How to Leverage Status for Career Growth | Toby Stuart

holiday season travel gifts hosting it's easy to lose sight of your money this time of year I saw all the travel and gift expenses adding up, and it was a wake-up call. Made me stop and adjust my spending before the credit card bill arrived. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. Rated Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025.

Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. And right now, just for our listeners, Monarch is offering 50% off your first year. I'm checking my holiday spending category to make sure I don't start the new year with a debt hangover. You can link everything. Investments, 401ks, property value.

Get your true net worth and stay on top of your year-end priorities. Monarch does the heavy lifting. Link all of your accounts in minutes. Clear data visuals, smart categorization. You'll never touch another spreadsheet again. Don't let financial opportunities slip through the cracks.

Use code charm at monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code charm. Are you a person that loves being organized and checking things off lists? If so, you need to try stuff.

Stuff is a new to-do list app for iPhone and iPad. It's built for people who love to write things down, check them off and complete their goals. I have dozens of thoughts and tasks that pop into my head throughout the day. Podcast ideas, marketing angles, fun things to do with my daughter.

Stuff makes capturing them fast. Type it, speak it, scan a photo, whatever works best for me in the moment. I crank the volume on my phone before checking something off. That little sound when you complete a task is so satisfying. And the animations are so smooth.

I actually love looking and completing the tasks on my list. Lists and stuff are built like completable projects. That book you want to write, the business you want to start, or that trip you want to plan. It takes form inside of stuff, step by step. The Adventure Log keeps a permanent record of everything you complete. Look back. Look back on what you've accomplished. You're getting way more done than you think. Download Stuff for free today by going to trystuff.app.

That's T-R-Y-S-U-T-F-F dot app app. Or search for Stuff, S-U-T-F-F, in the App Store. And to enjoy everything Stuff has to offer, you can get 50% off your first year of extra stuff. by using code charm at checkout get stuff done and start enjoying your to-do list again download stuff from the app store today

If you have a friend who you think is prominent in some domain, just the very act that they're hanging out with you leads to a boost in your own status. And status is broadly created by affiliation. All right, let's kick off today's show. We're talking with Toby Stewart, Stanford professor and author of Anointed, the extraordinary effects of social status in a winner-take-most world.

Toby reveals how invisible status hierarchies control everything from career advancement to social opportunities and why understanding these hidden rules change everything. Status isn't about merit. It's about who you know and who knows you. Once you understand how status compounds like interest, you can stop working harder and start positioning yourself smarter. Toby shares why your best work gets ignored, how algorithms amplify status inequality.

the hidden costs of high status, and why imposter syndrome proves you're succeeding. Welcome to the show, Toby. It's great to have you. Thanks, AJ. Social status is something that we've talked a bit about on the show, but I'm really curious to hear what drew you to it and writing this book. Oh man. That's the story of a life. But so I've been working on this all the way back since graduate school. The paper I read and I think it was my probably my second year of graduate school. And it just.

literally changed how I saw the universe of the world. The paper is called The Matthew Effect in Science. And it's a very short paper. It was written a very long time ago. And the gist of what it says... is that science is a status system. And science is this area where you think, particularly when you're in it, where you think it's all about objectivity. It's the best idea that wins, and that's what matters.

It is itself a status system. There, you know, universities are ranked, like faculty are ranked, departments are ranked, journals are ranked, everything's ranked. But you think... you have this perception, particularly with science, that there's some kind of objective quality ordering and the really, really good stuff, the really, really important ideas are on top. And the paper just opened my ideas. I said, well...

Maybe not. That was certainly my experience in academic science back in my early on in my career, started researching cancer biology, and we were really excited about our results. And I remember.

telling my mentor like hey we're finally going to publish and he's like no actually we're not because this other higher status lab got similar results and they're going to go with their results over ours and it was yeah just shocking to me thinking exactly that that science this beacon on the hill where just the best ideas rise to the top is not really the case there's this story that

kind of comes early in the book that I really, really, really love. And I think it's really maybe crystallizes a lot of the argument in the book. So the story goes, there's a paper, it's a long time ago, submitted to a... prestigious scientific journal and it's sort of back before computers and there's no, nothing's digital. And so the actual, like you can imagine that the typed manuscript shows up.

The story goes, the cover page on the manuscript was separated from the body of the text. And so when the journal's editorial board took a look at the paper, they had no idea who had... produced it. They didn't know who the scientist was or the lab it came from. And they read the paper and they kind of said like voodoo science. Like not only is this like not interesting, it's like utter nonsense.

And it turns out that the author of the paper is this guy who's eventually known as Lord Raleigh, who wins the Nobel Prize in physics and had sort of done everything in his career. He's the guy who explains to us why the sky is blue. And so what happens is when the title page is reunited with the document, the journal issues this flowing apology letter.

and publishes the paper as the lead off journal. And so the kind of taking that and then extrapolating it to a more general sort of what's going on here. you have literally exactly the same words written on this page. Like there is absolutely nothing that changes about the document itself. But when we switched the idea... identity of the producer of the document, the evaluation of it radically changes. And that's the essence of status. You could take this sort of same quality item or idea or...

consumer product or book or kind of, or bottle of wine or you name it, and you switch the identity of the producer and it radically changes how we evaluate it. So many of us have. had moments in our life where we've been impacted by status, but it does feel invisible and kind of hard to put your hands around and really understand. And you start the book off with this idea of the big ship.

came into doing research on this subject and learning more and more and more about it, you start to realize, like, it's just everywhere. The whole world is a status system in one way or another. And, you know, and there's this... you know, super interesting literature, mostly in the field of social psychology. And it even shows like if you take random people and put them into a group, like instantaneously, they've created a hierarchy.

They didn't know one another beforehand. They're never going to see one another again. And yet there's still this... hierarchy that forms. Every moment in which people come together, we create these groups and we do it when we're young kids and we do it as adults and we do it especially in ongoing relationships like workplaces. organizations and friendship groups. The big shift is we often think we're evaluating something for what it is, but in fact, we're instead evaluating who made it.

And it turns out there are a lot of consequences of that. The unfortunate part for many of us is we like to believe that we're living in a meritocracy. And yes, there's a combination of talent, but effort also goes into... the best ideas, the best things rising to the top. In actuality, there's these invisible forces to many of us who aren't playing the status game, holding us back from ever achieving that.

And that gets into kind of every level of the book. So let me try not to ramble when responding for five minutes and just give you kind of a couple of thoughts about that. So one is there's this classic. distinction in sociology between what we call a scribe status. And achieve status, I achieve my status by working really hard, making a great contribution to whatever group I'm in. You know, so effort.

talent, those all go in to achieve status. Ascribed status is more like we are born into a status hierarchy based on characteristics that were randomly assigned to us because, you know, we are... We're three white guys and we happened to be born three white guys, but we could have been born. Hispanic female in some other country and our lives would have been very different and we would have entered the world in a different status system. So when we think about someone's status, it's a mix.

achieve status and ascribe status. But the second thing, and this gets to Merton and the Matthew effect, which is the paper I mentioned in the opening, is that Status has this sort of interesting property where it often becomes a cumulative, which is to say there's these processes in life that work that way, where if you get a little bit ahead.

you kind of run out in front and that tends to be true when there's a payoff to a relative advantage so you know in sort of the modern world one way in which that manifests all the time is like imagine say you're trying to push a book on LinkedIn or something like that, right? Where if you can get into the algorithms that boost, the boost then contributes to attention to...

Your news, which then leads to more attention to the news, which then leads to some other algorithmic boost, which creates this sort of viral loop that creates status. And for a variety of reasons, that is the way status works in the real world. Many of us. don't even realize the way those algorithms now are functioning in this manner. So we like to think of the internet as democratizing a lot of things and giving us all access to getting our ideas out there.

But Johnny and I, and I know Johnny's chuckling now, you know, we've spent enough time even trying to grow the show with the algorithms and how quickly once that little lead is established. Then it catches fire because more attention is gathering. The algorithms are giving it more attention, more fuel. And all of a sudden, yeah, it could be the exact same concepts in the book, but one's a bestseller and one is a book that no one's read.

Honestly, I don't even want to reply because you said it better than me, but we might wish that the world worked differently, but particularly in the online world, in the modern era, and particularly now with incredibly good and incredibly quick. AI systems deciding what we're interested in, what we'll like, what we should see, right? It's our intention. The choice, the consideration set, the things that we look at are very much algorithmically manipulated today.

A lot of people would say that, you know, we've been under this algorithmic system for quite some time, maybe even a decade or two. And they'd be right. It just gets better. and faster and more precise. Well, better and precise depends on who is building the AI and what they want the AI to do. Fair, very fair. So better in a neutral, a possible sense of that term. What's funny about it is we get to watch these AI wars happening in real time right now, and it's only as of...

I would say in the last couple of years that the public has really started to figure out how it's shaping up and what's going on. I mean, I think obviously Elon is one of the most. The outgoing guys, Sam Altman, we see him talk here and there, and then there's NVIDIA and some of these other groups. Elon is constantly using Grog, but also using his own platform.

to show what's going on, what he wants people to see going on in his world. And it's quite illuminating all of the stuff that is happening back and forth with all of that. Better is such a complicated word, John, here, because, you know, in a way for us, the algorithms are better in the sense that they are coming to such a comprehensive understanding of us that.

You know, the algorithms are serving up things to us that like might be super interesting or valuable to us. Like the targeting is getting better and better and better and better. Of course, though, what's actually happening is there's a multi-trillion. By trillion, I mean trillion multi-cap market cap business behind algorithm that's doing certain things that are advantageous to a set of platforms. And that is ultimately what...

drives the algorithms themselves. So it's complicated, but they have the property. They tend to have the property of the status system when one LinkedIn post or Instagram post or TikTok video starts to get a lead. in an algorithmic ranking system, it gets boosted. And the status system often works very much like that, where these little differences that can be nearly random.

early in a life or early in a career lead to these lifelong status differences among us, which create enormous differences. comes. So one of the arguments in the book is effectively you could think of status as a form of currency. You know, the book's called anointment and the anointed have a currency, which is they have

this social status, which gets converted into opportunities of every sort, social opportunities, but also economic opportunities. And so, you know, status really is a currency. And if it is self accumulating. then early leads produce pretty extreme outcome differentials over a lifetime. And for that reason, yes, AJ, going back to your earlier observation.

The status system partly underlies inequality. Hiring the right person with the right skills, that's what moves a business forward. If you want candidates who match what you're looking for, you need Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Hiring? Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post even seen on other sites. Give your job the best chance to be seen with Indeed's Sponsored Jobs. They help you stand out and hire quality candidates who can drive the results you need.

Sponsored jobs boost your post for quality candidates, so you reach the exact people you want faster. And that makes a big difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 90% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. you reach a bigger pool of quality candidates. So join the 1.6 million companies that sponsor their jobs with Indeed. If I needed to hire a new editor, I'd go to Indeed and be specific, not just can edit audio.

I'd say I need somebody who's edited conversation podcasts for at least three years, gets our style, and knows our software. Someone who's done this before. And with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you get people that fit that description. You're not digging through resumes from people who've edited one YouTube.

video, you're getting actual podcast editors who know what they're doing. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you only pay for results. No monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, just a boost whenever you need to find quality talent fast. People are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In a minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed Data Worldwide.

Spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results now with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help you get your job the premium status it deserves. at Indeed.com slash charm. Just go to Indeed.com slash charm right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed from this podcast. Indeed.com slash charm. Terms and conditions apply.

Hiring, do it the right way with Indeed. The cable knit sweater I picked up from Quince is getting me through this cold weather. It's warm, structured, and looks way more expensive than it was. And every piece is made from premium materials by factories that meet strict standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. They cut out the middlemen.

No traditional markups and you get the same quality as luxury brands at a fraction of the price. Get your wardrobe sorting and your gift list handle with Quince. Go to Quince.com slash charm for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash charm. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash charm. That exact concept of being anointed. Back in time, we're looking at...

the Catholic Church as anointing. Now, these platforms and all the different ways you can be anointed also serve as signal and status where you want to combine as many of them as possible. so that you're ranked on LinkedIn and on Instagram and on YouTube. And it's an arms race to get all these platforms anointing you. Whereas in the past, we would only rely on the New York Times bestseller list or we would only rely on that.

restaurant critic in our area now all of these platforms are in a race to anoint those leaders to steal our attention it's incredibly powerful if you have the ability to anoint Because if you have the ability to anoint, you're creating economic value for people. And the anointers have this way of recouping a bunch of ads. Absolutely.

the competition to anoint is getting broader and broader and broader. If you're an individual and you're thinking about all of this, it's a big headache because now you have to kind of manage. your image or your reputation or your status across these multiple different platforms and places in life. It's insane. Remarkably for someone who spends most of their career thinking about this, I do very little of it, but I don't envy you building a podcast.

I mean, it's hard work. Being in business 20 years, there was a time when Yelp reviews really mattered and Yelp was anointing businesses as something you should trust. And now it's switched to Google. And destroying businesses. And, you know, you're constantly.

As you're trying to sell your goods or you're trying to gain status, you're now recognizing that these anointers carry a lot of weight and we have to pursue them in our pursuit of status. Remarkably, I think Yale previews actually still do matter somehow. nothing against yelp but like they still matter but there's actually a bunch of papers that that that really just go out and try to estimate the benefit to a business of having positive reviews and of course

Yelp reviews have really now moved over to Amazon reviews and those can be incredibly valuable. So one of the things that happens when we talk about status is we often really just focus on the high status. side of the pecking order, but it's the opposite too. Negative reviews can be quite, they can eviscerate a business. And so the other side of it is also really important.

part about that is Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, they become entertainment in themselves. They become part of the joke themselves. I see it all the time. Oh, go to see this product's reviews. And then you see a hundred hilarious reviews. You're like, well, I got to write one. So now you're at, you're adding to the mess. And of course, that certainly, I wouldn't say delegitimizes it, but if it can turn into an entertaining blog that everyone contributes to.

Then what's its usage of actually getting good information about a restaurant that I want to go to? I have to ask myself the question, why does anyone care? Because... I'll take Yelp reviews. I'll look at them when I'm going to go to a restaurant and then I'll realize they're like 97 Yelp reviews for a restaurant. And those are accumulated over what? Three years or four years or something. And then if you think about it, there's like

there are 97 people who went to that restaurant tonight, right? And so what you have is this tiny random fraction of people who are contributing reviews and they're often... you know, either super happy or they're friends with the owner or they're pissed off. And kind of that's what you're seeing. But you could ask yourself, like, why would you even care? Like, why is this diagnostic of anything? What does this tell me about anything? But that...

kind of gets to one of the other core arguments in the book, which is the way that I describe it is status is kinetic. It moves around. Status is broadly created by affiliation. So the world is established. You have a bunch of actors that are already really well known for something rather for reasons, but they're already well known.

Whoever they decide to bless or anoint automatically results in transference as a status. And that happens in super subtle ways. I mean, that's like getting attention from the cool kid at recess. on the playground in fourth grade right i mean all the way up to harvard admitted me and i got a degree with that kinetic energy around status i mean it can go from

the punchline of a movie like Idiocracy and Croc Shoes to high-end fashion. And now it's on runways and it's a high status symbol in literally years. That kinetic part of it, I think a lot of us miss because when we think of status, we think of those longer established institutions that tend to create it, especially in a university structure and a journal structure in the academic world.

where they've been able to anoint for so long that it doesn't seem like it's as kinetic. So let's go back to anointment because, you know, it's funny. So I got this just coincidentally right before we jumped on air. So I was walking on the beach one day and during COVID and the title anointed occurred to me.

That was one of the moments for the book, right? You know, like you think of a title that you like and then you got to write the book. What is it about this sort of religious imagery that really draws me? And then I remember like I went to a Catholic high school and... had mass every Friday afternoon all through high school. And this religious imagery I found super fascinating. So the book is called Anointed and that's Old Testament, right?

There's this moment where holy oil is placed on a forehead and there's a ritual and someone becomes a king. And we think about these sort of super prominent, super stable institutions as... being the anointers in the world, like the huge prize, the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the super prominent universities, the church, the monarchy.

In some ways, it's actually a real misnomer because what I really want to get across in the book is that these hierarchies are literally everywhere. And so you're also anointed. by this slightly cooler kid at recess, like when you're in the fourth grade and you are all throughout your life by the people or the institutions who are willing to affiliate with you.

and sort of share their status with you or do something that elevates you on a local status hire. I mean, I love the imagery, but I want to get up. I also want to push people away from it's just these like, you know, rites passages or major. in one's life that creates status distinctions. They literally happen every day in the live social groups that you're in. Almost everybody thinks they're a little bit misplaced in the status order.

And if they do this, that, or the other and jockey a little bit, they'll work their way up. You know what drains your energy faster than a bad networking event? An overpriced phone bill. The big wireless companies love taking your money. They count on you not switching. Right now, Mint Mobile is running their best deal of the year. 50% off all unlimited plans.

That's $15 a month for unlimited. $15. That's less than most people spend on coffee in a week. You get high speed data, unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network. Bring your current phone. Keep your number. No contracts. to turn your expensive wireless bill into actual savings. Go to mintmobile.com.

That's mintmobile.com slash charm. Limited time offer. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months required. That's $15 a month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Speeds may... When you're making good money, it's easy to get complacent.

You don't track every dollar. Then the holidays hit and you realize you have no idea where it all went. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. Monarch, rated Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the...

All in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. And right now, just for our listeners, Monarch is offering 50% off your first year. I've put off organizing my finances for years. Monarch does the heavy lifting.

Like all your accounts in minutes, clear visuals, smart categorization. I'll never touch a spreadsheet again. Forbes named it best app for couples. CNBC put it in their top fintech companies in the world. There's a Reddit community with 34,000 users who shape how the product gets built. If you're not on top of your money, you're missing chances to save more, invest smarter, and hit your goals faster. Don't let financial opportunities slip through the cracks.

Use code charm at monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code charm. In a lot of situations, we don't think about the status that we have either. So oftentimes we pay attention to it in the moments where we're craving more of it. We don't think about it in the moments when we have it in these other contexts.

One of the arguments in the book is that status is super important in our lives in part because it makes things simpler. And you know, you guys, I, you know, you. You've had a lot of interesting guests on this podcast before, and I'm sure you are very familiar with this idea that we're boundedly rational. We have limited cognitive capacity. We're not super good at like considering a million different options. When we try, we fail. And then we have like stereotypes and biases and schemas.

It's not that there's malice behind all of those. It's that they're cognitively efficient. Like we are trying to get through life efficiently and we don't have the ability to process everything. Status is one of these things where it's a cue to us. And one of the arguments in the book is that it's not just like, what do we buy or what do we want? It's also how do we behave?

If we walk into a meeting in the office and the more high status person in the meeting takes kind of the head of the table, then we don't have to have this awkward moment about who sits where. And that's all like a status process working in the backgrounds of our minds that we're not even really thinking about. It just becomes at some point reflexive how we respond to a status order. So I think you're exactly right, AJ. We're in certain...

And certain moments were like hypersensitive to it, you know, though we never really liked talking about it. And they're often conscious choices that we're making, just not socialized in that manner. So we're not going to say I'm putting on this watch to symbolize to this boardroom that I'm successful, but that is why we're putting on that watch and not wearing our Casio. Or we're not going to say I'm vacationing in this location.

because that's just where I enjoy my leisure. But I'm vacationing there because that's where I know other influential people vacation. And I have an opportunity to showcase my status to that social group when I snap my photos for Instagram. Being born in the West. It's appearing that we have an opportunity to transcend where we are or any caste system. Whereas not born in the West...

there's only so many opportunities that are open to you due to the caste system. To go back to the broad theme of merit, we're a far cry from a meritocracy in the United States. There were much more of one than nearly all of the world has been for nearly all of history. I'll take it compared to what else it is to options. Right. So, you know, if you're born almost anywhere in the full history of humanity, you're born into some version of a hereditary or caste system. And then...

sort of your whole opportunity set and what you get to do is a function of what group you were born into. From a society, a societal perspective, that makes no sense. And there's this sort of... quote I dug up when I was writing the book that I just loved. And I think it was Thomas Paine. And he said something like, if Homer's kid wrote a novel, I probably don't want to read it.

That's like a hereditary system. If you were born into the monarchy, then you're a monarch, right? Sure. But that doesn't make you very good at your job. There's a status system in the United States. It is incredibly important. It radically shapes. opportunity, it pulls us a long way away from our sense of meritocracy, but there's still merit in the system, right? I mean, partly status is achieved by merit.

Right. It gives you more mobility in the system than just pure status alone. Key part in this around the institutions and what we used to look to for status was there was less of an ability to. fake it or to cheat it or to obscure your status in that system where there were a few tastemakers, critics setting the argument for who was anointed.

But now we can game the algorithms. We can buy a thousand books of our own and become a bestseller. We can lie on our resume and present ourselves as having that certification or gone to that institution or borrow status from wherever we want. And it seems like with the more and more places developing that we can be anointed, there's more and more pressure to fake it until you make it. And I go back and forth on it a lot, right? And so like, when was it easier to scam your way off?

The book kind of goes into a bunch of history on this because there's some pretty famous scam artists, right? And they're fun. The idea behind it is, you know, status is a super valuable resource, which it is. then it's like money. And just like, you know, there's fraud and cheating and even criminal behavior to obtain unearned financial capital, so is there to obtain social status.

And I even, I think, remember looking up the etymology of the word charlatan, which looks like it entered the English language in the 17th century. And at that point, we just... needed a word for doing some kind of status scam, which is generally what a charlatan is. Part of me says that it was way easier back then because there were no government-issued IDs.

There's like no internet with like every tiny little bit of information about all of us in some data set somewhere. If you wanted to be a doctor, you could just kind of dress like one.

and move to a different town where no one's ever met you and tell everybody you're a doctor, I kind of miss those days of scamming. But on the other hand, in the digital world... Like there are so many different ways to try to manipulate, you know, sort of who you are and what you are. There's a whole kind of cottage industry and buying life. or reposts or comments or reviews. And you can now robotize all of that. You could have GPT-5 write you a bot to create.

a whole bunch of fake reviews somewhere and trust me it knows how to do it whether it will or not i'm not sure but it's like not a very hard problem right now in the digital world there is an enormous amount of faking to obtain higher status the pressure to maintain that status again with it being kinetic you know i think there's this thought of oh i just get

status bestowed upon me and then I have it and it's great but there are downsides to having that status and with it being kinetic it takes a lot of effort to maintain it. aspect of social status which i thought a little bit about but not not nearly enough about is like what does it mean when you have it and when you don't have it sort of for you individually psychologically

we look at people with high status and we think like that's the land of milk and honey. Like everything is amazing if you have high status. But in fact, it's difficult in a lot of ways. And one of the ways is it creates like almost like a hamster wheel phenomenon, which is like your highest status, you're a prominent fashion designer, or you're a Michelin starred restaurateur, or you're a Nobel Prize winning academic. you know at that point the world like it really expects a lot out of you so

While it's easier to produce when you're in those positions, there's an enormous amount of pressure on you to sort of keep the output up. And the second thing is, you know, you mentioned Elon Musk and he's a fun one to talk about and think about. these days. Like, you know, so Elon's status, I think, has hemmed and flowed a little bit. And part of it is when you become high status, like you nearly lose control over the public dialogue about you. Completely.

That's what I was just going to mention. And he's one example, but there are numerous now buying media companies and trying the best they can to control the narrative about themselves because of the pressure they face with that immense amount of status.

Wealth certainly created that status, but business success creates that status. And then, of course, there's, well, you got to write books about how you had that success. You got to tell us the story of why you're so successful. We want to mirror that success. Other people need to learn from it.

And then it creates this pressure that leads to you tweeting late at night, buying the Washington Post, building ships for your wife, like all these things that we laugh about billionaires doing. We're like, why are they doing it? They seem so thin skinned.

But in actuality, it's the pressure of the status that they have to maintain that oftentimes on their journey upward, they never even thought about. They never even consider that would be the weight on their shoulders. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless, while being a part of legendary nights, from backyard jams to sold-out arenas. There's a song in every toast.

Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org. Jack Daniels and Old No. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey. 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery. Lynchburg, Tennessee. Coca-Cola. For the big. For the small. The short. And the tall. Peacemakers. Risk takers. For the optimists. Pessimists. For long distance love. For introverts. And extroverts. The thinkers.

And the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you. When you have that status, you are detached. from so many other things. Your own public perception is one of them, but just what's going on on the street, just the general temperature of the everyday person. and what is going on there has only been I have been lucky in my life to have a couple moments where I was lifted up and had that experience and

It may have only been a weekend, but the comedown is like, I have to go back to reality now after that? And then getting a taste of just... Living in that manner, but being so detached from so many of your normal everyday concerns, it separates you from the rest of humanity. So much in both of these comments. So cut me off if I ramble, but, you know, but so much in both of these comments. So, you know, I'm the first one, AJI. So I.

I had just run across this, can't even remember what it said, but I just love this title. So I ran across an editorial in the New York Times when I was writing the book. And it was something like, why is everything all of a sudden Taylor Swift's fault? Yeah. Why not? When celebrity reaches a point, like that sort of outsized level, then everybody's always talking about you and you can easily lose control of the narrative.

Book talks about this guy who won. He's a restaurateur. Then he got a Michelin star. That's like the Academy Award at the restaurant. There's not a lot of starred restaurants. And he's in this kind of sleepy Spanish village. And now all of a sudden he's a Michelin starred restaurateur. What happens is first, everybody shows up with giant expectation.

I'm going to start restaurants. It ought to be amazing. It's got to be absolutely amazing. And if it isn't, then, you know, then I'm probably going to be disappointed. Whoever is in the local community coming like... coming over to the watering hole and and having a meal and like very friendly and very informal and local events like people with instagram account showing up from you know seven countries away and you know they expect

30 good pictures and they care about that. The nature of what this chef is doing and what the restaurant's about, it like changes radically. And so he just gives the star back. So he's like one reaction.

And then I sort of in the book contrast that to Gordon Ramsay, who's this like celebrity chef and Gordon writes about, he writes about if you like, if you have two stars. or three stars or even one star, then next year you might lose your star. And losing your star is catastrophic. That's like losing your wife or something. So you have to do everything possible.

to not lose the star. So you have like kind of one person looking at this and saying, take it back. I don't want all of the consequences of this. And another one thinking like, you know, like, I mean, like I'm John, I'm in that moment where I've been elevated.

don't want the weekend to end. I want the weekend to go forever and ever and ever and ever. John, on your point, absolutely. And there's this expression that I really got to thinking about. You know, you hear this all the time. It's lonely. Oh, yeah. The truth, I think, is a fewfold. But one of it is, if you have high status in any walk of life, you automatically inherit this problem.

which is you have to question everybody's motives. Because everybody wants a piece of you. Everybody wants to interact with you. And then you sort of move into like, how do I have authentic friendships? for human connection with people I trust and value and create relationships that are consistent, stable, meaningful in life when everybody wants something. And then the second thing is it just creates this...

It creates a weird boundary, like, you know, almost like I'm the boss and you're the subordinate and sort of supervisor, employee or subordinate, superior relationships. there tends to be the sense of let's not broach this divide. Let's keep the relationship in whatever roles we're in, but not, but then we're not going to have this sort of social relationship on top of it. The third factor is that

Once you get annoyed, your world becomes different. The world of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift and Jeff Bezos, they're not the world of the average person's world. So your ability to relate. And your ability to understand, like, concerns and what matters to sort of your typical person, you lose that. 100%. Often when you become very high status.

Johnny lived in L.A., I still live in L.A., encountering so many people with that status. I often laugh about the headlines about their outrageous behavior because it doesn't really contextualize, to Johnny's point, how different their world is.

and how in any moment they're under a magnifying glass in ways that that many of us would just never experience in our lives but what i wanted to point out for those in the audience who are listening is saying why do i care about these people with incredible amounts of status well

you might be sitting there right now with imposter syndrome, which is a symptom of carrying the weight of status. And I thought that was such a unique perspective from the book that I think many of us don't think about when we think about imposter syndrome. central premises of the book to go back to a conversation we had earlier is that you could take these in life take these super small differences early on like somebody might be a tiny bit smarter or

a tiny bit better of an athlete or maybe not. I mean, it's just random, like somebody catches a break and then that compounds and you start to separate because status creates more status. The way it does that is if a very prominent artist makes a new piece of art, like what's a good piece of art? I mean, I asked that question and just pause for a second because.

Who knows, right? Who knows what's a good piece of art? But I can tell you, a good piece of art is the piece of art that Gerhard Richter made. already this like super prominent contemporary artist and so if he makes a new piece of art and we don't know how to really judge it directly then let's just call it an amazing piece of art because it's Gerhard Richter but then like we have this like

We already are in this self-fulfilling prophecy world where the art is good because it's Gerhard, right? And then Gerhard is this prominent artist because he makes amazing art. And we're in this virtuous cycle. And there are other factors that the book talks about to go into how that compounds over time. But if we then take that back to the imposter syndrome, what it means is that

where you stand in the status order is really decoupled from where you stand in the quality distribution. Like your status ordering is super skewed. We have these super high status people, but they're not like... that much better than somebody else at doing what they do. And that's what creates the imposter syndrome. Like the world expects you to stick the landing every time, to nail it, to hit it out of the park, to be amazing.

at whatever it is you do, if you have high status, and you realize, well, I'm just a human being, too. Another point to that with art, I myself have been a musician my whole life, and there, of course... There are artists who made music that I love. But as soon as they got status, as soon as everyone else adopted them, as soon as Taylor Swift went from playing at the Whiskey A Go-Go.

with her acoustic guitar or country songs to Superstar Taylor. A lot of the organic things that made these people so relatable or made their art so special to you. is now lost. I mean, there are many artists where you discuss their before and after, and it changes for people. And I'm sure there are people who love them as their, now that they have status and didn't like. the music they made when they were just a club band dogging it from one garbage dump to the next.

in a van for $20 a night. I'm one of those people. I love artists that I can go and see with 30 people in a room. To me, that's amazing. And of course, there are so many bands that I'm like, yeah, I can't listen to that band anymore. Not now that you're listening to. when you're Beyonce or you're Taylor Swift and the whole world is listening to you, your problem is at that point that you have to appeal to everybody. And if you're...

authentically a musician of a particular kind doing a particular genre and doing it really, really well, it's super hard to appeal to everybody because it doesn't, right? That's why you have to reinvent yourself. You know, it's like, oh, Beyonce's country album. Why is she in country? Because she's trying to garner more status. She needs more popularity. That's, again, that that kinetic pressure that's felt. And I know we're.

running short on time here, but I'm fascinated now by this AI race. So Johnny mentioned, you know, Sam Altman and Elon and, and While humans are still in control of AI by managing it with the language input that's being used for their models, you know, we have these imbalances around status where Grok might say Elon has more status and OpenAI will say.

Sam has more status because we're futzing with the models. But what happens once the models adopt their own language and now they are the ones who are determining status for us? AI is one of these things where like it just doesn't matter. You know, my view of it is it literally doesn't matter what topic you're talking about. It's about to change. AI is going to change everything about how our social and economic worlds and mental worlds function.

All of the world's creativity has been used to train these models. And what's happened now is the narrowing of that output. So, you know, you request a cover letter, I request a cover letter, and it's going to be within a very narrow band of each other because the AI has taken all of human creativity.

and now condense it down in its predictive model of what the next word should be. And there's only so many next words that AI is going to come up with versus a human. Well, it's certainly, I think, going to suppress a lot, condense a lot of distribution. So that's another way of making the same point, which is that there was like...

Kids are writing essays to get into college and there's a lot of variation in them because, you know, some are really terrible and some are really, really amazing and most of them are okay. But now they're just all good. because the system gets rid of all the terrible ones. And so we can't use terrible to screen people out. So instead, we're going to have to look on some other criteria to make these assessments rather than evaluating the work per se.

And I think those are going to, in the short term, be the traditional status markers. Where can our audience find out about your work in the book? Anointed, the book's just available at all the usual places. If anyone's interested, I'd love for them to have a look. Thank you again. Thanks a million, AJ. Appreciate it. And now I'd like to showcase one of our X-Factor Accelerator members. Take it away, Michael. Hi, my name is Michael, and I'm an accountant for an insurance company.

before the x-factor accelerator i struggled to build and maintain close connections in my social circle because i wasn't the best at sharing thoughts and feelings with others The reason I joined the X Factor Accelerator is to improve my overall social confidence with my family, friends, colleagues, new acquaintances, and in my social and romantic life.

My favorite thing about the X Factor Accelerator is that it helped me overcome my fear and anxiety when interacting at large social events so that I can now confidently approach others and make new connections with ease. What I'm looking forward to now is using the skills, techniques, and experience I've learned to create long-lasting and more meaningful relationships with the people I care about most in life.

Thank you, Michael. It was an honor and a pleasure working with you too. And good luck to you and all of your future endeavors. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It will mean the world to us and it helps others find the show. Until next week, go out there, have an amazing week, have an amazing weekend, and we'll see you soon.