The Invisible Hierarchies that Rule Our World (with Toby Stuart)

Status isn't fixed; it's transferred and "bestowed," shaping who gets resources, attention, and opportunity. So argues author Toby Stuart of UC Berkeley in his book, Anointed. He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts explore why hierarchies persist--reducing conflict, allocating scarce resources, and curating our overwhelming choices--and how endorsements, blurbs, and brands quietly steer our judgments, from bookstores to wine shops and art galleries. At the end, Stuart reflects on imposter syndrome and how thinking deeply about the anointed changed how he sees success.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is September 3, 2025, and my guest is Toby Stewart, the Leo Helzle Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Our topic for today is his book, Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World. Toby, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Thanks, Russ. Thrilled to be here. Really, really excited for our conversation.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Me, too. What's the central idea of the book? Why'd you call it Anointed?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  So, Anointed, you know, I have to say, I think I'd probably call it Anointed because it hearkens back to my Catholic school, my Catholic high school, and these, you know, a non-Catholic and Catholic school, but these biblical references kind of landed with me. And then, but Anointed gets to just a central part of the book, which is this idea about social status that it moves around. So, it moves from actor A to actor B, that is, actors that have high status bestow it upon others. And that happens in the cosmic scheme of things,

• 1:48Speaker 01

  like anointment in a biblical sense, or anointment in modern life. Like, we use that word colloquially, and we use it often to mean some kind of status event that's more of a rite of passage. So, you graduate from college, or something happens where your status is elevated. But- But it also happens, you know, call it micro anointment or something. It happens on a daily basis, all the time, everywhere. And the central idea of it is that status moves around. And that transference process, anointments, consecrations, endorsements are vitally important to the distribution of opportunity.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, you've been anointed as a guest on Econ Talk. Now, it's a modest return. It's a modest investiture. But it's an interesting way to think about the world. And you are, at times, I think somewhat positive toward this concept, but mostly critical of it. But I want to start with some of the positive benefits, which, you know, you can think of them as the benefits of hierarchy. A different way to think about anointment is that there's some people at the top, and they get, as you suggested a minute ago, more opportunity.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  They often get more resources. They certainly get more prestige, a non-monetary but very quite important benefit. So another way to think about this, which you write about, is hierarchy. A hierarchy, despite its non-egalitarian and somewhat negative implications, hierarchy has some benefits. What are they?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so let's just go back to the beginning of that comment. And you're too modest. I'm genuinely delighted to be here. And, you know, I mean, I'll tell you, I'm doing a bunch of podcasts concurrent with the launch of the book. And so I've listened to them. And I started listening to Econ Talk. And I think I ended up listening to like 10 episodes or something like that, because I just, you know, really, really enjoyed it, both the interviewer and the interviewees. So actually, I feel like I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah, so hierarchy is everywhere. And, you know, without kind of mincing words, like we can, hierarchies are

• 4:20Speaker 01

  True and and they exist in in pretty much all social scientific disciplines in some form and they exist in nature and in all places. So this, you know, this hierarchical ordering of human beings or of or of mammals or of objects or of, you know, universities like we're we're a couple of academics talking to one another like talk about a hierarchical world, universities and our obsession with ranking and faculty and and various forms of rankings. These hierarchies are everywhere and when you see something that's everywhere, it's generally that there's a reason for that. And and so the book dives into a bunch

• 5:04Speaker 01

  of the reasons for for why hierarchies exist. But let me let me make a couple remarks and then we can jump into whatever you whatever aspect of this seems most interesting. But but one is that, yes, hierarchies form everywhere. Two is that one of their central roles is that they they tend to dictate how resources are allocated. So in in the animal world where it all began, hierarchies are dominance hierarchies and they dictate who gets the two most important resources, which are which are which are nourishment and mates. And the distribution of those resources is unequal across the dominance hierarchy, just

• 5:49Speaker 01

  as the distribution of opportunity is unequal across the status hierarchy and unequal in a way that probably most of us wouldn't think is particularly fair if we understood, you know, kind of the true origin of of that that distribution of opportunity. And so so I think when when, you know, your sense that I'm critical of of the status hierarchy, that's getting into how it impacts who gets what and whether, in fact, it's a fair way to allocate resources.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  But there are positives, which you start with.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  There are positives, and the positives are, you know, it is a way to allocate resources that isn't we punch one another in the face. So, so one is, you know, and let's go all the way back to Leviathan, which we both probably read in graduate school, but, but, but no one likes man in the state of nature, in his state of nature, without some sort of social organization to, you know, to keep him in check. And the dominance hierarchy is a way to do that. So if you're imagining, like, you know, go back to hunter-gatherer world, where we need to, we need to exist in social groups to have any chance of survival, like, we need

• 7:07Speaker 01

  to work together, we need to build shelter, we need to hunt, we need to do, we need, we need to create an agricultural system, we need to do whatever we need to do to acquire the resources for survival. Well, to do that, we have to be in a group, and if we're in a group and we get resources, we then have to figure out how they're split up. And without a system, of which a status hierarchy is one for allocating resources, we just dispute. Like, you think you deserve it, I think I deserve it, she thinks she deserves it, everybody thinks they deserve it, and we end, we end up, you know, literally punching one another in the face back in the old days. And so, the status hierarchy prevents that, and that's, you know, much of the origin of it.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  In the modern world, you know, the book argues it does a whole lot more than that, and, you know, the, the other kind of main functions of the status hierarchy is, one, it helps us resolve uncertainty and judgment. So we rely on it all the time in ways that, that I think most of us often don't recognize. We make status-based decisions, just intuitively or reflexively. Another, so it helps us very much in deciding what to do. It also is very influential behind every scene, so to speak, and that is, when, when we make choices, particularly in the modern world, and let's You know, get into this as we go on, but choice, you know, and I bet I bet you've done,

• 8:37Speaker 01

  you know, 50 past episodes that touch on this in one, one way, shape or form, but, but, but choice is like often near infinite. Like there's so much optionality and there's so many things and there's so many options for how, for what and how you do and what you consume in the modern world. That all has to get curated and the status hierarchy is just this gigantic behind the scenes curator of whatever gets in front of you in the first place. So allocation of resources, reduction of choice, navigation to a choice. Those are three of the key things that it does for us.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  So I really found the idea of it simplifying choice fascinating. I am not a, a big fan of the worrisome nature of the so-called paradox of choice. I like lots of choices, but I don't want to pretend when you force me to think about the fact that, you know, I don't try everything and I don't have a perfect system or an algorithm for figuring it out. You know, you're talking about books, obviously blurbs, quotes from other authors or so-called experts count. The answer is, the question is, why, why should, why, why is that? And you can give some answers, but a lot of times a well blurbed book is awful. There are great

• 9:59Speaker 00

  books that are unblurbed or relatively unblurbed. So this is not a small thing that you're pointing to. Ironically, perhaps the, the past episode that comes to mind first is not what you might have thought about the paradox of choice or utility maximization. It was actually episodes we did with Cynthia Haven and Jonathan Bae, and I've forgotten how to pronounce his name. I apologize. I might be right on Rene Girard and the idea of mimesis, this idea of imitation. And as an economist, I mean, imitation is an appalling idea. I mean, we're supposed to maximize utility, optimize according in the current to the homo economicus.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  The idea that I would just imitate somebody, copy what they do is deeply disturbing, both to my natural instincts as an economist and as my perhaps inflated view of myself as a person with agency.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  But the idea of annoying it, excuse me, but the idea of annoying it is, there's a lot of that lying around influencing me in ways that I probably don't realize.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  So much in that, in that question, but yeah, so again, I'll go back to the beginning and say, I think unlike you, I've, I've thrown in the, I've thrown down the white flag. Like when, when, when, when it comes to choice, don't give it to me. Like, I mean, the, I want to curate it. So there is, I think, you know, I think a lot of us spend an enormous amount of time working, you know, this is a little bit beside the topic of the book, but thinking about choices that are irrelevant. And so if we just made them and got on with it, life would be better for us. I mean, I'm, and I'm at the moment obsessed with the concept of agency, but that's, you know, that's because of AI and maybe we can come

• 11:55Speaker 01

  back and, and talk about that later, later. But, but yeah, I mean, mimicry. So, so there is so much mimicry. And what happens is if you are high status, it's nearly guaranteed that somebody is going to, that many people are going to mimic you and that mimicry is a form of homage. Like, I mean, you're, you're deeply influenced by somebody or something to the point that, that you mimic them. And if you're like them, you know, the hope is often that there's some status based benefit that rubs off on you. Right? I mean, and so,

• 12:36Speaker 01

  you know, in its own way, conspicuous consumption of any form is, is a type of mimicry.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's take it to the next level. If I respect a particular person or author and they write a good blurb on a book, I like to think that after reading the book and enjoying it, I think, wow. That I was right to respect that endorsement. But it's possible that it colors the way I read the book. And I think, well, if so and so liked it, it must be a good book. And afterwards, I rave about it, even though, again, this is a question of agency and and actual autonomy. There is the possibility, I don't like the idea of it, but there is the possibility that I'm influenced in ways I don't appreciate.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  The blurb on the book is this fascinating thing, right? Because it's just a few words. It tells you very little. How many, let me ask you this, Russ. How many, how many lousy blurbs have you ever read? Like, how many times have you ever read on a book, on a book cover? This is a horrific, this is a terrible book, don't open it.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Zero.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's like, you know, there's no real information.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  So we call in economics a selection bias, yeah. We don't take every, it's not a, we don't take a random collection of people's impressions of the book, yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, this is true for all reviews, right? And all things, right? Because any Yelp reviews, I just find so interesting, but let's, let's, let's leave that for now. So, so we're talking, in the economics world, we're talking about signals, but the signals have, you know, they have one valence, which is positive. And so all you can determine based on a blurb is, do you recognize the name of, you know, the identity of, of the person who, who, who wrote the blurb? But if you think about that, we've just shifted what constitutes a worthwhile book to who blurbed it and who the author is versus what's inside of it.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  And, you know, and so books in your field, you're going to make sense of. So you will actually be a very good judge of, of, you know, what's called quality of, of a book if you read it. And, you know, not necessarily a universal judge, but from your, from your standpoint, you're going to come to a judgment and you're going to feel probably conviction in the judgment, like this was a good use of a day, or it was a poor use of the day. You learned something, you thought it was well. Written, you thought it was fun or funny or compelling in some way or you didn't. You're gonna make that judgment. So, you know, make of them what you will. Um, this is neither of our fields, but in the process of writing this, I found this, this, I thought it was a pretty hilarious FMRI study. So functional magnetic resonance.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  So these are the brain imaging studies where you, um, neuropsychologists look at, um, look inside of brains, um, in a scanner when we're making decisions. And then, um, sort of make attributions about how we feel about things based on what regions of the brain light up and how they, they light up, um, as we're making choices. So there's this one study which I found, which kind of gets to, I think, what you might call the core thought experiment in the book. Um, which is they, um, they take like a bottle of two buck chuck, so really an expensive wine. And they serve it up to somebody in who's, who's going into a scanner.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And then they take the same two buck chuck and they put it in a bottle of, of, of wine that's a label them that, that many people would recognize. So it's the same product, literally, like it is this, it's two buck chuck in both, um, it's cheap wine in both bottles. But it turns out if, if I give you cheap wine in an expensive bottle and you're like most of us, you're gonna recognize the label on the bottle. And you're literally gonna have a different physiological experience to the wine. And you're going to believe that you liked it more. But you're not gonna, but you didn't like it more because it's different or better in any way. It's the same wine, what you, which you're responding to is the identity of the logo.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  And you're making, you're reassessing the identical product based on what the label is on the bottle.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm somewhat skeptical of those studies, partly because of selection bias, of course. If you showed that most people loved the, didn't love the wine when it was in the fancy bottle any more than they did when it was in the crummy bottle, you wouldn't get published. So there is a little bit of a publication bias there. But I think, and I think there's a second question, which is spur of the moment in an experiment, your response is going to be different than if you took it home. And, you know, it's happened supposedly in bars, right? They, they re-bottle the, the cheap Scotch and put it into the fancy bottle, which you can't observe. It's done when the bars close. It's not done in

• 17:46Speaker 00

  front of you. I've always been a little skeptical of that. I have a pretty good palate. I don't have a world-class palate, I'm sure. But I, I'm pretty good at being disappointed in things I paid a lot for, expecting to be great, and, and finding out that they're bad. The same would be true of blurbs that, that are wildly enthusiastic. But it's possible I do that in other areas without realizing it, and maybe I'm unusual in my ability to, I'm a bit of a contrarian, which means that I don't like the whole idea of people telling me what's good, and, and I have a rebellious streak. So I, I'm open to the possibility that there's more there.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I do like, I mean, just, we can, we can move on. I mean, there's, like, there's hundreds of studies that show this, just across, you know, they're not fMRI studies, they, they just show it.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Water, yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  I mean, you could think of, like, you know, you could think about, like, the audit studies with resumes as an example of the same thought experiment, where basically, you know, what I, what I want to, what I want to say is that there, there are many of these experiments where you take literally, and it's the way the book opens, with a bunch of different, you know, sort of fun stories around this, but where you take literally the same object, and then you change the identity of the person associated with it, or the organization. And people completely reassess its value. And they're doing that. But the only thing you've changed in the experiment is the identity of the person. Like whatever product we're talking about is like the bottle of wine, right?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  But I mean, I also, I have to say that like someone once told me, and I've believed it ever since and repeated it 100 times, that if, if you got a PhD and you're a social scientist, you should consider yourself non-representative of the general population about nearly everything.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, you like an economist walks into, you know, a grocery store and what happens? Well, whatever happens isn't what happens when, you know.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Well, that's, that's fair. But I also want to raise the possibility that I alluded to earlier, which I think is interesting, that you actually have a different experience. It's not just your brain. You called it a physiological experience. I think that's very possible. It's, um, and I think we're not very sensitive to it. And a book like this makes you at least consider it. You know, obviously a product that's endorsed by a certain person, you could enjoy it more than if it were not endorsed by that person, a person that you respect, admire, revere. It's not just that you're fooling yourself. You might actually have some kind of emotional connection to that endorsement that, that

• 20:35Speaker 00

  is quote, real. But it doesn't change your point, which is there's a lot of power. Obviously people with name recognition, celebrity status, people who are adulated, obviously can anoint, they're anointed and they can anoint others and products and raise the status of those products. Let's talk about the counterpoint. You can respond in a sec, but I, I want to turn to the worker bee approach, which is a little bit, which is an alternative. So you can say, if you wanted to respond to that, fine, but otherwise.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  No, no, definitely, definitely. I want to respond to that one because you, you actually just got to like, I mean, there's, there is five or six meta points or whatever, like, you know, and. And you got to, you got to one of them, but um, and, and that is that you actually have a different perception of a product. Because it's affiliated in some way, like it's blurred by somebody you really respect. Um, and, um, i- it's a book and that actually in some way is going to change your perception of, of the product. And like, you know, and so I, my guess is for books like that, that is true for a lot of people.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  It's probably not true for you, but like if you're not. An art aficionado when you, when you see a painting and then you figure out who the painter is. Like if it's some prominent painter, you rethink what you're looking at. Like you just walked by it, but now you want to return and, and you want to see it. And it isn't because of the art, it's because it was created by the artist. And if we go back to wine, there are these, so there's a market for like. Empty bottles of the, of the premier crew or whatever, screaming or whatever. And, you know, of course, part of that market is just fraud, like somebody's going to refill it and sell it. Part of the market is like, okay, so I put in the two buck chuck, but I take it to the restaurant.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  I have it uncorked, um, and I sit there at, you know, at like at the big central table. And there's this lineup of bottles at the end, right? But I, what, what I care about is that, you know, and people do, um, let me remove the I from that. Um, from, from that, from that comment, but people do like there's an actual market for these. Um, and more so in some cultures than others. Um, and, and it's the actual affiliation that you get with the high status product. That people are interested in versus the product per se.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would just add the example, which is. In a way unrelated, but I think it's a similar, might be a similar psychological effect. When you buy a souvenir on a vacation.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  And you buy a coffee mug, or a tea towel, or a keychain that reminds you of a trip. And it's a pretty cheesy piece of work, the way it's been made. And you buy it anyway, some people do. Because when they look at it, they get a good feeling. Not because it's aesthetically pleasing in and of itself, because it's tied to that experience, that vacation. Which, you know, I don't, I don't, I think that's a real fact. I don't want to suggest it's something wrong or fake about it. And, you know, similarly, you know, buying a product that is endorsed by a celebrity,

• 24:04Speaker 00

  using a tennis racket, or a baseball bat, or some kind of device that's been recommended or endorsed, literally, is signed by, it's so, it's George Foreman's coffee cup to mix, for my metaphors, has an emotional impact on us that, I don't think, I don't think there's anything wrong with it, per se. I don't think there's anything irrational, per se, about that. In fact, you could argue it's, it's kind of a cool thing. I get a little taste of glory that I can't otherwise have. So, I don't know if you agree with that.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I, I mean, I totally agree with that. I, and, and I've, you know, and I've, I've long ago left homo economicus in the, in the, you know, the dustbin. Like, I don't, I mean, I, I have stopped generally comparing things to a rational benchmark, though it's like, it's, it's a fun intellectual exercise to do that. You know, I'm, I've kind of, you know, again, like, where I spend so much time around behavioral economists and psychologists and social psychologists, that, that I'm pretty convinced that we're, we're very much emotional, emotional decision makers. But where, where it becomes a central concept in the book is just like, so if there is

• 25:28Speaker 01

  this positive feedback loop, whereas like, okay, so if, if a product is appreciated more or admired more like a painting. Because it was created by by a prominent prestigious anointed artist. Right then, then we're going to end up in this feed feedback loop where you know, the artist is actually better because they made a good painting. But they made a good painting because they're a good artist, but that right. And so you you actually can end up in these cycles where you. Where because you're of high repute. What you do is highly regarded and because it's highly regarded. You're of even possibly higher repute, or you at least reinforce your status.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  And that's this kind of endogenous dynamic that can happen if we make evaluations. Um, based on the prestige of the identity and we tend and we tend to do that more. Um, when there's a lot of ambiguity about how good something is. Like it's that uncertainty where it's like, we're just not really sure. Like, you know, if I if I buy an Electrolux vacuum cleaner and I take it home and it doesn't pick up dust. Right. I'm not going to say like, oh, it is this, I'm going to elevate the status of the brand like.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  But Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart endorsed it.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Well, right. I mean, so there are these products where. And, you know, weirdly, there are products where they're, you know, and so to get into this a little bit in the book. But like, if you're a social scientist, you you just wouldn't expect status dynamics there, but they're but they are anyways. Um, but as a general rule, the more ambiguity there is about how we think about something like a book. Or um, or a job candidate who we haven't met. Or um, you know, a piece of art or. You know, we, you know, I get into into this a lot because the other part of my life is I live in tech and entrepreneurship. Um, outside of my academic role, that's what I do. And I've, you know, for 20 years run.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Um, entrepreneurship programs at the Elite Business School, so a startup. is another thing that is nearly impossible to assess at an early stage. And that's one of the ways I got into studying status was in the world of tech and science, where I think status dynamics are enormously important. Okay, you were gonna go, to take you back, you were about to

• 27:55Speaker 00

  No, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna push it to a different, I'm gonna stay on this topic for a minute, because I wanna, you, you've encouraged me to, to give you a hard time on this.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  What you're suggesting, which I think is absolutely true, is that anointment and the role of status and hierarchy is more important in products that don't have objective measures of quality, art, wine, et cetera. And I, but, is that a good thing? And I'll, let me make the case, you know, there's a, there's a famous story, which I suspect is true, that in his old age and fame, Picasso would go into a restaurant, and they get the bill, and he would make a doodle on the bill and sign it. And that would be his way of paying, because his doodle was of value, because he's Pablo

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Picasso. Now, I can't do that.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  One, I'm not, I'm an objectively bad artist, but it's not, is it a bad thing that Picasso, who, you could debate, you could still debate whether he's any good, there are a lot of people, I'm sure, who hate Picasso's work, but many do seem to love it, and I think love it for all kinds of reasons that are real. The fact that, that those, certain people are given the authority and power to use their blessing, in this case, a doodle is more than a blessing, and actually is, could have monetary value, but I'm talking about now, the fact that Picasso picks a young artist and elevates that person reputationally, which, in music and art and theater and, and

• 29:43Speaker 00

  all, literature, there are all kinds of examples where people emerge from darkness because of the endorsement of a, of a great artist. That seems like a good thing, because, and the reason I would defend it is that Those people who have that power usually have passed some kind of test. You could debate it, whether it's any value at all because it's so subjective. But Picasso is Picasso. Now, I don't think I'm totally fooled by the power of his art. And so is it really surprising or even bad that those people have outsized influence on who else? I mean, it would be sinister if they chose people and then abused them, right?

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Because they had this power over them, that they were bribeable and used their endorsement power that way. But I don't think that would degrade their reputation potentially if people didn't like what they suggested, if you think there's any agency left. But anyway, is it really so bad?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  So, there's so much in that one. Is it so bad? I mean, so a lot of the book is in... Like, I don't mean to be making normative judgments about these things in the book. So is it so bad? You know, we need... So I would argue that there are... Like, take art. Like, nearly everyone's an artist. And then there's a giant number of professional artists. Like, people would actually claim that, you know, that art is my profession. There's a giant... I don't know what the number is, but there's a giant number of artists.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  But there's a finite amount of wall space at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  An extremely finite amount of wall space or floor space. So we have these organizations. There are organizations where people...

• 31:48Speaker 01

  of collectively decided they'll view art, right? I mean, there's public art, there's other place, you can put art anywhere, but there are these, there are these places with, with a very finite resource, which is wall space. So there's another, there's another version of that, which comes before the museum, which is there are art galleries and there are, there's a whole, like, complete pecking order of prestige and the gallery world. And much of the curation happens long before the museum. It's, you know, what artist does Larry Gagosian decide to put on the walls of, of his, of his gallery? And, and I would make a couple of points. One is I, I think that choice is almost never purely about merit.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  And second, there is no concept of merit, because if you took a panel of, if, if you had ten galleries, who are all great contemporary art galleries, and you had them look at a hundred new artists each, I'm not even sure there'd be overlap in which one they chose to put on, on, on the wall. So that's, you know, that's, that's ex ante, that's before anything happens. Once, once Gagosian puts you an artist on the wall, it's game over. And so, and so, anointment in the art world is getting to the Gagosian wall. And if you

• 33:12Speaker 01

  get to the Gagosian wall, you're then probably gonna, you know, go, you know, slightly downtown to the MoMA's wall eventually, because, you know, you've been anointed by one of the most influential versions of a critic in, in the business. So, so, but if I think about it from, from the standpoint of consumer choice, like, you and I can have this conversation because we both know exactly who Pablo Picasso is. So, we can, we wouldn't even have the conversation if there wasn't some status process in the art world that decided, like, who we should be looking at, and who we should be talking about, and who we should be having the conversation about. So, this is what I mean when I say there's like, this status

• 33:56Speaker 01

  dynamics that sit behind the scenes. Like, you know, there's like, a million and one things that happened before you ever got to the museum and see, and saw who was on, on the wall. But my view is, if you reran history, like, take the thought experiment, where you just rerun the history of art. That we would, in all times, in all cases, end up with different artists on the walls of the MoMA because there wasn't one objectively greater than everybody else artist. Like, we've constructed that story, but there was some other immensely creative Picasso that you've never heard of and never will. I mean, there were probably dozens of other

• 34:38Speaker 01

  versions of that, but like, the anointment dynamic didn't unfold for them, but it did unfold for Pablo. So, you know, but is it normatively bad? Like, it's normatively, in my view, unfair, based on most of our, you know, fairness is a very funny word, like, do an episode on that one. Like, I, you know, I once heard a prominent economist, actually, it was a guy called Michael Jensen, in a meeting, like, I, you know, I said, I said, "Something's unfair," and he said, "Yeah, unfair means you don't like it, and fair means you like it." So, you know, so whatever the definition

• 35:19Speaker 01

  is of fairness, that's its own can of worms. But, but I think the outcomes that are created by the status process, most of us would look at that and say, "Well, it's not exactly fair."

• 35:31Speaker 00

  It's a fascinating, I love the thought experiment. I would just say, about the gallery art sequence, it reminds me of my experiences as an author when I was shopping for agents. And at some point, I realized the goal was not to convince the agent that your book was worth it, was quality or wonderful. It was to convince the agent that an editor would find it worthwhile. Because that's what an agent does. An agent doesn't decide what's a good book. An agent decides what editors think is a good book. And it's just,

• 36:13Speaker 00

  it's a small thing, but I think it's, it's, it's true. And I also agree...

• 36:19Speaker 00

  That because of the subjective nature of reputation, we can debate whether this plays out over time in a different way. I mean, we recently had the episode on For Whom the Bell Tolls at Hemingway, and Hemingway's reputation went down, and it's doing pretty well, actually. It's doing better than theater dryzer, just for example, or other people who, as you point out, we've never heard of, who were modest successes in the 1940s and 50s, say. But I don't think, I don't find anything sinister about it. I think in what we're talking about, it's inevitable. It's not fair. When you told the story about Michael Jensen, who I know a little bit, I thought you were going to say economists

• 37:02Speaker 00

  don't do fair. That's another standard thing you hear from economists. But I don't know whether it's fair or not. There is an inequity or an injustice, certainly, in the fact that some wonderfully talented poets, composers, artists, authors don't make it and others do. But I don't find it sinister. Do you?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  No, no, not at all. And in fact, a central point in the book is that the reason we have a status system is functional. Like, we have a curatorial problem, right? And we just talked about art, but we can do the same thing in books. Like, there's this enormous funnel in all the world, right? And so the curatorial problem in books is that there's also a ton of people who consider themselves writers and have written or are writing a book. And so you have an enormous amount of content, but you actually have a very small amount of shelf space in a physical bookstore. And we could argue whether Amazon's

• 38:06Speaker 01

  any different or not. But the reality of online anything is that if you have whatever 3 million SKUs or however many books, book titles there are on Amazon, it might be more than that, it's still finite shelf space because you're going to have to organize the content in a way where people see some of it and not others of it. And so, and so there's the collaborative filter and there's, you know, product placements and all the things that happen when, when, when you're searching online. And so we need some way to curate things. I mean, and then let's go to the modern world, which is, you know, we're talking about sort of cultural content, but another form of cultural content

• 38:48Speaker 01

  is social media. And, and literally in the span of time that it takes you and I, we're both a bit verbose, it seems, but the time it takes for you or I to complete a, a thought, there's more content that's been uploaded to, you know, TikTok, Instagram, you know, Facebook, Snap, and, you know, WeChat, like whatever, you know, whatever is left, like there's more content created in the span of this than I, than I could view in my entire lifetime. Let's throw YouTube in there, literally, like if you did the math on it. So in that long wind, I think hundreds of thousands of videos have been uploaded onto the internet,

• 39:29Speaker 01

  right? And so, and so you have this, it's just like, literally, you can't imagine, none of us can imagine, you know, what these petabytes of data, like the amount of content that is. But, you know, we sit down in, in, in front of our phone and we're going to start scrolling and we have to start somewhere and like non-random is probably going to be better than random. And, you know, and then lying behind that is some status-like process that, you know, determines what goes viral and what doesn't and what, and what gets your attention. But it isn't, I mean, it's not sinister in the sense of like, we need

• 40:09Speaker 01

  some mechanism to, to accomplish that feat, to take that super wide funnel and winnow it down to, you know, a consumable version of a choice set. It's just that most of us just accept the choice set as it's given to us and don't really think that much about like how it all got there. And, and it's really important in terms of like who gets what opportunities to understand the process by which it got there.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  You have a section on the downside of being anointed, which I found extremely interesting. We had Tim Ferriss on the program recently and we discussed an essay he wrote sometime in the, I can't remember when he wrote it, after he became pretty famous, now he's more famous. And it was about, it was basically be careful what you wish for because his life has some negatives that I couldn't imagine. It's a very, very powerful essay because when you become famous in the modern era, it has a dark side and you don't go into the full range of darkness, but you talk about some of the examples.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  You talk about impostering, privilege and less discerning consumers when restaurants get a Michelin star. Talk about, talk about some of those.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, let's, let's start with the restaurants. I mean, that's a fun one. So, so if you're a foodie, then, then you definitely pay attention to Michelin ratings, right? These are super influential ratings and there's a very small number of restaurants in the world that have stars. And so you would think if you're a restaurateur, unambiguously what you want is like the Nobel Prize of restaurants, which is, you know, the Michelin three star. And like, that's unambiguously what you want. But, you know, your, your whole life changes when that happens. And so I started to like chase down Michelin starred chefs because that was just, for me,

• 42:20Speaker 01

  that was, the book, there's, there's 100 examples of stuff in the book and, you know, and they're like the ones I found interesting or fun as I was writing it. And so there's, it turns out there's this group of chefs and they, they, they literally handed back their stars. And the story I found that I most liked the most was this restaurant in, in Spain where, you know, it was like a kind of, a village restaurant where like people would, you know, come and break bread and, you know, families would eat there and they'd have conversations and it would be crowded, it would be crowded but casual. And then he started experimenting, did some inventive things with, with the menu. Michelin comes along and they star it.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Okay, but then when they star it, you then enter, if you're in this world, you enter, one thing is you you you jump on top of a hamster wheel because the star isn't like you have it forever and ever and ever and ever. Like, you know, there's certain, there's certain, if you want to, if you're a writer and you want to pull it, surprise, you'll always carry it around. But the star is one of those, those versions of anointment where you have to re-earn it every year because, you know, they, they're, the, the, the guy reassesses restaurants. And if you think about it, like, there's, I mean, I also spent a lot of time looking into and thinking about the process by which we create rankings

• 43:43Speaker 01

  and ratings. Like, I mean, you are absolutely not going to, to crack open the US News and World Report college rankings every year if every year Harvard is one, you know, Yale is two, Princeton is three, Stanford is four, MIT is five, and the University of Chicago is six. Like, if every year those are the top six, let's say, it's uninteresting, right? So you have to change the rankings, like, by literally changing the criteria on what you're going to rank. So you resort, or just, you know, re- re-weight so that, so that the rankings change. So anyways, if you're a Michelin-starred chef, there's one, there's

• 44:22Speaker 01

  this enormous amount of pressure to maintain, you know, the, the quality, and I'm going to put quality in quotes and come back to that in a second, but maintain the quality that justifies a Michelin star. But the second thing is, now, all of a sudden, like, the whole, everything that happens in the restaurant changes because it goes from, like, people driving in from a, you know, 20-kilometer radius, or five-kilometer radius, or, you know, whatever, like, coming to restaurants, seeing friends, like, you, you, you imagine, you know, some version of Cheers, but, but, but, but, you know, Spanish Village style. But now, it's like, you know, people who are foodies, who are coming in from wherever

• 45:05Speaker 01

  because they have to, they have to try the food at this Michelin-starred restaurant. So the audience completely changes. To an audience- That's looking for something else, right? What they want is pictures to put on their Instagram feeds to show the world that they've they've been here or to consume the experience in some way that's radically different than the experience that happened before the stars. So like, you know, it literally, it's one of these things where it changes. It changes your world. If you if you generalize a little bit beyond that, one is there's a lot of visibility of high status actors. Like, you know, we are like, think about all of that.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  All of, you know, the New York Post and whatever there's like and Reddit and like whatever happens. Like if a celebrity does anything, the world pays attention to it. So you do lose your privacy, but you're also constantly on the stage. So managing your managing your brand or your status becomes a, you know, a 24 seven job, particularly in in in the social media world. And so there are just, there are lots of things that that change about life. If you're if you join the truly anointed set, you know, the one the one that I think is most general and most interesting and that people struggle with the most is some version of the imposter, so you know, what we now call the imposter syndrome

• 46:32Speaker 01

  or some kind of anxiety that you have. Because usually if you're high status in whatever your your field is, it doesn't matter. You're in front of audiences often. And audiences form very high expectations because they think of you as, you know, being great at what you do. And if in fact, you're a little less great than your position in the status hierarchy would suggest that the rational response to that, I mean, rational in the sense, the characteristic response for that that represents the situation you're in. I'm walking into a room. Everybody thinks I'm going to be absolutely amazing. I'm less amazing than they think.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  I'm going to disappoint people. Therefore, imposter syndrome, right? I mean, so or some version of of anxiety. That is actually the rational response to a world in which the stat the distribution of status is super right tailed, where you have these very, very prominent actors, but the distribution of merit or talent is less skewed.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a fascinating example. And I, you know, I think about it.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  I think about it a lot. I think about athletes who are, you know, in the top 10th of a percent, or whatever it is of their skill set, they get nervous. Uh, for all kinds of reasons. Part of it is simply disappointing their fans. It's, it's nice to be anointed in a field where

• 48:09Speaker 00

  it's easier to keep quality constant. You know, I, I would suggest a singer has a certain advantage, but of course singers get colds and their voices aren't quite up to what they want. And they have that anxiety. I'm sure even without that. So it's probably a, it's probably a myth that there's some fields where people don't have imposter syndrome. But I think when we look at those people, we think, well, they're so talented, or they're so this or that. And, uh, but that's not the way we see ourselves often in, in those settings. It's fascinating. Do you think, um,

• 48:45Speaker 00

  anointing is, is less important than it was 50 years ago, and maybe less important than it will be in 50 years?

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Because of what I would call the death of expertise? Uh, or is it just that being anointed is more democratic than it used to be? Obviously, there are influencers on Instagram and Tik Tok who, who weren't anointed by anybody. They just caught fire for reasons that have nothing to do with their status, uh, ex ante. Uh, now they have some status. They can, they can bestow, uh, goodies on folks if they want. But, uh, I wonder about this. It seems to me the world's a little less hierarchical than it used to be. Do you agree?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Um, so the last statement I unambiguously agree with, um, in at least a grander historical timeframe. So, so let's come back to 50 years. Like, the last 50 years are really interesting, and the next five are going to be wild, in my opinion. But the last 50 are interesting. So in, in the grand scheme of things, you know, in the book, you know, we never, we never got back to work or be. So let's, can, can I take you back? I'm gonna take you back there for a minute. So, so in, in the book, you know, I, I, I argue there's like three and a half sources of status. The one, you know, that that we're talking about with expertise and the one that I think

• 50:15Speaker 01

  most of us just can just sort of conceptually think of would be a fair source of status is some version of merit. Now, merit alone is a problematic idea like so. So the the idea would be people with a lot of merit who do things that are really good or really valuable or really high quality are the ones that should have high status. So status is a reward for being really, really, really good at something. Now, the way status works in in reality is like, you know, we we often will think about global status. We'll have this conversation about a tenth of a of a tenth of a percent, a thousandth of a percent, like the most recognized artist or the most, you know, the the the athletes

• 51:00Speaker 01

  we watch on television or whatever. But every social group has a status hierarchy, like your work group in in the office does. You're, I mean, weirdly, like, you go into a yoga class and there's a status hierarchy, like, you know, there's the one who's like, who can bend in that way. I mean, I long ago gave that those up, but, you know, but but you so so there are there are status hierarchies everywhere and what constitutes merit, you know, merit based contributions to a group is very different across every version of of the groups that we have. But one source of status is absolutely it's given to the people who are the best at doing whatever is valued in that context.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  You know, so there are, I think, quality differences among writers and, you know, and they're actually like the quality of the writing and that affects to some extent the the prestige of the of the writer. The second thing is, and that's what the book calls work for B status, you earn it, you work for it. The second thing is all societies at all times and all places allocates status differently to what sociologists call ascribed characteristics. And in ascribe, the way you think about it, an ascribed characteristic is there's a whole bunch of characteristics that you have that were just kind of, you know, for for is it awkward way to say it, but were assigned to you at birth.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Like you were born to a, you know, you were born into a religion, into, into a skin color. You were born male or female, like you had, you had, you know, the, the S R Y gene or whatever it is, or you didn't. You were born, like, you're, you're probably gonna be tall or you're gonna be short. You were born, you were born, you know, also all the characteristics that are just given to you, like you didn't choose them, you chose none of those. And if everything was redone, I mean, if there is a you, you would get different characteristics. But we order those, like, they all have status consequences.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  And in past versions of society, there's no mobility out of them. That is, whatever you were born into is where you end up, and, you know, that's kind of the iron rule of law. So if you think about like a rigid caste system, or a feudal system, like, you know, in a feudal system, you don't go ask the kid who's working in the field, you know, what they wanna do when they finish college, right? You know, they're gonna work in the field, like, you know, like their father did, and like, their, their children will. That's the system, like, there is no mobility. And so, but we get status from these described characteristics, and we're all dealt a different hand there, depending on, you know, where we are and what, what, what we got.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And then the third place where we get status is it's kinetic, it's you get anointed. That is, the high stat, the people who have status in the system move it around by choosing who to affiliate with or not. And that happens everywhere all the time. So, you know, every university has an admissions committee and decides who to let, you know, through the campus gates, and who not to let through the campus gates. And from, you know, from the bottom of the pecking order all the way up to the elite universities, these are status conferring, conferring institutions, right? And when they confer status, they do. But that happens in all, in all walks of life, everywhere. So, we have these, like, three ways in which we create status.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Now, let's come back to the question of whether it's more important now than it was 50 years ago. I mean, I don't, I think first empirically, there isn't a way to do that study or answer that question. But, but conceptually... What's happened is there is now this this complete change in in what I would call the the scale or the geography of status that's created by the Internet, the smartphone, the the global platforms with four billion users or whatever the numbers are at for the biggest global platforms now, you know, north of half a billion, but all the way up to, you know, something like three or four billion people in one place. And what

• 55:22Speaker 01

  that allows somebody to do is have global recognition, whereas 50 years ago, that was a much harder task, right? We lived in a more local world. And if you go back, and if you go back 50 years before that, like before anything was digitized, we lived in a way more local world. And and there, you know, status is still super important, but nobody can, nobody can achieve true global status because there's no way to get the distribution where you're in front of, you know, the kind of the population of the planet. Now you can get that distribution. So the scale of the anointment dynamic, I think, has changed with the global distribution of content. But I don't think there's even

• 56:07Speaker 01

  a way to think about or know whether it's more important or not.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just that point about scale. It's, you know, it's true of any economic activity. It's part of the reason we get to a world where the rewards are so disproportionate. If you can appeal to an international audience, I'm watching Crash Landing on You, which is a Korean show, very much focused on North and South Korean differences, and which I'm sure I do not fully appreciate. It's in Korean. I watch it with subtitles, and I love it. And of course, that's a very different world where I have to go to North Korea or South Korea and watch a play, you know, with 100 people that's held in the

• 56:54Speaker 00

  daytime because there's no lighting for for evening performances. So the world has changed tremendously. The rewards, obviously, for athletes and performers who can have international appeal, Shohei Ohtani is an obvious example. In baseball, you know, Michael Jordan was that person. Muhammad Ali was that person. Adele is that person. These folks have Wildly, enormously greater rewards than the, as you point out, the second best or the whatever, further down the scale. It's the rewards are very skewed.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm just sorry to interrupt, but you have me now thinking about Korea. And like, you know, and so like, take K-pop, like where,

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  you know, these K-pop songs, you know, whoever, whatever, whoever, you know, I, here I'm, I'm outside of my, my bailiwick, but you know, these K-pop songs go like global. And, you know, they create global mega-stars.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  You know, 50 years ago, that, that couldn't happen. Like, there was no way to happen. And then, you know, a Korean film, like it's been this series of Korean films that, that, you know, like Best Picture at the Academy Awards, right? And, and that's a modern world phenomenon where if you create content, it's possible to distribute it to global audiences and, and, and get this like just vastly greater benefit from, you know, whatever recognition you have. Like, I mean, so, you know, when Beyonce issues her next song, like, it's not just going to be us here in, in, you know, we Americans listening to this. Like, it's going to be everywhere all at once.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  Nice. I do, I do want to add that econ talk is heard in 200 countries. But I don't want to get you too excited about that, Toby. Some of those are quite small.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  I didn't know there were 200 countries. I was shocked to discover this. There's more than 200, but we're about in every one of them, at least that gets measured by an IP address. Let's close with talking about AI. You alluded to it earlier. We don't know at this moment how important AI will be in our lives. Six weeks ago, I was pretty sure it was going to be enormous. I'm starting to wonder, maybe it's not as important as I thought. We'll see, but it will affect status and it will affect annoying. What, what are your thoughts?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I um, so I'm going to, I mean, I I know a little bit about what you think about it because one of the episodes I listened to was your Dwar Kesh.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  That was weeks ago. That was weeks ago. I think, you know, I've I've gone, moved on from there.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, well, okay, but I, you know, my guess is Dwar Kesh hasn't moved on.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Throw that out there. I mean, if what you're if what you're thinking about is some kind of, you know, disappointment with with GPT five or whatever. So I think, so I literally think if you stopped AI today, which you which you will not, because, you know, one of the things that's gone on, I'm sure you're aware of this, is the there are four companies that this year will spend more on investments in AI than the than NASA spent to send a man to the moon over a 14 year period. Like, this is in in like 2025 CapEx alone is, you know, that number looks to be north of $300 billion spent by four companies. Like, I

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  there is never in human history been an investment at the scale of this. And that investment is going to pay dividends, or or, you know, extract a toll of epic proportion. I don't know how to how to think about that. I am 100% convinced positive that that that AI is going to change most things about nearly everything. So I think it's just the most profound change in human history. But coming back from that, let's talk about the status system. So the first thing, so, you know, I and I've been trying to editorialize on this, the and the limited time I've had in the last couple of weeks. So the first

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  thing I think it's going to do is reinforce the prestige hierarchy. Like, we are going to pay, I think that the net effect of AI right now, and I've, you know, my, you know, so my little research group is spinning up, you know, we work on mainly like computational social science kinds of projects, so we work on very. Large data sets and and look for look, look, look, look at things. So I'm doing a ton of things on the job market right now, but I'm also starting up a set of projects that are going to look at whether we're we are in in the short term more heavily relying on pedigree than we have in the past.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  And the argument for that is that like, take, you know, the most important argument for that is take writing.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  So I think for all of human history, I mean, since we invented, you know, the written word, language and instruments to communicate. We have made assessments of people based on writing. So we do that when you apply for a job, you write a, you know, historically, you write a cover letter and you write a resume. We do it when you apply to to go to a college and we do it when, you know, when you're grading anything at any point in life. Like you write something and then it's graded. And so writing has been this and and it's everywhere, by the way. I mean, I'm I'm looking at us and I'm thinking for some reason like, and then there's your blurb on your dating site profile. Like it's used to evaluate you everywhere.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  But writing high quality content just got to be, you know, nearly universally available and basically free. So there's not a a person in the United States with access to a state of the art AI system that can't prompt a very good college admissions essay. I mean, far better than the average one. Like if you could, if you, if you took the history of college essays and assembled them all and compared them to a bunch of prompted essays, I guarantee you the with today's models, I guarantee you the average quality of what you just prompted is far above the history of the college essay sample.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  But you just took a signal about that we've long used to make assessments of people and you've occluded it. And now we're back to where the conversation started, right? We used to have this pretty easy way to assess someone and now it's gone. So now we've taken sort of the written word and, you know, the same goes for skills assessment. Like there's all of these, you can't, you know, if you want to, if you want to figure out how good a coder is, you know, you need to now take them into a room. Disconnect the Internet, watch them write code because you can't rely on anything else, not a GitHub repository, not a, not an online examination. Like, it's a wonky world where

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  we go back to this, you can't judge quality, right? Because we don't know whether the content was created by the person or the machine, or like a collaboration of the person and the machine. And when you can't judge quality, that's precisely the time in which you rely on pedigree. So like, if you're a college admissions officer, take that problem at a place where a lot of people want to go. You can't figure out, you know, it's very hard now to read an essay and say, I'm admitting them because this is an outstanding essay, if that ever happened. But what you can do is you can say, like, I've heard of the high school, or, you know, there's some other status marker on the background, and so I'm

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  going to overweight that relative to information that formerly was a signal, but now it's just noise.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a fascinating thing, and I, I'm, um,

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  I'm not 100% sure it's going to change everything about everything. I used, I felt that way about three months ago. I am a little, little more skeptical, but it clearly has changed. I would say it's changed the ability to write a mediocre, a pretty good essay. I think people will still compete at prompts, which is really a thin read to lean on for admitting people into college or a job. It's going to be a very, a very different world, just, just for that. Like you say, if it doesn't, even if it doesn't advance in the next 18 months, and I do suspect it will, and if it advances, well, we'll see.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  I mean, we had a little hope that prompt engineering was going to be a thing, but then came the reasoning models, and it's not really a thing anymore. So, I mean, there's complex prompting to generate, you know, agentic AI systems, but, you know, but I, I think, I, I think we already are at the point where it's a very good writer. And and there's new approaches to how it's being trained to become an excellent writer. And so, but I mean, the thing you have to keep in mind when you look at it is like, you're looking at this, like, think about what it's learned between model, you know, between Gemini one point five and Gemini two point five or G P T four and G P T five.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Like, it's immensely better at stuff, but it's learned all that in, you know, what, four months, six months, like whatever the time interval is between major model introductions. It's learned at a rate that, you know, it took us humans like a century to learn that, right? I mean, it's it's just astonishing what's happening, but, you know, but I don't think we know yet how how it's going to affect things. I think short run, we see a heavy reliance on pedigree. Longer run, I think it actually could really uproot the whole system, right? Because now let's go back to to where we opened and and and I said I've given up on choice. And you said you'll never give up on choice.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  But one of the ways I've given up on choice is I now routinely say, like, you know, I, I mean, I I bought, I won't say what, but I bought it, I will. I bought like a beard clipper on Amazon a couple of weeks ago. And like, that's the normally the kind of decision I hate to make. Like, I get onto Amazon and it's like, ah, you know, a thousand of the damn things. And I can't tell the difference.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  Well.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  They all have like, you know, they're between.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  Four point three, yeah.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  They don't mean anything, but they're all between four point four and four point six or whatever. You know, there's no information in the ratings, like, you know, I can like, look at which ones I like aesthetically. You know, I will sit and think there would be like some irrelevant price difference to me. And I'll sit and think about like, do I want to pay that? So instead, I took an A I system and I entered a prompt. And I made it my agent. I said, I want you to choose one.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Like I wanted to be between these two price points. I could care less about the brand. You go read the reviews. You go do the work. You bring me back. You bring me back one, not two, one. And so it eliminated the choice for me. And I am going to use that all the time. And it made, you know, by any standard, and we had to figure out what it does when it processes information. But I think by any standard of rationality, it made a more rational choice than I would have done. And a certainly more expeditious one from from my standpoint.

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  Let's close with a personal reflection. You've been writing about this to write the book. You thought about it a lot before that. You've been studying it. Has it affected your own human craving for status, do you think?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Um, so no one's asked me that question. I mean, I think, I don't, you know, I don't know if it's because of the book or not. But I think about status in some ways, my own status, much less than I used to. Like, much less. So I've had this, you know, kind of interesting academic trajectory where you you might argue that I've migrated downwards by choice in in the status hierarchy. I mean, and, you know, also like factoring in

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  the the job offers I have had. I mean, Berkeley is an amazing university. So so it's totally, you know, it's great.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  You're not slumming.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  I'm not slumming, you know, but, you know, but I did move from Harvard to Berkeley. And And that's not a like, it's not a common move that that people make. But I think, you know, from from my own, you know, status, like I think mostly about professional status, but that's because I'm a workaholic. So I spend so much time working and then, you know, doing like that is vast majority of the time that I spend I work. So I think much less about it, but I think that's like age and career stage and where I am in life. Like I have, I have what I need for sure. But what I will say is that the book got

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  me to be very reflective about how people respond to status. And for me, that was the most personal and the most interesting, probably, chapter to write was how if you have high status, you respond and the cost of having low status, which I've thought a lot about over, over my career, but maybe in a sort of more objective kind of academic way, because I've worked a lot on, you know, on, on status differences based on ascribed characteristics and what that does to, to equitable opportunity. That's been like, you know, the sort of peer reviewed research, lots of it. So, so I thought a lot about

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  that. And, you know, but then when you, when I wrote the book, I just thought a lot more about like the human reaction, the emotional reaction, what this all means for people's sort of internal states versus the, you know, the, the sort of more external stuff. And all of that absolutely does, you know, change you in ways that probably are hard to put your, your finger on. But, but I think, you know, anyone who writes a book, like it is a bit of a personal journey, almost no matter what, what the topic is, because it has, you know, even more than I think usual in the academic world, it sort of, it, it assigns you to a quiet place. Right? I mean, you are going to spend a lot of time,

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  you know, probably sitting alone, thinking, writing, researching, reading stuff. And so it's a reflective undertaking, I think, no matter what. But, you know, this topic for me, very, very much so.

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Toby Stewart. His book is Anointed. Toby, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Love the conversation. Thanks for having me, Russ.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.