Bestselling author Will Starr joins us to talk about his new book 'The Status Game' and why it's so important to understand what makes us tick, and why virtue is the most important thing we can do to get there.
00:01:52.280and you know so that's that's why we tell stories in the way that we do because we've been making
00:01:56.020these newer processes and in this book I wanted to wanted to sort of take it a bit further and go
00:02:01.080okay so if the conscious reality of life is a story what's going on subconsciously what's the
00:02:06.480truth and so the status game is is my attempt at answering that question like what's really going
00:02:13.240on under under the hood and and I think a lot of a lot of human social life is about two things
00:02:19.840So connection and status. So because of our tribal evolution, we're compelled to connect into groups of like-minded people.
00:02:29.380And then once we're in those groups, compete for status.
00:02:32.100And we see that all the way through our society. And in particular, one of the things that you focused on was virtue, people competing to be the most virtuous.
00:02:43.560Absolutely. So, yeah, I think to understand this, you've got to sort of understand where the kind of the status game comes from.
00:04:54.340religion was the way that we principally yearn status.
00:04:57.500Even people in very kind of low caste groups before the Industrial Revolution, you know, if they were like a peasant working on a farm, they could still feel like they had status because they were a good Christian and they were doing all those good Christian things.
00:05:12.100And now that's declining, people still want to pursue virtue status, especially the ones that haven't really got what it takes to achieve the competence forms of status.
00:05:20.380and I certainly see that playing out you know a lot online a lot in social media and a lot in what
00:05:26.580we think of as cancel culture well before we get into that I actually I think your book and your
00:05:31.220work is so much more fascinating than just a conversation about the culture wars uh Francis
00:05:36.180and I've always been interested in talking to evolutionary psychologists and biologists and
00:05:40.440various people about some of the underlying stuff that makes humans who they are so let's start by
00:05:46.520talking about that and let's talk about bullying a word that you just mentioned I've never thought
00:05:51.920about it but as we were waiting for you to come I was sort of thinking what is the social function
00:05:57.460of bullying because it exists in every society I think pretty much so there must be some purpose
00:06:02.580to it and is that is that for the majority or certain people to assert their dominance so that
00:06:08.200they become higher status is that what it's about yeah I guess it depends on what context you mean
00:06:12.520bullying but certainly one-on-one playground bullying is about dominance and um you know
00:06:18.120children start competing for status as soon as they start learning how to play with other people
00:06:22.200when they fight over who gets access to the toy that's a symbolic status battle and that's certainly
00:06:27.400true um uh in the context of bullying there's a study that i cite in the book that looked out
00:06:32.920that looked at looked at why school children um um you know pre-adolescent school children tend
00:06:38.380to be bullied and ostracized from their social groups and it's very often when they um when they
00:06:45.200when their behavior or something about them makes them a threat to the status of that social group
00:06:49.720when they embarrass people or make them feel uncomfortable and and that kind of negative
00:06:54.440status kind of feels like it's leaking out into the into the other the people around them they'll
00:06:58.300start bullying them and ostracizing them so and of course you know this kind of bullying is is
00:07:05.000always about status it's always about taking somebody that's there and pushing them down there
00:07:09.400and and and with your kind of active that's the dominance you know act with the act of dominance
00:07:13.820you know raising yourself up so that ties then into what you're talking about which is online
00:07:19.320and you know cancel culture has become this very politicized word but i actually think you know
00:07:25.820people will be tempted to think that cancel culture is what people who are right of center
00:07:30.560let's say, say about what happens to them from people left of center, I sort of see it as a much
00:07:36.200more universal thing that's going on and the harassment and mobbing and bullying happens from
00:07:41.200everybody. So is that what's driving it? It's a bunch of people who you sort of hinted at it,
00:07:48.340don't have the ability to achieve status through competence, don't have the ability to achieve it
00:07:54.580through dominance force violence etc but here is this great tool you know you've got a twitter
00:08:00.700account and you can go and harass a celebrity what you know today it's dave chappelle tomorrow
00:08:06.680it's going to be someone else yeah is that what it's about it's low status people achieving status
00:08:11.920at the expense of someone famous it is but but but but the only thing that i'd say about that is
00:08:17.300that it is dominance behavior because dominance isn't just about physical violence it's about the
00:08:20.980threat of violence but it's also about the threat of ostracization you know we don't dominance is
00:08:27.380about is about you know is partly about one-on-one physical competition but it's also about competition
00:08:33.960with reputation and you know a person's reputation that's their kind of avatar that's their you know
00:08:38.640what they're playing the status game with so if you attack someone's reputation you're attacking
00:08:43.500their identity you're attacking the core of who they are and everything they've worked towards
00:08:47.900the kind of locus of the meaning of their life so so so you know it isn't violence when we attack
00:08:54.400reputation but it's something you know close to it it's a it's a dreadful thing that we do
00:08:59.420it's it in the book i thought you know i kind of explained that there's no pure games there's no
00:09:04.880there's no pure success game and pure virtue game they're kind of mixtures always this called
00:09:09.280mixtures um and i think kind of cancel culture and you know the worst of human behavior even up
00:09:15.720to and including genocide which I also write about is virtue dominance play it's virtue play
00:09:20.480because it's about you will follow the rules you will not insult our sacred beliefs you will not
00:09:24.620insult our sacred symbols and if you don't we will get you so that's that that's that dominance
00:09:29.960kind of virtue play and and it's fundamental it's human behavior you know we're very good at blaming
00:09:35.320you know Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey for causing all these things but they haven't caused
00:09:40.180it they've just connected people together and when you connect people together they're going to play
00:09:44.160status games and this kind of thing is going to happen but now we've got the status game with
00:09:49.440virtue and then we destroy people whilst at the same time being hashtag be kind yeah which to me
00:09:57.160is just the most mind-blowing thing i've ever seen but but but that's again it's just consistent with
00:10:02.620you know that that's part of the storytelling brain we have this conscious experience of life
00:10:07.320and you know in previous books i've described the brain as a hero maker it's very good at making us
00:10:12.740feel heroic and justifying all our all our acts and it's thought that the strongest bias of all
00:10:18.140is the moral bias so so the brain is very good at saying you know you know fundamentally you're
00:10:22.860a good person and you're a better person than all these other people um and and and that's what the
00:10:27.940be kind thing is all about that's people's brains doing what brains are supposed to do which is tell
00:10:31.620a story about your own virtue and your own superiority whilst playing this rather cynical
00:10:37.260status game subconsciously so and that's not unique to the internet you know the the nazis
00:10:43.940thought they were on the side of the good the communists thought they're on the side of the
00:10:47.140good that's just what brains do and even when presented with objective facts like you're
00:10:52.340literally ruining someone's career yeah you are you are impacting on their mental health you are
00:10:57.620causing and creating suffering but they deserve it right that's the argument they deserve it yeah
00:11:02.060Exactly. So that's exactly right. I mean, you've got to kind of understand a bit how the brain
00:11:07.500works. And one of the things that I write about kind of continually in my books, which, because
00:11:12.280I think it's just extraordinary, is the fact that, you know, the brain is constructing a story
00:11:17.540constantly about the world. And that's literally, you know, information comes in from the world
00:11:21.540and it constructs this like storiescape for us to live in. And a lot of it is delusional. A lot,
00:11:29.200you know it's kind of designed to again make us feel heroic and we really and it's really good at
00:11:34.740kind of being very shifty with the objective truth and twisting it and turning it to make
00:11:39.620us feel that we're heroic and as i said you know before the nazis thought they were the heroes of
00:11:43.340that story they genuinely thought they were and so did the communists they genuinely thought they
00:11:47.520were the communists thought they were punching they said we're punching up you know they're
00:11:50.540obviously not using our contemporary phrases but they were punching up at the you know the
00:11:53.600bourgeoisie and the czarists and all this stuff um and in the same way the people online are
00:11:58.480convinced that they're punching up too. And there's a chapter in the status game that looks
00:12:03.940specifically at the culture wars. And what I thought was interesting is when you look at the
00:12:07.640narratives of the left and the right, you know, the two sides of the culture war, they both tell
00:12:12.080a story, which is in part convincing about that they're punching up. And so the classic, you know,
00:12:18.360the kind of extreme left cancel culture of people. So they're punching up, you know,
00:12:23.560essentially white people, especially white men, especially straight white men. And the argument
00:12:29.800is they've hoarded all the status, they've hoarded all the power, and it's not fair. And we're
00:12:33.660destroying this evil elite that doesn't deserve to be there. But if you look at the other side,
00:12:38.520the right wing view, it's like, well, when they look up, they don't see straight white men,
00:12:43.420they see educated people, they see, you know, highly educated elite people, you know, people
00:12:48.080who went to kind of Ivy League universities and Oxbridge, people who were running the BBC and
00:12:52.060in the New York Times. And they're both ways of seeing the status game that have some validity
00:12:57.360to them. And I think that's when these stories become really dangerous, because they have this
00:13:01.460kind of kernel of truth. But they're stories. They're not real. They're massively simplistic.
00:13:06.280It is true that historically, in white-dominated countries, white men have had an advantage.
00:13:11.920But it's definitely true now that if you've been to Oxford, Cambridge, or an elite university,
00:13:16.420or you work at the BBC, you've got a massive advantage
00:13:19.340over an awful lot of straight white men who don't have those advantages.
00:13:24.060So the brain tells this heroic story, which is usually really simplistic,
00:17:14.360But if the gossip was positive, this person did an amazing thing
00:17:17.320they'd raise in status and become heroic so it's an essential component of you know we've all
00:17:22.980evolved to gossip children begin to do kind of tattletale forms of gossip almost as soon as they
00:17:27.420can talk it's baked into us and then you got to look at the grants of human history so so that's
00:17:34.460how we were regulating our societies for thousands of years and then when we settled down and
00:17:39.220communities started growing so big that we couldn't know everybody personally so we couldn't gossip
00:17:44.660about everybody individually we invented the big god religions and and so religion is a gossip
00:17:49.280network but god knows all the gossip and you're going to get punished or rewarded after life so
00:17:54.200and and it was the feeling that god was watching you that that controlled your you know largely
00:17:58.980controlled your behavior um and then you know in our kind of post Nietzschean age when now god is
00:18:06.080dead journalism did that job journalism became our gossip network that's how we tattled about
00:18:11.920especially high status people and and you know moral outwaves was raised and they will be punished
00:18:16.360and you know we're living in a kind of post-journalistic age now and I've lived and
00:18:20.220worked through it where where the norms of journalism have just collapsed because of the
00:18:23.600internet and social media is our new gossip network and so so it's not just this thing
00:18:29.180that people do you know for a laugh on their phones the gossip network is as I said is an
00:18:34.300essential component of human life it plays a crucial role and it's a pathological form of
00:18:39.200gossip network because you know there are barely any consequences for spreading malicious gossip
00:18:44.800I think back in the days of the tribe you know people you know if you spread malicious gossip
00:18:48.340you were going to get gossiped about and bad things could happen to you um you know in the
00:18:54.140glory days of journalism yes of course there were left-wing and right-wing newspapers fine but but
00:18:59.240there was still pressure on journalists to get it right to get the truth and if you didn't get the
00:19:02.960truth you got a bad reputation or you worked for a crappy tabloid and everyone looked down their
00:19:07.480knows at you anyway um but but but those norms just don't exist on they're scarily hard to find
00:19:13.640in traditional journalism these days um and they barely exist on social media you know and not only
00:19:19.140do they not barely exist they they also exacerbate and encourage yes these worst tendencies in people
00:19:26.100that's the problem isn't it yeah exactly everything you attach status to we're going to
00:19:30.180flock to it i mean in in the book i talk about this status game that um anthropologists found
00:19:34.520on an island in Markenesia which is based on yams and the idea was whoever brought the biggest yam
00:19:40.260to the feast was declared number one in the feast and that was the thing and he's raising status and
00:19:45.900so what happened on the island was that it was a kind of a male game this all the men just became
00:19:50.720obsessed with growing yams and they became amazing at growing yams they would crawl out their bed at
00:19:54.780two in the morning to go into their secret yam pit in the forest to tend to it and stroke it and
00:19:59.080feed it fertilizer and and there were stories there of yams that were so big it took 12 men
00:20:03.820to carry them into the feast on a special stretcher so that's that's humans you know if you
00:20:08.040attach status to something we're going to do it and we're going to do it big and and you're
00:20:12.080absolutely right you know these days you're attaching status to these extreme political
00:20:15.920beliefs um you're attaching status to to the ability to to to tear your kind of ideological
00:20:21.160enemies down so that's what we're going to do and that's what we're doing so so so it's yeah it's a
00:20:26.440it's a pathological gossip network that incentivizes this kind of virtue dominance form of status
00:20:32.420game. But it's also made the status game worse. It's made it more toxic. Much more toxic. Yeah,
00:20:39.300absolutely has. I mean, one of the things that I write about, again, in the book is this idea of
00:20:46.000the moral panic. I kind of readdress what is a moral panic. And I look at the satanic panic in
00:20:52.040the 1980s as a form of moral panic. But actually, I think when you look at it from the status point
00:20:56.780of view, it's not really a moral panic. I call it a status gold rush. Because what you've got is
00:21:01.160this is this small group of therapists um that hit upon this way of becoming incredibly rich
00:21:07.520incredibly famous and um you know interviewed on oprah um hosted at big conferences and um
00:21:14.480you know interviewed by academics um uh and you know perhaps more important than even the money
00:21:21.380and the fame is is that kind of story they're allowed to tell themselves that we're saving the
00:21:25.260world you know we're saving the world's children from the forces of evil and so what happened
00:21:29.560during that was that was that flocks of people were drawn to this satanic panic um status game
00:21:35.040in which uh you know the idea was that these therapists was and police officers were seeking
00:21:40.160out secret satanic sex abusers um uh and you know and it was a disaster it spread throughout
00:21:45.780the us it came to the uk you know dozens of people had long prison sentences for doing
00:21:50.780things they couldn't possibly have done like you know throwing children at sharks and stitching
00:21:55.680their eyelids shut during a kindergarten and then somehow returning the kids to their parents
00:21:59.900unharmed at the end of the day like mad stuff and and and you know i think it makes much more sense
00:22:05.900when you see that i see the idea of a status gold rush that it wasn't a moral panic that was that i
00:22:10.640don't think it was driving the satanic panic it was a status gold rush all these people with
00:22:14.680ordinary lives just therapists just family experts suddenly became famous rich and um that they felt
00:22:22.360that they were saving the world from the forces of evil and I think that's what we see on social
00:22:26.360media too it's a it's a you know it's a status gold rush there are millions and millions of just
00:22:31.060ordinary people with ordinary lives who suddenly feel that they're fighting the good fight against
00:22:34.800the forces of darkness and you know we're going to tear down Dave Chappelle or whoever it is or
00:22:39.280Kathleen Stock or whoever it is and and and you know you've got to understand that status is an
00:22:45.420immeasurably valuable resource it's a basic human need if we don't feel that we have status we become
00:22:50.840mentally unwell depressed even up to feeling suicidal if our status is taken away from us
00:22:57.100in a kind of dramatic way we even become physically ill if we don't feel we have
00:23:01.280sufficient status so it's an immeasurably valuable resource and what social media has given us
00:23:06.980is enabled us to do is is is to gather that resource um and in such a way that we have so
00:23:13.860you know we have more status in our online lives than we do in our real actual lives
00:23:18.660So that's really valuable to people. And that's, you know, that's what their brains want. Their brains aren't particularly interested in finding out the truth. Their brains are interested in how do I get status?
00:23:28.200Will, and is this why people are so fearful of humor and comedy? Because comedy is one of the most powerful ways to take status away from things. When you mock something, even playfully, you are taking away the significance from it.
00:23:45.020and we saw it you know the comedians i grew up watching in the in the 90s there were the bill
00:23:50.120hickses the george carlens yeah they went after religion because the religious right at that time
00:23:54.900had quite a lot of cultural significance and dominance and these people were taking that
00:23:59.360away and now you see that when it's flipped and it's the far left that's got this uh cultural
00:24:04.840dominance they fear comedy they they're terrified of it and they're fighting against it because it
00:24:10.160takes away the significance and the status that they've tried to give to their beliefs is that
00:24:14.300why that yeah absolutely i mean a basic you know a basic way that back in the days of the tribe
00:24:19.580that we would we would manage people's behavior social behavior is if we were gossiping about
00:24:24.560them and the gossip was bad you'd begin by mockery and you know a bit of mockery and humiliation you
00:24:30.460know that that so that's that's that again that's a that's an elemental kind of form of human
00:24:34.120behavior so and it's a way of it so it's a way of drawing people down and that's exactly right i
00:24:39.520grew up you know in the 90s i'm a gen xer i remember watching bill hicks on channel four
00:24:44.160late one night and having my mind just blown and and you know i grew up in a catholic family and
00:24:49.220in those days it was that you know especially in america the catholic right that were dominating
00:24:53.820and and judging people's moral behavior and i was a big metal fan and they were trying to ban
00:24:58.280all the records that i that i liked and it has flipped these days it's the it's the you know
00:25:02.800i've always identified as a left-wing person i still do but it's it's the left that are doing
00:25:07.520that these days it's a section of the left well it's a section of the left absolutely yeah and
00:25:11.960you know I don't think it's a as you as you point out it's a coincidence that these are the people
00:25:16.300now that the comics are going after and we talk about humiliation you used a very powerful example
00:25:23.080of the power of humiliation when you were talking about I forget his name Elliot Rogers yes Elliot
00:25:29.860Rogers and what happened to him if you could go into that a little bit yeah so I mean when I was
00:25:34.940thinking about the book and whether whether there was a book in this I kind of set myself a test and
00:25:38.660that test was okay if you're going to argue that status is so important then what happens when our
00:25:44.040status is taken away it must be pretty bad so so you know I started looking into that and the idea
00:25:49.320of humiliation because that you know one of the technical definitions of humiliation is it's the
00:25:53.260it's not only the removal of your status it's the removal of your ability to claim status in the
00:25:57.460future you're so you're so down there that you're just gone basically nobody wants to have anything
00:26:02.420to do with you ever again. And it turns out that that is a catastrophic thing for humans to
00:26:08.840experience. If it's serious and it's chronic, it goes on and on and on. One researcher described
00:26:15.700humiliation as an annihilation of the self. And humiliation is found in the backgrounds of lots
00:26:21.700of serial killers, terrorists, honour killers. I mean, if you think, you know, it's implicated
00:26:26.920in genocide the humiliation of the nation or the racial group and they fight back so if you think
00:26:33.700about the very worst of human behavior you'll find humiliation in there so that that to me was like
00:26:38.960okay this is I think this is right about status I think it is this important and so I tell the
00:26:44.300story of Elliot Rodgers in some detail because he's a so he's a spree killer he's one of these
00:26:48.460kind of incel spree killers but before he died he left a he uploaded to the internet 108,000 word
00:26:55.500autobiography which is um was called my twisted world um and it's an extraordinary it's a truly
00:27:01.980extraordinary document i mean you know it's chilling but he's it's fascinating because
00:27:08.100you know so in the book i say that the most dangerous people probably on earth
00:27:13.480are narcissistic people so people who believe that they're entitled to high status and they
00:27:19.240expect to be treated as if they're important and they're humiliated so when you humiliate a
00:27:24.620narcissist it's it's bad because because they they're dropping down a hell of a long way and
00:27:29.840and and and if they're male and if you're male you're much more likely to respond with violence
00:27:33.900that's another you know factor so so grandiose male and humiliated are this kind of you know
00:27:40.780these three kind of red flags and Elliot Rogers was definitely an example of that I mean
00:27:45.880his book uh is is sort of greasy with its descriptions of his wonderfulness he describes
00:27:52.500himself as a beautiful gentleman and things like this and thinks he's gorgeous and wonderful and
00:27:57.440can't understand why we're not falling at his feet. But he's also unflinching in his depictions
00:28:03.100of how miserable his life was and how he was bullied and hated by everybody that he essentially
00:28:09.440went to school with. And after he did his spree killing, the narrative across the media, left and
00:28:16.520right was that the cause of what he did was his obsession with the game world of warcraft um and
00:28:22.680i said because it's a violent game and you're killing stuff so that's you know makes sense
00:28:26.040right um but i argue in the book that's actually not true that actually world of warcraft was his
00:28:31.500only source of status and if you actually read his book it's only when he stops playing world
00:28:36.420of warcraft that he goes completely insane and so so he describes basically achieving the enormously
00:28:43.440least statusful experience of achieving the kind of top level of world of warcraft and when he's
00:28:47.780playing world of warcraft it's he's not worrying about school he's not worrying about girls and
00:28:52.420being popular he's happy um and then he finds out that the people the friends who he's playing world
00:28:58.160of warcraft with he discovers that they've been meeting up in secret behind his back to play
00:29:02.600without him which is just heartbreaking for him because you know and he describes playing the
00:29:06.680game with tears rolling down his face because he's so crushed by this realization so he stops
00:29:12.000playing and literally the day he stops playing he confides to his last remaining friend this
00:29:17.440bizarre vision he has of the world now in which he he wants sex to be abolished completely
00:29:23.280because as far as he's concerned um the the problems of the of the world are the fault of
00:29:30.160women because women choose who to have sex with and they keep choosing you know jock aggressive
00:29:35.600types so that they keep procreating with these people and giving birth to more aggressive jock
00:29:40.540types so his solution is he hasn't seen millennials yeah yeah well this is pre this is pre then and so
00:29:47.200he and so he wants to wipe out all the women um keep a few in in a lab um to um uh artificially
00:29:54.640inseminate to keep the to keep the um to keep the to keep the population going well at least he had
00:30:00.120a vision yeah yeah but but so when i read that so when you hear that you just think that's mental
00:30:04.700that's mentally ill like that is gone right um and um it's about as misogynistic as you can get
00:30:10.900it is you can't really get many much more misogynistic than want to annihilate all women
00:30:14.640um but then when you look at that in the context of the second world war
00:30:19.240that is exactly the sort of story that the nazis told about the world when when the german nation
00:30:24.660which is a grandiose nation you know the most successful nation in continental europe before
00:30:29.160the first world war utterly humiliated by the treaty of Versailles um and that's the story that
00:30:34.920that you know it's not a nation of Germans because they weren't all Nazis but but that was the story
00:30:39.500that the Nazis told about the world was the Elliot Rodgers story but it's instead of women it was
00:30:43.480Jews so when that kind of connected for me I just thought that that's extraordinary because
00:30:47.740it I think it shows you that it's something innate in us when we feel that our status has
00:30:53.700been unfairly taken from us that's when we're i think our most irrational and our most aggressive
00:30:59.680and you've never very neatly brought us back to the culture war there because one of the arguments
00:31:05.260that you laid out and this is something i've been very concerned about for some time now
00:31:08.280you know you talked about how people on the right and the left have their own simplified versions of
00:31:14.400of what's happening and it makes perfect sense but particularly the far left one is the one that
00:31:19.560troubles me um and the reason it troubles me more is that the narrative of the far left as you put
00:31:25.160it yourself is that there's this group of people who've been historically very privileged they've
00:31:30.440got all the advantages they've had hoarded all the status yeah and we must now humiliate them
00:31:35.540i mean that is the narrative right yeah so you've got a very large group of people uh who are as
00:31:42.000you've said for physiological and biological reasons are much more prone to violence and other
00:31:46.480than other groups men they are the vast majority of society uh white people in the in the country
00:31:54.120in the uk certainly and in america uh and you have a a driven campaign that at least to me seems like
00:32:02.440that is supported by media organizations by institutions of government by uh authorities
00:32:09.340the police the health cases everywhere there seems to be that it's at least allowing that to
00:32:15.320happen right those systems now given what you've said to me that seems a very dangerous game to be
00:32:23.180playing it is i think it is a very dangerous game to be playing and you can see a little bit of it
00:32:27.660in the trump and brexit events of 2016 you know i think it's it's been it's been commented before
00:32:34.980it's not news that the the lots of the people that voted for those things were white working
00:32:39.720class and lower middle class people whose living standards have declined in in the last few decades
00:32:46.560but also their sense of status has declined you know you know there used to be respect in being
00:32:52.660a working class person um and now that you know the media decries them as you know deplorables
00:32:58.140and trailer trash and you know you've got labor politicians tweeting union jacks and going oh
00:33:03.160you know and i think it's true that trump and brexit was a reaction against that it was like
00:33:07.180no you fuckers you know you've got to stop treating us like this and that's that that's
00:33:12.000their story of you're the educators elite who you're looking down looking down your noses at us
00:33:16.360and there's a there's a definite truth to that and i and i and i do i i do worry about this and
00:33:22.200i do think it's true that there's there's a generation of young men that are being raised
00:33:27.920today in canada the us and the uk who are being raised in in a world in which men are white men
00:33:35.780know just bad they're responsible for all the bad things in the world and the morally correct thing
00:33:40.760to do is to put them to the back of every queue um and to not give them any of the important jobs
00:33:46.140and you know and and to hold them back and that's dangerous and because because because what's going
00:33:52.820to happen well one of two things you know either they're going to internalize those ideas and and
00:33:58.360just suffer terrible self-esteem uh and and depression thinking i'm a white man i'm terrible
00:34:03.300I'm awful I'm a disaster I need to I need to just step back and let everyone else have a life and
00:34:10.600not me or more likely they're going to become really fucking angry and they're going to push
00:34:15.300back and you know I do think we're going to be seeing that increasingly I mean you know I I'm
00:34:21.160in this kind of small world of publishing there was a very interesting story that was published
00:34:24.740in the observer um a few weeks ago that talks about the kind of the female domination of the
00:34:29.060publishing world. And I think it's absolutely true that's happening. The bookseller, the trade,
00:34:34.120the trade paper of the book industry a few months ago, two months ago, published their list of the
00:34:41.140rising stars of the book industry. And somebody worked out they were 85% female. And I don't know
00:34:46.380if that's true or not exactly. But if you look at that cover of the bookseller magazine, it's Hunt
00:34:50.680the White Man. I mean, I think there's one there in this huge constellation of faces. And no one
00:34:55.880was talked about that it was just accepted as this is the future you know so if you're a young
00:35:00.220white man that loves reading and loves publishing and is desperate to become a publisher and you see
00:35:04.480that how are you going to react and I just think if I say if it continues it's I think it's going
00:35:10.640to continue because no one's pushing back against this you are I think in a few years going to see
00:35:14.920the resurgence of a significant men's rights movement I mean at the moment the men's rights
00:35:19.280movement is a joke because people just laugh at it um you know often for good reason but I think
00:35:24.100it's going to stop being a joke, you know, at some point in the coming years.
00:35:28.560Because what it needs, that movement, is someone charismatic, someone to come in,
00:35:34.040someone who can, you know, get people together, someone who can mobilise a group. And then once
00:35:38.940that happens, you know, it's ready to explode, isn't it?
00:35:42.460It is ready to explode. And, you know, I don't want to say that Jordan Peterson was, you know,
00:35:47.960you know yeah I mean he he wasn't a men's rights activist I don't think in in that sense but but
00:35:54.240I think what Jordan Peterson did show was two things one was as you say there's a huge feeling
00:35:59.180out there that you know men absolutely flock to him and the other thing I thought about the Jordan
00:36:04.060Peterson kind of phenomenon was that was that in my journalistic career I've written I've written
00:36:08.500about men's issues I've written about male suicide I've written about male survivors of sexual
00:36:12.560violence. And so, you know, I've thought a lot about male pain. And, you know, in my corner of
00:36:18.820the world, a left wing corner of the world, a very kind of feminist kind of focused corner of the
00:36:23.040world, the idea of male pain is something to be laughed at. It's like, are you joking? It's
00:36:27.380ridiculous. I mean, you don't talk about it. You know, it's a kind of thing to be mocked.
00:36:32.160And I think, you know, I think what was fascinating about Jordan Peterson was that he
00:36:35.400actually understood male pain. You know, he said, I know that you're hurting. And I understand that
00:36:41.380you're hurting and i feel it and i care and and that was just you know electric and and so it was
00:36:47.400a you know when he was at his peak um before he got sick it was extraordinary to see and i think
00:36:52.720and i think what he did was he just pricked at that uh that that growing feeling of upset that
00:36:58.720there is in the kind of in the masculine world at the moment because we're in this weird situation
00:37:03.020where you're not supposed to talk about it because if you talk about it you're the enemy
00:37:06.500but it's there but the other thing jordan did which i thought was very important is that he
00:37:12.560emphasized for men and women because his message resonates with people of i nearly said of all
00:37:19.300genders fucking hell all 960 his message resonated with him my point was that he forced people to
00:37:30.060understand that in a society that we live in now competing on dominance and competing on virtue
00:37:38.720are not really routes to happiness the best way to compete and be happy is to compete on competence
00:37:45.320yeah that's the point that i think he always emphasized which is why i i was very frustrated
00:37:51.260at the reaction to jordan from people of the persuasion that you were describing earlier
00:38:25.660and to me the reaction to Jordan Peterson was so disappointing precisely because of that because
00:38:31.320I see him as an agent of detoxifying all of that anger and all of that unpleasantness that you
00:38:39.920refer to but instead he was treated as being the very head of that movement yeah I just thought
00:38:45.460it was such a catastrophic misinterpretation of it yeah I don't think I've ever seen a public
00:38:50.340figure so misunderstood to Jordan Peterson I have to say I mean I became aware of him again because
00:38:56.300of my interest in the storytelling brain and my book before the status game was the science of
00:39:00.080storytelling and I was researching that and and so I came upon his videos which talks about the
00:39:05.280psychology of storytelling and this was kind of before he you know the c16 stuff and so when all
00:39:10.700that happened I just thought this isn't this I've not seen any I've watched all the hours of his
00:39:14.220videos and I've not seen any of this kind of weird you know version of Jordan Peterson that I'm now
00:39:18.740being told um um is there and i completely agree i mean you know in the in the book i take a sort
00:39:24.380of broader view and tell kind of the history of the world from the point of view of the of the
00:39:28.200status game and and i talk about the idea of modernity modernity is when the emphasis shifted
00:39:34.640from playing virtue games to success games that that's what that's about so before the industrial
00:39:39.160revolution revolution before the um enlightenment um most of us are playing virtue games it was it
00:39:44.740It was honor, duty, religion, stay in your lane, be respectful to your superiors.
00:39:50.600You know, that was life for centuries.
00:39:53.080And then it all changed, you know, post-industrial revolution.
00:39:57.400We started specifically attaching success to things like discovering useful knowledge, making things more efficient, creating inventions, bigger, better, faster, more.
00:40:09.740And, you know, like with the Yams, when you do that, we're going to do it.
00:40:12.500Wherever there's status, we're going to flock to that thing.
00:40:14.740And so, yeah, I think, you know, it's counterintuitive. But in the book, I argue that if you want to, if you really want to save the world, if you want to do good in the world, if you really want to be a virtuous person, actually, you should play a success game. Because success games are the things that have, you know, saved billions of lives through vaccinations. Success games have lifted billions of people above the poverty line.
00:40:36.100it's people you know solving problems that have done those things not people in churches not
00:40:42.220royal families which is another kind of form of kind of virtue game um so yeah you know it's
00:40:49.040playing those success games um that i think is is the real answer the real way to do good in the
00:40:54.700world but isn't the problem as well i'm such a negative bastard isn't the problem as well that
00:40:59.500virtue games are just much easier to play than success games it's easier to write a tweet guy
00:41:06.020Like, Dave Chappelle is a transphobe and he should be castrated for trans rights, right?
00:41:19.240Or to go to university to study biochemistry and then go on and do virology and then become a virologist and then work in whatever field it might be.
00:49:08.900How do we get away from those extremes to a world that is more balanced
00:49:13.120when I personally feel that we've become more extreme?
00:49:17.240Yeah, I mean, in the book I write about justice,
00:49:20.300i think what's really important is is that we play many games for an individual so so as i said you
00:49:27.160know like like the most pathological way of living your life is in a cult and that's dangerous not
00:49:32.940only because it makes you very vulnerable to very strongly irrational beliefs but also what happens
00:49:38.720if you're kicked out of the cult or the cult collapses that's your whole identity everything
00:49:43.060that you've ever worked towards you know goes away um uh so in the book i write about sort of
00:49:49.680playing a hierarchy of games this idea that so we know that people with a variety of identities
00:49:55.200tend to be happier and healthier um because they've got it's like a hedging they're hedging
00:50:00.060their status so they've got that you know you've you've got lots of different ways of owning
00:50:04.180status i'm you know i'm interested in politics i've got this hobby of building i know rockets
00:50:08.940or whatever it whatever you whatever you're doing i love i love architecture i've got my job i like
00:50:14.060to be a good parent there's lots of different ways that you can feel good about yourself and feel
00:50:17.320feel statusful and i think that's that's the that's the maximally healthy kind of psychological
00:50:22.300lifestyle and so so i think on the individual level i i think that's what we should be trying
00:50:27.320to do playing this kind of hierarchy of games where you've got one main game because competence
00:50:31.580is hard as we've been saying you need something to focus on but also hedging it so so that you
00:50:36.840haven't got all your all your eggs in that kind of um one basket but i think societally i you know
00:50:42.400i i you know i i think it's i think it's happening slowly i think i think slowly we are going to see
00:50:49.560new norms you know new kind of cultural status game rules that the the start sort of turning
00:50:55.640against that kind of cancel culture narrative you know i think at the moment you're seeing
00:50:59.580although he's wobbling the netflix guy you know netflix very well has the the the head by the time
00:51:04.580this goes out the company could have gone bust chapelle could have been like hand drawn and
00:51:10.140yeah and yeah and so you are seeing you know glimmers because i think what i think what the
00:51:16.200problem has been is that we've seen an absolute failure of leadership i think we've seen
00:51:21.140institutions and leaders completely fold because it's dreadful it's it's terrifying the idea that
00:51:27.960you're going to be that you or the company that you lead or the organization that you lead
00:51:31.220is going to be the target of a cancel culture mob and your personal reputation and the reputation
00:51:35.460of all the people that you care about is at risk is terrifying so it's quite glib to say oh they're
00:51:40.380just a bunch of cowards but i can understand the cowardice you know i'm not saying i'd be any
00:51:44.660better if i was if i was there heading up a university or a big corporation but but but i
00:51:49.260think what's going to hopefully going to happen is is it's going to be that that that thing where
00:51:52.540the more people stand up to this and get away with it and actually earn status by getting away with
00:51:57.380it earn respect and esteem by by standing up for their staff and going no we're not having this
00:52:02.140We're not going to allow, you know, our team to be treated like this.
00:52:06.300And the more leaders see other leaders achieving that, I think slowly you're going to see finally these institutions sort of standing up to this, you know, this small minority of people who are often dominating the narrative at the moment.
00:52:19.700And coming back to just because we're sort of in the advice for people phase of the conversation, one of the things that interests me the most out of what you were talking about as someone who's, you know, I've been extraordinarily wealthy.
00:52:36.840When my father spent a few years being very wealthy