Toby Stuart (on social status)
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dax Shepard, I'm joined by Monica Padman.
Hello.
Today we have an organizational theorist and distinguished professor of business administration at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, Toby Stewart. Toby has written a book on one of my very favorite topics, I annoyingly talk about this. The book is called Anointed, The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World. This was so fascinating, wasn't it?
Yeah, really interesting deep dive into status and how we're impacted by it.
Yeah, I was very aware of the evolutionary benefit of status, but I didn't know about how we use it as a very useful shortcut to identify quality and competency and all these little areas of our lives where we have a very little bit of amount of information and we have to rely on something and ultimately what we will default to is status and it affects everything as well.
Yeah, and he talks about how AI is going to,
Potentially.
Mix that up a little bit, which is interesting.
It is. Please enjoy Toby Stewart.
He's an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur.
He's an entrepreneur.
Toby Stewart, do you ever get confused for the race car driver, Tony Stewart? Are you ever making a reservation and they're excited? God, I wish that would happen to me. I'm so waiting for that to happen. Put that idea out there. Oh, I will, I will. Restauranteurs, listen. Before we even start, you're in the business school at Berkeley, but what was your ride to that? What did you major in?
And he says before we start, meaning we have started. Oh, sorry. Just so you know.
Yeah, and the whole thing was an accident. So I went to a liberal arts college in rural Minnesota because my idea of college was you go somewhere, it's got to be cold. It can't be in a city. Right. It's got to be dark and miserable. And like you sit in the basement of a chapel and read Dante. So I went to a liberal arts college. I thought I was going to be a philosophy major and that turned out to be kind of hard. So I honestly have to admit, I just kind of gave up.
What ran apart? What was the roadblock with it?
I think I read the groundwork to the metaphysics of morals, so Immanuel Kant.
Before you walked in, we were literally having a discussion.
About the categorical imperative. You know what's wild? I asked the other day GPT-5 to explain the categorical imperative to me in a sonnet written by Joan Didion. Whoa. What a fun prompt. And it's batshit. It did it.
It did it.
As far as I know, Joan Didion's never written anything. I mean, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's unbelievable and good. I read this passage of the book like 45 times.
And it just went in click.
Well, I don't know. It's philosophy. Does it ever click? Right, exactly. You know, it's like you could just keep going and you never really feel like you understand in entirety. So I just kept going.
And would you maybe have agreed too, even if you understand it in its entirety, there are different occasions for different ones to make more sense. It's like we want there to be a unified one singular philosophy that explains it. It doesn't. It's like you're constantly going back between utilitarianism and Kantianism.
Constantly. And I often wonder what would happen if I went back to it at this stage of life. Because the other thing is philosophy, when you try to understand it, but you have no wisdom. Yeah. So rereading stuff that influenced you when you're older, if ever the time presents. So anyways, I went to Carleton College. I started in philosophy. I flipped to economics because it was just way easier. I graduated in economics. I was a disaster in junior high, but got my shit together in high school and college. So I did really well and I finished. And at that point, I started to rethink a PhD in philosophy.
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