#2571 - Jimmy Carr

“Okay, so I can link this back. All right, so there's a book called Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. It's like arguably the greatest work of literature in the Western canon. It's a wonderful book. And a guy called Joseph Campbell studied it for his PhD.”

“And he wrote about the myths inherent in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. And he wrote this book. He wrote his dissertation on this book. Took him years. And then afterwards, he did a like too long, didn't read version of it, which is called The Hero Has a Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey.”

“And then George Lucas picked up those books and he made Star Wars. So Star Wars is a too long didn't read version of Finnegan's Wake, which is a version of Vico. And Finnegan's Wake's got these incredible things in it: of like, he sort of predicts AI.”

“how to use it. Well, that's why I wrote this book about, I wrote this book on jokes with two friends. You know, this is like I wrote this thing with Amanda Baker and Abby Grant, this book on jokes, which is like, so it's in third, so that's like the taxonomy of jokes, like the descriptors of all the different joke types, not the function of the joke, but the type of the joke.”

“I'll do 20 minutes of just like bang, bang, bang, like three, four big laughs a minute. And try and, you know, try and get, get them into, I suppose the thing about the last bit of the book, that on jokes book is about rhythm and about how comedy has a natural rhythm. It's about 92 beats a minute.”

“What are we going to talk about the fourth turning? The fourth turning. All right, we'll be right back. Fourth turning. We're back. We're back. So, fourth turning? The fourth turn. So, there's a theory that this guy, Neil Howe, wrote this book called The Fourth Turning in 1996, and he predicted everything that's happening in the world right now.”

“He basically said, like, the world moves in these four eras: first, second, third, and fourth turning. And we're entering the fourth turning now. So, you go, it's almost like the thing that I think is happening is we've gone from being 1945, the end of the war, is our foundation myth, right? We won the war, and that foundation myth is crumbling.”

“You just complain a bunch of times, come in with a lot of brain fog. It'd be so easy to dupe your doctor into giving you Adderall. 100% it would be easy to do. And it's legal for them to do. And what is it, basically? What's the treatment? It's fucking speed.”

“But then that thing, Neil Postman had, he wrote this brilliant book in like 1984, right? Called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And it was about Ronald Reagan getting elected. And it was basically, he said, we've gone from reading newspapers to watching the news on TV. And his big take was when the news got music, he knew our civilization was over.”

“Dr. Suzanne Humphreys, she's a guest on the show. I just want to tell people that are listening. There's a great book called Dissolving Illusions. And if you just counter-check all the things that she put in that book, you can read it all online, you'll find out she's telling the truth. And it's indicative of the same shit that we just went through with the COVID epidemic.”

“better. There was a great book, Factfulness, about things are- Yeah, I read the Pinker book things can be terrible and still be getting better than they were. They're just not utopian, and we want utopia.”

“And he marks them with these hundred-letter words. And the last one is 101 letters because he was doing a reference to the Thousand and One Nights. Everything's a reference to a reference. It's incredibly dense. But the idea that AI is, Vico called them, he would refer to them as gods which we don't have a name for yet.”

“And he wrote this book. He wrote his dissertation on this book. Took him years. And then afterwards, he did a like too long, didn't read version of it, which is called The Hero Has a Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey. And then George Lucas picked up those books and he made Star Wars.”

“Has a Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey. And then George Lucas picked up those books and he made Star Wars. So Star Wars is a too long didn't read version of Finnegan's Wake, which is a version of Vico.”

“You know, this Iain McGilchrist guy, you probably had him on. He wrote The Master and His Emissary. So he wrote this book about how the right brain and the left brain don't do different things. They do the same thing differently. He's an incredible writer, right?”

“He's old. He's maybe 80. Master in his Emistry. And he wrote another book called The Matter with Things. They're both phenomenal. Slightly beyond me, but kind of phenomenal. So this left brain thing is like, left brain is complicated.”

“This is the thing. They always have. You know, I've talked about this recently. I just finished it, this Alan Watts book from 1950? Is it the, what is it? The... The Wisdom of Insecurity.”

“ideology you've got. Did you read that? You know, Tim Urban. You ever had him on the show? No. He wrote this book called What's Our Problem? It's like one of my favorite books for the last 10 years, right? And so the book is: it's not about left and right, it's about how you think about things.”