How to Leverage Status for Career Growth | Toby Stuart

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0:45Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. 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.

1:20All 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.

2:04Welcome 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 in writing this book. Oh, man, that's the story of a life. So I've been working on this all the way back since graduate school. paper I read in, I think it was my, probably my second year of graduate school. And it just literally changed how I saw and understood the world. 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.

2:43And science is this area where you think when you're, particularly when you're in it, where you think it's all about objectivity. It's like, it's the best idea that wins and that's what matters. And 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 it's, there's some kind of objective quality of ordering and the really, really good stuff, the really, really important ideas are on top. and the paper just opened my ideas.

3:19I 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 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.

4:04So the story goes, there's a paper, it was 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 the typed manuscript shows up. And 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.

4:48And 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 like 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 to 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.

5:33But when we switched the 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. As I 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.

6:22The 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 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 gonna 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.

7:01like workplaces and 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.

7:43So let me try not to ramble when responding for five minutes and just give you a 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. So effort, talent, those all go into achieve status. A scribe 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, you know, we're three white guys and we happen 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.

8:40So when we think about someone's status, it's a mix of achieved status and ascribed 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 pay off 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 buck on LinkedIn or something like that, right?

9:27Where 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.

10:16The 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 relatively good and incredibly quick AI systems deciding what we're interested in, what we'll like, what we should see, right? It's our attention, the choice, the considerations, the things that we look at are very much algorithmically manipulated today.

10:54A lot of people would say that 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 so better and a um and a as 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 years that 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 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.

11:56Elon 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.

12:37Of course, though, what's actually happening is there's a multi-trillion and 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 in outcomes 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.

13:55And 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. As the weather finally cools down, I'm swapping in the pieces that actually get the job done. Warm, durable, and built to last. And Quince delivers every time. Quince has all the fall staples you actually want to wear on repeat, like 100 % Mongolian cashmere sweater starting at just 60 bucks, classic fit denim, and real leather and wool outerwear that looks sharp and holds up.

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16:28That 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.

17:06It'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 it. 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. So 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.

17:53I 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 Yelp reviews actually still do matter somehow. Nothing against Yelp, but like they still matter. But there's actually a bunch of papers that really just go out and try to estimate the benefit to a business of having positive reviews.

18:35And 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. The other 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.

19:20You're like, well, I got to write one. So now you're adding to the mess. I mean, so every, 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 often 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?

20:01And 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 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.

20:40Status is broadly created by affiliations. 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. And 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.

21:24And 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 the university structure. in 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 during COVID and the title anointed occurred to me.

22:04And 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 like, you know, 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? I mean, it's like, you know, there's this moment where holy oil is placed on a forehead and there's a ritual and someone becomes a king.

22:39And 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.

23:30I 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 acts in one's life that create 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. Think you're the only one struggling with performance issues in the bedroom? You're not. And now there's an easier way to fix it from home. That's where Rex MD comes in.

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25:24Expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. 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.

26:04One of the arguments in the book is that status is super important in our lives in part because it makes things simpler. And you guys, you've had a lot of interesting guests on this podcast before, and I'm sure you are very familiar with this idea of work 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. And 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.

26:52And 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.

27:30We're in certain moments, we're like hypersensitive to it, though we never really like 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.

28:08Being 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 comparatively to what else are the 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.