Secrets Unveiled: The Power of Hidden Truths with Andrew Gold

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[00:00:27] How doers get more done.

[00:00:31] When you're drinking a frozen beverage from McDonald's,

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[00:00:59] Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

[00:01:10] The Psychology of Secrets,

[00:01:12] My Adventures with Murderers, Cults and Influencers.

[00:01:17] This was just a great book.

[00:01:19] Like every page was riveting.

[00:01:22] It's so interesting how many secrets,

[00:01:25] like just everything about secrecy,

[00:01:27] like what are secrets?

[00:01:29] What are the big secrets that we know of?

[00:01:32] How do you tell if someone's saying a secret or,

[00:01:36] and then on top of it,

[00:01:37] all this stuff about cults, influencers, murderers.

[00:01:41] Andrew Gold, once again, back on the podcast.

[00:01:44] He has the YouTube channel, Heretics.

[00:01:46] I highly recommend it,

[00:01:47] but I really recommend this book,

[00:01:49] The Psychology of Secrets.

[00:01:50] You can order it on amazon.co.uk.

[00:01:53] And our conversation has really given me a lot of things

[00:01:58] to think about, about the whole nature of secrets.

[00:02:01] I hope you enjoy it.

[00:02:03] Here's Andrew Gold.

[00:02:08] This isn't your average business podcast,

[00:02:11] and he's not your average host.

[00:02:14] This is The James Altucher Show.

[00:02:25] It was all right.

[00:02:25] Like it's a stressful thing.

[00:02:27] It's sort of a conveyor belt kind of system.

[00:02:29] It's like, you know,

[00:02:30] you're backstage with a couple of people

[00:02:32] and you start to realise, right,

[00:02:33] they've got certain views,

[00:02:35] so I'm probably supposed to be against them.

[00:02:37] So I need to have the views that are not the ones they have.

[00:02:40] And they were a bit cliquey or clicky,

[00:02:42] I think Americans say,

[00:02:44] the two of them, because they've been together,

[00:02:45] they're quite woke and they're doing their thing.

[00:02:47] And I was like, oh, am I the bad guy here?

[00:02:49] I'm supposed to come in and defend Kevin Spacey

[00:02:52] and all those kinds of things.

[00:02:54] And so I felt a bit, oh gosh, this is awkward.

[00:02:57] And then you go in and he's sort of doing his thing,

[00:02:59] like looking down, he's not really, you know,

[00:03:01] and I was like, oh, hi, Piers.

[00:03:02] And he's like, hi, hello.

[00:03:04] And then suddenly you're going live.

[00:03:06] And then when you're finished,

[00:03:07] you're sort of shuffled out of there.

[00:03:09] So I didn't really get to meet the man so much,

[00:03:12] but it was, you know, it's good.

[00:03:13] It gives you some street cred or something.

[00:03:15] Yeah, no, I think that's the goal really,

[00:03:18] is that it gives you that authority

[00:03:20] that you've been on that show

[00:03:22] and your opinions are recognized enough

[00:03:25] and your knowledge is recognized enough

[00:03:26] that you're chosen to represent that point of view.

[00:03:29] So I think that's really great.

[00:03:30] I always find though, whenever I've been on like talk shows

[00:03:33] or television like that,

[00:03:36] I feel like I have to like take five showers

[00:03:38] to clean myself off afterwards.

[00:03:40] Just because it just, for me, it feels a little icky.

[00:03:44] And I feel like I'm not really,

[00:03:47] and this is nothing, this is only my own experience.

[00:03:49] This has nothing to do with your experience

[00:03:50] with Piers Morgan.

[00:03:51] I just feel like I haven't really contributed anything

[00:03:52] to the world, even though I was on this, you know,

[00:03:55] what's usually considered a very important platform.

[00:03:58] And anyway, that's my thing.

[00:04:01] I know exactly what you mean.

[00:04:02] I know exactly what you mean.

[00:04:02] And because I live a couple of hours away from London,

[00:04:06] I have to shower because physically I also feel icky.

[00:04:09] So physically and psychologically,

[00:04:11] I get home and there's just absolute disgusting headspace.

[00:04:14] And again, you know, what the hell was this whole thing?

[00:04:16] And what do I think?

[00:04:18] You know, because I hadn't actually, you know,

[00:04:20] they called me, they messaged me when I was on the plane back.

[00:04:22] I'd been in New York, New Yoik, in your country.

[00:04:25] That's my impression.

[00:04:26] And they said, can you come on Piers tomorrow?

[00:04:28] I was on the plane like, oh God, I've got to go on the bloody,

[00:04:31] I've got to go on Piers.

[00:04:32] And they were like,

[00:04:32] you've watched the Kevin Spacey documentary, haven't you?

[00:04:34] And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:04:36] Because I don't know, I thought maybe it was years ago,

[00:04:37] but it turns out it's a new one.

[00:04:38] I didn't know that.

[00:04:40] So I go on and I was just, I was playing my role.

[00:04:42] And I'm going, come on, like, what did he do wrong?

[00:04:45] Someone gave him a blowjob

[00:04:46] because they wanted to get up in their career.

[00:04:47] Because I'm just saying, do I think this?

[00:04:49] I don't know what I think.

[00:04:50] And the woman next to me was like, wait,

[00:04:52] you think it's fine for him to be grabbing people

[00:04:53] in corridors and things, do you?

[00:04:55] You think all this is fine?

[00:04:56] And I was like, oh, I didn't know that was,

[00:04:58] she was like, you haven't even watched this, have you?

[00:05:00] And I was like, yes, yes, yes, no, I did.

[00:05:01] Of course I did.

[00:05:02] But I hadn't.

[00:05:05] Oh my God.

[00:05:05] So you had a secret.

[00:05:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck.

[00:05:10] I shouldn't have secrets anymore

[00:05:11] because they're not good for you.

[00:05:13] But I would have been socially ostracized to such an extent

[00:05:16] had I revealed said secret on the show

[00:05:19] that I would never have been invited back.

[00:05:21] Well, okay, we're obviously gonna talk about secrets

[00:05:25] and whether they're good for you or not.

[00:05:27] But what was the Kevin Spacey, there's a new documentary.

[00:05:29] So I always thought the whole thing with Kevin Spacey

[00:05:31] is that 30 years ago at a party,

[00:05:33] he groped somebody inappropriately

[00:05:35] and he got canceled.

[00:05:36] That really was when he got canceled.

[00:05:38] And then I guess new things came to light.

[00:05:40] But what's the new documentary about?

[00:05:42] It's Channel 4 in the UK's released it.

[00:05:44] And it's just one of those ones,

[00:05:46] you've seen these before,

[00:05:47] where it's just like person after person

[00:05:49] in a beautifully shot thing.

[00:05:50] It's like a guy sitting there and it's like,

[00:05:52] who's this guy?

[00:05:53] This is gonna be another victim.

[00:05:54] And by the sort of fourth or fifth,

[00:05:57] you're like, okay, I don't need to watch this anymore.

[00:05:59] So I didn't watch the whole thing

[00:06:00] even when I did watch it after getting home from Piers.

[00:06:03] But yeah, people, he told me that

[00:06:06] if I wanted to get ahead in my career,

[00:06:08] I had to give him a blow job.

[00:06:09] And he lied to me about this or that.

[00:06:12] And he kept telling me he was gonna take my script

[00:06:14] to this place.

[00:06:15] But every time it was like,

[00:06:16] but first you have to do this.

[00:06:18] Those kinds of things,

[00:06:19] which I think we now see as abuses of power.

[00:06:22] But 15, 20 years ago.

[00:06:24] Let me ask you this,

[00:06:25] like you talk in the book about AI

[00:06:27] that can roughly recognize in faces,

[00:06:32] not necessarily if someone's lying,

[00:06:35] but you started talking about this.

[00:06:36] But like, the example was the parole,

[00:06:41] which people are likely to go against,

[00:06:44] act badly when they're on parole.

[00:06:47] And the AI was good at identifying that.

[00:06:49] Do you think in the future,

[00:06:50] AI will be good at telling?

[00:06:52] These people said this in the documentary

[00:06:54] and we always like to believe

[00:06:55] that they're telling the truth.

[00:06:56] We wanna assume the best in people

[00:06:58] and particularly when there's calling

[00:06:59] that they're being abused

[00:07:00] because we don't want abused people to be ignored.

[00:07:02] But do you think, clearly sometimes people do lie.

[00:07:06] Do you think AI will be able to tell

[00:07:08] in documentaries like this if someone's lying or not?

[00:07:10] Yeah, I mean, you raised such a good point

[00:07:12] because I'm watching these guys

[00:07:13] and when I'm watching it,

[00:07:14] I'm believing them,

[00:07:15] but that's not enough to put someone in prison, right?

[00:07:17] And then, okay, is the line,

[00:07:20] is the threshold about where we judge someone

[00:07:23] to go to prison different to the one of,

[00:07:25] I should just, I don't wanna watch his movies anymore.

[00:07:27] Like those lines are probably a little bit different, right?

[00:07:29] The burden of proof changes.

[00:07:32] It's a really hard one to know

[00:07:33] because that's an unknowable firstly.

[00:07:35] Secondly, I think that, yeah,

[00:07:36] there's a big part in the book

[00:07:37] about we put too much emphasis on body language and things

[00:07:41] when we think people are lying or telling the truth.

[00:07:44] It's actually very hard to know.

[00:07:45] However, lie detecting,

[00:07:48] well, lie detectors, polygraph tests,

[00:07:50] they are better than they should be

[00:07:52] because we talk about how bad they are.

[00:07:53] They still get between 60 and 80% right.

[00:07:55] That's insane.

[00:07:57] So...

[00:07:58] And is that better than humans?

[00:08:00] That is better than humans.

[00:08:02] Yeah, that is better than humans.

[00:08:03] Humans, I think, I need to check the book again,

[00:08:06] but we get like 50% right.

[00:08:09] It's like a guess.

[00:08:10] We're so bad.

[00:08:11] We have no idea if someone's lying or telling the truth

[00:08:14] and officers and people,

[00:08:17] it depends if someone's like a particularly manipulative liar

[00:08:20] and if their faces match or if they're mismatched too.

[00:08:23] So when they're matched, meaning someone's lying

[00:08:26] and they look like a shifty person in a cartoon,

[00:08:29] their eyes are darting back and forward,

[00:08:31] humans are like 70, 80% accurate

[00:08:33] and investigators and detectors are even better.

[00:08:36] When it's someone who's mismatched,

[00:08:37] all of us are equally absolutely terrible,

[00:08:40] but the lie detector remains 60 to 80% accurate.

[00:08:43] So it's pretty good,

[00:08:46] but not enough to put someone in prison

[00:08:48] for the rest of their life

[00:08:48] because every hundred people you do,

[00:08:50] you'll get 20 to 40 wrong.

[00:08:52] And what's interesting though,

[00:08:53] you said psychopaths can get away with lying

[00:08:56] with a lie detector 88% of the time.

[00:08:58] So lie detectors are not good with psychopaths.

[00:09:01] Yes, psychopaths can't fool lie detectors

[00:09:04] and that was one of the most fascinating things I found.

[00:09:05] Oh, they can't fool lie detectors?

[00:09:07] That's really interesting.

[00:09:09] They don't fool them at a particularly

[00:09:10] more of a rate than we do.

[00:09:12] I mean, the thing with the statistics around lie detectors

[00:09:14] is it changes depending on the lie detector machine

[00:09:17] or who's using it, who's doing it.

[00:09:19] So that's why they vary so much.

[00:09:21] But the point there was that the psychopaths

[00:09:23] are actually not better.

[00:09:25] And that shocked me

[00:09:26] because I thought that was the whole thing

[00:09:27] someone who's neurotic like me would give myself away

[00:09:30] and these psychopaths,

[00:09:31] but basically it's done on your base rates.

[00:09:33] They have to really warm you up for about an hour

[00:09:35] just having a casual conversation.

[00:09:37] So a psychopath's base rate or their body movements,

[00:09:40] their skin, their heart,

[00:09:42] everything is going to be really low anyway.

[00:09:44] So that just means that the machine

[00:09:46] has to be really, really sensitive

[00:09:48] to any slight changes the machine will pick up on.

[00:09:51] There's also something called duper's delight.

[00:09:54] Psychopaths get a bit of a kick out of lying to you.

[00:09:56] So that kick is going to be registered anyway.

[00:09:58] So the psychopaths can't fool it any better than we can.

[00:10:02] So let me ask this because I always feel,

[00:10:06] I used to think I was a good judge of people,

[00:10:08] but then I realized everyone I spoke to

[00:10:11] always said that they were good judges of people.

[00:10:13] Like everybody thinks they're a good judge of people.

[00:10:15] And I realized kind of just looking back over time

[00:10:18] that I'm actually not really that great a judge of people.

[00:10:20] Often I'm very wrong and I'm probably worse than average

[00:10:24] because I think I kind of tend to be very trusting.

[00:10:26] And is anybody an above average judge of people?

[00:10:32] I don't know you know,

[00:10:33] because there's a great book called

[00:10:35] The Intelligence Trap by David Robson

[00:10:37] about really smart people and it shows how smart,

[00:10:39] and you're clearly a very smart person,

[00:10:41] but you're not a good judge of character.

[00:10:43] You had me stay at your house.

[00:10:44] That was a very big, it could have been a big mistake,

[00:10:47] which was lovely by the way.

[00:10:48] Just watching you now has brought back all the memories.

[00:10:50] I wish I were there just hanging around.

[00:10:51] Come on over again anytime.

[00:10:53] It's a long way, isn't it? Expensive travel and everything.

[00:10:56] But I will, I will. I'd love to.

[00:10:58] But yeah, more intelligent people make more mistakes,

[00:11:02] which is again remarkable.

[00:11:04] Arthur Conan Doyle is a great example of that.

[00:11:07] He believed in fairies.

[00:11:08] He's the writer for Sherlock Holmes.

[00:11:11] You know, this is the master of deduction

[00:11:12] and he thought that he saw a photo and it was a fairy

[00:11:15] and he was positing that fairies,

[00:11:18] they seem to have a belly button or a navel

[00:11:21] or whatever Americans say for belly button,

[00:11:22] which must sound really ridiculous to you.

[00:11:24] What's a belly button in America?

[00:11:26] A belly button.

[00:11:26] Oh, right, okay.

[00:11:27] That just sounded really English when I said it.

[00:11:29] So yeah, he believed in it, had a whole theory about it.

[00:11:34] The thing is you're super intelligent

[00:11:35] and you're able to convince yourself of all of these things

[00:11:38] because you're very good at doing that.

[00:11:40] So I don't know if anyone's good

[00:11:43] at being a judge of character.

[00:11:45] Certainly we found that statistically detectives

[00:11:48] and inspectors and things are really not much better

[00:11:51] than the rest of us.

[00:11:52] They're trained to look out for lies.

[00:11:54] They're better at detecting incoherent parts

[00:11:57] of people's excuses for why they weren't in certain places

[00:12:01] or why they were there.

[00:12:03] They've been trained to do that,

[00:12:04] but I don't think they're particularly better.

[00:12:06] And I would say that anyone who thinks they're really good

[00:12:09] probably isn't just for a bit of Dunning-Kruger

[00:12:11] kind of thing, you know?

[00:12:12] Yeah, and I kind of think everybody thinks

[00:12:15] they're pretty good.

[00:12:16] Like there's several skills out there.

[00:12:18] Like, you know, it's that whole thing

[00:12:19] where nine out of 10 people think

[00:12:21] they're an above average driver

[00:12:24] or most people I talk to who play poker

[00:12:27] think they're an above average poker player.

[00:12:29] Most people think they're above average judge of people.

[00:12:31] So I think there's a kind of category of skills

[00:12:34] where people in general think they're better than average

[00:12:37] when you can't have everybody better than average.

[00:12:39] Some people have to be below average.

[00:12:41] So I'm willing to take the hit on driving

[00:12:44] and judge of character and even like lying.

[00:12:47] It's very hard for me to tell someone's lying.

[00:12:50] But I would think with AI,

[00:12:52] let's say you feed it 10,000 facial expressions

[00:12:55] of someone who's lying and 10,000 facial expressions

[00:12:57] of someone who's telling the truth.

[00:12:58] And then you make glasses with this lie detector

[00:13:02] in the glasses and I could look at someone

[00:13:04] and then use AI to determine what the chances are

[00:13:07] that they're lying or not.

[00:13:08] I bet you that's possible.

[00:13:09] I bet that is.

[00:13:11] Stuff like that will surely come around

[00:13:13] and that's going to bring up

[00:13:13] all sorts of philosophical issues.

[00:13:15] If the machine says someone did it,

[00:13:18] even if we don't have the evidence,

[00:13:19] just because it's showing they lied,

[00:13:20] is that enough to put someone away?

[00:13:22] There was a scene in the book I did with Dr. Marvin Chun

[00:13:26] who is involved in brain reading,

[00:13:28] which is, you know, it's now been around for years and years,

[00:13:31] brain reading where you put someone in a fMRI scanner

[00:13:36] and you can actually,

[00:13:37] you can draw what they are thinking of

[00:13:40] and you can read what they are,

[00:13:42] what the words they're thinking

[00:13:44] or what they're listening to.

[00:13:45] And that's actually real

[00:13:47] and that's absolutely insane.

[00:13:49] At the moment, it's not, it's still a bit blurry,

[00:13:52] it's still a bit vague,

[00:13:52] it doesn't get it quite right

[00:13:54] because the fMRI scanners are only really good enough

[00:13:56] to get to the nearest like thousandth neuron at a time

[00:14:00] to know which ones are firing up and which ones aren't.

[00:14:02] But it stands to reason that within,

[00:14:05] it might be 10 years, it might be 100,

[00:14:06] it might be 1,000,

[00:14:07] we will be able to locate individual neurons

[00:14:10] and see if they're firing up

[00:14:11] and we'll get a really good idea.

[00:14:13] And I bet someone will be able to do that

[00:14:14] with just a phone, you know,

[00:14:15] you just hold out to someone's face

[00:14:17] and you'll know what they're thinking

[00:14:18] and if they're lying.

[00:14:20] But it's interesting what we do know,

[00:14:23] like you mentioned this one statistic in the book,

[00:14:25] which is that the longer,

[00:14:27] and this is counterintuitive,

[00:14:29] the longer people are married,

[00:14:30] the less they actually can, you know,

[00:14:34] guess what the other is thinking.

[00:14:36] Yes.

[00:14:37] Which surprised me.

[00:14:38] Yeah, we get,

[00:14:39] and also that was from someone's book

[00:14:42] and I wish I could remember his name to give him a shout out

[00:14:44] but I can't think of who it was,

[00:14:45] but it was a book and it was good.

[00:14:47] And the point here was that

[00:14:50] couples that have explosive arguments

[00:14:53] tend to fare better long-term

[00:14:55] because they're constantly resetting

[00:14:57] their opinions of one another

[00:14:58] and they're resetting who they are.

[00:15:00] You have an explosive argument,

[00:15:01] it's like, oh, that's who she is,

[00:15:03] like she's, you know,

[00:15:04] and that's constantly happening.

[00:15:06] Whereas if you're one of those couples

[00:15:07] who never argues, never has explosive arguments,

[00:15:10] 30 years later, you suddenly find like,

[00:15:12] who is this person I'm living with?

[00:15:14] I haven't recalibrated anything

[00:15:16] to understand who the person,

[00:15:17] the 45-year-old is compared to the 20-year-old

[00:15:19] that I first met, you know?

[00:16:25] But the rest of your body, oh yes,

[00:16:28] it's gonna relish every moment of it

[00:16:31] because there are drinks.

[00:16:32] Then there are drinks from McDonald's.

[00:16:35] Try the new ice cold frozen Philadelphia Fanta

[00:16:38] with piping hot fries.

[00:16:40] Get any size frozen drinks for $1.49.

[00:16:43] Price and participation may vary,

[00:16:44] cannot be combined with any other offer.

[00:16:47] Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

[00:16:52] It's so interesting, all this stuff,

[00:16:53] like, do you know,

[00:16:55] you ever read the book about data

[00:16:57] by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz?

[00:16:59] No.

[00:17:00] I forgot the name of this book.

[00:17:01] He's been on the podcast twice about,

[00:17:03] so he's a data analyst and he used to work at Google

[00:17:06] and he had an interesting anecdote,

[00:17:08] which is that in India, for some reason,

[00:17:14] there's a lot of search queries about

[00:17:18] the fetishizing of, I think it was,

[00:17:22] you know, feeding off of your wife's breast milk

[00:17:27] during sex.

[00:17:29] So I think that was the actual fetish.

[00:17:33] I'm not entirely sure.

[00:17:34] But you wouldn't have known this about this,

[00:17:37] and it was only from this one country.

[00:17:39] And you wouldn't have known this if it,

[00:17:41] like, it's not like people talk about it or write about it,

[00:17:44] but it's just like all these people

[00:17:45] in the privacy of their homes Google it.

[00:17:47] And so that-

[00:17:48] What the why?

[00:17:49] Why it is?

[00:17:51] Well, I don't know why it is,

[00:17:52] but it's interesting how data allows us to kind of,

[00:17:56] you know, in all of its different forms,

[00:17:58] like in this case, it's Google queries.

[00:17:59] Data is sort of unraveling the secrets

[00:18:02] of society pretty quickly.

[00:18:04] Yeah, that's smart.

[00:18:05] I'm just thinking of two possible reasons.

[00:18:08] Okay, so one is, and this is, I'm just half joking,

[00:18:11] but just they don't have any food, they're hungry.

[00:18:15] And so breast milk, because that is a way, right?

[00:18:18] If you're on an island,

[00:18:20] you can drink your own wee once.

[00:18:22] I'm not talking about if you're just on holiday

[00:18:24] on an island somewhere, you shouldn't do that.

[00:18:26] You should go like swimming or something

[00:18:27] and have a nice time and go for dinner.

[00:18:29] But if you're like on a desert island, drink your own,

[00:18:32] you know, I don't know what you can do with your sperm.

[00:18:34] I haven't looked into that.

[00:18:35] But presumably breast milk can,

[00:18:37] but you have to, the woman has to have just had a,

[00:18:39] I forgot that they don't just constantly eat breast milk.

[00:18:42] Okay, forget that for a second, but that might be.

[00:18:44] And then cows are sacred, aren't they?

[00:18:47] What's sacred?

[00:18:48] Oh yeah, cows are sacred, that's right.

[00:18:50] That's where it comes from.

[00:18:51] And it's interesting that, again, like,

[00:18:56] with the fact that there's so much data in the world now,

[00:18:59] this is what's, you know, you mentioned how,

[00:19:03] you know, different sex toys were keeping track of data

[00:19:06] inappropriately, like one company lost

[00:19:09] in a class action suit because it turned out

[00:19:11] they were keeping the data on people's usage

[00:19:13] of their Bluetooth enabled sex toys.

[00:19:17] But also I think it was Garry Kasparov

[00:19:21] was telling me about this.

[00:19:21] He is doing some consulting for a cybersecurity firm.

[00:19:24] You gotta be careful even of your nest,

[00:19:27] you know, your internet thermometer,

[00:19:29] because what if, you know, from two to 3 p.m. suddenly

[00:19:33] one day it's hotter than usual in the bedroom

[00:19:37] and the person traveling on work sees why,

[00:19:40] why was all of a sudden the bedroom like,

[00:19:42] you know, 90 degrees?

[00:19:43] Like there's a lot of data that we never would have had

[00:19:47] before in the last million years,

[00:19:49] but now it's telling us all these things

[00:19:52] about our lives and our personalities

[00:19:54] and society's lives that were secret before.

[00:19:58] And all this is gonna be more and more revealed.

[00:20:00] Yeah, we had, it seems like we may have had

[00:20:03] a very small window in human history

[00:20:05] of the last 300,000 years where privacy was a thing.

[00:20:10] And, you know, centuries ago,

[00:20:13] they didn't have corridors or hallways

[00:20:15] or anything in a house.

[00:20:16] That's a new concept.

[00:20:17] So it was just like a room

[00:20:19] and everyone sleeps in that room.

[00:20:20] So the parents having sex,

[00:20:22] that's just in front of the kids.

[00:20:24] The kids go into the toilet,

[00:20:25] everyone's hearing and smelling that.

[00:20:27] Like privacy just wasn't a thing.

[00:20:29] That's a relatively new concept for us.

[00:20:32] And we've managed, it's brilliant and wonderful,

[00:20:35] although maybe you could argue it makes us weaker

[00:20:37] because we're just,

[00:20:38] we're so used to having all of our space.

[00:20:40] And then as soon as that's encroached upon, we're upset.

[00:20:43] But yeah, that seems to be dying quite quickly

[00:20:46] because of all of these things.

[00:20:47] The death of privacy, the sex toys are everywhere.

[00:20:50] The Alexas are everywhere.

[00:20:52] And one of the segments in the book was about this guy,

[00:20:55] Babos, I'm not gonna guess his very long Greek name.

[00:20:58] I don't know how to pronounce it.

[00:21:00] But he had this relationship

[00:21:03] with a British woman called Caroline, I believe it was,

[00:21:07] in Greece.

[00:21:08] And one day, police get called.

[00:21:11] And it turns out Babos is like,

[00:21:13] he's got like a thing over his mouth,

[00:21:15] he's on the floor all tied up.

[00:21:16] And she, the wife and the dog are dead.

[00:21:21] And there's the baby, I think the baby survived.

[00:21:24] And it took like, you know, there was months of Babos,

[00:21:27] this Greek guy in front of the press,

[00:21:29] just crying, going to the grave every day, really sad,

[00:21:33] working with the authorities to find

[00:21:35] what he said were Albanian murderers

[00:21:37] who had come over and stolen their money

[00:21:39] and tied them up and all of this stuff.

[00:21:41] And I'm sure most people,

[00:21:42] when I started telling the story have already guessed,

[00:21:44] I mean, Babos was the killer.

[00:21:45] Or maybe they wouldn't have guessed that.

[00:21:46] But Babos was the killer himself, right?

[00:21:48] And the way they got him was like,

[00:21:53] after the time, so he had tied himself up,

[00:21:55] he'd killed their dog as well

[00:21:57] because he wanted to make it look like

[00:21:58] these Albanian gangsters had come and killed his wife,

[00:22:00] but he killed his wife.

[00:22:02] They got him, you know, he had like disabled his CCTV,

[00:22:05] he'd done loads of clever different things

[00:22:07] with the technology to make sure that it wasn't shown.

[00:22:09] And she was wearing like a heart thing on her watch

[00:22:13] that he had just neglected to think about.

[00:22:15] And that stopped beating at the time much earlier

[00:22:19] than he said that it had happened.

[00:22:21] So that started to cast doubts on some of the story.

[00:22:24] And then they looked at his phone on his health settings

[00:22:26] and it showed that he was doing lots of steps

[00:22:28] after a certain hour,

[00:22:30] because he was moving up and down

[00:22:31] when he said he had been tied up.

[00:22:32] So that's how they got him.

[00:22:33] Like there are so many things

[00:22:34] you think you've disabled all of it,

[00:22:36] and there's more that knows

[00:22:38] and can tell everyone what you're doing all the time.

[00:22:41] It's sort of like the other aspect of AI,

[00:22:43] which is, you know, you see all these videos now

[00:22:46] where Joe Biden says something

[00:22:48] or Donald Trump says anything

[00:22:49] or LeBron James says something,

[00:22:51] and it's not what they said,

[00:22:53] but AI can make the face look like they said something

[00:22:55] and it can mimic the voice.

[00:22:57] And so now clearly there's no way to really know

[00:23:00] or soon it'll be the case that there's no way to know

[00:23:02] what's real, what's not.

[00:23:04] I wonder if we have to just take a different view of,

[00:23:07] we just have to say, look, we don't really know what's,

[00:23:09] we're never again gonna know what's real and what's not.

[00:23:11] Like we don't know what's a secret,

[00:23:13] what's the truth, what's a lie.

[00:23:15] We kind of just have to give up on that fact.

[00:23:18] You would, I feel like so far,

[00:23:21] and I don't know if this will always happen,

[00:23:22] capitalism, I'm not some like mad pro-capitalist guy,

[00:23:25] but so far it seems to always find a solution

[00:23:28] for the problems.

[00:23:29] It causes its own problem and then somehow solves it.

[00:23:32] So I wonder if, you know, it might,

[00:23:37] it's caused this problem that now we're not gonna be able

[00:23:39] to know what's real and what isn't.

[00:23:41] Just from like science and technology,

[00:23:42] everything's growing and we're building these mad things

[00:23:44] and it's gotten out of control.

[00:23:46] Well, those same clever people, I'm hoping,

[00:23:49] will find ways to show, hey, this is genuine

[00:23:52] and this is not.

[00:23:53] And who knows if they're gonna be,

[00:23:54] I mean, I've heard murmurings of that,

[00:23:56] ways to sort of imprint something into the,

[00:23:59] maybe the DNA of the video to say,

[00:24:01] this is a real video that hasn't been touched by deepfake.

[00:24:03] I mean, I'm extremely worried.

[00:24:04] I mean, everyone is worried about losing their jobs to AI.

[00:24:07] And I don't know if you've seen,

[00:24:08] have you seen those like 24-hour news stations

[00:24:10] full of just fake people?

[00:24:12] No.

[00:24:13] Oh man, because I, you know, every single person,

[00:24:16] I'm sure you've found this as well,

[00:24:17] is like, it's mad, like AI is gonna take everyone's jobs,

[00:24:20] not mine though, because my job is so important

[00:24:22] and special and different.

[00:24:23] And so I, you know, and I suppose I felt like that

[00:24:25] as a YouTuber, because I've now, since I last,

[00:24:28] I guess I was a podcaster and I think I'm now a YouTuber.

[00:24:31] I thought, well, how can they do that?

[00:24:32] And now I've seen these news channels

[00:24:34] and it's people that look and sound just like me and you.

[00:24:37] They look like they're in a real studio

[00:24:39] and they're doing 24-hour news.

[00:24:40] They've got inflection in their voice.

[00:24:42] They're going like, hey, over to you, John.

[00:24:44] What do you think was going?

[00:24:45] Well, it's a bit crazy what's happening up here.

[00:24:47] Oh, you're, you know, you're American, John.

[00:24:48] Yeah, I am.

[00:24:49] And that's going on.

[00:24:51] And why couldn't they just have,

[00:24:53] and once you can have one or two like AI YouTubers,

[00:24:56] you can have an infinite number.

[00:24:57] So there could be millions of people all putting out

[00:25:01] their own AIs.

[00:25:02] Well, how the hell am I going to compete with this like AI

[00:25:05] that is tuned to say the most perfect things

[00:25:08] at the most perfect times

[00:25:10] to get as much interaction as possible?

[00:25:12] The only thing I can think is

[00:25:13] if there is something in it to show,

[00:25:15] no, no, but this is an AI

[00:25:17] and you hope that people still want to watch real people,

[00:25:19] but they might be able to get away with it

[00:25:21] without us knowing who's AI and who's not.

[00:25:24] We know people don't really care that much

[00:25:25] about watching real people because for instance,

[00:25:28] they watch cartoons and anime and so on.

[00:25:31] And they're just as happy doing that for entertainment

[00:25:34] as they are watching real people.

[00:25:35] But you're a writer and a journalist

[00:25:38] and like an investigative type of journalist.

[00:25:40] So like, let's say I was building a media organization

[00:25:44] and let's say it was a financial news service.

[00:25:46] I would fire all the financial reporters

[00:25:48] and replace them with AI

[00:25:49] because AI could do probably a better job

[00:25:51] like of reporting Microsoft's earnings,

[00:25:53] probably a better job

[00:25:54] because they know past earnings of Microsoft.

[00:25:57] They can say, oh, it's similar to how Oracle had a dip

[00:25:59] because of this, this, this.

[00:26:01] So AI is going to be a better basic financial journalist.

[00:26:04] And for celebrity gossip too, I would fire everybody.

[00:26:08] Oh, Britney Spears had a weird video the other day,

[00:26:11] the same day her, some legal case was coming up.

[00:26:14] Like AI could do that better than humans,

[00:26:16] but look at what you do.

[00:26:18] In this book, for instance,

[00:26:19] you have spent time building up a relationship

[00:26:22] with Amanda Knox who's famous or infamously

[00:26:26] had this case in Italy, this murder case in Italy

[00:26:29] that was held the world by, you know,

[00:26:31] it was a gripping story and you interviewed her

[00:26:34] and you have your own unique take on interviews.

[00:26:36] I think for true creatives, AI will be like a collaborator

[00:26:41] but you're always going to be able to enhance

[00:26:43] what the AI does.

[00:26:45] Even if the AI is great, even if the AI is great,

[00:26:48] the AI is not going to interview Amanda Knox

[00:26:51] and build a relationship with her

[00:26:52] and, you know, get the answers you got.

[00:26:55] And I'm just using that as an example.

[00:26:57] The whole book is filled with stories and examples

[00:26:59] and people who opened up to you about secrets,

[00:27:03] now maybe they would open up the same way to an AI,

[00:27:06] but you're going to have your personal interpretation

[00:27:08] and you're always going to be able to take

[00:27:12] what an AI produces and enhance it.

[00:27:14] But for a video, you can't enhance it, it's already done.

[00:27:18] Like it's just, here's the video, you know,

[00:27:22] let's put me in there now to make it better.

[00:27:24] That's not going to be a role that happens.

[00:27:27] So I think for some things,

[00:27:29] AI is going to be a great collaborator

[00:27:30] and make your job better.

[00:27:32] But for other things, yeah, the job's going to be fired.

[00:27:36] But, you know, I do think, you know,

[00:27:40] AI and data are going to play a big role,

[00:27:42] have a big effect on the role of secrets.

[00:27:45] Just like, you talk a lot about cults in the book.

[00:27:49] I think in general, the internet

[00:27:51] and the more widespread spread of knowledge

[00:27:55] has probably reduced, I would think,

[00:27:56] has reduced the influence of cults on people.

[00:27:59] But maybe I'm wrong.

[00:28:00] You talk a lot about cults in this book.

[00:28:02] Yeah, yeah, well, I used to do a lot of YouTubing on cults

[00:28:06] and now I'd sort of do more culture war stuff

[00:28:09] because I caught it controversy, I suppose.

[00:28:11] I suppose as cults have become less controversial,

[00:28:13] it's just because everyone's on board with that

[00:28:15] except for Tom Cruise and John Travolta,

[00:28:17] like everyone's anti-cult except for those two guys.

[00:28:20] And even John Travolta, I think secretly,

[00:28:22] he's like, let me out, you know?

[00:28:24] Yeah.

[00:28:25] So the cult stuff I find fascinating

[00:28:28] and I think you're right.

[00:28:30] There were two big, I mean, Scientology is the one

[00:28:31] everyone likes to know about

[00:28:32] because Scientology is the celebrity one

[00:28:35] and it was really big at one point

[00:28:37] and they still claim to have millions

[00:28:39] and millions of members.

[00:28:41] It's thought that they actually have 20 to 30,000 now

[00:28:44] which is smaller than like our numbers of listeners.

[00:28:47] Like we have larger cults now in that sense

[00:28:49] than Scientology.

[00:28:52] So they had a lot of trouble.

[00:28:54] I mean, the first thing that happened was WikiLeaks.

[00:28:55] They got loads of stuff about the origin story

[00:28:58] of Scientology out there

[00:28:59] and then South Park famously put out this episode

[00:29:02] with Tom Cruise and John Travolta

[00:29:06] all about the secrets of Scientology

[00:29:07] and what they actually believe.

[00:29:09] And that's one of the things I think people were surprised by

[00:29:11] is if you look at cults,

[00:29:13] people think that cults only tell their truth

[00:29:15] to their members and they keep other truths out.

[00:29:18] But not only do they actually,

[00:29:20] I mean, they do keep other truths out

[00:29:21] but they also don't reveal their own doctrine

[00:29:24] to their members.

[00:29:26] And that's something that religions used to do.

[00:29:28] You go back to Christianity years ago,

[00:29:29] it was only available in Latin or Greek or whatever.

[00:29:33] They didn't want the populace

[00:29:35] to actually be able to understand what they were worshipping.

[00:29:37] That's a way to keep people,

[00:29:39] if you keep them not knowing all the time,

[00:29:40] they're just gonna be obedient

[00:29:41] because they don't know what's in there.

[00:29:42] That's a real way, secrets to keep power over people.

[00:29:46] Scientology, again, people think that Scientologists,

[00:29:49] you know, they're like,

[00:29:50] how can you believe in this stuff?

[00:29:52] Galactic warlord Xenu has taken nine

[00:29:55] or like hundreds of billions of people from his planet

[00:29:58] and put them into Earth,

[00:30:00] which was known as Tegiac back then,

[00:30:02] and in Scientology speak,

[00:30:04] and put them into volcanoes to kill them.

[00:30:07] And their souls came out,

[00:30:08] they're called operating thetans.

[00:30:10] And the operating thetans were put into cinemas.

[00:30:12] This is actually what they believe.

[00:30:14] They put into cinemas,

[00:30:15] and the cinemas taught them fake things

[00:30:17] called Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

[00:30:20] And the real thing is Scientology.

[00:30:22] So who could possibly believe that?

[00:30:24] But most Scientologists don't even know about that.

[00:30:27] You don't learn about that until you go up these levels

[00:30:29] called operating thetans.

[00:30:31] One, two, and operating thetan three,

[00:30:34] or operating thetan level three

[00:30:35] is when you learn about Lord Xenu.

[00:30:38] By that point,

[00:30:39] you've already spent hundreds and hundreds

[00:30:40] of thousands of dollars.

[00:30:42] You're in so deep.

[00:30:43] You've cut off all of your family and friends.

[00:30:45] So there's the boiling frog concept

[00:30:48] where it's happened so slowly

[00:30:49] that you just have to sort of go along

[00:30:51] with whatever they're telling you by this point.

[00:30:53] And the sunk cost fallacy as well.

[00:30:55] You've put so much in,

[00:30:56] you've got no choice.

[00:30:57] You've lost all your friends and family.

[00:30:59] Just keep on going.

[00:31:01] So it's amazing how,

[00:31:02] and even then,

[00:31:03] every level up you go,

[00:31:04] the more money you give,

[00:31:05] the more secrets you are told,

[00:31:07] the more special you feel as well,

[00:31:09] but also the more in their control you are.

[00:31:12] Yeah, it's interesting.

[00:31:16] Yeah, you're right.

[00:31:17] All these cognitive biases you meant,

[00:31:19] that you just said,

[00:31:19] like sunk cost fallacy and so on.

[00:31:21] And when I was reading that in your book,

[00:31:23] I was thinking there were two other things at play

[00:31:26] which remind me of Robert Cialdini's book, Influence.

[00:31:29] One is consistency.

[00:31:30] So with Scientology,

[00:31:32] or NXIVM is a good example.

[00:31:34] NXIVM was a fascinating example

[00:31:35] because as you point out in the book,

[00:31:37] there's not the whole kind of science fiction backstory.

[00:31:40] And it was sort of unique in famous cults because of this,

[00:31:44] but it starts off just as a self-help thing.

[00:31:47] Like, hey, come to this meeting

[00:31:49] and we're going to talk about

[00:31:51] how you could feel better in life

[00:31:52] and perform better and be more productive.

[00:31:55] And so it's almost like,

[00:31:58] there's like this consistency thing happening

[00:32:00] which Robert Cialdini talks about.

[00:32:02] Get people to say yes.

[00:32:03] Like, hey, don't you want to know

[00:32:04] how to live a better life?

[00:32:05] Oh, yes, of course you do.

[00:32:07] So you kind of bring them in with consistency.

[00:32:09] And then as they trust you

[00:32:10] and as they get used to saying yes to you,

[00:32:12] they stay consistent with that.

[00:32:14] And now they say yes to more and more extreme things like,

[00:32:17] hey, do you want to go to this retreat?

[00:32:19] It's only $10,000.

[00:32:21] And oh yes, of course I do.

[00:32:24] And I remember one time going to,

[00:32:27] what was the thing that came after Est?

[00:32:31] It was cult-like.

[00:32:33] And I remember going to the first meeting.

[00:32:34] I went because there was this girl I liked

[00:32:36] who said, oh, we should go to this.

[00:32:38] And then afterwards, two people like double teamed me

[00:32:42] and said, hey, we're going to have a retreat next weekend.

[00:32:46] Do you want to go?

[00:32:47] And I'm like, well, I have to check my schedule.

[00:32:51] And then they really started pouring it on.

[00:32:53] Like, oh, are you not ready?

[00:32:55] Are you not a committed kind of person?

[00:32:59] Like, do you always doubt yourself and blah, blah, blah.

[00:33:03] So there was like all these tricks they were using

[00:33:05] to try to get me to say yes, because I was already there.

[00:33:09] Interesting.

[00:33:10] NXIVM is interesting because I knew someone

[00:33:13] who was very high up in NXIVM,

[00:33:16] and I knew when she was still in NXIVM

[00:33:18] and she would talk to me.

[00:33:20] This is when NXIVM wasn't like a common word.

[00:33:24] Keith Raniere was still out there doing his thing.

[00:33:26] And she would tell me stuff like,

[00:33:29] why are people persecuting us?

[00:33:30] We're just trying to help people.

[00:33:32] And, but of course that was the first step

[00:33:35] towards a much more, you know, a darker side to it.

[00:33:38] And so I wonder if that's like

[00:33:40] how people get sucked into these things.

[00:33:43] The consistency aspects.

[00:33:44] Yeah, no, absolutely.

[00:33:46] There's probably so many aspects to it.

[00:33:47] Yeah, you start saying yes,

[00:33:49] and if they've just gotten you.

[00:33:50] It's interesting you went with a girl as well,

[00:33:52] because that's, a lot of people get into cults

[00:33:54] because of that as well.

[00:33:55] I mean, Steve Hassan is known

[00:33:56] as sort of the cult godfather or something

[00:33:59] for writing about the dangers of cults.

[00:34:03] And he wrote this thing called the BITE model, B-I-T-E.

[00:34:06] And it's like one of those things

[00:34:07] where it's a list of this is what a cult is kind of thing.

[00:34:10] But he, when he was younger,

[00:34:12] he was like, I don't know, in his 20s.

[00:34:13] He was at university.

[00:34:14] He'd just been broken up with by his girlfriend

[00:34:16] and he was in the library

[00:34:17] and three beautiful women approached him.

[00:34:20] And he was just like, at that point,

[00:34:21] I just lost hold of all of my senses

[00:34:24] and was very vulnerable.

[00:34:25] And these beautiful women were saying,

[00:34:26] hey, you got to come along

[00:34:27] to this thing called the Moonies,

[00:34:29] which was Reverend Moon in South Korea

[00:34:32] who was thought to be the second coming of Christ.

[00:34:34] I don't think that everyone is,

[00:34:37] I mean, there's a line in the sort of anti-cult community

[00:34:40] on YouTube and all these things.

[00:34:42] They will sort of, I think they're scared to victim blame.

[00:34:45] And I understand that urge

[00:34:47] that you don't want to blame

[00:34:48] the people who've fallen into cults.

[00:34:50] And I think we shouldn't blame them.

[00:34:51] We should just be honest about what's going on.

[00:34:54] And most of us, I think most people listening,

[00:34:56] if they were told,

[00:34:57] no matter how beautiful these three women were,

[00:35:00] they were told the second coming of Christ

[00:35:01] is a South Korean guy

[00:35:03] and you should come and join this thing.

[00:35:05] And most of us would say,

[00:35:07] no, you were right, thank you.

[00:35:09] So I don't know.

[00:35:11] But yeah, I agree with what you're saying

[00:35:13] with the consistency aspect.

[00:35:14] Once he said yes once or twice,

[00:35:16] the guy's in.

[00:35:43] The sizzle of McDonald's sausage.

[00:36:05] It's enough to make you crave your favorite breakfast.

[00:36:08] Enough to head over to McDonald's.

[00:36:11] Enough to make you really wish this commercial

[00:36:14] were scratch and sniff.

[00:36:16] And if you're a sausage person,

[00:36:18] now get two satisfyingly savory sausage McGriddles,

[00:36:21] sausage biscuits or sausage burritos for just $3.33

[00:36:24] or mix and match.

[00:36:25] Price and participation may vary,

[00:36:26] cannot be combined with any other offer

[00:36:28] or combo meal, single item at regular price.

[00:36:30] Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

[00:36:35] Think about the guys you wrote about with Scientology.

[00:36:37] It's the one who like joined twice even.

[00:36:39] And you know, and again, most people, like you say,

[00:36:43] don't know about the Lord Zinu stuff and all that

[00:36:46] until they're level five or whatever in the Scientologist.

[00:36:49] And so people, and it's like you said too,

[00:36:53] the smarter you are, the more likely it is

[00:36:55] you could believe in these things.

[00:36:57] You know, I think it's true too.

[00:36:59] The higher IQ you are,

[00:37:01] the more likely it is you could be hypnotized.

[00:37:03] Like you start to tell a story of this guy,

[00:37:05] I think his name's Paul Robeson,

[00:37:07] wins a Nobel Prize and is somehow convinced

[00:37:10] to bring cocaine over the borders of Argentina.

[00:37:13] Like how did that guy get convinced to do that?

[00:37:16] Nobel Prize winner.

[00:37:17] It's so, it's amazing.

[00:37:18] And we all think we're not gonna get duped by stuff.

[00:37:21] And I had, I nearly got duped just the other day.

[00:37:24] I'm trying to make myself a Wikipedia page,

[00:37:26] which is an embarrassing thing to have to admit,

[00:37:28] but I know that it will help me for my career.

[00:37:30] So then screw it, we'll try and get ahead.

[00:37:32] And I was like, why don't I have a Wikipedia?

[00:37:33] So I tried to make it.

[00:37:34] And anyone who's tried to do that kind of thing

[00:37:36] on Wikipedia will know it's like impossible

[00:37:38] because there's a million rules to follow.

[00:37:40] There's a million rules and there's nasty people.

[00:37:44] Not all of them, I wanna add,

[00:37:46] but some who are just in control of these things

[00:37:49] and have undue amount of power

[00:37:51] because it's this decentralized thing.

[00:37:53] Yes, 100%.

[00:37:54] And so I'm sitting there going, what's, you know,

[00:37:56] anyway, I put a draft in.

[00:37:57] So now there's a draft.

[00:37:58] It says it could take up to three months.

[00:38:00] Someone on LinkedIn sent me a message

[00:38:02] and it's a LinkedIn person, works for Wikipedia,

[00:38:05] does all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:38:08] I've seen you've got a draft in.

[00:38:09] There's just a few little things you need to change

[00:38:11] and then we can put it up.

[00:38:12] Saying we, as if he's at Wikipedia, all this stuff.

[00:38:14] And that's really tempting.

[00:38:17] And he said, can you just, here's my email address.

[00:38:19] And his email address was Jonathan at wikiadmin.org

[00:38:23] or whatever it was.

[00:38:24] Oh my God.

[00:38:25] Yeah, like that's really compelling, isn't it?

[00:38:26] If you're me and you want to...

[00:38:28] So I'm going, oh, thank you.

[00:38:29] So I sent the email and I'm just,

[00:38:32] because I thought, you know, I don't know.

[00:38:34] It didn't even cross my mind this was fake

[00:38:35] because it was so obviously real.

[00:38:37] Although, you know, one of the things that actually got me

[00:38:39] because I did look again.

[00:38:40] So I emailed saying, hi, it's me.

[00:38:42] That'd be great, thank you so much.

[00:38:43] And then he replied saying, yeah, yeah,

[00:38:45] just give me a phone number

[00:38:47] and I'll just give you a quick call.

[00:38:48] And then I thought, okay,

[00:38:49] like you could have just messaged me

[00:38:51] what the problems were on LinkedIn.

[00:38:53] You could have messaged me in the email

[00:38:55] but now you're asking for more information.

[00:38:57] You want my phone number as well.

[00:38:58] What do you want my phone number for?

[00:39:00] And then I had another look at his LinkedIn

[00:39:02] and it said he speaks Urdu.

[00:39:04] And I know that's, I don't,

[00:39:05] there's nothing against people who speak Urdu

[00:39:06] which is one of the many languages of India.

[00:39:09] But his name was like Jonathan.

[00:39:11] And I thought, hang on,

[00:39:12] there are very few people called Jonathan who speak Urdu.

[00:39:15] Something's not right here.

[00:39:16] So I didn't sort of follow up with any of that.

[00:39:20] But they've just done a good job.

[00:39:21] So we could all be gotten, but very few of us.

[00:39:25] Okay, here's the thing with the cult people.

[00:39:27] When you join a cult,

[00:39:28] I think, and I get a lot of flack for saying this,

[00:39:31] I think that part of you wants to be above other people.

[00:39:35] And I think that's with the victim blaming thing,

[00:39:37] no one wants to admit that bit.

[00:39:39] They just say, hey, clever people can be susceptible.

[00:39:41] And I think, yeah, clever people

[00:39:43] who want to climb a hierarchy

[00:39:45] and to be able to be in control of other people

[00:39:47] and to be special.

[00:39:48] So that's what I think.

[00:39:49] I think that's very true.

[00:39:51] I think the hierarchy thing is critical.

[00:39:53] Like when you look at cults that have,

[00:39:55] let's say spun out of Scientology,

[00:39:57] meaning high level people who are at Scientology

[00:39:59] who ended up starting their own things,

[00:40:01] it always has that, hey, there's 12 levels.

[00:40:04] Here's the initiation for the first level,

[00:40:06] then second and third.

[00:40:07] And it's always more and more money

[00:40:09] to get to like higher and higher levels.

[00:40:11] And that works.

[00:40:13] You look at like, you know, I don't want to,

[00:40:16] not everything with a hierarchy is bad,

[00:40:18] but you look at like sports.

[00:40:19] Okay, you're either in the minor leagues or the major leagues

[00:40:23] or you're in this division or the higher division.

[00:40:26] And people judge their self-worth

[00:40:31] by where they are in the hierarchy that they choose.

[00:40:33] You can't be in every hierarchy,

[00:40:35] but oh, let's say you're a standup comedian.

[00:40:37] I saw this in the standup comedy world.

[00:40:39] Are you performing at small clubs, bigger clubs,

[00:40:43] you know, theaters, arenas, stadiums?

[00:40:47] Like there's a whole hierarchy there.

[00:40:49] And I think that's how society is more or less

[00:40:52] formed that way.

[00:40:53] So it makes sense that cults, you know,

[00:40:56] oh, here's a hierarchy that I actually could rise in

[00:40:58] and that they love me.

[00:40:59] They're love bombing me

[00:41:00] and they want me to rise in this hierarchy

[00:41:02] as opposed to most other hierarchies.

[00:41:04] That's it, the status game.

[00:41:07] Not only that, like you want to have power over others,

[00:41:10] not just people in the hierarchy,

[00:41:11] but hey, if you join this cult,

[00:41:14] you're going to have powers or some extra knowledge of life

[00:41:17] that you could use to, you know, make money or whatever.

[00:41:22] Yeah, you know what's proof of that?

[00:41:24] I just want to say about what you were saying

[00:41:25] about that need to climb ranks and be special

[00:41:28] and all of that stuff.

[00:41:29] I'm part of a, because I did a lot of YouTube

[00:41:31] with all the ex-Scientologists.

[00:41:33] So I'm part of their sort of ex-Scientology community.

[00:41:34] And as you can probably guess,

[00:41:36] it became quite culty itself and loads of infighting,

[00:41:39] loads of, they'd be telling these stories

[00:41:41] about their time in Scientology

[00:41:42] and acting a little bit as though like,

[00:41:44] God, it was so bad.

[00:41:45] But you could tell there was a little bit of pride

[00:41:47] about one of them was higher up than the other

[00:41:49] while they were in the cult.

[00:41:50] And they've all fallen out

[00:41:52] and it's been an absolute disaster

[00:41:53] all the ex-Scientologists.

[00:41:54] And I think it's just personality types.

[00:41:56] You've just got the personality types.

[00:41:58] I mean, to be fair, many of them were born into Scientology,

[00:42:00] but the ones who joined,

[00:42:02] these are people who want to climb up

[00:42:04] and be ahead of people.

[00:42:06] Yeah.

[00:42:07] And so I'm just curious,

[00:42:08] like you include the stuff about cults

[00:42:11] in a book called The Psychology of Secrets.

[00:42:15] I guess what's interesting there is that

[00:42:17] even the members of the cult don't know all the secrets

[00:42:19] and revealing the secrets

[00:42:22] is a way of luring people more and more in.

[00:42:24] So secrets have this hold on us.

[00:42:26] They're like a magnet.

[00:42:27] Like if you think about every movie

[00:42:29] and novel in the world,

[00:42:31] okay, sometimes people structurally describe

[00:42:34] a movie or a novel as, you know,

[00:42:36] the arc of the hero, Joseph Campbell's,

[00:42:38] you know, the hero's journey.

[00:42:39] But another way to describe the structure of a story

[00:42:42] is that there's a giant secret in the middle

[00:42:46] and it's gift wrapped with many layers of wrapping

[00:42:49] and each wrapping gets you further and further

[00:42:53] into the story until finally the secret is revealed.

[00:42:56] Like that's all what a story is.

[00:42:58] You delay it as much as possible.

[00:42:59] But if Scientology gave away too much of their secrets

[00:43:02] too early on, it's like, well, what do I do now?

[00:43:04] There's no point.

[00:43:05] So yeah, that's absolutely true.

[00:43:07] And it's obviously not just Scientology.

[00:43:08] This is something that authoritarian cults

[00:43:11] have done for a long time

[00:43:12] is to use secrets against one another.

[00:43:14] If you were high up in the Stasi,

[00:43:16] you might get a little bit of extra information

[00:43:18] about your neighbours rather,

[00:43:19] and who wouldn't want that

[00:43:20] rather than be the neighbour who isn't getting information,

[00:43:23] but their information about them

[00:43:24] is going to everybody else.

[00:43:26] So this use of secrets is a way to suppress people.

[00:43:31] I mean, it really is.

[00:43:33] And I think if you...

[00:43:36] Sorry, I lost my train of thought.

[00:43:38] Shit, what was I saying?

[00:43:40] So the secrets is like kind of withholding secrets

[00:43:43] and then giving secrets is almost like a currency of power,

[00:43:46] like in the authoritarian society sense.

[00:43:49] Yeah, and to speak to your movie,

[00:43:50] but this is what I was going to say

[00:43:51] to your point about movies

[00:43:52] and under the stories that we tell one another,

[00:43:55] it's definitely true

[00:43:56] that if something is supposed to be a secret

[00:43:57] or if part of it is kept secret,

[00:43:59] it really elevates that to the sublime,

[00:44:01] the mundane to the sublime.

[00:44:03] I give an example of my dad.

[00:44:06] One of the earliest memories I have as a child

[00:44:08] walking in on my dad

[00:44:09] and he's got like silver foil in his hair

[00:44:12] and he's dyeing his hair basically,

[00:44:14] getting highlights in there.

[00:44:15] You know, he was quite vain.

[00:44:16] He had this long hair.

[00:44:18] And nobody would remember that

[00:44:20] like as an early childhood memory

[00:44:22] except that he went,

[00:44:24] no, don't come in, like no, no, no, close the door.

[00:44:27] And I was like, oh shit,

[00:44:29] I've like stumbled in on something secret here

[00:44:31] and that has just like imprinted itself

[00:44:33] on my psyche forever

[00:44:36] and it's just such a boring, stupid thing.

[00:44:38] It's just him getting hair dye

[00:44:39] but you make something a secret,

[00:44:41] it just elevates it to this incredible level

[00:44:43] and I think good storytellers,

[00:44:46] good authoritarian leaders and cult leaders,

[00:44:48] they know exactly how to use those secrets

[00:44:50] to sort of ensnare you.

[00:44:53] Yeah, and like, you know, think about it.

[00:44:55] If he hadn't yelled out like,

[00:44:57] you know, get out of here or whatever,

[00:45:00] would you have remembered it?

[00:45:01] No, not in a million years.

[00:45:03] So it's interesting too how

[00:45:07] it's not the secret itself,

[00:45:08] sometimes it's the wrapping around the secret.

[00:45:12] Like that's why the unraveling done artfully

[00:45:15] is either a story or an authoritarian regime

[00:45:18] or a cult.

[00:45:19] And you know, you mentioned early on in the book,

[00:45:21] something like 97% of people in a survey

[00:45:23] say they have some deep, dark secret

[00:45:26] and people communicate.

[00:45:30] If I tell you a secret,

[00:45:31] let's say we're hanging out,

[00:45:32] I tell you a secret,

[00:45:33] that's almost a way of bringing two people closer.

[00:45:36] Oh, this person's sharing a secret with me,

[00:45:39] now I'm going to share a secret with them

[00:45:40] and it's sort of,

[00:45:42] that's often a way of two people becoming closer

[00:45:46] and that could be used in a manipulative way too

[00:45:48] if you know that's why you're revealing the secret.

[00:45:50] And so it's interesting how fundamental

[00:45:55] the psychology of secrecy is to all communication really.

[00:46:00] Absolutely.

[00:46:01] And I think also,

[00:46:02] I try to think about what a secret actually is

[00:46:05] and how it differs from something that's just private

[00:46:08] or a lie is also,

[00:46:10] is that a secret?

[00:46:11] Is it not a secret?

[00:46:12] Where do these things overlap?

[00:46:13] And it's interesting,

[00:46:14] I love thinking about the fact that,

[00:46:17] okay, so a secret it seems

[00:46:19] is actually a societal transgression.

[00:46:22] It's you've done something that you want to keep quiet

[00:46:26] that goes against the norms

[00:46:28] of the particular time and place you live in.

[00:46:30] So I don't know,

[00:46:32] if you kept a slave in the 18th century,

[00:46:35] then that might be private,

[00:46:37] but it's not no big secret,

[00:46:39] it's just everyone knows that's what you're doing.

[00:46:41] If I had a slave in my house now,

[00:46:44] that would be a huge secret, you know?

[00:46:46] And the only thing that's changed

[00:46:48] is the time and society and whatever,

[00:46:49] like human beings are still human beings.

[00:46:52] And the value of that information has risen, right?

[00:46:55] Because fewer people have slaves,

[00:46:57] one would think as a percentage of society,

[00:46:59] fewer people have slaves living in their basement

[00:47:02] now than in the 1800s.

[00:47:04] And so the value of that piece of information has risen

[00:47:08] because supply has gone down

[00:47:09] and demand has probably gone up for that knowledge.

[00:47:13] The value of that information has gone up to the level

[00:47:15] where you could say this is a secret.

[00:47:17] No, absolutely.

[00:47:18] And then another example is like,

[00:47:21] you might think that how often your parents have sex,

[00:47:23] that's a secret or whatever.

[00:47:25] Your parents have sex, that's a secret.

[00:47:26] And it's not really because...

[00:47:28] But that information has no demand.

[00:47:30] There's no demand for that information.

[00:47:32] So what's the difference between that secret

[00:47:33] and the slave in the basement?

[00:47:37] Well, that secret goes along with societal expectations,

[00:47:40] that's all it is.

[00:47:41] And funnily enough, if a couple doesn't have sex,

[00:47:45] so the less salacious option is just,

[00:47:47] a couple doesn't have sex, right?

[00:47:48] Boring. What a boring piece of information.

[00:47:51] But that is a secret.

[00:47:52] That is a secret because society expects

[00:47:55] that a couple has sex.

[00:47:55] When the sex dries up, that becomes a secret.

[00:47:58] Them having sex is just private.

[00:48:00] So anything that's private,

[00:48:02] if you make that something that would cause ostracization

[00:48:06] where it aired, if anyone knew about it,

[00:48:09] or if it was something that goes against societal expectations,

[00:48:12] that's when it becomes a secret.

[00:48:14] And, you know, that has really important...

[00:48:20] I think it's important because the way

[00:48:23] that we portray ourselves on Instagram,

[00:48:25] for example, social media,

[00:48:26] and I know this is an overspoken about topic,

[00:48:28] but we're these perfect pristine people

[00:48:31] and all of these kinds of things.

[00:48:33] It means that when you do something

[00:48:34] that doesn't go along with those ridiculous expectations,

[00:48:37] you feel a lot of shame

[00:48:38] because those are the societal expectations.

[00:48:41] They don't align with what we're all actually doing.

[00:48:43] And that's why in my survey,

[00:48:45] I did a survey to find out how much people pick their noses

[00:48:47] because I just find that such a ridiculous, silly thing

[00:48:51] that, you know, I told a story about a friend of mine

[00:48:54] who he always remembers one of the first memories he has

[00:48:57] when he was like 10, his mom's taking him to school

[00:48:59] and he's got his finger right up his nose,

[00:49:02] like really having a pic.

[00:49:03] And then he suddenly notices

[00:49:05] that outside the window, they're in traffic.

[00:49:08] There's these three girls about his age

[00:49:09] who've been walking alongside the car,

[00:49:11] looking at him the whole time and laughing with each other

[00:49:14] and pointing and stuff.

[00:49:15] And it's just what a traumatic thing.

[00:49:17] And it's so bizarre because it's something that everyone,

[00:49:20] according to my survey, does.

[00:49:21] Most people feel they do it way too much.

[00:49:24] And yet we have to pretend it doesn't happen.

[00:49:26] And that makes it into a secret

[00:49:27] rather than just a private matter.

[00:49:30] There's one theory which we just talked about,

[00:49:31] which is what's the value of this information?

[00:49:34] The other is what's the penalty for this information?

[00:49:37] So, and that's something that's a little bit personal.

[00:49:39] For him, the penalty of these girls

[00:49:42] seeing him pick his nose was pretty high.

[00:49:45] Even though it's girls he's never gonna see again,

[00:49:47] he never has to think about this in the future.

[00:49:49] But somehow in his head right that moment,

[00:49:50] the penalty was so high,

[00:49:52] he remembers it for the rest of his life.

[00:49:54] And it's the same thing with,

[00:49:58] for your dad, his self-conception of the penalty

[00:50:02] of his secret was so high

[00:50:04] that that's what made it kind of bigger than it was.

[00:50:08] So that's like a self-perception kind of thing.

[00:50:11] And also things like insider information in the stock market,

[00:50:15] there's a legal penalty.

[00:50:17] So that's why some things are a secret.

[00:50:20] If you have information and that can't get out there,

[00:50:22] there's a penalty for that information

[00:50:24] getting out there, a legal penalty.

[00:50:26] And as opposed to other things,

[00:50:29] which might just be, there's no penalty,

[00:50:31] there's no value, but it's private then.

[00:50:35] If someone said, James, how often do you have sex?

[00:50:39] Okay, I'm not gonna reply, that's secret.

[00:50:44] I think it's private.

[00:50:44] I think that's private.

[00:50:46] Unless the number is either like zero or like a thousand.

[00:50:51] And then it's like-

[00:50:52] Right, because then there's a penalty.

[00:50:53] There's some ostracism, there's some judgment.

[00:50:55] Yeah, yeah.

[00:50:56] I think a lot of this is an evolutionary hangover.

[00:50:59] If you look at tribes,

[00:51:00] imagine tribes going about their business,

[00:51:02] doing their thing back in the day,

[00:51:05] and then you did something that you knew

[00:51:07] went against societal expectations.

[00:51:09] So in my friend's case, it's had his finger up his nose.

[00:51:12] That went against society.

[00:51:14] So he suddenly had this pang of utter humiliation.

[00:51:19] And that's a way for your body to tell you,

[00:51:21] you're walking around in these tribes like,

[00:51:22] hey man, you just did something

[00:51:24] that the rest of the tribe don't like,

[00:51:26] and I'm gonna make it feel really bad for you in here

[00:51:29] so that you don't ever do that again

[00:51:31] and don't get kicked out the tribe.

[00:51:33] Right, so that's really interesting because,

[00:51:36] okay, so Darwin had his theory of evolution,

[00:51:39] but then he had this other theory,

[00:51:41] which he wrote about,

[00:51:42] I think it was his theory of sexual selection,

[00:51:44] which he asked the question, why are artists attractive?

[00:51:49] Why are rock stars attractive?

[00:51:51] And it's because everyone loves a rock star.

[00:51:56] And his theory was that they sort of rose

[00:52:01] beyond evolution in the sense that

[00:52:04] an artist had no real value in society.

[00:52:07] If you painted on the cave walls,

[00:52:09] you're not like hunting and getting food or anything.

[00:52:12] So this idea that you've risen beyond

[00:52:16] the normal expectations of evolution

[00:52:18] and that becomes value.

[00:52:19] Like how could this person be so special

[00:52:21] that he's even beyond evolution?

[00:52:23] And so Darwin's theory was that

[00:52:25] that is sexually rewarded more than even

[00:52:28] being the best hunter of bears.

[00:52:31] And in this case, if you don't care that someone

[00:52:36] saw you picking your nose,

[00:52:39] you're cooler than the people who do care.

[00:52:42] The people who do care are like more nerdy,

[00:52:43] like, oh my God, I picked my nose and they saw,

[00:52:45] but the people who are cool are like,

[00:52:47] screw you, I can do whatever I want.

[00:52:49] They get the girls or the guys or whatever.

[00:52:52] And I noticed, and the reason I bring this up

[00:52:56] is I noticed when I was writing,

[00:52:58] when I switched around 2010,

[00:53:01] I used to write about mostly just stocks and financial stuff.

[00:53:03] And then I started writing about how times

[00:53:05] that I've gone broke and other kind of shameful things

[00:53:09] where things I used to be ashamed about,

[00:53:10] but then I would just write about them openly.

[00:53:12] My audience probably, my writing audience probably 10X

[00:53:16] over what it was before because I was owning,

[00:53:20] I was rising beyond the shame I was supposed to feel

[00:53:24] about going broke.

[00:53:26] I think that's, there's definitely something to that.

[00:53:29] I'm not, the only thing I think is that,

[00:53:32] of course you could do something really embarrassing

[00:53:34] and it would get millions of views,

[00:53:35] but it might not make people think you're cool.

[00:53:39] I think people like to think you're cool

[00:53:41] because you're a great writer

[00:53:42] and because the things that are embarrassing

[00:53:44] are things that happen to everyone all the time

[00:53:45] and people can relate.

[00:53:47] There's also a difference between,

[00:53:48] as you say, you're owning it like that.

[00:53:49] There wasn't much that my friend could have done,

[00:53:51] I don't think, when he had his finger up his nose like that.

[00:53:53] So, I know he has,

[00:53:55] I think there are some things that cause such revulsion

[00:53:57] in a particular society.

[00:53:59] So it just so happens in Western modern society,

[00:54:02] a finger up a nose is just revulsion.

[00:54:05] And if you try and explain your way out of that,

[00:54:07] the groupthink is so strong,

[00:54:09] you'll see people jump on you.

[00:54:10] We can take a much stronger, more disgusting example.

[00:54:14] There was recently this guy in Spain who's a politician,

[00:54:16] I don't know if the news reached the States,

[00:54:19] and he was found to have been eating shit, basically.

[00:54:25] And he'd put them on some website or I don't know what

[00:54:27] and people had found out that it was him.

[00:54:29] And obviously that's disgusting

[00:54:32] and he quit his job and all of these kinds of things.

[00:54:34] And then a friend of mine, do you know Peter Boghossian?

[00:54:38] Yeah, yeah, he's been on the podcast a bunch of times.

[00:54:43] Oh, great, okay, I love Peter.

[00:54:46] And so Peter tweeted,

[00:54:49] because he's always just going to be that guy.

[00:54:51] He just doesn't care and he owns it.

[00:54:53] And he goes, I'm going to be that guy.

[00:54:54] And he said, okay, the guy did a horrible thing,

[00:54:56] but here's something, why don't we just leave him alone?

[00:54:59] Right?

[00:55:00] And you would think that if it were possible

[00:55:02] to just own stuff that people would have gone,

[00:55:03] good point, Peter, they absolutely hounded him.

[00:55:07] And I spoke to Peter, he said, I just don't care.

[00:55:09] I don't care.

[00:55:10] Like, fine.

[00:55:11] But I was stupid enough to then tweet like, come on,

[00:55:13] because people were putting under Peter's thing,

[00:55:15] saying obviously you like eating shit as well.

[00:55:18] That's how the groupthink works.

[00:55:19] You can imagine a tribe.

[00:55:20] I mean, we know about witch hunting.

[00:55:22] You can imagine a tribe back in the day.

[00:55:23] You do one thing that you're not supposed to do,

[00:55:26] everyone's going to jump on you

[00:55:27] because they're scared that they're going to get accused

[00:55:29] or whatever it might be.

[00:55:30] I find it so cowardly and contemptible, but it's just life.

[00:55:33] And so loads of people saying that.

[00:55:34] So I just replied saying, guys, like, you know,

[00:55:36] just because you're missing the point here,

[00:55:39] he's just saying a guy did a disgusting thing.

[00:55:41] He's lost his job.

[00:55:42] He's been embarrassed.

[00:55:44] Job done.

[00:55:44] Let's move on.

[00:55:45] And as you can imagine, I got loads of tweets going,

[00:55:47] oh, obviously Andrew and Peter both like eating shit

[00:55:50] and all this stuff.

[00:55:51] So I think that idea of owning it is a nice idea

[00:55:53] and can work in certain circumstances.

[00:55:55] But if you sort of screw up in any way,

[00:55:57] that tribe, that cultish mindset of the human being

[00:56:00] is there to punish you quickly.

[00:56:03] I think you're right.

[00:56:04] I think because like in my,

[00:56:05] in the situation I described about myself,

[00:56:08] it was okay.

[00:56:11] I still got all the trolls and the haters.

[00:56:13] That was interesting to me.

[00:56:14] But the reason why I 10xed the audience

[00:56:17] and got many more people who liked my stuff

[00:56:20] was because this has happened to many people.

[00:56:22] They've all kept it secret

[00:56:24] and they all related to what I was writing.

[00:56:27] Whereas not everyone's going to relate to like eating shit

[00:56:30] or being supportive about eating shit.

[00:56:32] So that, you didn't really have a natural audience

[00:56:35] of people to support you.

[00:56:37] Yeah.

[00:56:37] Just to reiterate to anyone listening,

[00:56:39] I wasn't supporting the act of eating shit.

[00:56:41] Neither was Peter.

[00:56:42] It was just a mind,

[00:56:43] I mean, Peter does that, anyone who knows him,

[00:56:45] he likes to, he's very much a contrarian.

[00:56:48] I mean, as are you and as am I,

[00:56:50] and I imagine many people

[00:56:51] who listen to your podcast are as well.

[00:56:53] And you just want to sort of throw something out there

[00:56:55] and go, well, you know,

[00:56:56] maybe we shouldn't all jump on this guy.

[00:56:57] I'm very, I hate any kind of jumping,

[00:56:59] everyone jumping on one guy.

[00:57:01] And I always feel bad for that guy.

[00:57:03] And I don't know.

[00:57:05] But again, that's another dimension of secrecy.

[00:57:08] Depending on how relatable the secret is,

[00:57:12] supporting that secret.

[00:57:14] So now one level further,

[00:57:16] supporting that secret will subject you

[00:57:19] to the same type of judgment.

[00:57:22] And we see this all the time.

[00:57:26] People will judge you based on who you hang out with.

[00:57:28] And sometimes that's appropriate,

[00:57:29] but sometimes like in this case,

[00:57:31] just a tweet supporting Peter who made a tweet saying,

[00:57:34] hey, leave this guy alone.

[00:57:35] That got you the same,

[00:57:38] you inherited suddenly the same hostility

[00:57:41] that the Spanish politician got

[00:57:44] when his secret was revealed.

[00:57:45] So there's such this magnetic power on secrecy

[00:57:49] that is so immense,

[00:57:51] which is why I think approaching this

[00:57:53] as the psychology of secrets is so compelling.

[00:57:58] Secrets are really powerful.

[00:58:01] And that's why as well,

[00:58:03] I started looking at what kinds of people

[00:58:05] do we reveal our secrets to?

[00:58:06] And it turns out that most people,

[00:58:08] when you ask them, who do you think you reveal secrets to?

[00:58:10] We tend to say we reveal our secrets to polite people.

[00:58:13] Like, oh, a nice polite person, I'd probably tell them.

[00:58:16] And in actual fact, it's the complete opposite.

[00:58:17] We don't.

[00:58:18] And that's because on some level

[00:58:20] we know they would be the worst people to tell.

[00:58:23] Because what does polite mean?

[00:58:24] Polite means you adhere to societal norms

[00:58:26] at a particular time and place.

[00:58:28] Again, what is polite in Japan

[00:58:29] might not be what's polite in America.

[00:58:31] We know what's polite in America

[00:58:32] and the UK is even different.

[00:58:33] It's different all over.

[00:58:35] It's a totally subjective social construct.

[00:58:38] It doesn't mean anything.

[00:58:40] And if you happen to be harboring a Jew

[00:58:43] in the time of the Nazis,

[00:58:45] well, the polite thing to do

[00:58:46] is to report that somebody's doing that.

[00:58:48] So you would not tell a polite person

[00:58:50] or during times of the Stasi or whatever.

[00:58:52] You wouldn't tell them, by the way,

[00:58:54] I went and watched pornography or whatever

[00:58:56] because they hated pornography in the Stasi.

[00:58:58] So we never tell polite people.

[00:59:00] Polite is not...

[00:59:00] And if you want to get secrets out of other people,

[00:59:02] don't sort of stress how polite you are.

[00:59:05] The best thing to be is assertive.

[00:59:07] And I think someone like Peter,

[00:59:08] in pushing back there, he was assertive, right?

[00:59:11] That Spanish guy doing his disgusting habits

[00:59:14] would have been much better placed to tell just Peter

[00:59:17] than to tell all of these people

[00:59:18] who would consider themselves to be polite,

[00:59:19] but really are just bullying this guy

[00:59:21] waiting for him to kill himself, you know?

[00:59:23] Well, assertive but not judgmental.

[00:59:25] Like you'd have to get a sense

[00:59:26] that they're not gonna judge you.

[00:59:28] That's true.

[00:59:29] That's true.

[00:59:30] I mean, one of the examples I looked at

[00:59:32] there's a journalist here called Louis Thoreau,

[00:59:35] Americans sometimes pronounce it

[00:59:36] the son of the travel journalist Paul Thoreau.

[00:59:40] He's like the guy in the UK that people will think of

[00:59:42] when it's like, oh, everyone reveals their secrets to him.

[00:59:44] How does he do it?

[00:59:45] How does he get people to trust?

[00:59:46] And everyone just thinks,

[00:59:47] oh, he's really polite and whatever.

[00:59:49] And I went and watched back

[00:59:50] and he was actually pretty judgmental.

[00:59:52] He was like, that's bullshit what you're saying.

[00:59:53] That's not true to Nazis when he was interviewing them,

[00:59:56] stuff like that.

[00:59:57] But he's definitely assertive

[00:59:59] and he definitely does show compassion.

[01:00:01] So those were the two biggest indicators of traits

[01:00:04] in people that we revealed to.

[01:00:06] So what, in what sense was he compassionate?

[01:00:08] So he's saying that's bullshit

[01:00:09] but maybe he wasn't being judgmental.

[01:00:11] He's just saying, I don't really believe that that is,

[01:00:15] like he's not judging the secret.

[01:00:16] He's just saying, I don't believe that that's true.

[01:00:18] So maybe then-

[01:00:19] That's true.

[01:00:20] That's true.

[01:00:21] There's an element of,

[01:00:22] there is an element of judgment there.

[01:00:23] I just think it's like, they're seeing this guy,

[01:00:25] they're going, hey, he's, I'm a Nazi

[01:00:28] and I hope no one cuts that bit out of context.

[01:00:31] I'm a Nazi and no one wants to talk to me ever.

[01:00:34] Well, here's this journalist and he's hanging out with me.

[01:00:36] We're going on the school run to take my kids to school.

[01:00:39] We're like having lunch together.

[01:00:41] And yes, he keeps, as you say, having a go at me

[01:00:43] and he is a bit judgmental.

[01:00:45] He's judging some of the stuff

[01:00:45] but he sees me as an equal.

[01:00:47] He doesn't think he's morally superior to me.

[01:00:48] He's not polite.

[01:00:50] So something about me trusts him

[01:00:52] because I guess evolutionarily we know a polite person

[01:00:54] is someone who sticks too rigidly to social mores.

[01:00:59] And he's compassionate.

[01:01:01] I see that how he's interacting with his crew

[01:01:04] or how he's talking to my daughter right now.

[01:01:06] He's interested and he wants to get to the human in people.

[01:01:10] I think that's what,

[01:01:11] that's how we get people to tell us their secrets.

[01:01:12] So those are the traits we have to sort of emphasize.

[01:01:15] And there's always this relationship

[01:01:17] between secrecy and lying

[01:01:19] because if you don't want to tell a secret

[01:01:20] and someone directly asks you,

[01:01:21] you have to lie to cover up the secret.

[01:01:24] And you discuss in the books,

[01:01:26] and you brought up Anne Frank earlier,

[01:01:29] but you discussed how Sam Harris who wrote a book, Lying.

[01:01:33] Sam Harris has been a frequent guest on this podcast.

[01:01:37] You mentioned how he had a professor in college

[01:01:40] who was able to convince him

[01:01:41] even in the Anne Frank situation,

[01:01:43] you shouldn't lie to the storm troopers

[01:01:45] who come to the door asking if Anne Frank's there.

[01:01:48] What's the argument for not lying?

[01:01:51] I mean, 100% I would lie if Anne Frank was in my attic.

[01:01:55] I would hope that I would lie.

[01:01:58] You never really know how you react in a certain situation,

[01:02:01] but I hope I would lie.

[01:02:03] So what's the argument though for not lying?

[01:02:06] I think I'd do that thing where I'm like,

[01:02:08] no, she's not here,

[01:02:09] but like with my eyes,

[01:02:10] like looking like she's up there kind of thing,

[01:02:12] don't kill me.

[01:02:14] As long as you don't kill me, I'm fine.

[01:02:16] Now, hopefully I would also be brave, but who knows.

[01:02:18] So Sam didn't really give,

[01:02:21] I mean, it was quite muddy what he seems to say.

[01:02:24] He's not entirely sure of what he's saying.

[01:02:26] He doesn't give examples of what the teacher

[01:02:28] used to say in that Anne Frank situation.

[01:02:32] And he even, after sort of spending a long time saying,

[01:02:35] you know, we must just always tell the truth.

[01:02:37] It's always best to tell the truth.

[01:02:38] He then says only a psychopath

[01:02:40] would actually endorse this kind of behavior.

[01:02:43] Like I must tell the truth in that circumstance.

[01:02:46] I mean, let me just interrupt for one second.

[01:02:49] Like I guess there's a macro argument

[01:02:52] where is why you'd have to be a psychopath.

[01:02:55] The macro argument might be,

[01:02:57] I'm going to tell the truth here

[01:02:58] and Anne Frank is gonna die.

[01:03:00] But because I told the truth,

[01:03:02] they're gonna be more likely to listen to

[01:03:04] and believe all my neighbors

[01:03:06] who will lie about the girls they have in their attics.

[01:03:09] And all of those girls will be saved

[01:03:12] because the people will believe

[01:03:14] because they knew I was telling the truth.

[01:03:16] Yeah, I mean, I think that's maybe,

[01:03:19] it's a bit specious, isn't it?

[01:03:20] But you're hopeful in that situation,

[01:03:22] you'd be panicking, wouldn't you?

[01:03:23] I'd be like, yeah, okay, maybe I'm helping.

[01:03:25] I'm helping other people.

[01:03:26] I'm helping all the others to survive.

[01:03:28] I mean, Immanuel Kant gives this answer

[01:03:30] because he's a truth purist

[01:03:31] and he was a philosopher, a German guy.

[01:03:35] And so he said,

[01:03:37] the issue here is that you lie

[01:03:40] and say no, Anne Frank's not up there.

[01:03:41] Now this was before Anne Frank.

[01:03:44] So it was just a random person that you're harboring.

[01:03:47] But you say Anne Frank's not up there

[01:03:49] and then you don't know this

[01:03:50] but Anne Frank climbs out the window

[01:03:52] and escapes.

[01:03:54] And then the guard, the Nazi,

[01:03:57] he's left because you said no, Anne Frank's not up there.

[01:04:00] And the Nazi then comes across Anne Frank in the road

[01:04:03] and kills her.

[01:04:04] And that's your fault

[01:04:05] because your lies led to that situation.

[01:04:09] Yeah, I read that argument in the book

[01:04:11] and I was thinking that seems really convoluted.

[01:04:14] Anne Frank has to be shopping in the grocery store now

[01:04:18] and then the Nazis just randomly run into her

[01:04:20] and now she definitely dies

[01:04:21] as opposed to maybe she would have died.

[01:04:23] And so, by the way, it does make me think

[01:04:27] that there were probably too few

[01:04:30] or too many philosophers back then.

[01:04:32] Now just everybody's a philosopher

[01:04:33] because you have Twitter.

[01:04:34] So the value of being a philosopher has gone to zero.

[01:04:38] The supply is now infinite of philosophers.

[01:04:42] Poor philosophers.

[01:04:44] Hmm?

[01:04:44] Well, the philosophers,

[01:04:45] I mean, they weren't exactly swimming in money before,

[01:04:47] were they, the philosophers?

[01:04:48] Right.

[01:04:48] Now it must be their economy,

[01:04:49] but yeah, it's just sunk.

[01:04:50] It's just crashed.

[01:04:52] Yeah.

[01:04:52] So, I mean, what did your own relationship to secrecy,

[01:04:57] like, okay, you know,

[01:04:59] and I'm pretty sure we've talked about this before,

[01:05:01] but where do you stand on radical honesty?

[01:05:03] Because that's related to all this secrecy

[01:05:06] and the Anne Frank stuff and so on.

[01:05:08] It's just certain kinds of people.

[01:05:11] I was on this podcast called Trigonometry.

[01:05:13] Do you know that?

[01:05:14] Yeah.

[01:05:15] So Constantine Kissin and Francis Foster.

[01:05:18] And I had a great time on there.

[01:05:20] And when we finished, Constantine said,

[01:05:23] well done, that was great.

[01:05:25] That was really, really, really good.

[01:05:27] That's going to do well, you know, that kind of thing.

[01:05:29] And I said, yeah, but I mean,

[01:05:32] I say that to everyone when they come on my podcast.

[01:05:34] Like if someone, you know,

[01:05:35] I just always tell them, you were brilliant.

[01:05:37] You were wonderful.

[01:05:38] That was so good.

[01:05:39] I mean, I've even said that in times where I think,

[01:05:40] God, I can't even put that one out.

[01:05:42] That's so bad.

[01:05:43] But I'll still just be like, fantastic.

[01:05:44] Thank you so much.

[01:05:45] Yeah, you're really good.

[01:05:46] And he just went, I thought he would sort of agree.

[01:05:49] I don't know.

[01:05:50] And he's like, really?

[01:05:51] Why?

[01:05:53] I went, what?

[01:05:53] Why?

[01:05:54] Because it's easier

[01:05:56] or because this is a person who's given up their day

[01:05:59] to come and whatever.

[01:06:01] And if they are going to realise later down the line

[01:06:03] that, oh God, my video wasn't actually very good

[01:06:06] or whatever, at least they've realised it.

[01:06:08] You know, they're at home,

[01:06:09] they're with their family,

[01:06:09] they're alone or whatever.

[01:06:11] Instead of like face-to-face with the guy

[01:06:13] who's like looks really disappointed in them.

[01:06:15] That's such an awkward thing

[01:06:16] and so sad for them to have to go through.

[01:06:18] And he said, well, you know, you've just got to be honest.

[01:06:21] You should always be honest.

[01:06:23] I don't know what's right there.

[01:06:25] I just know it's not natural for me to do it.

[01:06:27] And it appears that it is natural for him to do it.

[01:06:30] And I think that helps him out a lot

[01:06:32] because he has no issues with just being honest

[01:06:35] and putting everything on the table

[01:06:36] and it makes him a wonderful arguer.

[01:06:38] But I couldn't do it.

[01:06:39] I think you wouldn't be able to do it either.

[01:06:41] I definitely would not be able to.

[01:06:43] No, you can't.

[01:06:44] You can't even reply to a text, you know?

[01:06:46] I know.

[01:06:47] Oh, wait, have you texted me and I've not replied?

[01:06:50] No, I didn't bother.

[01:06:50] Which is by the way...

[01:06:52] No, but it's true.

[01:06:53] This is a huge problem for me

[01:06:55] that's getting bigger every single day

[01:06:57] that I literally cannot respond to people.

[01:06:59] And then everyone who I like,

[01:07:02] because those are the people who texted me

[01:07:03] are people who I like,

[01:07:04] everybody who I like starts to hate me.

[01:07:06] Yeah.

[01:07:07] And I don't know what I can do about this problem.

[01:07:09] It's some kind of issue I have.

[01:07:10] I'm fortunate that with you,

[01:07:12] I went into this with my eyes open

[01:07:13] because when I met you a year and a half ago, I think,

[01:07:17] I'd already read your articles.

[01:07:18] You don't even reply to your own family.

[01:07:20] So I gave you a bit of shit about it,

[01:07:21] but I just thought, okay, this is someone I'm meeting

[01:07:23] who's very nice, very hospitable

[01:07:25] and what a lovely experience it was.

[01:07:27] And it really, really was.

[01:07:28] I mean, you know,

[01:07:29] and I'm not going to have an ongoing relationship

[01:07:33] with this man until Jay maybe messages me or something

[01:07:36] because he can't reply to texts.

[01:07:38] It's just as if phones weren't a thing

[01:07:40] and I've accepted that.

[01:07:42] I can't respond to phone calls either.

[01:07:44] Oh, God.

[01:07:45] So I don't, it kind of makes me isolated,

[01:07:48] but I'm trying, I'm trying really hard.

[01:07:52] It's, I need like some, I don't know how to do it,

[01:07:55] but you know, it's so, by the way, just in general,

[01:08:02] all the topics that you write about

[01:08:03] and that we talk about, they're so interesting.

[01:08:06] Each one deserves its own podcast.

[01:08:08] Like I love reading about NXIVM

[01:08:10] because I knew personally someone who was like neck deep

[01:08:13] in that cult while they were still in it.

[01:08:15] I love reading about Scientology

[01:08:16] just because I didn't really know

[01:08:18] that all that stuff about Lord Zeno.

[01:08:19] I hadn't seen the South Park episode

[01:08:21] and it was interesting how even people

[01:08:25] very deep into Scientology were still high enough

[01:08:28] to know all of these secrets.

[01:08:29] So it was fascinating to see how they unraveled their secrets

[01:08:32] in order to basically extract more money from people.

[01:08:35] And, you know, just in general,

[01:08:37] the psychology of secrecy made me think

[01:08:38] of the connection between secrecy and storytelling.

[01:08:42] And it builds a whole new model of storytelling

[01:08:44] if you think about stories in terms of secrets.

[01:08:48] And it's just always fascinating stuff

[01:08:50] that you're working on.

[01:08:50] Like what else are you working on?

[01:08:52] What are you working on now?

[01:08:53] Thank you for the kind words, by the way.

[01:08:55] I do really appreciate that.

[01:08:56] And it reminds me of the storytelling.

[01:09:00] I mean, that's such a big part

[01:09:01] that we've actually lost in,

[01:09:03] because I try to look at the good sides as well.

[01:09:05] And I did have a go at Hasidic Judaism in the book,

[01:09:08] but they would say to us like,

[01:09:10] okay, you've got your individualism

[01:09:12] and you've got your American dream and all of this stuff

[01:09:14] and you can do what you want to do.

[01:09:15] Okay, but you've lost what we have, what they have,

[01:09:18] which is they gather around a fire or whatever it might be

[01:09:22] and they tell one another stories

[01:09:23] and they can't wait for the next story.

[01:09:25] And there's something nice about that.

[01:09:27] Now I wouldn't change it for what we have,

[01:09:28] not in a million years,

[01:09:30] but I also want to be honest that I think,

[01:09:32] oh, it's sad that we don't really have that.

[01:09:36] I mean, I started this new channel that's going to probably,

[01:09:38] I mean, it might piss off half your listeners,

[01:09:40] but the other half will absolutely love it.

[01:09:42] Because I was doing the YouTube channel

[01:09:44] about cults and ideologies.

[01:09:45] And every now and then I went into controversial terrain.

[01:09:49] Like people don't mind, like I said,

[01:09:51] everyone's on board with you about Scientology.

[01:09:53] But when you go into like,

[01:09:56] well, either side of the political spectrum,

[01:09:57] like is Trump a cult or whatever?

[01:10:00] People are really angry.

[01:10:01] And if you go on the other side,

[01:10:03] is trans ideology a cult or something like that?

[01:10:06] Everyone goes bananas.

[01:10:07] And so I thought, I've just got to start a new channel

[01:10:09] and just do that stuff.

[01:10:10] I'm really interested in the culture wars.

[01:10:12] Obviously both sides,

[01:10:14] when you go too far either way are awful,

[01:10:16] but I don't find the right as interesting

[01:10:18] as a storyteller, as a YouTuber or whatever,

[01:10:20] because I don't know any right-wing people.

[01:10:22] I don't know guys running around saying,

[01:10:24] Jews will replace us.

[01:10:26] And just, oh, I hate black people

[01:10:30] and I should have a slave.

[01:10:31] I don't know anyone.

[01:10:32] That's not to say they're not out there,

[01:10:33] but no one I grew up with and no one I know

[01:10:36] is espousing this stuff on Instagram.

[01:10:38] Whereas loads of people I know

[01:10:40] who I went to university with

[01:10:41] and all these kinds of things

[01:10:43] are shouting all sorts of woke stuff,

[01:10:47] trans women are women, that kind of thing.

[01:10:50] So I just thought, okay,

[01:10:50] you can't have a YouTube unfortunately that does both

[01:10:54] because you get an audience

[01:10:55] and your audience are gonna go for one way, unfortunately.

[01:10:59] That's a really sad aspect of...

[01:11:03] I think Peter Boghossian told me this.

[01:11:04] I think basically he said,

[01:11:06] you can't be in the middle if you want an audience

[01:11:09] because then both sides...

[01:11:11] I think it was either Peter Boghossian or Scott Adams

[01:11:12] who told me, if you present the view of both sides fairly,

[01:11:18] then everyone will hate you.

[01:11:19] Yeah, 100%.

[01:11:20] That's what he did with the shitting Spanish man.

[01:11:23] The way YouTube works

[01:11:24] and I feel like I've got the algorithm sort of down,

[01:11:26] not that there actually is an algorithm,

[01:11:28] it's just basic psychology.

[01:11:29] It's basic human psychology.

[01:11:30] And so if I water things down and make them nuanced,

[01:11:33] it doesn't get as many clicks.

[01:11:34] That's just life, it's just reality.

[01:11:36] It means that I lose a lot of friends

[01:11:38] who think I'm more extreme than I am.

[01:11:39] The interviews are very nuanced.

[01:11:41] The titles and thumbnails on YouTube are pretty extreme.

[01:11:44] But also I've now got,

[01:11:46] after six months of this new channel,

[01:11:48] it's already got 125,000 subscribers.

[01:11:50] Most videos get 100,000 to 500,000 views.

[01:11:53] So it's doing well.

[01:11:55] And I know that what it does is

[01:11:58] every time I put out a new video,

[01:11:59] if I were going to put out something like,

[01:12:01] oh, this is the problem with Trump.

[01:12:02] You know, he's not very statesman-like

[01:12:04] and he's just a bit of a buffoon or whatever,

[01:12:07] or things I would like to say,

[01:12:10] you know, I'm still probably pro-choice

[01:12:13] and I'm a vegan, I'm not very passionate about it,

[01:12:16] but I don't eat meat and things like that.

[01:12:19] If I suddenly put out something like,

[01:12:20] why I don't eat meat?

[01:12:22] Well, what YouTube will do

[01:12:23] is it will show those 125,000 subscribers first.

[01:12:26] These are the guys that signed up because I said

[01:12:28] the left has a worrying relationship with Islam.

[01:12:31] You know, they don't want to, they're not going to click.

[01:12:33] And if they don't click,

[01:12:34] YouTube won't show the actual audience

[01:12:36] who would want to see that stuff about why I don't eat meat.

[01:12:38] So you can't win.

[01:12:39] I tried and tried and tried

[01:12:41] and the videos that were a bit more worthy

[01:12:43] and that other side just failed every time.

[01:12:46] And then you can't pay to run your channel.

[01:12:50] But anyway, that's what-

[01:12:52] No, that's right.

[01:12:52] That's very interesting.

[01:12:53] That's similar.

[01:12:54] Someone told us the LinkedIn algorithm

[01:12:58] it takes anything you write

[01:13:00] and it shows your first 30,000 subscribers

[01:13:05] the article or the content.

[01:13:07] And then if they like it,

[01:13:08] it shows it to the rest and then to the outside world.

[01:13:11] And if they don't like it within the first 60 seconds

[01:13:14] or minute or 10 minutes or whatever, then it's gone.

[01:13:18] And I'm thinking, boy,

[01:13:19] my first 30,000 subscribers were 18 years ago.

[01:13:22] So I don't even know who, you know, they're all dead.

[01:13:25] I don't even know who they are.

[01:13:27] That's a problem.

[01:13:28] That is a problem on like YouTube in particular.

[01:13:30] It's not so much of a problem on like an audio platform

[01:13:32] because an audio platform doesn't have discoverability

[01:13:35] in the same way.

[01:13:36] So people subscribe to it.

[01:13:37] If they like what you've put out,

[01:13:39] they'll always get a notification and they'll watch it.

[01:13:41] I listened to it, sorry.

[01:13:42] On YouTube, you only get big views from discoverability

[01:13:46] which means YouTube saying,

[01:13:47] hey, this video is doing really well

[01:13:48] with his normal subscribers.

[01:13:49] Let's push it to new groups.

[01:13:51] And that's how you grow.

[01:13:52] And that's how a video does well.

[01:13:53] So you are constantly incentivized,

[01:13:56] not just financially,

[01:13:56] but also you want your channel to do well, you know,

[01:14:00] to get more and more extreme guests

[01:14:02] who are all one way and all one way of thinking.

[01:14:05] And even like I had a guy on the other day

[01:14:07] who was really nuanced.

[01:14:08] He's the guy who wrote the status game Will Store.

[01:14:10] And early on, he said he made a sort of joke

[01:14:13] about anti-vaxxers because, you know,

[01:14:16] it just seemed obvious to him that the vax is fine

[01:14:18] or whatever.

[01:14:19] And I didn't even say, I don't have an opinion.

[01:14:20] I don't, you know, it's not my area of expertise.

[01:14:23] But I saw a huge drop off

[01:14:24] because somebody had said a thing

[01:14:26] that went against what their tribe thinks

[01:14:28] for like an anti-woke or non-culture war channel

[01:14:33] and they couldn't handle it.

[01:14:35] So anyway, I try, I'm just trying as much as I can

[01:14:39] to keep it balanced.

[01:14:40] And I think the way to do that now

[01:14:42] is have extreme guests on,

[01:14:44] because people click on that,

[01:14:46] but halfway, ask them about what they're talking about.

[01:14:48] And then halfway through say,

[01:14:50] okay, let's have an argument, you know?

[01:14:53] And so, and then I still get to feel like,

[01:14:56] hey, I've pushed back against some of the views,

[01:14:59] but some of them I agree with.

[01:15:00] So it's a lot on the-

[01:15:02] How fast do you do the argument?

[01:15:03] Like how fast do you have to bring the argument in

[01:15:06] to get the controversy in?

[01:15:07] Well, the argument doesn't necessarily get more views

[01:15:10] because the argument is,

[01:15:12] if you imagine all my followers and subscribers are going,

[01:15:15] yes, this is a video about why the trans thing

[01:15:18] is no different to exorcism in another part of the world,

[01:15:22] because it's just like teenage girls

[01:15:23] who don't have control of their lives,

[01:15:25] trying to exert control over something

[01:15:27] and it's their body or whatever.

[01:15:28] You want to watch that video,

[01:15:30] then that's what you're on.

[01:15:32] You're like, I'm on this video.

[01:15:33] So we've got a guest,

[01:15:34] the guest is telling me all that stuff.

[01:15:35] And if I suddenly go, well, hang on, I don't agree.

[01:15:38] That's already putting a bit of, they're getting annoyed.

[01:15:40] They're writing comments going like,

[01:15:41] hey, well, Andrew's not on board with this.

[01:15:43] Well, I am.

[01:15:44] And people are pissed off and they click off.

[01:15:45] There's too many other videos for them to watch

[01:15:47] with people who do say the things they want to hear.

[01:15:50] So that's the reason that I actually leave the argument

[01:15:53] for like half an hour in.

[01:15:54] And it's for me really,

[01:15:56] but it's also good for trailers on Twitter

[01:15:58] and things like that.

[01:15:59] So that is good.

[01:16:00] I did a good one the other day.

[01:16:01] It was a really woke woman called Enia Luko,

[01:16:05] who is a black English ex-soccer player

[01:16:09] who is a pundit, like a commentator on TV

[01:16:11] all the time with the football.

[01:16:12] And I think you know from my story and everything,

[01:16:15] I used to work at the BBC and made documentaries.

[01:16:18] And then they said, because you're a white man,

[01:16:19] we can't have you on screen.

[01:16:20] You have to be like behind the camera

[01:16:22] and we'll put a minority on screen.

[01:16:23] And I was like, but it's my work.

[01:16:24] The journal, I found the stories

[01:16:26] and that's what they wanted.

[01:16:27] They didn't want to hear that I was Jewish.

[01:16:28] That didn't help.

[01:16:29] They would just laugh at me when I said that and whatever.

[01:16:33] And so we had this debate, her and I,

[01:16:35] where she was saying, hey, DEI is a good thing.

[01:16:38] And I was saying, no, it's not.

[01:16:40] And that did like really well, not on YouTube.

[01:16:42] It did okay, got 200,000 views,

[01:16:43] but on Twitter, it like blew up,

[01:16:45] got over 2 million views because it was this big clash

[01:16:49] and also because unfortunately

[01:16:50] she really didn't come across that well.

[01:16:52] And it was one of those kind of disaster ones, but you know.

[01:16:56] So that's what I'm doing.

[01:16:57] It's a channel called Heretics.

[01:16:59] That's so interesting.

[01:17:01] And the stuff about the algorithm is interesting

[01:17:03] because I feel like,

[01:17:04] I don't know what I did early on in YouTube,

[01:17:06] but I must've quickly built up to about 50,000 subs.

[01:17:10] But that was like, again, years and years ago,

[01:17:12] more than 10 years ago.

[01:17:14] And now I post something

[01:17:17] and I tend to be pretty neutral about a lot of issues.

[01:17:19] I just want to kind of learn and get information

[01:17:21] and maybe story tell, but I can't get views

[01:17:26] because I'm just like not triggering the algorithm at all.

[01:17:28] I'll get literally like 12 views on something.

[01:17:30] You're completely fucked, man.

[01:17:32] You're fucked.

[01:17:33] You got to start a new channel.

[01:17:34] I think that's right.

[01:17:35] I think I do have to start a new channel,

[01:17:36] but your channel is like related to like your email

[01:17:39] and like your Google account and all that.

[01:17:41] I guess I have to start a branded channel.

[01:17:42] Like you started a channel with a name like Heretics.

[01:17:44] It's not like the Andrew Gold channel.

[01:17:47] It's actually got a purpose that's outside of you.

[01:17:50] So you could start a new one.

[01:17:51] Your problem isn't that you're James Altucher.

[01:17:54] That's a good thing.

[01:17:54] People will sign up,

[01:17:55] but it is a problem what you've encountered.

[01:17:57] You've got a lot of people at the beginning.

[01:17:58] A lot of celebrities get a lot of subscribers

[01:18:01] at the beginning.

[01:18:02] They start a YouTube channel

[01:18:03] and then their videos don't do well.

[01:18:04] And the reason for that is that subscribers,

[01:18:06] those people are not necessarily people

[01:18:08] who want to watch an hour long interview.

[01:18:10] They're people who like the guy, say it's Ricky Gervais.

[01:18:12] They're like, I like this guy, Ricky Gervais.

[01:18:13] I'm going to just subscribe.

[01:18:15] So suddenly he's got a million followers,

[01:18:16] but none of them are actually people who watch his kind,

[01:18:20] if he was doing podcasts, let's say.

[01:18:21] None of those people who watch it.

[01:18:23] So what happens every time he puts out a new video,

[01:18:25] or let's say you, every time you put out a new video,

[01:18:27] those people followed you

[01:18:28] because they liked the stuff about like the articles

[01:18:30] that were controversial,

[01:18:31] things you've said that are controversial in the past.

[01:18:33] But maybe these are not podcast listeners

[01:18:35] or podcast viewers on YouTube.

[01:18:37] They've just seen your name and they go,

[01:18:39] oh, I like him, click subscribe,

[01:18:41] but they'll never watch it.

[01:18:42] So you're just screwed from the beginning

[01:18:44] because every video you put out goes to them first.

[01:18:46] They don't watch it, no one else gets to see it.

[01:18:48] So yeah, you've got to start again.

[01:18:51] And that's why I started again with Heretics.

[01:18:52] It just wasn't going to work on the old channel.

[01:18:54] I think that's really smart.

[01:18:56] I'm going to experiment with this.

[01:18:58] So, and then when's the book on Heretics coming out?

[01:19:02] Oh man, I might, I started it.

[01:19:04] It's called, what was it?

[01:19:07] The Unintentional, or the Unintentional.

[01:19:13] Oh man, hang on, I want to get this right

[01:19:15] because I had this great name

[01:19:17] and I've probably got it here.

[01:19:19] The Unintended.

[01:19:20] The Unintended Bigot Chronicles of a Hellbound Heretic.

[01:19:26] And it's about how,

[01:19:28] because I haven't mentioned this,

[01:19:29] but this book, I was invited to like loads

[01:19:31] and loads of museums, the Tate Museum,

[01:19:33] all of these kinds of things to speak about it.

[01:19:35] And every single one of them got in touch

[01:19:37] after inviting me with Pam McMillan

[01:19:39] and disinvited me

[01:19:41] because they say I'm a controversial figure.

[01:19:43] I think it's mostly because of the gender stuff.

[01:19:46] So I've not been able to do any of that

[01:19:47] like traditional publicity.

[01:19:49] And I'm like, this is weird.

[01:19:50] That is fascinating.

[01:19:51] Yeah, so I'm sitting there thinking,

[01:19:52] it's interesting because the book, as you know,

[01:19:53] doesn't even touch on culture wars.

[01:19:55] It's all about psychology and secrets

[01:19:57] and those kinds of cults and things.

[01:19:58] So I just thought, how has it gotten to this point

[01:20:01] where, I mean, one very quite famous journalist,

[01:20:04] his name was going to be on the back

[01:20:05] and he also called up the day before

[01:20:07] and said, I've seen what you've been doing

[01:20:09] and I don't actually disagree with you

[01:20:11] but I can't have my name on the back of the book.

[01:20:13] I was like, okay, thanks for that coward.

[01:20:16] But you know, how is it,

[01:20:18] I'm interested in investigating that,

[01:20:19] sort of telling the story

[01:20:20] of how I started the YouTube channel

[01:20:22] and all of these things

[01:20:22] and trying to analyze myself and go like,

[01:20:25] am I a bad guy?

[01:20:26] What's going on?

[01:20:27] And have I let myself be captured by audience and ideology?

[01:20:30] So that's what I'm interested in now.

[01:20:33] Can we do another podcast about that

[01:20:35] like in a couple of weeks?

[01:20:37] Yeah, of course.

[01:20:38] We could do it right now and after you write the book.

[01:20:40] We can do that.

[01:20:41] And we can do that in a couple of weeks if you want.

[01:20:43] And then I'll just push the psychology of secrets at the end.

[01:20:46] That's what I want people to get

[01:20:47] because you know what?

[01:20:49] They did a weird thing.

[01:20:50] It's not even out in America till the 1st of September

[01:20:53] on Amazon, you can pre-order.

[01:20:55] Oh, psychology, this is not out till 1st of September?

[01:20:58] Yeah, it's mad but it is out in the UK.

[01:21:01] So what all my sort of subscribers in America are doing

[01:21:04] is you go to amazon.co.uk,

[01:21:06] you've got to go to the English Amazon,

[01:21:08] the UK Amazon and order it there.

[01:21:11] And then they ship it over.

[01:21:14] It's like, hopefully it's only like five or $6

[01:21:16] or something to ship it over from the UK.

[01:21:19] Well, people should absolutely get it.

[01:21:21] Like they should get it now because I really,

[01:21:24] I don't always enjoy, look,

[01:21:27] when I have a guest on, I usually love what they do.

[01:21:30] But sometimes like maybe they ghost write the book

[01:21:33] or maybe they're not really a writer.

[01:21:34] So it's a little bit, I like the ideas

[01:21:36] but it's a little harder to get through the book.

[01:21:39] You are an excellent storyteller,

[01:21:40] you're an excellent writer.

[01:21:41] This book is so fascinating.

[01:21:42] Like the concepts around secrecy,

[01:21:45] the psychology of secrecy, I just loved it.

[01:21:48] So it's a great book and you're always a great guest,

[01:21:52] Andrew, you're always welcome on the podcast.

[01:21:55] You should come on all the time.

[01:21:57] And thanks once again for coming on this side.

[01:22:00] And by the way, here's what I'll do.

[01:22:02] I'm gonna release the podcast now.

[01:22:03] So people can order off of amazon.co.uk

[01:22:06] but also I'll release it in the first week of September

[01:22:09] when it comes out.

[01:22:10] Mate, you're amazing.

[01:22:11] You're an absolute legend.

[01:22:13] Double hit.

[01:22:13] So thanks once again, Andrew.

[01:22:15] I really appreciate it.

[01:22:17] It's such interesting stuff.

[01:22:18] Oh, thank you, James.

[01:22:20] Anytime.

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