Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin. And this is a show

for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today

is a journalist and the author of this brilliant book, The Status Game, will still welcome to

Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. The word I was also looking for is best selling author and my

brain sort of malfunction. But you are, in fact, this is your sixth book as you were just telling

us. Yeah. Yeah. Before we get into the show, tell everybody a little bit about who are you,

how are you, where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting

here talking to us? Well, obviously, I'm a writer. I've been a journalist for about 20 years,

you know, just over 20 years now. And I've been writing books, yes, since I was in my mid 20s.

And I've always been interested in, you know, what makes people tick, you know, what drives people,

makes people believe kind of crazy, irrational things. And that's been the theme throughout my,

a lot of my journalism in certainly my books. Well, yes, indeed. And what, you know, the status

game seems to me to be going to the very fundamentals of what makes us tick. Yeah.

We were talking before we started about our former guest, Dr. Mike Martin, who wrote a book

of why we fight, which is all about testosterone and the desire to seek status and all of that.

So if anyone's uninitiated, I'm familiar with the subject, what is the status game?

Well, the status game is the subconscious reality of human social life. That's how I see it. You

know, lots of my previous books, I've been focusing on the conscious experience of life,

which is a story, like the brain processes reality and turns our life into a story. And we're the

hero at the center of our lives and we're surrounded by this cast of characters. And we're on these

amazing missions. And, you know, so that's why we tell stories in the way that we do because we

were making these newer processes. And in this book, I wanted to sort of take it a bit further and

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