In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and writer joins us to talk about his new book, The Status Game, and why he thinks we should all be playing the status game. We also talk about Anthony Bourdain and how he got his start in comedy, and how we can all learn to play the game we play in order to be more like a better human being. And we talk about how we get hijacked by the status games we play to earn our place in the group and the things we think we need to do to earn that position. We also discuss how we end up believing crazy things we don't really need to believe and how that can lead us to believe crazy things that we don t really need or want to believe. And we get into why we're all vulnerable to these things and how they can make us fall into the status-game we play. Thank you to our sponsor, Trigonometry. They are a great place to get your mind, body, and soul ready for a good night out! Joe Rogans Podcast by day, The JOKER Experience by night, by night. -Joe Rogan Podcast by night - The JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCES by day -The Status Game by Night by night Thanks for listening and supporting the show, Joe Rogan Experience by day and Night, all of you can be a part of the JOB JOB RIDE by JOE JORGAN EXPERIENCE by night! - Thank you for listening, Joe JOBJORRAN Podcast by DAY and Night Joe ROG by Night, by DAY, by Night Joe JORRJOBRAN by DAY by DAY - by DAY JOBRJAN by BOBORRIVAN by DAILY, by NAKED by DAY Joe RODAN PODCAST by MONDAY by YA CHECK OUT THE JOB BOOTY by CHECKOUT BY DAY by YANKEES by VOGAN EPISODES by VOCAL MODE, by VOTED BY DOG DAY by VYANKEE AND VYNN BONUS BOURIER BY YA RYAN BOWYER by PODOR DAY by KEVIN MACHINES AND TALKING ABOUT THE FAST AND GIVING THEM A RATE AND GOSTRIBELLO BOULEARD by DAME AND GOOGIE BOWLER BY MRS.
00:01:46.000They did, like, quite a few interesting shows where they were just shows.
00:01:50.000It wasn't what it is now, which is this, like, bizarre version of news TikTok just grabbing you with everything that's going to terrify you every day.
00:02:01.000And there's so much to terrify you about today.
00:02:13.000So, ladies and gentlemen, we started this podcast after a long conversation about Anthony Bourdain, but it felt like we were already rolling, so let's just roll into it.
00:02:22.000I really enjoyed you on Trigonometry, and that's why I wanted to talk to you here.
00:02:26.000Because it's just, I think your book is The Status Game.
00:03:01.000They can get hijacked by far right movements or far left movements or a lot of different things can happen that can really screw your life up if you get hijacked by these just normal mechanisms of human thinking.
00:07:09.000And you know, cults are interesting because cults are like, all human groups are kind of cults, but looser.
00:07:14.000So every human group is a status game in the sense that it's a group of people who believe the same things and there's sort of rules for being part of that group.
00:07:24.000And the more, the better you become at following those rules and becoming its ideal of self, the higher you rise up that status game.
00:07:33.000The only difference between cult and a religion and a business and a political group is that it's much tighter.
00:09:00.000If you're so confident about all these thoughts and about what life is about and where we're going and what awaits us, and if you follow these rules, God, that's so confident.
00:09:27.000Leaders would bubble up by consensus when, say, we wanted to solve a particular problem to do with hunting, then the best hunters would be deferred to.
00:12:07.000And I think there's like eight and a half billion people in the world and I think it's like 500 million atheists.
00:12:14.000So that just shows you how many, just how wired we are to believe basically any old shit we're told to believe as long as we feel like it's going to get a status and secure connection into a supportive group.
00:12:26.000I remember during the suicide bomber days when that was something that was in the news all the time.
00:12:31.000They talked about 72 virgins and that these gentlemen thought that they were going to get 72 virgins in heaven.
00:13:12.000It's like that kind of a, you know, it's an exaggeration.
00:13:15.000But I think the real promise there, though, I mean, the 72 versions is, yeah, but I think the real promise for suicide bombers is, again, its status.
00:13:23.000It's like, if you sacrifice your life on behalf of the group's mission, you're a hero.
00:13:31.000And again, I think it's a really good example of how...
00:13:34.000Human beings value status over their lives.
00:13:36.000I mean, that's how much we value status.
00:13:38.000We're the only animal that kills ourself, which is just a weird thing in itself.
00:13:42.000An animal would voluntarily end its own life.
00:13:45.000And very often the reason that people will kill themselves is because it's a sudden drop in status or they feel completely isolated and alone.
00:13:53.000So they're lacking in those essential kind of psychological resources to such an extent that they end their own lives.
00:13:59.000And that's how much we value these things.
00:14:02.000Suicide bombers are another manifestation of that.
00:14:05.000Like, if you're going to consider me a hero, and if Mohammed is going to consider me a hero, strap me up, brother.
00:14:12.000That's how crazy we become about these social rewards.
00:15:58.000And when they look at the psychology of people that are vulnerable to falling into cults, it's very often people that have struggled to fit into the status games of ordinary life.
00:16:13.000So they're really vulnerable to these cults.
00:16:16.000Because what cults offer is absolute certainty.
00:16:19.000If you cook your scrambled eggs this way, if you only put two inches of water in your bath, the UFOs will come down and they're going to take you to the level above.
00:16:31.000That's what they were offering to you though, the level above human.
00:17:00.000But what was interesting about his memoir was he said that people talk about brainwashing in cults and people talk about how we were forced to follow these rules.
00:17:26.000Well, that's why, you know, one of the fascinating things about some cults is that they use very bizarre language and that they all agree to it.
00:17:33.000They have, like, specific terms that they say.
00:17:36.000Like, doesn't Scientologists, they'll call people, they have, like, an abbreviation for someone who's, like, a hostile person?
00:17:44.000Because I remember someone was explaining to me, someone who left the church was explaining to me how if someone would be hostile, you have a very specific way you describe them and that they all do it in the group.
00:18:44.000Because it seems like that was part of it.
00:18:47.000There was a big allure of how many successful people were following that religion.
00:18:53.000I mean, some of the most successful actors Tom Cruise is one of the most successful actors of all time, and he's literally the poster boy for that.
00:19:05.000Somebody was saying to me the other day that they thought that actors were particularly susceptible to Scientology because they've got this weird...
00:19:12.000They don't really have an identity, actors.
00:19:14.000They were always sort of slipping into everybody at different people's identities.
00:19:17.000I thought that was an interesting kind of theory.
00:19:31.000You've got to give respect to Tom Cruise, though, because Tom Cruise is like 60 years old, and he still does his own stunts, including jumping a motorcycle off a cliff.
00:19:59.000And I guess in my 20s and 30s, I was very, very atheist and, you know, hated religion.
00:20:04.000But then I kind of did a lot of this research.
00:20:07.000And once you accept that what humans need to be healthy psychologically and physically is connection and status, you see that that's actually what religion provides people.
00:20:16.000That's what religion provides my parents, is that they're connected into community and they feel important.
00:20:36.000Populations in which we live, it's very hard to feel securely connected.
00:20:40.000I mean, as you said a moment ago, the tribes in which we evolved were very small, like 30 to 50 people.
00:20:45.000So it's quite easy to feel securely connected.
00:20:47.000It was quite easy in that environment to feel important, like valued by other people.
00:20:52.000I mean, probably it was not rare in the tribe to feel invaluable, like you're needed because everybody was needed.
00:21:00.000There wasn't many people around to find the tubers and catch the rabbits or whatever.
00:21:04.000But in this day and age, in these huge groups in which we belong to, it's much harder to feel...
00:21:11.000Relative status, because you're competing with millions of people, especially online.
00:21:15.000And I think that's a source of a huge amount of misery in the modern world, and identity anxiety, identity stress.
00:21:24.000We feel really unsatisfied with the amount of connection and status that we have because we exist in these fucking massive international tribes now.
00:21:36.000And the other factor is I think because of the nature of commuting and public transportation and of going to work all day and then being under someone else's control most of the day and then commuting home,
00:21:55.000I think the way human beings figure out what's the best way to behave and what's the nicest way that we can all get along, what makes the most sense, is when we talk the most.
00:22:05.000And most of the day, you can't really talk.
00:22:09.000Most of the day, you can't sit down for a couple hours.
00:23:10.000I mean, that's a perfect example of how the status games work is that used car salesman is a status game and it has its particular model of self which we Kind of the brain identifies and turns us into.
00:23:25.000By the way, I should just say there's a lot of very cool used car salesmen.
00:24:27.000I've got to turn myself into this person.
00:24:29.000Yeah, that was a giant thing in stand-up to the point where the punchline in Atlanta, Georgia had a back green room and people would write on the walls.
00:25:21.000But you see how this is appealing, and you see that there's a pattern that seems to be successful, and then you just mimic that pattern, mock that pattern.
00:25:29.000And that's why it's so incredible when someone comes along and does something in that space that's new but still works.
00:25:35.000That's, for me, the definition of a genius.
00:25:37.000Anybody can experiment, but most experiments go wrong.
00:25:39.000But if you experiment with the form of stand-up or whatever, if everyone's doing Hicks and you come up with something new and it works, That's incredible.
00:25:46.000It's just people are so easily influenced.
00:25:48.000And when someone is really stunningly good, like there's a David Tell problem, okay?
00:25:53.000The David Tell problem is David Tell's so good that when you work with him all the time, you start delivering your punchlines like him.
00:26:02.000But they're not as good as his punchlines.
00:26:05.000And you fucking sound like Dave Attell.
00:26:32.000If you read a book that you really love, the next day you'll turn your computer on and you'll be writing in a slightly shit version of that style.
00:26:38.000Well, that's what Hunter S. Thompson said he did.
00:26:40.000Didn't he write The Great Gatsby over and over and over again just to get a sense of the rhythm of the words?
00:26:45.000When he was learning how to write, I believe he did that.
00:26:47.000But I think he also did the Book of Revelations, didn't he?
00:26:51.000Yeah, which I thought was amazing, because you can really sense that in his writing, this kind of apocalyptic madness.
00:26:57.000I'm sure I read a similar thing about, I don't know if he rewrote the Revelations or whether he used to read it over and over again, but I'm sure I remember reading that about Hunter Thompson.
00:29:47.000Yeah, it's so accurate Yeah, and you know when we think about the way our world changed four years ago I mean, it's kind of similar in a way.
00:30:16.000What happened in the 1960s is fucking bananas.
00:30:20.000I mean, they basically turned this counterculture hippie love movement into Charles Manson and the Manson family and the fucking CIA was dosing people with LSD. They were doing anything they can to stop the anti-war movement.
00:30:36.000Anything they can to stop these hippies and made everything illegal.
00:31:44.000And then so Thatcher and Reagan came up with this neoliberalism idea of increasing competition everywhere, getting rid of the big state, selling off, privatizing all the national industries, going to war with the unions.
00:32:00.000And when I was doing my research for my book Selfie, I was sort of – because I was interested to know, like, if you change the rules of the status game, do we change as a culture, as a bunch of people?
00:32:16.000Like, if you think about who were in the 1960s versus who were in the 1980s, you go from fuck the man to greed is good, you know.
00:32:24.000And I found this really quite sinister interview from 1981 with Margaret Thatcher, where they're interviewing her about, you know, what are your big plans?
00:32:33.000And she said she was going on about, you know, in the last 30 years, everything had been about the collectivism and getting together and how they're going to get rid of all that and increase competition.
00:33:22.000There was a really interesting study that found in 1983, they were looking at Changes in birth names.
00:33:28.000And for generations and generations, babies have been called things like, you know, Alfred and John and Barbara, like all the traditional names.
00:33:36.000But in 1983, suddenly we started naming our kids weird names because we wanted our kids to stand out and be a star.
00:33:43.000And when you look at the changes in values between the 60s and the 80s, 80s and 90s.
00:33:49.000Suddenly, money becomes a dominant value.
00:34:36.000Like when they did a similar study in the 60s, I think it was 1965, it was less than half of people thought being rich was an important thing in your life.
00:35:40.000But also don't be lazy and rely on the state to take care of you either.
00:35:44.000Well, yeah, I think, I'm not sure if it was Tony Blair, but certainly, I think it was Tony Blair that talked about the idea of neoliberalism with cushions, which I love that idea, because it's true that it kind of worked.
00:35:55.000It was brutal in the 80s, but most of us are much wealthier now than we were in the 80s.
00:36:33.000And when you're in severe poverty, especially if you're in another country, like when people look at this caravan of people coming in through South America, through Mexico, I would do it too.
00:37:02.000Seems like a normal thing that people want to have a better life.
00:37:08.000I think that we've just got to figure out why we have these parts of the world, why we have these communities that are just never getting better and help them.
00:38:18.000You don't want to know how the sausage is made.
00:38:20.000But if you really want to, I mean, if you want to try to fix everything everywhere, say, I'm not buying anything from anybody who doesn't get paid what you're supposed to get paid here.
00:38:30.000Yeah, but you've got to account for the economies are different in different parts of the world, aren't they?
00:38:34.000Okay, then let's balance it out for the economies in those places.
00:38:36.000Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good rule.
00:38:57.000If you own a factory in Juarez, how much do you have to pay those people?
00:39:05.000Don't economists have that Big Mac test where they look at how much a Big Mac costs in each territory and from that they can work out the relative strength of each economy?
00:39:13.000So the test would be you'd have to be able to buy X amount of Big Macs per day with your daily wage.
00:39:25.000We just have this real weird desire to never stop making more.
00:41:45.000You can't just sell your stuff to people, like whatever you are, what piece of this and whatever you want to call it, stocks, call it whatever you want.
00:41:53.000You're selling chunks of your company, right?
00:43:12.000Also this dirty thing where you can't buy stock if you know things.
00:43:18.000yeah you know like if i knew that some was about to pop off and i bought a bunch of stock this must be so tempting like if you know for a fact that tomorrow this stock is going to be up here oh yeah it's tempted the out of me i don't know whether i'd be able to not uh yeah i don't i'm not that motivated by money That I would do that.
00:43:39.000But it's just a natural desire people have.
00:43:44.000Yeah, because whatever we've attached our status to, we want more and more of that thing.
00:43:49.000And it doesn't matter how famous and rich we become.
00:44:03.000I think this whole competing with the Joneses, keeping up with the Joneses, it always fuels technology at the end of the day, because that's the thing you buy every year.
00:44:28.000And it's constantly going in this general direction of ever complex technology that interfaces with human beings and now with AI. And it's going to be an artificial life form.
00:44:39.000And whether it's 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, or it's already happening in a fucking lab in Ohio.
00:44:47.000It might already be happening right now, where they have an artificial life form, and that's going to be the new dominant life form on Earth.
00:45:06.000Well, it comes from before we were human.
00:45:08.000We've been competing for status since before we were humans, since we're animals.
00:45:10.000Well, we still are animals, but since before we were human animals.
00:45:13.000And in the tribes in which we evolved, the more status that you earned, the more food you got, the better food you got, the safer your sleeping sites, the greater your access to your choice of mates.
00:45:23.000So basically, the more status that you get in your group, everything gets better.
00:45:28.000And wouldn't that motivate you to make...
00:45:30.000The most complex thing a human being has ever made.
00:45:50.000We have this distorted idea of what is like a fiercely competitive person.
00:45:55.000When we think of fiercely competitive people, we only, for whatever reason, consider basketball players, football players, baseball players, fighters, athletes, race car drivers.
00:46:06.000We consider fiercely competitive people the people that are engaged in sports and activities every day.
00:46:29.000It's like, you know, I need the status.
00:46:32.000There was a great story that I found for the status game about Steve Jobs and the true origin story of the iPhone.
00:46:38.000I don't know if you've heard this, the true origin story of the iPhone, which is that Steve Jobs, his wife, he used to hold these barbecues in wherever they lived, Silicon Valley.
00:46:47.000And one time he was at this barbecue and the husband of one of her friends worked for Microsoft.
00:46:53.000And he's like rubbing Steve Jobs' face in it saying, oh, we've invented the future of computing.
00:48:04.000It certainly has created a lot of great things, right?
00:48:07.000It certainly has created a lot of amazing inventions that enhance our lives, but it's also, it's like, it's moving in this non-stop direction.
00:48:14.000It always seems to me like we're a bunch of fucking buffalo being herded off a cliff.
00:48:18.000Like, does anyone know where this cliff is?
00:48:20.000Will we just keep going with this stuff?
00:48:24.000I mean, with all the international chaos that's going in the world, the conflicts, the wars, the Ukraine thing and the Israel-Hamas thing, it's like, fuck, man.
00:48:36.000I mean, that's a status thing, too, right?
00:48:38.000And ultimately, ultimately, I mean, when you can get groups of people to go after other groups of people and be convinced that those people that you don't even fucking know are your problem, the fact that that game is still being played in 2024...
00:48:52.000But it would never stop being played because we're storytelling animals and we tell stories about status.
00:48:57.000And I think one of the key things that I realised when I was doing the book was that the conscious experience of life is a story, but the subconscious reality is this game.
00:49:08.000The brain is constantly playing a game for status.
00:49:10.000We've got all this insane subconscious technology that we use for measuring Our status versus other people that we're completely unaware of.
00:49:18.000Like there's one about the tone of voice during conversation.
00:49:22.000They call it the paraverbal frequency band.
00:49:25.000And you can't hear it consciously, but it's a way of organising status hierarchies when we meet people.
00:49:33.000And the person who's top It sets the tone and everybody else matches to meet the tone.
00:49:39.000And these psychologists studied a bunch of Larry King interviews, a bit like this one.
00:49:44.000And they stripped out the paraverbal frequency band and they could work out who he felt superior to versus who he felt inferior to.
00:49:52.000So he felt inferior to, I think it was Liz Taylor and superior to Dan Quayle.
00:50:02.000And there were particular interviews which were very, Irascible and didn't go very well.
00:50:11.000And they found that they were just not matching.
00:50:13.000So there's all this stuff going on beneath the hood of consciousness, which is constantly organizing us into kind of status games.
00:50:21.000And it's that that causes the hierarchies of life.
00:50:25.000That's the reason why communism could never work.
00:50:28.000Because they're trying to wipe out the...
00:50:31.000The effects of status in society, but you can't wipe out the effects of status in society because it's in our brains.
00:50:37.000You go into an elevator with three other people and you've already figured out within seconds who's the highest status, you know, where you sit in the pecking order, who's got the nice luggage, who's getting out of the suites floor at the top.
00:51:21.000The funny thing is when you talk to people about this and you just point out these just logical patterns of human behavior, it doesn't work.
00:52:20.000Yeah, where's all the Polish people come from?
00:52:22.000So I went to Poland to find out where all the Polish people had come from.
00:52:25.000And we went to this old steelworks, this old sort of Stalin-era steelworks, and the Polish journalist who was my fixer said, oh, you know...
00:52:32.000I just mentioned casually how the Poles are such hard workers.
00:52:35.000And she was like, we're not hard workers.
00:53:40.000It seems this pattern just constantly happens over and over and over again.
00:53:44.000But there's always people that they play to the most charitable and the kindest people in the world and they phrase things in a way that if you oppose this idea That somehow or another you're cruel.
00:54:23.000And I think there's a big misunderstanding about what that competitive instinct, what that status instinct is.
00:54:29.000And I found it with talking about the book, a lot of people just really don't like it, this idea that I'm arguing that status is a human need, that everybody has it.
00:54:37.000And they go, I'm not interested in status, you know.
00:54:50.000But all that status is, technically, is the reward that we get for being of value to the tribe.
00:54:56.000So back in the days that we evolved, There are three essential ways of earning status for human beings, aside from boring things like looks and height and whatever.
00:55:07.000So this is the animalistic, you can force somebody to attend to you in status, either physically or with social violence of the kind you see on social media.
00:55:17.000So people compete to have a reputation of being very virtuous, so courageous, somebody who knows the rules, follows the rules, believes the sacred beliefs.
00:56:47.000But it's just a natural human pattern that if we can recognize, we can also, like, mitigate some of the problems that come with it.
00:56:56.000Yeah, I mean, that's why I like talking about communism, because communism was the biggest experiment we've ever had in eradicating status.
00:57:04.000So Marx and Engels, their big idea was that status comes from private property, from private ownership.
00:57:12.000So you could have a house and it's a perfectly functional house and you're happy with it.
00:57:15.000But then somebody builds a big palace next door, suddenly you feel shit.
00:57:19.000So they said, you know, like communism can be summed up in one sentence, which is the abolition of private property.
00:57:30.000Like there were some anthropologists, sociologists who went to the Soviet Union in the 50s.
00:57:34.000And they found 10 distinct social classes in the Soviet Union.
00:57:38.000All they did was they took the existing status game hierarchy with the wealthy at the top and the workers at the bottom and they flipped it.
00:57:44.000So the workers were at the top and the wealthy and former wealthy really were at the bottom.
00:57:49.000And those former wealthy, the bourgeoisie, the children of the bourgeoisie, were absolutely discriminated against openly and horrifically.
00:57:56.000If you weren't tortured and killed, you were held back.
00:58:25.000Brett, they had had, I think it was like a day of appreciation for people of color, where people of color could stay home, they still get paid, and go, wow, I wish Mike was here.
01:00:02.000And that's how, you know, when you think about how, especially, you know, men, especially white men, especially straight white men are treated at the moment.
01:00:37.000I was watching an argument on TV. Twitter, where this man and this woman were going at it, and the man said something that was factually correct, and the woman said, if you think that I'm going to take information from a straight white man...
01:02:06.000A bit intimidated by that because I'm standing in the Guardian with this woman telling me that effectively I guess I've been racist somehow or sexist somehow.
01:02:13.000So I just said to her, I'm not going to have this conversation with you.
01:04:46.000First is that they are the richest of all the seven groups.
01:04:50.000So they had more people earning over £50,000 per year as a family.
01:04:55.000Secondly, they were the most highly educated of all the seven groups.
01:04:59.000So these people that are constantly going on about privileged, If they're the most privileged people in Britain, they're amongst the most privileged people in the world.
01:05:08.000The second thing, which I thought was amazing, was that they were six times more likely to make political comments on what was then called Twitter.
01:05:15.000And they make more social media contributions than all of the rest of the groups combined.
01:05:43.000Also the numbers, so in the UK they make up 13% of the population, in the US they make up 8% of the population.
01:05:50.000So on social media, because they dominate social media, they feel like Sometimes the majority of the country, but their beliefs are actually really marginal.
01:06:00.000One of these, I think it was YouGov, asked people, who do you think should be the next governor of the Bank of England, a man or a woman?
01:06:08.000This is the kind of story that drives our media into paroxysms.
01:06:36.000But because these people, these 13% or 8% in the US, are so highly educated and so wealthy, they dominate The media, they dominate the gatekeeping positions in publishing companies and TV companies.
01:06:49.000So they really have the kind of commanding voice in our culture very often, but they're a tiny minority of who we are.
01:06:58.000But it really does behave like a religion in a lot of ways.
01:07:04.000Marc Andreessen broke it down very eloquently, where he's explaining that it has all of the things that a cult has.
01:07:10.000It has the indoctrination, it has the excommunication, where you're shamed and kicked out of the group, the disconnect from the group members.
01:08:14.000I was so committed to this that I had this girlfriend when I was in high school, and I had the keys to the gym because I would work out there any time I wanted.
01:11:05.000And it's these people that just get sucked into believing that this guy can give them enlightenment and connect them to God by touching their head.
01:11:15.000Yeah, and the thing is, man, even after this guy got exposed and he was hypnotizing the men and having sex with them, it was crazy shit, right?
01:11:25.000But even after he got exposed, the people that went through the experience of having this guy touch their head when it was...
01:14:15.000But it's just so fascinating how people just fall into these patterns.
01:14:21.000It's just a natural thing that we have to be aware of.
01:14:25.000I think that's why it's so important, the way you say it and the way you talk about these things and the way you lay it out, it makes it so much more palatable to a lot of people.
01:14:34.000They look at it and go, oh, these are all just patterns that people play.
01:14:37.000Yeah, we believe what we have to believe in order to...
01:16:03.000And so this is the thing that we were never taught about Hitler in schools, which is probably still a bit, I don't know, it's going to trigger people, but it's the truth.
01:16:12.000Hitler was an incredibly successful leader of Germany for the time when he was...
01:16:18.000The first thing which was a surprise to me was that when you see those black and white films of Hitler spitting and shouting and ranting, you assume that he's talking about the Jews all the time.
01:16:28.000Have you seen how they've translated into English now with AI? They're going through it, yeah.
01:20:33.000While other drugs are banned or discouraged, methamphetamine was touted as a miracle product when it first appeared on the market in the late 1930s.
01:21:16.000So it's the same as the cult that was promising, we're going to take you to a level above human.
01:21:23.000It's always the promise of these mad people that we're going to give you so much status that we're going to essentially become superhuman.
01:21:30.000It's what the communists thought as well, that the average human, their intelligence would become so much that everybody would be a genius.
01:24:37.000They called it the Great Compression because it was a compression between the gap between the rich and the poor.
01:24:42.000And that was the era in which An ordinary American person without a college degree could have a house and a car and a vacation every year and a wife at home raising their children.
01:24:52.000Yeah, that's how it can work without socialism.
01:25:44.000If we were going to make fun of a foreign country that we were in dispute with, we would say, yeah, when we sent our leaders there, you know what they did?
01:25:51.000They fucking got rid of all the protesters.
01:26:56.000Essentially what you're doing is you're saying to a bunch of therapists and family counsellors that you can be like an incredible hero because America is full of these Satanists running kindergartens and they're secretly abusing your children and we need to go and hunt them out.
01:27:14.000And so because that belief gives them status, they all decide to believe it.
01:28:16.000He said, at first I thought she was making it up, but then I thought it was true.
01:28:21.000And according to her story, there was an 81-day satanic ritual where Jesus and the archangel Gabriel turned up, and Conveniently removed all the scars of her abuse.
01:29:48.000And I bet it goes back to what you're talking about, too, though, because I think status in his relationship with his woman allowed him to believe some nonsense.
01:29:56.000And also, the $300,000 advance he got for his...
01:30:37.000These are from like the 80s or whatever this started, but whatever I was just looking at, like this NPR brought up says QAnon revives the satanic panic, but who is this woman?
01:31:40.000And people went to prison for years on the basis of this testimony.
01:31:44.000And so that's another thing that changed my thinking, this idea of moral panics.
01:31:48.000I think often moral panics are actually just these status frenzies, status kind of gold rush movements, where there's so much status enough for believing this nonsense that people helplessly, because that's how we're wired, start to believe it.
01:32:01.000Boy, social media doesn't do us any favors with that, does it?
01:32:04.000God, the ability to just tweet out something the moment something hits the news or whatever, and your hot take on it.
01:32:10.000How many fucking people have lost their careers because of a hot take?
01:32:59.000You get to either yell at people or yell with people.
01:33:02.000Yeah, and I think for me it's interesting.
01:33:04.000I don't know whether this is true or not, but one of my sort of pet theories is that the rise of all this social justice activism online happens after the financial crisis.
01:33:13.000So in 2008, it begins with the Occupy movement, and you can sort of draw a straight line through Occupy to what's going on today.
01:33:19.000And I think there's a sense amongst millennials and Gen Zs, partly a real truth sense, that...
01:33:23.000The success games that we were playing in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s are over now.
01:33:45.000So, you know, we have to get our status from somewhere.
01:33:47.000So if success is hard, we're going to do more virtue.
01:33:51.000So I think that's at least part of the explanation for what's happened since, you know, the financial crisis was this, you know, the story that we were left with was that these people were unpunished, that the game is fixed, it's dangerous, it's not working anymore.
01:34:06.000So there's a lot of anger, you know, comes out of that.
01:34:11.000It's just so unfortunate how easy it is to engage in this behavior and how few guidelines there are.
01:34:19.000Other than your work, and some other people have talked about it, but it's like the way you're saying it, and the way you're saying it in your book, and the way you said it on trigonometry...
01:34:28.000It allows people to have, like, a look at the wiring under the board.
01:34:32.000Like, oh, this is what the problem is.
01:34:34.000And I would hope that people that are engaged in that realize, like, what a psychological capture that shit is.
01:34:42.000It's so weird for you because you get it.
01:34:45.000I've had friends that have had, like, real problems with, like, engaging with people on Twitter.
01:36:07.000That's why social media is so addictive because every time you make a contribution to social media, you're like pulling the wheel of that slot machine and either your status goes up or it goes down.
01:36:17.000And that's why they're doing this because it's compulsive because we're gambling with a resource that is incredibly important to us.
01:36:25.000And you can do so in a way that never existed before.
01:36:29.000Like, if you're some guy who's shredded and you just do fucking curls on Instagram all day, you'll get a lot of people that pay attention to you.
01:37:15.000Why social media is so powerful is like it's been globally successful in every culture social media is caught on because it's offering something that humans fundamentally value enormously and need to survive, which is status.
01:37:29.000It's a new way of harvesting this incredibly valuable resource that we value more than gold.
01:37:35.000When you say that people get physically ill from it, what happens to people when they don't get status physically?
01:37:41.000It's the same as, I think it's quite well known that loneliness is bad for us, but loneliness is a connection, status is the same.
01:37:47.000So there was a bunch of really interesting experiments done in the UK in the British Civil Service, which is a massive organisation, hugely stratified.
01:37:55.000And this guy, Dr. Michael Marmot and his team went in there and they found that...
01:38:01.000Your place in the hierarchy predicted your health outcomes.
01:38:04.000And this wasn't to do with how healthy you were in other respects, or it wasn't to do with your diet, you know, where they controlled for all of that stuff.
01:38:12.000Literally, the person one down from the very top had slightly worse health outcomes from the person at the very top.
01:38:18.000So, for middle-aged people, the people at the bottom of the hierarchy had four times the risk of death than the people at the top of the hierarchy.
01:38:26.000And then other academics went into the lab and they did an experiment with monkeys, I think baboons.
01:38:31.000And they gave these monkeys these delicious diets of like pizza and ice cream.
01:38:35.000They basically made them really unhealthy.
01:38:37.000So filled them with atherosclerotic plaque and tried to work out who got sick and who didn't get sick as a result of their terrible diets.
01:39:14.000And it's for the same reason as loneliness.
01:39:16.000When the brain registers that we're lacking in the resource of status, it puts us into that stress state of raises inflammation, lowers antiviral response.
01:39:27.000And we're not designed to be in that state for long periods of time.
01:39:30.000That's a response that's designed for being chased or attacked.
01:40:32.000What I found is that the people who are suicidal who call me, there's generally three reasons why people get suicidal in my experience on the phones.
01:40:39.000The first one is chronic pain, obviously.
01:40:42.000The second one is people struggle with recent bereavement.
01:40:46.000People become suicidal when somebody they love or a pet they love.
01:40:50.000But by far the most common reason people phone when I've spoken to a suicidal is to do with their identity failure.
01:40:59.000They're severely lacking in connection or status, usually both.
01:41:03.000And not only are they lacking, they're stuck.
01:41:13.000Feel statusful in the world and and So yeah, this is it's a massive red flag for you know, that's that's that's a huge reason why humans choose to end their lives because they feel like I'm severely lacking in connection and status This is such an important thing to talk about because this is never discussed when people talk about Depression all they ever want to tell you is that it's a chemical problem.
01:41:38.000It's not your fault That's all they ever want to tell you.
01:41:40.000Yeah They don't want to tell you that the quality of your life affects the way you feel.
01:41:46.000And if you're doing what you want to do, and you have good friends, and you're having fun times, and you're a good person, you're nice to people, they're nice back, they like being around you because you're fun, then your life is better.
01:42:29.000I mean, one of the things I do because of my knowing about status when I'm on the phone with these people is I always make the point of...
01:42:36.000At the end of the call, trying to build them up a bit, you know, I tell them, and I mean it sincerely, that the fact that they've phoned in this, what is probably the worst night of their life, is heroic, that they're courageous, that most people don't suffer like you're suffering, and, you know,
01:42:51.000so what you're, you know, like, these, and it always, it always goes down well.
01:42:55.000They always go, oh my god, wow, you know, no one's ever said that stuff to me before.
01:43:01.000It's magic, the effect it has on the phones, when you just give people a bit of, I think you're an impressive person, I think you're kind, I think you're smart, or whatever it is that I feel they are on the phones.
01:43:12.000There was a case recently in the UK, a teacher, a head teacher, Killed herself when her school was inspected by the government inspectors and it went down from outstanding to inadequate.
01:43:26.000And she killed herself and they found her journals from the day before she did that and she said in the journal, the words inadequate keep flashing before my eyes.
01:44:11.000That's the problem with cuntiness, right?
01:44:13.000We kind of tolerate that kind of communication with people.
01:44:16.000We look in and we watch from a side, like, oh.
01:44:20.000But there's something to that, that is, you really are pumping out negativity.
01:44:25.000It does have an actual effect on human beings on the other end, as much as you like to pretend it's some sort of a sterile, professional act that you're doing.
01:44:34.000Yeah, you're pumping out shitty things.
01:44:36.000And you're doing it for status, right?
01:44:37.000Well, when you take someone's status away, like they took her status away, I feel it is like an act of social violence.
01:44:44.000Like our identity is of massive importance to us.
01:44:48.000And so when someone takes that away, that's why acts of actual physical violence, why they often happen, is when someone is disrespectful to somebody else.
01:44:55.000And the act of physical violence doesn't only restore that status back to its sort of set point.
01:45:01.000It turns that humiliation into a sense of pride.
01:45:05.000So that's why violence is so tempting.
01:45:09.000It's why if you have the capacity for violence, it's often used because it can transform that sense of humiliation into a sense of pride.
01:45:16.000It sends a negative status into a positive status.
01:45:20.000The key is to have enough faith that you don't care.
01:46:24.000And so they're much more worried about, insecure about their sense of status.
01:46:29.000So when you take it away from them, it's kind of much more… That's a real danger of the status game of telling those people that someone's done this to you and that those people should not be heard from.
01:46:41.000Those people are the reason why you're in the situation that you're in.
01:46:45.000You're empowering people to hate someone specifically because of the way they look.
01:46:51.000No matter what you think the justifications of that, it's the exact same thing in every culture when that happens.
01:47:00.000And you're getting trapped into it because of what you're talking about because it's a status game and you could dominate someone by calling them out because of their privilege and you could stop a conversation in its tracks.
01:48:36.000As soon as you start We're good to go.
01:49:05.000You know, we've all fallen for this stuff, if we're honest, in our past.
01:49:10.000And I think it's just really important just to be on the lookout for it and to be conscious of the fact that our brains are really good at turning our hatreds into a virtue.
01:49:20.000They're really good at telling us, no, you're right.
01:51:09.000He believes this stuff so passionately that he was kind of offered the opportunity to withdraw his opinions in an Austrian court.
01:51:18.000It's in his 70s, this was, and he refused and went to prison in his 70s.
01:51:23.000And so what I did, because in my book, The Heretics, it's called The Unpersuadables in the US. It was about why people believe crazy things and the stories that we tell.
01:51:32.000And I wanted to hang out with him because he's an incredibly intelligent man who has these fucking mad beliefs about the world.
01:51:43.000And so what I did was, in order to make money at the time, he was selling these tours of Holocaust sites.
01:51:49.000So you could pay two and a half grand and go for a week with him on these tours.
01:51:53.000And he would give you the real, inverted commas, history of what actually happened in these places.
01:51:56.000Where was he getting this information from, supposedly?
01:52:01.000I mean, it was his own scholarship, but he was doing that thing that, you know, he was finding his own interpretations of this scholarship.
01:52:07.000And what did he say about, like, the trenches filled with bodies?
01:52:11.000Oh, well, I mean, he went through a period of outright Holocaust denial, which he then kind of repented.
01:52:17.000And the reason that his flirtation with outright Holocaust denial was based on this study.
01:52:23.000This guy, he took a chip out of the wall of one of the gas chambers and had it analyzed.
01:52:33.000It was a documentary on this guy, Dr. Death, who was a guy who made execution equipment in the United States, and he got roped up with this Holocaust denier group, and they sent him to Auschwitz to examine.
01:52:44.000And he said that it didn't show any of the signs of gas.
01:52:48.000No, the one that got Irving was that this person said, well, the amount of toxins in this concrete isn't even enough to...
01:55:14.000And she said to me, oh, you know, you might not know this, but all the boys have got together.
01:55:18.000And in your lectures at the end of the day, they're all asking questions I'm asking David questions that they think are going to be useful and helpful for your book because I think you've been really badly treated.
01:56:09.000And so Irving was going to show downfall and give his alternative take on what was really going on.
01:56:14.000And one of these guys couldn't watch downfall because his dad was in the bunker with Hitler and he found it too upsetting.
01:56:21.000And that was a big lightbulb moment for me.
01:56:23.000So my takeaway from that was that these...
01:56:26.000David Irving aside, these guys had all been brought up by parents who were proper Nazis.
01:56:33.000And obviously Nazis are synonym for evil.
01:56:36.000And they couldn't cope with the fact that their dads, probably, mums perhaps as well, were evil.
01:56:43.000So they'd kind of gone on this lifelong mission to convince themselves that the Holocaust was this kind of fabrication and that none of it actually happened.
01:56:52.000So the stories that in Brain Kicks In, they couldn't allow themselves to believe this horrific thing about their parents who they adored and looked up to.
01:56:58.000And probably their parents had filled their head with some of this stuff too, you know.
01:57:01.000Knowing what you know about our desire for status and how that's just...
01:57:07.000It's impossible to remove from the human mind and human society.
01:57:12.000Do you think that we could have like a warning guidebook for human beings?
01:57:20.000The same way the Constitution is sort of a warning guidebook to establish a republic.
01:57:24.000Like let's make some real clear checks and balances and let's make sure that the senators and the congresspeople and all this stuff gets in place in the judicial branch.
01:57:33.000They planned it out to make sure that one person couldn't just take over and run it.
01:57:39.000It feels like we should have guidelines, specifically that we teach people at an early age, to recognize that and call it out when you see it.
01:58:09.000We should be able to see those outside of the merits of the ideas that we're discussing.
01:58:16.000Whatever we're discussing, whatever it is that some sort of public social issue that everybody's debating, we should be able to discuss it outside Of this status trap, where if you yell this, everybody goes, yeah, that should be childlike.
01:58:33.000We should shun people to do that and teach people at a fucking really early age not to do it.
01:58:40.000It's hard to learn because there's no precedent.
01:58:42.000It's not like there's a hundred years of history on how to use the internet properly.
01:58:57.000But if we could explain to people when they're very young, when they're impressionable, these are patterns that human beings fall into and this is why they do these things that you think they're being mean or they're being bullies.
01:59:12.000And so the kids could get it in their head and maybe they could stop doing it while they're doing it at a young age and learn better patterns.
01:59:19.000And then as they get older, just sort of have a much more rational way of interfacing with people.
01:59:50.000They told the Germans, you're right, they're wrong, we're going to get you what you deserve, and we're going to take it out on these people whose fault it is.
02:00:03.000Government, this horrific episode in our history, it didn't begin with force.
02:00:09.000It began with telling people stories, stories that they wanted to hear, simplistic stories about status, about you're wrong, it's their fault, we're going to, I'm going to give you what, you know, we're going to make Germany great again.
02:00:22.000And, you know, people love that stuff.
02:00:24.000I mean, the other thing that I think is that people...
02:00:28.000What we need to hear at the moment, I suppose, is about you can't take the status away from a group of people and expect no pushback.
02:00:38.000Because since the 60s, the left have stopped caring about the white working class and poverty and started caring much more about minorities and women for lots of very good reasons, obviously.
02:00:46.000But when you ignore a group and they feel disparaged and the real working wages for the white working class in America has fallen since the 60s, their quality of life has plummeted.
02:00:59.000And it's the same way that I feel that we're treating young men at the moment.
02:01:03.000You can't raise a generation of young men in an environment where you take all their status away and not expect them to react.
02:01:10.000So people worry about, oh my God, Andrew Tate, how are people flocking to these men that, I don't know anything about Andrew Tate, but, you know, say he is misogynist.
02:01:20.000How could it be that our young men are flocking to this individual?
02:01:24.000It's because you're calling them, you know, you're calling them You're removing their status.
02:01:30.000So you can't, you know, the left need to understand, you can't disparage and dismiss and insult these entire categories of people.
02:01:37.000And I speak as a lifelong left-wing person.
02:01:39.000You can't do that and not expect some pushback.
02:01:42.000My friend Duncan said that about the pandemic when the people on the left were attacking all the people on the right.
02:01:48.000He said, dude, this is going to lead to a totalitarian right-wing government.
02:01:56.000Because all these people on the left are going crazy.
02:01:58.000And when I saw the riots and shutting down the streets, he was like, oh, this is going to lead to a totalitarian right-wing government because it's going to be the opposite reaction to this.
02:02:47.000And if we can recognize patterns and how people fall into patterns, I think we can have less nuts.
02:02:53.000This has to be established at a young age.
02:02:57.000It's hard for people once they've become set in their ways, especially if they're politically active or socially active online, and they're really kind of addicted to it.
02:03:06.000That's really where they get their jollies from.
02:03:08.000If you just tell them right now, you've got to cut that out.
02:03:10.000Like, what am I going to do for 10 hours a day?
02:03:15.000You know, that's one of my things that I've always gone back and forth in my head about is universal basic income.
02:03:22.000One part of me is always like, you know what, if people just had enough money for food and shelter, then they could go do what they want to do.
02:03:29.000They could chase their dreams and pursue their dreams.
02:03:32.000The other part of me is like, yeah, but then they're not going to have any incentive to do anything.
02:03:36.000They're going to have their food taken care of, they're going to have their shelter taken care of, and there's going to be a certain percentage of people that are never going to get their ass going.
02:03:45.000We're going to miss wasted potential of people who could have pulled their life together and become something really special by overcoming these bizarre obstacles that lead you to success in any given field.
02:03:56.000But if all of a sudden you have all your food taken care of and your shelter taken care of and you just want to sit there, And you're okay?
02:04:04.000There's a certain amount of people that need a little something to get them going.
02:04:08.000And a lot of really ambitious people came from poverty.
02:04:12.000And it's because when they were young, they didn't have shit, and then they figured out that you've got to work harder, and you've got to go after things.
02:04:19.000But I think we all have different personalities and people are going to respond to poverty in different ways.
02:04:23.000And some people have a particular personality where they're wired more for the pursuit of status, where they're going to go, fuck this.
02:04:42.000So, you know, ballpark figure, 50% of who we are is genetic.
02:04:47.000So we all have different personality types.
02:04:49.000And so if you're extrovert, that's a good thing in our neoliberal market economy because you're sociable, you're ambitious.
02:04:57.000If you're low in agreeableness, that's also a good thing in our particular environment because you're competitive.
02:05:04.000But if you're not those things and if you have a low IQ, then you are going to struggle massively to compete in the world today.
02:05:18.000So my argument is that those people deserve some help.
02:05:22.000Those people deserve a social safety net because there's no such thing as a pure meritocracy.
02:05:28.000Human brains don't roll off the production line at Foxconn.
02:05:31.000We're all wired differently with different talents.
02:05:33.000And the fact is some people have low IQ. Some people have personalities which are antisocial, which means that they can't get on in human groups.
02:05:47.000For example, to turn an extrovert into an introvert because of, you know, because a lot of that is genetic.
02:05:52.000Like we're born with these semi-finished brains.
02:05:55.000So genes aren't fates, but they do set us in a certain direction.
02:06:00.000And most of the rest of that kind of creation of self happens when we're young in the first 20 years of life.
02:06:06.000And it's mostly sort of episodes of life over which we have no control.
02:06:11.000So by the time we're in our 20s, early 20s, we're kind of who we are.
02:06:14.000There's not much that's going to change us in a dramatic sense apart from serious trauma.
02:06:21.000So I think that's why we, you know, that idea of neoliberalism with cushions, I think there are categories of people that are always going to need our help through no fault of their own because they're just not equipped biologically to deal with this hyper-competitive world that we're all born into these days.
02:06:38.000What percentage of people that do have the potential to break out of that won't because of a social assistance net that's a little bit too comfortable?
02:07:13.000Yeah, a great school system discovers those people and motivates them and tells them, you could have incredible stuff if you just do a bit of work.
02:07:21.000You've got an excellent mind and an excellent personality.
02:07:23.000And I think that's the job of the school system is to find those people and give them the very best education they can possibly have.
02:07:31.000And again, that's a welfare kind of social safety net tax, sort of slightly bigger tax thing.
02:07:52.000But then there's also a good argument that some people have never been given the opportunity to excel in a thing that they're interested in because they never really found a thing they're interested in.
02:09:11.000So there's a really great academic, he may have even been on this, I don't know, called Joseph Henrich, who's done lots of work in how we operate in groups.
02:09:18.000And he's done this research that shows that those people that we kind of glom onto, especially when we're young, but we never stop doing it.
02:09:28.000There are various cues in our environment that we subconsciously seek out to mimic people.
02:09:47.000So if we see somebody who's really competent at something, we'll start to mimic them and copy them.
02:09:54.000There's success cues, so the symbols of success, so the fast car or in the tribal context, the necklace of teeth.
02:10:02.000And then the other one is prestige cues.
02:10:05.000So if we see lots of other people attending to one person, we'll also attend to them.
02:10:09.000And then the psychologists call this the Paris Hilton effect, where the more people look at somebody, the more people look at them, and it just goes into this runaway thing until you get somebody like Paris Hilton who's got no...
02:10:20.000It's not a skill for anything, who becomes globally famous.
02:10:23.000So the brain's always looking for these people to identify and then copy.
02:10:33.000And the logic is that these people are high status.
02:10:36.000They've worked out how to earn status in the game that we're playing.
02:10:40.000Copying them, we too will learn and rise in status.
02:10:44.000So I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that role models are really important.
02:10:49.000And I think that's why we see, you know, the government always worries about issues of like street gangs in socio-economic, you know, in poor places, jihadist groups in those places.
02:10:59.000And the reason we have street gangs and jihadist groups isn't because...
02:11:03.000Boys will be boys and they're naughty, they're criminals, they're monsters.
02:11:08.000And so if you're a young man growing up in a horrible estate in South London and you're 14 years old and you want status and you've got a choice, I'm going to work in the supermarket, stack in shelves, or I'm going to become a drug dealer and drive a Ferrari.
02:11:23.000So that's what society needs to figure out.
02:11:26.000It's kind of what you were saying is that we need to give young people, especially in lower socio-academic groups, more opportunities to earn status.
02:11:35.000I mean, that's one of the things about being middle class is you get all those opportunities to earn status.
02:11:38.000You get education, you go to college, you can choose all these careers.
02:11:41.000But poorer people just don't have those opportunities.
02:12:03.000Yeah, there was a guy in the 70s who went to this, it was Nigerian Africa.
02:12:12.000And there used to be this, like a run by the royals, so aristocratic rulers.
02:12:20.000And then these jihadists came in and just got rid of them all.
02:12:23.000And he was curious, this guy, his name is Bascom, I think, Jerome Bascom.
02:12:27.000Why is it that Islam is really popular in this place?
02:12:30.000Because it should be hated because they've swept away everybody's status games, the existing status games they were playing.
02:12:37.000So he went in and he met two former descendants of the royalty.
02:12:42.000And one of them was a peanut seller and he was miserable.
02:12:46.000And he was kind of stooped and depressed and struggled in his marriage and was bitter because he used to be this big man and now he was nothing.
02:12:55.000And the other guy had gone into the Islamic, the Muslim, the status game of Islam.
02:13:00.000And he learned the Koran by the age of 16, which is very prestigious.
02:15:50.000Because status is your reward for offering value to other people.
02:15:53.000So why would you not want to offer value to other people?
02:15:55.000That's like the definition of a loser.
02:15:57.000If you stop caring that other people think you're a valuable person, then you really are those people that you were talking about that just have no up and go.
02:16:13.000He was another guy that, you know, the roots of the universe is fascinating that he went to, was it Harvard University and had those experiments?
02:16:21.000And that was an exercise in humiliation.
02:16:25.000And part of what they did, they would dose him up with LSD and they would do humiliating things to him and berate him.
02:16:31.000And they were doing it as an experiment.
02:16:34.000They were trying to see what they could do to him and how he would react.
02:16:38.000And the fact that they were using LSD while they were doing this is so nuts.
02:16:41.000Yeah, they got him to, they said it was a genomic experiment and the first thing to do was he had to write down in great detail all of his secrets, all of his hopes and dreams, like his most personal, important things.
02:16:52.000And then he was sat in a desk like this with lights shining in his face and all these people were just mocking him, mocking him, mocking him, tearing him to bits.
02:17:26.000Which, you know, they didn't understand back then, I guess, that that's crucial to the development of a human being.
02:17:32.000Without it, literally, a baby will go mad.
02:17:35.000And so then, when he was older, one of the things his brother talked about, because his brother was the one who read the manifesto and recognized his brother's handwriting, because it wasn't just a manifesto.
02:17:45.000It was the specific way that he was talking about things and the way his understanding of technology and It was his brother.
02:17:51.000His brother had this crazy anti-technology philosophy a long fucking time ago.
02:17:56.000But he was saying that if he made an advance on a girl and the girl rejected him, he would be horrific and angry and write letters and just berate her.
02:18:07.000It was crazy where he had to go, what the fuck are you doing?
02:18:10.000So he knew his brother was just broken.
02:18:40.000So his brain told this horrifically misogynist story that women were responsible for all the evils in the world and decided to go out and kill a bunch of them.
02:20:42.000But in his memoir, he goes from being a— Yeah, definitely a weirdo, without a doubt.
02:20:48.000But then he starts telling a story where actually he's this kind of godlike character that has a special insight in the world.
02:20:58.000And the special insight is that all the evil in the world is because women choose jocks to procreate with and not superior people like him.
02:21:08.000So what he's going to do is take over the world and abolish sex.
02:21:12.000Because sex is at the root of all evil.
02:21:14.000And he's going to allow certain women to procreate under certain conditions, but only for the continuation of the species.
02:21:20.000And so he goes from just being a misogynist and an outcast to somebody who's mentally ill.
02:21:25.000Well, call me cynical, but I don't think people not playing World of Warcraft with you can do that.
02:21:32.000I have a feeling he might have already been out of his fucking mind.
02:23:35.000The fact that humans automatically reward each other and ourselves when we give to others is probably the most wonderful thing about our species.
02:23:43.000It's like an incredible thing that we do.
02:23:45.000So it's nothing to be, I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of that people feel good about.
02:24:22.000And that's one of those things that crosses both ideological boundaries.
02:24:30.000And this is where I think we have a real problem, is that so many people just subscribe to whatever one side believes because of this status game.
02:24:41.000And they don't take any consideration, like, why am I attached to this idea?
02:24:43.000What does it have to do with the other ones that I like?
02:24:45.000Or why are they all lumped in together?
02:24:47.000How come if I believe this, I also have to believe in that?
02:25:26.000Once you're past the age of 45, or even 40, if all of your beliefs line up with left or right, then something's gone wrong with your life.
02:25:34.000Like, by the time you're 45, you should be smart enough to have figured out that they've got some stuff right, and they've got some stuff right, and you should have decided for yourself which is which.
02:25:45.000And so when I meet somebody that's my age, and they're just giving this sort of list of talking points from left or right, I just think, oh, God, you're 16. You're a 16-year-old.
02:25:58.000It's weird how some people will argue about something, and then when you just calmly and rationally ask them, like, why do you believe this?
02:26:05.000Like, what do you know about studies that were involved in this?
02:26:09.000Like, what do What do you know about the origin of this?
02:26:11.000You can say it in the most peaceful way and just talk just like that, and they'll get hostile because they don't have that information.
02:26:19.000They just know that you must be some sort of a bad person if you're not following the narrative.
02:26:24.000Like, come on, we all know what's going on.
02:26:41.000Very few people can stand outside their ideas.
02:26:43.000And one of the things that I always try to tell as many people that listen, one of the things that's benefited me tremendously is when I stop being attached to my ideas.
02:27:48.000Because those are the ones that are status generators for us.
02:27:53.000Our status depends on this idea that Yeah.
02:28:15.000Yeah, and it's a really dangerous trap that everyone can fall into, all of us.
02:28:19.000That's why cults are so terrifying to me.
02:28:21.000They're not terrifying to me because I look at these people like, oh, they're so stupid, you know, these fucking dummies are going to ruin the world.
02:28:28.000No, I'm terrified because that could have been me.
02:28:30.000I think it could be anybody, and I think we are naive to think that we're not subject to the same kind of capture that many, many people have gotten into.
02:28:39.000Whether it's communism, or whether it's socialism, or whether it's Nazism, or one of these crazy fucking cults, where people cut their balls off, wear the purple sneakers, you could get sucked into it.
02:28:52.000Maybe you are at a certain level of your life where you have enough sophistication and understanding, and you're good at reading people, and you can recognize bullshit.
02:29:00.000But maybe you have enough for that, but maybe the next one will get you.
02:29:04.000Maybe there's one that's a little bit better.
02:29:06.000It's kind of a church, but it's a rock and roll kind of thing.
02:29:11.000A thought experiment that I like is this idea that shows that your irrational beliefs are invisible to you.
02:29:20.000So when you think about the people that are close to you, like you can, you know, each one of those people, what they're wrong about, like this person, don't get them talking about that.
02:29:29.000And then the further you go out from your social circles, the more wrong and mad and crazy people get to you, get to the ball cutting cold and the communists.
02:29:36.000So that just leaves you in the middle, the island of perfect island of absolute rationality.
02:29:41.000So you go, hang on a minute, that can't be right.
02:30:00.000You feel like I'm the most correct person, literally, in the world.
02:30:05.000You know logically you can't be, but you can't see, you can't find what you're wrong about.
02:30:09.000Especially if you're rationalizing everything that you do and every idea that you have as being the correct idea, which is why it's so dangerous.
02:30:17.000Your value, your worth should not be entirely your ideas.
02:30:41.000But if you irrationally defend an idea, then it is you.
02:30:45.000Well, as soon as that becomes an active belief, a belief that you're acting out in the world, that's causing your behavior, that you're trying to spread to other people and convince other people it's true, then you're already on a slippery slope because you're already feeling irrationally about that belief.
02:31:00.000And I've seen it happen to brilliant people.
02:32:24.000So it's like this guy who is incredibly smart and incredibly well-known In the skeptic community, had managed to convince himself that the placebo effect was this fake thing that didn't really work because it was only psychological, just to give him permission to sort of shit on homeopathy.
02:32:41.000But does the placebo effect work in terms of curing diseases?
02:32:59.000Yeah, I mean, there are well-known studies that show that when you buy a brand – I always buy brand-name painkillers because it has greater placebo than the cheap supermarket-owned brand.
02:33:09.000And even when you know it's the placebo, it still works more.
02:33:14.000So that extra few bucks that you're spending on the brand-name painkillers is worth it.
02:33:18.000Well, isn't there just a problem with calling yourself a skeptic?
02:33:20.000Because why don't you just be a thinker?
02:33:22.000It's like, why are you specifically looking at things and it's, meh, I'm cynical.
02:34:19.000So his whole thing was like, it's an easy thing to do.
02:34:21.000If you prove anything that's supernatural or woo woo, he used to call it, you get a million dollars.
02:34:28.000And the fact that nobody had ever got this a million dollars was his proof that none of this could exist.
02:34:33.000But there is story after story after story after story of people applying for this million dollar challenge, him backing out at the last minute for spurious reasons and then attacking that person in public.
02:34:43.000So that happened again and again and again.
02:34:45.000I think the worst instance of that was this Greek, again, homeopathy person who'd spent something like half a million euros setting up a study in a hospital to test...
02:35:16.000But one of the amazing things about that was that I asked him at the end of the interview after he'd admitted, yes, I've lied about this stuff.
02:35:23.000I said, have you ever changed your mind about anything?
02:35:26.000And he was in his 80s at the time, I think.
02:35:28.000He couldn't tell me a single thing that he had ever changed his mind about.