Will Storr Part 1 | The Status Game

23:42Jimmy:like it's just being being useful to other people well that's right so competence is such a huge um driver of status in amongst humans you know we we look for people who are good at what they do and and who display signals of their success, which is why we like a Rolex watch sometimes and that kind of thing, or an expensive car. So I think that, you know, being at school and being great at sports, you're already, you're demonstrating competence, which especially for men is a really important thing. It's a core part of someone's identity. But I think that's a really interesting idea that actually working in teams makes you somebody better at kind of playing those social status games, you know you know i've never thought of that but i think that's really interesting i'm sure there's something to that because especially at that age to be to be you know the loner in the in the class and to be the person who's a bit introverted is hard yeah you know it's hard but i think we are

24:37Will Storr:getting better at understanding that right like i do think there's i think there is but there is obviously greater understanding of neurodivergence in schools but also just in sort of adult life as well of organizing things with people and realizing that they are just they're just wired a bit differently um yeah i think it's yeah i think it's like i think that is one of the good things that's kind of happening in the sort of work space actually is that people are being a bit more kind of like aware of neurodivergence and sort of like and how you kind of like utilize that as well right in terms of the organization as well is quite um it's quite interesting um have you ever thought about going back to university to do it like do any kind of masters or anything no well i haven't

25:25Jimmy:to do a master's i'd need a degree wouldn't i wouldn't i i'd have to start from the very beginning i can't imagine you'd struggle with they're not going to be asking for your a levels well honestly i don't i just have no interest like like i just don't i'm just i don't i i just not that interested in going to university like like you know i'm in i mean i'm in a you know kind of lucky position in the sense that i i get to spend a lot of my time doing my own research and um you know when i was a journalist i don't get this privilege anymore when i was a journalist i used to i could phone up you know i could get a story commissioned on certain subjects and then that would enable me to speak to some of the world's best psychologists you know david eagleman jonathan hyde sophie scott and neuroscientists and i'd get to get them on the phone you know so that that was a great education in working in learning about psychology and neuroscience being just writing about the stuff in newspapers because I got to you know Bruce Hood got access to all these amazing people now I have to do it through my own reading and research because I'm not a journalist anymore but still it's

26:23Will Storr:And how do you get the idea for like what ideas have you got in your head for like future books and so without giving any kind of exclusives what sort of peaks you're like how does the sort of the day of Will's Door look when you sort of sit down?

26:39Jimmy:Well, I think the things that pique my interest are the kind of trying to uncover the kind of secret forces that kind of control human life and the things that are actually going on kind of underneath the surface of consciousness. So, you know, one of my early books, The Heretics, was looking at why otherwise intelligent people believe crazy things. so you know David Irving who I spent some time with the historian who's the historian who used to be very highly regarded and now and then since decided that Hitler was a friend of the Jews controversial and so yeah he's been obviously excommunicated spent time in prison for his views but not a stupid man by any stretch a very smart man so that was a really interesting mystery for me like how is it that somebody as smart as that kind of believing that Hitler was a friend of the Jews and so so that that the answer was because the human brain is a storyteller it's not really interested in the truth it's interested in the story and is interested in a story that makes me feel good about myself so that was the beginning of this and every book really has been a another step on the journey of kind of understanding that that basic idea of the brain as a storyteller and and really the status game is that is a kind of updated thesis from the from the heretics there is it's talking about we want to be heroes but the status game is really about yeah you know it's it's kind of saying a similar thing that we all want to feel heroic in our lives and one of the ways that we do that is by earning status and telling stories about ourselves as well along along the way um and yeah i think it's just how it's changed in terms of you know and i think about

28:24Will Storr:this with like my kids and so on it's like i grew up at in school those formative years kind of in the noughties and it was quite like it was just before that kind of like social media explosion although we were using the internet but we were you were basically in competition with people in your school and kind of the county maybe like you never really kind of like got sort of beyond that and then all of a sudden like you know if you were growing up just 10 years later you were all of a sudden in competition with people from like all across the globe yeah well that's that

28:59Jimmy:that's one of the that's one of the major changes that's happened to our species um and it's something that i'm writing about in my the book that i'm writing at the moment um really and it's and it's so so you know in the long period in which our brains evolve we're playing status games with essentially a dozen people yeah like you know people often talk about the size of the human drivers being about 150 but that would include you know we had this fish infusion arrangement where we we'd had these sort of smaller units that would occasionally hook up with bigger units but but day to day it was between 30 and 50 people and now you split that in terms of gender because back in the day men would compete with men women compete with women um and there wouldn't be much crossover and you know people have you know different age groups we compete with different age groups so so so when we evolved status is relatively easy to come by so you know you just got to be pretty good hunter pretty good finder of sweet potatoes or honey or builder of camps or he's really good at lighting the fire she's really good at um you know finding the where the bees are or whatever it would be and and so coupled with that that we have this you know this this this very this habit of group narcissism in our in humanity so we would be so we would believe our tribes were amazing the best tribe in the world and we were a crucial part of it so everybody mattered everybody felt essential everybody felt everybody felt important um for the vast majority of evolution and then 11 000 years ago we settled down we stopped being hunter-gatherers you know and and you know towns and villages sprang up um and um you know the first mega cities appeared around 3 000 years ago you know huge um communities with different cultures and people from different background so suddenly you know we were meeting strangers for the first time and then that was the era of big gods and suddenly status games became about religion about christianity and islam and that's these are all status games even buddhism is a status game have hierarchy you win or you lose heaven or hell karma you know all of that stuff and then you know in england the job was invented and suddenly we're working with these big companies and and today the status games are you know we we play are just vast you know we we're on social media with billions of other active users that some of the biggest economies of the world are not nations they're companies like accenture the um accountancy firm yeah have more employees than the population of iceland i found out yesterday you know like it's amazing um nvidia the chip company you know the most company in the world their um their market valuation is bigger than the gdp of every country in the world except britain not britain sorry i wish america china and germany you know So these are just a huge status games that we're playing these days.

31:46Jimmy:And I think that's why there is this, you know, despite the fact that we've kind of solved the major problems of survival, we have food and security and shelter. We still feel anxious and we still feel worried and we still feel insecure. There's still a hole in there because I think there's a sense that we struggle to feel that we really matter, you know, in the way that we did back in the days of the hunter gatherer tribe.

32:09Will Storr:I also think that's quite a class thing as well right so like one of the reasons I started this podcast was because I could feel my relevancy slipping after Downing Street right and like we'd had a kid and there'd been a pandemic and whatever but I could still feel it going and I've been around all my network asking what I should do with my life next and weirdly no one sort of is going to write it out for you that's one of the lessons I've learned but I was like well I can't just go around again and be like a year later like so i've got it so i was like oh well i've got to have this thing and that's where like the the podcast started from and so on and like a bigger part of it that than i'd like to admit than is part of the story is like yeah it was definitely about kind of staying socially relevant do you know also that the word job right comes from like jobby and basically kind of got codified in about 1858 i was reading this yesterday as well like and because i think it's interesting that actually it's only existed for around 170 years and it was basically moving an amount so that's where sort of jobby comes from it was like a job lot i think is also okay where it sort of comes from and that was probably the first kind of like physical jobs were about like moving stuff was like a big part of it to then go and build stuff because i've been trying to think about like what if all the kind of tech bros are right about if we're not going to have any jobs in three years or whatever the latest kind of predictions are what it's what it's actually going to mean and i think it's it's a it's a big deal

33:41Jimmy:because it's it's people's usefulness right it's huge it's people's mattering and people's mattering matters more than their actual lives you know people choose yeah mattering over uh you know as the most important thing all the time whenever we go to war whenever there's a jihadist blows himself up um you know or even something as benign as starting to smoke you know like my generation we all smoked even though we knew we were going to get addicted and it might kill us just that we might look six percent cooler at the bar so you know like that's that that's how much status means to us you know it's usually important uh and i and i think that there's always that with you're seeing it now with the ai people but it's but it's been there for a while this idea that once we figure out how to get this the machines to do our jobs for us we're going to have this life of leisure and i think it completely misunderstands what a human being is because human beings don't actually want a life of leisure i mean some of us do but most of us don't but we want to be useful we want to do something and if we don't feel useful and we don't feel like we're doing something if we don't feel that we're offering value value to the human family in some way we get depressed we know we don't like it so so it's a complete it's a quite cynical misunderstanding of of the the amazingness of our species to think that oh yeah that's actually what we're going to want we're going to want ai to do our work for us and we're going to want to sort of sit back and drink pina coladas because it's not true and it's actually you know a good thing because because people are going to carry on figuring out ways of being useful somehow yeah

35:09Will Storr:and the human need to kind of create as well i think is yeah sort of important on that like there's an amazing book i talk about it's quite a lot but it's charlie colnutt wrote a book called is this working and he went and spoke to 80 people about their jobs today and it's almost like the opposite of jimmy's jobs of the future in some ways in terms of speaking to people here and now and it's like lots of kind of like everyday jobs like nurses etc and it was what what was interesting in it was the amount of like shadow work and kind of like bureaucracy that a lot of these jobs have and it's one of the things i say to people at the moment about ai is do not underestimate human's capacity to make work for one another right like it will it's got this great line in it about a kind of a construction site worker or sort of director on a construction site being like i can't have a conversation with anyone in sight without then having to go and put it in email afterwards right like it's kind of like real health and safety understandably perhaps but i think we shouldn't underestimate that humans will be very good at finding work for other humans whether useful or not like yeah different question yeah well i think that's right i i think that the future

36:21Jimmy:with ai in it is um is a mystery but but but i am optimistic that we'll you know we'll figure it out because i just i think that most people um we're not just going to give up as a species and go oh i'm useless now um there'll be a transition and it'll be hard but and and certain elements elements of it might not be better just like the music industry has been completely suffered hugely since the beginning of the internet I mean you know after I worked at the record shop I worked at a record company for a while and I saw the beginnings of the internet and and and you know the Napster era and it was already just terrible what it's done to the music industry and the music industries today is a is a you know it's a story state compared to what it was and that's because of the internet so it's not as though you can't be naive and think that every every act of progress is is necessarily positive yeah um musicians struggles especially that middle band musicians really struggle to make a living anymore yeah you know one of my favorite singers she she's always on um instagram selling songwriting lessons for like 60 quid an hour or something it's like it's it's it's just she said you know you just sort of heart breaks a little bit because it's like yeah you know 20 years ago you'd have been you'd have had a massive record deal and have lots of money spent on you but that just doesn't there isn't that money anymore

37:41Will Storr:in recording music i find it so sad i also find it interesting to kind of like come back to it on a kind of like status level because it strikes me that entertainer is still quite a high status job and people still want to do that and arguably it's one of our oldest jobs if you think about jesters of the court and so on but and it's become much more accessible for people to become entertainers because of the internet but like you say it's kind of like the economic side of it has

38:09Jimmy:been completely ripped out well that was it like i mean when you know back in the 90s in the grunge era and before that the the whole story about music industry was like oh they're a bunch of crooks they're the man and you know they're gonna and all this stuff and it was it was kind of that was probably true in the in the elvis era but it was much less true in the 90s and early noughties you know what would happen i had some friends this happened too they got signed by mca they got given a quarter of a million quid you know and then they had tons of money spent on them as but in terms of studio time producers stylists photographers to submit the album cover it's amazing if you're a band that's amazing this company is spending a fortune gambling to see whether they can make you a star or not it's a great collaborative thing and if you are a star we're going to make money you're going to make money everyone's happy um and then um perhaps 10 years ago i went and did a story at youtube about young youtube entertainers and interviewed some millennials remember this this um this this young woman who's really talented um talking about how you know she does all this well the first thing was that the the model completely changed so before it was and this is the same in books too really to an extent before the contract was the idea you know the kind of social contract in a sense was that the if you're you be talented and we'll get you your audience that's the deal and then and that's the split but now you've got to get your audience first and then you might get a record deal or a publishing deal so that's that's really hard um and then this poor woman was saying oh and she was making money by um i think she had some sponsorship deal with nescafe and when i met interviewed her she was making up songs about this freeze-dried coffee in a cup and i was just like this is so depressing and it's like you know kirkabane would be turning in his grave but she was like no it's good at least i get some money this way and i thought this is a disaster this is like that like you i i can't i can't accept that that that this is a good thing for for for for music that no this is the model now it was better before when people were having to spend money on albums because there was money to invest in a and r like you know britain had one of the most exciting um um music you know music in the world we we invented you know um genre after genre after genre trip pop drum and bass juggly like in my era working in the record shop you know we were constantly coming up with stuff and now it just doesn't happen anymore like the music the kids coming up with today sounds like the music they were coming up with in 2001 you know what is ed sheeran i mean i love billy eilish she's very talented and so and her brother but it's quite sounds so derivative it sounds exactly like the stuff that was a very safe version of massive attack like really safe in a way you know so so so that's what we've lost we've lost this great exciting kind of churning um um you know vital industry where there's that's held together by a and r people who love music throwing money at interesting people yeah that's what that's what

41:00Will Storr:it used to be you know it's like culture stopped in 2008 almost it's like no no but it's true but

41:07Jimmy:there's a truth to that like well like when you think about that thing of if you think about what music was like in 1980 versus 1960 this yeah it's just vastly different you've gone through several revolutions but if you think about what is 2026 versus 2006 it's the same it's essentially the same it really is and that that is something that we've lost that is something we've lost because of the internet but i think because it sits so much at the heart of this podcast and

41:33Will Storr:what we're trying to do at jimmy's jobs of the future right because it's in a way i believe the world has now been more meritocratic in the sense of you can come from anywhere and you can upload a song or a blog post or whatever it is to the internet and you can send it to people and there's a chance that somebody will take a chance on you but at the same time like you were saying about you've got to build an audience first right that's probably been a shift in the last five to eight years in terms of like the social media side of it being really like well you know you bring the proof to us first yeah that you can do it so it's like this thing of where yes it's got easier to make it in life but the the the funnel and the time that it takes almost

42:15Jimmy:makes it harder but i'm not sure in in certain ways it has got easier because i think there are different skills you can have the skill of being a great writer and the skill of being a great musician and then there's a skill of building an audience and that's a different skill like you know i personally have always struggled with social media like when twitter happened and i saw all these writers who would who were perfectly fine writers but but they had this genius for Twitter yeah and because they had this genius which was something they were famous essentially it was like yeah how did you do that and I tried to do that and I couldn't do it because I don't have the ability to do tweets yeah and I still don't and I'm crap at social media and it has been a massive drag on my career that that like it like I would you know and so so so it's a so I think that's a problem I think I think it's a problem that publishing companies and record companies and I expect you to have built your own audience because what if that's not what you're good at yeah really that should be the job of the of the company that's you'd be the talent yeah the talent should be the talent and the and the publishing company and the record company should should be the person finding the audience for you

43:14Will Storr:that's how it used to be yeah i think it's true as well because i i also think that one of the things that we talk about jobs is that we think of them as singular tasks right and actually most of the time they're a collection of tasks and they're color and and the the almost of all jobs as well is they're getting wider and wider things like journalism the classic used to be able to just be a writer or just like now you need to do all of this constellation of different abilities yeah right like all of which have their own sort of like rack of skills and so on i mean charlie xcx wrote a fascinating piece on substack about the life of being a pop star yeah recently and just partly her saying like quite a lot of it's about sitting in kind of like gray rooms and build you know you see the bit on stage but actually it's like all this like gray in between and just also how she has to do all these other things and like she also has a creative outlet for them like her sub stack is brilliant and the pieces is definitely worth a read for those interested in in jobs but i just yeah it's that we again it's like demanding more and more of people to be well i guess it's a classic thing about having be you know it's kind of width over depth

44:24Jimmy:right yeah yeah that that's that's right and actually another um really talented young british musician pink panther s who's from near my neck of the woods was i saw an interview with her recently and she was talking that saying that she knows some incredible young musicians but they're just not good at branding themselves and she was saying to them and she's great at branding at branding herself you know but but but she she was saying if only they could have this they could start doing that then they could they could become successful and i was like sure but it's a shame that that that as I said, there used to be teams of people figuring out that stuff for you.

44:57Jimmy:You put these gloves on, you know, we're going to get your hair done. You know, there were these four or five magazines. There were these experts that would train you and help you to do that stuff. And, you know, somebody like Pink Panther, I still even did Charlie XCX. I've got a genius for that kind of personal branding. I mean, you can see Charlie XCX in a crowd from a mile away. She's so distinctive. But, but, but yeah, so they're kind of lucky in the sense that they, they, they're extremely talented. musicians both of those women but they're also fantastic at that that the kind of branding side of it and indeed i think pink pantheraist did come up through tiktok that's actually yeah that's how she that was her route she was doing songs on tiktok definitely i'm gonna ask you at some point

45:35Will Storr:for uh talented writers that we might not be aware of but i won't always bring it on you like i mean but like we'll definitely we do that kind of like um pass the mic thing and so on

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