you may know you will have seen him on the podcast circuit Rob Henderson Rob Henderson I was listening to him last night on Chris Williams A brilliant guy the coiner of the phrase luxury beliefs And there's an additional take I'll have on that which is that people could you define Yes I ought to explain this So Rob's thesis he grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles He's just published a book uh which I really recommend It's actually a a bestseller in the US already uh called Troubled about his childhood and um he effectively had a you know he I think has only a couple of memories of his mother don't think he ever knew his biological father ended up being fostered and fostered in turn in a slightly dysfunctional home and I think you know he Rob would probably agree when I said that he got his together by joining the USAF to some extent and then ended up uh going to Yale and then on USA US Air Force and um Uh one of the interesting points of the book is that the stability of your home background has a bigger determinant on your future success This is not by the way I want to be absolutely clear about this This isn't destiny okay It's simply statistics But if you look at statistics then generally people's life outcomes are more predicated on the kind of stability of their family background than on family wealth or on education And yet what Rob noticed is that when he got to Yale it was fashionable to say you know I think marriage is just a social construct you know and uh you know I think people should be free to you know live in you know open partnerships with you know polyamory and so on you know you know that Now those people themselves didn't actually adopt those behaviors but it was fashionable to advocate for them Yeah And he argued that this was and and he coined the phrase effectively uh you know fashionable beliefs in that there were beliefs that people held not because they really believed in them or that there was empirical evidence that these beliefs were uh indeed true or useful but simply because it raised your status holding that belief Wow There there are certain beliefs It's very interesting if you talk for example on the question of cannabis legalization Okay Now by definition if you've got into Yale okay you're probably not a stoner and you don't have a major problem with drugs because if you did have a major problem with drugs you probably wouldn't have got there But it's very fashionable people who've got there who don't have a problem to go yeah it should all be decriminalized and blah blah blah simply because that's a belief which has become almost arbitrarily fashionable Um and so you cleave to the beliefs that high status people uh tend to have regardless of anything else simply because they make you look good and feel good Yeah Now what's interesting to me is that to some extent the political left might have taken a wrong turn here because if you if your principal motivation is the redistribution of wealth and resources okay there are ways psychologically where you can get rich people to give their money to poorer people and still feel good about it Okay there are all sorts of psychological tricks I mean that's philanthropy after all You know that's the Gates Foundation at an extreme level but it's also paying tax paying duties You know airlines have worked out ways in which rich people pay considerably more to fly to the same destination than poor people There are lots of ways in which you can separate the wealthy from their money without making them feel bad But there's no way you can remove someone's or reduce someone's status and still leave and leave them feeling better That that mechanism just doesn't exist in my opinion So by turning politics into a status war between tribes where each group seeks in many ways to essentially promote policies and beliefs which make their own group look and feel good and uh and which perhaps demonstrate their commitment to a group that holds those beliefs and thereby diminishing the status of people who disagree with you you'll never change anybody's mind Now if you look at advertising you can look at all the world's advertising you will not see a single for example advertisement from Ford going "If you drive a GM car you're a moron." Okay Now I'm sure it's been tried In fact I know it was tried but it never I think it never ran in the very late days of um Bill Burnback I think where they kind of showed monkeys drinking other brands of beer M and that that was an ad which Burnback himself killed because he said what we're trying to do is to win over our competitors drinkers and you're portraying them as as apes Yeah Okay You can't change people's minds by diminishing their status Okay I mean the least persuasive message you can possibly say you can possibly construct is effectively I am right and you're wrong you dumb piece of Okay It's not persuasive in many ways If you want to persuade people you do the opposite You practice flattery or you do things that elevate their status or make them feel good about doing something And as I said you can make people feel good about surrendering money and resources and time Okay All sorts of voluntary activity goes on in life We've got evolutionary mechanisms for that What we haven't got as far as I can see is any evolutionary mechanism by which I can actually reduce my status and feel good about it Have you read heard of um Will Store's status game Yeah I've read it It's fantastic I've literally the science of storytelling um the status game has has um and his point is to be fair which is that your p I mean this is where of course you know great restaurants aren't always about food 100% Okay It's about in particularly in places like New York I mean I find it a bit irritating in New York You say "Where are you going this evening?" You name the restaurant they go "Oh that was so last year." And you go "Well is the food any good?" Because I'm not really interested in whether it's last year or this year But you have this kind of weird kind of I guess it's a positive feedback effect where places just become hyper fashionable for a time and then basically hit a peak and fall off I think London and the UK is less guilty of that Generally we a good restaurant can remain a good restaurant for decades much more easily here I think social media is is is what pulls gasoline on the status the sort of beginnings of the status fire because it's like I think what we'll su actually when I said um I I think I said fashionable beliefs he actually calls them luxury beliefs luxury beliefs the fashion beliefs luxury belief But I I think pulling this again into kind of food and drink the ultimate um as you as you said you can't say you you buy a Ford because you're a Yeah But where I think this has almost gone to the next level is you know those um vegan meat brands Yes Who have their way of almost saying it is we're going to like look we're not going to be like tofu or um uh like tofu what's the other one hemp which is like a kind of I know exactly what you know exactly what it is They're going to say we are we are in terms of this binary piece we're talking about earlier It's like we are um we are bacon We are and it's almost you had you had of course the brand which I think is now owned by Unilever called the vegetarian butcher You had a brilliant branding effort in Beyond Meat Yeah Which was effectively saying this isn't a compromise This isn't actually a substitute for meat It's actually meatier than meat itself Yeah And that's a very clever branding in a sense you know um Tesla very cleverly did it with electric cars because it had always been assumed that an electric car was a kind of compromise you know that it was slower It had obviously had lower range That's kind of inevitable at least at this stage But you know it had you know uh that you bought an electric car entirely as an act of self-sacrifice to benefit the planet And Tesla comes along with a car which is basically a saloon car which has the performance of a super car Yeah Okay I mean literally it it squares the circle if you like It it doesn't it actually says this isn't a contradiction at all There's no there's actually no compromise required when you have an electric car You can have an electric car which is a better car M but that question of of turning politics into a status game where you seek to demean for example I mean calling people racist for things which are not remotely evidence of racism on the part of the person using the language for instance um uh particularly some of that status game I think is evidenced by people taking up arms on behalf of minority groups rather than actually letting the minority groups speak for themselves I find something creepy about that Well that's I want to hear from trans people I don't want to hear from a bunch of political activists affecting to speak on behalf of the trans community I want trans voices on the TV talking about their own personal experience Okay And so when you have those people who essentially take up a kind of white savior approach that's a status game That's a luxury belief going on there Now it happens on the other side as well I'm not suggesting this isn't in any way one-sided What I'm saying is that there is no real form of persuasion that's effective that is preceded by the humiliation of the person you're trying to persuade Espressos is sponsored by supply chain software gurus unleashed It talks your ecom and accounting software It's helped islands cut admin time in half Get granular clarity on your margins Know where your stock is Don't miss availability Brands like Candy Kittens TinyRebel and Trip all use Unleashed And so should you