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

But I just thought it was extraordinary that in 1986, there was cancel culture, they were arguing about pronouns, you know, all the stuff that we see today and that we, you know, we tend to— we often blame 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.

Will Storr, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Chris. Well, good to be here.

Dude, I loved your book. It is awesome.

Thank you. That's really good to hear. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it.

You nailed it, man. So you've done all this research about status throughout all of that. What were some of the weirdest status 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, um, uh, called Pompeii. And, and there, um, they had this, they had this kind of thing where, um, you know, it was very stratified in Pompeii, that life there, like it is everywhere, you know. And it— 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 they would have these feasts, these chiefly feasts, and the person who brought the biggest yam was declared number one. Literally, that's what they called him, number one. And, um, And yeah, and he, 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'd sneak out of their homes at 2 in the morning and, you know, they'd grow their yams in secret, you know, parts of the forest, cover them with branches so nobody could see the yams and tend to them with fertilizer. And yeah, and you know, in 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 feast using a special stretcher on poles. You know, so that's status madness. And, you know, as I recount in the book, we can direct our craving for status at anything, and we do.

And a yam is among those that we can use.

Yeah. Yeah.

What is a yam? Is it like a sweet potato? What the fuck's a yam?

It's like a— well, it's kind of a tuber, but I don't know.

I don't actually know what a tuber is. Pretty unsexy thing. to use for— I'd rather get the Ferrari if that's not—

Yes, exactly.

I can't ride my yam down the street.

Yeah, it seems more fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just, you know, this is how the status game works, you know, that we can use anything as a symbol of status, that it could be a giant yam, it can be, uh, yeah, a Ferrari, it can be a lovely watch, it can be, um, how great an activist we are, you know.

Well, the reason that that example's so funny is that we look at it and think, oh, yams, like, 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. Or, you know, the classic example is watches. You can buy a Casio watch for, you know, fucking 80p on eBay, or you can spend $2.4 million on a watch, and they're just telling you the time. I mean, and that $2.4 million watch is just as stupid as a giant yam.

Can't even eat the Ferrari.

Exactly. Exactly.

Can't even eat the Ferrari. So you say that status is more important than sex, power, or money. Why is that?

Well, I'm not saying it's more important. I'm saying that, you know, we have lots of, you know, different drives, but I think status is, is one of the, one of the most fundamental ones. I wouldn't say it's more fundamental than sex. Um, that, that really is a basic. But, um, you know, it goes back to our evolution. You know, as I'm sure you know, um, we're apes. We were a kind of weird kind of ape that has kind of mastered the art of cooperative living. And so, um, that's what we do. We, we, you know, that's how we've solved the Darwinian problem of survival and reproduction. We, we, we gather into coalitions. So we, you know, we, we have this, um, urge for connection and to be accepted and to feel, you know, belongingness. Um, you know, that's a really important one. But once, once we've connected in, we— there's always this urge to move up. We're not typically content to be Thought of as likable but useless. You know, he's a nice guy, but he's just fucking rubbish. You know, that's not what we you know that's that's not human nature. We want to rise. We want we want to we we want to sort of move up. And you know back back in the you know in in 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 safe the safer our sleeping sites, the greater our choices of mate. So when you think about that in terms of survival and reproduction. evolution, the more status we have, the better our capacity to survive and reproduce. So that's a very basic idea that your brain understands completely. Go for status, because if you go for 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. You know, but the, but the basic is, is, well, connection first. But then once you've connected, 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 is 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 then compete for status with other groups. So the status game is constantly working on those 2 dimensions, you know, internally and versus rivals.

How do you define it?

Define status? Yeah, yeah. It's esteem, being thought of as valuable, useful. You know, it's not just, oh, 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 or somebody that you— but status is about admiration, respect, feeling somewhat above. 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 describe it as the original currency. Before that, we haven't evolved to crave money. Money wasn't around when our brains were doing all that evolution. We've evolved evolved to crave status. And money is just one way that we've— it's a yam, you know, it's one way that we've— one way 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 aren't interested in power. Some people aren't interested in money. Money is obviously very useful beyond its purposes as a status symbol, but that's essentially, you know, what it is, is a kind of way of playing the status game. that absolutely directly gets you, you know, better resources and, uh, and enables your, uh, survival and reproduction, accelerates your capacity to survive and reproduce.

What are the main ways that people can attain status?

So there are lots of sort of basic ways, you know, youth, beauty, age, you know, but, but both youth and age are ways to get—

yeah, when you get between 35 and 50, you're fucked, and then on the other side you're all right.

Yeah, yeah. You know, like, like in the book, I think I sort of slightly sort of glibly say that, but, you know, by the hotel pool, youth wins. But when you're trying to get a seat on the train, you know, age wins. So it depends on the, the context. Um, so, so yeah, you know, it's so traditionally, of course, age would always win, but now in our kind of youth-obsessed culture, um, it's, it's less so. But, but the, the, the basic ways that, you know, the more interesting ways are the ways we've, we've evolved. So firstly, it's dominance, you know, 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, not, 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, hens peck at each other until their pecking order is established, and that's how they play their status game. But, but we know humans, when we kind of settled down, you know, we developed these new ways of playing status games. You know, some animals do play games with reputation too, it's thought, interestingly. But, but, 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. And there are 2 ways you can be useful to your tribe. One is by being virtuous, so courageous, generous, but also, you know, a good conformist, good follower of rules and a good person, you know, a person who punishes rule breakers. You know, that's part of being virtuous. And the other way is by being successful, being skillful, by, you know, being the best honey finder, the best hunter, the best grower of yams, you know. So those are the 3 kind of essential ways that we play status games: dominance, virtue, and success. And if you think about those 3 different routes to status, they kind of define the kinds of status games that we play. So, you know, boxing is a dominance game. It's about violence, and it's about who's the most dominant individual. A religion or a royal 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 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 3. But usually, one route to status will be dominant. So in boxing, that's obviously a dominance game. But it still has 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 willy-nilly. You've got to be really skillful to be a successful boxer. So you can see how all those 3 routes to status are in most games, probably all games, but one tends to be— it's like a flavor in a soup, the dominant kind of flavor.

Which one's most 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. And when you're forcing people to attend to you in status, that is, you know, in many contexts, an inherently unstable way of kind of leading a status game. As you see throughout history, you know, dominant leaders tend to fall. But the research is quite interesting, because it shows that when a status game, a group feels under threat, they tend to want a dominant leader to lead them. So, you know, we, you know, it's a kind of a typical thing that when, when the status of a group feels under threat, like in times of war or even a pandemic, um, that, that people want to be led by somebody who is more dominant. And, 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 it, it, it, it, it— we're in trouble, you know. We need a leader to come in and tell us what to do, you know. Um, dominance. Um, uh, one of the concepts that I write about in the book in some depth is this concept of tightness, which psychologists talk about. You know, groups and cultures can be tight, tight versus loose. And so, you know, in the West, we're quite— we have quite loose cultures. Um, yeah, and, you know, it's not just in the West, um, uh, but, but yeah, you know, the UK, the US, we're quite loose cultures. We're not that conformist. Um, uh, that, that, you know, we value individual freedom. But other cultures, you know, 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. Um, they're, they're better at following rules. They tend to be kind of more superstitious and, and liable to kind of believe, uh, you know, the wild stories that are told amongst their, amongst their group. And so in times of trouble, you know, we tighten up. You know, even the loose, you know, you see it during the pandemic, you know, especially in the UK. You know, we've been very conformist during the pandemic. You know, the anti-vax thing isn't a major thing over here like it is in the States. We've tightened up. And, you know, my personal default is, okay, tell me what to do. I don't care. Just if you want 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 this idea of the copying instinct. Humans are 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, you 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. And I thought that was really interesting because in a sense, the chimps are smarter than us in that context. You know, they just don't need to do that. But we're copying everything and that's the status game. And I remember when I was 8 years old, I was obsessed with this pop star, Nick Kershaw. I was completely, oh my God, I was— and I remember seeing him on TV AM crossing his legs in a certain way. He had his ankle on his knee and I thought, ah, and I just started doing that. I didn't know why I was doing it, but I started just sort of sitting around with my ankle on my knee.

That's going to be my route to become a world champion pop star.

Yeah. 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 we, you know, we— I call it the copy, flatter, conform kind of, you know, the copy, flatter, conform process. That's what we want to do. We copy them, we flatter them. Oh, you're amazing. You know, we lavish them with status and we conform. You know, we do what they tell us to do. And that's kind of a strategy. It's because we want to climb up too. And we're looking at them. They're up there.

Yeah.

So if we copy everything they're doing, and we're nice to them, so they'll 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 nuance. It's a very nuanced question. And it's something that I really, really kind of wrestled with when I was writing the book. And so The answer is it depends. And as I said, I think, you know, generally, the general fact is 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. You know, it isn't just like a score on a scoreboard. You know, if I sell this many books, but then my rival sells this many books, suddenly now I'm down here. And so We're constantly, constantly measuring other people's status versus us. And, you know, we've evolved in relatively small groups, you know, compared to today's globally connected internet world. We haven't evolved to play these huge, vast games where we're kind of, you know, subconsciously comparing ourselves to bloody Michelle Obama or the King of Thailand or whoever it is. So, so, you know, we are kind of riven 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 like— and we go into that mode of, I want to be like this person, you know, I want to learn from this person and 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, um, metric that we have in the back of our brains where you're— you and Nick Kershaw, you were 8 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 a rival, 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. So I imagine that that— that closeness actually provides more rivalry as opposed to sort of cooperative modeling.

Definitely. Yeah, that's, that's absolutely right. And that was one of the, one of the sort of more surprising things that I learned that, you know, you might think that maximizing the sense of competition between people would give you maximal performance, say, in a company. But it's actually not true. You know, too much competition just gives you a hellish, say, corporate environment, you know, everyone's big because, you know, status is freely given. And if status is in short supply, and we're fighting for it, no one's going to be giving out status. I mean, it's going to be miserable, going to be a miserable, um, you know, place to work or environment to be in. And actually, um, you know, but rivalry really is, um, rivalry is something else. So, so rivalry happens when, as you say, when we're very close, um, feeling very closely competitive with an individual or another company. And, um, it's that closeness that's, that creates the rivalry. So, so typical rivals have a history of, you know, near wins, near losses, skirmishes. And, you know, you can think about Apple and Microsoft or, you know, obviously Apple have now kind of beaten them into a pulp. But for a long time, Apple and Microsoft were deadly rivals because they were close, you know, for a while. And yeah, and I think that works obviously on the individual level too, is the people closest to us that we become very rivals to. And actually rivalry can be very, very motivating. You know, it can, you know, as unpleasant as it feels, it can be an absolute force for success when we kind of lock into a rival and go, right, it's personal. I'm gonna beat you. You know, how—

What were some of the examples that you found to do with the ridiculous relativity of status? Wasn't there any— was there an Economist article to do with job titles?

Yeah, that's right. There were— it wasn't an Economist. There 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 would opt for, given the choice, they would opt for a more statusful job title rather than more money. And so filing clerks wanted to be called data storage specialists, was one of them. And 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 workload, 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, that, that, yeah. And, and that, that shows the importance of status. And, you know, it sounds stupid, but there are 2 things to say about that. And, and first is just to kind of re-up the idea that we have evolved to crave status on a fundamental level, psychologically, and 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, 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.

Yeah.

The flashy watch is an act of imagination. Even, you know, our, you know, our— 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 it's something else. It doesn't exist in the real world. All these moral arguments we have with everybody, they 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, it's all acts of imagination, you know. And that, that's the world that humans exist in. We connect into groups and we have these shared imaginary games that we play where we, where we say this job is great and this job isn't great, this belief is great and this belief isn't 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 our conscience is. that our conscience is 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, I read the phrase in Sarah Jane Blakemore's book. And, you know, she talks about this idea of the imaginary audience, the conscience is this imaginary audience. You know, we're a social animal, and, you know, status, you know, if 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 as this kind of rehearsal, this kind of prediction machine. If you imagine doing something really bad, your conscience twitches, oh, you shouldn't 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 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. You know, that is danger. Danger lies that way because that— because when you do that, it's a social thing. You're dropping in status in the eyes of your co-players. And that is bad. You know, that is in the old— you know, it's thought that capital punishment was once a human universal. So that's the ultimate cost for, you know, dropping too far in status, you're dead. So, so that's, you know, that, that's the conscience. It's this kind of— it's helping us out by predict— both predicting and by, you know, wagging its finger at us, uh, the things we've done in the past. You know, it's like a pain signal, I guess, in a way, warning you that something's wrong with your behavior.

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 mean, I think the initial— the kind of the journey that I've been on with this is, is firstly—

Sorry, did you get uncomfortable? Did you find it uncomfortable as you slowly imbibe that a lot of the things that you valued in yourself, the virtuous qualities you thought you had, are just these shameless plays to desperately try and get Will Storr's name further up the endless totem pole of status in the world?

Well, to be honest, I have quite— I don't— well, I mean, I don't know, not really. I don't really have a hugely high I have self-esteem issues. I don't think I didn't go on that journey. I never thought I was this saint anyway. But, but, but, but yeah, I think you go, go on a journey of, of initially quite cynic— quite cynical, quite going, well, you know, all these moral things we do, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a game. It's a status game. And, you know, the Pope, Mother Teresa, they're moral superstars, you know, in the same way that, you know, you know, Barack Obama is a political superstar and Nick Kershaw was once a pop superstar. You know, they're superstars and we treat them 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 know, you address, you know, them as Your Holiness, and they wear these huge bloody hats on and, you know, gold cups. You know, the status displays are so unhidden.

Ostentatious.

Yeah, ostentatious. It's not even disguised in that kind of virtuous world. But then after a while, you know, I began to reconcile that. And actually where I ended up was a place not so cynical, because Because once you understand that status, you know, status is really a fundamental, as I say, human need. And so the mistake is saying, oh, it's just status, it's only status. Status is, you know, incredibly important to us. So 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 develop this kind of evolved technology in which we are rewarded for doing, you know, altruistic, selfless acts. It's 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 selfless and we're celebrated by the people around us when we, when we act selflessly is absolutely incredible. I mean, it's the best part of us. And so So, 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 just like imbibed this. It's just this instantiated embodied knowledge that we just do. Yeah. And then you go, well, no one needed to teach me really. I 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, 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, you know, globally looking at, you know, what are the fundamental 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 7 basic, you know, universal moral rules. But they are very kind of very basic and open to, you know, huge interpretation. It's, you know, like respect your elders and/or respect your superiors, appear selfless, things like this. So biologically, you know, 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, you know, we learn about it throughout childhood. That's what childhood is all about. It's, you know, 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 can— you've actually got it. You've you've absorbed it and you've become a, you know, 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 2 years of not, not actually seeing anyone is working or not. So what happens if you continually lose status?

Really bad things. You know, one of the— when I was thinking about, you know, in the very, very early stages of thinking about whether even this could be a book, I, I kind of set myself little task. And that was the task, your question, really. You know, if you're going to argue that status is important, it must be really bad when we lose it. So, 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 so the definition that I came across of humiliation is it's, 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, you know, one psychologist describes humiliation as the nuclear bomb of the emotions. So when you look at the very worst things that human beings engage in, from anything from genocide to honor killings to spree killings to, you know, many instances of serial murder, it has humiliation at its core. So, so, you know, 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 Rodger, the incel. And I was able to tell that story because before he killed a bunch of people and himself, 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, you know, what I came to is, 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, you know, solve status disputes with violence. That's a horrible cocktail. Male grandiose and humiliated is really, really dangerous. And, you know, I talk about, you know, the example of the Unabomber is quite extraordinary. This, this, this guy went to Harvard and had— took part in these basically humiliation experiments. They were like government-sponsored experiments, I think CIA-sponsored experiments to see—

Is that the MKUltra thing, or is that a different guy?

I think it was related to that.

People in the comments, this is the sort of thing that YouTube excels at, so we will find the answer. Whoever knows the answer about MKUltra and the Unabomber, 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 is normal in psychological experiments. They basically had them write down all their dreams and hopes and ambitions Lots of confessions, even about things like thumb sucking and masturbation. So all their all their secrets, all their hopes and dreams and values. And then they sat them down in front of you know these bright lights and basically mocked them, mocked these individuals. And this happened again and again and again for years. And you know Kaczynski's brother said, "You know we didn't know what was going on, but we saw the change in him." You know, and you know what does the UN in Unabomber stand for? Universities.

Why?

Because you know they were they were part of his. Campaign of terror. He would send bombs to universities. He ended up with this kind of mindset that 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 Rodger 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.

Grandiose, humiliated, and aggressive.

And male.

And male. So you've got the dark triad, but this is more like the dangerous triad. That's the 3 that you need to make sure that you don't have. Yeah, it's interesting thinking about what happens when people lose status, that, that it gets degraded over time. What about tall poppy syndrome and people that, 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, the, the ones that you watch just to sort of pity them because you, you enjoy watching how much they're sort of wrecking everything.

I have no idea what you mean, Chris.

Will, come on, I'll go through you. I'll go through your following if I need need to. But yeah, everyone's got that. And the tall poppy syndrome must be a part of this.

Yeah, totally. As I say, you know, if we don't directly, you know, relate to somebody and kind of really admire them and want to be them, we tend to, you know, really become quite envious of them. And so, so yeah, you know, the tall poppy syndrome has been found to be a cross-cultural effect. There was a great study that I didn't put in The Status Game because it was in my previous book. I didn't want I would love to have cut and pasted it into the new one.

Pollinated the 2 books.

Yeah, but it was done by psychologists in the University of Shenzhen. It was really clever. They got these people and then they say, you're going to be taking part in a neuroscientific experiment, but we're running a bit late. Why don't you go over there and play this computer game and just spend 10 minutes on there? So you go over and you play this computer game, and you come off the computer game and you say, well, you know, 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, 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— it's the— I think it's Tanya Singer, I think, that was the neuroscientist that found this, that when we empathize, you know, not the same neural patterns but similar neural patterns will be seen in the brain as 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'd done either better or worse at 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'd 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, you know, it's just extraordinary evidence for this, you know, this tall poppy syndrome that People who we see as higher status than us, you know, we don't feel empathy for them. We don't like them. Another, you know, the study that I do quoted in The Status Game shows that people, you know, when people reading about somebody successful and rich, their pain signals become more activated. Or, you know, the kind of the, yeah, the pain signals become evident. And then when, when they read a story of that same person being You know, suffering a fall, pleasure systems become activated. So, so, so, you know, it's in us. It's the status game mechanism incarnate in our brain. Yeah, it's how, it's how we experience the world. And it's not a nice part of human nature, but it, 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.

Mm-hmm.

And that shows of status from people, specifically people that we're kind of close to, whether that be geographically, we, 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, shorter 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, you know, contrary 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 an iceberg and it's a miserable lizard, but take that same lizard and put it in the desert, suddenly it's a happy lizard. Nothing has changed about that lizard, but everything has changed about that lizard. I always think that's an underrated solution for a lot of our problems, is by trying to change our circumstances. As ruthless as it sounds, changing the people who you're spending your life with It shouldn't be an option that you should just dismiss. If somebody's repeatedly making you feel bad, then get rid.

The bizarre thing is that a lot of the time we want people that are motivated, that are growth-minded, that make us 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, on, 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, whether it's a humble brag or it's showiness or there's constant pictures on Instagram, you know, or whatever it is. You know, it's perfectly possible to be, you know, friends with people who are higher status than you if they, if they don't constantly remind you of that fact. I think it's the constant reminders of that fact that kind of upsets people. You know, it's the humble bragging and all that stuff. And also, you know, lots of it can be really, you know, positive. So I didn't write about this in The Status Game, but in my journalistic life a few years ago, I did a story on CrossFit and I went to the CrossFit annual CrossFit Games in California. And, you know, 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. 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. The status game can be positive. These people aren't 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 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 a status-generating machine. Any successful group is a status-generating machine. It's generating status for all of its players.

Presumably though, status— 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 5 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 outgroup that you no longer are. So have 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 2 things. So one thing is, you know, 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-sum. So internally, I don't know that a zero-sum game is exactly right. Because, you know, 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 go, yes, mate, yes, mate, yes, mate, I'm feeling really good because that's a 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 of a really bad status game is Enron, the company Enron, who had this Rank and Yanks So, you know, 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, were just kicked out. And everybody was, you know, so everyone's just fucking terrified. And, you know, and so you don't want to be working for Enron, you know. So I'm not— so I think zero-sum game, you know, status is relative, but it doesn't have to be— that doesn't necessarily mean it ends up being this 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 everyone in that group is when your game wins over a rival game. You know, there was a really telling piece by a quote from Laurie Lee, the author Laurie Lee's autobiography. And, you know, he was, you know, a kid at the height— I don't know about the height of the British Empire, but certainly when the British Empire was still the British Empire. And, you know, he talks about being about as poor as they get. They lived on boiled cabbage and that was what they ate. And, you know, but he said, we'd look we'd sit in the classroom, we'd look at the map, world map on the walls, all the pink bits were the British Empire. And he said, we'd look at each other and we'd feel like centurions. You know, it's that idea of, you know, when our group, when the group to which we belong is high status, no matter where we are in it, we feel great. You know, somebody working for Apple Computers, you can go to the Apple Store tomorrow, and you can see people who work at the Apple Store, they think they're amazing, because they work at the Apple Store.

You know, 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 backend of my iCloud and they break everything, I'm wrecked.

No, well, 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. You know, I was working, I think I was earning £85 a week or something. And I thought I was amazing because I worked at Longplayer and all the idiots worked at R-Price and HMV. You know, I 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 1 of Love Island. 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. Uh, yeah, so what happens? You, you take Vanessa, 19, hairdresser from Wigan, and you just deposit her in the middle of a villa, and then 6 weeks later she's got 2 million followers and a brand deal with PrettyLittleThing. What?

You're still a fan then?

No, no, I've never watched it. I've never watched a single minute. I lived it, so I've served my time. Yeah. Yeah. For 4 weeks, a month or so.

I'm going to watch that series.

Please don't. Please don't. What happens when someone radically gains status?

I think it's dangerous. You know, I do. I think, you know, there's a very interesting study that I kind of write about in depth in the book. And the psychologists— it was very small. So they had 12 people, which is usually frowned upon in the world of, you know, psychological studies. But 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 experience of kind of huge fame. And they talk about this process that is initially just amazing. It's just dreamlike. 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. 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— the only friends that you've got left are the people that are there with you because of who you are. So you stop trusting everybody. And then, you know, I thought what was really telling was that ultimately what happens is that some of them started talking about how nobody really knows me. And actually, it was like they had plenty of the success variety of status, but they started wanting the virtue kind of variety of status. And they started getting cross because, oh, I'm actually the real me. If you only knew the real me. So 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 enormous success when she was in her early 20s. And yeah, I was in a Hollywood film, I'll go that far, and then nothing. And, you know, when I met her when she was in her, I would say, early middle age, and she struck me just as a deeply unhappy woman, you know, she kept referencing the film and the success. And, you know, she talks a little bit about how the fact that she can't go out and just get an ordinary job now because then there'll be stories in newspapers about, look at this person, look what 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 thing that's ever happened to me. It was amazing. But I left with a powerful sense that it was actually the worst thing that ever 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 enormously 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, so yeah, I, I, 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, that's the ideal 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, but, but the sudden spike of fame when you're 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 and 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 it's a 7-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 worse than that, it says that you're red.

Hmm.

So the only way to get— and a lot of people that are part of this Whoop community, they talk about green recovery. So 7 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.

Yeah.

And let's say that you keep your Whoop on for 50 years, and in 50 years' time, your heartbeat's like— resting heart rate's 1 a minute and your 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 sort of 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 in the book called The Floor, and, you know, and the floor really, I argue, it's this idea, is what you— is exactly what you say, is the fact that we very easily acclimatize to our sense of status. You know, we might suffer wafts 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 deserved all of those rewards and all my critics are idiots. You know, that's what we do. You know, we accept the status and we acclimatize to it, and then we want more, you know, and we keep wanting more and we keep wanting more. And I think that's why super famous people end up often, not 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— they have to show the people around them that they have more and more status. So their behavior becomes kind of ever more monstrous. So there are some stories in there about kind of crazy celebrities wanting their— I think it was Kanye West wanted his— they said that the carpet in his dressing room was too bumpy and he ordered it to be ironed. So someone had to go and iron his carpet, you know. And, you know, some of the, you know, Fred the Shred, the, the old boss of the Royal, um, uh, Bank of Scotland, and, you know, having it whilst he was making all his terrible huge sort of cuts, um, was having his kitchen in his office relocated so his scallops could arrive to his desk, um, a little warmer. Yeah. So, so, you know, it makes the, the, you know, So high status can easily make monsters of us exactly because of that, because we acclimatise to it. We accept our level 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 their boots?

Yeah, that's when we're talking about, you know, the resentment again, the fact that we don't like big shots. And there's lots of evidence in the anthropological literature of, you know, people dealing with with what is sometimes referred to as big shot behavior. And yeah, I like that idea that there's one Inuit group that sings a song of derision at people who are the braggarts and the big dicks. So I just thought that was hilarious, a song of derision. My God.

So they circle the person that's got a bit too much big dick energy and they sort of point and bring him down a couple of pegs.

It's Twitter essentially, but in a sense.

Eskimo Twitter.

Yeah.

How does the status game relate to cancel culture?

Well, I mean, it's very, very, very much so. I mean, I mean, you know, the internet mobs, I think, are, um, a dominance-virtue game. It's about threat, it's about, um, coercion, it's about you will follow the rules of my status game.

Also virtue signaling on the side of the, of the canceller as well.

Absolutely, yeah. And, and, and yeah, and I, I think one of the— I think probably the, 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. You know, we seem to love leaders, but, 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, you know, elders or kind of high status. They were relatively egalitarian groups of 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 kinds of sway. But it's very much about You know, these, 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're going to be punished. It was just this sense of consensus would gather against this person and it would be an atmosphere of gossip, people telling nasty stories about him. And that would create moral outrage and more moral outrage would create more consensus and it would build up and build up and build up until, you know, in the case in which I describe in the book, this poor bastard was accused of using sorcery to kill somebody and he was killed and eaten. Yeah. And so, and so that's exactly what you see. You know, that is exactly what you see on social media. No one's in charge of a cancel 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— and it kind of fires at this person. And so, you know, The Tyranny of the Cousins is about this idea that, you know, when we were evolving in those groups, we weren't under the kind of fear of the tyranny of leaders. It was the fear of the tyranny of these cousins. And they weren't literal cousins, but there were these ideas of these closely, you know, these tribal elders that would sort of lead and whisper to each other and try and make this consensus happen. And, you know, it's extraordinary. I could compare kind of a modern mobbing to a deadly mobbing in, 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, or being too scared to defend themselves, and then sort of semi-confessing, but then not, because they didn't actually bloody do anything. And, you know, you see this in the Gaboose, and you see this in, you know, 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. 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 But the fundamental of where these impulses came from is our nature, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And 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 in there was the idea of the selfie camera. And, you know, the idea was that, you know, the technologists— it's Steve Jobs's fault and it's, you know, Google's fault for selfie culture because they put these cameras on the phone. But the original selfie cameras weren't called selfie cameras. 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 nan. But that's not what we did with them. We started taking pictures of ourselves, mostly. So Silicon Valley are constantly throwing ideas at us. 99.99% of those ideas get rejected and a tiny amount of them 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 Selfie is exactly the same as what I found when I was researching Status 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— formed back in the 1980s, still when people were having to do that thing with their phones like off WarGames. 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 California that would gather around little interest groups and they would just play little status games talking about wine or the eco stuff or whatever it was. And when it got to about 500, this sort of— this individual arrived who just basically hated men and was just, you know, firing off all this anti-male invective constantly. And, you know, and they kind of mobbed around this person, got them kicked off the platform eventually, deleted as many of their— this person's entries as possible.

Yeah.

So it was all there, and this person was gender non-conforming. Conformist. So biologically female, didn't identify as man, but used male pronouns and used male name. So slightly complicated. But I just thought it was extraordinary that in 1986, there was cancel culture, they were arguing about pronouns, you know, all the stuff that we see today and that we, you know, we tend to— we often blame on Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey happened in the very first social media website. And to me, that just shows Whereas, 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 ends up— 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 quote this, this, you know, one of the other things I wrote about in Selfie and also in this book is this kind of utopian technologist idea, the Wired magazine ideas from the '90s and the early 2000s, the vision of the internet, which is when you connect everybody together, it's going to be this utopia, no hierarchy, no disagreements, 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. That's what we do, for good and for ill. That's what we do.

As individuals, is it 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. It obviously is. People don't like to think of themselves as only, I only do this for status. It's a terrible— we readily recognize it in our enemies, but we hate recognizing it in ourselves. And I think It's really this idea of the storytelling brain. If the subconscious truth of us is we're just all out going for connection and status, as well as those other drives, sex, food, all that other stuff.

Enabled by status.

Yeah. Yes. And the conscious experience of life we have isn't 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 our day-to-day life and conjures this heroic story of self that explains who we are in the best possible light. And, you know, 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 know, you really believe it's true. You've got all these biases and prejudices which distort reality. You know, we even misremember our past in such a way that makes us feel more heroic. So, so, 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 want to— I'm just— I'm a good person. I am. I am better than everybody else. It's not, you know, so, um, so, so yeah, I think, I think that's why there's this disconnect. You know, it's this, it's this, 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. Um, I, I, no, I didn't. Uh, anxious About status. No, I mean—

It's 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 schmooze 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 status game.

Yeah, I suppose that's why politics is so fascinating and makes such great stories, because people's status is so fragile in the world of politics. And, you know, again, you see, you know, why politics is such a vicious world, 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, so yeah, I had never thought that, but that's a really interesting point. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the one profession I do write about in the 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 lawyers who just left law school and were going into their big-name law firms. He basically said to them, by the way, within 2 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. The paper was basically a description of the status game. It was saying that by the very fact that you're a lawyer and you've been through law school, you're an incredibly competitive person. Now you're in a new game, and that game is measured by money. You're going to become obsessed with money because every 6 months, the legal journals print this league table about who's earning what, and you're going to pore over those league tables. But the problem is you're going to be working as hard as it's possible to work. You know, lawyers are really unhappy people. There's high divorce rate, high alcoholism, 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 it's 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 clients, you know, and so on and so on. And he said, he was perfectly, perfectly honest, it happened to you, it's gonna happen to you, because it happened to me, you know. So, so, so, you know, I think the legal, you know, the, you know, the big-name legal profession, I think, is just an insanely intense status game.

But by the evidence of that paper, is it possible to exit the status game then?

No, it isn't. It really isn't. But it is possible to play different games, you know. And so One of the really funny studies that I came upon was this one that looked at meditation. We often hear from these wellness people that say, oh no, I used to be really interested in ego, but now I do mindfulness meditation. They studied 3,700 meditators, and these meditators were specifically chosen, the ones that were meditating, their practice was about ego needs and success and stuff 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— and it would 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, I've got this insight that nobody else has got. You can't get away from it. You can't do it. Yeah, it's, um, I always remember in The Heretics, one of my previous books, I went on a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat, really hardcore meditation. And every few hours our meditation would be interrupted by this British— it was in Australia— this British guy would come in in all his robes and whatnot, and he'd give us his talk. And because I was there, I wasn't good at the job of meditating, so I had bad hips, my hips were killing me, so I 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 bollocked. I was told off because he was so offended by the sight. But he said, you know, showing me the soles 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, you know, the sight of feet was so, you know, it's just ridiculous, you know, the whole thing. It's just ridiculous. Like, it was comical that he was so chippy about his status that that's what he did. So, so yeah, I mean, and the only people, the other people apart from meditators who try, the hikikomori in Japan, of course, who feel that they can't connect. What are they? They're the shutaways who refuse to leave their bedrooms. And when you look at, you know, the beliefs of the average hikikomori, that, you know, that they, they could hear very closely with what we describe as the status game. They say that we are, you know, 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 yourself from other people. But you've still got that imaginary audience in your head that's judging you all the time and probably not judging you very well.

Shame and guilt.

Yeah, exactly. So you can't, but what you can do is play different games. You know, if one game isn't working out for you, you know, 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 don't want to play just one game because people who play one game 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, you know, when one group is your sole source of status, you're highly at risk of irrational belief, irrational behavior. So cults, you know, fundamentalist religious groups, you know, fundamentalist political groups, you know, on the left and on the right. You know, if these people are sourcing their connection status from just one source, they're very liable to start believing sort of crazy things and behaving in damaging ways. And it's dangerous for them, too, because if they're kicked out of the group or if the group kind of fails in some way, their whole sense of self fails, because they have nothing— your sense of self is bound up in the games that you're playing. You are the games that you play. But then the answer isn't to play lots and lots of games equally, because status games are hard, and to actually earn status in a status game takes effort and time and application. So I think the ideal 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 you know, a few other ones in this kind of hierarchy. So you've always got that kind of— you've got, you've got different versions of self, different versions of you who are earning status in various different ways. And you're kind of— it's like a hedge, like a property portfolio thing, your 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 about virtuous. You know, one of the, one of the things that I kind of looked at was, okay, so, you know, If there is 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. Dominance, virtue, and success, the 3 main games of human life. So, so, so really it's warmth and sincerity and competence. If you, if you can, if you can approach people embodying those 3 qualities, it's very hard for you to fail in life because when you, when you're warm to people, you're saying to them, you're signaling to them, I'm not going to, 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. You know, when things are going badly, I'm going to tell you they're going badly because, you know, the 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, you know, in a warm way. And then finally, competence. You know, I'm going to be useful. I've got all the— I've got this skill and, you know, 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 3 qualities, it's hard for you to fail in life.

I love it. Will Storr, ladies and gentlemen. The Status Game on social position and how we use it. Is this the COVID of the main one?

So this is a joke.

So this is a galley copy, and I don't know if anyone's ever gonna— are you all right for me to show this? Can I show what this looks like?

Yeah.

So yeah, um, 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 Storr. 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 ballsy 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 I saw the designer's options and that was at the bottom, I think they'd 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 just think, oh, I'm being a dick.

So, you know how big the text is that they've got your name on here? I think it's really funny, people that 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, @WStorr.

Amazing. Well, thank you, brother.

Cheers, Chris. It was great talking to you. Thank you.

Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months. And don't forget to subscribe. Makes me very happy indeed.

Peace.