Transcript of Toby Stuart (on social status)

Wndri Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on Expert. I'm Dax Sheppard. I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hello. Today we have an organizational theorist and distinguished professor of business administration at the Hauss School of Business, UC, Berkeley, Tobi Stuart. Tobi has written a book on one of my very favorite topics. I annoyingly talk about this. The book is called Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World. This was so fascinating, wasn't it?

Yeah. Really interesting deep dive into status and how we're impacted by it.

Yeah, I was very aware of the evolutionary benefit of status, but I didn't know about how we use it as a very useful shortcut to identify quality and competency and all these little areas of our lives where we have a very little bit of amount of information and we have to rely on something. And ultimately, what we will default to is status. It affects everything as well. Yeah.

And he talks about how AI is going to potentially mix that up a little bit, which is interesting.

It is. Please enjoy Tobi Stuart. I'm Jon Robbins, and on my podcast, I sit down with incredible people to ask the very simple question, How do you cope? From confronting grief and mental health struggles to finding strength in failure. Every episode is a raw and honest exploration of what it means to be human. It's not always easy, but it's always real. Whether you're looking for inspiration, comfort, or just a reminder that you're not alone in life's messier moments, join me on How Do You Cope. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts or listen to episodes early and ad free on WNDRI Plus. How Do You Cope is brought to you by Audible, who make it easy to embark on a wellness journey that fits your life with thousands of audiobooks, guided meditations, and motivational series. Hello, I'm John Robbins, comedian and host of WNDRI's How Do You Cope podcast. I'm also, Plot Twist, an alcoholic. I've written a book, Thirst: 12 Drinks That Change My Life, published by Penguin. Thirst is a book about alcohol. It's mystery, it's terror, it's havoc, it's strange meditations. But, John, I hear you cry. Isn't that a rather odd book to write for a sober man who more than anything wants to stop thinking about alcohol?

Well, yes, but I had to go back to find out why the one thing I know will kill me still calls out across the night. It's the story of what alcohol did for me and what alcohol did to me. If that's of interest to you or someone you know, Thirst, 12 Drinks That Change My Life is available to pre-order now online and from all good bookshops.

He's an option expert. He's an option expert. He's an option expert. He's an option expert. He's an option expert. He's an option expert. He's an option expert. He's an option expert.

Tobi Stewart, do you ever get confused for the race car driver, Tony Stewart? Are you ever making a reservation and they're excited?

God, I wish that would happen to me. I'm waiting for that to happen. I could put that idea out there. I will. I will. Restauranteers, listen.

Before we even start, you're in the business school at Berkeley, but what was your ride to that? What did you major in?

And he says before we start, meaning we have started. Okay.

Oh, sorry. Just so you know.

Yeah, and the whole thing was an accident. I went to a liberal arts college in rural Minnesota because my idea of college was you go somewhere, it's got to be cold. It can't be in a city. It's got to be dark and miserable. You sit in the basement of a chapel and read Dante. I went to liberal arts college. I thought I was going to be a philosophy major, and that turned out to be hard. I honestly have to admit, I just gave up.

What ran apart? What was the roadblock with it?

I think I read the Ground work to the metaphysics of moral, so Emmanuel Kant.

Before you walked in, we were literally having a discussion.

About the categorical imperative. You know what's wild? I asked the other day GPT-5 to explain the categorical imperative to me in a sonet written by Joan Diddian. What a fun prompt. It's batch it. It did it. It did it. As far as I know, Joan Diddian's never written. She's a commentator. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's unbelievable and good. I read this passage of the book like 45 times.

It just went in click.

Well, I don't know. It's philosophy. Does it ever click? It's like you could just keep going and you never really feel like you understand an entirety. So I just kept going.

Would you maybe have agreed, too, even if you understand it in its entirety, there are different occasions for different ones to make more sense. It's like we want there to be a unified one singular philosophy that explains it. It doesn't. It's like you're constantly going back between utilitarianism and Pontianism.

Constantly. I often wonder what would happen if I went back to it at this stage of life? Because the other thing is philosophy when you try to understand it, but you have no wisdom. So rereading stuff that influenced you when you're older, if ever the time presents. So anyways, I went to Carleton College. I started in philosophy. I flipped to economics because it was just way easier. I graduated in economics. I was a disaster in junior high, but got my shit together in high school and college. So I did really well and I finished. And at that point, I started to rethink a PhD in philosophy, even though I wasn't a philosophy major. But I thought that's a big step to take. So maybe I should back up a little bit. We're old, so I'm older than you. This was the Career Center day. So I walked into the Career Center and there was this list of companies coming to interview. And it's still the same. But back then, if you graduate from a pretty good college in economics, your choice is, do you want to go into banking or consulting or these generalist kinds of roles?

And so I got an offer at a consulting firm. But just as I was about to sign on the data, outlined, Harvard Business School showed up. So at Harvard Business School, they teach every day a case study, and they were interviewing people to write case studies.

Meaning invent them, a whole stock or synthesize.

What happens is you get hired by a faculty. So I was hired by a fellow called David Callas, who's still there. He was developing HBS's first course on corporate strategy. Every day at HBS, you teach with a case study. We needed 20 new cases on corporate strategy. He would identify this list of companies, contact the executives, get permission to do it, have some sense of what it was going to be about ahead of time, but not full sense, and then we would show up and write the case. I had this one job offer, which was to go work for a consulting firm, which means make spreadsheets and work really hard. This other one, which was way less hours, and the job was fly around the world and meet corporate executives and take notes and then learn to ask your own questions. I'm like, A or B? B. I went there. I didn't even know what a business school was, but I loved my two years there. It was Super enlightening.

And you were earning a graduate degree in that process?

No. My job title was research assistant. I was an employee. To this day, it may be the best job I've ever had. I figured out what a business school was and realized you could do interesting things. And these people were living these dual lives where they were academics half the time and the other half of the time or a third of the time or whatever. Everybody had a different balance, but they were out doing interesting things in the world.

Now, at that time, because what I've been shocked to learn as I've interviewed a lot of different professors from business schools is, say, Adam Grant, he's in the Wharton business school, but he's an organizational psychologist. There's all these different disciplines that are pulled into the business school that is a little counterintuitive. Was it always that way or did that develop?

It's been that way for a long time. It's been that way since a Ford Foundation report in the '30s or '40s. I forget the full history of this, but for a long time, business schools have been multidisciplinary. A lot of it's what you would think. They're people with PhDs in economics, PhDs in finance. They're often econometricians. There are mathematicians in operations research. There are psychologists. There are a handful of sociologists, which is the closest discipline to me.

Well, that's what's interesting. As I'm reading your work, I'm like, this guy feels like a sociologist.

Yeah. So these days, I would probably be called more like a computational social scientist. But yeah, the way that I think is as a sociologist who's learned a lot of economics and a lot of psychology.

Right. So then you acquired some graduate degrees at some point.

Yeah. No, I got a PhD.

In economics?

My PhD is from Stanford Business School, and it was more in sociology than anything else, but lots of graduate econ courses along the way. Right.

Now, in the course of your career, you taught at University of Chicago, you taught at Harvard, you taught at Columbia, you're now at Berkeley. So this is like a real smorgasbord of the elite institutions. How would you characterize those different schools? Just because I'm curious.

What do you want to mention? I also spent last year at MIT and thought about moving there. So I've been to a few of the others.

Do they all have really distinct cultures?

The two most distinct places I've been are the University of Chicago and HBS. So Harvard Business School is this interesting place. It's like on a pole. Everybody thinks of it as Harvard, but it's the actual Applied Business School. A large fraction of the faculty actually doesn't do much of what I would think of as scientific research. And the University of Chicago Business School is the other pole. That's all focused on basic social science research. And so those two are extreme. So being on the faculty is very different. Hps is a pretty strong culture in a pretty unique place. But getting an MBA at Chicago or at MIT or at Columbia, their difference is, but they're not giant differences. Yeah.

Because Berkeley is its own vibe, We're friends with Ken Goldberg, who's a robot.

I know Ken. Do you know Ken? Yeah. Ken's done this.

We fell in love at some conference.

Grip.

Yeah. Grip. He was just saying, Berkeley is interesting because you can have the experience you want there, but you got to fight for it. It's not like you show up and they're like, Here's how you have a great time. It's like, that's the thing there. Maybe you're drawn to that or you're not.

I love Berkeley in a different way. First is it's flat out beautiful. It's ridiculous. It's got eucalyptus trees and redwood trees and palm trees, views of the water, built in to the Berkeley Hillside. So I mean, that physically, I find the place to be stunning. The faculties are equally excellent at all of these places. They're very minor differences.

Is there an anarchy vibe there, though?

No. The berserkly culture is mostly gone. The dudes with the super long beards and the Bergenstocks. Bergenstocks don't mean what they used to, but they're not around as much.

A professor with the same sweater on for the entire semester.

Yeah, there's much less of that now than there used to be. It's very much an entrepreneurial hub now. There are these amazing companies that have been started on the Berkeley campus, like Databricks, for example. What's that? One of the $100 billion valued private AI companies. It's a very interesting, very technical database company. But there are lots and lots that have come off the campus. And so there's a lot of that happening, and it's definitely different. So compared to everywhere else I've been, it has many fewer resources, and then that has lots of impacts. I mean, it just doesn't have the endowment. Because it's a state school. Historically, it didn't raise the money. There's just something interesting about it, too, which is that at some point, it gets to some of the things in the book. Once you make rankings and they matter, then everybody figures out how to manage to the rankings. If you're making a film and you know you're up against some critic and you need that critic to annoy the film, you might even have the critic in your mind when you're making the film. What happened is the business schools, the rankings was the most important one.

Historically, it's been business week. At some point, it was the salary delta between when you entered and when you graduated became part of this. Then there was also a rise in tuition at Berkeley. That happened and it changed the character of the school as these things were going on. But it used to be a ton of people who would come. It was historic Berkeley where they had social enterprise focuses. Then it evolved into...

They're just too close to Silicon Valley.

Then it evolved much more into Silicon Valley. So anyway. Yeah. Then it evolved much more into Silicon Valley.

Okay, so your book, I get a list of different books that are out, and I am endlessly fascinated with status. I'm endlessly fascinated from the anthropological sense. And I am regularly saying, guys, the full game is status. You're not aware of it, but it is almost the most essential preoccupation we have. And I'm always thinking about it in just our evolution. And you definitely get into that. But what's great is you take the chunk that I know on how it served us evolutionarily, and then you start marching through time with it and how it now presents itself currently in so many fascinating ways. But maybe I think we just start with the function of status in a group animal species, one that's not solitary, one that has to get along with a bunch of other members of the group.

I had not read a lot of this stuff when I wrote the book because I came to it from the angle of I'm a modern social scientist. I'm at this end of the river. How did this all come to be? That wasn't actually a question that I thought much about. Then I started to read a little evolution, Anthropology. If you go back to Primates, and Sapolsky has done a lot of this work, the Baboon Project. You imagine a group of animals and you have to band together to make it. So nearly every animal species, there's some group or clan structure. The problem that you have in these structures, and this is Hobbes and Leviathan when we're talking about people, but the problems that you have in these structures is if you put a group of animals together and there's no structure and there's no and there's no hierarchy and there's no enforcement mechanism and there is a finite amount of resources, we're basically going to beat the shit out of one another to fight over what there is. Then what do you do? Well, one is you have to organize, and the second is it turns out that if you create a hierarchy, it solves the problem of resource allocation.

Not entirely because there's plenty of hand-to-hand combat in a baboon troupe. But the general idea is that the hierarchy becomes a mechanism for allocating resources. And you want high status because if you're at the apex of the hierarchy, the two key resources are in food or nourishment and mates, and you get more of those. But then once the hierarchy is established, you move into sanctioning mode. So if members of a group act in ways that are incompatible with their status in the hierarchy, they're sanctioned. So if you take something that's beyond what you're entitled to given your position, there's a sanctioning mechanism. And it is for that reason that on the evolutionary side of things, we now believe that status antenna, so to speak, the ability to understand a hierarchy landscape. To read the status room. Exactly.

Is maybe the thing we do best, and we don't even know we're doing it.

But we actually have it. It's innate because it dates all the way back to hierarchy.

Your life dependent on it.

Yeah, exactly.

Because if you don't play by these rules, the alpha runs you out, and then you're on your own to live, and you can't make it on your own. You can't make it. Those genes can't even pass on, almost. Anyone that doesn't play ball. We're just so implicitly status-oriented. What is fun about your book is you start breaking down how that now operates in modern society. Let's explain those some status things that are happening that people might be completely unaware of, like Rembrandt's a great one, and then we can introduce anointers.

I I learned about art when I was writing the book just because it was fun. So the book is much broader than the cultural markets, but status is super important in the cultural markets of which Hollywood is certainly one. So your industry and media, writ large, status processes are obviously super important in how these markets function. The Rembrandt story was just so interesting to me, though. I became aware of a situation where there's a Rembrandt collector, and it's literally in the dude's blood. His great, great, great, great, great in a Rembrandt portrait. His family has been collecting Rembrandts for however many generations since then. Jónsíx is his name. He's an art dealer, collector, significant figure in the art world. He's flipping through a catalog at Christie's. You learn all these things when you write a book. The catalog was for an auction that happens during the day. It turns out if it's the big time stuff, you don't auction it in the day, you auction it at night. He sees a painting in the catalog and something just fires in his brain. He's looking at the painting and the painting is attributed to a disciple of Rembrandt, an unknown disciple.

It's just the circle of Rembrandt. It looks very much like a Rembrandt painting, but it's nowhere in the history of art.

In their We're predicting at that point that this thing's probably going to go for about $18,000 to $25,000.

Yeah. When you buy art at auction, there's a range. Things often don't sell because you don't want to get up to the reserve price or they sell above the range. But this is what the organizers of the auction think is going to happen when the auction transpires. The range on this is tight and low. But Jan VI is looking at this, and there's a clue in the painting that makes him believe this isn't a circle of Rembrandt painting, this is a Rembrandt.

Right.

What if you could buy an actual Rembrandt?

Based on the collar of the portrait, the person in the portrait was wearing a certain collar.

That collar existed, as far as anyone knew, in portrait art for a short window of time. That window of time predated when Rembrandt was a star. So he couldn't have disciples. So he had no disciples yet.

So who would be ripping off Rembrandt prior to Rembrandt being famous?

Exactly. So he didn't have this whole factory that he eventually had of people who were working with and apprenticing under him. And so sixth is like, Well, this must be an actual Rembrandt. So he buys it. And then it all gets really interesting. There are two things I learned. So one is if it's a Rembrandt, I don't know what it's worth, but like 50 or $100 million. Oh, my God.

Well, the previous Rembrandt sale was for a pair of Rembrandts that went for $172 million.

Yeah, a big number. It sold the year before. You got a Rembrandt. That is a valuable object. But there are a couple of things about it that are really fascinating if you're interested in status. It sets up the whole thought experiment that underlies the book. We have a situation now where there's just one object, and the object is a painting. Here's the thing. It is the same painting. We can all agree there's just one painting. If you put it into one, I'm going to call it an identity state that is a circle of Rembrandt, it's worth $20,000. But if you take the same painting and you call it a Rembrandt, it's worth $50 to $100 million. But it's the same fucking painting.

There's two layers happening, which is so fascinating. The first layer is that Rembrandt. Rembrandt has the ultimate status, so anything he created is going to have more value. But now we get into the expertise of Six who bought it because his interest in it, in his renown, now becomes its own little Rembrandt situation in a sense.

Yeah. So now he's got a project on his hands. I still think about this all the time, and I just wasn't aware of it. Now, Six is on a mission. The mission is to convince the art world that this is a Rembrandt. He can self-anoint it, a Rembrandt. I mean, that's what he does, but he owns it, and that's not super credible. He's a little incentivized. He's got a little bit of an incentive here. So he then has to convince the art world that it's a Rembrandt. And how do you do that? Well, it turns out they're Just a handful of people who are the experts in Rembrandt, and they'll stare at it, and they'll do all sorts of technical analysis on it. But at the end of the day, it's often a bit of a judgment call. Who gives these guys the authority to decide that it's a Rembrandt?

Probably of all 10, some people didn't want to be involved, but a handful of the really recognized ones go along with this theory to some degree. I'm sure there would be some critical mass where they could, these five people have nothing to do with Rembrandt, could make an unknown painting of Rembrandt.

There's even status within that. The people who are deciding whoever's the best at that is going to probably have the most weight. They're all just eyes looking at a thing.

It turns out, I should have written this up in the book, but I didn't, the exact opposite thing also happened, which is there was a Rembrandt in a museum, I forget where, and it was delisted. It's in some museum, and literally the entire traffic of the museum is to see this one painting. Many years later, some small group of people decide, in fact, it isn't.

Michael Lewis is telling us about one that sold for $270 million to a Saudi guy, and then everyone was like, it's not even- Now they're like, it's not real. It's not real.

Probably the $470 million. It's not only conceivably not real, it's like 10% of a Da Vinci. I think it's the Salvador Mundi we're talking about. Yes, it is. It's just a hand. The whole thing needed a full restoration. It was in lousy condition. There's a $470 million paid for a hand, which shows you the value of having the right status. Yes.

It's so wild. It's wild. So much of it is in the scarcity, right? That's a huge piece of it.

One part that I like, again, I think it's really easy to always look at these things and be very critical of it, but I think there is a function behind this, which is You're trying to make sense of the world at all time, and you are hoping to make decisions that are the best decisions, and you don't know, and you're not an expert on most things. So we absolutely need people with status that we come to trust so that they can help us navigate this world because we don't have the capacity to get brilliant at everything. There is a really good function to it at the foundation or a logical one.

Which at the end of the day is the core argument in the book, which is it's a spidery thing, social status. It impacts so many different dimensions of our lives, but it's never gone away because it also serves a bunch of functions. The way I would generalize that, I mean, you've had so many interesting people on this show, and I've looked at the names and listened to some of the podcasts, the information problem comes up all the time. What do we do when there's information overload or when we don't have enough information. One of the arguments in the book, which I don't think is very controversial, is that we live in all of these super important information poor environments. I love art, but I want to generalize it way broader than that. Here's an information poor choice. I need to go see a medical specialist because I have a problem. This is a really important thing or could be. You have to choose the right doctor, but how do you do that? It's an information thin environment. And then my other world, so I live a very schizophrenic work life. But at Columbia and HBS and Berkeley, I've run entrepreneurship.

And so most of what happens since I've been doing this is the students are interested in venture capital-back tech entrepreneurship. So you have a startup, but it's not a thing yet. It's like a true startup. And where are you going to put your money? It's a very information poor environment. Or you're an employer and you're looking at a resume and you're deciding whether to interview somebody or hire somebody All you know is what it says on the resume. So we live in all of these walks of life in these very information poor environments. Dating apps.

Yeah. That's a huge one.

Don't get me started. I did a dating app project once. Anyways. Tell us. Are you on here with that one? Yeah. It's funny. This is literally the first time I've ever maybe talked about this project. I had a student once, and she was off the beaten path a little bit, but I wanted to support her. And she shows up. I wasn't expecting this. We had this conversation, and she says, I want to study cool. I want to study what it is to be cool and what it means in markets. No one's ever pitched me on that.

What's the metric for cool?

We talk about it all the time.

So I thought it was a cool idea and wanted to be supportive. So we got to talking and somehow we decided one thing we could do is we could maybe figure out who's cool on a dating app. This dates me because it went back quite a while. I had this other idea that I wanted to do, which was ridiculous, but I'll tell you. I've never really talked to a doctor about this, but I'm convinced I suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Oh, I haven't. She's also self-diagnosed as having sad.

I self-diagnosed myself and I definitely have it. That's why I believe you.

You guys just have depression, but continue. No.

I mean, May gray and Boom, boom, get the hell out of here. I agree.

I can't handle it. I can't even tell you, yeah, when we're in those months, I'd say half of our conversations are about sad.

It's real.

You definitely don't want to be on the beach. You got to be back here. That's right. You get the fog burning off. So I got Okay Cupin. Do you remember those guys? When they were one of the big dating sites, I got them to give me their data, including the click stream. It was, of course, carefully anonymized. Very ethical. Yeah, exactly. We weren't using it for anyone's selfish purposes. I just put it that way. So My idea was because we had the timing of all searches and all messages. Back then, I don't know if norms have changed. I mean, they have somewhat literally at the platform level. But back then, nearly all messages were originated by men. I think all the data that we had were heterosexual relationships. I had this idea that men would be more ambitious on sunny days. Oh, wow.

What a bizarre thought you had. That's very original.

I mean, if it's going to lift the mood, right? Then you're feeling on top of the world. If I don't crush it today, it's because it's cloudy outside. Interesting. You get a built-in.

It could go opposite, though, because you could feel lonely and depressed all the day.

As all theories are, it's very egocentric because mine's the opposite. It's like, Oh, and I'm gloomy. I want to self-medicate with the attention of someone else. Right.

Lots of options. Well, I mean, so there are many problems with this.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare.

It was a terrible idea because I've done this a few times. I get infatuated with the idea, but it doesn't work as an academic project. There's a bunch of problems with this from a scientific perspective, one of which is you choose when to be on a dating site. And so if it's crappy weather out, you have fewer alternatives. And so there you're way more likely.

A lot of variables to weed through.

She wanted to study cool. We eventually wrote one paper on this. But speaking of status, we did find the Benjamin Button thing, which is that at the time, OKCupid would log profile changes. There were like height thresholds and age thresholds where people would say, get on the site at 43, and two months later, they would be 39.

Oh, wow. Or they were 5'7 and they were 5'9.

If you were above a certain height, you actually would train. Sure. Which is conceivable, but not over the time intervals that we look. But if you think about it, it's ground zero for status processes because it is a low information environment. It's the mating market, which has always been status-based. You have a lot of room to probably augment or misrepresent who you actually are. It's a signaling game, and you decide what you're going to signal, what you're going to say about yourself.

God, you know what's crazy is now that you're explaining that whole thing, just two nights ago, I have a 10-year-old, and she came over to school, and she was so sad because everyone knew about a certain K-pop band. And although she knew some of the members, she didn't know all the members, and they were talking about a certain dance, and she was really sad about it. Oh, really? And she said to Kristen, I don't even know where to find this information. It was so sweet and so cute. So they had been having the debate for a long time. And then I entered the fray and I said, Delta, I want to teach you one life lesson right now, which is, and I got to have mom back me up. If I have any attribute that I would bet on, it's that I'm cool. I don't think people thought I was hot, they didn't think I was sexy, but I think I've pulled cool off most of my life. And I said, Here's how cool works. The eight group of kids are talking about the K-pop thing, and they go, You don't know that song? And you go, Oh, no, I never heard it.

And what you're signaling to them is, I haven't heard it, but I don't feel insecure about it because I don't need to fit in that much. And they are feeling the insecurity, and they will read that as like, She's so confident she doesn't even care about being left out. What's funny, and what I didn't work through even further is that status.

But there's another side of that that I think is super important in the status world, which is that it turns out that high status people, there is definitely stratum in affiliations. And by the way, anything about status plays out either in Hollywood or among 10-year-olds. That's pretty much the same. Go to a middle school and everything that happens in the status world is going to happen there. But one of the things is high status people tend to hang out with high status people. And then that creates this in the no group where there's information exchange. And in some context, that's incredibly valuable information. It might be valuable for determining who's cool. It also might be valuable for determining where a job opening is coming or a part that you want or what stock is about to shoot. There are information advantages to having high status because you tend to be around other people who have valuable information.

This is the rich get richer.

We're going to get to that, the cumulative. But talk about human credential, because then you introduce anointing. It's not just the people who have status, but then there's this interesting thing happening, which is people are often ceremonially given status. You give the story of King Solomon being made a king by putting the oil over the head, and this is very literal anointing. But this exists nonstop for us, the anointing process.

Anointment is this a ritual, and the idea is you had a status before, and then there's a discrete jump. So you've been anointed. In your business, there's lots of ways to get anointed.

You get in the union, you get inside.

Then there's a whole pyramid all the way up.

Steven Spielberg cast you.

Who's the most important person in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg's assistant or casting agent or whatever. It's this whole series of things, and then you win the Academy Award.

You point out just walking across the stage in a cap and gown. Before you walk across that stage, You have one status. You're not the graduate of this thing. On the other side of the stage, you have official status.

You have a diploma. You can list yourself as such. But the broader point, which has been a lot of my work and is the thing that I find so interesting about status processes, is that status is in constant motion. When you have a lot of it, which you do, you give it away all the time. Maybe it's different than winning an academy award, but it's the same concept on a micro scale, and it happens everywhere all the time.

I've absorbed it. You already mentioned Sapolsky was on here. If I'm an academic and I get pitched to go be on a show and I go, Well, fucking Robert Sapolsky was on, this must be a pretty good show because I know he's a genius.

This is exactly what a publicist does. I should know the podcasting world better than I Right.

I don't know that you should, but continue.

I mean, I listen to a whole bunch of these. It's super fun and it's super interesting. The job of getting to sit in this room and everyone comes and you get to choose who you want to listen to. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. I have a publicist helping me. When we get to that point, lots of book marketing these days is podcasts. She'll say, I'm interested XYZ in having you on the show. And then the first thing she does is lists who else has been- Bill Gates, Obama. I mean, I'm nervous.

But it It works. It's funny because it's the other way, too. We try to get high status people on so that we can say, We had Brad Pitt on. Don't you want to come on, too?

It's working. It's just never-ending two-way street.

So it's in constant motion. There's another general point that comes out of that. Status is a funny resource because you give it away, but it doesn't necessarily deplete. Most resources, if you have them and you give them to somebody else, then you no longer have them. You change possession, right? I mean, you had something and then you gave it away, and now you don't. But if you take UCLA, when UCLA graduates a class, they print a whole bunch of degrees. When they print those degrees, they give status to the graduates. But it isn't like they're depleting their supply.

It's flubber. It's self-generating. It's like, then you have all these people there representing UCLA.

Then they go out and now you have like a UCLA grad with this huge podcast, and now that elevates the status of the school. But you see, though, you have to be a little bit careful in selection because if If UCLA randomly chose people and there were lots of poor outcomes, things would work a little bit different. There's the hot restaurant in Hollywood. Well, why is it hot? It's because the right people are there. But why are the right people there? Well, because it's the hot restaurant. You have this virtuous cycle when the high status interconnect with the high status.

We didn't finish. I do want you to land that point because it's a great point. In this information poor environment where you need medical help, you're left to do what?

In the book I call this the big shift. So take any product that you have to choose or service or thing to attend to. Attention is a huge resource now. There is so much competition for our attention because just imagine the amount of social media and podcast and YouTube and content that's created during the course of this conversation. More than we could consume in 18 lifetimes is my guess if you literally added it all up.

It's even crazier in our business, I heard, Oh, the attention economy. Now we're in an attention economy. That phrase has been around for 12 years. But to see now when they list in the trades, Netflix says 261 billion hours consumed. It used to be dollars. The movie did this. Now it is 261 billion hours were spent on this thing, and that's the metric of it. It's so literal now. It's a measurement of attention. That's the win.

And they have also changed their algorithm to have shows and movies that you can also be splitting your attention. So it's called something.

Two screen viewing.

Yeah. And so you can be watching the show and on your phone at the same time.

It can be too complicated because you still got to be on Instagram. They're making content specifically for that.

Unbelievable. I know. What a world. I No. Let's go back to the general point. So there are all these contexts. I walk into a wine story. I supposedly know something about wine, but I don't. I look at any one bottle, I've got no idea. This old adage, don't judge a book by the cover, is dumb because how else are you going to judge the book? Yeah, exactly. I I do this all the time. I walk into a bookstore. I love bookstores. I love to read. What am I going to choose? I need a doctor. I have no idea who the good orthopedists are, but I need an orthopedist. How am I going to choose? It just goes on and on and on.

If the doctor is a Harvard trained doctor.

There you go. Exactly. That feels like a shortcut. That's exactly it. When you're in these very information poor environments, by the way, I put totally art house films into that category. I see them and then afterwards need someone to tell me whether they were good or not. Right.

Totally. Do we like that?

Totally. That was profound, right? Or it wasn't. I make that judgment. Somebody else has to tell me. Then I feel good if someone says, That was time we'll spend. I mean, the brutalist is an amazing thing. But what you do then is you evaluate the person or the institution or the organization that's affiliated with the product rather than evaluating the product itself. That's what a signal is. We do this endlessly. When we do that, we change how markets function. This is a status thing, because what we're often looking for is some pedigree in whatever context we're in with the producer of the object. We're making an evaluation based on that pedigree rather than the actual product or service. I don't know if the orthopedist is good. I know that Harvard Medical School is supposed to be good. Exactly.

Yeah. Then this phenomenon, the big shift, it compounds. Can Can you explain how it compounds? Your cumulative advantage example of your daughter's goldfish is really great.

Yeah, that was a fun one.

Which you bought two identical goldfish, put them in a bowl. One had a little bit of an abnormality on its mouth. So when it ate, some of the food would come out. And then when the food would come out, it would go to snatch it, but the other one would be closer to it and get it. And within a very short time, one of them was enormous. Yeah. And one of them stayed the same size. Because the bigger he is, the better he can get the piece of food.

There's my daughter, and she's young at the time, you don't want a goldfish corpse on your head. This is a problem. You don't want to deal with this problem. One of them had this tiny advantage. But because that one got more food, it grew. With the growth, its advantage increased because it got much larger, much faster. Then it's a totally unfair. It's David versus Goliath at this point. I literally would sit there at the fish tank. I would put pellets into the fish tank. The fish tank is a glorification of what this is. This was a glass bowl. But I would have to sit there, put pellets in it, and then like bop the big one on the mouth when it would come up. That was the only way to keep the little one alive. The point is they started the same. One had a tiny little advantage, but that advantage became a giant advantage over time.

But this is life. This is everything. This is the neighborhood you're born into. This is one person does better on the SAT.

It's all around. It's one of the important points in the book. I'm not trying to make strong normative arguments about this. It just is. The consequence of that is that the distribution of status is more skewed than the distribution of merit. Hollywood is this great example of it because you have the A-list actors. It's not a giant list. I'm sure everyone on this show has been an amazing actor, but so is the B-list actors. The talent is similar, but the rewards and recognition are very dissimilar.

Well, where it's most pronounced is as you gain that status, you now have access to the directors with great status. Once you can play the director game, it's almost bulletproof. Leonardo DiCaprio only works with Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Nolan. His movies are going to work. These are the three best filmmakers alive, and the status got him into those movies, and so it is a runaway freight train.

Now we're back to the exact same thing with the podcast where you got Sapolsky on. He's absolutely a super interesting, super accomplished, super recognized academic. Or you got Adam Grant on the show, and then anybody would be thrilled to get to be here.

Again, though, on the other side of it, yes, we have a wide range of actors on. We have people who are not as big and flashy, and those are some of the best interviews we have. And then I'm sitting here like, this is unfair that people are not clicking on this link. Merit-wise, it's actually better than the one we do with the A-listers. But because of the status, those don't get the I's. It's so weird.

I do want to point out, though, so I think you could hear all this and also I think that that's the only force in this dynamic, which is not because I just watched the Billy Joel two-part documentary. And there's also plenty of cases where the anointers have always hated him. America didn't give a fuck. Piano man rocks. I don't really care what they're saying. I can hear it. So merit does break through.

It absolutely is true that one of the sources of status is merit. Merit's a super complicated concept on itself. The fallacy of the meritocracy in that Horatio Alger sense, and that you could argue there's of a myth about meritocracy in the contemporary United States than is backed up by the amount of social mobility.

It's true and completely unlikely.

Yeah, exactly. Do we live in any sense in a straight meritocracy where the best and most talented and most deserving win? No. No.

Also, what does it even mean?

This is the great philosophical point. It's like, what is a meritocracy? Who gets to choose what merit is?

Who's deserving, in quotes.

Who deserves it. That's where wine was amazing. Learning about wine in the book because There are these markets with critics like the film business, Roger Ebert and the famous film Critics and Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. The critics are super influential, but wine is this one industry where there was just a guy who... He was like Lord of the Rings. He was the Tsar of it. He dominated the evaluation of wine. The guy's name is Robert Parker, and he had this publication called The Wine Advocate. But what's merit when you drink a bottle of wine? What constitutes an amazing wine?

I forget the It's a statistic you give, but it's like 98% of people can't tell the taste of the $2,000 bottle. You could never just give them a sip of it and they go, Oh, that's that. Only the label will tell you.

Well, there's also these fun experiments. They'll give professional psalms, wine tasters, flights of wine. Imagine giving a wine critic 12 small samples of wine. Then people have thought of some clever experiments like take the same wine and put it into three of the glasses and then see if it's rated the same every time. It's one of these areas where sometimes that works out, but not most of the time. You will have experts disagreeing with themselves on rating a wine in one sitting from the same bottle. What is merit in this world? It turns out if you have super high status, so if you're Robert Parker, you get to choose. Because Robert Parker had a taste function. It was different than the taste function that past critics had. He liked a certain type or style of wine. Those became the wines that critically appraised as having the greatest merit.

This is his own personal preference. But how did he become him?

There are ways to get anointed, and sometimes it's that you catch a lucky break or you try hard. To go back to the point, there's absolutely merit. On average, there's a positive correlation between having high merit in some context and having high status in that context. It's just the correlations, it's nowhere near one, right?

Right. You also get into the book, The Four Self Interpretations of Anointed Status. I found this pretty interesting. For people who have been anointed and recognize they've been anointed, it happened to you, you got offered to join the board of Yahoo in a hostile takeover by Microsoft. You were like, Why on earth are they offering me this? I've never run a company. It's because you're a Harvard business school professor, and that's really why. What are the versions people have of being anointed?

Okay, so now imagine you have high status, and I really don't want to be the guy who says, Woe is me. You have high status. As a general rule, go back to Sapolsky's the Boones because there it's great. You do not want to be at the bottom of the ladder. You'd usually rather be at the top of the ladder. But there are times where it's pretty damn stressful to be the alpha.

Oh, yeah. It's a chimp empire. It's a miserable existence.

How would one with high status react to it. I argue there are four responses to this. One, which was my experience of it, is some version of the imposter syndrome. Because what happens is, particularly if you study this, then you realize that if professionally, say, things go really, really well, you're by definition out over your skis because you get these things and you get this recognition, but you didn't really fully earn it. I could retell the story of my career, but there were a lot of lucky breaks and then a lot of things that led to an early bit of good fortune that then is like the fish tank, where then the status compounds. And then the upshot of that is you realize that people expect you to be special, but you're maybe just about the same as everybody else in the room. The person you beat up for this. Yeah, Exactly.

Or you're special in this one sliver, but you're not in others.

And not in others. Where you're expected to have discerning judgment, which is the Yahoo story. You have status in one domain. You're a good actor, but why does that make you a good podcaster? It's a very different scale. So why should your status in this walk of life transfer over? But it does. It does all the time. One is I don't deserve it. So now I'm nervous and insecure because I'm in this position that I didn't earn. And that creates a lot of expectations on me that I can't meet because I'm not going to stick the landing every single time. So that's one response to having high status.

I think I'll just add, after interviewing a thousand people, it's comforting to know that that is, by a landslide, the most common reaction. Almost every actor we talk to has dealt with imposter syndrome.

Some are in imposter syndrome. I have zero surprise hearing that because I think Hollywood is one of the areas where the cumulative advantage process is stronger than it is in other walks of life because that go back to that 20 actors lining up for the first casting call. If one gets it then boom, their career runs away.

If we're talking to them, something exponential happens. Yeah.

Then they're always public facing. It's got to be heaps of criticism, no matter what you deal with, heaps of criticism. That's one. A second one is what we call privilege. One of my favorite quotes. It's normally attributed to Barry Switzer, the football coach. I'm not positive that's the right attribution, but the quote goes, he was born on third base and thinks he had a triple. Right. You remember that one? Yeah. And so that's like, I'm up on top of the pecking order. I'm like the high status person.

I hate to say this, but you mean a disproportionate amount of those people.

Okay, so that's the second reaction.

If you teach at an elite university, it is very hard to get in there. But I can make a pretty educated bet on what your childhood was.

Mine.

No, at a student that would get into Harvard.

Yeah, it has changed a little over time in fairness. And as a kid, Berkeley, it's very different, but absolutely. So the second reaction is, it's some version of privilege, but I earned what I have. And so then you're less insecure about it.

You're The quote is, I deserve it. I deserve it. The reaction is, I deserve it. They're delusional about why they got...

You got here on your own. The third one is, some version of God gave it to me. It depends on the world you live in, but there are worlds where this is still the prosperity gospel.

In sports, it's It's very indexed. It's very indexed. Because you do have this seemingly God-given talent. It's not like you can work to be 6'7.

Sports is a fun example to talk about annoyment, but in sports, you see it all the time where it's an extension of preordination. It was God's plan. Depending on where you are geographically and what belief system you grew up with. The famous example is John Rockefeller, who was the founder of Standard Oil and was probably the richest man. Chicago University. University of Chicago was a major donor. Rockefeller had 1. 5% of US GDP in wealth. But he was very much, God gave it to me.

He put me here to make it so I can redistribute it.

It's a divine plan. Then the fourth way, which I would argue is probably the best response and the most psychologically healthy response is some form of humility about it, which is there was a lot of luck and a lot of people helped me, and I'm grateful. I should think about that and what I can do to help other people.

To spread this status to as many people as I can. Okay, now we get into an interesting zone, and I want to hear what your ultimate conclusion is. You present this notion of AI as this very curious tool for us to potentially move through life any of this. Lay out how AI could really alleviate us from this inequity of status.

Yeah, I'm slightly off the deep end on AI. It's pretty much all I work on now. I am definitely in the camp that if you stop the progress of AI today, which you won't, because in the history of the world, there's never been an investment at the scale of capital investment in AI today. So it's literally insane. This year, there are four companies, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabets, Google, and Amazon, who are projected to spend north of $300 billion on infrastructure buys, not 100% for AI, but largely for AI. That's in 2025. That doesn't count what was spent in 2024, and it doesn't count what will be spent in 2026. It's an extremely incomplete list of spending. But there are so many different ways where it then interfaces with the status system. I'll give you an example. I'm too lazy to shave, so I buy this beard clipper thing where you just go like... I had one and it was starting to maul me. It's time for something new. You should not cut up your face every time you shave. How do you make that choice? How are you going to buy a beard clipper? What are you going to do?

Well, status-wise, what you normally do, you go like, Oh, Norelco, that's been around forever. My dad used Norelco. That's got to be a great product.

That's not how I would do it because I'm like, there's something new. There's probably something new and better than what my dad I had.

So I'm googling- You would probably have seen one of the people on your makeup tutorials use a certain thing. They look great and you trust them and you go, Fuck, that's got to probably be... So it would be status-driven as well.

Yeah, definitely.

I love these. Okay, so here's what I would do. I would get on Amazon. Nouralco is the only brand that comes to mind. I think it's the only one I know. By the way, they should really support this episode. So I would get on Amazon and I would search for this, and there'd be like 9,000 choices or something. And I'd look at them, I'd be What the hell? So now I got to go for a wire cutter or something like that, and I got to read reviews, and then I have to look at prices.

I hate to admit this, but I'm very price-driven. I don't need the most expensive razor out there, but I don't want the cheap one. So I'm going to go for the high end of the middle one. So many of my decisions are made on what they're charging, which, of course, who fucking knows?

If it means anything. But also, I'm just going to guess that the value of your time is high and the amount of time you waste thinking about which of these is a relevant decision. It's just all dumb. But there's trillions of dollars in market cap all aimed at you undertaking the search in a particular way and then making this decision. Now, move to a world where I have an AI agent, which you do now. You'll soon have amazing personal agents if you choose. I can't wait for my fully capable AI agent. But Gemini and ChatG, all the AI systems are currently agentic. What I did is I went to one of them and I typed in a command. The prompt was, I want a recommendation for a beard trimmer. I don't care about any features. I want you to read reviews. I We could give a shit about the brand. Rule out the cheap options because I'm already cutting myself up. I want you to make a recommendation with one product. Yeah, I don't even want three. I don't want three. I don't want a choice. I want one product. Then I bought a beard clipper.

I just bypassed all of the efforts to influence me. I bypassed Nouralco's ad budget. You think about traditional status processes. I instructed my agent not to care.

To, in theory, make a merit-based decision.

That then raises a question of the agents work. We're going to move into a world where everyone's going to try to manipulate how your agents are working.

A hundred %. There's going to be advertising built into these agents where they're prompting specific products.

So I think that's one way in which we're going to impact the status system, where there's a lot of these attempts to influence our judgment where we can outsource the decision to an agentic decision maker that we instruct to have certain criteria or not. And we'll see how that evolves. It's not prime time yet, but my guess is it will be one day. But maybe in a more profound way, AI We know this already from early research, but just hands-on experience. It's an amazing equalizer. If you have a health problem, everybody by this point has typed in symptoms into a chatbot and it's wild. You're normally in this world where you have what we call an information asymmetry, which is you're going to see a doctor because the doctor knows a ton more than you. We're in this world all the time where we're transacting with counterparts who know way more than us. That drives how whole markets function and how status dynamics function. But we're removing all of that or lots of it, not all of it. Because now you're armed with, you have a doctor in your pocket and you have a second opinion in your pocket.

So that's an important change. But the one that I've been thinking most about is it also takes skill differences and equalizes them in terms of the ability to produce output. Imagine the joyful job of being an admissions officer to any institution that reviews written evaluations today.

You're reading feedback, you're saying?

Well, you remember the college essay, for example, or the cover letter when you're writing a resume, or the grant application. Anywhere you submit a written document, the email you write to anybody to ask them to do something for you. I mean, you must get so much in the email. I can only imagine what comes in. But now everything's extremely well organized, Well-written because it's all prompted. And so what that does is it takes an information-rich environment and turns it into an information-poor environment.

Meaning you don't know if the person you're evaluating or the product you're evaluating, use the AI to generate.

Meaning that the high school student who writes the college essay with assistance of AI. Yeah, who knows? Did they do it themselves? Did they do it? I know. I hate that. We hate that. You can't evaluate anymore. When people were writing for themselves, there was a great deal of information in what they wrote. Now that's gone. So what's that going to do? I make the argument in the short term, it's going to reinforce the status system because what we're going to then do is we're going to rely on pedigree. We're going to make the big shift. We're going to evaluate the person because the content, we can't evaluate it. That's interesting.

That's what I think about often. It's like everyone will present as equal.

Here's the interesting thing, which is it's like a calculator. I don't give a shit if someone can do long division, they don't need to. If I need help from somebody that has to calculate something, I don't give a shit how they do it. I just care that it gets calculated. Longer term, where it gets interesting with respect to status is, do we stop caring whether it was the person because the robot is just a calculator? We have universal access to it. It's in everyone's pocket all the time. What matters isn't what the human does, it's what the combination of the human and the machine does. I think if that happens, then we actually end up suppressing status differences among us. It's all too early to say, but we think of this as a technology. It's so much more than that. It's going to affect every aspect of life, and it's going to really affect what happens in any content production business.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Thinking through all the things that are going to happen because of AI, it's just wild.

But one thing I think for sure is true, we're going to need a whole new social science because we are about to have some version of these relationships with AI systems, which I think we all will. They won't necessarily be romantic relationships, but it's going to be super weird to have an assistant who actually knows way more about you than any human knows about you.

Yeah, it's more than you know about you.

Even when you talk to it now, we've talked about this, I'm really scared of it and anti it, but I used it the other day to figure out if my carbon monoxide detector was broken or it was going off. It was such a good answer and I kept asking more questions, and it was so helpful to me. I felt true relief from the answer. I was like, Thank you so much. Then I was like, I don't need to be doing that. This is a robot. I don't need to be please and thank you.

You know what? There's some studies, right? They operate better when you're nice to them. No, but then that's bad.

That's not good. It shouldn't be a human.

If it helps you, at some point OpenAI published what it costs them when people say please and thank you. Oh, really? Because it's token consumption. You're giving it more information or you're telling it something. It will not do more because you said please, but politeness is expensive. It's not free from a computational standpoint. Yeah, that's interesting. I do think it will be profoundly important for the status system in ways it's very hard to anticipate. Now, but to come back to the point that you were making, and I concur 100%, which is the book, some people read it and interpret it as being negative on the status system. That isn't what I meant at all. What I meant the book to do was to say, this is a wildly interesting, complicated phenomenon that permeates our lives. We should know how we are. And we should know how we are, and we should think about it, and we should think about the ways that it affects our lives. And we should probably change some of our behaviors around it, though I'm not super prescriptive around that. And it's this complicated thing, but that's true of most everything.

There's some upsides and some downsides.

It's also It's easy. I feel like I have to be the one to point out that it's easy to defend status when you have it. Everyone in this room has some.

I had a weird hunch you were going to say that. Yes, we're incentivized for me to go like, I don't think we should remove it because that's how we function. I already anticipate it. I just will say in my defense, when I was a broke UCLA student with no status, it was in Anthro, I still thought, oh, yeah, this is how we work.

It is the function. But you were more likely to say, that's unfair that that person has this. That's not right that that person has this.

But that's why I was drawn to Anthro is you don't study it to make a conclusion. You don't say this is how it functions and it's bad or it's good. That's the premise of cultural relativism. It's just it is what it is. That's what you're there to discover and not really levy a verdict. So I will say I very much was accepting that that's what we are back then before I had it.

But yeah, it's just like what we say about the sim. We're more likely to believe in that because we have great lives. Someone who has a bad life is probably like, I don't think there's a sim. My life sucks. Totally agree. Same situation. If you don't have any status, you're probably not going to be like, Yeah, I think this is the way it should be.

This is really interesting. So let me take it to another just interesting point about status, which is we need your your life, and we need people to see your life. I'm going to say it's different for me. I was born to a reasonably upper middle class family. I did a stint as a juvenile delinquent for a different reason, but it wasn't because of anything going on at home. I don't think anyways, who knows? I I got super lucky. I was loved my whole life by my parents and well treated by them, and they provided great education resources, all the things. When I look at my life, I think I might not have been born on third, but I was born on second. I was super fortunate, and the worst decision you can make is to be born poor. You had a different life, but you got here. That's genuine social mobility. Social mobility and status mobility has to happen for the system to really stay together. And so what you want for the system to function peacefully is for there to be a widespread belief that mobility is possible, because if there isn't, it's a different experience to be at the bottom of the road.

So it's one thing to be down there and think, I'm always going to be here. There is no alternative to this, but it's a very different thing to be here and have prominent examples of status and social mobility, those glue the system together. And so there is mobility. So the wrong read of the book is that the status system is just self-perpetuating. The right read of the book is it's partially so.

Right. It's like all things. It's like it needs to be monitored. You need to be aware of it. I got asked to give the speech for the Anthro graduating class, and I did. And literally, the whole thing was about status. I was like, you love your seats at the Hollywood Bowl, so long as you always look behind you and see how many people you're sitting in front of. But if you're in the fourth row and you obsess about the fact that there's three rows ahead of you, which is how we're designed to think, you're going to miss this great.

I mean, that's awesome. And first of all, what a venue. Every time I'm in LA, I to go to the Hollywood Bowl.

I think it's our best offering.

It is an amazing place to see a show. I'm here, and I can tell you what's at the Hollywood Bowl tonight and tomorrow. I was looking at it and at sections. But this is another great point, which is that there's a phenomenon We are born comparers. But then that gives us some discretion about how we feel. Because if you're sitting in the fourth row, if you think about it, you can choose who you want to compare yourself to. You can compare yourself to the first row, or you can compare yourself to the eighth row. That's your decision. And a life skill is to look at the way that doesn't make you feel bad. But another life skill or another set of choices that you have is there was a book that was written by an interesting Cornell economist called Choosing the Right Pond, which is that you can choose what status system you enter most of the times, maybe not at work, but in other parts of your life.

You can have status for being able to smoke the most weed.

If you're a great weed smoker, you should join a weed smoking group.

That's the currency in your group.

Let's suppose you can smoke five joints a day, but there is someone else who can smoke 12. You might want to join the group where five is a lot of joints. Yes.

Because if you join the group where everybody else can smoke six or up, you just went to the bottom of the ladder. Now, that is one of the great lies in America, too, is we also interview so many people who they grew up in the great neighborhood. We just were interviewing somebody. Alicia Silverstone. They went to Hillsborough, but they were just making it. So you're in Hillsborough. You should feel awesome and you feel poor because you're the poorest in Hillsborough. It's such a relative mind fuck.

Everything is a relative mind fuck. Yes.

And you got to decide, I'm pulling myself out of this.

Essentially, all of us can be miserable by choosing people to compare ourselves to that make us feel bad about ourselves. We all have the capacity to do that. So one of the interesting things that comes to mind is you have high status, and there are ways in which you get that where they never get taken away from you. And then there are ways in which you get that where you can lose it. You're an actor and you win a Golden Globe, or you win an Academy Award, or you win a Cann Prize, or you get a festival prize. You want it. You get to keep it for life. And the status that comes with it is yours. But then you're like a Michelin star restaurant.

Because they can take those away.

They take them away. I mean, they do it all the time. It's an annual thing. I know. So you're like a Michelin star restaurant for 2025. You might be a three-star, but you can go to two to one to It actually completely changes your life to get a Michelin star if you're a chef. In some ways, don't feel sorry for them. It's the Nobel Prize of the business, but it puts you on a hamster wheel. It creates an enormous amount of pressure.

Yeah, no one should feel bad for anyone, but there is a stress that comes.

Exactly. People hate when I sound like I'm a right wing birther person that wants everyone to have kids. But I will say that's the joy of having a child is the singled identity that can't be taken from you.

It cannot be taken.

Yeah, it feels very, very solid and comforting in moments of great fear and panic about the other permeables.

Yeah, I guess you're right. That's an identity that can't be taken. But if you're in a position where you're struggling, that kid- Amplifies your fear. Yeah. Because you have to take care of this thing.

Yeah, or just in my experience, you're like, all right, but the kid doesn't give a fuck about that. I had directed a movie. It failed. I was on my way home. I was self-pity. And I was like, these little girls have no idea what a box office is. They don't give a fuck. They want you to be dad when you get home. And that's number one job. It pulled me out of the self-pity spiral of my other identity, which is successful filmmaker.

But I mean, someone who maybe can't feed their kid. It does have an impact. Sure. Yeah, it's just for you. I don't know.

Well, this has been so much fun, Tobi. This has been delightful. Yeah. Anointed the extraordinary effects of social status in a winner-take-most world. And I'm just going to add, if people didn't sense that from the conversation because the conversation was pretty in-depth. It's a very playful You're using Taylor Swift as examples. You're using Delana- I was going to bring her up.

What were you going to say? The people she has opened for her, immediately they've jumped all these rungs. She has Haim. Haim must be so good.

There are so many interesting status dimensions of the Taylor Swift story. It's incredible. But yeah, the book, it's very much written for a general audience, and it draws on examples from all different walks of life. They're all fun. All the case examples are.

Thank you. No, it's a very playful, fun book. It's not overly academic in any way. Domi, this has been great. I know you're on the fence about writing a book in the first place, but should you write another one, we would love to talk to you again.

Amazing. Now I'm writing another book.

All right. Good luck with it. Thank you. Everyone check out another.

Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Hi, there. This is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check with Ms. Monica.

Wow. We had a crazy Armchair Anonymous pop-out sim story that has- It really hit home for you. Yeah, it intersected with my previous life in a very crazy way.

Very exciting. Very exciting.

Very exciting. Okay, well, two things. You are about to go to the hospital.

Yeah, I'm going to leave after this fact check and head over to the hospital.

Do you want to tell people what's going on?

Well, I guess in order of me realizing I had gone to Beverly Hills, and on my way back, there was a ton of traffic, so I was in the car for a while. I was like, really, really had to pee. Then I got home and I could barely pee. Yeah, it's not a good sign. What the fuck is going on? So my first thought is like, Oh, in large prostate, this happens. A lot I read about that. There's some options on the table. You get like, Flowmax or one of these things. So that was my first thought. So then I hit my doctor and say, Hey, this is happening. Is this something I have to come in for, or can I just get a flow max thing? And he said, Well, I'd like to rule out that it's not an infection. And I was like, Yeah, okay. That makes more sense because this feels a little dicier. So then I have, I guess this is Wednesday night.

Thank you, Rob. Rob's telling me to fix my hair.

Oh, he's so good at that. I get a crazy fever, chills, and then my body is in a tremendous amount of pain Wednesday night. I don't sleep for more than 15 minutes straight because just everywhere hurts. So then I wake up and I'm like, Yeah, I think you're right. This is an infection. And he's like, okay, I'm not there today, but go in and give a blood sample and a urine sample. So I did that yesterday morning. Were you able to pee? I can pee, but it's like it takes forever to get it out. It just barely comes out, and it hurts. It does not feel good. So start the antibiotic yesterday after I gave the things. And then last night, the family has now done their own research, and they're like, well, if you have an infection that's entered your bloodstream, that's sepsis. Yeah. And I said, But I feel a lot better than I did yesterday. And they're like, Yeah, but even see, it says here you can feel better, but it doesn't mean you're not. And so I talked them into letting me sleep at home last night. Okay. So that we could finish our day of work today.

Okay.

And then I had more follow-up calls with the doctor. My blood results did since come back. Okay. And I do have a very elevated white blood cell count. So I do have a big infection. Okay. So I am now, after this, I'm going to scoot over to the hospital and probably get some intravenous Antibiotics.

Antibiotics. And then continue the ones you're on, I assume.

Well, I'm sure they'll tell me what the move is at that point.

Interesting. I think this happened to my dad.

Okay.

When they were driving back from Florida or something, He held his pea or something? He had to pee, and then it was really, really enlarged. Then they had to go to the pivot and go to the hospital. They were like, Thank God you came because it was about to burst. Yeah.

I guess there's something called prostate scitus, prostate scitus, whatever. It seems like, at least not from the internet, that that's what it might be. But now that I've accepted It's an infection and I've accepted all that. I'm now going back and going, Oh, this could be related to the original blood blister that they said could be staff. Maybe I just ignored it. Maybe now it's- It's spread. Other places. So someone's going to be like, It's so nice to have health care. And yes, I'm really grateful I have health care.

Yeah. But I felt betrayed.

My feelings were hurt this morning. I thought, if this is all from riding my bicycle, which I was trying to do to be a good boy and be extra healthy, to live for a long time for my family, and this all is stemming from there, that feels unfair. You're supposed to get in trouble when you're a bad boy.

I understand. But also you're focusing on that part instead of the part that's like, someone told you to... A doctor told you to take antibiotics and you didn't do it.

A couple of months ago, yeah. Yeah, because that hot compass worked. Okay, we're good.

Yeah.

Who knows? Maybe they're not really, or maybe they are. But there are unique feelings happening in my body. Let's just say that. Now I have the very bizarre indigestee feeling. But I had written down so many things I wanted to talk about in the fact check. Okay. Do you have one that you want to come up with right away?

I just got back from the funeral. Yeah. It was- Can we call it a funeral if you don't bury a body? We cremated.

Right. But if it's a cremation- It's still a funeral. It's still a funeral. Okay. I think so. I accept that.

It wasn't a burial, but It was a ceremony and a cremation.

A cremating? Mm-hmm.

Okay. That was really interesting, seeing that whole process and being put in and the door being closed and the button and being pressed and all that was really- Being pressed. Someone is designated to turn the knob, start the cremation process.

You guys were present for the cremation? Yeah. Oh, I did not know that you could observe this. You're not watching, though. You can't see.

Well, in India, they used to. That's how cremation was done, literally on wood.

A pyre of wood.

Yeah. But now, obviously not. Now, it's like- It's not great for the environment. Through actual cremation.

We got to filter it.

Yeah, but we went in. Then there was a whole ritual. There's a Hindu ritual where there was putting stuff on her body. Did you like it? I really did. The whole thing. I mean, it was, of course, so sad to see her, but she also looked really at peace and nice.

But yeah, there was like- So there was a viewing?

Yes, there was a whole thing. There was a viewing, a ceremony. I mean, a lot of people spoke. My dad spoke. Yeah.

Which was- Did he do a great job?

He did. So he went last because he's the littlest brother. And his older living brother is in India, so he sent in a video. Okay. And he started it and was like- You never did answer my question.

They were both in the military in India, not here. Correct. Yes. Yes. Okay. One was a lieutenant colonel and one was a wingmaster or something. Yeah.

He was the highest level. Oh, okay. Yeah. So on the like, what is it? I don't know. They It sent something out, and it said- Survived by. Survived by, and it had the brothers, and it had all these prefaces with the other two brothers.

Accreditation. Master Sergeant III, decorated. Yeah.

And then a Then she said, Mr. Ashoka, badman. I was like, What a loser. No. Oh, my God. No. It really made me laugh. But anyway, he was basically like, She's at the bar, and I tried to meet her, and I failed miserably. Then the second brother goes and also says nice stuff. Then my dad basically goes and he's like, Well, everyone said everything.

Little brother. Here I am. Once again.

Yeah. But he did say... He said, which I thought was a ding, ding, ding, because here When we have people on who we admire and we don't really know, we can't really say. There's no words to say it. We just say, We're grateful and thank you. He just said, I'm just going to say thank you. That was really, really sweet.

But no Anyone's crying at this thing. Is anyone crying?

People are crying, yeah. Okay, good. Oh, yeah. People are crying. Yeah, there were all these Hindu traditions, even though she really wasn't very religious, but I think she wanted some of this stuff, or we decided to do it anyway. It was really cool to experience that. I've never experienced that before.

Those traditions don't get here by accident. They're useful.

In all the speeches, a lot of people would say things about the religion and the the big tenants of it and the God of Death. It was just all I was like, I really need to learn more.

Yeah, that would be fun.

Another thing that I thought was really beautiful. She came here in the '60s, pre-civil rights. And so if you got to come, they labeled you as either Black or Caucasian. Sure. So Indians were put in the Caucasian category. Oh, interesting. Which at the time- That upset that Florida acting coach. Correct. Yeah. But at the time was good for- In 1960s. Because it was trees. Yeah. Anyway, she came and she... I didn't really realize the level of genius she was until I'm hearing all these people talk about her. She was on another level statistician, and she went to the University of Chicago. Then she was a professor. Then she started all these businesses and all these things. Very, very, very cool person. But, yeah. We're in this little chapel, and people are speaking, and I look and I see this really blowy, flowy, beautiful American flag flying outside. I was like, Yeah, that's right. She did this. Be careful. She came. I just think that's a beautiful American story. It is.

Don't make me cry is what I'm saying.

I thought you were saying it was getting political.

No, this is the thing that would really set me off. Sorry. It is what I would want someone to think, that this place with all of its warts is still the most special place.

It's the most beautiful. And this person- For a woman in 1960 to be able to come somewhere and live to all of her potential is the thing we do right. A hundred %. And it's the most beautiful thing about this country. And this is the potential here. And she ended up being so successful here and being this independent woman here and owning all these homes and doing all this stuff and fulfilling her dreams, which ultimately did take her. But you know.

But again, better than not your dream taking you. Yeah.

I think she would have felt that way. It was really, really beautiful.

If I go out in a fireball, like 210 miles an hour at 85, you just got to go like, God bless me. That's exactly how we'd want to go.

I know. We would have to look at it that way. You can't judge 82 years based on the last five minutes. That is so unfair. She did the last text she sent to her daughter was on the boat.

Feeling great about it.

Yeah. She said, I'm on the boat. This is exhilarating. This is what I've always dreamed of.

It's as good as you can do.

It's as good as you can do. It was really, really lovely. I obviously felt like I wish we had all, as a family, done this while she was alive.

These are the things that- It should be standard that if you hit like 80, you get a living funeral, and maybe you'll be around for another 25. But let's just do it where everyone can see you.

Or let's do it any... Let's just get together more, guys. Like, make the time. It's really important. But Yeah, it was beautiful. It felt like closure. There was a double rainbow that night. Oh, my gosh. That day after the memorial. So it was really nice. Good. Yeah. And then there's all these fun stories about my dad being a rascal, which was always fun.

Was he rascally?

Yeah, very rascally. Very rascally.

I get a rascally sense from him. Little rascal underbelly. Little brother.

Yeah. I did think of you, actually, because he said, my uncle Jay said that he was always trying to live up to my aunt Lily. My dad said, and I was always trying to live up to my uncle Jay. Right. He said, and I failed miserably. So it's like, yeah, these little brothers are always trying to be their big brother. It's really, really Really something. But anyway, it was nice.

I'm glad it was that.

Me too. It was a struggle to get there. It was three hours away from the thing. Last night, I left late. I got to the hotel at midnight. I had booked the wrong day for the hotel. There's just a lot, but it was worth it.

Oh, good. Yeah. Good, good, good. Well, a lot of the things I wrote down have to do with screen grabs I've grabbed. Okay, great. That involve you, as I like to do. I like to scour the comments and find out. Okay. This is a great point someone made. I don't know why I didn't think of it at the time. But when you thought that Matthew Friends had the same father as Matthew Perry, what didn't occur to you is that his dad would have two Matthews. So someone wrote, I love that Monica thought Matthew Perry's dad had two sons named Matthew. I said, Oh, good point. I hadn't thought of that either. But yeah, that'd be insane. Unless he's George Foreman I didn't think about that at all because you think of Matthew Perry and Matt friend.

Matthew. I haven't heard- This is the same name, though. Yeah, that's embarrassing.

Okay, and then someone else wrote this, the same topic. All caps for some reason. Had to come here to say, Mom thought Matthew Perry and Matthew friend were brothers because she probably googled Matt friend dad. And Matthew Perry is also named Matt and was on Friends.

A hundred %.

No. This mystery really sent a lot of ships in different directions. Wow. But minimally, that was funny that both were named Matthew.

Yeah. I didn't think it through. I just saw it and thought, whoa.

But maybe the dad would have been like, it worked the first time. Also, the age gap between these two is 20 plus years.

Exactly. To me, it could be different. It was definitely different moms. Clearly. And maybe both moms were really attached to the name Matthew.

Maybe they insisted on Matthew.

Exactly. I don't know.

Still, I would have been as the dad, I've been like, I already have. My son's already going to be uncomfortable with the fact I'm having another son 30 years later. So maybe if we didn't name him the same thing, he wouldn't feel as replaced.

Yeah, but maybe the mom is like, That's my dad's name. And I told him on his deathbed that if I had a son, I would name it. So there's no other. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah, see? It's really easy. It's really easy to do.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. So that was my Instagram update. Okay, great. And then the other couple of things I wrote down is, I wonder if Wina is sad about pips.

Oh, this is an important thing to talk about.

Yeah. I'm not Wina. I'm not playing pips. So don't feel abandoned by me.

Okay.

But do you think- For people who don't know what's going on. Yeah. Connections was our first love. It's created by Wina and made by her. And now everyone's starting to send around pips.

Yeah. And guess what?

And I got worried about her. I do love pips. You love pips. And are you playing Connections as much?

Yes. Okay. So I still do the whole thing.

Okay, great. Well, this must take a lot of time.

It is, but it's a fun morning activity. I do the mini. This is the order I do. Okay. Mini. Wurtle. Strands.

Fuck me. Well, three. Okay.

Connections. Wow. Pips. So Pips only happens if I have time. And Pips has three. It has easy, medium, hard. So I like to try to do them all.

Wow. Is this your whole morning?

It's a long time in the morning. Yeah.

It's a good. It's better than Instagram.

Exactly. It gets my brain moving.

And that brings us the other thing I wrote down. Okay. It's like two public... One concern,. This is a public service announcement. This crossed my mind. For some reason, when I was with Eric and Molly, we were talking about phone use. We had seen a comedian. She was talking about phone use a lot. And here's what I did think that's interesting about your phone. Let's say you spend two or three hours on it a day, and you're having fun experiences. You're seeing fun videos and everything. But what occurred to me is, I don't have a single fun memory of being on my phone, a specific memory.

You don't? No. From being on your phone at all or being on social media? I'm on social media.

Okay. I can't see an actual... I know I've been consuming social media on a bad day, 2 hours a day, and on a good day, none. But what I know is I have no specific I have a specific memory of like, oh, that one time I was sitting on the couch just loving Instagram. And I was like, I don't think you can commit them to memory. They're not real experiences.

Okay, that's interesting. Okay, I think you're right.

But also- They just go on a void. The proclamation I want to make is no one will ever be on their deathbed reflecting about this great time they had on their phone. I don't even think you can make those memories.

Scrolling and stuff. Yeah. I think you can have them texting. I have them.

Texting? Yeah. That's a relationship.

That's a connection. Yeah, exactly. But I think in the same way, sometimes that happens, like when you sent me the video of the lady pooping.

Woman squirming.

Yeah, pooping in the- But again, that was interactive, and that was you and I, and that's like- Yeah. Yeah.

So there are- Maintaining a real-life friendship. Yes, that's right. But just the like, oh, and I saw this, and I saw this, and I saw that, and I saw this, and I saw this argument, I saw this. I don't think any of those are committed to memory. So, weirdly, I connected these dots. It was like, every moment you spend on that will never be reflected on. That's interesting. It was a waste in the moment. And then even worse, it's like a gap in your real life.

Yeah, that's probably very, very true. That's scary. But you know what's funny? I wonder why this is true? Because it's not connection. But I do have days that I think back on fondly of just watching three hours of cooking videos, not on Instagram, but still. I do think of that very fondly. Like, oh, that was so nice. I felt cozy. I mean, to me, that was like watching TV, which fond memories of that, obviously. I wonder what's different about that.

I think just the speed. Like the speed. There's too much. Your brain has got to decide they're not going to hold on to this. It's not quintessential for your life. And it just knows to dump it. And so it's just these holes, I think, in your memory, which is- Yeah.

Because maybe with the cooking videos, because I am learning about cooking.

And you're making a future goal of like, I'll try that dish, and I'll serve it to these people. There is something real life impacty about it. Or it's just scrolling. Or if I'm looking at another thing, I think is you're not going to remember any of your cruising shopping stuff. Or for me, looking at cars, I'm not going to be like, I remember that time I saw that 84 months thing. It was done perfectly. And I just loved being on the couch, convincing myself I needed to buy it and then talking myself out of it. I just can't imagine that's what's on the deathbed.

No, it's not. Yeah.

And not everything has to be for your deathbed. But if you can't even recall it, I think that's a maybe.

That's fair. That's definitely fair.

Last thing is, and I want to know your... So as we've discussed, I actually like being embarrassed. And We had a moment the other day, they talked about the roller skating. So I had the roller skating behind the motorcycle with tow ropes. So that went great. Yes, the kids. And then I thought, oh, even better, I'm going to put a long bar across the back of the four wheeler, which is lower. And then so when we're going down hills and they need to brace so that they don't go too fast, they'll have a nice bar they can hold on to. This is a huge improvement. So it's got tow ropes and it's got this bar. And so we go out trial run. It's awesome. I don't know what we did. Maybe the battery died of the speaker we were listening to. So we go back in the house, grab a new speaker. When we come back out, we're just taking off. And also we'd seen no other cars, right? Well, 10 feet after leaving the driveway, Delta decides she's going to shoot the duck, which is a tricky skate move. You're only on one skate and you're crouched all the way down.

And she rips them on the roller skate, right?

Yes, she does. She can do them. Yeah.

Well, she ate shit, right? And so she hit the asphalt. She's laying there screaming. As soon as I turned to see, oh, boy, how hurt is she? I noticed, oh, God, there's a car waiting now. I got a kid on the ground. I'm on a four-wheeler. Lincoln's in the mix. Yeah. Then I run over to Delta. It's okay. Tell me where it hurt. Then as I'm looking up, now I got a car on the other side. We're causing a traffic jam in the neighborhood.

This is hard.

I'm immediately super embarrassed. You are. As a dad. I'm like, they think what I'm doing is responsible, and here this kid's hurt. I'm getting really embarrassed- In a bad way. That other people are judging me as a parent. Lincoln bolted. Lincoln got the hell out of there.

She did? She ran back home?

She skated back home. We were very close. We had just pulled out. She's like, Get me out of here. I go to Delta, How bad is it? I got to get you out of the road because we have a traffic jam now. I pick her up, I put her on the four-wheeler. We then make a four-point turn that's embarrassing, and then we finally get away, and then the traffic jam goes away. We get back in the house. I don't know. 40 minutes later, Link and I are walking through the yard, and she just goes, I go, Where the hell did you go? You just bowed. She goes, I was so embarrassed. I go, How do you think I was feeling? She goes, Oh, I know exactly how you're feeling. You were definitely embarrassed that people thought you were a bad dad. I'm like, Yes. Then we bonded over, and she said it. She goes, I love being embarrassed, though. Like 10 minutes later, I just love it. And I go, Yeah, me too. It feels so unique, doesn't it? We were panicked. Oh, my God, we got to get out of this road, the whole thing.

So we had this really fun time bonding over that we both have that gene, where we love being embarrassed.

Interesting. Does it matter about what? If you're embarrassed that you're a bad dad.

You're leading me perfectly to all the zones. Oh, wow. So obviously, that's the thing. There are things that I love being embarrassed about, and then there are other things I don't. And so what I'm going to share with you that I don't like that I've recently become embarrassed by. Okay. Is I've made the same joke a few places, and it's percolated up because we have Mom's Car, we have this show, then we have guests that maybe warrant me retelling the story. But I've told this thing about that I told Kristenristen to just start meeting me places because she's too famous. And I realized I've told it in three different places. And by the third time I saw it, I'd be I'm so embarrassed. I was listening to this show. This guy thinks this joke is so good. He just keeps saying it. And when I'm caught recycling a bit or a joke, I'm really humiliated. And this has been bubbling up a couple. There's a few I've recycled too many times, and I'm on it, listener, and I'm going to clean it up because it's embarrassing.

Wow. Yeah.

I don't like that.

Well, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's my fault. Well, I'm sorry you feel embarrassed. Yeah. I don't mean to- Go ahead. Fuel more embarrassment because I really don't want to- You probably cut out a lot of- Yes. There are stories that they're just... The only reason it comes up is because it's all recorded, right? In life, people tell the same stories, and you don't think about it because you're not... You're saying it to the same people.

Also, I would add is I make a point not to retell stories to people that have already heard it, but we're constantly in situation where three times a week, we're sitting with people we've never met. That's what I'm saying. And then so now I got a reason to tell this person this story. That's exactly what I'm saying. But you shouldn't have to sit through it again or wob.

Well, it's not that. No. That's what I'm saying. In real life, we all tell stories, the same story to many different people, and no one's going to, quote, catch you because it's different people. That is what you're doing. You're telling someone new. But the problem is Everyone else has heard it. This is what happens when we're in such an intimate setting. I think it's easy to forget that there is an audience who has heard this already. I know. I do. There's a handful of ones that I'm just like, that's always going to go. We're getting rid of that. That's going to go. Now, sometimes I have to leave it.

Because it'd be insane that the person followed up with that without the set up. I agree. This is why my defense of it, usually. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, I got to keep telling a certain few stories because that's what leads to the other people's stories.

Well, and I have a bit of a solution because sometimes you do this naturally, right? But sometimes you don't. And that's when we get in a pickle. But often naturally, because I understand the impetus to tell it because it also... You're telling it so that the person feels connected to you.

And comfortable with whatever the thing is.

Yes, exactly. You're relating to them. So I think you don't have to stop doing that. I know what you're going to say. There's something at the end. Then you just say one sentence that's the actual question so that the story can go. So you make it cleaner. Okay. Yeah. The story can then just get chopped, but they've heard it. That's good. But they've heard it. And then it's just the question is clean.

I thought you were going to suggest something different, which I have made a concerted effort to clean up. Okay. Which is a lot of times, well, most of the time I'm telling the story to start the process. Yes. But I am guilty sometimes if they told me the story, they didn't need any prompting, and then I then match them at the end, which we don't need. And I have become aware of that. Yeah. And I try now to not go like, Me too. Yeah. I was also in Iceland.

Well, and again, sometimes it's fine. It's not necessary. If it's a new story and it's interesting.

Yeah. But Yeah.

It's okay. I find it very endearing that you're embarrassed by it.

I'm going to clean it up. I just want whoever's flagged it, I'm going to clean it up.

That's nice.

Keep the material fresh as possible.

I wish I had been a little braver because there have been some times where I've been like, I do need to tell them that that story has to be removed from it's got to go. It's got to go. But But I haven't. I don't want to be like, so don't do this. That feels mean or bad or telling people what to do. It could break my rhythm, my mojo. Yeah, exactly. I just want to mess with you or make you feel like I'm trying to control things or something like that. I haven't done it. But now, look, we're in a position where you're embarrassed.

Yeah, but I hope you feel comforted by the notion that I'm attempting to be aware.

No, I know. But you had to get there the hard way. I could have given you any... But maybe you would have been mad at me if I did it that way. Who knows? It's hard to know.

There's no way to... It's hard to know. I just know that I'm not going to be telling the one punchline ever again unless I'm talking to someone on the steeps of Mongolia, and I'm pretty certain they've not heard it.

Well, it's also funny. I was thinking because when we had Matt, friend on who's a huge arm cherry. Yeah. Again, in any other circumstance, most of the people we have on, I don't think Liz is. They're not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these stories are new. But with him, I don't remember what it was, but I remember thinking like, I know he knows. He knows this story. He probably knows how it ends. And that's funny. Anyway, I'm sorry you're embarrassed about that.

That's okay. Just something to work on.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how embarrassed are you about that versus your carbuncles?

Well, it's interesting. One, I'm culpable for, and one is just I'm a victim. So I shouldn't feel guilty or embarrassed by the carbuncles, but of course, I feel more gross. And I don't like to feel gross to people.

No, nobody likes that.

No. But just like, if I'm teeming with some infection, that's disgusting. And no one wants to be with a sept. No, it's not disgusting. No one wants a septic lover. Well, speak for yourself. I don't mind a sept. I guess the right septic lover. I take pit septic.

As long as it's temporary. Well, no, I don't want to say that in case we have any long term septic people listening. It's great. Everyone's attractive.

Everyone's great, either septic or not.

Everyone's great. All right, well, let's get you to the hospital, so let's move on. Okay, great. Okay, some facts for Toby. Has Joan Diddian written a sonnet? Because he asked AI to write a sonnet- In? In Joan Diddian's voice. He said, But I don't know if she's ever written one. She not write a formal sonnet. Okay. Based off my research. Five novels, 10 books of non-conviction, and a play.

Say the name again.

Joan Diddian?

Yeah. So what's crazy is someone else I'm reading about- She's huge.

I'm reading a Joan Didian book right now.

Oh, you are? Mm-hmm. What was I reading right before the Charlie Sheen book that I put down? Can I glance? Yeah. Okay. I know what it is. I think Joan Didian was Brett Easton, Alice's favorite author as an inspirer. Who? Brett Easton, Alice. I don't know him. You do Less Than Zero, American Psycho.

Oh, director?

No, novelist. But several of his books have been turned into movies. Got it. He wrote The Screenplay. So he's done both. Got it. And he has a book out, maybe it's two years old, called Shards. And it's about growing up, going to one of these fancy private schools in Hollywood. Oh, interesting. In the '80s. And it's so juicy with '80s pop Hollywood rich kid. You would love it. But he's talking about her constantly, which is funny because I'm completely unfamiliar with her work. Really? Yeah.

What's her seminal- She's an icon. She's an icon. Most famous Joan Diddian book. Let's see what pops up. While I'm reading the white album, that did pop up. Oh, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Oh, I am aware of that title.

Yeah. I guess that's the most popular or whatever. But yeah, she has a ton. She was She almost went to Pulitzer. She was just a big icon in the '70s, I think. She was in the scene. Anyway- I'm going to read something by her.

That's my commitment.

Yeah, I really like what I'm reading now. Okay. I would recommend it. All right, let's see here. The Rembrandt that was delisted. So several Rembrandt paintings have been demoted, but some of the most well-known include Portrait of a Young Woman. That's a 1632 painting. Once considered a Rembrandt, was downgraded to the worship of Rembrandt. Yeah, 1970. Oh, this was such a ding, ding, ding.

I had to- You had to put your eyeballs back in your head?

Yeah, they popped out. Now, don't get offended. I won't. But the name of the painting is Old Man in an Armchair.

Oh, this is like a ding, ding, ding with the Eames chair. Exactly. Oh, yeah. I'm an Old Man in an Armchair.

Well, you're not old, But you're a man in an armchair, and then in 20 years, 30 years, we could say you're an old man in an armchair. But I feel like we got to get this.

The painting? Yeah. What is the current value of it?

I don't know, but it was demoted.

Oh, that helps.

So it's not going to be that expensive. It was bought in 1957 by the National Gallery, and then it was demoted soon after. But we'll take it.

The art world is the shadiest world ever. I know. It's such a shady world.

It's so interesting. Anyway, there's a couple of others, but that was the main one. Okay, we talked about Harvard, and if you can guess the type of childhood that most of those kids come from.

Yes.

I looked into some of their financial aid. I got curious about that. I looked at percentage of low-income students at elite colleges. Low-income students, defined as from the bottom 20% of income distribution, consistently make up about 5% of the student body at highly selective institutions. 5%. That's nothing. That's not a lot. That's a roaming error.

Not enough.

It does say, In comparison, approximately 40% of students attending all other institutions nationwide were Pell grant recipients. So that's good.

Well, that's the thing. And then, of course, they don't have the status because of it. It's like, yeah, they're in the UC system. They're in the state colleges. It's all the same. It's all the same. Most of these kids who go to these schools, their parents did. It is this revolving door of advantage.

Yeah, absolutely is. Anyway, that was it. Oh, okay. Not very many facts for Tobi, but it was a very interesting conversation. That's it.

Thanks, Tobi. Bye. Thanks, Tobi. Tobi, love you. Tobi, love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the WNDRI app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wundri. Com/survey.