Kurt Nelson  0:07  
What if I told you that the most powerful force shaping your career, your relationships and even your daily decisions is something you can barely see? Tim, I'm curious. What is it? It's super common in our world, but it's something we don't necessarily think about on a regular basis.

Tim Houlihan  0:26  
Okay, so back to my original question, what is it?

Unknown Speaker  0:32  
Don't you just know? Don't you know

Unknown Speaker  0:34  
if it's invisible,

Kurt Nelson  0:35  
tell me. Well, in this episode of behavior grooves, we're going to do a deep dive into this invisible architecture of status, and we're going to talk about that with Toby Stewart, professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and author of anointed, how status shapes our lives.

Tim Houlihan  0:56  
Yeah, so status isn't just about designer handbags or fancy job titles, according to Toby, it's humanity's greatest invisible force determining everything from which resumes get callbacks to how we evaluate art or music or even scientific discoveries. Toby reveals how this hidden system operates through three distinct channels merit anointment and those characteristics we're simply born with, yeah,

Kurt Nelson  1:26  
and I'm not born with any of them, okay, but here's where it gets really interesting. We're living through what Toby calls an evaluation crisis, as AI often makes it impossible to distinguish human created work from machine generated content. We're defaulting even more heavily to the status markers and to pedigree to make decisions about what's important or what's valuable to us. Yeah,

Tim Houlihan  1:57  
okay, but before we head over to our conversation with Toby. We need to let listeners know that this is our last episode before our last episode is the last episode before October

Kurt Nelson  2:10  
16, 2025 Oh, good. I thought you were going to tell me something I didn't know.

Tim Houlihan  2:14  
Here. It's the last episode before our celebration in Minnesota on October 16, 2025 which is going to be a live event, and we would love for you to join us make this last digit, last minute decision now just, just do it. Come and join us. Yeah.

Kurt Nelson  2:33  
I mean, come on. We're hopping up on a plane to tonight and come join us. Because I don't know when this is going out, but come join us, and we're celebrating 500 episodes in eight years of doing this podcast. And we're going to do it with Professor Nick Eppley from the University of Chicago, who is going to be the keynote speaker, and he's even going to not just talk to us, he's going to conduct a live experiment, and it's going to be a fun experiment, not those kind where you get shocked or anything like that. It's going to be a really fun experiment. All right. So, so hop on the train, jump on the plane, get in your car, whatever it is, if you have to travel 100 miles, 1000 miles, doesn't matter. Come join us in Minneapolis on October 16. Don't prime people that this is going to be painful. It's just going to be fun.

Tim Houlihan  3:24  
All right, yes, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have even brought it up. It's going to be fun. Fun. Fun. All right, back to our conversation with Toby Stewart on status. We're going to, in our conversation with Toby, we're going to talk about how status functions, like a renewable resource, the compounds over time, like interest on your money, right exactly, or why isolation might be more dangerous than power

Kurt Nelson  3:47  
for leaders, because it's really lonely at the top, of

Tim Houlihan  3:51  
course, absolutely, and how understanding these dynamics might just change how you see the world,

Kurt Nelson  3:58  
and it might just help you find your groove.

Tim Houlihan  4:01  
I'm Tim Houlihan, here with my longtime partner, Kurt Nelson, and this is behavioral grooves.

Kurt Nelson  4:06  
Okay, so with that, it's time to sit back and relax with a cup of fully freshly brewed status and enjoy our conversation with Toby Stewart. You

Tim Houlihan  4:26  
Tim Toby Stewart, welcome to behavioral grooves.

Toby Stuart  4:28  
Thank you, Tim, it's a super pleasure to be here. I'm really excited for this conversation. We

Tim Houlihan  4:33  
are too. We are too, and we're going to, course, get started with a couple of loosening up questions. Would you prefer to learn a new language or a new instrument,

Toby Stuart  4:42  
you know, so the answer is both. The answer is both and the truth is neither, because, you know, because I have a brain that can accommodate neither of those tasks, because I have, throughout my life, tried to learn languages. And play instruments, and I am an abysmal failure at both, so but if pushed to one or the other, I take instrument,

Kurt Nelson  5:09  
wow. Well, you got in Good gracious with Tim there, and I will tell you, Toby, you and I are exactly the same. I have, over the course of 58 years, tried many musical instruments, failed miserably. Tried many different, well, actually not tried many different, but I've tried Spanish multiple times. Still can't. I can. I can order a beer. That's about it in this paper,

Toby Stuart  5:33  
I mean, and that's what I can do in Spanish. And I bet you're like, I bet you did exactly what I did, which is when you when you got the sense that that lock in, that lockdown, was coming, you rushed an order into Amazon for an electric guitar because you were gonna, like, relive your adolescent fantasies by learning to play Stairway to Heaven or free bird during covid, which you know, is exactly what I attempted and failed to do. Oh, well,

Kurt Nelson  6:02  
I got the acoustic version. So not the electric, but the acoustic. There we go.

Toby Stuart  6:07  
Yeah, that was a panic buy right before lockdown.

Kurt Nelson  6:13  
I took mine out of the closet where it had been gathering dust for like five years. So there you go. All right, Toby speed around. We're supposed to be moving through these quickly. Are you a coffee drinker or a tea drinker? What is it that I just saw you? You drinking? There was

Toby Stuart  6:28  
it that one? There's no question. I mean, I just love coffee. Love it. So I every day it's a battle to not over consume. So I will nurse I drink. I mean, I love espresso, but I drink drip coffee so I can nurse it all day long, because I just I enjoy it so much, the smell, the taste, even cold coffee. So what

Tim Houlihan  6:52  
does all day mean? Is all they mean like 11 or noon?

Toby Stuart  6:57  
Yeah, no, all day typically means more towards like three, four or 5pm so, and it's like, it's inched, it's inched up over time. So, yeah, I started with Emma. I'm sticking to 16 ounces, and now it's like 24 ounces, and we'll see where it goes from here. Are you headed to

Tim Houlihan  7:13  
rehab soon? This, you know. So the good

Toby Stuart  7:16  
thing the recent research is like, I'm I'm prolonging my life and increasing my health span. So by all accounts, this is a very good vice to have

Kurt Nelson  7:31  
as vices go. I think it's a good one. I have a every Wednesday I go to rotary and I have rotary meeting in the morning. And there they have, you know, brewed, nice, nicely brewed coffee that I drink three or four cups during the course of an hour and a half, and then I come home, I normally have a cup every day, but when I come home on Wednesdays, I'm just jittery. Do you drink decaf? Or are you a caffeinated guy as it

Toby Stuart  7:55  
Yeah, I just don't tend to go to decaf. I mean, I really, I'm, you know, I don't. I mean, I I'm caffeine only, so caffeine, okay,

Kurt Nelson  8:04  
I need to change, but I can't either, so I don't know why. So, okay, all right,

Tim Houlihan  8:11  
well enough, enough coffee. I'm curious. I want to ask a speed round question about the book. Which is more dangerous for someone at the top, isolation or power.

Toby Stuart  8:23  
That's, that's a really interesting question, isolation. I mean, isolation is just dangerous period. You know, I totally believe in the loneliness epidemic and, you know, and that's a, you know, that that'd be jumping way ahead, but that definitely, I think is, is a potential byproduct of being at the top is, you know, there's, like most of the old adages, there's something, there is something to the concept of lonely at the top.

Kurt Nelson  8:52  
Yeah, I think we'll get into that even more as we, as we start talking about various different things. The last of our speed round questions Toby is, if you could eliminate one status based bias from society, do you have a Do you have one that comes to mind that you would say, yep, snap my fingers and this one is gone, Grace, oh,

Unknown Speaker  9:17  
and help. Okay,

Kurt Nelson  9:18  
all right, we need to go expand upon, yeah, even before we start talking about other stuff. What? What about that? Is the reason you want to get rid of it? Why? Why is that standing above the others?

Toby Stuart  9:31  
Well, I mean, so that, so transitioning into the book The there are really status really comes from three places and 111, place, which is the one that I think we'd all we'd like to think the world works this way. Is, is, is some version of merit, like, you know, status is this funny resource, because. It's given to you by a group. It's the deference or respect that you get from other members of a group. And it's a very valuable resource. We'll get into that. We'll get into that later. And part of your status is earned because you do something that the group really values, and the group kind of has this currency to give you back, which is, which is respect. And we would, most of us, would like to think that's the way the world works. Like the prominent people, the prestigious people, they're the ones who have, you know, done something really significant or valuable for some version of a collective now, without trying to go all over the place, right when we open up when I say that, I should point out that collect the groups value really, really different things, right? So you can imagine, like, you're in a you're like, a member of an inner city gang, and like, how do you earn status in that group? Well, how do you think you aren't you earn status in the street gang, right? I mean, it's, you know, like you're the gnarliest, you know, most willing to engage and, yeah, like you're the one who'll do the gratuitous violence or whatever, but, but, but most of our groups, like the workplace or most civic organizations or friendship groups, you know, you earn status by doing something good for the group. So that's one source of status. The second one is, is, you know, kind of complicated ways where the title comes from. It's annointment. And that is, you get status by being blessed or, or even just sort of affiliated with by somebody who already has status. So, so organizations and people who have status give it out all the time. So like, imagine a prestigious university. You know, I've been at a number of them. They all give out degrees. And every year, what they do is they confer status on on somebody else. But the third one, which is gets us back to the opening, is what we called ascribed characteristics, and in all in all groups, in all societies, in all places and all times, certain individual characteristics are valued above others. And like, you know, historically, you just, like the easiest example of this, like a caste system, like you are just born into a place in the Status hierarchy, and you are what you were born to. And we call that an ascribed characteristic because it's ascribed to you at birth, like you don't choose it. You can't help it. It's just the life lottery. But it turns out, and I'm getting long winded here, I just want to ask the mic back to you guys, but it turns out that one of these characteristics is race, and we often associate status differences with race, and you know, they deeply bother me.

Kurt Nelson  12:44  
Yeah, yeah. Beautifully said, Hey, grooves, we're interrupting your regularly scheduled programming with some big news, and we want you to be a part of

Tim Houlihan  12:53  
it. That's right, we've got not one, but two massive milestones hitting at the same time, and we're throwing a party to celebrate both of them.

Kurt Nelson  13:02  
Okay, so milestone number one, we are about to cross 500 episodes this fall, when we started this thing back in 2017 Tim, did you ever dream that we would make it to 500

Tim Houlihan  13:13  
I did nothing, not at all that never, never crossed my mind. And milestone number two, it's our eighth anniversary. So we're combining both celebrations into a single epic live event in Minneapolis.

Kurt Nelson  13:28  
Yeah, and that live event is going to happen October 16, 2025 so mark your calendars, and we're going to be taking over a private room at Malcolm yards in my hometown of Minneapolis, where Tim used to live when he was cool. And here's the kicker, if you attend, you'll get to participate in a live behavioral science experiment with Nick

Tim Houlihan  13:49  
Eppley, yeah, the famous university of chicago professor, the researcher who proved that talking to strangers can actually make your day better. He will be sharing some observations on a happy life, and the audience will participate in a hands on experiment. And

Kurt Nelson  14:06  
this isn't just a party, it's science in action. So check the show notes for details, but consider this your personal invitation to join Tim and me as well as many other people on Thursday, October 16 in Minneapolis, make your travel plan. Sign up now. Make it make it happen. Folks, here we go.

Tim Houlihan  14:28  
We can't wait to see you. And until then, keep finding your groove.

Kurt Nelson  14:33  
This goes back into the book where you are bringing in some of the different studies that are out there that show, look, if you have a resume and you have a African American sounding name versus a more white sounding name, people confer various different things on it, various different aspects. So is that what you're saying? Let's get rid of that aspect of this element of status that that race should not. Come into this at all.

Toby Stuart  15:01  
So the the book has a number of these stories. The resume is one of them, where, where it's, um, I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask you to have a little thought experiment with me. Like, is, and the the experiment goes, you have the same object, and it really doesn't matter what the object is. So, like, I'm holding up in front of the camera. This, this phone, this happens to be an iPhone, you know. So it's an object. It does a certain set of things. It's an object. And we could call this an apple, or we could call this a anything else, you know, I won't denigrate another brand. It could be an apple, or it could be an anything else phone. And the value of the phone is different based on the identity characteristic associated with it, in particular, the status of the actor that's associated with it. That thought experiment is like massively prevalent, where you have one object and it could be in multiple identity states. So let's now take a resume, like you take a resume, and there's this beautiful study that a couple of former colleagues did where they they took a bunch of resumes and they made them into pairs where you take literally, exactly the same work history, same words, same titles, same company, same everything, and all you do is you change the name, but the name cues race, so the name suggests that the person with the resume is Caucasian male or black male, or, you know, Caucasian female or Hispanic female. And these are called audit studies. You send them around, and you actually then look at it. Who gets called back? Okay, now again to repeat, it's the identical resume. So there should be an identical callback rate if you send them out to 10,000 random employers. But guess what happens?

Kurt Nelson  16:53  
They don't get called back? Yeah,

Toby Stuart  16:56  
yeah, yeah. Like, you know what happens. Everybody in the audience knows what happens as well. So the callback rate is very different based on the implied race of the name.

Tim Houlihan  17:08  
It's it's brutal, isn't it? It's absolutely brutal that the world works that way. We are talking with Toby about his new book anointed, and you describe status as humanity as humanity's greatest invisible force, maybe most powerful invisible force. How can something so invisible, so unseen, have such dramatic impacts on health and wealth and career trajectory? Yeah.

Toby Stuart  17:36  
I mean, I think lots and lots of things are unseen, though, so so some of status is very much seen, right? I mean, there's all these like, and then the way that I think people will often, maybe the first thing that that that comes to mind when, when you talk about status is like, people will think conspicuous consumption, kinds of things like these, really, you know, these really exclusive logos that you see on name plates, on cars or handbags or or clothing or whatever. So you know the classic. So there's a lot of status that we just directly see, but, but there's then knock on effects of status that we don't see and we don't think about. And then there are status based processes that are pretty close to reflexive, like, you know, like, I just, they're, like, ingrained behavior, and we conform to the rules of the status system, but we don't, you know, we don't often, like, really sit and think, Okay, this is what I'm doing, and this is why I'm doing it. Like, it's so prevalent that it just becomes reflexive behavior, and for both of those reasons, sort of the knock on effects that I think most people don't really think about, and the just more implicit, quiet, like there's a status process happening in the background, and that's what determines things in your life, but you just don't even really think

Unknown Speaker  19:01  
about it. Yeah,

Tim Houlihan  19:04  
this, this idea that there's this reflexive element to it reminds me that there that mental shortcuts, heuristics are these, are these quick, reflexive kinds of things, right? That that it helps us navigate our way through the world with the least amount of thinking. Do you think that there are times when when some level of intentional ignorance could be beneficial to us? Oh,

Toby Stuart  19:29  
absolutely. I mean, great, great question. So you know there's, I'm not a psychologist, but I've lived my whole career amongst psychologists, and and I've lived my whole career in these, in these discipline based business schools, which means I've operated in this world of like, economics, you know, psychology, sociology, finance, and increasingly, computational social science, which is a little bit of a mash up of all of the the above. Up, but looking at really big data sets. And so I have read a great deal of psychology and spent a great deal of time with with psychologists. And, you know, the argument about heuristics is really that we need them, right? I mean, we need to be efficient, because there is in particularly in the modern world, but even before, there's just, like, infinite choice. Literally, like, if you sit down and you just think, what can I What should I do today? Or what can I do today? Excuse me, there's no limit you can do, like, endlessly, like literally, even if all you're going to do is, you know, plant your ass in a chair and take out your phone and look at stuff, there's an affinity to look at effectively, like there is so much content at your fingertips that, like it's it wouldn't end in, you know, 1000 lifetimes, right? So it's effectively infinite. And so for all of these things, we need shortcuts. And the kind of classic shortcuts are these mental heuristics that, just you know, allow us to move quickly to a decision point, and that, you know, also affect how we think about decisions and you know, and the and those are complex, because while they might move people away from some optimal outcome, they move people quickly to an outcome. And there's a lot of benefits, cognitive benefits, to expediency. And one of the arguments I make in the book is status is one of these things that operates in a way, like the heuristic, like it helps us make choices about what to consume, and it helps us make choices about how to behave, and it helps us make choices about how to split up resources. And it often does all those things invisibly, like it determines what you're even considering in the first place, like what makes it on the shelf, so to speak. So it reduces your choice set and the background in ways that, like we don't even ever think about. But by doing that, it brings us closer to actually, like making decisions and getting on with it.

Kurt Nelson  22:15  
Toby, do you think it's a good proxy in those examples? And again, I'm thinking about this in you brought up the Apple versus an orange phone, right? Or whatever other name phone right is, is that always, always? Is probably the wrong term here. But, but is status a good proxy for making those shortcuts? In other words, you know, because something has status does that because, as we talked about at the very beginning, Merit should be part of some of this component. So if merit is the main part of it, then that would be reflective of being a good proxy for for something along that line. But that doesn't necessarily always mean that merit is the sole reason for for status norm might even have any any aspect of it, if I understand that right. Is that my

Toby Stuart  23:08  
Yeah, so, I mean, so that's a super that's a super complicated question, because I think the answer to the question, if you have 60

Tim Houlihan  23:21  
seconds go.

Toby Stuart  23:26  
So I think the answer to that question, I mean, like to answer that, I'll get to put it this way, to answer that, I have to ask you a set you have to ask you a question, which is okay, you asked me, is you effectively asked me? Okay, so we're gonna rely on status to make a decision, okay, so, I'm, I'm gonna buy an iPhone. You know, an iPhone is not, exactly, not a very good example, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy something because it's a high status, you know, I'm gonna get a degree at at Stanford University because it's a high status University, right? Okay, but, but, like, but when you make that decision, you probably, you know, a student say, making that decision probably doesn't have a super clear idea of, like, that's where I'm going to get the best education. And all these things are going to happen at Stanford. They're not going to happen somewhere else, and they're and so what this, then does is it begs, but, you know, but what's very clear is Stanford is a prestigious university, and when you graduate, you're going to be, you're gonna have a Stanford diploma, and that's going to be worth something that is, you know, so but, but the question is, what's the outcome you're trying to maximize? Okay? And I asked that question because if, what if? If, what you're thinking is, let's What if we all could agree to make choices that would make the world more fair, right? Then the answer to that question is, tax status is a terrible proxy for making decisions. But if the question is, how do I move quickly to a decision that's, on average, a decent decision, the answer I would. Give you a status is an amazing proxy. So, you know, so, so it kind of depends on the outcome, which I think, I think you were, you were maybe thinking of the first outcome and not the second outcome, but

Kurt Nelson  25:12  
exactly, exactly. So thank you that I, I love the way that you frame that, because, again, the the end result of what we're trying to achieve, there's, there's layers there, right? There's, there's the first order layer of, I need a degree, right? But there's on a bigger scale. I want to have more fairness. I want to have a more, you know, all encompassing world. Well, then that doesn't, that's not a good proxy in that case. And so there's the multiple layers to this. As you said, it was a super simple question to answer for you. So there you go, and

Tim Houlihan  25:47  
you did it in less than, you know, 35 minutes. So I say, bravo. One of the things that struck me about the book is this idea of when it comes to bestowing this anointed, you know, crown on someone that it reminds me, reminded Kurt and I actually, of the messenger effect in behavioral science, where the person who is saying it because of their status has greater influence or less influence, depending on their particular status. When they say, Well, we're going to anoint this person, if it's the person of the right status, if it's the right messenger, they can actually have greater influence on how we perceive that. Did it? Am I getting that right? You're getting

Toby Stuart  26:35  
it 100% right. And, you know, so, so, just to, just to restate, I mean, what, what your, your point is that the high status can anoint and the low status can't, right. So, I mean, so, and that is and, and when you ask about power or isolation, the thing about having high status is it conveys many things, including power. So status and power are not identical concepts, but status always implies power, right? I mean, you can have power without status because you can, you know, have sort of the official power to of office, to sanction and like nobody could respect you, but you could still have the power to sanction. I wonder who falls into that category these days, you know, but, but, but you know. So that so status implies power. But one of the powers is the power to anoint, and one of the really, you know, there are many, many, many fascinating things about, about status, but like, one is like, you know, it's, it's like our when you whenever I think about resources, I'm reminded of this, like environmental economics class I took when I was an undergraduate at Carleton College, and, and, and thought I would add that. And there we go. And, yeah, so, so I took this class from, you know, my, my favorite undergraduate teacher on environmental economics. And like, this is a split between renewable and non renewable resources. And like many resources are non renewable. That is when you, when you deploy them, they're gone. Okay? Like, money is interesting, because if you spend it, it's gone. There's the other there's the other side of money, which is usually, if you have money, you somehow manage to make more money. But, but, but in principle, when you spend capital, it disappears. Status doesn't, if you spend it carefully, which is so I have the so if I have status, if an organization or a person has status, they have the power to anoint, but they have to be a little bit careful about it, because if you repeatedly anoint the wrong, and I'm gonna put wrong in quotes, but because, you know, because That's a pretty nuanced concept, but if you repeatedly anoint the wrong the wrong people, so is, that is, in other words, I give Imagine if Stanford University chose out of the bottom of the high school class instead of the top of the high school class, what would happen to the value of the Stanford brand, right? I mean, it's kind of depreciate pretty quickly so, so, so you have to be careful about who you anoint. But then, on the other hand, it isn't like, you know, so let's say Stanford prince, I don't know, 3000 degrees this year in at graduation, whatever the number was, however many undergrads are. It's not like it had to, like, give up and you know, X percentage of its status for each of the diplomas that it offered, which, which bestowed status on somebody else, right? So, it's this, it's a very peculiar kind of a resource.

Kurt Nelson  29:47  
It's really interesting when you you bring that up, because I think there's a that, that aspect of being freely available, right? As you said, it's, it's that, it's the sun. Light, right? There's the you can get energy from sunlight, and there's still more sunlight that's coming in, and you're not doing it, but that that careful part of it. And I can think about this, you know, you talked about Stanford, but if I was, you know, somebody who was a VP and inside of an organization, and I'm starting to be very careful about who I anoint as kind of the up and coming people within the organization. I can do that for many people, but I have to be careful about it, from what I'm hearing you say, because if I pick the wrong people and they pan out, that could then negatively impact my status, is that what I'm hearing Exactly, right?

Toby Stuart  30:43  
So, you know, if you I mean, you know, I'm an academic, so be an academic for a second, like, you know, you have this. So if you're a professor at a prestigious university, you have certain anointment powers, and one of them is for one of them is for graduate students when they go out on the job market, right? And it says, like and anointment matters, where, in in places where there are information problems, and we should put that out. So what? So, so there's an information asymmetry, and this is an incredibly prevalent problem, right? I mean, so there's the whole world is filled with situations where one party has more information than the other, and we call that a situation of asymmetric information. So imagine like, you're you're a VP in a company, and somebody's working for you, or you're a professor at a university, and you have a graduate student like, you know more about those people than whoever an audience is for them, right? Because you've had all this time with them, and he's like, see how they think and how they work and their work ethic, and you know how quickly they respond to emails and all the fit, and you know way they're there all the things, all the things, so you have more information than other people. And when you then make a referral, right, what you're doing is you're kind of putting your reputation on the line with each of those referrals. And if somebody accepts that referral and, you know, they make a job offer, they use somehow, this person you're recommending, and it turns out to be a total dud, you know, what are they going to think? They're going to think, Huh, like, the next time you come around and you push somebody, they're going to think little less sure I want to buy this one, you know, like, and that's, and that's the brakes on the anointment dynamic. It's also why it's not entirely irrational, right? Because, you know, because people kind of understand that, like, you know, like, so take an athletes that endorse products, because these are another form of status transfer. You know, athletes are going to, if you're a big, big name athlete, you're probably going to spend a little bit of time investigating the brand. Like, you're not going to just take the paycheck. You're going to look into the brand, the company, the product, or your people, will do that, because, you know, you're worried about attaching your name to something that then has the potential to denigrate your name. But what's interesting, and I want to come back, because I love this, and like you guys have me thinking about the sun. So, you know, because the sun is a renewable resource, but the sun is a resource that isn't renewed by its use. Okay? So it's a renewable resource, like the sun shines every day and at the same intensity, but like, if there's a whole bunch of solar cells on planet Earth, right? We aren't recharging the sun. We're just, you know, capturing that energy to use here, but the the so let me throw out, but in status, it's different because it's a two way street. Okay, so now imagine what happens is, I refer a I send a PhD student often to the job market, and I refer them, like, super strongly, and then they just hit a grand slam in the first couple years in their career, right? Then, like that, then elevates my status, right? And so you have this, like, you know, this kind of chicken and egg thing going on all the time. Like, you know, the like, the right people show up at the right nightclub, right? And, but, you know, but, but the nightclubs, the right nightclub because the right people show up at it, but the right people show up at it because it's the right nightclub, right? So you actually have this reciprocal exchange system, whereas the sun, it's just a you know, we're not, we're not sending anything back when we consume solar here.

Kurt Nelson  34:46  
Yeah, no, I love it.

Tim Houlihan  34:48  
It reminds me of a conversation we had with Rosalind Chow a few months ago. Rosalind is a professor in the social and Decision Sciences Department of Carnegie Mellon with George Lowenstein and you. We were asking her about power versus status, and she quickly went to status. She's like, Oh, that's that's like, that's the big thing. It's not, it's not so much about power, but, but I want to read you a quote and just get your your reaction to this here. Toby, she said, the goal of networking is to gain status rather than power, and you do that by helping other people. You need other people to give you status. You can't have status in a social vacuum.

Toby Stuart  35:26  
Yeah, so that last piece is a hunt, you know, it's so, so the last piece of this is 100% true, and then we could spend the rest of the show talking about the intermediate segment of that system. So, you know. So you're like, you know, I'm going on a ferry this afternoon. Like, it's a very short ferry, so I'm going to be fine, even though there's a hurricane swell somewhere around here these days today, because, you know, because that's what's happening today on the east coast of the United States. But, you know, imagine you're on that ferry ride and it, you know, it capsizes, and it's a Gilligan's Island thing, but there's only Gilligan, right? So, you know, so you end up on the island all by yourself, right? Okay, there's no status on that island, right? There's just, there's no social status. There's just, you okay? I mean,

Kurt Nelson  36:21  
multiple people in my head have different statuses,

Toby Stuart  36:28  
and the schizophrenics mind their status. But, you know, yeah, but, but I didn't, kind of like, you know, the way we classically think of status, it's, it is deference paid to you by other people, but you need another person there, right and then, and for that deference to be created so, so status is a social relationship, and you could think about, in fact, this is exactly the work that my advisor, my dissertation advisor, did, that, you know, is what drew me into this whole, I mean, there was this, when I went to get a PhD, I was not planning on working on this topic. I discovered it sort of early on, and it just radically changed how I how I thought about things and and it became, you know, I guess, an avocation. And, I mean, it just it became how I it, not only my work, but how I, how I started to think about things so but he saw status as a network, like it is a set of deference relationships, and you then and then, when you think about it that way, Like status is a gift somebody else gives you. And but we live in a world that's an exchange system, so I have to give something back, okay? And so I think the mid section of that sentence is the thing that I give to somebody is help, and when I give them help, they return that help with honor or or respect, but you know, but there are other ways to earn their honor and their respect that is less about helping them and more about, you know, other forms of activity or contribution or things you've done like, you know they admire you, not because you've ever done anything nice or kind or considerate, but because you know you're crushing it on some performance dimension, or because you know, because you know other people that they really admire or right and so the exchange system is a lot more complicated than like, you give me different I do something nice, and you give me deference in return.

Kurt Nelson  38:45  
It's not a tit for tat. Then component in that, in a very simplistic manner, from not in a narrow sense, exactly. Yeah, you brought up an interesting piece about this, the network component of this, which raised a thought in my head about the hierarchy of status is, is there a set hierarchy of state? You know, there's the status kind of ladder that you climb up, yeah, in a network. Is that different? Again, we started off talking about, you know, the status within a gang is very different than the status of my rotary club, which is very different than the status of, you know, the business organization that I'm I'm in, yeah, how does that all parlay into this? I mean, I know we're

Toby Stuart  39:35  
already most of the way through, but can I just say I'm, I'm loving this conversation with you guys.

Kurt Nelson  39:40  
So great, great set of

Tim Houlihan  39:43  
questions. You can say that five more times thanks Toby,

Toby Stuart  39:51  
great set of questions, and just so you know that one is there, is there, like a set hierarchy? My answer is yes and no. I mean, so there's like, so like, like, if you you know, and I'm sorry to keep talking about my world, but I live in such a status based world, right? So if you take, if you like, ask, if you take a field, you know, so you need some kind of bounded ish social group. So if you take, like, a field of study, and then you go to people in the field and you say, like, who's the high like, create the status hierarchy for this, this field, and they do, you know, what you're going to find is that people are going to have a little bit different senses of what the hierarchy is, so probably not radically different. Like, everybody's gonna agree. Like, these are, you know, these 20 people are, like, the big people, and, like, you know, but, but one may say this one's first and this 1/3's most influential, or something like that, right? And so you'll have these, and all grooves have social hierarchies in them. But that doesn't mean that they have full consensus about what what the hierarchy is, and in particular, I think they're not good studies on this. So I'm just like, I'm telling you what I think. I think it's a podcast. You can do that. Yeah, it's not being quite pinned to the wall and an academic seminar, but, but, so I think, you know, one of the things that is very, very common is that we as individuals have a different sense of what our status is than the rest of the group. So like, you know, we so there's a little dissensus about the ranking, but probably not radically. So like, like, if you take an academic field, for example, no one's going to say, no one's going to find something that no one's someone who's in the field that no one's really ever heard of, and say, like, that's the you know that that one's the big name. Like, that isn't going to happen, but you could see sort of minor disagreements, but, but, but ranks would be high, highly correlated. But we often feel that we have the wrong status, and more commonly than not, we probably feel like we deserve a higher status than we have. But there are certainly, you know, people who feel the opposite, and there are probably personality and and trait characteristics that underlie that. And you know, we don't, like, have, I mean, we know a little bit about this, but we don't, we don't know a ton about it, but what it means is that we often do a little bit of status jockeying, because we think there's room to move up a little bit, and we want that, right and so, so you can think of In, like, in, like, any sort of small group setting is the hierarchy is a little bit contested. And, you know, people are looking for ways to climb the ranks.

Unknown Speaker  42:50  
Yeah,

Tim Houlihan  42:51  
I'm gonna, I'm just gonna go out on a ledge here, because I'm thinking of John Rawls veil of ignorance model and right. So, like his, his thesis is, if you were to design a society, how would you design it? You know, from from scratch? Would you, if you had that, you know, wand, magic, wand Toby, would you go back and say, I'm going to design it without any kind of status hierarchies? Or would you modify that some way? I mean this,

Toby Stuart  43:23  
to me, is just the greatest thought experiment of all time. I mean, I just, I just, I read John Rawls as an undergraduate, and I think when I discovered the literature on status, it was probably partly that that made me gravitate so much to it. So Rawls runs this thought experiment, and he says, okay, like, imagine, I think of it as, like, there's a cosmic waiting room, and you're in the cosmic waiting room, like you're about to be born, but you haven't been born yet. And it's a 100% lottery, where, what, to whom, how you'll be born, which is, in fact, exactly what happens like we don't, you know, we don't choose anything about our birth conditions, right? They're 100% handed to us. So you don't know if you're male female, you don't know if you're a six foot five or three foot four. You don't know if you're any you have no idea what shade of complexion you have. You don't know whether you're Japanese, Chinese, Ganis or, you know, a Minnesotan, you know, none of these things. And then the question is, like, like, so none of us can really do this like we're not really capable of running a thought experiment. But the question is, what's the world you want to enter? Yeah, and Rawls argues that that what the world you're going to want to enter is a way more equal world than the world that we have like you're not, you know? And this gets in. Into like, are you risk averse in the cosmic waiting room or not? Right? And most of us, you know like that becomes, but you know that that becomes the big thing. Are you risk averse or not? But most of us, according to Rawls, would choose to enter a world where there's much more equality than we have and and I love that. And I think it's like, I think everybody should walk through that thought experiment to understand what they have or what they don't have in terms of status that comes from a script of characteristics. Like, you know, here we are, like three white guys talking on a show who lived our lives in a period where, you know, if you if you could choose to be anything, probably what you wanted to be was a Caucasian American, right? Because male, because you had a lot of advantages that other people didn't have if you were born into that that group over our lifespans. So, so everybody should sort of think about, you know, the like the lottery that actually determined what what we have. And, you know, the other way to put it, by the way, by the way, this quote that I've always loved, that, you know, I bet I think, I mean, I think there's a tiny bit about debate about this, but it's often, it's usually attributed to the football coach, Barry Switzer and and the quote goes, which I think most people have heard, is like, he's talking about someone, and he's like, That guy was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, yeah? And that's the, you know, that's the cosmic lottery, like, you know, whoever it was, like, was born to affluent parents with a lot, a lot, a lot of privilege, or like, with this incredible innate ability, and didn't have to work very hard to realize it, and all of that. But, you know, but the problem with all of that is, if you end up in this equal world, you still have this situation where you have a million decisions you have to make about life. Like, you have to decide which doctor to go to, and you have to decide which accountant to use and which lawyer to hire, maybe, and which you know which what car to buy and what phone to buy. And like, there's this endless number of choices you have to make. And the argument I would make is like, left to our own devices if we remove like status based inequality from the world, those choices become a lot more difficult, and we're going to just get mired down so like we might ideologically or on moral grounds or ethical grounds, not love this system, but from a More kind of pragmatic something has to get done today, like I gotta make choices. It's a very valuable way to screen things and let me throw out. I just wrote an editorial on this. I think this sort of pedigree is going to become even more important for a while in terms of how we make decisions, because it's one of the ways in which AI is going to mess with everything.

Kurt Nelson  48:06  
Expand on that, what do you mean? How is AI going to mess with everything? And what does the role of status play, then in in adjusting to that or responding to that?

Toby Stuart  48:20  
Yeah, so I do, you know, I have a pretty complicated work life, and so, so one of the companies that I'm really involved in is work day. So I think a lot about and I'm involved with Workday. I mean, great set, a great set of people and remarkable business. But I'm also partly involved in it, because I, I'm, at the moment very concerned about what happens with the future of work and in an AI age, right? Because, you know, I mean, let's not even talk about notebook. LLM on a podcast, but, you know, pretty wild, right? But, yeah, like so. So imagine now it's like, 2025 and you're an employer, and you're like, you're a big company, and you have to screen resumes and cover letters, okay? And so in all of the past, when you saw resumes and cover letters, there were like, the information in those we're not like, it's not 100% accurate. And there's like, but there is information and what's in front of you, right? I mean, at least on average, like, in any particular case, you might have a cover letter or resume somebody submitted that someone else wrote, but now it's like, there's no difference at all, because, you know, GPT, whatever version we're on, or Gemini, whatever version we're on, or Claude, whatever version we're on, is going to write a very similar, you know, kind of, you know, kind of, in terms of, at least the the that, the surface level, kind of writing quality, and all of that and so and but the same, so we. We face what I would call an evaluation crisis already, because we can't tell anymore What's human created versus what's Gen AI created. And if what we want to do is evaluate a human based on like documents and output and you know. And soon even, you know, art and video and all the things, right? Because these things are also also great. We have this huge uncertainty problem, right, which so? So what it does is it takes the uncertainty problem in an evaluative space and makes it larger than it was in the past, which is exactly when we default to status markers, right? Because you can't judge, you can't evaluate the thing in front of you, so you're just going to evaluate the pedigree of the person or the organization. So I think at least for the short term, we're going to see an even heavier reliance on pedigree and status markers than we have in the past. Oh,

Kurt Nelson  51:01  
that's really fascinating. I never thought about it from that perspective, just again, using your resume cover letter approach, the writing quality, there's an implied element of that. 10 years ago, right? If I wrote really good prose and had well articulated thoughts that were in good, concise sentences that read easily. I could make some inferences about you as as a candidate, given whatever, however that would relate to the job that's there today that doesn't that no longer stands because I'm being assisted by or helped by AI, which then I could start really crappy and have really horrible writing abilities and prose, but because of the tool, so no longer is that an evaluative kind of checkbox that I can use. And so now it's like, okay, so what are those check boxes that I can use? And you're saying status is going to be in the near future, at least probably one that we can, we can count on. Is that correct?

Toby Stuart  52:05  
Yeah, you just said that 10 times better than me. That's like, I'm going to respond to that by saying what he said. You know

Tim Houlihan  52:17  
that that's good. I I'm segueing into music because the music industry is is a hierarchical, anointed, status oriented, you know, organization, Grammys. You know, the Grammy Awards are not always about the best, literally, the best artist or the best songwriter or the best song, you know, but these artists get anointed and and they move along. You brought up you talked about losing my religion in the book, which I thought was pretty great, which I kind of have to ask, is REM a favorite band first?

Toby Stuart  52:58  
I mean, I'll admit that REM was my college band, okay, okay, you know. And I think REM is the only, it's certainly the only band I've seen live more than twice. And you know, you know, you'll remember these guys, the replacements were in town when I was, when I was at Carleton, and so I did see the replacements a couple of times. But, I mean, I was, like, the closest I've ever come to be a groupie was REM. Like REM was, you know, I'd say maybe Bowie and REM were my college music, you know, when I wasn't listening to jazz, pretending I smoked so

Kurt Nelson  53:44  
in the basement of the cathedral? In the basement of the Carlton

Unknown Speaker  53:47  
College cathedral?

Tim Houlihan  53:49  
Yeah, well, I guess, gosh, so many questions, so little time, when you think about about an industry that's really built on, on status. Do you think that? Or to what degree are we really missing out on really great talent? I mean, just yeah,

Toby Stuart  54:11  
oh, so much. And yeah, and I wish we had, I wish we had more time, because, you know, we are, you know, let me say the second time, you guys are fantastic interviewers, and this is a lot of fun and, and I wish I didn't have stuff all afternoon so we could hang out and talk, even if we aren't, even if we weren't recording. So but yeah, I mean, there's the obvious cases. So like the book, the book has, like, lots of fun with wine, with and with art, and you know, so. But if you take any of the kind of classically cultural markets, right, these are, these are like ground zero for for status, dynamics, music, certainly, because there isn't really, there's no real sense of quality. Yeah. Like, I mean, you know, art like you walk into so I spent my whole morning doing art stuff, and this side project I'm working on right now, I learned a lot about art and the process of writing the book, because I just got I found it increasingly the art market in particular, increasingly fascinating, as I was doing this in the book opens with an art story, but, but art is an example of this product where, like, you walk into, say, a gallery and you, like, see a see an artifact, like a painting on the wall, and like, you know, I think most of us are going to react immediately, like, we say, like, I like it. I don't It's okay. I want to think about it like, you're going to be somewhere in that, in that spectrum. But if you ask so, so if you I walk into a gallery, that's what I'll say, no, if you ask me if it's a good piece of art, I'm going to look at you and say, I have no idea. Like, I mean, I'll say, like, it appeals to me, but I have no idea. So, like, it costs money, like it does like, I have no idea if I want to spend the money, because I don't know if it's a good investment or a terrible investment. Like, I have no idea. But if you then told me, you know, it says talking about this this morning, so if you then told me, it's a season, then I'm like, Oh, well, that's a great piece of art. I love it, you know, because and, and, so if you think about what, what's happened there, like, I mean, it's what I just did, is in the book, I call it the big shift, which is I evaluated the art, not by the object, but by the by the entity who associated with it. And it turns out, in markets, in ways we probably don't have time to get into, but the book does, if in all markets, if you're evaluating something based on sort of how you see the producer versus how you see the product, you're going to see a completely different set of dynamics than if you only evaluated the product per se. And I would argue that this is a critical effect of status on how economic markets function. But before we leave the topic, and the reason I also love this question is what really got me to study status is I read this paper, paper that was so eye opening to me when I was in my first year of graduate school. And it's an old paper by a very prominent sociologist. It's called the Matthew effect in science. It's very short, and what the paper basically shows is that, like, and I had, you know, to just slightly contextualize this, I had actually gone to get a PhD because I had been told I was just, like, super naive undergraduate. I had been told that, like, if you go get a job in the corporate world, like, it's just all about, you know, sort of ingratiating yourself to the boss and, like, kind of who you know, and how you behave and how you network. It's like a networking project. And like, I don't want to go into that world. I think I'm going to suck at it. Like, I should go into the one that's that's just, like, based on hard work and merit. And so I thought that science was going to be this, like science of all fields. Like, if you're not in it, you just going to look at it and you're going to think, well, like the papers that are important are the ones that are about great ideas. Like, people come up with great ideas and do careful work, are the ones who made like, they're the successful sciences. And then it turns out, like, that's still naive, and it's like a ground zero status system. So even in areas that are in sort of industries that you would think are way more objective and where they're way more objective quality, you know, sort of measures quality, status processes are super important.

Kurt Nelson  58:37  
So for our listeners, real quick, Matthew effect. Tell us in a short summary what the Matthew effect is.

Toby Stuart  58:47  
Yeah, the Matthew effect is just this. It's, it's, it's super simple. It's the rich get richer, and, and the idea and, and we really believe that that many aspects of status work like that. And by that, I mean, if you get just a little bit of a head start, so you get a little more status than other people, it has this property of compounding over time. So the tiny little advantage you start you start out with like you becomes this huge advantage over a career or a lifetime in music and art, in science, in technology and entrepreneurship, and, you know, in many different areas, and that's the inequality of it all right? Because you just start off with these modest differences in terms of of individuals that then amplify over time. And so the book dives into that a lot

Kurt Nelson  59:44  
it does, and it's a really interesting part of the book, Toby, we're going to have to have you back. We're going to have to talk about all of this in some other time where we get to dig in deeper, because there are so many questions that we have that are still. Still blank on the page here, as well as many more that I've thought up as just from the conversation. So

Tim Houlihan  1:00:05  
okay, okay, so we've talked a little bit about your you know, some musicians that have influenced you in your life. If you were on a desert island and had a listening device that could store two musical artists their whole catalog, but just two. Which two would you choose?

Toby Stuart  1:00:23  
That's easy, Mozart and Duke Ellington. Oh, wow,

Tim Houlihan  1:00:29  
that I love, I love how quickly you went to both of those that that's fantastic. I

Toby Stuart  1:00:35  
mean, I but you know, if you, if you made me choose two bands, I mean, that I would tell you to f off. I'm not going to

Tim Houlihan  1:00:47  
but you mentioned jazz a couple times. You're not going to Kurt Peterson or I

Toby Stuart  1:00:57  
might have said Miles Davis. I might have said Thelonious. I might have, you know, I, you know, but, but, but I would have, like a great, I would have a great jazz catalog and a great classical catalog. If I were stuck in on an island with only, with only two things right? And that's very true, what I would do, and

Tim Houlihan  1:01:18  
I but you by choosing Mozart and Duke Ellington, you've got big catalogs with both of them and a wide variety

Toby Stuart  1:01:25  
which is top of mind.

Tim Houlihan  1:01:31  
Toby Stewart, thank you so much for being a guest on behavioral grooves. We've so enjoyed this.

Toby Stuart  1:01:36  
I've loved it as well. It's a lot of fun and really, truly great questions. Thanks. Thanks a million for having

Kurt Nelson  1:01:50  
me. Welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Toby. Have a free flowing conversation and groove on whatever else comes into our anointed brains.

Tim Houlihan  1:02:02  
You know, anointing is really important. Yeah, I agree with Toby's thesis here, that it's a really critical part of what what's gonna helps us figure out what status really means well,

Kurt Nelson  1:02:16  
and I think here, here's the thing is that behavioral grooves needs to be anointed as behavioral science podcast out there, so all of our listeners need to just, you just need to anoint us that. And then we're gonna, we'll run with it. We'll thank you, and we'll say we appreciate it, and then we'll run with it.

Tim Houlihan  1:02:36  
So so you could help us by just leaving a review, just

Kurt Nelson  1:02:41  
by, saying hey, or just telling your friends, going that you know, the best podcast out there, by far across the board, is behavioral grooves, particularly if you're interested in behavioral science or just having fun, there you go.

Tim Houlihan  1:02:57  
Doesn't even have to be best in the universe. Could just be best on Earth,

Kurt Nelson  1:03:05  
just best on Earth. Forget those Martians. Forget those you know, I'm already those jupiterians. You know, those, those guys, Jupiter, all right, let's get back to grooving on Toby and this anointment and status component. What? What do you what do you want to groove

Tim Houlihan  1:03:29  
on? Mr. Houlihan, I'm excited about Toby's comments about AI and how how confusing AI is making our world right now, and how it relates to, you know, status and and sort of what that means. So I think that that he really keys into something, this idea of disruption, because AI is absolutely a disruptive force. And there are definitely good things, right? There's, it enhances our life. It No. I mean, if I want to cook a new recipe, I don't have to go to a recipe book. I don't have to go to a cookbook. I can go to chat GPT and just say I've got these three things in I've got pickles and and mayonnaise and braunschweiger in my refrigerator. What should I make? And it will come back with a recipe for me. It's fantastic. It will help me evaluate things. It will help me write. AI is fantastic. It will help AI will help me plan trips. So there's a lot of enhancements.

Kurt Nelson  1:04:31  
I just want to know what recipe it's going to come up with, with braunschweiger pickles and mayonnaise. I think this would be if it could come up with a decent recipe. My God, AI, is like the best thing ever. I mean, oh, my god, totally. Why would those be the three things you have in your refrigerator? Oh, excuse

Tim Houlihan  1:04:59  
me, that's. We digress, like those things,

Kurt Nelson  1:05:03  
they're all wonderful, but don't come up with a recipe. What is it? It's a braunschweiger sandwich. There you go, easy with pickles. Oh, my God, all right, okay, yeah, no, so, so this AI piece, I think is really interesting, and obviously people can tell that. You know, behavioral grooves. We're not a, we're not a AI driven podcast here. No, no, but I think it is interesting, because, all right, getting serious, this idea that we could always look, you know, you talked about merit, right? And this idea of merit being part like if somebody wrote a really good resume that showed something about that person, right now, they might have had a lot of help. They might have, you know, even had somebody else do it for them. But that was much less likely. It wasn't the norm, and now a resume is going to be gone through AI to write it so that it just it sounds fantastic, so now I don't have that indication of the quality of this candidate anymore based upon the quality of their resume, and that changes a whole bunch of How we have to evaluate people.

Tim Houlihan  1:06:21  
It does so any business presentation, just about any business communication, could be run through AI, to be slicked up and well produced and and honed in such a way that, maybe not today, but I could imagine in years to come, could just be exceptional. And how do and that kind of leads to a question about, How do we know? How does a manager know, for instance, how good that employee is? Now, you know, I guess, I guess that's kind of the, you know, the one of the underlying questions

Kurt Nelson  1:06:55  
well, and I know we were going to get into this later, but let's get into it now, this idea of, does that matter? I mean, if, if we are truly looking at the output, if we're saying we're hiring you to deliver X and X needs to be of a certain quality, right? That's typically when we think of of knowledge workers, when, even when we think of of, you know, any kind of manufacturing job or different pieces you are hired to do, x, x has to meet certain standards, certain qualities. Does it matter how that gets done?

Tim Houlihan  1:07:36  
Yeah, and I think it does bring up a really interesting question about the business community, in for the last 70 years, has very much focused on results. It kind of almost doesn't matter how you get there. Strategy has been less important than what kind of results the strategy produces. And I think if we continue to only value the results, AI will be fine, but it will also it could reduce critical thinking. It could actually disable the people who are driving for those results from actually being critical about what other what are the ways that we should get there, like the does the end always justify the means?

Kurt Nelson  1:08:20  
Yeah, I mean, you and I both agree, I think that that's not, not the case, right? Exactly, we don't want to cheat. We don't want to do that. That being said is AI cheating is, is that there and into the degree that, you know, part of the issue, I think, in today with with AI being, it's the hallucinations. It's the it's the, you know, if you ask AI to come up with, what are these studies that support, you know, statuses being different pieces, and you ask them that it'll give you a few research papers that are there, but it might also make up research papers. Yeah, and we've both had that experience where it literally and it might tell you things that, unless you know how you know some, some have intimate knowledge of this, it is very convincing in how it conveys things. And so it may tell you things that are wrong, but it says it in a very convincing way, like how to make a brown Schweiger pickle and mayonnaise sandwich that tastes awesome. And you go, awesome, I'm going to do this, and then it tastes like shit, you know? So that is, that is one of the things that is, I think it's an issue now, does that, you know, is, does that supersede the ability to just get a really great recipe? Maybe, if you had better ingredients, I don't know. I. Yeah, that's, I think this is, this is the hard part, right? And so coming back to Toby, I think the the important piece here is, all right, we, how do we evaluate, how do we evaluate how good somebody is? And again, this is, I know this is a big issue. I just went to a panel discussion on AI, and they had an educator in there. And one of the big things that they're they're looking at is, how do we assess, if somebody knows this information, how they can, you know, particularly, it's an online the educator was an online thing, and he was talking about how people, you know, they get an assessment, they can just put it into AI and it answers. It 90% they get an A and but they haven't done it, they haven't learned it. So how do you assess their capability? And I think it goes back to Toby is all right, you can be anointed. I mean, I can vouch for you as an individual, yeah, and you could vouch for

Tim Houlihan  1:10:57  
me, but how are you going to know that I'm good enough, and that's going to take, that's going to take real life, authentic interactions, like we're you're going to have to actually get to know me, and you're going to have to see me in different situations, right? That that allows you to feel comfortable saying, I'm willing to anoint him, I'm willing to say that this guy actually knows his stuff, and then the other option would be, would be pedigree or certification or some kind of objective thing. But I know, I I guess, is it possible that someone could completely manipulate that, like, could I have in my resume that I'm certified in Adobe and Microsoft Windows and Azure and all the stuff and

Kurt Nelson  1:11:44  
and I did it using AI because they, they didn't. I was, yeah, I got the, I actually have that certificate, but I used AI in order to get it. So again, this is, it's, it's so just becomes more and more important to be able to have that, that anointment from a real person, as opposed to even some of the other things I think there Now Tim, this was an intro, I mean, in the book, and kind of in talking with Toby, the focus in on art, right, and how we You know what is good art is often determined not by what we think, but if that art is anointed as good art. And this for a long time, yeah, for a long time, this has always been. I mean, why is, why is Picasso? Picasso and you know George, you know Smith out there, who did something that looks very similar to Picasso, but it isn't. And you know that sells for 100 bucks, and you know, Picasso sell for millions, right? So thinking about art and music and thinking about AI, what are the broader implications for that?

Tim Houlihan  1:13:00  
Yeah, I think it's really interesting because it in the world of AI, then you kind of have to wonder, well, who generated it? Who was the generator of that, that art, that music, that that piece that we're listening to or viewing, and does it? Does it matter in the world, right? If it all comes down to being anointed, what if the credible source said that's still a good piece, that's still a good song, or the masses decided it's a good song, even though it was generated by an AI source? I kind of think maybe it doesn't matter when it comes to something subjective as music or art, I'm not, I'm and I'm not advocating for AI to generate music or especially as a songwriter, I'm I'm not an advocate of that. I still think that people need to create, people need to to publish their own music and to create their own art, but, but what the public likes is up to what the public likes. I think,

Kurt Nelson  1:14:08  
okay, but this comes into an interesting piece. Do you feel different about a love song that or a heartbreak song or a painting that depicts some human emotion, and you look at it, or you hear it, and you think about the person who wrote this, felt those Emotions, you know had that. And now is it different? Because I put in, you know, love song into AI create me a great love song, and it pops out, and the lyrics are wonderful, and they get a cool, you know, sad, you know, minor chord. Word progression to give you the sadness, right? I don't know. Does that change how I if I know that, versus if I don't know that, right? If I don't know that, I can still feel that, but if I do know that it was generated by AI, does that change how I'm listening to that song? Does it pull up my heart strings the same way that if you had written that song just by yourself?

Tim Houlihan  1:15:29  
Well, I think that depends on how you want to experience music. If there's a lot of people who listen to music who don't care about the artist or the generation process, because they just like the beat. There's just, it's it served up on a playlist and it was good enough, and that that's all they need. So that's sort of a end justifying the means. But there are a group of people that I think care about the state of the artists themselves, the creator it's and this, this also ports over to the business world, where now we have to ask the question of, how do we determine a merit based advancement system, if we can't identify where the merit is coming from? Is the merit coming from the person or from the AI partners that they've got involved?

Kurt Nelson  1:16:20  
So I might actually push back against what you just said there, because I don't know if, on the musical part that there are certain people who just listen to it has a good beat. I can dance to it. I give it a nine or, you know, whatever that would be, right? I think there is a priming and a component of effect that always, regardless of the music it comes from a person and you, there's some aspect to that that I think is different than than just being mechanically created. Maybe I'm wrong. I probably am wrong, but

Tim Houlihan  1:17:03  
it's hard to separate. If we take Taylor Swift and to take the songs that she's created, I don't think you can separate easily separate the product of her work from her persona at this point, because of her brand. But when she was, you know, 17, and she was just getting started, there wasn't that much persona there. I mean, there was certainly producers trying to create a persona around her, but, but I'm not sure if it, if a song that that she wrote connected to Taylor Swift when she was 17, versus a song that sounded exactly like that, that was created by AI would have mattered, like a song, for instance, for me, like, if I played you a song and said I wrote this, you'll have and then I and then I play another song, and you go, Oh, I like that too. And you go, well, actually, I didn't write that. That was an AI generated song, but I'm playing it, I don't think for me, with the audience that I have and the scope of branding that I have would make a difference.

Kurt Nelson  1:18:09  
I don't know, yeah, yeah, you bring up. I mean, it's a really good point. And you do think your your component on merit based promotions and or, you know, reviews at the end of the year. It goes, it goes. It's a difficult question, right? I mean, if I'm really good at being able to tap into AI and I can get the output that we need, is that good? Is that a good thing, or do I need to be able to do that on my own? And depending upon the situation that you're in, depending upon the type of work that you do, it might, it might be different. I mean, there is a bigger question here, is AI ultimately, does it democratize this? So it says, like, you could go to, you know, get a graduate degree or or have 30 years experience, but doesn't matter, because I now have the knowledge of the world at my fingertips to be able to, you know, apply that knowledge probably maybe even better than your 30 years in graduate degree. You know, does it for you, or is there something innately valuable about that, right?

Tim Houlihan  1:19:24  
Will it entrench the existing hierarchies that are in place to say, wherever you are in, the status that we're going to kind of lock you in there? Or, as you said, does it democratize? Does it say it doesn't matter how much pedigree you have that if your output again, this, this kind of gets back to my original question. Are in the business world, are we still going to value the end over the means? Are we still going to value the results over how we got to the results? And I think if we continue to emphasize just what whatever the results are, then. Might be a huge democratization. It, it could be,

Kurt Nelson  1:20:04  
I could be, and, but what does that mean? Does it mean that anybody can do a podcast like this, and, you know, we could have an, I mean, there are already examples of that out there. There's a company that's like, pushing out, you know, 5000 podcasts a week, yeah, and they're all AI generated, and I again, right now, people who listen to it say it's mostly slop, it's crap. It doesn't have a coherent component. It doesn't really make sense. I mean, same thing they say about us, but,

Tim Houlihan  1:20:37  
but, but that'll change on AI, but it won't change about us exactly

Kurt Nelson  1:20:43  
there is that element that it will get better. It will get to the point where it will be a podcast that talks about behavioral science that conveys the same or better information than what we're doing. So if I'm listening. Does do I care that it's Tim and Kurt doing this because I feel some affinity towards them, yeah, and there's some their value. There's some value in that affinity and in that kind of being human part, or is it just here's, you know, I want to learn about loss aversion, and I want to hear, you know, the components of Daniel Danny Kahneman and and Amos Tversky is their take on, you know, that you can get that from an AI generated podcast. Is that going to then make us a dinosaur. Are we going to be, you know, kicked out to the Kurt? What's what's it going to do? And then, if that's the case, what? Uh, where else? I mean, how is that going to just change society?

Tim Houlihan  1:21:52  
So well, as always, it's good to end on one of your epistles, and I think that that's great. But is there anything else? Is it okay to wrap up here?

Kurt Nelson  1:22:00  
Oh no, it sounds good to me. Just I'm going down a rabbit hole of depression and sadness of oh my god, life as we know it is not going to be the same.

Tim Houlihan  1:22:11  
No, no. We should just remind listeners that this is the last episode before we publish. The last episode we published before our October 16, 2025, event in Minneapolis. Okay, not the last episode ever.

Kurt Nelson  1:22:26  
Well, AI might make this the last episode ever, because it'll just improve and we will be it'll be aI behavioral grooves, and people listen to that much more than us. Anyway. No, yes, it. Go out, get your tickets. Join us in Minneapolis. It's live. You will actually know that we are not AI generated visions, that we are actual people, and we are, you know, in the flesh, that we have a heart and a brain that doesn't really operate like it should, but we're there. So, yeah,

Tim Houlihan  1:22:57  
all right, well, well, back to Toby. What we see from Toby Stewart's work is that there is a looming AI evaluation crisis, and we're going to see a fundamental shift in how human capability gets addressed. And frankly, I'm not ready for it.

Kurt Nelson  1:23:13  
I'm not ready for it either. And when Toby predicts that we'll lean even harder on pedigree and status markers, I don't think he's celebrating this trend, but I think he's. He might be warning us about it, and it's probably a warning we should all heed.

Tim Houlihan  1:23:29  
Yeah, maybe the most important question isn't whether AI will disrupt our current systems, because it already has. Maybe the big question is whether we'll use this disruption as an opportunity to create fair ways of recognizing human potential, or whether we're just going to retreat into the comfortable with flawed shortcuts of status and pedigree. Yeah.

Kurt Nelson  1:23:52  
So think about, talk about epistles. There you go. Man, oh my god, the choice, as they say, is ours, and we hope that you make the right choices this week, or the good choices as you go out and find your groove. You

Unknown Speaker  1:24:08  
you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai