Transcript of Jimmy Carr Interview on Modern Wisdom Podcast

And then people are talking to you and you’re just being yourself, being loose.

So it’s not — you’re not being anxious about anything. Finding something where you can do that, that’s the secret sauce. Finding something that you enjoy doing that you can be in that kind of flow state.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A thought without control is an interesting insight. I think helplessness — a lot of people have this sensation that “I can’t enact my will on the world, I can’t ensure that this thing is going to behave in the way that I want to.” But if I think about it enough, it’s kind of the same as preparing for it.

JIMMY CARR: I wonder — Mark Fisher wrote about this beautifully, about the privatization of anxiety and stress and the idea that we are blaming the individual for mental health problems. If you look at the stats of how many people are suffering with depression and anxiety, I think you have to conclude that it’s a societal problem. We’re not arranging our society in a way that is conducive to good mental health.

People are incredibly stressed in the world, and it’s a collective action problem. It’s not something you can solve on your own. If you’re a depressed young man, you cannot solve the problem on your own. You have a dispersed identity. If you want to be happy, go and make some other people happy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a vicious cycle though, right? Because the thing that you need is to rely on other people. But given that you’re around fewer people than ever before, you don’t have the same level of cohesion as you would’ve done a few thousand years ago.

JIMMY CARR: Well, look at what we’ve done. Everything’s now for the individual, right? So what used to be a game of five-a-side on a Wednesday night is now a personal best at the gym. Well, that’s isolating. The idea that you are tracking your steps every day rather than going for a walk with a friend — it’s very isolating.

So think about the manosphere. There’s a lot of talk about it in the last six months after Louis Theroux’s brilliant documentary. And you look at it and think, well, it’s the wrong prescription for the right problem. There is definitely a problem going on.

Pro-Gang, Pro-Drinking, Pro-Gambling

So my take on it is I’m pro-gang, pro-drinking, pro-gambling. Let me give you the argument.

Pro-gang: where should men be? Together. Men are really good at checking other men. Gangs have got a bad reputation because some of them do shoot people and deal drugs, okay, but that’s a very small percentage. Mostly it’s guys with other guys hanging out, and they check themselves, and it can be an incredibly positive force.

And I’m very pro-drinking. Scott Galloway has the best line on it: the risk to your liver is as nothing compared to the risk of social isolation. So I think we should lower the drink— I’ve set up these youth clubs around the world. They’ve got jukeboxes and pool tables, and they play sports on a big TV, and they’re really fun. They’re called pubs, and they’re everywhere.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right?

JIMMY CARR: And what we should do is just lean into that and say the youth clubs are already there, they’re called pubs. We should lower the drinking age to 16. Because if you think 16-year-olds aren’t drinking, well, you’re living in a fantasy world anyway.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Certainly in the UK. I don’t know about — how much do people drink in the US at 16?

JIMMY CARR: Quite a bit.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A lot. Right.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah. People drink at 16. Here’s what you do though. You legalize drinking at 16, not for individuals — you’ve got to bring three mates with you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you can get hammered in a group and not on your own.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, well, you’re not going to get hammered. There’s four of you, you’re going to check yourself, you’re going to make sure you don’t get kicked out of the pub.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And sometimes I’ve egged friends on in a group of people. It gets worse sometimes.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, but I’d rather they were together doing that in a space with other people, and people of all ages, and there’s other adults in the room. I’d rather that than they were drinking in a park. I’d much rather.

And gambling — there’s a huge problem with gambling at the moment where people are gambling online and sports betting. It’s like they’re trying to game the system, because you can’t see a way out, right? You’ve got to deal the younger generation in. But I think gambling should be about the bigger things — taking a gamble on yourself, taking a gamble on a career. That’s the big gamble, the big risk: saying that you want to do something and coming out as someone that’s ambitious.

I think the younger generation need to be dealt in in a way that they’re not at the moment. What hope is there to buy a house and start a family? It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that they’re not given the conditions to do that. I don’t think there should be any tax on the under-30s.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you seen Rory Sutherland’s one, where he thinks your first £250,000 should be tax-free, which is an equivalent?

JIMMY CARR: That’s a great idea. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you just get that first £250,000, dollars, and no tax on that. And then the tax kicks in afterward.

JIMMY CARR: It’s a great idea. I mean, under-30 is just that life stage of trying to get to the table.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The same reason that Bill Perkins suggests giving your kids their inheritance when they’re 30.

JIMMY CARR: Because that book, Die with Zero, is so brilliant — it’s about so much more than that, about what you should be doing at what stage of life.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

JIMMY CARR: So the idea that there’s young people feeling anxious — yeah, great, well, we’ve arranged our society incorrectly then. It’s almost like we’ve inverted Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — that pyramid where you need food and shelter and security. Two hundred years ago, people were worried about starving but proud of their name. Now people are, calorifically, fine, and they’re anxious. It’s not a great situation.

Happiness, Depression, and Time

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

JIMMY CARR: It’s kind of, I suppose, slightly Buddhist almost immediately, because I think happiness is a time machine. I think depression is thinking about the past, and anxiety is worry about a future self. In the moment, you tend to be fine. But people don’t have a sense of being able to sit in the moment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, it’s interesting with the flow state thing, because at least in my experience, when you’re in the deepest flow state possible, you actually don’t have much memory of what happened. At least when I’ve done my show — we did shows within days of each other in Sydney at Darling Harbour a few months ago — when you drop into the show, and someone said, “How did that section go?” I have no idea what happened.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, you were in the moment. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because you have moved yourself out of the way. And it’s interesting that what we say we want is more memories, right? We want time to expand and for us to be able to look back. And yet the most enjoyable way to spend the present moment is in a way that we won’t be able to remember in future. It’s this sort of paradox. But the worst thing is to go, “Well, I can definitely remember what happened, but I remember that I wasn’t there. I remember that I was worrying about this thing that was going to come up next, or that I was fearful, or I was distracted. I wasn’t really in the moment.” That seems like the worst way to spend the present.

JIMMY CARR: Isn’t that the Eckhart Tolle story? You know that story about him? He was horribly depressed in his 20s, really, kind of thinking about ending it all. And he was on a park bench, and he thought to himself, “I can’t live with myself.” And in saying that, he went, “Well, who’s ‘I’ and who’s ‘myself’? Wait a second.” And he just realized you can separate those two things and get beyond that. There’s an equanimity in being able to separate yourself from your thoughts sometimes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I really do think that the worry is about control, right? It’s strange, because no amount of anxiety is going to make any difference to what’s going to happen.

JIMMY CARR: But control’s an illusion right the way down. I blame Plato and the Zoroastrians for coming up with the idea of heaven and perfection. There is no heaven and perfection. I’m with Nietzsche on this — embrace the chaos. You can’t have control over what happens, only how you react to it. So it becomes very stoic very quickly, because you just go, “I’m in charge of how I react to this stuff.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I definitely think a lot of people blame themselves, and to some degree I understand why, because you want to feel like you have agency over what’s going on. You want to be the person that’s in control. You don’t have to rely on anybody else. But a good question to ask yourself is: am I depressed, or is my life depressing? Am I anxious, or is my life anxiety-inducing?

JIMMY CARR: Is it depression or sadness? If it’s circumstantial, then I think it’s sadness. I think it’s much more acceptable to say “I’m depressed” than to say “I’m sad.” But if it’s circumstantial and you could do something about it, then great.

Generations, Elites, and the Overproduction of Elites

I’ve been thinking about a thing recently. I don’t believe in generations. And you won’t find someone who’s a bigger Neil Howe fan than me — the guy who coined the phrase “millennial.” But I don’t really believe in generations. Putting a whole cohort of people into one box makes about as much sense to me as horoscopes.

There are people that are entitled and people that are ambitious in every cohort. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are in the same generation — they’re very different people. Actually, there’s entitled people that are young and there’s people that are very ambitious, and the difference is where you are and where you want to get to. If you want to do something about it, you are ambitious. If you want someone else to do something about it, if it’s their responsibility, that’s entitlement. It’s a pretty good working definition. You meet young people who are great, and they get lumped in with this “millennials be like this” nonsense.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But there has to be some sort of delineation. And I do think that there are changes that occur across time, right? Across a group from a long time ago to now, there are changes. And if you just put these random bars in between them to break them up — does that not make sense?

JIMMY CARR: I don’t think it helps. But, listen, I can contradict myself and say I do think we need to do something for the younger generation. We need to change the way — ’cause effectively, what have we done? We’ve raised the school-leaving age in the UK to 21.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because it’s mandatory to get a degree now.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, everyone goes to university, and a university degree is a luxury item. It’s a Louis Vuitton handbag. And if everyone’s got one, the value of that obviously decreases.

Peter Turchin talks about the end of civilizations — he’s brilliant. He talks about two reasons why a society collapses. One is the inequality of wealth, which we’ve almost supercharged now with social media, because everyone can see everything all the time. And then he talks about the overproduction of elites. When you overproduce elites, and they don’t get what they’re promised — so if you work hard at school and get a degree from a good university, and then think, “Where’s my four-bedroom house? Where’s my wife and family?” — what it hasn’t delivered, then that elite feels let down by the system and what it tacitly promised them, and becomes the counter-elite, and that counter-elite fights against the system and tries to bring it down. So I think that’s why we’re in the beginnings of a revolution at the moment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think that’s one of the reasons why America has a more prevalent victimhood culture than somewhere like the UK does. That’s because when you’re growing up in the UK, you’re not really told that you can be whatever you want to be — that blue-sky thinking, helicopter vision isn’t given to British people in the same way. If you diverge from the path, that tall poppy syndrome kicks in, and you tend to be chopped down pretty quickly. Whereas in the US, for all that it’s a horrible, misogynistic, judgmental, xenophobic country trying to keep everybody down, the American dream still is accepted. It’s part of the fabric that most people believe. And that means that if you did everything right, and grow up and become an adult, and the world doesn’t deliver to you that which you were promised as a kid, quite rightly, you feel indignant. Like, “Hey, where’s my stuff?”

JIMMY CARR: I think it’s the UK.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t think you want there to be some social mobility.

JIMMY CARR: You want to be able— essentially, you want your kids to do better than you did in life. That’s what you kind of want. But it really, I suppose—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And kids also want to do better than you did as well.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, sure. I think from a political point of view, I’m less concerned with equality — Peter Turchin is very worried about there being equality — I’m more concerned with abundance. What does the future hold? Is it going to be Star Wars or Star Trek in 50 years’ time? I’d love to believe it could be Star Trek, that there is abundance. Although even if there is, we’ll get used to it. ‘Cause the world that we live in now — if you showed your great-great-grandfather your life now, he would think you’d been made emperor.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Habituation’s a hell of a drug.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, you just get used to this stuff. Rich and poor is always going to be relative. But the idea that everyone’s needs are taken care of — because really, people think they want more money, but really money is the thing that gets you what we really want, which is good healthcare and good education and the right amount of calories and all the important stuff.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Until you start to fold status in, right? Because one of the big reasons that you want money is to have more money than the guy that lives next door.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah. Taking care of everyone’s physical needs in society is a collective action problem — making sure there’s a safety net there that isn’t a hammock. But you can’t take care of people’s metaphysical needs. So the difference is between a Casio watch that tells the time perfectly reasonably and a blingy Rolex that shows, “Hey, you made it, baby” — whatever the extra value you get from what it means to you. You get into René Girard, where we’re full of mimetic desires. We don’t know what to want. Not having to impress other people — that’s the superpower.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

JIMMY CARR: That’s the thing that really makes a difference to the quality of your life. If you know what you want, you don’t have to impress other people. That really does simplify life.

Getting Stuff vs. Having Stuff

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That would be a wonderful gift. I don’t know how the hell you would give it to people, but the gift of being able to say you don’t have to impress anybody else would liberate so many people from perverse desires, from being distracted by things that they don’t actually want to do, that they’re only doing to perform. It’s the hidden versus observable metrics thing that me and George talk about all the time.

JIMMY CARR: Well, it’s interesting. Getting stuff is fun. Having stuff isn’t fun. Getting stuff is fun. That’s a weird kind of lesson — you talk about 2D, 3D lessons. That’s a real 3D lesson. You have to experience that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bill Perkins was my first big 2D, 3D lesson. I read the book, and then I brought him on the show — that’s like a 2D, and then maybe a 2.5D lesson, getting to sit down with him and talk about these ideas about how to structure your life, to focus on having fun and spending money in smart ways that brings you together with other people. And then we finished the episode, and he said, “What are you going to do now?” And I said, “I’m probably going to go home and write the show notes for this episode and get the file across to my editor.” And he said, “Do you want to come wakesurfing?” It’s like, “Okay, of course I do.”

Went downstairs — he had a driver outside waiting for us. We got on the boat with the boat captain who had swim shorts and a towel, and then we did that. And then we went back to his house on the lake, which is the most expensive house ever sold in Austin. And then his driver, on the way to take him back to his jet, dropped me off at home. I was like, “Oh, that’s a 3D lesson.” I could have read the book 50 times and not had the same tangible, visceral experience.

JIMMY CARR: I think it’s not easy for young people. I think it feels like limitations are very freeing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct.

JIMMY CARR: Once you decide what you want to do, and what you’re going to work at, and who you’re going to be with, life gets very simple, because you stop thinking about how to live and you start thinking about living.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, yeah, I guess an analogy would be if you were in a boat in the middle of the ocean — if you just have to row real hard and you know the direction you’re going in, that’s probably not—

JIMMY CARR: That’s a Marcus Aurelius line, isn’t it? “If you don’t know where you’re going, no wind is favorable.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, not too dissimilar. But if you’re also having to direct yourself, you’re lost in the rumination of, “I took five miles in that direction, but maybe I should—if I take a slight right here—” David Epstein’s new book is all about this. It’s all about the power of constraints and how they breed creativity. People think they want as much optionality in life as they can get.

JIMMY CARR: Hormozi’s very good on this. I met Hormozi the other day for the first time, but it felt like getting together with an old friend.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I can’t imagine two people that are more different sartorially than you and Alex.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, we looked slightly odd at dinner. It was really interesting, because his new big idea is that there’s too much optionality. If you never cash in those options, what’s the point? “I like getting an MBA, and then a PhD in business.” No, no — just start a business. It doesn’t matter if it goes bust, start another one. The map is not the territory. Get out there and do the thing.

Talking vs. Doing

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I think that’s another challenge that young people have — everybody has, forget saying “young people,” it’s anybody existing in this current world — which is that your ability to say things, as opposed to do things, has never been more tuned up. You are what you do, not what you say you do. And unfortunately, talking about the thing and doing the thing vie for the same resources. You need to allocate yours appropriately.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah. Don’t tell me about your priorities. Show me last week’s diary.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

JIMMY CARR: That’s what you actually did.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And I think the prospect of being able to talk your way or proclaim your way publicly and privately — right, to yourself — “I’m going to put this plan together, I’ve got this” — this is one of the issues of obsessing over productivity too much, that productivity ends up becoming the goal, not the means to be able to get a goal. The masturbation of productivity keeps on happening.

There’s a Mark Manson line I wanted to get you to react to: “The small thing you didn’t say six months ago has been collecting interest ever since. By the time resentment shows up fully formed, most people have forgotten what the original conversation even was.” I think the same thing is true for when we don’t keep promises to ourselves. When you made a deal with yourself a long time ago, you can’t quite remember it, but there’s this latent distrust in you doing what you said you were going to do. And no one else knows about it — it’s just you, it’s your relationship with you. “I said that I was going to do this thing, and I didn’t show up, and I didn’t show up, and I didn’t show up.” And after a while, you begin to resent the part of yourself that makes plans, because you don’t think it’s going to come to fruition.

Compound Interest and Systems

JIMMY CARR: Yeah. Well, I suppose it’s that thing of — having a six-pack doesn’t give you confidence. Being the guy that shows up at the gym every day gives you confidence. You take care of yourself. I think it’s about compound interest, really, because compound interest on money is miraculous. When you look at Buffett and his wealth, most of it was built through time. Time is the factor that people don’t take into consideration there. He’s a very smart investor, but really, time was the thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 90% of his wealth was accumulated after the age of 60.

JIMMY CARR: That’s exactly right. It’s like — compound interest on your skills is insane. If you put the reps in, if you do the work, it’s insane what you build over time. But it gets back to that thing for me about your goals will be beaten by your systems every time. Everyone’s got great goals, everyone’s got big ambitions, but what are you going to do tomorrow? What’s the small thing that you can break off that’s manageable, that you can do today?

It’s why I love what I do. Mainly it’s jokes, and writing jokes is comparatively easy, because you can just sit down and write one, and then you test it. There’s no point discussing it. There’s no point having a meeting where you go through it with some friends. Just go out, find an audience, tell them. They’ll tell you whether it’s funny or not. Great feedback loop.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I suppose the problem with most other projects is that you can’t iterate a product and get audience feedback quite so quickly. You can’t work out whether or not you want to release a t-shirt design in one small chunk — go through all of the process of getting the design, get it printed, see how many people want to buy it. “Oh, one person bought it.” Well, let’s update it again. The iterative nature of that is pretty cool.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, it’s harder. I’m very lucky, I think, to be in a business where if the audience like it, they tell you straight away.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And they can’t not tell you either. Even people who dislike you — if you tell a joke that’s sufficiently funny, I think the response just kicks in.

JIMMY CARR: Well, even if it’s like — my favorite noise in comedy is still that cognitive dissonance laugh, where there’s a laugh followed by a deep, “Oh,” where they’re shocked at themselves for having just laughed. The laughter kind of betrays you. I think your laugh, it’s kind of a deeper level of you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I suppose I might be a little bit wrong there. If you really, really don’t like somebody, and you decide to sit in the third row with your arms crossed and go, “Go on then, funny man, make me laugh” — I think you can convince yourself into not liking somebody that’s doing well at their craft in comedy. I don’t think that the same thing is quite so true in music. I think that an absolute banger pierces through your defenses even more than comedy. Something that would be less than that would be a conversation — between two people on stage, or some sort of keynote speech, or whatever, that wasn’t even that interesting, wasn’t engaging. Comedy’s deeper, and then music is deeper still.

JIMMY CARR: It’s like the art and the artist. Can you separate them? Can someone who’s done a terrible thing, and you know they’ve done a terrible thing, can they still be funny? Can they still be musically gifted?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

JIMMY CARR: I think you probably can tease it out. I think it’s probably fine.

Bravery, Consequence, and Confidence

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Peter Crone’s got a question: “Who could you be in the absence of your concerns?” It made me think about—

JIMMY CARR: That’s really good, isn’t it? “Who could you be in the absence of your concerns?” There’s a great line I often think of: “You can do anything you want. You only have to face the consequences.” It’s really powerful, because it’s that thing of going, “You’ve got absolute freedom, but you have to wear it.” There’s freedom of speech but not freedom of consequence.

And I think about Saint Lawrence a lot. You know the story of Saint Lawrence?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No.

JIMMY CARR: He’s the patron saint of comedy. Saint Lawrence was burnt alive by an emperor over a fire, and as he was being burnt alive, Saint Lawrence said, “Turn me over, this side’s done.” It makes me think of bravery — that’s a very brave thing to say in a pretty awful moment. But the only reason we remember him is because he said that. There’s a certain amount of bravery — say the thing. Say the thing. Good luck. Some people won’t like it. It’ll be all right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “Who could you be in the absence of your concerns?” But me and George keep talking about the fact that so many people are held back by a lack of confidence rather than a lack of competence. Their self-belief is the biggest rate limiter on what it is that they can achieve.

JIMMY CARR: But self-confidence comes from — there’s a line, “Self-confidence comes from giving the world irrefutable proof you are who you say you are.” So find something small that you can do, do what you can with what you’ve got, where you are. You could wish away the first two — “I wish I had different things, I wish I was somewhere else” — but just accepting the reality of where you are and working with that seems to be pretty powerful. You can’t choose where you start. You just choose where you finish.

Gratitude and Celebration

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s your relationship like with gratitude?

JIMMY CARR: I do a lot of gratitude practice. Meister Eckhart said, “If you only said one prayer, and it was thank you, that would be enough.” I think that’s bang on. Disposition is more important than position — where you are in the world doesn’t matter, your disposition is everything. And the only thing that seems to shift disposition is a sense of gratitude. Across time and space, we’re lucky to be here now, and we’re lucky to have the friends that we have, we’re lucky to have lived in the world that we live in. It’s extraordinary that we’re in a privileged position, and I think acknowledging that on the regular is great.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are you able to take time to celebrate when you’re moving so quickly?

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, I kind of think celebration and gratitude are linked. Done correctly, celebration is gratitude in action. You throw a party, you invite everyone, you celebrate — there’s something lovely about that connection to other people, doing it with others. I don’t think you can really celebrate on your own. Being grateful with other people is really good as well — sit down and chat with other people about how great this is. It’s really nice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I think a lot of people struggle, especially when they’re at their busiest, to take time away from doing the thing, to think about the thing, and to realize how fortunate they are to be in that situation.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah. Well, Chairman Mao — wasn’t it — “You can’t smell the roses from a galloping horse.” I think I should—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I should put together Chairman Mao quotes.

JIMMY CARR: I should put together a book. I’ve been thinking about this — a book of incredibly wise stuff said by shitty people. It’d be quite a good quote book — “Well, I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It would be nice to have the quote on one page and then the person that said it on the next page.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah. “Equanimity with impermanence.” Wow, Hitler. Oh, no.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Damn it. Yeah.

JIMMY CARR: It’s ruined that for me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, but I—

JIMMY CARR: Not that he never said that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It is an interesting challenge, right? When things are going well and everything’s busy, and you’re not really paying that much attention — that is the time when gratitude is probably most available to you, but you’re so busy, and the calendar is always packed, and you’re moving forward, excited about the future. So taking time to reflect on the present is pretty tough. And then when things slow down and stuff starts to go a little bit worse, that’s when you wish you’d had the gratitude from before to rely on, and you retroactively try to think about it.

Problems as a Feature, Not a Bug

JIMMY CARR: It’s the frames — it’s how you think about stuff. Problems are a feature, not a bug. A problem just means something needs your attention. People have a crazy notion, if they stop and think about it, that one day their problems will be over — they’ll have dealt with everything and it’s done. Well, obviously not. You just level up. All you do is level up, and you get more complex problems. If you can solve really complex problems, you’re doing very well in the world. Elon Musk is a trillionaire.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

JIMMY CARR: Because he solved some very complex problems, and there’s money to be made doing that. So problems are a feature, not a bug. They’re great — it just means something needs your attention. You should be grateful for that. Someone needs your time, you need to take this call, you need to deal with this thing. Boredom, I think, is unappreciated serenity. You’re in a serene moment — there’s nothing going on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Great.

JIMMY CARR: Doesn’t happen often. I can get to where Tibetan monks get to in an airport lounge in Detroit. Nothing going on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As long as you don’t get your phone out.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, it’s fine. Well, we’re carrying the phone everywhere with us now. It’s like the mobile labor camp tracking our every move. Crazy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was in the gym a couple of months ago.

JIMMY CARR: Of course you were. Look at you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And one of my friends was talking to me about how his wife keeps on complaining that he uses his phone at night, always sending messages, organizing stuff, running businesses or whatever. And he came up with a very fortunate, but I think actually philosophically pretty interesting, excuse: “I’ve got a mind that likes to solve problems. I’m just trying to give it good problems to solve.” I think lots of people have a problem-solving brain. But only some people have great problems that they’re going to solve with it.

JIMMY CARR: Well, that’s what I think of with anxiety. My mind is often racing. I’ll wake up with, I suppose, what you’d call a panic attack at like 4 or 5 in the morning, and my mind’s just on, and I’ll worry about stuff. It’s often counterfactuals — worried about things going wrong, people getting hurt. You just kind of ruminate on crazy stuff. And if I give it something like, “Oh, we need to write a joke about Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham or something,” I go, “Okay, right, great. Give it something to do.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So using action as an antidote to anxiety then?

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, I love that. I love the idea that that cures it pretty well.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s very difficult to worry about the future when you feel like you’re moving yourself toward it. And that problem-solving brain thing is interesting, because I wonder how many people are churning themselves up inside because they have a brain that likes to solve problems, but they don’t have any good problems to solve. So they pay attention to politics, or porn, or their ex, or this situation that’s outside of their control in some foreign country they can’t get access to.

JIMMY CARR: Well, is that not what the news is? If you were trying to design something to engender mental health difficulties, you’d make someone aware of a problem and give them no agency. That’s what reading about the Middle East is — it’s an absolute clusterfuck of a situation, and there’s nothing—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Good luck dealing with that.

JIMMY CARR: —we can do about it. There’s nothing we can—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s nothing that you can do about it.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because I wonder whether it would feel better or worse for the situation to actively have nothing you could do about it. There’s an asteroid coming to Earth — no one can do anything about it. It’s the simulacrum that someone could fix this, but not you.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, we’re not in that game. I think that thing about having agency — okay, there’s a bigger thing here, which is I think we give empathy to people that we like and agency to people that we don’t like. If you imagine there are two marches, and one of them is super far-right dudes marching with skinheads and jackboots — we give them agency. If they put a brick through a window, we say, “Lock them up and throw away the key.” And then there’s another march, people marching for social justice, and they throw a brick through a window, and we say, “Well, that’s the language of the streets, the unheard.” So we give them empathy and then agency. Actually, you should give both — you need agency and empathy for everyone. Believe that people can handle it, and believe that everyone’s got a part to play.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We need to be responsible for the things that we did, but also we’re enmeshed in the situation that brought us to that point too — the motivations of what got you there. But that problems thing, I really do think — I wonder how many people would find that all they need are better problems to solve. All that they need is something to focus their time and attention on in a better way.

I came back from a meditation retreat last week — I’d spent seven days without my phone, almost exclusively in silence. And I came back, and I was flying out of San Francisco, and walked into the departure terminal. One of the pieces of advice we’d been given was to put sunglasses on and put AirPods in, because you’ve basically been in silence for a week with no screens, no nothing. It’s a lot of stimulus to go from 0 to 100. I sat down in some airport restaurant, looked up at the screens, and it was wildfires in Europe raging. That was the first thing I saw on a screen basically since I’d got off the retreat. I remember feeling this strange constriction inside of me, and I’m like, why?

JIMMY CARR: I better get a hose.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why the hell is that what’s on? I’m aware — is it newsworthy? Yeah, kind of. But what does it do? It makes us feel like we’re being informed about the world, but really all it’s doing is piercing our nervous systems and making us feel worried about stuff. It’s strange.

JIMMY CARR: And yet I want to be informed about what’s happening in the world. I feel like I’m addicted to that. I like knowing what’s going on. I like thinking about what the solution might be. But you get to chat about it — you don’t really get to influence what happens.

Achievement Without Celebration

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The gratitude point — Michael Smolens has this line where he says, “I have a hard time celebrating my achievements, because in my mind, it was my obligation to achieve it.” A lot of people that are high performers have this sense that the higher you climb, the further you have to fall. As you get better, your standards are always going to increase, so you’re always going to suck in comparison to what you think you should do. And that’s great, because it continues to push you to work harder, to improve, but also it means that success isn’t a cause for celebration — it’s just the minimum level of acceptable performance, and anything less than success becomes a failure.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, well, I think you need to be in a state of, I guess, imposter syndrome once every 18 months, two years. You need to level up constantly, where you feel like you’re in a space of, “Oh wow, I can’t believe I did that, that was good.” Push yourself a little bit, try and do something else.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that difficult when you’ve got close to the top of your game?

JIMMY CARR: Well, it depends what game you’re in. You can change games, you can do things a little bit differently. My business is the service industry — I make something that people want, I make them happy. And no one seems to remember any of my jokes, but they remember how I made them feel. The show tonight is nothing more than an advert for the show when I come back next time. That’s the way I’m thinking of it. And then you’re trying to find these moments — the show’s changed over the last couple of years, where there’ll be a moment where someone asks something, and you chat to them, and it’ll be slightly more heartfelt, sweetening the pill with laughter.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why did you change that?

JIMMY CARR: I don’t know what happened, what went on that I suddenly started chatting to people in the audience, and we started to connect in a slightly different way. It’s been really lovely. I love that line, “Laughter’s the shortest distance between two people.” I’ve often spoken about this — if your best friend is the person you have the least filter with. If you meet someone on a plane and say, “I saw the World Cup, it’s a good game, isn’t it?” — nothing, right, surface level. And if you say, “Oh my God, you have to see these hemorrhoids, it’s incredible” — that’s connecting at another level. You’ve got no filter with that person. That’s your best friend in the world. And if you treat the audience like that, you get paid back tenfold. People feel that — “Okay, there’s no — he’s treating us like adults, he’s saying the things that he thinks are funny.” There’s a real connection there. And increasingly, people aren’t talking about things in the mainstream media, so there’s a gap. Chat about things that are going on in the world.

The Overton Window of Comedy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Isn’t it interesting that what you’re looking to do with comedy is to say the thing that maybe lots of people think, or hadn’t realized that they thought, and to say it with a degree of no-fucks-given bravery, that means you are the person who pushes the boundary in that regard?

JIMMY CARR: Well, I think people talk about the Overton window in politics — the idea of what’s the most left-wing and what’s the most right-wing thing you could say that’s socially acceptable at a dinner party. That’s the Overton window of conversation. It’s expanded massively in politics the last couple of years, to the left and to the right, for better, for worse. I think comedy does that for conversation. I think the real benefit of going to a comedy show isn’t necessarily the two hours you spend laughing at the jokes — it’s the conversation you have on the way home, where the conversational Overton window has broadened. I don’t think people were as open talking about sex and politics before and after George Carlin and Richard Pryor came along.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s interesting.

JIMMY CARR: I think they expanded the window. And I think someone like Dave Chappelle is out there expanding the window of what you can and can’t talk about.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you’ve got that with spicy topics, insights that might be somewhat controversial or inflammatory, or on the edges of what people would typically do. But there’s another dimension, which is a sort of level of sincerity or earnestness or emotionality, a depth — maybe an unapologetic, self-deprecating, sometimes exposing look at how people are motivated, and maybe how you are motivated, or how somebody in the audience feels about something. And that almost feels like another type of Overton window, separate from the first one.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, it doesn’t all need to be the incredibly controversial thing. I’m very happy to talk about third-rail topics and try to be funny about them, but I’m also very happy to be earnest and sincere about stuff.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s a level of earnestness which is commonly publicly accepted, and there’s a level of earnestness and depth which pushes outside of that as well. I’m kind of obsessed with this idea that people are desperate for authenticity, but they’re allergic to sincerity. People love the idea of someone just being themselves, speaking their truth forward. But when you see a father break down crying because his wife left him, a lot of the internet has this sort of allergic aversion response to that. We want people to show themselves.

JIMMY CARR: I think if you’re going to do anything that’s even vaguely out there, you’ve got to turn off the comment section. Other people’s opinion of me is none of my business. You do your thing, you’ve got your audience, and they come and they enjoy it, and we have a good time. Great. Anyone throwing shade on that, going, “Well, how can you talk about serious things? He tells offensive jokes.” Okay, well, we all contain multitudes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You get what I mean though, right? You have the classic Overton window, and then you have this emotional Overton window as well — how deep are you prepared to go in a live show, how edgy are your jokes allowed to be, and how earnest are your conversations allowed to be? There is an expected bar beyond which people really prick their ears up and pay attention, have a more animated response to it. One of the areas you can dig into is, “Holy shit, he really went there.” Or when you’re sat down with a friend, having a conversation over dinner, and it bounces between the level of emotionality that’s normal, and then it descends into one that is not so common.

JIMMY CARR: Well, what are you solving for in a comedy show? Laughter is the main metric for comedy. You want there to be three big laughs a minute, and you want to have that frequency with the jokes. But also silence — don’t be afraid of silence. A silence where there’s a poignant moment and everyone has a little think — good, fine, we can have that as well. It’s nice that it’s changing, because it keeps it very exciting for me that you’re not doing the same thing again and again. It’s not like you’re doing the same show — we’ve got different flavors.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Certainly you’re looking to optimize for memorability to a degree as well — for people to go, “Yeah, I really loved that sensation,” as opposed to, “What did you do? What was it like to go see this artist last year?” “I can’t remember.”

JIMMY CARR: Well, memorable is interesting, because if someone chooses to come and see you live, it’s a big deal. But really, I think people want to go out to festivals, see music, see plays — but they also, we used to gather around the fire and talk, and then we gathered around the radio and talked, and then we gathered around the television and talked. And even something like The Royal Family — you remember that sitcom in the UK — it’s like a distant memory, people watching TV like that, because now we have the phones. People are on their own, watching their own thing, their own stream.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Even if they were in the same living room together, each person would be on a screen of their own that nobody else is looking at. And I suppose, “Hey, have you seen this thing?” But yeah, you are right — The Royal Family, which I guess Americans are definitely not going to understand the reference to, but people sitting around watching the television together as a family.

JIMMY CARR: And you would watch shows that you weren’t necessarily that into because mum liked it. You’d go, “Oh, I guess we’re watching Desperate Housewives, whatever it was.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Was the thing there was only one TV, as opposed to five TVs, one per room.

Social Media, Attention, and AI

JIMMY CARR: I was thinking about this recently, about the idea of social media and the issues around it, the bigger picture. There used to be a thing when I was at school where people talked about Native American peoples having this belief that if someone took their photo, it would steal their soul.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

JIMMY CARR: And I remember thinking, “Oh, that’s crazy, that’s ridiculous, they think that photo is going to steal their soul.” And now I think, well, it might not be one photo, but 1,000 a day, that’ll do it. That’ll absolutely do it. That will break you away from who you are, alienate you from yourself. And then I was thinking about even the language of it — it’s not hiding, it’s nets and webs, the internet.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How so?

JIMMY CARR: It’s the web, right? It’s the internet. What do nets and webs do? They catch people — that’s what it’s doing. I think Aldous Huxley was right about this. Our power will not be taken from us by some overlord. We’ll give it away for cheap dopamine. Huxley said it was Soma, the tablet. And he was even right about that — it’s just a different kind of tablet.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So not some equivalent here of treating people like slaves, which caused them to not work as hard as you might want them to, and they would rebel and sometimes be lazy. But if you can manage to create a system where people actually want to work as hard for you as you want them to, by incentivizing them on the back end, then you’ll get them to continue to drive themselves as they work harder and harder. I guess it’s kind of the same here, but with regard to distraction and freely giving away your information and your attention as well — you don’t need to demand it from people, you just need to make the incentives aligned so that they want to give it to you.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, it’s a really interesting time. These new technologies are coming along, and we have to integrate them into our society. I think ultimately the trajectory will be up and it’ll be better, but we have to learn how to work with this stuff.

AI is the other thing everyone’s talking about. We haven’t quite figured out what it is yet. I think AI is like a musical instrument — anyone can sit down at a piano and make a noise, but it takes time and attention and practice to direct it into creating a symphony. It’s like an instrument. We’re going to be using that tool, but how do we use it? At the moment it’s very early stages.

My take on AI is — I don’t have religion, I don’t think we were made in God’s image, but I think we so wanted there to be a God, we created one in our image. It’s all-knowing, all-powerful, can create miracles, and lives in a cloud. Well, what am I talking about? I think it’s like that. Hegel and Nietzsche had the idea hundreds of years ago that God wasn’t there for the Big Bang, but the universe is a device for creating God, and that we are the universe experiencing itself.

I think everyone’s very impressed with AI because they’ve forgotten what they are. We are much more impressive than AI. AI is really good at left-brain stuff, but the right brain comprehends where the left brain apprehends — it’s all Iain McGilchrist’s stuff. The gestalt, the whole, the complex stuff, it can’t do. It can do the complicated though, so well. So in a sense, maybe it’ll take away the drudgery of life and allow us to be more human, to do more artistic, fulfilling, fun things with our lives that make us feel more connected. That’s the dream.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s the dream that’s being put forward. I think a lot of people have kind of forgotten about the connection, comprehend side of their own existence so much that if there is a threat to the drudgery being taken away — and that’s not to say that that’s all it’s going to do, it very well might take away everything else as well.

JIMMY CARR: Well, we can only see the jobs it will take away, because they already exist. We can’t see the jobs it will create, because by definition they don’t exist yet. So we’re in a pickle now. But this is precedented — this has happened before. The Industrial Revolution really made physical strength obsolete. You don’t need that anymore to farm the land, to make things — machines do all of that for us. And this is taking away some of the drudgery of white-collar work. But hopefully creativity will become uniquely human.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “Favorable conditions never come. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, that’s really good, isn’t it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But there is this sense that at some point in future, my problems will be out of the way and I can finally get down to doing the real thing, as opposed to thinking this is the situation I’m existing in — I’m always going to be faced with problems. There is never going to be a time where I have none, like completing a video game and arriving at a level where there’s no more enemies. That’s just what life is.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah. You want people to have some idea that there’s a future, that they want to start families, that they want to live a life. There’s shocking statistics about the abortion rate in the UK — you heard this? I think it’s one in three viable pregnancies now end in abortion in the UK, which — put the morality to one side, that’s not my business — but what does that really suggest? That people feel that they can’t start a life, they can’t build a family, they can’t settle down. They don’t feel able to, with the climate that we have at the moment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Favorable conditions never come.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah. You want people to feel like they can, that life’s going to be better for their kids — well, life’s going to be better for them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if favorable conditions felt like they were here even when they weren’t? That’s the kind of world you want people to be in, right? An abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset. Believing that you need to wait for favorable conditions in future is, by definition, a scarcity mindset — right now is not enough, and in future it may be better if I can construct the world in this very specific way.

JIMMY CARR: It does feel like we’re living through a very unique time. I suppose everyone always thinks this — but did they in the ’90s? There was nothing going on in the ’90s.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There was — I mean, you lived through it, you tell me.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, relatively quiet.

A Unipolar World, Then a Multipolar One

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right. Yeah.

JIMMY CARR: Since the end of Pax Americana, really since this phase of history starts in ’89, ’91 — the Berlin Wall collapses, the Soviet Union’s gone, and suddenly you go from being a bipolar world to a unipolar world. And no one noticed for 30 years. But just as the American Navy got smaller, the canary in the coal mine was the Somali pirates. That never would’ve happened when the US Navy was at full strength with an enemy in Russia — it would’ve pleased them, no problem at all, safe navigation, they would’ve schooled them. And then suddenly things fracture. We live in a multipolar world now, and it’s very confusing. On a geopolitics level, it’s a very strange time, and you’re seeing this revolution go on. If you take revolution to mean the replacement of elites — the mainstream media is being replaced, academia, there’s a replication crisis and they’ve lost a lot of credibility, politics now, the major parties in the UK may never win another election, the ones we’ve had the last 100 years. It really is a fracturing of our system. I suppose it gets back to Robert Frost and the idea civilization is a clearing in the forest, and we have to relitigate and rebuild all of this stuff.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think that people are going to look back in 50 years, 30 years, at 2026, and go, “Those were the good old days”? The nostalgia that a lot of people have for the ’90s?

JIMMY CARR: I don’t know. There’s something about — what’s that lovely quote — “Strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men, and so it goes.” I think there’s something about the fact that we’re in a very tumultuous time now — the technology crisis.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You think this is hard times?

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, I think this is hard times. I think it’s very tough out there for people. There’s a lack of leadership, and if you look at how countries are being run — it’s clearly these are hard times.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know the idea of kayfabe, right — that thing from WWE, where it’s all about the metagame being played, the optics. Everything is unreal and surreal. Definitely, if you look back — there was that debate between Obama and whoever he was going up against in 2008, 2012, and before they begin, they’d say, “My opponent, I respect him very much,” and so on. And then you roll the clock forward to this literal WWE event, with personal insults and swearing back and forth. And you think, is statesmanlike behavior unnecessary stodge? Is it this sort of prim and proper pomp and circumstance which isn’t needed? Or has something there been, if not lost, caricatured — turned into this exposition of itself, this ridiculous role-playing game. Everybody’s LARPing as what they’re supposed to be, and it’s all been turned to extremes. It certainly feels very extreme at the moment.

JIMMY CARR: It really does. But I don’t think it’s unfixable. I think we’ve been in worse spots than this in the past. There must have been people in 1943 going, “We’re in the middle of a world war, this is bad, isn’t it? What’s going to happen? How are we going to straighten this out?” I think about that a lot.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think about how kinetically and literally, things were significantly worse at almost every period in human history up until now. But I wonder whether metaphysically and symbolically, things were quite as bad. I wonder whether we have the most confusing time now, even if it’s not the most kinetically dangerous time.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s solutions out there, and I think it’s a question of statesmanship — that’s really the thing you need. You need great leadership in these kinds of times. You need someone that’s good at thinking about 20 years in the future rather than the election cycle.

Fixing the UK, Fixing America

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s happening in the UK at the moment? I’ve not been back for a while.

JIMMY CARR: The UK is not in a great situation. I think Andy Burnham’s going to take over, and I wish him well, and I don’t know what’s going to change. I think it requires some sort of radical realism. If you were going to fix the UK, what would you do? I think the fundamentals are it needs to be more competitive as a nation.

What makes a nation competitive? Two percent on income tax either way, or changing the stamp duty laws — it’s all kind of nothing, just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They need someone to come in and actually address the real problem. There are four things that affect a country’s competitiveness: the currency, the rate of the currency; the energy cost; the amount of red tape, bureaucracy; and tax. You can do things to all four of those to make the country more competitive. Britain needs to be competitive on the global stage. When we left Europe, for better or for worse, people voted for that, and we never really did it, and we never really competed.

So if I was in charge for the day: I devalue the currency, I devalue the pound. I think the pound’s overvalued — why is a pint £7.50 in London? Because it’s overvalued as a currency. People talk about redistribution of wealth to the north — we keep it high because of the City of London. And I’m not really concerned about the exchange rate affecting your holiday in France being more expensive for two weeks of the year. I’d be more concerned with the other 50 weeks of the year where you work. We’ve got to be a net exporter of things, so our things need to be cheaper, and in order to do that, we have to lower the currency value, which is relatively easy to do.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: People say that the UK is the 7th biggest economy in the world, but it’s not — it’s the 7th biggest city in the world surrounded by a very poor country.

JIMMY CARR: And then, but you want it to be redistributed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You want there to be factories being built as far away from London as you can get. It didn’t feel like the wealth of the City of London was reaching Newcastle or Middlesbrough or Stockton.

JIMMY CARR: And we have the most expensive energy in the world — I think it’s like four times higher than America.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No way.

JIMMY CARR: And it’s crazy, and it’s systematically being— I mean, is this Green New Deal stuff?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that why that’s happening?

JIMMY CARR: Well, there’s a bit of that, but I’m all for the Green New Deal — just give me a long enough runway. Give me 25 years, and I’ll give you net zero.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not 2030.

JIMMY CARR: What I want to do is be as technologically advanced, if you can imagine this for ambition, as France was in the ’70s. France in the 1970s built 56 nuclear plants. They’ve got the cheapest energy in Europe. They don’t give a damn what Russia says, or what’s going on in the Middle East, because they’ve got their energy sorted. Do that. But it’s a very long-range plan — anyone that says “I can fix energy in two months” is living in a dream world.

And then regulation, the red tape — cut all of that. We’re like the end of the Soviet Union, the amount of regulation you need to do anything in the UK now. They could cut an awful lot of that red tape and free people to be more entrepreneurial.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Everybody likes the idea of being in a country with an illustrious history — how esteemed, how long it’s been around. A guy comes out with a mace, in his cap, and there’s wood everywhere, everything’s mahogany. You go, “Yeah, that’s great.” But you also accumulate a lot of bureaucracy along the way, and there’s a lot of hurdles you need to jump over to get stuff done.

JIMMY CARR: Well, the tax thing is very close to my heart. If you go to somewhere like Estonia, post the Soviet era, they had to do something and didn’t have much time to think. They’ve got one tax form. Estonia has a law where the government can’t ask you for the same bit of information twice — if you give your address to your doctor, they assume the taxman knows your address, and everyone else, because it’s all joined up. The tax form’s one page, and they have a flat rate of tax, and they collect an awful lot of tax. I’m not interested in equality, I’m interested in abundance. What would get everyone living in Britain? We just have to compete with other countries and get people to come to us, start businesses, and want to live where we are.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We’ve got the same number of universities in the top 10 as America does, but we produce five times fewer entrepreneurs out of those universities.

JIMMY CARR: I think we probably produce the same amount of entrepreneurs, but they end up somewhere else.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re not in Great Britain. Brain drain.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, they’re all somewhere else. Which I think means it’s possible to change it. That’s what I would do with the UK — currency, lower the energy, you need a 20-year plan for energy in the UK, cut a bunch of regulation, have a flat rate of tax, and see if that works, and if it doesn’t, change it. I think that’d be a positive thing to do.

America — I think I could fix America in two moves. I would have open primaries for Congress, Senate, presidential, everything would be open. People would have to go to the center — you wouldn’t be appealing to your constituency, you’d be appealing to the center. Ninety percent of people agree about 90% of everything. And then I would have term limits for senators and Congress, because — I don’t blame Donald Trump for being powerful, I blame the checks and balances for not checking and balancing. They haven’t done their job. It’s an amazing piece of technology, the American Constitution, but you’ve got to work it. It doesn’t just sit there. It’s an active thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I had Bernie Sanders on the show, and he’s been in government longer than I’ve been alive. All right, it’s pretty intense.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, that’s it. I think the idea of 20 years, maybe — that sounds reasonable.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there term limits in the UK?

JIMMY CARR: No. But there used to not be a term limit on president — I think they brought it in with Roosevelt. Roosevelt did, I think, three terms.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He was trying to go for a third. Yeah.

JIMMY CARR: Well, anyway. We’ve solved the problems of the world there, haven’t we? Fixed it.

You Can’t Save Souls in an Empty Church

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you heard David Ogilvy’s line, “You can’t save souls in an empty church”? I heard it a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve kind of been obsessed with it since. This idea that if you believe in something, you have a moral duty to spread that message around. A lot of people insulate themselves from having to have their ideas meet reality by saying, “Oh, it’s just so sophisticated and refined, that’s the reason it hasn’t managed to become sufficiently popular.” It’s like being the underground band whose music is a virtuoso type thing — it would be very hard for the proletariat to understand how sophisticated and complicated what we’re doing is. But “you can’t save souls in an empty church” makes it incumbent on anybody who believes in a thing to find a way to get that message out — whether it’s climate, or young people, or suicide, or the birth rate, or art, or taxes, or whatever.

JIMMY CARR: I don’t know. I totally agree. I think the idea of talking about those things that are third rails and getting a message out there is really good. It’s probably the most difficult but most beautiful bit of my show at the moment — I talk about suicide in the show, and I tell people the terrible truth, which is suicide doesn’t work. People commit suicide because they want to get rid of the pain, but you can’t get rid of the pain. All you can ever hope to do is redistribute the pain, to the people that loved you. It’s a big moment. There’s a non-zero number of people in the audience that are suffering, who go, “Oh, right. This is my burden to carry.” It’s a tough thing, but it’s interesting to talk about that stuff. It’s interesting to have that platform and to feel like I could say that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a terrifying realization. Yeah.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, it’s big. But if one person listens to that and goes, “Oh, right, okay, that means I can’t” — great.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s some data from George, from The Tin Men, that told me that 90% of men who took their own lives had sought help from a mental health practitioner before they did it. So the “we just need people to open up and talk to the professionals” thing doesn’t seem to be working in the way that we anticipated.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, it’s Rilke, isn’t it — “Feel everything, beauty and terror. No feeling is final.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, well, unfortunately it can be, if people decide to make that decision. There’s something similar from Blake Burge, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got: “If you want a calmer life, you need to address small problems while they’re still small. The cost of dealing with an issue rarely gets cheaper with time. Procrastination turns uncomfortable things into unavoidable things.” Basically, if it doesn’t fit, eventually it’ll hurt wearing it.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, I think that’s again on the compound interest of positive things. If you’re saving money, it works. If you’re building skills, it works. But also if you have problems and don’t address them, they’re going to get worse over time. So addressing that, having the tough conversations — I think you could probably track quality of life by how many uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Or do you feel comfortable having them, right? How many people around you can you speak to with no filter? And then there’s the other half of that — who can you sit in silence with and not need to fill it? It’s a way you can work out who your best friend is.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, make a terrible podcast.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, but it would be wonderful, regulating, for the two guests that were there. Just don’t publish those ones — publish the ones where you talk with no filter.

But I really feel like we’re on the cusp of something happening, where we’ve got these new technologies, and they’re atomizing people, distracting them. And everyone kind of becomes a little aware of the fact that maybe they’re dangerous, or maybe they’re making us live our lives in a way that’s maladaptive and, although immediately gratifying, ultimately becomes destructive. And now we’re just about getting to the point where people are thinking, “I probably need to take some really intense action to try and get rid of that out of my life. I need to join a run club. I need to start going out to shows. I need to force myself to head to a coffee shop. I don’t want to be working from home anymore. I’m going to go back into the office. I’m going to spend time around people.” People’s ability to adapt to new technology is able to move so much more quickly than our habits are, and that means that for the last decade, decade and a half, people were on the receiving end of it. And now I think people are starting to realize they can push back.

JIMMY CARR: I mean, I think it’s knowing what we are as well. There’s a great quote about Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. Well, let’s roll the dice on that and see how we do. It’s crazy, and it’s only going to get worse, I think, now with the interface of AI — how’s that going to change the world? It’s kind of shifting sands. I just think we need to be connected. That’s kind of the business model of what I do — getting people out to shows, to sit in a room together, and to laugh.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’ve had to put pants on. It’s a big deal.

JIMMY CARR: But I do think that’s what people crave — going out and being together. They don’t necessarily even have to know the other people, just to be there. It’s like church — they’re kind of coming together, finding something.

Compounding, Small Promises, and the Arts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The addressing-problems-while-small thing, I think, works very much personally as well. The way that you degrade your trust in yourself, like we were talking about earlier, happens with one missed promise, with one attempt at change that you decided against, or that you couldn’t hold yourself to. And this is why small changes end up compounding. It’s also why it feels very unfair — people can look at someone at the top of their industry and say, “Well, why is it that all the gains accrue to that person?” It’s because the compounding interest is working in their favor. And the same thing happens in reverse, unfortunately, too — people spiral up, or spiral down.

JIMMY CARR: I do worry about the arts for that reason — the oligarchy of the arts. There’s an oligarchy in the arts now, where with movies, it’s existing IP, or sequels, or prequels, that dominate. Really dominate — it’s like five big movies a year that dominate 90% of the box office. And with music, it’s the oligarchy of five huge artists that dominate globally. It used to be 100 artists, or 200 artists, that all sold pretty well. Books are the same. I hope comedy is broad enough that there’s — people can pick their favorite stuff, and it doesn’t get dominated too much by big names. You want it to be so there’s lots of different people enjoying it.

My big driver is I want to get more people interested in doing comedy rather than just going to see it. I’ve written this book on jokes with my friends Abbie Grant and Amanda Baker. It’s essentially how to write jokes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Can anyone become funny?

JIMMY CARR: I think so, yeah. I think everyone’s got a story to tell. And if you think about what stand-up comedy is, it’s ordering your thoughts, writing them down, and finding your own authentic voice. That strikes me as an incredibly worthwhile activity that should be taught in schools — probably more useful than learning music. Music’s very valuable to learn as well, but grade 8 on the piano won’t come in handy when you’re doing a best man’s speech, or a presentation at work, or talking to your partner and actually having that ability to write down your thoughts and find perspective in life — which is also kind of what comedy does. It’s very good at waking us up.

Think about what jokes are, right? It’s kind of like Kahneman — is it Kahneman?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman.

Jokes, Notation, and the Science of Comedy

JIMMY CARR: Kahneman, okay. First-order and second-order thinking. The setup for a joke is first-order thinking — you make an assumption about what the guy’s going to say, and then the punchline snaps you into, “Oh, I actually had to think about that.” So the brain is designed to not have to think. Your brain’s an LLM — pattern recognition. And then comedy makes you go, “Oh, okay, I’m thinking, I’ve got to think about that in a new way.” It snaps you awake.

I think it’s quite childlike in a sense, because children really think, and grown-ups, beyond a certain age, tend to be just pattern recognition — you’ve seen this all before. Comedians have this ability to really think about stuff. It’s a very attractive way of being. I’d like more people to get into it — I think they’d enjoy watching it more if they knew a bit more about it.

Comedy’s quite a new medium — it’s not been around as long as music. You know what — hang on, I’ll have a drink, I’ll tell you a story. Have you heard of Gregorian chants? Okay, do you know why you’ve heard of Gregorian chants? I’ll tell you. So Pope Gregory, about 1,000 years ago, is wandering around the Vatican, goes to some local churches, and they’re all singing the songs differently. And he goes, “Well, this is some nonsense, I want them all to be sung the same. Write down the music.” And the bishops go, “The thing is, you can’t write down music, it’s ethereal, it’s from another realm, it’s about soul and groove, and whatever.” And he says, “Here’s the thing — I’m the Pope. Write it down.” So they wrote down the music, and that’s why we know what Gregorian chants are.

Now, interestingly, fast forward 400 years from that, and you have Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, who couldn’t have existed without musical notation. So writing down comedy — there’s too much magical thinking in my business. There’s too much, “Oh, that guy’s just got funny bones,” or “He just gets up there and does the thing,” or “He just wings it, he’s just funny.” No — they’re jokes. They’re jokes. It doesn’t diminish the enjoyment of jokes to know how they work. The less magical thinking, the more everyone can go, “Yeah, can you learn how to be funny? Of course you can.” You’ve got a story to tell, and you’ve got a voice. “Most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a song unsung.” I don’t want that to happen. I want jokes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you are kind of arguing that unlike music, or acting, or writing, comedy’s never had a shared vocabulary, and you can invent one. You’ve invented one.

JIMMY CARR: Why do you think? I suppose it’s about putting it together. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants — you didn’t invent anything.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You just spotted what was there, in the same way that musical notation doesn’t create music — it describes music that already exists.

JIMMY CARR: And then can you reverse-engineer it and see if it works? I’m working on — I’ve written the book that’s coming out in October, with Abbie and Amanda. And then we’re working on putting together a kind of interactive course, using AI as a teaching method. It’s really interesting what you can achieve with that. Can I build a comedian with that? If I can, then great.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You say you’ve got the first scientific theory of what actually makes jokes work.

JIMMY CARR: Well, I don’t know if it’s a scientific theory. It’s a bit inside baseball, but broadly speaking, it’s taking that pattern recognition and reversing it — making sure you’re waking up the mind. The sudden revelation of a previously concealed fact. It’s so simplistic in a way, but that trick is just delightful.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you ever felt guilty about giving the trick away? Do you think other comedians are going to get annoyed at you for demystifying it?

JIMMY CARR: No, it’s like — everywhere had a guild, right, everyone had a secret society. It’s like the magic circle, of comedy. I think most comedians I know don’t really know how they write jokes. They find it on stage, or stuff occurs to them and they note it down and remember it, but they don’t have a system for it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re virtuoso musicians, but they don’t know notation.

JIMMY CARR: They wouldn’t be able to teach it, because they haven’t thought about it in that way. Great, they’re doing their thing and doing great, fine. But I think the idea of being more systematic about it is a really positive idea, and I’d like to give that gift to people — to throw the rope down and say, “Come on, we can all do this.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is writing harder than performing?

JIMMY CARR: I think writing’s the job. Writing is self-assignment. You’ve got to sit down, and no one ever tells you to. There’s no point in a comedian’s career where their manager sits down and says, “All right, you’ve got to write.” People just assume that. That’s the preparation. That’s the reason you succeed or fail. You’ve got to deliver on that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do you feel about comedians having writers, or buying jokes off other comedians?

JIMMY CARR: If you write on TV shows, it’s the absolute norm. On 8 Out of 10 Cats, or Last One Laughing, or any of those shows I do, we’ve got a writing room, and they’re brilliant. Some people are great at writing, and they don’t really want to perform.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So that seems pretty valid. There must be a comedian today who you think embodies everything the book’s trying to teach, and then presumably someone who you think is great despite discarding many of the rules?

JIMMY CARR: I think knowing what the rules are is the first step, and then breaking them all is—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Who do you think breaks them the most?

JIMMY CARR: In terms of comedically — I’m just trying to think of someone that’s funny. It might be someone like Bob Mortimer. Vic and Bob might be slightly lost on your American audience — really surrealist comics, kind of absurdist. I can’t quite put my finger on why that’s funny, but it’s really, really funny. It’s taken me by surprise and out of nowhere.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that stuff less formulaic? Is it a bit more of a jazz virtuoso improvisation?

JIMMY CARR: I think so. But Vic and Bob love jokes as well, so it’s whatever you want to be — they’re very unique. I think they also fall into that thing of, if done correctly, learning how to write jokes and then putting yourself into it. With comedy, you don’t want to be the best. You want to be the only. There’s no best in comedy — a top 10 list is meaningless, because it’s what makes you laugh, what do you like. And the more someone is themselves on stage, the more people gravitate towards them. It’s not a competition. It doesn’t matter how many people do well — it just makes it a bigger pie.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let’s say you had six months with someone completely unfunny, to try and make them as funny as possible. What would you be teaching them first?

JIMMY CARR: I think the first thing would be to recognize their story. What do they want to say? What could they say that no one else could say? What’s their take on life? It might be they want to tell a personal story, it might be they want to talk about politics, or sports, whatever they want to talk about. You assess that, and then, how do we make that surprising and delightful to listen to?

I think everyone’s got a sense of humor — how dark, or sardonic, or sarcastic it is, that varies, and what you like varies. Your taste in comedy is like your taste in food and sex. Some people like spicy, some people like vanilla. It’s great.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about timing? What’s the secret to comic timing?

JIMMY CARR: There seems to be a pattern in rhythm — the approximate speed of delivery. If you speak at about 92 beats per minute, that rhythm tends to work not just for comedy, but for spoken word, political speeches as well. That seems to work very well — people get into that rhythm, and you can see the audience respond to it. It seems almost magical, but I don’t think it is — there’s something about that cadence of speech that lends itself to an audience being able to tune in to what you’re saying and focus. Some people rush it and it feels a bit garbled, all over the place. It doesn’t mean speaking fast or slow — it’s where you put the intonation, where you put the beat. The rhythm is incredibly important.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “I Have a Dream” is 92? And I think there’s a Winston Churchill one as well.

JIMMY CARR: Obama’s is 92, and he speaks quite slowly, but he’s on that beat, and he’s a magnificent public speaker.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What joke template do you think has survived longest?

JIMMY CARR: The most classic is, I guess, the pullback reveal, where it’s almost like a comic strip — you’re looking at this thing, and then you pull back and he’s on the bus. That seems to work universally across time. And there’s wordplay. Jokes are the “haha” and the “aha” — they’re very similar, often insights into something. I think the oldest joke is from the Philogelos, an old Roman book of jokes, and it has a joke in it that still works, I think. A guy’s in the barber’s getting his hair cut, and the barber says, “How do you want your haircut?” And the guy says, “In silence.” It’s almost 4,000 years old. It’s joke-shaped. I wouldn’t open with it, but yeah.

Crowd Work and Connection

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s been the change since doing more of the crowd work stuff and putting that online?

JIMMY CARR: I think it’s made it slightly bigger, in terms of the audience — it’s growing. I think there’s more of a connection to people now. Five years ago, people might come up and say, “Well, I saw the show,” and, “Thanks,” a photo. And now people want to have a conversation about something. It’s very nice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s deepened the connection.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, I think so. I had my stand-up persona on stage telling jokes, and then this podcast mode, and they’re merging. I’m really excited about that, I really like it. I like the idea that there’ll be 90 minutes of bang-on one-liners in the show, but there’ll also be half an hour of chatting about stuff in life.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How much has that influenced you? Because you were pretty well established doing the jokey thing, and even though you’ve been well-read and did the university stuff and all the rest of it, it does feel to me like there’s been a pivot. And fortunately me and George have been able to be a part of that, be friends and hang out. How much has the podcast world influenced that?

JIMMY CARR: I think it’s been a huge influence. But it’s also about what you’re interested in talking about. You don’t want to be one-note — like a band that plays on stage where everything is a floor-filler, but sometimes you want to slow it down, you need a couple of ballads in there. So it’s nice to have a mix in the set — go out and do 20 minutes of just one-liners, great, but then have a little chat with people and see where the evening takes us. And make it feel like it’s live in the room, this is happening now, and it’s not going to happen again. The quicksilver of it is really nice — this is happening now, and then the moment’s passed.

Clichés, Repetition, and What Remains

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve been thinking a lot about the reliance that me and the boys have had on really trying to drill home a bunch of core principles. I came across this Nabeel Qureshi quote: “A cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others, because they always sound like clichés.” And I understand why permanently drilling the same, or what appear to be variants of the same kind of trite insight — “fake it until you make it, but you need to believe in it beforehand” — is it right though?

JIMMY CARR: Well, I don’t think it is. If you read the comments, you’d see someone being terribly kind of above it all, going, “Oh, rubbish. Systems beat goals, whatever.” Okay. Well, what have you done?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, there’s definitely a question of, “If you’re so smart, how come you still haven’t done it?” If you get bored of people talking about cold, dark, quiet for your bed — okay, why is it that your sleep still sucks?

JIMMY CARR: It’s okay to go through that. Early 20s is really the best time for that — if you want to be super cynical and shit on everything, great, do your thing. And then at some point you go, right, what can I do? There are two different ways of learning — sometimes you have to go and, like, the reason I wrote the book on jokes is I feel like I macheted my way through the jungle to become a comedian. It was not a well-worn path. I had to get there and figure out how do I write this, how do I put on a show, how do I do the thing, okay, doing two shows a night, whatever — I created this career for myself. And I feel like now it’s incumbent on me to help and say, “Look, just do this, that’ll help, that’ll definitely move you, that won’t be wasting your time. If you want to do the same thing as me, that’s how you write the jokes. Great. Then go and do your own thing.” But I think the idea of not repeating stuff because you think, “Well, people heard this before” — well, maybe, but there’s that great quote about how in the work of genius, we see our own discarded thoughts.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

JIMMY CARR: So we’re constantly hearing stuff that we kind of already know, a lot of the time. There’s nothing I’ll say that people will go, “Oh, that’s totally new,” but they might go, “Oh, I’d kind of forgotten that.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think if it’s something that is totally new, often people probably will be more likely to discard it. If I’ve got no anchor point at all, I need to be incredibly brave and have quite high conviction around whoever it is I’m listening to, to pivot my entire worldview based on something I had no reference point for prior to. But I don’t know what the critical mass is of people needing to hear an insight before they become convinced by it, but I know it’s usually not once. And with that in mind, I really like trying to drill home pithy insights that are condensed down in a way you can remember. My memory’s not that great, so for me, synthesizing or condensing a big idea into a pithy little aphorism or mantra—

JIMMY CARR: It’s what remains, right? Let’s say you read a book, and it’s 500 pages long. You remember one little quote from that book — well, that’s what remains. That’s the thing you just can’t get rid of, can’t get out of your head. It’s in there, and you go, “Well, that’s kind of brilliant, that’s great, that’s the nugget I was looking for.” And then you walk with that, and if it changes how you interact with the world a little bit, then fantastic.

Trajectory, Competence, and Compounding Courage

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Has your opinion on trajectory and position changed, given that your trajectory has continued to rise now to — I think the most dates in the world, or the biggest global tour by tickets sold in comedy, something like that, that you did last year?

JIMMY CARR: You’d struggle to find anyone to care. But yeah, I think the trajectory is very good, it’s building nicely. And more important than that, I think — when are people happy? When they’re getting good at stuff. Competence is such an important thing for people — to get good at something.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It doesn’t matter what it is. And to feel like they’re getting better as well.

JIMMY CARR: And you think about kids — kids learn lots of different things. They learn how to ride a bike — you couldn’t ride a bike, and then you struggled, and then you could. It’s really fun to learn how to do stuff, right? And then some people get better at it, and they can do tricks and mess around. Comedy is something where there’s endless amounts of tricks, so you just keep getting a little bit better all the time. I really like that. Is it kaizen, I think, the Japanese term? Like British Cycling does it really well — getting very slight, incremental improvements over time brings an awful lot of satisfaction. I think that’s very exciting to me. And then trying to put myself out of my comfort zone every 18 months or so, trying to put on bigger tours, or play different rooms, or do it in a different way. That makes me feel slightly uncomfortable — maybe try to hold some silence and space on stage for people in a way that feels new to me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know what else is interesting about the spiraling up, the compounding of doing things and becoming brave at trying new things with a bigger skillset underneath? I think people’s sensitivity to cynicism keeps them in place. As they don’t do much more than the basically zero they’re doing now, their fear of cynicism just stays the same. And you need to be able to get past it, because there are going to be people who say, “I don’t think that’s cool,” or “That’s a silly idea to try and do something new.” But the fewer fucks you give, the more you become acclimatized to not giving a fuck, which means you give fewer fucks over time, which means you can be more brave and more experimental — you can take bigger swings with a bigger skillset underneath. But if people are welded in place by their fear of criticism, or skepticism, or cynicism — that means they don’t get started.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, it’s slightly tragic, worrying about what other people are thinking of you the whole time, and then not wanting to. I remember mid-20s, when I left my job and told my friends I wanted to be a comedian, the reactions were really, “Oh, I think Jimmy’s having a breakdown.” They didn’t see this — they didn’t see where it ended, they just saw the beginning of it. “No, no, you’ve got a good job, what are you doing, you lunatic?” And it was like, “Yo ho ho, a pirate’s life for me.” It seemed kind of crazy. But if you’d listened to that — it’s that lonely chapter where you have to slightly leave who you were behind. You have to say goodbye to that, and there’s a grieving to that, and you have to move on to that new phase.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, there’s two things. There’s a grieving of where you were, and there’s a fear of where you’re going, because you don’t know that the next step has actually got any promise for you. And again, if you’re in a world where you don’t have an abundance mindset, which I think a lot of people don’t, with so much complexity and uncertainty and chaos — what’s going to happen in future? I don’t know if this thing’s going to go completely terribly wrong. Why would I give up a certain 5 out of 10 for an uncertain 8 out of 10? Because it might be a 3 out of 10, and that would make me feel really bad. And if you’ve got high inequality too, you can see not how high you could climb, but also how low you can fall. “Oh, I really don’t want to fall low.”

Discipline, Motivation, and Obsession

JIMMY CARR: That looks horrendous to me. Yeah, there’s two most important days — the day you’re born, and the day you find out why. And finding out why is like, what could you commit to? What could you say, “I’m all in on this, I’m going to do this thing”? I’m a big advocate of specialization — find the thing that you enjoy, that you can’t stop thinking about. What’s play to you and work for others — that’s kind of where your edge is, that’s going to be the thing you do better than anything else. And the safe option is fine — some people don’t find that in work, they find it in hobbies and other pursuits.

I was chatting to someone recently, someone in the crowd was asking about music, saying, “I’m a musician, you got any advice?” And I don’t know anything about music. I said, “Well, if you would do it anyway, then do it.” It doesn’t have to be the way you make money. Doing something creative and fulfilling could be the hobby, and if it becomes the way you make money, great, but it should be something you would do anyway.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s an interesting relationship between discipline, motivation, and obsession. Discipline is saying, “I will make myself do the thing.” Motivation is “I want to do the thing.” And obsession is “I can’t not do the thing.” A lot of the time, when we look at somebody who on the outside appears motivated, what they’re actually doing is just the cooled-off version of a past obsession — this thing they were obsessed with 20 years ago that’s now formed into a part of their identity. That’s somebody who goes to the gym, but was completely obsessed with it.

This is me — when I was in university, I would not go on nights out, I’d stay in and read bodybuilding forums, and I’d get up and make sure my protein was right and all the rest of it. And I’m like, that’s lame at the time. But now when I go to the gym, it doesn’t really take discipline to go and do it, I’m not superbly motivated, it just is who I am. But some people are serial obsessives. If you don’t ever allow that obsession to climb inside of you and really wear your life for a little while, kind of like a puppet, you don’t get to benefit from all of the accrued gains down the line, because this obsession isn’t going to last forever.

JIMMY CARR: That’s true.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. The problem, I think, that people come up against is that if you’re not prepared to let that obsession really get inside of you and drive you forward, you miss out on this beautiful opportunity. Lots of people go their entire life without having an obsession that’s worth anything. And sometimes people can become obsessed with stuff they really shouldn’t be — politics, porn, your ex, gambling, video games. Although video games can be quite fun. But if you’re the sort of person that consistently becomes obsessed with stuff, that’s good. I think you really should allow that to embrace your life for a period, because it’s this odd alignment of motivation and opportunity and skillset and timing and life situation — all of this comes into alignment in one go, and then this weird kind of magic happens. I don’t think you can engineer obsession particularly well. You can force discipline, right? Which is why people love it — if you’re prepared to pay the price, it’s always there. Motivation is a halfway house — you can engineer it a little bit. Maybe you start to spend a lot of time around other people who do the same sort of thing, get some social pressure, listen to your favorite playlist, get yourself amped up. Motivation’s halfway between the two. But obsession, you can’t really engineer, and that means when it comes along, it’s got a certain magical quality to it, and it’s temporary — it is going to leave. Most people aren’t obsessed at 50 by the same stuff they were at 30.

JIMMY CARR: I think the people that are, you’ve heard of.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Correct. Because they’ve been crippled.

JIMMY CARR: I think the people that have got that — again, it’s compound interest — that really builds up over time, if you can keep doing that thing, if you’re still interested in that thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s the freest discipline and motivation that you’re ever going to get, right? “I can’t not do the thing.” It’s what I think about when I go to the toilet, it’s what I think about when I fall asleep at night, it’s what I think about when I’m eating my lunch, it’s what I think about when I’m waiting in line to get into the airport. Every single part of your life is cohering to get you toward this thing. And that’s cool. And I know society has a really bad relationship with obsession, because it comes laden with a lot of baggage that people either don’t understand or fear.

JIMMY CARR: Well, I guess it’s linked to addiction. People with addictive personalities never really get over the addiction — they just get addicted to something else. Some of my best friends who are in AA would’ve been addicted to the gym afterwards, or addicted to eating right, or addicted to shopping — whatever the next thing that comes along is. It’s compulsive behavior. But if you can direct that compulsive behavior to something that builds and grows and feeds back, then fantastic.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s the problem-solving brain thing again, right? Give yourself good problems to solve, give yourself an obsession that’s worth something. You can’t generate all of them, but you can kind of help guide yourself. That really is the freest way to become great — your insight around, “Do what feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else.” If you can find something that is positive-sum and pro-social, and isn’t going to destroy you or the world around you, just let it weigh on you for a bit.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, as long as it’s not fentanyl, great.

Fentanyl, Homelessness, and Broken Systems

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, well, there’s tranq now, which is like fentanyl’s fentanyl. They just keep on releasing new versions that are more powerful all the time.

JIMMY CARR: I think fentanyl really scares me. You know a drug is powerful if you’re using heroin to take the edge off it. “I’m going to come down from this, this is a bit strong, I might put some heroin in this.” There’s an argument that the fentanyl crisis is China’s revenge for the Opium Wars.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What were the Opium Wars? I’ve heard of this, but I don’t know what they were.

JIMMY CARR: It’s when the British went to China and forced them to trade with us, and we sold them a bunch of opium.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s what fentanyl is mostly landing in America. So the British started it, and the Americans are paying the price on the receiving end of it.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, but I can definitely see a connection. We are Greece to America’s Rome. We’re kind of part of the same thing really — I mean, I know they had the War of Independence, but come on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: A lot of it’s coming over the southern border through Mexico, the fentanyl. Crazy. I’ve seen some videos — there’s this area in Philadelphia, I think, where constantly YouTubers are going and filming it. It’s Skid Row’s Skid Row. It’s so intense.

JIMMY CARR: I’ve seen it in some cities around America. It’s really — well, look, what happened, we shut down all the asylums in the ’80s, because we saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and decided asylums were terrible places. We didn’t run out of crazy people — there’s a lot of crazy people out there. So the homelessness problem is ultimately a drugs and addiction problem, and a problem with mental health. We need to treat that and take it very seriously, rather than — building new houses is a part of that, but it’s a very small part of it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, the safety net in America doesn’t sweep people up in the same way it does in the UK. I don’t see in the UK the same kind of shuffling, shouting-at-the-sky, clutching a—

JIMMY CARR: There’s still too much of it. It feels like — I travel maybe 50 countries around the world on tour, and you become very aware of — it’s my favorite quote, William Gibson, the sci-fi writer, said, “The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed.” I think the more you travel around the world, the more you see how different places deal with different problems. You go, “Oh right, we could have a utopia if we took all the elements from all these different places.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like having the perfect outfit, but you’d have to go to 55 different stores. Where’s had the least intense problems with homelessness that you’ve been to?

JIMMY CARR: Well, I think Lisbon really turned it round, because Lisbon, Portugal was one of the roughest towns in the world — big heroin problem. And they legalized drugs, but that’s only half the story, a very small bit of it. They basically said, “We’re going to ring-fence the money we spend fighting the drugs, and we’re going to spend all that money on rehabilitation and education and some housing.” So they took that money, legalized drugs, and said, “Anyone that wants to get off drugs, you come here, anyone that needs to be housed, you go here.” And they basically solved the problem. They ended up with very few people on heroin who get it from a pharmacy. And the crime rate falls off a cliff when you take illegal drugs out of the situation, because people don’t have to feed their habit, and petty crime goes down massively.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Presumably organized crime also has the rug pulled out from under it.

JIMMY CARR: Yeah, a lot of it. So that solved the problem. I think it’s slightly creeping back a little now, because the ring-fencing of that money you can do for a certain amount of time, but then politics gets in the way and people say, “Actually, we need that money for something else.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because you take for granted the progress that’s been made.

JIMMY CARR: Sure. So the problem creeps up again — the idea that there’s always going to be a problem around that, we’re going to need to fight that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s kind of like “strong men make good times,” but the equivalent for government in relation to society. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence.

JIMMY CARR: They forget why they’re spending that money on that thing. It only happened about 10, 15 years ago. It’s interesting, those kinds of problems that get solved. I’ve got quite spicy views on drugs. Here’s my take on marijuana — do you want to hear my hot take?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Bring it on.

JIMMY CARR: Okay. I think it should be illegal for the under-30s, because it’s kind of the opposite of a performance-enhancing drug — it’s a performance-inhibiting drug. It takes away people’s drive and ambition, and in those early-to-mid-20s years, when people really need to have that drive, because you’re out of the school system and on your own, and you’ve got to be a self-starter, it’s self-assignment — right, so banned. Thirty to fifty, it should be legal — you’re a grown-up, you make a decision as to what you want to do, what you want to put in your body. Fifty and above, mandatory — not because I think it’s a good drug, I don’t think it’s a good drug, but I think it would redistribute the wealth to the young, because old people would be slightly high and out of it.

Legalization, Organized Crime, and Purpose

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, so you’re going to pharmacologically retard the people that are old, and make the playing field more even for the people coming up.

JIMMY CARR: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay, yeah, but I’m down. I hate weed, it does not agree with me at all, but I think it’s an interesting theory. On the Portugal thing, I really get the sense that the more we try to legislate our way through things — those are kind of like the one good article per hour-long doom scroll on X, insights that encourage people to keep chasing red tape. It’s like, “But what about that one thing that went well?” And therefore we just add bureaucracy and add bureaucracy. I would be fascinated to know what the relationship between organized crime and the government is, because it’s one of those nationwide slapdowns that would completely cut off at the knees an entire universe of pretty dangerous, pretty nasty guys who are all trying to cartel their way to wealth. It’s a single move that would basically put a huge industry of people out of business. There must be so much pressure between a government and — imagine if you’re part of some organized crime group, how many different favors you’re going to call in to try and not get this thing passed, because it’s going to stop your entire business.

JIMMY CARR: I like the idea, though, of the cartels getting a lobby group together to go, “We can’t have drugs legalized.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re putting us out of business.

JIMMY CARR: This would be terrible for our business plan.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exactly. I like what you’re saying though about young people really needing to use that drive. It’s kind of like the obsession thing — a lot of the time people talk about “nobody is coming to save you” as a line, but “nobody is coming to save you” also implies that nobody’s coming to stop you.

JIMMY CARR: Well, yeah. And nobody cares more than you. I think, empathetically, you want there to be a great safety net for want — you want there to be universal basic income, which essentially we sort of have in the UK under the benefit system. There’s a version where you’ll get something from the state, and you’ll be okay, you won’t go hungry, we hope. But the idea of universal basic income is a bit too close to “we don’t need you,” and I worry about that. I worry about purpose being one of the key things — Morgan Housel has this great equation on happiness being freedom and purpose. If you have those two, you’re pretty much on a good road, because everyone wants there to be benefits available for everyone, everyone wants there to be a safety net. But no one, when you think about it, wants that for their kids. No one looks at their newborn and goes, “Oh wow, I hope he gets really great benefits.” You want them to have a fulfilling life, where they go out and do something and add value to society. That’s what we want.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s an interesting challenge, I suppose, where we want to support people. We’ve got this future of automation coming through, we know purpose is important, but if you clear off all of the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — which was all that anybody was obsessed with for almost all of human history — self-actualization, asking the question, “Am I self-actualizing?” is actually an indication that you’re in a really wonderful position across the expanse of human history. But that’s much tougher to answer than, “Where do I get my next meal from?”

JIMMY CARR: I think it’s a false read, though. In liberal democracy, we’ve oversold the individual — the liberal bit — and the demos is underutilized. There’s not enough connection between people, at the family and friends and community level, that smaller level. Those connections are what people are missing. I do think it’s the safety, security, calorific stuff — you want to take care of the basics for everyone, education and healthcare, make sure everyone’s okay to a level. And then you want abundance. You want everyone to have an exciting, fun time. You want that for your kids, and if you want that for your kids, you want it for everyone.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The intergenerational competition theory — I’ve never even thought about it before, but what you said earlier, you want your kids to do better than you did, and also your kids want to do better than you did. But that means there is this embedded growth obligation, that everything always needs to be getting better all the time.

Expectation Inflation and the Debt We Owe

JIMMY CARR: Well, there’s another way of — again, Morgan Housel, such a genius writer, wonderful — he has this idea that the biggest inflation in the world is not currency inflation, it’s expectation inflation. We expect so much more than we did in the 1970s. I remember the ’70s — it was rough. And it’s so much better now, but the expectation is so much higher than it’s ever been. But the other name for expectation inflation is progress. That’s what progress looks like — you factor in all the stuff that’s there, and you want more. And that’s a good thing, ultimately. If you look at it on a global scale, if you care about humanity as a whole, getting everyone up to our level would be an incredible achievement. The biggest things in the world are not talked about — the worst things in the world, the easy fixes that we just ignore because they’re not sexy. Burning biomass kills 3 million people a year — burning wood, peat, and stuff inside homes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: From asphyxiation?

JIMMY CARR: Well, it’s cancer, right? It’s horribly bad for people. Smoking is a much bigger problem than we think it is, because we’ve solved it here, in America, and in the English-speaking world, really. But in South America and Africa and Asia, smoking is a huge problem, and it’s so easy to fix. The playbook is there — we know exactly what to do, but we don’t.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So that’s the future being distributed to a different area — from our future to theirs.

JIMMY CARR: Peter Singer is very good on this stuff — no, actually, Derek Parfit’s got really good things on the debt that we owe to future people and to geographically dispersed people. The idea that we should care about that stuff at least.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I had William MacAskill on the show — he’s the long-termism guy, What We Owe the Future. I think he was the youngest tenured philosophy professor in the world. He talks about what we owe future generations, but people don’t really think about that in quite the same way.

JIMMY CARR: It’s odd — net zero is a really good example of that. We have to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels, but in the short term, that’s very difficult to do, and it affects the poor disproportionately. So that should be an aim in, like, 25 years, but you have to start building the nuclear plants now, in order to make that happen. And then you could have that eventuality — that’d be great.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But it takes statesmen to look on those timescales, and everybody just wants to get elected for their next four-year term.

JIMMY CARR: And it’s that thing of — Britain, I think, could put its feet up now, in terms of having had a big effect on the world. But the idea of being an example to other nations of how to do that — that would be the flex. That’d be the thing to do, to get there before anyone else, because you’d go, “Well, we built the plants.” So in 25 years, we look like geniuses. And also, if you get energy down to essentially zero cost, how many businesses would that attract to the UK?

British Culture and National Pride

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When it comes to culture, British culture, what do you wish more British people understood or knew?

JIMMY CARR: What, culturally?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. For me, British culture has an awful lot of charm to it, but there are some lethal poisons thrown in with it. Tall poppy syndrome is one of them. The sense of maybe a lack of mobility, the quite ossified class system — in the US, what somebody earns determines their current level of class, but in the UK it’s where you went to school, or your accent. Is there something you wish more British people understood? If you could inject something into British culture, what would it be?

JIMMY CARR: I think it’s oikophobia — the fancy term for the hatred of one’s own culture. I think people need to take a bit more pride in that. It’s not immediately apparent that a place without a past has a future, and I think having that shared belief in what we’ve done in the past — we beat the Nazis, we ended slavery. It’s not nothing, it’s big. And the English language is a beautiful thing. George Mack’s got a good line on this — if you had top trump cards for Great Britain, and you go, “Okay, name a thing” — music, the Beatles. Physics, Stephen Hawking. Biology — well, Tim Berners-Lee for the internet, whatever. We’ve done lots of great things, and we continue to punch above our weight, and people should take some pride in that. I think taking pride in where you’re from is quite an important thing. And local communities are at a lower level like that too — I think people like where they’re from, they have a sense of that.

Closing

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Heck yeah, Jimmy Carr, ladies and gentlemen. Jimmy, love you, appreciate you coming through.

JIMMY CARR: No, I really enjoy — I think you’re right, coming on this show and doing this kind of thing has really changed me as a performer. It’s been incredibly valuable to me. Hopefully in the right direction — they’ll decide, look at the comments section. Until next time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thanks, bye everybody.

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