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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Toby Stuart (on social status)

08 Oct 2025

1h 37m duration
19695 words
4 speakers
08 Oct 2025
Description

Toby Stuart (Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World) is an organizational theorist, professor of business administration at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and author. Toby joins the Armchair Expert to discuss attending Harvard Business School before knowing what business school was, the role of sanctioning mechanisms in a social hierarchy, and how circles of status can affect the value of works of art by millions of dollars. Toby and Dax talk about the ‘cool’ experiment he conducted on dating apps, the observation that anything of status plays out in Hollywood or among ten-year-olds, and how the anointing ritual reflects across various social strata. Toby explains why status is unlike most resources in that it can be given away but doesn’t deplete, what distinguishes merit when evaluating a bottle of wine, and implications for those that over-index in the prosperity gospel.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Audio
Transcription

Full Episode

0.25 - 19.539 Dax Shepard

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.

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19.76 - 19.98 Monica Padman

Hello.

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20 - 45.141 Dax Shepard

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?

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45.241 - 53.393 Monica Padman

Yeah, really interesting deep dive into status and how we're impacted by it.

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53.558 - 76.328 Dax Shepard

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.

76.348 - 79.532 Monica Padman

Yeah, and he talks about how AI is going to,

79.512 - 80.313 Dax Shepard

Potentially.

80.333 - 82.757 Monica Padman

Mix that up a little bit, which is interesting.

82.817 - 85.141 Dax Shepard

It is. Please enjoy Toby Stewart.

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