#268： How the Science of Competition Can Make You a Better Man
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, I talk to author Poe Bronson about his new book, "Top Dog," which digs deep into the science of competition and how it can improve our performance in a wide variety of tasks. We discuss the difference between adaptive and maladaptive competition, the culture of virtuous competition that existed amongst the ancient Greeks, and how you can shape competition to make you a better man in all aspects of your life.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. And what
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if I told you there's a performance enhancing drug that's completely free, completely legal
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and has no ill side effects when used correctly. Oh, and you've probably already taken it many
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times in your life. Well, that drug is competition. And today on the show, I talked to author Poe
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Bronson about his book, Top Dog, that digs deep into the science of competition and how
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it can improve our performance in a wide variety of tasks. In today's podcast, Poe and I discuss
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the difference between adaptive and maladaptive competition, that's good and bad competition,
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the culture of virtuous competition that existed amongst the ancient Greeks, and how you can
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shape competition to make you a better man in all aspects of your life. Really interesting
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show. After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash top dog.
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So you coauthored a book a few years ago called Top Dog, The Science of Winning and Losing, which
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is all about the research about what competition, how it influences performance, what it does
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to our biology, our psychology. But let's start off with this, because you argue in the book
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that competition has all these enormous benefits that come with improving performance, but it
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seems like these days competition has sort of a PR problem. There's this ethos in public
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schools and in public life that cooperation beats competition. So why does competition seem
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have this PR problem these days? The fact that it has a PR problem is a lot of why we were
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motivated to work on the book in the first place. And we felt a significant disconnect between what
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the scientific research was saying and this default thinking about competition. And one of the things
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that is there is just as we wanted to emphasize throughout our society that teamwork is important.
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And we recognize that the kids that we're educating are going to have to grow up and work largely
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in teams. Not all of them, but the vast majority of them. We've also kind of misread why children
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misbehaved. And we think that superiority rings of competition. And we just didn't parse these things
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correctly. You know, just for the most fundamental aspect, think of it this way. Like what's the most
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famous example? It would be you're on a sports team. You're competing while you're cooperating.
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Right? When you're on a team working for your company, what are you doing? You're competing with other
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companies in the marketplace. Your team is up against other teams. Cooperation and teamwork are integral to
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competition, not divergent from competition. In fact, just to just delve quickly into the science, we fundamentally
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get this wrong. The hormone of cooperation is actually the very same hormone as the hormone of competition,
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which is testosterone. And there's this great study where these neuroscientists would have women come into
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the lab and they would play economic type games where you can either, at a certain point in the game, share
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the winnings with your partner or steal all the winnings at the end of this little economic game.
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And before they played, these women were told they would be given a little flask and drink it and they
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would be told, you've either been given a hormone, a testosterone, or you've been given this other
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chemical that we're not going to tell you yet. And after they played, they asked the women what did
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they think? You played the game a certain way, you stole from your opponent or you shared with your
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opponent. What hormone do you think you were given? And the women who stole from their opponent, they all
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assumed, I must have been given testosterone. And the women who shared with their opponent said, I must have
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been given this magical chemical. What is it? I really want it. But in fact, it was exactly the other way
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around. The women who had been given testosterone shared with their opponent. The women who stole from
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their opponent had actually just been given a placebo. They'd been given nothing. And that testosterone was
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driving cooperation, not stealing from your opponent. Because to be a good teammate in a competitive
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setting, you've really got to be fine-tuned to this. And if they do these studies of college soccer
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teams and they rate them on, you know, 15 matrix assessments for how good are they really a team
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player? Like, you know, do their eyes glance over their shoulder and spot their team? And how do they
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modulate the tone of their voice to communicate well? And they also check testosterone levels as
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they rise and vary from a day before the competition to pre-competition to during the
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competition to after. And what they found is that the athletes whose testosterone goes up
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are better team players. And we just have this thing dead wrong.
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I'll let you ask me a question again, Brett. Sorry to rip off there, but I care a lot about this.
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And it bums me out that we just have this point of view that is just wrong. It's not just wrong,
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like philosophically wrong or analytically wrong. It's like scientifically wrong, biologically wrong.
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Yeah. And I think that's really, I think that's counterintuitive for a lot of people. It's like
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you said, most people think testosterone is this sort of rage inducing hormone that makes you selfish
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and overly aggressive, but the research indicates otherwise. And we'll get more into the physiology
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of competition and including testosterone, some of the other neurotransmitters and hormones that are
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involved in the competitive process. But do you think another reason why there's a PR problem with
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competition is that we are using the word competition to define two types of competition?
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I think in the book, you talk about there's adaptive competition and maladaptive competition.
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Yeah, that's, that's, that's really good insight, Brett, that, that we use one word to describe
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two different things and we, uh, we don't parse them and separate them. We do understand we have
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this bad, you know, we have this term for, you know, what is being a bad sport mean. And so we recognize
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these differences, but we think that somehow it's fundamental to competition. Certain competitions
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can give rise to lots of cheating. Certain competitions can give rise to poor performance.
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The vast majority of competitions, especially if it's well-structured, gives rise to increased
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performance, to good sportsmanship. The ancient Greeks, um, Ashley, my co-author and I were, you know,
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we're kind of just fascinated because we were just brainstorming. We're like, what is ancient Greece known
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for? Well, it's known for two things. It's known for the Olympics and it's known for giving us democracy.
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And then we were like, I wonder, you know, is there a connection between those two in any way?
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They both seem to be ancient Greece. Ancient Greece was a certain period of time. And so we looked it up.
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Interestingly, the ancient Olympics were at first a religious festival and they, uh, a truce was part
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of this because to travel across each other's lands, they needed to have a truce and they came together.
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And as it grew in its popularity and these different sultans and kings of different
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regions would come to attend this religious ceremony, it began to be a question, well,
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who gets to light that fire that starts this religious ceremony?
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And so they decided we'll have a foot race. It was a 200 yard long foot race and everybody
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put up their best athlete to race in this foot race and somebody won. And then slow,
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this religious festival slowly merged into what we know of as the Olympics.
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And as the Olympics ensued, uh, the, the, it wasn't just like the athletes who went to, uh, Athens to
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compete. It was actually a whole posse, right? Like the king and his philosophers and his poets and
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slaves and his warriors who would, the warriors were often the people who were, uh, the athletes.
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And they would come a month ahead of time and they would train, they would train for the Olympics.
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So all these philosophers and poets were hanging out and they were watching these athletes
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transform their bodies through training. And as they watched it, they began to think
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and discuss amongst each other. You know, it's interesting because we have this philosophy of,
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say somebody from an upper caste or an upper class person is better than a lower class person. But
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look at this lower class soldier who's transforming his body. Maybe we have this wrong. Maybe you can
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transform your mind. Maybe these people ought to have a voice. They ought to have essentially a vote.
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And in this way, the origins of democracy were exactly
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fostered in that month of training for the Olympics, that the Olympics gave rise to democracy itself.
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And they loved good sportsmanship. And the, the Greeks were already always into these
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games and little competitions with checkers and bones and card games and variations of that kind of
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stuff. And they loved these sports. And, uh, there, there are these, uh, famous statues that
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there's, uh, they're, they're kind of gone now, but you can find photos of them that are sort of
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replicas. They were called the Zanes and there were some wrestlers that cheated and they rigged matches
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in about the 400s BC or something like that. And the ancient Greeks immortalized those wrestling
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cheaters with statues with statues outside of the, the, uh, uh, uh, Olympic, uh, stadium.
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And they were there, stood there, you know, for a thousand or years or so, um, before they sort of
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fell. But, uh, imagine that, imagine if rather than debating whether somebody was to get into say our
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baseball hall of fame or football hall of fame, instead we actually immortalize them as cheaters
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outside of the hall of fame. So they got a spot at the hall of fame just on the outside.
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Uh, the ancient Greeks, uh, really understood this difference between adaptive and maladaptive
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competition. It was deeply imbued into their philosophy and they, uh, they had specific different
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words for both types. And we've lost that as a society today.
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Yeah. And it was interesting to you, you highlighted the books that they didn't just
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compete over sports. They competed at the Olympics. There was like poetry competitions
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or oratory competitions. Um, even their political process was competitive. You, you try to joust to
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be the best, uh, or a titian, best red titian. Um, and there was competition, like people judged
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each other by that, but in the end, it sort of produced this sort of flourishing as they would call
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it this excellence. Um, because of it. Right. The goal of competition was not winning itself.
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Competition was a process that makes you better. And to be clear, it's not just like when, and when
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we say that even listeners might go, Hey, wait a minute, what do you, what do you, what like,
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think about calmly here. Competition makes us better. The first and biggest ingredient is that training,
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right? Knowing that people have to compete, they train and they get better through the training.
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Even if in the actual event itself, they may do well or do poorly, whatever it is. If just to bring
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that back to, you know, say where we started with like kids in our modern society, um, scholars
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will begin to study things like say math competitions. And what they've found is that
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even kids whose parents signed them up for the math contest or the math club, and they don't like
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math, but their parents sort of forced them to do it, come out of it, really enjoying it and learning
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way more math than they would have in regular class. And it's largely because it's a, it's a team
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environment. You're part of a team. You don't want to let your team down. So you're in addition to your
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intrinsic drive to say, be good at math, which they may not have. They have this, uh, social drive to
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support their team and not let their team down. And they train, they get better. And even if, uh,
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in that moment of competition, they don't win or whatever, they still come away with a, a really
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good experience. And they don't feel like a loser because they lost. They, they're very aware that they
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got a lot better. And in fact, the scholars who've been doing this research have begun to look across
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all sorts of other competitions in schools. And there is quite a significant movement akin to
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say how startups, startup competitions to have weekend long accelerators, where you have a challenge
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and over the course of the weekend, you equip with ideas and you draw on resources. And by Sunday,
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you make pitches and some people get funding in a similar way. This sort of gamified, uh, academic
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competitions are really successful. And most interestingly, and most effectively, they're
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used in actually driving the teaching of creativity. So in the science of creativity,
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we are learning that, yes, some people's brains are more naturally adapted to it than others. Just
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like a basketball player might, it helps to be tall in basketball. Um, but everybody can get better
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at basketball and everybody can get better at being creative and especially means to not just teach
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it as an art form, but to teach creativity in the sciences and to teach it in history classes and
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to use competitions and sort of short term academic competitions are really successful at driving up
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motivation, engaging young learners, um, and getting students to really, um, internalize what they're
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learning, have some drive. It, it, not that you want to do it every day, but it really works.
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And I think the key thing here about competition is to understand that some of the difference
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between short term and long term competition, you know, competition is stressful. Long term stress
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is maladaptive. It hurts you, wears you down, it destroys a lot of the hormones that your body needs,
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but short term competition where you train and prepare and then you have a stressful period of time
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where you're competing and performance stress can be good for you and can actually help your
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performance. And then you have rest and recuperation after. So this is really important, training,
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competition, rest and recuperation. If you never let people rest, you know, endless competition is
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bad for them, but training, competing and resting as a cycle is really effective at driving performance
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and engagement. So I think, um, from what you just said, we can kind of get an idea, kind of refine
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what adaptive competition and maladaptive competition looks like. So it sounds like adaptive competition
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is, is process focused. It's focused on the training and that you're going to get better through the
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process. Maladaptive competition is primarily focused on winning or losing.
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And, uh, and, uh, not, and, and not providing rest and recuperation and, and not allowing that phase
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of training, um, uh, where people can creative problem solve their strategies, where they can improve
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their, their skill sets that'll be drawn upon in the competition. Um, look, I mean, look, I, I can with my
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brother start washing the dishes, you know, at our summer house and next thing, you know, it turns into a
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competition, you know, and it's fun. Right. And, and, you know, when we were kids and we would do that, it could get
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out of hand and there's no skill building. I mean, the competition can break out anywhere, anytime. Uh, and it doesn't
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necessarily mean it's good or it's bad. I, and I don't know that we're obsessed with that. I think
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what we're thinking about here is what is the proper role of competition in, uh, in, in our, especially
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our children's lives where we're most protective and then also long-term in our regular sort of working
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lives. So it sounds like the ancient Greeks and most of humanity is kind of intuitively understood,
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um, how competition can improve performance, but it wasn't until the 19th century,
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where we started getting scientific about it. Um, can you tell us about the study that the guy did
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with like, I think it was like a rowing machine, uh, back in the 1800s where he found that, yeah,
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competition can actually help improve some individual's performance. Right. The very first
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scientific study, this is a guy triplet and he created this, uh, it's a rowing machine where you,
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you didn't pull on an oar, you, you sort of rotated this thing in a circle. He tried to come up with a
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unique physical contest that nobody had a pre skill. Nobody was already good at it. No one was
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naturally doing this motion. And he tested all sorts of people on this competing, pushing themselves
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as hard as they could. And, and what Ashley and I got drawn to, especially was the work he did on
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children. And he found that sure enough, you know, if you ask a child to go as fast as you can,
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put yourself, drive yourself, you know, they would, they would do pretty good. But if you put them in
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competition with another person, they would do even better for the most part, but not everybody.
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I mean, has, has this research been replicated? This type of research has been replicated the
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premise of it, you know, thousands of times in thousands of different ways and in every dimension
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of our life, that how do people do in competition versus how do they do by just driving themselves?
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And where this body of science and say, where did we go wrong as a society in interpreting this
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was we would, you know, you'll always see some kids who up in a competition, they do poorly. They
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don't like it. It's not working for them. And they do far worse than they would be if they just drove
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themselves. And there was this kind of a moral judgment to say, well, then competition is bad
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rather than looking more acutely or more granularly at what are all these studies saying about when
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does competition lead to poor performance? It's a subset of the results. Why is it happening? What are
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the conditions? And typically seems to be some form of maladaptive competition. But the most fundamental
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rule here of all, the one that all of the studies show, is that what works is when it's a fair
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contest. When, say, going back to those two kids on this rotating rowing machine, that when one kid
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was up against another kid who was just flat out better and faster, and the kid who wasn't as good
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felt like she had no chance, she couldn't beat this person, then she would crumble.
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And interestingly, the person was really good, unchallenged, you know, coasted. So both of them
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would do worse. But across all of this body of research, when people feel like it's a fair
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contest, they tend to do really, really do improve. There's a, there's a study about the Air Force
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Academy that, can I, can I tell people about this? Yeah, no, I was hoping you'd bring it up. Here's
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a modern example of this. So really interesting one. So at the Air Force Academy,
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I think, I'm getting right, maybe about six years ago, you know, to even to get into the Air Force
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Academy, it's one of our top institutions, and you need to get a letter of recommendation from
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a congressperson or administrative person, and you, you know, you have to have good grades. But even then,
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there are students there, young cadets, who, who don't survive, and they drop out. And, you know,
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across the board in the military, their strategy is, has been of late, like, you know, we used to be
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proud of the fact that we would cut kids, and they would drop out. But now they realize, you know, we need
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every one of these good kids we can get. And we need to stop, like, these mechanisms that disempower
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them, we want to find a way to help them all be really good cadets, really good future soldiers,
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really good people in our society. So these economists had this idea, and they wanted to
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use these comparative effects, this social effect. And they had this idea. So to me, I call it the
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J. Edmark effect, because when I was in ninth grade, in eighth grade, there was this kid, J. Edmark,
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and he was my friend. And his mom, whenever I go to his house, she was always asking him to hang out
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with Poe, because I was a good student, and he wasn't a good student. She kept figuring I would
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rub off on him. And all of my good habits would rub off on him. So a similar idea was, was conceived of
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at the Air Force by these economists who were consulting with the Air Force Academy. And they created
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these platoons, these groups of 30 incoming freshmen. And they paired up, like, the group,
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like, half of these little platoons were students who were at risk, because, you know, they were on
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the bubble, and of maybe not succeeding once they got there. And they paired them up with really high
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performing young cadets. And they thought that just by living in the same dorm, by eating together,
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by studying together, by training together, that the high performers rub off on the low performers.
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And they thought this was going to be this magic social effect. And the school year went on,
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and they started to see some problems right away. And they got worried, but it was an economic
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experiment, and they were measuring it and doing it. And by the end of the year, they were like,
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uh-oh, we messed up. And that the low performers had not been rubbed off on by the high performers.
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They had, like, that girl who was doing the rowing machine who collapsed and crumbled. They had
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withdrawn from the high performers. So they would eat together, but they'd go to the other end of the
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table. They would study together, but they'd go to a different part of the library. They had moved
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their bunks. They had sort of protected themselves from this endless comparison to someone for whom
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they could not really compete. It was not a fair contest, and they'd pulled away.
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Unfortunately, the Air Force had already seeded, essentially, next year's dorms, if you will. So
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they actually did this for two years, and the second year's results were just like the first
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years. And the reason we know about this study, because, you know, failed studies, you think,
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well, they never appear in the press, or they never appear in the journals, but was that,
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essentially, afterwards, in order to create these dorms of high performers and low performers,
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they had to take out the middle performers. And they put all the middle performers, you know,
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in their own dorms and in their own troops. And what they found over there, when they looked at them,
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almost as an afterthought, was that they had done really well as middle performers over the course of
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that first year of their freshman year. All of them had a fair contest. On any given day,
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they could outperform each other, because through focus and hard work and extra effort.
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And so there was almost a sense that on a daily basis, you could outshine your competitors
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by applying drive and hard work and concentration. And as a result, they had pushed each other
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up to the level of the high performers. All of them. And that a fair, essentially the lesson here
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is that fair contests, where kids literally experience that capacity, you know, we can say forever,
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it's all about hard work, son. You know, you just got to try, you know, or, or as I famously,
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you know, had written in Nurture Shock and New York Magazine years before, you know,
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praising children to call attention to the role of hard work. Well, you can talk till you're blue in the face.
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You actually have to give kids a chance to experience it. And that chance is where they literally are
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kind of like, just about even with the other people around them. But if they try harder,
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if they're like, you know, dad's been saying this for a long time, maybe I'll, maybe I'll try it,
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this hard work stuff. It works. And they make that sort of intrinsic internal connection that,
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that, that this hard work stuff that everyone's always talking about actually can help you.
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That's really, so some great insights there about being mindful about the competitions you place
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yourself in or your kids in. So, I mean, this is not just like, it doesn't have to be like,
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that's a reply to formal competition, but let's say you're trying to improve, I don't know, in your
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physical fitness in some capacity. You don't want to partner up with a really super fit guy.
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You want to find someone who's maybe just a little bit better than you or about the same
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and use him as sort of the benchmark. And that could allow you to see some progress in your life.
00:28:13.460
Yeah. Well, the studies say that, yes, that, that such pairing will, will give both people,
00:28:23.320
you know, a fair chance. And, and there will, both sides will, will drive each other to, to more success.
00:28:33.240
You know, if you're paired up with a, a weightlifting buddy or something, you know, there can be other
00:28:42.440
things there, right? I mean, it's like, you may not really be competing. You're just supporting each
00:28:47.820
other and, you know, you got to put in the work and stuff. So people tend to improve in both situations.
00:28:55.740
It's just that when you pair yourself with someone who's sort of your equal, your comrade in arms,
00:29:03.240
in some sense, your partner in this, then, then you, uh, get more benefits than any other situation.
00:29:10.980
And, um, I'm curious, were there any differences between how female cadets or male cadets, or
00:29:17.180
similar studies like it, and how men and women respond differently to these differences and skill
00:29:24.900
level in, in terms of competition? So at the time, the Air Force Academy was about 20% women,
00:29:31.440
and it's, and it's going up. Um, and there were no differences there in that situation. But again,
00:29:36.720
that is a self-selected group, right? But there is an enormous body of research around, um,
00:29:46.680
competition and its effect on men and women that are divergent. And I just want to predicate this
00:29:53.400
carefully because I'll kind of give away the ending, which is that these differences between men and
00:30:01.380
women are in fact not really that they're a male or that they're a female. It's just that certain
00:30:09.380
biological characteristics more commonly appear in males and less commonly in females, but they still
00:30:17.320
appear both in males and females. And so where we want to start is with a, um, a gene variation
00:30:27.680
called the COMT gene, C-O-M-T. And it codes enzyme that clears dopamine from the synapses in your brain.
00:30:39.220
And, uh, most of our brain, we have these, uh, these dopamine clearers, these, these janitors that come in
00:30:52.280
and clean up everything. But in the prefrontal cortex, which evolved most recently for our brains, we, we don't
00:30:58.320
have the usual mechanism. We have this sort of substitute teacher or substitute janitor and has to come in and do this
00:31:04.980
stuff. And, and what it does is it, it actually biologically expand, explains the font phenomenon
00:31:12.800
that some people perform poorly under stress and other people actually need the stress to perform
00:31:24.220
their best. That they actually don't, don't turn it up until, you know, the night before the paper's done
00:31:31.380
or got to make that presentation tomorrow. And this sort of thing that we naturally feel and become
00:31:39.240
aware of in our lives that some people almost crave this stress and they don't do a good job until the
00:31:44.680
stress is there. This is actually the mechanism for that. And what's happening is depending on your gene
00:31:51.360
variation, you can, uh, have a perfectly, perfect level of dopamine in your prefrontal cortex in non-stressful
00:32:01.000
situations. But when stress happens, that juices up. And other people, and this is the other half of
00:32:09.420
society, are, are people who, who chronically have too low dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. And
00:32:18.740
during stress, that dopamine level goes up now to optimal level. So your brain actually works better
00:32:25.460
under stress. So now that's really cool. And that's a big parenthetical because I want to bring it back
00:32:32.540
to men and women, right? So actually estrogen down regulates this COMT gene. So it's especially true
00:32:43.800
that as estrogen cycles over the course of a month, it interacts with this. And what it can mean
00:32:52.760
is that, uh, biologically, uh, women can have more of the behaviors of, uh, sort of the fundamental
00:33:06.260
default of essentially having too much dopamine. They're flooded with dopamine and their brains don't
00:33:11.500
work as well under stress. And again, that's, this is based on genotypes. So it's all related to the
00:33:18.540
genotypes. And this is not true of all women. There's many other social factors that affect
00:33:23.220
men and women. I think the, the one that, uh, so what they find, this is really interesting as, as,
00:33:30.040
as sort of a consequence is that this also affects essentially how rational people's brains are at
00:33:36.680
different times. And so all these studies show that like female financial analysts on wall street
00:33:44.540
studying literally like every single financial estimate made by an analyst for 20 years
00:33:53.620
on every single stock in every single industry show that female financial analysts are on average
00:34:01.080
about eight percent better than male financial analysts. Women are better at seeing the risks than
00:34:08.940
men are. Men are better at ignoring the risks. So this even relates to say, uh, when we know as a society,
00:34:21.060
we want far more women to, you know, run for office. So what the studies slowly, the science is teased out
00:34:29.000
because they look at like every state and they look at who campaigns in these states to look at judges and
00:34:33.840
races. I mean, these scholars do a really good job looking at all this stuff. And what they find is
00:34:39.140
that women, when they see that the odds of winning are poor, they don't enter the race. When they see
00:34:47.840
the odds of winning are possible and not even like great, but just possible, they enter the race more
00:34:54.680
than men do. Men are really good at ignoring the odds. Men are willing to say, people say, you know,
00:35:01.380
there's no chance to win and be like, screw it. I'm entering anyway. Like that's the classic guy
00:35:06.780
response, you know, and we heroize that, but it's actually comes down to this like fundamental biology
00:35:13.560
about how we assess risk. Um, and what makes a race most give, what, what's the one thing that
00:35:20.980
changes a race from you kind of not having a chance to having a chance? It's whether there's an incumbent
00:35:25.520
in place. And incumbents, you know, uh, tend to win political races about 90% of the time in the
00:35:34.140
United States across all categories. Uh, and so when the incumbent incumbents are no longer running,
00:35:43.240
you'll see far more women in a race because they are judging that they have a chance. Men will enter
00:35:49.440
races regardless of the odds of winning. And so this is kind of interesting. You can't hear this
00:35:56.140
stuff without thinking, well, how does that affect say startup culture or startups where the odds of
00:36:03.560
succeeding in a startup might be one in three or one in 10 to get a 10 X return. Um, that the fact
00:36:10.420
that essentially women are smarter about this, um, may be a factor influencing essentially the supply
00:36:19.040
of female entrepreneurs. And if, and it's, I'm not saying that like that's permanent by any means,
00:36:25.880
it's not permanent by a long shot, but it's, it is about culture and support. So people need to
00:36:30.360
understand that they have a chance. Uh, otherwise they'll evaluate these on their own.
00:36:36.980
It's really interesting. I'm curious. So, I mean, I, I understand that, uh, you know, being risk
00:36:41.260
sensitive has, can play out in the long, but, but are there any advantages for being risk naive?
00:36:47.380
Because I mean, obviously men have it, we've had it for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years.
00:36:52.220
There's possibly, there has to be a benefit to it or else we wouldn't have it. So I mean, what is
00:36:56.440
the adaptive reason why men are risk naive? So again, let's, I want to, I want to be careful
00:37:04.240
about overgeneralizing here because I know this is a sense of thing. So, but at this point, it's
00:37:08.240
important to say that when we say men are this, women are this, we should probably stop at this point
00:37:13.340
because, uh, there are plenty of female entrepreneurs. And so that's basically what's,
00:37:19.340
what I'm talking about here is a phenomenon that on average men, this, and on average women that
00:37:23.680
for any particular male or female, uh, it's one third of women have this, uh, capacity to essentially
00:37:33.500
ignore risk and two thirds of men. Okay. So this capacity to sort of, uh, try it anyway and believe
00:37:42.940
in yourself and grind it out and disprove the odds. That's something that two thirds of men and one
00:37:49.500
third of women have biologically. And this, uh, uh, accurate, uh, risk sensitivity is a, is a biological
00:38:00.500
construct that two thirds of women have and one third of men. And so it's an interaction of certain
00:38:08.020
genes. It's actually, uh, bizarrely, this is actually something that is wired in at fetus stage
00:38:18.660
at about two months into the fetal cycles. And, um, those same hormones that act upon that deep part of
00:38:34.760
the brain and, and spinal cord and, and they, they also do other things. So one of the, so, so literally
00:38:44.380
they impact like those same hormones impact how long your fingers are. So you can do studies that
00:38:52.780
measure the length of fingers among Italian entrepreneurs. And you'll find that, that the
00:38:58.640
one, you know, the one third of the entrepreneurs are women and they'll have a finger length set of
00:39:05.660
traits that as do the men, that, that is probably, that is something that is established two months into
00:39:12.660
their fetal development. This is the, uh, 2d, 4d ratio, right? Yeah. Right. Um, aspect of thinking
00:39:19.820
about or being intentional about competition is, um, the size of the competitive pool. And I think you
00:39:27.640
highlighted research where you found that as the competitive pool increases, the competitive drive
00:39:34.640
decreases in people because I mean, it makes sense. There's less of a chance. There's more people in
00:39:39.480
there. There's less of a chance that you can win. So I'm curious. I mean, this is, I think an
00:39:44.340
important thing to think about in our globalized hyper-connected economy where we're hypothetically
00:39:51.020
competing now with millions of other people, not just in your state or even in your country, but
00:39:56.280
around the world. So how do you, how do you maintain that competitive fire in such a large
00:40:02.500
competitive pool? I mean, I can see a lot of people say, wow, it's not even worth trying. I'll just
00:40:06.800
kind of be mediocre in my life because there's no way I can beat those startups in India or China or
00:40:12.480
Silicon Valley. Yeah. There's the, and, and, and, you know, or think of, uh, those who've taken the
00:40:20.380
ACT or the SAT, you know, listeners would have had that largely had that experience. And if you sit
00:40:26.840
there going, you know, you get there, that test and you're like, man, every student in the country
00:40:33.320
is taking this test today and I have to compete against all of them. It's really demotivating
00:40:39.840
and it, it demotivates you and has certain biological consequences in both in the long term and in the
00:40:49.440
short term. Right. And even in the short term, just thinking that way will, uh, tune up your
00:40:59.600
brain's, uh, fear networks. It will tune down your brain's reward networks. It will, uh, tweak
00:41:10.060
the ratio of noradrenaline to adrenaline, which is like to perform, you want to get a really certain
00:41:17.180
ratio there. It will affect your blood pressure. It will affect, uh, your, uh, vasoconstriction,
00:41:23.600
vasodilation and your, uh, body's capacity to sort of convert fuel into energy. And just by thinking
00:41:33.160
about it differently, and then you will suffer poorer performance just because you think of it that
00:41:38.460
way. You know, what works, I mean, to take like taking the ACT or SAT, like what works is to say,
00:41:43.540
you know, it's a challenge a friend or challenge a cousin or challenge to say,
00:41:47.060
hey, you and I are going to compete. We both took that test. We both did okay. We're going to see
00:41:54.220
who can improve their score by more. And if you focus your competition, you can improve. And
00:42:02.000
in this landscape of our globalized world, that same mechanism works that you want to focus your
00:42:09.540
efforts on beating so-and-so. There's other, you know, startups work because they are typically in
00:42:20.580
a space where there are a lot, just like there's always coming out of Hollywood, two movies about
00:42:26.440
Mars at the same time, two movies about the White House blowing up at the same time. You know,
00:42:31.120
you're like, startups are in the same way. There's startups in your space and you're competing with
00:42:36.080
them. And if you focus your efforts on them, you tend to do really well. One of the most fascinating
00:42:41.180
industries where we saw this pattern was in Italy, the industry that makes not packages,
00:42:50.280
but they make the machinery that makes packaging. So the way we get pharmaceuticals, the way we get
00:42:58.080
blister packs or the clamshells around cell phones, I mean, all these things have been invented as this
00:43:04.820
new packaging. And they come from all these newfangled packaging machines. And if you turn
00:43:10.600
back the clock 15 years, Germany really dominated the packaging machine industry. And Italy was
00:43:16.960
a much smaller player. But in this very small region of Italy outside Bologna, there are about 200
00:43:25.020
packaging machines. And they're not all competing with each other. Inside that industry of where there's
00:43:29.860
200 packaging machine companies. And they make these, you know, these huge machines are the size
00:43:34.840
of a room that costs, you know, $400,000. But they will churn out all sorts of modern packaging.
00:43:42.380
In cosmetics, there's four companies. And they know who each other are. And they are fiercely
00:43:49.000
competitive. And they can go to dinner in Bologna. And they can be like, yeah, there's the guy who just
00:43:55.000
came up with that new thing that the machine can do. And that's everybody's buying it. And it's great.
00:44:00.980
And so through intense local rivalries, the people in those companies were passionate,
00:44:10.820
were knowledgeable, their status was at stake. And they drove themselves to succeed by emphasizing
00:44:16.720
local rivalry. And in the process, they went from being a small player in this global market to the
00:44:22.200
dominant player in this global market. And so it's important to think less globally when you're
00:44:31.320
competing. And instead to think more about, you know, who's your rival? Think of sports. How,
00:44:38.180
how, you know, look at Nike and Adidas are rivals, and they're pushing each other. And they're doing
00:44:46.640
great while, through that rivalry, while smaller, other companies like Fila and stuff have sort of
00:44:54.240
had to step aside. In sports, we see historic rivalries that push teams to sort of figure out
00:45:04.920
how to get better, how to reach that next level. So the lesson for us is to sort of think locally
00:45:12.980
here, think more about our rivals, think about our direct competitors.
00:45:16.940
All right. So I think there's some really two good insights we've hit so far. So the first one was,
00:45:21.200
if you're going to compete, make sure the competition level is at a parity, right? You
00:45:25.200
don't want to compete with someone too high. And then also, you want to narrow your field of
00:45:29.860
competition. You know, if you have to do that, psychologically, right, instead of thinking about
00:45:34.680
every kid in America is taking the SAT, or I'm competing with every other, you know, software
00:45:39.160
developer in the world, you think about, I'm just going to compete against these, you know,
00:45:43.260
few dozen that I know, and I'm going to try to best them as best I can.
00:45:47.460
Okay. Well, let's go back to this biology, because I think the biology stuff is really interesting.
00:45:52.600
We've hit a few of the things already, talked about how testosterone actually makes people
00:45:58.500
more cooperative. In order to be more competitive, we've talked about the COMT gene,
00:46:03.120
and it's an influence on dopamine. So let's talk about the process of what happens to our
00:46:09.020
physiology as we prepare for competition, what happens during competition, and then what happens
00:46:15.420
afterwards, whether we win or lose, and why we have those responses.
00:46:19.640
So I think the best way to approach this is, let's get back to how we as a side, so I'm going to come
00:46:31.120
at this, but I'm going to talk about stress. I'm going to talk about how we as a society label
00:46:36.200
stress, and we have a, even more so than we are down on competition, we are really down on stress.
00:46:47.760
We make a broad sweeping connection between stress and poor performance. People say,
00:46:57.760
Hey, honey, how was your day? I wasn't very good. I was stressed.
00:47:04.420
You know, how was your test? I was stressed. Stress taking reduces performance.
00:47:10.880
And we go like, oh, yeah, well, what's wrong with that? Of course, it's what it does.
00:47:15.040
Like, we just accept it. And so let me tell you about the work of Jeremy Jamison. Jeremy was,
00:47:22.580
he's done this work starting, we did it with Harvard students who were preparing for the GRE exam,
00:47:31.540
where they're really competitive about what elite academic program they're going to get into for
00:47:37.240
graduate school. And he's also reproduced at the other end of the spectrum with community college
00:47:42.460
students in Michigan. And the paradigm is the same. I'll just talk about the Harvard students
00:47:48.660
for a second. But they come in and they take a, and the GRE is computerized test now. So the first
00:47:53.920
thing they get is they spit in a cup and they're told they're going to, their saliva is going to be
00:47:59.940
measured for different hormones and stuff. And they read a page that, and half the students read a page
00:48:07.540
that says, you know, this is a study on the connection between stress and performance.
00:48:14.180
And the others read that, and then they also continue to read a paragraph that says,
00:48:18.660
new science is questioning whether stress is bad for performance. And it may, in fact, even help you.
00:48:26.500
We don't really know, but when you're taking this test, if you're feeling stressful,
00:48:30.920
it may, it's an open question whether it's going to help you or not. And they took the test and the
00:48:40.440
kids who got that prompt, who were told that stress might help them performance, performed 50 points
00:48:48.940
higher out of 800 on the GRE, just from reading that. And when they took the actual GRE, they actually
00:48:59.320
scored 65 points higher months later. And they hadn't continued to be taught this. They just
00:49:06.660
taught it once. And now, so you might think, hmm, I get it. See here, here's what happened.
00:49:13.480
You told them that don't stress out about your stress. You told them your stress isn't bad for you.
00:49:22.040
So, you know, you essentially tricked them to not be stressed. But that was, in fact, not the case.
00:49:30.880
They had taken their saliva levels, and they had tested them for alpha amylase and cortisol.
00:49:35.660
And they found that these students were, in fact, truly stressed and more stressed. It was how their
00:49:41.180
body interpreted stress. See, if we label it as a bad thing, we are actually harming our students,
00:49:49.520
ourselves, every time. There is a very big difference here between long-term stress and
00:49:54.420
short-term stress. Short-term performance stress can be harnessed to help you, not to hurt you.
00:50:03.020
And constantly panicking about, like, stress of competition is undermining kids because it's
00:50:08.560
labeling short-term stress as wrong. Stress, those physiological symptoms are actually your body
00:50:16.100
loading up with lots of energy because it knows this moment of competition is happening.
00:50:23.700
And we interpret it often as nausea or as anxiety. But if you interpret it as energy loading to prepare,
00:50:33.980
you will actually perform better. And what I was describing to you in kind of a previous question
00:50:43.680
about how the way we mentally conceive of stress triggers our vagal nerves that instantly change
00:50:55.520
the ratio of noradrenaline to adrenaline, which affects out throughout the entire skeletal structure
00:51:01.360
of our body, the vasodilation versus vasoconstriction, which affects energy capacities and especially
00:51:09.560
tunes up the reward networks or tunes up the fear networks, all of that is that physiology
00:51:17.140
is moderated by how you conceive of stress. And that if you can conceive of short-term stress
00:51:25.480
stress as pumping you up, as gearing you up, as readying you for competition, you will perform
00:51:32.860
better. And you can actually harness your stress to perform your best. And remember that that's true
00:51:40.660
regardless of the comp gene. But remember that already, if you need a little bolus of a pat on the
00:51:46.600
back here, remember that, you know, because the comp gene is evenly distributed in our society,
00:51:52.940
a quarter of us fully need stress to perform our best. Intellectually, we think better under stress.
00:52:02.540
And another half of us at least share, have a gene, at least one of the two genes for that. We would
00:52:09.440
have got it from our mother or father. So a lot of us can really benefit from this. But in fact,
00:52:18.220
what I'm describing as sort of the way that the mind controls the physiology, that's true of all of
00:52:23.780
us. And we need to change as a society how we think of short-term stress and differentiate,
00:52:34.040
parse it like the Greeks to the distinction between short-term stress that's predicated with training.
00:52:41.180
I got, you know, I knew I had a presentation. I was working so hard on that presentation. I knew
00:52:46.300
I was going to have to give it. I knew it would be stressful, but I prepared. And then there was
00:52:51.420
the moment of performance and I nailed it. And then afterward, rest and recuperation. And if you
00:52:57.380
give yourself those cycles, you can really do amazing work in that moment.
00:53:03.920
What do you do if you have the comp gene where you crumble under pressure? How should you approach
00:53:14.920
So it's a great question. Because when I would speak at, say, schools about this,
00:53:23.400
many parents sit there thinking, and I mean, sometimes they're almost in tears. They're
00:53:28.960
kind of interpreting this, like, wow, it's my kid's physical physiology. It's her biology. It's his
00:53:37.260
biology that must be the case, that my kid really is not wired for stress. And they feel like it's
00:53:46.380
fatalistic, like there's nothing I can do about it. And their natural, quick thinking strategy is
00:53:54.680
towards, well, I need to make sure then for my kid to learn that they need to not be in a stressful
00:54:03.200
situation, to not have to deal with any sort of performance stress at all. And, you know,
00:54:10.460
when the time comes, maybe I won't even have them take the SAT. You know, because it's just,
00:54:15.860
there's no, my kid has no chance because of this sort of biological fatalism. The science,
00:54:20.240
the scientists, no scientist who works in this field actually agrees with that as a sort of an
00:54:25.880
adaptive response. What they all note is that, you know, our brains learn, and we have many layers
00:54:32.920
of systems. And what's really important to do is to train up our stress management systems and our
00:54:42.100
stress control systems. So it's the same way I was describing that it's true for everybody,
00:54:47.460
no matter what level of type of comp gene you have, that if you think about short-term stress
00:54:53.620
as performance enhancing, you can leverage it. It's important to inoculate kids to the stress
00:55:01.400
response. And to inoculate them, it means to stress them without overwhelming them. And to understand
00:55:09.340
the difference. And if you can adaptively train kids to cope with stress, but not to overwhelm them,
00:55:16.580
their, their strength, their stress management systems in their body and in their mind will
00:55:23.460
improve. Their mind will learn how to activate these certain networks to control this stuff.
00:55:31.920
Simplest example, this is, it's going to sound amazing, but you can tell with a certain neural scan,
00:55:38.780
which kids are going to be shy at about nine months old in their life. And you see a certain
00:55:45.580
brain reaction. And by the time they're about six, you will see, and certainly by 10, you will see that
00:55:55.640
about half of those kids, even though they are sort of biologically predisposed to be really shy,
00:56:01.820
have learned to master and control that response and tune it down. Um, I was one of those kids,
00:56:09.900
I was perversely shy until I was about six years old. My son also had this same neural signature for
00:56:16.580
sure. Neither of us would you think of as shy. We've learned through our sort of stress management
00:56:21.920
systems to, to calm that response. And so in the same way, it's really important to empower,
00:56:31.760
to inoculate, to strengthen these sort of stress management systems so that they don't, uh,
00:56:38.260
undermine you. Sure. There's going to be situations where you can't control that and you're going to
00:56:43.300
have that sort of negative comp gene thing. You're going to be overloaded and you need to de-stress in
00:56:48.180
those points to perform your best. No question. And some people will, won't, you know, they,
00:56:54.560
they're never going to turn themselves into someone who really needs stress to perform their best.
00:56:58.440
They're still going to be the kind of person who without stress, they perform their best,
00:57:02.080
but maybe even under stress, they can still do well. Right. Um, so it sounds like practicing
00:57:07.160
in stressful situations. So like if you're practicing for the SAT, like do it under like time
00:57:12.740
restrictions, or if you have a fear of public speaking, like, you know, slowly build up an
00:57:19.120
audience until you can sort of manage that, that stress that you will have. So just a lot of
00:57:23.620
practice, it sounds like is the, the, the remedy or part of the remedy. Well, let me just be really
00:57:28.480
clear. Look, um, I scored, you know, I, I did great on the SAT, right? I have the genetic profile
00:57:39.160
that's going to help me in those moments. Um, but the SAT is the worst form of competition anyone's
00:57:46.720
ever had. It's dumbest thing ever. It, you cannot prepare for the stress of the SAT. You only take
00:57:55.240
it, you know, once or twice in your life. There's no training for it, but most of all, it's just badly
00:58:02.440
competition designed because let's see, when I put my kid on a swim team, even if she doesn't win,
00:58:08.480
I'm like, she made friends, she got activities, she was outside, you know, she had mentors,
00:58:15.220
she had coaching, she learned a value of hard work, you know, she became a better swimmer.
00:58:20.080
She got some, you know, white ribbons. Uh, we had some birthday cake, you know, there's all these
00:58:25.220
good reasons to be in the pool that aren't just about winning, but nobody ever comes out of the SAT
00:58:32.860
and says to their friend, you know, I bombed, but I really made a lot of friends at the Kaplan Center.
00:58:43.220
It's the only competition where the only thing that matters is the final score, and that is not a good
00:58:49.280
competition. Nobody ever says, you know, I crumped in there. I scored terrible, I'm sure,
00:58:58.460
but I learned a lot of vocabulary in all of my training that's going to help me long term.
00:59:06.860
That would be the approach, which is that winning or losing, you got better. No, this is a competition
00:59:12.460
where the only thing that matters is the final score, and that is by default a maladaptive competition.
00:59:17.000
Now, should we have SATs or not? Well, SATs are going to be a test that benefits those who have the
00:59:28.220
biological predisposition to handle that kind of performance stress. On the other hand, if you got
00:59:33.900
rid of them, all the rest of it is a system designed to biologically, to favor those who biologically
00:59:42.680
don't have that system. Either way, we're kind of screwed, and so we need to balance these things
00:59:50.380
fairly. We need to understand and recognize that we do have systems in place that some kids who score
00:59:57.120
poorly on that kind of stuff nevertheless can be great, brilliant students, and vice versa. There are
01:00:04.780
people who don't do great all year long. They don't do amazing stuff, but when they have to write that
01:00:10.820
paper, or when they do take that standardized test, they ace it, and that's showing you sort of them
01:00:16.460
at their best. And in this way, both types of students can show you what's at their best, but
01:00:22.160
I cannot defend the SAT. Let me just make it clear. It's a competition where the only thing that matters
01:00:27.660
is the final score. Right, right. Well, hey, Poe, this has been a great conversation, and there's a lot
01:00:33.240
more we can delve into, so I'm going to recommend everyone go check out the book Top Dogs, but where can
01:00:36.980
people find out about your latest works? I think you mentioned earlier before the conversation that
01:00:41.380
you're doing a lot of research about the future of sport. Yeah, so the last two years, we've set up
01:00:49.360
an editorial team, and we're doing work on the future of sports, and you can find that on Twitter
01:00:56.680
at futureof or on the website at futureof.org, and it'll take you to the sports report. We do this
01:01:05.540
with cooperation with 62 professional teams, and it's been really fun. I think there's a lot of,
01:01:15.400
it's not that a lot of technology is so much going to change sports as it is this, that a lot of change
01:01:22.300
is coming to all of our society as a result of new technologies. Sports is an interesting prism
01:01:28.300
by which to look at these and to get used to some of these new technologies and to think about it,
01:01:33.440
and it's fun. So, futureof.org is where you can find the future of sports.
01:01:40.500
Fantastic. Well, Poe Bronson, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
01:01:43.760
My guest today was Poe Bronson. He's the author of the book Top Dog, The Science of Winning and Losing.
01:01:48.160
You can find it on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also, check out his website,
01:01:52.880
poebronson.com for more information about his work, and also check out the show notes at
01:01:57.600
aom.is slash topdog, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
01:02:14.000
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and
01:02:17.980
advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. Our show is edited
01:02:22.300
by Creative Audio Lab here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you have any audio editing needs or audio production
01:02:26.160
needs, check them out at creativeaudiolab.com. And we appreciate your reviews on iTunes or Stitcher.
01:02:31.960
It helps us out a lot. As always, thank you for your continued support. And until next time,