How and Why We Play Social Status Games - Will Storr
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Hey friends, how's it going? Welcome back to Deep Dive. What you're about to hear is an interview with Will Storr, who is the best-selling author of this book, The Status Game. And he's written a bunch of other books, including a book, Selfie, which is all about like selfie and social media culture and how we're obsessed with ourselves. But this new one is fantastic. It's called The Status Game. And it's one of my favorite topics. It's basically about all of the different ways in which practically all human behavior is ultimately motivated towards seeking and acquiring

requiring more social status. We talk about how status is a fundamental part of the human condition and how this has been a thing from like the dawn of time. We talk a little bit about the three different types of status games that we can play in everything that we do. And we talk a little bit about how the pursuit of status is often seen as a negative thing, but it can actually drive us to do bigger and better things with our lives. And we also talk about practical ways to increase one's social status if you're into that kind of thing by, you know, tactics like warmth and sincerity.

which sound like tactics, but are actually just generally being a decent human being. So yeah, hope you enjoy the discussion. Okay, let's talk about the status game. How did you become interested in the topic of the pursuit of social status? Well, so The Heretics and then Selfie and then The Science of Storytelling, those three books were all about that idea of the brain as a storyteller. They were all pursuing this one idea, which is the brain is...

Is this delusional machine, which, as I said before, remixes reality into this heroic story. We're in the middle of the world, the universe, everything revolves around us. We're amazing. You know, as long as we're psychologically healthy, we have all these, you know, crazy biases. So, you know, I started to think, OK, so if that's...

if that's what's really going on, if that's the kind of delusion we're in the middle of, if that's the kind of lie of the brain, what's the truth of the brain, what's actually going on kind of beneath the hood. And so this phrase that I read, I think it was a psychologist, I think Robert Hogan came up with this phrase. I used it in the selfie and the science of storytelling that our secret subconscious drive is to get along and get ahead. And I always love that because it's so simple to understand. Get along.

And the reason it's those things is because we're tribal. We're a tribal animal. We're these apes that have mastered the art of cooperative living. We're driven to... And so for those reasons, we have these very strong subconscious urges to getting together in groups of people who are like-minded and pursue goals with them, but also compete for status

with other members of that group, but also those groups compete for status with rival groups. And so that, that's tribal life. That's life in the tribe. You know, um, that's why we, we organize the human life is organized like that because it was organized like that 20,000 years ago on the African Savannah. Uh, and you know, I always found it's amazing that that's still human life today. You know, those groups are political groups, their football teams, their, um,

you know, cults, their religions, their corporations, that we, this is what we do. That's human social life. It's groupish and it's compete competition. And so, so the status game is, is really a book about that. Get along and get ahead. Now that's what a game is. A game is you get along, you, you clump into a game of group that you're playing a game with and then you, you start competing. Yeah.

Yeah. How did the story kind of come together? Did you start off with the hypothesis that this is a thing and then find the stories and the examples and stuff to back it up? Or was it more investigative? Like, what was the approach there? Yeah, it was...

So when I was researching Selfie, and Selfie is about how in the West we're very individualistic and self-obsessed, relatively speaking, to the rest of the world. And so it was looking at kind of selfie culture, that narcissistic selfie culture. That's a great title, by the way. Yeah, it wasn't mine. I can't take credit for that. Yeah, I remember seeing it, I think in 2017 or something. Yeah, that's when it came out. Yeah, and I was like, oh, that's it.

interesting book yeah good yeah um yeah and um and i i interviewed this guy called professor bruce heard he's a very well-known psychologist down at the university of bristol and it's put in my interview he said to me oh you know he said why do we do the things that we do so once we've got enough money to live and survive and we've got enough money for our families to survive everything is just about validation you didn't use the word status you use the word validation now that's why we write books that's why we pursue you know it's why i'm a scientist and yeah

And when he said that, my immediate response was, oh, come on, that's so cynical. That's such a ridiculous thing to say. And then I just sort of thought about it for another 30 seconds. And I just thought, I think he's right. I think he's right. I really do think he's right. And that just really stayed with me. And then I just started researching it. So I started looking at the science of kind of status. But then the light bulb moment for me was really...

the game part of it. But because if you just say it's all about status, that's half the story. The other half is the connection. You know, once you, once we've connected, it's like connecting with other people. So, so once I sort of realized that, that one of the light bulb moments for me was, was one of my ghostwriting clients actually.

and he's a guy with a working class background he became very successful and he's very very alpha male like you know powerful um uh you know military background like for middle class lower middle class like book geek like me quite intimidating and um you know when i first met him it was a meeting at a publishing company i was a bit nervous to be with him because i felt like

As far as he's concerned, I'm this wimp, this little nerdy wimp, you know, with my little cardigan on. But I kind of felt he was a bit nervous to meet me. He was a bit uncomfortable meeting me. And that really made me sort of ask, why, what was going on there? And it was great because he was really nice and I was expecting him to be a bit dismissive of me, but he was so nice, you know, and he was really enthusiastic to understand. And his whole thing with me was just like, mate, I don't know what you do, but just do what you do. Yeah. Just make this a great book. And, you know, he'd really trusted me. Yeah. And, um,

And that was the big break for me because I realized that we have different ways of measuring status. Like his way of measuring status is with physical strength, banter, probably football, like talking about football. That's his criteria for claiming status. And that's what he's proud of, you know, his physicality. Whereas my criteria for claiming status are things like books you've written and getting nice reviews in the Times or, you know,

fucking paintings on the walls, all those kinds of things. And that's when I suddenly realized we're not all competing with each other. We're playing different status games. So when he came around my house to work on my book and he saw the paintings on the walls and all the books on the shelves, even with the fact of his incredibly masculine life,

he probably would have felt a little bit intimidated and a little bit uncomfortable because he's in, he's in a different world now. And his criteria for claiming status suddenly doesn't count. And he, you know, um, and when I go into his world and I'm meeting with his very, very masculine, terrifying people, I'm like, you know, I mean, everyone's really nice. So, so, so, you know, but, but, but,

But that was the breakthrough. We're playing different status games. And the thing to understand is that we're not all competing with each other. We're all playing little individual games. And each of these games has kind of symbolic ways of claiming status. So if you think about Monopoly, the way you symbolize status in Monopoly is those little plastic houses and hotels and the money. And that's how we play status games. So his symbolic...

Claims to state is there is his physicality his history of extreme violence You know his success. He's huge successes in that physical world. Yeah And probably he's very proud of playing I know if you can make football or whatever those things are and mine are completely different and but and it was it's and it was the understanding that really made me see the world in a different way to understand

the status games that we all play and how they drive us and make us kind of different kinds of people. - We're gonna take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor Brilliant. Brilliant is a fantastic online platform for learning maths, science and computer science with interactive and engaging courses that I've been using for many years. But to be honest, I wish I'd had the lessons in maths to hand when I was preparing for my BMAT when applying to medical school. A lot of the time when we're taught maths at school, the focus is on empty memorization of formulas that we can apply in our exams.

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And the first 200 people to sign up by that link will get 20% off the annual subscription to the website. So thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this episode. Yeah, as I was listening to the audiobook, I found myself thinking that it is very hard to get away from the fact, from the idea that seeking status is bad. And that, you know,

similar to the stuff they talk about in The Elephant in the Brain, you know, that quote from, allegedly from JP Morgan, that a man always has two reasons for doing something, the good reason and the real reason. And if I think of like, what's my real reason for being YouTuber, for doing this podcast, for wanting to write a book, it's like, if I've got to be honest with myself, it is broadly status motivated. And I'm like, shit, this is bad. Like, shouldn't I have a more like altruistic impact? And it's like, yeah, it's kind of nice, like teaching people, it's kind of fun talking to a camera. But really, if I was doing it

If I was talking to people and then hitting delete rather than hitting publish, suddenly that changes the equation. And so OK, what's going on there? Yeah, what do you think about that? I guess when we think or when we point out the status thing, it feels like a negative.

He does feel like a negative and that was the journey I went on because it isn't I mean it can be a negative There's lots of negative in the book about the about the bad sides of the status game, but it's also What's made civilization is what is what makes us good people? You know the history of the status game again goes back to those tribes the tribes in which we evolved and so You know nature has to find a way of incentivizing us to be valuable people. You know, we humans

can be very selfish and self-interested and delusional and all those things. So how do you get these creatures that have a tendency towards selfishness to be selfless and to work for the benefit of the tribe? Well, you incentivize them with status and status is this reward. So what happened was, you know, we were playing status games with our reputation. We had a reputation in the tribe, you know, and you'd get a good reputation. You'd go up in the status game if you proved yourself to be valuable to the tribe.

And there's two ways of being valuable to the tribe. You can be virtuous, so you can be generous, courageous in battle, a follower of rules and an enforcer of rules, or you can be successful. So you can be valuable to the tribe by being a really great honey finder, a really great hunter, a really great storyteller, a really great sorcerer.

And so it's this reward that you get for being valuable, for being useful, for being kind and generous. And so that was true 10,000 years ago. It's still true today. It's if you think about, like, we're not used to seeing people like Gandhi and, you know, Malala as...

superstars, as celebrities, but they are, you know, they are moral superstars. And that's good. It's good. That's good. That's humanity at its best, I think, is when we see valuable people like Gandhi or like...

the people who invented the astrazeneca vaccine that you know um and we make celebrities of them we're celebrating them as we're making them heroic and so you know without that we wouldn't have civilization we wouldn't have the moral world as we know it because you know you can feel it with with the moral status thing when you do something good and kind

You feel it in your body. You go, ooh. You feel up. You literally feel physically up. And when other people find out that you've done a nice thing, they go, oh, that's amazing. And that's an automatic thing.

And that's brilliant. That's the best of the human animal. So I do think it's... I completely agree with you that we are used to, we are conditioned to seeing status as this negative thing. And it can be a very negative thing. But it's also the very, very best of who we are as a species. You know, in the book, I talk about things like the origin of the iPhone, for example. You know, with Steve Jobs...

kept meeting this guy from Microsoft at these parties 'cause his wife was friends with his wife. And this guy would be, "Oh, we've solved computing. "We're gonna kill Apple. "We've got this new touchscreen device with a stylus." And Steve Jobs was just livid 'cause he was like, "How can you talk to me like that? "How can Microsoft solve computing?"

And he came in and apparently there was a set of expletives and he said, right, we're going to show them how it's really done. And it's not a stylus, it's with your finger. Make the thing with the finger. And they made it. And that was the iPhone and then became the iPad. It started off as the iPad. So, you know, that's a great example of somebody very... Steve Jobs was very interested in status and usually, you know, obsessed with status. And, you know, the iPhone, for better or for worse, has changed the world. And it began with...

Just somebody feeling belittled at a barbecue in California. I guess if we think of our own motivations kind of on an individual level, the way I kind of think of it is that there is always some kind of status game that I'm playing in basically everything I do.

But there's nothing I can do about it. And so it's actually kind of fine. And so similar to, you know, why do I go to the gym? Well, I can pretend it's for health reasons. But really, everyone knows what the real reason behind going to the gym is. But that's not the end of the world. It's, you know, we don't need to have fully pure altruistic motives for the things we do to still actually be good.

That's right. It's like men's health isn't really a health magazine. It's a sexy body magazine. It's an, I want to look good naked magazine, you know? And that's, yeah, that's right. And, and, um, yeah, um, I think the health version of that wouldn't, I don't think it would sell very well. Um,

Yeah, you can't you can't Get away from it. It's it's in your kind of body. It's in your brain You know as soon as you're out in the world mixing with people. It's automatic you're judging them They're judging you the game is on you know so One thing that I think they talk about in the book is when status is taken away That can often be like a really really terrible thing. I wonder if you can kind of elaborate that on a little bit. Yeah, I

So status is this kind of social nutrient. It's like it's an essential kind of thing that we need. We need to feel respected and valued by the people around us. And when we don't, we become unwell. We become psychologically unwell. We become depressed, become stressed, become anxious.

We also can become physically unwell when we're kind of repeatedly robbed of status. At its most extreme, in the book I write about humiliation, the state of humiliation. And humiliation is, we've all been there, it's a horrific kind of experience. And humiliation is this,

It's not just that you've been robbed of all your status within a group. You've been robbed of the ability to claim it ever again in the future. Like you're so, it's been, it's gone so wrong that people are like, leave. We don't want anything to do with you anymore. And you're kind of forbidden from the group. And that's, I mean, you know, that, that, that's a fearsome thing. Subconsciously that, that, that's, that's the equivalent, you know, in the back in the tribal days, um,

If we were that lacking in status within the group, it would have been probably a death sentence. Either we were kicked out of the group, and that's a death sentence itself, or we were executed. Execution, capital punishment is thought to have once been a human universal. So we really fear it. And, you know, as I said, we need status. It's this kind of fundamental thing.

psychological nutrients. And I think when in the book, I write about people who have been, who are kind of humiliated again and again and again and again. And these are the people that become very unwell and often extremely violent. There's a chapter in the book on mass murderers, serial killers, spree killers, terrorists, honor killers. And humiliation is deeply implicated in all of those phenomena.

Given that, if we accept that we're all sort of playing status games, is there anything that we can slash should do differently as we're going about our lives and keeping that in the back of our minds? Yeah, I think it's useful to be aware of the game when the game is in process. Yeah.

it's often very easy to become irritated and frustrated by little slights that people might make to us. And...

you know anybody seen curb your enthusiasm that's all about a guy who is highly attuned to kind of status lights in the book I write about this study where about orange glasses of orange juice and this is the if you pull lots of glasses of oranges for people but you get slightly less orange juice and everybody else it's really like you get really upset about it you know and that's because it's not it's not actually just a mouthful of orange you should been robbed of yeah it's it's your

your brain has gone that symbolic of your status. So that's how insanely obsessed the brain is, as a subconscious brain is with our relative status. And we're all used to, every day we probably have an experience where we feel a bit slighted. And I think once you understand that that's just your brain

being a completely obsessive idiot about your status. It's much easier to... You don't stop feeling the feelings, but I think you can separate yourself from them much easier and just almost like a Buddhist look upon yourself and go, oh, that's my brain being stupid. But I think one of the big takeaways for me as well is that I think we often forget that...

You know we have status to give like the prestige forms of status virtue and success those two forms of prestige We get them from other people other people voluntarily give them to us when we do good things Yeah, and so we have status to give unlimited reserves of status to give other people and we're often quite bad at giving it We often quite jealous kind of jealously hoard our kind of stores of status and I think

No, I think just life for ourselves, it gets much better when we're more generous with status. Yeah. You know, even for a selfish reason that people want to be around us more if we're giving out that stuff. As long as you're not completely inauthentic about it, I think there's a risk that you go, it's like Hollywood and, you know, like the LA thing of, oh my God, you look amazing. Yeah. And nobody believes a word you're saying, you know, as always sort of laps into that. I think understanding that great gift that you have and that you can give it to people and

really make their day. So what does that look like in practice? Like, is it like laughing at someone's joke, even if it's borderline funny? I don't think it's being, I don't think you have to be inauthentic about it. I think, I think there's always something nice you can find to say about somebody. And, um,

- Yeah, and it's just saying it. Like sometimes it can go wrong. I was just, the reason I stopped there is because I had a slightly uncomfortable, I was doing an interview to promote the status game with this woman on the radio. She had a really beautiful speaking voice. And after the interview, I said, "You've got such a beautiful speaking voice."

And I think I made her a bit uncomfortable. I think she thought I was coming on to her. I was like, oh, God. Sometimes you've got to be careful about that. I really wasn't, you know, but like I was just trying to be nice. But it's things like that. You know, there's always something nice. I mean, she might not have. I was worried that she thought that it came out badly. But yes, as long as it doesn't come off as creepy or insincere, you know, I think that there's always this sort of gift that we can give other people.

That makes a lot of sense. You said in another podcast that you were on, I think on Jordan hobbing the show, you said that...

You were talking about this whole idea of when people say, oh, I don't care what people think of me. Yeah. I wonder if we can elaborate on that a little bit. What's the deal with that? We are going to take a little quick break from the podcast to introduce the sponsor of this podcast, which is CuriosityStream. If you haven't heard by now, CuriosityStream is the world's leading documentary streaming subscription platform founded by John Hendricks, who's the founder of the Discovery Channel. And on CuriosityStream, they've got hundreds of really high quality, high budget documentaries covering all sorts of things from science and technology to history and ancient civilizations to phantoms.

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We are wired, you know, to our core to care about what other people think of us. It's in the human machine. It's part of our human nature to care about what other people think of us. And I think, as I said before, it always makes me laugh when people say that because they always say it in a certain way. I don't care what other people think of me. And they're like, you're just, you know, that's just another way of claiming status. You're claiming that you're better than everybody else. Like, you know, and it's so ironic because it's obviously very important to them that other people think

They don't care what other people think about them. So it's just you know, it's just it's just it's just never true I think if it is true If it ever was true about somebody that that's gonna be a person who is extremely badly socially adjusted and more likely end up either in prison or in a Institution, you know, if you don't care what they will think about you you're you're not going to be a functional person Yeah, so there was an interesting chapter where he talked about sort of the

the sort of the, the real life cues that we give off when we are higher status or lower status. And I wonder like often, you know, we did a survey for the podcast and people said that they like getting actionable tips that they can apply in their work life. Yeah. And I was kind of thinking that like,

Are there actionable tips that you can apply in your work life, for example, knowing that the status game exists in every relationship you're going to have at work, for example? Yeah, I think so. You know, one of the things I think is really important is...

In the business context is to always have that understanding that you're you're never the hero and other people's stories They're always the hero. They're always the one on this great pursuit of status which their brain remixes as this kind of heroic, you know Pursuit and so it's so it's much better in a business context to come across as

The kind of that like it you're a helpful person in their story Yeah, so there's a story scholar who I think it was really smart guy called Christopher Booker who wrote a book or the seven basic plots It's a huge like two thousand word two thousand page thing. I think is like huge Tome but but he writes about this archetypal figure in story called the light figure and

And the light figure is like... The light as in light? Yeah, exactly. The light figure. And the light figures come into the story and they're like the ghosts in the Christmas Carol. Their job is there to help Scrooge become heroic, to see the area. And so I think in the business context,

If you go in there boasting, I'm amazing, you want to work with me, I'm fantastic. You're going to put people off because you're not the hero, they're the hero. So you're much better off being the light figure and your story is, this is how I'm going to help you gain status. I'm going to do these things to help you. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is about impression management. So there's lots of science that's looked at how socially do we give a good impression to other people?

And for a long time, they talked about two domains, warmth and competence.

And more recently it's been argued that there should be a third domain added to that, which is morality. And when I was reading about this, it really struck me because in the book I write about there's three status games. There's dominance, which is the aggressive, animalistic status game. There's virtue and there's success. And those three, they called them warmth, competence and morality. But I called it warmth, competence and sincerity. Map on perfectly to those three status games.

So I don't know, but I don't think that's a coincidence. I think that it's interesting that those map onto those three status games so well. And the logic is when you approach somebody with warmth, what you're subconsciously signaling to that person is that I'm not going to compete for status with dominance with you. I'm not going to threaten you. I'm not going to coerce you. I'm not going to.

use physical violence against you, so we're going to have a healthy, non-aggressive status game. When you're signaling with sincerity,

You're saying I'm going to play a good virtue game with you, which is I'm going to be morally respectable. And that doesn't mean I'm going to suck up to you. I'm not going to give you bullshit. I'm going to tell you the truth. And when I'm not happy, I'm going to tell you I'm not happy. So I'm going to be sincere. I'm always going to be honest with you. And then finally, competence. If you come across as a competent person, you are signaling not only am I going to be useful to our community,

Not only am I going to be useful to our group, our game, but you also might learn some stuff from me. So there are things that I can do. And if you learn how to do them from me, you're also going to raise in status. So I think if you can, it's obviously easier said than done. But if you can manifest in those three ways, warmth, sincerity and competence, it's very hard to know how you're going to fail in life.

You know and you know, you can't just come across in those ways. You've got to actually live those ideals You've got to be sincere. You've got to be non-aggressive. Yeah, and you've got to be competent You've got to be good at your you know, you gotta be good at the thing that you're doing So yeah that I think knows that that's kind of a practical idea Sincerity and confidence competence Oh competence. Yeah. Yeah. It strikes me that have you seen suits?

No. Oh, so there's this, it's this lawyer show. And this is guy Harvey Specter. He's like this big shot lawyer. And the way he comes across to his clients is very warm, sincere and competent. Okay. The way he comes across to his, his opposition is very like dominant, like full on alpha male, like that kind of stuff going on. Do you think in non work context, like in social contexts, it strikes me that maybe the competence matters less than it's actually about warmth and sincerity?

Yeah, I think, you know, there is always those two things going on, connection and status, getting along and getting ahead. And I think when it comes to connection, belongingness, warmth and sincerity are obviously really important. And yeah, I was thinking connection more important. I mean, you know, yeah, virtue, I guess, matters for status and for connection. But I think, yes, but status, but competence is very much a kind of status thing.

Yeah. You, you, you're attracted to competent people because you're impressed by them, not because you feel like you want to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I was, I was reading happy by Derren Brown. Um, he talks about stoicism and stuff. Um, and one of the lines that really stuck with me and from that book was that we think people are attracted or people, we, we, we, we sometimes think people are attracted to competence, but in fact they're attracted to warmth. And like, I,

I think definitely when I was younger, I thought the way to make friends was to signal how competent I was at like A, B, and C. And then over time, I actually realized that actually no one actually cares in a friends context. In a business networking type context, fine. But in a friends context, actually warmth and sincerity is the way forward. Yeah. I think that's true. Yeah, I think that's true. But I also think there's a...

I don't think, I think you could, like at school, people want to be friends with the best footballer, you know, so I do, there is that stuff going on as well. I don't think it's true to say completely like that, that we're not, we don't want to be friends with competent people because I don't, I don't, you know, people who are really able are very attractive people.

They suck in people around them. There's a book called The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, which is really good, writing about that, about how attractive competence is to other people. And, you know, I wonder if there's a gender difference there too. I don't know whether it's more of a kind of male thing. I don't know. Oh, on that note, in your research, did you notice any gender differences in how the different genders compete for status?

I tried to keep away from gender a little bit because it's so dangerous. It's a dangerous area to derive that. So I kept it on not quite safe ground, but safe in terms of the research. And so the research on this is so solid, it's basically inarguable. Like it's so well evidenced. And so all over the world,

There is a generalized and there's importance that it's general. It's not every woman is different from every man in this way. It's just a generalization. But generally speaking, there are difference in interests in the kind of games that we play. So women tend to be more interested in people and men tend to be more interested in things. So if you got 100...

you know, people, 50 women and 50 men together and said, step forward those who are interested in tractors, the chances are that more men than women would step forward. And, you know, what that means is that if you, in a tractor, if you've got a tractor factory, there's gonna be more men than women working there and more men at the top of the hierarchy. And that's not gonna be because of sexism. It's just gonna be because of

Predictable differences in interest. So I thought that's as far as I went with gender in the book because it's so well evidenced that. It's so clear, that difference, and it's so universal. The question is whether that's...

genetic, whether it's actually in our genes or whether it's socialization. But because it's universal, I'm dubious that it's completely socialization. Like if it was socialization, cultures are so different around the world. You'd expect to see quite a lot of variety. You'd expect to find this culture over here where the computer engineers are mostly women and the

you know, that doesn't exist. Yeah. You know, so, so, so, you know, there was, there was, yeah. So, so, so that, that is very well evidenced that. So, and, and, and I think that's, that, that's a mistake that's often made in the culture where you get certain industries that are male dominated and some of the female, like, you know, teaching, nursing, female dominated and, and, and, and,

there's often a kind of patriarchy argument, like an argument from conspiracy overlaid on top of that. And often that's not really what's going on. It's just, it's just a result of how generally speaking,

The injustice in that for me is that often those people-centered industries, they don't pay you well compared to the things versus industries. And that's the thing that's not fair. Yeah. Yeah. But how you fix that, who knows? Yeah. Yeah. While we're on the topic, did you come across any race differences in how the status game is played at all? Not race differences. No, no, no. I'd be very skeptical if somebody was to argue that there are any race differences. I think there are cultural differences. Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah. So there are big cultural differences. The main one that we know about academically is East versus West. So West were individualist.

And so we see status pursuit more, it's much more about the individual. It's about me and my achievements. And so, you know, we are kind of self-aggrandizing, you know, we're kind of relatively show-offy. Whereas in the East, that's seen as very taboo. And the East is much more communitarian culture. It's Confucian versus Aristotelian in a way. And that Confucian communitarian culture is much more about the group.

And so status is much more about the group serving the group. And so how that manifests in day-to-day life, there was a very interesting paper that I write about in the book by, I think it was a Japanese anthropologist, writes about face, the concept of face. - Oh, yeah. - And he said, it's fascinating, he said that in Japan, if an individual is picked out, one member of a group is picked out for individual praise, that seems extremely shameful.

and embarrassing because what you've done is you've made everybody else look worse in the group. And so what they'll do, that person usually, is they'll deliberately do a really terrible job at work for the next days or weeks in order to be the worst in the group, to kind of rebalance the group. So that's completely the opposite in the West where it's like, ah, I'm the best.

Fuck you guys. That's kind of the more the thing that we do. So that's a huge cultural difference. And I wrote about that in Selfie. Susan Cain also writes about this in her book Quiet. And in the book, she writes about how in China, shyness is seen as a leadership quality, which again is completely different way that we experience the status game in the West. It's much more about confidence, personal confidence here. But, you know, whereas...

People with shyness are high status in China. So no race differences, but certainly lots and lots of cultural differences. The whole status thing has clearly been around for a very long time. But then you add the internet and you add social media onto this thing. What are the kind of implications in your...

Well, social media is just one huge status game. If you think about those three games, dominance, virtue and success, that's what social media is. It's like there's people doing dominance, being aggressive to each other, bullying each other, doxing and cancelling and all that stuff. There's virtue, people signalling, oh, I think this is... They're talking about politics, it's all about virtue stuff. This person's bad, this person's good. This law is bad, this law is good, etc.

all that stuff. And there's also success games. Look at my amazing gym body, look at my healthy breakfast, look at my tan knees in the Maldives. So that's what social media is. It's dominance, virtue and success.

And so, you know, one of the things I also write about in selfies is this idea we have that, you know, these are kind of inventions of Silicon Valley and they've kind of created these things which have like distorted the world and made us. But I think, I don't think that's how it works. You know, in selfie, I write about how the selfie camera was invented as a business tool for doing, you know, conferences. And it was called the front facing camera when it was launched. And then it was us, the people that decided to do selfies.

And then the tech companies went, okay, that's what you want to do with them. Then here's Instagram and here's, you know, here's, you know, yeah. So, you know, Twitter wasn't Twitter, as we know, when it launched, it was a free SMS text message service, you know? So, so, so, so what you've got are these technologies kind of working out by trial and instinct, what people want and giving it to them and what people want are status games. And that's what Twitter is. That's what Instagram is. That's what TikTok is. And in the book, you know, I write about, you know, I call that,

the social media, a slot machine for, for status. And I think it's quite well known by people who are interested in, in, in sort of back, have had kind of behind the scenes interest in social media, all that, the BJ Fogg behavior model, which is the idea is this kind of evil genius who, he wrote this book in 2003, predicting the iPhone, just extraordinary, you know, writing about this young girl who has this device. It's about the size of a pack of cards and a whole life's on it. And maybe like he basically foresaw the thing in 2003. It was unbelievable.

Not only did he foresee the iPhone or the smartphone, he came up with this model of how to make it basically not addictive, like a compulsive, to make it so it was hard to put down. And what he wrote was that what you want to make is it gives rewards, but the rewards are...

unpredictable. So like a slot machine, you don't know what's going to happen. You're going to get the money, you're not going to get the money. And so when it's unpredictable, you can't stop looking at it. And so that's quite well known. But I think the missing piece for me is that is what are you gambling with? And what you're gambling with is status. That's exactly what you're gambling with whenever you make a contribution to social media. Whether it's a

Comment on Twitter or photo on Instagram or whatever something on LinkedIn about your new project. Yeah You always want to refresh and be like, well, how many likes I've got exactly it's like how's it done? How's it done? Then you can go up you can go down, you know, and that's what's compulsive about it So yeah that that's that and I think that's why social media is universally like it's gone around the world It's not just a Western thing. It's all around the world and because its status status is a universally

necessary it's part of the human condition it's part of the it's part of what we are as a species so it's it's addictive yeah yeah i guess one of the one of the main takeaways that i took because i'm as as i read stuff like this i'm always kind of interested like yeah that's cool kind of from a society level in terms of understanding stuff but is there something that i can do myself to kind of apply this knowledge in an interesting way yeah and i i often think about status when it comes to um

when it comes to how I feel about like my own career and stuff, like back in the day where my peer group was medical students and doctors, there was a status game going on for who was getting the highest grades, who was the best looking, who was the best at sports, et cetera. There were all these different kind of fields of status game being played.

But because I was doing the YouTube stuff and business stuff at university, I'd sort of opted out of the status games that, quote, everyone else was playing and was doing very well on this other thing, which to me was, yeah, I'm high status because I'm the only one who's doing this business stuff. And then over time, as I was working for two years as a doctor, I was one of the probably most successful YouTubers in that sphere. Very easy to win that status game.

Now that I am not a doctor anymore, I'm like, shit. Like now the status game that I sort of find myself playing is with all of the other YouTubers. Yeah. Of which there are loads of them who are more successful than I am. And now I'm like, god damn it. And so I find myself doing this weird thing where...

Or for example, where like I speak to a lot of startup founders and startup founders make like stupid amounts of money, even more stupid amounts than YouTubers make. And so it's like, oh, this guy is, you know, like, you know, having a, having 2 million subscribers is cool, but this guy's got a hundred million pound business. And because the peer group, the comparison group has changed the way that I personally feel about my own accomplishments and my own level of status is always kind of in flux based on who I'm speaking to and all this kind of stuff.

But when I recognize this I kind of take take a step back try to do that kind of thing of like no hang on This is just my brain going wild because of the status stuff. I actually don't need to think this way I can actually just try and focus on being grateful for what I have and trying to opt out of the status game as much as possible knowing that it's never really going to be fully possible because we're all human at the end of the day, but It is at least something to aspire to I think yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, it's um, it's uh, yeah, it's uh,

I think it's really valuable to understand the game that we're all playing. And then once you do, you can, yeah, you can kind of think yourself, you can sort of foster more kind of healthy habits, I think, in that way. And yeah, it's tough. I mean, you know, the game that you're playing now as a YouTuber is hard, you know, it's a tough one. But as I said before, I think the trick is knowing this isn't the...

the last game you're going to be playing. This is going to be a stepping stone. Yeah, it's a stepping stone to who knows what. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Nice. I posted on Instagram asking if anyone has questions for you. And so we have a bunch of questions that people have asked through Twitter and through Instagram. So Sarah Coey asks...

How does status actually lead to longevity if it doesn't lead to happiness? I don't know. She's getting some kind of link between status and longevity. Well, there's a famous set of studies called the Whitehall Studies. There's a guy called Dr. Michael Marmot, which looked at the British Civil Service, which is a huge, huge organization, very stratified. And what he found was that

The higher you went up the hierarchy, the better your health outcomes, the lower your mortality. And so you might think, okay, that's because the richer you are, the more you're eating salad and having a personal trainer. But that wasn't true. It was separate from kind of lifestyle and all that stuff. And what he found was that if the person at the very top of that hierarchy smoked and the person one beneath that person also smoked, that one person beneath would be more likely to get sick

as a result of their smoking than the one at the top. So it was incredibly, the brain's incredibly...

Sensitive to our level of relative states where we sit in our status games of life And they found this is true for men and for women And the health differentials were really quite extraordinary That they even found it in laboratory conditions with baboons So they call these baboons is poor bloody baboons in a lab and they fed them a really terrible diet like, you know high calorie

crisps or whatever i don't know what it was pretty delicious but you know really bad for them yeah um and and they found the same truth was for truth of baboons as was in civil service was at the lower you were to the hierarchy the more likely they were to get sick as a result of their bad diets and then they changed the hierarchy they i don't know how they did it but they conspired to change the hierarchy the baboon troop and the health outcomes changed in lockstep

So that's just extraordinary evidence that they mom of course is the status syndrome that the and so, you know It's kind of speculative as to why that's true But there's a field called social genomics a quite a new field could social genomics and social genomics is the science of how our social world Impact the function of our genes and interview to go call presses Steve Cole out in, you know

University of California, who's an expert in social genomics and he thinks it's to do with inflammation, which you obviously know all about as a medic. The idea that if we're kind of lower on the totem pole,

the body's preparing you for attack and for trouble and for crisis. And we're not designed to be an information for a long period of time. We are designed to be an information for a short bit of time. And if we, and, and, and it also changes our antiviral response. Um, so, so, so, so that, that's what he thinks is, that's what they think is going on. So, so, so I wouldn't say, so,

I guess it wouldn't quite be true to say that having high status gets you longevity. It's probably more accurate to say that having high status protects you from getting ill. It's kind of the same thing, but it's probably slightly more accurate to say. It's not like a long life. Well, it kind of is a long life, but it's more of like a protective thing against illness. Yeah. Good stuff. We have a question from Jamie Donald. I guess we've sort of covered this. Does everyone see status in the same way? I might not see something as high status that another person does.

Yeah, no, they don't. So a classic example would be cars. You know, if you're a middle class person driving a shiny Audi or a shiny BMW or, you know, like a whatever, it's seen as a high status thing. But if you're above that in the social class, it's an Aristo, that's seen as a low status thing. And, you know, I live in the country, the proper poshies, they drive around a knackered old...

Land Rover covered in dog hair and mud. And they'll actively look down. And it's the same as, you might get somebody who is in the wellness world, for example, who drives a battered old car. But that's their status symbol. They're showing the game that they're using. So no, we all play different status games and we all have different criteria for claiming status.

And yeah, I grew up with a, not grew up, when I was working in the record shop, I lived with a modern white, I was a lodger and another guy living in the house was Tim. He was a hippie and he was in a very, so he was very anti-materialistic and in his head, he wasn't playing the status game 'cause he didn't care about possessions and all that stuff.

But of course he was. That's his way. That's his criteria for claiming status, looking down his nose at people who wanted to buy a big telly. His small telly was his status symbol. Nice. So we've got a question from King2 underscore cool, who says, how are children attracted to status as they grow up?

That's a great question. Well, it's almost immediate. And so I mentioned Bruce Hood earlier, who was the guy that got me thinking about this in the first place. And he's published a very interesting book called Possession, which is about the psychology of possessions.

And he writes about kids who fight over toys. And so, you know, toys as a status symbol, the reason they want the toy is not because they want the toy. It's because who has the toys on top. So that's that's how that's the kind of one example of very early manifestation of the status game in kids.

And so during childhood, those are the kinds of basic games we're playing. And we're demanding status. We're crying and getting upset when we don't get the toy. And then what happens in early adolescence is our brains begin to change in a very specific way. And they change such that we become much more interested in social status in the sense of what's

what our peer groups think of us. It's much less about what we've got, I want, I want, I want. It's much more about what do other people think about me? And so that's why teenagers are this really weird combination of risk takers that drive too fast.

And historically they would smoke and drink, but I think the current generation, they're quite so much, we did. You know, risk takers, but they're also really like self-conscious and get really embarrassed just because they're highly, highly attuned to status. So the risk-taking is all about look at me and the high self-consciousness is all about, it's just that huge sudden awareness that you're being judged by everybody that's looking at you.

you and that's because the brain is suddenly changed and it's making you it's kind of making you an adult you know you you'll be cut you're playing adult status games yeah and that's why peer group is so important you know why that's why parents have this have this experience of losing their children adolescents they become other people and the peer group becomes much more important than the childhood than the parents because the peer group is a status game it's the first

proper status scale that they play. - And I guess that need for that profound sensitivity to status, I guess that mellows out a bit as we get older. - Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So we're definitely highly attuned to that stuff in adolescence, acutely attuned, and we definitely mellow out. I'm sure there might be data out there, but I didn't come across any data that looked at our need for status across the lifespan.

The reason I was interested in that, apart from adolescence when there's lots of work about how our brains change in adolescence which maps onto the status game idea.

The reason I was interested in is because it seems to me that when we hit 60 70 we do become a lot less interested in status And I think possibly a lot happier as a result, you know But I couldn't find I was interested in in the science of retirement like what happens that we happier in retirement or not But it's really mixed. It's really mixed The psychology some people are happier some people aren't and a lot of it depends on whether they chose to retire or not but I couldn't find any clear signaling in that but I

So I don't know is the answer to the question, but I have a strong suspicion that our need for status kind of is very high in our teens and 20s. Maybe kind of plateaus. I kind of hope it starts going down 50s, 60s, 70s. I really hope it does because it's exhausting. I wonder, is the...

It's evolutionarily is the pursuit of status like a sort of survival reproduction type thing. Yeah, it's completely connected to survival reproduction because it's in the groups in which we evolved, the more status you got, the more food you got, the better food you got, the safer your sleeping sites, the greater your choice of

access to your choice of mates the better your children were looked after so it's deeply deeply implicated in survival and reproduction basically the more status we got the better able we were to survive and reproduce so that's why it's very basic heuristic in the brain go for status because if you go for status everything else gets better and that's why it's so fundamental that's why it's such an obsession because it is a proxy for survival and reproduction nice so we've got Maximilxn who asks

Is virtue signaling disingenuous? No, virtue signaling, everybody has virtue signaling. We all do virtue signaling. We all do success signaling. We all do dominant signaling when we're cross with somebody, you know. So no, it's not. I think it's one of those things like echo chambers. We've got a new fashionable phrase with something that's always existed. You know, echo chambers, we always...

You know, have groups of like-minded people who see the world in similar ways and sort of clump together with people who share our story of the world. And, you know, there wouldn't be virtue without virtue signaling because if you don't signal it, you don't get the rewards of the virtue, which is...

people thinking you're a good person. I suppose even like saying please and thank you is virtual signaling. And complaining about virtue signaling is virtue signaling. Yeah, quite. So it's a silly. It's hard to, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Nice. We've got a question from Ella Louise. Oh, interesting. How would you recommend dealing with someone who tries to humiliate you in the workplace without turning to gossip to make yourself feel better, specifically when they're a manager who would therefore have higher status than you do? This is a question that sounds like it's got some backstory to it. Yeah.

I wonder what Ella's been going through. Yes. Well, that's really hard. I mean, you know, I think if somebody is humiliating you in the workplace, you should never humiliate people. You know, it's an awful thing to do. And it's also completely counterproductive because when you humiliate people, you make an enemy. And you don't want to go through life making enemies. How do you deal with it? You know, in my experience, people like that...

If you find you're not getting on with them what you generally find is that other people don't like them either and And if you kind of just tap that a bit you'll find out that other people don't like them How do you deal with it without without without gossiping is really hard because gossip is is another one of those things that has a bad rep like a social tool, isn't it, but it is it's universal is how societies function so You know

if you were to take that completely literally you you would say you can't tell anybody about it ever which you're not going to fix the only way you can fix it is by i mean so so the way to fix it by going up to that person actually sitting down with them and saying look i'm fine you're i'm finding it humiliating the way that you're talking to me and if that doesn't work uh i would just you know you have to sort of report them because you can't you can't go through your work work you

your personal life being humiliated it's it's it's it's an awful thing to be put through there's no excuse for it i don't think yeah yeah and i think like speaking to that point that like everyone wants to be the good guy in their own life story if i as a manager if i have one of my team members come to me and say that my actions have made them feel humiliated there is no way that can make me feel like a good guy so i'm like oh my god i need to change something yes and i found out anytime i've been in that position that has been what's happened uh yeah when it's when i've been speaking to a manager or things or things like that so i

Yeah, I think often there's just a case of open and honest communication. And we hope that people have sufficient goodwill and niceness and stuff too, actually. That's right. I think that's exactly right. It's that sincerity. One of the best things a boss ever said to me was,

was when I was a features editor, so I was kind of had a management position. He took me to one side and he said, "Keep the emotion out of it." You can talk to people and tell people things are wrong, but you just get too emotional. And when you get emotional, people get upset. And I thought that was such great advice. Like I was so thankful that he told me that. And so I think when you are having those difficult conversations at work, keep the emotion out of it. So if you would go to that boss and say,

You know, when you treat me like this, I feel really humiliated. But you don't, you're not angry. You don't confront them in that way. If you're calm and not emotional about it, I think it's got much greater chance of having success because they're not feeling like it's a dominance based status challenge. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Viftonogon asks, can you trick yourself into looking more positively at yourself by implying online that you have a lot?

I guess like fronting online to feel better about yourself. Sorry, can you say that again? Yeah, I guess the question is, can you trick your brain into having higher self-esteem by kind of implying on the internet that you have a lot of possessions? I don't think it's a good idea. I think that's a bad idea because you've got to feel authentic. I mean, there's the whole history of

the self-esteem movement in America where... And it came out and it went all across the West and much of the world, really. And that was this idea, I wrote about it in my book, Selfie, that if you do that, if you...

yourself and boost yourself and tell it tell tell everyone tell the world you're amazing you'll just become amazing and everybody will believe it and it'll be fantastic and it isn't true like that that's that's that's that's a that's a one-way street to narcissism you know so if you if you want to get status that's not actually connected to anything real that's what narcissists do they just say I deserve high status and you will treat me as high status and that is that and people don't like those people yeah you know like we're very attuned to overt displays of status yeah we

we don't like it at all. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is why I guess this whole like industry of like signaling status without signaling status has sprung up because no one's actually going to tolerate me like I am high status. Exactly. Yeah. Bizarre. Okay. Just a bunch of rapid fire questions that we always end up in the podcast with. What advice would you give to your younger self? Stop worrying about everything.

Nice. Who's had the biggest influence on your career? I would say the biggest impact on my career would be my agent. And it's a boring answer, but my agent will. Yeah, I mean, having a good agent just is transformative for my career. What's one tip for someone looking for success? Just competence. It's that sincerity and the competence. I think it's competence, but it's also...

Understanding that I think one of the things that I learned being a features editor was You know when I came to work at arena I wanted to bring all these great writers from loaded and start using because they were great writers Yeah, but they were just obnoxious right and and you know, and so no matter how they said they did really good work But they just made my life a miserable because they were just so obnoxious like one guy submitted an interview with Ant and Dec with no punctuation in it and

Like what a dick move. So like, and that taught me a lesson was that you could be unbelievably good at your job, but if you're a dick, it doesn't matter. So yeah, so be good, but be a dick. I guess like competence, warmth and sincerity. What does the first hour of your day look like? So the first hour of my day, I've got like a secret Twitter account.

oh i've got i've got a twitter that i use to promote things yeah and i've got a secret twitter which is locked down in an egghead which is the people who i actually want to read their tweets there's not many people on it but i spend the first hour a day going like reading like my real like personal my personal twitter with it with some coffee yeah yeah um what uh material item could you not live without i tell you what one is i can't live without yeah

There's a hot chocolate maker, because I don't drink alcohol anymore. There's a hot chocolate maker. There's a company called Noops. K-N-O-O-P-S. They do unbelievable hot chocolate. Like, it will blow your mind. And they sell this hot chocolate machine that makes these hot chocolates at home. It costs about 80 quid. I couldn't live without that. Sick. Yeah. Yeah, they're incredible. They make the... It's just unbelievable. I didn't know hot chocolate machines existed. Yeah. Yeah, it...

You put these like it's not like powder. It's like I'm little pellets of chocolate and it heats them It heats the milk and whisks it at one at the same time Unbelievable What books what book other than your own would you recommend to anyone would I recommend to anyone? So I really like this book

You could do anything with your life. Oh, Raoul Mote by a guy called Andrew Hankinson. So I really like Andrew. He's a very, very creative nonfiction writer. So very experimental. And so this book, he managed to get access to all, Raoul Mote was a spree killer. He managed to get access to all his kind of personal documents and he sort of recreated his life story just using his kind of personal documents, his kind of psychiatric reports and all this stuff. So it's a really fabulous book. So I'd recommend that to anybody. I love it.

it um what quote or mantra do you live by oh that's a really good question the quote or mantra i live by is you could never expect 100 life if you get a 51 you've won no day you can never expect 100 day if you get a 51 you've won charles bakowski said that i think that's a really good it's a good way to live your life if you get a 51 you've won nice yeah and finally journey or destination

journey every time nice love it well thank you so much for coming on um links to all of the books and your socials and all the things will be in the video description or in the show notes wherever people are watching this check out the book it's very good on audiobook on audiobook um this looks quite intimidating in real life but it's on on audiobook i promise it's not and it's it's genuinely very interesting so thank you so much for coming on thanks for having me ali it's been a great conversation thank you all righty all right so that's it for this week's episode of deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast

are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.