Modern Wisdom - #374 - Will Storr - How To Play The Status Game

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Will Storr is an award winning author and journalist. Status is the original human currency. Prestige, renown, respect and admiration are all sought after because it gave our ancestors better access to mates, safety and resources. Now the modern era has arrived, the lions are no longer chasing us but our desire for status is a strong as ever. Expect to learn why growing a huge yam can make you the favourite in your tribe, why tall poppy syndrome exists, the reason for our conscience, the risks of radically gaining or losing status, the winning qualities to develop if you want to enhance your status, how the status game relates to cancel culture and much more... Sponsors: Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Status Game - https://amzn.to/3hzYnrD  Follow Will on Twitter - https://twitter.com/wstorr  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show, my guest today is Will Store. He's an award-winning journalist and an author, and we're talking about how to play the status game. Status is the original human currency. Prestige, renown, respect and admiration are all sought after, because it gave our ancestors better access to mates, safety and resources. Now, the modern era has arrived and the lines are no longer chasing us, but our desire for status is as strong as ever. Today, expect to learn why growing a huge Yam can make you the favourite person in your tribe. Why tall poppy syndrome really exists? The reason for our conscience, the risks

of radically gaining or losing status, the winning qualities to develop if you want to enhance your status, how the status game relates to cancel culture and much more. Honestly, Will's new book, The Status Game, is one of the best things that I've read this year. If you enjoy this episode, then links to go and get it are in the show notes below. It's so interesting and fast-paced, there's tons of stories, and it's super relatable, and it kind of makes you feel silly, but self-aware and world-aware

at the same time. It's awesome. I really, really hope that you enjoyed this episode. I also want to give a massive thank you to everyone that has been sharing the show over the last couple of weeks. The growth that we're seeing at the moment is insane and it makes me feel so supported and satisfied and happy to continually reach new ears with these interesting fascinating guests that I find. So if you are one of those people that's sharing the show and showing support, thank you very, very much. I love you long time. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Will Store. Will Store, fan of the game. Well, stop. Lock it in the show.

Thanks Chris. We're good to be here. Dude, I loved your book. It is awesome. Thank you. That's really good to hear. Thanks Chris. You nailed it, man.

So you did all this research about status, throughout all of that, what was some of the weirdest, stateless games that you found? I think the one that I always go back to is the Yams. Yeah, in 1948, this anthropologist went to this tiny island in Micronesia, at called Pompeii, and they had this kind of thing where it's very stratified in Pompeii, life there, like it is everywhere, but

it's quite hard to break through to the upper levels of Pompeii society, but you could do it one way, and that one way is by growing a massive yam, and these feasts, these chiefly feasts, and the person who brought the biggest yam was declared number one, literally that's what they call him number one, and yeah yeah, and, you know, he would, they would be, you know, raised in status. And, you know, what happened, the inevitable consequence of that was that the men of Pompeii just became obsessed with growing the biggest yams. And they, they sneak out of their homes at two in the morning and, you know, they'd grow their yams in secret, you know, parts of the forest, cover them with branches, and then we could see the yams in secret, parts of the forest covered them with branches and then we could see the

Yams and tend to them with fertilizer. And human ingenuity and the human craving for status being what it is, they grew massive Yams. Yams so big that it would take 12 men to carry them into the theme using a special stretcher on poles. So that's that's that's that's that's status madness. And you know, as I'm recreatingreating the book we can direct our craving for status at anything and we do an I'm is among those that we can yeah, yeah, what is it? Yeah, it's like sweet potato what the fuck's a young it's like it was kind of a tuba But I don't know I don't actually know what you're in sexy thing To use for sad rather get the Ferrari if that's not exactly sexy thing to use for Saturday, rather get the Ferrari if that's not exactly.

I can't ride my Yam down the street. Yeah, it seems more fun. Yeah, just you know, this is another status game works. You know, we can use anything as a symbol of status. It can be a giant Yam. It can be a Ferrari. It can be a lovely watch. It can be a hell-gritting activist we are, you are. Well, the reason that that example so funny is that we look at it and think,

oh, YAMS, how ridiculous. But objectively, there's nothing any more or less ridiculous of a YAM versus a Ferrari or versus being the best social justice warrior. Yeah, exactly. The classic example is watchers, you can buy a cast-eater watch for, you know, fucking ATP on eBay. Or you can spend $2.4 million on a watch. And it's, they're just telling you the time. I mean, and that's $2.4 million watch is just as stupid as a giant jam.

Can't even eat the Ferrari. You can't eat the Ferrari. So you say that status is more important than sex, power or money. Why is that? Well, I don't think it's more important. I'm saying that, you know, we have lots of, you know, different drives, but I think status is one of the most fundamental ones. I wouldn't say it's more fundamental than sex. That's really a basic. But, you know, it goes back to our evolution. As I'm sure we're apes, we're a weird kind of ape that has master the art of cooperative living. That's what we do. That's how we've

solved the Darwinian problem of survival and reproduction. We gather into coalitions. We have this urge for connection and to be accepted and to feel belongingness. That's a really important one. But once we've connected in, there's always a surge to move up. We're not typically content to be thought of as likeable but useless.

He's a nice guy, but he's just fucking rubbish. There's not all we, that's not human nature, we want to rise, we want to sort of move up. And back in the kind of hunter gatherer days when our brains were doing much of their evolution, it was the case that the more status we earned, the better food we got, the more food we got, the more safer our sleeping science, the greater our choices have made. So when you think about that in terms of survival and reproduction, the more status we have, the better our capacity, so far, to survive and reproduce. So that's a very basic idea that your brain understands completely. Go for status. Because if you go to status, you're going to get that sex,

you're going to get that power, you're going to get that yam, you're going to get that Ferrari. But the basic is, well, in connection first, but then once you've connected it, once you've connected in with this coalition of like minded people, you try and rise. And when you kind of take a step back, that is human existence, that is human thriving. Those groups take the forms of political coalitions, businesses, hobby groups, cults, religions. That's just what we do as humans. That's the basis of human behavior. We gather into groups and we connect into groups and we strive for status. Individually, in those groups, we compete for status with other people, but those groups think compete for status with other groups. So the status game is constantly working on those

two dimensions, internally and versus rivals. How do you define it? Define status. Yeah, it's steam being thought of as valuable, useful. you know, it's not just, you know, connection and belongingness, which people talk a lot about, you know, is about, you know, just feeling loved, I suppose, as you might love a family member or a kind of romantic partner or, you know, something that you, but the stages is about admiration, you know, somewhat above. That's what we like to think, that's how we like to think of ourselves and our groups. Is it like an existential currency

that our brain sort of keeps track of? Yeah, I mean, in the book I discovered is the original currency. Before that we haven't evolved to crave money. You know, money wasn't around when our brains were doing all that evolution. We've evolved to crave status. And money is just one way that we've, it's a yeah, you know, it's the one way that we've, what one way that we, that we count. codified status. Yeah, it's another way that we play the status game.

You can use power as a status symbol and people do. But some people are not interested in power. Some people are not interested in money. Money is obviously very useful beyond its purpose as a status symbol. But that's essentially what it is. It's a way of playing the status game. The absolute directly gets you better resources and enables your survival and reproduction. It accelerates your capacities to survive and reproduce. What are the main ways that people can attain status? So there are lots of sort of basic ways,

youth, beauty, age, you know, but both youth and age are ways to get. So when you get between 35 and 50, you're fucked and then on the other side, you're all right. Yeah, you know, like in the book, I think I sort of start to sort of globally say that by the hotel pool, youth wins. But when you're trying to get a seat on the train,

age wins, so it depends on the context. So yeah, it's traditionally, of course, age would always win, but now in our kind of youth obsessed culture, it's less so. But the basic ways, the more interesting ways, the ways we have evolved. So firstly, it's dominance. Dominance is the most basic, animalistic way that we get status. And dominance is about violence, the threat of violence, the threat of punishment, and so that could be physical violence or reputation destruction or ostracization. So dominance is, you know, unfortunately, you know, a part of our human nature and has

been since before we were humans. Dominance is typically a much more kind of animalistic way, you know, the hens peck at each other until their packing order is established. And that's how they play their status game. But we know humans, when we kind of settle down, you know, we develop these new ways of playing status games. You know, some animals do play games with reputation too, it's thought, interestingly. But we kind of really mastered the art of playing status games with reputation by earning prestige. And fundamentally, it's about showing yourself to be useful to your group, to your tribe.

There are two ways you can be useful to your tribe. One is being virtuous, so courageous, generous, but also a conformist, good follower of rules and a good person who punishes rule breakers. That's part of being virtuous. And the other way is by being successful, being skillful, by being the best honey find at the best hunter, the best grower of yams. So those are the three kind of essential ways that we play status games, dominance, virtue, and success. And if you think about those three different routes to status, they kind of define the kinds of status games that we play.

So boxing is a dominance game. It's about violence, and it's about who's the most, you know, dominant individual. A religion or a role or a role family is a virtue game. It's about deference, obedience, following the rules, and a corporation or a scientific endeavor is a success game. They're award rewarding status on the basis of you successfully achieving some closely defined goal. And just the important thing to note here is that there aren't any really pure games.

All games tend to be a mixture of all three, but usually one root to status will be dominant. So in boxing, that's obviously a dominance game, but it's not as a virtue element too, because you have to follow these rules. And obviously it's a success game, you have to be, it isn't just about throwing punches would he nearly, he got to be really skillful

to be a successful boxer. So you can see how all those three routes to status are in most games, probably all games, but one tends to be, it's like a flavor in a soup that dominant kind of flavor. Which one smells fragile? I'm going to guess the dominance, the fear and force. What do you mean by fragile? In that ruling through fear, to me seems like the least scalable. Getting people to actually buy into you as a human, to get them to want to support you. This person has virtue, they are useful to us.

We can trust them. That, to me, seems like it would scale very well. Whereas fear and force inherently seems more risky. Yeah, I think there's something to that definitely. When you're forcing people to attend to you in status, that is, in many contexts, an inherently unstable way of leading a status game, as you see throughout history, dominant leaders tend to fall. But the research is quite interesting because it shows that when a status game a group fills under threat, they tend to want a dominant leader to lead them. So it's

a typical thing that when the status of a group feels under threat like in terms of war or even a pandemic, that people want to be led by somebody who is more dominant, and that's found interestingly across gender, that's men and women tend to prefer dominant leaders in those times. Why do you think that is? Well, because we're in trouble. We need a leader to come in and tell us what to do. Dominance, one of the concepts that I write about in the book in some depth is this concept of tightness, which

psychologists talk about. Groups and cultures can be tight versus loose. And so in the West, we have quite loose cultures. It's not just in the West. But yeah, UK, the US are quite loose cultures. We're not that conformist. We value individual freedom. But other cultures, Germany is a relatively tight culture.

The southern states versus the northern states of America, southern states tend to be tighter. So they're more conformist, there's more dominance going on. They're better at following rules. They tend to be more superstitious and liable to believe the wild stories that are told amongst their group. And so in times of trouble, we tighten up, even the loose, ETC during the pandemic,

especially in the UK, we've been very conformist during the pandemic. The anti-vax thing isn't a major thing over here like it is in the States. We've tightened up, and my personal default is okay, tell me what to do, I don't care. If you tell me to wear a mask, I'll wear a mask, if you want me to drop it, I'll drop it, just tell me what to do. And I think that's the appropriate, that's actually appropriate in a time of threat, to go into that kind of tighter, kind of hunker down and enter that

kind of tighter, more conformist space. How do high and low status people relate to each other then? Well, the game is always kind of jostling. One of the interesting things that I read quite a lot about in my research is the idea of the copying instinct. You were just amazing at copying people and we tend to copy the high status people who are in our game. So they're the people that we look up to and go, I want to be like you and we'll tend to kind of blindly copy them. And it's quite interesting, there was one study

that looked at the behavior of young human children versus chimps and the experiment was, there was a certain procedure that you had to go through in order to get some sort of treat. And the chimpanzees quite quickly worked out which parts of the procedure weren't, they were copying, they were learning by copying. And the know, quite quickly worked out, which parts of the procedure weren't, you know, they were copying, they were learning by copying, and the chimps quite quickly worked out, which parts of the procedure they could drop, but the young humans copied everything,

they didn't care, they just copied everything. I thought that was really interesting, because in a sense, the chimps are smarter than us in that context, you know, they just, I don't need to do that, I don't need to do that. But we're copying everything, and that's the status game. And you know, I remember when I was eight years old, I was obsessed with this pop star, Nick Kershaw,

you know, it was completely, you know, oh my God, I was, you know, and I remember seeing him on TDAM you know, with his, crossing his legs in a certain way. He had his ankle on his knee and I thought, wow, and I just started doing that. And you know, I didn't know why I was doing it, but I started to go and just go to sit and around with my ankle. That's going to be my route to become a world champion pop star.

And I didn't know why I was doing it, but that's the programming. We look at people that we want to be like, and I got at the copy, flatter, conform, kind of, the copy, flatter, conform process. That's what we want to do. We copy them, we flatter them. Oh, you're amazing. We lavish them with status and we conform. We do what they tell us to do. And that's kind of a strategy. It's because we want to climb up to and we're looking at them.

They're up there. So if we copy everything they're doing and we're nice to them. So they allow us to be around us, then we'll hopefully rise too. Do you think that we actually like people with high status, or do we just secretly hate them and find them useful allies? That's a good question because it's a nuanced question and it's something that I really kind of wrestled with when I was writing the book. And so the answer is it depends. And as I said, I think, generally, the general factors we resent high status people,

status is of such value to us. And it's relative. So the more other people have, the less we have. It isn't just like a score on a scoreboard. If I sell this many books, but in my rival sales, this many books suddenly, now I'm down here. We're constantly measuring other people's status versus us. We've evolved in relatively small groups, compared to today's globally connected internet world. We haven't

evolved to play these huge vast games where we're subconsciously comparing ourselves to bloody Michelle Obama or the King of Thailand or whoever it is. We are kind of subconsciously comparing ourselves to bloody Michelle Obama or the King of Thailand or whoever it is. So we are kind of driven with resentments. But there are exceptions to this, and the exceptions are really when, as I say, it's the Nick Kershaw thing again, it's when we're sort of playing a status game and we're looking up at somebody and they're playing the same game as us and we're going to that mode of, I want to be like this person, you know, I want to learn from this person, become this person. And then, you know, that kind of fights through that default resentment. And actually, we, you know, we start to admire them, you know, we admire artists and, you

know, icons who we feel have a piece of us in them and that we want to be like. Presumably there must be a closeness metric that we have in the back of our brains where you're, you were Nick Kurshaw, you were eight years old, you weren't competing with him. So modeling his behavior is still a high status thing for you to do that doesn't look like deference to arrival as opposed to if you had the kid that was in the year above you and wore cooler trainers, maybe you and him could be jostling for similar sorts of status. I imagine that that closeness actually provides more rivalry as opposed to sort of cooperative modeling.

Definitely, yeah, that's absolutely right. And that was one of the sort of more surprising things that I learned, that you might think that maximizing the sense of competition between people will give you maximal performance, say, in a company. But it's actually not true, too much competition, just gives you a hellish, say corporate environment everyone's, because status is freely given. And status is in short supply, I'm fighting for it. No one's going, you know, status is freely given and status is in short supply

I'm fighting for it. No one's going to be giving out status. I mean, it's going to be immeasurable, it's going to be a miserable, you know, place to work with environment to be in. And actually, you know, rival really really is, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, rivalry happens when, as you say, when we're very close, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, feels very close to competitive with an individual or another company. And it's that closeness that creates the rivalry. So typical rivals have a history of near wins, near losses, skirmishes. And you can think about Apple and Microsoft, or obviously Apple have now beaten them into

a pulp. But for a long time, Apple and Microsoft were deadly rivals. Because they were close for a while. And yeah, that works obviously on the individual level too, is the people closest to us that we've become very rival or as to. And actually, rivalry can be very, very motivating. It can, as unpleasant as it feels,

it can be an absolute force for success when we kind of lock into a rival and go right is personal. I'm gonna be you, you know. How what was some of the examples that you found to do with the ridiculous relativity of status? Wasn't there an economist article to do with job titles? Yeah, that's right. It wasn't an economist, it was a study. I think it was of 17,000 employees in Britain. And I think by memory it was 70% of them said they were up for,

given the choice they were up for, a more statusful job title, rather than more money. And so a filing clerks wanted to be called Data Storage Specialists, was one of them called data storage specialists, it's funny, but they were onto something. Status is really important, and as important as resources are, status is also extremely important, and it's not an irrational, I don't think it's an irrational choice to make. It sounds so irrational though, think about it. You're choosing to get what is essentially just an intangible nothing over a real explicit, objective, quantifiable, take it home, pay

it, make it work for you, asset. And people would rather have 70% of people would prefer to get, I think I saw a study as well previously to do with, would you rather double your work, double your wages and everybody else stay the same or 10x your wages and everybody else 20x. And the vast majority of people chose to get the absolute lower figure but the relative higher figure. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that shows the importance of status. And it sounds stupid, but there are two things to say about that. And first is just to re-up the idea that we have evolved to crave status on a fundamental level, psychologically, and is also, you know, evidence,

there is evidence also physically, we need to feel like we have status, otherwise we're in trouble, big trouble psychologically. So it matters, it's like an essential nutrient for the mind, status. So we need it. And also, you know, these job titles, it's just an act of imagination, but it's all an act of imagination. The fast car is an act of imagination. The flashy watch is an act of imagination. Even, you know, the moral status games that we play are acts of shared imagination. You know, we decide one day that this is the morally correct thing to do the next day

or something else. It doesn't exist in the real world. All these moral arguments we have with everybody that don't actually exist. You can't find a moral truth under a microscope. You can't dig it out of the ground. You know, it's all acts of imagination. You know, and that's the world that humans exist in. We connect into groups and we have this shared imaginary games that we play where we say this job is great and this job isn't great. we play where we say this job is great

and this job isn't great, this belief is great and this belief is great. This type of activity is worthy of status, this type of activity is not worthy of status. This is something that really struck me when you broke down what are consciences, that are consciences basically an internal enforcement mechanism for things that we predict our culture would reward or punish in terms of status. Yeah, so it's not my phrase, but somebody came, I read about it in a red-the-phrase in Sarah Jane Blakemore's book. And she talks about this idea of the imaginary audience, the conscience of this imaginary audience. We're a social animal and status, if it it's not dominance is given to us, voluntarily

by the people that we share our lives with. And so you can see the conscience, this is kind of rehearsal, it's kind of prediction machine. If you imagine doing something really bad, your conscience twitches, you should do that. You respond with fear. But if you imagine yourself doing something fantastic, the people that you share your life with are going to think it's great, you feel really good. And that's your conscience kind of helping you, predicting. And, you know, and it also punny, you know, it also obviously works retrospectively too. If you do something really bad, that's a kind of signal from your, from your kind of status game playing cognition saying, don't do that again. That is danger. Danger lies that way because when you do that, it's a social thing. You're dropping in status in the eyes of your co-players. That is bad.

In the old, it's thought that a capital punishment was once a human universal. So that's the ultimate cost for, dropping too far in status. You're dead. So that's the conscience. It's helping us out by predicting and by whacking its finger at us. The things we've done in the past, it's like a pain signal in a way, warning you that something's wrong with your behaviour. It's interesting that a lot of the things we value in terms of morals and virtue, they don't look as selfless in the harsh light of the status game, do they? No, I think the initial, the journey that I've been on with this is, is, is, firstly, you start. Sorry, did you get uncomfortable? Did you find it uncomfortable as you slowly imbibe

that a lot of the things that you valid in yourself, the virtuous qualities you thought you had are just these shameless plays to desperately try and get Will Storz named further up the endless Totem pole of status in the world. Well, to be honest, I have quite, I don't, I don't know, not really. I don't really have a hugely high opinion of myself. I've still for Steve issues. I don't think I didn't go on that journey. I never thought I was this saint anyway. But yeah, I think you go on a journey of initially quite

cynical, quite going, well, all these moral things we do, it's a game, it's a status game, and the Pope, Mother Teresa, their moral superstars, in the same way that Barack Obama's a political superstar and Nick Kersher was once a pop superstar. They're superstars and we treat them as superstars. When you look at the, you know, I grew up in a Catholic household. When you look at Catholic displays of status, it's absolutely ridiculous. You address them as your holiness and they all were these huge bloody hats on and, you know, gold cups, you know, the status displays are so unhidden.

Oh, so tati, yeah. Yeah, is really a fundamental as I say, human need. The mistake is saying, oh, it's just status, it's only status. Status is incredibly important to us. It's not just and only status. It's really important that people feel good about themselves. And you know, secondarily, the fact that our species has kind of developed this kind of evolved technology in which we are rewarded for doing the, you know, make altruistic selfless acts is absolutely fantastic. That's like probably the best thing about our species is that we have,

you know, both this conscience inside us, so we feel good when we do something as selfless, and we're celebrated by the people around us when we act selflessly, is absolutely incredible. I mean, it's the best part of us. And so that's where I ended up really. It's actually, you know, an amazing thing that we have a system of automatic reward for acts of selflessness. That's a really cool insight. The fact that if you were to take the actions as objectively as you can, which is kind of what philosophers do, I suppose, right,

they remove the presuppositions and the biases and they look at is doing this thing actually good in the harsh light of day. And it kind of seems like it is, but we've just, like, imbibed this. It's just this instantiated embodied knowledge that we just do. And then you go, well, no one needed to teach me,

really, I've just, no one actually ever said all of these different rules. There isn't a huge list of them somewhere. I just kind of know. And then you've got the conscience that acts as this internal enforcement mechanism that makes sure that you stay on track. Yeah, it is. It's wonderful. Yeah, it is. I mean, and there's some really interesting work that when they go around globally looking at what are the fundamental kind of moral rules. And one of the,

of course, there are lots of different ideas about this, but the study that I talk about in the book is this one that finds these seven basic universal moral rules. They are very basic and open to a huge interpretation, it's like respectful elders or respectful superiors, appears selfless, things like this. Biologically, it does seem like there is a basic kind of very basic kind of blueprint for human moral behavior. But all the rest of it is cultural, and we learn about it throughout childhood. That's what childhood is all about. It's in school with our parents, it's teaching us the rules of the status game of our time and place. You do this. Good boy, good girl, bad boy, bad girl,

it's all status, it's all up and down. If you do this, you're up, if you do that, you're down. And you're, you know, childhood is about training that imaginary audience in your head. So you don't need the parents anymore, you don't need the teachers anymore, you've actually got it, you've absorbed it, and you've become a player of your time and place.

Childhood is like training the imaginary audience in your head. I think that's pretty good. It's the first day back to school today for a lot of kids, so they'll be learning whether or not that internal audience over the last, perhaps two years, if not actually seeing anyone who's working on that. So what happens if you continually lose status?

Really bad things. What one of the, when I was thinking about, the very, very early stages of thinking about whether even this could be a book, I kind of set myself a little task and that was the task or question really. You know, if you're going to argue that status is this important, it must be really bad when we lose it. So what does that look like? And so I started to research humiliation, the effects of humiliation and that's what

really convinced me because the definition that I came across of humiliation, the effects of humiliation, and that's what really convinced me because so the definition that I came across of humiliation is it's not just somebody taking your status away from you. It's basically robbing you of any hope of claiming that status again in the future. You're so lacking in status, you're basically banned from the game. And one psychological describes humiliation as the nuclear bomb of the emotions. So when you look at the very worst things that human beings engage in, anything from genocide to honor killings to spree killings, to many instances of serial murder, it has humiliation at its core. So that really convinced me that this was a really important subject and

that status was, you know, a fundamental human need. In the book, I tell in some detail the story of Elliot Rogers, the in-sale, and I was able to tell that story because before he killed a bunch of people in an in-sale, he left a 108,000-word memoir online, which was, you know, really a truly extraordinary document because he, whilst being unbelievably narcissistic, is also incredibly honest about his shortcomings and his problems. And there you see, and I think we know what I came to is the most dangerous people are not only the ones who've been humiliated again and again and again and again, but they're the narcissists, the grandiose people who've been humiliated again and again and again and again, because they feel entitled to a life up here, but what

reality is giving them is down here and down here and down here, you know, for years. And, you know, especially if you're male and you have a propensity to solve status disputes with violence, that's a horrible cocktail. Male, grandioso and humiliated is really, really dangerous. And I talk about the example of the unibomber is quite extraordinary. This guy went to Harvard and took part in these basically humiliation experiments. They were like a government sponsored experiments. I think CIA sponsored experiments to see what happened. Not the UK ultra thing, or is that a different guy?

I think it was related to that. To people in the comments, this is a sort of thing that YouTube excels at. So we will find the answer. Whoever knows the answer about MK Ultra and the Unibomid, please link to a video in the answer. Whoever knows the answer about MK Ultra and the Unibomet please link to a video in the comments. Yeah, so they basically got a group of people, including Ted Kaczynski, and they said, you know, you're going to do a scientific experiment, they didn't really tell them what it is, as normal in psychological experiments, and they're basically had them write down all their deep, all their dreams and hopes and ambitions, lots of confessions, even about things about thumb sucking and masturbation, so all their secrets,

all their hopes and dreams and values. Then they sat them down in front of these bright lights and basically mocked them, mocked these individuals. This happened again and again and again for years. Because Inskis brothers said, we didn't know what was going on, but we saw the change in him, you know. And you know, what does a UN in Unibomb Stanford University is? Why? Because you know, there were, there were part of his campaign of terror, it would send, you know, bombs to universities. You know, he ended up with this kind of mindset, that, that, you know, all these kind of scientists who were kind of torturing him when he was at Harvard were responsible for all the problems in the world. And the grandiosity was there.

He was going to lead this global revolution. And like Elliot Roger with his 108,000 word memoir, he had his, I think, 35,000 word manifesto published in, I think it was the Washington Post. So obviously a grandiose man, definitely severely humiliated, and you see the consequences. Grandios humiliated and aggressive. So you've got the male and male. So you've got the dark triad, but this is more like the dangerous triad. That's the three that you need to make sure that you don't have. Yeah, it's interesting thinking about what happens when people lose status,

that it gets degraded over time. What about tall poppy syndrome and people that sort of have it and then you have these huge falls because there's a sense inside the slow motion car crash. Everybody hate follows some people on their social media that the ones that you watch just to sort of pity them because you enjoy watching how much they're sort of wrecking everything. I don't know.

I see what you mean Chris. Well, come on. I'll go through you following if I need to. But yeah, everyone's got that. And the tall Poppy Syndrome must be a part of this. Yeah, totally. As I say, if we don't directly relate to somebody and really admire them and want to be them, we tend to become quite envious of them. The tour probably has been

found to be a cross-cultural effect. There was a great study, I didn't put in the status game because it was in my previous book. I would love to have cut and pasted it. It was done by a psychologist in the University of Shenzhen. It was really clever. They got these people and then they just say, you're going to be taking part in a neuroscientific experiment. But we're running a bit late. What do you go over there and play this computer game and you know just spend 10 minutes on there so you go over and you play this computer game and you go off the computer game and you say well you know just just out of interest you were kind of pretty mediocre you know all these people over here did much better than you and all those people over there did much worse than you so that is so you okay you sit down and then they put these people in a brain scanner. And they showed them, I think, images or videos of having injections

in their face. And what they were looking for were signals of empathy, because as you probably know, you know, when we, when we, I think it's a tania singer, I think that was the neuroscientist that found this, that when we empathised, you know, not the same neuro patterns, but similar neuro patterns will be seen in the brains if we were actually getting that injection in our face. So they took them and the people that they saw were the people from the waiting room who don't know that better or worse, that the game than them. And then afterwards they said to the people, you know, did you feel empathy, you know,

what did you think about those images? And they said, oh, it's terrible. The injections, oh, must have been awful. And they said, did you feel empathy for them? Oh, yes, yes, yes. Did you feel empathy for all of them? Oh, yes, yes, yes. But the brain scans gave the lie. They tended to only feel empathy for the people who had done worse than them on the game. And they didn't feel any empathy for the people who did better than them on the game. So that shows you, it's just extraordinary evidence for this, this tall poppy syndrome

that people who we see as higher status than us. We don't feel empathy for them, we don't like them. Another, the study that I do quoted in the status games shows, when people reading about somebody's successful and rich, the pain signals become more activated. Oh, you know, the pain signals become evident and then when they read a story of that same person being,

you know, suffering a fall, pleasure systems become activated. So, you know, it's in us, it's the status game mechanism in our brain, yeah, it's how we experience the world. And it's not a nice part of human nature, but it is an undeniable part of human nature. Trying to map what you've said so far together, it feels like we have this sort of relativistic viewpoint of where our status works, right? It's not absolute, it's to do with who we're near. And that shows of status from people, specifically people that we're kind of close to,

whether that be geographically, that we can relate to rivals, that makes us feel quite uncomfortable. Also reading about it and showing other people having success, that makes us feel less good. Losing status is bad for our health, it can cause us to be depressed, and it makes us live for less short amounts of time. Does this mean that we should choose our friends very, very carefully?

Yeah, I mean, I would say so. You know, I mean, one of the things I wrote about in my book, Selfie, which was out a few years ago now, is this idea that it's actually, a contra to what all the self-help gurus will tell you, it's very hard to change yourself. And a much better route to kind of something that feels like happiness is by changing your environment, changing, I talked about this idea of the lizard and the iceberg.

You can put a lizard on the iceberg, and it's a miserable lizard, but take that same lizard and put a lizard on the iceberg and it's a miserable lizard, but take that same lizard and put it in the desert, suddenly it's a happy lizard and nothing has changed about that lizard, but everything has changed about that lizard. And I always think that's an underrated, it's a solution for a lot of our problems,

it's by trying to change our circumstances. And as Ruth says it sounds, changing the people who you're spending your life with, you know, it shouldn't be an option that you just dismiss if somebody's repeatedly making you feel bad, then get rid of the bizarre thing is that a lot of the time we want people that are motivated, that are growth-minded, that makers want to bring out the best of us, but those people are often going to be rivals. They're going to be people that are doing well, that have their own hustle. Maybe it's not the same hustle as us.

And yeah, I mean, it seems to me that the best friends for the status game would be the ones that are doing worse than you. Well, it depends on how that person is coming across. You know, what we don't like are the people who are doing well and they brag about it, depends on how that person is coming across. What we don't like are the people who are doing well and they brag about it, whether it's a humble brag or it's show-in-us or there's constant pictures on Instagram

or whatever it is. It's perfectly possible to be friends with people who are higher status than you if they don't constantly remind you of that fact. I think it's the constant reminders of that fact that upsets people. It's the humble bragging and of that fact. I think it's the constant reminders of that fact that kind of that upsets people. It's the humble bragging and all that stuff. And also, you know, it can be really, you know,

positive. So I didn't write the letters in the stages game, but in my, you know, journalistic, not a few years ago, I did a story on CrossFit and I went to CrossFit annual CrossFit Games in California. CrossFit is a classic example of how these dynamics can be used for good. CrossFit is a status game, it's absolutely a status game, it's a success game, and it's all positive. People are just there positively pumping status into you when you're working out, and that's how it works, And that's why people get addicted to it.

Because every week you're getting better and better and people are clapping you and clapping you. And it's that. So the status can be positive. These people are, a crossfit group is going to be bad if it's in a sense of, oh, look at you. I'm much stronger and faster than you. But that's not what crossfit is.

It's all positive. So that's my idea not what CrossFit is. It's all positive. So that's my idea of what CrossFit is. So you can have healthy status games, but they're the ones that aren't miserly in the status. In the book I talk about how a successful group is the status generating machine. Any successful group is the status generating machine. It's generating status for all of its players. Presumably those status down. Status is kind of is a status generating machine. It's generating status for all of its players. Presumably those status down. Status kind of is a zero-sum game.

In order for you to rise in status, you have to rise relative to someone else. That's the whole point. So even if you decide to have your group of your five friends that you are the average of and you have that group, even if they do manage to raise you up, that is only in relation to an out group that you no longer are. So if we still got in group out group mechanisms,

it's just that we decide how broad we want to have that viewpoint. It's getting very meta. Yeah, yeah. So there's two things. So one thing is, you know, the status games compete with other status games. You know, so you're competing both internally and externally. And it doesn't have to be, I don't know if it's zero, so internally, I don't know that a zero-sum game

is exactly right, because in the CrossFit example, you can imagine, everyone's just, there will be a hierarchy there, of course there will be. There's Anne Middleton at the top, and there's me at the bottom, you know. But if Anne Middleton's been really nice to me and going, yes, mate, yes, mate, yes, mate, I've been really good because that's the high status person making me feel like I really count. And I'm doing a really good job. So that, you know, so it doesn't have to be,

you know, one of the examples I give as a really bad status game is Enron, the company Enron, who had this rank in the ink system. So, regularly, the whole company would be chopped up into pieces and parts. The top 15% would be rewarded. The bottom 15%, I think it was, would just kicked out. And everybody was, everyone's just fucking terrified. And so you don't want to be working for Enron. So I think zero sum game, status is relative, but it doesn't necessarily mean it ends up being its absolute kind of hellscape.

The other thing, of course, is that status games compete with other status games, and a major source of status for everyone in that group is when your game wins over a rival game. There was a really telling piece by a quote from Laurie Lee, the author Laurie Lee's autobiography. And he was a kid at the height of the British Empire, but certainly when the British Empire was still the British Empire. And he talks about being as poor as they get. They lived on boiled cabbage, and that was what they ate.

He said, we'd be sitting in the classroom, we'd look at the map on the walls, or the pink bits with the British Empire, and he said we'd look at each other and we'd feel like centurions. It's that idea of when our group, when the group to which we belong is high status, no matter where we are in it, we feel great.

It's somebody working for Apple computers. You can go to the Apple Store tomorrow, and you can see people who work with the Apple store, they think they're amazing because they work at the Apple store. Well, we need to be very careful about dissing the people from the Apple store. My entire life is built upon that infrastructure. So if they fucking log into the back end of my eye cloud and they break, they break everything, I'm wrecked. No, but I have personal experience. My first job when I left school was working in the local independent record shop and we were the biggest snobs in the world.

You know, I was working for a shop. I think I was earning 85 pounds a week or something and I thought I was amazing because I worked at long player and all the idiots worked at our price and HMV. You know, I'm saying that about Apple because I've been that person, 100% the archetypal indie snob from high fidelity, sneering at Celine Dion. I was that person when I was 19, so completely guilty. What happens, we've talked about what happens if someone loses status, what about if someone radically gains status? You might not know this, but I went on Love Island. I was the first person through the doors

of season one of Love Island. So, correct, yes. That is amazing. Yeah, I tend to wait about 45 minutes before I drop that in, so I've timed it. I've timed it about right. Yeah, so what happens? You take Vanessa, 19, hairdresser from Wigan,

then you just deposit her in the middle of a villa, and then six weeks later, she's got two million followers in a brand deal with pretty little thing. What? You still have found any? No, I've never watched it. I've never watched a single minute. I lived it, so I've served it my time. Really?

Yeah, I've been living for four weeks a month or so. I'm going to watch that series. Oh, please don't. Please don't. What happens when someone radically gains status? I think it's dangerous. I do. I think there's a very interesting study that I kind of talked right about in depth in the book. And these psychologists, it was very small, so they had 12 people, which is usually found upon in the world of psychological studies.

But there were 12 unnamed, very high status Americans, you know, a psychological studies. But there were there were there were 12 unnamed very high status Americans, so celebrities, you know, actual kind of celebrities. And it was quite extraordinary, you know, and it was sort of passing, you know, their their experience of kind of huge of huge fame. And they talk about this process that is initially just amazing. It's just dream life, people are calling your name. One of them actually said suddenly you matter. But then what happens is, you know, there are various stages, one of which is that you start losing all your old friends

because, you know, compared to you, they're nothing. And you can't spend time with them without reminding them of the fact that you're now up here and they're down there. So you lose all your old friends. The only people with the only friends that you've got left of the people that are there with you because of who you are,

so you stopped trusting everybody. And then, I thought what was really telling was that ultimately what happens is that they, some of them started talking about how nobody really knows me. And it was like they had plenty of the success variety of status, but they started wanting the virtues kind of variety of status. And they started getting crossed because, oh, I'm actually, the real me, if you only knew the real me.

So it's like, it's obviously not all it's cracked up to be fame. But also, I think personally, I remember a few years ago meeting somebody who obviously I won't name, but she found in almost success when she was in her early 20s. Yeah, I'll say in a Hollywood film, I go that far, and then nothing. And when I met her when she was in, I would say, early middle age, and she struck me just as a deeply unhappy woman. She kept referencing the film and the success, and she talks a little bit about how the fact that she can't go out and

just get an ordinary job now because there have been stories and newspapers about, look at this person, the court they're doing now. But I kind of, you know, I think if you were to ask her about her success, she would probably say it's the best things that have happened to be, it was amazing. But I left with a powerful sense that it was actually the worst thing that have happened to her because it ruined the rest of her life. And, you know, we're not designed to have that much status. You know, we evolved in these relatively small groups. We haven't evolved to have global fame levels of status. It's not good for us. You can see it in the behavior of people becoming almost famous. You know, not all the time, but especially

when they become famous young. It does something to people. It turns them into not nice individuals. So, yeah, for me, the ideal, you know, the ideal, sort of perfect life would be a slow, but, you know, steady rise in status throughout your life. That's the ideal to go for. You know, you wear every year, you achieve something else, and you achieve the next thing, and you achieve your achievement. I don't idea to go for, you know, where every year you achieve something else and you achieve the next thing and you achieve the next thing. I don't think that's

possible, you know, because there's always going to be setbacks, but the sudden spike of fame when you were 19, 20, 21, I think is very often a disaster because it's unsustainable. It is like hedonic adaptation, the way that we deal with our status, and then we're so relativistic that as soon as we've been to that peak, now even though we're continuing to look forward, we've always got this reference point behind it. Well, I'm not where I used to be. So yeah, this was something that I had in my head. There's a fitness tracker that I use, and it tracks your heart rate variability in your resting heart rate

and it gives you a score and it says this is how rested you are and whether you are green, amber or red is dependent on how you are relative to your previous period, let's say to seven day window or a 14 day window. And if you are better than that, then it says that you are green and if you're about the same, it says that you're amber and if you're better than that, then it says that you're green. And if you're about the same, it says that you're amber. And if you're worse than that, it says that you're red. So the only way to get a lot of people that's a part of this whoop community, they talk about green recovery. So seven green recoveries in a row is like, wow, you've nailed your recovery mate.

But what they don't realize is that the only way to perpetually get green recovery is to essentially have a resting heart rate that drops to nothing and a heart rate variability, which is limitless. Because over time, you have to continue progressing. Let's say that you keep your whoop on for 50 years and in 50 years time your heart beats like resting heart rates one a minute and heart rate variability is 3,000 or something. That's the only way that you could do it. And it's kind of the same with status, that the only way to assuage our feelings of not having the right amount of status is to continually grow, which obviously, I guess, lends itself

perfectly to a meritocracy where you are what you do, a capitalist society where you can contribute, where you want to be on this wheel of personal growth and improvement and contribution and stuff like that. Yeah, I think that's right. So there's a chapter called the floor. And the floor really, I argue, it's this idea, is exactly what he says. It's the fact that we are very easily acclimatized to our sense of status. We might suffer wafes of imposter syndrome if we get a sudden bump, but that doesn't usually

last long. And when we get our rewards, we're very good at deciding actually, I deserve to all of those rewards and all my critics' idiots. You know, that's what we do. We accept the status, and we are climatised to it, and then we want more, and we keep wanting more, and we keep wanting more. And I think that's why super famous people end up often, not always always obviously, but often end up becoming so monstrous because they keep wanting more status and more status and they have to show that they have to show the people around them that they have more and more status so their behaviour becomes kind of ever more monstrous. So there are some stories and they're about kind of crazy celebrities wanting there. I think it was Kanye West wanted his, it said that the carpet is dressing as too bumpy and he ordered it to be ironed. So I had to go and iron his carpet.

And you know, some of the Fred the Shreds, the old boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland and you know, while whilst he was making all his terrible, huge sort of cuts, was having his kitchen in his office relocated so his scallops could arrive to his desk, a little warmer. So, you know, it makes, you know, high status can easily make monsters of us, exactly because of that, because we're climbers to it, we accept our level as appropriate and then we want more and then we want more and then as appropriate, and then we want more, and then we want more, and then we want more. What about those inuits that you looked at?

Didn't they do a song and dance when people got too big for the booth? Yeah, that's when we're talking about the resentment again, the fact that we don't like big shots, and there's lots of evidence in the anthropological literature of people dealing with what's sometimes referred to as big-shot behavior. And I like that idea that there's one in New York group that sings a song of derision at people who are at the brackets and the big dicks. So I just thought that was hilarious. A song of derision, my god. So they circled a person that's got a bit too much big dick energy and they put him in a pint and bring him down a couple of pegs. Yeah, it's Twitter essentially.

But in your own Twitter, yeah. Yeah, yeah. How does the status game relate to cancel culture? Well, I mean, it's very, very, very much so. I mean, you know, internet mobs, I think, are a dominance virtue game. It's about threat, it's about coercion, it's about you will follow the rules of my status game. Also, the two signaling on the side of the,

of the canceler as well. Absolutely, yeah. And yeah, I think probably the most interesting thing, the idea that really made sense of cancel culture for me was this idea called the tyranny of the cousins, and the chapter about internet mobs is called the tyranny of the cousins. And this was a real surprise to me, so it's this idea that the groups in which we evolved very often, not always, but very often didn't have like a big leader, big man leader at

the top, who was in charge. And you know, that was really surprising to me because when you look at human life today, there's leaders everywhere. We seem to love leaders, but they weren't. And so there was no sort of big single leader that was in charge of everything. Instead, there would be sort of a group of elders or kind of high status, there were relatively egalitarian groups, relatively high status people that would gather together to make decisions at certain times. relatively egalitarian groups, relatively high status people that would gather together to make decisions at certain times. And, you know, according to their specialism, you know, different people might have, you know, different kind of sway. But it's very much

about, you know, these early human groups, these pre-modern groups, are very much about consensus or the illusion of consensus. And so that happens when people break the rules of the group. You know, it wasn't like somebody would decide you were going to be punished. It was just a sense of consensus would gather against this person. And it would be an atmosphere of gossip. People were telling nasty stories about him. And that would create moral outrage and more moral outrage, create more consensus and it would build up and build up until in the case

in which I talked about describing the book, this poor bastard was accused of using sorcery to kill somebody and he was killed in eaten. And so that is exactly what you see. That is exactly what you see on social media. No one's in charge of a council culture mob. No one can start it, no one can stop it. It's something that builds itself up in an atmosphere of accusation, gossip and consensus and it just fires at this person. The tyranny of the cousins is about this idea that when

we were evolving in those groups, we weren't under the fear of the tyranny of leaders, it was the fear of the tyranny of these cousins. And there weren't literal cousins, but there were these ideas that these closely, these tribal elders that would sort of lead and sort of whisper to each other and try and make this consensus happen. And it's extraordinary, I could compare kind of a modern mobbing to a deadly mobbing

and I think it was the Gubusi tribe in Papua New Guinea. And some of the details are sort of hauntingly similar in what happens in these incidents. You know, the victims, in a state of panic, when they realize what's happening, you know, dancing between, you know, defending themselves, it being too scared to defend themselves and then sort of semi-confessing, but then not because they didn't actually do anything. And you see this in the Ghibu City, and you see this in victims of cancel culture. You also looked at the first ever social media network thing from the internet ages ago,

and there was echoes of exactly what we're seeing now there. And it's just a reminder that perhaps technology's removed the friction and it's made it more expedited that we can do this. It's quicker and it's more aggressive. And there's more fragmented groups in groups and out groups that are playing status games against each other because of that frictionlessness.

But it's nothing new. Now to blame, and this was something that was a tough pill for me to swallow because I think that human nature, I like to think that human nature is fundamentally virtuous and good, and it's an easy out to blame the ills that we're seeing at the moment on algorithms and social media, but they may magnify, but the fundamental of where these impulses came from is our nature, right? Yeah, absolutely. This was a big lesson I learned again when I was researching selfie and that was all about, you know,

the kind of the narcissism of social media and where that came from. And one of the big sort of turning points of understanding for me and there was the idea of the selfie camera and, you know, the idea was that, you know, the technologist, Steve Jobs' fault, and it's Google's fault for self-acultry because they put these cameras on the phones. But the original self-accomers weren't called self-accomers, they were called front-facing cameras,

and what Apple and the other companies thought they'd be good for were business meetings and for talking to your man. But that's not what we did with them. We started taking pictures of ourselves mostly. So Silicon Valley constantly throwing ideas at us. 99.99% of those ideas get rejected. And of tiny amounts of get picked up.

And it's the people. It's human beings that decide which Silicon Valley technologies are successful. And those companies then tune their platforms and devices around what we want. And what I found in South Korea is exactly the same as what I found when I was returning to the States game and social media.

It's that you can't blame Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey for cancel culture. Yeah, the first kind of social media site, as we would recognize it today was the well, which was back in the, you know, from back in the 1980s, still when people were having to do that thing with their phones like off-war games.

I don't know what it is, a modem. So it was a very small group, and when it got to about 500 users, so the well was a bit like Reddit. So the idea was like people, it was mostly people in in California They would gather around little interest groups and notice little status games talking about you know wine or the Ecos stuff or whatever it was and when it got to about

500 this sort of these individual arrived who just basically hated men and was just you know firing off all this Anti-male invective constantly and you know and. And they kind of mobbed around this person, they got them kicked off the platform eventually, deleted as many of their dispersants, entries as possible. Yeah, so it was all there and this person was gender non-conformist. So biologically female, didn't identify as a man, but used male pronouns and used male name. So slightly complicated. But I just thought it was extraordinary that in 1986, there was council culture,

they were arguing about pronouns, all the stuff that we see today, and that we often play on Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, happened in the very first social media website. And to me, that just shows, you know, what is Twitter? It's status games. You bring people together, you connect them into communities, they start competing for status. And, you know, with each other and against, you know, game versus game. And that's what that, and so, and, you know, and when that started working for Twitter, of course, they, they molded their technology around these things, but they didn't create it.

It was inevitably what was going to happen, you know, I quite this, this, you know, one of the other things about Nselfie and also this book is it's just kind of utopian technology study, the wired, you know, magazine ideas from the 90s and the early 2000s, the vision of the internet, which is when you connect everybody together, it's gonna be this utopia, no hierarchy, no disagreement, everybody getting on together. And it's just the opposite of what happened. And it's the opposite of what happened

because it's human nature. You know, that's what we do. You know, for good and for ill, that's what we do. As individuals, is it low status behavior to talk openly about status? Is acknowledging status motives a low status signal? Yeah, that's a really weird one. Obviously, people don't like to think of themselves as only, I only do this for status. We readily a terrible, we readily recognise it in our

enemies, but we hate recognising it in ourselves. And I think it's really this idea of the story telling brain. If the subconscious truth of us is we're just all outgoing for connection and status, as well as other drives, sex, food sex, food, you know, all that other stuff. And they're both status. Yeah, or, yeah, yes. And the kind of conscious experience of life we have is in that. We tell this heroic story about ourselves. And, you know, so in several books, I've talked about the idea of the brain as the hero maker.

It takes all the messy realities of heart, day to day life and conjures this heroic story of self that explains who we are in the best possible light. And increasingly, the way I've come to see that kind of story is it's almost like a sales pitch to both, to the people with whom you share your life. You really believe it's true. You've got all these biases and prejudices which distort reality. We even miss remember our past in such a way that makes us feel more heroic. So I think it's that kind of sales pitch, that story that is actually the conscious experience is so resistant to this idea

of status because it doesn't want to think of ourselves as that. It's a hero maker. It wants to say no, I want to change the world. I'm just I'm a good person. I am better than everybody else. It's not, you know, so yeah, I think that's why there's this disconnect. It's this unpleasant subconscious truth, I think, in a way. Did you have a look at which occupations are the most and the least anxious around status? I didn't. I didn't see any data on that.

I, no, I didn't. Anxious about status. No. I mean, just the most sort of status anxiety, I suppose, because you think about, I mean, just the most sort of status anxiety, I suppose, because you think about, I mean, politics is as far as I can see almost exclusively that, like, it's all image and shmuz and connections and, yeah, this is one of the things that I think that behind the scenes of, you know, the West Wing or Whitehall or whatever, these people must be just frantic, terrified,

perpetually, constantly playing this sort of very political, by nature, backbiting the status game. Yeah, I suppose that's why politics is so fascinating and makes such a great story because people's status is so fragile in the world of politics. And again, you see why politics is such a vicious world, but simply because status is incredibly fragile and it can be taken from you at any moment and there's a sense of people plotting against you. So yeah, I never thought of that, but that's a really interesting point. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the one profession I do write about in book is the legal profession, because I found this incredible paper by this former lawyer and now Judge, he wrote this paper basically addressing young, you know, young lawyers who just left, you

know, law school and were going into their big name law firms. And he basically said to them, by the way, you're going to pick up, within two years, you're going to become corrupt. Every day you're going to be making corrupt decisions, you're going to be lying, you're going to be stealing. And this is why. And the paper was basically, you know, a description of the status game, it was saying that, you know, by the very fact that you're a lawyer, you've been to the law school, you're an incredibly competitive person. And now, you're in a new game, and that game is measured by money, and you're going to become obsessed with money because every six months, the legal journals print this league table about who's earning what, and you're going to become obsessed with money because every six months the legal journals print this league table about who's earning what and you're going to pour over those league tables.

But the problem is you're going to be working as hard as it's possible to work. Law is a really unhappy people. It's high-deforce rate, high-accosism, high drug abuse, terrible working hours. So given the fact that you're incredibly competitive, you're playing a game in which money is your status symbol and you're already working as hard as possible to work. What are you going to do to get ahead? Well, what you're going to do is you're going to start double billing. You're going to start accidentally losing documents which are unhelpful to your client and so on and so on. And he said, he was perfectly honest. It happened to you because it happened to. So, I think the big name legal profession, I think, is just an insanely intense status

game by the evidence of that paper. Is it possible to exit the status game then? No, it really isn't, but it is possible to play different games. One of the really funny studies that I came upon was this one that looked at meditation. Because we often, these wellness people say, oh no, I used to be really interested in ego, but now I do mindfulness meditation. They studied 3,700 meditators and these were meditators, were specifically chosen, the ones that were meditating, they were practiced about ego needs and success and status. And they found that they measured very high in spiritual superiority. It's just really funny because you know that's true. You know that when

you know, and it will be as true of me as it's true of anyone. If you become really good at meditating, you start to feel really good about yourself. You start to think, oh, you know, I've got this insight that nobody else has got. You can't get away from it. You know, you can't do it. So, so, yeah, it's, I was remembering in the heretics, one of my previous books, I went on a 10-day silent for passionate retreat, really hardcore meditation. And a few hours, our meditation would be interrupted by this British, it was in Australia, this British guy would come in on all his robes and whatnot and he'd give us this talk. And because I wasn't good at the job of meditating, so I'd bad hit my hips for killing

me, so I was sitting with my feet facing him. And then on the second day, I think it was, I was pulled out and I was, you know, of the group. And I was ballicked, I was told off because it was so offended by the sighted bite, he said, you know, showing me the souls of your feet is very rude. I just thought, man, you're supposed to be Mr. Enlightenment, right? Like, you're supposed to be the guru here. And you've just really shamed me and embarrassed me because the sight of my feet was so, you know,

he's just ridiculous, you know, it's the whole thing. Like, it's just ridiculous. Like, it was comical. He was so chippy about his status that that's what he did. So, yeah, I mean, the other people, the other people are part of the meditators you try, the Hikamori in Japan, of course, who feel that they can't connect.

They're the shutter ways who refuse to leave their bedrooms. And when you look at, the beliefs of the average Hikamori, they can hear very closely with what we discover as a status game. They say that we are, I find it impossible to connect with other people, nobody values me, so they just shut themselves away in their bedrooms. And that's the only feasible way you can separate yourself

from the status game, really, in a sense, is by separating itself from other people. But you're still got that imaginary audience in your head, there's judging you all the time, and probably not judging the movie. Yeah, you can't. but what you can do are play different games. You know, if one game isn't working out for you, you can go and play a different game. And also, you know, in the end of the book, I advise a few things. And one of them is to play a hierarchy of games.

You're not gonna play just one game because people who play one games are in a cult. And that's the definition of a cult. It's like, it's a status game that's completely exclusive. You're not allowed to get your connection and status from anywhere else, not your job, not your family, not your friends, it's us and us alone. And when one group is your sole source of status, your highly risk of irrational belief, irrational behavior.

So cults, fundamentalist religious groups, fundamentalist political groups on the left and on the right. If these people are sourcing their connection status from just one source, they're very liable to start believing crazy things and behaving in damaging ways. It's dangerous for them too, because if they're kicked out of the group or if the group fails in some way, the whole sense of self-fails, because they have nothing to do with the game. You're a sense of self-sacrifice bound up in the games that you're playing. You are the games that you play. So, but then the answer isn't to play lots and lots of games equally, because to, to, to, to, to, you know, status games are hard and to, and to, and to actually earn status

in a status game takes effort and time and application. So, I think the idea is to play a hierarchy of games, really, is to have one main game to which you devote most of your time, but then have a few other ones in this kind of hierarchy. So you've always got that kind of, you've got different versions of self, different versions of you who are earning status in, it's got various different ways. And you're kind of, it's like a hedge, like a portfolio. Like a portfolio. You're portfolio, yeah.

So I think that's the ideal. What are some of the qualities that people should try to develop if they want to be a virtuous, high status individual? Well, I don't know how virtuous. One of the things that I kind of looked at was, okay, so if there was this thing as the status game, how should we behave? What's the optimal way that we should behave? So I read

the literature on, they call it optimal presentation, I think, or self-presentation, how we should present to people, if we were to be received well socially. And it was very interesting because when you looked at what they were saying, it did cohere around this idea of dominance, virtue and success, the three main games of human life. So really it's warmth and sincerity and competence. If you can approach people embodying those three qualities, it's very hard for you to fare in life because when you're warm to people and you're saying to them, you're signaling to them I'm not going to which going to seek status by domination. I'm not going to threaten you

I'm not going to coerce you. I'm not going to bully you. You know, I'm here in warmth when you're sincere You're saying I'm going to be virtuous. You know, I'm not going to bullshit you I'm you know when things are going badly I'm going to tell you they're going badly because you whole point of prestige, the success and virtue is you're useful. So I'm going to be useful because I'm going to be sincere, I'm going to tell you the truth in a warm way. And then finally, a competence. I'm going to be useful.

I've got this skill. And you're going to learn this skill, too, and together, and this skill is useful for our game. And it's going to help our game win in its competition with rival games. So I think that's the really, you know, I call it a blessed triumvirate of qualities, warmth, sincerity and competence. If you can embody those three qualities, it's hard for you to fail in life. I love it. Will store, ladies and gentlemen, the status game on social position and how we use it. Is this the cover of the main one? So this is a joke. So this is a galley copy and I don't know if anyone's ever getting, are you all right for me to show this?

Can I show what this looks like? Yeah, so yeah, and this is, there we go, we're in focus. This is the smartest galley cover I have ever seen. So for the people that are just listening, it says the status game on social position and how we use it. And that takes up about 10% of the front. And then in huge letters below it says, by the best selling author, Will Store, it's huge that takes up all of the bottom of it. Dude, I wondered, I was talking to a friend,

I was like, if he decides to do it, it's really bauzy, because presumably it probably doesn't convert well when it's on the airport, whatever, bookshelf. But I was like, that is fucking brilliant. So I'm glad that I'm happy that I got this one. If people, the designers options, and that was at the bottom, I think they've done that as a joke, but I was like, that is amazing.

That we've got, and I'm campaigning for that to be the paperback cover, but I'm not sure. I have had some feedback from people who haven't got it and they're just saying, oh, I'm being a dick. So, will, you know how big the text is that they've got your name on on here. This is really funny. People don't get irony.

If anyone wants to keep up to date with what you're doing, where should they go? Twitter's the best place at WStore STOW. Amazing. Well, thank you, bro. Cheers, Chris. It was great to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you.