Ideas and insights for the week ending 1 March

Great opening lines, the anatomy of a dated joke and how to boost your brain chemicals

Last week I hosted the Cambridge Learner Awards, the national celebration of New Zealand’s smartest children. The supreme winner was Seivin Kim, a year 13 from Avondale College (interestingly one of the few non-private schools who take on the Cambridge curriculum - there must have been some parents there wondering why they’re paying $7000 a term).

Seivin’s principal told me that when she first started winning awards (she came top in the world at maths in Year 10) she was “a quiet, shy girl who was very nervous meeting the principal”. You can still see plenty of that quiet shyness in her, but she accepted the challenge of getting up onstage and delivering a speech to the 300 odd students and their parents who attended the event.

“Hello” she began, “and thank you for this terrifying opportunity.”

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As opening lines go that was pretty unbeatable. The comedian Ben Hurley and I were head writers on the early seasons of the comedy show 7 Days, and we’ll still message each other from time to time when we come across a great gag, simply written.

We both seek the holy grail - eight or nine words you can say at the top of a performance that will get a laugh … no set up required.

With this beautiful opening line Seivin joins the ranks of comics like Steve Martin (“I’m your host, Steve Martin, Saturday Night Live’s most recent diversity hire” at SNL’s 50th anniversary show last week) and Chris Rock (“Welcome to the 76th and FINAL Academy Awards”).

I have my own reliable opening. When I’m welcomed onstage to applause I soak it up theatrically for a few seconds then begin “Yes, it’s me … the affordable John Campbell”. Another comedian I used to know would say “I know what you’re thinking: I look like Vin Diesel f***ed a Tellytubby”.

The problem with a great joke about your appearance is that if it keeps going well you become reluctant to change your appearance. I know of at least one comedian who kept the same unfortunate haircut for years just so that he could keep his opening line.

Not so the Irish comedian Ed Byrne. When I first saw him at the Hopetoun Alpha in 1995 he walked onstage, grabbed the microphone and introduced himself:

“Hi I’m Ed Byrne, but you might remember me as Darlene from Roseanne.”

I’d like to think that Ed eventually cut his hair short for stylistic reasons, and was happy to lose a great joke as part of the process. But I suspect the Roseanne reference was starting to date a little anyway - he would have heard the tiny but perceptible decline in the volume of laughter he was getting each night at that opening joke and concluded that it was time to retire it on his own terms.

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Not all of us are performing regularly enough to see a joke start to fail in real time. I MC (similar to stand up but not as hard) a lot, and tend to use a combination of trusty jokes alongside ideas I’ve written specifically for the event (“welcome to the Cambridge Learner Awards, you brilliant and talented people,” I began the other night. “And welcome to your children.”). But sometimes an event organiser will ask for a little more and I’ll be forced to dig into the 2009 comedy journal to try and put together an extra 10 minutes of jokes which have been stage tested and proven to work.

It’s fascinating/terrifying to discover that certain jokes you used to tell don’t work any more, and even more fascinating/terrifying when you discover that onstage. I’m not talking about PC-gone-mad/cancel culture here, so much as how differently a joke comes across from a 49 year old RNZ presenter in 2025 than from a thirty-something anonymous guy a decade or two earlier.

Here’s a joke I used to do about my time living in London. There’s a fair bit of set up before this but you get the picture:

“After a while you start to get quite used to being the only Kiwi at the party. You actually start to hope no other Kiwis will show up. You’re in the corner, trying to convince some Spanish girl how exotic New Zealanders are … then some stoner from Raglan walks in wearing jandals and … suddenly there’s one other person in the room who knows you’re not actually speaking Māori.”

Man that joke used to go so well. And there were a good few punchlines after that. But I don’t do it anymore because … well, I think people probably expect that I can speak a bit of “Māori” - a lot of media people do.

And we don’t tend to say “speaking Māori” anymore either - instead we say “te reo Māori”, meaning the language of Māori. Maybe I could make that wording change and it still might work, but I still reckon people would be reluctant to laugh as loudly. You don’t always have time to process the political content of a joke before you react to it but there is enough in the above to put the laughter brakes on. Is it a culturally insensitive joke? I don’t think so, but it doesn’t matter what I think, only the reaction in a room of people who have their own complicated responses. And complicated responses don’t make for reliable laughs.

The last time I did this joke was five years ago for a room full of insurers at a leaky ballroom in Rotorua. They’d asked for 20 minutes of entertainment which was a real stretch for me, and I threw this anecdote in to fill the gap.

It went well on stage, but as I retired to my hiding place behind the sound desk a young Māori woman approached me.

“I just wanted to say that joke was really racist” she said.

“Oh really?” I began. “I’m so sorry …”

“Naaaaaahhhhhhh!” she laughed. “Just kidding, you’re all good.”

Jesus Christ. I can still feel the way my stomach dropped in the moment. I haven’t touched the material since. There’s plenty of comics who’ll go much further, but there’s also plenty of other things to joke about.

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Towards the end of her speech, Seivin said “I am looking forward to this speech being over”. Another great line. It was perfectly timed and I thought about the presence of mind it would take to include that - relatable, no doubt truthful - idea in your speech. Most people include all the “I’m nervous”/ “wish me luck” stuff at the start of their speech and then barrel into it. It was a simple and lovely idea to call back to it, and it was a great example of the intelligence that had got her to the podium in the first place.

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Kate Rodger

texted me this week during a random interview on my radio show.

“U better do a substack on this he’s bloody brilliant”

and then

“I want my kids to listen to this”

and finally

“So so good. Spoke in such short simple compelling sound bites perfect for teenage and tweenage ingestation 😎”

When Kate talks, you listen. So here is that substack.

She was referring to my interview with TJ Power, a neuroscientist who has written a book called DOSE. It’s an acronym that stands for Dopamine, Oxytocin, Seratonin and Endorphins - the chemicals your body produces to make your brain feel good.

You can listen to the whole interview here but if, like me, you prefer text to audio (and would walk across a bed of nails to avoid having to watch an online video), here is a lightly edited transcript of the parts of the conversation I think Kate was talking about. It’s a decent chunk of text so take it or leave it - and as always thank you for reading my substack!

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Jesse

Can you take a moment to walk us through exactly what these chemicals are and what they do in the body?

TJ Power
Yeah, definitely. So the key thing that underlines this whole concept of the DOSE effect is something called evolutionary mismatch, which is just the idea that these four chemicals evolved for hundreds of thousands of years for a very different lifestyle to the one we have today. The dopamine chemical was the one that motivated us to do really hard stuff, so we had to make fires and hunt and build. And dopamine was like this motivational chemical. Oxytocin connected us together and created this desire to form a bond with our tribe. Serotonin guided us towards natural food, towards sunlight, towards … towards a connection with nature, towards resting our bodies. And then endorphins was a very useful chemical that could destress our brain.

Jesse
And is it difficult to tell which one of these dose chemicals you might be short of at any given time?

TJ Power
No, it's very easy. And that's what I found so useful about this is rather than just thinking, I feel bad, I don't know what to do about it. There's very specific symptoms if you're low in each of the chemicals. So if you were really demotivated and you couldn't be bothered to do anything, that means your dopamine is low. If you're feeling really lonely and socially disconnected, oxytocin. If you felt very tired and anxious in your mind, serotonin. And if you felt kind of like stressed and angry, that would be endorphins. And as people journey through DOSE, they then can come to understand the actions that can alleviate that challenge.

Jesse
Why is, why is dopamine so essential to human survival? It's a bit of a primary function, that one.

TJ Power
Yeah, it really is. And we are living in dopamine land now in the modern world. And without dopamine, we would never have bothered to stay out there for four hours hunting with our bows and arrows to get the deer, or we wouldn't have scratched the rocks together for three hours to make the fire or build the shelter. And it was this chemical motivating us to do the ridiculously hard stuff it took to survive. And then in the modern world, we've managed to hack the way in which we can get that elevation that used to take hours and now we can get it instantaneously opening a social media app or watching pornography, for example. And that's very confusing for our brain.

Jesse
What happens in the brain when we, for example, when we spend a lot of time on social media and we keep getting those blasts of dopamine without having to do the work to earn it?

TJ Power
There's this area of our brain called the ventral tegmental area. And you can imagine it like a little dopamine factory and then where it's producing these dopamine vesicles, they're like little bubbles. You can imagine a little factory of dopamine bubbles in the brain and then there's this reward center called the nucleus accumbens. And if you're doing some kind of slow, effortful action, say you're gardening outside or you're reading a book, or you're working hard on a project, a few of those bubbles are moving across from the dopamine factory to the reward center. When you go on social media, it floods loads of those bubbles towards the reward center and it feels good whilst you do it. But then when you look at the dopamine factory, it's then very low in the dopamine resource. There's not many of these left. And that's then what puts us in this state where we can't focus on anything. We can feel depressed, low mood, low motivation as a result of using up this chemical in too quick of a manner.

Jesse
Right. The supply is limited. And what about sugar? Something like sugar. Does that have the same effect as scrolling on TikTok?

TJ Power
It really does. I mean, TikTok is the modern world technology version of sugar. Effectively, like when you compare the different ways we can interact with a phone, TikTok is very quick pleasure and sugar has a very similar effect. Rapidly dopamine will shift towards that reward center in the brain. And it feels great during, like we all love sugar, but afterwards you'll notice you feel a little bit deflated. And that's your brain trying to guide you and trying to say, oh, this isn't actually valuable for your survival. So I'm going to create a negative emotion to try and dissuade you from over engaging in this behavior.

Jesse
And does it have an impact on willpower? Easy dopamine?

TJ Power
Yeah. This willpower is a fascinating topic because there's this area of our brain called the anterior mid cingulate cortex, and it's where your willpower is housed. It's this little ball in the center of your brain. And if you look at someone like super ages, people that get to 100 plus, they regularly have a bigger area of their brain called the amcc because they have exhibited so much willpower over time. There's so many times where they haven't wanted to do something, but they've made themselves do it. And if we have high dopamine levels, it's easier to activate willpower. And if we have low dopamine levels, it's very hard to activate willpower.

Which is why if we get really drunk on a Friday night, you'll notice your willpower on a Saturday is much worse than on a day where you might have worked really hard all day and then you're looking at your willpower after that.

Jesse
Are there activities that you can do to try and bolster that factory a bit to make sure there's more dopamine to go around?

TJ Power
Yeah, 100%. So the first most important thing is what we call take action when you wake. And it's very important that you don't wake up and immediately access the quick dopamine in the phone, but instead you do something that is effortful. So if you were to wake up, you get out of bed and you go and say, for example, start brushing your teeth, or you start reading a few pages of a book, or you make your bed or you have your shower. Anything that is involving taking action rather than staying still when you wake would be step one. And then as you move through your day, there are certain actions we can explore that could be even more advantageous.

Jesse
Yeah, that's interesting. So it's not about the bed looking pretty, it's about the. The fact that you took the time to do it, even though you perhaps didn't really feel like it.

TJ Power
Yeah. It's our brain for 300,000 years as hunter gatherers had to do a lot of stuff that we didn't actually want to do, but we just had to do. And we're living in, like, the easiest survival world we've ever had as a species. And our brain is confused. It's like we spent 99.9% of human history doing a lot of hard stuff, and now we're entering an easier way of operating. And your brain just wants some of those harder actions, like as simple as making your bed. Cold showers, for example, have become very popular in the modern world. And they're a simple example of doing something that you don't want to do, but then get a dopamine benefit as a result.

Jesse
And then there's serotonin.

TJ Power
Yeah, so 90% of your serotonin is being created in your gut, so operates a little bit differently. And we have a very clever system called our vagus nerve that are connecting our gut and brain together so that they can chat with each other. And this chemical really wants our body to be flourishing and to be happy. So it wants really good, nutrient dense food coming into our bodies that it can utilize all those nutrients to build this chemical. It also wants a lot of time in natural environments. New Zealand definitely has some good natural environments. You're in a good spot there. A bit different when I'm selling this idea to people in London. And then you Also want good quality sleep. You're right, that sleep has an impact here. In the daytime when we build serotonin, it then gets converted at nighttime to something called melatonin, which is what puts us to sleep at night. So high serotonin in the day means good sleep at night.

Jesse
And where do ultra processed foods fit into that picture?

TJ Power
Yeah, they are very confusing for our body. They're very artificial. And you can imagine it as simple as when an ultra processed food turns up, obviously that's not something that is created in nature. And our whole body is just designed to be perfectly aligned to the natural world. And when they turn up, we get this big dopamine rush with those dopamine factories I explained earlier. But then those body, those foods enter our gut and in that moment, creating serotonin is the least of the priorities. The priority becomes how do I detoxify these poisonous molecules in my body and get them out of me? And I understand how hard this is. Like ultra processed food is cheap, it's readily available, it's faster to cook.

So it is a complicated situation for our world, but it is very valuable, as we see in the research for mental health, particularly young people's mental health, if we can reduce these ultra processed foods.

Jesse
This all makes a lot of sense, TJ. And yet, if it were easy to master these natural chemicals in our brain, we'd be doing it already, wouldn't we? But we're not. So where do you suggest we start?

TJ Power
My biggest piece of advice for everyone, whether it's you're listening to this for yourself as an adult, maybe it's your kids listening, is this simple concept of take action when you wake. It is so important that we don't just get given a donut the moment we wake. And that phone, for our brain, is effectively a donut. And it's really reducing our willpower to then do all the other stuff we know we need to do, the healthy food and the nature and the connection and so on. So that simple shift of take action when you wake is such a perfect domino to push over that could benefit the rest of your life.

Jesse
I know you're keen on intermittent fasting, but you're also keen on phone fasting. How long are you talking about going without your phone?

TJ Power
Yeah. So we've really tested a lot of different concepts around phone addiction. And the most simple solution we found is for humans to become more comfortable with just physical distance from the phone. Because no matter how many apps you do and blocking things and all that screen time stuff, if the phone is just not near you when you're cooking, when you're watching tv, when you're exercising, when you're socializing, when you're working, very quickly, your screen time plummet. So with this phone fasting idea, we start with simply 15 minutes when you wake and 60 minutes in the evening. So those are the two windows you commit to gradually, as we evolve it, on the weekend, people start doing two hours on a Saturday and two hours on a Sunday completely phone free. And then we slowly progress it from there.

TJ Power
But if you start with 15 in the morning, 60 in the evening, and two hours on the weekend, where you're physically away from it, that's an awesome place to be.

Jesse
You suggest concentrating on a task for at least 15 minutes each day. How can that help?

TJ Power
Yeah, so when were those hunter gatherers, when were, say, hunting for food, you can't imagine the level of concentration it would take. And when our brain deeply focuses one thing, it enters what we call flow state, which is this deep state of focus. And we can all find flow state in stuff that is unique to us. That could be reading a book, it could be a creative project, it could be art, it could be sport, it could be gardening. But it's very important that every single day, our brain experiences our attention being very centered on just one thing. So finding what that means to you and what instinctively gets you into that state and acting upon it is really good for the dopamine.

Jesse
And finally, TJ, what's the prize when people change their habits and learn to work for their dopamine?

TJ Power
They'll experience a much calmer and present experience of life and one where doing the hard stuff that they know they really want to do in life - that's going to get them to the specific place they're aiming for - doing that hard stuff is going to end up feeling easier than ever before.