Status: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How To Get It Without Driving Yourself Crazy | Will Storr

Plus more surprising information on this fundamental human drive. Will Storr https://www.thescienceofstorytelling.com/ is a multi award-winning writer and Sunday Times bestselling author. His latest book is A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of storytelling to lead, motivate and persuade https://www.thescienceofstorytelling.com/books. Waking Up, a top-notch meditation app with amazing teachers and a ton of courses for all levels. If you subscribe via this link: wakingup.com/tenpercent http://wakingup.com/tenpercent, you'll get a 30-day free trial—and you'll be supporting the 10% Happier team, too. Full and partial scholarships are available. In this episode we talk about: The key elements of a properly deployed story The different ways to measure status The three main ways humans compete for status The benefits of altruism as a source of status The  balance between self interest and altruism How mindfulness factors into the status drive Managing our relationships with social media Related Episodes: Why You Can't Pay Attention - And How to Think Deeply Again | Johann Hari https://www.danharris.com/p/why-you-cant-pay-attention-and-how-77b?utm_source=publication-search Sign up for Dan's newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Ten Percent Happier online bookstore https://bit.ly/46TZglY Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hey, gang. It might be tempting to think of status as something that only eighth graders are obsessed with, but status is a fundamental human drive that permeates all aspects of life and is really not something any of us can afford to ignore. And just to say, status has become increasingly salient in our lives because of social media, where we're actively encouraged to count our likes and followers. There are real psychological and physiological implications here. High status often correlates with greater access to resources, better healthcare, reduced stress, and lower risk of chronic diseases. Conversely, low status can increase stress, anxiety, and susceptibility to health problems. So it's a big issue.

• 1:02Dan Harris?

  And today, we're going to talk about what exactly status is, why it matters, and how to get it without driving yourself nuts. My guest is Will Storey, the author of six critically acclaimed books. This interview focuses on two of his books. We'll spend a lot of time talking about his book, The Status Game, but we will start with his latest book, which is called A Story Is a Deal, which is all about another fundamental human drive, narrative, and how to use narrative or storytelling to your advantage, both at work and in your personal life. So this is a fascinating and varied conversation. We hit the key elements of a properly deployed story, the different ways to measure status,

• 1:44Dan Harris?

  the three main ways humans compete for status, the benefits of altruism as a source of status, which I found very interesting, the balance between self-interest and altruism, how mindfulness factors into the status drive, and how to manage your relationship with social media. Just to say, I discovered Will Store as a result of his appearance on the Waking Up app, which is run by my friend Sam Harris. I heartily recommend Waking Up, and you can sign up for the app at wakingup.com/tenpercent. That's T-E-N-P-E-R-C-E-N-T, wakingup.com/tenpercent. I will put a link in the show notes. Just so you know, if you buy a subscription via

• 2:24Dan Harris?

  that URL, you will get a 30-day free trial and you will be supporting me and my team as well, because we will get a portion of the proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say, if money's an issue, Sam offers scholarships. That's the same policy that I have over on danharris.com. If you can't afford it, we'll give it to you. Will Store coming up right after this. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of

• 3:08Dan Harris?

  sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node

• 3:49Dan Harris?

  of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to The show, wherever you're listening or watching right now, that really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful.

• 4:32Dan Harris?

  You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Will Store, welcome to the show.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Dan.

• 4:45Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. As I was saying to you before we started rolling here, that I want to talk about your, your new book on narrative and how we evolved for stories and how we can harness that in our business life and elsewhere. And you also have written in a very compelling way about the issue of status. And there's going to be some overlap in these two conversations. We'll start with narrative and then move to status. You copacetic?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, perfect. That sounds great.

• 5:10Dan Harris?

  Awesome. So in your new book, you, you make this case that storytelling is like hardwired into us as a species. Can you say more about that?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so our brains are literally, you know, we're storytellers. We, humans are the only animal that experiences their lives as story in like narrative form. So beginning, middle and end, we fantasize about happy endings in the future. We ruminate about things we've done in the past. We experience other people as heroes, villains, allies, judases. You know, so, so we're constantly living in this story world and we're constantly at the center of this kind of unfolding narrative.

• 5:47Dan Harris?

  And why was that important from an evolutionary standpoint?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Well, story does something quite magical, really. What story allows us to do is kind of fuse individual brains together. So everybody's thinking in the same way. And that I argue is the original purpose of story. So, you know, humans are an ape. We're not like an ape. We are an ape, but unlike all the other apes, we rely on each other to survive. So other apes live in troops, but they hunt individually and they behave individually. Whereas we. Absolutely rely on each other to survive. So we're kind of like an ape, but we're kind of like an ant as well. We're kind of this weird hybrid species. So how do you do that? How do you achieve that? If you're Captain Evolution?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you you invent story and what story does is it takes over an individual brain, takes over lots of individual brains and wires them together. So everybody understands the world in the same way. Everybody's focused towards the same ultimate goal. Everybody has the same values. So that's what story is doing. It's fusing human brains together into one.

• 6:51Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I this is maybe a digression, but did you ever read The Overstory?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:58Dan Harris?

  Richard Powers is brilliant novelist. He wrote this book called The Overstory, won a Pulitzer Prize. I'm I'm reading his newest book right now, which is called Playground. The Overstory, it shouldn't have worked because it's a book about trees. But actually, it's about our relationship to trees in a larger sense, our relationship to nature. This new book Playground is about our relationship to the oceans. But there's a moment in The Overstory where Powers is describing one of his characters. Hopefully, I'm not mangling this, but one of the characters is is a kid and he's studying ants. And looking at how they move in synchrony and and then thinking about how the humans are, you know, fucked because we really can't do that in some way. And he has this image of like an out of order sign

• 7:42Dan Harris?

  hung on a, you know, off the phallus of a human, you know, like this is why we can't get it together on climate or anything else. But as I listen to you, I'm thinking, actually, if we could all tell ourselves the right story about our future, well, we actually could collaborate on these seemingly intractable, but also existential issues facing the species like climate, like AI, like nukes. Like I said, that was a digression, but I I say it to see if you have any reaction.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's absolutely right. But but I think the important thing is telling the right kind of story. And and there are right and wrong ways of telling stories that motivate people and persuade people. And often, especially on the left, for some reason, the left are just not quite as good as telling stories in my kind of experience as the right. The right seems to have an instinct for this, the left. The left tend to go to data and facts a lot more. That that stuff kind of fails to inspire. The left also sometimes falls into the trap of telling a an overly kind of negative story. So for example, I mean, one of the things that I've sort of experienced myself over the last few years. Over the rise of, you know, identity politics that's sort of taken over the UK and

• 8:52Speaker 01

  America is that, of course, you know, people with a deep interest in identity politics are very interested in making everybody more anti-racist and making that a kind of a dominant sort of motivation in their daily lives. And how a lot of people involved in identity politics do that is by telling a very negative story about how awful we are and how terrible things are for people. And, you know, I'm not saying that any of that isn't true. It's all true. It's a true story, but it's not a story that motivates. And the story that you never hear in the UK, for example, is that, well, you know, the UK have an incredible history of anti-racism. We, you know, we were the first people in the world to outlaw slavery. We spent 70 years in the high seas, spending fortunes, sacrificing blood to police the high seas, to abolish the slave ships. We were pivotal in fighting the fascists

• 9:36Speaker 01

  of the Second World War. So we have anti-racism in our blood, in our culture. And that's the story that would motivate people in Britain to become more interested in fighting racism. But you never hear that story. You just don't ever hear it. They never tell it. And in fact, there was a campaign to erect a statue in one of the coastal towns in memory of the young men that died fighting slavery. And they were refused permission to erect this statue. For me, it's this failure of understanding story. You know, people want to be told a positive, optimistic story, a story that makes them feel, gives them status. And so the story I was describing is one that says that that kind of implants this idea of anti-racism in British culture. You know, and to say as well, stories are never fully true. Stories are always, of course, the reality is way more complex than

• 10:20Speaker 01

  that, especially in Britain with our colonial history. But if you want to, if you want to motivate people, if you want to make people fold anti-racism into their identity, and to make it a core part of who they are, you've got to tell them a positive story in saying, this is already who you are. And value it, treasure it, make that a source of status, the fact that we fought the slavers, the fact that we fought in the Second World War, and we, you know, we helped destroy Hitler, the world's biggest ever, in amongst most monstrous ever fascist. But yeah, so it's, so it's, you know, people still don't really understand how to deploy storytelling in the, in the right way, that you have to tell a positive story, a story that, you know, my book is called A Story is a Deal. A story has to make a deal with you. You know, the deal often is for status. And so

• 11:02Speaker 01

  if you accept my story, the reward for you is connection or status usually.

• 11:08Dan Harris?

  So we've already gotten the status, or as you would say, status.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 11:14Dan Harris?

  You're probably saying it correctly. So we've already gotten there. So but what do you mean by status or status in this context? And yeah, what do you mean?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  When you talk about status, people often jump to things like, you know, the Kardashians and celebrity culture and billionaires and and the idea that people that pursue to status is the pursuit of celebrity and fortunes. Then it isn't that. And the status is simply the the sense that you are of value somehow to other people. Humans have two great psychological desires that really control our so much of our experience, our everyday life. And one of those is belongingness. We want to feel loved and and belonging. So so with friends, with lovers, with family, of course, we want to feel accepted and we are accepted and acceptable. But as well as that, we want to feel of value. You know, we want to feel like we were offering something back to other people. So we want to be respected. And that's the status part

• 12:07Speaker 01

  of it. So that's another great drive, you know, and you can think of it when, you know, universally, when people feel rejected, they feel terrible, a human being, you know, it's the opposite of connection. And the same way, if people feel disrespected, they may feel worthless and yeah, valueless, then that's also a universally negative experience for human beings. And so that kind of speaks to our constant desire and a constant interest in those two things, connection and status.

• 12:33Dan Harris?

  It strikes me that these fundamental human drives for connection, for status, and frankly, for storytelling, can all be harnessed or deployed for good and very dangerously for ill.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, that's that's absolutely true. You can see, you know, in in the history that's unfolding around us at the moment, and the history that we look back on, is that story is incredibly seductive. Story is how we understand the world. Story is how we think. Story is how we understand who we are and what we should be doing and where we should be going. So so if somebody comes along and tells a really, you know, really compelling story, and a story that offers us status and offers us connection, we will always be vulnerable to believing it. The brain's far more interested in the story that we're telling about ourselves than it is in understanding the truth. We're not wired for truth. We're wired for story.

• 13:28Dan Harris?

  Well, we will come back to status in a much deeper way in the later portions of this conversation, you know, like, given that it is a huge part of our makeup, how do, how do we live with this drive, you know, how do we manage our desire for status without driving ourselves crazy? And you have a lot of interesting thoughts about that. But let's stay with storytelling, because as you said earlier, in a business context and in many other contexts, if you do it the right way, you can have really powerful impacts by telling a story. And so I'd be curious to like, get, you know, tactical, like, what are the elements of a properly deployed story? And one of the practical tips, and you can tell me if this is the wrong place to start, but one of the practical tips in your book

• 14:09Dan Harris?

  is to identify what is the primary motivator of the audience you are speaking to.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It's really all about understanding your, your audience and understanding the story that they tell about themselves and that they tell about the world, you know, what are the things that they value? One thing that all storytellers are always trying to do, whether they're writing a Hollywood movie script or a novel, or whether they're crafting an advertising campaign, is this feeling of identification. So that feeling that when the audience is experiencing your story, they identify with it. They think, well, yeah, I understand that. I understand that person that I'm seeing. And then once they've identified with your character, with your story, that they're kind of in, they've connected to it. And so that's the first really important thing. Once you've identified with the story, with a character in a story, with a message in a story, you experience

• 14:56Speaker 01

  that feeling of connection, which is one of the gifts of storytelling. And then, of course, the other thing is, is status. You could tell a story about how people like us in this story can make ourselves feel more valued and more, more valuable. And that's also extremely seductive.

• 15:13Dan Harris?

  In terms of the connection piece, one of the concepts you talk about is the importance of having a protagonist who is, and you use this term, a relatable underdog.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, underdog is such a, for me, a fascinating kind of concept because, of course, you know, there's huge psychological diversity as you go around the world. Everybody's very different in lots and lots of ways. But if there's one thing that people kind of share, unless you're suffering from narcissistic personality disorder perhaps, is the sense that you're an underdog. The sense that, you know, you've got these great goals, you've got these meaningful things that you want to achieve, but it's hard and you're struggling and, you know, you're the underdog. And it's interesting when you hear billionaires and politicians speak, even the most powerful people in the world tend to feel like underdogs. And in terms of their kind of personal experience, they often are. They often are facing incredible threats, incredible challenges. I mean, you know, life is struggle against obstacles.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  That's a description of not just human life, but all life. So there's a sense in which we are all always feeling like an underdog. And I think that's why underdogs are so relatable. Showing an underdog in a story is a really great shortcut to identification. When we see, when we see an underdog, when we see somebody struggling against odds, we automatically feel a kinship with that character. It's very seductive. I mean, the book I write about, I think it was Disney, where they were designing this skating rabbit robot for Disney parks. And they had a problem that the skating rabbit robot was felt inhuman somehow. And so what they did was they programmed it to struggle a bit on its skates. It fell over on its skates and it got up, managed to skate. And by adding this moment of vulnerability, this kind of underdog moment of struggling

• 16:54Speaker 01

  against an obstacle, suddenly people loved the skating rabbit. They identified with it, it became relatable.

• 17:02Dan Harris?

  Honestly, the pause here is because I'm thinking about, I'm many years into writing my next book, which is a memoir. And so I'm thinking like, I'm going to steal some of these ideas. Do it. For people listening at home who want to steal some of these ideas and apply it to their lives, specifically as it relates to the relatable underdog. You know, if you're pitching a business or if you're trying to rally the troops in an existing business or in your family, in whatever context you're in, to tell the story either of, hey, get on my side, see things the way I see it because I'm going to tell you about me and my struggles, or make it a collective, hey, we are the, are the underdog. Here are the struggles we're facing against, let's do it together.

• 17:47Dan Harris?

  Am I articulating this correctly?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's absolutely correct. As I say, the great challenge of all storytellers is creating that sense of identification with the character in the story or even the brand that you're trying to promote. And telling a story in which you present as an underdog is automatically relatable. People just tend to prefer, they feel connected to underdogs because that's their experience of life. So yeah, that's absolutely correct.

• 18:14Dan Harris?

  The other thing you talk about in terms of telling a story in a powerful way is the importance of emotion. Can you say more about that?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  So we've been emotional creatures for far longer than we have been storytelling creatures. We've had emotions and feeding systems for millions of years since before we were human. So we still really are guided by our emotions. We are feeling creatures that think. I think Antonio Damocio, the Italian neuroscientist, said that. And so story works really by manipulating emotions or making you feel something. So stories is this kind of interface that sits on top of our emotions. And you can experience that most obviously at cinema or a theatre where everybody goes into the cinema in the midst of their own lived experience of story, their own life. If it's a good film, if it's identifiable and they get sucked into it, then their experience of their own story shuts off and they become,

• 19:06Speaker 01

  they experience the story that they're being shown on the screen all at one, their brains fused together. And importantly, they feel those feelings. They feel elated when the protagonist has a win. They feel terrified when the protagonist is in danger. If the story has a happy ending and everything comes nice at the end, they feel wonderful and fantastic. And they leave the cinema all feeling connected and all feeling sort of buzzing with happiness together. So that's another way that stories are fusing brains together. They're making people feel the same things. And that's really the core of the power of story is that it does manipulate and alter people's emotions.

• 19:43Dan Harris?

  You cite some data that if the story has emotion, it can lead to better recall and stronger influence?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Yes. So I think there was a BBC study that they did with some neuroscientists that looked at the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. It was a cross-cultural study too. So it was, you know, people in the West, people in Asia, and I think people in South America, if I remember correctly. And they found that the advertisements that were best recalled were the ones that were most emotional. So regular emotional peaks in the story that they were telling implanted the message of the advert in their minds successfully. Didn't really matter what the emotion was, was the surprising result. It was just, as long as it was emotional, they would remember it. So that's why you get a lot of adverts that they just seem to be there to make you laugh, make you smile, make you feel a bit weepy. They're just doing that thing of making you feel an emotion

• 20:33Speaker 01

  and then putting their logo on that emotion. And then mostly what marketing is, is a war for memory. When you're in the convenience, when you're in 7-Eleven and you're in front of the wall of fridges, deciding what drink to get on a hot summer's day, they want their drink to be the first drink that pops into your mind. So they're all fighting this war for memory. And that's why a lot of advertising is just simply the repetition of logos. That's why they fight for shelf space at eye level, because they want to, by, you know, brutal repetition, just get that logo into your head. And a really effective way of doing that is by telling emotional stories in form of advertising, because using that emotion implants that logo, that kind of brand identity into your mind.

• 21:14Dan Harris?

  Are there other practical techniques for deploying or harnessing the power of storytelling that are worth talking about before we get to status?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there are a few sort of basic principles. One of the most important principles, especially for marketers, is simplicity. Absolute simplicity is really crucial when you're trying to tell persuasive stories. And that's important whether you're Making an advert or whether you're leading a team. One of the stories that I tell in a story is a deal is NASA. Like before JFK came up with the idea of NASA's one goal to be to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade, I think something like that. They had six or seven various goals. And then that became their one goal. And there's one academic did a really amazing study looking at, you know, the internal culture of NASA and found it became transformed when that one simple goal that you could visualize,

• 22:11Speaker 01

  you could imagine a man walking on the moon. It's a visualizer is also very important that everybody, including the person cleaning the toilets, the secretaries at the front desk all became highly motivated because they were all felt part of this story. We've got this collective mission. We're going to put a man on the moon. So that absolute simplicity, that sense that you can visualize the end goal. So Bill Gates famously, his early ambition was to have a computer on the desk of every office. That's a goal that you can visualize. So that's a really great story that can rally the troops, that can motivate people. Very simple. It's one thing and you can visualize it. So that's what's really essential for leaders, I think, to have that commitment to absolute simplicity in the stories that they tell. And again, they're all optimistic.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  They're all positive. They're not beating people around the head with bad news, saying you must do better. It's a, it's a vision of an incredible future that is simple and easy to see.

• 23:09Dan Harris?

  I'm taking notes for, I just started a company a couple of months ago. So I'm really taking notes about like how I can inspire better. Oh, well, I'm tempted to go back to status, but I don't want to do that without checking in with you to, to make sure that there isn't something more you, you feel needs to be said on, on the power of story.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  No, honestly, Dan, I could go on for hours about stories. So, so yeah, honestly, I think it's good. I think we covered some good ground there. Thank you.

• 23:37Dan Harris?

  Awesome. Let's just go back to this issue of status. As we go back to it, remind me again what it is. In a few words, what is status?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  So status is just a feeling that you are of value to other people. That you're offering value to the human group, to the collective.

• 23:53Dan Harris?

  Thank you for the refresher. And one of the things you talk about is that we have this kind of status detection system. What does that mean?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  So psychologists, neuroscientists talk about this idea that we have this status detection system, this always-on bit of technology, this constantly assessing where our relative status is in any social situation that we might be in. So it's constantly looking for how people are treating us in a million different ways, how close they're standing to us, the amount of eye contact they're giving us, how much they're letting us speak, that's a big one. You know, all the ways that we can measure status, it never ends. In one study, they found that they gave lots of people glasses of orange juice and one person got less orange juice than everybody else. And of course, that person got very upset and started ruminating, like, why have I not got this orange juice? You know, so the orange juice becomes a measure of relative status. So that's the status detection system.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  You know, you can go into an elevator in a hotel and you're immediately, unconsciously often, who's got the posh luggage, who's going to the suites on the top floor, who's the janitor? You know, you can't go anywhere as a human being without your brain automatically judging where you sit and where everybody else sits. And that's the beginning of every hierarchy, every car system, every class system. It all comes from this stuff in our brains. It's why you can never eradicate it. It's why communism was such a hopeless project, because you can't scrape this stuff from the human brain, because it's been in the brain since before we were human.

• 25:19Dan Harris?

  Well, there's the macro question of, you know, how do we deal with this from a societal level? We can get to that if you want. But for me, I'm much more interested in this show, in helping individuals do their lives better. And so as I listen to you talk about this always-on technology, this status detection system, which of course I, like everybody else, relate to, it does seem like an organ in our brain or in our body, whose job solely is to secrete suffering.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  No, well, yes, it's not, that's not, that's what you think, isn't it? And, and you know, like, I think we are very attuned to the suffering that that inevitably brings, but it also brings moments of great pleasure. You know, I, I, I think status is just as good as it is bad, like equally, like, like, like some of our most important moments in life are when we achieve something, when we get a great exam result, when we get the job that we wanted, when we publish the book, or, you know, you've just launched a business, when the business becomes successful. Let's not shit on these moments, I think they're, they're really important. And I had an experience of a Christmas where a very close friend of mine, who's a writer, was going through a hard time and, you know, he'd read the book and liked it. And, and he was, you know, he was talking about how he was sort of concerned about

• 26:28Speaker 01

  his, how his writing was going and, and he said, oh, it's just stupid, it's just ego. And I had to say to him, there is no just ego. I think that's part of the problem that we have in our culture is that we're very influenced by these eastern ideas that the ego is bad, and maybe it comes from Freud as well, I don't know, that ego is bad, that we should, we should resist ego. But I think that's very, very dangerous, that's very damaging when we disregard the importance of status to people. I mean, as, as you no doubt know, Down, in the UK, in USA and elsewhere, the, the people who are most highly at risk from suicide are middle-aged men. And a lot of that is because middle-aged men, a lot of their status comes from their roles in life, from their job, from, you know, am I a provider and a protector to my family? How do I look?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Am I, you know, and in middle age, we hit our limits. I mean, perhaps our marriage isn't as good as it used to be, perhaps we stopped being promoted. This stuff causes real pain, it really matters. And I think it's a real problem when we say, oh, it's just ego, it shouldn't really matter, it's, you know, it's just silly. It isn't silly. Status is a fundamental human need and it matters. And so I think we should be much more compassionate to ourselves and to other people when they start feeling that inevitable suffering that comes along, when they feel for whatever reason that their status is under threat or is in decline.

• 27:48Dan Harris?

  I definitely will never argue against compassion. And is there not a kernel of wisdom in the it's just ego? Like, what is really important for that writer who's struggling? Is it having a bestseller and getting the accolades? Or is it creating something beautiful that is helpful, no matter how it's received?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. So there are lots of different ways that you can measure your status. And I'm not going to mention his name, but he really doesn't need any more status. He's very successful. Yeah, so there's lots of different ways you can measure status. And perhaps your latest thing isn't as successful as you might want it to be. But you're still moving people, you're still giving people great pleasure. And I think for me, the kernel of truth, so A, there's, yeah, there's lots of different ways you can measure your status. You don't have to be fixated on the one metric that you're, that you're not doing so well in. I think that's, that's a great piece of advice. The other thing is, I do think there's wisdom in trying to reduce the ego pain. Like, I'm not saying that there is a wisdom in that, because of course there is. So, and I do think that matters. And if mindfulness helps you do that, then you go for it.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  I think the danger is in that we have this very powerful cultural idea that the status shouldn't matter and it's just ego. And when we feel bad, we fail, it's, it is in itself a failure. And that's just not true. You know, that's, that's just not true.

• 29:09Dan Harris?

  So maybe a better phrase, and this is clunkier, than it's just ego, is, you know what? I'm concerned about the status implications of whatever I'm worrying about. But perhaps I'm looking for status in the wrong place.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Or measuring my status in, in, in the wrong way. I mean, one of the things that happens quite naturally to people as they get into late, later middle aged, is that we, we tend to shift from pursuing our own status to becoming more of a teacher role, like sort of a grand, intellectual grandparent role. And so, so I do suspect that that's a kind of natural way, like, you know, that we do change the way that we're playing status games as we get older. We get a value by teaching the next generation how to do what we've spent our lives. Learning how to do. So that's one way of doing it. I mean, another thing that I talk about in the status game are these different kinds of games there are to play. So there were three ways that humans essentially compete for status. I mean, there's lots, but there are three main ones. The first one is dominance, which is not good. I mean,

• 30:10Speaker 01

  that's the animalistic pushing each other around. I'm going to force you to attend to me with status type of way, a mafia don or an army, you know, or playground bully, indeed, you know, what we're used to compete for status. The other two are virtue. So in the human groups in which we evolved, you could earn status by being virtuous, by knowing the rules, following the rules, being generous, being courageous. Then there are these competence games, success games, being good at something. That's the other way that you offer value to other people by providing, by creating value, you know, economically, by becoming somebody that other people can copy and mimic and for themselves, you know, learn how to do something. And one of the things that I realised when I was writing the book was that when you become a parent, you automatically start playing

• 30:55Speaker 01

  these virtue games because you start to, you're doing good things for your children, hopefully. And then you start earning status through your children's success. But I'm not a parent. So all I really do is I get up and I work. So I'm got the kind of mono maniacal obsession with this one competence based status game. But I realise that's a very dangerous psychological place to be. You've got one thing, you've got one source of status, that's madness. So I started volunteering in my spare time, which is something I never would have thought about had I not done this book. And so now I spend about four hours a week, you know, volunteering for a voluntary organisation locally. That's now an enormous source of, significant source of status for me because it's this virtue game that I'm playing, that I wasn't playing before. So I think the other piece of advice

• 31:38Speaker 01

  is to play different kinds of games, or even play multiple competence based status games. Like if you have a job at work and you enjoy your sports, you go and play football or soccer or whatever it is, that's another status game you're playing. So I think having multiple sources of status, especially as you start getting older, I think is really good advice.

• 31:57Dan Harris?

  And by game, you're not trying to minimize virtue. You're just, it's just a heuristic, a rubric you're using to help us think about the many avenues available to us.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, I'm sort of defining a game as it's a collective of people who have an agreed set of rules. And if you follow the rules, you rise in status. So in that way, Christianity is a status game. You can be a good Christian or a bad, you accept the rules of Christianity. And you can, you know, the harder you work at being Christian, the higher you raise in status in the eyes of your fellow Christians. So I don't mean to use the word game to diminish anything at all. It's that basic, you know, I think the games that we play for fun, they're just riding on that neural circuitry that's evolved to play the actual games of life, the games that matter much more.

• 32:42Dan Harris?

  Right. Well said.

• 32:48Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Will Store talks about the balance between self-interest and altruism, the benefits of altruism, and why status is so important.

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• 34:09Dan Harris?

  I think there might be more to say, you'll tell me if I'm wrong, about altruism as a really healthy source of status. And then also maybe some where that could get catastrophic. You want to pick up on that?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is another thing that surprised me as I was doing my research. It really made me see the world in a different way, because I think you would assume that if you want to change the world and be good, then you would play a virtue game. And if you wanted to just be rich and famous, you play a success game. But I became much more worried about virtue games as I was doing this research, partly because virtue is always local. So each collective has its own idea of what's virtuous, which is why you get such, you know, we're just going through this cultural period in the in the West, but much more seriously before that, we had Nazism and we had Communism, both two terribly ideologies that were incredibly damaging and horrendous for different reasons. But both the Nazis and the communists, the committed ones, the ones who believed the story, were absolutely convinced that they

• 35:09Speaker 01

  were the virtuous ones, that the fight against the Bolsheviks, the fight against the Jews, was virtuous, that they were saving the world, they were making the world a better place. So virtue can be extremely dangerous because it's local. The brain doesn't care about the truth, it just cares about the story. So we can easily be seduced into doing terrible things as a way of building virtue-based status and harvesting virtue-based status from the people around us. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing was really this idea of changing the world and making the world a better place. And you realize that the people that have really changed the world, especially in the last 200 or 300 years, are the success game people, the people who pioneered the Industrial Revolution, the people that invented vaccines. I mean, I don't know, I feel like the person who

• 35:53Speaker 01

  invented the polio vaccine has probably done more good for the world than all the popes combined, you know, the pope being a kind of virtue-based superstar. So that also changed my mind, this idea that actually if you genuinely want to change the world, you should play success games, because it's the people who invent the things that are going to hopefully at some point, we pray, rescue us from the climate crisis. These are the people who invented the vaccines, the people who are working at how to make healthy food cheap and deliver it to the doors of people who need it when they need it. These are the people that are doing incalculable good for the rest of the world. That's what I believe.

• 36:30Dan Harris?

  You said a lot of things in there that I want to follow up on because they're so interesting. I'll come back to the benefits of altruism as a, as a source of status. But just picking up on the last thing you said there about how playing success games in some way can be like the highest form of virtue in a way, like you can create a lot of impact in that way. And it just got me thinking about something that I've gnawed on for a long time in my life, which is this balance between self-interest and altruism and how that line is very blurry. And in many ways, there are aspects of altruism that are deeply self-interested because you feel

• 37:10Dan Harris?

  good when you're useful to other people and pursuing what could be derided as selfish success, business success can have emergent properties that are incredibly altruistic and beneficial to other people, like, you know, sparking the computing revolution or creating a vaccine, et cetera, et cetera. So any thoughts on, on that tricky balance?

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that I think the first thing is just this whole idea of altruism. And people get very upset about this idea that when I'm arguing that it's just really all about virtue-based status because it sounds like I'm saying something very cynical, but I don't think I am saying something very cynical. When you do something good, generally people respect you more, they offer you status. That's your reward for doing the good thing. And also you feel good in yourself, you feel, you feel, you know, you feel, oh, I feel great. I feel good. You know, when I've come back off a shift for this volunteering thing and it's gone well, I'm driving home, I feel great about myself. That's not a bad thing. That's to me is the best thing about human nature. I mean, what an amazing animal that we are, that when we do good, when we do something that benefits somebody else more than it benefits us, we're rewarded by other people automatically.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  And we feel good about ourselves. That's actually a really good thing. That's not a negative thing. You take that away and I think we really would be back into the realm of nature, red in tooth and claw. So this idea that we should feel guilty when we feel Good about ourselves and we do something altruistic or selfless, I think he's wrong. I think we deserve, you know, that's the deal again, the story makes we deserve to feel good about ourselves and we deserve the status that other people give us. It's a great system and it's a wonderful system because it's automatic mostly. When people find out that we've done something good, they'll think better of us and that feels good. So it's a great, it's like it's a wonderful system. And the other thing is about this idea of success games.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  I mean, this is another thing, I think, the way that my perception has shifted doing this work. And I could even narrow it down to a particular moment. I was in India, I tend to go away to Asia to do all my reading, so I locked myself away for weeks. And I was walking around thinking about all this stuff and I saw these women just sitting on the street in Mumbai chatting away happily. And what they were doing, you see this a lot in India, if you've been to India, is they've got this bag of these very pretty flowers and they sit there, they're threading these flowers into a necklace and then they'll sell the necklace. And so you just had, I mean, it's kind of obvious really, but what are these women doing? Well, they're adding value, they're taking the flower and the thread and they're turning those into something that's worth more than the flower and the thread individually.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  And that's capitalism at its best. Somebody comes along and sort of magically adds value, they create something that's worth more than its individual pieces apart. That is a wonderful thing, that is a fantastic thing. I mean, I write in my book about, we've got a supermarket chain here, Tesco's, it's like our Walmart. And Tesco's annual tax bill is 4.5 billion pounds, 4.5 billion pounds. So that's how much value they're putting back into our country, into our police force, into our road system, into our school system, into our health service. You know, it's a, you never really think about this stuff, but it's capitalists who are, yes, they're interested in the share price and they're interested in the, they're paid huge sums of money and we're envious of their big houses, but they're also doing

• 40:34Speaker 01

  this incredible thing of creating enormous value for society and civilization. And I was a journalist for the first 20 years of my life. I'm very happy that we're telling stories about corruption and tax dodging and all the, all the malevolent things that capitalists and business people do. But I also think we should talk more about the 4.5 billion tax bill because I think it would make us so cynical about people playing these success games and I think that will be good for us.

• 40:57Dan Harris?

  Yeah, no, it's tricky. I mean, I think I'm a capitalist. I know I'm a capitalist. And you talked about the Industrial Revolution, which was amazing in many ways, but also probably the point of origination for the climate crisis that could have deeply deleterious impacts on my child's future, et cetera, et cetera. And we also have extraordinary income inequality. And I think there are fair questions to be raised about how the allocation of wealth in our society. And so it's not an unalloyed good capitalism.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. You still need the virtue games. I mean, you need success. It's very crude generalization, but generally speaking, you can see the right as the success game people who are interested in business and capitalism and abolishing regulations and lowering the tax bill. And you got the left who are interested in the virtue, protecting people. That's exactly as it should be. The fact that we've got this kind of constant war between the people who want to supercharge capitalism and the people who want to say, well, hold on a minute, what about the climate crisis? What about the people at the bottom of the path through no fault of their own? So the fact that there's this constant toing and throwing between these two poles is exactly as it should be. Like, it's fantastic. Although it's bloody and difficult and enraging when you're living in the middle of it, if you

• 42:14Speaker 01

  take a step back, it's a great system. And as you rightly say, capitalism, I mean, they always think, when people talk about, is capitalism good? Is it bad? Is religion good? Is it bad? I mean, this is storytelling. It's not realistic. I mean, capitalism, religion, these are incredibly complex systems, and they have an incredibly complex set of tradeoffs. And capitalism is no exception. Capitalism is incredible and amazing, but it's also horrendous and exploitative and miserable. So that's the unhappy, non-story of capitalism. It's not good or bad. It's both at the same time. But what we have is the left telling one story, the right telling the other story. But in their tussle, in their eternal war between virtue and success, we hopefully end up making things better, hopefully.

• 43:01Dan Harris?

  I want to go back to what you said before about like, and I agree with this about, you know, there are many bugs in the human design system. But one feature in the human design system is that when we do good, we feel good.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:14Dan Harris?

  That's just incredible. And I think personally, my opinion is if there is salvation on offer for the species, it's going to probably be in that direction. And you said something about the fact that we shouldn't feel bad about the fact that it feels good to have the approbation of other people when we do a good thing. And I agree with that. And I think it's just sometimes plain feels good to be useful to other people when nobody else is looking. So you can take status out of the benefits of altruism and the benefits are still there.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Well, the idea is that that feeling that we get internally of how we're, how we're doing.

• 43:51Dan Harris?

  Oh, I see. I see.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  The idea is that that's our, it's sometimes called the internal audience. So we've evolved to be a tribal species. So what we want to be doing is pleasing the tribe because by pleasing the tribe, we get connection, we get status, we're accepted and we're valued, which is what we want. But you have to have a way of kind of policing yourself, imagining I'm going to do this thing and how I'm going to feel. So, so, so we've almost got this internal tribe that we carry around with us. And it can be a terrible thing because I'm sure everybody has this thing where just out of nowhere, you remember, you remember something shameful we did like 25 years ago and suddenly you go, oh God, you know, you know, it's this awful thing. But that's your internal tribe giving you the shame of the tribe saying, don't do that again. It's like a pain system and a kind of pleasure system, but a kind of internal

• 44:38Speaker 01

  social version of that. And it's just all part of being a tribal species. So, so that's why we can feel a kind of this bump in status, even if we're alone and nobody's seen us do what we do is because you've got this internal audience that's constantly assessing our behavior to make us a hopefully a better tribal cooperator.

• 44:56Dan Harris?

  That's really interesting. One more question about altruism. And I definitely take your point that it is the largest point you're trying to make here, if I'm hearing you correctly, is that in the midst of a culture where we have plenty of unhealthy status games on offer, and we'll talk in a minute about social media, altruism is a great diversifying factor for your status games and that can really help you get a sense of meaning and worth that is incredibly helpful, no matter what else is going on in your life. I believe that is, or at least that's a major takeaway for me. And I do want to point out that I can see in my environment, not in myself, because I'm a constitutionally wired really for selfishness, but I can see among people in

• 45:41Dan Harris?

  my personal life and in my work life, a kind of catastrophic altruism where people are not asserting their own needs enough. And so I just want to see if you agree with that flag.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, we're all different and we all have different strengths and vulnerabilities. And that's certainly true that you can fall into this kind of pathological trap of not asserting yourself enough. And in A Story is a Deal, one of the things they write about is this need that we have for individual status. And I think it's the least understood kind of facet of all this stuff. And in the book, I argue that in the 20th century, the communists and the capitalists were actually making the same mistake about human nature, which is that a successful human should just blend into their group and become this kind of invisible part of their organization, whether it's being a communist. And communists weren't supposed to work for themselves, they were supposed to work

• 46:41Speaker 01

  for the revolution, for the communist ideal, the collective. But in a lot of these capitalist companies too, in the Ford Motor Company, even the Wall Street banks in the 1990s, you had to be this kind of corporate clone. You had to dress precisely as the bank wanted you to dress. You couldn't have a beard. There was a sense that you had to become, again, this completely kind of invisible, kind of faceless cell in the corporate super organism. And it makes people feel terrible. People need to feel individually valued and individually seen within any group. And I think that organizations are still not great at understanding that.

• 47:22Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so if you're setting up a system where you're erasing the possibility for status, it's problematic.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:33Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Will talks about how mindfulness factors into the status drive. His findings may surprise you here. He also talks about managing your relationship with social media and the case for understanding over criticism.

• 47:52Speaker 03

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• 48:24Dan Harris?

  Getting back to this discussion of like how to manage the fact we all have this status drive, this status detection system, and we talked about some ways to, you know, have healthier sources and to diversify and to explore altruism. What about mindfulness? My understanding of mindfulness as a practitioner is that it's a kind of self-awareness that allows you to see the shit that's coming up in your head and not be so owned by it. So, for example, I might notice, oh, I'm tempted to virtue signal on Instagram, or I am tempted to brag about something, or I'm tempted to dominate somebody to make myself feel better. And I can watch that urge, not tell myself I'm a monster. That urge is there, it's natural.

• 49:07Dan Harris?

  Let it go and make a saner decision on the other side. Does that sound to you like a good way to manage this part of our wiring?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  So there's a couple of things about mindfulness. So what you're describing, of course, is wonderful, this idea that you can detach yourself from your behaviour and not be your behaviour and not allow the behaviour to dictate the feelings, to dictate your behaviour. So that's obviously going to help and a wonderful life skill. But the idea that mindfulness meditation kind of destroys the ego and frees you from the need to earn status is just not true. There was a study that was done by the University of Edinburgh. They took 3,700 mindfulness meditators and they chose people specifically that meditated to reduce their ego needs. And they found that they all measured very highly in what they called spiritual superiority. So they all, you know, and it's human nature, of course, that they were really good at meditating.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  And they felt pretty good about that. And actually, when they thought about it, they felt superior to all the other people that didn't understand the amazing insights that they had. So I thought that was just really funny, you know, it's funny because it's one of those things is funny because you just know it's true. Like, it's just human nature. When we get good at something and we feel that we've got this special insight into the world, we feel great. We feel a bit superior. So that's what people find. Again, not to say that there's no point meditating, because that's not true. The model that you described where you kind of free yourself from being a slave to your emotions is enormously valuable. But the idea that it destroys the ego. I mean, in one of my earlier books, I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat, a bit passionate meditation retreat in Australia. And I'll never forget, on the second day, we

• 50:42Speaker 01

  had to like sit cross-legged for 16 hours a day and meditate. It was an absolute nightmare. And in between meditation sessions, the guru would come, this bald-headed Brit would come and lecture us about things. And on the second day, I was kind of pulled out of the thing. And I was given a note because nobody was speaking. You have to go and see the guru. I don't know what is, I don't know what the right word is. And I went to see him and he told me off because I was sitting with my legs, you know, there's hundreds of people, he'd spot me at the back, sitting with my legs straight forward, and the soles of my feet were facing him. And he took enormous offence to the fact that my soles of my feet. So to the extent that he would pull me out and, you know, and tried me. And I remember thinking afterwards, hang on a minute, you've been talking to us about the destruction of the ego. But this is just an extraordinary

• 51:23Speaker 01

  example of the fact that you've got a very, very brittle ego, that you've taken offence at this. I think that was the first time I ever got sort of a bit cynical about this idea that meditation really destroys the ego needs. I don't think that's necessarily true.

• 51:41Dan Harris?

  My understanding of the Dharma specifically is, and I can't speak for the mind of a Buddha, because I am very far from that. And so maybe at the deep end of the pool, a truly enlightened being, if there is such a thing, doesn't care so much about status. Although if you look at the Buddhist texts, the Buddha himself is talking about wise people and unenlightened worldlings. So there's status baked right into that. And he called himself the Tathagata, the awakened one. So there's status built right into that. But in terms of the rest

• 52:21Dan Harris?

  of us, I think it's not so much about destroying the ego as it is about seeing through, as like kind of putting it through a cheese grater.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:32Dan Harris?

  Seeing through the illusion of the insubstantiality of our stories and not, in the end, being so owned by them. And, you know, in a lot of the art and storytelling around enlightenment, you know, this process of, you know, getting to the end of the meditative path, the end is sometimes described as returning to the marketplace. So it's not like you float off into, I mean, there are some versions of this where you float off into the mystery. I don't know. But there are other versions where you, you become enlightened, you see through some of the more obnoxious aspects of the ego, and then you return to the marketplace, you return to the world to be more helpful.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  That's great. Yeah.

• 53:15Dan Harris?

  So that's kind of my semi-informed take on what you're saying?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I would say I had the same response as you when you actually look at the kind of ideological, if that's the right word, structure of Buddhism. It's very hierarchical. It's not about reincarnation. And, you know, if you do well, you get reincarnated up here. And if you do badly, you don't, you're down there. That's the status game. That's just a pure status game. So it's, but, but, but, yeah, I agree. Aside from that, I think the ability to see what's happening when you're feeling

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Humiliated when you're feeling disrespected and not respond to that, not react to that. I think he's incredibly valuable.

• 53:56Dan Harris?

  Incredibly valuable, easier said than done, but not a bad north star.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:01Dan Harris?

  Before I let you go, let's just talk about social media, which is your fellow Brit, Johann Hari has called social media, among other aspects of of modern life, ego itching powder, which that's a phrase I like. As social media, I mean, even I as a, I'm somebody who never really used it. But in starting a new business, realized that was kind of dumb for me not to be, you know, in that particular marketplace. And I've tried to become what I call like a node of sanity. And I don't scroll through Instagram much. I go to look at how my posts are performing, which makes me unhappy. And it is essentially a status game for the internal audience and for comparison to who knows what ideal.

• 54:45Dan Harris?

  And then if I do find myself scrolling, that also makes me unhappy. And I'm a guy who's, you know, like in the mental health business. And so what about everybody else? It just, this seems like, and I'm not a Luddite, I'm not saying social media should be banned. I'm just saying this seems like a treacherous zone. So what say you?

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, well, in the early days of social media, you had the kind of utopians that thought that when the internet became universal or near as damn it, that we'd see this new reality and all the hierarchies that part will be destroyed. And it's all deeply naive because, because what, you know, what happens when you connect five billion brains together? I think this, I think there's about half the population of the world are on social media now. People start playing status games and, and, you know, earlier on, I described three main games. There's dominance, there's virtue and there's success. Well, that's social media, you know, you get people are pushing each other around in that kind of council culture kind of vein. You've got virtue signaling everywhere, which is obviously something we all do. That's part of playing a status game. And you've got success, people showing off about how thin they are and where they've gone on holiday

• 55:50Speaker 01

  and, and look at my successful children, all the, all the rest of it. I mean, that's what we're doing. We're playing status games. And I think the reason that social media has become so incredibly successful, so rapidly. Across all cultures is because it's given us a new way of mining this incredibly valuable resource. There are lots of young people for whom they have more status packed into their phones that they keep in their back pocket or their purse or whatever than they do in their actual real lives. You know, so you see why they get addicted to it. It becomes really the self as they exist in the virtual space becomes incredibly important to them. It can be their main source of status. The other thing, of course, is the kind of BJ Fogg stuff, the idea

• 56:32Speaker 01

  that that you could make phones addictive by making the rewards unpredictable.

• 56:40Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  So, you know, in the status game, I describe social media as a slot machine for status. You never quite know what you're going to get. You put a post up, you just described checking your post and how they're doing. Sometimes it could go amazing. Sometimes it could be a disaster. So you never know what you're going to get. And that was the amazing insight of BJ Fogg when you wrote his book Predictive Technology in 2003. He predicted the invention of the iPhone. There's a paragraph in that book that describes an iPhone, you know, years before it was even invented. It's an incredibly prescient book. And in there, he says, this is how you make it, you know, essentially addictive is you make it like a slot machine. You make the rewards unpredictable. And of course, BJ Fogg's course, the guys who invented Facebook and Instagram all went through his course at Stanford University. And we're now living through the kind of results

• 57:24Speaker 01

  of his, I mean, his genius. Sure, he's a genius. I mean, it's an incredible insight, but incredibly powerful. But even BJ Fogg, I think, didn't understand what exactly we were gambling with. He doesn't really talk about status. But to me, you know, having done this book, it's clear. That's what we're gambling with on social media. We're always gambling with our status. It's built into the platforms, likes, retweets. There are so many ways of measuring status on Twitter, X, Facebook and all that stuff.

• 57:52Dan Harris?

  Do you have thoughts on?

• 57:55Dan Harris?

  How to manage our relationship with social media successfully, aside from just abstinence?

• 58:04Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I mean, I'm a believer in Carl Jung always talked about this idea of making the unconscious conscious and how even that could be a powerful thing. You know, and I guess it goes into what you were saying about mindfulness, too. I think understanding what social media is and why it's addictive, that alone can be quite powerful because it makes you see that the likes, they don't really matter. It's just that a status detection system is glomming onto the likes, the retweets. You know, it is just a game. The other thing I think is very dangerous about social media is that the easiest form of status to get is virtue-based status, and especially on social media. All you've got to do to get some virtue-based status is to attack one of your ideological enemies in front of your peer group, and they're going to think you're great.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  And I think that's why social media becomes so toxic, because it's a very, very easy way to earn virtue-based status. You can just do it in a few clicks and you're there. So, you know, one of the things I write about in the status game is the idea of reducing your moral sphere. We're always these days, especially on social media, looking out into the world to morally judge other people and actually to reduce that sphere and focus much more on your own moral behavior and stop being so bloody obsessed with everybody else's moral behavior. Because your obsession with other people's moral behavior, a lot of that is to do with the desire for status, and it isn't very nice as it manifests on social media. It's not productive.

• 59:25Dan Harris?

  But just picking up on that, you know, we're at a time where there's, in my country, in the United States, where there's an enormous amount of tumult and upset about the perceived moral flaws on the other side of the red-blue divide here, you know, whatever side you're on. I strongly suspect many of the people listening to this are on the blue side of it.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:45Dan Harris?

  But I really want this to be a place for everybody. When you say reducing your moral sphere, if that was the right, if that's the right phraseology, if I'm reproducing that correctly, are you saying that I shouldn't look at people from the opposite party and take a critical eye to their moral behavior?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but I'm saying that you should try and see through the story. I'm a left-wing person, I was from a Guardian journalist, but doing this work is, you know, I wrote my former book Selfie when Trump first came in and I had to quickly add a whole chapter to that book before I went to press to sort of try and account and explain for, you know, the unexpected election of Donald Trump the first time around. And, you know, and what doing these kinds of things has taught me is that the story is very seductive and actually it's often very destructive to both sides. And what I believe in my middle age is that the left and the right just see the world in a different way. They tell a different story of the world. It isn't that one side is evil and one side

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  is on the side of the angels. It's just they both, they both kind of see half of the truth. You know, I talked about the idea about complex systems. The economy of the America of any country is a complex system. The effect of immigration on the economy is a complex subject. You know, it's incredibly complex, but we tell very simplistic stories, morally drenched stories about this stuff. If I could make one change in the world, it would be that the left and the right stop falling for their very emotional, very seductive, very simplistic stories about the opposite team and just try and understand in an open-hearted way why they're telling a different story about the world and why it doesn't come from a place of malice and hatred. Because both sides equally see each other as coming from

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  a place of malice and hatred, you know, to get rid of that emotional stuff and try and understand why they believe the world should be that way. I mean, one of the, one of the things, you know, it's a very simple thing, but maybe it's a good way of explaining it, is this idea that I was always brought up with, which is you can tell the Tories that our Republicans are evil because they always want to lower taxes for the rich. And so what could be more evil from that? You're making the rich richer. And because you're lowering taxes, you're making the poor poorer. You can't argue with that. But then when you listen to the story from the other side, it's like, well, yeah, because the rich are the ones that are creating the value, the rich are the ones that are forming these companies that are paying all the taxes. And if you tax them above a certain level, they'll just leave the country. They'll bugger off and go somewhere else. Or they're

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Companies will fail. So you don't want to do that. So there's this very delicate balance between raising enough tax revenue to look after, but also protecting the people who are creating the value that's enabling our national health service to exist and, you know, paying for the police. So, so, so these stories can seem inarguable, but there's always a story on the other side, which if you actually take the time and, you know, being twenty as a journalist forced me to do this, to go to the opposite end and talk to people that I might not otherwise talk to. There's always a story from the other side that once you get rid of all that moral judgment and all that rage, you think, okay, I don't agree with you, but I get that now. I understand that now.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  So, so of course, criticize when you feel you need to criticize, but I feel like both sides spend far too much time criticizing at the moment and not enough time understanding. This place that we're in, where each side thinks they're the devil, is horrendous, is awful, and it's all storytelling.

• 1:03:12Dan Harris?

  Well, I have a large degree of agreement with what you're saying. And perhaps it's not a coincidence that I too was a journalist for thirty years.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:03:22Dan Harris?

  TV. And so, you know, I lived my life talking to

• 1:03:27Dan Harris?

  everybody from cult leaders to terrorists to people I disagree with politically, and that was my job. So I really am able to kind of understand that everybody got their story and very few people wake up in the morning deciding I want to be a bad guy. Having said that, I recently have spent some time on social media making the case for understanding, if not compassion, I actually think understanding is a form of compassion in the second era of Trump or then the second chapter of Trump or whatever. And generally speaking, it's been well received. And there have been some people who are like, yo, you're a financially secure, straight white male. Some of the threats that I perceive as a keen and acute.

• 1:04:10Dan Harris?

  Don't apply to you, you know, when they, when the president gets up and says there are only two genders, that's not a problem for you. When abortion is banned, that's not a problem for you. I don't know if they, if they can't figure stuff out in Ukraine, you're not a Ukrainian, on and on. And I think you could probably make the same case from the right vis a vis the perceived threats from the left. I mean, I think I have an answer to this, but I'm curious what, what your answer is because you could probably get the same accusations hurled at you.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, everybody's got their own set of reasons why they can feel that they're under attack. And I think a lot of the reason why Trump won the, the first time is because the left in the 1960s stopped caring about the working class and stopped caring about the white working class in particular and started caring much more about issues of gender and race. So, so I mean, it happened with the same in the UK that the white working class stopped being cared about by the left and they started actually sort of being the enemy and started being looked down upon. And we didn't call them deplorables. We always called them racist and football hooligans and this, that and the other. Every side has its own set of ideas as to why they feel that it was all victimized by the culture. And of course, there's always going to be points in history where you, where you do

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  have to fight. Talk to everybody about the Second World War and the end of slavery. Sometimes you've got to fight and that's just a fact. But I still feel that if you want to, if you really want to make the world a better place, it is about understanding. You know, I talked to everyone about that, you know, the, the story we're never told in the UK about the things that we have done in the past that have been against racism and bigotry. That people on the left that I know would, it would make them sick to tell that story, to actually say, come on, Britain, you know, you know, we've been anti racist in the past. We should be proud of how anti racist we've been because it goes against everything they stand for, which is the British horrendous colonial, this, that and the other. But if you actually want to persuade people, if you want to get people on side, you have to tell them a story that's not going to alienate them or push them away and make

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  them feel less than. In other words, you have to tell them so it's not going to take their status away. That could be really, really hard because it can go against our principles in a very deep way. But that's the best way of doing it because, you know, the, the more you fight one way and you might win, but then the pushback from the other way is going to be even bigger. And you see this at the moment with, between the left and the right. The left wins, then the right wins, right wins bigger, the left get more fiercer. And it's just this escalation of. Aggression, an escalation of stories, of storytelling.

• 1:06:32Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  And I don't think it ends in a good place.

• 1:06:35Dan Harris?

  And the word you didn't use there, but you do use it in the book. And it is kind of the atomic bomb of emotions. I believe Brene Brown even said that is humiliation.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, that wasn't my quote. There was, there was somebody else. I forget the academic that came in with it. But humiliation being the atomic bomb of the, of the emotions. If you humiliate somebody, you take away all their status in a very sudden and sort of public way. It's at the root of the very worst of human behavior. I talk in the status game. I, I kind of tell the story of the Second World War leading up to the Holocaust from the perspective of status. And it makes sense suddenly when you, when you see it through the lens of status. Germany was the most successful high status country in continental Europe. They were humiliated after Versailles. The Jews got the blame for that. And look what happened.

• 1:07:23Dan Harris?

  This has been a fascinating discussion. I suspect people have feelings about it. So, uh, I have a, I have a pretty active chat on, uh, on my Substack. And so I'll, I'll open up a chat and let people feedback on this. Maybe I'll even ask you if you can come into it.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:07:39Dan Harris?

  And if you're listening to this in real time, uh, you can come chat with me and with Will about it. Two questions I ask kind of habitually at the end of every show. The first is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't get to?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  No, no, I think we covered a huge amount in, in a relatively short space of time. So thanks, Dan. I really appreciate that.

• 1:07:58Dan Harris?

  Likewise. Thank you. And then finally, you mentioned the names of your books, several of them, but can you just give us a full list? And also is there a website? Just everything Will stores so that we, if we want to dive in, we can.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the website is willstore.com, S T O double R. Just very briefly, the books, The Heretics is about my journalism days, going out, meeting Nazis, cult leaders, finding out why people believe that, why intelligent people believe, you know, sometimes crazy things. Selfie is his history of the Western self. Then there's the science of storytelling. The status game we've been talking about tonight. The Stories of Deals, my new book out February the, the 12th. So it should be out by the time this airs. And that's how people use storytelling for kind of persuasive and sort of leadership.

• 1:08:40Dan Harris?

  Excellent.

• 1:08:42Dan Harris?

  What a body of work. Excellent. All right. Well, Will, thank you again. Really appreciate it.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate the good chat. Thank you.

• 1:08:51Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Will. Don't forget to check out his appearance over on the Waking Up app. You can sign up for the app at wakingup.com/10%. That's T-E-N-P-E-R-C-E-N-T. Wakingup.com/10%. I will put a link in the show notes. Just so you know, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you will get a 30-day free trial and you will be supporting me and my team as well, because we will get a portion of the proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say, if money's an issue, Sam offers scholarships. That's the same policy that I have over on danharris.com. If you can't afford it, we'll give it to you. If you are a member at danharris.com,

• 1:09:34Dan Harris?

  you will get today's episode and all future episodes ad-free. You'll also get the chance to chat with me. I frequently do live video sessions where I guide a meditation and take your questions. So would love you to sign up there. Final thing to do here is to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn from the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

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