YouSaid · the spoken record

Will Storr

lines on the record: 114
first: 2022-08-08
most recent: 2022-08-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Absolutely, yeah, because we have this imaginary audience in our heads, we're not just being judged by other people, we're being judged by ourselves. So yeah, I think that's hugely important.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Massively because I feel good about myself. This is my game writing. And if I feel like I've written something good. I feel like this hope”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it all gets too dark, what helps you find the light? I mean creation. I mean, that really is true. If I'm feeling depressed, I've got this. It's quite cheesy. I've got this little saying I say to myself on the head, which is the only way out is art. And so if I want to feel good, I'll go and do some work, do some writing. And if I'm proud of it, it'll sort of pull me out of it. So that's kind of what helps me see the light my art.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or they could be religious. I mean, their religion is a status game, and that's a virtue game. It's often a healthy virtue game, you know, in a religious game. I've got to follow the Ten Commandments and go to the church and do whatever I've got to do. And then I become a high status Christian or whatever. That's a big journey I've gone. I used to be very angry and hostile about religion because of my background. But now I see that religion, although it's not for me. Hugely valuable to people because it gives them a status game to play.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So even with So there's also that to say, and also, you know, life is a never-ending game as long as we're not suffering from depression. If we're a mentally healthy person, we're a little bit optimistic. We're backing ourselves a bit. You know, that's what people are like. I feel like I'm going to, I have the capacity to achieve X, Y, and Z, you know, so yes, there will always be people at the bottom, but A, they're probably not going to stay there for very long because the game's so fluid. And B, that doesn't mean that they're condemned to a life of constant misery and torture.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, we all play individual little games. So it isn't as though the cleaner in the office feels like they're competing with Michelle Obama. Because if they did, they would just throw themselves out the window. That's not how life works. That cleaner is comparing themselves to the other people in their life they work with, their families, their cousins. So they're not feeling horrific because they're not the king of Thailand. So that's not how it's working. Life isn't that brutal. Two, we have amazing imaginations. And, you know, we're very good at buffing ourselves up and finding ways of seeing real value. And I think in a healthy organization, as I say in the book, you can go to a meeting as the lowest status member of the organization in that formal status game, make a fantastic contribution and leave them like the king of the world, like the best person in the room. And if that's a healthy organization, that's how you'll be made to feel too. You'll be like, oh, it's brilliant. It's amazing.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's always going to be a hierarchy. You can't remove the hierarchy from the human. It's how we process reality. I mean, when you go into any social situation, if you introduced to five strangers, you know this. You have a conversation within minutes, you start getting a sense of who's up there, who's down there. And it'll be body language. It'll be who's got the jobs, who's got the clothes. You know, your brain's just calculating. You can't stop it. It's going to happen. And you can't stop it because everybody else is doing it to you too. That's something that other people give to us as well is our sense of status. We sense it from other people. So there will always be people at the bottom in inverted commas. But there are a few things to say. That sounds grim, but there are a few things to say about that. The first thing is that...”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's connection and status for me. I mean, the last time we have a really badly was when I moved back. I lived in Australia for four years and did quite well in Australia as a freelance journalist, but came back with nothing, no job, because I was a freelancer. And so, yeah, and then for a while, I just thought I was going to have to start doing day shifts in magazines. Like it was bad. I just felt like everything had gone wrong. And so I think that was very much connected to status. I mean, I'm very bad because in the book, I recommend playing lots of games, playing multiple games. The science is pretty clear that the more status games people play in their life, the more sources of status they have, the more groups they belong to, the more stable their personality, the happier they tend to be. And as I said earlier on, I just tend to do writing. That's kind of what I do. That's partly the selfish reasons for the volunteering. I want to have another source of status.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often is focused more around success, personal success. So I think that's why you see lots of male suicide in middle age. Because in middle age, men start losing their bodies. Their careers might grind to a halt. Their relationships with their children might start going wrong. They might get divorced and divorced, you know. Yeah, it's not good. So I think that that's where men particularly might get into trouble when men feel like I'm not a success. I'm not looking after my family in my job. It's that sense of being a failure. I think that's very, very hard for men.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, again, you've got to be very careful by not generalizing. There's a huge variety in what men are like, but just still sort of underline the fact we're talking sort of generally speaking here. My sense is that, as I said before, women are much better in your great words at going together, whereas men tend to be more by instinct go it alone. And like everything, that's a trade-off and the negatives are... That we are, you know, we are less good at talking to other people and sharing our kind of burdens. I think that I've got no scientific evidence to back this up, but my impression is that that male identity”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, his view and mine too is that I don't think sure talking helps, but just saying to men you should be more like women is not that helpful. And actually what we need to do is figure out what are men like and start trying to develop solutions that are specifically designed for men. I just think saying to men you should learn to cry. Haven't cried for years. You know, it's like it's just not fair on men. It's not smart. There needs to be more work done in how can we actually help men in a male-friendly way. I think that's the way to go.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The solution isn't that men should be more like women because you can't change biology. But I think you're right. I think, especially with the social connection thing, we have to push ourselves a bit harder. And I always notice with the social stuff, it just seems to always happen where when you've got a social appointment coming up, you think, oh, what did I say yesterday that for? But then that's like 100% of the time we think, oh, I don't want to go. But then when you go, you go, oh, I had a great time. This is amazing. I should do this more often. And that's also 100% of the time. It's so weird that we seem like men especially seem to be so bad at predicting how much we're going to enjoy a social occasion.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I kind of really do believe that there are basic biological differences between the genders on average. You have to say, generally speaking, there's huge overlaps, of course. We're more alike than we are different. But I think on the average, I think, you know, men and women are, you know, there are differences. And I do think that one of them is how we manifest socially. I think women are much better instinctively at the group. Whether that's politically or in a friendship context, there just seems to be men seem to have an instinct for going it alone. And women seem to have an instinct for the”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My head had started telling this story that it was me that had failed all my exams and was a total disaster. But it was amazing to sit around table with all these lots of lawyer and there's all these successful people. We all failed our exams. It was just a really bad school. But we all kind of succeeded regardless of that. So that's been really fun and I've had to kind of. Yes, so I think it's moving the dial on connection. That's what I'm missing.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we've already spoken about, one of the things I don't have is much connection. Like, I've got a great marriage, but outside the marriage, I don't really see people that much. And I feel like because I don't have children, I don't actually do anything for anyone else. So I felt like I was becoming quite a selfish life. Everything was just about either my, well, puff my dogs. So I'm obsessed with. I don't do anything for anything else. So I figure that's a bit of a hole in my life. So that's why I'm going to start volunteering. I've got to be interviewed by this charity, but assuming that goes well. So I think that's a whole. And I do want to sort out the connections side of things. Like I've started having semi-regular meetups with some old school friends recently, which has just been an absolute joy to see these people after, you know, so long. And I kind of...”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a very good question. So, I think that one of the things, one of the things I've done recently is I've not started yet, but he's going to be happening this month, it's going to start volunteering for charity because I feel like”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because in real life reality, it's usually a trade off. Most things are trade-offs. And so, yes, in lots of sense, if you're playing your success games, it's a good thing. It's a massive motivator. It was for Steve Jobs. It was for Michael Jordan. It sounds like it is for you. But that doesn't mean it's 100% good thing. If you start losing, that's going to become a source of a lot of misery for you. So I think we often make mistakes when we try to figure out whether something is good or bad. Because I think the reality is that most things are trade-offs.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's fascinating. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's fascinating. And so that description you say of somebody whose holidays does were constantly looking for rivalries, I think that's correct. And I also think it's a mistake to think, is it healthy or is it toxic? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? I think one of the things I try not to do in my books is to categorize what's good and what's bad.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“them on, and in the book I tell the story of the true origin story of the iPhone, which is quite amazing. And it begins when”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fucking war, and you've got to grab. And I think that's when you end up with extremely toxic and ultimately potentially corrupt corporate cultures because status is very hard to come by. So that's what you want to avoid. And it's thought that a very moderate amount of competition is quite good to motivate people, but it very quickly goes wrong. The alternative to that is rivalry. Now, rivalry is healthy and a massive motivator. And rather than being all against all, rivalry is one against one. So that's one individual against one individual or one group, one team against another team, or one organization against another organization. And rivalry is characterized by having this status competition that's characterized by lots of near misses and skirmishes. So you can think about Apple and Microsoft had a period where there were great rivals and that rivalry kind of pushed.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was this difference between competition and rivalry? So when you first think about competition and rivalry in business, you think that's the same thing. But it's not. So competition is bad and rivalry is good. So when I'm talking about competition, I'm talking about a corporate structure like Enron. So that's the example I use in the book. So Enron famously had their rank-and-yank system where the top, I think it was 15% got promoted. I think they were judged them at least twice a year. Everybody in the company got judged. The top 50% got promoted. The bottom got fired and the middle were just fucking terrified. So that's competition. So competition is a sense of all against all. You go into work and it's a”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Real politicky Of slightly cynical way is if we are generous with status, people are going to want to be around us and they're going to want to work with us and some of that status will wash back. So I think don't treat status as if it's a limited resource. In the business context, I think there's a really, it's not in that final section, but one of the other sort of light bulb moments for me in the business context.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we can, but we have loads of opportunities in our lives to give status to our employees, to the people around us. And we often don't. And so I think that feeds back in a kind of...”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because you can't win. I mean, that's the thing. I think the brain has this story that we live by and stories contained happy endings and happy endings if I achieve this, then I'm going to be happy. And again, it's weird because we know that's not true when we've lived a bit of life because, you know, but we still kind of believe it. If I get this, if this next book sells 100,000, then I'll be happy. And it's like, I know that's not true. So you don't ever win it. That's an illusion. That's the storytelling brain, you know, just giving you a bit of a lie to keep you motivated. I think there are various ways that you can succeed in the status game. You know, some kind of are quite practical. I think one of the most practical is that this amazing revelation that status is more valuable than money to most people. And it's free. Like we have status to give.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. But the other thing to say about that is, and this is again how I've changed. I mean, I'm a lefty, I've always been a lefty, but this book has really opened my mind to the idea that actually we do benefit from these people, not just in the obvious ways. They hire a lot of people. They give, you know, people get meaning and purpose from their jobs. People get to live a life and pay their mortgage from their jobs. They pay taxes that keeps the countries running. They're doing all that. But also with the space race, they're competing because they're playing a status game. That's obvious. But science and technology benefits from that too. I mean, I don't, you know, there will no doubt be a number of innovations that are hugely useful to humanity that come as a result of this space race or races like it amongst these highly motivated top-level players.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me anymore, or the people down there, or, you know, or even above me, you're competing with people, they're competing with the people who they're playing against. And they're all highly successful, highly motivated, incredible individuals.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Games, the millionaires, the billionaires, the Elon Musk, they're competing with the people immediately around them. They're competing, like Elon Musk is competing with Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook. So they're no happier than the people at school who are competing to be the best, or not say no happier, that's the general. I mean, I don't know. But, you know, the higher you go, the harder that game becomes. So, you know, that's taken away a lot of that. Oh, I wish I was this. I wish I was that. Yes, I'd love a yacht, you know, but still, you know, I'm not naive anymore to how difficult and punishing that life can be at the very top because you're not competing with.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, again, I say we already are, but I think, you know, another way that all this research has made me understand the world a lot better is that when we look at very high status people, really rich, wealthy, successful people, half our brain is just jealous. It goes, lucky them, and we imagine have this brilliant life and they're so happy and everything's wonderful. With the other half of our brains, we know that's not true. Because when you meet very rich and successful people, they're often not happy, right? Yeah, exactly. Suicide, there's alcoholism, there's workaholism. You know, they're not happy. The marriages don't last. So it's made sense of that to me. And that's actually quite a nice understanding that there isn't this hierarchy of happiness where the richer you are, the happier you are. Because we're all playing individual status games. So, you know, those people playing high level status.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evolve to operate in a global environment of modern media and the internet. So you get these feedback loops where lots of people are looking at one person, so more and more people start looking at that person and they get reported in the press and then more people start looking at them. And they call it the Paris Hilton effect because I think when they figured out what was going on, Paris Hilton was the big, why is she famous person? But you might as well just call it the Kardashian effect or whoever the latest person is that happens to be really famous and no one can quite work out why it's because it's a feedback loop once lots of people start looking at that one person everyone just piles in because the brains are assuming they must be high status, they must be worth attending to if everyone's attending to them.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's actually a perfectly valid point. He sees himself as higher status than you. And so both of your... Game subconsciously were playing a status game. And so that's another way. We're also measuring another queue is how other people are attending to that person. So if we notice lots of people attending to a person, we will automatically assume they're worth attending to. And so what's interesting, Joseph Henry writes, is that these effects were designed to work in small groups of people because that's how we”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the time monitoring our environment for status queues and playing that game. And so we're constantly monitoring other people's body language. We can measure someone's relative status versus submissive versus dominant in 43 milliseconds. That's how quick when we see somebody, we measure how dominant or submissive they are in terms of status. So that's how quick it is. So we're looking at things like successful interruptions in conversation. The more successful interruptions you make, the higher status you are. Like we've all been in situations, maybe you're not for a while, where you're trying to get a word in Edgevar. Everyone's just like, maybe in a family situation. And you just think, oh, fuck it.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is, again, Joseph Hendricks' work where he looks at how do we identify the people that we want to copy Flatican form. So there are various cues. One of them is with success queues. So in the hunter-gatherer tribe, it might be a hunter has a big necklace of teeth, one tooth from every creature that he's killed. So that's why we have jewelry these days, because it's a success queue. And it's amazing when you read about the detail, because the brain is some neuroscientist call that has his status detection system. So we are constantly...”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think about it. Yeah, but that's the thing. I think we're so sensitive to reductions in status that will never fly.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. But it's also smart thinking because when we're judging other people's status, it isn't just how much money they have. In fact, the money is often invisible. The title says a lot. So if you were to make he's my podcast CEO, he's more likely than to go on and get a better job somewhere else, higher status, more money because of that bump in status. So it's actually the instinct is correct. It's a smarter move to take the title than the grand”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, but it's not that surprising when you think about the evolution of the brain. We haven't evolved to crave money because money hasn't been around long enough. We've evolved to crave status and money is just one way that we can measure status. But there are loads of other ways we can measure status. So it doesn't have to be money based. And as you said, that was quite a major study. I think it was 15,000. People in the UK that they surveyed and found that most would accept a high status job title over a modest pay rise, yeah.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People read the same books as their idols, they dress the same way as their idols. They might even, you know, I find, I mean, I'm embarrassed about it, but I think it's probably very common. When I've watched a stand-up comedy special and I've loved it, I'll find myself talking like that comic the next day and like using their inflections a bit. It's just kind of weird, you know, or laughing like them, you know. So generally speaking, we're quite envious creatures. We don't like high status people. But there's a very narrow class of people that we identify with. And those are the people that feel like super successful versions of us. We relate to them, we identify with them. And that's when that...”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Found myself sitting at school the same way as Nick Kershaw. You know, so like my copy flatter conform mechanism is switched on. That's imprinting. So I think that's how kind of fame works. I think it's that we see people who feel like a piece of us but are highly successful piece of us. Like that person's like me, but amazing. And so these very ancient evolved mechanisms switch on, even though we're probably never going to meet that person. They just switch on and we become. And so, you know, you'll notice that.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to become high status. So if I want to become high status, of course, do everything they're doing. So if I do everything that they're doing, it'll work. So it switches on. And then we've got the flatter process, which is I need access to this person. I want to be around this person to be able to learn everything that they're doing. And you do that with, you know, flattery is a good way of doing that. It's like, you know, you're amazing. I love this, what a great book. What a great podcast. You're amazing businesses. And then, you know, so we'll let people in who treat us that way and conform. You do what you do what you do what you're told, you behave. And so, you know, you can think about that when you think about celebrities, you know, like I remember when I was seven or eight years old, I was obsessed with this guy called this guy, Nick Kershaw. And I remember seeing him on TVM and he was crossing his legs in a certain way with his ankle on his knee and his legs sticking out. And I just...”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was a really sort of kind of Naughty paradox for me to get my head around when I was writing the book. And the closest solution I could come to it was, so when you look at how human social groups work, there's a really amazing research in America called Joseph Henrich, who studies this stuff and has written about a couple of books about this. And he talks about how we learn. And so in those, again, those groups in which we evolved, which we've sort of looked to to figure out why we are like we are, what you'll find is that when you were growing up, young people look, they identify high status people from which to learn. And those high status people are going to be like them in some way. They're probably going to be the same gender and they're going to have the same kind of interests and, you know, that kind of thing. And so this mechanism switches on, which is copy, flatter, conform. So you start copying their behavior because the brain goes, well, this person's high state.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course, it does. Yeah, I mean, that's evolved to. Want to feel of value, but unfortunately being of value is kind of relative, like if everybody is equally valued, then nobody's valued. Do you know what I mean? We're all in the same level. So I think that's when it can become quite damaging. And that's where life can become quite exhausting, especially in these kind of highly competitive neoliberal world that we live in, where everybody's pushing, pushing, pushing to succeed, pushing to succeed. And it's true, you know, we hate it when our friends become successful parts of us. Always going to because it kind of devalues what we have, you know, it's just an unfortunate byproduct of the status game.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So this is why I never believe that Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory is I think he did kill himself because he's just at this huge drop in status. It just makes him incredibly vulnerable to suicidal thought and ideation. So yeah, so it's not just drops in status. It's especially sudden drops in status makes us very vulnerable. And also I found it was interesting the research says it's also being left behind. So if we stay still and everybody else accelerates that also makes us vulnerable to potentially anxiety, depression and potentially suicidal ideation.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same is true for connection. So when we're lonely, the same thing happens, the lonelier we are. When we lack status, the same thing, you know, we have information goes up, antiviral response goes down, which is bad for us in the long term. And there's the same with the social genomics people say it's the same with loneliness, which is why loneliness is bad for our health too.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's from the White Hole Studies. Yeah, that's part of what Dr. Mark is mental. Yeah, it's crazy. So they're really significant. It's not marginal. It'll be marginal from one layer to the next when you actually look at the whole game. It's very significant, the differences, the health outcomes from the top and bottom.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite alarming. As you said, there's so many compounds. I mean, life is much more complicated than that. It is true that people smoke and don't smoke and so on. But what Marmot finds is that if you take two smokers, the one higher up is less likely to die of a smoking related disease than the one lower down.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Levels of status, we have this status detection system that's constantly monitoring our level of status. And so the idea is that when the brain registers that we are dropping in status or we're not too high in status, it prepares ourselves. It changes the way our genes work and the actions of our cells change in such a way that kind of prepares us for kind of trouble. So inflammation goes up, antiviral response goes down. And so the body changes in such a way that we become more ill.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And vulnerable to heart problems and so on. And they found that it was the same that the lower you went down the monkey pecking order, the more likely the monkeys were to die of these heart-related diseases because of their bad diets and the ones at the top. And then importantly, they conspired to change the hierarchy of the group. I don't know how they did it, but they changed them. Maybe they took out the top monkey. But they changed the hierarchy of the group. And they found that the health outcomes changed in lockstep with a change in hierarchy. So what if a monkey went up, they became less likely to die. And so then you might ask, well, this is crazy. Like, why is this? And so the closest answer that scientists have come, there's a whole field called social genomics. It's a new field. And social genomics is all about how does our social world affect the function of our genes. So, you know, we're social animals. Our brains are constantly monitoring how we're doing in the world. What are our levels of connection?”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's lots of evidence. So, the obvious thing is, oh, that's just because if you're being paid less, you maybe can't afford the personal trainer, you know, you're eating worse. But it wasn't, that wasn't the case at all. Literally one rung down below at the very top. So still a very, very wealthy, successful, high-status people had worse health outcomes than the person at the very top. So it really did seem like the brain is highly attuned to where we sit in a pecking order. And the lower we are down in that pecking order, the more unhealthy we became. Another set of scientists looked at this in a laboratory. So they took a bunch of monkeys who obviously like us very hierarchical if they status games. And they deliberately felt this is a terrible experiment. It's pretty awful. But they deliberately feathered them a terrible diet of fast food, like chocolate and crisp. So they ended up having a high level of athlosclerotic plaque, which is, you know, they were getting clogged up, basically.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of that going on at the moment, and I think a lot of it is because You know, trying to be kind of open-hearted about it. I wrote about this in Selfie and the status games that since the financial crisis, life has got harder, especially for young people. Success get, you know, like it's hard to get on the property ladder. People are leaving university with student debt. There's massive underemployment for graduates. We've got what they call elite overproduction. We're producing too many smart educated people for the roles to fit in. We're now entering a new recession apparently. So life is much harder for millennials and Gen Zen's than it was for boomers and Gen Xs. So success games are harder to play. So what you're saying, I think what you're seeing is online. People get status wherever they can. So they start playing virtue games instead.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cancel culture mobs, people attacking each other for believing the wrong things. That's a virtue dominance game. At their very worst, a virtue dominance game, you know, in the book I write about the rise of the Nazis, I write about the final chapter which kind of brings the whole thing together is the story of the rise of the communist and the Soviet Union from the perspective of status. And, you know, that's also a virtue dominance game. They're not interested in competence, in success. They're interested in you're going to believe this. And if you don't, we're going to punish you.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The tribe, you enforce the rules of the tribe, you know the rituals, you believe in the spiritual stories. So virtue isn't just about being selfless and kind and loving to your tribal members. It's also about being an enforcer. And I think, you know, there's no such thing as a pure game. That's the other thing to kind of point out. You can see a boxing match is a dominance game. It's pretty clearly a dominance game. But it's also got a virtue element to it. There's some rules in boxing. You can't just go and kick them in the groin. You know, like there has to be some virtue in there too. So you call that dominance virtue game. And I think the worst games, I think the games that are most destructive are what I call virtue dominance games. So virtue dominance game is one in which I'm raising status by enforcing rule, but by following rules and knowing the moral rules, the dominance component is I'm going to force you to do it. So, you know, that's what you see on social media.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT