Jimmy Carr
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The Joe Rogan Experience · #2571 - Jimmy Carr
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Why Is Life Hard for Young People Now?
Jimmy Carr says life is hard for young people now, and for everyone, because this is the first generation that has had to ask whether to get married, whether to have kids, what to do for a living, and whether they believe in God.
A hundred years ago those questions did not come up. A person was born into a Christian community where everyone got married, everyone had kids, and the job was the place a father already worked. Nothing in that list had to be chosen. He calls people now self-authored, and he says that freedom is a heavy responsibility.
He also says mental health trouble has been treated as a private failure. The way society is organized has produced a lot of depression and anxiet
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What Is Anthropic's Project Panama?
Joe Rogan reads a Northern California court case decided in late July this year about Anthropic's model Claude. The internal memo calls Project Panama the effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. It tells the company to be discreet and to use a code name so nobody would know the scanning was underway.
He reads a $1.5 billion settlement over using what he thinks was upwards of 7 million books. As he reads the outcome, the court later treated the scanning as fair use. He takes the code name as evidence Anthropic knew people would revolt if they found out, and that the company was caught and paid.
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Why Was Fritz Haber Wanted for War Crimes?
Jimmy Carr says four things hold the world up: ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastic, and all four take huge amounts of petrochemicals. A chemist in Germany in 1909 invented ammonia fertilizer, a way to make fertilizer from ammonia and petrochemicals, and 48 percent of the world's population relies on that fertilizer for food. Joe Rogan names him: Fritz Haber.
Jimmy Carr says Haber was receiving the Nobel Prize for that invention while he was wanted for war crimes. He invented mustard gas and toxic gas in World War I, and he invented Zyklon A. The warning smell was later removed to make Zyklon B, which was used to gas people in the concentration camps. Haber's wife shot herself at home with
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What Four Events Equalize a Society?
Joe Rogan says four things cause equality to happen: war, revolution, civilizational collapse, and pandemics. Anyone wishing for equality is wishing for one of those, and he says the result is terrible.
People are so divided, he thinks, that it almost takes an attack before they come back together. A shock like another 9/11 might do that. Inequality is the force Peter Turchin describes as bringing civilizations down. A pandemic, he thinks, did some of that leveling for a little while at the start, when nobody knew how severe the disease was and the country was locking down. Everyone went through the same experience. It did not stay uniting. It turned into a tribal split, including over vacc
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Is Cleopatra Closer to Us Than to the Pyramids?
Joe Rogan says we live closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra lived to the building of the pyramids. He and Jimmy Carr are talking about Egypt. The Greeks looked at a system that locked in and never changed, and they did not want to copy that mistake.
The gap is the strange fact in the middle of that history. Joe Rogan then tells Jimmy Carr to look up Graham Hancock, and he calls Hancock Jimmy Carr's countryman. Jimmy Carr does not know the name. Hancock had a Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse, for two seasons. Joe Rogan says Hancock was one of the first guests on The Joe Rogan Experience, has been back many times, and is a friend. He thinks Hancock is right, and that dozens of archaeologists
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What Is the Difference Between an Artist and an Entertainer?
Jimmy Carr says the difference is what the person needs from the crowd. Robbie Williams told him he is an entertainer in the pure sense: if you do not love him, he does not love himself. Comics may be better at not caring what people think, because they are not entertainers in that pure sense.
An artist can be told the new record is loved and still treat the record as the point. Jimmy Carr puts Bob Dylan on that side. He writes the jokes, but he does not write the show. Joe Rogan calls the failure mode audience capture: if the work exists only to collect love and affection, the performer becomes a covers version of themselves, a hall of mirrors that reflects what the crowd is thought to wan
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Why Is a Rolex Worth More Than a Casio?
Jimmy Carr says a Casio tells the time the same as a Rolex, but the Rolex has a metaphysical value attached because of what it says above telling time.
People mix up what they want intrinsically with what is only an instrument. Love, connection, and joy are wanted for themselves. Money is the classic instrument for getting them. Respect from other people often stands in for self-respect, and a locus of control within you is a massive advantage in life. A line from Fight Club puts the trap plainly: spending life making money to buy things to impress people you do not care about. Social media hijacks the same habit, with people chasing likes all day and collecting agreement that says I like y
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What Is the Opposite of Faith?
Jimmy Carr calls certainty, not doubt, the opposite of faith. He does not like being certain and would rather leave it open. He likes people who believe in God. People who know God, communicate with God, and say God gives them instructions trouble him. He does not think the abilities under discussion are real. He thinks they are a way of accessing intuition everyone already has.
Taking the Lord's name in vain means attributing selfish desires to God and saying God wants the act. It does not mean cursing. Saying God damn it when you stub a toe is fine. God is not fussed about that. Saying we have to go to war because God told me is the misuse. A man Joe Rogan had just read about announced th
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Why Do Schools Still Teach Like the Prussians?
Jimmy Carr says schools still teach like the Prussians because the Prussians taught information and discipline to staff an empire. In a world where information is free, attention becomes everything, so the questions that follow are why go to school and why learn. The aim is the ancient Greek one: teach for character.
Why learn any subject? Every subject in school is the same subject. The work is attention, being able to give something your attention. With infinite information available, the skill is strategic ignorance.
A Prussian education staffed an empire with information and discipline. An education built like the ancient Greeks trains character, and under every subject the real subjec
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Why Do People Think They Will Stop Changing?
Joe Rogan calls the pattern the end of history fallacy, and it is why people think they will stop changing. Ask most people how much they changed in the last 10 years and they say they do not even recognize themselves from 10 years ago. They are so different now. Everything has changed, and they think different things. Ask how much they will change in the next 10 years and they say not at all. They are what they are. Their ways are already set, the present self is solid, and the person they are now is the person they will stay. People always land on the same answer.
The same reflex shows up when people look at the wider world. Every society feels caught in a very rough patch. A broad enough
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Why Is Changing Your Mind Called Hypocrisy?
Joe Rogan says changing your mind became the worst sin, treated as hypocrisy, and he would rather wear that label than stay the same person for life. A hypocrite says one thing and does another, like a preacher cheating on his wife. The meaning crept until hypocrite also meant changing your mind. The new meaning is silly. A person is supposed to evolve, and he changes his mind all the time.
Ideas are not the person holding them. Ideas are things a mind entertains. A person shows up in the response when reality, data, or the consequences of an idea arrive. When a plan was supposed to go well and turned out badly, the honest move is to name what happened and what was learned. Sharing why a co
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How Does Tim Urban Rank Ways of Thinking?
Jimmy Carr describes Tim Urban's ladder for how people think: a scientist, a sports fan, a lawyer, then a zealot. What's Our Problem, one of his favorite books of the last 10 years, is about how you think, not about left and right. New evidence would change a scientist's opinion. A religious zealot will not change and stays ride or die.
Between the scientist and the zealot, a sports fan likes the team but will not want a win that comes from cheating, because the rules of the game matter more. Election fraud should look like horseshit even to someone on that side. A lawyer will speak for the team no matter what without really believing it, and the zealot above the lawyer really believes ever
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Why Does AI Make Mass Surveillance Cheap?
Jimmy Carr says AI made mass surveillance cheap because the cost of a Stasi-style police state has fallen by five orders of magnitude. Losing jobs is very serious, but he thinks people are worried about the wrong thing.
It used to cost like 20% of GDP to run the Stasi and keep eyes on everyone. 30% of the population were spying on the other 70%, and it cost a lot to operate. The same surveillance can now run off a laptop, so the regime becomes a cheaper thing to do.
The shift is in the price of control. A police state that once took a huge share of the economy and a huge share of the people can now be run far more cheaply.
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Why Don't Joke Books Match a Comedy Show?
Jimmy Carr says there are no books of jokes that match a show, because comedy is two-way communication and it lives in the room, in the space between the comic and the crowd. Reading the routines is not just as good as watching them.
At a comedy show, people agree to a journey of line crossing. They allow someone to say something they probably do not really mean, because it is funny and the laugh is good for everybody. Social media does the polar opposite. It takes someone's words out of context, paints them in the least charitable light possible, and with jokes fixates on the verbiage as if the line were a statement or testimony in court about an event. The joke was never that kind of clai
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How Does Drone Warfare Threaten Fixed Military Bases?
Joe Rogan says bases have become liabilities because asymmetrical drone warfare lets an attacker hit a site everyone already knows and that cannot be moved. At least 20 United States military sites in the Middle East were confirmed damaged by attacks within the last two years.
The figure is a documented minimum, not a complete tally. It counts bases and shared military facilities used by United States forces, not 20 bases owned only by America. In Ukraine, drones fly on monofilament line, and there is no way to stop them. Footage shows thousands of strands, animals use the line for nesting, and robots deliver death from the sky while getting more competent.
The United States operates from
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What Is the Kailasa Temple?
Joe Rogan says the Kailasa Temple is one immense temple carved right out of the mountain, so the entire structure is a single piece of volcanic rock, massive, elaborate, and insanely hard.
A man sent a hundred men for two years to destroy the temple, and after two years they quit because they could barely put a dent in it. The carving only removes stone. A bad column on a built temple can be swapped for another column, but a mistake while cutting the whole temple from one rock cannot be fixed. Millions and millions of tons of stone are unaccounted for. The kookiest explanation is laser technology that melted the stone away, which would mean people had something akin to laser cutting tools t
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What Is the Fourth Turning?
Jimmy Carr lays out Neil Howe's case that history runs in four turnings and that the world is entering the fourth one now. Howe wrote The Fourth Turning in 1996 and predicted everything happening in the world right now. The end of the war in 1945 is the foundation myth, the story that we won the war, and the myth is crumbling. As the myth crumbles, institutions crumble with it. Life now is a revolution, and a revolution means the replacement of elites.
Academia has lost all credibility. A replication crisis runs through the social sciences. Traditional political parties are falling away while everything lurches to the left and to the right at the same time. The medical community once truste
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How Does Jimmy Carr Treat Alcohol?
Jimmy Carr treats alcohol as borrowing happiness from tomorrow. He thinks he went without a drink for the first 12 years of doing comedy so nothing would derail the work. He had drunk at college and did not think he had a problem. When he found comedy in his mid-20s, he went all in and refused anything that could knock him off course.
A person can have a drink, but five drinks leave tomorrow slightly wrecked. He looks for something to do today that would leave him super happy tomorrow, a gift to his future self. Whether a life is remembered with regret or nostalgia depends on what a person does today. A whole life is too big to think about on a deathbed, but tomorrow is a chunk he can hold
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Where Does Musical Notation Come From?
Jimmy Carr says musical notation comes from Pope Gregory, who wanted every church to sing the same songs and ordered the music written down. People who never get inside the Comedy Store can learn comedy from a book that writes the structure down.
Pope Gregory traveled outside the Vatican and heard other churches singing the songs differently. He wanted the songs to be the same and ordered the music written down. A man refused, arguing that music cannot be written down, because if music does not live within a human soul it is ethereal. Pope Gregory insisted he was the pope and ordered it written down anyway. It took a couple of hundred years. Musical notation comes from that order. 300 years
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How Much Do Chinese Pool Tournaments Pay?
Joe Rogan says winners of pool tournaments in China are paid like half a million dollars, on tables whose corner pockets and side pockets curve like a snooker table. Outside China, only a handful of players, maybe ten or maybe 20, make a very good living at pool, even with more tournament money than when he was playing eight hours a day.
Pool is geometry. A player splits the table into sections, picks where the cue ball should finish, and chooses the angle so the next ball is waiting. On a normal pool table a ball can be fired down the rail with follow and still drop, so the cue ball can travel on to the next shot. Curved pockets do not take a ball down the rail. It has to be rolled in gent