Carr On Comedy | Jimmy Carr | EP 233

If you've seen a joke written down, you haven't heard the joke. There's a dialogue, there's an interaction with the audience. There's a difference between seeing the words that were in that joke and hearing that joke and experiencing that joke in the same way. That's probably true for the most daring jokes you know because when you're in a live theater and you say something that's right on the edge, right? Yeah, hilariously funny, it's because you're carried away with the moment. You get this witty idea and bang, you nail it. But that sort, and that's right at the edge of what's permissible, you take it out of context, it's a catastrophe. Here's the thing again, you know you can joke about anything but not with anyone. You know, yeah, that's for sure. My audience is not the same as your audience.

Hey everybody, I'm thrilled today to have with me Mr. Jimmy Carr, one of the world's funniest men, one of the world's purposefully funniest men, which is an important distinction. An award-winning comedian, writer, and television host, Mr. Jimmy Carr is one of the biggest selling comedy acts in the world, has performed in venues in 40 countries. His last tour, "Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits," it's a somewhat narcissistic title, we might add, sold almost half a million tickets globally, with his current show "Terribly Funny" set to exceed that figure by the end of 2022. He's a household name in UK television hosting Channel 4's "8 Out of 10 Cats" and some variants of that, and presenting Comedy Central's "Roast Battle UK" and "Your Face or Mine." He's also performed as part of The Royal Variety performance three times, which is something particularly impressive to us Canucks enamored archaically with the Queen.

He was the first UK comedian to sign a stand-up deal — I think that means a comedy deal rather than a straight deal — with Netflix in 2015, releasing "Business" in 2016 and "Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits" in 2017. He's also performed in my favorite city, Montreal, at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, which I'd highly recommend, since 2003, with more appearances than any other UK act in that time. His YouTube channel, where he's accrued over 500,000 subscribers and 130 million views, was launched in 2018. And because all that is not enough, he's also a published author. He co-wrote "The Naked Jape: Uncovering The Hidden World of Jokes" in 2007 and his highly anticipated memoir, "Before and Laughter," launched in September 2021 and made the Sunday Times bestseller list.

So, I have a question for you to start. I have to know the answer to this; this is serious business. A 15-foot tall replica of Carr's head was used in an advertising campaign for Walker's crisp and has subsequently appeared in various publications. And then it was transported from Preston to the Wicker Man festival. I have to know about that. How in the world did that come about and why?

There was a charitable campaign for this brand of crisps called Walkers, very beloved British crisps, and they built an enormous model of my head. I mean, who knows why? My head's quite big enough as it is. And then it's been turned into a bar. So occasionally my Twitter will blow up once every couple of years when they transport it, because it goes on the back of a flatbed truck, and they take it up and down the motorway, and people just go, "Was that an enormous effigy of Jimmy Carr? Has he finally lost his mind?"

Did you say it was a bar?

It was a bar, yeah. They turned it into a bar, and it was a huge thing. You could sort of climb up inside it, so they turned it into a bar. I don't know. I mean, it's a weird world we live in, isn't it?

It's weird, to say the absolute least. So your head is a bar? Okay, well, that's an answer, and thank you very much for that. So, what's the biggest venue you've performed at?

I mean, I've played a couple of stadiums. I've done shows in stadiums, but I think like often when you've been in a stadium, like an arena, like a 10 or 12,000 — but it's very much whispering into the abyss. You're sort of, you're telling your jokes and they sort of, they, you're just on send. And I like comedy to be a conversation. And even if there's like two and a half, three thousand people in an amphitheater, in a room, you feel like there's a discursive element. So if something happens in the room, I want to be aware of it.

Let me ask you that about that immediately. So, because I always think of my lectures in venues like that as a conversation as well, and I also found that if they get too large — and maybe that's more than four thousand, something like that — then it is in a sense whispering into the abyss. It's as if the individual people start to disappear, and then you can't make contact with your audience the same way.

Yeah, it's like it's that thing about what's the right... um, what's the right size. You know, the medium is the message, I suppose. You're Canadian, of course, you'll be quoting McLuhan. The idea that you go, rock and roll feels like it can sustain a bigger audience than accommodate. And maybe a lecture, even a little bit smaller than that. Like, what's the, you know, you need a critical mass for the audience that you also need it to be the right level, that you feel like no part of this thing, and you're an important part of it.

So it feels like in a comedy show, if someone at the back of the room shouts something out, I have to be able to hear it and I have to be able to respond to it, otherwise they're not really in the room for the conversation. And I like that. I encourage people to join in. I always think there's a very special thing when you become a comedian and you find your own audience. There's lots of different audiences, but my audience comes and sees me, and we share a sense of humor.

One of my favorite quotes about comedy is, you know, laughter is the shortest distance between two people. The idea that it connects us and that we have the same sense of humor. And in that room, we can joke and we can mess around, and they can be as funny as me. Like, I don't have... sometimes when you go and see a musician, you're just blown away by their talent. You think, "This guy is just phenomenal. I can't get over how great they are." I could never do that with a comedian.

It's not quite the same thing because you're thinking, "This guy's got the same sense of humor as me. You can be as funny as anyone." And you know, in my book, it's about this really. It's a case for living through humor. And I think the best jokes, the funniest things that have ever been said are not said by famous comedians. They're said by you and your friendship group and your family. They're in jokes, and comedy at its best recreates the in-joke of the tribe within that space.

The rock and roll types, you know, when you go to a great concert in a large venue, um, if the audio is good, it's as if the musicians are playing in the sun in some sense to the crowd. But I've noticed in a lecture, and it seems to be the same in stand-up, which I think has very many similarities with a good lecture in front of a live audience, that you have to be talking to individuals. And I always talk to one person at a time in the crowd. You know, I actually look at someone, and I have a little conversation with them and switch to someone else. And there's something that seems to be intimately — and that’s partly why it's a dialogue — and there seems to be something that's intimately personal about that that's not the same with something that's more art, more purely artistic.

Yeah, I think so. I think you could perform a song in an empty room, and it's still a song. And I think a comedy act, a joke, without, you know, it's feed line, punchline, laugh, it's binary. You either get a laugh or you don't. Without the crowd, it isn't anything. The crowd performs such an important function in comedy above and beyond all other art forms because no one can tell you whether that's a good or a bad song. It's like, "Well, it's interpretation." But with comedy, it either makes people laugh or it doesn't. It's a binary response you're looking for.

I think the critics immediately, because we don't need comedy to be mediated by critics. It either works for you or it doesn't. Yeah, the crowd is such an important part of comedy. And I think one of the things that I advocate in the book is, uh, comedians, because one of the comedians' superpowers is failure. We're very good with failure because our feedback loop is so short. We're allowed to take a million different chances. So when you go and see one of the greats, when you go and see Chris Rock or you watch a Chris Rock Netflix special, um, you're seeing an hour of material that everything works, and you're just seeing the results. You're not seeing the tireless campaign to get to that hour, the thousands of jokes he tried that didn't work, the wordings that weren't quite right on the jokes that did work, the work you don't see any of, you just see the results.

So it's often that thing about the audience is so, has told him every step of the way. The audience is a genius. Lenny Bruce said it first: the audience decides what is and what isn't funny and what isn't acceptable. The audience will tell you what's acceptable. If you just get a response from an audience that's neither here nor there, it has to be a laugh. Even, it's one of my favorite noises in comedy is cognitive dissonance, and I get it a lot. You get an enormous laugh, and then you get a sharp intake of breath because the audience have laughed at something, and then their conscience has arrived late to the party because the conscious part of the brain, or whether consciousness lives, is a bit slow. A laugh is a reflex.

What you find funny is very much like your tasting food or your sexual preferences. How spicy you like it really depends, and you don't get to choose that; it chooses you. Some people like spicy food, some people like kinky sex, some people like edgy comedy, and it really chooses you. So I love the idea that sometimes a laugh will betray you — your sense of humor is a more... it tells you something about yourself. You laugh at something that's incredibly transgressive and edgy, and then you kind of feel bad about it immediately and you have to... you know, I like that cognitive dissonance.

Well then you have to decide whether it's your sense of humor that's at fault or the judgment of shame that immediately follows your recognition of the fact that you laughed at something dark and, you know, and horrible. And it isn't obvious to me that your sense of humor is likely to err the same way your judgments are. It seems to me to be a pure spirit in some sense. And it's fascinating to me as well that you're watching the audience while you're performing comedy, but you're also saying that as you construct your routines, if you're a really, really good watcher and listener, then you try to see what sticks, so to speak. You throw things at the wall to see what sticks, and if you really pay attention to the audience, then they'll tell you how to be successful, right?

Yes, that's all you have to do is collect that. Yeah, you're really collecting data over 20 years. So you've obviously got the thing about comics as well — when they do good audience work, it's like airline pilots. Like if you ask an airline pilot how long they've been a pilot, they won't give you it in years, they'll give you it in hours in the sky. And I think there's something about that that's very... I love the analogy because the amount of time spent on stage is where you learn that skill. You become kind of battle-hardened to that, or I suppose the analogy in your world would be the amount of time you spent researching or the amount of time you spent in debate, so you're ready for that. It's not your first rodeo. You've not had that exact thing happen before, but something similar to it, so you kind of know how to respond to that.

And it's... your feedback loop is constantly... you're kind of getting better and improving. Yeah, well you know, about when I generally tended right from the beginning of my career not to lecture from notes very much and once I got more conversant with what I was lecturing about, I just abandoned notes altogether. And the huge advantage to that was that I could continually watch my students, and I could see what it was that I was saying that mattered and what didn't, and I could drop everything that wasn't gripping and intriguing to them. And you know, to the degree that I was attached to my notes and a pre-prepared lecture, then I would lose the contact with the audience, and that's why it's boring in some ways.

You know, that reminds me of it reminds me of the great Mike Tyson quote. Mike Tyson said, "Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face." And I think when you're giving a speech, when you're doing a performance, the audience is the punch in the face. You didn't think they'd laugh at that bit, or they didn't... they look bored and they're not engaged yet and I haven't got them.

And I often use the analogy of on my toes and on my heels at a show. So sometimes you'll go on a show, you'll be on your toes for the first five minutes, and then at some point in the show, you'll feel like, "I got him. I got it." Yeah, we're there together, that's right. That's when your body language changes a little bit, and then something happens, you're on your toes again. There's a sense of a kind of an ebb and a flow to it which is, uh... yeah, it's interesting because it's an art form, I guess, that involves the audience more than any other.

The audience with no training, no prior qualification required, no instinctively... like anything above maybe 50, 60 people. It's like if a joke works in front of 60 people, it'll work in front of 3,000. There's a real consistency across the globe as well. I don't notice... I mean, if you speak English, I'm doing my performance in English. It's really... it's incredible how uniform audiences are and what they will laugh at and how loud they will laugh, what gets an applause break, what doesn't.

So do you find a marked difference now? Maybe you haven't heard much of this experience because you're so successful, but I don't like going to movies, especially comedies, if the theater is empty. And I don't like lecturing to a hall that's half full because I find it much more difficult to get that response that you were describing of everyone being there together and something flowing if the place is sporadically populated.

Yeah, I know I would agree. I mean, I think comedy is social. I think so. Let's unpack that because the first bit is about seeing a comedy movie in a crowded cinema. That's just smart because laughter is tribal. Laughter is... it's a signal to other people. It's "remote tickling." Laughter is about a million years older than language. It's a different part of your throat than you're using; it's basically remote grooming. And I think it's... I mean, hey, do you know rats laugh? Yes, if you tickle them with a pencil eraser. Yeah, then they laugh, but it's so ultrasonic that you can't hear it unless you settle down.

Oh, did you see about a Horizon special about laughter, which I think is on YouTube? You'd be able to see, but we got Dunbar. So Dunbar, obviously, the Dunbar number is the number of friends you can have. They often quote him when they're talking about social media. And the interesting thing about humans is we have a much higher Dunbar number than silverback gorillas. Silverback gorillas can only groom themselves, literally. So they, you know, if you've got 50-55 silverback gorillas in a group, they all groom each other a little bit every day, and that's how it goes. That's the size of that, and that allows a certain amount of specialization.

But humans can get to 150, in a tribe, because we can remote groom. And remote grooming is about laughter. Why do you specifically make that argument that it's specifically about laughter, and why is it that you associate it specifically with grooming? Well, because the purpose of laughter, sort of pre-language, certainly would have been to sort of go, "I am not a threat; we are friends." There’s a connector. So if you think of the most basic example, tickling. If you tickle a child, it's an aggressive act that is made benign by the laughter. So I was thinking a while ago with some of my friends about the use of self-deprecation and humor among tough working-class men.

Because one of the things, and I really like that — one of the things that working-class men do, and I really see this as a class-based thing at least to some degree, is that they hurl insults at one another, but they have to be funny. And then, you know, your prowess, your status in some sense within the group, especially if it's a friendship group, but even sometimes if it's a work group, is how barbed your darts can be and still be funny. That would be the first one. So how close can you get to that line where it's actually an insult? And then the second thing would be, well, can you take a damn joke?

And let me tell you a story; maybe you'd like this. So I'll work on this, okay? I worked on this rail crew in Northern Saskatchewan with a bunch of guys, a bunch of native Canadians. A lot of them had been in jail. Like, it was a rough bunch of guys. And when I first started working, you know, they're all skeptical of me; this is back when I was a kid. But I persevered, and I made jokes and I wasn't a twit or, or an or any of those things, hopefully. And then, you know, I got into the group, and that just went fine. But while I was there, this guy came along who was pretty touchy and pretty arrogant.

And he brought this lunchbox along with him that looked like his mom packed, which was a big mistake socially. He's supposed to bring a paper bag that's not too showy. And so, he got this appellation "lunchbox," and that really made him mad. They called me Howdy Doody, which I didn't really like, and I asked the guy why, and he said, "Because you look nothing like him," which I thought was a really good joke.

And anyways, lunchbox didn't like being called lunchbox, and he got irritated all the time. And so the guys on the crew, and it was stretched about half a mile down the railway, would throw pebbles at his hard hat while he was working, and that would piss him off more. And so the rocks got bigger and bigger. And you know, the whole crew was watching this, and now and then, a pretty decent-sized rock would hit lunchbox on the head in the helmet, and everybody would sort of laugh under their breath. And you know, he was chased off in a week, and all that was testing to see if he could tolerate, you know, being pushed a bit, and they didn't want him in the group if he couldn't do it.

Well, I'm very interested in that. There's a lovely Australian turn of phrase, which is typically crude in Australia. You might have to bleep this, but in Australia, they have a phrase that kind of sums it up. You'll call... you'll call a mate and you'll call a mate. There's an intimacy to insults and language, and taking the piss out of each other. There's an intimacy to that that's because it's family, it's friendship, it's a connection.

And I think language is so nuanced. Like if you just take the humor out of it, you're just being brutal. But the humor, like it's sort of like, we love each other so much that we can trade blows, and that doesn't even matter. It's something like that. It gets to that thing of you know, love is unconditional; friendship isn't. So it kind of gets to a thing of going, "Listen, if you love each other, you can sort of take this, and it's fine." And the badge of honor of being able to take a joke. Sometimes the worst thing you could say about some of the British is that you can't take a joke.

Yeah, well, it's fun being a Canadian in relationship to comedy because I watched a fair bit of British comedy when I grew up. I love Monty Python, which I discovered when I was 12. And I just... I thought it was actually a circus show when I first watched it, and I thought, "What the hell is this?" And then my dad turned out to like it too, which I thought was extremely bizarre. And so what I loved about British comedy in particular — I think this is characteristic of your culture — is that British comedians tend to be extremely self-deprecating, and British satire is like that too. They're after themselves a lot.

And you know, Americans really didn't have a great hand for satire, I didn't think, until The Simpsons came along. That was the first truly self-satirical satirical comedy that I'd seen coming out of the U.S. Well, I guess, or Lenny Bruce or any of those kind of greats would have been a huge influence on that. I mean, you know, The Simpsons didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, standing on the shoulder of giants, as is always the way with comedy, you know, we're part of a very proud tradition that goes back through variety and court jesters and trickster gods.

We're part of that tradition. We're outside looking in. We're slightly other. I mean, it's that thing of, you know, comedians in a room of 3,000 people, I'll be the one person facing the wrong way. That kind of sums us up as a group.

Yeah, well that's kind of the position of artists in general, you know, because artists tend to be outside the, what you say, the traditional competence hierarchies. They're viewers from the outside and observers, and so they're not in the hierarchy in some sense. And I do think that that's true of comedians, and the fact that the jester is the only person that can tell the king the truth is extremely interesting. And also, it's interesting that the king who can't tolerate his jester has become a tyrant.

That's a way of telling. Yeah, it's a great story about the Great Wall of China. Do you know that story? When the emperor's building the Great Wall, I mean it nearly backfired the kingdom, the Great Wall of China. And the plan was to paint it red. That was always the plan. We're going to paint it; we're painting it red. And the jester made so many jokes about painting it and how it would bankrupt them and how it would destroy the kingdom and made all the jokes that the emperor changed his mind, except, I mean, I need to paint it! It's crazy.

But it's an interesting kind of thing of like the effect that sort of speaking truth to power is not an easy thing to do. It's much easier to get your point across if everyone's laughing.

Yeah, that's for sure. Well, I also thought when I was lecturing when I was at Harvard, I was lecturing about the most serious things I could think of, and it was usually about totalitarianism and atrocity — like, really dark things. And this thought always came in my mind. It was like, "Look, if you really mastered this, you wouldn't be so dead serious about it." You'd be able to do it with a light touch, like with a bit of comedy.

And I thought, "Jesus, how can that possibly be true given the topics that I'm addressing?" But I've certainly come to realize that I'm at my best as a lecturer when I can… when I'm not so dead serious and maybe possessed by a certain amount of anger. When I can leave in what I'm saying with jokes, I'm in the right place then.

Well, I mean, the audience loves that. I mean, but in the macro and the micro because, I mean, if you look at totalitarian states, not famed for their sense of humor, I mean, their cabarets... yeah, they're not funny.

Well, but Cabaret is really interesting as a piece because the idea of the cabaret clubs in Germany were shut down because they realized you can't hate someone you're laughing with. And laughter builds a bridge. It's tough to be racist when you're laughing with a comedian from a different ethnicity. It really does kind of, it makes bonds in society, and it joins things up. And you know, Russell Peters really has done that well, I think.

Yeah, the idea that you bring lots of different people together and sort of share that common experience. So yeah, I think there's something in, you know, and actually when you're doing a lecture about something incredibly serious, to be able to make a point about something and to be funny about it is... it's kind of magnificent because it shows confidence and competency. And being able to be a little bit self-deprecating and taking oneself too seriously, it's kind of... it's all to the good.

Yeah, well, it's a mark of transcendence, I think in some part, right? Because you know, if you do something stupid and then you laugh at yourself, it's like simultaneously you're the fool, but you're also the thing that can look at the fool and say, "Well, I'm a fool but I can do better. And I don't have to take that."

Isn't there something with life, with you know, if you look at the mental health crisis that's going on globally at the moment, it's about perspective. You know, comedy offers perspective in a way that I think is incredibly profound and meaningful to me because you look at, you know, what suicide is like the extreme example, right? So suicide is the symptom of depression and depression is... it's basically, suicide is the permanent solution to a temporary problem.

And comedy is very good at lending perspective and going, "Look, this is... let's step back from this."

And the question is where are you stepping back to? Do you think, like if you make a joke about an extremely serious subject, you know, and you're stepping back somewhere, right? And you're sharing that with the audience and they go there too, where is it, do you think, they keep it going when you step back?

I think it's processing. I think there's a sense in which when we joke about something, we're taking something that's too horrific to talk about to acknowledge, and we're making it okay. So that theory of benign violation on comedy comes up. The idea that you go, we're taking things that are violations in our culture, in our world, and we're making them benign by laughing about them. We're taking away their power.

So if you imagine that the Venn diagram of violations, and we're making them benign and joking about them and processing that thought, it's a very important part of our... because so much of life is terrible, and so much of our culture is, you know, assuming obviously, you know, it is the obfuscation of decay, that's the phrase, isn't it? It's the... we're trying to hide death. We're trying to not think about mortality.

That idea, or to transcend it. I don't think comedy is denial. I think it's genuine transcendence. And you know, that idea that you take away someone's power with laughter, it's like that's actually literally true. When I used to work out, I had a couple of friends I worked out with a lot, and they were pretty damn funny. And one of the things we would do when we were bench pressing and sometimes heavyweights is make the guy laugh. And you cannot exert muscular force when you're laughing.

And that's where the phrase sort of "collapse into laughter" comes. So that's really interesting physiologically. You put in the book about what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Now what happens to you from a physiological point of view when you laugh is, I think, fascinating.

I mean, I like to think of myself as a drug dealer. I'm a drug dealer, but the drugs are already in the audience. I'm never going to get taken by the police because I'm releasing endorphins, but you've got the endorphins on you. You're getting it, and dopamine. Why? Because dopamine mediates positive emotion, and all the cocaine and the drugs, the psychomotor stimulants, are very potent dopamine releases.

So it's literally the case that when you laugh and facilitate positive emotion, you are activating that circuit without harm. Right? And I sort of view, you know, watching things on screens as fentanyl. It's a substitute. It's not the real thing. You need the real thing. When you're watching on the screen, it's like those drugs are being cut up. Someone stepped on that cocaine. You need the pure thing of, like, being in a room with other people. That's where you release it.

You don't laugh in the same way when you're watching your favorite, you know, if you see Monty Python on a screen, you laugh. But if you go and see them live, if you go, you know, they did that talk show, it's a different order of laughter. You're falling about. It's a... and you, you know, as you say, you collapse into laughter. You have fits of laughter.

You know what it does for the vagus nerve? It tells your body you can digest your food. It calms you. It's perfect, and it's a, I think it's a necessary part of it.

Yeah. Do you have any idea what the movement of the abdomen that's associated with laughter does physiologically?

Yeah, I mean, I've kind of looked into it. I wouldn't be the expert on that, but the idea that it does allow you to digest and to process in a way that's, you know, very, very beneficial. It doesn't have any negative effects of it. If you could buy a drone that did what laughter did with the amount of side effects that laughter has, which is literally none, it would be the perfect drug.

Yeah, so that idea about having to be there with the people, that's interesting too. Because I'm going back on tour. I did a tour in 2018, and I think it's all just about as many tickets as yours, by the way. Haha. And so, anyhow, I'm going back next year, and I'm wondering why I'm doing it because I could just do YouTube videos, and you know they're pretty effective. And I could just sit here and do them, and they're pretty fun, but I really want to do it. I really find it ridiculously exciting.

And part of it is the feedback from the audience, right? There's an, I get informed by that in a way it's more than that. You're giving people an experience because I... you never forget who you saw live. You never forget who you saw live. You know, no, no one goes, "The Rolling Stones, did I see them live or not? I can't remember." But a YouTube video, did I see that YouTube video or not? I don't know, maybe I watched it, maybe I didn't. But going to something live...

Going, it's also the thing that you're doing, the high before the high. The people that will buy tickets to the show, they buy tickets to a comedy show, they buy tickets to a lecture, and they go, "Right, I'm gonna go out. I'm gonna laugh a lot, or I'm going to be stimulated. I'm buying into this. This defines me. This is my sense of humor. This is my kind of speaker. I'm gonna buy into it. I'm gonna go there. I'm gonna be with my tribe for the evening."

Other people that, you know, everyone has something in common in that room when they come and see you. Everything has someone in common when it comes to me. It's that sense of humor. Like we don't have anything else in common. There's people from all different walks of life in my audience. There's people from 16 to 90 in the crowd, and they all have something in common for that one evening. We've created a village.

And that's a very, very special, very powerful thing to let people be part of that. And sure, you could just stick it on YouTube and put it on send, and that's a facsimile. And it's a pretty good facsimile in the world that we live in, and it's been a lifeline the last 18 months for people. But really giving them that experience is very special.

And also you have to kind of limit that a little bit because actually you can't really play the arenas. I mean, you could, but it becomes a different thing. In the arenas, what you sort of, what you do in arenas becomes kind of a Tony Robbins event, and then it’s all... it's at a different frequency. It becomes about ginning people up rather than connecting, you know?

Yeah, we did, I did make a distinction between the... sorry, there's a distinction. There's comics you go to laugh with, and there's comics you go to see. Sometimes you get a comedian where people love them so much they don't really care about the jokes. They just want to be in a room with them.

You know, it's that thing, Dave Chappelle is that. Dave Chappelle? I mean, he's a good storyteller, right?

Yeah. I played with Dave last week in London. He was over in London doing shows and I, myself and Jeff Ross opened for him. It was pretty fun. It was a good scene.

Yeah, I think there is a sense of kind of hero worship and wanting to be in the room, and there being something. I think, you know, George Carlin probably had it as well, that kind of almost preacher feel is really interesting, that people are drawn to that in a secular world we're looking for people to...

Yeah, Rogan has some of that, I would say.

Yeah, I think he's got a lot of that.

Yeah, John Mulaney, he's got more of that kind of one-liner thing, but he's got an interesting persona. I don't know how much that's his true character. You know, he's kind of like this 1950s advertising executive, Mid-America suburbs nerd, and he plays on that real well.

It's interesting. You can't really convince people you're not what they assume you are, you know?

John Mulaney, I know he's had some issues recently. Much more complex than... interesting character than people would maybe give him credit for. I'd say the same about Theo Von. Theo plays this bumbling Southerner because he's a very, very smart man. He's a smart guy, yeah.

It's often the way that you go... there's two things in life, isn't it? And I write about this a lot in the book; there's, you have to know who you are, right? That's the first big journey in life is finding out who you are, what you're about, what your skills are, what your edge is in life, what do you do best, not better than anyone in the world, but what do you do? And that's not marketing work at Shell.

Definitely not! Definitely not.

So it's that thing, you have to find out who you are, but it's also important as a duality because you have to find out how you're perceived in the world as well. What do people think you are? People look at me and they don't see an immigrant, they don't see someone that's dyslexic; they see a very confident British man somewhere between Hugh Grant and Mr. Bean, right?

So they've seen that, so you better know how you're perceived in the world, and you also better know who you are authentically. And I think having both of those things is very important, kind of armor for going out to the world. I mean, I did your, before coming on this, today I did your "Understanding Yourself."

Oh, you did Understand Myself? Well, yeah! So tell me what your personality is like!

Well, let me guess, you're extroverted as hell. You're probably pretty disagreeable. I don't imagine you're that conscientious because it's hard to be conscientious. You're high in openness, 97th percentile in conscientiousness.

Yeah, incredibly conscientious. But the thing, I mean, without getting into the horoscope of it, everyone’s fascinated by themselves. I do find it like it's an incredibly useful tool because you go... well, most people are looking... that’s the, there are two great adventures in life, there’s finding your purpose and then there’s pursuing it, and most people don’t get to do either.

My book really is about trying to share that. So I did the autobiography, but I wanted it to be, I wanted it to be half about me and half about you and half about, like what are the beliefs that you have to have in order to pursue that journey? What are the good questions to ask yourself? What's the right way?

And I found that, and I knew I was talking to you today, so I thought, well, I’ll be a good student. I’ll do a little bit of research and do that. And I just thought, yeah. Are you married? Are you married?

I've just had our first kid. We've been together 21 years. A nice story, you know. If you do that Understand Myself, and she does it, it will generate a report about your differences and similarities and where you're likely to misunderstand each other and why. So all she has to do is sign up and do it, and then you can link your accounts, and it'll generate this third report.

Yeah, that's really... I did it with my wife recently, and it was really useful.

Does it put you in touch with a lawyer, or do you have to find your own?

Yeah, well, that's a feature we should add, like a value-added feature. We can get some lawyers to pay for that if it comes up then. It's really... you're not a great match, it should just come up of like, "I love that thing."

Do you ever read that researcher at the love lab? Do you ever read his stuff?

Are you talking about the research on what predicts divorce?

Yeah, you mean eye-rolling, for example, which predicts divorce with 95% accuracy?

Yeah, yeah.

And he could do it within five minutes. We often do it with couples over dinner where we've got myself and Carolina. We'll put it right 100% of the time where it's like, if someone displays contempt for their partner, it is over. It's gone.

Hey, so let's talk about that for a sec. How about if we all display contempt for our political opponents? Does that make it over too?

I think maybe it does. I think there's a sense in which political parties now have become like sports teams. You blindly follow left or right, blue or red, whatever your team is, and you become entrenched in our culture. People talk about echo chambers, it's amplifiers. The left has moved to the left, the right has moved to the right, and there's a couple of liberals left in the middle going, "Well, we need..."

The problem with the middle, the center ground is it's not exciting. I want that to be kind of... you know, I want to be a radical moderate, but it's such a...

Well, that's what I've been trying to do with responsibility, you know, and to... about disability needs crisis management. Because responsibility sounds boring, but it's incredibly empowering. Like if you take responsibility, like no one ever... when you win something, you never go, "I'm responsible for this."

But you go, actually, responsibility is about the nexus of control is within you. It's the idea that you go, "No, I'm in charge of this now." So that's really the story of the early part of my life was about taking my life and actually leading my life as opposed to just letting things happen.

Yeah, let's talk about that. So you graduated, and then you went and worked as a marketer for Shell, but you didn't like that, and then you took a sideways...

Okay, well please tell that story.

I didn't make any decisions in my life until I was about 25.

Why did you do the things you did if you weren't making decisions?

I did the best next thing. So when you're 16, you decide to stay; you can get a job or you can stay at school. The best thing to do is to stay at school. And the best thing to do is to try and pass those exams, try and go to the best university you can.

So I went to Cambridge because that was the best one I could think of. And so I went there, and I got the best degree I could. And then at the end of that, you got the best job that you could. So far, I've not made any decisions. It's been about what's presented to you and the next step.

A very well-worn path, yeah? A typical kind of conservative path?

Yeah, and then we'll see. Since, you know, so then the idea of being kind of in your mid-20s and going, "Well, hang on, whose life am I leading? Where's this going?" And you can see, because it's such a well-worn path, you can see into the future and go, "Well actually, I know exactly who I'm going to be in ten years' time, in five years' time, in 15 years' time." Whatever the time period is, by looking at someone ahead of you on that road and then going, "No, I don't want that. I want life to be an adventure. I want to find a purpose. I want to find something special for me."

I don't think there's anything special about me. I don't think anything magical happened. I think I was exposed to, for want of a better phrase, self-help, NLP, and cognitive behavioral therapy at the right age, when I was ready to go, "Right, that's for me. I'm going to be like that person."

So something as simple as a personality test, something as diverting as it's like kind of, I suppose, a rationalist horoscope is such a powerful thing because the more you get to know yourself through doing that stuff, the better able you are to go, "Right, what's my edge? What am I bringing to the party in life? What do I do better than anyone else? What am I going to devote my life to?" Because you make your own luck. It's your edge, what you do best, your hard work plus time, that's your luck.

We're all of us just buying lottery tickets. Nothing's guaranteed. But if you want it to pay off, you're going, "Right, can I put everything into this? It's gonna pay out eventually."

What do you mean by everything when you say that?

And because you made this shift into comedy, it looked like it was pretty sudden and pretty successful, pretty soon. So that's a very weird thing to do and a very weird thing to do successfully. So what do you mean by you do everything?

Success came later, but I think being all in when you find it, being all in is quite important. So finding comedy for me, it felt like suddenly I arrived in a space where work is more fun than fun.

So I was working 300 nights a year, and it didn't feel like anything... We both had a similar experience actually; I know a little bit about you, in our mid-20s, of giving up alcohol because work was more important. And it reminds me that I'm of the opinion that the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety; it's purpose.

Hey, the clinical literature on that is crystal clear. The only reliable treatment for alcoholism that's ever been discovered is spiritual transformation; that's it. And even the hard-nosed researchers know that. And that's very tightly akin to this notion of pursuing something meaningful.

Yeah, but I think that could be expanded in a very meaningful way because you go, "All purpose doesn't need to have a spiritual element to it." And I think it does, because it's about your life's meaning and your journey.

That might be the spirit of laughter, you know?

Yeah, I think so. And then, you know, that certainly, I feel that the, you know, the more I read about trickster gods, the more you think, "Oh, that's a very interesting position in society." Yeah, he's the precursor to the Savior.

The trickster is always the precursor to the Savior.

Yeah. John the Baptist was the trickster, right?

Yeah, yeah. Christ, fool... I don’t know if he told jokes though. And of course, my head will end up on a plate.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I mean, I wanted the book to be quiet. I'm quite sort of passionate about it, the idea that I wanted the book to be funny and engaging and my story, but I also wanted it to be, look, there's the hero's journey. I wanted it to have the tools in there for someone else to go, "I'm not interested in comedy at all, but I can see how I could do my thing." And if I believed the same things, what would happen for me?

Because your beliefs become everything. And not, not your beliefs in terms of your spiritual beliefs per se, but the assumptions we make about what we can and what we can't do. They're almost... I don't know what you call them, the unseen beliefs about, "Well, I'm not the kind of person that does that."

Or, "I'm not the sort of person that would do this," or "I'm not the kind of person..."

Yeah, I told my niece phoned me the other day. She wanted to talk to me; she's 17, I believe, and she just applied to university, and she was happy to share the news of her acceptance to a couple of institutions. And we had a good conversation about the fact that, you know, when you leave to university, if you leave home, one thing that can happen to you is that you can be a new person. You can decide what garbage and wreckage you're going to leave behind and not drag with you, and you can decide who you're going to be and what kind of friends you want.

If you're lucky in life, you get a few chances to do that. You're preaching to the choir here. I was 16, and I changed schools through happenstance. We moved house, and I changed schools for what we would call sixth forms, so for the last two years, and you become acutely aware that you are a story you tell yourself.

That you can, and you can choose to kind of be... I was quite a terrible way in my first school. I got in a lot of trouble, and then I changed. I can't believe that. And then, but in my second school, I kind of went, "No, I just, I’ll be academic and I'll do well and I'll go to a good university." And then at the university, you can kind of... you reinvent yourself. I mean, the cliché really of finding yourself is travel, and you go, especially if you go on your own.

Which is probably easier for young men in this day and age than young women, but your trip to travel on your own in Southeast Asia or something, and you kind of, you meet new people and you try on different hats.

And hey, I got something cool to tell you about that. Don't know if you'd be interested, but I read at one point Jung's description of the maze in Chartres Cathedral. And in the maze, you enter on one side and then you traverse the entire circle, and that's equivalent to traversing the globe. And the maze is set out so that you walk all four quadrants, and then you come to the center. So then you're at the center if you walk all four quadrants.

Now, what happens when you go somewhere new is two things. One is you learn new things, so you pull in new information and that enriches you. But here's something that's even cooler, and it's related at a deep level to the psychobiology of play and pretend. So if you go somewhere new, that requires you to be someone other than you were, new genes turn on in your nervous system and code for new proteins. It turns on biological potential that isn't, in fact, implicit inside you and builds you into a new creature.

And so the idea behind that, traversing the circle, which is equivalent to a pilgrimage, is that if you go to all places, you get to the center of things because you turn everything in yourself on by doing that. And that's the same thing you're doing in some sense when you're listening to your audience so intensely and finding out what they appreciate and what's funny.

Right, you're visiting these new domains, and that transforms you into something... well, something they want and something you want. If you're lucky, if you're careful and you're lucky.

I find it a fascinating kind of... I mean, travel is obviously... I sort of think the nature-nurture thing comes into it because I think a lot of people assume like nature-nurture. The debate is pointless because it's very important, but there's nothing I can do about nature. That's the cards I've been dealt, right?

So other than a little bit of plastic surgery, nose job.

Yeah, a nose job, man. Hair transplant.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, those are pretty nice teeth for an Englishman!

Thank you, uh, thank you to my audience; you've paid for it! The but the idea that you go, look, you've got your nature. That's the cards you're dealt. You make the best of that. That's nurture. Is making the best of that. The idea that I think a lot of people have, the idea that nurture finishes very early, it's about parental nurturing. And, you know, when you're 18, you're finished.

But the idea of nurture as a lifelong pursuit. And you can't really beat your environment. So it's important you're in an environment. I mean, the environment in kind of a literal sense of going, not just where you are, but who you're with is your environment. So it's just around yourself with people.

And I think we're all quite narcissistic. I think, I like who I am when I'm with certain people. I like being a father. I like who I am.

Yeah, but that might not be narcissistic. That might be the... like if you love being a father, you have a great relationship with your children. How do you... it's perfectly reasonable for you to assume that that's when you are your best self.

I thought that when I was a father; I love being with my kids. Well, it's a great relationship. Even that thing of like the conversations that you have, the friends you choose to go to dinner for, the work environment.

I remember arriving in the world of comedy at age 25 and just thinking, well, this is... I like who I am here. This is fun. Right.

Right, there's a spirit of possibility here that I hadn't experienced before. So success happened very early on within that world, not in terms of financial gains or status, because sort of who cares? That's for someone else. That's very external, that measure of success, but the idea of happiness came out of that.

That was, that was transformational in terms of my whole way of being changed. And I think, you know, happiness is... it's one of those words that's become, uh, conflated in the book. I'm sort of obsessed by the accuracy of language and how we...

Well, that's a good thing if you're writing a book!

Yeah, but that, you know, the idea that I talk about is being sad. I wasn't depressed, I was sad. And there's a huge difference because depression is about serotonin levels and chemical imbalance. That balance in your mind, it's a very serious disease with very serious repercussions, suicide being the most serious side of the symptom.

Sadness is about circumstance. Sadness is fantastic. Sadness just means you don't like things as they are. Well, things are going to change. You can, you know, you're... you're not... now, and you're a virgin.

Yeah, well, you're going to change. One of the things I did constantly as a therapist... so this is part of the cognitive behavioral process, let's say, it's collaborative empiricism. It's like, "Okay, your mood isn't good, but there's some variation in it."

So what you're going to do for the next week is you're going to watch yourself like you don't know who you are, and you're going to see if you can identify times when you're not so sad and then see if you can figure out like where those... where you are, what you're doing, what you're thinking.

Why are you not sad then?

Yeah, yeah.

And then can you do more of that? Could you do more of that?

Well, it's interesting. I mean, again I talk about this in the book. I wouldn't have the same qualification as you, but my cure for that is flow state. Get into a flow state. Get to a state where you're not aware of the passage of time.

Yeah, yeah, that's a marker. That's a weird marker, that one, that you're out. Then, you know, that's way... that’s where you’re outside the domain of mortality concerns at that point too, right? Because that weight of mortality that weighs upon us is integrally linked with consciousness of time, and in that flow state, that disappears, and that means in some sense, you're united with eternity in those flow states.

It's not a trivial thing.

No, it's hugely important. I read a fabulous thing on... I mean, I think sport is often where people, you know, if you're playing tennis or whatever that happens to be, my sport, but you would you go, "I'm not aware of how long I've been doing this. This has been just a pleasure."

And I've been so focused. Taking your conscious mind and giving it something to do so that your subconscious can relax is, I think… I'm not great with meditation, but I quite like doing Lego puzzles with my other half because you go, "Yeah, I'm just going to get busy. Get all that busy, so that you can then relax."

I talked to Sam Harris about that a fair bit a couple of weeks ago because he has this meditation app that he's being—everybody's waking up. I think it's fantastic, but I tend to listen to the talks on waking up rather than doing the meditations because it always seems, uh, I don't know what that is about me, but it always feels like doing the meditations is, "Am I doing this right? Am I quite getting it?" I should go back and investigate more, but it's, uh...

Well, you know, you have that out that you already described too, though, that because you're dead and you're successful.

Yeah, absolutely! But you know, we discussed the possibility you get in that worried state where you're possessed by your propositional thoughts about gloom and doom, and all that's running around in your head. And to get out of that into a different state is actually psychophysiologically rejuvenating.

I think I've got quite positive in the book as well, an attitude towards... I suffer anxiety more than depression, I think a lot of people do. And for me, I try and see it as the negative side of creativity. The idea that all of the good things that have happened to me have happened through creativity, and be open to the muse.

But also, once you open those gates, there's an anxiety that can come in as well. Your racing mind might get you a joke very quickly on the spot, but it also might result in you waking up at five in the morning with a panic attack. And I think sometimes seeing the negative things in life for what they are is part of the whole; it's very valuable to kind of make your peace with what life is.

It's like if you're a stand-up comedian, there's a lot of travel; there's going to be a lot of planes and trains and automobiles, and travel. You're going on a concert tour, making your peace with going, "Yeah, that's part of the thing that I'm loving doing."

This is part of the whole. There's, you can't just have that bit. You have to take it all.

Well, that's also part of the problem with envy. You know, when people compare themselves to other people, they say, "Well, I really wish what that son of a had." And that kind of malevolence often comes along with it.

Here's a point about envy that I make in my book. I make a very clear distinction — I suppose you could have it either way on the etymology of the word — but for me, envy and jealousy are very different. For me, jealousy is about, "I don't want him to have that." I'm jealous of what they have, but I don't necessarily want that myself.

Envy I think could be a very positive thing in one's life because envy for me strikes me that the only question that really matters in life in any given situation is what do you want. It's the most profound, meaningful question at every level, whether you're looking at a menu in a restaurant or trying to decide what to do with your life, what do you want?

And envy often gives you very accurate pointers because you look at someone else, you read someone else's book. Let's say from your perspective, you might read someone else's book on psychology and you might go, "That guy absolutely nailed it! I can't believe how good that is."

And it spurs you on to work harder to say, "Well, I need to be more succinct in my language and I need to clarify better." Or for me, I might watch someone's comedy special and just go, "Oh, that blew my mind what they did! I gotta get better at this. I'm going to break down what they did, and I'm going to get better at it."

So envy I think can be powerful. The idea of, not wanting someone else... you know, comparison is the thief of joy is one of my favorite quotes, and it just 100% of the time it kills it as soon as you look in someone’s having more fun than you somewhere.

That envy, you know, that's interesting to use that dark emotion in some sense as a guide to what you actually value. So if you notice what you're envious of, then you can tell what you actually value. Even what you want.

I've got that lovely first peoples story in the book about the white wolf and the black wolf. You know that story, right?

Yeah, I don't think so.

So there's a black wolf and a white wolf, and they represent good and bad. I mean, you know, the first peoples, and they say, "So which wolf are you gonna feed?" And the kind of the colonial white man's retelling of the story was, "Well, you call... you feed the white wolf."

But if you only feed the good wolf, there's actually a downside because the dark wolf, the black wolf doesn't just disappear. He's waiting around every corner to attack.

So wait, waiting.

Yeah, you also might need him to scare off other wolves.

Yeah, so that idea of going, "Well, look, actually you feed them both, and you kind of you use that the darker thing to turn to good." You said, "Well, something as negative, potentially, as envy, it could be an incredibly powerful force in your life if it tells you what you want."

And when I say what you want, it's like... I'm going to sound like an old hippie here, but I genuinely, on that question of, "What do you want?" I think wishing wells work, but they work way before people think they work. The magic wish? Not so much, but knowing what to wish for is everything.

You'd be amazed how many people that go to a wishing well and they wish for a million pounds. It's like, it's like they're wishing for a token. They don't know what they want. They're putting off answering the question, what's the thing you really want? And it's... it's like that's so fundamental to happiness in life and to finding your purpose. Finding what is that thing at the base level that you want.

Because knocking on the door will open, asking you will receive.

Yeah, that has very much to do with specifying and admitting to yourself and then actually working towards what it is you actually want. So many people that I wanted to be a comedian. I remember telling people that I want to be a stand-up comedian. I remember calling my first Edinburgh show when I first did a show "Barefaced Ambition." Because I was very, I want this to be my life. I want to do this. I want to pursue it.

I want this to be who I am; this is an identity level pursuit for me. And the universe conspired to help me, it felt like! It felt like everything was... once you tell people that I'm going to do this, it was like I felt like, "Okay, everything's pointing in the right direction."

There was a real congruency to who I was.

Well, you definitely sound like you're happy now; there's no doubt about that.

So thank you. So, yeah, so, well, you had this job that you took after you graduated from university and it was a good, you know, solid stable job. And so, why didn't that work for you? And when did you know that you might be funny? And, you know, not in the peculiar way, obviously, but...

I hadn't written a joke until I was 25. I was like a fan of comedy, but I hadn't written a joke. I had not been in school plays particularly; I've not taken an interest in comedy above and beyond being a consumer. I was about 25 and I suddenly kind of went, "Well, this is my age."

The thing that I'm good at is talking to people. The thing that I’m good at is getting ideas across and making people laugh was such an important part of my life. I trace it back to my mother. I trace it back to... she had an extraordinary laugh; she was a very funny Irish woman.

Uh, had a lovely tone of phrase, and there was a high value put on making people laugh in our house because...

Could you make her laugh?

Yeah, it wasn't a particularly happy home, but, and I think if you're talking to comedians, I think the question to ask is... people often, people ask about, you know, depression and comedians, because the... the tears, the clown thing is so... it's such a delicious irony. Why wouldn't you ask about that?

But actually, I think the question to ask that's more interesting is, which of your parents was sick? I think comedians often have to make things okay within their family, and I certainly had that experience. And then it was about kind of... when you obviously your life is understood backwards; it's lived forwards, and it's understood in the rear view, but looking back, it was obvious, of course, that's what you're going to be good at. You're good at, you know, within friendship groups, within family, and making people laugh at making things okay.

So you knew that. You knew that about yourself, that you could make your friends laugh, your family laugh. And all you said also, make things okay. Is that peacemaking or...?

Without humor, I think peacemaking was part of what I view humor as. I think it's a methodology for making things okay, for lightening the mood, for, you know, for me it's kind of a panacea.

I mean, I'm ultimately, I'm self-medicating with humor. So how in the world did you come about the decision to leave your job? And you also mentioned cognitive behavior therapy in there that... that you did something that... that...

Yeah, actually, when you work for a large company like Shell, there's a training budget every year that they're assigned to their staff. So if you work on the oil rigs, it's all health and safety training. I was working in a fancy office in central London so there's no need for any health and safety stuff.

It's all fine. The most dangerous thing was the coffee in the coffee machine. So for me, I could go and do those kinds of courses in those days that they gave us. I went and did some NLP training with a guy, you know, one of these kind of corporate away day things, and it got exposed to NLP and just went, "Oh, this is phenomenal."

I'd lost my religious faith on a trip to, um, uh, Israel. Some, ironically, the scales had fallen from my eyes and I kind of went, "Well, if I'm right about Christianity, everyone else is wrong." That fundamental kind of... it's kind of a tiny pebble in my shoe had become a boulder, and I just couldn't live with it anymore.

And I slowly, over about a year-long period lost my faith, and then I found NLP, and I kind of thought I basically latched onto another belief structure, and the idea that the map is not the territory, the idea that, um, who you... how you perceive the world is how the world is.

We see the world not as it is, but how we are. The idea that, you know, I suppose disposition is more important than position. And it's very difficult to change your disposition, but it's so much easier than changing the world.

And I kind of, I suddenly, everything through being exposed to that became possible, but the possibilities became like, well, fundamentally my belief became anything anyone else can do, I can do. And that's incredibly empowering, and it's scary, and you're suddenly not leading your life for the next, for the afterlife.

You mean I still got a huge belief in the next life, but not the afterlife. The precision of that phrase, I think the allegories of religion I still enjoy, but I just don't believe them literally.

So the idea of going, "Now is it next life?" Of course there's a next life. You move through phases. I'm a father now, and I’m, you know, in my late 40s. I'm a very different person than the person that started on this road 25 years ago to being a comedian. You know, every molecule in my body has changed. Of course, I'm a different person.

There's, there's a next life. Literally. But, but the afterlife, it struck me that the afterlife was a way of the ultimate in procrastination, and it struck me that religious belief was very good for the tribe, not great for the individual.

And in our society at the moment, maybe there's a, it's an interesting thing going on at the moment where the pendulum has swung too far to the individual, and there's not enough tribal thinking going on.

That's an awful lot to unpack there. What specifically, so you said you moved from Christianity and you moved into a psychotherapeutic realm in some sense, and that opened up all sorts of possibilities for you. You started to realize that you had been hindered by your own presumptions, some of them unexamined, about who you were and what you should be doing.

How did your fat... did you have family around at that time? Like, are you constrained in your choices in some sense or not?

I think I was a little bit constrained by a sense of duty that was... I'm not sure whether that was real or imagined. I think very often that's one of the assumptions you make about what I should do to be a dutiful son.

Uh, that my mother died around the same time and that was weirdly quite... I was quite, I believe what psychotherapists would call enmeshed. I had a very close um, sort of a substitute partner from my mother group, you know, very close. You could argue too close. So when she died, that was crippling for me.

You know, the grief was... was very overpowering, but also freed me up to go, "The thing that I had feared as a child, the philosopher of the key parent, had happened. The worst thing had happened." And you kind of look around, you're still standing, and you go, "You know, what are the lessons from that? Well, go and live your life the best you can."

Make, you know, suddenly there was a sense of urgency to my life that this is, you know, you get one life. Mortality became a very real thing through grief. The idea that this is the only chance you get, you have to make good on this.

This is... right, you know, that's kind of the black wolf and the white wolf there is, you know, the white wolf you might think, well, that's the meaning that you found in this pursuit, but you're also chased by the fact that you realized the fragility and shortness of life.

And it's definitely better to be if you're going somewhere, it's better to be running from something and running towards something. You're a lot more motivated then.

Yeah, I felt like it was a... I felt incredibly old when I was 25 and working in an oil company. I felt as old as I've ever felt. And then the next year, I was suddenly in this other world where I felt like a teenager again. And I kind of have done since. It felt very... it's... you know, I don't view atheism as a, um, a cold, dry academic pursuit. I view it as a kind of an empowering rush of blood to the head.

An incredible sense of responsibility... was overwhelming. The idea that you were responsible for your life. And at some point, you have that associated with the atheism, that realization, I think, was the idea that you weren't living for the afterlife; you were living for this one because you were, you were focused on making this life as good as it could be.

You weren't waiting at the analogy to hippie; you weren't waiting to be brought flowers; you were planting your own garden. You're responsible for this; you better make this work for you.

So that transformation, I believe, heightened the sense of the significance of your life for you by forcing you in some sense to realize, well, how irreplaceable it was and how time limited it was. That also didn't undermine you by the sounds of it.

I genuinely felt like I was waking up. I genuinely felt like I was in a bit of daze, like the scales had been lifted. I've been, I've been kind of wading through treacle, in my early 20s, like post-college. That kind of trying to hold on to that previous life, like, "You know, talk about..."

They're talking about next lives. You know, university was, you know, a blast. You know, had a lot of fun, a lot of drinking, great. And then you leave, and suddenly you're in the real world, and it's just... I didn't like it. I didn't like where I was in it. I didn't find it... I hadn't found a purpose.

So it's kind of, you know, there's a lot of trudgery, and I hadn't found that thing. And then suddenly I found this incredibly privileged position where work was more fun than fun.

So I could put everything into it.

So on that personality test, were you high in openness to experience?

Yeah. How high? Remember?

And you're 98% in conscientiousness as well, you said something like that?

I think so, yeah.

Okay. So that's that makes you kind of a strange person politically because you've got the conscientiousness of someone who's conservative, and that would maybe account for your dutifulness, you know, that initial presumption about duty. But openness runs in some ways contrary to that. That's the wellspring of creativity.

And so maybe that job at Shell was good for duty but not for, you know, the jester and artist.

I'm a radical moderate is what I am. I’m like a classic kind of liberal thinker. You know, the, um, I guess that's where I am. So political parties for me sort of aren't really the thing.

It's... I don't find them particularly... I don't think it's a... they're not useful. I think it strikes me that being a member of a political party now is like ordering from a set menu in a Chinese restaurant. You know?

You only order from the set menu maybe the first time you go, but as soon as you know what you're talking about, you kind of, you think different things on different issues.

I don't agree with anyone about everything.

How did you score on agreeableness? Do you remember?

Um, I think I was pretty high. I'm gonna look. I've got it here. I've got it on my phone. I can tell you how agreeable I am.

I think you're right.

All right. I think it was... I was saying, yeah. I'm curious about that in relationship to humor because, you know, comedians are often blunt, and you have a real edge to your humor.

I mean, it can get pretty dark, and there is a real element in your humor of... well, there's provocation. I mean, that's not that unique, I suppose. Comedians do a fair bit of that, but maybe everyone should do this test before they get...

Agreeableness?

No, I was typical. Typical agreeableness. And did it split into politeness?

Do you have the split there for politeness and compassion?

I think it had, uh, yes, uh, I think I had more compassion than politeness. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I'm not the most politic guys.

Well, it's not that easy to be a polite comedian.

Yeah. Compassion, very high. Politeness, very low.

Yeah.

Okay, okay. Very high, um, industriousness, very high. I mean, it's a pleasure to take this test. I think it's like ten bucks or something, but going and doing this... it's understandingmyself.com. I must say, it's a very pleasant half-hour going and doing it and answering your questions.

And then to understandingmyself.com, just to clarify, just it's a really interesting kind of process because you go, well, no matter what kind of, what comes out, you can kind of agree with it or disagree with it, whatever, but it's a very nice thing to kind of go and say, "Okay, that seems about right."

That seems...

Yeah, well, it's also interesting to know that, you know, that is how you are in some sense, and other people are actually different than that. They're actually different.

And so they're like an extrovert and an introvert have a certain amount of trouble in a relationship because the extrovert is actually filled with enthusiasm as a consequence of social interactions and really wants them, whereas the introvert feels drained by that and needs much more time by themselves and perhaps in nature.

Those are real differences, and you know, you can mediate between those to some degree if you're a good negotiator. But you're starting from basic, from different principles, from different priority principles.

Yeah, I must say those things are very, you know, they're very useful. I mean, that whole thing about love languages I find fascinating, the idea that... I mean, that's kind of the most simplistic, I think, of all the relationship tools.

The idea that different people have...

A lot of languages, different people...

Well, look, a conscientious person would like to have a... conscientious person would offer dutiful work to their partner, and an agreeable person would offer empathic love, no? And an extrovert would offer enthusiasm and joy.

And so, because those temperamental differences do in some sense set what we value and in some sense reflexively, like you can differentiate your personality with work, and you can develop the traits on the other side of you, but that takes work.

You're sort of granted those priority values and commitments to begin with in your temperament. It's really useful to see where you might be different from your partner.

You know, my wife is less polite than me. She's more blunt than me...

Less highlighting, more blunt than you?

What? What?

Well, I'm actually very high in agreeableness as it turns out. I actually don't like conflict at all.

But I mean, I've watched a couple of your debates, and I would beg to differ on implement, but...

Yeah, I know. You'd think that, but see what's happened to me is that what I learned partly being a psychotherapist is that conflict delayed is conflict multiplied.

And so I'll weigh in when I think there's something wrong, and it tears me into pieces. I really hate it, but I know it's better than putting it off and waiting for