The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr

Will is an author who brings out the unexpected ways that we’re vulnerable, and how to manage those vulnerabilities and turn them into strengths. The author of six books including Sunday Times bestsellers, he’s one of the most interesting voices on how we can manage our worst impulses to succeed in the modern world. In a conversation that covers everything from are we more narcissistic than we used to be to how a desire for status underpins all of our ambitions, to how to deal with low self esteem and suicidal thoughts, Will held nothing back on this unfiltered exploration of the surprising strategies we can employ to deal with the dark sides of life. Will’s new book, The Status Game, is out now in the UK and in the US on the 23rd August. Follow Will: Twitter - https://twitter.com/wstorr Will’s book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Status-Game-Will-Storr/ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You shouldn't raise your children to believe that they can be Beyonce. The chances are they can't.

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  Will Storr is an award winning author of six critically acclaimed books. His ideas are disruptive, challenging and life changing. And some of them will make you feel incredibly uncomfortable.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  People don't like to talk about this stuff. 99% of self help books never mention genes. They want to promote that idea of, well, I can be whoever I want to be. But a huge amount of who we are is who we were born as. That myth of you have full control of yourself as a human being. That's the problem. It's not about embracing your flaws. It's about accepting your flaws.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Our lives are full of status pursuit. The more status that you earn, the better everything else gets. But that was true 10,000 years ago. It's true today. The brain is highly attuned to where we sit in a pecking order. The lower we are down in that pecking order, the more unhealthy we became. If you take two smokers, the one higher up is less likely to die of a smoking related disease than the one lower down.

• 0:56Steven Bartlett?

  That's mental.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  It matters massively.

• 1:00Steven Bartlett?

  How do we advance in the status game?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  That there are kind of three general types of status games that we can play. First game is a

• 1:08Steven Bartlett?

  Without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  Will, first of all, thank you for being here. Take me right back then to your early years because I think when I was reading through your different books here, throughout them, you have glimpses of your own perspective and it hints back to what I read about your, your early years. So take me back, right back to the start, you know, before the age of, let's say 12.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Okay. So, yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  I was brought up in Sommech Wells in Kent. Middle class family, very Catholic. It was quite a Victorian, strict, superstitious religious upbringing. Not the happiest upbringing, I have to say.

• 2:10Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Because my parents were very strict. My father was very strict especially. And they were very much in the grip of their Catholic belief system, which I just didn't, never, like, always baffled me even as a kid. It's like, what? How can you believe this stuff? And I went to a Catholic school. So, and I was quite a, I was probably a difficult, if you were to ask them, they'd say I was a difficult child because I was pushing against that all the time. You know, I thought it was crazy. I wasn't very good at authority and rules. So it was a bad fit, I would say. And I think that's what's, you know, one of the things that's kind of driven my interests into adulthood.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  My, you know, my, my, my second book, The Heretics, was looking at, why do otherwise smart people believe, end up believing these crazy things? Because my parents are smart people. But, um, yeah, you know, they believe in heaven, hell, Satan, all of that stuff. I, I think that's how my childhood has informed my interests as an adult, trying to figure out how, how that happens.

• 3:19Steven Bartlett?

  In your, in your book, Selfie, you, you talk a lot about self-esteem and the role that plays. What was your, give me the context of your, how your self-esteem was shaped in those early years?

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Ah, well, um, how it was shaped in those early years? I guess it was poorly would be the answer. I think the, you know, because.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  My behaviour was not great. The continual message I would get from teachers and parents was that you're, you know, you're a bad person, you're gonna end up in prison, you're gonna end up in care.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there was very little kind of positive feedback in my, in my childhood, which I think is, that that causes damage that you're never gonna get over, I believe.

• 4:09Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think you you never get over that damage?

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Yes, because I I think, you know, we're all born with a certain kind of personality, with a certain genome, and that that's not fate. That doesn't define who you're gonna be forever. But but it sets you on a certain course. It makes you vulnerable to a certain kind of mindset. And, you know, I I think a good childhood, a good upbringing can,

• 4:34Speaker 00

  you know, correct that to a certain degree. But a bad one can can set it on a sort of negative course. And I'm quite a neurotic person. I'm anxious, I've always worried a lot. So so when you take that kind of natural personality type, high neuroticism, and add into that a childhood which kind of reinforces that sense that the world is dangerous, that people are out to get you, all of that stuff, that that that that reality isn't safe. I I I and then, you know, what happens is your brain is still being formed really up until you in your mid twenties, you know, that that is in your mid twenties, when when that when those kind of learning processes stop. And so it's very hard, and probably, I would argue, probably impossible to reverse

• 5:17Speaker 00

  eighteen years of that kind of feedback once it's happened, because that's those are the years in which your brain is learning how the world works. And and so, yeah, so I I don't think it's fixable.

• 5:30Steven Bartlett?

  That that's one of the the ongoing. Conversations or debates or things that I've kind of been chewing over from doing this podcast and listening to people from all walks of life that have achieved amazing things that still have underlying trauma or sort of self stories that are controlling their their life and their behaviour. And I spent a long time talking to people about whether you can ever truly eradicate some of these traumas, the like the puppet master that's in the back room controlling your biases and all these things. And my conclusion over the last literally weeks has been that we can diminish the power that our early traumas have over us, but they're always going to be there. And is that is that where you find find yourself, but in terms of your belief

• 6:12Steven Bartlett?

  that we can diminish the power of those stories, but they'll always be there?

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Absolutely. That's exactly right. That's why I believe in you. Exactly. Yeah, that we can definitely diminish their power. And you know, I'm 47 now, and it still amazes me that you still you never stop learning and you never stop learning about yourself. You never stop learning about things you get wrong. And I've got to stop doing that, you know, it's overly simplistic to think of consciousness as this battle between reason and emotion.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  But there is something like that going on, you know, like our emotionality is usually in charge of what we're thinking and what we're doing, you know, we respond emotionally and that voice in your head then tells a story about what you're feeling. And usually it's to justify that emotion. It's to say, yes, you were right to feel like that. You were right to respond in anger and hostility at that person. And then the next day you think, oh, maybe it wasn't.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  You know, so I think what we call what we used to call reason, that reasonable voice in your head actually often isn't reasonable. It's just justifying and validating your initial emotional response, which is, you know, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. So I think what you're doing when you're learning, for me anyway, is you're learning actually, I mean, almost a parent yourself to turn that voice in your head into a someone that isn't going to be a harsh judge or on the other extreme, someone who's just going to accept and validate and defend everything, every behaviour, every thought you have, every mistake you make. You're looking for that that balance all the time. And then you're looking to spot.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  I think you're looking to spot those occasions on which you're making the same mistake over and over again, you know.

• 7:54Steven Bartlett?

  Have you got a harsh judge in your head?

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I have. I, you know, I'm self, I'm self-employed. I've been a, I've been a writer for, you know, without an employee for 20 years. You, you kind of, I think you have to have a harsh judge to get yourself out of bed, to get yourself in front of the computer, to do eight hours plus work a day. So I think to, it's kind of weird. I think, I think to achieve any, anything significant, you've got to, there's got to be a harsh, harshness to, I'm just trying to think whether judge is the right,

• 8:29Speaker 00

  right word. Like I read recently that the ideal parent is kind of firm, but also kind and caring and understanding. And I, and I think that's what, I think that's, if that's the ideal parent, I think that's really, that, that, that's the ideal of who should be inside our own heads, really. You've got to have that balance. And I think you can, you can go, you can go wrong in either direction.

• 8:53Steven Bartlett?

  Your book Selfie?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:55Steven Bartlett?

  What was the, I mean, I love the name. It was very of the time in 2017 as well.

• 9:02Steven Bartlett?

  What was the inspiration behind writing this book?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Right. So the book before that was called The Heretics and The Heretics was, as I said before, it was kind of inspired by this idea of what, how do smart people end up believing crazy things. And so that, that book was all about when we have these stubborn beliefs that kind of, that, that are irrational, that we don't let go of. So I was hanging out with Holocaust deniers. I was hanging out with creationists, UFO believers, people like this. And then in the promotion for that, I was asked again and again and again by people, so what makes people change their minds? You're saying that people can never change their minds. And I didn't have an answer to that question. I was going to have to bluff through it. So I thought, no, I don't understand that. So maybe I should try and find out. So I was a journalist at the time as a day job.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  And so I started interviewing lots of people who changed their minds, like in big, dramatic, kind of powerful ways. And one of those guys was this amazing psychologist called Professor Roy Baumeister. He spent his kind of early professional career in the self-esteem era of the eighties, you know, when, and this is the era I was brought up to, when everything was about self-esteem, when it was all about, that the kind of message out there was, if you want to be successful, just love yourself. You're amazing. You're fantastic. You can do anything that you want. You know, it was Whitney Houston, the greatest love of all is yourself. It was, it was that kind of era. And I remember it from school. I remember like, you know, the teacher saying to me, the problem with you, Will, is you just have low self-esteem. And they always go, self-esteem is a social vaccine. And if you, if you loved yourself, it would mean that you would be more successful, you'd

• 10:35Speaker 00

  be happier, you'd have a better marriage. And, you know, in America, they, they thought that self-esteem was going to solve homelessness, the gang culture, teenage parenthood was a big moral panic of the time. They thought it was going to cure that. So and he was like, well, is it true? Is this actually true? And so they looked into it and they found actually that there was no evidence that, that any of this was true, that, that every study that quoted it as being true, just referenced another study and he went in this breadcrumb trail of studies. They were all just quoting each other and there was no actual evidence any of this is true. And they tested, they, they actually tested to see whether that self-esteem myth was true or not. And it wasn't, it wasn't true. It was, it was originally based on this idea that they, this, this, this observation

• 11:18Speaker 00

  that schoolchildren who did well in exams also had high self-esteem. So they assumed that having high self-esteem made you good at exams. But actually, they had high self-esteem because they'd done good in their exams. It was, it was the other way around. God, this is obvious in retrospect, but that's what they, you know, so that, that was the error they made. Correlation, causation, that old chestnut. So, so he published his study and the initial response was just, you know, it was absolutely torn to pieces. It was either ignored or attacked. But slowly, he was proven to be right. And so when I was, I, I wrote a profile of Baumeister and, you know, he was a fascinating guy. And then

• 12:00Speaker 00

  what I realized was that this idea had not just changed a person, but it changed a culture, like the whole culture of the West, Britain, America, Canada, and lots of Europe. When I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, we were just obsessed with this idea. And it was just wrong, it was completely wrong. So that was the, that's the heart of selfie. It was this idea of, you know, how did selfie culture happen? How did we become so self-obsessed? And the self-esteem movement was a big part of that story. And it's the kind of, it's the kind of central story of the book.

• 12:32Steven Bartlett?

  Chapter zero.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:34Steven Bartlett?

  The dying self was quite difficult to read.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Ah, okay, yeah.

• 12:38Steven Bartlett?

  I thought it was a very, you know, you explore topics like suicide and your own sort of self-doubt and things like that, and your own suicidal ideation at times.

• 12:51Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you choose to start the book in that way?

• 12:55Speaker 00

  I suppose I wanted to start the book there to show, you know, why this matters. You know, where I ended up with in the book was this idea that we live, that we are in the West, individualists. You know, we see the world as made up of individual pieces and parts. And we are individually responsible for our fates. We're individually responsible for our success and our failure. And there's lots of good things to say about that. You know, it's an extremely motivating way of organising your thoughts, organising your life. You know, I am responsible for me and I will take care of me. But it's also kind of savage, you know, and it means, you know, that kind of Western myth

• 13:37Speaker 00

  we have is that, you know, that you can do anything that you want, just put your mind to it, you can achieve it, that kind of mindset. But very often, we fail. And so if it's true that you're responsible for your success, then it only logically follows that you're also responsible for your failure. And so these individualistic ideas accelerated in the 1980s. And that was because of a variety of things. It was the self-esteem movement partly, but the self-esteem movement became successful because of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, is my argument, neoliberalism, that we changed the economies of the West. We changed the game. You know, before the 1980s, we were much more collective, it was much more, you know,

• 14:19Speaker 00

  socialist, even in America, the top rate of tax was 90%, you know, it's extraordinary. And then the economy started going wrong in the seventies, so the neoliberal revolution happened and the idea, the central idea that, you know, Reagan and Thatcher pursued was we're going to increase competition wherever we can to reduce the social safety net. Privatise everything, just everyone's got to be competitive. And it changed who we are, you know, it when you change the rules of the game of life, you change the people who play that game, which is what my latest book is about, really. And so we became more competitive as a people. And what psychologists find is a major study that found that since the onset of neoliberalism,

• 15:04Speaker 00

  levels of perfectionism have increased massively in the UK, in America and in Canada. And perfectionism is implicated in suicidal ideation, in eating disorders, in steroid abuse and, you know, and self harm and so on and so on and so on. So that's what I wanted to begin the book there, to show why this matters. You know, this isn't just a kind of abstract academic exploration of the self. You know, I wanted to begin with, this is how it affects people.

• 15:36Steven Bartlett?

  If perfectionism can be quite an insidious issue in Western cultures where we're getting more individualistic, what is a better approach do you think to take for, what is a better message to share with society and the world about about that?

• 15:52Speaker 00

  I think, you know, I like the idea of, you know, I think the idea that I kind of develop is in selfie, partly it's about self acceptance rather than self love. I think self love is that, you know, I used to be a massive fan of Big Brother when Big Brother was on. And there was always a thing in Big Brother where somebody would behave completely obnoxiously. They'd be like rude, aggressive, just deeply unpleasant. And they would always defend themselves in the same way. They go, I'm just being me, that's just me. And if you don't like me, you know, and I think that's the self esteem movement talking. It's like, I'm my, I'm going to be my authentic self. And if you can't handle that, that's on you. And I think that's wrong, you know, you know, we're a social animal.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  We've, we have evolved to exist cooperatively. And I think when individualism, I think there's a lot to say in its defence, but when it goes too far, that's where it becomes, it becomes that kind of screw you mindset. So I think. Self-acceptance is different than self-love. Self-acceptance is, I'm flawed, broken animal, you know, as we all are. And, you know, a little like what we were talking about earlier on, it's about being that harsh but loving parent, rather than that, rather than being your own defence lawyer, you know, being that kind of harsh but loving parent. And being accepted, you know, having this acceptance that you are a flawed and limited animal. Like, you know, you shouldn't raise your children to believe that they can be Beyonce, if they want to be Beyonce.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Because the chances are they can't. She's like an extraordinarily talented and driven individual. She's the one in a billion, you know. So, you know, so I think that's an unhealthy message by which to raise our children and also, you know, talk to ourselves. And it's much more about understanding our strengths, our flaws, and kind of finding the right games to play. Find out that little corner of the world in which we can feel of value. I think that's what we should be trying to do.

• 17:47Steven Bartlett?

  Had your parents told you that you were Beyonce? And had those schools told you that you were Beyonce? Would you have been happier, do you think?

• 17:58Speaker 00

  I mean, I was sometimes told that I could succeed at school, but I just wasn't applying myself. And it's such a waste, it's such a waste, yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  But it's so weird, the school thing. I mean, I have to say, I think I went to a really bad school.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  It was a comprehensive school. You know, you hear these stories about teachers that inspire you, and oh, if it wasn't for this teacher. I never had that teacher. They were all just really bored and resentful. I remember going to class and there's one teacher who just opened his folder, where were we? He'd read from his folder for about 50 minutes and that would be the history lesson, you know. And that was the school I went to. It was miserable. And I always wanted to be a writer. And I was always in trouble. I was always this sort of problem student. And I had this English teacher who was quite nice called Mr. Lanaway. And I thought, oh, you know, I'm going to start writing short stories in my spare time. And I'm going to give this to my English teacher. It's just a way of getting like, look, you know, I've written this thing. And so I gave him a couple. And I think I gave him number three, you know, after writing on a third weekend, thinking that he was.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  In my head, he was thinking, oh, Will's, you know, William has found this thing that he's actually applying himself to. How amazing. And he said to me, oh. You know, this is all just extra work for me, don't you? Like that, so he kind of scolded me for giving him extra work to do. So I stopped, I stopped writing those, you know, short stories. And, and I just think if I, if I, if I'd have actually been encouraged to be, I was never encouraged to be a writer by my school or, you know, I, I wrote a school magazine and that, that caused me all kinds of trouble as well. So, so, so I was, I never actually had any encouragement. And I, I do kind of think if I was actually encouraged to be a writer, I would have probably got there sooner and probably been a better writer today.

• 19:42Steven Bartlett?

  On that point of Beyonce, though, it seems to me that if someone had turned around to you and said, you, you are Beyonce and you can do anything, you could be an amazing writer. It seems to me that that, that actually might have helped.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, yes, but that, but that's what I mean about identifying your strengths. Like, I think for me, writing was a strength, but nobody ever, and if that was identified, and if somebody said to me, God, you know, you should carry on writing. Literally, if one person, one adult had said to me, these short stories, you know, they show real promise. You should carry on writing these, it would have blown my mind. I'd have got, I'd have definitely carried on, but I just stopped, you know, I just stopped. And, and so, yeah, but that's what I mean. I, I, I think the mistake is, um, somebody, you know, in the research for selfie, this Harvard psychologist, Brian Little said, it's the myth of unlimited control, that myth of you can, you can, you know, you have full control over your, yourself as a human being, and that means that you can do anything. That's the problem, you know, that's the problem.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  And, but actually, I think what, what you should do is identify what is this person passionate about, you know, and what are they actually, what are they actually good at? And if, and if, and if, and if somebody saw promise in me as a journalist or a writer, then that, that's what they, they should have encouraged me in, but it was actually just a battle.

• 20:57Steven Bartlett?

  In, um, in the, in the chapter, the good self, in that book, chapter four, you talk about, the different forces that are controlling our behaviour. And it made me think, I've, you know, that I've also had this, this ongoing thought about how control of, of my life, I, over what the forces are that are actually controlling my life. Cause we tend to believe, obviously, as we would, from this first person view, that I'm making my decisions. But when I, this sounds quite, I don't care, I'm going to say it. When I reflect on the stories I've heard from men regarding.

• 21:29Steven Bartlett?

  Their behaviour before they've ejaculated and after they've ejaculated. It is pretty, it's, and I actually said this in like podcast number four, when no one was actually listening and it was just me and under the stairs in Manchester. I said, the change that I saw in my behaviour or how I felt before and after ejaculation is extreme.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:53Steven Bartlett?

  And I watched Rogan talk about this. He described it as being before ejaculation at the back of the bus. And you're just fucking being swung around the, he said, it's foggy, there's papers everywhere. And then, and then it says post ejaculation, it's like you zoom forward onto the wheel of the bus and go, oh, fuck, what was going on there? And you gain back control.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:11Steven Bartlett?

  And just this, it, for me, that was one of the clearest signs that my decision making is not as intentional as I thought it was.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:23Steven Bartlett?

  And you talk about that kind of thing a little bit in that chapter. Do you talk about a study where men are asked a variety of different questions while they're masturbating? Can you, can you share that study and also like what you learned from it about the way that we make our decisions?

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Well, I haven't, that was, I haven't read about that study for a good five years now, but I think it was something about, they were asked a series of questions about, were they asked a series of questions about what they would do in certain?

• 22:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's like their sexual preferences. So it's like, would you, would you be attracted to an animal? Would you be?

• 22:59Speaker 00

  That's it, yeah. Quite disturbing. And I think before they'd masturbated, their, their answers were much more extreme in the direction of, yes, I would have sex with an animal. Yes, I would pressure somebody into having sex than they would after masturbation. And I think most men can, can read that study and go, you can relate a little bit to, not, not that I'm saying that, you know, most men would have sex with an animal, obviously, but, but, but how are, how are, how are thinking is different? And, and, and, you know, and, and I love studies like that because I feel like it.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  You know, when we feel a different way, we do almost become a different person. Like I remember writing in selfie about, you know, when I'm trying to lose weight again. And on Monday morning, I'm absolutely resolute. It's like, I'm gonna keep my calories down. I'm gonna exercise every day. I am a machine. I'm a stoic. I'm athletic. You know, that's who I am. But by Friday evening, I'm just like, oh, sorry, I'm gonna get, I need to have some chips. You know, and it's like, it's not just that you feel a different way. It's almost that you've become a different person, for which I mean, you have a different personality. You're much more loose and happy and good to be around on Friday than you are on Monday. If you're like that, but you have a different value system.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  On Monday, I value this set of things. I value discipline and order and structure. And on Friday evening, I value fun and laughter and pleasure. So it is that we almost, you know, I think pre and post ejaculation, we almost become a different person. Monday morning versus Friday night, we've become different people. So I think that, you know, we're so fluid in who we are, depending on how we're feeling.

• 24:44Steven Bartlett?

  We don't wanna be though.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  No, it's not how we think of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a, yeah, a certain kind of person. Yeah, with a certain boxed in set of values and behaviours.

• 24:55Steven Bartlett?

  I think, you know, there's probably somewhere above 50% of people listening that can relate to that Monday issue of, you know, on Monday I am, you know, a Greek god and I am disciplined and I am everything. I'll become everything I wanna be on by, you know, by next week. And then something happens. How does, I would be remiss if I didn't ask, what can you tell us about how to stop? Or how to maintain or be consistent as our Monday selves? Is there anything you've learnt about the psychology there that might help us to be our Monday selves come Friday?

• 25:29Speaker 00

  So in in selfie, I write about how important it is to change our environment rather than try rather than change, try and change ourself.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  And the kind of the kind of story that I tell is, I call it the lizard and the iceberg, where if you take a lizard from the desert and pop it on an iceberg, it's going to be a very unhappy lizard. If you put it back in the desert, it's going to be happy and thriving and wonderful. And nothing is changed in the lizard, it's the environment that's changed. And I, and I think part of being an individualist is that we look into into ourselves, to our behaviour, to explain the causes of our behaviour. But actually, you know, so much of of of our behaviour is controlled by what's going on around us, by our environment. You know, and the reason we feel, you know, Friday on Friday is because it's Friday and that has a cultural resonance. That is Friday night, yeah, thank, thank fuck it's Friday.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  And we've done five days of work, so we feel different. So I think a lot of it is about changing your environment. There is a lot to say about, you know, if you take yourself to the gym, you've changed your environment. If you, if you can change, certainly with things like weight loss, I mean, it's a lesson I never seem to learn, but do not have that stuff in the house.

• 26:44Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my God, amen.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Guarantee that you will eat it. You know, it's, it's a drug. And, and so, so I think, I, I think maintain your environment to maintain yourself. You know, I think that's, that's one of the, one of the key takeaways that I've learned.

• 27:01Steven Bartlett?

  How to stay alive in the age of perfectionism?

• 27:05Steven Bartlett?

  How does one stay alive? One of the interesting things in that chapter was you kind of debunk this idea that alcoholism, for example, and a lot of these things, you know, that I've spoken to guests about on this podcast that they've suffered with, don't necessarily stem from having a unhappy childhood. I've got a friend that, you know, is very public about the fact that he became an alcoholic. And I, I guess I believed it was because of traumatic early events. I tended to believe that that was the case, but you debunked that quite clearly. And kind of assert that personality is the causal factor in most of our predispositions.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think one of the things that I've that I've learnt, well, certainly from research in that book, was just the incredible power of personality and the incredible power of our genes. It's really, people don't like to talk about this stuff because they feel it's disempowering. So whenever you read a self-help book, most of them, 99% of self-help books never mention genes because it's unhelpful. They want to promote that idea of 100% self-control, I can be whoever I want to be. But genes are so important. And as I said, it's not that they dictate who we are, or you know, or you're born with a kind of blueprint and that's all you're ever going to be.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  But you are born with a certain kind of genome, you know, with a certain level of likely neuroticism, openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, you know, how kind of happy or kind of angry and competitive you are, and so on. And so you're born kind of with a certain prevailing wind. And then your childhood experiences mostly will do the rest of that wiring up. So by the time you're in your twenties, you're kind of who you are, like not 100% because still traumatic experiences can break you to pieces, you know, lots of things can change, but you're kind of who you are. As I said, you know, people don't like that idea

• 29:07Speaker 00

  because it really goes against our individualist kind of credo of you can be Beyonce if you want to be. But it is nevertheless true that a huge amount of who we are is just how we were, who we were born as. You know, and I've got that addictive personality. I was an alcoholic. I haven't, I had to give up drinking when I was 26 because I'd lost control of how much I was drinking. And I still struggle with kind of, you know, sugar now. I've swapped booze for sugar is my problematic behavior, which is much easier to manage. So I get it. And but yeah, it's not, it's, I think part of the fact that we're these storytelling animals.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I think since seventies, since probably this, well, even the sixties, we've had this kind of therapy culture which wants to go archaeological digging in our pasts for the causes of our, all of our problems. And, you know, I think there is a certain amount of truth to that stuff. Like, I'm sure our childhoods affect us. But we tend to blame everything on our childhoods, everything on our parents. And I think alcoholism is one of those things that is mostly genetic. You know, you've either got that problem with addiction or you don't.

• 30:23Steven Bartlett?

  Can it be accelerated by trauma though? Because, you know, when I speak to psychologists, they often talk about it being a form of escapism in many ways, and other drugs and, you know, other self medications being a form of like trying to escape pain or trauma.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Definitely. Yeah. I think how to think about it is that it's, you could have a vulnerability to it.

• 30:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  And that's the genetic component. And if something bad happens to you, then you're much more likely to kind of fall into that trap.

• 30:51Steven Bartlett?

  Versus someone else who doesn't have that.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Who doesn't. Yeah, exactly.

• 30:54Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:55Steven Bartlett?

  On that point of storytelling, you mentioned storytelling there in our narrative. Your book in 2019 was about storytelling. I, having worked in marketing, was very compelled to read this book for the, probably, you know, we talked before we started recording that a lot of people will see a book about with the word storytelling on the front of it and think that they can use it from a marketing capacity or in a business sense. What have you learnt about how people can tell great stories in the context of business and marketing?

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so quite a lot. I teach, I teach business storytelling at Section Four, which is an American ed tech organisation. So I do a course there in the science of storytelling for business. And, you know, we are storytelling animals. We think in story. We, you know, narrative is basically. You know, how we experience ourselves and and life. And so, as I say in that course, if you're not communicating with story as a marketer, you're not communicating. You know, logic and facts and data and statistics, that's not the language of the brain. The language of the brain is beginning, middle and end, a character overcoming obstacles.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  I think a lot of the stuff we've been talking about is important, especially the idea that people think with their feelings. You know, it's feelings first, story second, the story justifies the feelings. And so if you want to tell persuasive stories, you need to first understand exactly who you're communicating with, and you need to understand how they feel about the world, how they feel about themselves, how they feel about, you know, justice and what their values are. And so that means understanding them kind of tribally. What groups do they belong to? Who are their heroes? Who are their villains? What motivates them? What demotivates them? So before you can sort of write the story, you need to figure out how they feel about the world.

• 32:51Steven Bartlett?

  So a bad story then would be one that was, because you know, I thought about this a lot, and my previous business was very successful in storytelling. So my first company, Social Chain, it's grown to be a very big business, maybe a thousand employees worldwide. We were, we started out as a, as a marketing agency, never had a sales team, because we focused on telling stories. Those stories were told on social media and on stage by me. So when I would go up on stage and talk about our agency to try and win business from Apple or Coca Cola, whoever it was, I would actually start by talking about me and my relationship with my mother. And that would be the first sentences out of my mouth when I walked on stage. If there was a thousand people or 15,000 people there, it would be about my mother. And through that story about my mother and my, and my upbringing and my

• 33:34Steven Bartlett?

  battles and all those things, eventually you'd learn about our business and what we do, and about the great work we do. But that was the preface of it. And that meant we never needed a, a, a sales team. I've always believed that if I'd walked on stage and started with a case study.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:51Steven Bartlett?

  I would have had to have a sales team at social team knocking on doors.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Definitely.

• 33:55Steven Bartlett?

  I think this is one of the biggest mistakes businesses make. When they pitch, when they when they speak on stage, when they post on social media, I think they have a they believe that the listener wants big numbers and to hear many views they got for their clients. And it just doesn't seem to be consistent with reality.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  No, it's not. I mean, so what you're doing when you're going through about your mother is you're connecting emotionally. So people are, you know, wanting, they're on your side immediately and you're making them feel good. You're making them feel things emotionally. The kind of framework that I use for business storytelling is that is that is that, you know, essentially people's brains process reality in the same way. And that's the, you know, so they're the hero of their story. You're not the hero standing on the stage. The company that's selling to you isn't the hero. They're the hero of their own story. They are, you know, they've got goals they're trying to pursue. We will have, you know, that which are the plots of our lives.

• 34:52Steven Bartlett?

  The audience.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, the audience, the person you're selling to. And then there's a brilliant story analyst called Christopher Booker, who wrote this amazing book called The Seven Basic Plots. And he writes about archetypal characters in storytelling that he calls light figures. And so the light figure is the example he uses of the three ghosts in A Christmas Carol, the Charles Dickens Scrooge story. So Scrooge is the hero of that story. But the three ghosts come in to show him Christmas past, Christmas present, Christmas future. They help him get what he needs, which is to become a better, more selfless, more generous, more loving, giving person. So that they are going to, they arrive in his story to kind of show him the way to help him get what he needs.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  And so that's what I argue, that's the appropriate position for most companies and organizations and leaders is not to be the hero. Because your audience feels like they're the hero. You're the light figure. You're there to help them get what they want. So when you go straight in with here's all my awards, here's what this person said about me, here's some statistics and stuff. You're not a light figure, you're presenting as the hero. What people really want to know is how can you help me get what I want? And that's, that's the story that you have to tell.

• 36:01Steven Bartlett?

  What kind of example can you give me to really make that, make me understand that in a real practical sense? Is there a brand you've seen do this really well? Is there an example of a?

• 36:12Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, my brain went to Nike for some reason.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's, oh, Nike's really interesting example. So, so obviously, one of the things that Nike has done recently is it's done that ad campaign around Colin Kaepernick, which is controversial, but did them, I think, I think they're something up to like 6% like after that, that ad campaign. And that's a really good example of an organization who is behaving as a light figure. So that Colin Kaepernick campaign has nothing to do with shoes. There's, you know, what they're not doing is going, our shoes will make you run 8% faster. We've got these sprung soles. We've got these amazing laces that won't trip you up or whatever. You know, their stats list is not in there. It's purely, they're telling a story.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  They've figured out that their client base are mostly believing, you know, this set of beliefs around the world. And, and those are goals, you know, people who, you know, the, the target audience that they're, they're appealing to want to achieve this kind of racial social justice and it's important to them. So, so what Nike are basically saying is, you know, we are light figures in this story. You know, we are, we are on the side of the Colin Kaepernick's of the people who are kneeling. You know, we believe that black lives matter. And, and so they're presenting as a light figure. And, and if you think about it rationally, it's kind of crazy. Like, why would a shoe company have this political thing? But it's because of the storytelling, because, because they're presenting as a light figure

• 37:43Speaker 00

  who, who was engaged in the kind of, you know, this particular mission in the world. And, you know, in, in order to kind of, to, to, to kind of join the mission, you, you buy the Nike shoes and, and it, and it worked, you know, it works really well. I mean, one of the archetypal examples that I talk about, that I love is, there was an ad that was broadcast, I think it was in the 60s by Volkswagen. And it was the first kind of modern ad, advert, the first, it was the first advert that you would look at and recognize as the kind of advertising that we do today. So before this Volkswagen ad. You know, all ads were just stats lists. Here's this amazing, you know, tire and this will

• 38:26Speaker 00

  get you north to sixty and whatever. And then this Volkswagen did this amazing ad where it just it was black and white because it was still in the days of black and white. And they had it just showed this guy, it was all snowing, it's a big blizzard outside. And this guy gets in his car, he turns, it's like, it's like, you know, just before dawn, turns on his ignition, drives his car through the blizzard, through the blizzard, through the blizzard, opens these huge shed doors. And then you hear this big engine start up and outdrives his snowplow. And it's how does the guy who drives the snowplow get to the snowplow? And it's just Volkswagen. And that's it. Really simple, really effective story. And it's showing Volkswagen as this light figure. We are helping the hero achieve what he wants. And, you know, I don't believe

• 39:08Speaker 00

  that the Volkswagen was particularly good at driving through blizzards. I don't believe that. And they certainly weren't making any factual claim in the sense that we are better than Land Rover and whatever, whatever, whatever, doing this because of this stat. It was as simple as that. And it revolutionized marketing. It changed everything because they'd figured out that kind of light figure form of storytelling.

• 39:30Steven Bartlett?

  And in that, are they saying that the Volkswagen Volkswagen enables you to be the hero that moves the snow? And Nike are saying that the Nike shoe, associating it with Colin Kaepernick, enables you to be the social activist hero.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Hero, exactly.

• 39:47Steven Bartlett?

  Like Colin Kaepernick was.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 39:51Steven Bartlett?

  Fascinating. I'm just going to change a few things about my, a few of my companies, I think, as the basis of that. Yeah, I think, I think we, I think in the course of business, we all forget that emotion is the most important thing. I'm thinking about all the newsletters that my companies have been writing. I've got various companies and the newsletters they write and the videos we make and how and how sometimes we. We think that facts and figures and information is what the viewer is looking for in their lives. But the most compelling way to draw them in to whatever we're doing, whether it's a newsletter or a tweet or whatever, is by putting emotion first and really thinking about what the emotion of the content is.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And with the Nike example, I mean, we live in, since the global financial crisis, we live in heightened political times. And so, you know, and people are always tribal. And so, you know, one of the big things that the successful kind of persuaders do is to make those tribal appeals. And, you know, sometimes it works with Colin Kaepernick, like with the Gillette razor campaign, it didn't work because you're kind of essentially attacking your target audience. So that was, you know, less successful. I think there was a terrible Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner.

• 41:00Steven Bartlett?

  Oh gosh, I was thinking about that.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Where they were kind of basically, yeah, where it was just making this, yeah.

• 41:06Steven Bartlett?

  Well, it put a super rich, beautiful model, white woman as the hero against social injustice.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  And drinking this sugary drink is going to help. Yeah, you know, so.

• 41:17Steven Bartlett?

  It was just all off, wasn't it?

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think organisations are sensing that partly how we can be a light figure these days is by presenting as people who are assisting in these political goals that have become very important to people, especially young people. And some people are getting it right, some people are getting it wrong.

• 41:38Steven Bartlett?

  There's a real science to it though, isn't there?

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:40Steven Bartlett?

  The more we've spoken, I've realised how there is a science to it when you understand the roles and also the audience, the roles of the characters in your content or your piece. And also where the, it's really about where the audience sees themselves, as you say.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:55Steven Bartlett?

  And how they feel represented. Your 2021 book, The Status Game, this is the book that when I was reading through all of my notes, I have by far the most amount of notes on.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Great.

• 42:06Steven Bartlett?

  Because maybe it's just, you know, the way I'm compelled or whatever, but it was really, really fascinating and felt very relevant, status as a topic. Why does status matter? And what is status for people that don't understand the word?

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Okay, so it matters massively. And the reason I wanted to write that book is because people just don't really talk about it very much. Even though our lives are full of status pursuit, people just don't talk about it very much.

• 42:35Steven Bartlett?

  Status or status, which one is it?

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Well, Americans say status, Brits tend to say status, but I guess it's both, yeah, it's both. So I think one of the reasons people tend to not like this subject is that when I make the argument that we're all motivated by status pursuit, that I think I'm saying we all want to be rich, we all want to be famous. And that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that we all want to feel of value. So we evolved as these tribal animals. And to be successful in the tribe means two things. You've got to be good at connecting with other people. So being accepted and formulating a sense of belongingness with other people. So that's belongingness, that's connection, that's not status, that's something else.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  But once we're in a group, in a tribe, we want to rise within it. We want to feel like we are of value to other people. And so back in the days when our brains were evolving, when we were living in the tribes, the more status that you earned, the more and better food you'd get, the safer your sleeping sites, the safer your children would be, the greater your access to your choice of mates. So as we all know, survival and reproduction are the basic, most fundamental drives we have as living things. And status, when you rise in status, your chances of survival and reproduction just go up and up and up and up. So when we're in the tribes, people would try and get status in the tribes.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  And the more status you got, the better everything else became. And so that was true 10,000 years ago, it's true today. That is still true today. The more status that you earn, the better everything else gets. So it's this huge, huge component of human behaviour. But it's subconscious. So we don't like to think about it sometimes. We like to deny it, even though we... All love to feel of value and we are all very, very sensitive to any indication that we, that somebody considers us to be of lesser value.

• 44:40Steven Bartlett?

  You know, you said at the start of that, that when you introduce this topic, people will have kind of an allergic reaction because they think, they think you mean, and it goes back to what we were saying about your audience receiving that message in a bad way because of where it frames them. It frames them as being kind of narcissistic and selfish and, you know, and those are, nobody wants to admit that they, they are selfish or they are, you know, they're concerned with status. They don't want to admit it. It's true. But no one wants to say it. I'll say it. It's just the way that we are.

• 45:11Steven Bartlett?

  But, and then you, you went on to say that, you know, people don't like to admit they want to be famous, but I, I tend to believe that a lot of people do want to be famous. And in that book, you talk about children in particular, when they're asked what they want to be when they're older. It's quite, pretty alarming, right?

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's, that's again, an indicator of the rise in individualism, that that's, that more and more kids in the West, since as Evan has been saying, we want to be rich, want to be famous. But there are all kinds of status games that we can play. And I think, I think the, I, I think the, one of the important things to understand about status games is, is that the brain is so obsessed with status. It, it assigns kind of status points to, it can, to anything. So for, so for some people, for lots of people, the accrual of money, that's their status game. That's how they're measuring their status, how much money I've got. But for other people, it can be how simply I live, you know, I, I, I know someone who, he's a lovely guy, but he considers himself to

• 46:09Speaker 00

  be sort of not materialistic and he's very much in the wellness space. And he, you know, was telling me last year that he's, you know, he takes his kids to their private school. But at the school gates, you know, he's got this beaten up old car that he's had since he was a student and he's got masking tape around the. The wing mirror and he was sort of talking, oh, you know, all the other parents have got these big Mercedes and Audis and BMWs, but I've just got this thing. And I think he was trying to express the fact that he just didn't care. He just didn't care about his status. But for me, he did care. That car was every bit as much of a status symbol for him as the, you know, the brand

• 46:50Speaker 00

  new Mercedes four-wheel drives were for the other parents. It's just that he was playing a different status game. In his game, having a crap car is a high status thing. Same as the aristocracy in Britain. So, you know, if you remember the British aristocracy, you look down your nose at people who have a brand new Japanese Lexus or whatever. They drive up beating up Land Rovers. And so it all depends what game you're playing. Different games use different things to symbolize status. And so that's how that game works. Lots of people play the fame game. Lots of people play the money game, but other people don't. You know, if you were hanging around with Gandhi in India, you wouldn't be playing the money game.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  You would have got more status for living. The more simpler your life became, the more status in that group you would earn.

• 47:41Steven Bartlett?

  It's so true. I've played all those games in my life and still playing many of them. I'm not here to lie, so that's just what it is. And I think really interestingly on that as well is one of the status games I was playing when I was a little bit, well, I say insecure, but clearly I'm still insecure if I'm still playing status games, status games now, was how much designer stuff can I buy and champagne can I buy in nightclubs? I played that game between 18 and 24. And then when I actually got money, when I actually was successful, I actually saw Louis Vuitton as a lower status thing. So I just started wearing all black and got rid of all of my designer stuff because I now think that it's-

• 48:23Speaker 00

  You're in a different game.

• 48:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a different game that I'm playing now. And so I don't, now I have an allergic reaction to anything designer because to me- Yeah, it's weird. I think it's low status. I think in my head it's like.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  That's true. And in the book I write about this hilarious study where they figured out, because in the in the luxury goods game, the bigger the logo, the lower the status.

• 48:42Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  And they figured out that I forget the exact measurements, but a certain amount of logo space, you know, like half an inch smaller meant, you know, $500 more on the on the price. And the most expensive designer stuff has a logo on the inside. It has no logo on the outside. And so and what that kind of speaks to is that, again, the whole world isn't one status game. There are kind of almost infinite status games and people, we're not particularly, we're not that interested in what people outside our like games think of us. It's much more about what people who are playing the games with us think of us. And so, you know, in my wife is the former editor of Elle magazine. So, you know, so, you know, that fashion luxury world, you know, people

• 49:27Speaker 00

  signal to each other. I will see a handbag and it will just be invisible to me what that handbag means, what the meaning of that handbag is. But the person, the owner of that handbag won't get the first fuck what I think about that handbag. They're interested in what's what, you know, that woman over there who knows about that handbag knows. And they'll know by the quality of the stitching, by a tiny little detail on the corner of that bag, that that is a really good bag. And that's what matters because that's, that's the game. They're playing a game with that person. They're not playing the game with me. So they don't care what I think.

• 49:54Steven Bartlett?

  It's so, you know, I have this very unproven thought that just came to mind when you were saying about the size of the logo, that when you're at the very, when it comes to luxury goods, at the very bottom of the status ladder, you want the biggest fucking logo possible.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:10Steven Bartlett?

  And you want it all over the car. And if you think about certain like, you know, people, you know, where they are in that in that status thing, they will have, they will wear a tracksuit of that logo. And then as you rise financially or in status, the logo, as you say, gets smaller and then it disappears. So if you look at billionaires, they're not wearing, Jeff Bezos is not wearing a Louie Vuitton tracksuit.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  That was in basics.

• 50:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. He's all plain.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:37Steven Bartlett?

  With the billionaires. It's all very plain. They have the yacht, they're playing that game.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, they do.

• 50:42Steven Bartlett?

  How many feet is the yacht? But yeah, super interesting.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Makes me wonder.

• 50:47Steven Bartlett?

  Do we actually really care about these things? Do we actually really? We spend, we spend our lives telling ourselves that we want that Birkin bag. We really genuinely love the Lamborghini. But do we, do we actually like the Lamborghini? Or do we just like what it's signaling about us?

• 51:06Speaker 00

  Well, I don't want to over, I don't want to over kind of, I almost over promise the story. Like, I think there's a danger where you can say, well, a Lamborghini is 100% status. There's nothing else. I think that's, that's not quite fair on Lamborghini. They're amazing machines and I've never driven a Lamborghini, but I'm sure it's a fantastic experience. You know, I, you know, I've driven sports cars a couple of times and it's been amazing. So it's not just status. Like it is, it's incredible to have like a camera that's like amazing photographs. So you are, you are getting something extra for your money, but it's, but, but, but mostly I think what you're getting is, is status. That, that's really mostly what you're getting and it's worth it. I mean, I think I, I don't want to fall into that trap of being condescending to status.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  It is a fundamental human need that we feel of value. And, you know, if we're playing a high level status game with lots of Lamborghini owners, it's really, really hard to feel a value in that group. So you've got to work really hard. So that's why a brand new Lamborghini for somebody playing that game will feel as good as a, you know, as a dirt bike to somebody playing, you know, a game over there. Like one might cost multiples more than the other, but it will feel just as good because they're worried about, they're only really concerned about what the other people in their, their game are thinking. So, so, so, yeah, we do care and it's, it's a good thing because it's, you know, the book does talk a lot about the negatives of status pursuit. But it also talks a lot about the positives of status pursuit.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  I mean, civilization, technology, that, that's what you get when people want to pursue status. When somebody wants to become the best technologist, the best vaccine designer, the best, you know, the best charity, we want to save the most lives. That's humans at their best and that's also status pursuit, but it's good, it's positive.

• 52:58Steven Bartlett?

  What is the toxic downside of being addicted to status though? And, and, and my sub question to that is that is insecurity and sort of? A lack of self-worth, a predictor of being addicted to status games?

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Being human is a predictor of being addicted to status games. We're all addicted to status games and-

• 53:19Steven Bartlett?

  Do you not think people that were bullied and that were low status in childhood, in some context, are those that then seek status most as adults?

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Maybe, but again, I do think that personality comes a lot into play. Like anything, some people are more interested in status than other people. Like Elon Musk is obviously incredibly interested in his own relative status and that's a big driver for him. Jeff Bezos, Beyonce, these people are very highly attuned to the status game and that's what pushes them, pushes them, pushes them to work harder than I will ever work. So I don't necessarily think it's about low self-worth. It's probably to do with genetic things like extraversion, agreeableness,

• 54:10Speaker 00

  which is a personality component. If you're low in agreeableness, you're competitive. It's that kind of type A personality. So there's definitely a genetic component to it, definitely. But there's also, you know, class comes into it. People on the lower socioeconomic groups have much less access to status games. So I think that's why, you know, if you're a poor guy raised in a housing estate in Stockwell and the only available status game to you are Tesco's Bakery and this gang over here, I know what I'm joining. You know, it's changed

• 54:51Speaker 00

  the way that I see some of those issues that, you know, we are programmed to crave connection and status and we will find connection and status wherever we can. And so I think that explains, you know, when people are joining gangs, it's not because they're naughty, it's not because they're bad people, it's because they're just doing what they're designed to do, but they're in an environment where there aren't many status games to play. There's just not a lot of options.

• 55:18Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because when I think of some of my friends that I believe in my own, you know, ill-informed observation are addicted to status, the ones that are really addicted to status, the ones that are really pursuing it, are actually pursuing it at the cost of connection.

• 55:35Steven Bartlett?

  And what I mean by that is my richest, most successful friend that I have that lives in a massive mansion in the middle of nowhere, because that's the place that he could buy the biggest house and has all the sports cars, is also the loneliest.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a really good observation. I mean, status and connection, they're separate things. So we crave by nature both of them. People tend to be happier when they're more connected. But status is a separate thing. And I think that's right. I think that's absolutely correct. Some people's dials are set. I consider myself somebody who is relatively high in need for status, which is why I ended up writing books for a living. But I'm relatively low in need for the connection. I don't really have much of a social life. I don't really want one. You know, I'm not bothered particularly. So everybody's dials are set in different ways. Some people have relatively low need for status and they're relatively high need for connection. And they're surrounded by friends and they're probably happier than I am. I'm sure they're happier than I am.

• 56:31Steven Bartlett?

  Is there instances where we can be too consumed with status and that can cause us to have adverse personal consequences?

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suppose, okay, so in the book, I write that there are kind of three general types of status games that we can play. First game is the dominance game. And so the dominance game, we share with animals. We've been playing dominance games for millions of years. And they are what they sound like they are. They're about aggression, but also the threat of aggression, bullying, you know, that kind of thing. Whenever we force somebody else to attend to us in status, that's dominance. There's success games, which is, I think, the best of human nature, competence. So when you're thinking about how do we become a valued member of our tribe, back in the days when our brains were evolving, we could be the best honey finder, the best storyteller, the best hunter, best finder of tubers. So

• 57:25Speaker 00

  that's how you're a value to your tribe, competence, of being good at something. But there's also virtue. You know, we can play virtue games. And so in the tribe, that means that you know the rules of the tribe, you enforce the rules of the tribe, you know the rituals, you believe in the spiritual stories. So virtue isn't just about being selfless and kind and loving to your tribal members. It's also about being an enforcer. And I think, you know, there's no such thing as a pure game. That's the other thing to kind of point out. Like you can see. A boxing match is a dominance game, it's pretty clearly a dominance game, but it's also got a virtue element to it, there's some rules in boxing, you can't just go and kick them in the groin, you know, like, there has to be some virtue in there too, so you

• 58:07Speaker 00

  call that dominance virtue game, and I think the worst games, I think the games that are most destructive are what I call virtue dominance games, so a virtue dominance game is one in which I'm raising status by enforcing rule, but by following rules and knowing the moral rules, the dominance component is I'm gonna force you to do it, so, you know, that's what you see on social media a lot, those cancel culture mobs, people attacking each other for believing the wrong things, that's a virtue dominance game, at their very worst, a virtue dominance game, you know, in the book I write about the rise of the Nazis, I write about the final chapter which kind of brings the whole thing together,

• 58:49Speaker 00

  is the story of the rise of the communists in the Soviet Union, from the perspective of status, and, you know, that's also a virtue dominance game, they're not interested in competence, in success, they're interested in, you're gonna believe this, and if you don't, we're gonna punish you.

• 59:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's a lot of that going on at the moment.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  There's a lot of that going on at the moment, and I think a lot of it is because, you know, trying to be kind of open-hearted about it, I wrote about this in Selfie, and I wrote in The Status Game, is that since the global financial crisis, life has got harder, especially for young people, success, you know, like, it's hard to get on the property ladder, people are leaving university with student debt, there's massive underemployment for graduates, we've got what they call elite overproduction, we're producing too many smart, educated people for the roles to fit in, it's, you know, we're now entering a new recession, apparently, so, life is much harder for millennials and Gen Z's than it was for boomers and Gen X's, so, success games are harder to play, so, what you're,

• 59:52Speaker 00

  I think what you're seeing is online, people get status wherever they can, so they start playing virtue games instead.

• 1:00:00Steven Bartlett?

  One of the alarming things you talk about in this book is that status, did I say that right?

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's the English way, because I have your.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  You're not American.

• 1:00:09Steven Bartlett?

  And that will harm my status.

• 1:00:12Steven Bartlett?

  Attack me in the comments section.

• 1:00:15Steven Bartlett?

  This idea that status games actually have an impact on our health and mortality, that we will die younger if we have lower status. What evidence have you got, have you got or found to support this idea?

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Well, there's lots of evidence. There's a big, a lot of it comes from this guy called Dr. Michael Marmot, who is just did this incredible set of work, which he calls the Whitehall Studies. So obviously Whitehall is the bureaucracy that kind of runs, that kind of takes the order, you know, the civil service that kind of works with the government. So it's an enormous organisation, highly stratified. And so Marmot looked at kind of health outcomes for people on different levels of that kind of hierarchy, that status game, and found that the lower you went down that status game, the worst health outcomes became. So the obvious thing is, oh, that's just because if you're being paid less, you maybe can't afford the personal trainer, you know, you're eating worse. But it wasn't, that wasn't the case at all.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Literally one rung down below the very top, so still a very, very wealthy, successful, high status people, had worse health outcomes than the person at the very top. So it really did seem like the brain is highly attuned to where we sit in a pecking order. And the lower, the lower we are down in that pecking order, the more unhealthy we became. Another set of scientists looked at this in a laboratory. So they took a bunch of monkeys who obviously like us, very hierarchical, they play status games. And they deliberately fed, this is a terrible experiment, it's very, it's pretty awful, but deliberately fed them a terrible diet of like fast food, like chocolate and crisps. So they, so they ended up having a high level of atherosclerotic plaque, which is, you

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  know, so they were getting clogged up, basically, and vulnerable to heart problems and so on. And they found that it was the same, that the lower you went down the monkey pecking order, the more likely the monkeys were to die of these heart related diseases because of their bad hearts and the ones at the top. And then importantly, they. Conspire to change the hierarchy of the group. I don't know how they did it, but they changed them. Maybe they took out the top monkey, but they changed the hierarchy of the group. And they found that the health outcomes changed in lockstep with the change in hierarchy. So if a monkey went up, they became less likely to die. And so then you might ask, what? This is crazy. Like, why is this? And so the closest answer that scientists have come, there's a whole field called social genomics.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  It's a new field and social genomics is all about how does our social world affect the function of our genes? So, you know, we're social animals, our brains are constantly monitoring how we're doing in the world. What are our levels of connection? What are our levels of status? We have this status detection system that's constantly monitoring our level of status. And so the idea is that when the brain registers that we are dropping in status, we're not too high in status, it prepares our cells. It changes the way our genes work and the actions of our cells change in such a way that it kind of prepares us for kind of trouble. So inflammation goes up and if our response goes down.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  And so the body changes in such a way that we become more ill.

• 1:03:28Steven Bartlett?

  There's a really

• 1:03:32Steven Bartlett?

  a narrative in there, which some might deduce from hearing all of that, which is that your level of success relates to your health. And this, I'm going to say it in a really gruesome way, which is the more successful you are,

• 1:03:48Steven Bartlett?

  the longer you'll live.

• 1:03:51Steven Bartlett?

  Obviously, there's loads of factors at play.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Steven Bartlett?

  If you're eating burgers and smoking and doing class A drugs, that's going to probably be a stronger sort of determinant in your outcomes. But, but generally speaking, if two people are eating the exact same thing, if they're living the exact same lifestyle in terms of what they're consuming and the way that they're living, and the only variable is their level of success in a status game.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Steven Bartlett?

  Then they will be.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  They're less likely to die if they're higher up.

• 1:04:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  That's true. Yeah.

• 1:04:19Steven Bartlett?

  Quite alarming, isn't it?

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  As you said, there's so many confounds. I mean, life is much more complicated than that. There's always, you know, it is true that people, you know, smoke and don't smoke and so on. But, but, but, but, you know, what Marmot finds is that, is that if you take two smokers, the one higher up is less, is less likely to die of a smoking related disease than the, than the one lower down.

• 1:04:37Steven Bartlett?

  In the status.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  In the status game, yeah.

• 1:04:39Steven Bartlett?

  Ladder or whatever.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Steven Bartlett?

  And one of the other things that I, I wrote down, reading that book, was workers at the bottom of the office hierarchy have at ages forty to sixty four, four times the risk of death of their, I guess administrators means managers.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:54Steven Bartlett?

  At the top of the hierarchy.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's from the Whitehall studies. Yeah, that's part of what Dr.

• 1:04:59Steven Bartlett?

  That's mental.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's crazy. So, so they're really significant. It's not marginal. They're, you know, when you, when you, it will be marginal from one layer to the next. When you actually look at the whole game, it's very significant, the, the differences, the health outcomes from the top and bottom.

• 1:05:12Steven Bartlett?

  It's absolutely mental. I've never really considered that idea before. That's status is playing such a significant role in my biological situation.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  The same is true for connection. So when we're lonely, the same thing happens. The lonelier we are, when we lack status, the same thing, you know, we, we have, our inflammation goes up and if our response goes down, which is bad for us in the long term. And it's the same with, the social genomics people say it's the same with loneliness, which is why loneliness is bad for our health too.

• 1:05:44Steven Bartlett?

  The other thing that I found particularly interesting was that when we lose our status, the consequences of that can be pretty morbid.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Steven Bartlett?

  And that suicide is often the result of people losing status and the speed in which they lose their status.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so this is why I never believe the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories. I think he did kill himself because he just had this huge drop in status. It just makes him incredibly vulnerable to suicidal thought and ideation. So, so yes, it's not just drops in status, especially sudden drops in status makes us very vulnerable. And also I found it was interesting, the research says it's, it's also being left behind. So if we, if we stay still and everybody else is, everybody around us accelerates, that, that, that also makes us vulnerable to. Potentially, you know, anxiety, depression and potentially suicidal ideation.

• 1:06:34Steven Bartlett?

  That in particular is quite an alarming thought that if you're in a group of five friends, best friends, and four of the best friends do really, really well professionally in their careers, whatever, just because of the context in which you're existing, you might become depressed because your four friends did well. And this, in some respects, might explain jealousy.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  Of course it does. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, you know, we, we've evolved to

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  want to feel of value, but unfortunately, being of value is kind of relative. Like, if everybody is equally valued, then nobody's valued. Do you know what I mean? We're all on the same level. So it's, I think that's where it can become quite damaging. And that's where life can become quite exhausting, especially in this kind of highly competitive neoliberal world that we live in, where everybody's pushing, pushing, pushing to succeed, pushing to succeed. You know, it's true, you know, I hate, we hate it when our friends become successful. Parts of us are always going to because it kind of devalues what, you know, what we have. You know, it's just an unfortunate byproduct of the, of the status game.

• 1:07:47Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about how we look up to people who are like us.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Steven Bartlett?

  But we also seem to be more jealous of people that are like us.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Steven Bartlett?

  Because they, because they are the clearest evidence of our own inadequacy.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was a really sort of, kind of knotty paradox for me to get my head around when I was writing the book. And the closest solution I could come to it was, so when you look at how human social groups work, there's a really amazing researcher in America called Joseph Henrich, who studies this stuff and has written about a couple of books about this. And he talks about how we learn. And so in those, again, those groups in which we evolved, which we've sort of looked to to figure out why we are like we are. What you'll find is that when you were growing up, you know, young people look, they identify high status people

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  from which to learn. And those high status people are going to be like them in some way. They're probably going to be the same gender, and they're going to have the same kind of interests and, you know, that kind of thing. And so this mechanism switches on, which is copy, flatter, conform. So you start copying their behaviour, because the brain goes, well, this person's high status. I want to become high status. So if I want to become high status, of course, I've got to do everything that they're doing. If I do everything that they're doing, you know, it'll work. So it switches on. And then we've got the flatter process, which is, I need access to this person. I want to be around this person to be able to learn everything that they're doing. And you do that with, you know, flattery is a good way of doing that. It's like, you know, you're amazing. I love this. What a great book. What a great podcast. You're

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  amazing businesses. And then, you know, so we'll let people in who treat us that way and conform. You do what you do what you're told. You behave. And so, you know, you can, you can, you can think about that when you think about celebrities, you know, like I remember when I was seven or eight years old, I was obsessed with this guy called, this guy Nick Kershaw. And I remember seeing him on TV AM, and he was crossing his legs in a certain way with his ankle on his knee and his leg sticking out. And I just found myself sitting at school with the same way as Nick Kershaw, you know, so like my copy, you know, my copy, flatter, conform mechanism has switched on. So I think that's, I think that's how kind of fame works. I think it's

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  that we see people who feel like a piece of us, but a highly successful piece of us. Like, that person's like me, but amazing. And so these very ancient evolved mechanisms switch on, even though we're probably never going to meet that person, they just switch on. And so, you know, you'll notice that. People read the same books as their idols, they dress the same way as their idols. They might even, you know, I find, I mean, I'm embarrassed about it, but I think it's probably very common. When I've watched a stand-up comedy special and I've loved it, I'll find myself talking like that comic the next day, like using their inflections a bit. It's just kind of weird, you know, or laughing like them, you know. So, so generally speaking, we're quite envious creatures. We don't like high-status people.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  But there's a very narrow class of people that we identify with, and those are the people that feel like super-successful versions of us. Like, we relate to them, we identify with them, and that's when that very evolved ancient mechanism switch on, which I call in the book, copy, flatter and form.

• 1:11:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. Much of what you've described as well explains influence in marketing and why it's so effective. Why we, why, you know, if you look up to someone, they can sell you anything.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:19Steven Bartlett?

  And that's what the whole industry is based on. The other, the other point that you talk about in the book around the role that status is playing, which really alarmed me and made me ponder quite a lot, was about how our pursuit for status is more important than our pursuit for money when we've kind of addressed the money topic, and how, you know, many employees would rather accept a higher-status job than a pay rise.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, different job title, yeah.

• 1:11:43Steven Bartlett?

  That's, that's pretty alarming.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, well, it is, but it's not that surprising when you think about the evolution of the brain. We haven't evolved to crave money because money hasn't been around long enough. We've evolved to crave status, and money is just one way that we can measure status. But there are loads of other ways we can measure status. So, so it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have to be money-based, you know. And as you said, that was quite a major study. I think it was 15,000 people in the UK that they surveyed and found that most would accept a higher-status job title over a modest pay rise, yeah.

• 1:12:17Steven Bartlett?

  So instead of, you know... I've got Jack sat over there. He's the producer, director of this podcast. So, Jack, what's your job title right now?

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  What did I say? Director slash producer?

• 1:12:28Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so if I change Jack's job title to CEO of the podcast

• 1:12:35Steven Bartlett?

  versus giving him one thousand pound pay rise, he'd probably take the CEO of the podcast.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. He's just a definite. But it's also smart thinking because, because you know, when we're judging other people's status, it isn't just how much money they have. In fact,

• 1:12:51Steven Bartlett?

  We never know.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  the money's often invisible. The title says a lot. So if you were to, you know, make Jack's, you know, he's my podcast CEO, he's more likely than to go on and get a better job somewhere else, higher status, more money because of that bump in status. So it's actually, the instinct is correct. It's a smarter move to take the title than the grand.

• 1:13:10Steven Bartlett?

  So I could reduce his salary by half.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  No, I think, yeah, that's the thing. I think we're so sensitive to reductions in status. That is, that will never fly.

• 1:13:22Steven Bartlett?

  That's interesting. You talk about the cues as well within status games that we kind of look for. What are those four cues?

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, this is again, Joseph Hendry's work where he looks at, you know, how do we identify the people that we want to copy, flatter and form? So there are various cues. One of them is with, they think on success cues. So in the hunter gatherer tribe, it might be a hunter has a big necklace of teeth, one tooth from every creature that he's killed, you know, so that's why we have jewelry these days because it's a success cue. And it's amazing when you read about the detail because the, you know, the brain is, some neuroscientists call it, has a status detection system. So we are constantly, all of the time, monitoring our environment for status cues and, you know,

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  playing that game. And so we're constantly monitoring other people's body language.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  We can measure someone's relative status versus, you know, submissive versus dominant in 43 milliseconds. That's how quick when we see somebody, we measure how. Dominant or submissive they are in terms of status. So that's how quick it is. So we're looking at things like successful interruptions in conversation. The more successful interruptions you make, the higher status you are. Like, we've all been in situations, maybe you not for a while, where you're trying to get a word in edgewise. And everyone's just like, maybe in a family situation, and you just think, oh, fuck it. I have Piers Morgan on the podcast, so I can get a fucking word in edgewise with him. But that's actually a perfectly valid point. He sees himself as higher status than you. Yeah.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  And so both of your games, subconsciously, were playing a status game. And so that's another way. We're also measuring, another cue is how other people are attending to that person. So if we notice lots of people attending to a person, we would automatically assume they're worth attending to. And so what's interesting, Joseph Henan writes, is that these effects were designed to work in small groups of people. Because that's how we evolved in very small tribes. They weren't evolved to operate in a global environment of modern media and the internet. So you get these feedback loops where lots of people are looking at one person. So more and more people start looking at that person, then they get reported in the press, and then more people start looking at them.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  And they call it the Paris Hilton effect. Because I think when they figured out what was going on, Paris Hilton was the big, why is she famous person? But you might as well just call it the Kardashian effect, or whoever the latest person is that happens to be really famous, and then no one can quite work out why. It's because it's a feedback loop. Lots of people start looking at that one person, everyone just piles in. And because their brains are receiving, they must be high status, they must be worth attending to if everyone's attending to them. People attend to them. And then, you know, you've also talked about how their health outcomes would be better potentially as well. Their success cues go up. Their success cues go up. You know, it sounds like a wonderful life to live. So should we all start pursuing status?

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  Well, again, I say we already are. But I think, you know, another way that all this research has made me understand the world a lot better is that when we look at very high status people, really rich, wealthy, successful people, half our brain is just jealous, it goes, I lucky them. And we imagine they have this brilliant life and they're so happy and everything's wonderful. With the other half of our brains, we know that's not true. Because when you meet very rich and successful people, they're often not happy.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, exactly. There's suicide, there's alcoholism, there's workaholism. You know, they're like, they're not happy, the marriages don't last. So it's made sense of that to me. And that's, and it's actually quite a nice understanding that there isn't this hierarchy of happiness, where the richer you are, the happier you are, because we're all playing individual status games. So, you know, those people playing high level status games, the millionaires, the billionaires, the Elon Musks, they're competing with the people immediately around them. They're competing, like Elon Musk is competing with Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook. So they're no happier than the people at school who are competing to be the best. Well, I say no happier, that's a general, I mean, I don't know. But, but,

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  you know, the higher you go, the harder that game becomes. So, you know, that's taken away a lot of that, oh, I wish I was this, I wish I was that. Yes, I'd love a yacht, you know, but still, you know, I'm not naive anymore to how difficult and punishing that life can be at the very top. Because you're not competing with me anymore, or the people down there, or, you know, or even above me, you're competing with people, they're competing with the people who they're playing against. And they're all highly successful, highly motivated, incredible individuals.

• 1:18:16Steven Bartlett?

  It's become really interesting, this whole space race.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Steven Bartlett?

  Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. You go, really, you all really care about rocket?

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  Exactly. But the other thing to say about that is, and this is again how I've changed, I mean, I'm a lefty, I've always been a lefty. But this book has really opened my mind to the idea that actually, we do benefit from these people. Not just in the obvious ways, they hire a lot of people, they give, you know, people get meaning and purpose from their jobs. They, people get to live a life and pay their mortgage from their jobs. They pay taxes that keeps the, you know, that keeps the countries running. So they're doing all that. But also with the space race, they're competing because they're playing a status game, that's obvious. But, but science and technology benefits from that too. I mean, there will, I mean, I don't, you know, there will no doubt be a number

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  of innovations that are hugely useful to humanity that come as a result of this, you know, this space race or races like it amongst these highly motivated, top level players.

• 1:19:19Steven Bartlett?

  Chapter 29 of this book, you you kind of you talk about how we can advance in the status game, status game, fuck that again, and the seven rules of the status game. How how do we advance in the status game? And what do you mean by advance? Do you mean win?

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  No, because you can't win. I mean, that's the thing. I think the brains, the brain has this story that we live by where where and stories can take happy endings and happy endings. If I achieve this, then I'm going to be happy. And again, we it's weird because we know that's not true when we've lived a bit of life because, you know, but we still kind of believe it. If I get this, if this next book sells 100,000, then I'll be happy. And it's like, I know that's not true. But so you don't ever win it. That's an illusion. That's the storytelling brain, you know, just giving you a bit of a lie to keep you motivated. I think there are various ways that you can succeed in the status game. You know, some kind of are quite practical. I think I think one of the most practical

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  is that is this amazing revelation that status is more valuable than money to most people. And it's free. Like, we have status to give. And

• 1:20:27Steven Bartlett?

  We can save money, as I've just shown. You can get, you can get, call him a CEO and you can go pay him half. It's unbelievable. I wish I'd known this earlier.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  But we can, but we, you know, but we, so we have loads of opportunities in our lives to give status to to our employees, to the people around us. And we often don't. And, you know, and so I think that and that feeds back in a kind of real politic-y, kind of slightly cynical way, is if we are generous with status, people are going to want to be around us and they're going to want to work with us. And they and and some of that status will wash back. So I think, you know, don't treat status as if it's a limited resource. In the business context, I think there's a really, it's not in that final section, but one of the other sort of light bulb moments for me in the business context. Was this difference between competition and rivalry?

• 1:21:18Speaker 00

  So when you first think about competition and rivalry in business, you think that's the same thing, but it's not. So competition is bad and rivalry is good. So when I'm talking about competition, I'm talking about a corporate structure like Enron. So that's the example I use in the book. So Enron famously had their rank and yank system where the top, I think it was 15% got promoted. And then they would judge them at least twice a year. Everybody in the company got judged. The top 15% got promoted, the bottom got fired, and the middle were just fucking terrified. So that's competition. So competition is a sense of all against all. You go into work and it's a fucking war and you've got to grab and, you know, and I think

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  that's when you end up with extremely toxic and ultimately potentially corrupt corporate cultures because status is very hard to come by. And so that's what you want to avoid. And, you know, it's thought that a very moderate amount of competition is quite good to motivate people, but it very quickly goes wrong. The alternative to that is rivalry. Now rivalry is healthy and a massive motivator. And rather than being all against all, rivalry is one against one. So that's one individual against one individual, or one group, one team against another team, or one organisation against another organisation. And rivalry is characterised by having this status competition that's characterised by lots of near misses and skirmishes.

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  So you can think about Apple and Microsoft had a period where they were great rivals and that rivalry kind of pushed them on. And in the book, I tell the story of the true origin story of the iPhone, which is quite amazing. And it begins when Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs' wife was friends with somebody from Microsoft and she would have regular parties, barbecues. And so this Microsoft executive, this unnamed Microsoft executive, would come to the barbecue and be bragging to Steve Jobs. And one day he was bragging to Steve Jobs saying, "We've solved computing. You know, it's over for you guys. We've figured it out. We've got these tablets with these styluses." They're gonna change everything. And then the next day, the Monday, Steve Jobs

• 1:23:29Speaker 00

  comes into work furious because his rival, Microsoft, is dragging their faces in saying, we've solved computing. And he says, let's show these fucking pricks how it's really done. It's not done with stars, it's done with fingers. That's how it's done. And that became the iPad, which, well, that became the iPhone. Well, first it was the iPad, but they released the iPhone, and then it reemerges the iPad. And as Scott Forstall, who was the guy that told that story, said, it was very bad from Microsoft that Steve Jobs ever met that guy. But that's the true origin story of the iPhone, this device that's changed the world, is status and rivalry. This guy from Microsoft rubbing Steve Jobs' face in it at a barbecue. So that's healthy, that's good. Well, not good for Microsoft, but that's what you want to be in a corporate

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  sense, in an organizational sense. You want to be encouraging rivalry and not competition.

• 1:24:18Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. I've always tried to make sense of my love of rivalry. And I've always wondered if it was a toxic flaw in me, or because it seems to be such an unbelievable motivator. I'm so, I'm so, I've always said competitive. And now I'm hesitant to say that word, but I'm always looking for a rival. Even, you know, I have 10 friends, we're in a fitness competition, and every month we hand out, oh, these fake awards. There's gold, silver, and bronze.

• 1:24:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Steven Bartlett?

  And four days out, I won gold last month. And then four days out from this month, my friend, good friend of mine, he's managing director of one of my companies, Olivier Onchev, he starts talking shit to me. And I was so happy he did, because I realized that in those last four days of the month, I was gonna do, I was gonna work out three hours, four hours a day to beat him. And it was, and it's almost, I reflected on what I saw in Michael Jordan's documentary, where Michael Jordan would, it would seem, look for rivalries. He would, so much so that he would make them up. And when they went and asked the other person if it had happened, they'd go, no, that didn't happen. But Michael Jordan had created a rivalry in his head to motivate himself. There's actually a clip on YouTube called, It Became Personal For Me, which is just a compilation of Michael Jordan repeatedly.

• 1:25:29Steven Bartlett?

  Saying a story that might have, might not have or might have happened and then saying it became, that's when it became personal with me. And then it shows him slam dunking on that person or winning another title or whatever. This constant search for rivalry is a motivator.

• 1:25:42Speaker 00

  That's fascinating. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's fascinating. And so that description you say of somebody who's highly tested as a constant looking for rivalries, I think that's, that's correct. And I also think it's, it's a mistake to think, is it healthy or like, is it toxic? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? I think, I think one of the things I try not to do my books is to categorize what's good and what's bad.

• 1:26:03Steven Bartlett?

  It just is.

• 1:26:04Speaker 00

  Because, because in real life, reality, it's usually a trade off. Most things are trade offs. And so, yes, in lots of senses, if you're playing your success games, it will be, it's a good thing. It's a massive motivator. What's for Steve Jobs, what's for Michael Jordan, it sounds like it is for you, but that doesn't mean it's a hundred percent good thing. If you start losing, that's going to become a source of a lot of misery for you. So I think we often make mistakes and we try to figure out whether something's good or bad, because I think the reality is that most things are trade offs.

• 1:26:35Steven Bartlett?

  You're completely right. It is a trade off. And working out for three, four hours a day was not a good idea.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:40Steven Bartlett?

  There was a significant cost to that with my, my relationship with my sleep, with, you know, with my productivity. So it is a trade off. And I guess it all depends what your objective, your objective ultimately is. You've written a number of books now, many, many books, more books than I think I'll ever write in my life, because I think I struggle to, to, to write books. And you know, you find yourself in a place in life now where you're forty.

• 1:27:05Speaker 00

  Seven.

• 1:27:05Steven Bartlett?

  Forty seven. It was difficult to find, find your age online. I had to go back to an article, I think, where you said you were thirty eight and do the maths. So I'm not sure if you're forty seven. But what else are you, are you in search of in your life personally? What else? I've asked this question in maybe the last, I don't know, ten episodes to my guests. But if, if, if your overall happiness was a recipe consisting of a set of ingredients, what are you looking for personally now in your life to fulfill that happiness recipe?

• 1:27:34Speaker 00

  That's a very good question. So I think that one of the things, one of the things I've done recently is I've, I've not started yet, but I've, I, it's going to be happening this month, is I'm going to start volunteering to a charity because I feel like.

• 1:27:52Speaker 00

  As we've already spoken about, one of the things I don't have is much connection. Like, I've got a great marriage, but outside the marriage, I don't really see people that much. And I feel like, because I don't have children, I don't actually do anything for anyone else. So it's kind of, I felt like I was becoming quite a selfish life. Everything was just about, apart from my dogs, who I'm obsessed with, I don't do anything for anything else. So I figure that's a bit of a hole in my life. So that's why I'm going to start volunteering. I've got to be interviewed by this charity, but assuming that goes well. So I think that's a hole. And I do, I do want to sort out the connection side of things.

• 1:28:36Speaker 00

  Like, I've started having semi-regular meet-ups with some old school friends recently, which has just been an absolute joy to see these people after, you know, so long. And I kind of, in my head, I'd start telling this story, that it was me that had failed all my exams and was a total disaster. But it was amazing to see, with all these, lots of, as a lawyer, and there's also these successful people. We all failed our exams. It was just a really bad school. But we all kind of succeeded regardless of that. So that's been, that's been really fun. And I've had to kind of, yeah, so I think it's, I think it's moving the dial on connection. That's what I'm missing.

• 1:29:16Steven Bartlett?

  We have to become more and more intentional about that connection, I think. I feel like men probably more so.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  Definitely, yeah.

• 1:29:22Steven Bartlett?

  You know, and it's one of the things I've said to my five friends is, I've said to them, you know, as we get older, when it's a birthday, or when there's a wedding, make sure we all go, because it's going to become increasingly, there's going to become increasingly more excuses as to why we shouldn't go, or we can't go. We live further apart, we have families. And you really, I feel like as a man, you really have to fight for that connection as you age. It's like.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I kind of, I kind of really do believe that there are basic biological differences between the genders. On average, you have to say, generally speaking, there was huge overlaps, of course. We're more alike than we are different. But I think, on the average, I think, you know, men and women are, you know, that there are differences. And I do think that one of them is how we manifest socially. I think, you know, women are much better instinctively at the group.

• 1:30:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  You know, whether that's politically, or.

• 1:30:19Speaker 00

  In a friendship context, there just, there just seems to be, men just seem to have an instinct for going it alone.

• 1:30:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  And women seem to have an instinct for the group.

• 1:30:30Steven Bartlett?

  Going it together.

• 1:30:31Speaker 00

  Going it together, that's a lovely way of putting it, yeah. And, and I, and I think that you're right, I think men especially have to fight against that. I think that's why the suicide statistics are so much worse for, for men. And, and I, and as the suicide expert I spoke to for selfie said, the solution isn't that men should be, you know, should be more like women, because that's, you, you can't change biology. But, but, and, but I think you're right, I think, especially with the social connection thing, we have to push ourselves a bit harder. And I always notice with the social stuff, it just seems to always happen where, when you've got a social appointment coming up, you think, oh, what did I say yes to that for? But then that, that lasts a hundred percent of the time, you think, oh, I don't want to go. But then when you go, you go, oh, I had a great time, this is amazing, I should do this more often.

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  And that's also 100% of the time, it's so weird that we, we seem so, like, men especially seem to be so bad at predicting how much we're going to enjoy a social occasion.

• 1:31:26Steven Bartlett?

  On that point with the suicide expert, you know, because much of the narrative I do hear regarding male suicide is that we, we just need to talk more. And we're often, with that argument often comes the, the sub point that if you look at how women are open and communicate with their social circle, with their, you know, their, their friends, and they, they say, I'm feeling this, I'm going through this, blah, blah, blah, blah. Men don't do that, so men need to do more of that.

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Steven Bartlett?

  What, what did you learn from your conversations with that suicide expert?

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  Well, hi- his view, and mine too, is that I don't think, I, I, like, sure, talking helps, but, but, but, but just saying to men, you should be more like women, i- is not that helpful. And actually, what we need to do is figure out what are men like? And, and start trying to develop solutions that are specifically designed for men. I just think saying to men that you should learn to cry, I haven't cried for years, you know, it's like, i- it's, it's just not, it's not fair on men, it's not smart, there needs to be more work done in, how can we actually help men in a male friendly way?

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  You know, I, I, I, I think that's, I think that's the way to go.

• 1:32:43Steven Bartlett?

  What are men like?

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  What are men like?

• 1:32:46Steven Bartlett?

  Because you know, you said we have to figure out what men are like and then cater to their unmet needs, I'm guessing in a way that kind of they can relate to. What is that?

• 1:32:57Speaker 00

  Well, again, you've got to be very careful by not generalizing. There's a huge variety in what men are like, you know, but just to underline the fact we're talking sort of generally speaking here. My sense is that, as I said before, women are much better, in your great words, at going together, whereas men tend to be more by instinct, go it alone. And like everything, that's a trade off. And the negatives are that we are, you know, we are less good at talking to other people and sharing our kind of burdens. I think that, I think I've got no scientific evidence

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  to back this up, but my impression is that that male identity often is focused more around success, personal success. So I think, I think that's why you see lots of male suicide in middle age, because in middle age, men start losing their bodies, their careers might grind to a halt, their relationships with their children might start going wrong, they might get divorced and divorce, you know, you know, yeah, it's not good. So I, and I think that that's where men particularly might get into trouble, when, when men feel like I'm not a

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  success, I'm not looking after my family, I'm failing in my job. It's that sense of being a failure. Yeah, I think, I think that's very, very hard for men.

• 1:34:31Steven Bartlett?

  The suicidal ideation you describe in selfie, was that linked to those reasons?

• 1:34:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think it's connection and status for me. I mean, the last time it happened really badly was when I moved back. From, I lived in Australia for four years and did quite well in Australia as a freelance journalist. But came back with nothing, no job, because I was a freelancer. And so, yeah, and then for a while, I just thought I was gonna have to start doing day shifts, you know, in magazines, like it was bad. I just felt like I'd, everything had gone wrong. And so that, I think that was very much connected to status. I mean, I'm very bad because in the, in the book, I recommend playing lots of games, playing multiple games.

• 1:35:17Speaker 00

  I mean, the, the science is pretty clear that the more status gains people play in their life, the more sources of status they have, the more groups they belong to, the more stable their personality, the happier they tend to be. And as I said earlier on, I just, I tend to do writing. That's kind of what I do. That's partly the selfish reasons for the volunteering. I, I, I want to have another source of status to protect myself against the inevitable

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  getting older thing.

• 1:35:45Steven Bartlett?

  When we realize that status games are like a comparative thing, so, you know, being a journalist, if there's a journalist that's the editor and is doing amazingly well, then, and you're underneath, and then there's somebody at the very bottom of the ladder. And the person at the bottom of the ladder is going to be lower status just by measure of comparison. So does that mean that in some regard, in the society we live in that is based on status, there will always be someone at the bottom that is feeling that way? Because just by a measure of comparison, there's going to be someone else who is making them feel inadequate or like low status.

• 1:36:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, there, there's always going to be a hierarchy. You can't remove the hierarchy from the human. It's how we process reality. I mean, when you go into any such a situation, if you make, if you, if you're introduced to five strangers, you know this, you know, like you have a conversation and within minutes, you're like, you start getting a sense of who's up there, who's down there. And it'll be body language, it'll be who's got the jobs, who's got the clothes. You know, your brain's just calculating. You can't stop it. It's gonna happen. And, and, and you can't stop it because everybody else is doing it to you too. You know, so, you know, that, that's something that other people give to us as well is that is our sense of status. We sense it from other people. So, so, so, so there will always be people, you know, at the bottom in inverted commas. But there are a few things to say about, that sounds grim, but there are a few things to say about that. The first thing is that.

• 1:37:03Speaker 00

  Again, we all play individual little games. So it isn't as though the cleaner in the office feels like they're competing with Michelle Obama. Because if they did, they would just throw themselves out the window. That's not how life works. That cleaner is comparing themselves to the other people in their life, who they work with, their families, their cousins. You know, so they're not feeling horrific because they're not the king of Thailand. So that's not how it's working. It's not, life isn't that brutal. Two, we have amazing imaginations and, you know, we're very good at buffing ourselves up and finding ways of seeing more value. And I think in a healthy organisation, as I say in the book, you can go to a meeting as the lowest status member of the organisation in that formal status game,

• 1:37:47Speaker 00

  make a fantastic contribution and leave feeling like the king of the world, like the best person in the room. And if that's a healthy organisation, that's how you'll be made to feel too. You'll be like, oh, it's brilliant, it's amazing. So even within those kind of formal games that we play in life, we can still have an encounter, an experience in which we actually feel hugely of value. So there's also that to say, and also, you know, life is a never ending game. As long as we're not suffering from depression, if we're a mentally healthy person, we're a little bit optimistic. We're backing ourselves a bit, you know, that's what people are like, you know, I feel like I'm going to, I have the capacity to achieve X, Y and Z.

• 1:38:29Speaker 00

  You know, so, so, so, yes, there will always be people at the bottom, but A, they're probably not going to stay there for very long because the game's so fluid. And B, that doesn't mean that they're condemned to a life of constant misery and torture.

• 1:38:43Steven Bartlett?

  And as you said earlier, they can, you know, they might also play for a Sunday league team and be top of the league and captain of that team.

• 1:38:49Speaker 00

  Or they could be religious. I mean, religion is a status game and that's a virtue game, you know, and it's often a healthy virtue game, you know, in a religious game, I've got to follow the ten commandments and go to the church and do whatever I've got to do. And then I've become a high status Christian or whatever. And that's, you know, that's a big journey I've gone on. I used to be very angry and hostile about religion because of my background. But now I see that religion, although it's not for me, it's hugely valuable to people because it gives them a status game to play.

• 1:39:21Steven Bartlett?

  And meaning and purpose.

• 1:39:22Speaker 00

  And Jack.

• 1:39:23Steven Bartlett?

  I was the same. I was religious up until I was eighteen. Very religious household and I rejected it quite passionately for many years until I stopped caring about it. So now I'm just like, do what you like. I don't care.

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:39:34Steven Bartlett?

  Which is a funny arc we kind of go through where it's like the aggression against it and then the acceptance of it. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the previous guest asks the next guest a question.

• 1:39:44Speaker 00

  Okay, right.

• 1:39:45Steven Bartlett?

  In the diary. So I get to read it now. Jack keeps the diary until this point.

• 1:39:53Steven Bartlett?

  The question left for you is, when it all gets too dark, what helps you find the light?

• 1:40:02Speaker 00

  When it all gets too dark, what helps you find the light? I mean, creation. I mean, that really is true. If I'm feeling depressed, I just, I've got this, it's cheesy, but I've got this little, I've got this little saying I say to myself in the head, which is the only way out is art. And so if I want to feel good, I'll go and do some work, do some writing. And if I'm proud of it, it'll sort of pull me out of it. So that's kind of what helps me see the light, my, my, my art.

• 1:40:32Steven Bartlett?

  And how does that relate to the Status Game book? Status Game?

• 1:40:35Speaker 00

  Massively, because I feel good about myself. You know, if I, this is my game, writing. And if I feel like I've written something good, I feel like there's hope.

• 1:40:46Steven Bartlett?

  And it kind of gives you a psychological status boost.

• 1:40:48Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. Cause we, you know, we, we have this imaginary audience in our heads. We're not just being judged by other people. We're being judged by ourselves. So, so, so yeah, I think that's hugely important.

• 1:40:59Steven Bartlett?

  Well, thank you. Incredibly illuminating. And it's given me a tremendous amount of food for thought. You know, when we do this podcast, I'm always selfishly looking for ways that I can make changes to my life or understand the decisions I'm making so that I can make decisions more in line with my values or more in line with where I want to go. And I think your, this book in particular, The Status Game, I pause every time I say it because I'm scared to get the fucking word wrong. The Status Game, this book in particular, The Status Game, is, is one of those that is tremendously illuminating because it explains so much. It's almost like it's turning a light on in a. Huge room that I didn't even know was there. And really revealing to me what the forces are that are controlling much of my decision making, for better or for worse.

• 1:41:44Steven Bartlett?

  It's not to say that I will abandon, try and abandon those forces because I don't actually believe I can. I think that's who I am. But being more conscious about them, which I think is exactly what this book allows you to do, as they relate to your relationships, your personal life, your business, is I think something that we can all benefit from. So, thank you for writing such an amazing book. And thank you for writing all of these amazing books. But this one in particular is my favorite. The Status Game came out last year, I believe.

• 1:42:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, just out on paperback two weeks ago.

• 1:42:11Steven Bartlett?

  On paperback two weeks ago. And I've had a lot of people, specifically because you've had a few conversations with some friends of mine, really raving about this book. So, I highly recommend everybody checks it out. Of all these books, I love them all, but this one in particular is my favorite. And I can't be more excited to see what you write next.

• 1:42:24Speaker 00

  Fantastic.

• 1:42:25Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you for your honesty as well. Not everybody is so willing to be so open and honest. And I think there's something so important because it's human and it's truthful about the way you're willing to be honest about your own struggles in your life and the things that you're searching for as it relates to connection and those things. That is, we're all going through the same battles. And hearing that from you as well, I think is particularly important. So, thank you.

• 1:42:50Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thanks for your amazing questions, Steve. And I had a really good time. Thank you.