All Episodes
Aug. 26, 2021 - Conspirituality
01:11:11
66: Spirituality & Status (w/Will Storr)

Spirituality, ill-defined a term that it is, often implies both an emptying out and an addition. What leaves is the vacuous clinging to achievements that are supposedly preventing us from seeing our true nature. What’s granted is a new mindset, a novel way of being, one in which you are at peace with both yourself and the world.Where does the drive for status play into this quest? As journalist Will Storr points out in his new book, The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It, you can’t escape our impulse for achieving status. You can learn to dampen its hold on you, however. Derek catches up with Will to discuss how status plays a role in anti-vax groups, spiritual communities, and political groups.We start this week with a Ticker by Matthew, who previews a bonus episode on the friendship porn we see on the Almost 30 episode in which the hosts share tears after being snowjobbed by Zach Bush.Show NotesAlmost 30 podcast, Ep.451: Dr. Zach Bush on Fear, The Immune System, & The Real Meaning of LifeThe Status Game by Will Storr review — how the fight for status defines our world -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to Conspirituality.
I'm Derek Barris.
August has featured a number of special episodes.
In fact, the three of us are not releasing one group conversation this entire month.
That's okay, as we communicate every day and are working on future episodes.
We're just trying to get some vacation time in.
In fact, I'm on a plane today for the first time in two years, and I'm really hoping you're not going to see any videos on our Instagram feed of someone getting duct taped to their seat.
Fingers crossed.
Speaking of Instagram, you can find us there, as well as on Facebook and YouTube.
And all three of us are on Twitter, myself and Matthew under our names, and Julian at Embodied Sacred.
And of course, we're on Patreon, where for $5 a month you can support us and get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
We start this week with a ticker by Matthew, who previews a bonus episode on the friendship porn we see on the Almost 30 episode, in which the hosts share tears after being snowjobbed by Zach Bush.
It's quite something to watch, for sure.
The feature interview is with British author and journalist Will Storr, whose new book, The Status Game, on social position and how we use it, is perfect for anyone who listens to this podcast.
I would argue anyone, period, but the spiritual and wellness communities feature plenty of influencers clawing for status, which, as you'll hear, is just the human condition.
Thankfully, there are ways to mitigate that tension, as Will explains.
If the quest for enlightenment includes knowing who we are, well, then we need to turn to evolutionary biology, psychology, and sociology.
I'd put spirituality last on that list.
Important, certainly, but constrained and even dictated by our animal nature.
Once we recognize that, however, progress is possible, which I'll be talking to Will about.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
Hey everybody.
The summer is winding down and I'm heading up north with my family and so my contribution this week is remote as Derek takes the wheel and Julian is on a research break.
First up is a correction I'd like to offer on behalf of our esteemed guest last week, Jatarth Jodea.
He appeared with Rachel Bernstein and we spoke about QAnon in the long run.
In one section, Jatarth misspoke about the conflicts within Northern Ireland decades ago, but then he tweeted out his correction, saying that he should not have called the Troubles the Irish Civil War, that he noted he was wrong on how long it lasted for.
It was 30 years and not 20, as he had said.
And he'd also inflated the casualties from 3,500 dead to 30,000.
And also the number of IRA involved, which was approximately 350 fighters, not 1,000.
And also the number of IRA involved, which was approximately 350 fighters, not 1,000.
So that was a lot of integrity, and thank you for that, Jithart.
So this week I wanted to offer for the ticker a brief stub of the bonus I'm preparing for Monday, which ties in with Derek's exploration of status with Will Storer on today's episode.
The title for the bonus so far is I Don't Know Who My Friends Are.
Which sounds a little extreme, but sometimes it's true.
And not just because I contend towards introversion, or because I have what might be some neurodivergent traits related to incessant writing, which in turn encourages me away from socialization.
I really don't know who my friends are sometimes, because I've grown up in an economy that parasitizes friendship.
And I have the sense that this is an unexamined current that flows underneath our analysis of influencer culture, our analysis of parasocial relationships, and how people bond superficially, unsatisfactorily, through conspirituality.
So where I'm coming from is that someone sent me a podcast featuring our favorite doctor who thinks he's a preacher, Zach Bush.
The podcast is called Almost 30, and I'd never heard of it, but when I got to the homepage, they made sure I felt like I should have, although I suppose I'm not the target market.
So they advertise it as a top 50 wellness spirituality ranking podcast for women, 30 million downloads, they offer courses, workshops, merch, the whole thing.
And from what I can tell, the podcast revolves around the fabulous spiritual lifestyle friendship between Krista Williams and Lindsay Simsek, the hosts.
They are 230 something.
I think the almost 30 part is a joke.
LA women who met at SoulCycle.
So, I'll post the Vox investigation into SoulCycle in the notes, but basically they met at a fitness cult and have gone on to uplevel their own brand of wellness pornography, which is a term I defined in an article I'll link to in the notes as well.
So I have to say I hated everything about this site.
It was slick, presumptuous, empty, but also grandiose, like all at once.
And I felt guilty because I couldn't really admire the shots of them in great outfits laughing on the beach, but it just felt like a nightmare of unearned privilege and tyrannical happiness to me.
Like real New Age Stepford stuff.
Like getting punched in the face by Gwyneth Paltrow wearing a boxing glove full of potpourri, but not the pure one variety of potpourri, like super high quality potpourri from Bali.
And I have to check in with myself as a male commentator here and ask just how much misogyny is behind my responses.
And that was the sound of me checking in regarding this case.
I just don't think that's it.
I have blind spots, to be sure, but I don't think that's what's going on because I hate men's sites like this even more.
Tantric Brotherhoods, CrossFit Hangouts, micro-brews and micro-doses, dudes consuming each other's snark like hot dogs.
I can't watch Joe Rogan because the whole channel smells like bully.
So, Almost 30 is Joe Rogan for white LA gig workers who are working the aspiration grift.
But I think what I really can't stand about it is that it offers what I can now see clearly as a subset of wellness pornography that I think we can call friendship pornography.
So I've got a definition for wellness pornography and if I change a few words we get We engage with friendship pornography by consuming attractive images and vicarious sensations of friendship for the sake of pleasure, without having to engage with the complexity of social conditions, class differences, boredom, sickness, or death, and without having to be responsible for the other in any sustainable way.
So why is this relevant to conspirituality?
At every turn on this podcast, we are talking about economies built on sales within demographics sewn together by consumerism.
It is a world in which charisma is the currency and emotions are the commodities.
When the influencer sells you on their subscription, community, quote unquote, they are offering a toxic mimic of friendship.
That's clear.
Think about how MLMs at one extreme end of this spectrum co-opt the lingo of community, tribe, and so on, when what they're really doing is turning every single social interaction within a given demographic into a sales pitch.
So why has friendship porn become such a big thing?
And why have I had this feeling of desiccation when I consider my own friendship landscape in relation to the wellness and yoga worlds?
I mean, it could be because I've spent the last decade ragging on yoga dipshits and busting cults.
That is definitely part of it.
But I think there's something more here.
Something about how the economy set us up for increasingly frayed social ties.
So, in the bonus episode, I'll be focusing in on the material and social impacts of freelance work, which is what predominates in the wellness world, and I'll be talking about how I think it impacts friendship.
And by the way, Krista and Lindsey might be truly great friends, because after all, they bonded over Zach Bush.
They wept together, because he sounded like Jesus.
I knew that I would cry before I was like sitting and I was like I'm gonna cry and I'm not exactly sure why and then he started speaking about just like the beauty of nature and the beauty of us as humans outside of
Things that make us feel separate from ourselves and wow I mean so I was crying and I cry I cry a good amount during interviews so I was like I didn't know if you were crying or not I was like fuck I'm crying again in an interview and you know at times it's it's I'm actually working on my energy management a little bit so I'm not so in the field of whatever that person's experience is so that I'm not crying all the time but and so when I looked at you crying too I was like oh my god dude
And then you look at Zach and he's just Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ on screen.
Fully Jesus Christ.
He's literally came back after channeling Jesus Christ.
You guys, this is us just saying it, but he never said that he was channeling Jesus Christ, FYI.
And it was like, Just fully holding his own energy in whatever was said.
But I don't want to end this on a laugh.
Because as absurd as this is, what really digs at me is that this peak moment of friendship bonding is public, performed, and generated by the piercing blue eyes and vocal fry of a manipulator.
And why?
Because if you're almost 30 or 30 and you've grown up in wellness and extremely online, what else do you have?
How else will you negotiate status if not through the stagecraft of the self mirrored into the stagecraft of relationship?
Spirituality, ill-defined a term that it is, often implies both an emptying out and an addition.
What leaves is the vacuous clinging to achievements that are supposedly preventing us from seeing our true nature.
What's granted is a new mindset, a novel way of being, one in which you are at peace with both yourself and the world.
The dilemma, of course, is that this isn't who we are.
Aspirations are essential to being human, but fulfilled aspirations turn out to merely be rungs on a ladder that never quite seems to end.
And forget it if someone questions how you're climbing.
Any slight to this attempt at perceived perfection... This isn't hyperbole!
Research conducted by University of Washington's Associate Professor Sarah Gimbel reveal that coming into contact with someone who holds different political beliefs is neurologically similar to walking through the forest and encountering a bear.
And if you think spiritual beliefs are any different than politics, you'd be wrong.
Not that we can't get better at this game, mind you.
And that's where Will Stewart's new book, The Status Game, ends up.
Admitting how fragile our egos truly are, how relentless humans can be in the pursuit of status, is the first and necessary step in dealing with an impulse that's ingrained in us as bipedalism and the need for sleep.
I'm guilty of this, as are you, and if your immediate reaction is, no I'm not, well, that's part of the game too.
Let me quote Will, a best-selling author of six books, and I've read four, and I have to say he's an exceptional writer.
Quote, If our need for status is so fundamental, this discomfort we feel towards it may seem surprising.
But that's the game.
To admit to being motivated by improving our rank is to risk making others think less of us, which loses us rank.
Even admitting it to ourselves can make us feel reduced.
So our awareness of our desire for status eats itself." End quote.
And as he goes on in the book, this cuts across all sorts of social fields, whether you're billionaires trying to create your penis-shaped rockets, or if you're on the lower rungs of society, status always matters.
Now we normally associate this lust for status with hedge fund managers and celebrities, politicians, musicians, but I'm sure long-time listeners of this podcast will recognize this thread running through the charismatic influencers that we cover every week.
Harder is it to recognize it in ourselves, but that's where the development of empathy comes into play.
Understanding what someone else is feeling is no small task, especially when that person is just an avatar on the screen or a voice in a pair of headphones.
You might think you relate, but we always see everything through our lens first.
I mention this not to chastise or judge, just to be honest with the evidence.
And while I wouldn't call the status game a prescriptive book, Will ends with seven rules to help us all navigate through the incessant drive for status.
Without giving away the game, let's touch upon a few.
For example, he advises practicing warmth, sincerity, and competence.
When we're warm, we imply we're not going to use dominance.
When sincere, that we're going to play fairly.
When competent, that we're going to be valuable to the game itself, both in its own battles for status and to individual players who might learn from us.
Will recognizes some games are more important to each of us than others, and if you understand the hierarchy, you become a better player.
Remember that we're all hallucinating reality, so try not to get caught up becoming too invested in anything, especially yourself.
And one last rule is to be different.
Which, he writes in one of my favorite lines in the book, originality also makes it more difficult for rivals to catch you.
And finally, recognize your status.
This is sometimes the hardest lesson in the spiritual realm.
Because we aspire to climb constantly, we sometimes forget how high we are above others as it is.
When what once seemed aspirational becomes commonplace, we lose meaning in the attainment and focus only on what is left to attain.
I've noticed this trend in some friends that are really into ceremony, be it psychedelic or meditation.
There's always a deeper layer, always more to be acquired.
I wonder when enough is enough, though enough rarely seems to do.
Even humility can be its own form of currency, the status of being the one most disciplined and benign, and therefore the highest above it all.
That desire is also the craving for status.
The meaning of life is not to win, Will writes, but to play.
Play, of course, implies competition, but it also implies boundaries, the forms of play children engage in to set the rules and create their own hierarchies.
It is possible to win and not be too invested in victory, just as it's possible to lose and take it really hard.
Likely you've experienced both.
I know I have.
I just sometimes wish the spiritual communities didn't take themselves so damn seriously.
The map is rarely the territory, and philosophies that are not lived have nothing more to offer than lip service, allusions that we believe can disguise the distance between what we say and even think we are, and who we really are.
Admit that you're playing, that even tiny accolades can mean the world, and move on.
Don't get so bound up in your position.
Be there, own it, and hopefully do some good with your lot in life.
Strive to make it better for yourself and for others.
Just don't color existence with rosy glasses.
A lot of people don't have it as well as you do, while others have it way better, at least in terms of social positioning and money.
Just own who you are without always feeling the need to be someone else.
Here's a personal roadmap I try to follow.
The quickest way to spot a liar is to listen to those who claim they're telling the truth.
If you want to identify an egomaniac, listen to who says that they're humble.
Trust isn't something you need to talk about and is usually the biggest red flag when someone says you can trust them.
Just be a trustworthy person.
That should be enough.
I had the pleasure of first speaking with Will after the publication of his 2018 book, Selfie, How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us, which is another book I highly recommend.
And I'm really glad Will agreed to have another chat.
His writing will challenge you, which is good because that's how you grow.
And let's be honest, growth is arguably the best possible outcome of this game that we're all playing.
Congratulations on the new book.
And Will, thank you for taking time out to talk to Conspirituality today.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks, Derek.
And we are going to talk about your new book, The Status Game, but I have to start with your 2014 book, The Unpersuadables, Adventures with the Enemies of Science.
It's pretty timely, and we've talked before, and I've read all of your books, and I think there is a through line of narratives that we can pull from to kind of understand where we are today and what we're going through, especially in the United States and the anti-vax movement.
But I'm wondering, when you were researching or writing this book, you were looking at more extremist, then seemed like extremist groups like white nationalists and had crossover with anti-vax.
Back then, almost a decade ago, could you have foreseen the strength that these movements would have picked up and fueled as we are engaging with the anti-vax community today?
Not at all.
I mean, I was actually thinking about this the other day.
Even I, like at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, like having written The Unpersuadables, which is all about irrational beliefs, I was predicting that the COVID pandemic would just wipe out the anti-vax movement because there's that phrase that there's no such thing as an atheist in the foxhole.
You know, everyone's dying around you.
Of course, that's going to bust through these crazy stories that people tell.
But actually, if anything, it's got stronger.
You know, it's extraordinary.
Just a couple of days ago, we had anti-vaxxers Making siege to the BBC Television Centre, which hilariously is no longer the BBC Television, it's now flats, it's apartments.
They didn't realise they went to the old BBC Television Centre and tried to storm their way in.
I mean, it's just madness.
And so it really does show the extraordinary power of irrationality that In this global pandemic that's killed millions and has touched probably every life, everyone knows somebody that's suffered badly from COVID.
It's still not enough to break through these incredibly powerful stories that people tell themselves.
Here in Los Angeles, we had anti-vax protests outside of a cancer clinic not far from where I live.
I went through cancer about six years ago, and I couldn't imagine anything worse than going through that experience, having to go to a clinic for your chemotherapy or whatever, and then Getting confronted by these idiots standing outside and having to walk past them and the lack of empathy.
And I do think this is because you write about anti-vaxxers in the status game, but can you give me a big picture overview from what you learned from The Unpersuadables in terms of why people go so far into these fringe or extremist beliefs such as the anti-vaccination during the time of the pandemic?
Yeah, sure.
So when you were talking about your experiences back then, you talked about the lack of empathy that the anti-vaxxers showed.
But I think that's the point.
I think to them, to their minds, they're showing extreme empathy because they're heroes.
Actually, it's you that's wrong, and they're trying to save lives.
So it's not that they are cartoon villains loving destruction and death and torture and pain.
They actually think they're the heroes, and sincerely.
And you know, the book I wrote before the Unpersuaded Wars was about, you know, it was sort of in my twenties, about ghosts and ghost hunters.
And the big takeaway from that for me was that people who believe in ghosts, they really believe in ghosts.
And people who are spiritualists and mediums, they really believe it.
You know, they're not these idiot frauds who are just in it for money and attention.
They sincerely believe it.
And I think what happens is that we sort of massively underestimate the power of the The power of the brain to kind of seduce people with its stories.
And that's the big takeaway for me.
It's that we've evolved not to be natural seekers of truth, but natural kind of believers of stories.
And there's no more convincing story than the story of our own heroism.
And if we hit upon a set of beliefs that make us feel heroic, make us feel kind of special and important, and we kind of attach our identity to that belief, then it becomes extremely powerful.
And you know, the mind has this kind of battery of ways of defending those kinds of beliefs from reasonable doubt. - Interestingly, in "The Status Game," you write about how societies such as Japan and China see status as the responsibility of the group, which is you write about how societies such as Japan and China see status as the responsibility
And we can talk briefly about Selfie, which was the book that we first met after you wrote Selfie, how we became so self-obsessed in what it's doing to us.
And that very much, I think, is a nice companion to the status game.
So when you're talking about the hero of your story, There is such an emphasis on me or I being the hero, not the collective society.
So, Rowling, what parallels were you able to draw between this thrust toward individualism from The Unpersuadables into writing Selfie?
Yeah, the cultural thing is really interesting, but I think the important thing to know about that is that it's not a categorical difference, individualist kind of Westernism versus communitarian kind of East Asian.
Confucianist culture is more a matter of emphasis.
We're all naturally groupish by default.
It's just that there's a stronger emphasis on the groupishness in East Asian cultures.
Anti-vax is a group.
And when somebody plugs themselves into that group, they're going to absorb that group's beliefs and other things too, the way they address, what they read, how they think, how they talk.
Humans are amazing kind of copying creatures.
And we're programmed to kind of join groups, to seek connection with like-minded people.
And then once we've joined those groups, most people aren't happy to be on the bottom rungs of any group necessarily.
Nobody wants to be the least important member of a group.
You know, we have this kind of will to rise, the will to gain status within that group.
And, you know, those are very sound evolutionary reasons.
You know, all living things are driven to kind of solve the problems of survival and reproduction.
And for humans, this groupish, kind of communitarian species, the more status that we get, the better our chances of survival and reproduction, the more resources we get, the safer our sleeping sites, the better choices of better choice mates.
So that's the basic heuristic in the human brain.
Just get status.
If you get status, everything else gets better.
So that's what we do.
We join groups and we try and get status.
And in a group like the anti-vax groups, these kind of irrational groups, the way you gain status is by defending and proselytizing their sacred beliefs.
So in the status game, I interviewed a young woman from Pennsylvania called Miranda Dinder, who just told me a fascinating story about her kind of tumble into anti-vax craziness.
She was 18, single mother, isolated socially really because all her friends were at college and she wasn't.
And she wanted a home birth, so she found a midwife that would do that.
And, you know, the midwife came around and just, you know, had the usual run of questions.
And then at the end, she said, have you ever considered not getting your child vaccinated?
And she was like, what are you talking about?
What?
I don't understand what you mean.
I've never heard of such a thing.
So she just said, oh, look on Google.
So Miranda went to Google and typed in why not vaccinate and was confronted with this entire kind of world of reasons why not vaccinate.
And then she hit upon this Facebook group and she said, that was the big one for me.
And, you know, she announced herself as vaccine hesitant and she was instantly surrounded by people telling her all these stories about, you know, I had this kid who became autistic.
I had this kid who, you know, it was a disaster, you know.
And so she was brought into this group.
What she said was that she immediately felt that she was surrounded by these amazing, impressive mums.
And she just thought, I want to be like these people.
These are really brave mothers who just are out there fighting for the health of their kids and how amazing.
And so, you know, she just thought, I want to be like them.
And she said, you know, the more you went out into the world and proselytized for your beliefs, the more you embrace those beliefs and fully actively believe them, the higher you would rise in that status game of the Facebook anti-vax group.
So, And you see that, that's very common in all kinds of these kinds of groups.
It's common in cults, it's common in religions.
This idea that in order to gain status you have to be the kind of puppet and warrior for the sacred beliefs of the group.
I want to talk more about the stories from the status game, but there is a through line, and I want to know the origins of the book, because, again, you have a book on ghosts.
I didn't know about that.
I don't know if it's available in the U.S., so I haven't seen that one, so now we need to go back further.
Okay.
Okay, well, so you have people with their fringe beliefs or extremist beliefs, or Good-natured beliefs that, you know, I don't really... ghosts and UFOs, I don't put in the same category as anti-vaxxers, personally.
But then, you know, you go into individualism and then the science of storytelling, of course, and you've been talking about the importance of narrative, and then you come to the status game.
So, had you been thinking about status this entire time, or what gave you the impetus to write the latest book?
Yeah, so in Selfie, one of the people that I interviewed was this quite well-known British psychologist called Professor Bruce Hurd, and during that interview he said, He said, why do we do anything that we do?
He said, um, um, you know, once we've got enough money to survive, everything else is validation.
He didn't use the word status, he said validation.
And I remember thinking, oh, that's so cynical.
That's ridiculous.
What a silly thing to say.
And then literally I thought about for about three seconds and I thought, oh no, God, he's right, isn't he?
You know, and then so, so yeah, I became really interested in it.
It was really that that kind of kind of set me on this road of thinking, wow, you know, But then there are lots of those moments when you're doing your research where you just think, well that could be an interesting book and that could be an interesting book.
But what really cemented it for me was the last three books have been about the brain as a storyteller, how the conscious experience takes the form of a story, this heroic narrative in which we are morally good people with great futures in store.
This is if we're psychologically healthy.
But then that raises the question, okay, so if that's a conscious experience, and if that's this kind of useful illusion, this kind of semi-truth that leads us down these mad pathways, what's the actual truth?
Like, what's the subconscious truth?
What's going on beneath the conscious level?
And I think this is the answer.
The brain is very good at weaving this heroic narrative that everything we do in the world is for the greater good and we're heroes, essentially.
But underneath that, what's going on is status games.
Because of the nature of our evolution, because we're this hyper-social ape who has to connect into groups and gain status within them in order to secure survival and reproduction.
That's what we're driven to do again and again and again and again.
That is human life.
You join games and you play them.
And that is, as I say in the book, that's religion, that's cult, that's business, that's sport.
Everywhere you look in human life, that's what's going on.
You know, I can tell by looking at you, Derek, we're playing similar status games because we basically look identical.
You know, we've got similar facial hair, we've got a similar t-shirt, we've never met each other, we live on different sides of the planet, but you can just tell by looking at us that we have very similar values and we have very similar, we tell very similar stories about the world.
And we've never met.
And we live thousands of miles apart.
But that's the power of the status game.
And it's the power of this kind of, you know, this copying instinct.
We all end up looking like each other, thinking like each other, acting like each other.
You know, that's human life.
Well, we also both in our offices here have plenty of books behind us.
So there's another point of connection.
Jesus, we've even got the same kind of wall, you know, even our walls are the same color.
And we've got a painting, but you've got a bike.
Paintings are on the side, you can't see them in the camera, but there's some.
Now, one statistic that that doesn't surprise me, but that jumped out off the page was that 69 of the top 100 economies in the world are not nations, but corporations.
And you write that there's no point that the chase for higher status ends, which made me think about the space billionaires recently.
So what what in your research have you found that when is enough enough is enough and ever enough?
No, and that's the really interesting thing about status.
For example, people often think that power and status is the same thing.
The way to think about status is it's a game and we use symbols to measure our status, depending on what game you're playing.
You'll use a different symbol.
So for some people, it's looks.
For some people, it's youth.
For some people, it's money.
For some people, it's power.
But power isn't the same as status.
Power is your ability to control resources and other people.
And what they find is that most people's appetite for power runs out pretty quickly because with power comes responsibility and stress.
But people have different appetites for money.
Some people don't really give a crap about money.
Some people give a lot of crap about money.
But status is different.
People's appetite for status kind of never runs out.
And I think the really interesting thing about it is that it's not that everybody wants to be top status.
You know, our current Prime Minister in the UK, Boris Johnson, he's famous for, you know, when he was a kid, he was like, I don't remember how old he was, he told his mum that he wanted to become World King.
That was his ambition.
You know, we're not all psychopathically ambitious like that, but we all want to be, we all want a bit more status all the time.
A bit more status, a bit more status.
And one of the studies that kind of made me smile was that one of the psychologists looked at money.
You know, money is a status symbol and how much money would make people satisfied.
And this psychologist surveyed people who were extremely rich, you know, millionaires and way beyond.
And consistently they all said between two and three times as much money and they'd be perfectly happy.
I mean, this idea that they're ever going to be perfectly happy, you know, is insane.
And you're right, you know, when money gets boring, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, you know, they want to go to space next because that's the next thing.
But I think the thing about that, you know, I'm a very left-wing person.
I've already been very left-wing person.
And this means I have this kind of bias against people like Jeff Bezos and these people, you know, I'm instinctively kind of repelled by them.
But what this book has taught me is that that's partly mistaken.
You know, because I think in other people's insane levels of status pursuit, you know, the rest of us do progress and the quality of life does get better and taxes do get paid.
Not enough taxes, I will grant you, but taxes do get paid and jobs do get created.
So, you know, we do need these psychopaths.
You know, these people who are so unbelievably obsessed with their own status that they will You know, go without sleep and, you know, food for their entire lives in order to win.
There's a lot I think about in terms of back during my studies of religion and anthropology, you know, the romanticization of tribes as if all tribes were egalitarian, that there was perfect harmony in these smaller groups.
And then, you know, as cities developed, things changed.
But you wrote that Even from research from modern hunter-gatherer tribes, there are ways of keeping people in check in the tribes in order of acquiring too much status.
So this does seem to be like this impulse toward status is biological.
It goes way back.
It's not just with the introduction of governments or large-scale governments.
Yeah, you know, that's a story that just won't die and it's a very tempting story, this idea that we were in, it was the Garden of Eden myth, that everything was perfect and then, you know, capitalism came along and everything went bad.
When researchers talk about the egalitarian nature of These small bands that we evolved out of, they're generally not, you know, apart from the ones that do kind of buy into that Garden of Eden story, they're not saying that these tribes are roughly equal because they don't want status and because they're all happy being equal and no one's shoving and pushing and they're all happy.
They're egalitarian because they care a hell of a lot about status and they are constantly checking each other to make sure that nobody Um, gets too big for their boots.
And, you know, when they do analysis of, say, gossip in hunter-gatherer, horticulturist tribes, the main subject is, you know, bad behavior by high status individuals, big shot behavior, people being pushy, people getting above their station, people showing off.
They're obsessively interested in status, just as we are.
The one thing I will say though is that of course capitalism and the modern age has radically kind of It has radically affected the way, our kind of levels of status anxiety.
So in that way, you know, you could say that's a negative because, you know, we've evolved to play small, to operate in small groups, small roughly egalitarian groups and keep each other in check.
So nobody actually gets too big.
There's no big, big man leader usually, you know, most often.
But now of course there is.
We live under leasers and we play huge enormous games.
That statistic that you said about the fact that most of the largest economies of the world are bloody corporations and not nations now.
That gives you this huge hint as to how big these games that we play are now.
And so we're not really designed to have enormously high status people loom over us like Redwoods.
That's not how we've We've evolved.
And so I think that's why you see quite so much resentment and ill feeling just generally at the moment because You know, we're designed to play relatively egalitarian games and not enormously, what's the word, steep games, unequal games.
You talked a little about the status symbols, but you also write about status signals, like the frequency of your voice when you're with groups, or I've read research before about pantomimes, where If you are with someone and they cross their arms, if you don't cross their arms, then there's less trust.
But if you immediately mimic them, it creates more trust.
How much of this is subconscious?
And from your research, do people who believe themselves to be higher status, do they consciously enact these things, like the changing of the frequency of their voice, or is all of this just happening under the surface and we don't really recognize it until research is done like this?
Well, it's subconscious.
It's extraordinary, the rapidity with which...
I mean, some neuroscientists, they describe the kind of neural wiring in our brains as being called a status detection system.
So we're constantly walking around measuring each other's status versus us, and we will use anything Any kind of sign and symbol of somebody else's status.
And one of the, you know, one of the just extraordinary studies that I wrote about in the book was that they showed people photographs of two different people wearing kind of what would be high status versus low status clothing.
And they immediately made judgments about their status about, you know, their, you know, bombing higher status and lower status, which is not surprising.
But then they were told specifically that they had the same job, had the same income.
But they still had the same immediate judgments of their high status and low status.
And then they were paid money, you know, and they still had high status versus low status.
And I think I'm right in remembering that this judgment was made in 0.29 milliseconds, or 29 milliseconds it might have been.
So enormously rapid.
So it's completely subconscious.
There are all these different ways that we use to measure somebody's relative status, and that's body language, tone of voice, the way we're carrying ourselves, the amount of successful interruptions in speech, volume of speech.
Some of these are completely biological.
I think the ones to do with status from dominance versus status from prestige are fully subconscious because we've been using dominance to play status games since before we were human, so millions of years.
Prestige is more recent.
But some of the others will be culturally conditioned.
If you grew up in China, you'll have a different way of measuring status than if you were brought up in the UK or the States.
Like here, somebody's kind of loud and individualistic.
We'll assume they're the highest status person.
But in China, you're more likely to think somebody kind of reserved and shy is the highest status person and they're not trying to grab all the attention.
So yeah, as most things are, it's a mix of culture and biology.
Speaking of culture, the culture I've been inside of in America has been the wellness and yoga community for a long time, not so much since the pandemic, but it was very much the circles I ran in.
And there's always been this fanciful notion that sounds good when you're in a group of like-minded people, which is not to judge anyone that we're all, you know, creatures of whatever deity is being talked about that day.
But then you get one-on-one with these people, and honestly, American yogis are some of the most judgmental people I've ever met.
Do you think that people, when they're in front of groups and they're speaking these illusions, illusory ideas, like don't ever judge anyone, which is biologically impossible for good reason, you can argue, do they really believe what they're saying or is that part of this status game?
They're just trying to put themselves up on a pedestal to make people fawn over them.
No, I think whenever there's doubt about this stuff, in my experience, Nine times out of 10, you should go for they really believe it.
They really believe it.
And I can't remember if I put the scene in the Unpersuadables.
I think I did.
But, you know, in the Amistrad was one of the chapters that I went to a 10-day silent retreat in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, Australia.
And it was Vipassana Yoga.
It was really hardcore.
Like I was a beginner.
I shouldn't have gone.
It was like 60 hours of meditation a day.
But these were four-hour sessions broken up with, you know, talks by this Brit, you know, really thin, you know, really this Brit Buddhist guy who was this, you know, he was kind of revered and worshipped by the group.
I don't know what his formal title was.
He would give these talks and people would listen.
It was a sauna retreat, so at the end of one of his talks, somebody went up and one of his team gave me this slip of paper requesting my presence in his office.
And it turned out that I'd mortally offended this man because, you know, I'm not very good at bending my limbs, not being practiced at yogi.
So I was sitting with the soles of my feet facing him.
And he was so offended by the fact that my soles of my feet were facing him that he thought it fit to kind of pull me out and really embarrass me.
I was really embarrassed, you know, by the whole thing.
But then I thought, Jesus Christ, you know, this is not enlightenment.
This is not destruction of the ego.
If you're so upset about seeing someone's feet, you know, it really gives a lie to it.
You know, this guy was so full of himself and so...
so full of his own importance and not only was he full of it, the people around him were full of it too.
All the people, all of the, you know, he was like a god to them.
And you just think, how are you not seeing the status dynamics here?
You know, they're so unbelievably evident.
When Vipassana came from Burma to the United States, it was originally the protocol was 49 days.
And the teachers were like, there's no way Americans are going to sit silently for 49 days.
Let's make a shorter version for the Western audience.
So don't feel bad about it.
I haven't even done a day of silence.
It was tough.
I've heard mixed results.
I mean, did you get benefits from it, though?
It was so weird.
I didn't.
I didn't.
And then on the last day, I kind of got so pissed off with the whole thing that I escaped.
I literally escaped after dark.
I walked through this forest and ate a pizza.
And then I came back and, you know, feeling much better.
The next day, it was, I had this amazing session of meditation where I, you know, it was like, I felt like I was coming up on a knee.
You know, it was, it was really quite extraordinary.
And of course I left, you know, the thing thinking, oh, my life has changed.
And it lasted about three days.
I tried to keep it up, but Jesus, meditating, I find it so difficult.
I find it, it's like torture for me.
I don't know why.
Oh, it's torture for everyone.
I mean, even years ago, I did a workshop with a woman, Sally Kempton, who had been in an ashram for almost 30 years meditating and came out.
And I remember someone asking her, you know, when you get to that place where there's complete silence and you're not thinking, like you're there, there's no thoughts, how long does it last?
And she laughed and goes, a second, two seconds?
It was just showing that I actually, from my experiences, very advanced meditators who really understand it have a humility around it because you don't stop thinking.
Meditation, and this is a long-standing argument which is kind of a sidetrack, but meditation and yoga are content-free.
When you're in that state of almost hypnotic trance, you can put any content into the people, your audience, and you can indoctrinate them.
That's how cults work.
So this idea that meditation often leads you to bliss, well then you come across this asshole who can't look at the bottom of your feet.
And then you realize that there is this cult of ego in everything.
So, I want to go back to the collective status for a moment because I really appreciate that you brought up That West and East, it's not such a clear line because that is true.
There's so much crossover in so many different ways and so many different cultural nuances wherever you go.
But you write when collective status is in decline, we become dangerously distressed.
And personally, I've been seeing all of what's happening around anti-vaxxers, anti-masks, whatever's happening.
And then we have climate change kind of looming over everything right now.
And that's something that's not being discussed.
Have you noticed similar patterns in the UK?
Yeah, I mean, climate change is discussed a lot, to be fair, in the UK.
And, you know, it does seem to be a cross-party issue now.
It wasn't when I was growing up.
It was very much a left-wing concern.
The righties have realised that this, you know, needs to be addressed.
So I don't think it's as partisan as it is in the US.
Of course, there are climate change kind of sceptics here too.
But yeah, it's interesting.
And it's interesting seeing, you know, my brother lives in Portland, Oregon.
And, you know, he's been talking to me about the anti-mask, anti-vax situation in the States.
It does, for whatever reason, seem to be a much bigger problem in the States than it does in the UK.
I mean, you know, we're so similar in so many ways.
And, you know, the UK too are going through a period of division and kind of culture war, for want of a better phrase.
But it does seem to be more pronounced in the US.
And I do wonder, you know, I do wonder about the kind of relative decline of, you know, the US is a much more kind of diverse nation than in the UK.
I mean, even on race, we're 85% white in the UK, which is, you know, we were overwhelmingly white.
So, you know, although we have our problems, The United States is this obviously unique nation which is basically made up of, you know, just a complete network of competing status games.
And I think what's happened over the last few decades is that there's become this equalization between what were dominant games and What used to be much more kind of, you know, the oppressed games, you might say.
So, you know, certain segments, especially the white working class, white middle class, you know, are going to experience that as a significant decline in status.
You know, and some of that decline is real.
It's not fantasy.
You know, they really are, especially with globalization, outsourcing of, you know, manufacturing and service industries to Asia.
Automation, you know, so some of this is real.
So yeah, I think a lot of this kind of cultural, societal discord that you see, underpinning it is groups feeling that the game isn't paying out as it used to, that the rewards are not there anymore.
And it isn't only in the U.S.
and the U.K.
that you see this.
It goes back all through history.
You write that the global luxury market is worth 1.2 trillion dollars, so you write a bit about conspicuous consumption.
Is there a point where that starts to change, or do we just run out the clock and people are just gathering as many resources as we have?
Well, I think the thing about conspicuous consumption which is kind of less well appreciated is that only people playing certain kinds of status games Seek luxury as a status symbol.
I know somebody in the wellness business who takes great pride in the fact that he drives a beaten up old car whose wing mirror is attached with masking tape.
And his beaten up old car is just as much a status symbol for him as these shiny Audis and BMWs that he's looking down his nose at.
It's just that he's playing a different game and his game uses different symbols to measure status.
He's very proud of the fact, I don't need that fucking car to make me feel good.
But he kind of does.
He needs a beaten up car to make him good.
You can't divorce yourself from the status game.
So that's the good thing about conspicuous consumption, is that norms can change.
And actually, you know, over here in the UK, of course, you know, we've got this history of aristocracy, you know, another group that has seen a great decline since the end of Empire and the Second World War.
But the aristos are still with us, you know, in their funny, you know, red trousers.
And they take great pride in, like my wellness friend, in driving beaten up old cars.
They'll rock up in a dirty old mud-strewn 1990s Land Rover and be very proud of it and actually look down their noses at people who have got the brand new Teslas.
And so, you know, status doesn't have to mean shiny, expensive and new.
It just depends on the game that we choose to play.
And I think, you know, since the 80s, as a Just as an observation, it does seem to me that we are now playing, you know, different games than we were in the 1980s.
You know, people are much more comfortable in using things like veganism, say, or social justice as a way of earning status and making themselves feel good about themselves than they are about, you know, taking cocaine in Wall Street or whatever it was.
When you can afford to live, when you don't actually have to worry about resources and money, I would believe that the games you play are going to be different than the games that people who can only afford the beat-up old car or not afford a car at all play.
But they're still playing games across all sectors, essentially, correct?
Yeah, definitely, yeah.
Yeah, so I mean, yeah, I mean, that's one of the kind of, again, one of the parts of this research that has genuinely made me see the world in a different way and certainly in a more empathetic way.
And that's that, you know, we are wired to join games and play them, to connect with groups who measure status in a certain way and play those games to get those status.
And you can't stop people doing that.
They're always going to do that.
And so what you see in lots of socio-economically deprived communities, you know, who don't have this great option of games to choose from, like we do, who have the benefits of education and, you know, financial resources, they often end up playing games in gangs or in Islamist groups, for example.
And, you know, young men, Much more likely, you know, from socioeconomically deprived backgrounds who are unemployed are far more likely to use violence to gain, to kind of force a sense of status of a people than anyone else at all.
So, you know, for me, I think that's a reason to have much more empathy for these young people that do end up joining extreme religions or cults or violent street gangs because Status is a fundamental human need, as fundamental as food and water, but, you know, it's a psychological need.
And if you're raised, you know, in the UK context, in a kind of tough housing estate in South London, and, you know, the only status games on offer are, well, schools are not going to count because your school is terrible, it's under-resourced and the teachers hate you.
You've got a local supermarket you can go and stack shelves in, or you've got a street gang that offers major status rewards.
All the high-status young people that you look up to are in the gang.
You're going to join the gang, and it's not about money.
It's about status.
It's about, I feel good about myself.
And actually, in a lot of these environments, The Islamist group or the street gang is offering the most status than any other game you might want to play.
And that's why people play those games.
And we're not going to, you know, get rid of the problems that gangs and Islamist groups, terrorist groups create until we start actually offering people from socioeconomically deprived backgrounds games to play that offer real status and aren't just, you know, just building a youth club or something, you know.
It's never going to work.
So you mentioned gangs, which is a group of like-minded people chasing a certain sense of status, but you also write about social rejection, and you say that social rejection was found in 87% of school shootings between 1995 and 2003.
And you also write that humiliation is the nuclear bomb of emotions.
When you get to that point where you have isolated individuals who don't find the gang, they don't find the like-minded, and they feel completely alone, then violence takes on a new measure.
How do you address that in the sort of society that we have where I don't want to romanticize groups, as I said, but at least if you're in a small group, the shame or rejection is all part of just keeping you in check as part of the group.
But now we exist in a space where people completely can exist outside of the groups.
Is there something we can do to address that?
Well, yeah, so, you know, in my research I wanted to, you know, one of the big questions for me when I was sort of thinking about this was, okay, so, you know, it's one of the tests really, the very early stages of the research was, if status is so bloody important, then there must be some literature on what happens when we It's taken away, it must be pretty bad.
And yeah, and there isn't a huge literature on humiliation, but yeah, so that line, the nuclear bomb of the emotions to be, yeah, I need to make it clear that I didn't come up with that, that's an academic that I quoted.
But that's what they say, you know, and they define humiliation as, it's not only the removal of all your status, but it's the removal of the capacity to gain status for basically forever.
You know, you're so removed from status, you're essentially kicked out of the game.
Jeffrey Epstein, for example.
You can see what happened to him as a humiliation, and that's why I'm as convinced as I can be.
I wasn't surprised at all when he committed suicide.
I just don't buy the conspiracy theories, because he was in a position perfectly designed to lead to suicidal ideation.
And so what I think is that we need to pay more attention to status as a fundamental human need.
We need to stop looking down our nose at it as something that only shallow people pursue.
We all pursue it.
But we also need to be very careful about this state of humiliation because it really does tie together.
If you can think of any of the most noxious forms of human behavior, you know, in the book I talk in detail about kind of the incels really, you know, these men who feel Narcissistically entitled to female sexual attention and yet fail to get it and experience that as a humiliation.
It kind of curdles into this kind of grotesque misogyny.
Specifically, I tell the story of this guy, Elliot Rogers, who left behind an extraordinary autobiography in which he was devastatingly honest about his life and his life's failures.
But also honor killings.
Honor killings happen when the family who are playing what you might call a fundamentalist religious game feel humiliated by a son or a daughter who might happen to be gay or might happen to have had premarital sex, for example.
And the only way they can restore their pride, their status, is by killing that person.
You know, conservative estimates there are around 5,000 honor killings a year.
You know, some estimates go way higher than that.
And, you know, finally, everything up to genocide.
You know, genocides tend to happen when the status of rival groups change.
And, you know, of course, the Holocaust is the genocide that We think of the first comes to mind and that happened following the, you know, the humiliations of the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles in Germany.
This, you know, incredibly successful, incredibly proud, high status nation was humiliated again and again and again.
And just like the incel, just like Elliot Rogers weaves a story blaming women for his downfall and that told him that kind of violent revenge on women was the just thing to do.
Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Germans told exactly the same story, which led to the Holocaust.
So, you know, to understand the importance of status is to understand the absolute peril, the danger of humiliating people and humiliating groups.
So I think we do well as a society and as a culture to start being very, very careful about humiliating other people, no matter how we feel about them.
I mean, you see this in social media.
So much of the conflict on social media comes about because it's public.
And when somebody attacks you on social media, it's humiliation.
You're being humiliated in front of all of your followers.
So that triggers people to just escalate aggression more and more and more.
You brought up two things there as I get towards the bottom of my list of questions, which is the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and social media.
Because I think about the neighborhood I live in Los Angeles is called Palms.
It's nice.
It's a decent neighborhood.
It's a lot of apartments.
There's crime.
It's fine.
It's not a nice area.
But even here, the average price of an apartment is $800,000 to $900,000.
And I recently read that if, from the 1980s, if housing prices kept track with wages, the average price of a house in the US would be $61,000.
So we obviously have a serious economic problem, and you write that far more effective than racial hatred.
was the promise of future status, referring to Nazi Germany, and that is well studied with Hitler.
You know, as terrible as it was for the German people, there is a list of, which you write about, of positive benefits he brought to the Germans in terms of the culture, the cultural outreach programs you talk about.
So there was this idea that has long existed in America that You can get that house with a picket fence and all of that.
But right now, it seems to have reversed because we have a president who is championing a brighter future, but it seems like a large part of the population just isn't buying it, both on the right and left, but predominantly the right.
But his message seems to really be falling flat right now.
Have you noticed that in the UK?
What's being promoted?
Is there a brighter future that we're looking at?
Well, I think you've got to separate the promotion from the reality.
This is one of the parts of the book I was most nervous about writing, because the reality is, and you don't ever hear this story for reasons that are going to become rapidly obvious, is that Hitler genuinely did bring status to Germany.
We have this kind of almost magic belief that he was a monster.
But Hitler wasn't a monster, he was a person.
And the Germans in the 1930s weren't monsters either, they were people with human brains.
And so Hitler came about promising, like Joe Biden, like Donald Trump, like Boris Johnson, promising that things were going to become better under his leadership.
And the fact is they did become better under his leadership.
By the end of the 30s, they'd gone from being in a state of absolute chaos to almost full employment.
They had loan schemes that so many people benefited from.
They put on operas.
They gave people free holidays.
There's just a huge list in the book of actual things that actually happened in the world that led Germans to believe that their national honour was being restored.
And one of the big surprises for me, I don't know how well known it is, but being brought up in Britain and being taught endlessly about the Second World War, The story that we get told is really, because it was so horrific, it's really mostly about the Holocaust.
And so you imagine that Hitler was there all through the 30s, ranting about the Jews in those speeches.
But actually, he was ranting about restoring Germany.
In the 20s, he was doing that.
Once he got into power, he dialed all that down because it didn't really go that well with the middle classes.
He was much more interested in restoring Germany's status.
And he did it.
And not only did he do it, but with these, you know, with these kind of various kind of schemes, you know, it was it was technological advances like the motorways.
The Nazis were the first government to definitively link lung cancer to smoking.
So, you know, they had all these amazing health and safety advances.
But also he undid the kind of humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles.
He just stood up to the European powers and took the land back and met no resistance.
So he had the message, but he also had the results.
And to me, when you think about those scenes of Germans, the famous scenes of Germans in hundreds of thousands flooding the streets and squares, completely going bananas at Hitler, you think, what happened?
They were all mad.
But that's the power of status.
You know, he promised them more status, he delivered it too.
And what you're seeing at the moment is people promising future status, but they're not delivering it.
Donald Trump said he was going to make America great again.
He didn't do that.
Joe Biden is full of promises, but he's not done anything practical to restore anyone's sense of status, as far as I can see.
It's quite interesting at the moment, we had a very rare moment of national pride with the vaccine rolled out in the UK.
For a vanishingly short period of time, we were with Israel as kind of world leaders in getting vaccinated.
And it was quite interesting to feel, even me, I'm one of these terrible lefties that sees a Union Jack and immediately thinks, racist, you know, that's my prejudice.
I'm not nationalistic at all, but even I felt proud.
I was like, oh, that's amazing.
You know, we're like, you know, world leaders and you feel it.
I felt it too.
And everybody I know felt it.
We were quite pleased with ourselves until They started going wrong again.
And that was a rare instance of somebody promising that things were going to be better after we left the European Union.
And actually, for a while it was.
If we'd have been with the European Union, we'd have been unvaccinated for a few months.
And I think they've overtaken us now, Germany again, typically.
So in order for this stuff to work, you can't just tell the story.
You actually have to make it happen.
And when you do, When you make it happen, people will love you, and they will support you, and they will become fanatical about you.
Sorry, there's a lot of ways I can go with that thinking about American politics, but I don't want to get into that.
I want to close on a good note, because as I'm reading the book, in the beginning, there are a lot of books that are written that you can tell from early on that they're prescriptive books.
And reading your entire book, I did not feel this was a social psychology book, a very insightful book about who we are as social animals.
But at the end, you actually offer prescription and it was really well done, which made me happy because you're very honest about it.
You're not offering this, oh, do this and everything's going to be great, which is such a publishing trend in America, especially.
Well, my publishers definitely wanted that book.
Yeah, I can tell you they wanted that book.
They wanted to call it the status game on social position and how to use it, but I had to say no, that's not the book I've written.
Because you're like, we're not going to think ourselves out of status, it's part of who we are.
At least if you recognize it, you can take some steps at mitigating the damaging effects, such as originality makes it difficult for rivals to catch you, which I thought was awesome.
So talk to me a little bit about the prescriptive elements of what you can do, knowing how dangerous that status can be, but also that it's just part of us.
What can we do to make things perhaps better as a society, knowing that this is who we are as animals?
Yeah, so I think the first thing is to accept it and understand how you, you know, the games that you're playing.
I can tell you that, you know, my wife always talks about one takeaway from the book, which is that you're not competing with everybody else in the world.
You're playing a local game with people immediately around you.
And, you know, she's a magazine editor, so she lives in a very competitive, she works in a very competitive world in fashion.
You know, she edits Elle magazine in the UK.
And she said that's just been really helpful to her, just to realize that all these people that she was feeling kind of jealous of and feeling like she was competing with, she's shut down most of those now.
Because, well, I'm not competing with that person.
That's an author.
I'm not competing.
So I think understanding that you're not competing with Michelle Obama or the King of Thailand, you know, understanding you're playing a local game is really useful.
And I think once you've done that, it's about playing a hierarchy of games.
So the first thing is you want to play multiple games, because if you only play one game, that's the definition of a cult.
What makes a cult a cult is that it has to be your sole source of status.
That group and its rules and symbols and its game.
They don't even allow you to...
That's why they want you to cut off even your family, your friends.
Everything is for the cult.
So that's the one game.
Fundamentalist religions are kind of similar.
Extremist political movements are similar.
They're very conformist and you don't really want to play those games because they're tyrannies.
When they become really tight and conformist, they're a tyrannical group and that's not good for you and it's not good for the people around you because you're going to start trying to co-opt them into your group.
In a dominant way.
So you want to play lots of games.
And that's partly for your own psychological health, because if I'm just playing the author game, and say I got cancelled tomorrow for saying Hitler did some things that were successful, and I couldn't publish anymore.
I'd be in serious psychological trouble, and actually I probably would be because I should play more games than I do.
But if you play multiple other games then you're kind of hedging against the loss of status in one domain.
But that's not to say that you need to play lots of games equally.
Because in order to really gain status in any group, in any game, you need to actually devote some time and thought and attention to it.
It's hard work to gain status in a group.
So that's why I say you should play a hierarchy of games.
Ideally, you should have a number of games that you're playing.
Not too many, but not too few.
And they should be in a hierarchy.
There should be one main game that you're playing.
I mean, you know, Derek, you've got the podcast, but obviously you're into wellness, you're into meditating, so that's another game.
So you're hedging, you've got these different identities, and your kind of psychological health isn't dependent on just one of those identities.
So that's a very healthy way, psychologically, of going about your life.
Export Selection