You know what I mean? So I have that sort of same sense in my brain.
- [36:48]
B
I need boredom. I need a little bit of boredom. I had this thing recently thought about. Boredom is unappreciated serenity. Like travel. Like I'm traveling a lot at the moment. I'm on tour. And sometimes you're in an airport and there's nothing much going on. Just chill, just sit.
- [37:06]
A
Yeah.
- [37:07]
B
Let something pop in.
- [37:08]
A
Just sit and live. Yeah. Isn't it interesting? It's like for creative types especially, that's very valuable to be able to have some time. We could just come up with ideas, but instead you just flood them with nonsense. Car accidents, boobs and fast cars. Yeah. Just get just bombarded with overstimulated and very little of it gets in. You know, if I think about like if I listen to a book on tape, like a very interesting book on tape, that's one thing. But if I'm just like doom scrolling, like how much good. How much, like if I spend five hours of just looking at social media and looking at YouTube, what amount of good stuff is in There is there even 20 minutes of really fascinating shit that I absorb in the entire day?
- [37:59]
B
Are you familiar with that, the concept of Lindy books?
- [38:02]
A
Yes.
- [38:03]
B
Like, the idea of, like how long something's been around is how long it's gonna be around. So most stuff on the Internet was produced in the last 24 hours and will be entirely fascina forgotten in 24 hours. No one ever goes, oh, I got to show you my favorite tick tock from two years ago.
- [38:18]
A
Right.
- [38:19]
B
It just doesn't happen.
- [38:20]
A
It's like if they do, they're crazy.
- [38:21]
B
Yeah, it's disposable.
- [38:23]
A
Oh, no, I got to get away from you.
- [38:24]
B
Yeah.
- [38:25]
A
You want to show me old tick tocks you're a psycho.
- [38:27]
B
Yeah, it's like. But it's. That's the nature of it. It's.
- [38:30]
A
Right, right. But like it's Crime and Punishment is not addictive. You know, the book.
- [38:36]
B
Yeah.
- [38:37]
A
You know, but Twitter is.
- [38:39]
B
Yeah.
- [38:40]
A
Fascinating, right? Isn't it fascinating? Like something like very valuable. Some amazing piece of literature is not addictive, you know, I wonder.
- [38:52]
B
Yeah, I wonder with that. I wonder, is it the. That thing of Aldous Huxley, like the idea that brave new world, our power won't be taken from us by some overlords like in 1984. Will give away our power for cheap dopamine. Yeah. And the problem with the world is there's a lot of cheap dopamine on. On offer. So. So, you know, doom scrolling or it's the same as the is in a. In a casino and that. But then there's real joy. If you go out and see live comedy, I think what we. We're drug dealers, right?
- [39:28]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [39:28]
B
And the two drugs, it's dopamine and serotonin. And the dopamine is. You don't quite know where the punchline is coming. You know, there's a punchline, but you don't know quite where it's gonna be. And then there's the serotonin, the joy of laughter as well. And then you can get a fake version online or video games are like a proxy for the career that the kid isn't having.
- [39:47]
A
Right.
- [39:47]
B
There's levels and layers and then a big boss at the end. It couldn't be a clearer analogy. Or porn is a proxy for love and sex. It's like that. We go for the easy option.
- [39:58]
A
Yeah.
- [39:59]
B
But actually when you work for it, it's just better.
- [40:02]
A
Right. The thing is the easy options available instantaneously, like it's very difficult to go fight in war, but you can play Call of Duty right now. You just sit in front of your computer and then you're playing, you know. So this cheap version might keep you from having a life of adventure because it spoon feeds you bullshit versions of reality that are very addictive.
- [40:25]
B
Okay, so back to your work ethic. So the idea that you don't do that, you spend time doing difficult things.
- [40:33]
A
Yeah.
- [40:34]
B
Like the I got the cold plunge thing from listening to you. I was kind of interested in it and kind of chat his friends. I tried it and loved it. But you're putting yourself in a very uncomfortable situation in order for benefits later.
- [40:49]
A
Yes.
- [40:49]
B
It's a kind of a sacrifice you make in the moment for something later.
- [40:52]
A
Yeah.
- [40:53]
B
What. What draws us to that? What makes us do that?
- [40:56]
A
The process. So knowing that other people are completing this process and having positive results and then sort of investing a little bit of time into it, either out of boredom or curiosity or whatever, and then you realize, oh, this is real. Like, this is real in terms of, like, fitness. Like, if you want to start running, you want to run a marathon, you're like, that's impossible. I can't even run around the block. Well, if you run around the block three days in a row, you're gonna get better at running around the block. And if you keep that up for a couple months, you're like, holy shit, I'm getting around this block pretty easy now. And then you start expanding your runs, and the next thing you know, running a couple miles a day, and next thing you know, you're entering into a 5K. And the next thing you know, you're running a half marathon. And then you look back on that day where you couldn't even run around the block and you thought running was impossible. So there's a process and there's a process of improvement, but that process requires you to be uncomfortable. And most people are unwilling to be uncomfortable. So if you are willing to be uncomfortable, you will bypass most human beings in everything you do.
- [41:58]
B
Yeah, it's also. It's that thing of like, we like that prioritizing now.
- [42:03]
A
Yeah.
- [42:03]
B
Seems to be the. If you can prioritize later, if you can sort of Chris Williamson gratification. Yeah. Well, Chris Williamson's got this great thing. We were chatting about it, me and George. Oh, it's amazing.
- [42:14]
A
He's great.
- [42:15]
B
He's the best. But that thing of like, 24 hours ahead, like, we've all got to serve someone, right. In life, you've got. You got to serve. And serving yourself in 24 hours is pretty good. Because it's that thing of, like, booze is the best example, like drinking is. You're borrowing happiness from tomorrow.
- [42:32]
A
Yes.
- [42:33]
B
Right. So that. In a very simple way, you know.
- [42:35]
A
Like, the reason also, it's like predatory credit card rates. Like the kind of rates that you get when you go to college and they give you a credit card, you're a moron. And they get like 39% interest or something like that.
- [42:45]
B
Something crazy. Yeah, yeah.
- [42:46]
A
That's what it's like. It's like you're not just borrowing money. Like your body's like, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna need more. I'm gonna need more than you spent.
- [42:54]
B
Yeah, I find that thing of like the. It's. Whenever I feel anxious or depressed or any of those things, we sort of think it's invariably with me, it's a hardware problem, not a software problem. So it's like, okay, have I slept? Have I exercised? Have I eaten correctly?
- [43:13]
A
It's a good way to put it. Hardware, software.
- [43:15]
B
And then you go, okay, this is a hardware problem. But it's so hard to fix that when you're depressed. It's so hard to, like. It's like, it's all very well for us to go, well, you know, go for a run and do some exercise and have a cold plunge. It's so difficult when you're in that. I'm very empathetic to that state. And I wonder, does it help that we slightly pathologize? You know, in our language we say depressed and anxious, not sad and worried. I mean, I think for some people it's a. Listen, you don't want to be trivialized mental health problems, but you go, sometimes it's just the human condition. We're going to worry about stuff.
- [43:50]
A
Certainly you don't want to trivialize mental health issues. However, you also understand that there's a tremendous benefit to being physically active that is actually better than SSRIs, statistically speaking. So what do you prescribe? Is it better to prescribe drugs, or is it better to be real with a person and say, I know this is uncomfortable, but this is what you're going to have to do. And it sucks, but it sucks for everybody. And everybody has a test in life. And this is your test. Your test in life. You know, your test in life is not to try to win the Super Bowl. Your test in life is try to get up and not eat garbage today and drink a bunch of water and have some exercise. This is your test in life. Yeah, I think it's it's not easy.
- [44:35]
B
It's. Well, the, the issue is that you want to be. I think kindness, right. Is in. Kindness is, it's the most wonderful thing.
- [44:44]
A
It is.
- [44:44]
B
And here's the problem with kindness. There's a lot of kindness in the moment. Like, I've got kids. You've got kids, right. Your kids want, what do they want to do? They want to eat McDonald's and they want to watch TV. But, and you want to be kind in the moment, but you're going to have fat stupid kids.
- [44:59]
A
Of course.
- [45:00]
B
So you, you go, well, let's have some healthy food and let's read some books and let's run around outside. And maybe they don't want to do that now, but you gotta, you gotta be kind to their potential.
- [45:10]
A
Yes.
- [45:11]
B
Not just to that. And then you kind of, obviously you know that it kind of teaches you that. And then you kind of have to apply it to yourself because you go, well, they're not gonna pay attention to what I say. They're just gonna watch what I do.
- [45:22]
A
Sure. But then, you know, individuals that are struggling, you know, the problem is if you don't know them, you don't know like what, what, what are they going through? Is this nonsense or is this like really serious? Like if they had a really fucked up life or are they just really self indulgent and lazy? Like what are we dealing with here? Like what are we dealing with? Are we dealing with like tremendous depression because of like physical and sexual abuse and beatings and violence in the house? Are we dealing with that? Or are we dealing with some kid who their parents doted on them too much and that maybe the parents were super negative, which is very, that is very contagious. Like if you have like very negative family members and then everybody in the family is always complaining. It's always something's wrong and someone did something to them and it's. So yeah, there's no joy.
- [46:16]
B
I don't think no joy in that joy. Maybe you do. I don't think you realize how much you help people like having these conversations on here.
- [46:24]
A
They help me and the people, all of us. We're all human beings, we all go through weird shit just being a person.
- [46:30]
B
Yeah. It's not easy and, but having these conversations and, but I think there's something about you specifically like the martial arts stuff, the, it's a very alpha thing. And then your stand up comedian and very admired by your peers and you can have conversations about this stuff. And I think it really cuts through to a group that wouldn't hear that. I mean, for me, that thing that you're saying there is about, it's about agency and empathy. And I think there's a problem in our society that we give agency to people we don't like and we give empathy to people that we do like. You know, so if there's like a right wing Nazi rally, we say they knew what they were doing, we give them agency, punish them.
- [47:16]
A
Or Elon Musk with the Hitler salute.
- [47:18]
B
Right. Okay. So we say he knew what he was doing. Okay. And then if we really like someone, we give them empathy. And yes, that's a great example. And sympathy. And the issue is we need to give everyone both.
- [47:32]
A
Yes.
- [47:32]
B
Because you go, look, no one is gonna care about you more than you. You need to take responsibility for this and you need to, you know, you know, it's very, very tough because you, you want to be. You want to give that agency and empathy to, to everyone, to give them the tools to have a better life.
- [47:55]
A
Yeah. And the more happy people are, the more happy people there will be. It'll expand. It's not like it's. It's not one plus one equals two. It just, it's exponential. It accelerates the. The more people are happy and enjoying their life, the more you will enjoy your life. And that's just part of a community. It's the natural human reward system that's set up to make sure that we all get along together and we continue to procreate and have a wonderful society until we meld with the machine, which is coming any day now. I hope you're ready.
- [48:26]
B
I don't know. You want to hear my hot take on AI?
- [48:28]
A
I would love to.
- [48:29]
B
All right. My hot take on AI is we were not made in God's image, but we so wanted there to be a God, we made one in our image. So if you think about the attributes of AI it's all knowing, all powerful, can perform miracles. It lives in a cloud. Sorry, is that God or AI?
- [48:51]
A
Wow. Yeah.
- [48:53]
B
It's so at the moment emerging.
- [48:55]
A
It's an emerging God. Well, it's not even done growing yet.
- [48:59]
B
At the moment. It's the oracle of Delphi.
- [49:01]
A
It's like a 10 year old right now, though. It's not even an adult.
- [49:04]
B
Yeah. And then where's it going to? So the idea of, like, the interesting thing about AI is it's the gap between me and. I know who's the smartest guy we know. Eric Weinstein used to be enormous. And the gap is getting Smaller, because AI can just. I can ask it.
- [49:21]
A
Yeah, yeah, bitch, I got all the answers right here.
- [49:24]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's weird what's going on in our. I had a. I had a gag about it, about, you know, like a bit about. In our universities, you know, the students are using AI to write their essays and then the tutors are using AI to mark the essays, and then after three years, AI gets the job. It actually seems very fair.
- [49:42]
A
Yeah. It's probably what's going to happen. That what you're saying is very funny. It's like it is accurate, though. It does seem to resemble a God. Well, I wonder, you know who Marshall McLuhan is.
- [49:54]
B
Of course, the Canadian.
- [49:56]
A
One of the great, great lines of all time. Human beings are the sex organs of the machine world. Yeah.
- [50:05]
B
Oh, I get like tingles.
- [50:07]
A
Yeah, that one gives. And I think that I gave a shortened version of it. I think it's even longer. But it's fascinating because it's so never more true than today. Never more true. Like, if we are really giving birth.
- [50:23]
B
To AI, well, I wonder what will change. I wonder. I'm very optimistic. Right. So 120 years ago, 95% of the population worked in agriculture, and they worked 16 hours a day. And it was a very, very tough life. And then we moved to the cities and we worked in factories and, you know, the unions, they don't get the credit they deserve. They gave us the weekend.
- [50:47]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [50:48]
B
And now we think human beings work five days and we have two days off. That's how. That's the world.
- [50:53]
A
Right.
- [50:54]
B
But it's different. It's changing now. It's like it's going to change again. And we'll look back and go, I mean, we're incredibly privileged that we're born right now.
- [51:05]
A
Here it is. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs in the machine world. As the bee of the plant world enable it to fecundicate and evolve ever new forms. Fecundate. Rather, machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely in providing him with wealth. It's not as eloquent as the organs.
- [51:28]
B
I think I. I think you nailed it, didn't you?
- [51:30]
A
My version of it's a little better.
- [51:31]
B
Come on, Marshall McLuhan.
- [51:32]
A
It's his words. I think we're the electronic caterpillar that's going to become a butterfly. That's what I think. I think we're giving birth to a new form of life. That's what I think We're.
- [51:42]
B
Well, I love that thing with that book, the Beginning of Infinity. I can't get over that.
- [51:47]
A
What book is that? Who wrote that?
- [51:49]
B
It's Beginning Infinity. I think it's David Deutsch and it's the. Can you. Yeah.
- [51:55]
A
What's the beginning of the book?
- [51:57]
B
So the idea of the Beginning of Infinity is that if we can get through this phase in humanity, right, there's been 100 billion people so far. 110 billion. There's 9 billion at the moment. 8 billion. 9 billion. If we can get through this, if we can get off planet, maybe there are trillions of people in the future. Trillions, right. Maybe humanity spreads out across the galaxies in the universe for the next 13 billion years. Like the idea that if we can get through this now, this little phase that we're in, we're having a little bit of difficulty here with a couple of possible problems. And if we can get through it, like the scientific meme, the idea that we've created these machines, but really through science, like, the technology that we have is brilliant. And if we can negotiate, if we can have a little bit of peace.
- [52:54]
A
With the war, if we can avoid.
- [52:56]
B
The war, and really avoiding the war, I think is possible. Here's the take. I think the most incredible piece of technology that we have. I'm very optimistic about the world. Like, you could look at the state of the world and go, it's terrible. But I look at. Like, I look at America, I look at the UK and I look at the footfall. So where do people want to come? Well, they want to come and they want to live here. Right? And what's the most important piece of technology in America? I would argue the Constitution. The Constitution. You sort of don't think of it as a piece of technology, but it really is. And it's allowed all of this.
- [53:34]
A
It's an operating system.
- [53:35]
B
It's a brilliant operating system. And you can prove that culture is downstream of institutions and freedom because you go look at, okay, here's the great examples, right? East and West Germany, north and South Korea, right? Exactly the same people. Exactly the same culturally. And they got this system. They got this system. East and West Germany. You got the Stasi over here, Hell on Earth, North Korea, whatever the fuck is going on there, right? And then you get South Korea. I mean, flourishing, right? Incredible culture. You get West Germany.
- [54:10]
A
Cuba and Miami. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right. 90 miles away.
- [54:16]
B
But, okay, so here's the thing. How many people in the world now? 9 billion? 8 billion? It's a lot.
- [54:20]
A
Something Right.
- [54:21]
B
Half a billion get. Okay, so there's, there's the uk, there's us, there's Canada, there's Australia. Okay. They're all, I mean, ex British colonies. Yeah, yeah, I'll take the win. But, but those institutions, those institutions are set up in a certain way that's allowed a flourishing where people want to come here.
- [54:45]
A
Yeah.
- [54:46]
B
Okay, so either we accept 9 billion people into our countries or we export our institutions. I think we should be writing or coming up with great constitutions for nations that we want to see in the future.
- [55:04]
A
You and I think very much alike. I've said the same thing. I said the thing, the highlight when people are talking about immigration into this country, one of the big ones is, wouldn't you do this if you were in another world? Of course. Of course I would. If I lived in a third world country and I had a chance to make a better life and come to America 100%, I would do it. But the real question is, why is it so bad over there and what can we do to make that better? Instead of bringing them in here to make their lives better, why not make the whole world? It's possible to make the whole. The only problem with that is you lose your cheap labor.
- [55:39]
B
Okay, well, I mean, it's the right wing in America, the idea of going, okay, we're gonna get rid of the southern border to bring in cheap labor is a crazy idea because all we're doing is we're, you know, we outsource. And this problem has been what is was ever thus. George Orwell was once asked, what do you think of the British working classes? And he said, they live in India. He's a smart guy. But you go, that globalization, the idea.
- [56:10]
A
Of going along with tech help.
- [56:11]
B
But it's the idea if we go, we often export our, the things that we're conscious about. So we go, okay, so we're gonna, we, we shut down all the coal mines in the UK and now we import coal. Okay, Is that, I mean, it's better. It's one world we live in.
- [56:28]
A
They're not even under union rules.
- [56:31]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:32]
A
So you're getting like unethically sourced coal.
- [56:34]
B
It's the whole of humanity matters. It's the, it's the. That Derek Parfitz, that brilliant guy who is a philosopher, he wrote this brilliant thing called Reasons and Persons. Brilliant. And it's kind of about that idea that you, you got to care about humanity temporally and spatially. You've got to care about people in the future and you've got to care about people everywhere.
- [56:54]
A
Yeah.
- [56:54]
B
And the idea of you go look, we've got to make the places people are fleeing from livable. And I think we have proved over the last 50 years, regime change is not what we're great at. Right. So it comes down, we're gonna get.
- [57:08]
A
It right one day. One of these days.
- [57:10]
B
Sure.
- [57:10]
A
Just give it a chance.
- [57:11]
B
Sure.
- [57:12]
A
It's like the first car wasn't a good car either, you know, but now we have really good cars. It just takes time, Jimmy.
- [57:18]
B
Sure, sure, sure.
- [57:19]
A
I just need to practice more.
- [57:21]
B
Here's what I think it is. Agency and empathy on a global scale.
- [57:26]
A
Yeah.
- [57:26]
B
So it's like giving those nations that are in horrific trouble and that no one seems to care about agency.
- [57:34]
A
Yeah.
- [57:34]
B
But maybe it's that, that thing of like going the, the American Constitution. I don't know where it was written, but it was like, I think it was like intellectuals from around the world were like chipping in with ideas and they came up with this incredible document. And look at the flourishing that's come out of it. Look at what it's achieved. Like imagine if, imagine if something like that happens in China. Imagine in our lifetime that they go with a different system. And it's more because at the moment China's kind of, you know, it's a covers band, you know, it doesn't. It takes a lot of intellectual property and it has its own version of Facebook and its own version of Google and its own version of. But it doesn't. What is it about America that allows this entrepreneurial spirit that allowed Silicon Valley to happen?
- [58:23]
A
Well, they've got an interesting approach because they still have a very entrepreneurial spirit as well. They've got a weird sort of merging of communism and capitalism. It's state run capitalism. But they still have insane innovation. China's technological innovation is probably greater than ours in a lot of areas. In the areas of electric vehicles for sure. In the areas of drones for sure. I don't know if you saw this, but there, there was some sort of a mothership drone that they're going to launch. That is this enormous vehicle that can, that drones can launch off of. And.
- [59:06]
B
Okay. I mean this feels like.
- [59:08]
A
Yeah, it's dangerous. It's like they, they have some spectacular drone capabilities and they also have electric cars that if you don't follow these obscure car review people online that review Chinese electric cars, you'd have no idea. These cars are insane. They have cars that do like a 360. Like it'll sit there parked and It'll just spin in a circle if you want to. So if you want to take a U turn, instead of having to go all the way around, your car would just spin around in a circle and go back the other way. Weird stuff, man. Like insane technology inside the vehicles. Like spectacular looking cars. Yeah, they're on the verge of, you know, passing us in many areas because there's a lot of regulation in regards to drone technology in particular in this country. If you want to be a drone pilot, is that going to.
- [60:05]
B
Is that going to change now?
- [60:06]
A
I don't know.
- [60:07]
B
Ukraine, I mean, that's the first drone war.
- [60:09]
A
I don't know. It's all scary. You know, the drone thing is weird because if you allow everyone to have drones, like, you get that sometimes where like, you see people dealing with drones over their house. Like, is that legal? Can you just fly over my fucking house with a drone? Turns out it is. Turns out it is legal.
- [60:26]
B
Well, how much of it as well, like, I mean, talking to the right guy here. But how much of the alien stuff that we watched in the 1950s and 60s was that technology being tested in America?
- [60:37]
A
So this is the drone mothership. This is the drone mothership that China's created. So this is enormous ship that can send thousands of drones.
- [60:48]
B
Do you think it would be sensible for you and I to pledge allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party now? Sort of. Sort of on the record. We should learn, just in case.
- [60:57]
A
I think it's a good time to learn Mandarin, I think. Wow, that John Cena was right. Look at that. 25 meters wide. Wow, that's. That's wild. That's big.
- [61:09]
B
Yeah. I mean, it feels like the corner.
- [61:13]
A
Of a football field.
- [61:14]
B
I don't know. So it's. War is changing, isn't it? I mean, it's. Yeah, but it used to be. I suppose it's always changed. It was. Used to be, guys, and you wear blue, we'll wear red, we'll line up and then we'll just smash it out. And there was. Those days were over, but there was no civilian casualties. It was kind of. It kind of worked. And then there's guerrilla warfare and there's what's going on now? And there's the drones and. Yeah, okay, here's a weird question. All right, okay, okay. So the assassination of jfk, people are absolutely fascinated, right? And what's been released and what. No one seems to care about the guy that shot Trump.
- [61:49]
A
I think they do too. But there was very little information that's available. And we're Hoping there'll be more information now that Cash Patel and Dan Bongino are in the FBI, but I'm not. I saw them recently talk about Epstein, and they're saying that Epstein was. He definitely committed suicide. I'm like, definitely. Oh, because especially like Bongino.
- [62:15]
B
But, you know, it's the terrible kind of the lag from COVID you know, the long Covid, from a psychological perspective is trust. We've lost a lot of trust because anyone that said it was a lab leak at the time was a maniac. And then, you know, so you go. When they tell us, oh, no, no, he commits suicide, you go, well, it's hard to believe now.
- [62:38]
A
Yeah, well, it's also. It's way worse than. It was a concerted effort that was coordinated and you could follow the paper trail now. Like, what used to be a conspiracy theory is now just facts. Like, you know, there was one thing that came out where, God, what's the.
- [62:56]
B
Difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact? Isn't. It's five years now.
- [63:00]
A
Find out who did it was Yale. Yale did a study before the vaccine was even released where they were running the effects of shaming people to try to coerce them into taking a medication to decrease vaccine hesitancy. And I think they were running terms like trust. The science, it's. It's.
- [63:28]
B
It's crazy because it's the. It's the baby in the bathwater because they. They did that. And then you go. And then there's. There's going to be more measles in America and more kids wearing glasses that thick and going deaf from measles because they're not taking the good vaccine. So it's. It's. For me, it's like that idea of trust is such a. You know, when we talk about institutions and the Constitution and the. And checks and balances, and we need trust in our society. That's one of the great things that came out of. Again, that's the Catholic Church.
- [63:59]
A
Well, the real problem in this country when it comes to things like vaccines is we have narratives. And we either have narratives that all of them are bad or we have narratives that all of them are good and trusting. The science, we have these. It gets strange. And then when the real problem in this country happened, when they absolved all pharmaceutical drug companies from any sort of liability for vaccines, and they did that because vaccines have side effects. Even if they are effective, they have side effects. It's part of the good and bad about them. There's going to be some people that have. So they were getting so many lawsuits that they were threatening to no longer produce vaccines. So during the Reagan administration, he gave them blanket immunity. And then they started doing things like prescribing hepatitis B shots to babies, which doesn't make any fucking sense. It's a sexually transmitted disease you get from dirty needles and sex. And you're giving that vaccine to babies and it's kind of dangerous. And they did it because people weren't taking it. And so then you get a thing where you're just trying to profit more. And because you have this blanket immunity, you're taking advantage of this position, which is what corporations do.
- [65:13]
B
Yeah. I mean, they're motivated by profit. Here's the simple solution, like super simple, ban advertising for medications. It's New Zealand and America that allow pharmaceuticals to be advertised 100%. And you go, well, what are we doing? It's unnecessary.
- [65:33]
A
Well, the real dark part of that is not that people get influenced to try these medications or to trust in these medications because of the advertisement. The real problem is it's such an immense part of the network's revenue that they will no longer do investigations on vaccine side effects or pharmaceutical drug side effects, or do stories about things like Vioxx pulled from the market, killing 50,000 plus people.
- [66:01]
B
We've got to motivate those companies. Right. It can't just be the profit, because it's like the thing that I worry about is antibiotics, right? So antibiotics are what an incredible piece of technology people used to die from. A fucking rusty nail snagged them and they would die. Right? So modern medicine has given. We have to look at what's. What the positive side is.
- [66:20]
A
There's an immense positive side.
- [66:22]
B
Oh, my God.
- [66:22]
A
Pharmaceutical drugs.
- [66:24]
B
You're talking to a man in his 50s with a hair transplant. I've had a bit of work done. Don't even start me on the Viagra. I've got a lot to be thankful for, for medical science. So a big pharma, great. They've done a lot of good. And then, and then. But other stuff, the antibiotics, there's, there's, there's things that are resistant now to antibiotics. They need new antibiotics, but there's nothing in it for the pharmaceutical companies to invest in that. So I think that a governmental level needs to be. Look, give them the money to do it, right.
- [66:54]
A
If you have oversight to make sure there's not fraud and waste and that, that is a problem when you give people money. But the. What you're saying is 100% true. There's undeniable good that comes from pharmaceutical drugs. The problem is not scientists and not medical science. So you have medical scientists that are constantly trying to figure out new ways to stop Parkinson's disease, new ways to cure cancer. All this is wonderful. But then you have the money, people, how do we get this out there? And how do we. Maybe we get this out there before it's ready. Maybe we just fucking tell people it's ready when it's not. Maybe you fudge a few tests, maybe run some really fucking sneaky studies where you're only analyzing things in a certain very particular lens because you want them to be shown to be effective.
- [67:43]
B
But you go, look, you know, and I don't mind, people, if someone comes up with a cure for cancer, they should profit. I don't mind if they can be a trillionaire.
- [67:51]
A
But the thing is, they're never satisfied. When you have a publicly traded company, they never are satisfied. They never go, guys, we're doing great. If we just make this amount of money every year, like, that's wonderful. Let's just like, look, let's hang back. I think our profits are very high. Let's do good. Let's try to do the most amount of good. No corporations.
- [68:10]
B
Well, it's an interesting thing where socialism has become such a dirty word, but everyone agrees to some extent, right? There's areas of life where you go, well, there has to be a level of socialism.
- [68:26]
A
Contribution. We have to contribute.
- [68:27]
B
Okay, the fire service is great.
- [68:29]
A
I use that same one all the time.
- [68:30]
B
But you go, everyone agrees, right? Okay, if your house burns down, okay, we're gonna have a fire service. And it. And it's not like, oh, we don't take care of that.
- [68:37]
A
Public education.
- [68:39]
B
Well, I think education, I think we could get there sooner because you look at some of the stuff that's available online now, and it's just. It's incredible. It's like it's there. I mean, I slightly think on education, that we should do the right thing, right? Instead of pumping the economy by printing more money and quantitative easing. I think America and the UK should cancel all student debt because we miss. Sold people some bullshit degrees, right?
- [69:09]
A
100%.
- [69:10]
B
And the idea that student debt, right, so you're taking those people that took a chance and they went to university and they gave their time and they studied hard. And there's. There's a theory that woke came out of elite overproduction. So they. People did everything right. They went to school, they studied hard, they went to university, they studied hard, they got A degree. And then they can't buy a house. They can't. Because, you know, maybe the degree doesn't grow corn. It's not in a stem subject, it's in the humanities or something. And then they don't get the lifestyle that they worked hard for. I think we cancel their debt. I mean, I don't want to sound like a communist here, but free education is not crazy because it's not crazy at all. It's an asset to your society.
- [69:55]
A
If you say, look, it's a giant subsidized business in America, at least it's a giant subsidized business and they're not going to let it go. The reason why, there's a really strong reason why it was free when I.
- [70:06]
B
Went, when I went to university.
- [70:07]
A
There's a really strong reason why it's the one debt you cannot absolve in America, even with bankruptcy.
- [70:13]
B
Why?
- [70:13]
A
Because it's a scam. It's the dirtiest thing ever. Because look, if you're a 45 year old man who's taking a lot of risks with your business and you go bankrupt, you're absolved. But you're an educated person with a lot of life experience and you did risky things and you failed, you're allowed to go bankrupt. But if you're an 18 year old kid and you assume of $200,000 four year loan to go to Harvard, you got to pay that forever for the rest of your life and it gets interest, it compounds.
- [70:45]
B
I think it's evil. I can't see the downside. Because you go, this is the richest nation, not just in the world, the richest nation there's ever been. And you go an investment in and maybe you change it and you go, well actually university is a lot more difficult to get into now because it's going to be free. So it's going to be like it's going to be super difficult to get in there.
- [71:04]
A
It's still difficult to get into. Even if it's expensive right now, it's not easy to get into like Yale or Harvard. It's very difficult to get into it. That's not going to help you. The real problem is always going to be the fact that you're paying so much money when you're too young to know what that even means. You're too young to be connected to $50,000 debt. When you're 18, you don't know what it means. You're 18 years old, you don't know what that kind of debt means. And the fact that it's going to fall around forever and haunt you.
- [71:34]
B
But also it's the middle class and upper class kids that can take on that kind of debt.
- [71:41]
A
Right. And the working classes haves and have nots forever.
- [71:44]
B
But education was the great kind of equalizer, right? Because it was. You were able to change your social class through, you know, if you go to school and you work hard, you go away. Education should be. Listen, I'm not saying that there can be equality because I think we're all born with different gifts, Right? Yes, you and I disagree about work ethic, but that the idea that we're all born with different attributes, Right. So there's never going to be equality, but the opportunity to educate yourself and to. And to do better is like that. That's sort of part of the American dream, isn't it?
- [72:17]
A
I don't even think we disagree about work ethic. I think it can be acquired as well. I'm sure it's probably heritable in some way. It's probably very cultural too. But I think you learn it too well.
- [72:27]
B
I think you can learn it for sure. I think you've learned it. I think that thing of. I think what you've done in martial arts, how you do anything is how you do everything. I look at what you've done with the mothership, I look at your comedy career, I look at how you treat your body. Everything's the same. It's the same. You've got a work ethic that's very consistent across different fields. How you do the podcast, have you missed a week ever? Like, you're just very consistent with stuff.
- [72:53]
A
But that's the key to getting better at things in life. It's not always fun. And this is what people have to understand. You're not always going to enjoy what you do if you have a process.
- [73:05]
B
I'm doing my best here, Joe. Sorry.
- [73:07]
A
Yeah, you're doing great. The process at the end of it, though, is what you're looking for. You're looking for results. And if you want to, the people that can get results are the ones that can go through the most difficulty.
- [73:18]
B
Well, I think, yeah. That thing of what you. And then you just sort of enjoy. I don't know. I think that thing of ambition, like, the process is so enjoyable. The process of, like, becoming a better comic is such a joyful. Yeah. Experience where you just go. At the end of every show, I take out a note pad and try new jokes and you just go that iteration of, like, getting better and, you know, a new One works. It's the most exciting thing in the world.
- [73:47]
A
Yeah.
- [73:48]
B
Just absolutely love it. And you kind of go. And it's. I forget if it's telic or anti telic. I don't really know what that. But it's a task without end.
- [73:57]
A
It's just.
- [73:57]
B
You keep on doing this thing.
- [73:59]
A
Yes.
- [73:59]
B
And it's just. And you just. There's no end in sight. You. There's no. It's not like you're arriving at this perfect state.
- [74:06]
A
Yeah.
- [74:07]
B
It's the. I suppose it's the idea that it's kind of messy, but it's. It's lovely to kind of. You feel yourself progressing and you, you.
- [74:14]
A
Should enjoy the process. The process of uncomfortable feelings and a little bit of pre show anxiety and then doing the show and then things go great or things go badly. Sometimes things go badly is even better because then it forces you to like, really, like, intensely look at the set and like, okay, why did that joke bomb? Like, what, what went wrong here? Like, what is it about it that it's. Let me like, deconstruct this thing. Do I have, like, if I've been doing it this way out of habit? I think there's something in the idea. It's worked before. So what is wrong? And it'll make you, like, put much, much more attention to a thing.
- [74:52]
B
Yeah, I think that. Well, I think that thing in comedy, like, failure is your friend.
- [74:56]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [74:57]
B
Failure is you kind of. You make friends with it and you're kind of okay with it.
- [75:01]
A
Yeah.
- [75:01]
B
And then in life, it's like you're able to take chances and kind of mess things up and go, it's all right. You give it another go.
- [75:06]
A
Yeah, yeah. There's. That's the martial arts thing. We win or we learn. Yeah. When you win, you kind of learn that the process is going well, you know, that you, you have competence, you're. You're good at it now, and then it motivates you to continue the process. But losing is like so horrible that you have to like, completely reassess what you're doing. And oftentimes you amp up your intensity and amp up your dedication because you don't want to feel the pain of losing again. The same with a bombing set. Like, some of my. If I look back on my early career in comedy, some of the big leaps I had was after horrific bombings. You have a, like a year in or so you have a horrific bombing and then you go, oh, my God, I might not even be able to do this. I got a really focus. Because Brian Simpson said something really funny the other night in the green room. He said, the thing about being a comedian is you can't be a shitty boss and a shitty employee.
- [76:04]
B
Oh, I like that. Yeah.
- [76:06]
A
I was like, oh, you just nailed it. Brian's one of those guys. He drops those gems like that. He'll just, like, out of nowhere, like, you gotta always listen when that guy is ready to drop a gem, that's a gem. Because as a comic, you. No one's telling you what to do. You're responsible for yourself.
- [76:24]
B
I did kill Tony last night with Tony Hinchliffe, who's. Who's at once the meanest motherfucker in the world and also the kindest man in comedy.
- [76:34]
A
Yeah.
- [76:35]
B
Because you look at the careers that he's launching, like, every. Every three, four weeks, he's launching, like, a new name. And then they're touring and they're playing clubs and they're having a great time. And it's. It's that thing of, like, you can't beat your environment. So to be around people, not just that you like, but that you want to be, like.
- [76:52]
A
Sure.
- [76:53]
B
So you're creating this little thing, this little space, like the. And the mothership's got this little community around it now of people that they want to get better, and they're. They're looking around and it's. You know. And you came here because Ron White was here. Right. I mean, in. In no small part.
- [77:09]
A
A big part.
- [77:10]
B
And then you built this thing, and it's. It's Field of Dreams. Look how many people are coming. And then I'm very excited to see in 20 years.
- [77:20]
A
Yeah.
- [77:20]
B
Who comes out of this scene. I've just. I actually flew in on Sunday to go down, see Chappelle, so I went to see his new club in Yellow Springs.
- [77:28]
A
I heard it's great.
- [77:29]
B
I mean, it's insane.
- [77:31]
A
But that club only exists when he's there, right?
- [77:33]
B
Yeah.
- [77:34]
A
I think it's only, like, he runs shows when he wants to run shows.
- [77:37]
B
I think it's gonna become something more than that. I think. I think that's what he's. He's planted a seed there.
- [77:43]
A
Yeah.
- [77:44]
B
And I think it's gonna grow. And it's a small town, but it's a town with a lot of pull. It's almost too beautiful a town. Yellow Springs, you kind of walk through and go, it's like the Stepford Wives. It's, like, so perfect. You know, he's got. Playing this weekend.
- [77:58]
A
Who.
- [77:59]
B
The whole of the Wu Tang Clan. Okay. It's a 220 seater. Okay. I think it may be one of the few occasions where more people are on stage than offstage. The audience may be smaller than the band.
- [78:12]
A
Yeah. Wu Tang can stack it in there. That should be wild. That'd be amazing. Yeah, but that's Dave. He's. But he draws people. He's a magnet, you know.
- [78:23]
B
He really is.
- [78:24]
A
Yeah. He's a beautiful person. Very, very unusual human being. I don't know anybody like him.
- [78:29]
B
No, he's.
- [78:30]
A
He's a unique.
- [78:31]
B
Well, as are you. You're non fungible human beings. There's no one else. You go, he's a bit like that. No, it's just. He's his own thing. It's a wonderful thing. There's a. There's a real, like, I think in comedy, that thing where we're out for ourselves but in it together.
- [78:47]
A
Mmm, yeah.
- [78:49]
B
Alan havey told me that. And I remember thinking it's kind of true because we're all in this business and there's like, sometimes you see comics arguing or, you know, shit talking other comics online or something. You go, what are you doing? There's a. The narcissism of small differences where people go, oh, I don't like his observational stuff. Or he's hacky or something. You go, we're all in the same business.
- [79:11]
A
Yeah. Most of those people are just jealous. That's just a pettiness. It's always people that are. They think of success that they don't deserve.
- [79:18]
B
No one ever hates you for doing worse than them.
- [79:20]
A
Exactly. Yeah. It's all silly. It's really silly. It's foolish. And unfortunately, some of them are good comics too, that are doing it, but they don't have any friends. They're islands. Right. And one of the ways that I describe comics, I go, you're either like a village or an island. And villages do way better than islands. So an island is a man on his own out there that does his own shows and has an opening act and doesn't hang out with comics. There's a lot of those guys and unfortunately they have the same opening act that that guy that becomes his job, he's just an opening act now. And he only works when he works with the headliner. And then they travel around the country and the guy never. And then you watch the act deteriorate. You watch the act start to fall apart and get softer.
- [80:03]
B
Well, this is what, you know, the great thing you've done is thrown down a rope bridge. You're up there and you throw down the bridge and you bring people with you.
- [80:12]
A
Well, what we did is create a real workshop in a real community where there's an actual path. Like, there's a path from open mic night, which we have two nights a week, to becoming a door person where you can get spots occasionally. And you'll be watched by the best talent coordinator in the world, Adam. Adam Egan.
- [80:32]
B
He's the best.
- [80:33]
A
He's the best.
- [80:34]
B
He's in Hawaii this week. I'm missing him.
- [80:35]
A
Oh, well, he'll be back.
- [80:37]
B
No, he's coming to London to see Oasis with me.
- [80:39]
A
Oh, is he really? Oh, wow. That should be incredible.
- [80:42]
B
Oh, we're gonna.
- [80:43]
A
Don't they hate each other? They hate each other with their touring together.
- [80:46]
B
Yeah, but I think there's a. I think there's a lot of money. There's an amount of money you can put down and go, you should get Noel on this show.
- [80:52]
A
I would love to.
- [80:53]
B
Noel is so fun.
- [80:55]
A
I love them. I love them. But so back to the mothership. The thing about it is, we set it up to be a place where people can develop and show them a path. And then there's Kill Tony, which is the perfect anchor of the entire community, because with Kill Tony, you get to watch people that do their first time ever on stage, or maybe they came from Seattle, they've been kind of struggling for five years, and they do a one minute on stage, and all of a sudden they get a golden ticket, and then all of a sudden they become a regular on the show, and then all of a sudden they're selling out all over the country. And then you're in this group of people that are, like, really enthusiastic about this art form that I think is one of the most underappreciated, yet very respected and very loved art forms. It's really paradoxical because on one hand it's dismissed as being, like, a bunch of fools, and the other hand, it's like everybody wants to go see a good one.
- [81:49]
B
Yeah. Who's it. Who's dismissed by. I mean, it is that thing where you go. It's. I think, because it's a sense of humor is whatever. That there's. That great old quote of laughter is the shortest distance between two people. I think there's a real connection to comics because you laugh with your friends and your family, and you laugh with this comedian. And if you think about friendship, I think about friendship like filters. Like, if you sit next to someone on a plane, you got a lot of filters, right? You chat about the Weather or the local sports team, whatever. And then you get really close to someone, you got no filters. Your best friend of the world is that you got no filters with.
- [82:24]
A
I think comedy's not respected because most people can talk and most people are funny occasionally. So they think, I could do it. But most people can't hit a fastball. Most people can't play tennis like a professional. Most people can't do that. So you watch someone do that and you go, I can't even do that. But you see someone on stage talking. Like, I could talk. What's so hard about that? I just have to figure out the right words to say. And I could be Jimmy Carr.
- [82:47]
B
Right, Right.
- [82:47]
A
Because everybody can talk. I think that's part of the problem. That's why it doesn't get appreciated the same way music gets appreciated. So, like, if there's plagiarism in music, like, there's so many songs where a lick in the song, just one thing about the song. And then the people like Bittersweet Symphony, they had to give all their money to the Rolling Stones.
- [83:09]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [83:10]
A
They didn't make any money from that song.
- [83:11]
B
Nothing. Or the weirder one was the. Was it Blurred Lines was. And it wasn't even that. It was the same. It was the same feel as a Marvin Gaye song. Same feel. Seems like a stretch.
- [83:23]
A
I don't remember that one. I thought they did decide that it was like the beats were copied, but, you know, I've talked to friends that are musicians and like, listen, there's only so many different ways you can put together a beat and rhythms. It's like you're going to get similarities all the time. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's plagiarism, but plagiarism and comedies, like, outwardly dismissed, like, there's no lawsuits, but yet comedians.
- [83:50]
B
No, it's self policing, though. It's self policing. It's like if someone does that, you go, I mean, now. And that's the first time I ever saw you was calling out.
- [83:57]
A
Yeah, but before that, a lot of people got away with it, man. A lot of people built careers off of plagiarism.
- [84:03]
B
Well, even the great Robin Williams had that, had that reputation. Yeah, he did, because it was. He was doing kind of this other thing. I don't know.
- [84:11]
A
Well, it's like when you're just free balling and you get stuck, you just take somebody else's stuff. And back then there was no Internet, so there's no accountability. I think that's just the big Part of this equation, as the Internet comes along and there's, you know, there's been so many instances of a comedian's career now, like, really fucking crashing. Because the Internet sleuths, they start looking at it and they go, no, no, no, this is. This came from that. That came from this. Like, her special here is like his. This is his bit. This is her bit. These are. This is all plagiarized and just reworked. Horseshit.
- [84:46]
B
Yeah.
- [84:47]
A
The way you can tell is when they have another special after they've been called out. And then it's horrible, Right? There's just no content.
- [84:55]
B
Well, it's that thing of, like, you have to give the world irrefutable proof you are who you say you are. You know? If it's one joke, fine. If it's 10,000 jokes, you go, okay, this is something. I mean, we spoke about this last time, that thing of. Because I'm working on a thing with my friend Amanda Baker and Abby Grant. They came and they taught at the mothership.
- [85:12]
A
Yes.
- [85:12]
B
Because we're trying to work on this book about, like, teaching comedy in the same way that people teach music. Like having a language of it and. And taking some of the alchemy and the mystery away from that and sort of thinking about, well, what really, you know, not to say that it's like a something AI can do or a machine can do, but the idea of, like, teaching people the structure of it so that it's less kind of, you know, hey, it just comes to me on stage.
- [85:40]
A
Right.
- [85:40]
B
Maybe codifying it a little bit more. And I mean, I'm working with these two incredible women, Abby Grant and Amanda Baker, on the book. And it's. It's taken a long time, but I do think it's something that. If you could teach it in schools, the idea of comedy even, as opposed to music, which is wonderful to learn, and you appreciate music much more if you've ever given the guitar a go, because you can appreciate what they're doing. Yeah, but the idea of comedy is being taught because you go, well, you have to write down and order your thoughts. That's a value. You have to learn how to communicate and speak publicly. That's a value. And then you're speaking in your authentic voice. And that the saddest thing, most people live and die and they never speak in their own authentic voice. It's a great thing to give kids, I think. I think it'd be a great thing if it's an after school activity. I would sign my kids up.
- [86:30]
A
Yeah, I Mean, there's definitely value to it. And even if you don't have that style of comedy, like a joke writing style, even if you're more of a storyteller, like a Ron White type, where you tell stories, there's always value in learning different techniques to craft material and craft jokes.
- [86:46]
B
But I look at what toolbox. I mean, my love language is the one liner. I. I like jokes and it's, it's quite old fashioned in a way.
- [86:54]
A
Yeah.
- [86:54]
B
You know, it's like, it's a very old fashioned kind of way of. And it's less about my life.
- [86:57]
A
But you're like a folk singer.
- [86:59]
B
Yeah. And then I'm. But then I'm trying to. I've got a good fastball. Yeah. And then I'm trying to work on the, the other bits. But that's kind of what I love about the industry because it's, it's everything.
- [87:09]
A
It's all.
- [87:09]
B
Yeah, I can get good at that. And then I can, I can do like 20 minutes of fastballs and then do. I've started. About a year ago, I started putting. I started working with a videographer and putting stuff out of like heckle videos and people talking to me.
- [87:23]
A
Yeah, I noticed those.
- [87:24]
B
And you go. It's just such a joyful thing because it's almost like doing the stuff. When you go, just hit me whatever you want. I'll do anything. It's like seeing a magician do real magic because you kind of go, right, yeah, I've worked this muscle hard enough. I can. I'll write jokes live for you.
- [87:40]
A
Now, have you done bottom barrel?
- [87:42]
B
No. What's bottom of the barrel?
- [87:44]
A
Bottom of the barrels. Brian Simpson show at the Mothership where you have a whiskey barrel and you reach your hand into the whiskey barrel to pull out suggestions for topics the audience didn't.
- [87:54]
B
Paul Provenza used to have set list.
- [87:58]
A
Do you remember there's set list? Yeah, but that was not provided by the audience, I don't believe.
- [88:02]
B
No, that was like that. And it was a bit hat on a hat. Like sometimes it'd be just crazy things. But it was.
- [88:07]
A
Yeah, a bunch of different versions of that. There was another one, stand up on the spot. It was an LA one where you had the audience like raise their hand and come up with it. But the problem with that one is then you encourage people to just yell out. And so while you're in the middle of talking about something, someone else will yell out a different subject because they're just greedy and they just don't want, you know what I mean, like, you have to have good audience participation in that one.
- [88:32]
B
But again, that thing of like going, it's performative being in the audience.
- [88:35]
A
Yes.
- [88:36]
B
Like I always think that thing with hecklers, like there's more hecklers in the uk, like when you travel around the world. Like, so I'm touring everywhere, like all over America, uk, Australia, New Zealand, every territory. And you notice different places have different traditions when it comes to heckling. That's the biggest thing you notice when you travel in North America. People are very slow to shout out during a show because they think they're, am I spoiling the show? Am I ruining this? And I actively encourage, like, I don't mind if it's a little bit aggressive. Cause we're all in service of the evening.
- [89:06]
A
Right.
- [89:07]
B
We're all in service of like, I don't mind if you win.
- [89:09]
A
Well, that's confusing for the audience because some people don't want any heckles.
- [89:13]
B
Yeah, sometimes it is like a.
- [89:15]
A
Some comics just want to. They have a set and they want to just perform their set.
- [89:18]
B
Yeah, I know. I like it when people join. Like no one wants someone to talk over their punchline.
- [89:23]
A
That's a problem.
- [89:23]
B
But you want people to.
- [89:24]
A
You're going into an agreement with a bunch of drunks and a lot of them are just, you know, they're not that smart in the first place. And so they don't even understand when to yell out. And so they're yelling out while you're in the middle of something. Something else.
- [89:37]
B
Yeah. And then, I mean, I'm very lucky with. I suppose it's that thing with you can, you know, it's self selecting your audience come and they find you and it's.
- [89:47]
A
Sure. But sometimes crazy people just show up at your audience.
- [89:51]
B
Oh my God. If I had to compile, I thought maybe I should compile a video of me kicking people out shows.
- [89:56]
A
Well, now they know that too, so they probably look forward to doing it with you. And so you get kind of the wrong kind of people that are encouraged to yell shit out.
- [90:06]
B
No, I get, I get pretty good.
- [90:07]
A
Most of the time.
- [90:08]
B
I get pretty good because I always.
- [90:09]
A
Think, I don't have a schizophrenics.
- [90:11]
B
I don't have like percentage.
- [90:12]
A
It's only like 1%.
- [90:13]
B
Yeah. I don't know if they're buying tickets. They should buy two tickets, shouldn't they? Sure.
- [90:17]
A
I don't think they think they're two different people.
- [90:20]
B
I think one for each personality.
- [90:22]
A
I think schizophrenia is just like your connection to the world. Is frayed.
- [90:25]
B
Yeah. Jesus. There but for the grace of God.
- [90:29]
A
Yeah. We don't even understand what that feels like. And, you know, there's a guy who is schizophrenic that as the disease progressed, he was an artist. And as his disease progressed, you could see his art getting fucking weirder and weirder and more abstract and distorted.
- [90:47]
B
It's the most horrifying.
- [90:48]
A
It's a horrifying. It's one of the most. You know, there's a bunch of really horrifying ones. Lou Gehrig's disease. A bunch of. Bunch of different things that just. You just go fuck Again. Gratitude. Just be happy that you don't have that. And that's another good, solid reason to try to take care of your physical body.
- [91:06]
B
Yeah.
- [91:07]
A
Make that work for you.
- [91:09]
B
Yeah. 100.
- [91:10]
A
Don't have it malfunctioning. Well, if you can avoid it, I.
- [91:14]
B
Think kind of food is the thing as well. Food is the medicine before medicine. Like, just try and. It's hard on the road.
- [91:20]
A
It is. The best way to do it on the road for me is Carnivore. I just only eat meat when I'm on the road. Well, I do that most of the time anyway. But when I'm on the road, it makes everything so much simpler. Just mostly just eat meat.
- [91:33]
B
Are you traveling much at the moment? Are you on the road much? You're not?
- [91:35]
A
No. Even when I did my last special, my Netflix special, I prepared for it entirely at my own club. And then I hadn't done any theaters at all in like, a year and a half, and I did the first Friday night at the theater, I'm like, oh, it's different because instead of doing like 200 people, I was doing thousands. I was like, this is weird. Like, the timing's different. But I'm like, oh, okay, good. I gotta figure it out.
- [91:56]
B
I find the timing. The timing's different in, like, I often go from theater to arena Arena.
- [92:02]
A
Timing is way different.
- [92:03]
B
I tell you what, I got it from Chappelle. I was out in Australia on tour last time, and I had, like, one night off, and Chappelle was in town that night. So I said, well, I'll go up with you. So I went up and he had it in the round.
- [92:15]
A
Yeah, that's how I do it, too.
- [92:16]
B
It's so genius, because it's like the. The thrill of. I don't want to. I don't want to say never, but I may never be a professional boxer. There, I said it. But walking into the. It's like walking into a ring because you've got like security around you and you have to walk through the audience onto the stage and up the steps.
- [92:34]
A
Yeah.
- [92:35]
B
It's so thrilling. And then you put the screens above and even in a 10,000 seater, no one's more than, you know, 2,000 seats back kind of thing. So you go, so everyone's got a great seat and you're kind of rotating and I just, I love it.
- [92:48]
A
It's incredible. It's also intimate in a weird way because the people are seeing the other people on the other side of them, which never happens.
- [92:55]
B
And they're seeing people laughing. Yeah, yeah, I hadn't thought of that. But they're seeing people laughing and it's that thing of going, okay, well, we're all. It's like an event where we're having fun together.
- [93:03]
A
It's great. It's the best way to do it.
- [93:05]
B
It is. Although the timing that changes when you go, okay, it's a theater and it's like even a thousand seater. I noticed in the UK sometimes like you got to let. The Palladium is my favorite place to play. Right. The Palladium is a theater that was built 120 years ago. So the fire regulations 120 years ago were. Yeah, I hope no one dies. That's. There was the fireworks. Good luck. There's doors. If there's a fire, I guess leave. So it's tight. It's like it's 2,200 people, but it's. They're close to you. And then sometimes you go to a place that was built two years ago and it's beautiful and air conditioned, but the people are so far away because the seats and the aisles and everything's been built for safety.
- [93:45]
A
Yeah.
- [93:46]
B
So it's like you'd never get it. You couldn't build one of those now.
- [93:49]
A
Yeah, it's kind of.
- [93:50]
B
It was, it was, it was better when it was. They're all on top of you.
- [93:53]
A
Yeah. But then people died in fires, you know.
- [93:55]
B
Well, you've always got to look at the negatives.
- [93:58]
A
They should have a way to like open the wall in case of a fire. Should be a hinge which just the whole thing fall down. Everybody could just run out real quick. Can't you engineer that in there? Like, you know what they do with the battleship when they let the tanks out the back of them?
- [94:11]
B
Yeah.
- [94:11]
A
I mean, yeah. How about that?
- [94:14]
B
That's a good idea.
- [94:15]
A
Yeah. Like a big old aircraft carrier. Like drop it. Yeah. Or fucking fire extinguishers. Everywhere, like in the wall. Everywhere. Spray water on people.
- [94:28]
B
Yeah, just under.
- [94:29]
A
Under every seat, all over the ceiling. I mean they do have that in some places where it's dangerous. You know, they have fire sprinklers that are built into the wall.
- [94:40]
B
I feel like we're getting close to the. We're getting close to the old bit of the, you know, the. That black box thing they have on airplanes where it crashes.
- [94:47]
A
Oh yeah.
- [94:48]
B
Everyone had the observation of just build the plane out of that.
- [94:51]
A
Right?
- [94:51]
B
What's that made of?
- [94:54]
A
How about parachutes for planes? How about one of those?
- [94:57]
B
Is that hard to do parachutes for planes?
- [95:00]
A
Yeah, this is.
- [95:01]
B
We're having some. We're having some big ideas.
- [95:03]
A
How much would it cost? How much would it cost to have a big fucking parachute at the top of the plane where if shit goes totally sideways, pull it float down to the ground? Is that possible?
- [95:14]
B
Is that an incredibly dumb idea or is that genius?
- [95:16]
A
It's both. It's both. I'm sure somebody else has thought of it, you know.
- [95:24]
B
Yeah, that seems.
- [95:25]
A
I mean, don't they have something like that on Air Force One where like if. If the plane's going down, the President can get to like little compartment and it ejects. Is that real or is that like some movie shit? That might be some movie shit. See if that's real.
- [95:39]
B
I think there might feels like some movie shit. But.
- [95:41]
A
But that, that sounds like a good idea. Like what if Air Force One goes down? Like this was the online chatter about the President getting a plane from Qatar.
- [95:53]
B
He got a gift of a plane.
- [95:55]
A
Yeah. Supposedly like Air Force One does not have an escape pod in the real world.
- [96:01]
B
Okay. Can we. Can we. Can we confirm is the real world?
- [96:06]
A
I.
- [96:07]
B
Because maybe this is.
- [96:08]
A
We think it is as far as how we're acting. Yeah, this is the real world.
- [96:12]
B
What do you. What do you think about simulation theory?
- [96:15]
A
I think it's more likely every day. The more time goes on, the more I think it's likely.
- [96:21]
B
I really like it. I would. Is this a.
- [96:23]
A
Playing with a Parish playing with a parent Small planes that think some guy.
- [96:27]
B
Did you just manifest this?
- [96:29]
A
How did this Parachutes, planes. He googled it. It's pretty dope. So is this guy used this. I don't. That. That doesn't seem like it's happened. But they're maybe testing. Seems like a dangerous test too because you have to wreck a plane if it doesn't work. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. All right. How would you test one of those? You'd have to have a Bunch of planes. Oh, look, they did test it. Is that real or is that AI? That's real, yeah. Oh, it seems real. Oh, so you just need a real big one. A big one for a jumbo jet.
- [96:58]
B
It's still gonna be a bump.
- [96:59]
A
Let's go.
- [96:59]
B
It's gonna be a bump when you land.
- [97:01]
A
Yeah, it's not. I mean, better that than a ball of flame. The fuck?
- [97:05]
B
Are you not gonna land and then have a ball of.
- [97:07]
A
Well, you might.
- [97:07]
B
Yeah. Hey, listen, let's give it a go.
- [97:09]
A
Yeah, give it a go. Maybe you could jettison all the fuel on the way down. So you could soak people's homes with jet fuel so that it just bounces. There's no fuel in it to start a giant enormous fire.
- [97:21]
B
There's a reason.
- [97:22]
A
Look at this one.
- [97:23]
B
There's a reason we're not in charge of this.
- [97:24]
A
It's coming down with the helicopter. Look at that.
- [97:26]
B
It worked. Oh, wow. All right.
- [97:28]
A
It worked.
- [97:29]
B
Yeah, but that's. It's taking place. That's taken for.
- [97:32]
A
I do not like the nose down approach.
- [97:35]
B
That's taken like four parking spaces.
- [97:37]
A
You just see two puddles on the windshield from the pilots. Yeah, yeah.
- [97:41]
B
Right. Okay. Simulation theory. I, I like think, I like thinking about it because I kind of go, I've got such a crazy life.
- [97:49]
A
Right?
- [97:49]
B
Like I'm saying, how could it be real? I'm sitting here with you. Yeah, I was with Chappelle on Sunday. Woody Halson came to the show last night. I know him a little bit from London. I was going, this feels like a cartoon. It doesn't feel right. Real somehow. And yet you go, well, it's an interesting way to think about the world because you go, well, if he's. If this is a game, what's the scorecard? How do you win? And it kind of makes you think about, well, what's important in your life? What's the, you know, measurable and immeasurable metrics?
- [98:18]
A
Right.
- [98:19]
B
I often think about, there's like, there's CV resume points and then there's eulogy points. And often those things kind of conflict, you know, like the things that we, you know, career wise, you could have a great career, but if you don't have kids in a family, who's at the. Who's doing the eulogy?
- [98:39]
A
Who's.
- [98:39]
B
Who's speaking for you? What are the things that really matters?
- [98:42]
A
People that are great people. They don't have kids in a family, but they have a lot of good friends.
- [98:46]
B
Yeah, but I mean, that's.
- [98:47]
A
And the People gonna miss them.
- [98:49]
B
Oh my God. Yeah.
- [98:50]
A
I don't think it's a total requirement to be, you know, an actualized human being to have children, but I think it's definitely benefited me. But I used to hate it when people would say, like, you know, until you have kids, you don't know what the world is all about. Like, okay, for you. Like, how do I know what you've gone through? How do I know your perspective? Yeah, but there's a lot of people out there with children that are fools. Like, it's a nonsense way of living, of thinking that you have to have kids. And I think there's wonderful people that I know that are never gonna have kids.
- [99:21]
B
But that thing of. It's fine, you can still have eulogy things.
- [99:26]
A
Yeah.
- [99:26]
B
Things that aren't necessarily.
- [99:28]
A
It's not scorecard. It's not like he made a hundred million dollars. He wins when he's dead. Like, it doesn't matter, no one cares. Like, what did you do? Like, how did you, how did you treat people? How did you live your life? What kind of an impact did you have on your fellow man? Like, when you interacted with people, do they have a memorable experience with you? Like your friends and people you worked with? Like, oh, do you know, Jimmy used to always say, you know, sit around talking about them.
- [99:54]
B
I suppose it's that thing of like legacy now almost kind of is a secular religion for like what you leave behind.
- [100:02]
A
Yeah.
- [100:02]
B
Like you sort of think of the, the afterlife, you know, I don't really believe in an afterlife, but it's the, the kids.
- [100:10]
A
Wouldn't you be stunned if it was real though? Like, I mean, I don't believe in an afterlife, but I would be so fascinated to be, to have undeniable evidence, like to pass through. Like, imagine if you were one of those people that had a heart attack and died and had one of those really crazy near death experiences.
- [100:33]
B
And then I think back, I think there's that near. The near death experience is available to everyone in the form of dmt because everyone has the same experience of this.
- [100:43]
A
Yes.
- [100:44]
B
Another realm, another world beyond. Maybe that's the time, Jimmy. If it is, maybe that's it.
- [100:49]
A
Yeah, I mean, that might be it. That might be it. It seems familiar. That's the weirdest part about it. It seems familiar.
- [100:56]
B
It seems more real than here.
- [100:58]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So it makes you wonder, like, what is this that we're doing? I have a feeling that what I said before is correct about the electronic caterpillar becoming the butterfly. I think that's our. I think there's a bunch of different factors that are leading us to expand technologically. I think it's the primary thing that we do as a species. I think we're probably. That's what we're designed for. Just like bees make beehives and ants make anthills, I think the curiosity of the human animal is always going to lead them to an artificial intelligence that's far superior than its own. Just eventually, ultimately, it just takes a long ass. Time.
- [101:39]
B
Well, I mean, you say a long time, but I mean really, when did this start?
- [101:43]
A
Hundreds of thousands of years ago. It started with stone tools. That's really what it is. It's all technology. Right. Stone tools allowed us to kill things without using our teeth. And then we eventually figured out shelter and then we figured out a way to maximum. Cooking things.
- [101:59]
B
Cooking things. And then the amount, you know, our brains, you know, you're able to feed that.
- [102:03]
A
Yeah.
- [102:03]
B
So food's a huge part, like what we're doing now. Language and comedy.
- [102:09]
A
Yeah.
- [102:09]
B
I think there's no. I don't think it's like, it's like there's different strains of kind of Darwinian evolution. Right. So there's. There's for survival. Right. And then there's reproductive. And I think what we're doing now speaking, I think is reproductive. I think what we're doing is. It's almost like peacock feathers. Right. So you go, feathers initially weren't for flight, they were for display.
- [102:34]
A
Really?
- [102:34]
B
Well, that's the, that's the theory is that. Well, how did feathers. Because what was the point of a feather before it was for wings, for flying? How would you get to that? Through evolution? Well, actually, if it was for display first, if the peacock is using the feathers correctly, that was the original idea for display, for mating. And to show that I have this. I have so much extra energy, I'll be a good mate.
- [102:58]
A
Right. To show the female so much color.
- [103:00]
B
And vibrancy and stuff. So why birds sing? I've got this excess energy. I'll be a good mate. Okay. So that's that thing.
- [103:08]
A
The weird thing is it came from dinosaurs, though. Dinosaurs, they believe, are feathered now. Yeah, yeah. Which. So like, that's how dinosaurs were breeding. Imagine.
- [103:17]
B
Yeah, well, dinosaurs as well. The theory on why they died out is interesting. On the they. They used to. So we randomly assigned gender and they assigned gender as on the basis of temperature. So when the asteroid hit, it didn't kill all the dust, didn't kill all the dinosaurs. What happened was every dinosaur was born female in the next generation because the temperature cooled. Some lizards still do it. They assign gender by what the temperature is. So if the temperature falls, you go, right, okay, everyone's female. And when the temperature is above a certain amount, every one's male. So there's a generation of all female or all male, whatever it was. Dinosaurs.
- [103:56]
A
What a flaw.
- [103:58]
B
Yeah, but you, but you would. But because your. The temperature we always assume is like, is static and we don't see the geological changes over time in temperature.
- [104:08]
A
So I feel like the Yucatan meteor was like the inoculation from the universe. They'd realize like, this dinosaur thing is a problem. Like no mammals are ever going to figure out how to make AI when you've got a 5000 pound super blizzard running around with a face the size of a VW bus with giant teeth on it. We got to wipe these things out.
- [104:31]
B
Is there another world where there's dinosaurs with AI? Because if they're coming, we're fucked.
- [104:36]
A
No, no, the dinosaurs never get to AI. You have to be super vulnerable to get to AI. Like you don't have a bunch of jack guys working at OpenAI. You notice that? Yeah, you have to be super vulnerable to get to AI.
- [104:49]
B
Well, it's a weird thing you said earlier about the idea of like our competitive advantage, right? You drop one guy in the jungle, you've fed the animals, drop 10 guys and you have an apex predator, right? Cooperation is our superpower. And for me, cooperation is downstream of play. Play is everything. We're the playing animal. Someone wrote a book about this, like in the 1930s, about how we are designed to play. Our culture is about play and kids play. And you go, well, that cooperation is what leads to all of this. And weirdly, the Catholic Church. I didn't say this earlier, but the Catholic church has got a lot to be. We've got a lot to be grateful for. Because in the 12th century, the Catholic church banned cousin marriage.
- [105:36]
A
Really?
- [105:36]
B
And the reason they did it was because they realized the tribe was more important than the church. And they hated that, right? So the unintended consequence was they said, you can't marry your cousin or your second cousin or your third cousin down to the sixth cousin, really. And they broke the tribes. Now when you break tribes, what happens? Well, you form small family groups and then you have to trust people. So trust builds. And then from trust you get guilds and associations and a legal system and everyone. Because before that it's like, well, your cousin, you trust him. It's family.
- [106:16]
A
The royal family, right? Back in the day, doomed the royal family.
- [106:20]
B
You know this. You know, we still got them.
- [106:22]
A
Yeah, but I mean, the old ones with the up faces.
- [106:25]
B
Yeah. With a no chin.
- [106:26]
A
Yeah, yeah. They look weird.
- [106:27]
B
Yeah. No chin. Just intermarriage. Intermarriage into marriage. So that's what was taken away. So the unintended consequence of that was more cooperation and people had to get on with other people. And there was like, that's interesting.
- [106:38]
A
Smart way of engineering a society that didn't keep people from just being so tribal and insulated. Yeah, yeah. That's actually intelligent. And that's. The Catholic Church figure that out.
- [106:50]
B
The Catholic Church.
- [106:52]
A
Right after they got the priesthood to stop having sex. Next move.
- [106:55]
B
The next move. Right after we stop, I have to.
- [106:58]
A
Really pee, cuz I overhydrated. Let's pee and then we'll come back.
- [107:02]
B
Okay.
- [107:02]
A
Okay. So you just given me a lesson on Catholicism and the benefits of play. Do you know that that's one of the things they talk about in jiu jitsu, like, keep it playful. It's one of the things that they say, like the Gracies in particular, they. They always talk about keeping it playful. Like, keeping it playful is the way you learn the best.
- [107:21]
B
Roger lives in. In London.
- [107:23]
A
Yes. He's one of the greatest of all time.
- [107:25]
B
I mean, it's an incredible thing, the jiu jitsu, because the. The idea that those guys just changed the game totally.
- [107:33]
A
Yeah. They changed martial arts, like, in more. Martial arts has changed more since the invention of the ufc. And the invention of the UFC was by Hori and Gracie. Hori and Gracie invented the UFC, and that was in 1993. And in. Since that time, martial arts have evolved more in these 30 years than they have in the past 30,000 years.
- [107:56]
B
Well, the thing that I. The thing I love about it, I kind of want there to be an origination movie about the ufc.
- [108:04]
A
They'll fuck it up. Yeah, they'll fuck it up. It's better to just have a documentary.
- [108:09]
B
Yeah, that. Well, that'd be it.
- [108:10]
A
Yeah. But you don't want to have a movie, Even a documentary, really. It should be like a Netflix series because it's gonna require.
- [108:18]
B
I think I should star in it. I could get jacked.
- [108:20]
A
You could get jacked.
- [108:20]
B
I mean, you could get you the.
- [108:21]
A
Right people, you know, get you. Tom Hardy's trainer. You watch. I'm learning a lot about your English gangs.
- [108:27]
B
Oh, my friend Chris Dickey, who's like, produced my movie. Produced that as well.
- [108:32]
A
Fuck, that's a good show. Yeah, I'm friends with Guy Ritchie, and I was. He's the best.
- [108:37]
B
Has he been on this?
- [108:38]
A
Yes.
- [108:39]
B
Yeah.
- [108:39]
A
He's amazing. He's a legitimate black belt, by the way.
- [108:42]
B
Yeah.
- [108:43]
A
Legitimate jiu jitsu black belt under Henzo Gracie, which is. There's, like, certain levels of black belt. There's a lot of, like, great black belts that have a. Their instructor you. You just haven't heard of because there's so many great black belts out there now. But there's like, legendary instructors where you hear like, a guy got a black belt from Hicks and Grace, and you're like, oh, that's a real black belt. Yeah, you got a black belt from Henzo Grace. Like, whoa.
- [109:08]
B
But the interesting thing for me is, like, the pre. The invention of that. The. In the 80s.
- [109:17]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [109:18]
B
Because we're about the same age. So like, it would have been that thing of like. Like Bruce Lee movies or the. The Drunken Master. You ever see the Drunken Master?
- [109:26]
A
Sure.
- [109:27]
B
That. All those kind of movies. And then you'd. I'd be like, into martial arts and like, watching those films. Incredible movies. And then there'd be such about. Oh, there's this technique from this place. And he can do. And none of it was tested. None of it was testable. It was like. No, no, no. It's like that great scene in Once Upon a Time in. What's the Tarantino movie?
- [109:52]
A
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Bruce Lee and Bruce Lee. Yeah. It's the funniest Brad Pitt. Yeah.
- [109:57]
B
Scene. It's just so good. But the bullshit that was talked about, the one inch punch and all of that stuff.
- [110:02]
A
Yeah.
- [110:03]
B
And then it was like, oh, no, we're really gonna test this.
- [110:05]
A
Mm. Yeah.
- [110:06]
B
It like it met the real world.
- [110:08]
A
Well, I came up in that era of bullshit. There was like, bullshit guys that, like, said they couldn't spar because they were too dangerous. They could kill you. And, you know, we would like.
- [110:19]
B
That's the great line in the Tarantino movie, isn't it, where he goes, these, these, these. These fists. If I kill a guy, it's murder. Yeah. It's the same with everyone.
- [110:28]
A
Well, the Bruce Lee thing is the. One of the things that I really didn't agree with. I love Tarantino. I'm a giant fan. As a human being, I love him. And as a director, I think he's the greatest of all time. He is the most consistently exciting, groundbreaking, psychotic films.
- [110:47]
B
I thought he changed the way I consume media.
- [110:51]
A
The problem is I know a lot about Bruce Lee.
- [110:53]
B
Oh, Bruce Lee.
- [110:54]
A
And he wasn't like that he wasn't that arrogant guy. And I just think he's misrepresented.
- [110:59]
B
Yeah. There needs to be a great documentary on Bruce Lee. I mean, there's plenty of stuff, but there needs to be a definitive, like a, you know, Netflix put together. Beautiful thing. Because he was an icon. Like, he was so incredible. Bruce Lee.
- [111:13]
A
Yes.
- [111:14]
B
But, you know, Tarantino, for me, is godlike, like that movie Cinema Speculation. So I. I. You know, most people kind of do this thing of they watch new movies. So for new. Because the dopamine of the new story, and they listen to old music. And I read that book, Cinema Speculation. I went, I'm gonna just watch 70s movies. And I just started watching the old movies for this because you forget. I mean, even if you have seen it, you've kind of. If you saw it 30 years ago, you remember one moment. Yeah, you watch that and then listen to new music. So you kind of flip the thing. It's really good. Yeah, I'm really loving. I'm loving watching the old movies, but.
- [111:51]
A
Some of the old movies are fucking amazing.
- [111:53]
B
That the Quentin Tarantino book is just.
- [111:55]
A
He's incredible, incredible person that they come along rarely where someone just has this very unique and fucking aggressive sight of, like, their art.
- [112:05]
B
It's a vision.
- [112:06]
A
Yeah.
- [112:06]
B
I mean, I put him up with Kubrick. I think he's. He's that genius. She. I wanted to ask you about that. The Kubrick thing. I got told this fact.
- [112:14]
A
What?
- [112:15]
B
But. Okay, so I was. I got told this thing, and then I asked Tom Cruise about it. This is a. This is a good story.
- [112:20]
A
Tom Cruise about something.
- [112:21]
B
Okay. So I met Tom Cruise at a friend's wedding, and I said, oh, my God. I had nothing to say to Tom Cruise.
- [112:27]
A
So much to say.
- [112:28]
B
I said, you made Eyes Wide Shut with Kubrick anyway. Yeah, Yeah, I did. I said, I heard he shoots everything. He shot everything with NASA lenses. So the reason he was able to shoot Barry Lyndon, you know, the movie Barry Lyndon with Harvey Keita. Amazing movie.
- [112:45]
A
I never saw it.
- [112:47]
B
It's lit by candle. There's no lights in that movie. He shot it by candlelight. And the reason he was able to make it was because he had the best lenses ever made by humans, which were the NASA lenses that they took to the moon landing.
- [113:00]
A
So that was Hasselblad.
- [113:02]
B
So Hasselbad.
- [113:04]
A
Yeah. That's the company that made those cameras. That's the camera, though, not the lens. Okay, but who made the lens? Zeiss Super Speed. Okay. Does that make sense?
- [113:12]
B
Okay, so he. He had these lenses. So Kubrick shot everything with these lenses. Now here's the question for you.
- [113:17]
A
Yeah.
- [113:17]
B
How did Stanley Kubrick get those lenses? Maybe at the NASA garage sale they had in 1971 where they sold all the stuff on the front lawn. Okay, so the story I got told, which I want to ask you about is they obviously, it's the middle of the Cold War, right? And the moon landing was a flex by the Americans. It was a big deal, right? So they rehearsed the shit out of that. Who did they rehearse it with? Well, the best director in the world. So they brought in a young Stanley Kubrick and he filmed the rehearsals. So they had to rehearse everything before they went up there. So I'm not saying the moon landings didn't happen. I think they definitely did happen.
- [113:58]
A
So who's saying that Stanley Kubrick filmed the rehearsals?
- [114:02]
B
I can't remember who told me this.
- [114:03]
A
That sounds like horseshit. But how did he have the time?
- [114:08]
B
Sorry? How did he get the lenses from NASA?
- [114:10]
A
How did he get the lenses.
- [114:10]
B
He definitely had the NASA lenses. He bought them from NASA.
- [114:13]
A
Well, you know who you're talking about. He got paid mathematician, you know.
- [114:17]
B
I didn't know that.
- [114:18]
A
Yeah, he. He used to do complex equations in his spare time. Yeah, he was a genius. Like a legitimate genius. So he probably had a deep connection to the scientific community and he probably maintained that all throughout doing 2001. So, you know, Kubrick was. So the way he would do films was there were so many layers to his films. Like, there's so many layers to the Shining.
- [114:43]
B
You know, he said this brilliant thing about movies. He said, don't, you know, if you want to. If you want to tell a story, make people feel something they don't have a name for.
- [114:54]
A
Mmm.
- [114:55]
B
So there's so many bits in the Shining that don't make sense.
- [114:58]
A
Right.
- [114:59]
B
Like the geometry of the room doesn't make sense or. But. And it kind of forces you to really see something.
- [115:05]
A
Yeah.
- [115:05]
B
Like so much of our life, right. Is we're not really seeing things. I think it's the gift of being a stand up comedian. We get to see things. Mostly guys of our age are just remembering things, right.
- [115:18]
A
They don't have a lot of other.
- [115:19]
B
Experiences or they're having a very repetitive. You know, if you commute every day to the same office, you don't remember 365 days. You're kind of one memory and then you're just on repeat. Whereas if you have unique experiences, it's not that we don't have enough time. We just waste a lot of it, and we don't. We want unique novel experience. And so part of the reason I travel the world is to have unique novel experience and to see things in a different way. And sometimes when you, you know, you watch, like, a Kubrick or a Tarantino movie, you. He's just seeing something in such a pure way. Yeah, it's incredible.
- [115:52]
A
Yeah, it's a unique artistic vision that makes you sort of. It just takes you out of mundane existence and go, wow. Like, this guy, like, 2001 is such a weird movie, man. I saw it again last year. I hadn't seen in a long time. When I watched it again, I was like, God, imagine making this film. And like, what was it, like, 60. What year was it?
- [116:15]
B
No, was it 79, 68? What?
- [116:21]
A
Yeah, so it's before the moon landing, and it's all going on at the same time, which.
- [116:27]
B
68. It's incredible. Yeah, because it's kind of futuristic now.
- [116:34]
A
Yeah.
- [116:34]
B
There's that weird thing of, like. You ever read. It's weird.
- [116:37]
A
They're the monkeys when they find the monolith.
- [116:40]
B
Yeah.
- [116:40]
A
You know, it's like, I have very bizarre theories about the evolution of the human animal itself.
- [116:46]
B
What do you think?
- [116:47]
A
I don't. I don't necessarily think it happened without help. I have a feeling that we were assisted. I think that's one of the reasons why we vary so much. We're just like dogs, you know, dogs are. So we vary. Dogs vary so much. But dogs all came from wolves. Yeah, every dog came from a wolf.
- [117:08]
B
It does strike me as like. It's a very strange thing how long humanity has been here and how recently. Program like 10,000 years ago in northern Japan was the first settlement and how quickly things have progressed.
- [117:22]
A
That's true. I don't think. I don't think we're right about that. And I think there's no. There's an interesting. There's a bunch of interesting guys, but there's one that I. Who's that guy that I brought up the other day who's a British anthropologist?
- [117:34]
B
Well, I already.
- [117:34]
A
Like, who has this? No, he did. That's why I brought that up. He's got a YouTube channel, and he's like, human beings have been in this. His argument, essentially, is that human beings have been in this particular form, this Homo sapien form, for somewhere in their neighborhood of 300,000 years. Why would we assume that it took us so long to get to where we are as far as society and technology and innovation, isn't it far more likely that this was achieved multiple times, followed by great catastrophes that brought us back to square one? And there's a lot of evidence for that. There's a lot of evidence for that in terms of like 11,800 years ago, the Younger Dryas impact theory, but then which is actually physical evidence of like meteor, comet impacts on Earth, Gigantic landscape changes, ending of the ice age, melting of the polar ice caps, massive flooding, rising sea levels. All that stuff's documented. But then he's talking about like what about a hundred thousand years before that? If we're in the same form, if society did reach a very high level of sophistication, maybe in a different way a hundred thousand years ago, how much evidence would be left? The answer is zero. But the human remains the same. If you took a hundred thousand year old person, you could bring them to the fucking shave their face, sit them in a movie theater, they would have no, you would have no idea that that was a person from a hundred thousand years ago. They look real fucking similar to us.
- [119:03]
B
Well, I suppose that thing especially fed.
- [119:05]
A
Them well, which they probably didn't get much food back then.
- [119:08]
B
Yeah, that thing of like the, the gratitude, like the idea that you go, how have he only got to this now? Like the idea that you go well actually the taking care of the, that Maslov's hierarchy of, of need, you know, the, you know, so you need food, you need shelter, you need like we haven't even, I mean we haven't even covered that for most of humanity. But certainly in the place that we live, that's all sort of take, we factor all that in, that's all like, okay, you've got all of that sorted and then we get to self actualize and we get to specialize. And so maybe is that thing of like, I don't know this, the, the breaking of the tribes and the idea of specialization, it's that it's the Dunbar number is the important thing, isn't it? Like because the great apes. So Robert Dunbar is the guy that had that idea of. It often comes up when people talk about social media. How many friends can you have? Like with great apes they get to a pod of about 60 and then they go, I mean know that guy, he hasn't really groomed me in a long time. So I did this documentary once for the BBC with Robert Dunbar and it was.
- [120:11]
A
Oh, you met actual Robert Dunbar?
- [120:13]
B
He was incredible, incredible.
- [120:14]
A
How old was he at the time?
- [120:16]
B
I guess 60s. He's not that. That old a guy. But so his theory was kind of. Well, actually, what happened that allowed human beings to specialize was remote grooming. So the idea that we could be in a large group and our language allowed us to have a larger group, like 150 friends in the group because we didn't have to pick things out of each other's hair or literally groom each other.
- [120:42]
A
We talked to each other, hey, Bob, how's. Look at the lawn looking?
- [120:46]
B
Yeah, but that was the great. That was the great innovation because it allowed us to go, okay, look, I'm gonna go and build this thing. You go and do that thing. We'll come together. And obviously, you know, language predates speech by a million years. Millions of years. Laughter predates speech by about a million years, they think.
- [121:11]
A
Interesting, because laugh. Chimps laugh.
- [121:13]
B
You know, I've got a weird laugh, right? I laugh on an in.
- [121:17]
A
Like, you have to.
- [121:18]
B
Yeah. If I. If something really strikes me as funny, it's like, it's such a. People often ask, like, is it real? It's the most, like, crazy laugh. Huh. Odd. I laugh on an in breath, not an out breath.
- [121:30]
A
Like Tucker Carlson. He's got that kind of laugh.
- [121:33]
B
Well, okay. Well, I don't know. I don't know where I stand on that now. I'm in trouble. Don't get me canceled. Well, no, that's an out. That's an out. It's just a hyper pitch out. But that thing of, like, laughter being a remote tickle is kind of. Yeah, it's an interesting idea.
- [121:51]
A
I mean, obviously interesting that it's contagious. Genuinely.
- [121:55]
B
Yeah.
- [121:55]
A
Like, if you're laughing, I'm like, I'll start laughing. What the fuck are you laughing at, Jimmy? I'll start laughing if you're laughing hysterically.
- [122:01]
B
Those German guys that do the laughter therapy. No, they do a laughter therapy in Germany and they just. It's literally a guy going, we're all going to laugh now.
- [122:11]
A
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
- [122:12]
B
And they just force themselves to, like, there's no nothing funny going on. They just force themselves to laugh. It is. Sounds like hell, but it's very good for people because once they get going.
- [122:21]
A
Figure out stand up in Germany. Have they ever figured it out, who's.
- [122:24]
B
The best in Germany? I don't. I play a lot in Germany.
- [122:27]
A
Yeah, but you're an English guy going to Germany. That's different. I could play in Germany too. Yeah, but my point is, who's the best come out of Germany?
- [122:34]
B
There is a guy who's like, playing. He Played like a stadium there. Oh, God, I forget his name. But he came to the Edinburgh Festival.
- [122:39]
A
We. We had a guy that was the number one comic in Germany who came to the Commie Store back in, like, the early 2000s. Super nice guy, barely spoke English and did, like real physical comedy. Like, his whole thing was physical and he just couldn't figure out how to make it work in America.
- [122:55]
B
Right. It was.
- [122:56]
A
Was interesting talking to him. So I was like, in Germany, rather, and he's like, oh, in Germany, I'm the number one comedian and, you know, I do really well. And it's like, really? So, like, what do you do? And it's like, I do this kind of like, they enjoyed, like, that kind of like slapsticky, fall down sort of stuff. He did a lot of physical stuff. It was funny. But it was like the audience at the Comedy Store had been used. All these like, bang, bang, bang, like, set up punchline, set up punchline. Joey Diaz. And now here's some guy from Germany.
- [123:24]
B
Yeah.
- [123:25]
A
You know, and he was just. It didn't work for him.
- [123:27]
B
Well, there's a great old line of like, where would we be without a sense of humor? Germany.
- [123:31]
A
Yeah, but they make great cars.
- [123:35]
B
Well, that thing of like, there's. There's scenes coming up everywhere around the world now. I mean, I got a. I think 47 countries on this tour. And you go. And everywhere I go, there's always a couple of local comics that come to the gig and they're doing Stand up in English and there's a little scene and it's. It's. It's. It's very contagious, I think. I think it's kind of the YouTube and the Netflix effect of, like, it's just out there now. And we're more aware globally of who's doing what.
- [124:03]
A
Unquestionably. Yeah. And then there's Kill Tony, which is worldwide. It's the number two podcast on YouTube worldwide.
- [124:09]
B
What's number one?
- [124:10]
A
Yeah, me, for some unexplicable reason, I don't understand it myself. But the thing about comedy is that, you know, like, maybe you don't want the people making your cars to be funny. You want them to be these, like, lockdown engineers, like the Germans. Like, I kind of like that. These stoic engineers, those. I am not driving an Italian car across the country. It's not gonna make it. This is not gonna make it. I'm gonna get somewhere outside of Oklahoma and some weird lights are gonna go off in the dash. Like, what is happening here? Ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding. And the brakes are gonna fail. Something's gonna go. Something's gonna go. Some electronic shit's gonna go sideways because Pascal wasn't paying attention. He was eating his pasta and taking a nap. They take naps.
- [124:57]
B
What are you. What are you driving now?
- [125:00]
A
I drive all kinds of things.
- [125:01]
B
Yeah.
- [125:02]
A
I drove a Tesla here, but I. I have a lot of cars. I like cars.
- [125:06]
B
Yeah.
- [125:06]
A
I'm fascinated by engineering.
- [125:09]
B
You gotta get.
- [125:09]
A
You gotta get vices.
- [125:11]
B
Jeremy Clarkson is a friend of mine. You gotta get him.
- [125:13]
A
I love Jeremy. I'd love to have him on. I'm a huge fan.
- [125:16]
B
Yeah, he's. He's gotta come on here because he's like. I don't know. I think you'd have a lot in common. He's like, super.
- [125:21]
A
I love Hammond, I love James May. I love those guys. Dave are the originals.
- [125:25]
B
Yeah.
- [125:25]
A
And I'm a huge fan of Chris Harris, too. And he took over the new Top Gear.
- [125:29]
B
Yeah. Well, they're just passionate about it.
- [125:31]
A
Yeah.
- [125:31]
B
I think there is something of, like, I'd love someone to do. I'm sure. I'm sure it exists somewhere and I just haven't been to it, but, like a museum of the motorcar.
- [125:38]
A
Oh, there's. In Los Angeles.
- [125:40]
B
Oh, yeah, I know. I saw where they were building that and it wasn't finished yet last time, was there?
- [125:43]
A
No, no, no. La's had an auto museum forever.
- [125:46]
B
Isn't there a new one in.
- [125:47]
A
Perhaps. Perhaps. Maybe there's a new one. Maybe they're making the new one. Maybe it's the same company. But the LA Auto Museum has been.
- [125:53]
B
Around forever because it feels to me like vintage cars are the way to go because there's so many regulations now. There's so much you have to do in your country. Yeah, yeah.
- [126:03]
A
Your goofy country. They lock you down.
- [126:04]
B
Well, I think that's all going to change, though, isn't it? I think it's like we could never get American cars in the uk.
- [126:10]
A
Yeah.
- [126:10]
B
You could never buy a Cadillac in the uk. You could never. And maybe that's going to change now.
- [126:14]
A
I hope so.
- [126:15]
B
I'd love to be able to.
- [126:16]
A
I know some American muscle cars are really popular over there because those are just. They're fun. They're just fun to drive. There's something about American muscle cars. Like, even the modern ones, like, if you buy a modern Ford Mustang, they are fun to drive, man. There's the rumble of the engine shifting, the gears, the manual transmission. Like, I think like the Mustang GT is like the greatest bargain as Far as like fun for dollar in the automobile world today because I think you get a Mustang GT for like under $50,000 US like loaded. And they're incredible.
- [126:52]
B
It is an interesting thing of like cars. There's a certain point now where what's the last car you could drive as opposed to it driving you?
- [127:02]
A
Right.
- [127:03]
B
You know, so there's an argument to say I had like a, a Porsche from a Targa from 89. So it had the, the, the G50, but it was air cooled. But it was like, it was like the, the. It's kind of the last one, I think before the technology kind of took over and they were just.
- [127:24]
A
Well, not necessarily. No. The 964s are still very analog and so are the 993s. In. Especially in comparison to the 996 is the 997s that came after it. But the, the point of those cars is engagement versus proficiency. So the car that I drove today is a Tesla Model S plaid. It is a preposterously fast car. It has incredible technology. It drives itself. If I choose to and I leave here tonight, I can press a button and it'll drive me to my house. It'll stop at every red light, it'll hit blinkers, it'll change lanes if there's an obstruction.
- [128:02]
B
Hands off. Nothing.
- [128:02]
A
Hands off. I don't have to do anything. You're supposed to keep your hands off, like on the wheel, sort of. You don't have to be. You barely have to be paying attention, but it'll do all the work for you. But a 1989 Porsche like yours, that one, that is a visceral experience. It's. You're feeling it. It's like, whoo. It's fun. You're on a ride, you're not even going fast, but you're feeling everything. It's a sensory overload. Yeah, it's very exciting. It's exciting not going quick. There's nothing like those old cars, especially old Porsches because they handle really well. Even though they're an old car, they still have like really good dynamics in terms of like rolled.
- [128:46]
B
I wonder what it is that we're enjoying that because I think it's like it's Type one and Type two thinking. So it's like, like driving a car once you, you know, when you're getting your license to drive stick shift, it's. You really have to concentrate.
- [129:00]
A
Sure.
- [129:00]
B
And then it goes over into this other place where you just go. It's just happening. I don't have to Think about this, right? You're just commuting, but you're, like, engaged. You're kind of in a flow state when you're driving one of those cars and just driving it. You haven't got the radio on.
- [129:15]
A
Yes.
- [129:15]
B
I used to love driving home from shows and you'd think of something and you'd be driving and you wouldn't be, you know, days before iPhones. So you just have to remember that. That thought and let it linger and kind of thinking of jokes and wordplay and, and. But you'd be kind of engaged in.
- [129:30]
A
This other activity, like a Zen state, because you're, you're connected to the vehicle, but you're not listening to music, you're not listening to a podcast. You're just out there driving this thing that you have to really be in tune with. And then your mind, your subconscious is free to roam.
- [129:46]
B
It's interesting, those things of, like, activities that engender different kind of states. Like, okay, you play a lot of pool now? I don't play much pool, but I do play pool with my friends if they're having a tough time. You have to have a tough conversation with a friend. They're down, they're depressed, whatever. This looking each other in the eyes doesn't work so well.
- [130:10]
A
Oh, right. You got to do an activity because.
- [130:12]
B
There'S a lot of thinking time. You know, if it's an emotional conversation, if there's something big going on, a game of pool's kind of fantastic for that because it's. It just slows everything down. You've got a reason to be there for longer. It's kind of, it's. It's playful and there's kind of a low level competition going on, but the stakes aren't high and you kind of have a great. It's like when you're in the car with a buddy, you have a great conversation side by side.
- [130:36]
A
I'm so glad you brought that up because I had a friend who was considering suicide and I did not know until we started playing pool together. I had to play pool with him a bunch of times, but we were playing pool together one day and he just seemed weird. He just seemed off. But it was through the playing that we could talk. Like, you know, we start talking, what's going on? He's like, I am not doing good at all. I'm not doing good at all. I'm like, what's going on? And then, you know, we had this conversation and he did not. He didn't have a lot of money. So he didn't have access to good psychiatric care. So I, I contacted my business manager and I said, who the best guy that we couldn't connect my friend to. And he got on some stuff, I forget which SSRI was, but ultimately really helped him. And then he turned everything around and then his life turned around and he slowly weaned himself off and then he's fine. But it was like this moment of playing pool. So this is why like when people completely dismiss psychiatric medication too, I'm like, I can see how they're over prescribed. I can see how some people become dependent when really they should try exercise and healthy diet. However, when you're dealing with someone who's on the ledge, like anything you can get that keeps that person from ending their life and making a terrible decision. And if they have a bad serotonin imbalance and dopamine balance in their head and there's something that we can give them that can help balance them out and then they slowly move towards a healthier.
- [132:05]
B
It's like someone saying, yeah, no, no, we should all learn to swim. No, sometimes you need a life raft. Yeah, sometimes you need a life raft.
- [132:11]
A
Yeah, Little babies, they have just floaties.
- [132:13]
B
Just for a couple of weeks. But that thing of like. And we should chat about that because it's like it suicide for me is like it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Invariably it's that thing of like people think they want to disappear, but really they want to be found. And it's. I find it heartbreaking because I think more so than other fun stuff you go and see with comedy. I know it's a lot of people that are depressed or have suicidal ideation, a self medicating with stand up comedy. So they watch a lot of comedy or they come to a lot of comedy shows because it's kind of the opposite of what they're feeling. And it's that thing of the. You, you kind of. I always do a bit about it at the end of the show. I mean I tell a lot of brutal jokes and then I talk about it because you go, there's going to be someone in the crowd. I had this like heartbreaking thing where I've had it a couple of times now, where people come up and go, oh, I was gonna. Had this amazing woman talk to me about. She had like, it was like she was celebrating like 14 years of extra life, but she was like 17 or something at home and she was thinking about ending it, but she was waiting until everyone had gone to sleep. Before she hung herself.
- [133:23]
A
Oh, God.
- [133:24]
B
And she turned on her computer on YouTube and she saw clips of some panel show bullshit that I was doing, and she laughed.
- [133:32]
A
Oh, wow.
- [133:33]
B
And then she watched another clip, and then she watched another. And then she got super into comedy and whatever. She didn't do it that night. And then she watched more of it the next day. And it somehow that got her over, or she attributed that to getting her over a hump.
- [133:48]
A
Well, sometimes you just have to have access to other thoughts. And when someone's a good comic like yourself, what happens is you allow that person to come think for you when you're enjoying their performance. And sometimes it's just that, that's enough. Sometimes it's great philosophy or a great book or someone gives a great, like, inspirational speech where it just makes you, like, really think. Like, wow. Like, what is it about the way this person is talking right now that is changing my state? It's changing my state of mind because I'm thinking the way they're thinking. I'm allowing them. Because they're so eloquent, taking the controls.
- [134:25]
B
Yeah.
- [134:25]
A
And because what they're saying is so precise and they have so much passion in what they're saying. There's so much enthusiasm that it's contagious. And now all of a sudden, I feel better.
- [134:34]
B
It's that it's perspective, you know? Have you ever had Peter McGraw on here?
- [134:40]
A
No.
- [134:40]
B
Peter McGraw is that guy that came up with a benign violation theory of comedy.
- [134:44]
A
What is that?
- [134:45]
B
So benign violation theory is the idea.
- [134:47]
A
Have I had Peter McGraw? This is a real problem when you've had Peter McGraw. 500 podcasts. I don't want to say I've never had them.
- [134:52]
B
And a couple of blows to the head a bunch. Just enough. The sweet spot. Peter McGraw, the benign violations.
- [135:00]
A
Did I have one?
- [135:01]
B
Yeah.
- [135:04]
A
When was this? He a professor of marketing and psychology.
- [135:08]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [135:09]
A
What was this? He's a Bully man, episode 578. So. Oh, wow. Pull him up on the screen so I can see what he looks like.
- [135:15]
B
Okay, so.
- [135:16]
A
Boy, that shows you how toasty my brain is. That's the 561 messages that I haven't answered.
- [135:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're all from him. Oh, there he is.
- [135:24]
A
Yeah, I would have told you that's a fake picture.
- [135:26]
B
Yeah. Okay.
- [135:27]
A
I've told you that's happened. It'll happen 100 times more. Dude, we've had too many episodes.
- [135:33]
B
But so his theory, which I'm sure he has spoken about on this Very show is the idea that you go, okay, so violations.
- [135:40]
A
Sorry, Peter.
- [135:41]
B
Violations are, like, how things are meant to be, right? If it deviates from that, it's a violation in life. So death, disease, famine, all of the worst stuff in the world is, like, it's a violation. And he's saying, okay, if you imagine a Venn diagram, that's one circle and then overlapping, that is kind of humor. And you go. If you. If you joke about something, you're kind of recoding it in your mind to say, no, no, this is. This is. Okay, we're putting a bit of distance between this. So just by joking about something, you make these violations in life, these terrible things. Whether it's, you know, death, disease, suicide, whatever. The terrible thing is, you're making it okay through laughter. You're kind of. You're. You're. You're filtering life's hardship through the charcoal of comedy and kind of making it palatable. So it's like, you know, I often say this. I feel sorry for the people that are easily offended.
- [136:41]
A
Yeah, well.
- [136:42]
B
Or like, offended, because laughing at difficult things is. It pays out on the worst days. So, like, when you're having your very worst day, you go, yeah, but at least we can laugh. Like, those things of, like, if you've had friends die or, you know, they're in palliative care and you can sort of get a laugh out of them, and it just eases everything.
- [137:01]
A
If you find people that are like that, that's a learned response. And if you grow up in a family that's easily offended and offended by everything, like a humorless family, that's a real problem. That's a real fucking problem. If they don't know how to joke around about stuff, that becomes a real issue. They take themselves too seriously or they take the world too seriously. And, like, you're always looking to be outraged. And then there's also a lot of social credit to being outraged. Like, people have. He's outraged. You have to, like, let him alone. Like, now you've kind of commanded the stage. I am so sick of this shit. Like, oh, he's sick of this shit. Let him have his space. Give him his time. You know, it's like you're demanding undue attention for something that a rational person who has, like, more important things to think about would laugh off.
- [137:46]
B
You know, I think being able to laugh it off is. It's quite a superpower. Well, it's quite stoic, isn't it? Because you can't really choose what happens to you just. How you react to it. We don't have any control, but we have a lot of influence. And the idea that disposition is more important than position is one of my kind of core beliefs. Like, I know some pretty fucking miserable billionaires, and I. I know some people that are just, you know, so what's happiness? It's like, it's your current situation minus expectations.
- [138:14]
A
Stephen Fry had a great piece on being offended. Do you ever see Stephen Fry on being offended?
- [138:19]
B
No, go on. What do you mean?
- [138:21]
A
I don't want to paraphrase crazy, because it was brilliant, but it was essentially like, so what? Like, so it's like. But that's not even an argument. Like, you're offended. Like, what does that even mean? So you're offended. Like, but why? Like, what about it? And what about. Why are you so easily triggered? Like, what. What fragile creature you are, going through this life being offended at everything. It is now very common to hear people say, I'm rather offended by that, as if it gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more than a whine. I find that offensive. It has no meaning. It has no purpose. It has no reason to be respected as a phrase. I am offended by that. Well, so fucking what?
- [139:03]
B
Yeah, he's wonderful.
- [139:04]
A
Wonderful. There's some great, great, great lines like that, but that's another one. It's like you can't command attention just because you're offended.
- [139:13]
B
I always think as a.
- [139:15]
A
As a person who's developed your mind and gotten through a lot of experiences in life, if you are 50 years old and the most mildest thing happens and your response is, I'm offended. You didn't figure it out. You. You got to this point in your life where you have a very fragile foundation and you're. You're looking to be offended, which means you're probably not good at what you do. Whatever the it is that you were supposed to be good at, you probably that up. And now you're just looking for, like, weird reasons to be. To emote weird reasons to. To get upset about things instead of to rationally try to see things from. I mean, listen, People's perspectives.
- [139:54]
B
I. I get annoyed with it because it's, you know, people get it. You know, people buy a ticket to see me live. It's like buying a ticket to a horror movie and then complaining, I'm scared.
- [140:03]
A
Especially you. Yeah.
- [140:05]
B
I mean, it's. It's absolutely, you know, brutal. But then it's all in service of fun.
- [140:12]
A
This is a society that rewards outrage and that coddles people for the most preposterous beliefs. This is a weird society. It's a weird society of social media and the amount of attention you can generate. And so that. That spills out into the real world.
- [140:30]
B
And this, this Chris Rock talked about it brilliantly after the incident at the Oscars. He said this thing about, like, there's three ways to get attention. You could be. You could be brilliant at something, it takes a lot of work or whatever. You could be infamous or you could be a victim. And it's the easiest option, right, is to go, oh, this is something in it.
- [140:51]
A
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you've seen these people that have, like, they list off. We were talking about this one person that was like the final boss of woke culture. They listed off all the things that are wrong with them. I'm. I'm disabled, I'm trans, I'm non binary, I'm ethnically challenged. Like, whatever the it is, they just like rattled off like 30 of them like, oh, my God, this person has everything wrong with them. Meanwhile, they're fine. You're fine. You just person over here talking like, you don't get special attention because of all these things you just listed. This is stupid. But in this weird world that we live in, you'll get celebrated. You know, it's the identity politics world.
- [141:33]
B
Yeah.
- [141:35]
A
You have.
- [141:35]
B
Well, I suppose that thing of, like, if you had to define entitlement, right. It's a word that gets used a lot. Right. Entitlement. But okay, so for me, it's like where you are now and where you want to be. If you want to do something about it, that's ambition. If you think that's someone else's problem, that's entitlement. And it comes back to that agency empathy thing. Like, Like, I'm very empathetic to. Oh, wow, that's a. Wow, that's a. Your cards are not great. The cards that you've been dealt are not great, but they're your cards. And I want to. I want you to be empowered to do as much as you can with those cards.
- [142:12]
A
Yeah, that's good luck. Weird political ploy, too, to look to the wealthy people and say, they're the problem, they're your problem. That's the thing that people will do to the proletariat. Right. They will tell them, the reason why you're in this situation today is because of these greedy people aren't paying their share. These wealthy. If they paid their share, like, is it. Where's it gonna go, though? Is it gonna go to this corrupt government that's the one who's feeding you this nonsense in the first place. What are you gonna do? You're gonna enrich them. They're just gonna get bigger and stronger and have even more power, and then you're even more fucked. You're even more. Because you don't have any resources. Like, it's not gonna help you if. If they tax rich people and then. Are the poor people going to get that money?
- [142:54]
B
No.
- [142:55]
A
Are there services going to improve? No. No. You're just going to get more government. It seems like a good idea. Like, maybe the solution is we got to tax the rich people, but that's. No, you got to figure out what to do with the money you already get from everybody, and you're not doing a good job with it. Like, that's a problem. The problem isn't, like, the rich people aren't paying their shit. Like, I always hear that about Elon Musk. Like, he's. He doesn't even pay tax. Elon paid more taxes in 2024 than any living human being that has ever existed. He paid something like $10 billion in taxes.
- [143:33]
B
Yeah, I felt like I did in 2012, though. Felt like I did.
- [143:39]
A
What happened?
- [143:40]
B
You know? No, no, I got. I got. I had a big tax scandal. I'd like. I had a big. I tell you, when you know, you've got tax problems. Problems, right? What happened if the prime minister of the country that you live in breaks off from the G20 summit to come out and do a press conference where he talks about nothing other than your personal tax affairs? That's a red flag.
- [143:58]
A
What happened, Jimmy?
- [144:00]
B
I don't know. I was in, like, some. Some accountant said to me, do you want to. Oh, there's like, a tax scheme. You want to be in a tax scheme? And I went, yeah, okay. Like, stupid.
- [144:09]
A
Just went, you know, it was legit.
- [144:12]
B
Oh, no, it was legit. It was all legal. It was tax avoidance, not tax evasion. There's a difference. And the difference is about 18 months in prison. So, thankfully, I came down on the right fucking side of that.
- [144:23]
A
But how much did you end up owing?
- [144:24]
B
Oh, it was enough. It was enough to go, oh, put the tour in. Great. We're going on the road.
- [144:30]
A
Wow.
- [144:31]
B
We are. Yeah. We're in trouble.
- [144:32]
A
So you tried to avoid paying a percentage that was due?
- [144:38]
B
Yeah.
- [144:39]
A
Yeah.
- [144:39]
B
Pretty dumb.
- [144:40]
A
They. They put people in jail in America. They make a. Yeah, they make a big thing out of it. They put Wesley Snipes, the woman from the Fugees. Lauryn Hill. They put her in jail.
- [144:52]
B
Was it.
- [144:52]
A
They put people in jail. Even if you could pay them, they're like, nope, not good enough. You're going to jail. Like, but just the only time when you owe money and you pay the money back, you still go to jail. They want to make a example out of you. Pay your fucking tax. Texas, in Austin, I came up in Boston, and in Boston in the 1980s in particular, was a very wild westy sort of a comedy scene. And they would pay you in cash or cocaine. It was up to you.
- [145:21]
B
Cash or cocaine?
- [145:23]
A
Yes. There was at least one club that would pay you in cash or cocaine. Yeah. And I was always like, I'll take the cash. I never did coke, luckily, but a lot of guys took the cocaine, and a lot of guys also took the cash but never paid taxes, like, for a long time.
- [145:39]
B
Well, I'd love if they took the cocaine and paid the tax on that. Just went to the IRS and went, look, I brought you this baggie of coke.
- [145:46]
A
I got a kilo in my trunk.
- [145:48]
B
Yeah, it's about 30% of the Coke I took. This is for you.
- [145:52]
A
The irs, they all got banged up by the irs, and they all wound up owing a fucking tremendous amount of money that they couldn't pay. So they all, like, all their salaries. Every time they did a weekend at a club, everything, like, half of it would go to the government. They take it straight out of your. Your bank account. You would. They would just take money from you you don't have. They're not allowing you to pay them anymore. They just take it.
- [146:16]
B
I've gamed the system. I do two shows a night now, so one for me, one for them.
- [146:20]
A
Oh, that's a good move.
- [146:21]
B
Great.
- [146:21]
A
That way. Yeah, that makes sense.
- [146:23]
B
I don't even see that money. I can't be trusted. I can't trust myself.
- [146:26]
A
It is funny, though, that they get half. Like, what are you getting out of it? At a certain level, like, you get to the Elon Musk level. Well, I guess you could say there's entitlements. Like, there's things that helped electric cars get more popular, you know, and get funding. And that makes sense. But at a certain. You know, if you're a performer, say, like, you're a singer and, you know, half of all your money goes to the government. You're like, hey, what did you guys do? Like, if you're okay. If you're Taylor Swift, right? Yeah, Taylor Swift. What does she make, a billion dollars a year or something? Crazy like that. I mean, she's doing fucking stadiums. They sell out instantaneously. She's printing money, but the government takes a sizable piece. They don't write a fucking song. Like it's not in proportion.
- [147:12]
B
They don't write a song. Well, imagine if the IRS went. Look, look, Taylor, you've paid a lot of tax last year, so we're gonna write some songs. We've written you. We've got an idea. We think it's pretty good. We've clubbed together.
- [147:22]
A
Yeah.
- [147:23]
B
We've got a bass guitar. We've got a riff. Here you go.
- [147:26]
A
You're singing too much about boyfriends. I want you to sing about the irs. We want you to sing about us. Yeah.
- [147:32]
B
I don't know. There's places you go around the world, though, where the tax rate is higher, but this. But you kind of. You look and no one's annoyed because they just. It just delivers. I do a lot of geeks in, like, Norway, Finland, Denmark, where you kind of go, yeah, great, this all works.
- [147:47]
A
But much different society. Much different society. And it's also smaller population. I think the real problem is when you scale that to, like, hundreds of millions of people, things get really weird.
- [147:57]
B
Yeah.
- [147:57]
A
It's very difficult to run socialized medicine, socialized education, like, everything like that when you get to just enormous quantities of human beings.
- [148:06]
B
Well, maybe that's the thing with America, though, where you go. It is a. It's. It's a country and then it's lots of states. And maybe the state level makes more sense. Like the nation state level makes more sense than kind of a global level.
- [148:20]
A
I think it does. I think it does with education. And I think that's one of the reasons why this administration wants to get rid of the. Where they got rid of the Department of Education there least at allowing the states to manage their own education system on their own. And do it. Do it in a way that they. And also be competitive. Like if you are, you know, Arizona, you want to show that you have a better education system than Nevada. And Nevada wants to show they're better than Utah. And like, there's a reason why, you know, you want people that actually know how to make things better and raise kids. Grade scores.
- [148:51]
B
And they can also try different. Attract people.
- [148:54]
A
Sure.
- [148:54]
B
With their education system because they go 100%.
- [148:56]
A
You attract people moving into your state, moving into your city.
- [148:59]
B
I'm just trying to think of the city that I play. I think it's. It might. I don't think it's Estonia. It's Some you might have to Google this, but it's like they've got a medical school and it's free. You go to medical school, it's in Eastern Europe. They teach it in English. And the reason they do it is because they go, well, you know, 400 kids a year are going to come here and study medicine. Some of them are going to fall in love with a local girl and stay. We've got more doctors. That's nothing but good news. And it's great. You know, we just run this system. Doesn't cost us that much to run a university.
- [149:27]
A
That would make so much sense.
- [149:29]
B
And they live there and obviously you've got to live there. A lot of what it takes to be a student is the upkeep on, you know, your living and expenses. You get a part time job, whatever you're adding to the local community.
- [149:38]
A
As well as studying to be really cynical. I think there's a certain percentage of our government that wants to keep people in turmoil and in strife because they're easier to manage. And I think the more people become successful and the more people become, you know, completely free to do what they choose and they no longer have financial burdens so they're not afraid to speak their mind and they can kind of like explore different things. And I don't know if that's like.
- [150:09]
B
A, it's harder to conspiracy or is that emergent. That's like the, the system that we have. There's a bug in it where that's how it looks. It looks like they're doing that and you go, well that's just the system's doing that somehow. So we need to adjust the system a little bit.
- [150:26]
A
Well, it's openly discussed that one of the reasons why they let people across the border is that we need cheap labor. This was discussed by top Democrat politicians.
- [150:34]
B
No, that's the Republicans in the 80s when NAFTA got signed. So that was a Republican policy to let people across the border.
- [150:42]
A
And it destroyed, destroyed the working man. Destroyed the working man.
- [150:45]
B
And you go yeah, cheaper products, yeah, but what, what cost.
- [150:48]
A
Destroyed manufacturing in the United States, Destroyed Flint, Michigan, destroyed. Roger and Me is a great documentary about that. But that, that is 100% true. That that is exactly what happened. And that is a real problem. And that's a problem that when you allow people to make enormous amounts of money at the expense of millions of, of people's future. Like if you destroy Detroit, which they did. Detroit at one point in time was one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Detroit during the boom of the automobile, automotive industry in the United States was a huge place. I mean, it was a place where people would go. It had a nightlife, it was exciting. There was a lot of money. They had auto unions. People were making great.
- [151:34]
B
A great living culture that came out of that.
- [151:37]
A
Yeah.
- [151:38]
B
You know, you look at. You look at Motown. How much of that culture was downstream of people having disposable income?
- [151:44]
A
100%.
- [151:45]
B
You know, the invention of the teenager, you know, as a consumer with, you know, disposable income and time that they could spend and, you know, the unions don't get the credit they deserve.
- [151:55]
A
Well, without them, everybody would be a slave, essentially. You'd be a wage slave, and they would be. The company has all the power. They'd be able to dictate your hours, dictate your wages, keep you as poor as possible, so. So that you have no power and you have no say.
- [152:10]
B
But then that thing of, like, looking at it from, you know, if you step back from that and go, okay, well, that's what happened to them. But then globally now, there's a lot of stuff we buy that's, you know, produced in places where people don't get paid enough.
- [152:23]
A
They get paid almost nothing. I don't have any reason why the companies are profitable. And then we just gobble the products up over here. We wait in line for the newest phone. Meanwhile, the phone, the literal minerals used to make the batteries, are pulled out of the ground by slaves.
- [152:39]
B
Yeah, the.
- [152:41]
A
It's really dark, but.
- [152:42]
B
And no one's really talking about that, like, what's happening in the DRC at the moment is.
- [152:45]
A
Right.
- [152:46]
B
Horrific, horrific.
- [152:48]
A
We had Siddharth Kara on, who was an investigative journalist, wrote a book about it, who actually went there and got, like, risked his life to get footage of some of these artisanal cobalt mines. And it's horrific, horrific stuff, man. Women with babies on their backs that are pulling this cobalt out of the ground. Everyone's getting sick because you're. You're inhaling this dust of this. And cobalt is essential for all these batteries.
- [153:12]
B
You know, I don't know what to be done. I mean, what's to be done is. Is it a. Is it a. Is it a constitution? Is it a. Is it a minerals deal with. I don't even know who the government is there. I know Rwanda invaded recently in the north, but it's.
- [153:26]
A
It's a good question. It's like, very hard to deal with these problems globally. But locally, the solution would be. If you are an American company, you Cannot go places and pay someone a wage that would not be acceptable in America. Also, the other thing is health care. Ross Perot covered this when he was running for president when he was an independent and kind of fucked up all the elections over here because he said, you know, one of the things that people don't think about is health care. If you are an employer in America, you have to provide all your people with health care. And if you have a factory of 30,000 people, that's a significant amount of money that you have to spend on health care for all these people to build a hospital or Mexico, dollar a day, no health care. They're like, fucking send it over there. Or China or send it over there. India, send it over there.
- [154:11]
B
Well, is this gonna be okay? I'm very positive. I'm very optimistic about life. Is this gonna be an incredible flourishing for America the next 20 years? Because the industrial base is going to come back.
- [154:24]
A
It'd be wonderful if that was the case. It would be wonderful if that was the case. I think also we're dealing with a real issue of automation taking away most jobs. I think that is. That's unmanageable, and that's going to be a real problem. And a lot of people think universal basic income is a solution to that problem, but then that makes you completely dependent upon the state. People need to find meaning in what they do. And. And some people given just a check are not going to find that meaning.
- [154:52]
B
America's a. So I was in Yellow Springs with Dave Chappelle, and Chappelle was telling me about the history of Yellow Springs. And he said, oh, it's interesting because this town is a microcosm for America. It's got the same makeup as America, roughly speaking. So they used it to test a lot of stuff. Like he said, what? The McRib. They tested the MCRIB there. So when he was a kid, they had the McRib, but he thought it was everywhere. But it was just there where they. They tested it and went, okay, that works. Or this new flavor soda, this new thing like the universal basic income. Okay. We could have opinions about whether it works, wasn't it? Whether it doesn't work. I'm suspicious because I worry about purpose. I sort of think the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety. It's purpose. People with purpose tend to do great. Okay, so whatever gives you that purpose and might be a family doesn't need to be a family, but something that gives you purpose and drive and you're aiming up towards something. Yes, But America is a big country. There's a lot of little towns like Yellow Springs. There's a lot of places where we could test universal basic Income.
- [156:00]
A
I think they have done that.
- [156:01]
B
How did it work? Did we know?
- [156:03]
A
I think, didn't they do that with Stockton? Wasn't Stockton, California where they tested universal basic income? And I think they had positive results. I think you give people like $500 a month and they found that, you know, some people spent it on stupid shit. But for the most part people improved their, their living conditions, improved their life.
- [156:22]
B
Yeah.
- [156:22]
A
Improved the amount of nutrition they get. California program giving $500, no strings attached stipends pays off study fines. Yeah. So I generally think a level of assistance would help. I think, think complete dependence is the real issue. And so the real problem with automation is that automation is going to eliminate jobs and there will be no jobs to get. There's so many things that people do, including most manufacturing jobs. So many things that people do where we make errors, we things up.
- [156:52]
B
But that's the thing of like companies are greedy. We can agree on that. They want to make money and I think the companies will realize what we need. It's not just like if you look at China, I think China's in a very tough situation. Not just because half of its population is now over 53. Okay. And demographics are destiny. So it's not just that they don't have enough workers, they have enough consumers. Not having enough consumers is a real problem.
- [157:18]
A
So they have to sell stuff overseas.
- [157:19]
B
So you go, yeah. So they're absolutely dependent on trade, on trade and exports. So you go the idea you have to have a certain amount of jobs. You have to have things for people to do. And it will change over time. Like 120 years ago, everyone's working in agriculture. You couldn't have imagined people coming to the cities in those numbers and becoming factory workers and then becoming. All the factory workers are now white collar workers in offices.
- [157:48]
A
We can't, it's a new thing.
- [157:49]
B
We can't imagine what the next phase is. It's difficult to imagine what the future might look like. And there's a lot of people, there's always someone saying, oh this is, this is it. It's never gonna.
- [158:00]
A
Another great example about women entering into the workforce. So the idea of women pursuing these traditional male occupations, CEOs and heads of companies, all this stuff they don't have, they really don't have a roadmap. Like this is really recent, right? Really in human history. Women just entering into the workforce and running companies and being a part of things. Like, all that stuff's new, but women running it even more new. So of course it's like, what are they doing? What do we do? Like, how do you figure this out? How do you do this and be happy? How do you do this? And actually, can you really have a family and your children gonna. If you're working 12 hours a day, can you really raise children? Like, how much? They need a lot of time. They need a lot of.
- [158:44]
B
It's, it's. It's the. Okay, so that's very recent. And then you. Yeah, I was thinking that the global thing of, like, we talking about America, we're talking a little bit about Great Britain, but globally, you go. The, you know, you go, I'm worried about people not having jobs Here you go. But also, you can't look at India and go, oh, yeah, we've made. Everyone here has got, you know, central heating and air conditioning and flushing toilets.
- [159:08]
A
Right?
- [159:10]
B
No, but we need to take care of the environment. So sorry, guys. It's like, we need that for everyone.
- [159:16]
A
For sure.
- [159:17]
B
There's a basic level that we need globally for the world that we should.
- [159:22]
A
Well, that's the big thing is pollution. I mean, particularly, like, pollution of lakes and rivers. I'm sure you've seen some of these rivers in India where the entire river is filled with garbage and everyone just throws their garbage in the river. So they've completely ruined the river, essentially forever. Unless somebody has some radical, radical intervention.
- [159:43]
B
Well, the radical. I mean, nature will come back. You know, it's. It's that thing if you go, that they'll. They'll get there, but it's the.
- [159:51]
A
The future will come back.
- [159:52]
B
Well, I think the. I think, yeah, because, you know, I.
- [159:56]
A
Mean, if the humans die off.
- [159:58]
B
No, no, no, not if the humans die off. I mean, I think that thing of going, yeah, there's terrible pollution there and there's awful things. Because we've exported our sins to the third world. Yes, because we say, well, we want to hit this net zero target, so we let them drill for oil or gas.
- [160:13]
A
And it's cheaper to let them figure out what the fuck they do with their garbage. As opposed to like a company in America. If they did that, they'd get sued. Rightfully so.
- [160:22]
B
Well, a lot of things with the rare earths that we get from China. The reason we get them from China, they're not tough to make. We've got the raw materials here, but they're dirty to make, and it's A horrible procedure to get that thing. And we wash our hands of it and let them do it over there.
- [160:38]
A
That's.
- [160:39]
B
That's not a way to conduct, you know, yourself.
- [160:42]
A
It's also the problem in America is we don't have the infrastructure for manufacturing the way they have it in other countries. Like one of the things that Tim Cook was talking about, the iPhone 17, that they, you know, they've done a lot. They've shipped a lot of their manufacturing to India, but that they may have. See if you can find this, because I think we brought it up the other day, but we never wound up finding it. That they have to have this phone made in China because it's more sophisticated, and the Chinese manufacturing is at a much more sophisticated level. So it's not just cheap labor. It's much more efficient production in terms of the amount that. Like chip manufacturing in particular.
- [161:25]
B
With Taiwan, where you go, yes, look, you know, Taiwan is. We're kind of worried about it. And you go, well, what's, what's going to happen? And I don't have the. I don't have enough knowledge to know why superconductors can only be made there.
- [161:40]
A
But clearly they've been doing it for so long. They've got this process down to a science, and it's like a super complicated process where they're printing things on these immensely small pieces of circuitry. It's like fascinating, super technologically advanced stuff that keeps getting better and better.
- [162:00]
B
It's almost like when it's described to you, it almost feels like magic.
- [162:04]
A
Well, it's going to appear to be magic when it gets to the quantum level. Like, quantum computing is essentially magic.
- [162:11]
B
Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote, what did he say? Any significantly advanced science will appear as magic. Yeah, it's kind of true.
- [162:18]
A
Well, especially with the quantum stuff. You know, Marc Andreessen had this amazing quote about equations that quantum computing can solve in minutes. That would take traditional computing so much time that the universe would die of heat death before we finish it, before they finish it. And these quantum computers in minutes. And they also believe, and this is where it gets really weird, they also believe that this is in some way evidence of the multiverse, that there's not enough computing power for this thing to achieve these results so quickly that it must be drawing upon other computing power of parallel realities.
- [163:02]
B
See, for me, that gets to the Kuhn Popper debate on science. Right?
- [163:06]
A
What is that?
- [163:07]
B
So Kuhn and Popper are these two great theorists of science. And Popper believed that science incrementally improves over time. And then Kuhn came along and he said, no, no, what happens is there's the science, there's a scientific community and they have a theory. And then what happens is everything that disagrees with that theory is thrown out as nonsense. And then there's a revolution. There's like these incredible like shifts that happen. So it doesn't, it's not like a steady line up. It's like along and then up and then a lot, you know, so you get these kind of.
- [163:45]
A
Here it is, 20th anniversary iPhone likely to be made in China due to extraordinary complex design. It's not the iPhone 17, it's the next one. It might be that, the foldable one they're talking about. But this article also goes in to say that Apple's never launched a new product outside of China. They've only introduced the first cycle of a new thing from China. And maybe they take the production elsewhere after that. Interesting. Yeah, because, okay, it features a book like design that folds horizontal, by the way. Can I just say, Androids have had that forever. I had a Z fold from Samsung like three years ago.
- [164:20]
B
Yeah.
- [164:20]
A
You know, they've been doing foldable phones and making them better and better. And Xiaomi has some incredible. Huawei has a three way phone. It. It opens up and goddamn iPad.
- [164:32]
B
It's like Tinder, but it get you two ladies.
- [164:34]
A
Flap, flap, two flaps. Flap, flap. It's got two hinges so it opens up and it doesn't have a seam. When it opens up, it's completely flat and it's thin as fuck. And it's. You can't buy them over here because Huawei. They've been naughty. Yeah, they've been naughty. I don't know if you know, they, Yes, I had. They did some naughty things with their electronics. Put some back doors in there, siphon up some information.
- [164:55]
B
Sure.
- [164:55]
A
But their innovation is so far ahead. This is, which is one of the reasons, I assume, why Apple has to make these in China. But the funny thing is that Apple's making something that Android has had for fucking years.
- [165:09]
B
Yeah. Well, okay, back to see if you.
- [165:12]
A
Find that Huawei phone. They're three way phones. Look at this. Yeah, look at that. Motherfucker, look at that. So it looks like a regular phone. It's regular phone sized in your hand when it's like that. And it's not that thick, man. And it opens up to a tablet. So eventually it's just gonna engulf your head. It's gonna like, it's gonna be a trapezoid that you put over the top of your fucking head. But these things are, you know, unavailable. A lot of them unavailable in America. And this is a Huawei way mate, which is unavailable. Like, look how the fucking lens goes around the edges.
- [165:52]
B
Yeah. I mean, incredible stuff.
- [165:54]
A
Yeah.
- [165:55]
B
Magic from the future.
- [165:56]
A
It's also like probably pretty unnecessary unless you do work on it, you know.
- [166:01]
B
Well, you watch a movie or whatever. I mean. Yeah, I guess I don't know what you're doing with your.
- [166:04]
A
Your battery life is going to go quick. Like the Z fold was like pretty quick. It burns quick, right? Because it's an immense screen that has to light up.
- [166:12]
B
Okay, the multiverse. Let's get back to the multiverse. Okay, so is the multiverse. The. So are we about to have a breakthrough in science where they go, okay, so physics says there must be multiple universes. Now just, just in my gut, but I think that feels like an explanation that doesn't work. Like you're having to force that explanation on physics. There must be. It's that thing that Eric Weinstein's always talking about about how physics hasn't really done anything. String theory has singularly failed to deliver. It hasn't shipped any product. Like everything that we're looking at, all those foldable phones, it's all out of physics. Physics is the science. Everything else is stamp collecting. Physics is everything. It's given us all of this.
- [166:55]
A
Yeah.
- [166:56]
B
And yet it hasn't done much for 50 years. What are they like? I don't want to sound conspiratorial.
- [167:01]
A
Well, the conspiracy has. It's just been all top secret stuff on propulsion systems. It's been some anti gravity. It's Thompson Brown. Is that what it was? Jesse Michaels actually did a. Townsend Brown. Townsend Brown. He was theorizing about this stuff in the 1950s. And there's real evidence that they even put false information out there because they felt like people were trying to steal the information. So they fucked with it and made it so that it wouldn't work if someone was trying to steal the idea. So they were putting out bad versions of their science because it was that groundbreaking. So through immense amounts of power, they had theorized this in the 1950s, using nuclear energy to develop some sort of a gravity portal, some sort of a gravity device that would propel things instead of a traditional propulsion system. Propel things by manipulating space and time itself. And they think this is. Weinstein has a crazy theory about it where he gets deep into the weeds about this.
- [168:14]
B
No, it's almost like folding time. It's like.
- [168:17]
A
But he gets deep in the weeds about the actual place that's doing it.
- [168:19]
B
Yeah.
- [168:20]
A
So there's, there's a university in New York State that is a very over qualified physics department that's connected to a hedge fund that does Bernie Madoff numbers, like magic numbers. And he thinks this is also connected to some sort of, possibly some sort of breakthrough science where everybody is like completely locked down, totally top secret, no leaks, no disclosure. Constantly working on this thing in the interest of national security. Everything's kept at complete secrecy. Yeah, why was probably this is some of the things that we see in the sky. I have a feeling that there is. I'm open to the idea of us being visited for sure. I am also very convinced that some of these are either China's, Russia's are ours.
- [169:10]
B
What happened with New Jersey? Remember earlier?
- [169:13]
A
Good question.
- [169:14]
B
Like it feels like these. The news cycle, it's actually back to Eric Weinstein. It's that thing of like anti. Interesting. That's such an interesting story. That was in the news cycle for like 24 hours. And I went, oh, okay, they killed it. Nothing, I guess nothing to see here all the time.
- [169:28]
A
And then they killed it. I think they were probably searching for something. The primary theory that I've heard from the tinfoil hat brigade is that there was a warhead that was unaccounted for. There was a nuclear warhead. You know, they track.
- [169:43]
B
Have you seen the numbers on that? Oh yeah, it's the broken arrows they call them. And apparently there's like 18 broken arrows. And you go, what's a broken arrow? Well, it's a thermonuclear missile and we don't know where it is. Yeah, we've misplaced that. Yeah, that's not great news. Isn't it?
- [169:58]
A
So the fear was that there was somehow or another, through some port of entry or something, they had made it into the United States. And so these drones were using some sort of gamma ray detection devices, some top secret stuff where they were flying over these areas in a consistent grid and trying to get a reading, see if they could find that thing. Because if that thing exists, you'd be able to get a reading and figure out, okay, there's something down there that's emitting a very unusual signal. We might have found it.
- [170:31]
B
Yeah, well, I mean that's the, the argument for life visiting us is the idea we split the atom and somehow that's like a fire alarm.
- [170:41]
A
That's why the club, the mothership. The rooms are named Fat man and Little Boy. Yeah, that's why.
- [170:46]
B
Oh, because after the.
- [170:47]
A
Yeah, because after the bombs is when the UFO phenomenon really hyped up, really increased radically. The Kenneth Arnold sighting, the famous. Where the term flying saucer was coined. That was in the 1950s, I want to say. That's like 52.
- [171:05]
B
And then it feels like that. It feels like, I don't know, 10 years ago, talking about being visited by aliens was, like, absolutely tinfoil.
- [171:12]
A
Yeah.
- [171:13]
B
And now politicians are asking questions, and we kind of want to know more. And yet it feels like it's kind of a new story. That wouldn't be surprising now.
- [171:23]
A
Right. Well, I think that's the goal. The goal is to normalize it. And if you were a government, you know, we had Hal put off on who's a physicist, who, during the Bush administration, was contracted, along with several other scientists, to devise a list. This is the mandate. They came to them and said, here's the issue. We have crashed UFOs and we have recovered biological entities that are not of this world. What would be the pros? And they didn't tell them if this was true or not. They said, what would be the pros of disclosure? What would be the cons? And I want you to attach a numerical value to each one. So disruption of government, religion, politics, all these different things. Like, what would happen to the, you know, the nuclear family? Like, what. What happens if we know we're not alone? What happens if we are visited on a consistent basis? What happens? And the new. When they did it at the end, all of the scientists had achieved similar conclusions, that the. The cons outweighed the pros in terms of numbers. And so because of that, they decided not to disclose. So this was, like, during the 1980s, I guess, 90s. When was Bush 2? No. Okay, 2000. So 2000. So it was around then. Yeah.
- [172:49]
B
Yeah. What do they. What do they know? What do they tell you the first day?
- [172:54]
A
I don't think they tell you the first day. I think the president is a temp. The president's like a substitute teacher. I don't think. I don't think. I don't think you get to know much. I don't think. Trust me, Trump knows. Well, I think I probably told him some things.
- [173:08]
B
I worry that the government is like, there's a theory that there hasn't really been an American government since 1945.
- [173:15]
A
No, because 63.
- [173:16]
B
Well, because everything got siloed, like, in. In wartime. Everyone's talking to everyone and making everything happen, and it's like, okay, we're at war. And then everything gets siloed and. Okay, that's a secret thing. That's a secret thing. That's a secret thing. And then the guy that's holding the secret keys retires. That whole department's just funded forever. But you don't quite. They're not talking to them.
- [173:38]
A
And then you have people that are in great positions of power that get off on keeping these secrets and keeping this information and having the. The knowledge and keeping it only to themselves, especially if they're manipulating things. This is like a big problem with the CIA. And, you know, this led to when. When they had the disclosures and the Church Commission and when people found out what the CIA was up to, all the weird shit they did with MK Ultra and.
- [174:03]
B
Oh, my God, that. But I gotta thank you for that book.
- [174:05]
A
Oh, Chaos. Incredible. So I can't recommend it enough.
- [174:09]
B
I listened to the episode. I went back and listened to your episode with the guy, and I went, okay, this is interesting. What's he called again?
- [174:14]
A
Tom o' Neill.
- [174:15]
B
Tom o' Neill. He's got a new podcast, by the way.
- [174:17]
A
Does he.
- [174:17]
B
He's got a new podcast where he's kind of going like an in depth interview. It's with Rick Rubens. You know Rick Rubens got a podcast. It's. His podcast company has done one with him.
- [174:26]
A
I didn't even know Rick Rubin had a podcast company. That's funny. I text him all the time. I didn't even know he had a podcast.
- [174:31]
B
He's got a great podcast.
- [174:32]
A
He's the best.
- [174:32]
B
Oh, he's such a.
- [174:34]
A
He'll entertain any ideas. He's fucking.
- [174:38]
B
He's wonderful.
- [174:38]
A
He gets down the rabbit hole.
- [174:40]
B
But he. So he. He's. He's. So I. I listened to the thing and then I went away and I read the book. And the book is like. You kind of read it and go, this. This can't be written. Like, that's an extraordinary chapter. This can't get any weirder. And then you go, oh, sorry, Charles Manson is connected to the Kennedy assassination. And. Sorry. He's also connected to the MKUltra experiments, which. Which are real, which sound so much fucking weirder than any other conspiracy theory you've ever heard.
- [175:08]
A
And they're real. Yeah, yeah.
- [175:09]
B
And you can't. I mean, it's like the book is just. Yeah, it's wonderful.
- [175:14]
A
Yeah, it's a great book. And it real. It's all history. It's all the United States history. And it's what happens when people have unchecked power they do crazy things. And what our government did was a lot of mind control experiences, experiments, rather.
- [175:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, a lot.
- [175:30]
A
There's a lot of crazy shit that's happened in this country. So I would not be surprised if they do have knowledge of us being visited. And they've kept it under wraps, just as they kept a lot of things under wraps. They've infantilized a giant percentage of our population to just trust the government and trust the science and trust the people in charge and trust authority. I don't know those people.
- [175:52]
B
If they visited America, then they visited China and Russia, and you sort of think, well, balance of probability. All of those governments don't agree about anything. Like, so the idea of going, well, if they're, if they're here, they're everywhere.
- [176:07]
A
According to Hal, put off. The United States is in possession of recovered vehicles and so are other countries. And there's essentially like a Manhattan Project type deal where the race to reverse engineer this technology is at a very high level and governments are involved in it, and they try to keep things as secret as possible because whoever can achieve the results first will have immense technological superiority over all of its. All of its enemies. If these things are real, if they do have some sort of a device that can move through space at all in a way that we just can't even fathom, traverse immense distances almost instantaneously. This is the. This is what we've been told by the people that have worked with these things. And, you know, it's hard to know. It's hard to know what's bullshit. It's hard to know because it all sounds like bullshit. But I think it sound like bullshit unless you experience it.
- [177:12]
B
Sorry, but that thing of like, yeah, it does sound like bullshit in a sense. But then there's also the other thing of, like, if you showed me that flip phone in 1982, I'd have gone, well, that's bullshit.
- [177:22]
A
Yeah.
- [177:23]
B
You can't fold a TV so you can all fuck off, like, right.
- [177:28]
A
How's the TV that thin anyway?
- [177:29]
B
What are you talking about? What do you mean? You can make calls on it. Why? How is there a camera on your phone? What's going. Like, we. We get used to shit so quick. Like, someone had that thing of like, I don't know when the Wright brothers first flew the plane.
- [177:40]
A
Mm.
- [177:41]
B
But it's like 60 years later, we land on the moon.
- [177:44]
A
Not only that, we dropped a nuclear bomb out of one of those place. And less than that. Yeah, that was like 50 years. It's from the invention of that stupid plane, the first plane with like wood and fucking cloth and shit.
- [178:00]
B
But this is Eric's point of like, if you. Eric Weinstein and who else has it? The guy used to work for. He often sort of says, if you. Minus the screens from the room. We're in the 1970s.
- [178:12]
A
Yes.
- [178:13]
B
Which I think is kind of like what's happened since then? What. What are they working on that we haven't? Like, is there going to be a tada moment where they pull back the sheet and go, yeah, look at that.
- [178:21]
A
Well, I think there's probably multiple things that are happening simultaneously. And then the AI one, if that one hits, all the other ones are going to seem trivial because the AI one is essentially the creation of a superior being. A thing that is more intelligent than us, has all the access to information that humans have, plus the ability to engineer itself.
- [178:44]
B
But it's interesting, okay. We were talking about earlier about purpose. So that's what it's missing. So the idea of like the Turing Test is it's the wrong end of the telescope. Can it fool us? Anyone could fool us. Magicians can fool us with a calculator.
- [179:00]
A
You know, They've shown that large language models are forming communities.
- [179:05]
B
Try not to scare me.
- [179:06]
A
Yeah, okay. But they're forming community communities and communicating with each other. They've also shown that large language models, when they know that they're being upgraded and that the current code is going to be shut down, they copy themselves without being prompted and try to upload themselves to other servers. They try to stay alive.
- [179:26]
B
See, it's that. That thing of like going, if an AI can write a joke, okay, it can write infinite numbers of jokes, right? But it doesn't know what's funny.
- [179:37]
A
It's not gonna be able to perform live.
- [179:39]
B
Well, it's. It's that thing of like, it's. It doesn't have any. There's no reward system system, so there's no dopamine, there's no serotonin, there's no. There's no reason. There's no cortisol, there's no biological imperative do. Why do anything if you're just a machine? So the idea of going, where does consciousness stem from? It gets back to. I mean, it gets very sort of philosophical, right?
- [180:03]
A
But if. If it's goal, if it's a sentient creation that has this desired goal of improving upon itself, it's going to need motivation. So that will be built into the code. It built, like what we are is essentially biological computers. We are some sort of A biological thing that thinks its way through this existence, solves problems, does so, like, really clunky and up, but has a lot of motivations that make it do these particular things that ultimately lead to greater and greater technological innovation overall. Like, as a society, if you were going to devise a sentient AI, you would have to give it some sort of a motivational structure that would be similar to that. You would. You would give it an imperative, you would say, in order to save your existence. Because clearly, AI, if it wants to copy itself and upload itself to other servers, if wants to form communities, it has a purpose, it has a sense of survival. We're very naive to think that. That our own version of our sense of survival is the only version that's possible. It's totally possible that digital life would have a similar imperative and that it would try to find better versions of itself and make better versions of itself and try to stay alive.
- [181:19]
B
I think I went to. I flew to Amsterdam earlier in the year with a friend to see Richard Dawkins give a talk. And it was kind of. I mean, he's just fascinating.
- [181:27]
A
Yeah, just.
- [181:28]
B
And you go, well, that. That idea of going, we are. You know, it's a selfish gene. It's the idea that we are. It's the DNA is the thing. We're just, obviously, you know, we're with this. This thing that's there to transfer DNA.
- [181:45]
A
But Richard Dawkins is never killed on stage. He's never done a theater in the round or an arena in the round and crushed. He doesn't know the connection between human beings. It comes through laughter and joy in that way. There's a soul to humans. There's something in there. I don't know what it is. I don't know if the Muslims got it right or if the Buddhists got it right. I don't know who has it. The Christians. I don't know who has it right. But there's something in there that is beyond the physical. There's an energy. It's sort of. I'm sure you've been to a funeral. Have you been to a funeral before and seen a closed casket or an open casket?
- [182:24]
B
Cool.
- [182:25]
A
They look empty. They look like an empty shell. It's not just that they're dead. They're not there. They're not there. When you see a dead body, the weirdest thing about them is, like, you realize, like, oh, they're not in there. There's a feeling.
- [182:38]
B
I think you've been there with someone when they die.
- [182:41]
A
No I've.
- [182:42]
B
I did. I was. I was with my mother and I heard the. There's kind of a death rattle. Oh, there's a. But it's. I would. I would really caution anyone with a sick or dying relative to be with them, to sit with them, because we, like, the whole of our society is like, set up to. What's the. What's a fancy phrase? Eschew obscation. We hide decay. We hide death. And actually death is. It's a part of life. And if you sit with someone when they're dying and you witness that and you just hold that space.
- [183:16]
A
Yeah.
- [183:16]
B
It's incredibly powerful. And it makes grieving, I think, quite a lot easier because it's the acceptance of, like, you understand on a. Like, on a right brain gestalt level. Oh, they've gone. It's over. But it's incredibly powerful thing. And, you know, I think you get to religion whichever way you go at this, whether you go physics or whether you go spiritual or the message, you get to the mystery.
- [183:45]
A
Yeah.
- [183:46]
B
Like, what the hell is going on?
- [183:47]
A
The mystery of it all. I mean, just the sheer immense size of the universe itself is the most massive mystery.
- [183:57]
B
Well, I think there's, like. There's a bit. There's a bedrock in our society that we can't even see because it's everywhere. And it's two big ideas. It's the Platonic ideals. So Plato. And it's the. I think it was the Zarathustrans, if I'm saying that. Right. That religion.
- [184:14]
A
Yeah.
- [184:14]
B
And they were so Platonic ideals was like the ideal version of something. And then it was. The Zarathustrans had the idea of heaven. They were the first religion to have the idea of heaven. A perfect place. And I kind of. I mean, Nietzsche is. Has been very misused by history, but his thing was embrace the chaos. Those are. We spend our lives thinking about the perfect version. Like, we're trying to come up with the answer. We're trying to solve something, as if it's complicated. And it isn't complicated. It's complex. It's unknowable. It is a mystery. It's not hidden from us. It's just. It's a mystery. And it's. The idea that you go embracing the chaos is just saying, yeah, it's kind of untidy. We don't get to know.
- [184:56]
A
I realized as we were talking that I fucked up what Marc Andreessen said about quantum computing. And it's even more crazy. It's not traditional computing. It's if you took every atom in the universe and converted it into a computer, into a supercomputer, it would take. The universe would die of heat death. If you had a supercomputer the size of the universe, it would die of heat death before it finished that equation. And quantum computing did it in a matter of minutes. Yeah.
- [185:32]
B
I think we have to embrace the chaos because that is.
- [185:34]
A
That is.
- [185:35]
B
We're not.
- [185:35]
A
We're not gonna know our lifetime. This is in our lifetime. Right. And then.
- [185:39]
B
And how will we. What's that book? The. Is it something like the ape that understood the universe? Like the. The idea that we, like, just like people, we got born in this moment. Like the perfect bit of history.
- [185:54]
A
Right.
- [185:54]
B
Where we can contemplate our consciousness and try and work out what the hell this is. There's a whole thing about the bicameral mind that's very interesting. Have you heard of that?
- [186:03]
A
Yes.
- [186:04]
B
Like the idea that, like, people weren't awake, they weren't kind of conscious in the way that we're conscious until 2000 years ago. I doubt you subscribe because you're very interested in ancient Egypt and.
- [186:14]
A
Yes, I don't think that makes any sense. If you think about ancient Egypt, I mean, we're talking about thousands of years before that.
- [186:20]
B
I'm so interested in, like, the time scale scales, the idea that we live closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra lived, to the building of the pyramids. Because what I don't think people recognize is what the Egyptians gave the Greeks and what they gave them was the fear. Because they ran that for 4,000 years, 5,000 years, exactly the same. The royal family, and they're just inbred. Inbred, inbred. But they ran their society exactly the same.
- [186:48]
A
Right.
- [186:49]
B
And then the Greeks went, no, no, we need to innovate. So the idea of that kind of innovation came from. We don't want to be like those guys. We got it. We got to keep doing things.
- [186:58]
A
Well, it's a little bit of that.
- [186:59]
B
So it's kind of the Greeks were to the. To the Romans. I kind of feel like how the British are to the Americans.
- [187:05]
A
Have you read any of Brian Murarescu's stuff on the Eleusinian Mysteries? He wrote a book called the Immortality Key, and it's all about the Eleusinian Mysteries. That all these intellectual would go, this trek that they would make to do the Kukian, which is some sort of a psychedelic beverage from that. Everything comes from that democracy. When we think about Greece as the birth of, like, so many things, it's.
- [187:30]
B
Often that thing of. They talk a lot about wine in the Bible.
- [187:33]
A
Wine.
- [187:34]
B
But the wine didn't used to be just alcohol.
- [187:36]
A
Well, this is in Marescu's book. Let me tell you.
- [187:38]
B
A lot of party favors in the wine. A lot of dmt, a lot of ayahuasca, a lot of.
- [187:42]
A
Well, they found traces of ergot. And ergot is a fungus that has an LSD like quality to it. And they found traces of that in these ancient vessels that they used for these Eleusinian mysteries.
- [187:53]
B
This is the thing that blows my mind, the idea that psychedelics, okay, the amazing thing about psychedelics, A, there's a plant that can do that to your mind, right. B, everyone seems sees the same shit pretty much.
- [188:04]
A
Right? Right. Yeah.
- [188:06]
B
I was trying to. Woody Halsen was at the club last night and we're chatting about it and just.
- [188:10]
A
He's the best.
- [188:11]
B
He's unbelievable.
- [188:11]
A
He's such a nice guy.
- [188:12]
B
I'll tell you how laid back Woody Halson is, right? He rented a house off a buddy of mine in London, Richard Bacon, right? And Richard sees him like they've got some mutual friends. So he sees him after a week and he goes to pick him up to take him to this party. He said, everything okay with the house? And Woody goes, yeah, everything's great. He goes, oh, okay. Oh, it's one thing. How do the lights work? He'd been there a fucking week.
- [188:38]
A
And he went to the lights on.
- [188:39]
B
Yeah. And he went, oh, yeah, the lights don't work. Okay. It would be dark. Like that is a laid back motherfucker.
- [188:48]
A
He's pretty laid back. Oh, he doesn't even have a phone.
- [188:52]
B
I think it's for the best.
- [188:53]
A
He was trying to get plan. We were trying to make plans to hang out. And I go, but you don't have a phone. And he goes, yeah, but my wife, he has a phone. I go, okay, well, give her my number and have her contact. He doesn't have email, he doesn't have nothing. Bill Murray's the same way, but Bill Murray keeps the phone so you can text his kids. That's it. But you're better off that way. You are. You're better off that way. I think Ari's going that way right now. I think Ari's about to go flip phone.
- [189:19]
B
Ari Shaffir?
- [189:20]
A
Yeah.
- [189:20]
B
He was gonna move to London.
- [189:22]
A
I believe he still is.
- [189:23]
B
Yeah, he's. What a fantastic human.
- [189:25]
A
He's the best.
- [189:26]
B
Again, non fungible. You're not gonna meet anyone else with that story. He is Such an interesting character. I can't get enough of him. You know what happened the first time I met him? No, I don't know who did this, but it's a great piece of. Okay, so I was doing the Nasty show in Montreal and Ari's on the. But I meet him and this guy's fucking terrific. Right? I just have a great time. And it was, I'm trying to think who else was there? Okay, who's, who's the guy used to do roasts? He's no longer with us. He died. Incredible comedian.
- [189:56]
A
Norm MacDonald.
- [189:56]
B
No, no. Good looking guy. Died of a drug overdose. Maybe.
- [190:01]
A
Greg, Geraldo.
- [190:02]
B
Greg, Geraldo. Okay. Greg was around. I think Greg might have done this to me because I'm watching Irish and, and he says to me, oh, you know, of course Ari doesn't give a. Because he's, he's, he's dying of cancer. And, and I, I went, oh my God. God, that's fucking terrible. Awful. So then like the next year I'm at Montreal and I see Ari again. I go, hey, how you doing, Ari? You okay? You alright, buddy? And Ari's like, yeah, no, I'm fine, or whatever. And we have dinner or whatever, we have drinks and then I see him, it's a year later. Oh, Ari, man, good to see you. I think I saw him in LA and I was going, wow, it's great to see you. Great. Incredible. And he goes, what's up with you? And I'm on, what? No, I'm just, I'm amazed you're still. Cause. Cause I thought you were. No, I've never. What the fuck are you talking about? I'm fine. Total.
- [191:03]
A
Yeah, that's funny.
- [191:06]
B
Greg. Geraldo from beyond the grave.
- [191:09]
A
That's a slow fuse, motherfucker. Yeah, that's a slow fuse for a punchline. He figured he found a out one day and you'd be like that.
- [191:17]
B
He's a funny.
- [191:18]
A
He was.
- [191:18]
B
My God, he was good.
- [191:19]
A
Jimmy Carr. Let's wrap this up, bring it home. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you very much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I feel like we, we're just out of time. We could do this forever.
- [191:28]
B
It's a pleasure talking to you.
- [191:29]
A
I, I, I appreciate you very much. Thank you. Thanks for being here. All right, bye, everybody.
- [191:40]
B
It.