The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2102 - Will Storr

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 CNN at one point in time, when Bourdain had his show on, they were doing some very interesting things.

00:00:18.000 They were trying to do shows, not just the news, right?

00:00:24.000 So they had No Reservations was the best one of them.

00:00:27.000 Where they had, you know, they just told Anthony Bourdain, just be you and just do what you do.

00:00:31.000 Do your best version of your show.

00:00:34.000 And they really just got out of the way. 0.98

00:00:35.000 And it was fucking amazing. 0.95

00:00:36.000 Yeah. 0.97

00:00:37.000 Yeah, so they got out of his way.

00:00:38.000 They let him be the best of himself.

00:00:40.000 They figured out how to do that.

00:00:42.000 Kamau Bell had a really good show too.

00:00:44.000 Is that show still on?

00:00:46.000 I don't think so.

00:00:47.000 What was that show called?

00:00:49.000 I'm sorry, I forget the name of these shows.

00:00:52.000 But W. Kamau Bell was really good at being calm.

00:00:57.000 United Shades of America.

00:00:59.000 United Shades of America.

00:01:00.000 Really good at being calm.

00:01:03.000 Like talking to KKK people. 0.99

00:01:05.000 And he's black.

00:01:06.000 And he's a comic.

00:01:07.000 But he's just a very nice guy.

00:01:08.000 He's a very nice guy.

00:01:10.000 Like a genuinely nice guy in real life. 0.94

00:01:11.000 And so when he's doing a show, even when he's confronted by the most ignorant racists, And he can have conversations with them. 0.86

00:01:20.000 And then, you know, they're like, well, you're not like the others. 0.81

00:01:24.000 Well, that's the best kind of journalism, you know, you can properly immerse yourself in those worlds.

00:01:29.000 Yeah, and CNN did that for a while.

00:01:31.000 You know, they had that other show, was it Radical, with that one gentleman who, Reza Aslan, is that his name?

00:01:42.000 That was another good show.

00:01:43.000 They did some interesting stuff.

00:01:46.000 They did, like, quite a few interesting shows where they were just shows.

00:01:50.000 It 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.

00:02:01.000 And there's so much to terrify you about today.

00:02:06.000 You know?

00:02:07.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:02:09.000 They seem to have lost the art of storytelling.

00:02:11.000 Yeah, it's very unfortunate.

00:02:13.000 So, 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.

00:02:22.000 I really enjoyed you on Trigonometry, and that's why I wanted to talk to you here.

00:02:26.000 Because it's just, I think your book is The Status Game.

00:02:31.000 That's right, yeah.

00:02:32.000 And I think what's really interesting about what you're talking about Mechanisms that make people understand, like, behavior patterns.

00:02:43.000 In a way, instead of just accepting them, you know, because I think a lot of people fall into accepting behavior patterns.

00:02:50.000 But what you're showing is, like, these status games that human beings play.

00:02:56.000 They're sort of wired into our being.

00:02:59.000 And we don't recognize them.

00:03:01.000 They 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.

00:03:14.000 That's right, that's right.

00:03:15.000 So I think the general thesis is that humans want two things.

00:03:20.000 They want connection into groups, and then once they're in the group, they want status.

00:03:24.000 So, you know, it's not enough to feel like we're a Christian.

00:03:28.000 We have to be a good Christian, and that means following certain rules.

00:03:32.000 And that's what brains just want to do.

00:03:35.000 Brains don't really care about what's true.

00:03:37.000 Brains are always asking this question, who do I have to be and what do I have to believe? 0.62

00:03:43.000 In order to earn connection and status.

00:03:45.000 And we're all vulnerable to this stuff. 0.95

00:03:46.000 And that's how people end up believing fucking crazy things. 0.94

00:03:49.000 Because the brain's just believing what it has to believe. 0.99

00:03:52.000 I've seen it with people that get what you call audience capture.

00:03:56.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:03:58.000 Where their audience, they find, they get some love.

00:04:01.000 You can only, if you're doing it politically, you can only do it once.

00:04:03.000 It's a dangerous move.

00:04:04.000 It's like changing genders. 1.00

00:04:06.000 Like you can't go male to female and go back to male again. 1.00

00:04:08.000 It's fucking, it's too complicated. 1.00

00:04:10.000 One shot deal, yeah. 1.00

00:04:11.000 So you get one shot.

00:04:12.000 If you start out a liberal, you're a lifelong liberal.

00:04:14.000 And then at 36, all of a sudden you become like the most hardcore right-winging Republican.

00:04:21.000 That seems like...

00:04:22.000 Well, what did you believe before and what happened?

00:04:25.000 Did you take mushrooms?

00:04:26.000 Did you fall on your head?

00:04:28.000 Did something happen where you just radically changed your ideology?

00:04:33.000 Or did you get captured by the idea of being accepted With much more vigor by the other side.

00:04:41.000 Like, that's one thing that they really do enjoy when someone bails on the other side.

00:04:45.000 And then, again, you can only do it once.

00:04:47.000 But you get, like, really embraced.

00:04:49.000 That's right.

00:04:50.000 And the more you embrace, the more you believe.

00:04:54.000 Yes.

00:04:54.000 Yeah, I mean, there's this concept that I write about.

00:04:57.000 I call it active belief.

00:04:58.000 There are loads of beliefs that we have, like...

00:05:00.000 How long is the Mississippi Ripper?

00:05:02.000 What is coffee?

00:05:04.000 We don't argue about these beliefs.

00:05:06.000 But there are certain categories of belief that possess us.

00:05:10.000 And these are the beliefs that we form our identity around and they're beliefs that we plug our status into.

00:05:16.000 So, you know, like if you're a Christian, it's like, I believe Jesus died and then three days later got up. 0.66

00:05:25.000 As I said, these beliefs are kind of dangerous because they take us over.

00:05:29.000 It's not enough just to believe them passively.

00:05:31.000 You have to act them out with your life.

00:05:33.000 And so these are the beliefs that drive things like the satanic panic, cult movements, communism, Nazism.

00:05:41.000 These are beliefs that sort of possess people and take them over. 0.93

00:05:44.000 It's like a parasite.

00:05:45.000 They're kind of scary things.

00:05:46.000 But as I said, we're all vulnerable to these kind of active beliefs.

00:05:51.000 I'm fascinated by cult documentaries.

00:05:53.000 And I was talking to my friend Todd.

00:05:56.000 We were talking about Wow Wow Country.

00:05:58.000 And we both said the same thing.

00:06:00.000 God, in the beginning it looked awesome.

00:06:02.000 In the beginning they were having so much fun!

00:06:05.000 And I think of myself at 21. And I had no real confidence in my view of the world.

00:06:17.000 I was 21. I was a young dummy. 0.96

00:06:20.000 I did not know what was correct and what was incorrect.

00:06:25.000 I had a general sense.

00:06:27.000 My family was very left-wing.

00:06:30.000 My parents were hippies in San Francisco, so I had sort of an ideology attached to that.

00:06:35.000 But I had no idea how anything in the world worked.

00:06:40.000 And if I ran into the wrong yoga teacher...

00:06:44.000 No, but that's it.

00:06:45.000 But that's how humans work, you know, with this tribal animal. 1.00

00:06:48.000 And nobody has any idea how the world works until they plug into a group.

00:06:53.000 And the group has its stories that it tells about how the world works.

00:06:56.000 Every group has its model of what a hero is and this set of beliefs a hero has.

00:07:01.000 And once we've plugged into that group, we orient ourselves towards becoming that group.

00:07:07.000 Yes.

00:07:08.000 That person.

00:07:09.000 And you know, cults are interesting because cults are like, all human groups are kind of cults, but looser.

00:07:14.000 So 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.

00:07:24.000 And the more, the better you become at following those rules and becoming its ideal of self, the higher you rise up that status game.

00:07:33.000 The only difference between cult and a religion and a business and a political group is that it's much tighter.

00:07:38.000 So the rules are much stricter.

00:07:39.000 There's a zillion rules.

00:07:41.000 I've written before about...

00:07:43.000 What was the cult that they castrated themselves?

00:07:51.000 Yeah, Heaven's Gate.

00:07:52.000 Heaven's Gate, that's right.

00:07:53.000 And they had rules even about how much toothpaste you're allowed to put on your...

00:07:56.000 Your toothbrush.

00:07:57.000 They had a rule about exactly how scrambled eggs were to be cooked and the rule was dry but not burnt.

00:08:05.000 So there was a rule about how much water you put in your bathtub.

00:08:08.000 Was the leader castrated as well?

00:08:13.000 No, he wasn't, surprisingly enough.

00:08:15.000 Really?

00:08:16.000 Yeah, they were called T and Doe.

00:08:17.000 There he is, T. Just imagine you are so low in your life that you think that's the guy that has all the answers.

00:08:27.000 Is that a tribal thing?

00:08:30.000 This is what I've always assumed, that that's just some holdover from when we were a part of groups of 150 people that needed a leader.

00:08:37.000 And generally that leader would be some old warlord.

00:08:41.000 He's probably like 35, you know, back then.

00:08:44.000 But had gone through a lot and was a strong leader, was someone that you admired as a leader.

00:08:49.000 And maybe in these tribal times, that's baked into our DNA. And when someone comes along and speaks confidently...

00:08:58.000 I am never confident.

00:08:59.000 I'm never confident.

00:09:00.000 If 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.

00:09:11.000 I'm not that confident.

00:09:12.000 So I could get sucked in.

00:09:14.000 Any human could get sucked in.

00:09:16.000 But is that what it's from?

00:09:17.000 Is it from tribal times?

00:09:18.000 Yes and no.

00:09:19.000 So one of the really surprising things about tribes, the tribes in which we evolved, is that the idea of the big man is a bit of a myth.

00:09:25.000 So they were kind of leaderless.

00:09:27.000 Leaders 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.

00:09:34.000 And what do you think?

00:09:36.000 But at some point in time, they became leaders.

00:09:38.000 I mean, they've been leaders for so long.

00:09:40.000 When we settled down.

00:09:41.000 When was that?

00:09:42.000 Like agriculture?

00:09:43.000 Yeah, it was about 11,000 years ago.

00:09:44.000 But don't you think that's enough to bake it into our DNA? I don't know.

00:09:48.000 I think what is in our DNA is that idea of A, stories.

00:09:52.000 So, you know, we're storytelling animals.

00:09:54.000 We think in stories.

00:09:56.000 Every tribe has its particular story about the world.

00:09:59.000 And so we're very good at channeling those stories.

00:10:02.000 And as I said, every story has its design of what is a hero.

00:10:06.000 And we try and become that kind of hero.

00:10:08.000 So that's that holdover from the tribal day. 0.99

00:10:12.000 But more fundamentally, again, it's that brain question of...

00:10:16.000 Who do I have to be?

00:10:17.000 What do I have to do?

00:10:18.000 Tell me what I have to do in order to achieve connection and status.

00:10:21.000 And that's what a cult does.

00:10:23.000 And that's what a charismatic leader does.

00:10:25.000 It tells you this is what you've got to do.

00:10:27.000 These are the rules.

00:10:28.000 This is who you have to become.

00:10:30.000 And that's really seductive to us subconsciously because those two things of connection and status are so incredibly important to us.

00:10:39.000 Yeah.

00:10:41.000 It's...

00:10:43.000 Is it something you think should be taught very early on?

00:10:47.000 It seems like this is information we should get to kids as young as we can, so they can recognize these patterns that people fall into.

00:10:55.000 Absolutely.

00:10:56.000 I've always thought that there should be a lesson in school about what is a human?

00:11:00.000 What is the basic operating system manual for a human?

00:11:02.000 And these are the mistakes that humans make.

00:11:04.000 Because, as I said, one of the big ideas is that We're not particularly interested in the truth.

00:11:11.000 The truth is it doesn't matter to human brains.

00:11:13.000 What matters is what do I have to believe in order for people to like me and respect me?

00:11:19.000 Well, that's why religions, like even radical religions, are so intoxicating.

00:11:24.000 Like you have to be all in.

00:11:26.000 You're part of a very special group and you all love each other like brothers and sisters because you're part of this group.

00:11:33.000 Yeah.

00:11:34.000 And you can come up with some radical ideas and get people to subscribe to that.

00:11:39.000 Especially if you attach things like death for people who leave.

00:11:43.000 Yeah.

00:11:44.000 You know?

00:11:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:11:45.000 That's right.

00:11:46.000 You're operating in some redline territory.

00:11:50.000 Yeah.

00:11:50.000 That's a wild group.

00:11:51.000 And the religions and the cults always do that thing of offering amazing rewards.

00:11:56.000 Of course.

00:11:56.000 At some point in the future.

00:11:58.000 Bro, heaven.

00:11:59.000 It's the best spot ever. 0.99

00:12:01.000 And the version of heaven differs between how bad the place where you live sucks. 0.99

00:12:05.000 Yeah. 0.62

00:12:07.000 And I think there's like eight and a half billion people in the world and I think it's like 500 million atheists.

00:12:14.000 So 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.

00:12:26.000 I remember during the suicide bomber days when that was something that was in the news all the time. 0.96

00:12:31.000 They talked about 72 virgins and that these gentlemen thought that they were going to get 72 virgins in heaven.

00:12:38.000 Like that is so cultural.

00:12:39.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:12:40.000 Like, if you offered 72 virgins to a Christian, they'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? 1.00

00:12:45.000 I'm not fucking any virgins, you crazy psycho. 1.00

00:12:48.000 How old are they? 1.00

00:12:49.000 What are you saying?

00:12:50.000 I'm not a pedophile, dude.

00:12:51.000 I just like women. 1.00

00:12:53.000 Yeah.

00:12:54.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:12:55.000 It's like...

00:12:55.000 Yeah, but I'm not sure how, I mean, I don't know if that 72 versions thing is true.

00:12:59.000 It could be like 21-year-old versions that have been saved for this moment by the great one.

00:13:04.000 But I think that term is not real.

00:13:06.000 I think the term 72 versions is like saying, you know, how many times have you lost your phone? 0.98

00:13:11.000 A fucking million? 0.92

00:13:12.000 It's like that kind of a, you know, it's an exaggeration. 0.99

00:13:15.000 But 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.

00:13:23.000 It's like, if you sacrifice your life on behalf of the group's mission, you're a hero.

00:13:28.000 You're like a god.

00:13:29.000 And so that's the promise.

00:13:31.000 And again, I think it's a really good example of how...

00:13:34.000 Human beings value status over their lives. 0.99

00:13:36.000 I mean, that's how much we value status.

00:13:38.000 We're the only animal that kills ourself, which is just a weird thing in itself.

00:13:42.000 An animal would voluntarily end its own life.

00:13:45.000 And 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.

00:13:53.000 So they're lacking in those essential kind of psychological resources to such an extent that they end their own lives.

00:13:59.000 And that's how much we value these things.

00:14:02.000 Suicide bombers are another manifestation of that.

00:14:05.000 Like, if you're going to consider me a hero, and if Mohammed is going to consider me a hero, strap me up, brother. 0.99

00:14:12.000 That's how crazy we become about these social rewards.

00:14:17.000 God, that is such an insane belief.

00:14:19.000 It's so insane.

00:14:21.000 And the most evil thing is when you hear about them talking kids into doing it.

00:14:27.000 Yeah.

00:14:29.000 You know, a young child, you know, what is the youngest suicide bomber they've ever used?

00:14:36.000 I don't know.

00:14:37.000 Just the idea that you can buy into it so much that you're willing to let your children go do that.

00:14:46.000 Yeah, but it's...

00:14:48.000 Wild.

00:14:48.000 It's evil if you think it's this kind of calculating kind of mathematical algorithm of advantage.

00:14:57.000 But they sincerely believe it.

00:14:59.000 They really believe it's true.

00:15:01.000 Right.

00:15:01.000 I mean, when I was an author, I was a journalist.

00:15:04.000 I've been meeting kind of crazy people, including Nazis, as part of my journalistic career. 0.86

00:15:09.000 That's one of the things that always strikes me is that They really believe it, this crazy stuff. 0.66

00:15:16.000 So it's not even in the sense that they're doing anything calculating by talking their children into being suicide bombers.

00:15:22.000 They think they're doing something heroic.

00:15:24.000 They think they're doing something amazing, as did the Nazis, as did the Communists. 0.73

00:15:28.000 Yeah, as did the KKK. People, they can fall into belief structures and they don't necessarily have to make sense.

00:15:36.000 But if they find enough supportive people around them that also believe that, then it becomes part of their tribe identity.

00:15:42.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:15:43.000 And it can be really stupid. 1.00

00:15:45.000 It can be really stupid. 1.00

00:15:47.000 We're fucking way more vulnerable than we'd like to believe. 1.00

00:15:50.000 That's one of the things that I was saying when I watched those cult documentaries. 0.99

00:15:53.000 Part of me is like, thank God I didn't run into those people.

00:15:57.000 Thank God!

00:15:57.000 They would've got me!

00:15:58.000 And 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.

00:16:07.000 The family hasn't worked.

00:16:09.000 The job hasn't worked.

00:16:10.000 The hobbies haven't worked.

00:16:11.000 So they've got no identity.

00:16:12.000 They've got no tribe.

00:16:13.000 So they're really vulnerable to these cults.

00:16:16.000 Because what cults offer is absolute certainty.

00:16:19.000 If 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.

00:16:31.000 That's what they were offering to you though, the level above human.

00:16:34.000 You have to wear the Nikes though.

00:16:34.000 Remember you have to wear the purple Nikes?

00:16:36.000 Yeah.

00:16:36.000 That's right.

00:16:39.000 There's this crazy memoir of one of the guys who was in this group. 0.99

00:16:45.000 He didn't cut his own balls off. 0.98

00:16:47.000 He left before the ball cutting. 0.99

00:16:48.000 But he was jealous. 0.97

00:16:50.000 He wanted to have his balls cut and there was only one person that could have it done in the beginning. 0.98

00:16:55.000 They flipped a coin and he was really annoyed that he lost the coin flip. 0.99

00:16:59.000 Oh my god.

00:17:00.000 But 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.

00:17:08.000 But we wanted to follow the rules.

00:17:09.000 Like, not following the rules would be like being a NASA astronaut and just not caring about how the space shuttle works, you know.

00:17:16.000 So they're not...

00:17:19.000 They don't consider themselves brainwashed.

00:17:21.000 They consider themselves, well, they're just in a status game, like any other status game.

00:17:24.000 It's just a very, very strict one.

00:17:26.000 Right.

00:17:26.000 Well, 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.

00:17:33.000 They have, like, specific terms that they say.

00:17:36.000 Like, doesn't Scientologists, they'll call people, they have, like, an abbreviation for someone who's, like, a hostile person?

00:17:42.000 I don't know.

00:17:42.000 What is it that they do?

00:17:44.000 Because 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.

00:17:58.000 Suppressive persons. 0.72

00:17:59.000 Suppressive persons. 0.72

00:18:00.000 Yeah, you're a suppressive person.

00:18:02.000 Or potential trouble sources.

00:18:04.000 Dude, I ordered Dianetics in like 1994. I had just moved to LA and I thought it was a self-help book.

00:18:11.000 I was like, all right, yeah, fucking look at it. 1.00

00:18:13.000 Your brain's going to explode. 1.00

00:18:14.000 You've got to get your shit together. 1.00

00:18:15.000 Look at all these people that are succeeding on Dianetics. 1.00

00:18:18.000 You know, I was 26 or whatever it was.

00:18:20.000 So I ordered this book and they never stopped sending me things. 0.97

00:18:24.000 I mean, they fucking never stopped sending me things. 0.89

00:18:27.000 Was there ever a point when you thought, Hang on a minute. 0.98

00:18:29.000 This is quite...

00:18:30.000 No.

00:18:30.000 No, no.

00:18:31.000 Once I realized it was Scientology, I was like, oh, Dianetics is Scientology?

00:18:35.000 I was like, okay. 0.98

00:18:36.000 But then part of me was like, damn, a lot of these Scientologists are doing really well in Hollywood. 0.95

00:18:40.000 Maybe that's a good call to join. 0.97

00:18:42.000 Maybe if they just let me be me.

00:18:44.000 Because it seems like that was part of it.

00:18:47.000 There was a big allure of how many successful people were following that religion.

00:18:53.000 I 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.

00:19:03.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:19:05.000 Somebody was saying to me the other day that they thought that actors were particularly susceptible to Scientology because they've got this weird...

00:19:12.000 They don't really have an identity, actors.

00:19:14.000 They were always sort of slipping into everybody at different people's identities.

00:19:17.000 I thought that was an interesting kind of theory.

00:19:18.000 Especially if you're really good.

00:19:19.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:19:20.000 You probably lose who the fuck you are. 1.00

00:19:22.000 Who am I? Am I Rocky? 1.00

00:19:24.000 Am I the Mission Impossible guy?

00:19:26.000 When they're walking around, everybody treats them that way.

00:19:28.000 I'm sure they treat Stallone like he's Rocky.

00:19:31.000 Yeah.

00:19:31.000 You'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.

00:19:41.000 Yeah.

00:19:42.000 That's how much he believes in this stuff.

00:19:46.000 But that's why these groups are kind of functional as well.

00:19:49.000 It's like I kind of have a weird kind of sympathy.

00:19:51.000 I grew up in a very strict Catholic household with very strict Catholic parents and I was very...

00:19:56.000 I hated it.

00:19:57.000 I was very rebellious as a teenager.

00:19:59.000 And I guess in my 20s and 30s, I was very, very atheist and, you know, hated religion.

00:20:04.000 But then I kind of did a lot of this research.

00:20:07.000 And 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.

00:20:16.000 That's what religion provides my parents, is that they're connected into community and they feel important.

00:20:21.000 They feel they're good Catholic.

00:20:23.000 Yeah.

00:20:36.000 Populations in which we live, it's very hard to feel securely connected. 1.00

00:20:40.000 I mean, as you said a moment ago, the tribes in which we evolved were very small, like 30 to 50 people.

00:20:45.000 So it's quite easy to feel securely connected.

00:20:47.000 It was quite easy in that environment to feel important, like valued by other people.

00:20:52.000 I mean, probably it was not rare in the tribe to feel invaluable, like you're needed because everybody was needed.

00:21:00.000 There wasn't many people around to find the tubers and catch the rabbits or whatever.

00:21:04.000 But in this day and age, in these huge groups in which we belong to, it's much harder to feel...

00:21:11.000 Relative status, because you're competing with millions of people, especially online.

00:21:15.000 And I think that's a source of a huge amount of misery in the modern world, and identity anxiety, identity stress.

00:21:24.000 We feel really unsatisfied with the amount of connection and status that we have because we exist in these fucking massive international tribes now.

00:21:33.000 I think there's another factor.

00:21:36.000 And 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,

00:21:52.000 I think we're conversation starved.

00:21:55.000 I 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.

00:22:05.000 And most of the day, you can't really talk.

00:22:09.000 Most of the day, you can't sit down for a couple hours.

00:22:12.000 Like this.

00:22:13.000 And just say, why do we behave this way?

00:22:16.000 Why is there this weird pattern that is so strong? 0.95

00:22:20.000 It's such a tightly cut groove that cutting your balls off and wearing purple sneakers becomes appealing.

00:22:27.000 It can fit right in there. 0.97

00:22:28.000 It seems to be like a pathway for this.

00:22:30.000 Yeah, and that's how humans communicate.

00:22:33.000 We sit down and we tell stories to each other.

00:22:36.000 And if we don't get to talk.

00:22:37.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:22:39.000 We're very lucky we get to talk.

00:22:41.000 Yeah.

00:22:41.000 But most people don't get to talk like this.

00:22:43.000 Yeah.

00:22:43.000 They don't have the time.

00:22:44.000 Absolutely.

00:22:45.000 Yeah.

00:22:46.000 And that's to our huge cost.

00:22:48.000 Yes.

00:22:49.000 Because where do we get the stories from?

00:22:51.000 We get them from social media.

00:22:52.000 We get them from the news, which is increasingly politicized and hysterical.

00:22:57.000 Yeah.

00:22:57.000 And so the outrage goes up.

00:22:59.000 Like if you're a used car salesman and you talk to people, you're bullshitting people all day long. 1.00

00:23:03.000 When do you ever turn the bullshit off? 1.00

00:23:05.000 Do you know how to anymore? 1.00

00:23:06.000 You probably become a used car salesman forever.

00:23:09.000 Yeah.

00:23:10.000 Well, that's what we do.

00:23:10.000 I 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.

00:23:25.000 By the way, I should just say there's a lot of very cool used car salesmen.

00:23:27.000 It's just a joke.

00:23:29.000 It's a term, but you do know there's a difference between salespeople that are just real friendly folks and then super sale-y guys.

00:23:38.000 And those super sale-y guys, I'm like, How does that guy turn that off? 0.98

00:23:41.000 Like, that's such a bullshit way to talk. 0.99

00:23:43.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:23:43.000 John Paul Sartre wrote about this. 0.99

00:23:45.000 He called it bad faith.

00:23:46.000 And he was sitting in a cafe in Paris at one time.

00:23:49.000 And he was watching The Waiter.

00:23:50.000 And he realized that The Waiter was just behaving like a waiter, like a classic Parisian waiter.

00:23:55.000 He's going, look at his movements.

00:23:56.000 And he was just really annoying.

00:23:58.000 John Paul Sartre.

00:24:00.000 He's acting in bad faith.

00:24:01.000 He's doing the dance of The Waiter.

00:24:02.000 That's not really who he is.

00:24:03.000 Right.

00:24:04.000 He's just being the waiter.

00:24:06.000 And he said, there's the dance of the auctioneer, there's the dance of the used car salesman.

00:24:09.000 And that's kind of what we do.

00:24:10.000 The dance of the strip club DJ. Yeah, and the dance of the member of the cult.

00:24:15.000 Dance of the lead singer of a rock and roll band.

00:24:18.000 And that's what the brain does, though.

00:24:21.000 It identifies, okay, what group am I in?

00:24:25.000 What does a hero look like?

00:24:27.000 I've got to turn myself into this person.

00:24:29.000 Yeah, 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.

00:24:39.000 Yeah.

00:24:39.000 And someone wrote in big letters, quit trying to be hicks.

00:24:42.000 Yeah.

00:24:45.000 When Jamie tore the place down, he's not this Jamie, Jamie that owns the club, tore the place down, he swore he saved that for me.

00:24:52.000 I want that little piece of memorabilia.

00:24:54.000 Because it was just so, there were so many people that saw Hicks and were like, God, he's so profound.

00:25:00.000 I want to be profound. 0.99

00:25:01.000 But you don't have shit to say, you don't even read. 0.99

00:25:03.000 I know. 0.99

00:25:04.000 Do we talk about Dennis Leary in this?

00:25:06.000 There's no need to.

00:25:08.000 Yeah, there's no need to.

00:25:10.000 But yeah, I've said enough about that.

00:25:12.000 Okay.

00:25:13.000 But yeah, there's just a lot of that.

00:25:16.000 There's a lot of posturing.

00:25:19.000 That's not really how you feel.

00:25:21.000 But 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.

00:25:29.000 Yeah.

00:25:29.000 And that's why it's so incredible when someone comes along and does something in that space that's new but still works.

00:25:35.000 That's, for me, the definition of a genius.

00:25:37.000 Anybody can experiment, but most experiments go wrong.

00:25:39.000 But 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.

00:25:46.000 It's just people are so easily influenced.

00:25:48.000 And when someone is really stunningly good, like there's a David Tell problem, okay?

00:25:53.000 The 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.

00:26:02.000 But they're not as good as his punchlines. 0.98

00:26:05.000 And you fucking sound like Dave Attell. 0.98

00:26:06.000 But it's not even... 0.99

00:26:08.000 They're not like plagiarists.

00:26:10.000 They're just easily influenced people that are starting.

00:26:13.000 They're not good yet.

00:26:14.000 You know what I mean?

00:26:15.000 You get susceptible to patterns.

00:26:18.000 Yeah, I don't even know if I would say that was easy influence.

00:26:20.000 I think it's just normal.

00:26:21.000 That's how brains work.

00:26:22.000 You know, they mimic, they copy.

00:26:24.000 When guys work together all the time, I see they start making the same sort of similar hand movements on stage.

00:26:30.000 You start doing the same kind of things.

00:26:31.000 Well, it's the same with writing. 0.70

00:26:32.000 If 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. 0.72

00:26:38.000 Well, that's what Hunter S. Thompson said he did.

00:26:40.000 Didn't he write The Great Gatsby over and over and over again just to get a sense of the rhythm of the words?

00:26:45.000 When he was learning how to write, I believe he did that.

00:26:47.000 But I think he also did the Book of Revelations, didn't he?

00:26:51.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:26:51.000 Yeah, which I thought was amazing, because you can really sense that in his writing, this kind of apocalyptic madness. 0.71

00:26:57.000 I'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.

00:27:05.000 I believe that, for sure.

00:27:07.000 Typed out the great Caspian farewell to arms, word for word.

00:27:12.000 A method for learning how to write like the masters.

00:27:15.000 Wow, that's someone dedicated.

00:27:17.000 That's commitment.

00:27:17.000 That's dedicated to it.

00:27:18.000 He's another guy that's like, man, if you just like drank half as much, you'd He'd probably still be around.

00:27:25.000 I would have loved to have met him. 1.00

00:27:28.000 At the end though, man, fuck. 0.99

00:27:32.000 I remember he did an episode of Conan O'Brien and you couldn't understand a word he was saying. 1.00

00:27:36.000 It's so sad.

00:27:38.000 It's like when you watch an old boxer and they can't talk anymore.

00:27:42.000 It's kind of a similar feeling.

00:27:44.000 Because in the early days, when he was running for sheriff of Picken County in Colorado, in Aspen, he was on fire.

00:27:54.000 He was amazing.

00:27:55.000 He was at the height of his verbal skill.

00:27:58.000 He was young and vibrant.

00:28:01.000 And then to see him at the end where he could barely...

00:28:03.000 You couldn't understand what he was saying.

00:28:05.000 Everything was a slur.

00:28:07.000 It was all this weird...

00:28:08.000 He had a bunch of health problems, hip replacements.

00:28:12.000 It was before he killed himself, but not much before.

00:28:15.000 Yeah, and the suicide tragically almost becomes predictable in a way.

00:28:19.000 Because again, it's that he had this status.

00:28:21.000 He was this incredible brain.

00:28:23.000 And he knows that he's down here now.

00:28:25.000 And that's intolerable for somebody like that to live with.

00:28:28.000 That's the tragedy of that.

00:28:30.000 Yeah, you've got to manage the biology, kids.

00:28:34.000 You've got to manage your biology.

00:28:36.000 And you've got to manage the decline.

00:28:38.000 I think when you've got as high status-wise as he has, it's that level of genius.

00:28:45.000 And then you've hit that decline.

00:28:47.000 It's a dangerous place to be.

00:28:49.000 It has to be just tied to the alcohol.

00:28:52.000 Because the mind is still the same mind.

00:28:54.000 Like when 9-11 happened, he still wrote a brilliant piece about 9-11.

00:28:58.000 Did you ever see that?

00:28:59.000 No, I didn't.

00:29:00.000 Johnny Depp narrated it in the movie. 0.99

00:29:03.000 And it was fucking great. 0.99

00:29:05.000 He narrated a couple of these Hunter to pieces in the movie. 0.99

00:29:08.000 And one of them was like how the 60s.

00:29:10.000 See if you can find that, Jamie.

00:29:13.000 Which one?

00:29:13.000 When Johnny Depp does this, Hunter S. Thompson narrates this story about the wave pulling back.

00:29:24.000 It's the wave of culture.

00:29:27.000 It's so eloquently, brilliantly written.

00:29:30.000 It's about the hope that he had in the 1960s.

00:29:34.000 And how the 1970s came and it all pulled back.

00:29:38.000 Yeah, it's a brilliant piece.

00:29:39.000 It's brilliant.

00:29:41.000 Yeah, and it's it just This is a strange memories on this now.

00:29:46.000 Not beautiful.

00:29:47.000 Yeah, 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. 0.98

00:29:58.000 Like, what the fuck happened? 0.99

00:30:00.000 Four years later, you're like, what the fuck happened? 1.00

00:30:03.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.97

00:30:04.000 And I think with us, though, there's hope that we'll eventually get to some place of normalcy and some semblance of peace.

00:30:15.000 But... 0.98

00:30:16.000 What happened in the 1960s is fucking bananas. 0.99

00:30:20.000 I 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. 0.99

00:30:36.000 Anything they can to stop these hippies and made everything illegal.

00:30:40.000 They made marijuana.

00:30:41.000 Well, marijuana was already illegal, but all the Schedule I substances.

00:30:43.000 It's all the sweeping part of the 1970s Psychedelic Act that was all about the Civil Rights Movement.

00:30:49.000 It was all about just arresting people for any kind of protests, any anti-government, Anti-war.

00:30:56.000 Let's find these hippies. 0.99

00:30:58.000 Everything's illegal. 1.00

00:30:59.000 Fuck you. 1.00

00:31:00.000 Go to jail. 1.00

00:31:01.000 And they put water on it.

00:31:02.000 They just put the fire out.

00:31:03.000 Wow, I didn't know that.

00:31:04.000 They put the fire out on this psychedelic counterculture that was the 1960s.

00:31:09.000 And we paid for it, artistically. 1.00

00:31:11.000 If you look at the 1980s, it's a fucking disaster. 0.98

00:31:15.000 What happened in the 1980s? 1.00

00:31:16.000 It's like these people, all they have was cocaine.

00:31:18.000 They're just doing cocaine and alcohol, and the movies are out of control.

00:31:22.000 Yeah, I mean, the 1980s, the other thing that changed, of course, was the economy in the 1980s.

00:31:28.000 And for me, that's the big thing that changed.

00:31:32.000 The economies of the West fell to bits in the 1970s, before the 1970s.

00:31:38.000 The gas crisis.

00:31:40.000 Yeah.

00:31:40.000 I think we forget about that.

00:31:42.000 That ruined American automobiles.

00:31:43.000 Yeah.

00:31:44.000 And 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.

00:32:00.000 And 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?

00:32:14.000 And it really does seem like that. 0.98

00:32:16.000 Like, 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. 0.84

00:32:24.000 And 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? 0.89

00:32:33.000 And 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.

00:32:43.000 And she did this thing. 0.54

00:32:45.000 She said, the method is economic, but the object is to change the soul.

00:32:50.000 Which is a really, like, megalomaniac James Bond villain thing to say.

00:32:53.000 But she did do that. 0.96

00:32:55.000 They did do that.

00:32:56.000 Change the soul?

00:32:57.000 Yeah, like, so, but by changing...

00:33:00.000 The rules of who we have to be in order to achieve success, they changed who we were.

00:33:06.000 We became, as a people, Gordon Gekko, Material Girl Madonna, Whitney Houston, the greatest love of all is loving yourself.

00:33:15.000 We went from pot to cocaine.

00:33:22.000 There was a really interesting study that found in 1983, they were looking at Changes in birth names.

00:33:28.000 And for generations and generations, babies have been called things like, you know, Alfred and John and Barbara, like all the traditional names.

00:33:36.000 But in 1983, suddenly we started naming our kids weird names because we wanted our kids to stand out and be a star.

00:33:43.000 And when you look at the changes in values between the 60s and the 80s, 80s and 90s.

00:33:49.000 Suddenly, money becomes a dominant value.

00:33:53.000 Celebrity becomes a dominant value.

00:33:55.000 Being good-looking becomes a much more dominant value.

00:33:57.000 There was a study about 20 years ago.

00:34:02.000 They asked 2,500 British under-10s, what is the best thing in the world?

00:34:07.000 And these under-10s, number one was being a celebrity.

00:34:09.000 Number two was being good-looking.

00:34:11.000 Number three was being rich.

00:34:14.000 Like, that's who we've become.

00:34:15.000 And the big change is the economy.

00:34:18.000 Like, we've become these kind of neoliberal, profit-obsessed, celebrity-obsessed individualists.

00:34:24.000 I don't know what number four is.

00:34:27.000 I want to know why.

00:34:28.000 Yeah.

00:34:29.000 I think because they're young though, right?

00:34:32.000 When you're young, that's what seems like everybody wants.

00:34:34.000 But not in the 60s and 70s.

00:34:36.000 Like 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.

00:34:45.000 And now it's way over 75%.

00:34:47.000 That's interesting.

00:34:48.000 Yeah.

00:34:48.000 I wonder how many of those people wanted to be famous before the invention of social media and reality shows.

00:34:54.000 I wonder if there was less of an aspiration.

00:34:57.000 There was, yeah.

00:34:58.000 So all of that celebrity stuff comes out of the 80s.

00:35:01.000 And the 80s, what defines the 80s is these big economic changes.

00:35:05.000 In order to survive in the 80s, you had to be a radical individualist.

00:35:11.000 You had to get up and go.

00:35:14.000 Profit motive, self-sustaining individualist, like a competitive individual.

00:35:20.000 Because before that, we had the big state, we had big social security cushions, we had public housing, and they got rid of all of that.

00:35:28.000 I feel like there's a comfortable medium in there.

00:35:31.000 We're missing out on it. 1.00

00:35:33.000 Don't be competitive to the point where you're a fucking psychopath. 1.00

00:35:37.000 You're saying greed is good. 1.00

00:35:39.000 Don't be that guy.

00:35:40.000 But also don't be lazy and rely on the state to take care of you either.

00:35:44.000 Well, 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.

00:35:55.000 It was brutal in the 80s, but most of us are much wealthier now than we were in the 80s.

00:35:59.000 Like, it's kind of worked.

00:36:00.000 But it's also created much more...

00:36:04.000 A separation between the top and the bottom, much more inequality.

00:36:07.000 So the rich are much richer now and the poor are much poorer than they were in the middle of the 20th century.

00:36:12.000 So it's created a lot more unfairness as well.

00:36:14.000 So you do need those cushions, I think.

00:36:16.000 Well, it also becomes an insurmountable position too.

00:36:21.000 When we say the rich get richer, the poor aren't getting any richer.

00:36:25.000 So that's a part of the problem.

00:36:27.000 It's like there's no escape from severe poverty.

00:36:30.000 Very few people escape.

00:36:33.000 And 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.

00:36:46.000 100%.

00:36:47.000 I'm not a terrorist.

00:36:48.000 I would hope that I wouldn't be a terrorist, you know, in a different life.

00:36:51.000 But 100% if I was living in a place that sucked with dirt floors and I found I could walk to America. 0.77

00:36:57.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:36:57.000 Like, I can get a job there?

00:36:58.000 Let's go.

00:36:59.000 You would do it.

00:37:00.000 100%.

00:37:01.000 It's natural.

00:37:02.000 Seems like a normal thing that people want to have a better life.

00:37:08.000 I 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.

00:37:20.000 It just seems super simple.

00:37:22.000 You want the world to be a safer place? 0.99

00:37:24.000 Take all these places that suck and give them economic security. 0.98

00:37:27.000 Give them education and healthcare. 0.97

00:37:30.000 Set up school systems that are really good.

00:37:32.000 You're going to change the whole atmosphere.

00:37:35.000 You're going to change everything.

00:37:36.000 Provide job opportunities.

00:37:38.000 Set up places where we should make – how about – here's a law.

00:37:42.000 Here's a law that you should make.

00:37:44.000 You can't sell anything made by people who make less than would be legal here.

00:37:50.000 Right?

00:37:51.000 Wouldn't that be an amazing law if we passed that? 1.00

00:37:54.000 If we just said, listen, we all know this is bullshit, okay? 0.97

00:37:57.000 We all know that if you're buying an iPhone, there's a lot going on that you wouldn't like to see. 0.98

00:38:04.000 There's a lot going on, from the mining of the cobalt to the people in the factories.

00:38:09.000 I don't want to see that.

00:38:10.000 I want the shiny titanium thing.

00:38:12.000 It's so pretty.

00:38:13.000 You know, you move it around in your hand like, wow, that's amazing.

00:38:17.000 That's what you want.

00:38:18.000 You don't want to know how the sausage is made.

00:38:20.000 But 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.

00:38:30.000 Yeah, but you've got to account for the economies are different in different parts of the world, aren't they?

00:38:34.000 Okay, then let's balance it out for the economies in those places. 0.96

00:38:36.000 Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good rule.

00:38:38.000 Do they do that, though?

00:38:39.000 They might actually...

00:38:41.000 I mean, what is the economy?

00:38:43.000 If you're in Mexico, what are you allowed to pay people in Mexico, and how much does it cost?

00:38:51.000 Let's pick a place, Juarez.

00:38:54.000 That's kind of a border town.

00:38:57.000 If you own a factory in Juarez, how much do you have to pay those people?

00:39:05.000 Don'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?

00:39:13.000 So the test would be you'd have to be able to buy X amount of Big Macs per day with your daily wage.

00:39:25.000 We just have this real weird desire to never stop making more.

00:39:31.000 Like, real weird desire to, like...

00:39:35.000 Maximize profit, expand, expand, make a big...

00:39:38.000 Nobody ever has a company and goes, we're good.

00:39:40.000 Just leave it like this.

00:39:42.000 That's because status is relative.

00:39:44.000 Right.

00:39:45.000 And so you're always insecure about your...

00:39:48.000 Status is an imaginary resource.

00:39:51.000 It only exists in our minds and in the minds of other people.

00:39:53.000 So you can't keep it.

00:39:55.000 You can't put it in a box.

00:39:57.000 So you're constantly having to make sure that it's still there, it's still there.

00:40:01.000 You're constantly measuring your status.

00:40:03.000 Apple are measuring their status versus Google and Samsung or whoever.

00:40:07.000 So there's that constant chippiness.

00:40:09.000 So you're always trying to ratchet up.

00:40:12.000 There was this really hilarious study they did where they got a bunch of Multiple millionaires and billionaires.

00:40:18.000 And they asked them, how much more money would you need to be perfectly happy?

00:40:22.000 And uniformly, they said, between two and three times more money.

00:40:25.000 And it's like, you're not going to be perfectly happy.

00:40:29.000 You delusional.

00:40:30.000 But that's the human brain.

00:40:31.000 So we think, well, when I've achieved this thing, I'll be perfectly happy.

00:40:36.000 But of course, we're happy for about 10 seconds.

00:40:38.000 Then we want the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

00:40:40.000 And actually, it's exhausting, but it's also how we built civilization.

00:40:44.000 It's also an incredible, amazing thing that we're restless.

00:40:48.000 We're never satisfied.

00:40:49.000 We want better and better and better and better.

00:40:51.000 It drives us forward.

00:40:53.000 I was going to say about the McDonald's thing, it's also a function of being a part of a public company.

00:40:57.000 You have an obligation to your shareholders to make more money.

00:41:01.000 The whole idea is, let's make more money.

00:41:02.000 We have to make more money.

00:41:03.000 Let's make more money.

00:41:05.000 Hey, I'm looking at the money, and it's not more.

00:41:08.000 I'd like more money.

00:41:09.000 That's the slight problem, because you can measure your status in all kinds of different ways.

00:41:13.000 There's infinite ways you can measure your status, and money being just one of them.

00:41:17.000 But that's part of the problem with the public company, is that money becomes the only important...

00:41:23.000 And it's not just money.

00:41:25.000 It's short-term profit.

00:41:26.000 It has to...

00:41:28.000 Every quarter has to go up and go up and go up and go up.

00:41:30.000 So that's a sort of damaged incentive in a way.

00:41:32.000 How much different would the world be if we made that illegal?

00:41:35.000 I'm not saying we should.

00:41:36.000 I'm not saying we should.

00:41:37.000 But how much different would the world be where all corporations have to be private?

00:41:43.000 All of them.

00:41:43.000 You just have to be a company.

00:41:45.000 You 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.

00:41:53.000 You're selling chunks of your company, right?

00:41:55.000 No, you have to own it.

00:41:57.000 You want to be in business?

00:41:58.000 You got to own your own company.

00:41:59.000 Because, yeah, there are two ways that you can measure the status of your company, I guess, two main ways.

00:42:03.000 One is how much money it makes, and the other is the quality of the product.

00:42:07.000 And what you see in today's world, of course, is the...

00:42:09.000 Stock price.

00:42:10.000 Yeah.

00:42:10.000 So quality tends to go down and down and down.

00:42:13.000 You've got shrinkflation. 0.75

00:42:15.000 So it's not just the quality.

00:42:16.000 It's what you're getting for your money goes down and down.

00:42:18.000 So it's kind of like fake.

00:42:19.000 It gives you the illusion of growth in the company.

00:42:22.000 We're making more money.

00:42:23.000 Yeah, because you're putting less berries in the yogurt.

00:42:26.000 That's why.

00:42:27.000 Yeah.

00:42:28.000 It's not a positive, productive growth.

00:42:32.000 It's a growth that comes from cutting all the good stuff out of your product.

00:42:35.000 Also, you would eliminate all the Gordon geckos, because that's not a business anymore. 0.99

00:42:39.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:42:39.000 You can't just sell stock anymore.

00:42:42.000 It doesn't exist.

00:42:42.000 You can't do that anymore.

00:42:43.000 Own something, bitch. 1.00

00:42:45.000 Own a company, make a product, and stop! 1.00

00:42:48.000 That's a fascinating thought.

00:42:49.000 Again, I'm not a supporter of this, nor do I know anything about economics.

00:42:54.000 But I would imagine that that would be better if, like, the companies had to be owned. 0.99

00:42:59.000 Like, you have to own the fucking company. 0.99

00:43:01.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:43:02.000 But then everyone's pensions would be fucked because basically people's pensions are all in stocks, aren't they? 0.97

00:43:07.000 Yeah. 0.91

00:43:09.000 I think we're in this now.

00:43:12.000 Also this dirty thing where you can't buy stock if you know things.

00:43:18.000 yeah 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.

00:43:39.000 But it's just a natural desire people have.

00:43:44.000 Yeah, because whatever we've attached our status to, we want more and more of that thing.

00:43:49.000 And it doesn't matter how famous and rich we become.

00:43:52.000 It never ends.

00:43:53.000 It never ends.

00:43:53.000 It's a bottomless pit.

00:43:54.000 It's a game you can never win.

00:43:56.000 And I think it's designed to make human beings create aliens.

00:44:00.000 That's what I think.

00:44:02.000 What do you think?

00:44:02.000 This is my thought.

00:44:03.000 I 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.

00:44:15.000 People buy phones and laptops.

00:44:17.000 If you're really balling, you buy a new laptop every couple years.

00:44:20.000 And that is, you're constantly looking for new processors, new innovation.

00:44:25.000 Is it AR? How big's the battery?

00:44:28.000 What's the battery like?

00:44:28.000 And 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.

00:44:39.000 And whether it's 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, or it's already happening in a fucking lab in Ohio. 0.99

00:44:45.000 Yes. 0.99

00:44:46.000 Doubtless.

00:44:47.000 It 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.

00:44:56.000 It'll be far smarter.

00:44:58.000 It hopefully will coexist with it.

00:45:02.000 It comes from...

00:45:03.000 Yeah, and it comes from the tribe.

00:45:05.000 It comes from...

00:45:06.000 Well, it comes from before we were human.

00:45:08.000 We've been competing for status since before we were humans, since we're animals.

00:45:10.000 Well, we still are animals, but since before we were human animals.

00:45:13.000 And 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.

00:45:23.000 So basically, the more status that you get in your group, everything gets better.

00:45:28.000 And wouldn't that motivate you to make...

00:45:30.000 The most complex thing a human being has ever made.

00:45:33.000 100%.

00:45:33.000 An artificial human.

00:45:35.000 100%.

00:45:35.000 And it's not about the money or the bling or the...

00:45:38.000 Nope.

00:45:38.000 It's just what we do.

00:45:39.000 I want to be better than you and I want to be the best inventor of artificial life form there is in the world.

00:45:44.000 Yeah.

00:45:44.000 Better than that dude and that person.

00:45:46.000 And yeah, and that's what motivates people.

00:45:47.000 That's what pushes people to...

00:45:49.000 Create amazing things.

00:45:50.000 We have this distorted idea of what is like a fiercely competitive person.

00:45:55.000 When we think of fiercely competitive people, we only, for whatever reason, consider basketball players, football players, baseball players, fighters, athletes, race car drivers.

00:46:06.000 We consider fiercely competitive people the people that are engaged in sports and activities every day.

00:46:10.000 But no!

00:46:11.000 No, there's fiercely competitive people that are involved in business and government and all sorts of other things. 0.99

00:46:17.000 And they're fucking psycho about this game that they're playing, whatever it is. 0.99

00:46:21.000 Whether it's stocks and bonds or selling pharmaceutical drugs, they're fucking psycho competitive about that. 0.99

00:46:26.000 And that psychoness is the status. 0.95

00:46:29.000 It's like, you know, I need the status.

00:46:32.000 There was a great story that I found for the status game about Steve Jobs and the true origin story of the iPhone.

00:46:38.000 I 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.

00:46:47.000 And one time he was at this barbecue and the husband of one of her friends worked for Microsoft.

00:46:53.000 And he's like rubbing Steve Jobs' face in it saying, oh, we've invented the future of computing.

00:46:57.000 You're done.

00:46:58.000 It's this pad thing with a stylus.

00:47:00.000 And apparently he really annoyed the fuck out of Steve Jobs. 0.98

00:47:04.000 So Monday morning, Jobs comes into Apple furious swearing and going, right, we're going to prove this prick wrong. 0.96

00:47:09.000 It's not stylus.

00:47:10.000 It's a finger.

00:47:11.000 Use the finger.

00:47:12.000 And from that barbecue came his rage.

00:47:16.000 And from the rage came the iPhone.

00:47:19.000 And that story was told by Steve Forstall, who was...

00:47:22.000 You know, intimately involved with all this stuff.

00:47:24.000 And he said, it was not good for Microsoft that that guy went to that barbecue that day.

00:47:29.000 And he's absolutely right.

00:47:31.000 But that's status.

00:47:32.000 Like, that...

00:47:34.000 It was personal for Steve Jobs. 0.99

00:47:36.000 It was Microsoft telling Apple that they were fucked and that they'd solved computing. 0.98

00:47:41.000 That's a perfect example of a psycho-competitive dude who would have probably won bike races instead of running Apple. 0.99

00:47:49.000 Yeah, back in the day, 20,000 years ago, he'd have been the best warrior in the tribe, stabbing the shit out of everyone. 0.98

00:47:56.000 Yeah, for sure. 0.93

00:47:57.000 And that's the kind of upside of aggression in a way.

00:48:00.000 Yeah.

00:48:02.000 It creates things.

00:48:03.000 It creates value in the world.

00:48:04.000 It certainly has created a lot of great things, right?

00:48:07.000 It 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. 0.95

00:48:14.000 It always seems to me like we're a bunch of fucking buffalo being herded off a cliff.

00:48:18.000 Like, does anyone know where this cliff is? 0.99

00:48:20.000 Will we just keep going with this stuff?

00:48:22.000 Like... 1.00

00:48:24.000 I 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. 1.00

00:48:34.000 How much longer? 0.99

00:48:36.000 I mean, that's a status thing, too, right?

00:48:38.000 And 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...

00:48:52.000 But it would never stop being played because we're storytelling animals and we tell stories about status.

00:48:57.000 And 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.

00:49:08.000 The brain is constantly playing a game for status.

00:49:10.000 We've got all this insane subconscious technology that we use for measuring Our status versus other people that we're completely unaware of.

00:49:18.000 Like there's one about the tone of voice during conversation.

00:49:22.000 They call it the paraverbal frequency band.

00:49:25.000 And you can't hear it consciously, but it's a way of organising status hierarchies when we meet people.

00:49:33.000 And the person who's top It sets the tone and everybody else matches to meet the tone.

00:49:39.000 And these psychologists studied a bunch of Larry King interviews, a bit like this one.

00:49:44.000 And they stripped out the paraverbal frequency band and they could work out who he felt superior to versus who he felt inferior to.

00:49:52.000 So he felt inferior to, I think it was Liz Taylor and superior to Dan Quayle.

00:50:02.000 And there were particular interviews which were very, Irascible and didn't go very well.

00:50:07.000 They weren't getting along.

00:50:09.000 One of them was Dan Quayle.

00:50:11.000 And they found that they were just not matching.

00:50:13.000 So there's all this stuff going on beneath the hood of consciousness, which is constantly organizing us into kind of status games.

00:50:21.000 And it's that that causes the hierarchies of life.

00:50:25.000 That's the reason why communism could never work.

00:50:28.000 Because they're trying to wipe out the... 0.56

00:50:31.000 The effects of status in society, but you can't wipe out the effects of status in society because it's in our brains.

00:50:37.000 You 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.

00:50:49.000 You know, we can't help but do it.

00:50:51.000 And so that's that constant work of the subconscious brain figuring out where we sit in the status hierarchy creates Human life. 1.00

00:51:00.000 Yeah, that's why Fidel Castro lived in a fucking mansion. 0.99

00:51:03.000 Yeah, absolutely. 1.00

00:51:05.000 Yeah.

00:51:06.000 There's communism.

00:51:07.000 That's how it works. 1.00

00:51:07.000 One guy and a bunch of fucking people with guns tell you what the fuck you're going to do. 1.00

00:51:12.000 Yeah, that's it. 1.00

00:51:13.000 I mean, look at Stalin.

00:51:13.000 That's the only way it works.

00:51:14.000 He was treated like a god.

00:51:16.000 The whole idea of communism, they wanted to create a kingdom of equality, they called it.

00:51:20.000 It was like, come on.

00:51:21.000 The 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.

00:51:28.000 You can't just...

00:51:29.000 Have equality of outcome.

00:51:31.000 It doesn't exist.

00:51:31.000 They will always just point to that it just hasn't been done right yet.

00:51:37.000 But isn't that amazing?

00:51:39.000 Isn't that amazing?

00:51:41.000 That despite of the many, how many thousands of people are in jail?

00:51:47.000 Is it millions?

00:51:47.000 How many millions of people are in jail?

00:51:49.000 Despite all that, Despite all the crime and poverty and chaos that somehow or another you're just gonna bring this all together.

00:52:01.000 Yeah.

00:52:01.000 If you just do it this way and everybody just divides the money out.

00:52:04.000 Yeah.

00:52:05.000 Who gets to tell people they're going to give their money up?

00:52:08.000 People with guns.

00:52:09.000 You take people's status away.

00:52:11.000 Years ago, I went to Poland to do some reporting on...

00:52:14.000 At the time, the big story in the UK was all these Polish people coming to the UK to do all this work.

00:52:19.000 Right.

00:52:20.000 I remember that.

00:52:20.000 Yeah, where's all the Polish people come from?

00:52:22.000 So I went to Poland to find out where all the Polish people had come from.

00:52:25.000 And 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...

00:52:32.000 I just mentioned casually how the Poles are such hard workers.

00:52:35.000 And she was like, we're not hard workers.

00:52:37.000 We're lazy.

00:52:38.000 I can't believe that you Brits think we're hard workers.

00:52:41.000 And she said, we've got this post-Soviet mindset.

00:52:43.000 So I said to her, what do you mean the post-Soviet mindset?

00:52:45.000 And she said, well, when everyone's getting paid anyway, you're not motivated to do any work.

00:52:49.000 So in a steelworks like this, Nobody would do any work. 0.99

00:52:55.000 And if somebody came in all enthusiastic and ambitious, they'd be bullied to fuck until they calmed down and stopped doing work. 0.99

00:53:01.000 So that was how it worked. 0.99

00:53:03.000 And there was a phrase like, you can turn up for work or you can not turn up for work.

00:53:06.000 You're still going to get paid.

00:53:08.000 So removing that stuff from human society removes...

00:53:12.000 Something that we need, which is individual status.

00:53:16.000 If you don't reward individual status, you don't motivate people to contribute to work.

00:53:22.000 And that's partly why communism collapsed, because it's incompatible with human nature.

00:53:27.000 Capitalism is the only system that we've got that is compatible with human nature.

00:53:30.000 It rewards the status instinct.

00:53:34.000 Yeah, it's really fascinating when you break it down that way because it kind of makes it undeniable.

00:53:39.000 Yeah.

00:53:40.000 It seems this pattern just constantly happens over and over and over again.

00:53:44.000 But 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.

00:53:59.000 Or that you're greedy or evil.

00:54:02.000 That there's something negative about you being competitive.

00:54:05.000 And it's essentially...

00:54:07.000 I think of the roots of it as kind of a cop-out of people that have been beaten in life.

00:54:13.000 Yeah.

00:54:14.000 You know, there's this thing that certain people do when things aren't going well.

00:54:19.000 They want to tank anything that's going well.

00:54:22.000 That's right.

00:54:23.000 And I think there's a big misunderstanding about what that competitive instinct, what that status instinct is.

00:54:29.000 And 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.

00:54:37.000 And they go, I'm not interested in status, you know.

00:54:40.000 You are.

00:54:41.000 But you're definitely interested in the benefits of it.

00:54:43.000 Do you like iPhones?

00:54:44.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:54:46.000 How'd you get an iPhone? 0.99

00:54:46.000 They're tapping on their iPhone, this shit idea. 0.99

00:54:49.000 It's crazy, right? 0.99

00:54:50.000 But all that status is, technically, is the reward that we get for being of value to the tribe.

00:54:56.000 So 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.

00:55:05.000 There's dominance games.

00:55:07.000 So 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.

00:55:15.000 There's virtue games.

00:55:17.000 So people compete to have a reputation of being very virtuous, so courageous, somebody who knows the rules, follows the rules, believes the sacred beliefs.

00:55:25.000 So a religion is a virtue game.

00:55:28.000 The royal family, weirdly, is a virtue game because it's about We're good to go.

00:55:47.000 Millennia, we were mostly playing virtue games.

00:55:49.000 It was caste, kingdom, Game of Thrones kind of land.

00:55:53.000 And then starting with the Industrial Revolution, we started playing success games.

00:55:57.000 So we started mostly like much more rewarding competence.

00:56:01.000 And so that competitive instinct is channeled into figuring out how to solve problems, how to create wealth.

00:56:08.000 And it's right that we reward that.

00:56:10.000 We've evolved to reward people who offer value to the human family.

00:56:14.000 That's status.

00:56:15.000 It's not a negative thing in that sense.

00:56:17.000 It's massively positive.

00:56:19.000 And weirdly, capitalism is an economic system that does the same thing.

00:56:26.000 It works with...

00:56:27.000 How status games work.

00:56:28.000 It works with how we've evolved to operate in human tribes.

00:56:31.000 That's why I love how you talk about this.

00:56:33.000 Because you change the term in a lot of people's eyes as well that listen to you.

00:56:38.000 Because status, for a lot of people, is kind of a pejorative.

00:56:41.000 Yeah, it is, yeah. 1.00

00:56:42.000 Yeah, it's like a dick. 0.99

00:56:44.000 Like, oh, you want status. 1.00

00:56:45.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:56:46.000 You're just an asshole. 1.00

00:56:47.000 But 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. 1.00

00:56:56.000 Yeah, I mean, that's why I like talking about communism, because communism was the biggest experiment we've ever had in eradicating status.

00:57:04.000 So Marx and Engels, their big idea was that status comes from private property, from private ownership.

00:57:12.000 So you could have a house and it's a perfectly functional house and you're happy with it. 0.98

00:57:15.000 But then somebody builds a big palace next door, suddenly you feel shit. 0.94

00:57:19.000 So they said, you know, like communism can be summed up in one sentence, which is the abolition of private property. 0.98

00:57:24.000 We get rid of that.

00:57:25.000 We get rid of people being interested in status.

00:57:27.000 Everybody works together.

00:57:28.000 But it just didn't work.

00:57:30.000 Like there were some anthropologists, sociologists who went to the Soviet Union in the 50s.

00:57:34.000 And they found 10 distinct social classes in the Soviet Union.

00:57:38.000 All 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.

00:57:44.000 So the workers were at the top and the wealthy and former wealthy really were at the bottom.

00:57:49.000 And those former wealthy, the bourgeoisie, the children of the bourgeoisie, were absolutely discriminated against openly and horrifically.

00:57:56.000 If you weren't tortured and killed, you were held back.

00:58:00.000 You know, in every sense.

00:58:02.000 And that's the thing about utopians.

00:58:04.000 Utopians often talk about, we're going to get rid of the hierarchy.

00:58:07.000 But they don't want to get rid of the hierarchy.

00:58:09.000 They just want a new hierarchy with you at the top.

00:58:12.000 Every single time.

00:58:13.000 Yeah.

00:58:15.000 That's what got Brett Weinstein in trouble when he was teaching at Evergreen University.

00:58:21.000 Do you remember this story?

00:58:22.000 I do, yeah.

00:58:23.000 It was the same situation.

00:58:25.000 Brett, 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. 0.98

00:58:36.000 He's very helpful.

00:58:38.000 Whatever it was.

00:58:39.000 And they decided one year to switch it. 0.82

00:58:43.000 And make it so that white people can't come. 0.98

00:58:46.000 You cannot come. 0.99

00:58:48.000 Which is a very different sentiment.

00:58:50.000 Then you can stay home if you like, and you still get paid.

00:58:52.000 But you can come.

00:58:54.000 But if you want to stay home, you just get paid.

00:58:55.000 And everybody just chose to stay home.

00:58:57.000 It's nice.

00:58:58.000 And thank you for appreciating me.

00:58:59.000 That's not a negative.

00:59:00.000 If you have the money to do it and it doesn't fucking stop everything in its tracks, sounds great. 0.58

00:59:05.000 Sounds like a nice liberal hippie thing to do. 0.98

00:59:08.000 But the other one doesn't.

00:59:09.000 The other one scares me because that's racist.

00:59:11.000 If you're saying white people can't be here, why not? 0.98

00:59:16.000 What did I do?

00:59:17.000 I didn't do anything.

00:59:18.000 You're saying that white people shouldn't be allowed to be in a place where they work. 0.95

00:59:23.000 Because you decide. 0.53

00:59:24.000 Because you decide they have to stay home.

00:59:25.000 Look, there's better ways of going about this.

00:59:27.000 It's a bad idea.

00:59:29.000 The idea behind appreciating people is great.

00:59:33.000 But the idea about discriminating people in any way is bad.

00:59:38.000 And if you're saying white people have to stay home, that's bad.

00:59:40.000 But that also characterizes, I'm not saying that the kind of woke thing is the same as communism, but it has echoes of it.

00:59:46.000 And it's the same flipping of the hierarchy.

00:59:49.000 So when I was doing my research into communism, there was this phrase that came up.

00:59:53.000 So the former bourgeoisie wealthy business people and the children of them were called former people.

00:59:59.000 It's a dismissive, you're a former people. 1.00

01:00:01.000 Wow.

01:00:02.000 And 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.

01:00:10.000 Talk, preach, brother!

01:00:12.000 They're former, you know, they're made to feel like former people.

01:00:15.000 There's a whole generation of guys who have been raised in a culture where...

01:00:19.000 They're being made to feel you've had your turn.

01:00:22.000 Sit down. 1.00

01:00:23.000 Shut up. 1.00

01:00:23.000 The future is not for you. 1.00

01:00:25.000 The future is for people who don't look like you and think like you. 1.00

01:00:28.000 And so that form of people really resonated with me.

01:00:31.000 It's like you straight white men, you're former people. 0.89

01:00:34.000 You're yesterday's people.

01:00:35.000 You're not the future.

01:00:36.000 You're not tomorrow.

01:00:37.000 I 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...

01:00:55.000 That was their comeback.

01:00:56.000 That was their comeback.

01:00:57.000 I'm not taking that information coming from a straight white man.

01:01:00.000 Like, the last thing we need right now is straight white man speaking. 0.98

01:01:04.000 Don't speak.

01:01:05.000 Just listen.

01:01:06.000 It's time to listen.

01:01:07.000 That's my favorite.

01:01:08.000 Just please be quiet and listen.

01:01:11.000 Like, hey, sometimes that's good advice.

01:01:13.000 And sometimes you're just telling people you want to talk. 1.00

01:01:16.000 Yeah, it's so ignorant. 0.98

01:01:18.000 And I had a similar experience once. 0.97

01:01:20.000 I used to teach a storytelling course at the Guardian newspaper.

01:01:24.000 Science of storytelling.

01:01:26.000 And so it's like how to use psychology and neuroscience to make yourself a better storyteller.

01:01:30.000 So I'm talking about studies and this study and that study.

01:01:33.000 And during a break, this woman came up to me and she worked for a major academic, like one of the biggest academic journals. 0.81

01:01:43.000 And she said to me, I've got a problem with what you've been talking about.

01:01:46.000 And it's that most of these studies are by straight...

01:01:50.000 White men? 0.89

01:01:50.000 And I was like... 0.89

01:01:52.000 So, like, okay, and what's the point?

01:01:55.000 And she was saying, well, you can't really trust them because they've got their own...

01:01:59.000 They're all evil.

01:02:01.000 Their perception of the world is wrong.

01:02:03.000 And, you know, I felt actually...

01:02:06.000 A 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.

01:02:13.000 So I just said to her, I'm not going to have this conversation with you.

01:02:16.000 Okay.

01:02:17.000 And she kind of went away.

01:02:18.000 But I just thought it was the fact that she worked for a major scientific publication.

01:02:23.000 She was telling me that because the work was done by straight white men, it could not be trusted.

01:02:28.000 That's Mississippi-level, like Mississippi 1932-level racism.

01:02:33.000 It was absolutely a baffling kind of moment.

01:02:36.000 And she was a smart person.

01:02:38.000 She was clearly a smart person.

01:02:39.000 But again, that's the...

01:02:41.000 That's the human brain.

01:02:42.000 It has to believe in order to make itself feel important and valued.

01:02:48.000 I've got an amazing example of that that I just sent Jamie.

01:02:51.000 I want you to see this headline.

01:02:53.000 Please make sure this headline is real first because I have been duped before.

01:02:57.000 Someone sent me this on the Instagram.

01:03:00.000 And if it is true, praise the baby Jesus because it's as good as the Babylon Bee. 0.98

01:03:05.000 It's so good.

01:03:06.000 It seems like satire.

01:03:08.000 It's so good.

01:03:09.000 Oh, I think I know what it is.

01:03:11.000 Oh, hold please.

01:03:12.000 Is it real?

01:03:14.000 Is it the teacher?

01:03:16.000 No, no, no, no, no.

01:03:17.000 He's trying to type with Carl.

01:03:21.000 I was a little buddy.

01:03:23.000 It's from 2017?

01:03:24.000 Yeah.

01:03:24.000 But it's real, right?

01:03:25.000 I mean, I'm seeing other people talk about it.

01:03:27.000 Okay.

01:03:28.000 So just post it then.

01:03:29.000 Let's see the article. 0.86

01:03:31.000 Straight black men are the white people of black people. 0.99

01:03:35.000 Oh! 0.81

01:03:40.000 That's South Park level.

01:03:42.000 That is amazing.

01:03:46.000 It feels counterintuitive to suggest that straight black men as a whole possess any sort of privilege.

01:03:52.000 Oh my god.

01:03:53.000 Oh my god.

01:03:55.000 Oh my god.

01:03:56.000 This is the great irony of these people.

01:03:58.000 It's amazing.

01:04:02.000 You know, these kind of woke people talk about privilege.

01:04:06.000 There was a study that was done in the UK a few years ago.

01:04:09.000 It was the More In Common report.

01:04:11.000 It's the biggest ever psychological study of Britain's social psychology.

01:04:16.000 You know, over 10,000 respondents.

01:04:18.000 And they were looking at these belief sets and they found there were seven distinct belief groups in the country.

01:04:24.000 One of those belief groups, they call them progressive activists.

01:04:27.000 And these are people for whom the fight for social justice is at the heart of their identity.

01:04:32.000 You know, they believe that how you get on in life is about not about your talent and your hard work, but about your race and gender.

01:04:39.000 So we know who they're talking about.

01:04:40.000 Yeah.

01:04:41.000 And so what was interesting about these people was...

01:04:44.000 It just astonished me.

01:04:46.000 First is that they are the richest of all the seven groups.

01:04:50.000 So they had more people earning over £50,000 per year as a family.

01:04:55.000 Secondly, they were the most highly educated of all the seven groups.

01:04:59.000 So 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.

01:05:06.000 So that was the first thing.

01:05:08.000 The 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.

01:05:15.000 And they make more social media contributions than all of the rest of the groups combined.

01:05:20.000 Doesn't it make sense, though?

01:05:21.000 Completely, yeah.

01:05:22.000 They don't have any financial stress, right?

01:05:25.000 They probably feel real guilty. 0.54

01:05:28.000 And if they're white, they feel super guilty. 0.71

01:05:31.000 And then they're young, and you get status from being progressive and an activist.

01:05:36.000 And you don't have to be competitive in the workplace.

01:05:38.000 You're out here throwing paint on the Michelangelos.

01:05:39.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:05:43.000 Also the numbers, so in the UK they make up 13% of the population, in the US they make up 8% of the population.

01:05:50.000 So on social media, because they dominate social media, they feel like Sometimes the majority of the country, but their beliefs are actually really marginal.

01:06:00.000 One 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?

01:06:08.000 This is the kind of story that drives our media into paroxysms.

01:06:12.000 They've hired another white man.

01:06:14.000 They get the shivers.

01:06:16.000 And...

01:06:18.000 This poll found that 5% of people thought it should be a woman. 0.98

01:06:22.000 3% of people thought it should be a man. 0.99

01:06:24.000 Everybody else pretty much didn't give a shit. 0.99

01:06:27.000 That's great. 0.99

01:06:28.000 That's the reality.

01:06:29.000 That's good progress.

01:06:29.000 Yeah, most people think it doesn't matter.

01:06:31.000 That seems indicative of the general population that I come across.

01:06:36.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:06:36.000 But 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.

01:06:49.000 So they really have the kind of commanding voice in our culture very often, but they're a tiny minority of who we are.

01:06:58.000 But it really does behave like a religion in a lot of ways.

01:07:01.000 It really does.

01:07:04.000 Marc Andreessen broke it down very eloquently, where he's explaining that it has all of the things that a cult has.

01:07:10.000 It has the indoctrination, it has the excommunication, where you're shamed and kicked out of the group, the disconnect from the group members.

01:07:17.000 It's got all those things to it.

01:07:19.000 And that's a big part of it, is worried about being shamed and cast out of the group.

01:07:25.000 Yeah.

01:07:25.000 Which is terrifying for people.

01:07:26.000 So they're willing to say and believe things that aren't that logical.

01:07:31.000 Just if they can stay in the group.

01:07:33.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:07:35.000 It's natural.

01:07:36.000 We believe what we have to believe in order to earn status in our groups.

01:07:40.000 And that's true for these people as it is true for anyone else.

01:07:43.000 And I agree with the cult thing.

01:07:45.000 But I would just add that All human groups have cult elements. 0.68

01:07:49.000 They have special languages.

01:07:50.000 They have rules, hierarchies, rewards and punishments.

01:07:54.000 It's just that cults are the tightest possible form of human group.

01:07:57.000 I learned that when I started doing martial arts.

01:08:00.000 Because one of the things that was really interesting about the martial arts world is it's very cult-like.

01:08:04.000 Yeah.

01:08:05.000 Especially when I did it in the 80s, the early 80s when I started, they were the masters.

01:08:12.000 You bowed to them.

01:08:13.000 You bow when you enter the...

01:08:14.000 I 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.

01:08:22.000 I taught classes there and stuff. 0.94

01:08:23.000 And she wanted to have sex. 0.99

01:08:25.000 And I wouldn't do it. 0.98

01:08:27.000 I wouldn't do it.

01:08:28.000 She was so hot.

01:08:28.000 I wouldn't do it.

01:08:29.000 I was like, I can't do it here.

01:08:31.000 This can't happen here. 1.00

01:08:33.000 At like 17, I was so horny and so stupid. 0.99

01:08:37.000 But I was like, uh-uh, we can't do it here. 0.99

01:08:40.000 Yeah, that's the power of the status.

01:08:41.000 It was like now, I'd be like, where?

01:08:44.000 What do you want to do?

01:08:45.000 You want to do it before?

01:08:47.000 But back then, that was a religious place for me.

01:08:50.000 I didn't think about it that way at the time.

01:08:52.000 I just knew what the rules were.

01:08:54.000 And I was not violating those rules in any way.

01:08:56.000 There's no way.

01:08:57.000 Yeah.

01:08:58.000 But there was a lot of weird stuff where some of the masters would date some of the married women.

01:09:05.000 It got real weird.

01:09:08.000 It got real culty.

01:09:09.000 I don't doubt it.

01:09:10.000 It's very culty because you adore this person who is commanding the group and getting everybody to march to the bark of his voice.

01:09:20.000 And he just commands all this attention and respect.

01:09:26.000 The gym I went to was a very good place where there was very little of that shenanigans going on.

01:09:29.000 But there was a bunch of them where it was a big thing.

01:09:33.000 You hear that about yoga places too.

01:09:36.000 The yoga guru guys start banging people's wives.

01:09:40.000 There was a place that I bought out here that was owned by a cult.

01:09:45.000 I bought a place for my comedy club, and I didn't wind up completing the deal.

01:09:51.000 I got out of it because there were some problems with the property.

01:09:54.000 And then I bought the place that I bought on 6th Street.

01:09:57.000 But before it, I bought this place called the One World Theater.

01:09:59.000 And the One World Theater was created by this guy.

01:10:02.000 His name was Jaime Gomez. 0.99

01:10:03.000 And he was a gay porn star and a hypnotist. 1.00

01:10:07.000 And he started a cult. 1.00

01:10:08.000 He started a cult in West Hollywood.

01:10:10.000 There's a documentary about it called Holy Hell.

01:10:12.000 And then they moved out to Austin and he had his followers build him this theater so that he could dance in front of them.

01:10:18.000 And that was the place that I bought.

01:10:20.000 So he could dance in front of them?

01:10:21.000 Dance in front of them.

01:10:22.000 He put on performances and danced in front of them.

01:10:24.000 Just the followers.

01:10:25.000 And he had a gang of them, man.

01:10:27.000 He had a gang of them in L.A. and West Hollywood.

01:10:30.000 And then when the Cult Awareness Network started going after people, he took off. 0.99

01:10:34.000 He thought they were on to him because the parents were like, where's my fucking kid? 0.97

01:10:37.000 So then he moves to Austin and builds this one world theater. 0.99

01:10:41.000 So my friend Ron White tells me about the theater.

01:10:44.000 Because I tell him I'm looking for a comedy club location.

01:10:47.000 And he goes, you should get that theater.

01:10:48.000 It's amazing.

01:10:49.000 So Ron White's my hero.

01:10:51.000 So I'm like, all right, I'll get that theater.

01:10:53.000 And...

01:10:54.000 As I'm like in the middle of the purchasing it, my friend Adam calls me and goes, did you watch the documentary on that cult?

01:11:00.000 I was like, oh, no.

01:11:02.000 How bad is it?

01:11:03.000 Oh, dude, it's bad.

01:11:04.000 You got to watch it.

01:11:05.000 It's crazy.

01:11:05.000 And 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.

01:11:14.000 That status. 0.99

01:11:15.000 Yeah, 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? 0.99

01:11:25.000 But even after he got exposed, the people that went through the experience of having this guy touch their head when it was... 0.98

01:11:32.000 It was called The Knowing.

01:11:33.000 It was built up for days and weeks.

01:11:35.000 And some people were denied The Knowing.

01:11:38.000 They could never get it.

01:11:38.000 And other people, today is your day.

01:11:40.000 And they couldn't believe it.

01:11:42.000 And they would sit there on their knees and this guy would touch their head and they would be in ecstasy.

01:11:45.000 And it looked real.

01:11:47.000 And they talked about it.

01:11:48.000 Even after, like, this guy's a fraud. 1.00

01:11:50.000 He's crazy. 0.98

01:11:51.000 He was this. 0.99

01:11:51.000 He was that. 0.99

01:11:52.000 He was manipulative and a liar. 0.98

01:11:53.000 But that moment, I felt like I was connected to God. 0.97

01:11:56.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:11:57.000 Like, he did something to me, and I felt the world change forever.

01:12:03.000 God, that mind is a powerful thing.

01:12:04.000 It's crazy how it works!

01:12:06.000 So what stopped you buying that theatre, then?

01:12:08.000 There was a problem with the property.

01:12:09.000 Oh, it wasn't because...

01:12:11.000 No, no, there was just some issues, and we couldn't negotiate it.

01:12:14.000 And I was like, this is...

01:12:15.000 And then I was like, you know what, it'd probably be better to be in the city city, like, where people walk.

01:12:20.000 You know, just make it more convenient for folks, too.

01:12:23.000 Because people are used to going to 6th Street.

01:12:25.000 And then I found that place, and I got the places there.

01:12:27.000 But the cult, that would have been a real problem, because a lot of people think I'm already running a cult.

01:12:32.000 That would have been a real problem.

01:12:35.000 Like, how he bought a cult building.

01:12:37.000 But also, to me, the real problem was, I don't necessarily know if I believe in energy.

01:12:48.000 Not energy.

01:12:49.000 I believe in energy.

01:12:51.000 But I mean that energy gets left in a space.

01:12:54.000 My stepdad went to Gettysburg and he said, you can feel the sadness. 0.95

01:13:00.000 And he's not like a spiritual fucking Ouija board type dude. 0.95

01:13:04.000 He's a very rational architect. 0.97

01:13:06.000 And he's like, you feel the sadness.

01:13:09.000 It's like you feel it.

01:13:10.000 You feel how many people Yeah, I get that feeling when I'm in Berlin.

01:13:16.000 People go on about how great Berlin is, but I always get this immense sense of heaviness when I've spent some time in Berlin.

01:13:23.000 Do you think that's because you know, or do you think it's in the air?

01:13:26.000 I don't know, because I'm not expecting to feel that way.

01:13:29.000 I don't know.

01:13:31.000 I mean, who knows?

01:13:32.000 I mean, there's certainly...

01:13:34.000 It's striking when you walk around Berlin, you still see all the shrapnel marks and the size of buildings are still there.

01:13:39.000 That's quite confronting.

01:13:41.000 That's why I was thinking, I don't necessarily know if I want that building.

01:13:44.000 Yeah.

01:13:45.000 Because that building was built by people who got juked by a con man.

01:13:49.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:13:51.000 He fucking shenanigans them into building him a theater. 0.99

01:13:56.000 Even if there's 0.001% chance. 1.00

01:13:58.000 A lot of shit happened. 0.99

01:14:00.000 One of the guys left and he sent this mass email. 1.00

01:14:03.000 This guy's been abusing me for fucking years. 0.99

01:14:06.000 The whole thing is nuts. 1.00

01:14:07.000 They flew the guy to Hawaii and he started a new cult out there.

01:14:11.000 It's in the documentary.

01:14:12.000 They go visit him in Hawaii.

01:14:15.000 But it's just so fascinating how people just fall into these patterns.

01:14:21.000 It's just a natural thing that we have to be aware of.

01:14:25.000 I 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.

01:14:34.000 They look at it and go, oh, these are all just patterns that people play.

01:14:37.000 Yeah, we believe what we have to believe in order to...

01:14:40.000 Yeah.

01:14:40.000 I think one of the things in history that this status research has really made me understand is the rise of the Nazis.

01:14:49.000 Growing up in the UK, there's always this question, how could it have happened?

01:14:54.000 How could this...

01:15:01.000 We're good to go.

01:15:05.000 We're good to go.

01:15:13.000 You know, massive, like the Apple and Google of the days, BASF, Siemens, you know, huge companies.

01:15:19.000 They were producing a third of the world's potatoes, you know, like quality of life had rocketed in the early part of the 19th century.

01:15:26.000 And then the First World War happened and they just assumed we're going to kill it because we're amazing.

01:15:31.000 And of course, they didn't kill it.

01:15:32.000 They lost.

01:15:33.000 And so that's humiliating in itself.

01:15:36.000 Humiliation being the loss of status.

01:15:39.000 And then there was the Treaty of Versailles, which was savage.

01:15:43.000 They had to give up their land.

01:15:44.000 They had to give up their military.

01:15:46.000 They had to pay the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations.

01:15:51.000 When all that triggered hyperinflation, their economy collapsed.

01:15:55.000 We took their industrial heartlands off them.

01:15:59.000 So it was humiliation upon humiliation.

01:16:01.000 Then Hitler comes along. 0.90

01:16:03.000 And 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. 0.99

01:16:12.000 Hitler was an incredibly successful leader of Germany for the time when he was... 0.94

01:16:16.000 In charge.

01:16:18.000 The 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.

01:16:28.000 Have you seen how they've translated into English now with AI? They're going through it, yeah.

01:16:33.000 In Hitler's voice. 0.81

01:16:33.000 Yeah, I haven't seen that. 0.81

01:16:35.000 I saw that going on Twitter.

01:16:36.000 Yeah, it's fascinating.

01:16:37.000 Because of AI, one of the things that they can do now, like that they can do even with podcasts.

01:16:42.000 So this podcast, When Spotify runs its AI through it, they'll be able to translate you into perfect Spanish in your voice.

01:16:51.000 Wow.

01:16:52.000 And they have this technology now.

01:16:54.000 I know they could do it in German, Spanish, and I think French, and of course English, and back and forth.

01:16:59.000 So they could do that with Hitler. 0.91

01:17:05.000 That's amazing!

01:17:08.000 I've advocated for you in these years that I have been decent.

01:17:11.000 I have spent my time in service of my people.

01:17:15.000 Now cast your vote.

01:17:17.000 If yes, then stand up for me as I have stood up for you.

01:17:23.000 See, he's talking about...

01:17:25.000 That sounds so much scarier.

01:17:29.000 Yeah, it does.

01:17:30.000 The Irish voice hasn't really got the attitude.

01:17:32.000 My work... 1.00

01:17:42.000 The fucking accent. 1.00

01:17:44.000 Boy, there's something about German. 1.00

01:17:46.000 When you hear him yelling, you're like instinctively.

01:17:49.000 I think it's burned into us.

01:17:50.000 Yeah.

01:17:51.000 But he's not.

01:17:52.000 During the 30s, he wasn't ranting about the Jews because everybody was anti-Semitic in that period in history.

01:17:58.000 But the middle classes, they didn't want to see the Jews being attacked and killed.

01:18:02.000 It didn't play well.

01:18:03.000 So he suppressed all of that stuff.

01:18:05.000 And all that ranting, most of it he's talking about, I'm going to restore Germany's status. 1.00

01:18:09.000 I'm going to create this third right, this thousand-year kingdom.

01:18:13.000 And that's what convinced people to support him.

01:18:17.000 And he did...

01:18:21.000 Some of the statistics are quite extraordinary.

01:18:23.000 When the Nazi Party came in, a third of the population were unemployed.

01:18:27.000 And by 1939, they had full employment.

01:18:29.000 Between 1932 and 1939, GDP went up 81%.

01:18:33.000 So he was doing the thing of restoring Germany's status. 0.92

01:18:38.000 And when you see that footage of people going completely mad, that's when he's reversing the humiliations of Versailles.

01:18:46.000 So he took back the industrial heartland by force.

01:18:50.000 And nobody stood in his way.

01:18:51.000 They went mad.

01:18:52.000 He took Austria. 0.82

01:18:54.000 Nobody stood in his way.

01:18:55.000 So it was all about the restoration of status.

01:18:58.000 That explains the rise of Hitler. 0.94

01:19:02.000 And there was some mad stuff in the research, like women would get swastika tattoos. 0.84

01:19:07.000 They would do the Hitler salute at point of orgasm. 0.96

01:19:10.000 Whoa, that's kind of hot. 0.80

01:19:14.000 There was a butcher that was making swastika sausages.

01:19:18.000 People would even name their female children after Hitler.

01:19:21.000 People with tuberculosis would stare for hours at pictures of Hitler because they thought they would make them better.

01:19:26.000 So again, that's another example of that status.

01:19:29.000 That's how mad people go for status.

01:19:31.000 It was taken away from them.

01:19:32.000 And he didn't just promise to restore it.

01:19:35.000 For a while, he did restore it.

01:19:37.000 So that's why they loved him.

01:19:39.000 It wasn't to do with the...

01:19:42.000 With really anything else.

01:19:43.000 When do you think meth came into the picture?

01:19:47.000 Because somewhere along the line, the Hitler story is not complete.

01:19:51.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:19:51.000 Unless you realize Hitler was a meth head. 0.97

01:19:53.000 Yeah. 0.67

01:19:53.000 And wasn't his army on amphetamines? 0.67

01:19:56.000 Everybody was on amphetamines.

01:19:57.000 That's how they talk the kamikazes into doing that. 1.00

01:20:00.000 Yeah.

01:20:00.000 That's not a natural pattern of behavior for grown men.

01:20:04.000 No.

01:20:05.000 Flying planes into boats. 1.00

01:20:06.000 You got to be fucking jacked. 1.00

01:20:08.000 Let's go, bitch! 1.00

01:20:09.000 You just want to take everybody out. 1.00

01:20:11.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:20:12.000 But Hitler was a full-on meth head. 0.73

01:20:15.000 And there's video of him at the Olympics in 1936 just straight up tweaking.

01:20:19.000 Have you ever seen that video?

01:20:20.000 Yeah, I have, yeah.

01:20:21.000 It's nuts.

01:20:22.000 And if you see that video, that's a guy.

01:20:25.000 He's not just doing that once.

01:20:26.000 Yeah.

01:20:27.000 I'm going to go to the Olympics for my first time trying meth.

01:20:29.000 That was a meth head, you know?

01:20:32.000 That's it.

01:20:33.000 Blitz.

01:20:33.000 While other drugs are banned or discouraged, methamphetamine was touted as a miracle product when it first appeared on the market in the late 1930s.

01:20:40.000 I bet it was a miracle.

01:20:41.000 Indeed, the little pill was the perfect Nazi drug. 0.90

01:20:44.000 Germany awake!

01:20:46.000 The Nazis had commanded. 0.72

01:20:48.000 Energized.

01:20:49.000 Energizing and confidence-boosting methamphetamine played into the Third Reich's obsession with physical and mental superiority. 0.85

01:20:55.000 See?

01:20:56.000 Superiority.

01:20:56.000 There you go.

01:20:57.000 In sharp contrast to drugs such as heroin or alcohol, methamphetamines were not about escapist pleasure.

01:21:02.000 Rather, they were taken for hyper-alertness and vigilance.

01:21:05.000 Aryans were the embodiment of human perfection and Nazi ideology could now even aspire to be superhuman. 0.84

01:21:12.000 And such superhumans could be turned into super soldiers.

01:21:15.000 That's it, superhuman.

01:21:16.000 So it's the same as the cult that was promising, we're going to take you to a level above human.

01:21:23.000 It'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.

01:21:30.000 It's what the communists thought as well, that the average human, their intelligence would become so much that everybody would be a genius.

01:21:36.000 That's what they really believed.

01:21:37.000 That communism would lead to. 0.94

01:21:39.000 The promise of these lunatics is always insane amounts of status. 0.97

01:21:43.000 And religions too. 0.97

01:21:44.000 That's what heaven is, isn't it?

01:21:45.000 And it's also hope to people who have none.

01:21:48.000 That if you go along with this, and there's much more people that have none than have some, and have a lot.

01:21:53.000 Those people are the problem.

01:21:54.000 Let's go get them. 0.71

01:21:57.000 That's the reason why I'm so sad.

01:21:58.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:59.000 But you don't understand.

01:22:00.000 That's just a trap.

01:22:01.000 It's just a giant trap.

01:22:03.000 It's a massive trap, yeah.

01:22:04.000 But it's so wild that most people don't address it that way.

01:22:08.000 They just get...

01:22:08.000 Even really brilliant people I know just get locked into these ideologically captured echo chambers.

01:22:14.000 Yeah.

01:22:15.000 And when there's a story that our status has been unfairly squashed and it's these people's fault, that's when it's dangerous.

01:22:24.000 And, of course, you had that...

01:22:25.000 With the Nazis, they blame the Jews for everything.

01:22:28.000 But you also get that in this day and age.

01:22:30.000 I mean, you know, like...

01:22:31.000 Men get blamed for a lot in this day and age.

01:22:37.000 Why do we get blamed for a lot in this day and age?

01:22:39.000 And that's why it gets a bit...

01:22:40.000 I'm not saying it's anywhere near as dangerous as that, of course.

01:22:42.000 But it's the same psychological kind of patterns repeating again and again and again.

01:22:48.000 We've been unfairly deprived of status, and it's their fault.

01:22:51.000 And that's really dangerous, those kinds of stories.

01:22:53.000 It is, but I... I feel like it's just an overcorrection.

01:22:56.000 And I feel like it's the wave washes this way and the wave washes that way.

01:23:01.000 And if you look at the wave of what black people have faced in this country, by every definition, it's far worse.

01:23:08.000 Absolutely.

01:23:09.000 Of course.

01:23:09.000 Far, far, far, far, far worse than anything that white privileged people are experiencing today.

01:23:13.000 Obviously.

01:23:14.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:23:15.000 It's also a clear indication that an imbalance Yeah.

01:23:33.000 Yeah.

01:23:44.000 In the face of, they just last night, in the middle of the night, passed some new Ukraine bill.

01:23:49.000 Like in the middle of the night.

01:23:50.000 I didn't know that.

01:23:50.000 They passed some bill.

01:23:51.000 It's like, how much is it, Jamie?

01:23:53.000 $95.

01:23:53.000 95 billion.

01:23:54.000 Wow.

01:23:55.000 Plenty of money.

01:23:56.000 Wow.

01:23:57.000 That's a lot of money.

01:23:58.000 Imagine what they could have done with the money that they've already pumped into Ukraine, just in the inner cities of this country.

01:24:05.000 Imagine.

01:24:05.000 Imagine if there was...

01:24:06.000 We said there's a war on crime and poverty and despair.

01:24:10.000 This is our new war.

01:24:11.000 Instead of a war on drugs, instead of a war on foreign countries, you know, questionable...

01:24:18.000 The origins of how this conflict started.

01:24:20.000 What about a war on the things that suck about America?

01:24:23.000 Yeah.

01:24:24.000 That's what happened in America in the 1920s.

01:24:27.000 There was the New Deal, the Social Security Act, the GI Bill. 0.62

01:24:30.000 They pumped loads of money into fixing America after the Great Depression.

01:24:34.000 And it worked.

01:24:35.000 There was a whole era in America.

01:24:37.000 They called it the Great Compression because it was a compression between the gap between the rich and the poor.

01:24:42.000 And 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. 0.52

01:24:52.000 Yeah, that's how it can work without socialism.

01:24:55.000 Everybody rise up. 0.94

01:24:56.000 Not fucking take all the money away from the successful people. 0.86

01:24:59.000 You could rise up too, but we have to figure out a way. 0.96

01:25:03.000 To fix these problems that have existed forever in this country that get no attention.

01:25:09.000 At a certain point, one of my favorite stories of this year was when Xi Jinping came to San Francisco.

01:25:16.000 Because when San Francisco has this horrible homeless problem, it's really bad, where they have tents everywhere.

01:25:22.000 But when he came, they cleaned everything.

01:25:24.000 They took everybody away.

01:25:26.000 They don't know whether nobody said nothing.

01:25:27.000 They put up fences so they couldn't put the tents there anymore.

01:25:30.000 They put up fences in front of these buildings where they would camp out.

01:25:33.000 They just took them all away.

01:25:35.000 And then when Xi Jinping came through, it was all beautiful.

01:25:38.000 It's amazing, isn't it?

01:25:39.000 It literally sounds like what we would say China would do.

01:25:43.000 Yeah.

01:25:44.000 If 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? 1.00

01:25:51.000 They fucking got rid of all the protesters. 0.98

01:25:53.000 Everybody was protesting. 1.00

01:25:54.000 They killed the protesters. 0.98

01:25:55.000 They took all the homeless people away, all the bums in the street urchins. 1.00

01:25:59.000 This is what totalitarianism looks like.

01:26:02.000 Yeah, that's what totalitarianism looks like.

01:26:03.000 That's what they did in San Francisco.

01:26:04.000 Yeah, yeah, that's hilarious.

01:26:05.000 It's just...

01:26:07.000 But the people that live there are so in that cult...

01:26:11.000 They're so in that leftist cult that they're never going to go, hey, this is not working. 1.00

01:26:18.000 It doesn't matter how many fucking needles you have to jump over, how much human shit's in the street, they'll keep voting the same way. 0.99

01:26:23.000 Yeah, because they have to believe what they have to believe in order for their peers to give them the... 0.99

01:26:27.000 Your thoughts on this, the way you describe it, is the only way that makes sense.

01:26:32.000 It must be a status game you can't get out of, otherwise they would have gotten out of it.

01:26:38.000 It's counterintuitive to success and the evolution of the community.

01:26:44.000 It's counterintuitive to it.

01:26:46.000 I mean, one of my favorite ones is the Satanic Panic was an insane status game and thing.

01:26:51.000 And so that began in the early 80s.

01:26:54.000 And...

01:26:56.000 Essentially 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.

01:27:14.000 And so because that belief gives them status, they all decide to believe it.

01:27:20.000 And the same with the police.

01:27:22.000 The police think they were, like, on the hunt for the, you know, local neighborhood cops.

01:27:28.000 They also, like, put memories into children's heads and had those children come back and change their stories.

01:27:33.000 That's right.

01:27:33.000 And some of the...

01:27:34.000 Some of the stories that came out that were believed, it was like children were saying they had their eyelids stapled shut.

01:27:41.000 There was one kid that said that she got flushed down a toilet into a secret underground abuse chamber.

01:27:49.000 How big is this kid?

01:27:50.000 It began with this book, Pazda's Michelle Remembers.

01:27:53.000 Michelle remembers the discredited 1980s book written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pasteur.

01:28:00.000 She said that she had devil horns and a tail surgically attached to her body. 1.00

01:28:06.000 And he married her.

01:28:06.000 Did he?

01:28:07.000 I didn't know that.

01:28:07.000 Yes.

01:28:08.000 An eventual wife.

01:28:09.000 I bet she was hot. 1.00

01:28:11.000 The crazy ones like that?

01:28:12.000 I bet she was fun. 1.00

01:28:14.000 That's what happened.

01:28:15.000 He bought into it.

01:28:15.000 He's like, yeah, baby.

01:28:16.000 He said, at first I thought she was making it up, but then I thought it was true. 1.00

01:28:21.000 And 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.

01:28:31.000 There was nothing left.

01:28:32.000 Oh, that's convenient.

01:28:33.000 Yeah.

01:28:34.000 I bet she was hot. 1.00

01:28:35.000 But the amazing thing about the satanic panic was that...

01:28:37.000 I think it was like there was 190 arrests.

01:28:41.000 83 people went to prison.

01:28:42.000 Oh, my God.

01:28:43.000 One person went to prison solely on the basis of the testimony of a three-year-old child.

01:28:47.000 Oh, my God.

01:28:48.000 This one couple that owned a daycare spent 22 years in prison.

01:28:52.000 And there was never...

01:28:53.000 Obviously, never any physical evidence.

01:28:55.000 There was no tigers or sharks or... 0.98

01:28:57.000 You know, scars in the eyelids, but people were offered status for believing this bullshit, so they believed it. 0.96

01:29:05.000 And therapists, police officers, lawyers, judges, Oprah was big on it, Gerardo Rivera was big on it, journalists were big on it. 0.98

01:29:13.000 Everybody believed, even though there was no evidence.

01:29:15.000 Like, one of the great guiding slogans of the satanic panic people was, believe children, which has...

01:29:22.000 Amazing Echoes, doesn't it?

01:29:24.000 It does.

01:29:25.000 So you had to believe the children.

01:29:27.000 And they had this statistic that only two in every thousand children make this stuff up.

01:29:32.000 So you have to believe them.

01:29:33.000 So they'd even have badges, Believe Children.

01:29:35.000 They had the Believe Children organization.

01:29:40.000 Bothered about Dungeons& Dragons.

01:29:42.000 What?

01:29:43.000 Can you show me a photo of the woman?

01:29:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:29:46.000 I want to see if she was hot. 1.00

01:29:47.000 I bet she was.

01:29:48.000 And 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.

01:29:56.000 And also, the $300,000 advance he got for his...

01:29:59.000 Well, so much for my theory. 0.98

01:30:01.000 LAUGHTER Damn it, I hate when I'm wrong. 0.99

01:30:07.000 Damn, she might have been just fun. 1.00

01:30:10.000 But he was ugly too, though. 0.99

01:30:11.000 For him, that's probably as good as he gets. 0.94

01:30:13.000 Right?

01:30:14.000 You gotta judge it on a curve.

01:30:15.000 Is this her?

01:30:17.000 That's older, bro!

01:30:19.000 No one looks great when they get old.

01:30:20.000 That's not fair. 1.00

01:30:21.000 That's not fair, you son of a bitch. 1.00

01:30:24.000 But these are older pictures. 1.00

01:30:26.000 She's a young woman here.

01:30:28.000 What is the one when she's a young woman? 0.72

01:30:30.000 The one up there in the corner.

01:30:33.000 Is that when they first arrested her?

01:30:35.000 Yeah, these are from the 80s.

01:30:36.000 Let me put it on the screen.

01:30:37.000 These 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?

01:30:47.000 Maybe that's her now. 0.99

01:30:48.000 I don't know. 0.94

01:30:49.000 The problem is some people are crazy, and they will make up stories.

01:30:54.000 And then there's people that are just trapped in these witch hunts, like the McCarthyism of the 50s. 0.81

01:31:01.000 Everyone's a communist. 1.00

01:31:02.000 I mean, Oppenheimer got roped into that shit. 1.00

01:31:05.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:31:05.000 There's so many people that were being accused of being communists. 1.00

01:31:08.000 You went to one meeting, like, what's this all about?

01:31:10.000 Well, that's it.

01:31:11.000 People call those moral panics, but I don't think they are moral panics.

01:31:13.000 They're status gold rush.

01:31:15.000 You know, so the status on offer for finding Satanists was massive.

01:31:19.000 Like, the government pumped tens of millions of dollars into these organizations.

01:31:22.000 They became famous.

01:31:23.000 There was one person who interviewed children who got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for...

01:31:29.000 And they're kids, so when they're saying, I got flushed down a toilet, I got...

01:31:33.000 Forced to kill baby tigers.

01:31:35.000 It's clearly stuff that four-year-olds are inventing.

01:31:38.000 But it was taken to be serious.

01:31:40.000 And people went to prison for years on the basis of this testimony.

01:31:44.000 And so that's another thing that changed my thinking, this idea of moral panics.

01:31:48.000 I 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.

01:32:01.000 Boy, social media doesn't do us any favors with that, does it?

01:32:04.000 God, the ability to just tweet out something the moment something hits the news or whatever, and your hot take on it. 0.98

01:32:10.000 How many fucking people have lost their careers because of a hot take? 0.98

01:32:14.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.99

01:32:15.000 I mean, that's the thing.

01:32:16.000 I was talking about those different kinds of status, virtue status, success status.

01:32:20.000 Virtue status is the easiest status to get.

01:32:22.000 Success is hard.

01:32:23.000 You've got to become competent.

01:32:24.000 You've got to become good at something.

01:32:26.000 Virtue is easy, especially on social media.

01:32:29.000 It's so easy.

01:32:29.000 So that's why it sort of becomes addictive.

01:32:32.000 People just make themselves feel good, get these little hits of feel good.

01:32:35.000 But it's also indicative of who you are.

01:32:38.000 Because no one who's really competent at something is engaging in that all day long.

01:32:44.000 That thing is usually by people that don't feel like they're getting the attention they deserve. 0.99

01:32:49.000 And then they'll go after whatever the fuck it is. 0.99

01:32:51.000 Absolutely. 0.99

01:32:52.000 Elevate them.

01:32:53.000 Whatever it is.

01:32:54.000 Whatever cause there is.

01:32:55.000 It's du jour.

01:32:57.000 Yes.

01:32:59.000 You get to either yell at people or yell with people.

01:33:02.000 Yeah, and I think for me it's interesting.

01:33:04.000 I 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.

01:33:13.000 So 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.

01:33:19.000 And I think there's a sense amongst millennials and Gen Zs, partly a real truth sense, that...

01:33:23.000 The success games that we were playing in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s are over now.

01:33:27.000 The game is fixed.

01:33:29.000 For millennials and Gen Z's life is harder in lots of real ways.

01:33:33.000 They can't get on the property ladder, they've got massive student debt, they're underemployed.

01:33:37.000 So what do you do if you can't play the success games that We Gen Xers played in the 90s.

01:33:43.000 Well, you play virtue games instead.

01:33:45.000 So, you know, we have to get our status from somewhere.

01:33:47.000 So if success is hard, we're going to do more virtue.

01:33:51.000 So 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.

01:34:06.000 So there's a lot of anger, you know, comes out of that.

01:34:09.000 Yeah.

01:34:11.000 It's just so unfortunate how easy it is to engage in this behavior and how few guidelines there are.

01:34:19.000 Other 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...

01:34:28.000 It allows people to have, like, a look at the wiring under the board.

01:34:32.000 Like, oh, this is what the problem is. 0.99

01:34:34.000 And I would hope that people that are engaged in that realize, like, what a psychological capture that shit is. 0.99

01:34:42.000 It's so weird for you because you get it. 0.98

01:34:45.000 I've had friends that have had, like, real problems with, like, engaging with people on Twitter.

01:34:50.000 Like, they'll post a hot take.

01:34:52.000 And then someone will post back.

01:34:53.000 And they'll be walking down the street and they can't even walk five steps before they're checking.

01:34:56.000 They want to check their likes and check their thing and see who's responding.

01:34:59.000 And then respond to the person who's responding. 1.00

01:35:01.000 Fuck you and fuck this. 1.00

01:35:02.000 And everybody's trying to zing on everybody. 1.00

01:35:04.000 And it's not good.

01:35:07.000 It's not good in any way, shape or form.

01:35:09.000 It never turns out well.

01:35:10.000 There's never one of those.

01:35:12.000 You go, I feel good about that.

01:35:13.000 That was really good.

01:35:14.000 I definitely won that one.

01:35:15.000 Not just that, but I feel like we got some good accomplishments.

01:35:18.000 No, most of those are not that.

01:35:20.000 Most of those are hostile, weird.

01:35:26.000 Unnatural ways of communicating.

01:35:28.000 You're just communicating through text with strangers.

01:35:30.000 It's like so unnatural.

01:35:31.000 And it is.

01:35:32.000 I mean, that's what social media is.

01:35:34.000 It's they've taken the status gains of life and put them in your phone.

01:35:39.000 I mean, and that's what, like in the 90s, there was all this, like from Wired magazine and people, all this digital utopia.

01:35:45.000 And I thought that when we were all online, it was going to create this hierarchy-free utopia.

01:35:50.000 Yeah.

01:35:51.000 Of course, that's not what happens when you connect billions of people together.

01:35:54.000 They play status games.

01:35:55.000 That's what they do.

01:35:56.000 And those three games of dominance, virtue and success, that's social media.

01:36:00.000 You know, we're pushing each other around.

01:36:01.000 We're virtue signaling and we're showing off about our success.

01:36:04.000 That's what we're doing.

01:36:05.000 And that's why...

01:36:07.000 That'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.

01:36:17.000 And that's why they're doing this because it's compulsive because we're gambling with a resource that is incredibly important to us.

01:36:24.000 Yeah.

01:36:25.000 And you can do so in a way that never existed before. 0.53

01:36:29.000 Like, 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. 0.82

01:36:37.000 Yeah, absolutely. 0.95

01:36:38.000 You just have workouts with your shirt off.

01:36:39.000 You'll get a lot of followers if you're a woman in your underwear. 1.00

01:36:44.000 We're good to go.

01:36:59.000 And a lot of people have more status in their phones than they do in their actual real life.

01:37:04.000 They're going to their ordinary job in their ordinary town, but on this platform, they're really someone.

01:37:10.000 They've got a bunch of followers.

01:37:11.000 So that shows you how...

01:37:15.000 Why 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.

01:37:29.000 It's a new way of harvesting this incredibly valuable resource that we value more than gold.

01:37:35.000 When you say that people get physically ill from it, what happens to people when they don't get status physically?

01:37:41.000 It'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.

01:37:47.000 So there was a bunch of really interesting experiments done in the UK in the British Civil Service, which is a massive organisation, hugely stratified.

01:37:55.000 And this guy, Dr. Michael Marmot and his team went in there and they found that...

01:38:01.000 Your place in the hierarchy predicted your health outcomes.

01:38:04.000 And 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.

01:38:12.000 Literally, the person one down from the very top had slightly worse health outcomes from the person at the very top.

01:38:17.000 And they were really significant.

01:38:18.000 So, 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.

01:38:26.000 And then other academics went into the lab and they did an experiment with monkeys, I think baboons.

01:38:31.000 And they gave these monkeys these delicious diets of like pizza and ice cream.

01:38:35.000 They basically made them really unhealthy.

01:38:37.000 So 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.

01:38:44.000 And it was.

01:38:45.000 It was the monkeys at the bottom of the hierarchy got sick more reliably than the monkeys at the top.

01:38:52.000 Even on the same terrible diet.

01:38:54.000 Yeah, and crucially, they then somehow changed the hierarchy, and the health outcomes changed in lockstep.

01:39:02.000 How did they change the hierarchy?

01:39:04.000 I don't know.

01:39:05.000 They did that.

01:39:06.000 I probably don't want to know.

01:39:07.000 It's probably really horrific.

01:39:08.000 With monkeys?

01:39:09.000 How do you pull that off?

01:39:11.000 Yeah.

01:39:11.000 So it is.

01:39:13.000 It's the status hierarchy.

01:39:14.000 And it's for the same reason as loneliness.

01:39:16.000 When 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.

01:39:27.000 And we're not designed to be in that state for long periods of time.

01:39:30.000 That's a response that's designed for being chased or attacked.

01:39:34.000 It's supposed to be like this.

01:39:36.000 And so chronic inflammation is really bad for us.

01:39:38.000 It makes us more vulnerable to cancer, Alzheimer's, all kinds of horrific issues.

01:39:44.000 So that's why lacking in status is bad for our physical health.

01:39:49.000 It's the same reasons why loneliness is bad for our physical health.

01:39:51.000 And that has to play a role in what gets diagnosed as depression then.

01:39:55.000 Oh, status is massive for depression.

01:39:59.000 A sudden drop in status is a red flag for suicidal ideation when we suddenly drop in status.

01:40:05.000 So, you know, anxiety, depression, self-harm is all tied to feeling sort of low in status.

01:40:11.000 Then in my spare time, I volunteer back in the UK for like a crisis hotline.

01:40:17.000 People phone it, particularly when they're Suicidal.

01:40:21.000 Oh man, what a great thing if someone suicidally get a hold of you.

01:40:25.000 That's a cool conversation.

01:40:26.000 You know, some people, they'd be droning on and on, like, bro, you're not inspiring.

01:40:31.000 Help me out.

01:40:32.000 What 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.

01:40:39.000 The first one is chronic pain, obviously.

01:40:42.000 The second one is people struggle with recent bereavement.

01:40:46.000 People become suicidal when somebody they love or a pet they love.

01:40:50.000 But by far the most common reason people phone when I've spoken to a suicidal is to do with their identity failure.

01:40:59.000 They're severely lacking in connection or status, usually both.

01:41:03.000 And not only are they lacking, they're stuck.

01:41:06.000 They're trapped.

01:41:06.000 They feel like there's nothing I can do.

01:41:08.000 My life is so fucked. 0.99

01:41:09.000 There's no way I can ever meet anybody. 1.00

01:41:11.000 There's no way I can ever...

01:41:13.000 Feel 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.

01:41:38.000 It's not your fault That's all they ever want to tell you.

01:41:40.000 Yeah They don't want to tell you that the quality of your life affects the way you feel.

01:41:46.000 And 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.

01:41:55.000 But that's connection.

01:41:56.000 Status is also really, you know, it's essential.

01:41:59.000 It's a big part of that.

01:42:00.000 And all of that contributes to this thing that we call depression.

01:42:03.000 Absolutely.

01:42:04.000 And no one wants to say that.

01:42:06.000 They want to say, get on this.

01:42:07.000 Come on, man.

01:42:09.000 We got something for you, buddy.

01:42:10.000 Pop this.

01:42:12.000 Come on, Will.

01:42:12.000 It's crazy.

01:42:13.000 Play along.

01:42:13.000 Because it seems so obvious.

01:42:15.000 It seems so obvious.

01:42:16.000 It does, but you can't bring it up.

01:42:18.000 No.

01:42:18.000 It's almost like it's a foreboding topic.

01:42:20.000 You can't say, well, how much of it is what you're doing with your life?

01:42:24.000 Does that factor in at all?

01:42:26.000 How much of it is what kind of friends you're around?

01:42:28.000 What kind of relationship are you in?

01:42:29.000 Exactly.

01:42:29.000 I 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...

01:42:36.000 At 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,

01:42:51.000 so what you're, you know, like, these, and it always, it always goes down well.

01:42:55.000 They always go, oh my god, wow, you know, no one's ever said that stuff to me before.

01:42:59.000 Like, it's like a...

01:43:01.000 It'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.

01:43:12.000 There 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.

01:43:26.000 And 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.

01:43:37.000 So that's horrific.

01:43:40.000 It was a big scandal about are these judgments, can we really reduce I think?

01:44:02.000 Was it an accurate statement, or was the school doing poorly for some reason, or was it just a cunty person? 0.92

01:44:10.000 That's the question. 0.97

01:44:11.000 That's the problem with cuntiness, right? 1.00

01:44:13.000 We kind of tolerate that kind of communication with people.

01:44:16.000 We look in and we watch from a side, like, oh.

01:44:20.000 But there's something to that, that is, you really are pumping out negativity.

01:44:25.000 It 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.

01:44:34.000 That's it. 0.98

01:44:34.000 Yeah, you're pumping out shitty things. 0.98

01:44:36.000 And you're doing it for status, right? 0.90

01:44:37.000 Well, when you take someone's status away, like they took her status away, I feel it is like an act of social violence.

01:44:44.000 Like our identity is of massive importance to us.

01:44:48.000 And 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.

01:44:55.000 And the act of physical violence doesn't only restore that status back to its sort of set point.

01:45:01.000 It turns that humiliation into a sense of pride.

01:45:05.000 So that's why violence is so tempting.

01:45:09.000 It'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.

01:45:16.000 It sends a negative status into a positive status.

01:45:20.000 The key is to have enough faith that you don't care.

01:45:24.000 Yeah.

01:45:25.000 You have to have enough where you don't mind some little breach of your status.

01:45:30.000 You're like, oh really?

01:45:31.000 Someone disrespects you.

01:45:32.000 You don't have to prove to them.

01:45:34.000 Because you have to understand what game you're playing.

01:45:37.000 Most people don't.

01:45:38.000 The consequences of violence are grave.

01:45:41.000 You do not want to engage in this pattern of behavior that people have locked into their brain.

01:45:47.000 Most of the time we don't use it.

01:45:49.000 The vast majority of human history, they used it a lot.

01:45:55.000 That, again, is carved into your brain.

01:45:58.000 You must resist, you know, in any way.

01:46:01.000 And most violent acts, it sort of concentrates in young men who are lower on the socioeconomic scale.

01:46:09.000 So they're people who are...

01:46:12.000 More aggressive by nature physically because they're built for that.

01:46:15.000 But the socioeconomic stuff… They feel slighted.

01:46:18.000 Yeah, but their sense of status is much more fragile because they haven't got some great job.

01:46:23.000 They haven't got a college education.

01:46:24.000 And so they're much more worried about, insecure about their sense of status.

01:46:29.000 So 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.

01:46:41.000 Those people are the reason why you're in the situation that you're in.

01:46:45.000 You're empowering people to hate someone specifically because of the way they look.

01:46:51.000 No matter what you think the justifications of that, it's the exact same thing in every culture when that happens.

01:46:57.000 It's just racism.

01:46:58.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:46:59.000 That's all it is.

01:47:00.000 Yeah.

01:47:00.000 And 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.

01:47:12.000 Yeah.

01:47:13.000 And become completely illogical just by deciding I'm not listening to a white man.

01:47:19.000 Yes.

01:47:19.000 Yeah.

01:47:20.000 That's absolutely right.

01:47:21.000 It's interesting.

01:47:22.000 That's absolutely true.

01:47:23.000 It's interesting because it's like it's the oldest trick in the book.

01:47:26.000 It's been around for so long.

01:47:27.000 And we would think that we would learn...

01:47:31.000 But there's something about us where we don't see the exact same thing if it's not Nazis with swastikas.

01:47:38.000 We don't see it coming.

01:47:39.000 Well, I think, again, it's that storytelling brain.

01:47:41.000 We're playing a status game, but our conscious experience of life is a story, and it's fiction.

01:47:47.000 And the story always wants to make us heroic, so we're virtuous.

01:47:51.000 And I think that makes...

01:47:53.000 People's hatreds are invisible to them.

01:47:56.000 So you could say to somebody, and I have said to somebody relatively recently, you know, I think you hate men.

01:48:03.000 You've got a problem with men.

01:48:04.000 You're always saying this about men and that about men.

01:48:07.000 Like, it's not very nice.

01:48:09.000 And then she said to me, well, you don't understand the problems I've had in my life with men.

01:48:12.000 I've been abused.

01:48:13.000 I've been abused.

01:48:13.000 All of which is true.

01:48:15.000 But so that's her brain telling herself a heroic, virtuous story that justifies her Her hatred of this class of human beings.

01:48:23.000 And that's true for everybody. 0.53

01:48:24.000 That's true for people who hate women. 1.00

01:48:25.000 That's also true for misogynists. 1.00

01:48:27.000 That's true for white people who hate black people. 0.99

01:48:32.000 Everybody's hatred is dressed up in a virtuous story. 0.99

01:48:35.000 And I think that's right.

01:48:36.000 As soon as you start We're good to go.

01:49:05.000 You know, we've all fallen for this stuff, if we're honest, in our past.

01:49:10.000 And 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.

01:49:20.000 They're really good at telling us, no, you're right.

01:49:22.000 You're right.

01:49:23.000 These people are the problem.

01:49:25.000 And your animus towards them is actually a good thing.

01:49:28.000 It's heroic. 0.99

01:49:29.000 Boy, what a weird fucking programming that we have. 0.99

01:49:33.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:49:33.000 Well, it's pure tribalism, isn't it? 1.00

01:49:35.000 Yeah.

01:49:36.000 It's just...

01:49:37.000 It's so bizarre to see how baked in that is.

01:49:42.000 And even with really well-intentioned, highly educated people, they just get sucked into it.

01:49:51.000 Well, especially...

01:49:51.000 You probably know about the studies that show that intelligence is no inoculation to this stuff.

01:49:56.000 So being more intelligent...

01:49:59.000 It doesn't make you any better at finding reasons why your stories about the world are false.

01:50:04.000 But it does make you better at finding reasons why they're true.

01:50:07.000 So really smart people can give you ten reasons why they're justified in their hatred of this, that and the other.

01:50:12.000 Whereas somebody less smart can only give you like three or four.

01:50:15.000 So intelligence is no inoculation to this stuff.

01:50:18.000 If anything, it makes it kind of worse.

01:50:22.000 I mean, one of my...

01:50:23.000 One of the stories that I wrote in one of my books called The Heretics was I was hanging out with this guy, David Irving.

01:50:30.000 Do you know David Irving?

01:50:31.000 David Irving was a really well respected historian of the Second World War.

01:50:36.000 And he just decided one day that Hitler was actually, in his words, a friend of the Jews.

01:50:43.000 Yeah, that's what he said.

01:50:44.000 And he had no idea the Holocaust had happened and it was all done by his subordinates. 0.99

01:50:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:50:48.000 He's been to prison for his anti-Semitic beliefs.

01:50:52.000 But he was really respected.

01:50:54.000 The reason we know about Dresden, the firebombing of Dresden, was because of his scholarship.

01:50:57.000 I think even in Slaughterhouse-Five he's mentioned positively.

01:51:01.000 And so he's completely excommunicated now from the historical...

01:51:07.000 You know, establishment.

01:51:09.000 He believes this stuff so passionately that he was kind of offered the opportunity to withdraw his opinions in an Austrian court.

01:51:18.000 It's in his 70s, this was, and he refused and went to prison in his 70s.

01:51:23.000 And 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.

01:51:32.000 And I wanted to hang out with him because he's an incredibly intelligent man who has these fucking mad beliefs about the world. 0.79

01:51:43.000 And so what I did was, in order to make money at the time, he was selling these tours of Holocaust sites. 0.83

01:51:49.000 So you could pay two and a half grand and go for a week with him on these tours.

01:51:53.000 And he would give you the real, inverted commas, history of what actually happened in these places.

01:51:56.000 Where was he getting this information from, supposedly?

01:51:58.000 Well, I mean, he was...

01:52:00.000 From the archives.

01:52:01.000 I mean, it was his own scholarship, but he was doing that thing that, you know, he was finding his own interpretations of this scholarship.

01:52:07.000 And what did he say about, like, the trenches filled with bodies?

01:52:11.000 Oh, well, I mean, he went through a period of outright Holocaust denial, which he then kind of repented.

01:52:17.000 And the reason that his flirtation with outright Holocaust denial was based on this study.

01:52:23.000 This guy, he took a chip out of the wall of one of the gas chambers and had it analyzed.

01:52:29.000 Is this the Dr. Death thing?

01:52:31.000 I don't think so.

01:52:33.000 It 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.

01:52:44.000 And he said that it didn't show any of the signs of gas.

01:52:48.000 No, the one that got Irving was that this person said, well, the amount of toxins in this concrete isn't even enough to...

01:52:57.000 Kill a cockroach.

01:52:58.000 But what he didn't understand was that cockroaches are really unbelievably good at surviving. 1.00

01:53:03.000 It's much easier to kill a human than a cockroach.

01:53:05.000 Well, not only that, that stuff subsides into the atmosphere.

01:53:07.000 We looked at it the other day.

01:53:08.000 That stuff subsides into the atmosphere very quickly.

01:53:10.000 Like, if you used it in a room and then opened up the doors, it would go into the atmosphere very quickly.

01:53:17.000 Yeah, so anyway, I mean, to be fair to Irving, because he did admit that he'd made a mistake there.

01:53:23.000 But he's still a deeply, deeply anti-Semitic man.

01:53:27.000 I mean, when I was talking to him...

01:53:29.000 So he was from the beginning?

01:53:30.000 And then that flavoured his Holocaust denial?

01:53:33.000 Well, it was weird.

01:53:34.000 What I got from him was that he actually was somebody that...

01:53:39.000 Is very pro-British Empire.

01:53:41.000 And I think he liked Hitler. 0.88

01:53:43.000 Like his family, his history goes back to, you know, is all very embedded in the British Empire.

01:53:49.000 And he blamed Hitler.

01:53:52.000 He liked Hitler because Hitler was modelling the Third Reich on the British Empire. 0.72

01:53:56.000 And we had to kind of relinquish empire to pay for the Second World War or something.

01:54:01.000 So he...

01:54:01.000 So that was my sense.

01:54:02.000 But more interesting than Irving were the people that...

01:54:05.000 Because the people that were on the tour were actual proper Nazis. 0.75

01:54:07.000 Like, they had proper Nazi tattoos. 0.64

01:54:09.000 Jesus.

01:54:09.000 Like, full on.

01:54:10.000 And I was undercover, so I had to pretend that I was also like them.

01:54:14.000 It was kind of a scary week.

01:54:16.000 But one of the most...

01:54:17.000 Did you get to talk to any of them?

01:54:18.000 All of them.

01:54:19.000 I was hanging out with them.

01:54:20.000 I was on holiday with them.

01:54:21.000 I was on a coach with them.

01:54:22.000 Yeah.

01:54:23.000 What are they like?

01:54:24.000 They're so weird.

01:54:26.000 So...

01:54:27.000 They're all men. 0.99

01:54:31.000 They...

01:54:31.000 I mean, I write about this in the book.

01:54:34.000 I hesitate to say it, but I do write about it.

01:54:38.000 They were quite nice.

01:54:42.000 You're so British!

01:54:44.000 So this is the weird thing.

01:54:46.000 So what happened was I interviewed David Irving on day one.

01:54:48.000 And, you know, at the time I was a Guardian journalist.

01:54:51.000 I couldn't hide my disdain for him. 0.99

01:54:52.000 And I kind of fucked up. 0.99

01:54:54.000 I let it be known... 1.00

01:54:56.000 Through my line of questioning that I felt he was a racist lunatic. 0.97

01:54:59.000 So he kind of walked off.

01:55:00.000 And I was kind of panicking because I was thinking, I've not got enough material for my book.

01:55:04.000 I need to interview him again.

01:55:05.000 And I was talking to the Nazis about, oh, I'm freaking out.

01:55:09.000 And then the person organizing the tour, I kept hassling and saying, I need to speak to David again.

01:55:13.000 I need to speak to David again.

01:55:14.000 And she said to me, oh, you know, you might not know this, but all the boys have got together.

01:55:18.000 And 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.

01:55:27.000 I just thought that's so nice.

01:55:30.000 But that's the thing.

01:55:32.000 That's what I write about in the book.

01:55:33.000 It's like the idea that these are monsters.

01:55:35.000 That's storytelling.

01:55:36.000 They're just blokes who've made a mistake about the world.

01:55:40.000 And what was most interesting about that was that The majority of those men had parents that fought for the Nazis in the Second World War.

01:55:49.000 So there was one guy on the last night of the trip, they were going to have the showing of the film Downfall, the super...

01:55:56.000 Did you know the film Downfall?

01:55:57.000 No.

01:55:57.000 It's a German film.

01:55:58.000 It's incredible.

01:55:58.000 It's a super realistic account of the last seven days of Hitler's life in the Hitler bunker.

01:56:04.000 It's an incredible, incredible film.

01:56:07.000 It's all set in the bunker.

01:56:09.000 And so Irving was going to show downfall and give his alternative take on what was really going on.

01:56:14.000 And one of these guys couldn't watch downfall because his dad was in the bunker with Hitler and he found it too upsetting.

01:56:21.000 And that was a big lightbulb moment for me.

01:56:23.000 So my takeaway from that was that these...

01:56:26.000 David Irving aside, these guys had all been brought up by parents who were proper Nazis. 0.81

01:56:33.000 And obviously Nazis are synonym for evil.

01:56:36.000 And they couldn't cope with the fact that their dads, probably, mums perhaps as well, were evil.

01:56:43.000 So 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.

01:56:51.000 Wow.

01:56:52.000 So 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.

01:56:58.000 And probably their parents had filled their head with some of this stuff too, you know.

01:57:01.000 Knowing what you know about our desire for status and how that's just...

01:57:07.000 It's impossible to remove from the human mind and human society.

01:57:12.000 Do you think that we could have like a warning guidebook for human beings?

01:57:20.000 The same way the Constitution is sort of a warning guidebook to establish a republic.

01:57:24.000 Like 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.

01:57:33.000 They planned it out to make sure that one person couldn't just take over and run it.

01:57:39.000 It 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.

01:57:48.000 And go, no, no, no, no, no.

01:57:50.000 This is not...

01:57:52.000 I know what you're doing.

01:57:54.000 You're hijacking this for your own good.

01:57:56.000 And we know when people do it, we can't say it.

01:57:58.000 Because if they attach themselves to a virtuous cause, what are you criticizing?

01:58:03.000 Blank? 0.91

01:58:04.000 What are you, a Nazi, a racist, a transphobe? 1.00

01:58:07.000 Whatever it is.

01:58:09.000 We should be able to see those outside of the merits of the ideas that we're discussing.

01:58:16.000 Whatever 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. 0.94

01:58:33.000 We should shun people to do that and teach people at a fucking really early age not to do it. 0.58

01:58:40.000 It's hard to learn because there's no precedent. 0.97

01:58:42.000 It's not like there's a hundred years of history on how to use the internet properly.

01:58:48.000 Nobody knows.

01:58:50.000 They're just doing it because it seems like a thing to do that makes you feel good. 0.92

01:58:53.000 Gives you a little shitty dopamine spike. 0.90

01:58:56.000 And so they just dive in. 0.94

01:58:57.000 But 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.

01:59:10.000 This is why.

01:59:11.000 These are all the patterns.

01:59:12.000 And 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.

01:59:19.000 And then as they get older, just sort of have a much more rational way of interfacing with people.

01:59:23.000 Yeah, I think so.

01:59:24.000 I think we should be taught this stuff.

01:59:26.000 I mean, one of the things that I took away from this was that you get this idea about fascism and totalitarians.

01:59:33.000 How that happens is that these evil people come marching in and forcing everybody to believe certain things.

01:59:38.000 Well, when you look at, say, the rise of the Nazis, fascists, totalitarians, they don't go in and force you to do anything.

01:59:45.000 They tell you stories that you want to hear.

01:59:47.000 They flatter you into...

01:59:48.000 You know, that's what the Nazis did. 0.94

01:59:50.000 They 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. 0.94

01:59:58.000 So this fascist...

02:00:03.000 Government, this horrific episode in our history, it didn't begin with force.

02:00:09.000 It 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.

02:00:22.000 And, you know, people love that stuff.

02:00:24.000 I mean, the other thing that I think is that people...

02:00:28.000 What 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.

02:00:35.000 So that's why Trump got voted in.

02:00:38.000 Because 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.

02:00:46.000 But 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.

02:00:58.000 They're going to react.

02:00:59.000 And it's the same way that I feel that we're treating young men at the moment.

02:01:03.000 You can't raise a generation of young men in an environment where you take all their status away and not expect them to react.

02:01:10.000 So 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.

02:01:20.000 How could it be that our young men are flocking to this individual?

02:01:24.000 It's because you're calling them, you know, you're calling them You're removing their status.

02:01:30.000 So you can't, you know, the left need to understand, you can't disparage and dismiss and insult these entire categories of people.

02:01:37.000 And I speak as a lifelong left-wing person.

02:01:39.000 You can't do that and not expect some pushback.

02:01:42.000 My friend Duncan said that about the pandemic when the people on the left were attacking all the people on the right.

02:01:48.000 He said, dude, this is going to lead to a totalitarian right-wing government.

02:01:53.000 He goes, watch what this happens.

02:01:55.000 Watch what happens.

02:01:56.000 Because all these people on the left are going crazy.

02:01:58.000 And 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.

02:02:07.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:02:08.000 So the harder one hits, the harder the response, and then the harder they hit back.

02:02:13.000 And it ratchets up.

02:02:14.000 Till civil war.

02:02:16.000 But the rhetoric ratchets up, doesn't it?

02:02:18.000 I mean, that's what happens.

02:02:19.000 It is potentially dangerous.

02:02:22.000 It's potentially very dangerous.

02:02:24.000 And it's not dangerous right here yet, right now.

02:02:27.000 But it is if you're in Gaza.

02:02:29.000 It certainly is if you're in Ukraine.

02:02:30.000 It certainly is in other parts of the world where they convince people that these people are the bad people and we're the good people.

02:02:36.000 Go get them.

02:02:38.000 And then there's the reality of bad people.

02:02:40.000 What do you do about them?

02:02:41.000 I mean, you can't just ignore the fact that there's terrorists out there.

02:02:44.000 Like, you gotta look at all of it. 1.00

02:02:45.000 The whole thing is fucking nuts. 0.98

02:02:47.000 And if we can recognize patterns and how people fall into patterns, I think we can have less nuts. 0.98

02:02:53.000 This has to be established at a young age.

02:02:57.000 It'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.

02:03:06.000 That's really where they get their jollies from. 0.60

02:03:08.000 If you just tell them right now, you've got to cut that out.

02:03:10.000 Like, what am I going to do for 10 hours a day?

02:03:12.000 That's literally what I do.

02:03:15.000 You know, that's one of my things that I've always gone back and forth in my head about is universal basic income.

02:03:22.000 One 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.

02:03:29.000 They could chase their dreams and pursue their dreams.

02:03:32.000 The other part of me is like, yeah, but then they're not going to have any incentive to do anything. 0.86

02:03:36.000 They'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.

02:03:45.000 We'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.

02:03:56.000 But 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?

02:04:04.000 There's a certain amount of people that need a little something to get them going.

02:04:08.000 And a lot of really ambitious people came from poverty. 0.96

02:04:12.000 And 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. 0.95

02:04:19.000 But I think we all have different personalities and people are going to respond to poverty in different ways. 1.00

02:04:23.000 And some people have a particular personality where they're wired more for the pursuit of status, where they're going to go, fuck this. 0.99

02:04:28.000 Right. 1.00

02:04:29.000 A certain percentage are going to go for it.

02:04:30.000 They're going to use it and they're going to chase their dreams.

02:04:32.000 Yeah, so my argument as a lefty is that a lot of that is genetic and can't be helped.

02:04:39.000 Really?

02:04:40.000 Genetic?

02:04:41.000 Yeah.

02:04:41.000 How so?

02:04:42.000 So, you know, ballpark figure, 50% of who we are is genetic.

02:04:47.000 So we all have different personality types.

02:04:49.000 And so if you're extrovert, that's a good thing in our neoliberal market economy because you're sociable, you're ambitious.

02:04:57.000 If you're low in agreeableness, that's also a good thing in our particular environment because you're competitive.

02:05:04.000 But 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.

02:05:18.000 So my argument is that those people deserve some help.

02:05:22.000 Those people deserve a social safety net because there's no such thing as a pure meritocracy.

02:05:28.000 Human brains don't roll off the production line at Foxconn.

02:05:31.000 We're all wired differently with different talents.

02:05:33.000 And 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.

02:05:40.000 They lose their temper.

02:05:41.000 And we can try and help those people, but you can't completely rewire those people.

02:05:46.000 It's impossible.

02:05:47.000 For example, to turn an extrovert into an introvert because of, you know, because a lot of that is genetic.

02:05:52.000 Like we're born with these semi-finished brains.

02:05:55.000 So genes aren't fates, but they do set us in a certain direction.

02:06:00.000 And most of the rest of that kind of creation of self happens when we're young in the first 20 years of life.

02:06:06.000 And it's mostly sort of episodes of life over which we have no control.

02:06:11.000 So by the time we're in our 20s, early 20s, we're kind of who we are.

02:06:14.000 There's not much that's going to change us in a dramatic sense apart from serious trauma.

02:06:21.000 So 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.

02:06:38.000 What 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?

02:06:48.000 Well, I think...

02:06:49.000 Is there a percentage that we're going to lose?

02:06:51.000 I don't know.

02:06:52.000 But I think what we need to have is...

02:06:55.000 I mean, I think that's why education is so important, because a good school system will find those incredible, talented people.

02:07:04.000 Like, my father was from a family of bricklayers going back generations, and he had a scholarship to Oxford University.

02:07:10.000 You know, you...

02:07:13.000 Yeah, 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.

02:07:21.000 You've got an excellent mind and an excellent personality.

02:07:23.000 And 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.

02:07:31.000 And again, that's a welfare kind of social safety net tax, sort of slightly bigger tax thing.

02:07:37.000 That certainly is.

02:07:38.000 But the idea of just straight money and housing.

02:07:41.000 That's what I'm talking about.

02:07:42.000 Straight money and housing is a different kind of social safety net.

02:07:45.000 And I think that there's a real good argument for what you're saying that some people are just...

02:07:50.000 They just don't have the tools.

02:07:52.000 But 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.

02:08:01.000 It's just getting...

02:08:02.000 There's some people that were like led very...

02:08:07.000 Un-spectacular lives.

02:08:08.000 And then they found this one thing.

02:08:10.000 And they got really good at that one thing and became a superstar at it.

02:08:12.000 And they'll tell you, you know, I was 28 years old. 0.88

02:08:14.000 I was just kind of fucking around one day with my friends. 0.93

02:08:16.000 And then I really got into it. 0.94

02:08:18.000 And the next thing you know, this guy's like a famous person in the field or whatever it is.

02:08:23.000 That happens.

02:08:24.000 That does happen.

02:08:25.000 It probably happens less if you have everything taken care of.

02:08:32.000 So there's a bunch of things going on.

02:08:34.000 There's people that are kind of hopeless, unfortunately, and maybe that is a genetic thing.

02:08:40.000 Maybe at least some of them it is a genetic thing.

02:08:42.000 But then there's also people that are uninterested.

02:08:45.000 And maybe uninspired, and maybe it's not as simple as them going to school.

02:08:49.000 It's just maybe like seeing someone around you that lives life in a way that you admire.

02:08:55.000 Someone who's like, I want to be like that guy, or I want to be like her.

02:08:58.000 Like, what is that?

02:09:00.000 And how do you get that to people?

02:09:02.000 Because that's a big factor.

02:09:03.000 That's a giant factor in who you become as an adult human being.

02:09:07.000 Like, who are you exposed to?

02:09:09.000 As a child.

02:09:10.000 Absolutely, yeah.

02:09:11.000 So 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.

02:09:18.000 And 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.

02:09:28.000 There are various cues in our environment that we subconsciously seek out to mimic people.

02:09:34.000 One of them is similarity.

02:09:36.000 So we identify people who are a bit like us.

02:09:38.000 So men are more likely to glom onto men, women, women, that kind of thing. 0.99

02:09:42.000 And then there's other various cues.

02:09:44.000 There's like skill cues.

02:09:47.000 So if we see somebody who's really competent at something, we'll start to mimic them and copy them.

02:09:54.000 There's success cues, so the symbols of success, so the fast car or in the tribal context, the necklace of teeth.

02:10:02.000 And then the other one is prestige cues.

02:10:05.000 So if we see lots of other people attending to one person, we'll also attend to them.

02:10:09.000 And 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...

02:10:20.000 It's not a skill for anything, who becomes globally famous.

02:10:23.000 So the brain's always looking for these people to identify and then copy.

02:10:33.000 And the logic is that these people are high status.

02:10:36.000 They've worked out how to earn status in the game that we're playing.

02:10:40.000 Copying them, we too will learn and rise in status.

02:10:44.000 So I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that role models are really important.

02:10:49.000 And 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.

02:10:59.000 And the reason we have street gangs and jihadist groups isn't because... 0.88

02:11:03.000 Boys will be boys and they're naughty, they're criminals, they're monsters. 0.98

02:11:06.000 It's because they need status. 0.92

02:11:08.000 And 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.

02:11:22.000 What are you going to choose?

02:11:23.000 So that's what society needs to figure out.

02:11:26.000 It'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.

02:11:35.000 I mean, that's one of the things about being middle class is you get all those opportunities to earn status.

02:11:38.000 You get education, you go to college, you can choose all these careers.

02:11:41.000 But poorer people just don't have those opportunities.

02:11:43.000 And so I think you're right.

02:11:45.000 Lives are wasted.

02:11:47.000 Human value is wasted because those opportunities just aren't made for young people. 0.98

02:11:52.000 You ever listen to Gangstar?

02:11:54.000 No.

02:11:55.000 Gangstar has a song about it called Just To Get A Rep.

02:11:57.000 Oh, really?

02:11:58.000 Yeah.

02:11:59.000 It's all about people doing things just to get a reputation.

02:12:02.000 Yeah.

02:12:03.000 Yeah, there was a guy in the 70s who went to this, it was Nigerian Africa.

02:12:12.000 And there used to be this, like a run by the royals, so aristocratic rulers.

02:12:20.000 And then these jihadists came in and just got rid of them all.

02:12:23.000 And he was curious, this guy, his name is Bascom, I think, Jerome Bascom.

02:12:27.000 Why is it that Islam is really popular in this place?

02:12:30.000 Because it should be hated because they've swept away everybody's status games, the existing status games they were playing.

02:12:37.000 So he went in and he met two former descendants of the royalty.

02:12:42.000 And one of them was a peanut seller and he was miserable.

02:12:46.000 And 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.

02:12:55.000 And the other guy had gone into the Islamic, the Muslim, the status game of Islam. 0.99

02:13:00.000 And he learned the Koran by the age of 16, which is very prestigious. 0.99

02:13:04.000 So he was killing it.

02:13:06.000 So he was killing it. 0.95

02:13:08.000 So he was proud.

02:13:10.000 He had multiple wives.

02:13:12.000 He was happy.

02:13:13.000 So he wasn't wealthy, but he was happy.

02:13:15.000 So he said, you know, that's why Islam was popular in that place.

02:13:18.000 It's because it was offering a new and functional status game.

02:13:22.000 So when you've got nothing...

02:13:24.000 You find a game to play if you want to be successful in your own mind and in your own health.

02:13:31.000 And so that's how Islam became so popular and successful there.

02:13:36.000 And that's how religions become popular generally.

02:13:38.000 They offer people who have not much else reliable past the status.

02:13:43.000 Yeah, that's why they try to squash them as quick as they can in this country when new ones pop up.

02:13:47.000 Yeah.

02:13:48.000 Thus, Waco, you know?

02:13:50.000 Yeah.

02:13:50.000 And thus, so many of them.

02:13:52.000 Well, that's what – again, that's what happens under communism and Nazism. 0.88

02:13:56.000 One of the first things they do is they get rid of all the other rival status games.

02:14:00.000 Like a big one in the Soviet Union was the Christians. 1.00

02:14:03.000 You know, they would torture and kill them. 0.93

02:14:05.000 Yeah, because it was – and it's still in China today. 0.96

02:14:08.000 Uyghurs. 1.00

02:14:09.000 Yeah, it's – They see religion as a rival status game and you can't have that in a big totalitarian state.

02:14:16.000 Yeah. 0.93

02:14:17.000 The Uyghur one's a crazy one, right? 1.00

02:14:19.000 Because it's hard to get information about what exactly is going on.

02:14:24.000 What are they making these people do?

02:14:26.000 Yeah.

02:14:28.000 It's such a strange subject in that it's so pivotal.

02:14:33.000 It's so crucial to understanding how human beings behave and what we do, but yet it's so rarely addressed.

02:14:41.000 Instead, they look at all the symptoms.

02:14:43.000 Everybody looks at all the side effects, but they're not looking at the actual pattern that people seem to just naturally fall into.

02:14:50.000 Yeah, I was amazed when I wrote the book that nobody had written it before.

02:14:55.000 Because it just seems so fundamental.

02:14:58.000 And I think part of the thing is that people are in denial about their own interest in status.

02:15:02.000 I think we've evolved to hide it from ourselves.

02:15:05.000 And so people insist that they're not interested in status.

02:15:09.000 But you are.

02:15:11.000 It's in your wiring. 1.00

02:15:13.000 Nobody wants to be called an asshole. 1.00

02:15:15.000 At all. 1.00

02:15:16.000 And that's because it's a removal of your status.

02:15:20.000 Yeah, it's like that thing, the I don't care thing.

02:15:22.000 Of course you care.

02:15:23.000 Everybody cares.

02:15:24.000 It's nonsense.

02:15:25.000 And you get self-help gurus saying you shouldn't care what other people think about you.

02:15:29.000 But it's like you're always going to care what other people think about you.

02:15:33.000 We're designed to care very deeply because other people give us our status.

02:15:38.000 And also, why would you not want to care? 0.97

02:15:40.000 Because that's a psychopath. 0.94

02:15:43.000 Exactly. 0.98

02:15:43.000 That's the problem. 0.98

02:15:44.000 The other thing they say is that how do we get out of the status game?

02:15:47.000 And it's like the same thing.

02:15:48.000 It's like, why would you want to?

02:15:50.000 Because status is your reward for offering value to other people.

02:15:53.000 So why would you not want to offer value to other people? 0.98

02:15:55.000 That's like the definition of a loser.

02:15:57.000 If 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. 0.97

02:16:05.000 Then you're the Unabomber. 0.66

02:16:07.000 Exactly.

02:16:08.000 Yeah.

02:16:08.000 The Unabomber really didn't like people.

02:16:10.000 Yeah.

02:16:11.000 No, but he was another one.

02:16:13.000 He 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?

02:16:21.000 And that was an exercise in humiliation.

02:16:23.000 Yes, it was the LSD studies.

02:16:25.000 And part of what they did, they would dose him up with LSD and they would do humiliating things to him and berate him.

02:16:31.000 And they were doing it as an experiment.

02:16:34.000 They were trying to see what they could do to him and how he would react.

02:16:38.000 And the fact that they were using LSD while they were doing this is so nuts.

02:16:41.000 Yeah, 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.

02:16:52.000 And 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.

02:17:00.000 So absolutely humiliated him.

02:17:02.000 And then what happened?

02:17:03.000 You know the story of his childhood too?

02:17:06.000 I don't know the story of his childhood.

02:17:07.000 When he was a baby, he was very ill.

02:17:09.000 And so they brought him to an infirmary and he wasn't allowed to have any contact with his parents for like months.

02:17:16.000 So for like several months while he was a child, I don't remember exactly how long, but it was horrifically long.

02:17:22.000 He didn't get human touch.

02:17:26.000 Which, you know, they didn't understand back then, I guess, that that's crucial to the development of a human being.

02:17:32.000 Without it, literally, a baby will go mad.

02:17:35.000 And 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.

02:17:45.000 It was the specific way that he was talking about things and the way his understanding of technology and It was his brother. 0.90

02:17:51.000 His brother had this crazy anti-technology philosophy a long fucking time ago. 0.85

02:17:56.000 But 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. 0.99

02:18:07.000 It was crazy where he had to go, what the fuck are you doing? 0.99

02:18:10.000 So he knew his brother was just broken. 0.99

02:18:13.000 He was always broken. 1.00

02:18:14.000 So to take that guy and dose him up with LSD and humiliate him, they made a fucking monster. 0.99

02:18:19.000 And who did he attack? 1.00

02:18:21.000 The UN in Unabomber, his universities.

02:18:24.000 It was revenge on the intellectual class who were kind of creating this world he hated.

02:18:31.000 It's like Elliot Rogers, the spree killer.

02:18:35.000 He felt rejected again and again and again by the...

02:18:38.000 By the pretty girls of the world. 1.00

02:18:40.000 So 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. 1.00

02:18:49.000 That's what the brain does. 1.00

02:18:50.000 It tells us these stories that the people who are responsible for my lack of status are evil and they must be destroyed.

02:18:58.000 It's a horrible pattern.

02:19:00.000 It's a horrible pattern that people get into.

02:19:03.000 And again, Not really that commonly discussed.

02:19:07.000 No.

02:19:07.000 We only discuss the actions themselves, not the root cause of it.

02:19:11.000 But how do you get a guy like that Elliot Rogers guy?

02:19:14.000 How do you fix that?

02:19:16.000 How do you stop that from happening?

02:19:17.000 Well, he left behind a, I think it's 80,000 word autobiography called My Twisted Life.

02:19:24.000 Did somebody publish it?

02:19:25.000 He put it on the internet before he did his killing.

02:19:28.000 Wow.

02:19:29.000 And it's an incredible read.

02:19:31.000 Wow.

02:19:32.000 I'm not joking.

02:19:33.000 Really?

02:19:33.000 Yeah, it's horrific.

02:19:35.000 But he's brutally honest about himself.

02:19:38.000 His life was absolutely miserable.

02:19:42.000 And so what I found was really interesting was that he always...

02:19:46.000 Starting in adolescence, he felt...

02:19:48.000 Where he was bullied relentlessly at school and he was desperate for a girlfriend.

02:19:54.000 He was just weird around people in general.

02:19:56.000 But he was kind of holding it together because he was obsessed with World of Warcraft.

02:20:01.000 So he would play World of Warcraft obsessively.

02:20:03.000 He got a lot of status in that he got to the highest level, which apparently is a very rare thing to do.

02:20:08.000 And then what happens is that he's just got these two or three friends that he plays World of Warcraft with at the internet cafe.

02:20:14.000 And then he finds out one day that they're actually playing without him in secret because they don't want to play with him anymore.

02:20:21.000 And that breaks him.

02:20:23.000 That's the thing that breaks him. 1.00

02:20:24.000 So he goes from just being a casual, you know, Very unpleasant misogynist to somebody who is mentally ill. 0.98

02:20:31.000 He starts talking about how— Is that definitive, though? 0.97

02:20:34.000 Because what did they say the reason why they stopped hanging out with him for?

02:20:37.000 He might have been insane already.

02:20:39.000 Well, he certainly wasn't normal. 0.60

02:20:42.000 But in his memoir, he goes from being a— Yeah, definitely a weirdo, without a doubt.

02:20:48.000 But then he starts telling a story where actually he's this kind of godlike character that has a special insight in the world.

02:20:58.000 And 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. 0.89

02:21:08.000 So what he's going to do is take over the world and abolish sex. 0.98

02:21:12.000 Because sex is at the root of all evil. 0.98

02:21:14.000 And he's going to allow certain women to procreate under certain conditions, but only for the continuation of the species. 1.00

02:21:20.000 And so he goes from just being a misogynist and an outcast to somebody who's mentally ill. 0.94

02:21:25.000 Well, call me cynical, but I don't think people not playing World of Warcraft with you can do that. 1.00

02:21:32.000 I have a feeling he might have already been out of his fucking mind. 0.99

02:21:35.000 That's just me. 0.99

02:21:37.000 Well, yes, he was definitely getting that way.

02:21:40.000 But for me, it was interesting that his only remaining source of status was taken away from him.

02:21:46.000 And it was that day when he has this revelation.

02:21:50.000 So maybe it's a coincidence. 1.00

02:21:52.000 I bet he was already out of his fucking mind. 0.99

02:21:54.000 There's no way that just does it to you. 1.00

02:21:56.000 No, no.

02:21:56.000 I'm not saying he went from black to white.

02:22:00.000 The straw. 0.99

02:22:01.000 He went from being a horrible, awkward misogynist to somebody who was having these fantasies of abolishing sex and that he was a god. 0.99

02:22:08.000 That's a kind of difference. 0.99

02:22:10.000 Yeah, it pushed him over the edge.

02:22:12.000 Yeah, that's what I think.

02:22:13.000 And there's a lot of people out there that are just on the edge.

02:22:16.000 Yeah.

02:22:17.000 Yeah.

02:22:19.000 That's why I think it's healthy to have, you know, lots of different status games.

02:22:23.000 You know, I think the healthiest people have multiple sources of status.

02:22:28.000 Yeah, you were talking about that in the Trigonometry podcast.

02:22:31.000 Like, have more than one thing that you're interested in.

02:22:32.000 That way all of your emotional self-worth is not invested in one particular thing that you do.

02:22:38.000 Yeah, it's like a hedge.

02:22:39.000 Really good advice.

02:22:40.000 Yeah.

02:22:42.000 I'd try to follow that advice.

02:22:43.000 I tell comedians too, you should have things you're interested in other than comedy.

02:22:48.000 Have something you really love that's fun to do.

02:22:50.000 Not just something you watch, but something you do.

02:22:53.000 That's why I joined and volunteered for this crisis line.

02:22:56.000 Because the only thing I do is write.

02:22:58.000 If this is taken away from me...

02:22:59.000 Right, right, right.

02:23:01.000 That's interesting.

02:23:03.000 But also there's something really powerful about helping somebody.

02:23:07.000 It's almost selfish.

02:23:10.000 You know what I mean?

02:23:11.000 It is, though.

02:23:12.000 Definitely.

02:23:14.000 I mean that in the best possible way.

02:23:16.000 I don't really think it's selfish.

02:23:18.000 I think it's wonderful.

02:23:18.000 But I think it's kind of selfish in that when I do really nice things, it feels good, too.

02:23:23.000 But again, that's the status game.

02:23:27.000 We are wired to, when we earn that kind of virtue-based status, we're wired to feel good about ourselves.

02:23:33.000 That's healthy, that's normal, it's good.

02:23:35.000 The fact that humans automatically reward each other and ourselves when we give to others is probably the most wonderful thing about our species.

02:23:43.000 It's like an incredible thing that we do.

02:23:45.000 So it's nothing to be, I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of that people feel good about.

02:23:51.000 Doing good things.

02:23:52.000 That's how it ought to be.

02:23:53.000 That's part of the reason why we do good things.

02:23:55.000 We're wired to give back to the tribe.

02:23:58.000 Yeah.

02:23:59.000 And the only thing that stops more of it is people that are in severe despair.

02:24:03.000 And then they get real selfish.

02:24:05.000 Because they have to.

02:24:05.000 They're looking out for themselves.

02:24:07.000 That's one of the major problems with not addressing all the horrible spots in a country.

02:24:12.000 It's like you're just going to have more people in despair.

02:24:14.000 Less people that engage in this status game in an enjoyable way, in a beneficial way.

02:24:21.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:24:22.000 Yeah.

02:24:22.000 And that's one of those things that crosses both ideological boundaries.

02:24:30.000 And 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.

02:24:41.000 And they don't take any consideration, like, why am I attached to this idea?

02:24:43.000 What does it have to do with the other ones that I like?

02:24:45.000 Or why are they all lumped in together?

02:24:47.000 How come if I believe this, I also have to believe in that?

02:24:50.000 Because that's what it is.

02:24:52.000 If you tell me that you don't believe in climate change, I can guarantee you how you're going to vote.

02:24:58.000 That's right.

02:24:59.000 I mean, that's it.

02:25:00.000 Like in the UK, somebody that thinks that there should be more public money spent on buses.

02:25:06.000 I can guarantee how you're going to vote.

02:25:08.000 But also, we were likely to be on the Palestinian side of the Middle Eastern conflict.

02:25:12.000 100%.

02:25:13.000 Buses, Middle East.

02:25:14.000 Nothing to do with each other.

02:25:16.000 How do you feel about guns, sir?

02:25:18.000 Yeah.

02:25:19.000 Do you believe in the Second Amendment? 0.99

02:25:21.000 Because I fucking do. 0.99

02:25:22.000 And then I know how you're voting. 0.99

02:25:23.000 That's it.

02:25:24.000 I mean, I've got this kind of idea that...

02:25:26.000 Not always.

02:25:26.000 Once 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.

02:25:34.000 Like, 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.

02:25:44.000 Yes.

02:25:45.000 And 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.

02:25:56.000 That's what's weird, right?

02:25:58.000 Yeah.

02:25:58.000 It'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?

02:26:05.000 Like, what do you know about studies that were involved in this?

02:26:09.000 Like, what do What do you know about the origin of this?

02:26:11.000 You 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.

02:26:19.000 They just know that you must be some sort of a bad person if you're not following the narrative.

02:26:24.000 Like, come on, we all know what's going on.

02:26:26.000 What do you want, Trump to win?

02:26:28.000 Everybody knows.

02:26:29.000 It's well known that.

02:26:30.000 And they get angry with you. 1.00

02:26:31.000 Are you stupid? 1.00

02:26:33.000 Are you stupid? 1.00

02:26:34.000 You really believe this? 1.00

02:26:35.000 I just want to know why you believe it.

02:26:37.000 I didn't say what I believe.

02:26:38.000 But people can't engage like that.

02:26:41.000 Very few people can stand outside their ideas.

02:26:43.000 And 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.

02:26:51.000 I don't believe in my ideas.

02:26:53.000 I do in the sense that these are some ideas that I have and I wonder if this is right.

02:26:59.000 But if it's not right, I'm not attached to it.

02:27:03.000 Like, I can go, oh, I used to think that, but now I know this.

02:27:07.000 And that doesn't diminish your worth. 1.00

02:27:10.000 But what does diminish your worth is if you fucking cling to that other stupid thing, even after you know it's not real. 1.00

02:27:16.000 That's just dumb. 1.00

02:27:18.000 Like, you're not your ideas. 1.00

02:27:19.000 You're just a human being that's interfacing with a fucking shitload of information. 0.98

02:27:24.000 And most of it, you're only gonna have a peripheral understanding of. 0.99

02:27:28.000 Ask most people, how's the sewage system work?

02:27:32.000 You don't know it's so important!

02:27:34.000 You use it every day!

02:27:35.000 How does it function without electricity? 0.99

02:27:37.000 I flush, it comes back, what the fuck's going on?

02:27:40.000 Most people have zero idea, but it's like a critical part of their day. 0.98

02:27:44.000 That's it, and that's about active belief.

02:27:45.000 It's the beliefs that become part of our identity.

02:27:47.000 They're the dangerous ones.

02:27:48.000 Because those are the ones that are status generators for us.

02:27:53.000 Our status depends on this idea that Yeah.

02:28:15.000 Yeah, and it's a really dangerous trap that everyone can fall into, all of us.

02:28:19.000 That's why cults are so terrifying to me. 1.00

02:28:21.000 They'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. 1.00

02:28:28.000 No, I'm terrified because that could have been me. 1.00

02:28:30.000 I 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. 0.99

02:28:39.000 Whether 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. 0.99

02:28:51.000 Maybe not you. 1.00

02:28:52.000 Maybe 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. 0.94

02:29:00.000 But maybe you have enough for that, but maybe the next one will get you. 0.94

02:29:04.000 Maybe there's one that's a little bit better.

02:29:06.000 It's kind of a church, but it's a rock and roll kind of thing.

02:29:11.000 A thought experiment that I like is this idea that shows that your irrational beliefs are invisible to you.

02:29:20.000 So 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.

02:29:28.000 No, this person's mad about that.

02:29:29.000 And 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.

02:29:36.000 So that just leaves you in the middle, the island of perfect island of absolute rationality.

02:29:41.000 So you go, hang on a minute, that can't be right.

02:29:43.000 So I'm not Jesus.

02:29:44.000 Like, I must be wrong about some stuff.

02:29:46.000 How convenient.

02:29:46.000 But when you go looking for what you're wrong about, and you can't cheat by going stuff that you don't care about.

02:29:51.000 Like, what ideas are really important to you?

02:29:53.000 Well, I'm not wrong about that.

02:29:54.000 I'm not wrong about that.

02:29:55.000 I'm not wrong about that.

02:29:56.000 So you can't see it.

02:29:58.000 You feel like Jesus.

02:30:00.000 You feel like I'm the most correct person, literally, in the world.

02:30:05.000 You know logically you can't be, but you can't see, you can't find what you're wrong about.

02:30:09.000 Especially 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.

02:30:17.000 Your value, your worth should not be entirely your ideas.

02:30:22.000 That's crazy.

02:30:24.000 It's a terrible strategy.

02:30:26.000 Because you could be hanging on to a bad idea, and then you have to cling on to it and defend it.

02:30:30.000 You can't say, oh, that idea was bad.

02:30:33.000 Because that's you. 0.99

02:30:34.000 You're bad. 1.00

02:30:34.000 That's what's stupid about it. 1.00

02:30:36.000 It doesn't have to be that way. 0.99

02:30:38.000 You can just think of them as ideas.

02:30:40.000 It doesn't mean you.

02:30:41.000 But if you irrationally defend an idea, then it is you.

02:30:45.000 Well, 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.

02:31:00.000 And I've seen it happen to brilliant people.

02:31:01.000 I really have.

02:31:02.000 And it's so weird to watch.

02:31:04.000 It's like you lost them.

02:31:05.000 They got bit by a vampire.

02:31:06.000 I did a lot of writing about that.

02:31:08.000 Do you remember the skeptics?

02:31:10.000 Do you remember when they were big?

02:31:11.000 Yeah, those guys were great.

02:31:13.000 But it always struck me that they were also irrational about certain things.

02:31:16.000 And when I was doing my reporting, their big kind of moral panic, kind of status frenzy was homeopathy.

02:31:23.000 They were obsessed with homeopathy. 0.96

02:31:24.000 And they were like, because homeopathy is just empty pills and it's ridiculous and da-da-da-da. 0.98

02:31:30.000 So...

02:31:31.000 But I just thought this is weird because we know the placebo effect works.

02:31:35.000 It's a real thing.

02:31:36.000 So surely homeopathy is just a very elaborate placebo theatre.

02:31:40.000 It works as a placebo.

02:31:41.000 So it still works.

02:31:42.000 So I put this to a guy who was a big famous atheist.

02:31:48.000 He presented a very famous podcast at the time.

02:31:52.000 And I said, what about the placebo effect?

02:31:55.000 Surely it's a valuable thing, homeopathy.

02:31:58.000 And he said, no, no, no, no, no.

02:32:00.000 That's not right.

02:32:00.000 The data is in on this.

02:32:01.000 We know about this.

02:32:02.000 He said, what we know is the placebo is only psychological, not physiological.

02:32:08.000 So people think they're getting better, but they're not getting better.

02:32:10.000 But it's like, hang on a minute.

02:32:12.000 If the perception of pain has decreased, then the pain has decreased.

02:32:17.000 If the perception of your depression has decreased, then the depression has decreased.

02:32:21.000 By that measure, Advil doesn't work.

02:32:23.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.87

02:32:24.000 So 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.

02:32:41.000 But does the placebo effect work in terms of curing diseases?

02:32:46.000 No.

02:32:46.000 Nothing.

02:32:47.000 Zero?

02:32:48.000 I don't think so.

02:32:49.000 Yeah, things like pain and depression, things that are, yeah, so it doesn't cure cancer, it can't shrink a tumor.

02:32:55.000 But it does work with pain and depression.

02:32:57.000 That's fascinating.

02:32:58.000 Yeah.

02:32:58.000 That's fascinating.

02:32:59.000 Yeah, 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.

02:33:09.000 And even when you know it's the placebo, it still works more.

02:33:14.000 So that extra few bucks that you're spending on the brand-name painkillers is worth it.

02:33:18.000 Well, isn't there just a problem with calling yourself a skeptic?

02:33:20.000 Because why don't you just be a thinker?

02:33:22.000 It's like, why are you specifically looking at things and it's, meh, I'm cynical. 0.81

02:33:27.000 You know, like, that seems silly.

02:33:29.000 There's a lot of things that are real.

02:33:30.000 Like, what do you do when you stumble across something that's real?

02:33:33.000 Well, I used to be skeptical, but this turns out to be legit.

02:33:36.000 No, it's like you're just looking at everything, hoping it's not legit, because that's where you get your value and your statement.

02:33:42.000 Exactly.

02:33:43.000 In that book, I ended up meeting James Randi.

02:33:50.000 He was their big god.

02:33:52.000 And he was a very strange individual.

02:33:59.000 And as part of the interview, I challenged him a lot on a lot of the things that he'd claimed in his life.

02:34:03.000 And he ended up admitting to me that he'd lied and been dishonest about his achievements in the past.

02:34:08.000 Oh, no.

02:34:09.000 What achievements?

02:34:11.000 Well, achievements and also lied a lot about the things he'd said about, you know, he had this million dollar challenge.

02:34:18.000 Yes.

02:34:18.000 Yeah.

02:34:19.000 So his whole thing was like, it's an easy thing to do.

02:34:21.000 If you prove anything that's supernatural or woo woo, he used to call it, you get a million dollars.

02:34:28.000 And the fact that nobody had ever got this a million dollars was his proof that none of this could exist.

02:34:33.000 But 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.

02:34:43.000 So that happened again and again and again.

02:34:45.000 I 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... 0.88

02:35:00.000 We're good to go.

02:35:13.000 You know, I have been dishonest.

02:35:15.000 I have been untrue.

02:35:16.000 But 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.

02:35:23.000 I said, have you ever changed your mind about anything?

02:35:26.000 And he was in his 80s at the time, I think.

02:35:28.000 He couldn't tell me a single thing that he had ever changed his mind about.

02:35:33.000 That is not a critical thinker. 1.00

02:35:37.000 That's a stubborn asshole. 1.00

02:35:40.000 And on that note, hey man, thank you very much for being here. 1.00

02:35:43.000 It was a lot of fun.

02:35:43.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:35:45.000 And like I said, I enjoyed your interview on trigonometry.

02:35:47.000 I recommend everybody go.

02:35:49.000 It's a great podcast anyway.

02:35:51.000 So thank you very much.

02:35:52.000 And thank you for the book.

02:35:53.000 And thank you for being able to lay this out in such a, like I said, digestible way.

02:35:58.000 Thank you, Joe.

02:35:58.000 I really appreciate you having me on.

02:36:00.000 It's been amazing.

02:36:00.000 I enjoyed it.

02:36:01.000 Thank you.

02:36:01.000 All right.

02:36:02.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 14, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2102 - Will Storr

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