Something You Should Know - The Fascinating Story of Batteries & How Status Changes Culture - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: August 31, 2024

Hot dogs come in packages of ten. Hot dog buns come in packages of eight. Why? Is this some sort of marketing ploy or plot? What could possibly be the reason for this obvious mismatch? This episode begins by revealing the explanation. https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a40984485/hot-dogs-buns-packages/ Think of all the batteries you use in a day. A good part of your life is powered by batteries. From your flashlight, all your remotes, your car to your cellphone – all these devices require batteries to function. As necessary as they are, you may not know a lot about batteries. For example, why are there different sizes? Why do batteries seem to last longer than before? Joining me to answer these questions and to reveal the interesting history of battery technology is James Morton Turner, author of the book Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future (https://amzn.to/3QYnR1n). You probably cringe when you see old pictures of yourself because your clothes and hairstyle look so horrible. Why is that? They looked fine at the time the picture was taken. What causes these things to fall in and out of style? It comes down to culture and status. Culture changes over time and so does our desire for status. That’s according to W. David Marx. David is a long-time writer on culture based in Tokyo and he is author of a book called Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion and Constant Change (https://amzn.to/3wNJeub). Listen as he discusses the fascinating connection between status and culture and how they work together to drive changes. Can your morning cup of coffee predict the weather? Maybe, if you know how to read the surface bubbles. Listen as I reveal how those bubbles predict the kind of day you are about to have. https://www.instructables.com/Predict-weather-with-a-cup-of-coffee/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why do hot dogs come in packages of 10 while the buns come in packages of 8? Then, batteries. They power much of your life, and there's a lot of things about them you don't know. One is, you know, lead-acid batteries, right, which are in every vehicle out there. They're the single most highly recycled product in the world. Or those AA batteries takes almost 150 times more energy to manufacture than you actually get.

Also, how can a cup of coffee predict the weather and the importance of status and culture and how culture doesn't change like it used to? If you say the 60s, people think about hippies or the Beatles. If you think about the 70s, you think about disco. People want their era to be represented by something unique. And if music all sounds the same and clothing is all the same from the year 2000 to now, there's a sense of cultural malaise. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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you should know anyone who cooks outdoors on the grill has probably wondered or even discussed the fact that hot dogs are sold in packages of 10, hot dog buns are sold in packages of 8. And why are they mismatched like that? There's been some talk lately about this because Heinz Ketchup in Canada has a petition going around to end the hot dog packaging mismatch. They're collecting signatures. I have no idea how effective that'll be, but at least somebody's trying. But why is there this mismatch?

According to the National Hot Dog Sausage Council, the reason isn't as strange as you think, nor is it a marketing ploy to sell more buns. It really has to do with the way things were sold back when it all started. In fact, it wasn't until 1940 that we actually began seeing hot dogs packaged in packs of 10, which is what we see now. So the hot dogs are in packs of 10 and have been since the 40s. Why are the buns in packages of 8? Well, hot dog buns most often come in packs of 8 because the buns are baked in clusters of 4 in pans designed

to hold 8 rolls. Now, while baking pans come in configurations that now allow baking 10 or even 12 buns at a time, the 8-roll pan remains the most popular. And that's why there's a mismatch. And that is something you should know. Hard to imagine a day goes by, well, it's hard to imagine an hour goes by, when you don't interact with a battery, or a battery-powered device, your phone, your car, a flashlight, your TV remote, your watch. Batteries are everywhere, and really it's hard to imagine life or technology without them. And as you're about to find out, batteries have come a long way in the last few decades, but few of us know much about them, like how they work

and why there are different sizes of batteries. But you're about to. James Morton Turner is author of a book called Charged, A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. Hi, James. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thanks for the invitation. I'm really excited to talk with you. So everybody knows what a battery is. We see them everywhere all the time. But what is a battery? What is that thing? Yeah, you know, a battery is something we rely upon every day. But for lots of us, you know, it's this black box. And really kind of the principles of a battery are surprisingly

simple. A battery is made up of one or more cells. Each of these cells contains an anode, a cathode, and electrolyte. And when you connect a battery, you know, the positive and the negative terminals, you know, with wire, you know, building them into a circuit, the battery releases electrons from the anode and the anode and the cathode undergo an electrochemical reaction. And the product of this is electrons that provide us with useful work, right? They can power light bulbs, they can power a motor, they can run a microprocessor and something like a smartphone. And so what is the beginning and brief history of batteries? I mean, batteries go back to the 19th century, kind of early experiments with batteries and generating

electricity. But in terms of deploying batteries at scale, the very earliest disposable batteries emerged in the late 19th century. The earliest rechargeable batteries, the lead acid batteries that we use in most of our cars, those emerged in the 1910s, 1920s. And then the batteries that kind of people are thinking about most these days, the lithium ion batteries, they were invented in the 1980s and first commercialized in 1991 in a camcorder. Oh, in a camcorder? Yeah, Sony invested a lot of work in trying to come up with a better battery in the 1980s. And they moved the lithium-ion batteries to market first in 1991.

And the first product that they used it in was the Sony camcorder. What has been driving battery technology? Because, I mean, they work. I mean, they've always worked. I mean, the AA batteries in the drawer in the kitchen work, but it does seem that in the last few decades, there's been a lot of effort to make them last longer, to do more things. What's driving all that? Yeah. So, you know, this quest for the perfect battery is, you know, one that would lead us to a battery that is incredibly lightweight, is very easy to recharge, that would last for a very long time and generate lots of power. And the challenge is that, you know, while we have lots of good batteries, none of them are

equally good along all of these different kind of metrics. AA batteries pack a whole lot of power, but they don't last very long. Lithium ion batteries are highly rechargeable, but they degrade over time and they don't recharge as fast as we would like them to. So one thing I've always wondered about is what's the difference between Duracell, EverReady, the extra super premium batteries, the store brand batteries? It looks the same, but clearly there are differences. There are certainly price differences. What is the difference? That's a really good question. clear that the magic behind batteries are the materials that go into them and the quality of

those materials and ultimately the performance of all of these different kinds of batteries really just comes down to what's making up the anode, the cathode and the separator and the electrolyte and how pure those materials are, how well they're engineered. And I think, you know, you talk about those different brand names and there are different levels of quality that go into engineering each of those products. And, you know, so that's why you see differences in performance between a name brand battery and perhaps an off-brand battery. The other thing I think about when I think of those different brands is that, you know, they play an important role in innovation around battery technology. And I think, you know, one of the longest standing concerns, kind of the question I usually get when I talk to people about my research is, you know, what do I do with those

batteries that are in my, you know, my closet in my, you know, that I've used that are in the yogurt tub. In the 1980s, you would have said, well, absolutely don't throw those away because mercury was an important part of early single-use batteries. One of the big innovations in those AA batteries and the other disposable batteries has been getting mercury out of the batteries. That was a transition that happened in the late 1980s into the early 1990s. Really? Well, wait a minute. I mean, here in California, I believe there's a law that says you're not supposed to throw batteries in the trash because they're toxic. And even places that take toxic recyclables take batteries. The implication there is that batteries are toxic. And I think people think that it's mercury in the batteries that's toxic,

but you're saying there is no mercury. Mercury has been phased out of almost all disposable batteries. There may be a few exceptions, but certainly all the common AA, AAA, 9-volt batteries, none of them have high levels of mercury. So why do we not want to just toss them in the trash? On one level, throwing batteries in the trash? On one level, throwing batteries in the trash doesn't pose an immediate environmental hazard. Batteries are no more corrosive than a lot of other things that wind up in municipal trash. Ideally, we would

recycle them and be able to recycle them efficiently and recapture the materials and put them to good use. I mean, it turns out that recycling single-use batteries is a real challenge. And the challenge isn't just figuring out how to do it. Really, the biggest challenge is figuring out how you efficiently collect all of those batteries that are out there and get them back into the recycling stream. And by the time you go to the effort and expend all of the energy that you need to collect all of those batteries and sort them and get them prepared

for recycling, often the costs of doing that actually outweigh the benefits that you get from recapturing the materials in the first place. Yeah. So the question of what to do with your AA battery is still a complicated one. I don't live in California, and what I do is I just put them in the trash. So I think most people's experience is that batteries today are better than they used to be. They last longer. The rechargeables recharge faster. But is that because of some big, huge advancement? Or is it like a lot of

other things where it's small incremental improvements over time that make batteries better? You know, advances in batteries come incrementally. I mean, it's very rare that we see a big breakthrough or an order of magnitude change in, you know, how fast they charge or how long they last. And I think, you know, it is, you know, as you're asking, it's this really active area of research. But, you know, most of the progress comes in these small incremental steps that have, you know, made batteries just good enough to serve the purposes that we've put them to. You know, so the range of electric cars has increased incrementally, but there hasn't been a big breakthrough. And, you know, that breakthrough may come, but it's not clear we're going to see that in the next, you know, five or 10 years.

And even when we do, it's going to take a long time to bring it to market. So my sense is like when I get a new phone, it seems like the battery is better than the battery that was in the last phone. You know, there's a lot of reasons for that. The battery in the last phone probably isn't working the way it did when it was new. But it does seem that as we progress through and get newer phones and newer tablets, the batteries seem better. Is that true? Or are those the incremental changes you're talking about? Or is that more my imagination? I don't think it's your imagination. I mean, I have the same experience too, but I think what, you know, so on the one hand, yes, right. The batteries are getting a little bit better and

they're getting better in lots of different ways. I mean batteries are getting a little bit better and they're getting better in lots of different ways. I mean, they perform a little bit better. They're also getting less toxic. I mean, we're manufacturing more batteries that don't have things like cobalt in them and these lithium ion batteries. And so, you know, the advantages are coming in multiple ways, kind of these incremental improvements.

But I think the other piece of this about why the batteries appear to last longer or perform better is that the technologies that they're powering are evolving as well, right? And so, you know, the iPhones and the cars and the other devices, they're often becoming a little bit more efficient, right? They run a little bit faster, requiring a little bit less power, or they're a little bit brighter, but they're a little bit more efficient, right? They run a little bit faster, requiring a little bit less power, or they're a little bit brighter, but they're a little bit more efficient and keeping that screen on. And so we're seeing the advantages both of the improvements in batteries, but also improvements in the efficiency of the technology that they're powering.

And when you put those two things together, that kind of helps explain how batteries have become more useful to us. And if you take a real big step back here and just think about why lithium ion batteries have become so ubiquitous, right, in all the laptops and all the phones, it's, you know, that they have improved, but the technologies that they are powering, right, the ability to pack all of that technology into a smartphone, right, that has become vastly more efficient than it was, right? You know, if you go back to 1991, you would need a supercomputer to deliver the same level of processing power that you now get on a single chip that runs on, you know, a thousandth the amount of electricity that that supercomputer once did to power the processor in your smartphone.

And, you know, that's something that a lithium ion battery can power. And, you know, so it's that combination of efficiency and increased capacity that explains why these batteries seem to be getting better. We're talking about batteries and how they became such an important part of life. My guest is James Morton Turner. He's author of a book called Charged, A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets. And built for Celine,

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Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys Visit Wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend, the skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. So, James, what's one thing about batteries that you find, like, really fascinating that maybe people don't know or haven't heard before? Yeah, I mean, I've been fascinated by batteries for a decade. And there are all sorts of things that really get me excited about batteries. I mean, can I give you three? I mean, one is lead acid batteries, which are in every vehicle out there, every conventional vehicle. They're the single most highly recycled product

in the world, which I just find astounding. Or those AA batteries, those AA batteries take a tremendous amount of energy to manufacture, right? To get that little portable kind of silver cylinder in that AA. I mean, it takes almost 150 times more energy to manufacture than you actually get when you use that AA battery. Or these lithium ion batteries that we've been talking about. I mean, they just, those are made up of materials that are sourced from around the world and unpacking those supply chains just, you know, makes clear kind of how entangled the technologies that we rely upon every day, and we're going to need more and more going into the future, how they entangle us and, you know, minds and communities and, you know, people who are doing

this work, you know, in places around the globe. You know, one thing I've always wondered about is why do we have all these different size batteries? Why doesn't everything run on double A's and why do some things run on triple A's? What's the point? You know, so there was a time when there were even more types of batteries. They came in more sizes. And so a big advance in the battery industry was to develop those standardized sizes. And the driver for that was the military. The military wanted to have batteries that were easier to purchase and to make sure that they would work in devices. So battery standards for the disposable batteries, those were set back in the 1920s and 1930s after World War I and then

accelerating into World War II. And that's when the AA and the AAA and the D and back then there were number six and number seven batteries, all of these different standards or batteries were standardized. Every Christmas, you open up presents and you go, oh, look, it needs batteries. And you go, AAA, I don't have any AAA. Well, why does it run on, what's the difference? What's the difference between a AA and a AAA? There is not a whole lot of difference apart from the size.

You know, when you're talking about disposable batteries and AAs and AAAs, you know, they are different size packages that, you know, have slightly different capacities based on the size, but the voltage, and that's the key piece and that the, you know, that the products are engineered around, the voltage is the same, whether it's a AA or a AAA or a D battery. And that's determined by the materials, the chemistry, the electrochemistry of the battery itself. But it has nothing necessarily to do with the kind of thing it's powering. No, I mean, you know, I guess in retrospect, kind of the genius of standardizing

the battery sizes, you know, once those standards were set and kind of codified by, you know, certainly by the 1940s, you know, all of the device manufacturers started engineering their devices to accept the standard size batteries. And, you know, so it was that transition from where, you know, battery manufacturers once were trying to manufacture custom batteries to fit all of these different devices, you know, moved away from that model to everybody, you know, designing their products, whether it was a flashlight or a radio or later a Walkman to accept, you know, the standard AA, AAAs. And, you know, that really played an important role and, you know, perhaps an underappreciated role in the fact that anywhere in the world, you could go and buy one of these standard size batteries to plug into one of these electronic devices. And it kind of created, we think of infrastructure and electricity, right? And we usually think of power lines and big factories, but this is a different kind of infrastructure

based on portable power and the standardization of these sizes that we're so familiar with today, the AA, the AAA, the nine-volt batteries. So I think in terms of the rise of the consumer products industry, the infrastructure of these standard battery sizes played a really important but underappreciated role. And it means that you're going to be scratching your head right on Christmas morning. You're like, where's the AAA battery? But you won't be alone. Well, I always wonder, so what goes on?

What's the process where a guy says, okay, we're going to invent there. We're going to design and create this new toy. And I think we're going to have it run on C batteries. Oh, no, no, let's have it run on AA battery. Who decides, and why do they choose what they choose? I guess two things come to mind. I think one is when you look back over the history of batteries,

there's this shift from using bigger batteries to smaller batteries. So it used to be that the AA's, or actually, I'm sorry, you know, the C's were, you know, kind of sold most often, and then it shifted to double A's. And now I think it's the triple A's that, you know, sell most often. And it's because the devices that they're being put into have become smaller and smaller over time because of improvements in technology and efficiency. You don't need those big batteries the way you did back in the, I mean, when I was a kid, everything seemed to run on a C battery. But I think the other transition is that there's a real effort

to get away from the single-use batteries. We're seeing many more products that are engineered with the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in them that can be plugged into USB ports to recharge. And so I think there you know, for, you know, this, there's been a real transition from, you know, having this, you know, common devices run on disposable batteries. And, you know, part of the frustration of that is, you know, where's the AAA battery when I need it, you know, to using more and more rechargeable batteries. And, you

know, from an environmental perspective, you know, that's a good thing. When you think of rechargeable batteries, like the battery in my phone is a rechargeable battery, but I don't take it out of the phone to recharge it. Like you kind of think of the old rechargeable batteries, you just charge your phone. And that's what that means is you're charging the battery in the phone. That's a big thing because it used to be that whatever it was you were using, you had to stop using it to go recharge the battery. Now you can keep using it while you recharge the battery. That's pretty amazing. You're right. I actually hadn't thought about it in exactly that way, but you're right. Not

having to take the batteries out means these devices, you know, continue to get used. Although I guess the exception might be it's hard to drive your car if it's plugged in, right? So maybe that model works better for our laptops and smartphones. But, you know, what it really gets at, right, is just kind of this constant concern for, you know, many people these days is keeping their devices charged, right? Keeping that phone charged or increasingly charging cars. And one of the questions is, could we have roads in the future that could charge cars as they drive? Because there's inductive charging technology built into roadways. One of the things, and I think a lot of people wonder about this, because we hear about, well, you know, we have to be greener and so you should buy an electric car.

But in order to power an electric car, you plug it into your, basically you plug it into your wall, which is power most likely coming from coal. So how, what's the benefit? A lot of people are thinking about this question these days, and odds are that electric vehicle is not going to be charged from coal because coal actually accounts for less electricity generation right now than do renewables like hydro and wind and solar. The renewables sector has grown to the point that it is larger than the coal industry for U.S. electricity generation. Natural gas is still a huge part of our electric grid, but coal is actually becoming a relatively much smaller component of the electricity that we rely upon for everything. And of course, there's regional differences. But for most people who are plugging in an electric vehicle, they're substantially reducing emissions by charging that car from

the electrical grid as opposed to driving a conventional vehicle. Well, it's funny to think how much we rely on batteries all the time in so many things, and yet we kind of take them for granted. Most of us don't really know how they work. So it's really interesting to get the backstory. I've been talking with James Morton Turner. He is author of a book called Charged, A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, James. Thanks, Mike. I've really enjoyed it.

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Well, the reason you think that now, but you didn't think that then, is culture. Culture changes. Hair gets longer, skirts get shorter, music changes, food changes. Our culture changes. And often the people who change the culture are people you might call high status, people with influence. Status and culture are intertwined, and how they change is really interesting. David Marks is a longtime writer on culture based in Tokyo, and he's author of a book called Status and Culture, how our desire for social rank creates taste, identity, art, fashion, and constant change.

Hi, David. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So what is, how can, how do you define culture and status? What do those two words mean and why do they seem to go together? Culture and status are both incredibly difficult and ambiguous words. And what I'm really interested in culture is thinking about things like music, art, fashion, hairstyles, the way we eat foods. I mean, the way I would think about culture is mostly that, you know, we have to survive, but it's the way we survive. I am very interested in kind of culture as a mysterious process, because culture changes. If you look at old photos, you notice embarrassing

haircuts and clothing, and you think, why did I wear that? Why did I think it was good at the time? And what is it that changes culture? Technology makes a lot of sense of why technology changes because it gets better, but culture kind of doesn't necessarily get better and yet we change it. And when you think about status, that's also a word that we use to mean lots of different things. And what it really comes down to is that status is your position in a social hierarchy. And as you move up in that hierarchy, the way people treat you gets better. And the thing about status, status is a bit of a taboo. We don't like talking about it. But as I was researching status and researching culture, I realized that they went hand in hand and you can't really understand

the process of status unless you understand culture and you can't understand culture unless you understand status. But what is it that happens? I mean, how can I look at a picture of myself from say 15 years ago and look at my hair and go, oh my God, I mean, that looks terrible. But I'm the same person and I thought it looked pretty good then, but I don't think it looks very good now. So what is it that changes? So hairstyles are a great way to understand culture and cultural change because they are arbitrary. If you have short hair or long hair, they don't really give you that many practical benefits. Maybe short hair is more

practical and yet hair kind of grows long and short. I'm really interested in the Beatles mop top because when you look at the mop top today, it just looks like a pretty standard haircut. When I was growing up in the 80s, I lived in Oxford, Mississippi, which is a relatively conservative town. And everybody had a mop top, like all the young guys had mop tops. And yet in the 60s, you know, it was scandalous, both in England and the United States when the Beatles had that haircut. Everyone yelled at them all the time about the long hair. And you try to think of why were people so concerned about this haircut that is now so standard. And, you know, what it really comes down to is that these arbitrary looks, these arbitrary styles have social meaning in based off, you know, who they

are associated with. And so in an era in which only rebellious people have longer hair, because everyone has short hair, you know, wearing these haircuts signals that you are part of this rebellious kind of outsider group. And so people get upset about that. And at the same time, you know, when certain haircuts get associated with people with high status, people we consider to be cool, those haircuts themselves become cool and we adopt them. But over time, the people who are cool change their haircuts and we change our haircuts. And we look back and say, why were we doing this thing that probably by the time we look at it has become associated with people who are old fashioned or uncool. So this process of why does culture change has so much to do with the values that we associate with it. And those values are rooted in the status hierarchies in that certain people at the top have certain styles and certain people

at the bottom have different styles. And it's usually a cycle where things go from the top to the bottom. And so over time, things lose their status value. So you mentioned at the beginning that status is where you are in a hierarchy and the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the better you're treated. So explain that a little bit. The best way to understand status is that it's your position in a hierarchy, but there are many hierarchies. And the two most important hierarchies to think about are what are called local status and global status.

And so your local status is, let's say, your position within your local community, within your family, within your school. And your global status is that status across the entire world. And so if you are a wealthy person, you have very high global status, which means kind of everywhere you go, you're probably treated with a lot of benefits that you don't necessarily think about all the time because you take it for granted, but you could walk into any restaurant or hotel, they would seat you. But maybe in your local community, people aren't particularly happy about how you made your money and treat you with a little bit more contempt. So it is complicated. The status is not

so easily calculatable for every single person based off of the assets that they have. And that's what makes it complicated. And that's what also makes it where we don't feel like there's necessarily a formula for getting status. But in general, I think it's fair to say that if you have more money, you have more status in society. So there are a lot of indicators of status. A certain brand of shoes or watches or handbags seem to carry more status than other brands. Why is that? So you're describing what are called status symbols. And this is a word we use quite a bit in normal English. They call things status symbols, but it's good to understand what a

status symbol is supposed to be. So status symbol is supposed to be objects or behaviors that are associated with high status groups. So a long time ago, the only people who could afford automobiles, let's say about 120 years ago, were wealthy people. So if you owned a automobile, it was a status symbol, because only rich people could own cars. And so today, it's very confusing, because companies are selling things like luxury shoes and luxury perfumes to a middle class audience. And maybe it's expensive for that middle class audience, but they'll stretch and buy these goods. And so if you see someone with a luxury handbag, it's very difficult to judge their status position just from those handbags. But these items are sold on the idea that in order to be associated with high status people,

you should own these objects. And so it has become very ambiguous in today's society but I believe the true status symbols are things where they are unambiguous that you must be wealthy or high status in order to possess in the first place and you know luxury shoes and handbags and things like that which are easily bought by you know most people especially with consumer credit don't necessarily fulfill that function. And so from a completely rational standpoint, maybe those are not the best purchases to make if you're trying to buy very effective status symbols, but they're most certainly sold as potential status symbols. But not everyone is interested in status symbols, or at least not

all status symbols. I mean, I, for one, would never spend thousands of dollars on a watch. I have a watch, works really well, it looks fine, it's nice, but I would never buy a really expensive watch, nor am I all that impressed when I see someone wear a real expensive watch because I think that money would be better spent somewhere else. What is so difficult about thinking about status and its effects on our behavior is those effects are often very invisible. And there was a recent neuroscience experiment that's quite interesting, which it asked participants to drink wine. And it did not

tell them which was the expensive wine and which was the cheap wine. And they just asked people, which wine do you like? And they looked at their brains and people said they liked the wine that happened to be the cheap wine. Then they told people what the prices were. And as they drank the wine, people started to enjoy the expensive wine more. And what was interesting is it was not just that they said that they enjoyed it more. They looked at people's brains and they found that the pathways had actually changed once you told people things were expensive. And so this status value, this value of objects as they associate with high status people infects other judgments we make. And so if you think about somebody who says, I've got to have the luxury handbag or the nice car, you know, to them, they're actually seeing these things as more beautiful, as more

desirable, or someone else may be less affected by this, or feels like it stretches them too far into an identity they don't want to be in. They're very comfortable in the group that they're in. You know, we're all on different journeys in terms of, you know, trying to become the person we want to be. And for many people, they aspire to move up and the things that are aspirational look more beautiful and are more desirable. And they're making those choices, whereas some people are more comfortable in the community that they're in and they don't need to change. There is this notion that we often hear that you should be satisfied with what you have and that always wanting more, that there's something wrong with that. You will chase that forever. But it does seem that wanting higher status is somewhat human nature. The way I would think about it is that it is rational to want higher status. If you see higher status people in your community, they're treated more, their contributions matter more, they get more

free stuff. It's a quite nicer, cushier life to have high status. And so wanting high status is logical. It makes a lot of sense. At the same time, if you're in any hierarchy and you try to claim status that you don't deserve. So if you want to be treated well, but there's no reason for you to be treated well, you often lose status. And so I think people have to make this calculation to say, okay, I'm at a certain status level. If I try to move up without any justification, my status level may go down. So I have to be conservative about the way I would like to move up. The other thing to think about we haven't talked about is low status, which is if you're in a low status in a group, it's quite painful. It's linked to depression, anger, all

sorts of bad emotions. And so one of the most important things also is for people to maintain their status because they don't want to slip down into low status. Is there any sense though of like what determines what gives you status? Who says that you know that status symbol really means what you think it means? How do those things develop? How do they become symbols of status? And whose taste is it? The criteria for getting status, again, is very different community to community. And it's different based on the economic structure and the political order. And so if you think about a feudal society, political capital, so your relationship with the king and the political order, was really the primary determinant of your status. In a capitalist society, how much money you have is a huge determinant about how much status you have. So these criteria change over time.

Think about the idea of fame, which is, it used to be very, very difficult to become famous. You had to have some sort of achievement. You had to be a movie star or on the news or a famous politician. And so fame was very valuable because very few people were famous. And now it's very easy to become famous thanks to the internet. Anyone can broadcast themselves. And so fame is still a way to get status, but it's probably a little less valuable than it used to be. And so depending on the rarity of these, let's call them assets like political capital or how much money you have, if you know other famous and high status people, your cultural competence, all of these things can

be criteria, but depending on the certain situation and what is valuable and how they associate with the actual people who have the highest status and power in society, that balance changes over time. Well, you mentioned because of the internet, anybody can be famous, how else has the internet affected status and culture? So the internet has massively changed how status is distributed and how it works. And I'll give you a couple of examples of how this has happened. One is that we have lots of culture on the internet. There's more stuff than ever before. And it used to be that some of the ways that high

status people created their own culture and created barriers so that other people couldn't adopt that culture was information and was distribution. And so if you had something that you could only get from France and no one else could get it, or if you knew about something, I knew about a restaurant that no one else knew about, these could be status symbols. But the internet has really destroyed these barriers. Everyone can know everything. Everyone can more or less get things from anywhere. And so the value of rare objects has become much more depressed. And things that are expensive are still the best status symbols. And so it's actually made things much more focused on money than before.

Another thing that has happened is it used to be that you only really signaled for status in front of other people in real life, or maybe if you were high society, you had your photo taken and put in a newspaper. But now if you think about Instagram, TikTok, all these social media apps, we are constantly signaling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can signal your status to people while you're asleep because your video is doing it for you. And so the very active status signaling has become devalued. The things that we used to show off like fancy vacations or fancy handbags have all become devalued because we see them all the time.

And a final thing that has happened is that fashion cycles used to make things valuable as we started to realize that high status people were all doing this unique thing. And that's what we call when things are in fashion or in style, it's when they're exclusively associated with a high status group. And the problem with the internet too, is that it makes these fashion cycles so fast because everyone can copy and imitate these exclusive practices. And so fewer things are actually in style these days because high status people adopt fewer things, knowing that whatever they do is going to be imitated more quickly. But also even when they do something new, they are imitated so quickly that the thing that they do becomes devalued very quickly.

And it doesn't quite have the same longevity as things in the past. So culture is moving very fast and there's lots of it. We're in a real era of cultural abundance. But that means that everything is less valuable than before. And that has changed kind of the way we understand our own culture. Well, it does seem like the way you describe it, it's like a rat race that you can never win. And why not just step off? It would seem to me that because things are moving so fast people would just throw their hands up and go i quit you know i'm fine the way i am i don't need to be chasing the next

big thing because there's another one coming five minutes from now exactly and i think that has happened and one of the ways you can think about it is watch films from the 1960s. And you will notice a film from 1963 and a film from 1965 and a film from 1967, all the clothing is different. All the hairstyles are different. You're able to date those movies just by how people dress. the mid-1990s, or I was watching The Bourne Identity, which I think is from the early 2000s. These films, people dress pretty much like they dress now. I think there's been a real conservatism of dress and style in the last couple decades. And I think that comes from the fact that when fashion cycles move too quickly, people just don't get wrapped up in those fashion cycles. It seems to me, at least in the United States, that cultural changes like we've been talking

about have really slowed down that, you know, in the past, every decade had a feel, you know, there were the sixties and it had its own fashion and its own music and its own haircuts and same with the seventies, same with the eights same with the 80s today you know I mean there's there's just not much of a feel of this decade or even the last decade it's all kind of the same we look back at you know movie like back to the future and what's so fun about that movie is number one seeing it from today you know the 80s style of the 80s bit of it feels interesting, but also that huge difference between 1955 and 1985 and Back to the Future. That's fun. The entire movie comes out of jokes

about those 30 years and how culture had changed. But if you look at the 30 years since 2022, you don't really have those stylistic changes to play with anymore. I think cell phones have changed. When you watch old movies, you look at cell phones and kind of laugh, but that's about it. And so, you know, at a micro level, we don't like these changes, but at a macro level, I think there's something disappointing at the moment that we're just experiencing fewer cultural changes than we used to in the past. Yeah, I agree. I mean, there is a sense of, you know, the 60s culture and the 70s culture and even the 50s culture. There was a culture, there was a look to it, a feel to it, the music, and we don't have that today. And yeah, it is disappointing.

I think there's an entertainment in the fact that if you say the 60s, people think about hippies or the Beatles. If you think of the 70s, you think about disco. People want their era to be represented by something unique. And if music all sounds the same and clothing is all the same from the year 2000 to now, I think there's a sense of cultural malaise that we do really judge our civilization by, are we creating new things? And if people don't feel like we're creating new things, if we're, you know, on the seventh or eighth Spider-Man movie, instead of, you know, creating new franchises, people get upset about that. Well, I like talking about this because we seldom talk about this. And yet, you know, status and culture to some extent is important to everybody. And it's good to get some insight into it. I've been speaking with David Marks. He's author of the book, Status and Culture,

How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, David. Thanks for being here. Mike, thank you so much for having me on. Did you know that you can predict the weather with a cup of coffee, sort of? Here's what you do. As you pour your coffee into the mug, notice the bubbles that rise to the surface. If the bubbles move rapidly to the cup's edge, it's going to be a nice day. That's because high pressure pushes the bubbles outward to the edge of the cup's edge, it's going to be a nice day. That's because high pressure pushes the bubbles outward to the edge of the cup,

and high pressure indicates good, clear weather. If the bubbles stay towards the center of the mug, the pressure is dropping and clouds and rain are probably in the forecast. And that is something you should know. That's the end of this episode, but there's another one coming soon. And in order to make sure you don't miss it, if you don't already, follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And that way, the episodes are sent right to you on your device, your phone, your tablet, wherever. And you don't have to come looking for me.

I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures?

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