Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2102 - Will Storr
Uploaded: 2024-02-14T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2102 - Will Storr' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2102 - Will Storr' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-02-14. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2102 - Will Storr

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
CNN at one point in time, when Bourdain had a show on, they were doing some
very interesting
things.
They were trying to do shows, not just the news, right?
So they had No Reservations was the best one of them.
Where they had, you know, they just told Anthony Bourdain, just be you and just
do what
you do, do your best version of your show.
And they really just got out of the way.
And it was fucking amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they got out of his way, they let him be the best of himself.
They figured out how to do that.
You know, Kamau Bell had a really good show too.
Is that show still on?
What was that show called?
I'm sorry, I forget the name of these shows.
But W Kamau Bell was really good at being like calm.
He's shades of America, shades of United shades of America, really good at
being calm, like
talking to like KKK people and he's black and he's a comic, but he's just like
a very nice
guy.
He's a very nice guy, like a genuinely nice guy in real life.
And so when he's doing a show, even when he's confronted by the most ignorant
racists,
he can have conversations with them and then, you know, they're like, well, you're
not like
the others.
Well, that's the best kind of journalism, you know, you can properly immerse
yourself in
those worlds.
Yeah.
And CNN did that for a while.
You know, they had that other show.
Was it Radical with that one gentleman who, Reza Aslan, is that his name?
That was another good show.
They did some interesting stuff.
They did like quite a few interesting shows where they were just shows.
It wasn't what it is now, which is this like bizarre version of news TikTok
just grabbing
you with everything that's going to terrify you every day.
And there's so much to terrify you about today.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's that they seem to have lost the art of storytelling.
Yeah.
It's very unfortunate.
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.
That's right.
Yeah.
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.
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.
That's right.
That's right.
So I think the general thesis is that the humans want two things.
They want connection into groups.
And then once they're in the group, they want status.
So, you know, it's not enough to feel like we're a Christian.
We have to be a good Christian.
Right.
And that means following certain rules.
And that's what brains just want to do.
Brains don't really care about what's true.
Brains are always asking this question, who do I have to be and what do I have
to believe
in order to earn connection and status?
Yes.
And we're all vulnerable to this stuff.
And that's how people end up believing fucking crazy things because the brain's
just believing
what it has to believe.
I've seen it with people that get what you call audience capture.
Yeah, absolutely.
Where their audience, they find, they get some love.
You can only, if you're doing it politically, you can only do it once.
It's a dangerous move.
It's like changing genders.
Like you can't go male to female and go back to male again.
It's fucking, it's too complicated.
It's a one shot deal.
So you get one shot if you start out a liberal, you're a lifelong liberal.
And then at 36, all of a sudden you become like the most hardcore right-wing
Republican.
Like, that seems like, well, what did you believe before and what happened?
Did you take mushrooms?
Did you fall on your head?
Did something happen where you just radically changed your ideology?
Or did you get captured by the idea of being accepted with much more vigor by
the other side?
Like, that's one thing that they really do enjoy when someone bails on the
other side.
And then, again, you can only do it once.
But you get, like, really embraced.
That's right.
And the more you're embraced, the more you believe.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, there's this concept that I write about, I call it active belief.
Like, there are loads of beliefs that we have, like, how long is the
Mississippi Ripper?
You know, what, how do you, what is coffee?
Like, we don't argue about these beliefs.
But there are certain categories of belief that possess us.
And these are the beliefs that we form our identity around.
And they're beliefs that we plug our status into.
So, you know, like, if you're a Christian, it's like, I believe Jesus died and
then three days later got up.
And as I said, you know, these beliefs are kind of dangerous because they take
us over.
It's not enough just to believe them passively.
You have to act them out with your life.
And so that these are the beliefs that drive things like the satanic panic,
cult movements, communism, Nazism.
These are beliefs that sort of possess people and take them over.
It's like a parasite.
They're kind of scary things.
But as I said, you know, we're all vulnerable to these kind of active beliefs.
I'm fascinated by cult documentaries.
And I was talking to my friend Todd.
We were talking about Wow, Wow Country.
And we both said the same thing.
God, in the beginning, it looked awesome.
In the beginning, they were having so much fun.
And I think of myself at 21.
And I had no real, like, confidence in my view of the world.
I had no, I was 21.
I was a young dummy.
I did not know, you know, what was correct and what was incorrect.
I had a general sense.
My family was very left wing.
We grew up, my parents were hippies in San Francisco.
So I had sort of an ideology attached to that.
But I had no idea how anything in the world worked.
Yeah.
And if I ran into the wrong yoga teacher.
No, but that's it.
But that's how humans work, you know, with this tribal animal.
And nobody has any idea how the world works until they plug into a group.
And the group has its stories that it tells about how the world works.
Every group has its model of what a hero is.
And this set of beliefs a hero has.
And once we've plugged into that group, we, you know, we orient ourselves
towards becoming that person.
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 reason between cults and a religion and a business and a political
group is just that it's much tighter.
So the rules are much stricter.
Like there's a zillion rules, like, you know, I've written before about what
they call, what was the cult that they castrated themselves?
Yeah, Heaven's Gate.
Heaven's Gate.
That's right.
Yeah.
And they had rules even about like how much toothpaste you're allowed to put on
your toothbrush.
They had a rule about exactly how scrambled eggs were to be cooked.
And the rule was dry but not burnt.
So there was a rule about how much water you put in your bathtub.
And was the leader called, was he castrated as well?
No, he wasn't surprisingly enough.
Really?
Yeah, they were called T and Doe.
There he is, T.
Yeah.
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, like, 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 about 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.
I'm not that confident.
So I could get sucked in.
Yeah.
Any human could get sucked in.
But is that what it's from?
Is it from tribal times?
Yes and no.
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.
Like, 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 what do you think?
But at some point in time, they became leaders.
I mean, they've been leaders for so long.
When we settled down.
When was that?
Like, agriculture?
Yeah, it was about 11,000 years ago.
But don't you think that's enough to bake it into our DNA?
I don't know.
I think what is in our DNA is that idea of, A, stories.
So, you know, we're storytelling animals.
We think in stories.
Every tribe has its particular story about the world.
And so we're very good at channeling those stories.
And as I said, every story has its design of what is a hero.
And we try and become that kind of hero.
So that's that holdover from the tribal day.
But more fundamentally, again, it's that brain question of who do I have to be?
What do I have to do?
Tell me what I have to do in order to achieve connection and status.
And that's what a cult does.
And that's what a charismatic leader does.
It tells you this is what you've got to do.
These are the rules.
This is who you have to become.
And that's really seductive to us subconsciously because those two things of
connection and status are so incredibly important to us.
Is it something you think should be taught very early on?
It seems like this is information we should get to kids as young as we can so
they can recognize these patterns that people fall into.
Absolutely.
I've always thought that there should be a lesson in school about what is a
human?
What is the basic operating system manual for a human?
And these are the mistakes that humans make.
Because, as I said, you know, one of the sort of big ideas is that we're not
particularly interested in the truth.
We don't.
The truth is doesn't matter to human brains.
What matters is what do I what do I have to believe in order to for people to
like me and respect me?
Well, that's why religions, like even radical religions, are so intoxicating.
Like, you have to be all in.
You're part of a very special group.
And you all love each other like brothers and sisters because you're part of
this group.
Yeah.
And you can come up with some radical ideas and get people to subscribe to that.
Especially if you attach things like death for people who leave.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
You're operating in some redline territory.
Like, that's a wild group.
And the religions and the cults always do that thing of offering amazing
rewards.
Of course.
At some point in the future.
Bro, heaven.
It's the best spot ever.
It's the best ever.
And the version of heaven differs between how bad the place where you live
sucks.
Yeah.
And I think there's like eight and a half billion people in the world.
And I think there'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 be