Welcome to another episode of Heretics today on the podcast. I've got one of my

favorite people in the world and very excited to put this one out into the world.

It's Will Store. Will Store is a wonderful writer. He's a

hero of mine. He's one of the people who really influenced me indirectly because he didn't know who I was and nor should he when I was reading his books but they were a huge influence on me.

And we're really discussing the status game today, which just has influenced my thinking so much.

I know that many of you are probably tired of hearing about it, of course.

He also wrote a book aptly named The Heretics where he goes around talking to all different kinds of people who believe very different things.

We're talking about creationists and things like that.

He wrote Selfy, how the West became self-obsessed, and the science of storytelling.

So some really, really interesting books.

One of the interesting things that he told me is that Selfy did extremely well with so many

mainstream publishers and legacy media because Selfy was about the West becoming self-obsessed.

It was derogatory about the West, and was a critique on the individualism that became quite extreme

among us, but while also looking at the good sides of that

because I quite like individualism. The status game however just was sort of

ignored a little bit by the mainstream whereas podcasters and alternative media and influencers

absolutely loved it. Will appeared on Joe Rogan to talk about it, all sorts of

huge podcasts,

because it seemed to be explaining a lot to us

about three main types of gaining status

and why status is so important to each of us as individuals and what sort of

games we play with one another to gain status over the tribe or over the rest of

...