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I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is October 16th, 2025, and my guest is author of Will Storr.

Our topic for today is his book, The Status Game.

Will, welcome to eContalk.

Thanks for having me, Russ.

It's good to be here.

So this book, Econ Talk listeners, will recognize the echo of Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments.

My favorite quote being man naturally desires not only to be loved but to be lovely.

That is, we care about earning the respect of other people and we like to matter and we like to be admired and we like to be we like to earn

that honestly if we can but sometimes fool ourselves and well you actually quote adam smiths

with a similar version of that quote which is fun for me to see but what this book is about

it's more than just the Adam Smith Insight.

It's about our perennial constant desire to judge ourselves, judge others, and give ourselves a score in the game of life because of our status and how we're treated.

So talk about what you mean by life as a game and the status game in particular.

Yeah, so the thesis is that the conscious experience of human life is a story, you know, that that's how we experience our life moment to moment, where they're kind of here at the center of this unfolding narrative. But the subconscious treats our lives in a different way. And so when I'm talking about life being a game, you know, that's what it's doing. It's, you know, there's a famous neuroscientist called Chris Frith, I quote in the book, who says that the brain treats your environment as a reward space. And it draws you towards the things that you need and pushes you away from the things you don't need. And that's what the subconscious brain is constantly doing. and the story of life is we're telling a story in justifying and rationalizing those movements to, you know, back and forth. And, you know,

the three big things that humans want is, you know, like all living things we want to survive,

obviously, and we want to reproduce. But in order to do that, humans have these other two

very profound urges. The first one is connection.

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