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March 7, 2022 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:37:52

Carr On Comedy | Jimmy Carr | EP 233

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	If you've seen a joke written down, you haven't heard the joke.
	There's a dialogue.
	There's an interaction with the audience.
	There's a difference between seeing the words in that joke and hearing that joke and experiencing that joke in the same way.
	Well, that's probably true for the most daring jokes, you know, because when you're in a live show, Theatre and you say something that's right on the edge, right?
	Hilariously funny.
	It's because you're carried away with the moment you get this witty idea and bang you nail it But that sort of and that's right at the edge of what's permissible you take out of context.
	It's a catastrophe Here's the thing again, you know, you can you can joke about anything but not with anyone You know, yeah, that's for sure.
	My audience is not the same as your audience Hey everybody, I'm thrilled today to have with me Mr.
	Jimmy Carr, one of the world's funniest men, one of the world's purposefully funniest men, which is an important distinction.
	An award-winning comedian, writer, and television host.
	Mr.
	Jimmy Carr is one of the biggest-selling comedy acts in the world.
	He's performed in venues in 40 countries.
	His last tour, Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits, which is a somewhat narcissistic title, we might add, sold almost half a million tickets globally, with his current show, Terribly Funny, set to exceed that figure by the end of 2022.
	He's a household name in UK television, hosting Channel 4's 8 Out of 10 Cats and some variants of that, and presenting Comedy Central's Roast Battle UK and Your Face or Mine.
	He's also performed as part of the Royal Variety performance three times, which is something particularly impressive to us Canucks enamored archaically with the Queen.
	He was the first UK comedian to sign a stand-up deal, I think that means a comedy deal rather than a straight deal, with Netflix in 2015, releasing Business 2016 and Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits 2017.
	He's also performed in my favorite city, Montreal, at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, which I'd highly recommend since 2003 with more appearances than any other UK act in that time.
	His YouTube channel, where he's accrued over 500,000 subscribers and...
	130 million views was launched in 2018.
	And because all that is not enough, he's also a published author.
	He co-wrote The Naked Jape, uncovering the hidden world of jokes in 2007.
	And his highly anticipated memoir, Before and Laughter, launched in September 2021 and made the Sunday Times bestseller list.
	So, I have a question for you to start.
	I have to know the answer to this.
	This is serious business.
	A 15-foot-tall replica of Carr's head was used in an advertising campaign for Walker's Crisp and has subsequently appeared in various publications.
	And then it was transported from Preston to the Wickerman Festival.
	I have to know about that.
	How in the world did that come about and why?
	There was a charitable campaign for this brand I've got a kind of crisps called Walkers, very beloved British crisps, and they built an enormous model of my head.
	I mean, who knows why?
	My head's quite big enough as it is.
	And then it's been turned into a bar.
	And so I occasionally, my Twitter will blow up once every couple of years when they transport it because it goes on the back of a flatbed truck and they take it up and down the motorway and people just go, was that an enormous effigy of Jimmy Carr?
	Has he finally lost his mind?
	Did you say it was a bar?
	It was a bar, yeah.
	They turned it into a bar.
	I mean, it was a huge thing.
	You could sort of climb up inside it, so they turned it into a bar.
	I don't know.
	It's a weird world we live in, isn't it?
	Yeah, it's weird to say the absolute least.
	So, your head is a bar.
	Okay, well, that's an answer, and thank you very much for that.
	So, what's the biggest venue you performed at?
	I mean, I've played a couple of stadiums.
	I've done, like, shows in stadiums, but I think, like, often when you've been at a stadium, like an arena, like a 10 or 12,000, but it's very much whispering into the abyss.
	You're telling your jokes and you're just on send.
	And I like comedy to be a conversation.
	And even if there's like two and a half, three thousand people in an amphitheatre, in a room, you feel like there's a discursive element.
	So if something happens in the room, I want to be aware of it.
	Let me ask you that about that immediately so because I always think of my lectures in venues like that as a conversation as well and I also found that if they get too large and maybe that's more than 4,000 something like that then it is in a sense whispering into the abyss it's it's as if that the individual people start to disappear and then you can't make contact with your audience the same way and Yeah, it's like, it's that thing of like, what's the right, what's the right side?
	You know, the medium is the message, I suppose.
	You're Canadian, of course, you'll be quoting McLuhan.
	The idea that you go rock and roll feels like it can sustain a bigger audience than comedy.
	And maybe a lecture, even a little bit smaller than that.
	Like what's the, you know, you need a critical mass for the audience, but you also need it to be the right level that you feel like you're part of this thing, and you're an important part of it.
	So it feels like in a comedy show, if someone at the back of the room shouts something out, I have to be able to hear it and I have to be able to respond to it.
	Otherwise they're not really in the room, in the conversation.
	So I like that.
	I encourage people to join in.
	I always think there's a very special thing when you become a comedian and you find your own audience.
	There's lots of different audiences, but my audience come and see me and they have, we share a sense of humour.
	And there's a sense, one of my favourite quotes about comedy is, you know, laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
	The idea that it connects us and that we have the same sense of humour.
	And in that room, We can joke and we can mess around and they can be as funny as me.
	Sometimes when you go and see a musician, you're just blown away by their talent.
	You think, this guy is just phenomenal.
	I can't get over how great they are.
	I could never do that.
	With a comedian, it's not quite the same thing, because you're thinking, this guy's got the same sense of humour as me.
	You can be as funny as anyone.
	And, you know, my book is about this, really.
	It's a case for living through humour.
	And I think the best jokes, the funniest things that have ever been said, are not said by famous comedians.
	They're said by you and your friendship group and your family.
	They're in jokes.
	And comedy at its best recreates the in-joke of the tribe within that space.
	Yeah, so the rock and roll types, you know, when you go to a great concert in a large venue, if the audio is good, it's as if the musicians are playing in some sense to the crowd.
	But I've noticed in a lecture, and it seems to be the same in stand-up, which I think has very many similarities with a good lecture in front of a live audience, that you have to be talking to individuals.
	And I always talk to one person at a time in the crowd.
	You know, I actually look at someone and I have a little conversation with them and switch to someone else.
	And so there is something that seems to be intimately, and that's partly why it's a dialogue, and there seems to be something that's intimately personal about that that's not the same with something that's more purely artistic.
	Yeah, I think so.
	I think you could perform a song in an empty room and it's still a song.
	And I think a comedy act, a joke, without, you know, it's feed line, punch line, laugh.
	It's binary.
	You either get a laugh or you don't.
	Without the crowd, it isn't anything.
	The crowd performs such an important function in comedy, above and beyond all other art forms, because no one can tell you whether that's a good or a bad song.
	It's like, well, it's interpretation.
	But with comedy, it either makes people laugh or it doesn't.
	There's a binary response you're looking for.
	I think the critics aren't big fans of comedy because we don't need comedy to be mediated by critics.
	It either works for you or it doesn't.
	So the crowd is such an important part of comedy.
	I think one of the things that I advocate in the book is one of the comedian's superpowers is failure.
	We're very good with failure because our feedback loop is so short.
	We're allowed to take a million different chances.
	So when you go and see one of the greats, when you go and see Chris Rock or you watch a Chris Rock Netflix special, you're seeing an hour of material and everything works and you're just seeing the results.
	You're not seeing the tireless campaign to get to that hour.
	The thousands of jokes he tried that didn't work.
	The wordings that weren't quite right on the jokes that did work.
	You don't see any of the, you just see the results.
	So it's often that thing about the audience has told him every step of the way.
	The audience is a genius.
	Lenny Bruce said it first.
	The audience decide what isn't funny and what isn't acceptable.
	The audience will tell you what's acceptable.
	If you just get a response from an audience, that's neither here nor there.
	It has to be a laugh.
	Even if one of my favourite noises in comedy is cognitive dissonance.
	And I get it a lot.
	You get an enormous laugh and then you get a sharp intake of breath because the audience have laughed at something and then their conscience has arrived late to the party because the conscious part of the brain or where the consciousness lives is a bit slow.
	A laugh is a reflex.
	What you find funny is very much like your taste in food or your sexual preferences.
	How spicy you like it really depends.
	And you don't get to choose that.
	It chooses you.
	Some people like spicy food.
	Some people like kinky sex.
	Some people like edgy comedy.
	And it really chooses you.
	So I love the idea that sometimes a laugh will betray you.
	Your sense of humor tells you something about yourself.
	You laugh at something that's incredibly transgressive and edgy, and then you kind of feel bad about it immediately.
	I like that cognitive dissonance.
	Then you have to decide whether it's your sense of humor that's at fault, or the judgment of shame that immediately follows your recognition of the fact that you laughed at something dark and horrible.
	It isn't obvious to me that your sense of humor is likely to air the same way your judgments air.
	It seems to me to be a purer spirit in some sense, and it's fascinating to me as well that you're watching the audience while you're performing comedy, but you're also saying that as you construct your routines, If you're a really, really good watcher and listener, then you try to see what sticks, so to speak.
	You throw things at the wall to see what sticks.
	And if you really pay attention to the audience, then they'll tell you how to be successful, right?
	Yes.
	So all you have to do is collect that.
	Yeah, you're really, you're collecting data over 20 years.
	So you've obviously got, the thing about comics as well, when they do good audience work, is it's like airline pilots.
	Like, if you ask an airline pilot how long they've been a pilot, they won't give you it in years.
	They'll give you it in hours in the sky.
	And I think there's something about that that's very...
	I love the analogy.
	Because the amount of time spent on stage is where you learn that skill.
	You become kind of battle-hardened to that.
	Or I suppose the analogy in your world would be the amount of time you spent researching or the amount of time you spent in debate.
	So you're ready for that.
	It's not your first rodeo.
	You've not had that exact thing happen before, but something similar to it.
	So you kind of know how to respond to that.
	And that feedback loop is constantly you're kind of getting better and improving.
	I generally tended, right from the beginning of my career, not to lecture from notes very much.
	And once I got more conversant with what I was lecturing about, I just abandoned notes altogether.
	And the huge advantage to that was that I could continually watch my students And I could see what it was that I was saying that mattered and what didn't.
	And I could drop everything that wasn't gripping and intriguing to them.
	And, you know, to the degree that I was attached to my notes and a pre-prepared lecture, then I would lose the contact with the audience.
	And that's why it's boring in some sense when you go here and lecture.
	You know, that reminds me of the great Mike Tyson quote.
	Mike Tyson said, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face.
	And I think when you're giving a speech, when you're doing a performance, the audience is the punch in the face.
	You didn't think they'd laugh at that bit, or they look bored and they're not engaged yet, and I haven't got them.
	I often use the analogy of on my toes and on my heels at a show.
	So sometimes you'll go on a show, you'll be on your toes for the first five minutes.
	And then at some point in the show, you'll feel like, I got it.
	I got it.
	Yeah, we're there together.
	That's right.
	Your body language changes a little bit.
	And then something happens and you're on your toes again.
	And there's a sense of a kind of an ebb and a flow to it, which is...
	Yeah, it's interesting because it's an art form, I guess, that involves the audience more than any other.
	other and the audience with no training, no prior qualification required, know instinctively like anything above maybe 50, 60 people is like if a joke works in front of 60 people, it will work in front of 3,000.
	There's a real consistency.
	And across the globe as well, I don't notice, I mean, if you speak English, I'm doing my performance in English, it's really, it's incredible how uniform audiences are and what they will laugh at and how loud they will laugh, what gets an applause break, what doesn't.
	So, do you find a marked difference?
	Now, maybe you haven't had much of this experience because you're so successful, but I don't like going to movies, especially comedies, if the theatre is empty, and I don't like lecturing to a hall that's half full, because I find it much more difficult to get that response that you were describing of everyone being there together and something flowing if the place is sporadically populated.
	Yeah, no, I would agree.
	I mean, I think comedy is a social...
	I think so.
	Let's unpack that because the first bit is about seeing a comedy movie in a crowded cinema, that's just smart because laughter is tribal.
	Laughter is a signal to other people.
	It's remote tickling.
	Laughter is about a million years older than language.
	It's a different part of your throat than you're using.
	It's basically remote grooming.
	Hey, do you know rats laugh?
	Yes, of course.
	If you tickle them with a pencil eraser, then they laugh, but it's so ultrasonic that you can't hear it unless you slow it down.
	I did a documentary on the BBC about a Horizon special about laughter, which I think is on YouTube.
	You'll be able to see it.
	But we got Dunbar in.
	So Dunbar, obviously, the Dunbar number is the number of friends you can have.
	They often quote it when they're talking about social media.
	And the interesting thing about humans is we have a much higher Dunbar number than silverback gorillas.
	So silverback gorillas can only groom themselves literally.
	So if you've got 50, 55 silverback gorillas in a group, they all groom each other a little bit every day.
	And that's how it goes.
	That's the size of that.
	And that allows a certain amount of specialization.
	But humans can get to 150.
	In a tribe.
	Because we can remote groom.
	And remote grooming is about laughter.
	And why do you specifically make that argument, that it's specifically about laughter?
	And why is it that you associate it specifically with grooming?
	Well, because the purpose of laughter, sort of pre-language, certainly would have been to sort of go, I am not a threat.
	We are friends.
	There is a connection.
	So if you think of the most basic example, tickling.
	If you tickle a child, it's an aggressive act that is made benign by the laughter.
	So I was thinking a while ago with some of my friends about the use of self-deprecation and humour among tough working class men.
	Because one of the things, and I really like that, one of the things that working class men do, and I really see this as a class-based thing, at least to some degree, is that they hurl insults at one another, but they have to be funny, and then You know, your prowess, your status in some sense within the group, especially if it's a friendship group, but even sometimes if it's a work group, is how barbed your darts can be and still be funny.
	That would be the first thing.
	So how close can you get to that line where it's actually an insult?
	And then the second thing would be, well, can you take a damn joke?
	And let me tell you a story.
	Maybe you'd like this.
	So I work on this...
	Okay, I worked on this rail crew in northern Saskatchewan with a bunch of guys, a bunch of native Canadians.
	A lot of them had been in jail.
	Like, it was a rough bunch of guys.
	And when I first started working, you know, they're all skeptical of me.
	This is back when I was a kid.
	But I persevered and, you know, I made jokes and I wasn't a twit or a twat or an asshole or any of those things, hopefully.
	Then, you know, I got into the group, and that just went fine.
	But while I was there, this guy came along who was pretty touchy and pretty arrogant.
	And he brought this lunch box along with him that it looked like his mum packed, which was a big mistake socially.
	You're supposed to bring a paper bag that's not too showy.
	And so he got this Appalachian lunch box, and that really made him mad.
	They called me Howdy Doody, which I didn't really like.
	And I asked the guy why, and he said, because you look nothing like him, which I thought was a really good joke.
	And Anyways, Lunchbox, that's a good joke.
	Lunchbox didn't like being called Lunchbox and he'd get irritated all the time and so the guys on the crew, and it was stretched about half a mile down the railway, would throw pebbles at his hard hat while he was working and that would piss him off more and so the rocks got bigger and bigger and you know the whole crew was watching this and now and then a pretty decent sized rock would hit Lunchbox on the head in the helmet and everybody would sort of laugh under their breath and He was chased off in a week, and all that was testing to see if he could tolerate being pushed a bit.
	They didn't want him in the group if he couldn't do it.
	I'm very interested in that.
	There's a lovely Australian term of phrase, which is typically crude and Australian.
	You might have to bleep this, but in Australia, they have a phrase that kind of sums it up.
	You'll call a mate cunt, and you'll call a cunt mate.
	There's an intimacy to insults and language and taking the piss out of each other.
	There's an intimacy to that because it's family.
	It's friendship.
	It's a connection.
	And I think language is so nuanced.
	If you take the humour out of it, You know, you're just being brutal.
	It's sort of like we love each other so much that we can trade blows and that doesn't even matter.
	It's something like that.
	I suppose it gets to that thing of, you know, love is unconditional, friendship isn't.
	So it kind of gets to a thing of going, listen, if you love each other, you can sort of take this and it's fine.
	And the badge of honour of being able to take a joke.
	Sort of almost the worst thing you could say about some of the British is he can't take a joke.
	Yeah, well, it's...
	It's fun being a Canadian in relationship to comedy because I watched a fair bit of British comedy when I grew up.
	I loved Monty Python, which I discovered when I was 12.
	And I thought it was actually a circus show when I first watched it.
	And I thought, what the hell is this?
	And then my dad turned out to like it too, which I thought was extremely bizarre.
	And so what I loved about the British comedy in particular, and I think this is characteristic of your culture, is that British comedians tend to be extremely self-deprecating.
	And British satire is like that, too.
	They're after themselves a lot.
	And Americans really didn't have a great hand for satire, I didn't think, until The Simpsons came along.
	That was the first truly self-satirical comedy that I'd seen coming out of the U.S. Well, I guess, you know...
	Well, Mort Stahl or Lenny Bruce or any of those kind of greats would have been a huge influence of that.
	I mean, you know, The Simpsons didn't come out of nowhere.
	They were standing on the shoulder of giants, as is always the way with comedy.
	You know, we're kind of part of a very proud tradition that goes back through variety and court jesters and trickster gods.
	We're part of that tradition where outside Looking in, we're slightly other.
	I mean, it's that thing of, you know, comedians in a room of 3,000 people are with the one person facing the wrong way.
	That kind of sums us up as a group.
	Yeah, well, that's kind of the position of artists in general, you know, because artists tend to be outside the Well, you say the traditional competence hierarchies.
	They're viewers from the outside and observers.
	And so they're not in the hierarchy in some sense.
	And I do think that that's true of comedians.
	And the fact that the jester is the only person that can tell the king the truth is extremely interesting.
	And also it's interesting that the king who can't tolerate his jester has become a tyrant.
	That's a way of telling.
	Yeah.
	It's a great story about the Great Wall of China.
	Do you know that story?
	When the emperor was building the Great Wall, I mean, it nearly backed up the kingdom, the Great Wall of China.
	And the plan was to paint it red.
	That was always the plan.
	We're going to paint it.
	We're painting it red.
	And the jester made so many jokes About painting it and how it would bankrupt them and how it would destroy the kingdom and made all the jokes.
	The emperor changed his mind.
	It's crazy.
	But it's an interesting kind of thing of like the effect that sort of speaking truth to power is not an easy thing to do.
	It's much easier to get your point across if everyone's laughing.
	Yeah, that's for sure.
	Well, I also thought when I was lecturing, when I was at Harvard, I was lecturing about the most serious things I could think of.
	And it was usually about totalitarianism and atrocity, like really dark things.
	And this thought always came in my mind.
	It was like, look, if you really mastered this...
	You wouldn't be so dead serious about it.
	You'd be able to do it with a light touch, like with a bit of comedy.
	And I thought, Jesus, how can that possibly be true given the topics that I'm addressing?
	But I've certainly come to realize that I'm at my best as a lecturer when I can, when I'm not so dead serious and maybe possessed by a certain amount of anger, when I can leave in what I'm saying with jokes.
	I'm in the right place then.
	Well, I mean, the audience loves that.
	I mean, but in the macro and the micro, because, I mean, if you look at totalitarian states, Not famed for their sense of humor.
	They're not funny.
	Well, but cabaret is really interesting as a piece because the idea that cabaret clubs in Germany were shut down because they realized you can't hate someone you're laughing with.
	And laughter builds a bridge.
	It's tough to be a racist when you're laughing with a comedian from a different ethnicity.
	It really does kind of Russell Peters really has done that well I think.
	Yeah, the idea that you bring lots of different people together and share that common experience.
	So yeah, I think there's something in...
	And actually, when you're doing a lecture about something incredibly serious, to be able to make a point about something and to be funny about it is kind of magnificent because it shows confidence and competency and being able to be a little bit self-deprecating and not taking oneself too seriously.
	It's all to the good.
	Yeah, well, it's a mark of transcendence, I think, in some part, right?
	Because, you know, if you do something stupid and then you laugh at yourself, it's like simultaneously you're the fool, but you're also the thing that can look at the fool and say, well, I'm a fool, but I can do better and I don't have to take that too seriously.
	Yeah, isn't there something with life with, you know, if we look at the mental health crisis that's going on globally at the moment, it's about perspective.
	You know, comedy offers perspective in a way that I think is incredibly profound.
	And meaningful to me because you look at, you know, suicide is like the extreme example, right?
	So suicide is a symptom of depression.
	And depression is, it's basically, suicide is the permanent solution to a temporary problem.
	And comedy is very good at lending perspective, at going, look, this is, look, step back from this.
	We all fuck up.
	Yeah, and the question is, where are you stepping back to, do you think?
	Like, if you make a joke about an extremely serious subject, you know, and you're stepping back somewhere, right?
	And you're sharing that with the audience and they go there too.
	Where is it, do you think, that it's going when you step back?
	I think it's processing.
	I think there's a sense in which when we joke about something, we're taking something that's Too horrific to talk about, to acknowledge, and we're making it okay.
	So that theory of benign violation on comedy comes up.
	The idea that you go, we're taking things that are violations in our culture, in our world, and we're making them benign by laughing about them.
	We're taking away their power.
	So if you imagine the Venn diagram of violations...
	And we're making them benign and joking about them and processing that thought.
	It's a very important part of our...
	because so much of life is terrible and so much of our culture is the obfuscation of decay.
	That's the phrase, isn't it?
	We're trying to hide death.
	We're trying to not think about mortality.
	That idea, or to transcend it, or to transcend it.
	You know, I don't think comedy is denial.
	I think it's genuine transcendence.
	And you know, that idea that you take away someone's power with laughter, it's like, that's actually literally true.
	When I used to work out, I had a couple of friends I worked out with a lot, and they were pretty damn funny.
	And one of the things we would do when we were bench pressing, and sometimes heavy weights, is make the guy laugh.
	And you cannot Yeah.
	Exert muscular force when you're laughing.
	And that's where the phrase sort of collapse into laughter comes.
	So that's really interesting physiologically.
	It's in the book about what happens in the vagus nerve stays in the vagus nerve.
	What happens to you from a physiological point of view when you laugh is, I think, fascinating.
	I mean, it's really, I like to think of myself as a drug dealer.
	Mm-hmm.
	I'm a drug dealer, but the drugs are already on the audience.
	I'm never going to get taken by the police because I'm releasing endorphins, but you've got the endorphins on you.
	And dopamine.
	Because dopamine mediates positive emotion.
	And cocaine and the drugs, the psychomotor stimulants are very potent dopamine releasers.
	And so it's literally the case that when you laugh and facilitate positive emotion, you are activating that circuit.
	Without harm, right?
	Without harm, yeah.
	And I sort of view watching things on screens as fentanyl.
	It's a substitute.
	It's not the real thing.
	You need the real thing.
	When you watch it on a screen, it's like those drugs are being cut up.
	Someone stepped on that cocaine.
	You need the pure thing of being in a room with other people.
	That's where you release it.
	You don't laugh in the same way When you're watching your favourite, you know, if you see Monty Python on a screen, you laugh.
	But if you go and see them live, if you go, you know, they did that tour show, it's a different order of laughter.
	You're falling about.
	It's a, you know, as you say, you collapse into laughter.
	You have fits of laughter.
	You know, what it does for the vagus nerve, it tells your body you can digest your food.
	It calms you.
	It's It's perfect.
	And I think it's a necessary part of work.
	Do you have any idea what the movement of the abdomen that's associated with laughter does physiologically?
	Yeah.
	I mean, I've kind of looked into it.
	I wouldn't be the expert on that.
	But the idea that it does allow you to digest and to process.
	It doesn't have any negative effects.
	If you could buy a drug that did what laughter did, with the amount of side effects that laughter has, which is literally none, it would be the perfect drug.
	And so that idea about having to be there with the people, that's interesting too, because I'm going back on tour.
	I did a tour in 2018, and I think it sold just about as many tickets as yours, by the way.
	Ha ha.
	And so, anyhow, I'm going back next year, and...
	I'm wondering why I'm doing it because I could just do YouTube videos and, you know, they're pretty effective and I could just sit here and do them and they're pretty fun, but I really want to do it.
	I really find it ridiculously exciting and part of it is the feedback from the audience, right?
	I get informed by that in a way.
	It's more than that.
	You're giving people an experience because you never forget who you saw live.
	You never forget who you saw live.
	You know, no one goes to Rolling Stones.
	Did I see them live or not?
	I can't remember.
	But a YouTube video?
	Did I see that YouTube video or not?
	I don't know.
	Yeah, maybe.
	Maybe I watched it.
	Maybe I didn't.
	But going to something live, it's also the thing that you're doing, the high before the high.
	The people that will buy tickets to the show.
	They buy tickets to a comedy show or they buy tickets to a lecture.
	And they go, right, I'm going to go out.
	I'm going to laugh a lot or I'm going to be stimulated.
	I'm buying into this.
	This defines me.
	This is my sense of humour.
	This is my kind of speaker.
	I'm going to buy into it.
	I'm going to go there.
	I'm going to be with my tribe for the evening.
	Other people that, you know, everyone has something in common in that room when they come and see you.
	Everything has someone in common when they come and see me.
	It's that sense of humour.
	We don't have anything else in common.
	There's people from all different walks of life in my audience.
	There's people from 16 to 90 in the crowd.
	And they all have something in common.
	For that one evening, we've created a village.
	And that's a very, very special, very powerful thing to let people be part of that.
	And sure, you could just stick it on YouTube and put it on send.
	And that's a facsimile.
	And it's a pretty good facsimile in the world that we live in.
	And it's been a lifeline the last 18 months for people.
	But really, giving them that experience is very special.
	And also, you have to kind of limit that a little bit because actually you can't really play the arenas.
	I mean, you could, but it becomes a different thing in the arenas.
	The sort of thing you do in arenas becomes kind of a Tony Robbins event.
	And then it's at a different frequency.
	It becomes about geeing people up rather than connecting.
	You know, there's a distinction between...
	Sorry, there's a distinction between...
	There's comics you go to laugh with and there's comics you go to see.
	Sometimes you get a comedian where people love them so much.
	They don't really care about the jokes.
	They just want to be in a room with them.
	You know, it's that thing.
	Dave Chappelle?
	Is that Dave Chappelle?
	I mean, I played with Dave.
	He's a good storyteller, eh?
	Yeah, I played with Dave last week in London.
	He was over in London doing shows, and I met myself and Jeff Ross opened for him.
	It was pretty fun.
	It was a good scene.
	Yeah, I think there is a sense of kind of...
	Hero worship and wanting to be in the room and there being something...
	I think George Carlin probably had as well, that kind of almost preacher feel is really interesting that people are drawn to that.
	In a secular world, we're looking for people to...
	Rogan has some of that, I would say.
	Yeah, I think he's got a lot of that.
	John Mulaney, he's got more of that kind of one-line thing, but he's got an interesting persona.
	I don't know how much that's his true character.
	He's kind of like this 1950s advertising executive, middle America suburbs nerd, and he plays on that real well.
	It's interesting.
	You can't really convince people you're not what they assume you are.
	You know, John Mulaney, I know he's had some issues recently.
	Much more complex and interesting character than people would maybe give him credit off the bat.
	Yeah, I'd say the same about Theo Vaughn.
	Theo plays this bumbling southern hick.
	He's very, very smart, man.
	He's a smart guy.
	Yeah, it's often the way that you go.
	There's two things in life, isn't there?
	And I write about this a lot in the book.
	You have to know who you are.
	That's the first big journey in life, is finding out who you are, what you're about, what your skills are, what your edge is in life.
	What do you do best?
	Not better than anyone in the world, but what do you do best?
	And that's not marketing work at Shell?
	Definitely not.
	Definitely not.
	So it's that thing of, like, you have to find out who you are.
	But it's also important as a duality because you have to find out how you're perceived in the world as well.
	What do people think you are?
	People look at me and they don't see an immigrant.
	They don't see someone that's dyslexic.
	They see a very confident person.
	British man somewhere between Hugh Grant and Mr Bean, right?
	So they see that.
	So you better know how you're perceived in the world and you also better know who you are authentically.
	And I think having both of those things, it's very important kind of armour for going out to the world.
	I mean, I did your, before coming on this today, I did your Understanding Yourself Oh, you did.
	I understand myself.
	So tell me what your personality is.
	Let me guess.
	You're extroverted as hell.
	You're probably pretty disagreeable.
	I don't imagine you're that conscientious because it's hard to be conscientious in a comedian.
	You're high in openness.
	97th percentile in conscientious.
	Yeah, incredibly conscientious.
	But the thing that I... I mean, without getting into the horoscope of everyone's fascinated by themselves, I did find it like it's an incredibly useful tool.
	Because you go, well, most people are looking...
	There's two great adventures in life.
	There's finding your purpose and then there's pursuing it.
	And most people don't get to do either.
	My book really is about...
	I'm trying to share that.
	So I did the autobiography, but I wanted it to be half about me and half about you.
	And half about like, what are the beliefs that you have to have in order to pursue that journey?
	What are the good questions to ask yourself?
	What's the right way?
	And I found that and I knew I was talking to you today.
	So I thought, well, I'll be a good student.
	I'll do a little bit of research and did that.
	And I just thought...
	Are you married?
	I've just had our first kid.
	We've been together 21 years.
	You know, if you do that, understand myself, and she does it, it will generate a report about your differences and similarities and where you're likely to misunderstand each other and why.
	So all she has to do is sign up and do it, and then you can link your accounts and it'll generate this third report.
	We're doing it.
	Yeah, it's really...
	I did it with my wife recently, and it was really useful.
	Does it put you in touch with a lawyer, or do you have to find your own lawyer?
	Yeah, well, that's a feature we should add, like a value-added feature.
	We can get the lawyers to pay for that.
	If it comes up, then it's really you're not a great match.
	It should just come up.
	Like, I love that thing in...
	Do you ever read that researcher at the Love Lab?
	Do you ever read his stuff?
	Are you talking about the research on what predicts divorce?
	Yeah.
	You mean eye-rolling, for example, which predicts divorce with 95% accuracy?
	Yeah, and you can do it within five minutes.
	We often do it with couples over dinner where we've got, myself and Caroline have got it right 100% of the time, where it's like if someone displays contempt for their partner, it is fucking over.
	It's gone.
	Hey, so let's talk about that for a sec.
	How about if we all display contempt for our political opponents?
	Does that make it over too?
	I think maybe it does.
	I think there's a sense in which political parties now have become like sports teams.
	You blindly follow.
	Blue or red, whatever your team is, and you become entrenched.
	In our culture, people talk about echo chambers.
	It's amplifiers.
	The left have moved to the left, the right have moved to the right, and there's a couple of liberals left in the middle going, The problem with the middle, the center ground, is it's not exciting.
	I want there to be a radical moderate.
	That's what I've been trying to do with responsibility.
	Responsibility needs crisis management, because responsibility sounds boring, but it's incredibly empowering.
	If you take responsibility, like no one ever...
	When you win something, you never go, I'm responsible for this, but you go, actually, responsibility is about the nexus of control is within you.
	It's the idea that you go wrong.
	I'm in charge of this now.
	So that's really the story of the early part of my life was about going, taking my life and actually leading my life as opposed to just letting things happen.
	Yeah, so let's talk about that.
	So you graduated and then you went and worked as a marketer for Shell, but you didn't like that.
	And then you took a sideways...
	Okay, please tell that story.
	I didn't make any decisions in my life until I was about 25.
	So why did you do the things you did if you weren't making decisions?
	I did the best next thing.
	So when you're 16, you can get a job or you can stay on school.
	The best thing to do is to stay at school.
	The best thing to do is to try and pass those exams.
	Try and go to the best university you can.
	So I went to Cambridge because that was the best one I could think of.
	And so I went there and I got the best degree I could.
	And then at the end of that, you got the best job that you could.
	So far, I've not made any decisions.
	It's been what's presented to you and the next step, a very well-worn path.
	Yeah, typical kind of conservative path.
	Yeah.
	So then the idea of being kind of in your mid-20s and going, well, hang on, whose life am I leading?
	Where's this going?
	And you can see, because it's such a well-worn path, you can see into the future and go, well, actually, I know exactly who I'm going to be in 10 years' time, in 5 years' time, in 15 years' time, or whatever the time period is, by looking at someone ahead of you on that road.
	And then go, no, I don't want that.
	I want life to be...
	An adventure.
	I want to find a purpose.
	I want to find something special for me.
	I don't think there's anything special about me.
	I don't think anything magical happened.
	I think I was exposed to, for want of a better phrase, self-help, NLP and cognitive behavioral therapy at the right age when I was ready to go, right, that's for me.
	I'm going to be like that person.
	So something as simple as a personality test, something as diverting as, it's like kind of, I suppose, a rationalist horoscope.
	It's such a powerful thing because the more you get to know yourself through doing that stuff, the better able you are to go, right, what's my edge?
	What am I bringing to the party in life?
	What do I do better than anyone else?
	What am I going to devote my life to?
	Because you make your own luck.
	It's your edge, what you do best, your hard work plus time.
	That's your luck.
	We're all of us just buying lottery tickets.
	Nothing's guaranteed.
	But if you want it to kind of pay off, you're going, right, if I put everything into this, it's going to pay out eventually.
	What do you mean by everything when you say that?
	Because you made this shift into comedy.
	It looked like it was pretty sudden and pretty successful pretty soon.
	So that's a very weird thing to do and a very weird thing to do successfully.
	So what do you mean you do everything?
	Success came later.
	But I think being all in, when you find it, being all in is quite important.
	So, finding comedy for me, it felt like suddenly I arrived in a space where work is more fun than fun.
	So, I was working 300 nights a year and it didn't feel like anything.
	We both had a similar experience, actually I know a little bit about you, in our mid-20s of giving up alcohol because work was more important.
	It reminds me that I'm of the opinion that the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, it's purpose.
	Hey, the clinical literature on that is crystal clear.
	The only reliable treatment for alcoholism that's ever been discovered is spiritual transformation.
	That's it.
	And even the hard-nosed researchers know that, and that's very tightly akin to this notion of pursuing something meaningful and significant.
	Yeah, but I think that could be expanded in a very meaningful way, because you go, well, purpose doesn't need to have a spiritual element to it.
	I mean, I think it does, because it's about your life's meaning and your journey.
	Well, it might be the spirit of laughter, you know.
	Yeah, I think so.
	Certainly, I feel that the more I read about trickster gods, the more you think, oh, that's a very interesting position in society.
	Yeah, he's the precursor to the saviour.
	The trickster is always the precursor to the saviour.
	Yeah, John the Baptist was the trickster, right?
	Yeah, Christ's fool.
	I don't know if he told jokes, though.
	And of course, my head will end up on a plate.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's an interesting thing.
	I mean, I wanted the book to be quite, I'm quite sort of passionate about it, the idea that I wanted the book to be funny and engaging and my story, but I also wanted it to be, look, there's the hero's journey.
	I wanted it to have the tools in there for someone else to go, I'm not interested in comedy at all.
	But I could see how I could do my thing, and if I believed the same things, what would happen for me?
	Because your beliefs become everything.
	And not your beliefs in terms of your spiritual beliefs per se, but the assumptions we make about what we can and what we can't do.
	They're almost, I don't know what you call them, the unseen beliefs.
	About, well, I'm not the kind of person that does that, or I'm not the sort of person that would do this, or I'm not the kind of person...
	Yeah, I told my niece phoned me the other day.
	She wanted to talk to me.
	She's 17, I believe.
	And she just applied to university and she was happy to share the news of her acceptance to a couple of institutions.
	And we had a good conversation about the fact that, you know, when you leave to university, if you leave home, one thing that can happen to you is that you can be a new person.
	You can decide what garbage and wreckage you're going to leave behind and not drag with you.
	And you can decide who you're going to be and what kind of friends you want.
	And if you're lucky in life, you get a few chances to do that.
	And you can just drop You're preaching to the choir here.
	I was 16 and I changed schools through happenstance.
	We moved house and I changed schools for what we would call sixth form, so for the last two years.
	And you become acutely aware that you are a story you tell yourself, that you can choose to kind of be.
	I was quite a tear away in my first school.
	I got in a lot of trouble.
	I can't believe that.
	But in my second school, I kind of I'll go to a good university.
	And then at university, you can kind of, you reinvent yourself.
	I mean, the cliche really of finding yourself is travel.
	And you go, especially if you go on your own, which is probably easier for young men in this day and age than young women, but to travel on your own in Southeast Asia or something, and you kind of, you meet new people and you try on different hats and Hey, I got something cool to tell you about that.
	Go on.
	If you'd be interested.
	Well, I read at one point Jung's description of the maze in the Chartres Cathedral and in the maze you enter on one side and then you traverse the entire circle and that's equivalent to traversing the globe and the maze is set out so that you walk all four quadrants and then you come to the center and So then you're at the center if you walk all four quadrants.
	Now, what happens when you go somewhere new is two things.
	One is you learn new things, so you pull in new information and that enriches you.
	But here's something that's even cooler and it's related at a deep level to the psychobiology of play and pretend.
	So if you go somewhere new that requires you to be someone other than you were, new genes turn on in your nervous system and code for new proteins.
	It turns on biological potential that is, in fact, implicit inside you and builds you into a new creature.
	And so the idea behind that traversing the circle, which is an equivalent to a pilgrimage, is that if you go all places, you get to the center of things.
	Because you turn everything in yourself on by doing that.
	And that's the same thing you're doing in some sense when you're listening to your audience so intensely and finding out what they appreciate and what's funny, right?
	You're visiting these new domains and that transforms you into something, well, something they want and something you want if you're lucky, if you're careful and you're lucky.
	I find it a fascinating kind of, you know, I mean, travel is obviously...
	I sort of think the nature-nurture thing comes into it because I think a lot of people assume, like nature-nurture, the debate is pointless because you go, yeah, nature is very important, but there's nothing I can do about nature.
	That's the cards I've been dealt, right?
	So, other than a little bit of plastic surgery.
	Nose job.
	Yeah, nose job, man.
	Hair transplant.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Those are pretty nice teeth for an Englishman.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you to my audience.
	You've paid for it.
	But the idea that you go, look, you've got your nature, that's the carbs you're dealt.
	You make the best of that.
	That's nurture is making the best of that.
	I think a lot of people have the idea that nurture finishes very early.
	It's about parental nurturing and...
	You know, when you're 18, you're finished.
	But the idea of nurture as a lifelong pursuit, and you can't really beat your environment.
	So it's important you're in an environment.
	And I mean the environment in the kind of literal sense of going, not just where you are, but who you're with is your environment.
	So if you surround yourself with people where, and I think we're all quite narcissistic.
	I think I like who I am.
	When I'm with certain people.
	I like being a father.
	I like who I am.
	Yeah, but that might not be narcissistic.
	That might be the...
	Like, if you love being a father, you have a great relationship with your children.
	How do you...
	It's perfectly reasonable for you to assume that that's when you are your best self.
	I thought that when I was a father, I loved being with my kids and we had a great relationship.
	Even that thing about the conversations that you have, the friends you choose to go to dinner for, the work environment.
	I remember arriving in the world of comedy, age 25, and just being I like who I am here.
	This is fun.
	There's a spirit of possibility here that I hadn't experienced before.
	So success happened very early on within that world, not in terms of financial gains or status.
	Because sort of, who cares?
	That's for someone else.
	That's very external, that measure of success.
	But the idea of a happiness came out of that that was transformational, just in terms of my whole way of being changed.
	And I think happiness is one of those words that's become conflated.
	In the book, I'm sort of obsessed by happiness.
	The accuracy of language and how we...
	That's a good thing if you're writing a book.
	Yeah, but that idea that I talk about in my mid-20s or my early 20s being sad.
	I wasn't depressed.
	I was sad.
	And there's a huge difference because depression is about serotonin levels and chemical imbalance in your mind.
	It's a very serious disease with very serious repercussions, suicide being the most serious symptom.
	Sadness is about circumstance.
	Sadness is fantastic.
	Sadness just means you don't like things as they are.
	Well, things are gonna change.
	One of the things I did constantly as a therapist, so this is part of the cognitive behavioral process, let's say, it's collaborative empiricism.
	It's like, okay, your mood isn't good, but there's some variation in it.
	So what you're going to do for the next week is you're going to watch yourself like you don't know who you are and you're going to see if you can identify times when you're not so sad.
	And then see if you can figure out where you are, what you're doing, what you're thinking.
	Why are you not sad then?
	Yeah.
	And then can you do more of that?
	Could you do more of that?
	Well, it's interesting.
	I mean, again, I talk about this in the book.
	I wouldn't have the same qualification as you, but my cure for that is flow state.
	Get into a flow state.
	Get into a state where you're not aware of the passage of time.
	Yeah, yeah, that's a marker.
	That's a weird marker, that one.
	That you're outside the domain of mortality concerns at that point too, right?
	Because that weight of mortality that weighs upon us is integrally linked with consciousness of time.
	And in that flow state, that disappears.
	And that means in some sense you're united with eternity in those flow states.
	It's not a trivial thing.
	No, it's hugely important.
	I read a fabulous thing on it.
	I mean, I think sport is often...
	Where people, you know, if you're playing tennis or whatever, that happens to be my sport, but you go, I'm not aware of how long I've been doing this.
	This has been just a pleasure.
	And I've been so focused.
	Taking your conscious mind and giving it something to do so that your subconscious can relax.
	I'm not great with meditation, but I quite like doing Lego puzzles with my other half because you go, yeah, I'm just going to get busy.
	Get all that busy so that you can then relax.
	Yeah, I talked to Sam Harris about that a fair bit a couple of weeks ago because he has this meditation app that he's been using.
	I've got his waking up, I think, is fantastic.
	But I tend to listen to the talks on waking up Rather than doing the meditations, because it always seems...
	I don't know what that is about me, but it always feels like doing the meditations is, am I doing this right?
	Am I quite getting it?
	I should go back and investigate more, but it's...
	Well, you know, you have that out that you already described, too, though, that...
	Because you're doing what you love and you're successful.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But, you know, we discussed the possibility.
	You get in that worried state where you're possessed by your propositional thoughts about gloom and doom and all that's running around in your head.
	And to get out of that into a different state is actually psychophysiologically rejuvenating.
	I think I've got quite a positive in the book as well attitude towards, I suffer anxiety more than depression.
	I think a lot of people do.
	And for me, I try and see it as the negative side of creativity.
	The idea that all of the good things that have happened to me have happened through creativity and being open to the muse.
	But also, once you open those gates, there's an anxiety that can come in as well.
	Your racing mind might get you a joke very quickly on the spot, but it also might result in you waking up at five in the morning with a panic attack.
	And I think sometimes seeing the negative things in life for what they are, a part of the whole, is very valuable.
	Make your peace with what life is.
	If you're a stand-up comedian, there's a lot of travel.
	There's going to be a lot of planes and trains and automobiles and travel.
	You're going on a concert tour.
	Making your peace with that and going, yeah, that's part of the thing that I'm loving doing.
	This is part of the whole.
	You can't just have that bit.
	You have to take it all.
	Well, that's also part of the problem with envy.
	You know, when people compare themselves to other people, they say, well, I really wish what that son of a bitch had.
	And that kind of malevolence often comes along with it.
	Here's a point about envy that I make in my book.
	I make a very clear distinction.
	I suppose you could have it either way on the etymology of the word.
	But for me, it's envy and jealousy are very different.
	For me, jealousy is about, I don't want him to have that.
	I'm jealous of what they have, but I don't necessarily want that myself.
	Envy, I think, could be a very positive thing in one's life.
	Because envy, for me, it strikes me that the only question that really matters in life, in any given situation, is what do you want?
	It's the most profound, meaningful question at every level, whether you're looking at a menu in a restaurant or trying to decide what to do with your life.
	What do you want?
	And envy often gives you very accurate pointers.
	You look at someone else, you read someone else's book, let's say from your perspective, you might read someone else's book.
	On psychology and you might go, that guy absolutely nailed it.
	I can't believe how good that is.
	And it spurs you on to work harder and to say, well, I need to be more succinct in my language and I need to clarify better.
	Or for me, I might watch someone's comedy special and just go, oh, that blew my mind, what they did.
	I've got to get better at this.
	I'm going to break down what they did and I'm going to get better at it.
	So envy, I think, can be powerful.
	The idea of not wanting someone else, you know, comparison is the thief of joy.
	Is one of my favorite quotes.
	And it just, 100% of the time, it kills it.
	As soon as you look at it, someone's having more fun than you somewhere.
	That envy, you know, that's interesting to use that dark emotion in some sense as a guide to what you actually value.
	So if you notice what you're envious of, then you can tell what you actually value.
	Of what you want.
	Yes, and not willing to admit to yourself.
	I've got that lovely First People story in the book about the white wolf and the black wolf.
	You know that story, right?
	I don't think so.
	So there's a black wolf and a white wolf, and they represent good and bad.
	I mean, you know, the first peoples.
	And they say, so which wolf are you going to feed?
	And the kind of the colonial white man's retelling of the story was, well, you feed the white wolf, you feed the good wolf.
	But if you only feed the good wolf, There's actually a downside because the dark wolf, the black wolf, doesn't just disappear.
	He's waiting around every corner to attack.
	Yeah, you also might need him to scare off other wolves.
	Yeah, so that idea of going, well, look, actually you feed them both and you use the darker things, you turn to good.
	You say, well, something as negative potentially as envy...
	It could be an incredibly powerful force in your life if it tells you what you want.
	And when I say what you want, it's like, I'm going to sound like an old hippie here, but I genuinely, on that question of what do you want, I think wishing wells work.
	But they work way before people think they work.
	The magic wish, not so much.
	But knowing what to wish for is everything.
	You'd be amazed how many people that go to a wishing well and they wish for a million pounds.
	It's like they're wishing for a token.
	They don't know what they want.
	They're putting off answering the question.
	What's the thing you really want?
	And it's like...
	That's so fundamental to happiness in life and to finding your purpose.
	Finding what is that thing at the base level that you want.
	Because...
	Knock and the door will open.
	Ask and you will receive.
	Yeah.
	And that has very much to do with specifying and admitting to yourself and then actually working towards what it is you actually want.
	So many people...
	That I wanted to be a comedian.
	I remember telling people that I want to be a stand-up comedian.
	I remember calling my first Edinburgh show, when I first did a show, Barefaced Ambition, because I was very, I want this to be my life.
	I want to do this.
	I want to pursue it.
	I want to be successful at it.
	I want this to be who I am.
	This is an identity-level pursuit for me.
	And the universe conspired to help me.
	It felt like everything was...
	Once you tell people, I'm going to do this, it was like, okay, everything's pointing in the right direction.
	There was a real congruency to who I was.
	Yeah, you definitely sound like a hippie now.
	There's no doubt about that.
	Thank you.
	Yeah.
	So, well, you had this job that you took after you graduated from university, and it was a good, you know, solid, stable job.
	And so, why didn't that work for you?
	And when did you know that you might be funny?
	You know, not in the peculiar way, obviously, but the comedic way.
	I hadn't written a joke until I was 25.
	I was, like, a fan of comedy.
	But I hadn't written a joke.
	I had not been in school plays particularly.
	I had not taken an interest in comedy above and beyond being a consumer.
	I was about 25 and I suddenly kind of went, well, this is my age.
	The thing that I'm good at is talking to people.
	The thing that I'm good at is getting ideas across and making people laugh was such an important part of my life.
	I trace it back to my mother.
	She had an extraordinary laugh.
	She was a very funny Irish woman, had a lovely tone of phrase, and there was a high value put on making people laugh in our house.
	Could you make her laugh?
	Yeah, it wasn't a particularly happy home.
	I think if you're talking to comedians, I think the question to ask is Often people ask about depression in comedians because the tears of the clown thing is such a delicious irony.
	Why wouldn't you ask about that?
	But actually, I think the question to ask that's more interesting is, which of your parents was sick?
	I think comedians often have to make things okay within their family.
	And I certainly had that experience.
	And then it was about kind of when you, obviously your life is understood backwards.
	It's lived forwards and it's understood in the rear view.
	But looking back, it was obvious, of course, that's what you're going to be good at.
	You're good at, you know, within friendship groups, within family and making people laugh and making things okay.
	Okay, so you knew that about yourself, that you could make your friends laugh, your family laugh, and you said also make things okay.
	Is that peacemaking or was that humor?
	I think peacemaking was part of what I view humor as.
	I think it's a methodology for making things okay, for lightening the mood.
	For me, it's kind of a panacea.
	Ultimately, I'm self-medicating with humor.
	So how in the world did you come about the decision to leave your job?
	And you also mentioned cognitive behavior therapy in there, that you did something that brought this...
	Yeah, I went and did...
	Actually, when you work for a large company like Shell, there's a training budget every year that they assign to their staff members.
	So if you work on the oil rigs, it's all health and safety training.
	I was working in a fancy office in central London, so there's no need for any health and safety stuff.
	It was all fine.
	The most dangerous thing was the coffee and the coffee machine.
	So for me, I could go and do, with that kind of those courses and those days, I went and did some NLP training with a guy, you know, one of these kind of corporate away day things.
	And I got exposed to NLP and just went...
	I went to my religious faith on a trip to Israel, somewhat ironically.
	The scales had fallen from my eyes and I kind of went, well, if I'm right about Christianity, everyone else is wrong.
	That fundamental kind of, it's kind of a tiny pebble in my shoe.
	I had become a boulder, and I just couldn't live with it anymore, and I slowly, over about a year-long period, lost my faith.
	And then I found NLP, and I kind of thought, I basically latched onto another belief structure, and the idea that the map is not the territory.
	The idea that how you perceive the world is how the world is.
	We see the world not as it is, but how we are.
	The idea that, you know, I suppose disposition is more important than position.
	And it's very difficult to change your disposition, but it's so much easier than changing the world.
	And I kind of, suddenly, everything through being exposed to that became possible.
	The possibilities became like, well, fundamentally, my belief became anything anyone else can do, I can do.
	And that's incredibly empowering, and it's scary, and you're suddenly not leading your life for the next, for the afterlife.
	I mean, I've still got a huge belief in the next life, but not the afterlife.
	The precision of that phrase.
	I think the allegories of religion I still enjoy, but I just don't believe them literally.
	So the idea of going, there is a next life.
	Of course there's a next life.
	You move through phases.
	I'm a father now, and I'm in my late 40s.
	I'm a very different person than the person that started on this road 25 years ago to being a comedian.
	Every molecule in my body has changed.
	Of course I'm a different person.
	There's a next life, literally.
	But the afterlife, it struck me that the afterlife was a way of the ultimate in procrastination.
	And it struck me that religious belief was very good for the tribe, not great for the individual.
	And in our society at the moment, maybe it's an interesting thing going on at the moment where the pendulum has swung too far to the individual and there's not enough tribal thinking going on.
	There's an awful lot to unpack there.
	What specifically...
	So you said you moved from Christianity and you moved into a psychotherapeutic realm in some sense and that opened up all sorts of possibilities for it.
	You started to realize that you had been hindered by your own presumptions, some of them unexamined, about who you were and what you should be doing.
	How did your family...
	Did you have family around at that time?
	Like, were you constrained in your choices in some sense or not?
	I think I was a little bit constrained by a sense of duty that was, I'm not sure whether that was real or imagined.
	I think very often that's one of the assumptions you make about what I should do to be a dutiful son.
	My mother died around the same time, and that was weirdly quite sort of, I was quite, I believe what psychotherapists would call enmeshed.
	I had a very close substitute partner for my mother.
	Very close.
	You could argue too close.
	So when she died, that was crippling for me.
	The grief was very overpowering, but also Freed me up to go.
	The thing that I had feared as a child, the loss of the key parent, had happened.
	The worst thing had happened.
	And you kind of look around, you're still standing.
	And you go, you know, what are the lessons from that?
	Well, go and live your life the best you can.
	You know, suddenly there was a sense of urgency to my life.
	That this is, you know, you get one life.
	Mortality became a very real thing through grief.
	The idea that this is the only chance you get.
	You have to make good on it.
	Right, so that's kind of the black wolf and the white wolf there.
	You know, the white wolf, you might think, well, that's the meaning that you found in this pursuit.
	But you're also chased by the fact that you realized the fragility and shortness of life.
	It's definitely better to be...
	If you're going somewhere, it's better to be running from something and running towards something.
	You're a lot more motivated then.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I felt like there was a...
	I felt incredibly old when I was 25 and working in an oil company.
	I felt as old as I've ever felt.
	And then the next year, I was suddenly in this other world where I felt like a teenager again and I kind of have done since.
	It felt very...
	I don't view atheism as a cold, dry, academic pursuit.
	I view it as an empowering Russian blood to the head.
	An incredible sense of responsibility was overwhelming.
	The idea that you were responsible for your life.
	How is that associated with the atheism, that realization?
	I think it was the idea that you weren't living for the afterlife.
	You were living for this life.
	You were focused on making this life.
	You weren't waiting, the analogy of a hippie, you weren't waiting to be brought flowers, you were planting your own garden.
	You're responsible for this.
	You better make this work for you.
	So that felt to me like a lot of responsibility, but also, great, this is going to be an adventure.
	So that transformation of belief heightened the sense of the significance of your life for you by forcing you in some sense to realize how irreplaceable it was and how time-limited it was.
	That also didn't undermine you by the sound of it.
	I genuinely felt like I was waking up.
	I genuinely felt like I was in a bit of a daze.
	Like the scales had been lifted.
	I'd been kind of wading through treacle.
	In my early 20s, like post-college, that kind of trying to hold on to that previous life.
	Like, you know, talk about next lives.
	There was, you know, university was, you know, a blast, you know, had a lot of fun, a lot of drinking, great.
	And then you leave and suddenly you're in the real world.
	And it's just, I didn't like it.
	I didn't like where I was in it.
	I didn't find it.
	I hadn't found a purpose.
	So it's kind of, you know, there's a lot of trudgery and I hadn't found that thing.
	And then suddenly I found this Incredibly privileged position where work was more fun than fun, so I could put everything into it.
	So on that personality test, were you high in openness to experience?
	Yeah, very.
	How high?
	I think 98.
	Remember?
	And you're 98 in conscientiousness as well, you said, something like that.
	Yeah, I think so.
	That makes you kind of a strange person politically, because you've got the conscientiousness of someone who's conservative, and that would maybe account for your dutifulness, you know, that initial presumption about duty.
	But openness runs in some ways contrary to that.
	That's the wellspring of creativity.
	And so maybe that job at Shell was good for duty, but not for, you know, the...
	That gesture and artist.
	I'm a radical moderate is what I am.
	I'm like a classic kind of liberal thinker.
	I guess that's where I am, sort of right in the middle of things.
	So political parties for me sort of aren't really the thing.
	I don't think they're not useful, I think.
	It strikes me that being a member of a political party now is like ordering from a set menu.
	In a Chinese restaurant.
	You know, you order from the set menu maybe the first time you go, but as soon as you know what you're talking about, you kind of think different things on different issues.
	I don't agree with anyone about everything.
	How did you score on agreeableness, do you remember?
	I think I was pretty high.
	I'm going to look.
	I've got it here.
	I've got it on my phone.
	I'll tell you how agreeable I am.
	All right, all right.
	I think I was quite extreme.
	I was angry.
	I'm curious about that relationship to humor because, you know, comedians are often blunt and you have a real edge to your humor.
	I mean, it can get pretty dark and there is a real element in your comedy of humor.
	Well, there's provocation.
	I mean, that's not that unique.
	I suppose comedians do a fair bit of that.
	Maybe everyone should do this test before they get agreeableness.
	No, I was typical.
	Typical agreeableness.
	And did it split into politeness?
	Do you have the split there for politeness and compassion?
	I think it had...
	Yes.
	I think I had more...
	More compassion than politeness.
	I'm not the most polite of guys.
	Well, it's not that easy to be a polite comedian.
	Compassion, very high.
	Politeness, very low.
	Conscientiousness, very high.
	Industriousness, very high.
	It's a pleasure to take this test.
	Orderliness, high.
	Extroversion, exceptionally high.
	Both enthusiasm and assertiveness?
	Yes, enthusiasm, very high.
	Assertiveness, exceptionally high.
	Neuroticism, exceptionally low.
	Oh, that's how nice for you.
	If you have to have one temperamental gift, that might be the one to wish for.
	Yeah, withdrawal, very low.
	Volatility, exceptionally low.
	Actually, the listeners of this, can I recommend, I think it's like 10 bucks or something, but going and doing this, it's understandingmyself.com.
	I must say, it's a very pleasant half hour going and doing it and answering the questions.
	Understandmyself.com, just to clarify.
	it's a really interesting kind of process because you go well no matter what comes out you can kind of agree with it or disagree with it whatever but it's it's a very nice thing to kind of go and and kind of and says okay that seems that seems about right that seems yeah well it's also interesting to know that you know that is how you are in some sense and other people are actually different than that
	They're actually different and so they're like an extrovert and an introvert have a certain amount of trouble in a relationship because the extrovert is actually Filled with enthusiasm as a consequence of social interactions and really wants them whereas the introvert feels drained by that and needs much more time by themselves and perhaps in nature Those are real differences.
	And, you know, you can mediate between those to some degree if you're a good negotiator, but you're starting from basic, from different principles, from different a priori principles.
	Yeah, I must say, those things are very useful.
	I mean, that whole thing about love languages, I find fascinating.
	The idea that...
	I mean, that's kind of the most simplistic, I think, of all the relationship tools.
	The idea that different people have love languages.
	Different people...
	Well, look, a conscientious person would like to have...
	A conscientious person would offer dutiful work to their partner.
	And an agreeable person would offer empathic love.
	And an extrovert would offer enthusiasm and joy.
	Because those temperamental differences do, in some sense, set what we value.
	In some sense reflexively, like you can differentiate your personality with work and you can develop the traits on the other side of you, but that takes work.
	You know, you're sort of granted those a priori values and commitments to begin with in your temperament.
	It's really useful to see where you might be different from your partner.
	You know, my wife is less polite than me.
	She's more blunt than me.
	Sorry, less polite and more blunt than you?
	What?
	What?
	I'm actually very high in agreeableness, as it turns out.
	I actually don't like conflict at all.
	I mean, I've watched a couple of your debates, and I would beg to differ on agreeableness.
	Yeah, I know.
	I know you'd think that.
	But see, what's happened to me is that what I learned partly...
	Being a psychotherapist is that conflict delayed is conflict multiplied.
	And so I'll wade in when I think there's something wrong and it tears me into pieces.
	I really hate it, but I know it's better than putting it off and waiting for the alternative.
	I mean, that's the other sort of premise of my book.
	It's not 12 Rules for Life, but it's got a lot of kind of There's a lot of life advice in there.
	And the hard choices now, easy life later, strikes me as the...
	I mean, all self-help basically says the same thing.
	Prioritise later.
	If you can pass the marshmallow test when you're five, you're just...
	I mean, life just becomes easier.
	Spoken like a conscientious person.
	But yes, it's a very good predictor of long-term success, that ability.
	And the marshmallow test is a predictor of long-term success, as it turns out.
	Yeah, I mean, there is such a thing as a time machine.
	I mean, it's just time only moves in this direction at this speed.
	But you get to meet yourself in the future, and you get to decide how fit and healthy you are, and how wealthy you are, and Everything else besides how happy you're going to be.
	It's all kind of, it's all a trade-off and everyone obviously, everyone has a natural bent towards right now because we live right now.
	The cutting edge of now is always happening so it's always easier to sit on the couch and do nothing rather than go to the gym or read a book or whatever the thing is that's a little If you get if you get really lucky you can live on the edge and benefit your future self at the same time right so that you could fall into that flow state in a disciplined manner so that you're present in the present and you love that because it's so engrossing and simultaneously Serve your multiple future selves.
	That's kind of a like an optimal uniting Principle, you might say.
	And I think that's signaled to us when we fall into that flow state, is that we're simultaneously serving, well, maybe not only ourselves, but other people, but also ourselves across multiple timeframes.
	And that's an instinctual signal that that's happening.
	Yeah, serving ourselves over multiple timeframes, I think it's a very, it's one of those analogies that's so useful.
	It's underutilized and so useful to think about yourself not just as being yourself, solid state noun in this moment, but being a verb over time.
	So the idea of mortality and deterioration and also how much health can you give yourself later on, you know, who you're working for.
	You know, ultimately you're in a bargain with yourself and the rest of society for how you're acting right now.
	It's a very interesting sort of thing to think about.
	So let me turn back to comedy for a minute.
	Who do you really like for comedians?
	Who do you really find funny that's operating right now?
	I mean, I suppose it's that thing about you often find your friends very funny.
	I mean, I find there's a guy called Neil Brennan.
	Who co-created The Chappelle Show, who has one of the best.
	I think you would love his special.
	It's called Three Mics.
	It's on Netflix.
	I think it might be the best comedy special that anyone's done.
	So the first mic is jokes.
	One-liner jokes.
	Not dissimilar to the kind of thing that I would do.
	Great.
	The second mic is stand-up.
	Longer-form material, you know, kind of routines.
	And the third mic is The Truth.
	And obviously you start watching Neil's show, and the first five minutes you say, yeah, tell us more jokes.
	Jokes are fun.
	Give me more jokes.
	Then about 30 minutes in, you're like, stand-up is really good.
	The stand-up bits are more fun.
	Less jokes, please.
	And then by the end of it, you're just, just tell me what happened with your dad.
	Just tell me what happened.
	It's fantastic.
	It's just, it's a really interesting, and the idea that he's made these very clear distinctions for us, I think a lot of people organically do that in a show.
	But he literally had three mics in three different settings and I thought it was a trial.
	I watched Chappelle's recent so controversial show and he did a tremendous amount of storytelling and one of the things that was masterful about what he did Was that he tied everything together at the end so nicely.
	So it was like the whole joke sequence had a punchline, right?
	The whole story had a point, and it was coherent across all the story and the jokes.
	So it elevated it to some degree, I think, to a place that just sequences of jokes can't attain.
	I mean, not that they're not worthwhile.
	No, I think there is a sense in which you watch better comedians, and you go, look, I've got...
	I've got a ticket to the lottery, right?
	Let's imagine there's a Mount Rushmore of comedy and the four greatest comedians are up there.
	I'm not on that Mount Rushmore, but I could be.
	I love the fact that being a comedian is a task without end, that I'm not done yet.
	I'm in my late 40s and I still feel like I'm kind of Okay, I'm in the gym now.
	I know my way around one-liners.
	I'm pretty great with jokes.
	Storytelling, I've done a little bit of it.
	I've put my tongue in the water, but I'm not there yet.
	But with the books, certainly, I'm becoming better.
	I'm better at opening up and sharing.
	And it's an ongoing...
	I mean, the great thing about most comics that are considered to be the greats did their best work in their 50s and beyond.
	Well, that is interesting because that's at variance with most artistic endeavor.
	Yeah.
	A lot of that happens in youth.
	It doesn't happen so much with, well, it does with musicians even.
	It tends to be a younger person's occupation.
	And that's not so much true for fiction writers, if I remember correctly.
	But it's interesting that it's not true for comedians.
	Yeah, I've got a whole sequence in the book.
	I used to find it very...
	Oppressive when I was young, reading about people that had made it very early on in life.
	You know, child geniuses.
	When you're a kid, it's like, ah, this guy's done everything, and you feel like you haven't even started yet.
	So I like the idea of, like, I used to often read kind of biographies of people that made it later in life.
	I like that thing of like, society worships youth so much.
	I like the idea of making it a little bit later is okay.
	It doesn't have to happen early.
	It can happen at any stage.
	I mean, my story was of someone in their mid-twenties finding their way in the world.
	So that kind of the analogy of the quarter-life crisis finding purpose and purpose being sort of the key that kind of that hero's journey.
	That can happen at any stage.
	That can happen in your 50s.
	That can happen in your 60s.
	It really doesn't matter.
	I think it's quite an empowering thing.
	So you like Neil Brennan, three mics.
	Who else do you think is great at the moment?
	There's a lady called Beth Stelling, you might not be aware of.
	I think she's a brilliant joke writer and storyteller.
	I like Michelle Wolf.
	I like...
	In the UK, there's, I mean, so many great comedians.
	I've been watching a lot of my...
	I had a friend that died recently, Sean Locke, who was a huge figure in my life.
	And obviously when he died, the first thing you do is you sort of go back and you look at his work and you look at all the stand-up that he did.
	And I found him just so incredibly funny, this guy, Sean Locke.
	Just...
	Everything about him was, because he looked a certain way, every joke was kind of heightened.
	Because he looked like a guy that had come, he looked like a worker man.
	He looked like he'd come to fix your boiler.
	And then he was doing this kind of incredibly surreal, light-touch jokes.
	And that, for me, is like, everything was kind of a heightened surprise because of that.
	And who do you think were the comedy greats?
	I mean, I think you'd be hard-pressed not to...
	I mean, Richard Pryor is one of...
	There's a sense in which everyone's doing an impression to a lesser or greater degree of Richard Pryor.
	Everyone's a tribute act for Richard Pryor because...
	It's good that he was named Pryor then, isn't it?
	It seems quite fitting.
	Perfect.
	Perfect bit of language there.
	He was an extraordinary talent.
	And really, there's a great...
	A fable in his life.
	I put this in the book, actually.
	I've done a chapter on Richard Pryor in the book.
	The fact that he was basically...
	He was a pretty successful comedian.
	He was good.
	He was on TV. Bill Cosby was the biggest comic in the world at the time.
	And Richard Pryor was a poor man's Bill Cosby.
	He was doing pretty mild...
	But very accessible comedy.
	He was on things like The Tonight Show, and he was very funny in a suit and tie, and he looked the part, the short hair, and great.
	And around 1968, 69, his mother died.
	His father was dying.
	There was the rise in the civil rights movement.
	This incredible thing was happening in America.
	And he was on stage in Las Vegas in front of a predominantly white crowd.
	And he looked around and he said, fuck it.
	I'm out.
	And he walked off stage and he walked away.
	And he really didn't come back for four years.
	He worked it out in black clubs, in predominantly black cities, and He didn't even come back straight away with, like, people think, oh, he came back and he was Richard Pryor.
	It took him, I think it was his third album back, this N-word crazy hit, and it hit big.
	But the two previous albums were underground, and he became this, he started using his language.
	He started being authentically himself.
	He started, it was, the good was the enemy of the best.
	He had this skill set and he turned it into this, he just, it was transcendent.
	He became this thing that was kind of bigger than, kind of reinvented the form.
	It's an extraordinary inspirational story about, and because of, you know, the other things that have happened to him, it's literally like a Christ-like story of life because he's burnt himself very badly.
	Mm-hmm.
	Everything that wasn't burnt away, what remains, is the thing that I take from that story.
	Everything that's not burnt, the essence of who he was.
	Things burn away if you listen to your audience.
	Yeah.
	Well, it's that thing about what remains.
	I love quotes, because the quote is what remains when everything that's not essential disappears.
	Not many people have read a Balsak.
	That's what mythological memory is like.
	Balsak or Voltaire or any of that.
	like it's all no one's read the books but those quotes keep on coming up because they're just the truth it just keeps on like it keep they keep on reappearing and you know some of richard prizelines just keep on reappearing because you go it's just you kind of nail that thing i i saw cosby in edmonton and he did a two-hour show and he used to come out on stage with a cigar because He just sat on a stool.
	That was it.
	The stage was completely bare and he told stories and jokes for two hours and the audience The guy in front of me was laughing so hard that he was almost in convulsions.
	His wife had to keep elbowing him in the side, trying to get him to straighten up because he was embarrassing her.
	But he had that audience in the palm of his hand for two and a half, two hours, I believe it was.
	They were roaring with laughter non-stop.
	It was absolutely masterful, tremendously funny, dark, but also warm.
	He was a great storyteller.
	It was really something to see.
	It is.
	I saw him live in Montreal as well.
	It's a weird one, isn't it?
	I think the separation of someone's work from their reputation, I think, is becoming...
	It's a...
	I mean, listen, if we can't do that as a society, we need to...
	Yeah, well, wouldn't it be lovely if we could always live up to our best?
	But we don't.
	Well, it's also because, you know, human beings are nuanced and difficult.
	It's...
	It's frankly, it's like, I don't think anyone is the worst thing they've ever done.
	But also with that, they're not the best thing they've ever done.
	People are people of people and sometimes their work can transcend that.
	But it's, you know, my problem with cancel culture at the moment is I'm slightly suspicious it might be the new burning books and And whereas we're very arrogant in our secular culture of our achievements, religion does certain things better.
	Religion has a road for redemption and forgiveness.
	Redemption are very underrated in the world of cancel culture.
	Confession as well, right?
	What's that?
	Well, confession is a key element in psychotherapy.
	That's what you basically do in psychotherapy.
	Here's all the things I'm doing that might be stupid and hurtful.
	Or the things that have happened to me.
	That's also a possibility.
	But it's often the former that are more useful.
	How come you haven't been cancelled?
	I have, several times.
	I had a tax scandal that nearly ended my career.
	I've had maybe four or five jokes over the years that have become problems, you know, the papers.
	It's an interesting thing when it happens.
	When the first time it happens to you, it's very shocking because you think, oh, my God, I found this incredible road.
	I found this life of being a comedian and I could lose it all in an instant.
	And that is terrifying.
	And then you realize it's kind of OK.
	It's like you go, everything doesn't fall away.
	The people that like you like you.
	The people that don't like you have a stick to beat you with.
	And it's often when things are taken out of context, when jokes are taken out of context.
	Like, I'm telling jokes in theatres to a paying audience of an evening.
	People have come to see me.
	They've bought into it.
	I'm not shouting them through someone's letterbox at 8am in the morning as they're eating their cornflakes.
	But that's what happens when it turns up in the newspaper.
	And if you've seen a joke written down you haven't heard the joke.
	There's a dialogue.
	There's an interaction with the audience.
	There's a difference between seeing the words in that joke and hearing that joke and experiencing that joke in the same way.
	Well, that's probably true for the most daring jokes, you know, because when you're in a live theater and you say something that's right on the edge, right?
	Yeah.
	Hilariously funny.
	It's because you're carried away with the moment.
	You get this witty idea and bang, you nail it.
	But that's right at the edge of what's permissible.
	You take that out of context.
	It's a catastrophe.
	Here's the thing again, you can joke about anything, but not with anyone.
	Yeah, that's for sure.
	My audience is not the same as your audience.
	So if we both decided, right, we're going to do a show together, and your audience came to the show and I opened for you, I did 10 minutes at the top.
	I don't think they would love it.
	There'd be overlap, some people wouldn't.
	We attract our own audiences that come to the show and the idea that you go suddenly then your jokes are held up to the scrutiny of everyone on social media and the loudest voices are the ones that ring out are the negative voices.
	And there's something a bit disingenuous about the press as well, where they'll report a joke.
	Yeah, a bit.
	Well, but they report a joke as if you're making a statement.
	And I don't really make statements on stage.
	I make jokes.
	So you go, well, the defense is always...
	Well, what do you think the relationship is between jokes and the truth?
	I think, and it's very interesting, I think it was Bertram Russell that said, when something is funny, search it very carefully for a hidden truth.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, comedians often say things that everybody thinks are true, but no one will dare to say.
	I think comedy lives...
	At its best, somewhere between, well, it lives between public and private discourse.
	And there's a huge difference between public and private discourse.
	Certainly at the moment, it feels like it's never been wider.
	But if you watch BBC... So comedians are even more necessary.
	Yes, but yes, I'm building my role.
	But, you know, the idea, if you watch BBC News, you would swear that everyone thinks in the same way and thinks the same thing about everything.
	And actually, there's a huge variety of opinion out there.
	And so different people go down different rabbit holes into their own media.
	But you go, there's a lot of...
	And comedians are kind of in the middle trying to make sense of it all and talking to an audience.
	And everything a comedian says has to be based in the level of honesty.
	Because it just isn't funny.
	Yeah, it's so strange though, because there are truths that aren't funny.
	So what is it about some truths that make them funny?
	What is exactly the relationship?
	Because funny is a subset of true in some sense.
	I don't think a joke needs to be true per se.
	It just needs to...
	Often the funniest thing is when you're pointing something out that's akin to the Emperor's New Clothes.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You're pointing out something that kind of, it seems obvious when you say it, but everyone kind of goes, oh yeah, I guess.
	Oh yeah, or they go, oh yeah, we're all like that, ha ha ha.
	We know that.
	Yeah, observational comedy does that job of kind of going, you know, we've all had this human experience.
	And if you're talking about something that's slightly more transgressive in society, it's like it's talking openly about it, so there's a sense in which it mimics friendship.
	Because it's having a conversation that you're not walking on eggshells.
	So political correctness at a comedy show is like health and safety at the rodeo.
	It just doesn't sort of belong there.
	It's not to say that political correctness is a bad thing.
	It's just saying it's about the application.
	Where does that work?
	I mean, I'm not...
	I think the obsession with words, with linguistics in PC is, I don't give a fuck what you call me.
	I care how you treat me.
	So I'm very interested in social justice, but I'm not interested at all in political correctness.
	And I think the two are being complicated because it's an easier fight to win.
	The straw man is the language.
	It avoids having to talk about the real topic a lot of the time.
	Yeah, it might also avoid having to confront those particular demons in your own soul as well.
	So that's a powerful form of avoidance.
	Yeah, it's interesting.
	One more question.
	We've gone about 90 minutes, and so why did you want to talk to me today?
	Why did you think that was a good idea?
	What sparked your interest?
	I'm curious about that.
	I think you're an incredibly interesting guy, because I think there's a sense in which what you're trying to do, certainly in 12 Rules, but I think maps of meaning as well, I think is such a valuable...
	You're reaching out.
	You are...
	A father figure for a lot of men without fathers.
	It strikes me that that's an incredibly difficult station to take.
	And you've been given, I think, a very hard time, I think, for trying to do something that's incredibly valuable and necessary.
	And I think in trying to write my book, I discovered that I wanted to try and give something back a little bit.
	I wanted to try and help in some small way.
	Partly it was about being a father and it was about having that energy as a father of going, look, If something happened to me tomorrow, what am I leaving my son?
	From my ego point of view, saying, what do I think about how the world works?
	And I felt that my book was something that you would respond to because it's a much more...
	I mean, I kind of went down the self-help route because I thought it was low-hanging fruit in some sense.
	Yourself and Sam Harris are great.
	But neither of you know your way around a dick joke.
	And I felt like there's a way in which delivering that material with a lightness that it feels like your audience might get a kick out of my book.
	So I suppose it was self-interest, but also I like what you've done.
	Well, thank you.
	I like what you've done, too.
	I think you're extremely funny.
	And is that actually your laugh?
	Yeah.
	Oh, my God, that's so horrible.
	Well, yeah, I mean, it's wonderful because it's that thing where it's a very, very distinctive laugh.
	But I think a laugh got me into comedy.
	Because my mother's laugh, she had narcolepsy and she had a thing called cataplexy, which is a bit of narcolepsy where you lose muscular control.
	So when she laughed, you often meet someone that makes no noise when they laugh.
	So she had a very extreme version of that where she would properly kind of just melt when she laughed.
	So obviously I was massively motivated to make her laugh.
	Like if she was driving when I was a kid, if you could make her laugh in the car, you'd have to grab the wheel and kind of steer because she'd kind of collapse in giggles, properly collapse.
	And it's, I don't know, I've always been very, I like strange laughs.
	I think they're quite magnificent.
	Infectious.
	There's no doubt about that.
	Yeah, well, look, I really enjoyed talking to you.
	I'm coming to the UK. I'm going to Cambridge and Oxford.
	I'm there for the last two weeks in November, and I have a couple of talks.
	Maybe I could shoot you over an invitation.
	I would love to come.
	I mean, you know, I work every night, but if they're during the day, I'd love to come and see you speak and I'd love to see, you know, what the reaction is.
	But I think it's, I think now as well, looking at something like 12 rules now, look, I really think there's a hunger now post-pandemic.
	People have been locked away for 18 months and they've had sort of We've come out of this collective hibernation and it's, right, what am I going to do next?
	What's my plan?
	Everyone's had that chance to kind of go, right, what's the next step?
	People are searching for a little bit of guidance and I think when you look at some of the things that you talk about, certainly in Maps of Meaning, the idea that myth and story and You know, they're kind of Jungian archetypes, the term I would use.
	You know, they're so important and they're so sort of interesting in our culture because we've kind of slightly thrown the baby out of the bathwater.
	Yeah, well, that's the sort of thing I'm going to talk about at Cambridge and at Oxford.
	So I'll be in touch in relationship to that then.
	We can meet in the UK. That would be really good.
	I'd love to.
	I mean, I'd very much It was just a very interesting, freewheeling conversation.
	I hope people will enjoy and get a kick out of it.
	And yeah, more power to you.
	Good luck.
	Same to you.
	And I'm looking forward to your next Netflix special to watch with my wife and crack up at your laugh.
	I think Christmas Day, yeah.
	But if your wife is even more brutal than you, wow, she's going to love it.
	Oh yeah, man.
	It's something to argue with her because she's really provocative.
	She'll just nail me with like these most...
	She can string together more vicious one-liners than anyone I've ever heard.
	And sometimes I'll just be in a frenzy because I'm so angry and she makes me laugh.
	Rich is one-liners than anyone.
	I'll take that, Gauntlet.
	Well, maybe you'll get the pleasure of meeting her, but you won't see her at her best, I'm afraid.
	I mean, lots of times in the middle of fights we've been having, we're both irate at each other, and she'll say something so unbelievably vicious and horrible, and then follow it up with something even worse.
	It cracks me up.
	I just can't believe she can do it.
	It's really quite something.
	That's kind of what there isn't enough of in the world, like proper debate.
	It strikes me that we're like in the culture wars, it's like World War I. Everyone's in their trenches and no one's getting out to have a little look around and a chat and a discourse.
	That's where the game is played.
	The discourse is everything.
	And it strikes me that that's happening now on YouTube because academia is, there's only one team have turned up to play.
	And so you go, well, that idea of going, there has to be a discourse and there's going to be There'll be a breakthrough.
	But I think it's going to come from popular science books and YouTube videos is going to be where people find their way.
	Yeah, and from comedy.
	That's for sure, man.
	Obviously, yeah.
	A little bit of light relief along the way.
	Well, a pleasure talking to you.
	Thank you so much.
	I really appreciate it.
	My pleasure, man.
	Thanks very much for talking to me today and I hope to see you in the UK. And good luck on your tour.
	See you in the UK. And with your book.
	And in Montreal next summer, the greatest city in the world.
	Yeah, it's a great place, man.
	I love Montreal.
	You know how it's somewhat Montreal?
	It's French food, American portions.
	The best.
	And it's also North American plumbing and European charm.
	Yeah, that does it.
	That sums it up.
	All right, look.
	Well, let's leave it there.
	I'll speak to you again.
	Take care.
	Ciao, man.

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