Brut McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

Being famous, knowing someone famous, getting the laugh after telling their joke, getting

a good grade, getting likes on a social media post, winning a video game, cooking a tasty

meal, being good looking, having inside knowledge, sharing a good recommendation.

Now we often think of status exclusively in terms of wealth, but it's actually a play

everywhere. In every situation, when we get the feeling of being in value, we feel

ever so slightly elevated in our relative social position.

The universal desire for status greatly influenced our culture as well as our own behavior

and the ups and downs of our mood. We would all do well then to understand status better,

with my guest today can help you do just that. His name is Will Store and he's the author

of the status game on social position and how we use it.

Today on the show, Will walks us through why status and its infinite forms is so important

to people, the ways it can be gained through dominance, virtue and success, and how status

games take place both with in groups and between them. We talk about the good of status, how

and give us a psychological high and motivate the pursuit of skill, competence and achievement,

as well as its dark side, including the way that a loss in status and the resulting feeling

of familiarization leads to depression and sometimes violence. Will explains how status

can be gained by enforcing the rules of a group and punishing those who seem to be lowering

the overall status of the tribe and how this puner-to-dynamic plays out online. We also discuss

how when you try to eliminate certain status games by making things equal, people just find

other status games play and then when one hierarchy is destroyed, another simply rises to

take its place. We inter-conversation with what we can do, if status games are inescapable,

...