Will Storr joins Joe Rogan to dissect The Status Game, revealing how humans prioritize identity-affirming beliefs—like cults (Heaven’s Gate, Scientology) or extreme ideologies (Nazism, woke activism)—over truth, fueled by psychological rewards like connection and status. Storr links modern moral panics (e.g., Satanic Panic, discredited Holocaust denier David Irving) to virtue-signaling, where progressive elites exploit perceived privilege despite marginal views, while Rogan warns of backlash from status-deprived groups (e.g., Ukraine’s civil conflict). They argue that early education on manipulative narratives and diversifying status sources—through competence, safety nets like UBI, or humility—could curb societal fragmentation and irrational hatred. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
I really enjoyed you on Trigonometry, and that's why I wanted to talk to you here.
Because it's just, I think your book is The Status Game.
And I think what's really interesting about what you're talking about Mechanisms that make people understand, like, behavior patterns.
In a way, instead of just accepting them, you know, because I think a lot of people fall into accepting behavior patterns.
But what you're showing is, like, these status games that human beings play.
They're sort of wired into our being.
And we don't recognize them.
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.
And you know, cults are interesting because cults are like, all human groups are kind of cults, but looser.
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.
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.
The only difference between cult and a religion and a business and a political group is that it's much tighter.
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.
Is that a tribal thing?
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.
And generally that leader would be some old warlord.
He's probably like 35, you know, back then.
But had gone through a lot and was a strong leader, was someone that you admired as a leader.
And maybe in these tribal times, that's baked into our DNA. And when someone comes along and speaks confidently...
I am never confident.
I'm never confident.
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.
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.
So they were kind of leaderless.
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.
And I think there's like eight and a half billion people in the world and I think it's like 500 million atheists.
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.
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.
The family hasn't worked.
The job hasn't worked.
The hobbies haven't worked.
So they've got no identity.
They've got no tribe.
So they're really vulnerable to these cults.
Because what cults offer is absolute certainty.
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.
That's what they were offering to you though, the level above human.
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.
But we wanted to follow the rules.
Like, not following the rules would be like being a NASA astronaut and just not caring about how the space shuttle works, you know.
So they're not...
They don't consider themselves brainwashed.
They consider themselves, well, they're just in a status game, like any other status game.
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.
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.
But that's why these groups are kind of functional as well.
It's like I kind of have a weird kind of sympathy.
I grew up in a very strict Catholic household with very strict Catholic parents and I was very...
I hated it.
I was very rebellious as a teenager.
And I guess in my 20s and 30s, I was very, very atheist and, you know, hated religion.
But then I kind of did a lot of this research.
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.
That's what religion provides my parents, is that they're connected into community and they feel important.
They feel they're good Catholic.
because my dad conducts the choir and you know this that and the other and so that's invaluable that's what humans need to survive and in our you know in the current world in the huge populations in which we live it's very hard to feel securely connected I mean, as you said a moment ago, the tribes in which we evolved were very small, like 30 to 50 people.
So it's quite easy to feel securely connected.
It was quite easy in that environment to feel important, like valued by other people.
I mean, probably it was not rare in the tribe to feel invaluable, like you're needed because everybody was needed.
There wasn't many people around to find the tubers and catch the rabbits or whatever.
But in this day and age, in these huge groups in which we belong to, it's much harder to feel...
Relative status, because you're competing with millions of people, especially online.
And I think that's a source of a huge amount of misery in the modern world, and identity anxiety, identity stress.
We feel really unsatisfied with the amount of connection and status that we have because we exist in these fucking massive international tribes now.
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, I think we're conversation starved.
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.
And most of the day, you can't really talk.
Most of the day, you can't sit down for a couple hours.
Like this.
And just say, why do we behave this way?
Why is there this weird pattern that is so strong?
It's such a tightly cut groove that cutting your balls off and wearing purple sneakers becomes appealing.
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.
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.
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.
And that's why it's so incredible when someone comes along and does something in that space that's new but still works.
That's, for me, the definition of a genius.
Anybody can experiment, but most experiments go wrong.
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.
Yeah, which I thought was amazing, because you can really sense that in his writing, this kind of apocalyptic madness.
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.
And I think with us, though, there's hope that we'll eventually get to some place of normalcy and some semblance of peace.
But...
What happened in the 1960s is fucking bananas.
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.
Anything they can to stop these hippies and made everything illegal.
They made marijuana.
Well, marijuana was already illegal, but all the Schedule I substances.
It's all the sweeping part of the 1970s Psychedelic Act that was all about the Civil Rights Movement.
It was all about just arresting people for any kind of protests, any anti-government, Anti-war.
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.
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?
And it really does seem like that.
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.
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?
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.
And she did this thing.
She said, the method is economic, but the object is to change the soul.
Which is a really, like, megalomaniac James Bond villain thing to say.
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.
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.
It was brutal in the 80s, but most of us are much wealthier now than we were in the 80s.
Like, it's kind of worked.
But it's also created much more...
A separation between the top and the bottom, much more inequality.
So the rich are much richer now and the poor are much poorer than they were in the middle of the 20th century.
Well, it also becomes an insurmountable position too.
When we say the rich get richer, the poor aren't getting any richer.
So that's a part of the problem.
It's like there's no escape from severe poverty.
Very few people escape.
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.
100%.
100%.
I'm not a terrorist.
I would hope that I wouldn't be a terrorist, you know, in a different life.
But 100% if I was living in a place that sucked with dirt floors and I found I could walk to America.
Seems like a normal thing that people want to have a better life.
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.
It just seems super simple.
You want the world to be a safer place?
Take all these places that suck and give them economic security.
Give them education and healthcare.
Set up school systems that are really good.
You're going to change the whole atmosphere.
You're going to change everything.
Provide job opportunities.
Set up places where we should make – how about – here's a law.
Here's a law that you should make.
You can't sell anything made by people who make less than would be legal here.
Wouldn't that be an amazing law if we passed that?
If we just said, listen, we all know this is bullshit, okay?
We all know that if you're buying an iPhone, there's a lot going on that you wouldn't like to see.
There's a lot going on, from the mining of the cobalt to the people in the factories.
I don't want to see that.
I want the shiny titanium thing.
It's so pretty.
You know, you move it around in your hand like, wow, that's amazing.
That's what you want.
You don't want to know how the sausage is made.
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.
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?
So the test would be you'd have to be able to buy X amount of Big Macs per day with your daily wage.
How much different would the world be if we made that illegal?
I'm not saying we should.
I'm not saying we should.
But how much different would the world be where all corporations have to be private?
All of them.
You just have to be a company.
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.
Also this dirty thing where you can't buy stock if you know things.
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.
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.
People buy phones and laptops.
If you're really balling, you buy a new laptop every couple years.
And that is, you're constantly looking for new processors, new innovation.
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.
And whether it's 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, or it's already happening in a fucking lab in Ohio.
We've been competing for status since before we were humans, since we're animals.
Well, we still are animals, but since before we were human animals.
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.
So basically, the more status that you get in your group, everything gets better.
We have this distorted idea of what is like a fiercely competitive person.
When we think of fiercely competitive people, we only, for whatever reason, consider basketball players, football players, baseball players, fighters, athletes, race car drivers.
We consider fiercely competitive people the people that are engaged in sports and activities every day.
But no!
No, there's fiercely competitive people that are involved in business and government and all sorts of other things.
And they're fucking psycho about this game that they're playing, whatever it is.
Whether it's stocks and bonds or selling pharmaceutical drugs, they're fucking psycho competitive about that.
There was a great story that I found for the status game about Steve Jobs and the true origin story of the iPhone.
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.
And one time he was at this barbecue and the husband of one of her friends worked for Microsoft.
And he's like rubbing Steve Jobs' face in it saying, oh, we've invented the future of computing.
You're done.
It's this pad thing with a stylus.
And apparently he really annoyed the fuck out of Steve Jobs.
So Monday morning, Jobs comes into Apple furious swearing and going, right, we're going to prove this prick wrong.
It's not stylus.
It's a finger.
Use the finger.
And from that barbecue came his rage.
And from the rage came the iPhone.
And that story was told by Steve Forstall, who was...
You know, intimately involved with all this stuff.
And he said, it was not good for Microsoft that that guy went to that barbecue that day.
And he's absolutely right.
But that's status.
Like, that...
It was personal for Steve Jobs.
It was Microsoft telling Apple that they were fucked and that they'd solved computing.
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.
How much longer?
I mean, that's a status thing, too, right?
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...
But it would never stop being played because we're storytelling animals and we tell stories about status.
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.
The brain is constantly playing a game for status.
We've got all this insane subconscious technology that we use for measuring Our status versus other people that we're completely unaware of.
Like there's one about the tone of voice during conversation.
They call it the paraverbal frequency band.
And you can't hear it consciously, but it's a way of organising status hierarchies when we meet people.
And the person who's top It sets the tone and everybody else matches to meet the tone.
And these psychologists studied a bunch of Larry King interviews, a bit like this one.
And they stripped out the paraverbal frequency band and they could work out who he felt superior to versus who he felt inferior to.
So he felt inferior to, I think it was Liz Taylor and superior to Dan Quayle.
And there were particular interviews which were very, Irascible and didn't go very well.
They weren't getting along.
One of them was Dan Quayle.
And they found that they were just not matching.
So there's all this stuff going on beneath the hood of consciousness, which is constantly organizing us into kind of status games.
And it's that that causes the hierarchies of life.
That's the reason why communism could never work.
Because they're trying to wipe out the...
The effects of status in society, but you can't wipe out the effects of status in society because it's in our brains.
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.
You know, we can't help but do it.
And so that's that constant work of the subconscious brain figuring out where we sit in the status hierarchy creates Human life.
It seems this pattern just constantly happens over and over and over again.
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.
Or that you're greedy or evil.
That there's something negative about you being competitive.
And it's essentially...
I think of the roots of it as kind of a cop-out of people that have been beaten in life.
And I think there's a big misunderstanding about what that competitive instinct, what that status instinct is.
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.
And they go, I'm not interested in status, you know.
But all that status is, technically, is the reward that we get for being of value to the tribe.
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.
There's dominance games.
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.
There's virtue games.
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.
So a religion is a virtue game.
The Royal Family, weirdly, is a virtue game because it's about being deference and knowing the rules.
And then there's success games, I call them, which is about competence, about being a great hunter, a great honey finder, a great sorcerer.
And that's what defines the West.
That's what made the West what it is, is that we started playing six...
Like for millennia, we were mostly playing virtue games.
It was caste, kingdom, Game of Thrones kind of land.
And then starting with the Industrial Revolution, we started playing success games.
So we started mostly like much more rewarding competence.
And so that competitive instinct is channeled into figuring out how to solve problems, how to create wealth.
And it's right that we reward that.
We've evolved to reward people who offer value to the human family.
That's status.
It's not a negative thing in that sense.
It's massively positive.
And weirdly, capitalism is an economic system that does the same thing.
It works with...
How status games work.
It works with how we've evolved to operate in human tribes.
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.
He's very helpful.
Whatever it was.
And they decided one year to switch it.
And make it so that white people can't come.
You cannot come.
Which is a very different sentiment.
Then you can stay home if you like, and you still get paid.
But you can come.
But if you want to stay home, you just get paid.
And everybody just chose to stay home.
It's nice.
And thank you for appreciating me.
That's not a negative.
If you have the money to do it and it doesn't fucking stop everything in its tracks, sounds great.
Sounds like a nice liberal hippie thing to do.
But the other one doesn't.
The other one scares me because that's racist.
If you're saying white people can't be here, why not?
What did I do?
I didn't do anything.
You're saying that white people shouldn't be allowed to be in a place where they work.
Because you decide.
Because you decide they have to stay home.
Look, there's better ways of going about this.
It's a bad idea.
The idea behind appreciating people is great.
But the idea about discriminating people in any way is bad.
And if you're saying white people have to stay home, that's bad.
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.
Talk, preach, brother!
They're former, you know, they're made to feel like former people.
There's a whole generation of guys who have been raised in a culture where...
They're being made to feel you've had your turn.
Sit down.
Shut up.
The future is not for you.
The future is for people who don't look like you and think like you.
And so that form of people really resonated with me.
It's like you straight white men, you're former people.
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...
That was their comeback.
That was their comeback.
I'm not taking that information coming from a straight white man.
Like, the last thing we need right now is straight white man speaking.
I used to teach a storytelling course at the Guardian newspaper.
Science of storytelling.
And so it's like how to use psychology and neuroscience to make yourself a better storyteller.
So I'm talking about studies and this study and that study.
And during a break, this woman came up to me and she worked for a major academic, like one of the biggest academic journals.
And she said to me, I've got a problem with what you've been talking about.
And it's that most of these studies are by straight...
White men?
And I was like...
So, like, okay, and what's the point?
And she was saying, well, you can't really trust them because they've got their own...
They're all evil.
Their perception of the world is wrong.
And, you know, I felt actually...
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.
So I just said to her, I'm not going to have this conversation with you.
Okay.
And she kind of went away.
But I just thought it was the fact that she worked for a major scientific publication.
She was telling me that because the work was done by straight white men, it could not be trusted.
That's Mississippi-level, like Mississippi 1932-level racism.
It was absolutely a baffling kind of moment.
And she was a smart person.
She was clearly a smart person.
But again, that's the...
That's the human brain.
It has to believe in order to make itself feel important and valued.
And so what was interesting about these people was...
It just astonished me.
First is that they are the richest of all the seven groups.
So they had more people earning over £50,000 per year as a family.
Secondly, they were the most highly educated of all the seven groups.
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.
So that was the first thing.
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.
And they make more social media contributions than all of the rest of the groups combined.
Also the numbers, so in the UK they make up 13% of the population, in the US they make up 8% of the population.
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.
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?
This is the kind of story that drives our media into paroxysms.
They've hired another white man.
They get the shivers.
And...
This poll found that 5% of people thought it should be a woman.
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.
So they really have the kind of commanding voice in our culture very often, but they're a tiny minority of who we are.
Because one of the things that was really interesting about the martial arts world is it's very cult-like.
Yeah.
Especially when I did it in the 80s, the early 80s when I started, they were the masters.
You bowed to them.
You bow when you enter the...
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.
They flew the guy to Hawaii and he started a new cult out there.
It's in the documentary.
They go visit him in Hawaii.
But it's just so fascinating how people just fall into these patterns.
It's just a natural thing that we have to be aware of.
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.
They look at it and go, oh, these are all just patterns that people play.
I think one of the things in history that this status research has really made me understand is the rise of the Nazis.
Growing up in the UK, there's always this question, how could it have happened?
How could this technologically advanced, sophisticated country descend into Nazism?
And once you understand the role the status plays, it becomes completely, for me, it's crystal clear.
Like before the First World War, Germany was just absolutely killing it.
They were the most successful country in continental Europe.
They were like had, you know, massive, like the Apple and Google of the days, BASF, Siemens, you know, huge companies.
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.
And then the First World War happened and they just assumed we're going to kill it because we're amazing.
And of course, they didn't kill it.
They lost.
And so that's humiliating in itself.
Humiliation being the loss of status.
And then there was the Treaty of Versailles, which was savage.
They had to give up their land.
They had to give up their military.
They had to pay the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations.
When all that triggered hyperinflation, their economy collapsed.
We took their industrial heartlands off them.
So it was humiliation upon humiliation.
Then Hitler comes along.
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.
Hitler was an incredibly successful leader of Germany for the time when he was...
In charge.
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.
There was the New Deal, the Social Security Act, the GI Bill.
They pumped loads of money into fixing America after the Great Depression.
And it worked.
There was a whole era in America.
They called it the Great Compression because it was a compression between the gap between the rich and the poor.
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.
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?
They fucking got rid of all the protesters.
Everybody was protesting.
They killed the protesters.
They took all the homeless people away, all the bums in the street urchins.
I mean, one of my favorite ones is the Satanic Panic was an insane status game and thing.
And so that began in the early 80s.
And...
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.
And so because that belief gives them status, they all decide to believe it.
And the same with the police.
The police think they were, like, on the hunt for the, you know, local neighborhood cops.
He said, at first I thought she was making it up, but then I thought it was true.
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.
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.
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?
People call those moral panics, but I don't think they are moral panics.
They're status gold rush.
You know, so the status on offer for finding Satanists was massive.
Like, the government pumped tens of millions of dollars into these organizations.
They became famous.
There was one person who interviewed children who got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for...
And they're kids, so when they're saying, I got flushed down a toilet, I got...
Forced to kill baby tigers.
It's clearly stuff that four-year-olds are inventing.
But it was taken to be serious.
And people went to prison for years on the basis of this testimony.
And so that's another thing that changed my thinking, this idea of moral panics.
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.
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.
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.
And I think there's a sense amongst millennials and Gen Zs, partly a real truth sense, that...
The success games that we were playing in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s are over now.
The game is fixed.
For millennials and Gen Z's life is harder in lots of real ways.
They can't get on the property ladder, they've got massive student debt, they're underemployed.
So what do you do if you can't play the success games that We Gen Xers played in the 90s.
Well, you play virtue games instead.
So, you know, we have to get our status from somewhere.
So if success is hard, we're going to do more virtue.
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.
So there's a lot of anger, you know, comes out of that.
It's just so unfortunate how easy it is to engage in this behavior and how few guidelines there are.
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...
It allows people to have, like, a look at the wiring under the board.
Like, oh, this is what the problem is.
And I would hope that people that are engaged in that realize, like, what a psychological capture that shit is.
It's so weird for you because you get it.
I've had friends that have had, like, real problems with, like, engaging with people on Twitter.
Like, they'll post a hot take.
And then someone will post back.
And they'll be walking down the street and they can't even walk five steps before they're checking.
They want to check their likes and check their thing and see who's responding.
Of course, that's not what happens when you connect billions of people together.
They play status games.
That's what they do.
And those three games of dominance, virtue and success, that's social media.
You know, we're pushing each other around.
We're virtue signaling and we're showing off about our success.
That's what we're doing.
And that's why...
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.
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.
If you're a woman in your underwear, rolling around on sheets and stuff, you get a lot of followers for doing not much else. - And that's the sort of the halting thing when I realized that actually, status is a resource that we need.
If we don't get enough status, we get mentally ill and we get physically ill too.
So being low status is bad for us physically.
And a lot of people have more status in their phones than they do in their actual real life.
They're going to their ordinary job in their ordinary town, but on this platform, they're really someone.
They've got a bunch of followers.
So that shows you how...
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.
It's a new way of harvesting this incredibly valuable resource that we value more than gold.
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.
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.
And this guy, Dr. Michael Marmot and his team went in there and they found that...
Your place in the hierarchy predicted your health outcomes.
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.
Literally, the person one down from the very top had slightly worse health outcomes from the person at the very top.
And they were really significant.
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.
And then other academics went into the lab and they did an experiment with monkeys, I think baboons.
And they gave these monkeys these delicious diets of like pizza and ice cream.
They basically made them really unhealthy.
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.
And it was.
It was the monkeys at the bottom of the hierarchy got sick more reliably than the monkeys at the top.
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.
And we're not designed to be in that state for long periods of time.
That's a response that's designed for being chased or attacked.
It's supposed to be like this.
And so chronic inflammation is really bad for us.
It makes us more vulnerable to cancer, Alzheimer's, all kinds of horrific issues.
So that's why lacking in status is bad for our physical health.
It's the same reasons why loneliness is bad for our physical health.
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.
The first one is chronic pain, obviously.
The second one is people struggle with recent bereavement.
People become suicidal when somebody they love or a pet they love.
But by far the most common reason people phone when I've spoken to a suicidal is to do with their identity failure.
They're severely lacking in connection or status, usually both.
And not only are they lacking, they're stuck.
They're trapped.
They feel like there's nothing I can do.
My life is so fucked.
There's no way I can ever meet anybody.
There's no way I can ever...
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.
It's not your fault That's all they ever want to tell you.
Yeah They don't want to tell you that the quality of your life affects the way you feel.
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.
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...
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, so what you're, you know, like, these, and it always, it always goes down well.
They always go, oh my god, wow, you know, no one's ever said that stuff to me before.
Like, it's like a...
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.
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.
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.
So that's horrific.
It was a big scandal about, oh, you know, are these judgments, can we really reduce a judgment of the quality of the school to one word?
But that was an example of somebody, you know, her problem was that she was really proud of the school she was running.
It was an outstanding school.
And suddenly it went to inadequate.
And the pain of that sudden loss of status was too much for this poor woman to cope with.
We kind of tolerate that kind of communication with people.
We look in and we watch from a side, like, oh.
But there's something to that, that is, you really are pumping out negativity.
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.
Well, when you take someone's status away, like they took her status away, I feel it is like an act of social violence.
Like our identity is of massive importance to us.
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.
And the act of physical violence doesn't only restore that status back to its sort of set point.
It turns that humiliation into a sense of pride.
So that's why violence is so tempting.
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.
It sends a negative status into a positive status.
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.
Those people are the reason why you're in the situation that you're in.
You're empowering people to hate someone specifically because of the way they look.
No matter what you think the justifications of that, it's the exact same thing in every culture when that happens.
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.
Well, I think, again, it's that storytelling brain.
We're playing a status game, but our conscious experience of life is a story, and it's fiction.
And the story always wants to make us heroic, so we're virtuous.
And I think that makes...
People's hatreds are invisible to them.
So you could say to somebody, and I have said to somebody relatively recently, you know, I think you hate men.
You've got a problem with men.
You're always saying this about men and that about men.
Like, it's not very nice.
And then she said to me, well, you don't understand the problems I've had in my life with men.
I've been abused.
I've been abused.
All of which is true.
But so that's her brain telling herself a heroic, virtuous story that justifies her Her hatred of this class of human beings.
And that's true for everybody.
That's true for people who hate women.
That's also true for misogynists.
That's true for white people who hate black people.
Everybody's hatred is dressed up in a virtuous story.
And I think that's right.
As soon as you start identifying a class of human being and saying these people are low status, these people are the source of my problems, that's when you know that's happening to you.
And, you know, at some point it happens to all of us.
It's human nature.
We are xenophobic by design.
You know, our groups, our status games, we feel we're wired to feel they're superior because they're our source of status.
So this stuff is incredibly tempting.
Like, you know, we've all fallen for this stuff, if we're honest, in our pasts.
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.
They're really good at telling us, no, you're right.
You're right.
These people are the problem.
And your animus towards them is actually a good thing.
The reason we know about Dresden, the firebombing of Dresden, was because of his scholarship.
I think even in Slaughterhouse-Five he's mentioned positively.
And so he's completely excommunicated now from the historical...
You know, establishment.
He believes this stuff so passionately that he was kind of offered the opportunity to withdraw his opinions in an Austrian court.
It's in his 70s, this was, and he refused and went to prison in his 70s.
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.
And I wanted to hang out with him because he's an incredibly intelligent man who has these fucking mad beliefs about the world.
And so what I did was, in order to make money at the time, he was selling these tours of Holocaust sites.
So you could pay two and a half grand and go for a week with him on these tours.
And he would give you the real, inverted commas, history of what actually happened in these places.
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.
And he said that it didn't show any of the signs of gas.
So what happened was I interviewed David Irving on day one.
And, you know, at the time I was a Guardian journalist.
I couldn't hide my disdain for him.
And I kind of fucked up.
I let it be known...
Through my line of questioning that I felt he was a racist lunatic.
So he kind of walked off.
And I was kind of panicking because I was thinking, I've not got enough material for my book.
I need to interview him again.
And I was talking to the Nazis about, oh, I'm freaking out.
And then the person organizing the tour, I kept hassling and saying, I need to speak to David again.
I need to speak to David again.
And she said to me, oh, you know, you might not know this, but all the boys have got together.
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.
I just thought that's so nice.
But that's the thing.
That's what I write about in the book.
It's like the idea that these are monsters.
That's storytelling.
They're just blokes who've made a mistake about the world.
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.
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...
It's a super realistic account of the last seven days of Hitler's life in the Hitler bunker.
It's an incredible, incredible film.
It's all set in the bunker.
And so Irving was going to show downfall and give his alternative take on what was really going on.
And one of these guys couldn't watch downfall because his dad was in the bunker with Hitler and he found it too upsetting.
And that was a big lightbulb moment for me.
So my takeaway from that was that these...
David Irving aside, these guys had all been brought up by parents who were proper Nazis.
And obviously Nazis are synonym for evil.
And they couldn't cope with the fact that their dads, probably, mums perhaps as well, were evil.
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.
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.
And probably their parents had filled their head with some of this stuff too, you know.
Knowing what you know about our desire for status and how that's just...
It's impossible to remove from the human mind and human society.
Do you think that we could have like a warning guidebook for human beings?
The same way the Constitution is sort of a warning guidebook to establish a republic.
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.
They planned it out to make sure that one person couldn't just take over and run it.
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.
And go, no, no, no, no, no.
This is not...
I know what you're doing.
You're hijacking this for your own good.
And we know when people do it, we can't say it.
Because if they attach themselves to a virtuous cause, what are you criticizing?
Blank?
What are you, a Nazi, a racist, a transphobe?
Whatever it is.
We should be able to see those outside of the merits of the ideas that we're discussing.
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.
We should shun people to do that and teach people at a fucking really early age not to do it.
It's hard to learn because there's no precedent.
It's not like there's a hundred years of history on how to use the internet properly.
Nobody knows.
They're just doing it because it seems like a thing to do that makes you feel good.
Gives you a little shitty dopamine spike.
And so they just dive in.
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.
This is why.
These are all the patterns.
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.
And then as they get older, just sort of have a much more rational way of interfacing with people.
I mean, one of the things that I took away from this was that you get this idea about fascism and totalitarians.
How that happens is that these evil people come marching in and forcing everybody to believe certain things.
Well, when you look at, say, the rise of the Nazis, fascists, totalitarians, they don't go in and force you to do anything.
They tell you stories that you want to hear.
They flatter you into...
You know, that's what the Nazis did.
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.
So this fascist...
Government, this horrific episode in our history, it didn't begin with force.
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.
And, you know, people love that stuff.
I mean, the other thing that I think is that people...
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.
So that's why Trump got voted in.
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.
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.
They're going to react.
And it's the same way that I feel that we're treating young men at the moment.
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.
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.
How could it be that our young men are flocking to this individual?
It's because you're calling them, you know, you're calling them You're removing their status.
So you can't, you know, the left need to understand, you can't disparage and dismiss and insult these entire categories of people.
My friend Duncan said that about the pandemic when the people on the left were attacking all the people on the right.
He said, dude, this is going to lead to a totalitarian right-wing government.
He goes, watch what this happens.
Watch what happens.
Because all these people on the left are going crazy.
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.
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.
Go get them.
And then there's the reality of bad people.
What do you do about them?
I mean, you can't just ignore the fact that there's terrorists out there.
Like, you gotta look at all of it.
The whole thing is fucking nuts.
And if we can recognize patterns and how people fall into patterns, I think we can have less nuts.
This has to be established at a young age.
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.
That's really where they get their jollies from.
If you just tell them right now, you've got to cut that out.
Like, what am I going to do for 10 hours a day?
That's literally what I do.
You know, that's one of my things that I've always gone back and forth in my head about is universal basic income.
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.
They could chase their dreams and pursue their dreams.
The other part of me is like, yeah, but then they're not going to have any incentive to do anything.
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.
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.
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?
There's a certain amount of people that need a little something to get them going.
And a lot of really ambitious people came from poverty.
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.
So, you know, ballpark figure, 50% of who we are is genetic.
So we all have different personality types.
And so if you're extrovert, that's a good thing in our neoliberal market economy because you're sociable, you're ambitious.
If you're low in agreeableness, that's also a good thing in our particular environment because you're competitive.
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.
So my argument is that those people deserve some help.
Those people deserve a social safety net because there's no such thing as a pure meritocracy.
Human brains don't roll off the production line at Foxconn.
We're all wired differently with different talents.
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.
They lose their temper.
And we can try and help those people, but you can't completely rewire those people.
It's impossible.
For example, to turn an extrovert into an introvert because of, you know, because a lot of that is genetic.
Like we're born with these semi-finished brains.
So genes aren't fates, but they do set us in a certain direction.
And most of the rest of that kind of creation of self happens when we're young in the first 20 years of life.
And it's mostly sort of episodes of life over which we have no control.
So by the time we're in our 20s, early 20s, we're kind of who we are.
There's not much that's going to change us in a dramatic sense apart from serious trauma.
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.
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?
Straight money and housing is a different kind of social safety net.
And I think that there's a real good argument for what you're saying that some people are just...
They just don't have the tools.
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.
It's just getting...
There's some people that were like led very...
Un-spectacular lives.
And then they found this one thing.
And they got really good at that one thing and became a superstar at it.
And they'll tell you, you know, I was 28 years old.
I was just kind of fucking around one day with my friends.
And then I really got into it.
And the next thing you know, this guy's like a famous person in the field or whatever it is.
That happens.
That does happen.
It probably happens less if you have everything taken care of.
So there's a bunch of things going on.
There's people that are kind of hopeless, unfortunately, and maybe that is a genetic thing.
Maybe at least some of them it is a genetic thing.
But then there's also people that are uninterested.
And maybe uninspired, and maybe it's not as simple as them going to school.
It's just maybe like seeing someone around you that lives life in a way that you admire.
Someone who's like, I want to be like that guy, or I want to be like her.
Like, what is that?
And how do you get that to people?
Because that's a big factor.
That's a giant factor in who you become as an adult human being.
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.
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.
There are various cues in our environment that we subconsciously seek out to mimic people.
One of them is similarity.
So we identify people who are a bit like us.
So men are more likely to glom onto men, women, women, that kind of thing.
And then there's other various cues.
There's like skill cues.
So if we see somebody who's really competent at something, we'll start to mimic them and copy them.
There's success cues, so the symbols of success, so the fast car or in the tribal context, the necklace of teeth.
And then the other one is prestige cues.
So if we see lots of other people attending to one person, we'll also attend to them.
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...
It's not a skill for anything, who becomes globally famous.
So the brain's always looking for these people to identify and then copy.
And the logic is that these people are high status.
They've worked out how to earn status in the game that we're playing.
Copying them, we too will learn and rise in status.
So I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that role models are really important.
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.
And the reason we have street gangs and jihadist groups isn't because...
Boys will be boys and they're naughty, they're criminals, they're monsters.
It's because they need status.
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.
What are you going to choose?
So that's what society needs to figure out.
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.
I mean, that's one of the things about being middle class is you get all those opportunities to earn status.
You get education, you go to college, you can choose all these careers.
But poorer people just don't have those opportunities.
And so I think you're right.
Lives are wasted.
Human value is wasted because those opportunities just aren't made for young people.
The other thing they say is that how do we get out of the status game?
And it's like the same thing.
It's like, why would you want to?
Because status is your reward for offering value to other people.
So why would you not want to offer value to other people?
That's like the definition of a loser.
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.
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.
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.
And so they brought him to an infirmary and he wasn't allowed to have any contact with his parents for like months.
So for like several months while he was a child, I don't remember exactly how long, but it was horrifically long.
He didn't get human touch.
Which, you know, they didn't understand back then, I guess, that that's crucial to the development of a human being.
Without it, literally, a baby will go mad.
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.
It was the specific way that he was talking about things and the way his understanding of technology and It was his brother.
His brother had this crazy anti-technology philosophy a long fucking time ago.
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.
It was crazy where he had to go, what the fuck are you doing?
So he knew his brother was just broken.
He was always broken.
So to take that guy and dose him up with LSD and humiliate him, they made a fucking monster.
It was revenge on the intellectual class who were kind of creating this world he hated.
It's like Elliot Rogers, the spree killer.
He felt rejected again and again and again by the...
By the pretty girls of the world.
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.
That's what the brain does.
It tells us these stories that the people who are responsible for my lack of status are evil and they must be destroyed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't believe in my ideas.
I do in the sense that these are some ideas that I have and I wonder if this is right.
But if it's not right, I'm not attached to it.
Like, I can go, oh, I used to think that, but now I know this.
And that doesn't diminish your worth.
But what does diminish your worth is if you fucking cling to that other stupid thing, even after you know it's not real.
That's just dumb.
Like, you're not your ideas.
You're just a human being that's interfacing with a fucking shitload of information.
And most of it, you're only gonna have a peripheral understanding of.
Ask most people, how's the sewage system work?
You don't know it's so important!
You use it every day!
How does it function without electricity?
I flush, it comes back, what the fuck's going on?
Most people have zero idea, but it's like a critical part of their day.
It's the beliefs that become part of our identity.
They're the dangerous ones.
Because those are the ones that are status generators for us.
our status depends on this idea that about biological women or about who about white versus black men versus women and then once once you're in that space you can't trust your own thoughts because your brain isn't thinking what's true your brain is thinking how can i defend this belief how can i defend this belief because this belief is me i am this belief this is my my status game is based on this belief yeah and it's a really dangerous trap that everyone can fall into all of us That's why cults are so terrifying to me.
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.
No, I'm terrified because that could have been me.
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.
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.
Maybe not you.
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.
But maybe you have enough for that, but maybe the next one will get you.
Maybe there's one that's a little bit better.
It's kind of a church, but it's a rock and roll kind of thing.
A thought experiment that I like is this idea that shows that your irrational beliefs are invisible to you.
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.
No, this person's mad about that.
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.
So that just leaves you in the middle, the island of perfect island of absolute rationality.
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.
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.
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.
And even when you know it's the placebo, it still works more.
So that extra few bucks that you're spending on the brand-name painkillers is worth it.
So his whole thing was like, it's an easy thing to do.
If you prove anything that's supernatural or woo woo, he used to call it, you get a million dollars.
And the fact that nobody had ever got this a million dollars was his proof that none of this could exist.
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.
So that happened again and again and again.
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, properly test whether this homeopathy worked.
And just on the eve of it happening, he insisted that it all had to start again and a pilot study had to be made.
And then blamed the other guy for pulling out.
So I came to him with basically a binder full of this stuff and he eventually admitted, you know, I have been dishonest.
I have been untrue.
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.
I said, have you ever changed your mind about anything?
And he was in his 80s at the time, I think.
He couldn't tell me a single thing that he had ever changed his mind about.