The Invisible Hierarchies that Rule Our World (with Toby Stuart)

Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.

We'd love to hear from you. Today is September 3rd, 2025, and my guest is Toby Stewart. The Leo Helzel Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Our topic for today is his book, Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take Most world. Toby, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks, Russ. Thrilled to be here. Really, really excited for our conversation. Me too. What's the central idea of the book?

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (73 minutes, 12,483 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.