The Art of Manliness - #268： How the Science of Competition Can Make You a Better Man

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. And what

00:00:18.740 if I told you there's a performance enhancing drug that's completely free, completely legal

00:00:23.620 and has no ill side effects when used correctly. Oh, and you've probably already taken it many

00:00:29.260 times in your life. Well, that drug is competition. And today on the show, I talked to author Poe

00:00:34.760 Bronson about his book, Top Dog, that digs deep into the science of competition and how

00:00:39.440 it can improve our performance in a wide variety of tasks. In today's podcast, Poe and I discuss

00:00:44.240 the difference between adaptive and maladaptive competition, that's good and bad competition,

00:00:49.000 the culture of virtuous competition that existed amongst the ancient Greeks, and how you can

00:00:53.340 shape competition to make you a better man in all aspects of your life. Really interesting

00:00:57.720 show. After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash top dog.

00:01:13.620 Poe Bronson, welcome to the show.

00:01:16.040 Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

00:01:17.340 So you coauthored a book a few years ago called Top Dog, The Science of Winning and Losing, which

00:01:22.000 is all about the research about what competition, how it influences performance, what it does

00:01:27.700 to our biology, our psychology. But let's start off with this, because you argue in the book

00:01:34.060 that competition has all these enormous benefits that come with improving performance, but it

00:01:38.360 seems like these days competition has sort of a PR problem. There's this ethos in public

00:01:43.900 schools and in public life that cooperation beats competition. So why does competition seem

00:01:52.200 have this PR problem these days? The fact that it has a PR problem is a lot of why we were

00:01:59.000 motivated to work on the book in the first place. And we felt a significant disconnect between what

00:02:06.120 the scientific research was saying and this default thinking about competition. And one of the things

00:02:15.100 that is there is just as we wanted to emphasize throughout our society that teamwork is important.

00:02:24.880 And we recognize that the kids that we're educating are going to have to grow up and work largely

00:02:31.160 in teams. Not all of them, but the vast majority of them. We've also kind of misread why children

00:02:39.100 misbehaved. And we think that superiority rings of competition. And we just didn't parse these things

00:02:48.480 correctly. You know, just for the most fundamental aspect, think of it this way. Like what's the most

00:02:55.600 famous example? It would be you're on a sports team. You're competing while you're cooperating.

00:03:01.560 Right? When you're on a team working for your company, what are you doing? You're competing with other

00:03:09.520 companies in the marketplace. Your team is up against other teams. Cooperation and teamwork are integral to

00:03:19.140 competition, not divergent from competition. In fact, just to just delve quickly into the science, we fundamentally

00:03:29.040 get this wrong. The hormone of cooperation is actually the very same hormone as the hormone of competition,

00:03:41.760 which is testosterone. And there's this great study where these neuroscientists would have women come into

00:03:52.160 the lab and they would play economic type games where you can either, at a certain point in the game, share

00:04:04.160 the winnings with your partner or steal all the winnings at the end of this little economic game.

00:04:11.040 And before they played, these women were told they would be given a little flask and drink it and they 0.93

00:04:20.320 would be told, you've either been given a hormone, a testosterone, or you've been given this other

00:04:32.960 chemical that we're not going to tell you yet. And after they played, they asked the women what did

00:04:39.600 they think? You played the game a certain way, you stole from your opponent or you shared with your

00:04:48.160 opponent. What hormone do you think you were given? And the women who stole from their opponent, they all 1.00

00:04:56.080 assumed, I must have been given testosterone. And the women who shared with their opponent said, I must have

00:05:02.800 been given this magical chemical. What is it? I really want it. But in fact, it was exactly the other way

00:05:10.800 around. The women who had been given testosterone shared with their opponent. The women who stole from 0.99

00:05:18.800 their opponent had actually just been given a placebo. They'd been given nothing. And that testosterone was

00:05:25.440 driving cooperation, not stealing from your opponent. Because to be a good teammate in a competitive

00:05:33.680 setting, you've really got to be fine-tuned to this. And if they do these studies of college soccer

00:05:39.040 teams and they rate them on, you know, 15 matrix assessments for how good are they really a team

00:05:47.200 player? Like, you know, do their eyes glance over their shoulder and spot their team? And how do they

00:05:51.760 modulate the tone of their voice to communicate well? And they also check testosterone levels as

00:05:58.720 they rise and vary from a day before the competition to pre-competition to during the

00:06:04.240 competition to after. And what they found is that the athletes whose testosterone goes up

00:06:13.200 are better team players. And we just have this thing dead wrong.

00:06:19.760 I'll let you ask me a question again, Brett. Sorry to rip off there, but I care a lot about this.

00:06:27.200 And it bums me out that we just have this point of view that is just wrong. It's not just wrong,

00:06:34.880 like philosophically wrong or analytically wrong. It's like scientifically wrong, biologically wrong.

00:06:45.920 Yeah. And I think that's really, I think that's counterintuitive for a lot of people. It's like

00:06:48.640 you said, most people think testosterone is this sort of rage inducing hormone that makes you selfish

00:06:54.000 and overly aggressive, but the research indicates otherwise. And we'll get more into the physiology

00:06:58.960 of competition and including testosterone, some of the other neurotransmitters and hormones that are

00:07:04.560 involved in the competitive process. But do you think another reason why there's a PR problem with

00:07:09.520 competition is that we are using the word competition to define two types of competition?

00:07:16.880 I think in the book, you talk about there's adaptive competition and maladaptive competition.

00:07:21.040 Yeah, that's, that's, that's really good insight, Brett, that, that we use one word to describe

00:07:29.120 two different things and we, uh, we don't parse them and separate them. We do understand we have

00:07:35.680 this bad, you know, we have this term for, you know, what is being a bad sport mean. And so we recognize

00:07:40.480 these differences, but we think that somehow it's fundamental to competition. Certain competitions

00:07:44.880 can give rise to lots of cheating. Certain competitions can give rise to poor performance.

00:07:53.280 The vast majority of competitions, especially if it's well-structured, gives rise to increased

00:07:57.280 performance, to good sportsmanship. The ancient Greeks, um, Ashley, my co-author and I were, you know,

00:08:05.280 we're kind of just fascinated because we were just brainstorming. We're like, what is ancient Greece known

00:08:09.360 for? Well, it's known for two things. It's known for the Olympics and it's known for giving us democracy.

00:08:14.320 And then we were like, I wonder, you know, is there a connection between those two in any way?

00:08:19.040 They both seem to be ancient Greece. Ancient Greece was a certain period of time. And so we looked it up.

00:08:25.120 Interestingly, the ancient Olympics were at first a religious festival and they, uh, a truce was part

00:08:35.120 of this because to travel across each other's lands, they needed to have a truce and they came together.

00:08:40.080 And as it grew in its popularity and these different sultans and kings of different

00:08:47.280 regions would come to attend this religious ceremony, it began to be a question, well,

00:08:52.640 who gets to light that fire that starts this religious ceremony?

00:08:57.600 And so they decided we'll have a foot race. It was a 200 yard long foot race and everybody

00:09:03.840 put up their best athlete to race in this foot race and somebody won. And then slow,

00:09:09.600 this religious festival slowly merged into what we know of as the Olympics.

00:09:14.240 And as the Olympics ensued, uh, the, the, it wasn't just like the athletes who went to, uh, Athens to

00:09:22.880 compete. It was actually a whole posse, right? Like the king and his philosophers and his poets and

00:09:31.680 slaves and his warriors who would, the warriors were often the people who were, uh, the athletes.

00:09:38.880 And they would come a month ahead of time and they would train, they would train for the Olympics.

00:09:43.760 So all these philosophers and poets were hanging out and they were watching these athletes

00:09:50.000 transform their bodies through training. And as they watched it, they began to think

00:09:55.680 and discuss amongst each other. You know, it's interesting because we have this philosophy of,

00:10:02.400 say somebody from an upper caste or an upper class person is better than a lower class person. But

00:10:09.280 look at this lower class soldier who's transforming his body. Maybe we have this wrong. Maybe you can 0.96

00:10:15.280 transform your mind. Maybe these people ought to have a voice. They ought to have essentially a vote.

00:10:23.280 And in this way, the origins of democracy were exactly

00:10:27.680 fostered in that month of training for the Olympics, that the Olympics gave rise to democracy itself.

00:10:39.600 And they loved good sportsmanship. And the, the Greeks were already always into these 0.97

00:10:45.760 games and little competitions with checkers and bones and card games and variations of that kind of

00:10:52.400 stuff. And they loved these sports. And, uh, there, there are these, uh, famous statues that

00:10:59.680 there's, uh, they're, they're kind of gone now, but you can find photos of them that are sort of

00:11:04.160 replicas. They were called the Zanes and there were some wrestlers that cheated and they rigged matches

00:11:12.080 in about the 400s BC or something like that. And the ancient Greeks immortalized those wrestling

00:11:19.920 cheaters with statues with statues outside of the, the, uh, uh, uh, Olympic, uh, stadium.

00:11:28.320 And they were there, stood there, you know, for a thousand or years or so, um, before they sort of

00:11:35.120 fell. But, uh, imagine that, imagine if rather than debating whether somebody was to get into say our

00:11:43.520 baseball hall of fame or football hall of fame, instead we actually immortalize them as cheaters

00:11:51.120 outside of the hall of fame. So they got a spot at the hall of fame just on the outside.

00:11:55.680 Uh, the ancient Greeks, uh, really understood this difference between adaptive and maladaptive

00:12:02.800 competition. It was deeply imbued into their philosophy and they, uh, they had specific different

00:12:11.040 words for both types. And we've lost that as a society today.

00:12:15.600 Yeah. And it was interesting to you, you highlighted the books that they didn't just

00:12:18.320 compete over sports. They competed at the Olympics. There was like poetry competitions

00:12:23.280 or oratory competitions. Um, even their political process was competitive. You, you try to joust to

00:12:30.000 be the best, uh, or a titian, best red titian. Um, and there was competition, like people judged

00:12:36.400 each other by that, but in the end, it sort of produced this sort of flourishing as they would call

00:12:39.920 it this excellence. Um, because of it. Right. The goal of competition was not winning itself.

00:12:46.240 Competition was a process that makes you better. And to be clear, it's not just like when, and when

00:12:54.480 we say that even listeners might go, Hey, wait a minute, what do you, what do you, what like,

00:13:00.720 think about calmly here. Competition makes us better. The first and biggest ingredient is that training,

00:13:08.880 right? Knowing that people have to compete, they train and they get better through the training.

00:13:18.720 Even if in the actual event itself, they may do well or do poorly, whatever it is. If just to bring

00:13:25.920 that back to, you know, say where we started with like kids in our modern society, um, scholars

00:13:31.120 will begin to study things like say math competitions. And what they've found is that

00:13:39.280 even kids whose parents signed them up for the math contest or the math club, and they don't like

00:13:47.040 math, but their parents sort of forced them to do it, come out of it, really enjoying it and learning

00:13:54.640 way more math than they would have in regular class. And it's largely because it's a, it's a team

00:14:03.920 environment. You're part of a team. You don't want to let your team down. So you're in addition to your

00:14:09.760 intrinsic drive to say, be good at math, which they may not have. They have this, uh, social drive to

00:14:17.440 support their team and not let their team down. And they train, they get better. And even if, uh,

00:14:24.800 in that moment of competition, they don't win or whatever, they still come away with a, a really

00:14:29.920 good experience. And they don't feel like a loser because they lost. They, they're very aware that they

00:14:37.200 got a lot better. And in fact, the scholars who've been doing this research have begun to look across

00:14:43.920 all sorts of other competitions in schools. And there is quite a significant movement akin to

00:14:52.240 say how startups, startup competitions to have weekend long accelerators, where you have a challenge

00:14:59.520 and over the course of the weekend, you equip with ideas and you draw on resources. And by Sunday,

00:15:03.280 you make pitches and some people get funding in a similar way. This sort of gamified, uh, academic

00:15:10.880 competitions are really successful. And most interestingly, and most effectively, they're

00:15:18.080 used in actually driving the teaching of creativity. So in the science of creativity,

00:15:24.800 we are learning that, yes, some people's brains are more naturally adapted to it than others. Just

00:15:30.480 like a basketball player might, it helps to be tall in basketball. Um, but everybody can get better

00:15:36.800 at basketball and everybody can get better at being creative and especially means to not just teach

00:15:42.880 it as an art form, but to teach creativity in the sciences and to teach it in history classes and

00:15:47.680 to use competitions and sort of short term academic competitions are really successful at driving up

00:15:55.760 motivation, engaging young learners, um, and getting students to really, um, internalize what they're

00:16:03.600 learning, have some drive. It, it, not that you want to do it every day, but it really works.

00:16:10.400 And I think the key thing here about competition is to understand that some of the difference

00:16:14.640 between short term and long term competition, you know, competition is stressful. Long term stress

00:16:19.920 is maladaptive. It hurts you, wears you down, it destroys a lot of the hormones that your body needs,

00:16:25.360 but short term competition where you train and prepare and then you have a stressful period of time

00:16:32.320 where you're competing and performance stress can be good for you and can actually help your

00:16:36.800 performance. And then you have rest and recuperation after. So this is really important, training,

00:16:42.800 competition, rest and recuperation. If you never let people rest, you know, endless competition is

00:16:48.080 bad for them, but training, competing and resting as a cycle is really effective at driving performance

00:16:55.200 and engagement. So I think, um, from what you just said, we can kind of get an idea, kind of refine

00:17:00.240 what adaptive competition and maladaptive competition looks like. So it sounds like adaptive competition

00:17:05.280 is, is process focused. It's focused on the training and that you're going to get better through the

00:17:09.440 process. Maladaptive competition is primarily focused on winning or losing.

00:17:14.480 And, uh, and, uh, not, and, and not providing rest and recuperation and, and not allowing that phase

00:17:22.960 of training, um, uh, where people can creative problem solve their strategies, where they can improve

00:17:36.080 their, their skill sets that'll be drawn upon in the competition. Um, look, I mean, look, I, I can with my

00:17:45.840 brother start washing the dishes, you know, at our summer house and next thing, you know, it turns into a

00:17:50.460 competition, you know, and it's fun. Right. And, and, you know, when we were kids and we would do that, it could get

00:17:56.740 out of hand and there's no skill building. I mean, the competition can break out anywhere, anytime. Uh, and it doesn't

00:18:05.060 necessarily mean it's good or it's bad. I, and I don't know that we're obsessed with that. I think

00:18:10.620 what we're thinking about here is what is the proper role of competition in, uh, in, in our, especially

00:18:17.620 our children's lives where we're most protective and then also long-term in our regular sort of working

00:18:23.060 lives. So it sounds like the ancient Greeks and most of humanity is kind of intuitively understood,

00:18:29.000 um, how competition can improve performance, but it wasn't until the 19th century,

00:18:35.040 where we started getting scientific about it. Um, can you tell us about the study that the guy did

00:18:40.620 with like, I think it was like a rowing machine, uh, back in the 1800s where he found that, yeah,

00:18:46.080 competition can actually help improve some individual's performance. Right. The very first

00:18:51.180 scientific study, this is a guy triplet and he created this, uh, it's a rowing machine where you,

00:18:57.140 you didn't pull on an oar, you, you sort of rotated this thing in a circle. He tried to come up with a

00:19:03.420 unique physical contest that nobody had a pre skill. Nobody was already good at it. No one was

00:19:10.020 naturally doing this motion. And he tested all sorts of people on this competing, pushing themselves

00:19:17.960 as hard as they could. And, and what Ashley and I got drawn to, especially was the work he did on

00:19:24.680 children. And he found that sure enough, you know, if you ask a child to go as fast as you can,

00:19:31.240 put yourself, drive yourself, you know, they would, they would do pretty good. But if you put them in

00:19:36.780 competition with another person, they would do even better for the most part, but not everybody.

00:19:43.480 I mean, has, has this research been replicated? This type of research has been replicated the

00:19:49.100 premise of it, you know, thousands of times in thousands of different ways and in every dimension

00:19:55.120 of our life, that how do people do in competition versus how do they do by just driving themselves?

00:20:02.480 And where this body of science and say, where did we go wrong as a society in interpreting this

00:20:10.620 was we would, you know, you'll always see some kids who up in a competition, they do poorly. They

00:20:19.320 don't like it. It's not working for them. And they do far worse than they would be if they just drove

00:20:27.120 themselves. And there was this kind of a moral judgment to say, well, then competition is bad

00:20:32.880 rather than looking more acutely or more granularly at what are all these studies saying about when

00:20:40.840 does competition lead to poor performance? It's a subset of the results. Why is it happening? What are

00:20:49.500 the conditions? And typically seems to be some form of maladaptive competition. But the most fundamental

00:20:55.960 rule here of all, the one that all of the studies show, is that what works is when it's a fair

00:21:04.860 contest. When, say, going back to those two kids on this rotating rowing machine, that when one kid

00:21:14.360 was up against another kid who was just flat out better and faster, and the kid who wasn't as good

00:21:21.980 felt like she had no chance, she couldn't beat this person, then she would crumble.

00:21:31.680 And interestingly, the person was really good, unchallenged, you know, coasted. So both of them

00:21:39.840 would do worse. But across all of this body of research, when people feel like it's a fair

00:21:45.940 contest, they tend to do really, really do improve. There's a, there's a study about the Air Force

00:21:54.000 Academy that, can I, can I tell people about this? Yeah, no, I was hoping you'd bring it up. Here's

00:21:58.900 a modern example of this. So really interesting one. So at the Air Force Academy,

00:22:06.060 I think, I'm getting right, maybe about six years ago, you know, to even to get into the Air Force

00:22:15.380 Academy, it's one of our top institutions, and you need to get a letter of recommendation from

00:22:20.260 a congressperson or administrative person, and you, you know, you have to have good grades. But even then,

00:22:27.540 there are students there, young cadets, who, who don't survive, and they drop out. And, you know,

00:22:37.720 across the board in the military, their strategy is, has been of late, like, you know, we used to be

00:22:42.860 proud of the fact that we would cut kids, and they would drop out. But now they realize, you know, we need

00:22:47.920 every one of these good kids we can get. And we need to stop, like, these mechanisms that disempower

00:22:55.660 them, we want to find a way to help them all be really good cadets, really good future soldiers,

00:23:02.680 really good people in our society. So these economists had this idea, and they wanted to

00:23:08.760 use these comparative effects, this social effect. And they had this idea. So to me, I call it the

00:23:16.120 J. Edmark effect, because when I was in ninth grade, in eighth grade, there was this kid, J. Edmark,

00:23:22.900 and he was my friend. And his mom, whenever I go to his house, she was always asking him to hang out

00:23:28.500 with Poe, because I was a good student, and he wasn't a good student. She kept figuring I would

00:23:33.320 rub off on him. And all of my good habits would rub off on him. So a similar idea was, was conceived of

00:23:39.940 at the Air Force by these economists who were consulting with the Air Force Academy. And they created

00:23:45.580 these platoons, these groups of 30 incoming freshmen. And they paired up, like, the group,

00:23:59.000 like, half of these little platoons were students who were at risk, because, you know, they were on

00:24:05.800 the bubble, and of maybe not succeeding once they got there. And they paired them up with really high

00:24:12.940 performing young cadets. And they thought that just by living in the same dorm, by eating together,

00:24:20.460 by studying together, by training together, that the high performers rub off on the low performers.

00:24:27.360 And they thought this was going to be this magic social effect. And the school year went on,

00:24:32.460 and they started to see some problems right away. And they got worried, but it was an economic

00:24:38.380 experiment, and they were measuring it and doing it. And by the end of the year, they were like,

00:24:42.080 uh-oh, we messed up. And that the low performers had not been rubbed off on by the high performers.

00:24:49.940 They had, like, that girl who was doing the rowing machine who collapsed and crumbled. They had

00:24:56.300 withdrawn from the high performers. So they would eat together, but they'd go to the other end of the

00:25:02.640 table. They would study together, but they'd go to a different part of the library. They had moved

00:25:07.860 their bunks. They had sort of protected themselves from this endless comparison to someone for whom

00:25:14.080 they could not really compete. It was not a fair contest, and they'd pulled away.

00:25:18.280 Unfortunately, the Air Force had already seeded, essentially, next year's dorms, if you will. So

00:25:27.900 they actually did this for two years, and the second year's results were just like the first

00:25:32.220 years. And the reason we know about this study, because, you know, failed studies, you think,

00:25:36.500 well, they never appear in the press, or they never appear in the journals, but was that,

00:25:41.300 essentially, afterwards, in order to create these dorms of high performers and low performers,

00:25:48.820 they had to take out the middle performers. And they put all the middle performers, you know,

00:25:52.260 in their own dorms and in their own troops. And what they found over there, when they looked at them,

00:25:57.780 almost as an afterthought, was that they had done really well as middle performers over the course of

00:26:05.380 that first year of their freshman year. All of them had a fair contest. On any given day,

00:26:12.640 they could outperform each other, because through focus and hard work and extra effort.

00:26:21.240 And so there was almost a sense that on a daily basis, you could outshine your competitors

00:26:27.580 by applying drive and hard work and concentration. And as a result, they had pushed each other

00:26:37.140 up to the level of the high performers. All of them. And that a fair, essentially the lesson here

00:26:44.120 is that fair contests, where kids literally experience that capacity, you know, we can say forever,

00:26:53.440 it's all about hard work, son. You know, you just got to try, you know, or, or as I famously,

00:27:00.160 you know, had written in Nurture Shock and New York Magazine years before, you know,

00:27:04.660 praising children to call attention to the role of hard work. Well, you can talk till you're blue in the face.

00:27:12.380 You actually have to give kids a chance to experience it. And that chance is where they literally are

00:27:21.120 kind of like, just about even with the other people around them. But if they try harder,

00:27:27.380 if they're like, you know, dad's been saying this for a long time, maybe I'll, maybe I'll try it,

00:27:31.880 this hard work stuff. It works. And they make that sort of intrinsic internal connection that,

00:27:39.480 that, that this hard work stuff that everyone's always talking about actually can help you.

00:27:44.340 That's really, so some great insights there about being mindful about the competitions you place

00:27:48.400 yourself in or your kids in. So, I mean, this is not just like, it doesn't have to be like,

00:27:53.400 that's a reply to formal competition, but let's say you're trying to improve, I don't know, in your

00:27:59.940 physical fitness in some capacity. You don't want to partner up with a really super fit guy.

00:28:04.940 You want to find someone who's maybe just a little bit better than you or about the same

00:28:08.560 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, 0.99

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 0.96

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 0.96

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

00:34:01.080 about eight percent better than male financial analysts. Women are better at seeing the risks than 0.82

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.85

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, 1.00

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 0.59

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 1.00

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 1.00

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.

00:45:47.040 Yeah.

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

00:53:11.020 the competitive process that way?

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 0.99

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, 0.71

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.

01:01:43.160 Thank you, Brett.

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,

01:02:35.320 this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - January 10, 2017

#268： How the Science of Competition Can Make You a Better Man

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