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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“So he published this study, and the initial response was just, you know, it was absolutely torn to pieces. It was either ignored or attacked. But slowly he was proven to be right. And so when I was, I wrote a profile of Baumeister. And he was a fascinating guy. And then what I realized was that this idea had... Not just changed a person, but it changed a culture. Like the whole culture of the West, Britain, America, Canada and lots of Europe. When I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, just obsessed with this idea. And it just was just wrong. It's completely wrong. So that was the heart of selfie. It was this idea of how did selfie culture happen? How did we become so self-obsessed? And the self-esteem movement was a big part of that story. And it's the kind of central story of the book.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moral panic of the time, they thought it was going to cure that. And he was like, Well, is it true? Is this actually true? And so they looked into it and they found actually that there was no evidence that any of this was true, that every study that quoted it as being true just reference another study and he went in this breadcrumb trail of studies. They were all just quoting each other and there was no actual evidence any of this is true. And they tested they actually tested to see whether that self-esteem myth was true or not. And it wasn't. It wasn't true. It was originally based on this idea that this observation that school children who did well in exams also had high self-esteem. So they assumed that having high self-esteem made you good at exams. But actually they had high self-esteems because they'd done good in their exams. It was the other way around. It's got this obvious in retrospect. But that's what they, you know, so that was the error they made. Correlation causation, that old chestnut.”
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 so I started interviewing lots of people who changed their minds, like in big dramatic, kind of powerful ways. And one of those guys was this amazing psychologist called Professor Roy Baumeister. He spent his kind of early professional career in the self-esteem era of the 80s, you know, when, and this is the era I was brought up to, when everything was about self-esteem, when it was all about the kind of message out there was, if you want to be successful, just love yourself. You're amazing. You're fantastic. You could do anything that you want. You know, as Whitney Houston, the greatest love of all is yourself. It was that kind of era. And I remember it from school. I remember like, you know, teacher saying to me, the problem with you, Will, is you just have low self-esteem. And they used to go to self-esteem, a social vaccine. And if you loved yourself, it would meant that you would be more successful. You'd be happier. You'd have a better marriage. In America, they thought the self-esteem was going to self-homelessness, gang culture, teenage parenthood was a big...”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so the book before that was called The Heretics. And the heretics was, as I before, it was going to be inspired by this idea of how do smart people end up believing crazy things. And so that book was all about when we have these stubborn beliefs that kind of irrational that we don't let go of. So I was hanging out with Holocaust deniers. I was hanging out with creationists, UFO believers, people like this. And then in the promotion for that, I was asked again and again and again by people. So what makes people change their minds? You're saying that people can never change their minds. And I didn't have an answer to that question. I'm going to have to bluff through it. So I thought, that's, you know, I don't understand that. So maybe I should try and find out. So I was a journalist at the time as a day job.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. To get your stuff out of bed, to get yourself in front of the computer, to do eight hours plus work a day. So I think it's kind of weird. I think to achieve anything significant, you've got to, there's got to be a harshness to I'm just trying to think whether judge is the right. Right word. Like I read recently that the ideal parent is kind of firm but also kind and caring and understanding. And I think that's what... I think that's the ideal parent. I'm thinking I was reading it. That's the ideal of who should be inside our own heads really. You got to have that balance. And I think you can go wrong in either direction.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't reasonable, it's justifying And validating your initial emotional response, which is, you know, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. So I think what you're doing when you're learning for me anyway is you're learning actually, I mean, almost a parent yourself to turn that voice in your head into someone that isn't going to be a harsh judge or on the other extreme, someone who's just going to accept and validate and defend everything, every behavior you do, every thought you have, every mistake you make. You're looking for that balance all the time. And then you're looking to spot. You're looking to spot those occasions on which you're making the same mistake over and over again, you know.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. That's exactly right. That's why I believe exactly, yeah, that we can definitely diminish their power. And I'm 47 now and it still amazes me that you never stop learning and you never stop learning about yourself. You never stop learning about things you get wrong. And I've got to stop doing that, you know. It's overly simplistic to think of consciousness as this battle between reason and emotion. But there is something like that going on. Our emotionality is usually in charge of what we're thinking and what we're doing. You know, we respond emotionally and that voice in your head does then tell us a story about what you're feeling. And usually it's to justify that emotion. It's to say, yes, you were right to feel like that. You were right to respond in anger and hostility at that person. And then the next day you think, oh, maybe I wasn't so I think what we call what we used to call reason, that reasonable voice in your head actually.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct that to a certain degree, but a bad one can set it on a sort of negative course. And I'm quite a neurotic person. I'm anxious. I've always worried a lot. So if you take that kind of natural personality type high neuroticism and add into that a childhood which kind of reinforces that sense that the world is dangerous, that people are out to get you, all of that stuff, that reality isn't safe. And then what happens is your brain is still being formed really up until in your mid-20s. It's in your mid-20s when those kind of learning processes stop. And so it's very hard, and probably I would argue probably impossible to reverse eighteen years of that kind of feedback once it's happened because that's those are the years in which your brain is learning how the world works and so yeah so i i don't think it's fixable”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, because I think, you know, we're all born with a certain kind of personality, with a certain genome. And that's not fate. That doesn't define who you're going to be forever. But it sets you on a certain course. It makes you vulnerable to a certain kind of mindset. And, you know, I think a good childhood, a good upbringing can.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, how it was shaped in those early years. I guess it was poorly would be the answer. I think because My behavior was not great the continual message I would get from teachers and parents was that you're, you know, you're a bad person, you're going to end up in prison, you're going to end up in care. Yeah, so there was very little kind of positive feedback in my childhood, which I think is that causes damage that you're never going to get over, I believe.”
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 yeah, you know, they believe in heaven, hell, Satan, all of that stuff. I think that's how my childhood is informed my interest as an adult trying to figure out. How that happens.”
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 my parents were very strict, my father was very strict, especially, and they were very much in the grip of their kind of Catholic belief system, which I just didn't never like always baffled me even as a kid. Like, what, you know, how can you believe this stuff? I went to a Catholic school. And I was quite, if you were to ask them, they'd say I was a difficult child because I was pushing against that all the time. You know, I thought it was crazy. I wasn't very good at authority and rules. So it was a bad fit, I would say. And I think that's what's, you know, one of the things that's kind of driven my interests into adulthood, my second book, The Heretics, was looking at why do otherwise smart people believe end up leaving these crazy things. Because my parents are smart people.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so yeah. I was brought up in Sommage Wells in Kent, middle class family, very Catholic. It was quite a Victorian, strict, superstitious, religious upbringing, not the happiest upbringing, I have to say.”
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 don't like to talk about this stuff. 99% of self-hole books never mention jeans. They want to promote that idea of I can be whoever I want to be. But a huge amount of who we are is who we were born as that myth of you have full control over yourself as a human being. That's the problem. It's not about embracing your flaws. It's about accepting your flaws. Our lives are full of status pursuit. The more status that you earn, the better everything else gets. That was true 10,000 years ago. It's true today. The brain is highly attuned to where we sit in a pecking order. The lower we are down in that pecking order, the more unhealthy we became. If you take two smokers, the one higher up is less likely to die of a smoking-related disease than the one lower down. It matters massively.”
2022-08-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The More Successful You Are The Longer You’ll Live: Will Storr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT