Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeart Radio talking with writer Chuck Thompson. The new book is The Status Revolution, the improbable story of how the lowbrow became the highbrow, and I just before the bottom of the hour, I sort of blurt it out. It used to be that a luxury brand got that reputation because it was handmade. You know, it was hote quotur. You would go in and get measured, it was a reels. It was a representation that you had the money to
spend on getting something made exactly right for you. Now, I would say almost everything that has a luxury brand logo on it is probably made more poorly than any of the other brands we buy. I don't know where are you with that? Well, I think you're absolutely right. I mean what I feel like is it. I mean brands like you know, Gucci, product, whatever, name your name, your favorite, they still indicate some monetary advantage because they are expensive by and large, but they no longer convey
this sense of status or elitism or excellence. And a big reason that is the consolidation of luxury brands over the past quarter century has changed the luxury industry considerably. I mean, for one thing, when you're a small family owned you know, artisan house, you're not worried about pleasing shareholders and expanding your market reach to every country on the planet. So what were once these small family run entities are not part of large corporations lvmh Louisaitan Moayhannasty
owns what seventy five or eighty brand? They own, Tiffany, they own Bulgari, Richmond owns Cardier and mount Block and Ralph Lauran and so forth. And one of the big conundrums facing these contemporary status marketers is reconciling the fact that while a product's prestige is often based on scarcity and cost, in order to attain the scale necessary to remain globally competitive, a consolidated brand now has to attract
a mass following. Right, But the concepts of scarcity and mass production are totally at odds, And so the scarcity part of the game is over right, And people people like you who have recognized that, yeah, well, and I was told that once. I was totally if you want to look like I was figuring how old I was. But somebody in my church or somebody told me, said, you want to look if you want to look like a success, don't advertise somebody else's product. Have something custom made,
custom made by a tailor. There's gonna be no big label sticking out, but you will. It will be what the original concept was. It's made just for you. You are, then you're not somebody else's brand. You're not walking around with somebody's sandwich boards logos all over You're You're just you are who you are and it fits you well.
And that's given rise to this phenomena known as counter signaling, in which you know, very wealthy people, your your CEO of your company will show up to the boardroom in you know, as baggy jeans and a San Diego Padres T shirt or something. It's sort of to say that, you know, we're going at this point, you're better off rejecting those kind of traditional brands for that very reason that you just outlined. Right, yeah, okay, but that's again this speaks to when this goes back to your CNN days.
You know, ilsa clinch would be covering something on the CNN Fashion thing on Saturday, and you know, within two months you'd see people wearing it and and I just I always kind of challenge that notion that there are there's a select few of people who decide how the world should be dressing, and I that all of that individualism or expression goes out the window and suddenly people are getting in lockstep behind something that looks terrible on them.
You know, I did a whole lot of research for this book, and I ended up leaving a lot of it on the proverbial cutting group floor, and a whole chapter on fashion was one of them. It's a really trick you want to get my head around. In the end, I kind of decided that trends fashion trends don't necessarily
equal status. I get that there's a zen diagram overlap there that you know, you dress it a certain way or you have a certain no matter what community you're in, whether you're a mafia don or a hip hop artist, you know, the way you dress does matter. You are what you dressed to some degree. Still, I never quite could put my head around this end, to be honest, where where trends stop and fashion stops and status begins.
And you know, that's another point I make in the book, which is status is such a massive and sprawling concept, I mean other you know, apart from economic payoffs, you know, social status seems to be about the most important instead of motivating force or social behavior in the world, certainly in Western society. And it's really tough to get a grip on. I'm not com claiming to be an expert
on this. In this book, I tried to seek out sort of the people who I thought were influencing that we're thinking about in different ways and highlight what they were telling me about status. Well, even the concept of influencers this you know, I don't know if you know. I teach it at Case State Kansas State University, and and there's a lot of talk from gen z media obsessed students who, you know, they want many of them want to be influencers. It just sounds great, Oh, when
I'm going to be an influencer, Well, okay, influence. What an influence based on what I mean? Why why should somebody say, oh, yeah, so and so said I should try this, and so I'm going to go out and buy it. That's fine, that's a recommendation. That's kind of a horizontal experience. Somebody you like on the online did that. But this this concept of who's moving culture. That's also sort of fascinating for me for the idea of a status revolution, because even the concept of what is considered
to be a status item changes really fast. What would you say, other than fashion, then, are the status must have these days? Or what are the former ones, or what are the ones that are coming well in terms of products. Look, what I always say is that status is a reflection of social values, and our social values are changing, and that's why status is changing. Our society is becoming really Balkanized at this point, right, Yeah, and so there is there's no uniformity of status across the
culture anymore, and I think that's part of this. Social media certainly plays a big part of it. You know, you talk about influencers, influence equals power, and that that can equate to status. One of the other points I really try to get across in the book is that I think we need to divorce ourselves from this idea that money always equals status. And it's true that wealth and status also do go hand in hand, but there's a lot of other ways that people attain status aside
from money. Some of the obvious ones are religious leaders, right, the Pope the pope that no salary. Right, officially, the pope is takes a vow of poverty, and yet the pope clearly has a great status, not just within the Catholic Church, even around you know, world leaders. The quarterback of a high school football team might enjoy terrific status and yet not really have any money to show for it.
I like to say writers often get a decent measure of status conferred upon they get asked to come on shows like this, and yet there's a very good reason that they often say of writers, he died penniless, right, right, right, It actually probably proves that he was a good writer, exactly. But but but to get to the back to your point, which is, I think there are a lot of different ways that status is being reflected and that people are
seeking out status today that they wanted. Social media's an obbi. I mean social media didn't exist whatever twenty twenty five, thirty years ago, and so um, you know, within that community, there's become this new currency of status, and that is at the moment to be an influencer or a disruptor, right is the other big ones, Yeah, a disruptor. It let's favor for people that is there. That is one
overused term. And when originally when something was a disruption, it's because it came on and it was it was so popular and so revolutionary, and it changed the game so strategically for a business that it literally killed off a sector. And the best way to look at that, as I as we talk about in class, is you look at Netflix killed off Blockbuster, the idea of the corner videotape store, just that that industry has gone. It
just doesn't exist. Whereas at one point you know that they were getting these uh, they were getting these draconian penal teams, and you were like, it's almost like it was almost a court when you would go into return something to the guy in the blue shirt the behind the counter and they'd look at you and you'd have to plead your case and why you'd have to pay forty dollars for a two night rental and so but then you compare that and now that's a that's a disruption.
But people say, oh, well, Left and Uber, you know they disrupted the taxicab industry. No they didn't. They expanded it and taxicabs still exist. And the concept. In fact, what's happened is Uber and Left are now more expensive than getting a cab. The idea of the ride sharing is, you know, that's a dynamic pricing thing that people in taxis don't have. There's a set price in when you get into a taxi. There is a price that can go up two three times depending on how many Uber
drivers are on the road at anyone given time. So it didn't disrupt it, it just changed it and expanded it. But taxicabs are still there. And you bring up a point that's really important to me, and that I think it's important about this status revolution, and that is that status is no longer, or should no longer be considered a zero sum game. Right. Status has widely been considered this finite commodity. Right, if I had status, that meant you had less. And this is the paradigm that ultimately
is what the status revolution seeks to over. That's great. Status is not just for the guilded elect it's not. It's for everyone. It's an imperative being driven by a
lot of different on a lot of different levels. So give me an example then, of other things which have become part of the must have list as you see it, and the things that people are being peddled and that whether it's some of these could have come and gone already, and I could think of a few that were at one time they were told was a status symbol, a symbol of your achievement for whatever group you are in. That now we kind of look back on it and
we kind of like that was quaint. Well, I'm going to take exception with one of the what I think is an underlying um, you know, idea of that. But I answer the question first. I mean, I opened the book with a chapter on rescue dogs, right and for the for the research for this book, I really wanted to find examples of status and movement within a status hierarchy in sort of unexpected and surprising places, right and
right now, you know. And I opened the book, but there was a random woman I met at Wyoming while I was on a fishing trip kind of rushed up to me and my buddy Chris and started bragging to us about her rescue dog and saying it was the same dog that was used in the bin laden raid and all this kind of stuff. And and that wasn't the first time that that had happened to me on some level, right that people were sort of presenting their
dog as this um, as this item of status. And the interesting gas found out of it was, you know, I started reading books like like Thorsten bebl in The Theory of the Leisure Class, which came out in eighteen ninety nine and was kind of the potemic book of
people studying status for more than a century. Second Veblan bitches about dogs and dogs use to status symbols back in the eighteen nineties, right, So I really thought it'd be fun to kind of track this whole idea of how dogs have played a role in sort of status. And I started to wonder about the whole rescue dog
phenomenon and you know, within the within the dogs. I'm not talking about virture signaling right now, which is a sort of a sibling impulse of this thing, but within the dog community, thirty or forty years ago, rescue dogs had no status whatsoever, a zero. And how do they make such advances in the canine world. I mean they have, they have legal protections. Now they're a whole class of dogs. And what was the catalyst for their you know, ascension?
And so that's one of those things that to me, UM was really interesting in a way that a pure bred dog that somebody might go to a kennel and seek out a pure bred dog thirty forty fifty years ago. Now the going to the pound, they're going to dogs that you know, when you and I were growing up the end guys drove around and vans and picked up and you know euthanize, right. Right, So that's one. That's
one example. But I've heard a couple of times in this conversation, um, right ahead, there's this go ahead, like there's this kind of mocking or caustic approach to people who are seeking status, who are are displaying status in certain ways. And I think that's part of what this
status revolution is all about. Right, For more than a century, our understanding of status has been kind of rooted in this retrograde assumptions of religious institutions and judaeo Christian ethics and Enlightenment ethics and social science disciplines that were informed by Victorian era ethos. Right, I mean everyone from like vlin I much Grandma Moses. Right. They cast a long shadow of derision and disapproval on the this basic human
drive for status. Right, Luxury is curtin issues, and status is sinful, it's a sign of moral weakness, or that you've been duped by Madison Avenue sharps. But here's the thing that's going on right now today, Like we're using these modern methods of research, and scientists and scholars are
overturning these beliefs. Right if they're using functional magnetic resonance in the right MRI, we're using that, scientists can actually see activity in the brain's pleasure centers heightening at the exact moment that a person consumes let's say, like a high priced bottle of wine or some other product that's associated with elitism or prestige, And a lot of that pleasure center activity is created by this rush of dopamine, right, the brain's primary reward chemical. And what this means is
that status seeking is neither. It's not a product of vanity or artificially created social anxiety. It's a measurable biological function. And people are social critics in years gone. But I had no way of knowing that. But we can see that stuff now. So rather than mock the pursuit of status and luxury, right, these emerging group of scientists want us to accept status and status seeking in the same way we accept our need for oxygen and sexual graphic
lease right right, and in other forms of dopamine delivery. Yeah, and we understand that's not to say that we need to give into this and just because it's a biological function, that it's every part of it's good and we should overdo it. But I think there's a growing understanding that that status and status seeking is kind of an inevitable, if not healthy, part of animal existence. Right, Every single animal society arranges itself on a status hierarchy. They all
do it, and so do we as humans. So rather rather than mock that pursuit or shame it, it's a lot better to understand it and accept it and work with it. Okay. And here's why I would say my point is about five degrees off of where you are. So my point is it's the actual objects themselves, not the pursuit. I'm I'm not looking down in some sort of calvinistic way of going, oh, you shouldn't want that. You should all life should all be about pleasure, of denying and all that. That was my dad. I mean,
I know exactly what you mean. It identified the one thing that would bring you pleasure and then he would be like, well, I can't do that, you know, And that was for whatever reason, that's where he got his dopamine rush, was in denying himself this you know, this kind of weird aestheticism. But I my point is this, and I think your dog analogy, I'll take it just
a slightly different way. The idea of a purse dog and being able to go on to a plane with a purse dog was for a period of time perceived as the status symbol of the elite and that they would have a little dog and a person go and sit in first class. Well, now you get onto a plane, there are so many, you know, companion animals on some planes. It's like it's like a Fisher Price see and say,
you know, you're just like the cow goes move. I mean, it's like there's just and so I That's what I'm saying, is that the things that people pursued that thinking that would that's I need. That that was considered like that's the thing I need to have. When really do you And you have people then who are kind of gaming systems and applying for things and saying I need to travel with my menagerie of animals because then I feel better being on a flight. Well, we all feel better
on a flight, and we can bring our dogs. But I think, by the way, what dog, What dog isn't a comfort dog? That's dog right exactly. Listen to more Coast to Coast am every weeknight at one am Eastern and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more