← 10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Happier with Dan Harris
Status: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How To Get It Without Driving Yourself Crazy | Will Storr
01:07:03
Plus more surprising information on this fundamental human drive. is a multi award-winning writer and Sunday Times bestselling author. His latest book is . Waking Up, a top-notch meditation app with amazing teachers and a ton of courses...
Loading summary
Transcript132 lines
- [00:00]
Will Storr
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Dan Harris
This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
- [00:18]
Will Storr
Hey gang.
- [00:19]
Dan Harris
It might be tempting to think of status as something that only 8th graders are obsessed with, but status is a fundamental human drive that permeates all aspects of life, and it's really not something any of us can afford to ignore. And just to say, status has become increasingly salient in our lives because of social media, where we're actively encouraged to count our likes and followers. There are real psychological and physiological implications here. High status often correlates with greater access to resources, better healthcare, reduced stress, and lower risk of chronic diseases. Conversely, low status can increase stress, anxiety, and susceptibility to health problems. So it's a big issue, and today we're going to talk about what exactly status is, why it matters, and how to get it without driving yourself nuts. My guest is Will Storr, the author of six critically acclaimed books. This interview focuses on two of his books. We'll spend a lot of time talking about his book the Status Game, but we will start with his latest book, which is called A Story Is a Deal, which is all about another fundamental human drive, narrative and how to use narrative or storytelling to your advantage, both at work and in your personal life. So this is a fascinating and varied conversation. We hit the key elements of a properly deployed story, the different ways to measure status, the three main ways humans compete for status, the benefits of altruism as a source of status, which I found very interesting, the balance between self interest and altruism, how mindfulness factors into the status drive, and how to manage your relationship with social media. Just to say, I discovered Will Storr as a result of his appearance on the Waking up app, which is run by my friend Sam Harris.
- [02:08]
Sam Harris
I heartily recommend Waking up and you.
- [02:11]
Dan Harris
Can sign up for the app@wakingup.com 10% that's T E N P E R C e n t wakingup.com 10% I will put a link in the show Notes just so you know, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you will get a 30 day free trial.
- [02:28]
Sam Harris
And you will be supporting me and my team as well because we will.
- [02:32]
Dan Harris
Get a portion of the proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say, if money's an issue, Sam offers scholarships.
- [02:41]
Sam Harris
That's the same policy that I have.
- [02:43]
Dan Harris
Over on danharris.com if you can't afford it, we'll give it to you. Will store coming up right after this.
- [02:49]
Sam Harris
It's a home improvement season and Wayfair is the best kept secret for all things renovation. Whether you're making a little update like new kitchen cabinet hardware or doing a full renovation, Wayfair has stylish and quality home improvement products for every budget. I've actually only recently been turned on to Wayfair and I'm excited to make some purchases. I've been scrolling through their website and in particular I'm interested in these outdoor fire pits that they have. We do a lot of outdoor entertaining at this time of year, so I'm interested in fire pits and also they've got other ways to heat outdoor spaces.
- [03:26]
Dan Harris
And light outdoor spaces.
- [03:28]
Sam Harris
The products look great, so I'm going to be doing a pretty deep dive into this aspect of Wayfair repertoire. But they have lots of stuff stuff for your bathroom vanities, vanity lights, mirrors, toilets and tubs. They've got kitchen stuff, floor and wall tile, pendant lighting hardware, sinks and faucets. They've got storage and organization stuff which my wife loves.
- [03:49]
Dan Harris
I'm excited to have her take a.
- [03:50]
Sam Harris
Look at this and Wayfair makes it super easy to tackle your spring home goals. Free and easy delivery even on the big stuff. Find all your home improvement must haves from flooring to light fixtures to faucets to hardware all in one convenient place. Shop the best selection of home improvement online. Get renovating with wayfair. Head to wayfair.com right now. That's W A Y-F-A-I-R.com wayfair every style, every Home I have spent more time than I care to admit obsessing about my hairline. I wrote about it in somewhat excruciating detail in my first book, 10% happier. The good news is, since I wrote that book, the technology for protecting your hair has gotten way better. An example is a new product called the Irestore Elite. You can say goodbye to thinning hair and hello to fuller, healthier locs. The iRestore Elite is clinically proven to regrow hair using 300 lasers and 200 LEDs that send light therapy directly to your scalp. You could just pop it on while catching up on your favorite shows or even while you relax with a good book. Irestore commissioned a four month double blind clinical study performed by a board certified dermatologist and laser surgeon and nearly all the participants saw an increase in hair growth with Irestore's laser and LED technology. And the best part of Irestore is that they offer a 12 month money back guarantee so you can try it with no real risk if your hair doesn't make a glorious return. You get a full refund. No awkward questions. Just fabulous hair, they say, or your money back minus a restocking fee. Give yourself the gift of hair confidence. This spring, for a limited time only, our listeners are getting a huge discount on the Irestore Elite when you use code happier@irestore.com head over to irestore.com and use happier for our show's exclusive discounts on the Irestore Elite. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Hair loss can be frustrating and anxiety provoking. You do not have to fight it alone. Thanks to Irestore.
- [05:56]
Dan Harris
Will Storr, welcome to the show.
- [05:58]
Will Storr
Thanks for having me, Dan.
- [05:59]
Dan Harris
It's a pleasure. As I was saying to you before we started rolling here, that I want to talk about your. Your new book on narrative and how we evolved for stories and how we can harness that in our business life and elsewhere. And you also have written in a very compelling way about the issue of status. And there's going to be some overlap in these two conversations. We'll start with narrative and then move to status. You copacetic?
- [06:22]
Will Storr
Yeah, perfect. That sounds great.
- [06:24]
Dan Harris
Awesome. So in your new book, you. You make this case that storytelling is, like, hardwired into us as a species. Can you say more about that?
- [06:34]
Will Storr
Yeah. So. So our brains are literally, you know, we're storytellers. We humans are the only animal that experiences their lives as story in, like, narrative form. So beginning, middle, and end, we fantasize about happy endings in the future. We ruminate about things we've done in the past. We experience other people as heroes, villains, allies, Judases, you know, so we're constantly living in this story world, and we're constantly at the center of this kind of unfolding narrative.
- [07:01]
Dan Harris
And why was that important from an evolutionary standpoint?
- [07:06]
Will Storr
Well, story does something quite magical, really. What story allows us to do is kind of fuse individual brains together. So everybody's thinking in the same way. And that, I argue, is the original purpose of story. So, you know, humans are an ape. We're not like an ape. We are an ape, but unlike all the other apes, we rely on each other to survive. So other apes live in troops, but they hunt individually and they behave individually, whereas we absolutely rely on each other to survive. So we're kind of like an ape, but we're kind of like an ant as well. We're kind of this weird hybrid species. So how do you do that? How do you achieve that if you're Captain Evolution? Yeah, you invent story and what story does is it takes over an individual brain, takes over over lots of individual brains and wires them together. So everybody understands the world in the same way. Everybody's focused towards the same ultimate goal, everybody has the same values. So that's what story's doing. It's fusing human brains together into one.
- [08:05]
Dan Harris
Yeah, this is maybe a digression, but did you ever read the Overstory?
- [08:11]
Will Storr
No.
- [08:12]
Dan Harris
Richard Powers is brilliant novelist. He wrote this book called the Overstory, won a Pilcher Prize. I'm. I'm reading his newest book right now, which is called Playground, the Overstory. It shouldn't have worked because it's a book about trees, but actually it's about our relationship to trees in, in a larger sense, our relationship to nature. This new book, Playground's about our relationship to the oceans, where there's a moment in the overstory where Powers is describing one of his characters. Hopefully I'm not mangling this, but one of the characters is, is a kid and he's studying ants and looking at how they move in synchrony and then thinking about how the humans are fucked because we really can't do that in some way. And he has this image of an out of order sign hung on off the phallus of a human. This is why we can't get it together on climate or anything else. But as I listen to you, I'm thinking, actually if we could all tell ourselves the right story about our future, well, we actually could collaborate on these seemingly intractable but also existential issues facing the species, like climate, like AI, like nukes. Like I said, that was a digression, but I say it to see if you have any reaction.
- [09:24]
Will Storr
Yeah, that's absolutely right. But I think the important thing is telling the right kind of story. And there are right and wrong ways of telling stories that motivate people and persuade people. And often, especially on the left, for some reason, the left are just not quite as good as telling stories. In my kind of experience as the right, the right seems to have an instinct for this, that the left, the left tend to go to data and facts a lot more. That stuff kind of fails to inspire. The left also sometimes falls into the trap of telling an overly kind of negative story. So, for example, I mean, one of the things that I sort of experienced myself over the last few years, over the rise of identity politics that's taken over the UK and America, is that of course people with a deep interest in identity politics are very interested in making everybody more anti racist and making that Kind of a dominant sort of motivation in their daily lives. And how a lot of people involved in identity politics do that is by telling a very negative story about how awful we are and how terrible things are for people. And I'm not saying that any of that isn't true. It's all true. It's a true story, but it's not a story that motivates. And the story that you never hear in the uk, for example, is that, well, you know, the UK have an incredible history of anti racism. We, you know, we were the first people in the world to outlaw slavery. We spent 70 years in the high seas spending fortunes, sacrificing blood to police the high seas, to abolish the slave ships. We were pivotal in fighting the fascists of the Second World War. So we have anti racism in our blood, in our culture. And that's the story that would motivate people in Britain to become more interested in fighting racism. But you never hear that story. You just don't ever hear it. They never tell it. And in fact, there was a campaign to erect a statue in one of the coastal towns in memory of the young men that died fighting slavery. And they were refused permission to erect this statue. For me, it's this failure of understanding story. You know, people want to be told a positive, optimistic story, a story that makes them feel, gives them status. And so the story I was describing is one that says that kind of implants this idea of anti racism in British culture, you know, and to say as well, stories are never fully true.
- [11:31]
Tara Anderson
Stories are always.
- [11:32]
Will Storr
Of course, the reality is way more complex than that, especially in Britain with our colonial history. But if you want to, if you want to motivate people, if you want to make people fold anti racism into their identity and to make it a core part of who they are, you've got to tell them a positive story. And saying, this is already who you are and value it, treasure it, make that a source of status. The fact that we fought the slavers, the fact that we fought in the Second World War and we, you know, we helped destroy Hitler, the world's biggest ever, you know, most monstrous ever fascist. But yeah, so it's that, you know, people still don't really understand how to deploy storytelling in the right way, that you have to tell a positive story, a story that, you know, my book is called A Story is a Deal. A story has to make a deal with you. You know, the deal often is for status. And so if you accept my story, the reward for you is connection or Status, usually.
- [12:22]
Dan Harris
So we've already gotten the status. Or as you would say, status.
- [12:25]
Will Storr
Yeah, sorry.
- [12:28]
Dan Harris
You'Re probably saying it correctly. So we've already gotten there. So. But what do you mean by status or status in this context? And yeah, what do you mean when.
- [12:38]
Will Storr
You talk about status? People often jump to things like, you know, the Kardashians and celebrity culture and billionaires and. And the idea that people at. The pursuit of status is the pursuit of celebrity and fortunes. And it isn't that the status is simply that the sense that you are of value somehow to other people. Humans have two great psychological desires that really control our. So much of our experience, our everyday life. One of those is belongingness. We want to feel loved and. And belonging. So. So with friends, with lovers, with family, of course, we want to feel accepted, and we are accepted and acceptable. But as well as that, we want to feel of value. You know, we want to feel like we're offering something back to other people. So we want to be respected. And that's the status part of it. So. So that's another great drive, you know, and you can think of it when, you know, universally, when feel rejected, they feel terrible. A human being, it's the opposite of connection. And the same way if people feel disrespected, they're made to feel worthless and valueless. That's also a universally negative experience for human beings. So that kind of speaks to our constant desire and a constant interest in those two things of connection and status.
- [13:47]
Dan Harris
It strikes me that these fundamental human drives for connection, for status, and frankly, for storytelling can all be harnessed or deployed for good and very dangerously for ill.
- [14:04]
Will Storr
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely true. You can see in the history that's unfolding around us at the moment and the history that we look back on is that story is incredibly seductive. Story is how we understand the world. Story is how we think. Story is how we understand who we are and what we should be doing and where we should be going. So if somebody comes along and tells a really compelling story and a story that offers us status and offers us connection, we'll always be vulnerable to believing it. The brain's far more interested in the story that we're telling about ourselves than it is in understanding the truth. We're not wired for truth. We're wired for story.
- [14:42]
Dan Harris
Well, we will come back to status in a much deeper way in the later portions of this conversation. Given that it is a huge part of our makeup. How do we live with this drive? How do we manage our Desire for status without driving ourselves crazy. And you have a lot of interesting thoughts about that. But let's stay with storytelling, because as you said earlier, in a business context and in many other contexts, if you do it the right way, you can have really powerful impacts by telling a story. And so I'd be curious to get, you know, tactical, like, what are the elements of a properly deployed story? And one of the practical tips, and you can tell me if this is the wrong place to start, but one of the practical tips in your book is to identify what is the primary motivator of the audience you are speaking to.
- [15:30]
Will Storr
Yeah, absolutely. It's really all about understanding your. Your audience and understanding the story that they tell about themselves and that they tell about the world. You know, what are the things that they value? One thing that all storytellers are always trying to do, whether they're writing a Hollywood movie script or a novel or whether they're crafting a advertising campaign, is this feeling of identification. So that feeling that when the audience is experiencing your story, they identify with it. They think, well, yeah, I understand that. I understand that person that I'm seeing. And then once they've identified with your character, with your story that they're kind of in, they've connected to it. And so that's the first really important thing. Once you've identified with the story, with a character in a story, with a message in a story, you experience that feeling of connection, which is one of the gifts of storytelling. And then, of course, the other thing is status. You could tell a story about how people like us in this story can make ourselves feel more valued and more valuable. And that's also extremely seductive.
- [16:27]
Dan Harris
In terms of the connection piece. One of the concepts you talk about is the importance of having a protagonist who is, and you use this term, a relatable underdog.
- [16:39]
Will Storr
Yeah. I mean, underdog is such, for me, a fascinating kind of concept because, of course, you know, there's huge psychological diversity as you go around the world. Everybody's very different in lots and lots of ways. But if there's one thing that people kind of share, unless you're suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, perhaps, is the sense that you're an underdog. The sense that, you know, you've got these great goals, you've got these meaningful things that you want to achieve, but it's hard and you're struggling, and, you know, you're the underdog. And it's interesting when you hear kind of billionaires and politicians speak, even the most powerful people in the world tend to feel like underdogs. And in terms of their kind of personal experience, they often are. They often are facing incredible threats, incredible challenges. I mean, you know, life is struggle against obstacles. That's a description of not just human life, but all life. So there's a sense in which we are all always feeling like an underdog. And I think that's why underdogs are so relatable. Showing an underdog in a story is a really great shortcut to identification. When we see an underdog, when we see somebody struggling against odds, we automatically feel a kinship with that character. It's very seductive. I mean, the book I write about, I think it was Disney. They were designing these skating rabbit robot for Disney parks, and they had a problem that the skating rabbit robot was. Felt inhuman somehow. And so what they did was they programmed it to struggle a bit on its skates. It fell over on its skates, and it got up, managed to skate. And by adding this moment of vulnerability, this kind of underdog moment of struggling against an obstacle, suddenly people loved the skating rabbit. They identified with it. It became relatable.
- [18:17]
Dan Harris
Honestly, the pause here is because I'm thinking about. I'm many years into writing my next book, which is a memoir, and so I'm thinking, like, I'm going to steal some of these ideas, do it for people listening at home who want to steal some of these ideas and apply it to their lives, specifically as it relates to the relatable underdog. You know, if you're pitching a business or if you're trying to rally the troops in an existing business or in your family, in whatever context you're in to tell the story, either of, hey, get on my side. See things the way I see it, because I'm going to tell you about me and my struggles, or make it a collective, hey, we are the. Are the underdog. Here are the struggles we're facing against. Let's do it together. Am I articulating this correctly?
- [19:04]
Will Storr
Yeah, that's absolutely correct. You know, as I say, like, the great challenge of all storytellers is creating that sense of identification with the character in the story or even the brand that you're trying to promote. And telling a story in which you present as an underdog is. Is automatically relatable. People just tend to prefer they feel connected to underdogs because that's their experience of life. So, yeah, that's absolutely correct.
- [19:28]
Dan Harris
The other thing you talk about in terms of telling a story in a powerful way is the importance of emotion. Can you Say more about that.
- [19:37]
Will Storr
So we've been emotional creatures for far longer than we have been storytelling creatures. You know, we've had emotions and feeling systems for millions of years, since before we were human. So we still really are guided by our emotions. You know, we are feeling creatures that think, I think Antonio Damocio, they Italian neuroscientists said that. And what. So story works really by manipulating emotions or making you feel something. So story is this kind of interface that sits on top of our emotions. And you can experience that most obviously at a cinema, you know, or a theater where everybody goes into the cinema in the midst of their own lived experience of story, their own life. If it's a good film, if it's identifiable and they get sucked into it, then their experience of their own story shuts off and they become, they experience the story that they're being shared on the screen all at one. Their brains fused together and importantly, they feel those feelings. They feel elated when the protagonist has a win. They feel terrified when the protagonist is in danger. If the story has a happy ending and everything comes nice at the end, they feel wonderful and fantastic and they leave the cinema all feeling connected and all feeling sort of, you know, buzzing with happiness together. So that's another way that stories are fusing brains together. They're making people feel the same things. And that's really the core of the power of story, is that it manipulate and alter people's emotions.
- [20:57]
Dan Harris
You cite some data that if the story has emotion, it can lead to better recall and stronger influence.
- [21:05]
Will Storr
Yeah, that's right, yes. So I think there was a BBC study that they did with some neuroscientists that looked at the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. It was a cross cultural study too. So it was people in the west, people in Asia and I think people in South America, if I remember correctly. And they found that the, the advertisements that were best recalled were the ones that were most emotional. So regular emotional peaks in the story that they were telling implanted the message of the advert in their mind successfully. Didn't really matter what the emotion was, was the surprising result. It was just as long as it was emotional, they would remember it. So that's, that's why you get a lot of adverts that they just seem to be there to make you laugh, make you smile, make you feel a bit weepy. They're just doing that thing of, of making you feel an emotion and then putting their logo on that emotion. And then mostly what marketing is, is a war for memory. When you're in the, in the convenience. When you 711 and you're in front of the wall of fridges deciding what a drink to get on a hot summer's day, they want their drink to be the first drink that pops into your mind. So they're all fighting this war for memory. And that's why a lot of advertising is just simply the repetition of logos. That's why they fight for shelf space, eye level, because they want to buy, you know, brutal repetition, just get that logo into your head. And a really effective way of doing that is by telling emotional stories in form of advertising, because it using that, that emotion implants that logo, that, that kind of brand identity into your mind.
- [22:28]
Dan Harris
Are there other practical techniques for deploying or harnessing the power of storytelling that are worth talking about before we get to status?
- [22:41]
Will Storr
Yeah, I think there are a few sort of basic principles. One of the most important principles, especially for marketeers, is simplicity. Absolute simplicity is really crucial when you're trying to tell persuasive stories. And that's important whether you're making an advert or whether you're leading a team. One of the stories that I tell in a story as a deal is NASA. Before JFK came up with the idea of NASA's one goal to be to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. I think something like that. They had six or seven various goals and then that became their one goal. And an academic did a really amazing study looking at the internal culture of NASA and found it became transformed when they had that one simple goal that you could visualize. You could imagine a man walking on the moon to visualize. It's also very important that everybody, including the person cleaning the toilets, the secretaries at the front desk, all became highly motivated because they all felt part of this story. We've got this collective mission. We're going to put a man on the moon. So that absolute simplicity, that sense that you can visualize the end goal. So Bill Gates, famously, his early ambition was to have a computer on the desk of every office. That's a goal that you can visualize. So that's a really great story that can rally the troops, that can motivate people. Very simple. It's one thing and you can visualize it. So that's what's really essential for leaders, I think, to have that commitment to absolute simplicity in the stories that they tell. And again, they're all optimistic, they're all positive. They're not beating people around the head with bad news, saying you must do better It's a vision of an incredible future that is simple and easy to see.
- [24:23]
Dan Harris
I'm taking notes for. I just started a company a couple months ago, so I'm really taking notes about how I can inspire better or. Well, I'm tempted to go back to status, but I don't want to do that without checking in with you to. To make sure that there isn't something more you. You feel needs to be said on. On the power of story.
- [24:44]
Will Storr
No, honestly, Dan, I could go on for hours about story. So. So, yeah, honestly, it's. I think it's good. I think we covered some good ground there. Thank you.
- [24:51]
Dan Harris
Awesome. Let's just go back to this issue of status. As we go back to it, remind me again what it is in a few words. What is status?
- [25:00]
Will Storr
So status is just this feeling that you are of value to other people, that you're offering value to the human group, to the collective.
- [25:07]
Dan Harris
Thank you for the refresher. And one of the things you talk about is that we have this kind of status detection system. What does that mean?
- [25:16]
Will Storr
So psychologists, neuroscientists, talk about this idea that we have this status detection system, this always on bit of technology that's constantly assessing where our relative status is in any social situation that we might be in. So it's constantly looking for how people are treating us in a million different ways, how close they're standing to us, the amount of eye contact they're giving us, how much they're letting us speak. That's a big one. You know, all the ways that we can measure status, it never ends. In one study, they found that they gave lots of people glasses of orange juice, and one person got less orange juice than everybody else. And of course, that person got very upset and started ruminating, why have I not got this orange juice? You know, that, you know. So the orange juice becomes a measure of relative status. So that's a status detection system. You know, you can go into an elevator in a hotel and you're immediately, unconsciously, often. Who's got the posh luggage? Who's going to the suites on the top floor? Who's the janitor? You know, you can't go anywhere as a human being without your brain automatically judging where you sit and where everybody else sits. And that's the beginning of every hierarchy, every caste system, every class system. It all comes from this stuff in our brains. It's why you can never eradicate it. It's why communism was such a hopeless project, because you can't scrape this stuff from the Human brain, because it's been in the brain since before we were human.
- [26:32]
Dan Harris
Well, there's the macro question of how do we deal with this from a societal level. We can get to that if you want, but for me, I'm much more interested in this show, in helping individuals do their lives better. And so as I listen to you talk about this, always on technology, the status detection system, which of course I like everybody else relate to, it does seem like an organ in our brain or in our body whose job solely is to secrete suffering.
- [27:01]
Will Storr
No. Well, yes, it's not. That's not, that's what you think, isn't it? And you know, like, I think we're, we are very attuned to the suffering that that inevitably brings, but it also means moments of great pleasure. You know, I think status is just as good as it is bad. Like, equally like some of our most important moments in life are when we achieve something, when we get a great exam result, when we get the job that we wanted, when we publish the book or, you know, you've just launched a business when the business becomes successful. Let's not shit on these moments. I think they're really important. And I had an experience over Christmas where a very close friend of mine who's a writer was going through a hard time and you know, he'd read the book and liked it and he was, you know, he was talking about how he was sort of concerned about his, how his writing was going and, and he said, oh, it's just stupid, it's just ego. And I had to say to him, there is no just ego. I think that's part of the problem that we have in our culture is that we're very influenced by these eastern ideas that the ego is bad. And maybe it comes from Freud as well. I don't know. The ego is bad that we should, we should resist ego. But I think that's very, very dangerous. That's very damaging when we disregard the importance of status to people. I mean, as you no doubt know, down in the UK in USA and elsewhere, the people who are most highly at risk from suicide are middle aged men. And a lot of that is because middle aged men, a lot of their status come from their roles in life, from their job, from, you know, am I a provider and a protector to my family? How do I look? Am I, you know, and in middle age we hit our limits. Perhaps our marriage isn't as good as it used to be. Perhaps we stop being promoted. This stuff causes real pain. It really matters. And I think it's a real problem when we say, oh, it's just ego. It shouldn't really matter. It's, you know, it's just silly. It isn't silly. Status is a fundamental human need and it matters. And so I think we should be much more compassionate to ourselves and to other people when they start feeling that inevitable suffering that comes along, when they feel, for whatever reason, that their status is under threat or is in decline.
- [29:02]
Dan Harris
I definitely will never argue against compassion. And is there not a kernel of wisdom in the. It's just ego. Like, what is really important for that writer who's struggling? Is it having a bestseller and getting the accolades, or is it creating something beautiful that is helpful no matter how it's received?
- [29:23]
Will Storr
Well, exactly. So there are lots of different ways that you can measure your status. And I'm not going to mention his name, but he really doesn't need any more status. He's very successful. Yeah. So there's lots of different ways you can measure status. And perhaps your latest thing isn't as successful as you might want it to be, but you're still moving people. You're still giving people great pleasure. And I think, for me, the kernel of truth. So A, there's lots of different ways you can measure your status. You don't have to be fixated on the one metric that you're not doing so well in. I think that's a great piece of advice. The other thing is, I do think there's wisdom in trying to reduce the ego pain. I'm not saying that there is a wisdom in that, because of course there is. So I do think that matters. And if mindfulness helps you do that, then you go for it. I think the danger is in that we have this very powerful cultural idea that the status shouldn't matter and it's just ego. And when we feel bad, we fail is in itself a failure. And that's just not true. You know, that's just not true.
- [30:23]
Dan Harris
So maybe a better phrase, and this is clunkier than it's just ego is. You know what I'm concerned about the status implications of whatever I'm worrying about. But perhaps I'm looking for status in the wrong place.
- [30:40]
Will Storr
Yeah, exactly. Or measuring my status in the wrong way. I mean, one of the things that happens quite naturally to people as they get into later middle age is that we tend to shift from pursuing our own status to becoming more of a teacher role, like sort of a grand intellectual grandparent role. And so I do suspect that that's a Kind of natural way, like, you know, that we do change the way that we're playing status games as we get older. We get value by teaching the next generation how to do what we've spent our lives learning how to do. So that's one way of doing it. I mean, another thing that I talk about in the status game are these different kinds of games there are to play. So there are three ways that humans essentially compete for status. I mean, there's lots, but there are three main ones. The first one is dominance, which is not good. I mean, that's the animalistic pushing each other around. I'm going to force you to attend to me with status type of way. A mafia don or an army or a playground bully, indeed, we're used to could beat for status. The other two are virtue. So in the human groups in which we evolved, you could earn status by being virtuous. So by knowing the rules, following the rules, being generous, being courageous. Then there are these competence games, success games. Being good at something, that's the other way that you offer value to other people. By providing, by creating value, you know, economically, by becoming somebody that other people can copy and mimic and for themselves, you know, learn how to do something. And one of the things that I realized when I was writing the book was that when you become a parent, you automatically start playing these virtue games because you start to, you're doing good things for your children, hopefully, and then you start earning status through your children's success. But I'm not a parent, so all I really do is I get up and I work. So I've got the kind of monomaniacal obsession with this one competence based status game. And I realized that's very dangerous psychological place to be. You've got one thing, you've got one source of status, that's madness. So I started volunteering in my spare time, which is something I never would have thought about had I not done this book. And so now I spend about four hours a week volunteering for a voluntary organization locally. That's now an enormous source of, significant source of status for me because it's this virtue game that I'm playing that I wasn't playing before. So I think the other piece of advice is to play different kinds of games or even play multiple competence based status games. Like if you have a job at work and you, you enjoy your sports, you go and play football or soccer or whatever it is, that's another status game you're playing. So I think having multiple sources of status, especially as you Start getting older, I think is really good advice.
- [33:11]
Dan Harris
And by game, you're not trying to minimize virtue, you're just, it's just a heuristic or rubric you're using to help us think about the many avenues available to us.
- [33:20]
Will Storr
Absolutely. I mean, I'm sort of, sort of defining a game as it's a collective of people who have an agreed set of rules. And if you follow the rules, you rise in status. So in that way, Christianity is a status game. You can be a good Christian or a bad. You accept the rules of Christianity and you can, you know, the harder you work at being Christian, the higher you raise in status in the eyes of your fellow Christians. So I don't mean to use the word game to diminish anything at all. It's that basic, you know, I think the games that we play for fun, they're just riding on that neural circuitry that's evolve to play the actual games of life, the games that matter much more.
- [33:56]
Dan Harris
Right. Well said. Coming up, Will Storr talks about the balance between self interest and altruism, the benefits of altruism and why status is so important.
- [34:20]
Sam Harris
This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you have a business of any kind, you probably need a website. I know the truth of that statement.
- [34:29]
Dan Harris
Having presided over the building of a.
- [34:31]
Sam Harris
Website of my own in the last year or so, I can tell you it's very important and also very useful. Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place. With Squarespace's collection of cutting edge design tools, anybody can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business. Start with Blueprint AI, Squarespace's AI enhanced website builder. To get a fully custom website in just a few steps, Squarespace offered us a free website to play around with their services. And our producer Tara Anderson had a very silly mockup website put together. In about five minutes, she got to choose from a bunch of different professional looking templates, sleek images and beautiful layouts, all with just a few clicks. And if this were a real website that she had made, it would get discovered quickly with integrated Squarespace SEO tools. Every website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto generated site map and more. So you show up more often on search engines and bring in more of your ideal customers. Head on over to squarespace.com 10happier for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, just use the offer code 10Happier10Happier to save 10% off your first purchase. Of a website or domain. I have spent more time than I care to admit obsessing about my hairline. I wrote about it in somewhat excruciating detail in my first book, 10% happier. The good news is, since I wrote that book, the technology for protecting your hair has gotten way better. An example is a new product called the Irestore Elite. You can say goodbye to thinning hair and hello to fuller, healthier locs. The Irestore Elite is clinically proven to regrow hair using 300 lasers and 200 LEDs that send light therapy directly to your scalp. You could just pop it on while catching up on your favorite shows or even while you relax with a good footage book. Irisore commissioned a four month double blind clinical study performed by a board certified dermatologist and laser surgeon and nearly all the participants saw an increase in hair growth with Irestores laser and LED technology. And the best part of Irestore is that they offer a 12 month money back guarantee so you can try it with no real risk. If your hair doesn't make a glorious return, you get a full refund. No awkward questions, just fabulous hair they say, or your money back back minus a restocking fee. Give yourself the gift of hair confidence this spring, for a limited time only, our listeners are getting a huge discount on the Irestore Elite when you use code happier@irestore.com head over to irestore.com and use happier for our show's exclusive discounts on the Irestore Elite. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Hair loss can be frustrating and anxiety provoking. You do not have to fight it alone. Thanks to Irestore.
- [37:24]
Dan Harris
I think there might be more to say. You'll tell me if I'm wrong about altruism as a really healthy source of status and then also maybe some where that could get catastrophic. You want to pick up on that?
- [37:40]
Will Storr
Yeah. So this is another thing that surprised me as I was doing my research. It really made me see the world in a different way because I think you would assume that if you want to change the world and be good, then you would play a virtue game. And if you wanted to just be rich and famous, you play a success game. But I became much more worried about virtue games as I was doing this research, partly because virtue is always local. So each collective has its own idea of what's virtuous, which is why you get such we're just going through this cultural period in the west, but much more seriously, before that we had Nazism and we had Communism, both two terribly ideologies that were incredibly damaging and horrendous for different reasons. But both the Nazis and the, and the communists, the committed ones, the ones who believe the story, were absolutely convinced that they were the virtuous ones, that the fight against the Bolsheviks, the fight against the Jews was virtuous, that they were saving the world, they were making the world a better place. So virtue can be extremely dangerous because it's local. The brain doesn't care about Z the truth, it just cares about the story. So we can easily be seduced into doing terrible things as a way of building virtue based status and harvesting virtue based status from the people around us. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing was really this idea of changing the world and making the world a better place. And you realize that the people that have really changed the world, especially in the last two or 300 years, are the success game people, the people who pioneered the industrial revolution, the people who invented vaccines. I mean, I don't know, I feel like the person who invented the polio vaccine has probably done more good for the world than all the popes combined. The Pope being a kind of virtue based superstition star. So that also changed my mind, this idea that actually if you genuinely want to change the world, you should play success games because it's the people who invent the things that are going to hopefully at some point, we pray, rescue us from the climate crisis. These are the people who are inventing the vaccines, the people who are working out how to make healthy food cheap and deliver it to the doors of people who need it when they need it. These are the people that are doing incalculable good for the rest of the world. That's what I believe.
- [39:46]
Dan Harris
You said a lot of things in there that I want to follow up on because they're so interesting. I'll come back to the benefits of altruism as a, as a source of status. But just picking up on the last thing you said there about how playing success games in some way can be like the highest form of virtue in a way. Like you can create a lot of impact in that way. And it just got me thinking about something that I've gnawed on for a long time in my life, which is this balance between self interest and altruism and how that line is very blurry. And in many ways there are aspects of altruism that are deeply self interested because you feel good when you're useful to other people and pursuing what could be derided as selfish success? Business success can have emergent properties that are incredibly altruistic and beneficial to other people. Like, you know, sparking the computing revolution or creating a vaccine, et cetera, et cetera. So any thoughts on, on that tricky balance?
- [40:51]
Will Storr
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that I think the first thing is just this whole idea of altruism and people get very upset about this idea that when I'm arguing that it's just really all about virtue based status. Because it sounds like I'm saying something very cynical, but I don't think I am saying something very cynical. When you do something good, generally people respect you more, they offer you status. That's your reward for doing the good thing. And also you feel good in yourself. You feel, you feel, you know, you feel, oh, I feel great. I feel good. You know, when I've come back off a shift for this volunteering thing and it's gone, well, I'm driving home, I feel great about myself. That's not a bad thing. That's to me is the best thing about human nature. I mean, what an amazing animal that we are. That when we do good, when we do something that benefits somebody else more than it benefits us, we're rewarded by other people automatically and we feel good about ourselves. That's actually a really good thing. That's not a negative thing. You take that away and I think we really would be back into the realm of nature, red in tooth and claw. So this idea that we should feel guilty when we feel good about ourselves and we do something altruistic or selfless I think is wrong. I think we deserve, you know, that's the deal again, the story makes we deserve to feel good about ourselves and we deserve the status that other people give us. It's a great system and it's a wonderful system because it says it's automatic. Mostly when people find out that we've done something good, they'll think better of us. And that feels good. So it's a great, it's like, it's a wonderful system. And the other thing is about this idea of success games. I mean, this is another thing. I think the way that my perception has shifted doing this work and I could even narrow it down to a particular moment. I was in India, I tend to go away to Asia to do all my reading. So I lock myself away for weeks. And I was walking around thinking about all this stuff and I saw these women just sitting on the street in Mumbai chatting away happily. And what they were doing. You see this a lot in India, if you've been to India, is they've got this bag of these very pretty flowers and they sit there, they're threading these flowers into a necklace and then they'll sell the necklace. And so you just had. I mean, it's kind of obvious, really, but what are these women doing? Well, they're adding value. They're taking the flower and the thread and they're turning those into something that's worth more than the flower and the thread individually. And that's capitalism at its best. Somebody comes along and sort of magically adds value. They create something that's worth more than its individual pieces and parts. That is a wonderful thing. That is a fantastic thing. I mean, I wrote in my book about. We've got a supermarket chain here, Tesco's. It's like our Walmart. And Tesco's annual tax bill is £4.5 billion. £4.5 billion. So that's how much value they're putting back into our country, into our police force, into our road system, into our school system, into our health service. You know, it's a. You never really think about this stuff. But these capitalists who are, yes, they're interested in the share price and they're interested in the. They're paid huge sums of money and we're envious of their big houses, but they're also doing this incredible thing of creating enormous value for society and civilization. And I was a journalist for the first 20 years of my life. I'm very happy that we're sending stories about corruption and tax dodging and all the malevolent things that capitalists and business people do. But I also think we should talk more about the 4.5 billion tax bill because I think it would make us less cynical about people playing these success games. And I think that will be good for us.
- [44:13]
Dan Harris
Yeah, no, it's tricky. I mean, I think I'm a capitalist. I know I'm a capitalist. And you talked about the industrial revolution, which was amazing in many ways, but also probably the point of origination for the climate crisis that could have deeply deleterious impacts on my child's future, et cetera, et cetera. And we also have extraordinary income inequality. And I think there are fair questions to be raised about how, you know, the allocation of wealth in our society. And so it's not an unalloyed good capitalism.
- [44:45]
Will Storr
No, absolutely not. You still need the virtue games. I mean, you need success. It's very crude generalization, but generally speaking, you can see the right as the success game. People who are interested in business and capitalism and demolishing regulations and lowering the tax bill and you got the left who are interested in the virtue protecting people. That's exactly as it should be. The fact that we've got this kind of constant war between the people who want to supercharge capitalism and the people who want to say, well hold on a minute, what about the climate crisis? What about the people at the bottom of the, of the path through no fault of their own? So the fact that there's this constant toing and throwing between these two poles is exactly as it should be. Like it's fantastic. Although it's bloody and difficult and enraging when you're living in the middle of it. If you take a step back, it's a great system. And as you rightly say, I mean these capitalism, I mean they always think when people talk about is capitalism good, Is it bad, Is religion good, is it bad? I mean this is storytelling, it's not realistic. I mean capitalism, religion, these are incredibly complex systems and they have a incredibly complex set of trade offs and capitalism is no exception. Capitalism is incredible and amazing, but it's also horrendous and exploitative and miserable. So that's the unhappy kind of non story of capitalism. It's not good or bad, it's both at the same time. But what you have is the left telling one story, the right telling the other story. But in their tussle, in their eternal war between virtue and success, we hopefully end up making things better. Hopefully.
- [46:16]
Dan Harris
I want to go back to what you said before about like, and I agree with this about, you know, there are many bugs in the human design system, but one feature in the human design system is that when we do good, we feel good. Yeah, that's just incredible. And I think personally my opinion is if there is salvation on offer for the species, it's going to probably be in that direction. And you, you said something about the fact that we shouldn't feel bad about the fact that it feels good to have the approbation of other people when we do a good thing. And I agree with that. And I think it just sometimes plain feels good to be useful to other people when nobody else is looking. So you can take status out of the benefits of altruism and the benefits are still there.
- [47:01]
Will Storr
Well, the idea is that, that feeling that we get internally of how we're, how we're doing.
- [47:07]
Dan Harris
Oh I see, I see.
- [47:08]
Will Storr
The idea is that that's sometimes called the internal AUDIENCE so we've evolved to be a tribal species. So what we want to be doing is pleasing the tribe, because by pleasing the tribe, we get connection, we get status, we're accepted and we're valued, which is what we want. But you have to have a way of kind of policing yourself, imagining, I'm going to do this thing and how am I going to feel? So we've almost got this internal tribe that we carry around with us, and it can be a terrible thing because I'm sure everybody has this thing where just out of nowhere you remember something shameful we did, like 25 years ago, and suddenly you go, oh, God, you know. You know, it's this awful thing, but that's your internal tribe giving you the shame of the tribe, saying, don't do that again. It's like a pain system and a kind of pleasure system, but a kind of. Kind of internal social version of that. And it's just all part of being a tribal species. So. So that's why we can feel kind of this bump in status even if we're alone and nobody's seen us do what we do is because you've got this internal audience that's constantly assessing our behavior to make us a, hopefully a better tribal cooperator.
- [48:12]
Dan Harris
That's really interesting. One more question about altruism, and I definitely take your point that it is the largest point you're trying to make here, if I'm hearing you correctly, is that in the midst of a culture where we have plenty of unhealthy status games on offer, and we'll talk in a minute about social media, altruism is a great diversifying factor for your status games, and that can really help you get a sense of meaning and worth that is incredibly helpful no matter what else is going on in your life. I believe that is, or at least that's the major takeaway for me, and I do want to point out that I can see in my environment, not in myself, because I'm constitutionally wired really, for selfishness, but I can see among people in my personal life and in my work life, a kind of catastrophic altruism where people are not asserting their own needs enough. And so I just want to see if you agree with that flag.
- [49:13]
Will Storr
Yeah, of course we're all different, and we all have different strengths and vulnerabilities, and that's certainly true that you can fall into this kind of pathological trap of not asserting yourself enough. And in a story, as a deal, one of the things they write about is this. This need that we have for individual status. And I think it's the least understood kind of facet of all this stuff. And in the book, I argue that in the 20th century, the Communists and the capitalists were actually making the same mistake about human nature, which is that a successful human should just blend into their group and become this kind of invisible part of their organization, whether it's being a communist. And communists weren't supposed to work for themselves. They were supposed to work for the. The revolution, for the communist ideal, the collective. But in a lot of these capitalist companies, too, you know, in the Ford Motor Company, even the Wall street banks in the 1990s, you had to be this kind of corporate clone. You had to dress precisely as the. As the bank wanted you to dress. You couldn't have a beard. There was this sense that you had to become, again, this completely kind of invisible, kind of faceless cell in the corporate superorganism. And it makes people feel terrible. You know, people need to feel individually valued and individually seen within. Within any group. And I think that the organizations are still not great at understanding that.
- [50:37]
Dan Harris
Yeah. So if you're setting up a system where you're erasing the possibility for status, it's problematic.
- [50:45]
Will Storr
Yeah. Yeah.
- [50:49]
Sam Harris
Coming up, Will talks about how mindfulness.
- [50:51]
Dan Harris
Factors into the status drive. His findings may surprise you here. He also talks about managing your relationship with social media and the case for understanding over criticism.
- [51:07]
Sam Harris
I have a strangely busy travel schedule.
- [51:10]
Dan Harris
Coming up in the next couple of months.
- [51:12]
Sam Harris
But the thing that I'm really looking forward to, the bright spot on my calendar is in a few weeks, I'm going to Montauk, which is one of my favorite places in the world. It's on the eastern tip of Long Island. It's primarily known as a summer spot, but it's actually beautiful year round. I'm going to Montauk with 1, 2, 3, 4, at least four families that are close friends of ours. They all have children who get along really well with my child. And we'll all be staying not at.
- [51:43]
Dan Harris
Hotels, but in houses.
- [51:45]
Sam Harris
I love being in a big house with lots of other people. It is so much more personal and intimate than staying at a hotel with other families. With many of these families, we've gone to places like Florida and gotten Airbnbs together. Being able to stay together in a beautiful place is so much fun and again, so much more intimate.
- [52:06]
Dan Harris
And here's the cool thing.
- [52:07]
Sam Harris
If you're going to be traveling soon, you might actually be sitting on an Airbnb gold mine. You might be able to put your own residence up on Airbnb so you can actually earn money while you're taking a vacation. I'm a huge fan of Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host.
- [52:32]
Dan Harris
I have.
- [52:32]
Sam Harris
Spent more time than I care to admit obsessing about my hairline. I wrote about it in somewhat excruciating detail in my first book, 10% happier. The good news is, since I wrote that book, the technology for protecting your hair has gotten way better. An example is a new product called the Irestore Elite. You can say goodbye to thinning hair and hello to fuller, healthier locs. The iRestore Elite is clinically proven to regrow hair using 300 lasers and 200 LEDs that send light therapy directly to your scalp. You could just pop it on while catching catching up on your favorite shows or even while you relax with a good book. Irisore commissioned a four month double blind clinical study performed by a board certified dermatologist and laser surgeon and nearly all the participants saw an increase in hair growth with Irestore's laser and LED technology. And the best part of Irestore is that they offer a 12 month money back guarantee so you can try it with no real risk. If your hair doesn't make a glorious return, you get a full refund. No awkward questions questions. Just fabulous hair, they say, or your money back minus a restocking fee. Give yourself the gift of hair confidence. This spring, for a limited time only, our listeners are getting a huge discount on the Irestore Elite when you use code happier@irestore.com head over to irestore.com and use happier for our show's exclusive discounts on the Irestore Elite. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Hair loss can be frustrating and anxiety provoking. You do not have to fight it alone. Thanks to Irestore.
- [54:10]
Dan Harris
Getting back to this discussion of like how to manage the fact we all have this status drive, this status detection system and we talked about some ways to, you know, have healthier sources and to diversify and to explore altruism. What about mindfulness? My understanding, you know of mindfulness as a practitioner is that it's a kind of self awareness that allows you to see the shit that's coming up in your head and not be so owned by it. So for example, I might notice, oh, I'm tempted to virtue signal on Instagram or I am tempted to brag about something, or I'm tempted to Dominate somebody to make myself feel better. And I can watch that urge, not tell myself I'm a monster. That urge is there, it's natural, let it go and make a saner decision on the other side. Does that sound to you like a good way to, to manage this part of our wiring?
- [55:01]
Will Storr
So there's a couple of things about mindfulness. So what you're describing of course is wonderful. This idea that you can detach yourself from your behavior and not be your behavior and not allow the behavior to dictate the feelings to dictate your behavior. So that's obviously kind of helpful in a wonderful life skill. But the idea that mindfulness meditation kind of destroys the ego and frees you from the need to earn status is just not true. There was a study that was done by the University of Netherlands. They took 3,700 mindfulness meditators and they chose people specifically that meditated to reduce their ego needs. And they found that they all measured very highly in what they called spiritual superiority. So they all, you know, and it's human nature, of course they were really good at meditating and they felt pretty good about that. And actually when they thought about it, they felt superior to all the other people that didn't understand the amazing insights that they had. So I thought that was just really funny. You know, it's funny because it's one of those things that's funny because you just know it's true. Like it's just human nature. When we get good at something, when we feel that we've got this special insight into the world, we feel great, we feel a bit superior. So that's what people find. Again, not to say that there's no point meditated because that's not true. The model that you describe where you kind of free yourself from being a slave to emotions is enormously valuable. But the idea that it destroys the ego. I mean, in one of my earlier books I went on a ten day silent meditation retreat, a Vipassana meditation retreat in, in Australia. And I'll never Forget on the second day we had to like sit cross legged for 16 hours a day and meditate. It was an absolute nightmare. And then in between meditation sessions, the guru would come, this bald headed Brit would come and lecture us about things. And on the second day I was kind of pulled out of the thing and I was given a note because nobody was speaking. You have to go and see the guru. I don't know what is, I don't know what the right word is. And I went to see Him. And he told me off because I was sitting with my legs. You know, there's hundreds of people spotted me at the back sitting with my legs straight forward and the soles of my feet were facing him. And he took enormous offense to the fact that my soles of my feet, to the extent that he would pull me out and, you know, and chide me. And I remember thinking afterwards, hang on a minute, you've been talking to us about the destruction of the ego, but this is just an extraordinary example of the fact that you've got a very, very brittle ego, that you've taken offense at this. I think that was the first time I ever got sort of a bit cynical about this idea that meditation really destroys the ego needs. I don't think that's necessarily true.
- [57:25]
Dan Harris
Well, my understanding of the Dharma specifically is, and I can't speak for the mind of a Buddha because I am very far from that. And so maybe at the deep end of the pool, a truly enlightened being, if there is such a thing, doesn't care so much about status. Although if you look at the Buddhist texts, the Buddha himself is talking about wise people and unenlightened worldlings. So there's status baked right into that. And he called himself the Tathagata, the Awakened One. So there's status built right into that. But in terms of the rest of us, I think it's not so much about destroying the ego as it is about seeing through. As like kind of putting it through a cheese grater. Seeing through the illusion of the insubstantiality of our stories and not, in the end, being so owned by them. And, you know, in, in a lot of the art and storytelling around enlightenment, you know, this process of, you know, getting to the end of the meditative path, the end is sometimes described as returning to the marketplace. So it's not like you float off into. I mean, there are some versions of this where you float off into the mystery. I don't know. But there are other versions where you. You become enlightened, you see through some of the more obnoxious aspects of the ego, and then you return to the marketplace, you return to the world to be more helpful.
- [58:59]
Will Storr
Oh, that's great. Yeah.
- [59:00]
Dan Harris
So that, that's kind of my semi informed take on what you're saying.
- [59:05]
Will Storr
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I mean, at the same responses to you, when you actually look at the kind of ideological, if that's the right word, structure of Buddhism, it's very hierarchical. It's a lot about Reincarnation. And if you do well, you get reincarnated up here. And if you do badly, you don't. You're down there. That's the status game. That's just a pure status game. But yeah, I agree. Aside from that, I think the ability to see what's happening when you're feeling humiliated, when you're feeling disrespected and not respond to that, not react to that, I think is incredibly valuable.
- [59:42]
Dan Harris
Incredibly valuable. Easier said than done, but not a bad North Star. Before I let you go, let's just talk about social media, which is your fellow Brit Johann Hari has called social media, among other aspects of modern life, ego itching powder, which, That's a phrase I like. And social media, I mean, even I, as a. I'm somebody who never really used it, but in starting a new business, realized that it was kind of dumb for me not to be, you know, in that particular marketplace. And I've tried to become what I call like a node of sanity. And I don't scroll through Instagram much. I go to look at how my posts are performing, which makes me unhappy. And it is essentially a status game for the internal audience and for comparison to who knows what ideal. And then if I do find myself scrolling, that also makes me unhappy. And I'm a guy who's, you know, like in the mental health business. And so what about everybody else? It just. This seems like. And I'm not a Luddite, I'm not saying social media should be banned. I'm just saying this seems like a treacherous zone. So what say you?
- [60:51]
Will Storr
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, well, in the early days of social media, you had the kind of utopians that thought that when the Internet became universal or nearest, damn it, that we'd see this new reality and all the hierarchies of the files would be destroyed. And it's sort of deeply naive because what happens when you connect 5 billion brains together? I think there's. About half the population of the world are on social media now. People start playing status games. And earlier on I described three main games. There's dominance, there's virtue, and there's success. Well, that's social media. You get. People are pushing each other around in that kind of cancel culture kind of vein. You've got virtue signaling everywhere, which is obviously something we all do, part of playing a status game. And he got success. People showing off about how thin they are and where they've gone on holiday. And look at my successful children, all the rest of it. I mean, that's what we're doing. We're playing status games. And I think the reason that social media has become so incredibly successful so rapidly across all cultures is because it's given us a new way of mining this incredibly valuable resource. There are lots of young people for whom they have more status packed into their phones that they keep in their back pocket or their purse or whatever than they do in their actual real lives. You know, so you see why they get addicted to it. It becomes really the self, as they exist in the virtual space, becomes incredibly important to them. It can be their main source of status. The other thing, of course, is the kind of BJ Fogg stuff, the idea that you could make phones addictive by making the rewards unpredictable.
- [62:26]
Dan Harris
Yeah.
- [62:26]
Will Storr
So, you know, in the status game, I describe social media as a slot machine for status. You never quite know what you're going to get. You put a post up. You just described checking your post and how they're doing. Sometimes it could go amazing, sometimes it could be a disaster. So you never know what you're going to get. And that was the amazing insight of BJ Fogg when he wrote his book Predictive Technology in 2003. He predicted the invention of the iPhone. There's a paragraph in that book that describes an iPhone years before it was even invented. It's an incredibly prescient book. And in there he says, this is how you make it, you know, essentially addictive is you make it like a slot machine. You make the rewards unpredictable. And of course, BJ Fogg's course, the guys who invented Facebook and Instagram all went through his course at Stanford University. And we're now living through the kind of results of his. I mean, his genius. Sure, he's a genius. I mean, it's an incredible insight, but incredibly powerful. But even BJ Fogg, I think, didn't understand what exactly we were gambling with. He doesn't really talk about status, but to me it's, you know, having done this book, it's clear that's what we're gambling with. On social media, we're always gambling with our status. It's built into the platforms. Likes, retweets. There are so many ways of measuring status on Twitter, x Facebook and all that stuff.
- [63:37]
Dan Harris
Do you have thoughts on how to manage our relationship with social media successfully aside from just abstinence?
- [63:50]
Will Storr
That's a good question. I mean, I'm a believer in. Carl Jung always talked about this idea of making the unconscious conscious and how even that could be a powerful thing. And I guess it goes into what you were saying about mindfulness too. I think understanding what social media is and why it's addictive, that alone can be quite powerful because it makes you see that the likes, they don't really matter. It's just that a status detection system is glomming onto the likes, the retweets. It is just a game. The other thing I think is very dangerous about social media is that the easiest form of status to get is virtue based status. And especially on social media, all you've got to do to get some virtue based status is to attack one of your ideological enemies in front of your peer group and they're going to think you're great. And I think that's why social media becomes so toxic, because it's a very, very easy way to earn virtue based status. You can just do it in a few clicks and you're there. So one of the things I write about in the status game is this idea of reducing your moral sphere. We're always, these days, especially on social media, looking out into the world to morally judge other people and actually to reduce that sphere and focus much more on your own moral behavior and stop being so bloody obsessed with everybody else's moral behavior because your obsession with other people's moral behavior. A lot of that is to do with the desire for status and it isn't very nice as it manifests on social media. It's not productive.
- [65:10]
Dan Harris
Well, just picking up on that, you know, we're at a time where there's, in my country, in the United States, where there's an enormous amount of tumult and upset about the perceived moral flaws on the other side of the red blue divide here, you know, whatever side you're on, I strongly suspect many of the people listening to this are in the blue side of it. But I, I really want this to be a place for everybody. When you say reducing your moral sphere, if that was the right, if that's the right phraseology, if I'm reproducing that correctly, are you saying that I shouldn't look at people from the opposite party and take a critical eye to their moral behavior?
- [65:50]
Will Storr
I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but I'm saying that you should try and see through the story. I'm a left wing person. I was from a Guardian journalist, but doing this work, I wrote my former book selfie when Trump first came in and I had to quickly add a whole chapter to that book before it went to press to try and account and explain for the unexpected. Election of Donald Trump the first time around. And what doing these kinds of things has taught me is that the story is very seductive and actually it's often very destructive to both sides. And what I believe in my middle age is that the left and the right just see the world in a different way. They tell a different story of the world. It isn't that one side is evil and one side is on the side of the angels. It's just they both kind of see half of the truth. You know, I talked about the idea about complex systems. The economy of the America of any country is a complex system. The effect of immigration on economy is a complex subject. Know it's incredibly complex. But we tell very simplistic stories, morally drenched stories about this stuff. If I could make one change in the world, it would be that the left and the right stop falling for their very emotional, very seductive, very simplistic stories about the opposite team. And just try and understand in an open hearted way why they're telling a different story about the world and why it doesn't come from a place of malice and hatred because both sides equally see each other. That's coming from a place of malice and hatred to get rid of that emotional stuff and try and understand why they believe the world should be that way. I mean, one of the things, it's a very simple thing, but maybe it's a good way of explaining it is this idea that I was always brought up with, which is you can tell the Tories are Republicans are evil because they always want to lower taxes for the rich. And so what could be more evil than that? You're making the rich richer and because you're lowering taxes, you're making the poor poorer. You can't argue with that. But then when you listen to the story from the other side, it's like, well, yeah, because the rich are the ones that are creating the value. The rich are the ones that are forming these companies that are paying all the taxes. And if you tax them above a certain level, they'll just leave the country, they'll bugger off and go somewhere else or their companies will fail. So you don't want to do that. So there's this very delicate balance between raising enough tax revenue to look after people look after, but also protecting the people who are creating the value that's enabling our National Health Service to exist and you know, play for the police. So, so, so these stories can seem inarguable, but there's always a story on the other side which if you actually take the time. And, you know, being 20 as a journalist forced me to do this, to go to the opposite aisle and talk to people that I might not otherwise talk to. There's always a story from the other side that once you get rid of all that moral judgment and all that rage, you think, okay, I don't agree with you, but I get that now. I understand that now. So. So, of course, criticize when you feel you need to criticize. But I feel like both sides spend far too much time criticizing at the moment and not enough time understanding. This place that we're in, where each side thinks they're the devil is horrendous, is awful, and it's all storytelling.
- [68:58]
Dan Harris
Well, I have a large degree of agreement with what you're saying, and perhaps it's not a coincidence that I, too, was a journalist for 30 years.
- [69:07]
Will Storr
Oh, okay.
- [69:08]
Dan Harris
TV. And so, you know, I lived my life talking to everybody from cult leaders to terrorists to people I disagree with politically, and that was my job. So I really am able to kind of understand that everybody got their story, and very few people wake up in the morning deciding, I want to be a bad guy. Having said that, I recently have spent some time on social media making the case for understanding, if not compassion. I actually think understanding is a form of compassion in the second era of Trump or in the second chapter of Trump or whatever. And generally speaking, it's been well received. And there have been some people who are like, yo, you're a financially secure, straight white male. Some of the threats that I perceive as a keen and acute don't apply to you. You know, when they. When the president gets up and says there are only two genders, that's not a problem for you. You. When abortion is banned, that's not a problem for you. I don't know if the. If. If they can't figure stuff out in Ukraine. You're not Ukrainian. On and on. And I think you could probably make the same case from the right vis a vis the perceived threats from the left. I mean, I think I have an answer to this, but I'm curious what. What your answer is, because you could probably get the same accusations hurled at you.
- [70:23]
Will Storr
Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, everybody's got their own set of reasons why they can feel that they're under attack. And I think a lot of the reason why Trump won the first time is because the left in the 1960s stopped caring about the working class and stopped caring about the white working class in particular and started caring much more about issues of gender and race. It happened with the same in the UK that the white working class stopped being cared about by the left and they started actually being the enemy and started being looked down upon. And we didn't call them deplorables, we always called them racists and football hooligans and this, that and the other. Every side has its own set of ideas as to why they feel the victimized by the culture. And of course there's always going to be points in history where you, where you do have to fight. Talks a little bit about the Second World War and the end of slavery. Sometimes you've got to fight and that's just a fact. But I still feel that if you want to, if you really want to make the world a better place, it is about understanding. You know, I talked earlier on about that, you know, the story we're never told in the UK about the things that we have done in the past that have been against racism and bigotry. The people on the left that I know, it would make them sick to tell that story, to actually say, come on Britain, we've been anti racist in the past, we should be proud of how anti racist we've been. Because it goes against everything they stand for, which is the British horrendous colonial this, that and the other. But if you actually want to persuade people, if you want to get people on side, you have to tell them a story that's not going to alienate them or push them away and make them feel less than. In other words, you have to tell them. So it's not going to take their status away. That could be really, really hard because it can go against our principles in a very deep way. But that's the best way of doing it. Because the more you fight one way and you might win, but then the pushback from the other way is going to be even bigger. And you see this at the moment between the left and the right. The left wins, then the right wins bigger, the left get more fiercer and it's just this escalation of aggression. An escalation of stories, of storytelling.
- [72:18]
Dan Harris
Yes.
- [72:18]
Will Storr
And I don't think it ends in a good place.
- [72:20]
Dan Harris
And the word you didn't use there, but you do use it in the book and it is kind of the atomic bomb of emotions. I believe Brene Brown even said that is humiliation.
- [72:31]
Will Storr
Yes, yes. That wasn't my quote, that was, that was somebody else. I forget the academic that came in with it. But humiliation being the atomic bomb of the emotions. If you humiliate somebody you take away all their status in a very sudden and sort of public way. It's at the root of the very worst of human behavior. I talk in the status game. I kind of tell the story of the second World War leading up to the Holocaust from the perspective of status. And it makes sense suddenly when you see it through the lens of status. Germany was the most successful high status country in continental Europe. They were humiliated after Versailles. The Jews got the blame for that and look what happened.
- [73:09]
Dan Harris
This has been a fascinating discussion. I suspect people have feelings about it. So I have a pretty activ chat on, on my sub stack and so I'll. I'll open up a chat and let people feedback on this. Maybe I'll even ask you if you can come into it.
- [73:24]
Will Storr
Of course.
- [73:25]
Dan Harris
And if you're listening to this in real time, you can come chat with me and with Will about it. Two questions I asked kind of habitually at the end of every show. The first is is there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't get to?
- [73:39]
Will Storr
No, no. I think we covered a huge amount in a relatively short space of time. So thanks Dan, I really appreciate that.
- [73:44]
Dan Harris
Likewise. Thank you. And then finally you mentioned the names of your books. Several of them, but can you just give us a full list? And also is there a website, just everything will store so that we, if we want to dive in we can.
- [73:55]
Will Storr
Yeah. The website is willstore.com S T O R R. Just very briefly, the books, the Heretics is about my journalism days. Going out, meeting Nazis, cult leaders, finding out why people believe that, why intelligent people believe, you know, sometimes crazy things. Selfies is history of the Western self. Then there's a Sansa storytelling. This status game we've been talking about tonight, A Story is a deal to my new book out February 12th. So it should be out by the time this airs. And that's how people use storytelling for kind of persuasive and sort of leadership.
- [74:25]
Dan Harris
Excellent. What a body of work. Excellent. All right, well Will, thank you again, really appreciate it.
- [74:31]
Will Storr
Thanks Dan. I really appreciate the good chat.
- [74:33]
Dan Harris
Thank you.
- [74:37]
Sam Harris
Thanks again to Will. Don't forget to check out out his appearance over on the Waking up app. You can sign up for the app@wakingup.com 10% that's T E n P e R C e n t wakingup.com 10% I will put a link in the show notes just so you know.
- [74:53]
Dan Harris
If you buy a subscription via that.
- [74:56]
Sam Harris
URL you will get a 30 day free trial and you will be supporting me and my team as well because we will get a portion of the process proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say, if money's an issue, Sam offers scholarships. That's the same policy that I have over on danharris.com if you can't afford.
- [75:15]
Dan Harris
It, we'll give it to you. If you are a member@danharris.com you will get today's episode and all future episodes ad free. You'll also get the chance to chat with me. I frequently do live video sessions where I got a meditation and take your questions so would love you to sign up there. Final thing to do here is to.
- [75:35]
Sam Harris
Thank everybody who works so hard on this show.
- [75:37]
Dan Harris
Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.
- [75:44]
Sam Harris
Lauren Smith is our Production manager, Marissa.
- [75:47]
Dan Harris
Schneiderman is our Senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our Executive producer and Nick Thorburn.
- [75:52]
Sam Harris
From the band Islands wrote our theme.
- [76:11]
Tara Anderson
You might say T Mobile takes the holistic approach to coverage because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network. Switch now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device, credit service report in 90 plus days device in eligible carrier and timely redemption Required card has no cash access and expires in six months.
- [76:41]
Talkspace
You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. With Talkspace you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner or just need a little extra one on one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus Talkspace works with most major insurers and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance, no problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to talkspace.com match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com save $80 with code SPACE80@talkspace.com.