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- [00:01]
A
Hey everyone. Jim here with a quick note. We're taking a brief two week break from new episodes to spotlight a couple of golden oldies from the Infinite Loops archive. Years later, these remain some of my favorite conversations I've had on the podcast. We'll be back with fresh episodes soon, but in the meantime, enjoy this trip through time.
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B
Thank you.
- [00:29]
A
Hi, I'm Jim o' Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops. Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like Infinite Loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that. To avoid going in Infinite Loops of thought, we hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens, including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker. With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together. Thanks for joining us. Now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
- [01:41]
B
Well, hello everyone, it's Jim o' Shaughnessy with another edition of Infinite Loops. My guest today is, I am excited to tell you, is the best selling author Will Storr, whose latest book the.
- [01:56]
A
Status Game on Social Position and How.
- [01:59]
B
We Use it was recently named the book of the Year by the Times of London to quote them. Will Storr is one of our best journalists of ideas from selfie and the History of Western self Obsession to the science of storytelling about how narratives shaped human lives and culture. His books are just joyfully interesting. I personally took a circuitous path to finding Will's books that started with The Seeker Jed McKenna who had concluded fear, regardless of what face it wears, is the engine that drives humans as individuals and humanity as a species. Simply put, we are primarily emotional creatures and our ruling emotion is fear with a detour. Through Robert Anton Wilson and Howard Bloom's books such as the Lucifer A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History as well as the Genius of the A Radical Revision of Capitalism and Joseph Heinrich's book the Weirdest People in the how the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, I managed to get a deep understanding of how we got to where we are, which Will brilliantly details in books such as the Adventures with the Enemies of science, the science of storytelling, and the book we will be discussing mostly today, the Status game. Well, welcome to Infinite Loops. I will admit to my audience that Will is the person who changed my mind. I insisted that I didn't play status games. And then Rob Henderson and I were having a conversation, and he's a young guy, he's getting his PhD at Cambridge, and he's like, jim, you do. No, I don't. And then I read Will's book and I went, yes, I do. So welcome Will. We'll be speaking mostly about the book, the status game, but I'm going to weave in your other books too, because you build such a wonderful case. When I go through all of your books, I am one who is swayed by data, who is swayed by studies. And you are very meticulous in the way you handle these. For example, I put up a study that I got out of one of your books about when populations go above a million gods appear vengeful gods. And like, immediately you corrected me and you said, nope, that study's been withdrawn. And I'm like, okay. I really, really like, yeah.
- [04:39]
C
I was just, oh, God, of all the studies, you have to pick that one. It's been corrected now in the current edition of the book. It's been corrected. Yeah. That one was controversial, unfortunately.
- [04:50]
B
Well, yeah. But I want to start out with your opening to the book Unpersuadables, the Enemies of Science. And you quote Jerome Bruner, I guess his name is. And I love this quote. A Self is probably the most impressive work of art we ever produce. We're focusing, as I said, mostly on the status game and why we play it. But I've noted by reading all of your stuff, you just seem to have both an obsession and a passion for finding out what makes us tick as human beings. Origin story.
- [05:23]
C
Ah, Origin story is. Well, yeah. Okay. So I was brought up in a very strict Catholic household. My parents were and still are believers in the Bible, believers in the literal trees of God, heaven, the devil. I was a young atheist. I never believed in God, and it always kind of baffled me. My dad's a smart guy, he went to Oxford, but he still believed in all this stuff, which I thought was just kids stories to me. I remember someone saying to my mom, if you were born in India, you wouldn't be a Catholic. And she said, oh, yes, I would, I would. I just thought, that's just mad. Like, that's crazy. I went to Catholic school and it was. I was in this kind of world of madness as Far as I could see it, I surrounded all these, these otherwise smart and successful adults who believed in this story, this crazy story. So I think that's the origin story. Really. It was just like absolutely kind of baffled because the question isn't why do people believe crazy things? The question's how do smart people end up believing crazy things? That's what I try to tackle in the Unpersuadables.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah, and as I told you before we started to record, this has fascinated me. I call it Human os, Human Operating System. And I do that for a very specific reason. I stole that term, by the way, from Brian Romelli. And I'm sure that I'll be stealing many of your terms as well. But I found that when I talked about it as belief and or your beliefs, people became really angry really quickly. And so I found that by changing it to the more generic Human os, also by beginning every conversation with saying, I am running the same Human OS as you are. So this is not. I'm not singling you out. One thing I did find in my research though, that is absolutely fascinating and makes a ton of sense, is that the more intelligent the person, the more likely they are going to be able to hold empirically crazy beliefs. Because when a highly intelligent person finds that belief, he or she builds an ironman argument for why that belief is true. Especially if they're like assertive and or extroverted types, they are going to assert that belief with a great deal of conviction. So they first convince themselves and then they go out and convince everyone else that's true.
- [07:52]
C
As I think I've written about that in a couple of my books, is believe that we're not naturally very good at looking for reasons why we might be wrong about things. So what we do is we happen upon a belief that feels true, matches the story that we're telling about how the world works. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys, who am I? And that feels true to us. And then what we do is we go out looking for evidence that we're right. And as soon as we find a bit of evidence to write, they call it the make sense stopping rule. We think that makes sense and we stop thinking about it. So that's how we think, that's how we reason. Unless we're given specific rules. Like a scientist has specific rules that are, are specific to undermine that mode of reasoning. So that's what we do. And the smarter we are, the better we are at doing that. Like in the Unpersuadables, my favorite chapter in that is when I was hanging out with this David Irving, who is this incredibly smart British historian he's spoken of approvingly in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The reason that we know what we do about Dresden, the Barbara Ring of Dresden, is because of David Evans Scholarship. He was a hugely highly respected scholar of the Second World War. And then one day he decided that Hitler was, in his words, a friend of the Jews. And the Holocaust was nothing to do with Hitler. He had no knowledge of it. I mean, he's mad. But this guy. And I think the mistake that people make is that they look at people like David Irving and think, well, they're evil because they're lying. Like, he knows that's not true and he's just saying it.
- [09:13]
B
I don't know.
- [09:14]
C
You can make up any number of reasons, but David Living genuinely believes that he went to prison for that belief in his 70s in Austria. You know, it's against the law to say stuff like that. And he was given the opportunity in court to confirm or deny the belief that 6 million Jewish people died in the Holocaust. And he refused to renounce his belief and went to prison. He's a man of enormous conviction and enormous intelligence who is enormously wrong. And that's where you can end up with this mode of thinking. When you've got an extremely smart person with access to enlarged amount of evidence that they can very easily end up in a very strange place.
- [09:48]
B
Yeah, one of the things, I've been working on this for most of my adult life, actually, because I'm always fascinated and we're quantitative investors, so I build models around everything. So one of the things that I did was started separating when I say I believe, invoking Karl Popper. If you believe, if it's. You can't run a test that falsifies that belief. So much of religious faith, for example, is belief because you can't put it to an objective, falsifiable test. And when then I had things where I thought we could do that, I didn't say I believe, I would say my thesis is. And I just did that for internal logic reasons. And that helped me a lot in terms of realizing that we, all of us are carrying around just tons of beliefs that we didn't put into our own brain. You mentioned your Catholic upbringing. I was also raised Catholic, although I will tell you a funny story. I was an altar boy and kept going up that line and. And I got a Jesuit priest one time, and the Jesuits are known in the Catholic faith as kind of the ones who are the bad boys and really fun to, like, go to a bar with. Really fun to play poker with. And so I thought I was old, and I can't remember why they picked me to do this. Old 16. And he's like, so do you like being an altar boy? And I'm like, honestly, Father, no, I really don't. Well, then why do you do it? Well, my parents. And he goes, but you're a good Catholic. And I went, actually, Father, no, I'm really not. And I launched into comparing Catholicism's belief with Greek myth. And I was like, honestly, Father, I got to tell you, Greek myths sound a lot more convincing to me. But rather than scold me, he got this twinkle in his eye and he goes, well, we can't get everyone, Jim. We just can't get everyone. So whereas my. My wife was raised in pre Vatican ii, even though Vatican II had already happened environment out in farm country in Minnesota. We're both agnostics. We're not atheists, because I can't test that belief and falsify it. But I'm a pretty aggressive agnostic. I'm generally skeptical of any organized religion, spirituality, that kind of stuff. Very different, because nature of the universe, who knows? But I want to come back to the status game. You start by saying, life is a game. There is no way to understand the human world without first understanding this. Everyone alive is playing a game whose hidden rules are built into us and then set silently direct our thoughts and emotions and virtually everything else that we do and our behavior. I love that opening because it fits so nicely with other things that I've read. I'm a huge fan of Robert Anton Wilson. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He was a buddy of Timothy Leary, and he started calling the various belief systems reality tunnels. And I really loved that explanation because he would teach a class, and his room was off a very long hallway. And the first exercise of each new semester was he asked his students to draw the hallway and people who couldn't draw could describe it, et cetera. He was fascinated by this idea that of the 30 descriptions and or drawings, none of them were the same. And so he came up with this idea that we all exist in different reality tunnels. And that one of the primary things that caused a great deal of human angst and despair is the fact that we don't understand this, and we don't understand that this other person maybe isn't really trying to aggressively come in on our beliefs. He or she just Lives in a different reality tunnel. And I really, really love that description because it makes you more compassionate and patient with people. When you know that, you understand that. Wilson said something along the lines of, you know, if you're not in the same reality tunnel and this person is speaking dog and you're a cat, you're not going to understand that person and you're probably going to think they're a bit crazy. So I think the same thing is going on with these status games that we play. Here's another one for you. If you wanted to rule the world, save the world, buy the world or fuck the world, the best thing is to do is to pursue status. Please elaborate on that. I love that line.
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C
Yeah, so when I'm talking about status, I'm not arguing that everybody wants to be famous, everybody wants to be rich, everybody wants to be good looking, although most of us do want to be rich and good looking. I'm starting that we want to feel of value in the world. That's what status is. Status is not the feeling of that we're loved and accepted. That's connection, that's difference, belongingness. It's the feeling that we are of value to our tribe, to our people. And so the discovery, that's a kind of a fundamental human need. Not a want, but a need that when we don't feel valued by the world, that we suffer psychologically and even physically, I think is extraordinary. It's massive. And that's what the book is about. And I suppose in that passage you've just quoted, what I'm trying to get to is the kind of absolutely fundamental nature of these games we play for status. If you want to buy the world, rule the world, whatever it was, fuck the world. The first thing to pursue is status. And that's true if you want to buy the world, that you need to pursue status in the, in the games of investment banking, or that's what you need to do first. If you want to rule the world, you need to play status games in power, in politics. If you want to fund the world, you need to play status games in becoming rich and famous and good looking in order to treat anything of note in life, the first thing to pursue is always status. I mean, even in the most elemental sense. You look at the war that's going on in Europe at the moment, Putin wants a piece of Ukraine, but the first thing he has before he gets a piece of Ukraine, the first thing he has to pursue his status on the battlefield, he has to win a status game. That's measured in blood before he gets to claim the land. Wherever you look in human life, there are status games, games going on.
- [16:01]
B
I wanted to ask, though, maybe because I just finished selfie, but it also comes up here a lot, and that is this idea of social media. Obviously, social media has a tremendous amount of problems. Yeah. Primarily because of, again, evolutionary. It's in our base code to be tribal. And first we want to fit in and then we want to stand out. I think that's one of your lines. But you also mentioned the Milgram experiments, the Stanford prison experiment, which are absolutely chilling to the level of dehumanization that people can quickly sink. Talk a bit about that. And the idea, obviously we see this happening on social media, everyone is tribing up and it's us versus them. And I think that for the most part, that leads to horrible results. I think that there's another path for social media where you'll still have that, but that you can find a disparate group of thinkers that can engage in meaningful discussions and that it's not all bad. But talk to me a little bit about social media and these sort of dehumanizing games.
- [17:12]
C
Well, the Stafford Brisbane experiment, since I wrote about that, and the unbustuables, that's about 12 years ago, that's become much more controversial these days. There's a couple of things in the unsupplatables that have fallen out of vogue. The Stanford Brisbane experiment and the implicit association test they also wrote about in that book, which is also fallen out of vogue. The initial, like Zimbardo's thesis about the Stanford Brisbane experiment was that we are all vulnerable to falling into evil behavior if we put into certain conditions. If you're put in a bad barrel, you will automatically become a bad apple. So the updated version of that theory really is in the status game, and that's social identity theory. And that adds a big caveat, which is first you have to identify with the role that you're playing in life. So it's perfectly possible to be a prison guard and identify as somebody who pursues rehabilitation, peaceful measures and be a lovely prison guard. But it's also very possible to be a prison guard, and perhaps arguably, more likely, certainly the UK and the US and identify as somebody that measures their status with the practice of harsh punishment and physical aggression and their ability to control dangerous people. And those are the ones that are potentially going to cause problems. So in the context of social media, what I'm arguing is that we all play different status games and the status Games that we play all have different rules and they all have different measures by which we measure status. Or in the words of academic Jerome Barker, criteria for claiming status. Some status games, their criteria for claiming status is that they are aggressive. They use sort of strategies of dominance to kind of shout over people, to punish people, to get them removed from their jobs, to destroy them reputationally, which is a kind of death as far as I'm concerned. So those are the status gains that we want to avoid. In the book, I call them virtue dominance games because they're this blend of there are three ways that we can pursue status. There's dominance, which is aggression, threat, bullying. There's virtue, which is moral behavior, but also the enforcement of moral behavior, the enforcement of your version of moral correctitude is often bad. These virtue games and their success, there's competence, there's being good at stuff, that's another way of being valued for other people. Then I think the worst games is virtue dominance games. We see that a lot on social media, which is I will aggressively enforce the moral rules of my status game. In my status game, you are a person of status if you believe X, Y and Z. And if you don't believe X, Y and Z, you have no status and no right to claim status. And I will make sure that in the real world too, that your claim to status is removed, whatever it is. Deep platforming, getting fired. In the book I talk about the communist game, the Nazi game. Of course these are orders of magnitude more evil that these games we play on social media, but it's still in the same category. So I think that's where things can go wrong. But the kind of status games that you play and our mutual friend Rob Henderson plays are status games where you earn status for sharing knowledge on social media. Rob Henderson, who I'm a big fan of, really smart guy, gets status points on social media. He gets retweets and likes when he finds a fantastic study and does a brilliant, clear, concise and useful analysis of that study. That's that status game. And so that's a brilliant status game. The best people that I follow on Twitter, that's what they're doing. They're playing status games. They are earning status. They've got 10 times more followers than I have because all I do is self promote on. I'm not very good at social media, I'm bad at social media. But they're of value to me. They're of huge value to me. Some of those studies that Rob tweets and you tweet and other smart people tweet. And in my books they're of literal value to me, those people. It's status games, that's what's being played. And I think in the book I talk about the best kinds of games really being success games. I'm a born lefty and I'll die lefty. My inherent belief was that virtue games were the games to play. We look after everybody and make sure he's okay and enforce moral correctitude. But the book changed my mind. It's not true. The success games are the ones that have changed the world. It's the people who are playing games of finding the vaccine, solving the industrial problem. These are the games that have increased wealth, that have solved the problem of child death in labor. And this goes on and on and on and on and on. Success games that have saved lives and made the quality of life infinitely more comfortable for billions of people around the world.
- [21:46]
B
Yeah, and it will not surprise you that I too identify with that particular game because I think it has demonstrably worked to the advantage of all humanity and I think that's fabulous. The dominance games, the virtue games. I literally make my blood curdle when I see things like the write up that you did about the ludicrous and yet like jaw gaping open time in particularly California where everyone was a Satanist. Yes, yes, I honestly read that and I just kept looking at other sources, not that I was doubting you, but because I remember just kind of tangentially reading about it in the newspaper and I remember saying to my wife, this is madness. This is like these are witch trials. And back to the idea of intelligent people being able to fall in here. Like what were these psychiatrists and psychologists? In my opinion they should be thrown out, they should be defrocked because people killed themselves over this and it increased.
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C
10, 20 years, I mean destroyed, totally destroyed.
- [23:00]
B
And this sort of complex adaptive systems generally all emergence comes from the bottom. I always try to put myself in the minds of others because I think in terms of reality tunnels and not like other things. That makes shifting around much easier in my opinion, at least for me. How do they convince? I mean, is there a target group here that has very low self esteem, that is yearning for something? And generally I find I'm a big believer that happiness comes from within, not from without. And happiness is a byproduct, you can't seek it in of itself. It's a byproduct of other things that make you happy, for example, a purpose in life, a family, et cetera. Are those the poor people who these people are preying on?
- [23:48]
C
First, I would argue that they're not preying on people. Again, just like David Irving, they sincerely believe what they're saying is true. So because of the reality tunnel effect, as you put it, we look at people who are living in very, very different realities than we are. The only way you can believe what you believe, as if you're an evil predator or a crazy person. But they do, you know, like I've been interviewing people who believe crazy things 20 years. Most of them sincerely believe. They're not hucksters. They really believe what they're saying is true. And I think that was true. For in cults, you wouldn't go to that extent. And people look at our world, they get money, they get sex with lots of people. Yeah, they get those benefits. But I still dubious to this idea that most cult leaders are crooks in the sense that they are deliberately coming up with this mad scheme in order to kind of entrap people. And in order to ask your question about what kinds of people the argument they're making the status game, is that they are the kind of people who have failed at the games of ordinary life. So in the words of psychologist Robert Hogan, humans want to get along and get ahead that we're tribal animals. That's what we want to do. We want to join tribes and thrive in them. So we want connection and status. And that's what we're trying to do when we play the games of life, whether it's religion, whether it's what we do for a living, whether it's a hobby, whether we're on social media as part of some group of people swapping studies. We want to connect with other people and earn status in the eyes of other people. And I think the kinds of individuals who are vulnerable to joining cults are the kinds of people who have failed and failed and failed again at the games of ordinary life. Because what cults offer is a very specific set of roles, precise. In Heaven's Gate, they had these huge rule books where this is exactly what you've got to do. In Heaven's Gate, it was how you could scramble egg, exactly what time you took your vitamins, how much toothpaste you could put in your toothbrush, how deep your bath was, where you could fast, I think was one of them. If you follow this set of rules precisely, we will reward you with connection and also status. That's the other thing that cults offer. Whether the cults offer huge amounts of connections, once you Follow the rules. You are, you know, loyal. Family for life. That's the promise, anyway. And cults offer incredible status. So if you join a cult, cults are really tight. Religion, if you join the Heaven's Gate co op, they promised you were going to enter what they called the evolutionary level above human. You were literally going to be swept off into in a UFO to somewhere better, like a version of heaven. So a cult is just a very tight human group.
- [26:19]
B
Yeah. I sometimes pop off on when somebody says, well, you studied cults. What's the most successful cult in history? And I always answer, the Roman Catholic Church.
- [26:29]
C
Absolutely.
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B
If we judge them just on real estate alone. And also, again, I take a somewhat more skeptical view, and that's why I enjoy reading you because you are always quick to step back and say, let's just hang on here for a minute. From the outside, from someone like me, I see them as grifters and as predators, really. And when I studied cults, you'll love this was pre Internet and there was some specific reasons that I wanted to understand cult behavior. And so I found this guy who was running a business called the Cult Awareness Network. And so I spoke to him at length on the phone. It happened. I was still living in the twin Cities of Minneapolis St. Paul at the time that he was coming there. And so we got together for a weekend and he took me through all of the techniques used. So love bombing, loaded language, all of these things that you can use to break a person down. By the way, armies do it all the time, and they're doing it to build people back up in the way they want them. So it's not that it is exclusive to cults. So that made me even more skeptical about cult leaders in general. And I still think that, like est, the Forum, those types of money cults, One of the things I looked into was many of these subgroups that broke off from those. If you did a deep packet on the founder, the majority were ex felons. So that fed my idea that these were all grifters. And your treatment, especially of Heaven's Gate, which to me was just so crazy that I just was like, I just can't get it. My friend Tim Urban, don't know if you're familiar with his work. He's the wait, but why? And he did this really funny thing on the Flat Earth society, and he came to a conclusion somewhat like yours, that from our point of view, in our reality tunnel, these people are Matt Brother Barking Mat. And we tease them and like, there's a Gif. I use on Twitter all the time when I said if you're trying to break somebody of the flat earth society and it shows a picture of an adult kicking a big globe the earth at a little kid and the kid falls over, it's like, okay, so. But then they will be. What I'm fascinated by, which you go into in depth, is the more evidence that you offer these people that they're wrong, the more fervently they cling to the belief, which also you cover in scientific storytelling. And maybe it's motivated reasoning on my part because one of my beliefs beforehand was that essentially breaking down a person's belief structure is a very, very dangerous game. And so facts aren't going to do it. Stories might. So I mentioned earlier that we're quantitative investors and for the love of God, I had to come up with a presentation which was I tell stories to tell you why you shouldn't pay attention to stories in investing. Because it seems to be in our DNA, the storytelling. The other thing about when you say status to most people. Let's back to our mutual friend Rob Henderson. He talks about Vibland goods and that they're gone. Basically like the iPhone that I use is exactly the same as the iPhone that Elon Musk uses.
- [30:07]
C
Well, I'm not sure about that. My wife is the former editor of the fashion magazine Elle. The multi billion dollar fashion luxury goods industry would probably argue with the idea that luxury goods don't exist anymore. I think that's a stretch.
- [30:22]
B
Yeah, yeah, I understand that we all.
- [30:24]
C
Have the iPhone and we will have a can of Coke and there's no better can of Coke. There are Tesla cars and rare champagnes.
- [30:32]
B
Yeah. You know, that's funny you bring that up, but I wanted to get back to Rob. What do you think about his idea about luxury beliefs?
- [30:41]
C
So, I mean, I think he's really smart. I love the phrase luxury beliefs. It's fantastic. One of the things, maybe I don't understand it fully enough. One of my questions about luxury beliefs is that I'm not sure that people like. I wonder if it implies a kind of conscious canniness about how we select our beliefs. Like we are craftily and consciously choosing what to believe, choosing to believe things that affect other people and don't affect us. I'm not sure that beliefs operate like that. Like for example, in the uk even now you have people voting political parties that are actually a negative for them. There's a large quotient of conservative voters in the working classes. These are sort of selection of the population that rely on the social safety net more than any other. They need free health care, they can't afford private. They need benefits to top up their wages. And yet they vote for a political party that. That is much more likely to drain those sources away from them because they're much other, more important beliefs for them about things like immigration. I think people act against their own self interests often because beliefs aren't so conscious. That's my thinking about luxury beliefs. I definitely think there's. I think it's a brilliant idea. I love the phrase and I think there's a lot to it, but I'm not sure people do kind of consciously select their beliefs in that cynical way. I think it's much more. I'm going back to that thing where I'm trying not to demonize people a bit. I'm not sure it's that demonic. It's a tense thing to believe because it makes the people who have those beliefs demonic. But I'm not sure that it's as straightforward as that. But I say I might be misunderstanding the idea that that's my thinking on it.
- [32:25]
B
I love Brits and have been there many, many, many times. Many of my close friends are British. And one of my friends, Rory Sutherland, who is the vice chair of Ogilvy over there, helped me understand how the Leave campaign was sold, basically. And I always try to look for, okay, follow the money here. Follow the attempts at persuasion back to Rob's luxury beliefs. I think that he comes from a unique place because his forthcoming book is all about. It's called Troubled, and it's his disastrous and horrible experience in foster care in the United States. And the stats on foster care are just stunningly bad. He got out, he joined the Air Force, very bright guy. So he got scholarships. And one of the way he made the case to me in our initial conversations about this was when he went to Yale, where I had a daughter go. He said that he. Again, now back to reality tunnels, because I think it's a better explanation. The reality tunnel of your average Yale or Oxbridge student is going to be fundamentally different than a kid who was raped in foster homes and had to go to the Air Force to sort himself out. He uses TV shows as his gateway into seeing the world the way that these kids at Yale saw it. In fact, I recorded a podcast with him and another fellow and it was just fun because it was like talking about why TV has the impact. I think it's lessening with social media, but that's a Completely different topic. Specifically on luxury beliefs, Rob was basically saying they espouse one thing. So they espouse that you don't need to be married to have children. They espouse that it's perfectly okay to wait to have children. And I can't remember the other ones. And his observation was, yeah, they expose all these things, but look at their behavior. They get married, they stay in that marriage, they do all of these things. So they're saying one thing and doing quite another. And so like Jung said, you are what you do, not what you say you will do.
- [34:44]
C
Yeah. And I think, you know, the work of Jonathan Haidt is so brilliant that exploring that we're all moral hypocrites. There's an extent to which we all say one thing and do another. Look at Prince Harry and his Private Jet youths. You know, it's. But we all do it. I mean, I know I do things that I get annoyed. Other people do the knife. I'm stuff doing it, but you find your own. Well, I've got an excuse. I've got. You got a story to tell yourself about why it's okay that you didn't do this, but other people shouldn't. I think it's part of human nature. I think another sort of really fundamental idea about human nature that. That has come up in the sciences in the last few decades is the fact that the self is a performance. We've evolved to a significant extent to perform the self in front of our tribe. To perform being a moral person, to perform being a valuable person. And of course, especially with success games, you can't fake competence that much, but you can certainly fake virtue. You really can. I think once you understand that the virtue game is performance, all of that stuff becomes predictable.
- [35:47]
B
Yeah. I used to say to people, if you really want to know three things that will get you ahead, the first thing you want to know is follow the money, because that's going to lead you to what is really motivating people. Number two, people who have the ability to reframe things have almost a superpower, because if you can get neural real estate that currently is thinking very highly of something or very opposed to something, and then hack into it and reframe it. Like the example I always give is death insurance, zero sales, life insurance, billions in sales. I love that.
- [36:25]
C
That's great.
- [36:26]
B
And that's just a good example of reframing. And the third is everybody's in the entertainment business, whether they realize it or not. That one caused the most fury of people who were responding to me. What do you mean? I'm a serious person. I do this and this and this and I'm like, okay. But the fact is, right, if you're trying to convince somebody of something, you better be fucking entertaining. I feel the same way about if you want to tell the truth. Billy Wilder said, if you want to tell the truth, you better be funny or they'll kill you.
- [37:02]
C
Yeah, that's very true. I mean, in the Unpersuadables, I think I wrote about this, I went to an Oxford debate. I was interviewing a very well known climate change denier who ended up being part of the Ukip, which was the Brexit thing, which came after. But anyway, he was debating a bunch of academics in Oxford about climate change. And on the one side you had these kind of very dour, straight laced, kind of aggressive and irritated scientists, and on the other hand you had Lord Christopher Monkton, who had been raised, went to Harrow School and had been taught debating. And it was extraordinary to sit there because, you know, I wasn't educated well, I was never taught debating. But you could see how like, he didn't win because obviously no one's going to vote for the climate change Theron University. He had the audience on his side and emotionally I preferred him because he was funny, he was entertaining and the academics were just sort of dry and aggressive and unpleasant. You wanted to spend time with him and it's like the Boris Johnson thing over here in the UK and to an extent, the Trump thing. Trump is lots of things, but when you've got the distance of grit, he's quite funny. He says things which, like me and my wife would crack up at some of the things he comes out with. He's hilarious, he's an entertainer to the people that he's trying to attain. He's funny and it's extraordinary how far wit can get you if you want to get people on your side. It's certainly more powerful in the case of Boris Johnson, the truth and competence, because especially the truth with that guy. I mean, you can argue about his competence, that his virtue game is terrible, but he got away with a huge amount, which no other politician could, because of his wit and his charisma. It's an extraordinary, powerful skill to have. And I think they teach, they must sort of have a way of teaching it at those kinds of schools in the uk because it seems to be this kind of, this weapon that people like that have which gets them so far, this kind of confident wit.
- [38:52]
B
That leads me to another question. How much of that in the status game you talk about you don't want things progressing to a genetic elite dynasty, right? And yet you also mentioned that the kids, men, women who graduated from the Oxbridges of the UK were far over represented in all of the achievement categories in people who knew them. I had a friend tell me in New York, we were having lunch and he noted that many of the people who work for this podcast are from India. And I'm like, yeah, the world is now their oyster. And he goes, you know what, Jim? That's true, but I want to tell you something. And I said, what's that? And he goes, I'm willing to bet, and I'll put money on this because that's one of my things. If you really want to see how much somebody believes some thing, all you got to do is they want to bet. And then suddenly they begin furiously backpedaling. But what he said to me really struck me and so I actually went through with it. What he said to me was this, Jim, you've been to India and you've met a lot of Indians here in America. I will say to you that 80% of the Indians you met are Brahmans, which is the highest of the cases system in India. And sure enough, as I went through and asked these people, I mean, I didn't conduct a study, I was just casually curious about it. But he was more right than not right. And you know the classic line in the uk, all an Englishman need do is open his mouth for a few seconds to get the other Englishman to hate his guts. The whole thing with accents in the uk. So how much are these archaic class systems? In the uk it would be accent, in India, it would be the case system. How much are they still very persuasive or pervading, if you will?
- [40:56]
C
I think it's less so now. I think that cut glass British accent is actually a negative. Lots of these games of play of life in the UK these days and you'll find posh people dropping their teas and things. For me, I think that kind of education and that kind of background gets you two things. The first thing is, as I said before, is this. You get socialized in a certain way. You get that easy confidence, that kind of charisma. They teach that in those schools. I mean, I went to a very bad comprehensive school. We didn't get debating lessons and things like that. There's, there's a kind of confidence that comes with that kind of education where you're just good in meetings. You can walk into A meeting room and people will defer to you because you have this confidence. So it gives you that. But it also gives you connections, it gives you a network of people in almost any industry that you can kind of touch upon if you want to achieve things. One of the things I was thinking about how this manifested as was researching the status games was just in the simple idea that for people very low on the socioeconomic ladder, they just don't have much choice in terms of the status games that they play. I'm just a solidly middle class person, had just an ordinary middle class background. So I had some, I mean I didn't go to university but I had, you know, there was some choice there. I went to work in a record shop and started a fanzine and got into journalism. I climbed my up these games. But if you're in a very private socioeconomic group, you just don't have those choices. That's why I think you see young men joining street gangs. That's why you see perhaps young Islamic men especially joining terrorist groups. We want status, especially when we're that age, when we're adolescent. And later lesson, we are in a desperate hunt for status. What options do they have? White working class boys are amongst the most deprived in the uk. Some of the worst social mobility. If you're a young working class man in South London, what are your options? Go work in the local supermarket stacking bread. You can be unemployed or you can join a gang and earn bank selling drugs, getting a reputation as somebody fearsome and exciting. That kind of shifted the way I saw this stuff. It's not young men being naughty and nasty and evil. It's young men doing what young people are programmed to do and that's to find status games to play. And yet they wake up at the age of 16, 17, 18. I find that there aren't any games to play. There's only one good game to play and that's this game. You might get me killed by the summer 25, but I don't care because between now and then I get to have status.
- [43:30]
B
Yeah, brilliant. And I completely agree with you. When you see the world through these lenses it makes terrific sense because it's the same here in the United States. If I'm anything, I'm just building fiercely anti authoritarian and I hate busy bodies and I hate people telling me what I should do or the way I should live my life. But I carry that on to everybody. I don't want anybody telling you know, this you can do and this you can't do. And yet if you look at our prison population, it is mostly disadvantaged people of color or very lower class white people who are, in my opinion, in prison because they were entrepreneurs and went into the drug business.
- [44:14]
C
Absolutely.
- [44:15]
B
And so it maddens me when you see this type of behavior and listen, those are the smart kids, those are the kids who are like, okay, what are my options here? This looks pretty interesting. It's going to make me very high status, it's going to make me rich, probably. I'm going to go do that. And so these pieties about rehabilitation, everyone knows that's bullshit and that a non violent offender who goes into jail comes out of jail considerably more likely to become violent. So this is still public floggings just changed a bit in my opinion. And it just seems to me that there is so much great research, your work included, that shows us that this is not so. It seems to me that at least we should try. And I'm going to do my bit. But you know, who am I? I'm one guy and just sort of point these things out because it's not like, as you make the case quite eloquently and quite forcefully, it's not like, oh, I'm going to go pummel that person or I'm going to do this. And I'm working with a guy here in the States named David Roney, who I find very inspirational. He's now a robotic surgeon, but he came up in Oakland, California in a very, very dodgy background and overcame it. But we were talking about that this weekend. He's like, for a while there it was be a gang banger or get out. And he chose get out. And for the reasons of that, we're going to be working together to tell his story a little bit better. But do you think that if everybody all of a sudden, let's say you just became the IT guy and you were on all the big talk shows and people were like, yeah, that makes sense. Do you think that we would sufficiently be able to change our behavior or is it just so hardwired into our human OS that we might intellectually understand it, but emotionally we're going to keep playing that game.
- [46:19]
C
What do you mean? What behavior change? What behavior change?
- [46:22]
B
Essentially the knowledge that these are inborn things that we do, trying to other the out group and all of that. Do you think it could actually change any actual behavior?
- [46:36]
C
I think you're always working against biology and by nature we're tribal, by nature we're xenophobic. That's what I've watched happen to my people, the left. Since roughly 2008, I've watched the left in America and in the UK and in Canada fall for those incredibly seductive natural urges we have to other and hate other people and demonize other people. We have storytelling brains that divides the world into heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. We don't think in reality, tunnel language naturally. So it's always going to be an uphill struggle. The brain is always wanting to hate, is always wanting to push people out because it's natural to it. It's how it understands the world. I do think so. It's always going to be there in the human os. It's always going to be there in human life. It will be. But I do think that we should be doing a lot more in education. One of the things that I've been writing about in all my non fiction books, it's all about what is a human, what are we? Even in my first book, which was kind of about ghosts, there's a chapter in there that begins, what are we these strange machines? And when you actually find out, so much becomes explicable and I think you become so much more empathetic and so much more able to stand apart from that story of heroes and villains, angels and demons. And I think that we should be teaching that stuff in schools. Children should be taught, hey, over the last 20, 30 years, we've discovered a huge amount about what a person is, what a human is. We know about what's great about people and what the dangers are about being human. And we're going to teach you that now. We don't do that. There should be human OS lessons for children between the ages of 9 and 16. And I think that could do a huge amount of enormous amounts of good.
- [48:22]
B
I agree. Somebody, a friend of mine was like, you're getting ready to do a seminar, aren't you? Because I was telling him all the books that I would have signed. I might even put it up on Twitter. All of yours are there. So you occupy a very large space. I don't know if you're familiar with Howard Bloom, but he's written some really interesting books on this same thesis. One of the things that's wild to me at least is that in status games and he looks specifically at, I think, chimpanzees, when another chimp challenges the alpha and wins, their physicality actually changes. They stand up straighter, they appear larger and their testicles drop even more. Yes, it's in the book. It's in the book.
- [49:12]
C
Wow.
- [49:13]
B
I will DM it to you because when I first read it, I was like, I do not believe this. This cannot be true. And then I talked to a friend of mine who that's their feeling. He's like, yeah, it is actually true. Wow.
- [49:26]
C
He saw the Peterson thing. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
- [49:30]
B
It's just like, are you kidding me? But it's true. And then I saw another thing, and I think that was also in one of his books about where we get the term pecking order from. Some guy decided that he was going to see if hens and chickens were hierarchy based. Quick answer. Oh, yes, they are. And he did it by going to a neighbor's. I just love how people come up with this stuff. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go borrow a hen from my friend the farmer over here and I'm going to throw that hen into my chicken coop and see what happens. And what happens is a melee of blood and fighting where they peck each other. Because the new hen has made the pecking order on sound, they've got to establish a new one. And what happens is they get in these massive bites. So what that I find interesting is that whoever was the alpha hen in the beginning has very few peck marks on her. Whoever was at the lowest level of the hierarchy usually is dead. The other chickens peck them to death, and then the new chicken who was introduced occupies her place somewhere along the hierarchy. I'll send you that reference as well. And so it was kind of like that's what I was doing the study of, like, is everything a hierarchy? My belief was, no, I was really unable to find. I mean, when you go all the way down to termite mounds in Africa and you study the behavior of bees and of ants and of all of this thing, the bees are the wildest, man. I mean, it's like talk about pecking orders that are firmly established. Same with ants. This led me to be far more receptive to ideas like your own, because this seems to be biology.
- [51:25]
C
Yeah, it is biology. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I think that's the main thing that I'm pushing against with the status game, is that people, not everybody, but lots of people, are immediately offended when they find out that I'm arguing that we're all driven by status. People just don't like that idea. It has such a bad rap, this idea, because we think of it in terms of money and greed and sharp elbows and pecking orders in heads, peck and sell each other's death. But humans are an amazing animal. We also play virtue games that are good charities play virtue games. They compete with each other to do the most good that the good characters do. Success games we play created civilization. They've created vaccines and cures for hideous diseases. They've lifted billions of people out of poverty. That status, the people who invented the COVID vaccines, I'm not arguing that they were motivated purely by status. Of course not. They're also, they're scientists, they're motivated by curiosity, they're motivated by just the sheer fun of being in the lab. That's also part of it. And I also argue that they want to be famous in any way. What they want to be is the best person they can possibly be. At the game of being a vaccine scientist, that drive has saved millions and millions of lives and dozens of economies, more than dozens of economies around the world has been able to come out of lockdown. So I think the biggest mistake that we make is by thinking of status as our most kind of pathetic, sad component of human nature. When it's yes, leads to terrible things, undoubtedly, and I write about them in the book, but it also relates to the very best of human nature.
- [53:04]
B
Completely agree. And you're thoughts about the success or prestige game are absolutely dead on in my opinion. At least I've concluded. Listen, I thought I didn't play status games. I was wrong. Thank you. Because you were the final person who persuaded me by the thoroughness of your research and how well you tell the story. And then so I started to think, well, okay, why don't we try to get people to play these beneficial status games? You note the people who did the mRNA. I mean, I was ridiculously excited about that. And especially in America with the divisions and the lack of trust. Something in my opinion that should have been celebrated that we came up with this vaccine in under, what, 12 months?
- [53:53]
C
Amazing.
- [53:54]
B
It's out fucking standing.
- [53:56]
C
We came up with three. It was the Pfizer, there was the Moderna, and there was AstraZeneca.
- [54:01]
B
Unbelievable.
- [54:02]
C
Yeah. That's human being.
- [54:05]
B
Yeah. And so I'm a huge fan of Deutsch's the Beginning of Infinity. And you know, he makes the point that humans are explainers and connectors and if you get them pointing that way, wonderful things can happen. I also wanted to ask you because we were just on kind of the scientists and there's a story that I found fascinating and it concerns the persecution of the well known physicist David Bohm by J. Robert Oppenheimer and others and Baum came up with the idea of hidden variables. And they found out that he had attended a Communist Party meeting at some point. And so essentially what happened was that when you look at this, it's just mind boggling. I did a thread on it here we have the greatest minds that should be dominated by the scientific method, by all of these things being dominated by fear of the government coming in and saying, you have a bad guy with you. He's a commie. Emotions jealousy, because Bohm's theory of hidden variables turned out to be pretty correct. And what Oppenheimer, who himself was just this genius, what he said to the fellow scientists when Bohm, they figured out that Bohm had been in the Communist Party, was, we have to ice him, we have to cut him out. And if we can't disprove his theory of hidden variables, we will ignore it. And all of this, by the way, is in writing. There's a wonderful film on David Bohm where this came up. And I'm watching this with kind of like this because essentially I concluded, I don't know if you've seen the film Mean Girls.
- [55:52]
C
Yes.
- [55:52]
B
Okay. The best way to describe what these genius physicists were doing was mean girls. A part of my thesis is that so called rational behavior. You help me along here a lot, quite a bit. We are, in my opinion, emotional creatures. And the emotion that drives us is fear, Specifically fear of being ostracized, being thrown out of the tribe. Because when we were hunter gatherers, being ostracized from the tribe was a death sentence. And so this fear motivates much of what we do, in my opinion. And then we paper it over with our unreliable narrator with rational sounding ideas that almost always are created post hoc. And when you see these geniuses engaging in this type of behavior, it's just like unbelievable to me. So I think that this is universal. Any other suggestions on how we could change the game rules, so to speak?
- [56:57]
C
I think it is fundamental human behavior. It's reputation destruction. And again, that begins with the human forms of status game. Lots of animals play dominance games, eloquently describing that the hen has a dominance game. Some animals, it still plays reputation games in its slight sense. Matriarch elephant has the status to lead other elephants to water, things like that. But humans have taken the idea of kind of reputation based status games to the nth degree. And these are these prestige games. There's two prestige games, as we talked about virtue and success. Most people, especially most people who aren't raised in a violent environment, spend most of our time playing games of virtue and success. We play games of reputation. I told him the John Pridmore story in selfie. His reputation was everything. As a violent man, you had to have a reputation for violence, and if you didn't, you're in trouble. So that's what we do. That's what we do with life. We play games not with our physical bodies like animals do, but with our reputations. And that's why reputation destruction is, I said earlier on, it's like a murder because that's who we are. That's really who we are. We have. We take a physical form and when we get physically sick and physically injured, it's painful physically, but we also take a reputational form and we spend most of our life thinking and protecting the reputational form of who we are. And so when a scientist that you're describing or anyone mobs up to attack somebody's reputation, it's not violence, but it's a version of it. Is my view when you destroy somebody's reputation, you destroy who they are, you destroy their meaning, you destroy their life's work. It's a terrible thing to do. That's one of the terrible things that social media has given the human animal, which is a new way to attack people's reputation. And so that's what you see is unpleasant people in the main, as far as I'm concerned, aggressive, virtue obsessed people waging missions of destruction against other people.
- [58:53]
B
Yeah. What's interesting is the broad applicability of this, because humiliation, as you rightly point out, I think, is if you humiliate someone entirely and you don't finish them off, so to speak, you are creating a very dangerous condition. The end of the Great World War I is a classic case of this where we, the United States unfortunately had a moralist as President Woodrow Wilson, and he insisted that Germany essentially be humiliated. So he created not only what would humiliate a person, he humiliated a nation because of the reparations and everything else. And of course it's not the entire reason why we got Hitler, but I think it's a very strong reason why we got Hitler. And then the question I was going to have for you is, do you think that it was just a stroke of luck or do you think that George Marshall at the end of World War II, understood, we don't want to do that again. We don't want to humiliate Germany and Japan. In fact, we think it's a better thing to completely rebuild those countries. Do you think that was an insight Based on our discussion here or just on that singular instance of seeing the bad?
- [60:12]
C
Well, I think it was a wise thing. As you know, there's a chapter in the State Game that argues that the principal reason we got Hitler and the Holocaust is because of humiliation. And I think that's true. It's not straightforwardly that we simply humiliated the nation. It's that we humiliated a grandiose nation, a nation that was quite full of itself and for good reason. When you find out it was the work of Richard Evans, which was my major source for that chapter, and you find out how unbelievably successful Germany was before the First World War, they were just killing it. They were crushing it industrially, financially, culturally. They were very proud of themselves, and rightfully so. And what we did was we absolutely humiliate. We drag their faces through the dirt, all made worse by the effects of the Great Depression. And what do people do when they're humiliated? What do people do when their reputation is taken from them, when they're robbed of their. What they believe is their rightful rank without storytelling brains? They tell a story about who is responsible for that. Earlier in the book, I tell the story of Elliot Rogers, who is one of these spree killers who felt it was sort of an incel type who felt entitled to having a hot girlfriend, essentially. And he couldn't get one, possibly because of his attitude. He became obsessed with this, why can't I get a hot girlfriend? Why can't I have girlfriend? Why do the girls all go for these big jock types? Why do they all hate me? And it curdles into this unbelievable misogyny where you just had this murderous hatred towards women. And the same thing happened in Germany on the level of the nation where a nation or a significant chunk of a nation told a story about who was responsible for their decline. And that was the Jews. And they developed a murderous hatred for them and also a murderous fury at the people that they thought were humiliating them with the Treaty of Versailles in France. So when you look at the psychological conditions of the Second World War and the Holocaust status, the loss of it and humiliation is deeply implicated in that entire chunk of history. I think it's interesting that we're seeing with the current war in Europe, there's an active debate about the extent to which it's wise to humiliate Putin. I mean, it's a question I can't answer. Certainly don't think it's a good idea to continue humiliating them once the war is over. I think that was the problem with Germany. But I certainly think the economic sanctions are a good idea now because they will help, theoretically, at least, reduce the status of the powerful people around Putin. They like their yachts, they like their luxury life. Nobody likes being a global pariah. So maybe it will have an effect, who knows?
- [62:47]
B
That was similar to the argument that I was making when people were asking me what my thoughts about that war were. And first off, I said, well, it's just an opinion. And like, I'm. I love how people come up with an opinion on whatever that they know very little about and then assert it as if they heard it directly from God. And so I generally say, I don't know, because normally I don't know. But that strategy immediately seemed sensible to me, was, it's not Putin that we need to worry about. It's all of his enablers. And they don't like their yachts being tracked. They don't like their private aircraft, the transponder being broadcast, where they're going. And so I think it's a very clever idea to go against the people who are enabling him.
- [63:36]
C
There has to be the promise of restoration of status. At the end of it, there has to be the carrot and the stick. I think that that's the important thing. And I think what went wrong, the First World War ended, and we just punished and punished and punished and punished.
- [63:50]
B
And I think that was the error, because you really. I cannot say enough. And I just have a couple more questions. You also are, in my eyes, incredibly honest about your own situation, about your own worries, concerns, your own problems that you face, which, again, reading your books make this just so much more real. People who listen to this podcast a lot, the first thing they ever say to me is, is, God, I feel like I know you. And I kind of got that sense in my giddy enthusiasm. Getting ready for today. Like, I feel a bit like I know you because you're willing to disclose things in your own life that were troublesome, but I think you're doing that simply to say, look, me too. And so if you're worried about how you're coming off, how you're presenting, etc. Well, take a step back. I'm amazed that you're willing to do the things you're willing to do. I'm amazed that you were willing to go to Esalen. And, like, I wouldn't do that for, like, all the tea in China.
- [65:02]
C
Yeah, well, that was my background. I mean, my first job in journalism, there was a magazine which has long gone there called Loaded and Loaded Was like kind of a concert journalism, Hunter S. Thompson type of magazines. So that's how I cut my teeth was going out there and doorsteping Mafia members in Staten island, jumping out of airplanes. I think the most. The stupidest thing they had me doing was going to Bali and scoring this drug called Ong, a local drug called Ong, like a witch doctor drug, and taking it and as a death sentence. I mean, you get killed in Bali if you caught with drugs. But we scored it off a bomb. I mean, we're looking back and just think it's just nuts. But it's status games, isn't it? I didn't want to come back to the office having not done the challenge. So I was literally risking my life and, well, being on these kind of crazy stunts that loaded. So that's the tradition I come from, where you kind of go out and get the story. So that's why in the Heretics or the Upper Spray Horses, it is in the US and in selfie, I like to get out there and have these adventures because that's kind of in my training as a writer very much.
- [66:01]
B
It also just, again, you tell a good story. You're telling it with facts, you're telling it with your personal experience, which I think is a great mix because it's just so much fun to read your work honestly. And so I was just like, I just can't imagine, like, I wouldn't do any of that, like the thing with the climate denier or the thing with the guy who denied the Holocaust. I just don't know that I could. I think I would. My own views would bleed out to the point where it would be a bad interview. I think one of your great talents is that you are willing to let them tell you their story. How do you do that? And I honestly mean this. How are you able to get all of these people to agree to let you shadow them, to let you. I think it's brilliant. I want to know your secret.
- [66:57]
C
Well, access is the hardest thing as a journalist to get, especially nowadays, the Internet, where they can Google you and they can find out all about you. David Irving was difficult because I was, at the time, my main employer was the Guardian newspaper. That's who I was doing most of my writing for. So he doesn't want the Guardian reporter, you know, going away. I went away with him for a week on this holiday, this World War II trip with him and his followers. But I think with David Irving, I just explained that I was writing a book about heretics, people who had the courage to stand up to. To the orthodoxy. And I wanted to know where he got his courage from. This, that and the other. So it was all true, what I said to him. There was no lie there. But of course, as I've already said, Daniel, he's not stupid. In the book I did talk about, I interviewed him early in the week and he got very suspicious because, as you said, I could not let my opinions bleed through a bit.
- [67:48]
B
Well, you point that out in the book. Yeah, yeah.
- [67:50]
C
And I kind of fucked it up. Like, he kind of refused to speak to me again. But then I forget how I talked him around. And in the final interview, we had a problem back and forth. But it's never. I don't know, I think because I've been interviewing people with crazy beliefs for so long, and because I have this understanding that, generally speaking, they're not crooks, they're not bad people, they're not evil, they don't mean me any harm. They just made a mistake and they believe it sincerely. And I think that's true of David Irving. He's made a mistake and that mistake has ruined his life. The person that suffered the motion, David Irving's beliefs is David Irving. He's been sued, he's been imprisoned, he's had his reputation taken from him. As unfashionable as it is to say these days, I kind of feel for people like that. The people on that trip were neo Nazis. They were Holocaust deniers. And as I said, event in the chapter when you scratched the surface, I found out that most of those, literally most of the people on that trip, and they were men, their parents served in the Second World War for the Germans. And on the final evening of that trip, there was going to be a screening of Downfall, which is this super real German. It was the film about the last seven days in the bunker with Hitler. What happened in the last seven days in the Hitler bunker. And one of the guys didn't want to watch the film because his father was in the bunker with Hitler and he found it too upsetting. And that just makes you go, fuck. Yeah. So you see, they are men that love their parents, but they are also men who've been raised in a world where the word Nazi for obviously very good reason, is a synonym for evil. And they don't want to believe their mums or probably their dads were evil, but they're probably their mums too. I mean, women were Nazis too. So they spend their lives, as you said at the beginning of the chat, searching out reasons to believe that it's all a lie, that it's all the nonsense. And that's what they were doing on that trip. We were finding more and more reasons to believe that actually the world is wrong and their mums and dads who are Nazis weren't bad people. It's all a lie. And actually they didn't really do anything wrong. They were just sticking up for jerk whatever. So, you know, for me, that's a much more interesting place to come to as a writer than, oh, they're evil all, they're nasty, all their toxic men or whatever, they're racists. And you know, they are. They are toxic, they are racist. It's true. But there are deeper, more interesting things to find out about people and those boring labels.
- [70:13]
B
What surprised you the most in all of your interviews, in all of your experiences? Again, I tip my hat to you, sir, that you're willing to do the things that you're willing to do. But which. And maybe there's not just one which one did you come away thinking, holy shit, man, I'm changing my mind about this.
- [70:36]
C
Generally speaking, over the course of my career, it's. When I began my writing career, I was very angry and very angry, specifically about the Catholic Church, very anti religion because of my upbringing, because, you know, it was pretty horrible being grew up in that environment. My parents, my dad especially, I love metal, heavy metal. And he thought it was the devil's music, he thought it was Satan. Me, my older brother would be in constant trouble and be, you know, it was just unpleasant. And I developed this huge rage against Christian dogma in the Catholic Church. And I think one of the things I've changed my mind about is the major things, is that I don't see them as. I know that they've got the. Obviously they've got the pedophilia and all that stuff. It's not good, bad. But I see the value now that religion has for people having done this work. We want connection, we want status. And that's what religions give people. Millions, billions of people around the world. It gives them meaning. I'm very lucky. You're very lucky, Jim. We live lives in which we can source meaning from other places. I have my writing, you've got your business, you've got a thriving Twitter thing going on there. But billions of people don't have these things. And they get meaning and status from their religion. And that's a wonderful thing, that's a fantastic thing. And I think it's a terrible thing to want to take away from people as some kind of atheists do. So I think that's the biggest thing that I've changed my mind about. That's been a huge U turn for me. I don't recommend my first book. I was 26 when I wrote it. It was, you know, it's kind of a comedic book really about ghosts of people who think ghosts. But even then I was very angry about religion when I wrote that book and that comes across in the book and very kind of contemptuous of people who have crazy beliefs. And that has changed enormously in me.
- [72:20]
B
Yeah, I luckily it never took with me so I never built up the anger at it. My wife still talks about the whole Catholic guilt thing. It still has got a bit of a hook in her and I just find that extraordinary. At the end of the book you have some great advice for people as to okay, if I've convinced you that you're playing the status game and you convinced me, one of the ones that I really liked and I think is very key and it's maybe not intuitive and that is this idea that it's easy to forget that we all have status that we can give to others and it is inexhaustible. And I really loved that thought because it's just so easy. And if you want to get people playing positive sum games and not lashing out at one another, this just seems like such a no brainer and. And yet I didn't think of it. I had to read it in your book. Which other one would you say from that list would you add to that for just people listening? I hope that everyone listening. I highly recommend all of Will's books, especially the one we're done most of our discussion on today, the status game. So read the books. But if you need a little more nudge to go there, this is a good one. Will, which other one in this list would you say would be a game changer for people if they started practicing it?
- [73:51]
C
Give away your status. I didn't explain it very well in the book. I'm going to write about it again but I think just didn't really get to the number of it in the book. I call it the trade off mindset. And the trade off mindset is stop thinking about the world in terms of competing groups. If this group wins, my group loses. Try and experience the world consciously as groups sharing trade offs because it's a much less toxic way of seeing the world. The example I always think about is pro life. I'm a lefty, I'm pro Choice, the abortion debate, and I'm a man, it's never really touched me. I've never, I don't have any kids. I don't feel very emotional about it. But I can see both sides to that story. Although I am 100% pro choice, I can see that there are losers to that position and one of the losers is mental. Because I'm sure there are lots of men whose stories we never hear in culture who fall pregnant with their partners and their partners decide to terminate. And then you've got this heartbroken man who all they wanted was this child and the child, they've got no rights, no say in it, and the child's taken. Now, I think in the trade off, it's right that the woman makes the choice because it's the woman's body. But I also think it's wrong that when we see it as good versus evil, we then are driven to deny that man's pain and say, will you just shut up? We don't want to hear from you. It's nothing to do with you. I think in the trade off mindset, we see as a trade off, I believe it's right that the woman has the choice, but it's not a victory for good over evil. It's a trade off between interests. And actually we should thank and respect and listen to the stories of those heartbroken men. We should acknowledge that if we're going to reward a win to one group, we should also thank and honor the losers too. Because I think when you don't, when you just say that, well, you can shut up, your voice doesn't count. You create enemies, you create toxicity, you create aggression. So I'm still not explaining the idea very well. I need to think about it more. But that's what I mean by this idea of seeing, trying to think about the world as groups negotiating trade offs rather than fighting over good and evil.
- [75:54]
B
I actually think you're explaining it very well and I have the same view as you. I'm pro choice and I'd never thought about it that way. That's an excellent way to think about it because I do think that one of the things that I hate about this, you know, you may not say that and this negation is that it leads to very bad places very, very quickly. I work a lot with younger people, not just in my profession, but across many professions. And one of the things that I see specifically with millennials, and I've done a little work with some of the zoomers, is this idea of preference falsification let's say if I was working with 10 different people with very disparate backgrounds, and I asked them the question, have you ever, in a group of your friends, lied about what you thought about something so that you would fit in with the group? And nine of the 10 answered, yes. And I had a longer experience with one fellow who was a physical therapist, and we went deep on it, and he said, it's really beginning to affect me. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he's like, ideas are appealing to me right now. Like sovereign, individual type ideas that he goes, I would have never, like, embraced before getting angry about. He goes, I'm angry at myself for lying about my preferences or my opinions. Sometimes I'm angry at those people who I consider my friends sort of forcing that on me. And it's one of these public knowledge, private knowledge games that the more you try to prohibit people from expressing opinions that are not violent, opinions that, you know, no, you can't yell fire in a movie theater. But to express opinions that may be at variance with the prevailing ethos, you're creating a time bomb, in my opinion. And oddly, you are inviting these people to explore areas that are probably not great for society or for them simply because they felt like, okay, going to show you. All right, well, this has been fantastic. We always end the podcast with a question, and I'm going to be really interesting to hear yours. So we're going to wave a wand. We're going to make you the emperor of the world. For one day, you cannot kill anyone. You cannot put anyone in a re education camp. But what you can do. Ah, sorry, yeah, I took that one away from you. What you can do is you can whisper into a magic microphone two ideas, thoughts that will be incepted in the entire population of the world. And whenever they wake up the next day, wherever their next day happens, they're going to get out of bed and they're going to think, I just had two of the best ideas in the world and I'm going to start doing this today. What you got for me? What are you going to incept?
- [78:56]
C
I think what the world needs now is just some humility. I think one of the ideas that I just keep going back to in all my books is this, that we're an animal. We think we're gods, but we're not. We're animals and we're flawed as fuck. And I think I'd want people to understand a. That they are hateful, that everybody carries around with them a dark story about the world. And that in their worst moments, that dark story takes them over and they start saying the things that they're saying. Everyone. So you don't get to say that that's not you, because you're a certain kind of person from a certain kind of background with a certain kind of political beliefs. It is you. I think that's the main one. I do it and I hear myself doing it. I think, Jesus. So I think that's the one thing I would like to spread, that basic humility, that understanding that you are a hateful person because you're a human. And humans can be loving, and they are loving, and they are also hateful. It's part of our nature. That's the first idea. I suppose a related idea is just this. And it's something that I still struggle with, and it still occurs to me, even though it shouldn't, because I've been writing about it for so long. And that is that it's absolutely possible to be completely wrong about something that you are 100% convinced is correct. In the heretics I write about that sort of have this thought experiment, and I say to people, think about whether you're right about everything you believe. And if you think about it with that distance, you can accept intellectually that that can't be true. Because if I'm right about everything I believe, I'm unique. I'm Jesus, I'm God. I am the calm, cool sense of wisdom. And what are the chances that you are the person who's right about everything? And if you think about the people closest to you, your wife, your husband, your mom, friends, they're right about most things. But she's wrong about that. And he's completely mental about that. And the further you go into your social circles, the more wrong people get until they're completely kind of batshit insane. So you can accept, if you think about it that way, that you're not that one cool, calm, clear center of perfect vision at the center of the universe. So, okay, accept it. I accept it. I accept it. So then, okay, so tell me what you're wrong about. And don't cheat. I don't care about your views about whether the M25 is a good motorway or the legs of the Mississippi riff. I don't know the least you're emotional about that you pin your status to, and you look for your opinions. You go, well, I'm not wrong about that. And I know I'm not wrong about that. You can't find it. You can't spot It. So we're all in the grip of this naive realism, this idea that we are. That we uniquely see the world with absolute clarity. And it should always give us pause when we encounter somebody. Perhaps they're in our family, perhaps they're on television versus the Internet. Who believes every bit as who every bit as smart as we are, perhaps smarter. And you believe with absolute conviction that we are completely, 100% wrong about what we think. That should give us pause. It should always give us pause because that's us. We're looking in the mirror. And I think that's the other idea that I wish could be further out there. Just that basic understanding, as hard as it is to process, that it's entirely possible that you are wrong about your dearest, most passionate belief.
- [82:10]
B
I love it. There's a GIF I use a lot on Twitter where people are asserting that they are right, and it's basically an opinion, and obviously an opinion, and usually not correct. I will simply put up a GIF that says it looks like a screensaver, and it says at the bottom, you are the only exception.
- [82:32]
C
Love it.
- [82:33]
B
And on that, I love both of those. On the first one, I just had a guest who gave something similar, which is he thought that you should be able to occupy the reality tunnel of someone who is the poorest among you, and actually so that you saw what they had to fight against every day. But then he surprised me by saying, and the richest.
- [82:56]
C
Ah, interesting.
- [82:57]
B
And I thought about that one for a long time, and his reasoning there was, guess what? They're people, too. They have problems too. And from the outside, it doesn't appear that's the case, but we're all humans. As I've gotten older, the insight that I've been able to have is the just incredible fragility of we humans. And again, we humans in including me, including you, including everyone that's listening to this. And I'll end with a quote from Tony DeMello, who was a Jesuit priest, Indian by birth. So very odd that he was a Jesuit priest who left the priesthood after awakening. He was not braggish about being enlightened. So he said it. Awakening. And it was, if you trying to see. See your own faults, look at what bothers you and other people. I love that.
- [83:55]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a teacher at school that said that. Yeah, yeah. Is that really uncomfortable to think about that? But I think it's probably because it's true.
- [84:05]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Will, thank you so much. This has been absolutely every bit as fun and exciting as I thought. It would be.
- [84:13]
C
Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate you inviting me on. Thank you.