Speaker 1: Pushkin. So our story actually begins a couple of decades
Speaker 1: ago at a dinner party thrown by a really rich
Speaker 1: guy in snowmass Colorado. He'd invited a bunch of his friends,
Speaker 1: plus two younger women he didn't really know. One was
Speaker 1: a writer who happened to be in town, Rebecca Sulman.
Speaker 1: It was this glam house that looked like a Ralph laurentad,
Speaker 1: with the chelims and woodburning stove and rusticity, some sort
Speaker 1: of luxury roughing it fantasy vacation home. And it was
Speaker 1: mostly older people, and clearly people who were wealthy and
Speaker 1: powerful and thought of themselves as important. And we were
Speaker 1: both about forty and were clearly like the young ingeneus
Speaker 1: in the room. Rebecca had gone to Colorado to visit
Speaker 1: her friend Sally. Sally had talked her into going to
Speaker 1: this party, and the point of the party was to
Speaker 1: make Rebecca feel ignored, at least that's how she felt.
Speaker 1: The host hardly said a word to her until they
Speaker 1: were about to leave, and then came over to us
Speaker 1: and said to me, so, I hear you've written a
Speaker 1: couple of books, And at that point, how many books
Speaker 1: had you written? I think seven, which is not technically
Speaker 1: a couple. And so I said several actually, and he said, oh,
Speaker 1: and what are they about in this already intensely patronizing town.
Speaker 1: My most recent one had been about Edward Moybridge at
Speaker 1: Moybridge's transformation of photography into a technology that could capture motion.
Speaker 1: And he interrupted me to tell me that I should
Speaker 1: know about the very important Moybridge book that had just
Speaker 1: come out, and he was about to explain to you
Speaker 1: about Wood Moybridge. He did proceed to explain about the
Speaker 1: very important Moybridge book I should know about. The host
Speaker 1: went on and on and on about this book about
Speaker 1: the British photographer that both women could tell he hadn't
Speaker 1: actually read. They could tell this because Rebecca had written
Speaker 1: the book River of Shadows, Edward Moybridge and the Technological
Speaker 1: wild West. It took my friend Sally three or four
Speaker 1: times of trying to interject that's her book before he
Speaker 1: actually listened to her enough to shut the fuck up.
Speaker 1: And so it's kind of glorious and horrific as a
Speaker 1: pristine shining diamond example, a pristine shining diamond like example.
Speaker 1: But of what the answer didn't leap instantly to Rebecca's mind,
Speaker 1: she filed the rich guy away as an example of something.
Speaker 1: It took her five years to find the words to
Speaker 1: fully express what it had been an example of. But
Speaker 1: then one morning she sat down and wrote a piece
Speaker 1: Men Explain Things to Me, she called it. It was
Speaker 1: an instant classic. I wrote the essay in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, and some mysterious, unnamed person who had always
Speaker 1: assumed as a woman coined the term man explaining in
Speaker 1: response to it. And then the world was off and
Speaker 1: running when you published the original essay. Did you get
Speaker 1: any kind of backlash? Was there any hostility? I got
Speaker 1: a very funny letter from a man who said he'd
Speaker 1: never patronized a woman in his life, and I just
Speaker 1: needed to get over my feelings of inferiority and speak up.
Speaker 1: And he proceeded to patronize. Why. Yes, well, welcome to
Speaker 1: my gender. Michael, you sound surprised. What Rebecca got next
Speaker 1: was an avalanche of similar stories, all from women. There
Speaker 1: is the woman who listened to a man explain how
Speaker 1: to pronounce her own name. There was the female scientist
Speaker 1: to whom a man explained the contents of her own
Speaker 1: academic paper. There was a one about well, I shouldn't
Speaker 1: really be the one telling you about this. Can you
Speaker 1: walk me through a few of them? Somebody tweets a
Speaker 1: photograph of a woman sharpshooter in last Summer's Olympics, and
Speaker 1: a man explains that she's got the wrong stance, and
Speaker 1: he's explaining she should hold it with both hands. He's wrong,
Speaker 1: of course, men explaining sports to professional female athletes turned
Speaker 1: out to be a whole subgenre of man's plaining. Molly Sidell,
Speaker 1: who won a silver or bronze medal in track in
Speaker 1: the Olympics a few years ago, tweeted, on my flight,
Speaker 1: I was talking to a guy next to me and
Speaker 1: it came up that I run. He starts telling me
Speaker 1: how I need to train high mileage and pulls up
Speaker 1: an analysis he'd made a a pro runner's training on
Speaker 1: his phone. The pro runner was me, it was my training.
Speaker 1: Didn't have the heart to tell him, just as Rebecca
Speaker 1: hadn't had the heart to tell the rich guy that
Speaker 1: he was lecturing her about a book she herself had written.
Speaker 1: She's obviously found the heart since can I just read
Speaker 1: you one? I have an almost bottomless appetite. Here's a
Speaker 1: woman named Eileen Mary O'Connell, who said on Twitter a
Speaker 1: few years ago, thinking about the time that I said
Speaker 1: I was distantly related to Marie Curie, and a man explained,
Speaker 1: it's pronounced Mariah Carey. I'm Michael Lewis, pronounced Michael Lewis.
Speaker 1: And this is against the rules where we explore on
Speaker 1: fairness in American life by looking at what's happened to
Speaker 1: various characters in American life. This season is about experts,
Speaker 1: and this episode is about men, or any way about
Speaker 1: this thing that men do because they really are naturally
Speaker 1: superior to women at one thing, offering themselves up as
Speaker 1: experts when they clearly are not. Now, I am, of
Speaker 1: course a man, and as a man, I might offer
Speaker 1: you with total confidence all kinds of theories about why
Speaker 1: we are the way we are. I could explain until
Speaker 1: every oxygen molecule is sucked out of the room why
Speaker 1: men are so ready to explain things to people who
Speaker 1: know more about those things than we do. But let
Speaker 1: me turn instead to the journalists Claire Shipment and Katty
Speaker 1: k because they wrote an entire book that offers up
Speaker 1: one really plausible theory, and I actually read it. It's
Speaker 1: called The confidence code. Columbia University has come up with
Speaker 1: a phrase, which we love, is called honest overconfidence. That's
Speaker 1: Caddy Kay and Columbia reckons that men tend to overestimate
Speaker 1: their ability by something like thirty percent. Women tend to
Speaker 1: underestimate their ability, but men tend to overestimate their ability.
Speaker 1: And they call it honest over confidence because it's not
Speaker 1: that they're pretending they know more. They actually believe they
Speaker 1: are about thirty percent better than they are. Now we've
Speaker 1: all learned to be skeptical about this sort of social science.
Speaker 1: Some researcher discovers something shocking about human nature and then
Speaker 1: it turns out to be not really true, or only
Speaker 1: sort of true, or true only in certain circumstances. But
Speaker 1: in the case of male over confidence, the findings are
Speaker 1: totally solid. If you want to do a social science
Speaker 1: test with a bunch of graduate students and you want
Speaker 1: to make sure you know in advance what the answer
Speaker 1: is going to be, you give a group of men
Speaker 1: and women a scientific reasoning quiz, and the men will
Speaker 1: nearly always say they're going to perform better than they
Speaker 1: actually do, and the women will nearly always say they're
Speaker 1: going to perform worse than they actually do. And why
Speaker 1: is this? I know it's a hard question to answer,
Speaker 1: but when does this first manifest itself in life? Do
Speaker 1: little girls and little boys exhibit this tendency or does
Speaker 1: it only happen later in life. This really starts to
Speaker 1: manifest itself in middle school, around puberty. We commissioned a
Speaker 1: survey for our book on Confidence and Girls that suggests
Speaker 1: that between the ages of nine and about thirteen, girls
Speaker 1: lose a third of their confidence and they never get
Speaker 1: it back. Obviously, boys can grow up to be under
Speaker 1: confident men, and girls can grow up to be confident women.
Speaker 1: And obviously not every man longs to explain things that
Speaker 1: he shouldn't. But there's an undeniable pattern here men thinking
Speaker 1: they have an expertise that they don't. You really don't
Speaker 1: have to look any further than Wall Street for examples.
Speaker 1: Imagine that you are an individual investor, maybe not that active,
Speaker 1: but occasionally trading. That's Terry o'deane, a finance professor at
Speaker 1: UC Berkeley. He and his colleague Brad Barber made what
Speaker 1: might be the purest case study of mail over confidence.
Speaker 1: But they set out to just look at how ordinary
Speaker 1: people traded in the stock market. You open up the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal one morning, you read a paragraph about
Speaker 1: some company. You say, Wow, that really sounds great. I
Speaker 1: think I'll buy it. So you don't pause and say,
Speaker 1: maybe professional investors already know this, It's already been incorporated
Speaker 1: into price. You just say, sounds like a good idea,
Speaker 1: I'll buy. Maybe another investor reads the same stuff, says
Speaker 1: intriguing company. But I really don't know enough to place
Speaker 1: a trade, and I gotta get to work. So what's
Speaker 1: the difference between over confidence and confidence? I can see
Speaker 1: how confidence is sort of what leads thought to action. Yes,
Speaker 1: but what's the difference just confidence? Why is it over
Speaker 1: confident systematically on the side of thinking you know more
Speaker 1: than you do and that's what leads you to buy
Speaker 1: the stock or sell the stock. Yes, I think it
Speaker 1: takes a great deal of hubris to think you are
Speaker 1: going to do part time if you have a regular job,
Speaker 1: you are going to do what professional money managers struggle
Speaker 1: to do, and many never succeed at. Unless you're trading
Speaker 1: on inside information, which is illegal. When you make a
Speaker 1: bet on the price of some stock, you're basically betting
Speaker 1: on the flip of a coin, and you're paying a
Speaker 1: commission each time you do it over and over. The
Speaker 1: smartest professional investors fail to outperform the market by picking stocks.
Speaker 1: For an amateur to even try, well, it's a lot
Speaker 1: like man explaining, Terry Odeane thought so too. He wondered
Speaker 1: whether there was any difference between how men and women
Speaker 1: behaved in the market, So he and his colleague got
Speaker 1: a hold of data from online brokerage accounts. They sorted
Speaker 1: the money into three buckets, money managed by single men,
Speaker 1: money managed by single women, and money managed by married couples.
Speaker 1: Men did worse than women, and not just a little worse.
Speaker 1: Both men and women underperformed to buy and hold approach,
Speaker 1: but men underperformed by one percentage point more a year
Speaker 1: on average than women. Single men by one point four
Speaker 1: percentage points more a year on average than single women,
Speaker 1: which is actually quite significant. Yes, it sounds like a
Speaker 1: little but if you compound that over a lifetime. Even occasionally,
Speaker 1: financial reporters will say, well does anyone really care about
Speaker 1: one percent? And what I usually say is, next time
Speaker 1: you're shopping for a mortgage, ask yourself that question, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, a one percentage point difference in your mortgage
Speaker 1: is going to add up to tens of thousands or
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of a
Speaker 1: thirty year mortgage. Hearing this, you might conclude that it
Speaker 1: would all be better off if Wall Street were overhauled
Speaker 1: and women were put in charge of the financial risk taking.
Speaker 1: But what we got instead was a world historic financial
Speaker 1: crisis engineered by very confident men. Even that didn't cause
Speaker 1: anyone to ask if leaving the financial risk taking to
Speaker 1: men was a great idea, except in Iceland. In Iceland,
Speaker 1: they actually figured it out. They replaced the men in
Speaker 1: the banks with women, and the male prime minister with
Speaker 1: a woman who promised never again to let icelandic men
Speaker 1: touch her banks. Outside of Iceland, men still mostly decide
Speaker 1: what to do with big piles of money. Terry o'deane's
Speaker 1: findings have gone ignored. But has anybody ever called you
Speaker 1: say thank you, Terry. I have my job managing the
Speaker 1: stock portfolio because of your paper. That has never happened.
Speaker 1: One thing did happen. I got a letter once. Shortly
Speaker 1: after paper got, you know, some coverage in the popular press.
Speaker 1: A woman wrote said, I want to thank you. She's
Speaker 1: in her sixties, and she said, my husband has been
Speaker 1: actively trading our savings and I've been very nervous about
Speaker 1: it for the last few years. And then I read
Speaker 1: about your paper and I told him to stop actively
Speaker 1: trading my savings. So I thought, well, that feels good
Speaker 1: against the rules, will be right back. Let's recap our
Speaker 1: findings thus far. Men are especially capable of thinking they
Speaker 1: know things they really don't. They feel a weird compulsion
Speaker 1: to explain subjects to people who know more about those
Speaker 1: subjects than they, and they are more likely than people
Speaker 1: who are not men to think they know things that
Speaker 1: are totally unknowable. Sometimes they even act on that belief
Speaker 1: and lose huge piles of money. But it's not really
Speaker 1: men's fault, or rather, it's not the fault of any
Speaker 1: individual man. If a man is deluded into believing he
Speaker 1: knows more than he actually does, it's because he's surrounded
Speaker 1: by people who share his delusion, who encourage his over confidence.
Speaker 1: The writer Maria Kanakova wrote a whole book about this,
Speaker 1: The Confidence Game. It was called It was all about
Speaker 1: con artists, but it is also about what con artists
Speaker 1: tell us about our culture. Exhibit A was a man
Speaker 1: named Ferdinand Waldo Damara, who had a gift for persuading
Speaker 1: people that he knew stuff that he did not were
Speaker 1: during the Korean War, and he decides that he's going
Speaker 1: to steal the credentials of a doctor in Canada and
Speaker 1: apply to be a doctor on a ship, a military doctor,
Speaker 1: because he actually identifies a perfect opportunity. Why would he
Speaker 1: even want to do that? Like, why would why would
Speaker 1: you want to be a doctor on a ship? So
Speaker 1: Damara is someone who is so narcissistic, so full of
Speaker 1: himself that he thinks that he is the best person
Speaker 1: in the world, and he loves more than anything else,
Speaker 1: playing god. And what is the ultimate profession where you
Speaker 1: really get to play god. It's being a surgeon. It's
Speaker 1: actually having people's lives in your hands. So he falsified
Speaker 1: his credentials, ended up getting an appointment, and ended up
Speaker 1: being the sole physician aboard this ship heading to Korea
Speaker 1: during the war. Not only that, but he then ended
Speaker 1: up operating on a ship full of soldiers who had
Speaker 1: been in an ambush. So he ended up operating on
Speaker 1: all of them and, as he said, saving their lives.
Speaker 1: But we don't actually know what happened you might see
Speaker 1: this imposters an extreme example, but you might also see
Speaker 1: them as a case in point. But this feels like
Speaker 1: a very male thing. I have a very hard time
Speaker 1: imagining a woman doing it. I agree, I agree, And
Speaker 1: I think that those types of coins that's why we
Speaker 1: don't really see we don't know any stories of women
Speaker 1: pulling something like that off all of the female cons
Speaker 1: that I was able to kind of unearth when I
Speaker 1: was when I was researching the Confidence Game, where things like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to pretend to be the daughter of Carnegie
Speaker 1: so that I can get people to loan me lots
Speaker 1: of money because they think that I'm going to come
Speaker 1: into my inheritance or something like that. But it's not
Speaker 1: a pretensive expertise. It's it's something very different. It's I'm
Speaker 1: not who I say I am, but it's not and
Speaker 1: I can do what I can't actually do. I am
Speaker 1: heir to this fortune, I'm a socialite and I have
Speaker 1: connections to royalty. I am part of the aristocracy. Why
Speaker 1: is it you think women don't pretend to expertise. I
Speaker 1: think that actually just because of the type of society
Speaker 1: we're in, the fact that we are in a male
Speaker 1: dominated world that female experts tend to be questioned more.
Speaker 1: If a woman says I'm the best surgeon you've ever seen,
Speaker 1: red flags are going to start waving. Con Artists pick
Speaker 1: up on psychological cues. That's how they can us. The
Speaker 1: cue here is that when we hear the word expert,
Speaker 1: we form a picture in our head. And that picture
Speaker 1: is of a man. My husband and I were on
Speaker 1: a pretty long flight. Her name is Aminemogul, doctor Aminemogul,
Speaker 1: and I was sitting it was like a triple seven jet,
Speaker 1: So I was sitting close to the aisle and in
Speaker 1: the middle section, and there was a gentleman who was
Speaker 1: walking back from the restrooms who was seated just one
Speaker 1: row behind me, to my left, and he just completely collapsed.
Speaker 1: I mean he just fell down, face forward, and a
Speaker 1: flight attendant immediately rushed over, and so she shouted to
Speaker 1: find out if there was anyone who was a doctor
Speaker 1: on the plane. Amina wasn't just any doctor. She was
Speaker 1: a former army doctor who now worked as a general practitioner.
Speaker 1: She'd been trained for battlefield emergencies. She was exactly the
Speaker 1: kind of doctor you'd won in this moment, and she
Speaker 1: was right there she'd seen it all. So I stood
Speaker 1: up and I said, I'm a doctor. And right behind
Speaker 1: this gentleman's row was a older male nurse. He identified
Speaker 1: himself as a nurse. He was a Caucasian. I'm South Asian,
Speaker 1: and he stepped up and the flight attendant kind of
Speaker 1: completely ignored me. And my husband was seated next to me.
Speaker 1: He's a pretty tall Caucasian guy, and he tried to
Speaker 1: alert the flight attendant and said, hey, my wife is here.
Speaker 1: She's a doctor. And she looked at me, and then
Speaker 1: she looked at him and she said, we have the
Speaker 1: help that we need. And and that was that. Do
Speaker 1: you think she looked at you and thought not doctor autely? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: And actually, you know what, now that I think about it,
Speaker 1: I think she actually said, what you're a doctor, like
Speaker 1: like it was somehow unbelievable. And my husband goes, yeah,
Speaker 1: she's a doctor, and then she just looked at him
Speaker 1: and said, oh okay, and then just kind of carried on.
Speaker 1: And I looked at my husband and I looked at
Speaker 1: each other and we were just like, well, that was bizarre. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: they were this man who might be dying on the
Speaker 1: floor of the cot and I'm thinking to myself, Wow,
Speaker 1: I hope he's okay. Unfortunately, it never occurred to the
Speaker 1: male nurse or anyone else that they were in the
Speaker 1: presence of someone who might know more than they did.
Speaker 1: But the truth was that Ameda didn't give the episode
Speaker 1: much thought until she stumbled upon a Facebook group of
Speaker 1: female doctors in which another woman described how she'd just
Speaker 1: come off a flight with some medical emergency and she
Speaker 1: shouted that she was a doctor, and everyone had just
Speaker 1: ignored her, and a lot of people just started chiming
Speaker 1: in with their anecdotes, and there were a lot of them.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of them. I was kind of
Speaker 1: shocked at how many other people had been through the
Speaker 1: same thing. That's how doctor Amina Mogul found out that
Speaker 1: this was actually a thing. Invisible female doctors on planes.
Speaker 1: Not even a man wants to die on an airplane
Speaker 1: because no one can see the female doctor in seat
Speaker 1: eighteen B. It's clearly not healthy for any society to
Speaker 1: treat men as if they know more than they actually
Speaker 1: do and women as if they know less. It encourages
Speaker 1: men to become imposters. It drags women with actual knowledge
Speaker 1: into imposter syndrome. It cheats the entire society of expertise,
Speaker 1: and so the obvious question is why does this happen?
Speaker 1: Before you or I answer that question, let's describe, or
Speaker 1: let's let Caddy K describe. One final science experiment done
Speaker 1: a few years ago by an American psychologist named Zach Estes.
Speaker 1: He sat a group of men and women and gave
Speaker 1: them a spatial awareness test. It's a series of like
Speaker 1: Rubik's cube type puzzles on a computer screen, and you
Speaker 1: have to solve these puzzles, and he gives them the
Speaker 1: same test, and the women do significantly less well than
Speaker 1: the men do. So Professor Estes goes back over the
Speaker 1: results and he sees that what's happened is that the
Speaker 1: women have skipped questions more often than the men have.
Speaker 1: And he thought that was interesting. The women were basically
Speaker 1: saying they didn't know the answer to a question a
Speaker 1: lot more than the men, and it wasn't because the
Speaker 1: men were more likely to know the answers. The next test,
Speaker 1: he gives the same group another set and he says, okay,
Speaker 1: now no one is allowed to skip anything. No omissions
Speaker 1: is what he calls it. So no one's allowed to
Speaker 1: skip anything, and guess what. On the test where the
Speaker 1: women have to answer the questions, they do just as
Speaker 1: well as the men. Sometimes it is better to think
Speaker 1: you know the answer to the question when you don't,
Speaker 1: because it leads you to answer the question rather than
Speaker 1: just leave it blank. That's the joy of overconfidence. It pays,
Speaker 1: and not just in a social science lab. In real life. Obviously,
Speaker 1: no one knows your cards except for you, and all
Speaker 1: they see is how you present yourself, right. The only
Speaker 1: information that's available is how you play. After Maria Kannakova
Speaker 1: wrote her a book about con artists, she stumbled upon
Speaker 1: a book called The Theory of Games by a pair
Speaker 1: of genius mathematicians named von Neumann and Morgenstern. Morgenstern had
Speaker 1: gone looking for games that resembled real life. He had
Speaker 1: this idea that if he could figure out the smartest
Speaker 1: way to play certain games, he could also figure out
Speaker 1: the smartest way to deal with a lot of situations
Speaker 1: in real life. He has this whole passage where he
Speaker 1: says that chess is boring, like chess is a bullshit game.
Speaker 1: Don't have me play chess because I can solve it. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm creating this thing that's going to become the computer.
Speaker 1: Give me enough computing power and I tell you the
Speaker 1: right move. That's not life. That doesn't help me make
Speaker 1: decisions in life. How do I decide in a nuclear
Speaker 1: war situation? He actually, you know, at that time he
Speaker 1: was advising the National Security Council, so this was not abstract.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, in roulette also total bullshit, because
Speaker 1: that's just gambling, that's chance. So that's almost the you've
Speaker 1: got the end of the spectrum. You can chess on
Speaker 1: one of which is entirely rule based, and you can
Speaker 1: solve with AI and coin flipping or roulette or total chance,
Speaker 1: and somewhere in between is poker, and that's life too. Exactly.
Speaker 1: Poker is the model for its decision making in life,
Speaker 1: because both poker and life are games of incomplete information,
Speaker 1: he said. In real life this is a quote from him,
Speaker 1: which is one of my favorite quotes. He said, real
Speaker 1: life consists of bluffing, of little tactics, of deception, of
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what does this man think I
Speaker 1: mean to do. Maria had never played poker and had
Speaker 1: no clue how to act, but she set out to
Speaker 1: become a professional poker player. The first thing she did
Speaker 1: was hire a coach, a famous player, and you had
Speaker 1: no idea of even the rules of the game. And
Speaker 1: I told him that I didn't know much about poker.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know that there are fifty four cards
Speaker 1: in a duck and he just he said, wait, excuse me.
Speaker 1: I just his face just changed and I said what
Speaker 1: And he said how many cards are in a duck?
Speaker 1: And now I start doubting myself a little. I said
Speaker 1: fifty four and he's like, well, you know, theoretically with
Speaker 1: the jokers, yes, but when we're doing odds calculations, it
Speaker 1: would be better if you used fifty two, you know,
Speaker 1: just to keep things a little simple. Is help me
Speaker 1: list the ways pokers like life. One is that you're
Speaker 1: never going to have or like life's dis making decisions
Speaker 1: in life one is you you have incomplete information. You're
Speaker 1: never gonna have perfect information. You know, you're never gonna
Speaker 1: have perfect information, but you're getting more information, so you
Speaker 1: have to update and respond to new information, which is
Speaker 1: his own kind of skill. Right. And there are probabilities
Speaker 1: that can be calculated, but they're only partially knowable, right,
Speaker 1: Am I wrong about that? Correct? This is all correct?
Speaker 1: Anything can you think of anything else that goes on.
Speaker 1: So then you have, I mean, the incomplete information works
Speaker 1: in a way where no one knows what cards you have,
Speaker 1: and the only thing they can see is how you
Speaker 1: act right. And that's true of all the other people too.
Speaker 1: But when she started out, Maria really didn't know how
Speaker 1: to act at a poker table. I was in a
Speaker 1: totally foreign environment. I was suffering from major impostor syndrome.
Speaker 1: Professional pokers about ninety seven to ninety eight percent mail.
Speaker 1: So this is something where you know you are often
Speaker 1: the only woman at the table, And so I was
Speaker 1: letting things like, oh, I don't want them to think
Speaker 1: I'm a bitch guide my decisions, or oh, well, you
Speaker 1: know you're raising so much here, you can just take
Speaker 1: the pot. It's fine, I don't need to win every
Speaker 1: single one. Here you go. This isn't the story of
Speaker 1: Maria's career as a poker player. You can read that
Speaker 1: in the book. She eventually wrote the biggest bluff. She'd
Speaker 1: wind up winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. Five cots
Speaker 1: and Lonnie can hit to eliminate Maria Knakova. He's pretty
Speaker 1: good at hitting this. Nope, he misses on this occasion
Speaker 1: and Maria Knakova survives. For my own purposes here, I'm
Speaker 1: interested in a single little lesson she learned about over confidence.
Speaker 1: So I had this conversation with my coach and he
Speaker 1: told me something that, taken with my work on over confidence,
Speaker 1: I think, really got to kind of the heart of
Speaker 1: the issue of confidence versus over confidence at the poker table.
Speaker 1: So what he told me was that people who start
Speaker 1: out playing poker tend to fall into one of two camps.
Speaker 1: Either they are way too cautious, That's what I was doing.
Speaker 1: You know, they're scared and they play scared. Or they
Speaker 1: are way too aggressive. They bluff way too much. Bluffing
Speaker 1: is to poker what man splitting is, the conversation a
Speaker 1: pretense that you know more or have more than you
Speaker 1: really do. It didn't come naturally to Maria. She didn't bluff.
Speaker 1: She was suckered by men who did. So were the
Speaker 1: other men, because when you haven't seen the other person
Speaker 1: play well, you judge them by how they seem. When
Speaker 1: nobody knows who you are, people tend to, at least
Speaker 1: at the beginning, give you the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1: So if you sit down at a new table and
Speaker 1: you are incredibly aggressive. The first time you're incredibly aggressive,
Speaker 1: people are probably going to assume you have a good
Speaker 1: hand and they're going to fold. The second time, they'll
Speaker 1: probably assume you have a good hand and they'll fold.
Speaker 1: So he said, if you're going to pick one extreme,
Speaker 1: you want to pick the aggressive extreme because aggressive players,
Speaker 1: you know, they tend to win more often, because aggression
Speaker 1: often pays off. So the first wave of washouts are
Speaker 1: the cautious people. Yes, so I would have lost my
Speaker 1: money long before the overconfident people. But also, when you're aggressive,
Speaker 1: you put people in more difficult situations. So if you're passive,
Speaker 1: you're easy to play against because other people can. Then
Speaker 1: you know, they know that when you're betting, you're strong.
Speaker 1: They know that when you're not betting, you're weak, and
Speaker 1: you become predictable. In professional poker, this eventually works itself out.
Speaker 1: You play thousands and thousands of hands with the same
Speaker 1: person and you see their cards after they've bluffed, and
Speaker 1: you learn not to take what they do at face value.
Speaker 1: But in real life, we don't usually get to play
Speaker 1: thousands of hands of the same game with the same people.
Speaker 1: In real life, we go to a dinner party with
Speaker 1: people we've never met. Real life is more like amateur poker.
Speaker 1: When you're aggressive, it becomes much more difficult, especially if
Speaker 1: you're smart. Aggressive that tends to win more money in
Speaker 1: the short term because confidence, actually, you know, is something
Speaker 1: at the poker table where confidence is part of the
Speaker 1: information that other people have. Maria had set out to
Speaker 1: see what poker could teach her about real life. One
Speaker 1: big thing it taught her was the power of overconfidence
Speaker 1: in all kinds of human interactions. Imagine two people coming
Speaker 1: into an interview right and being asked the exact same question,
Speaker 1: and someone asks me, okay, you know, do you know
Speaker 1: how to do this? And I say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I haven't worked on it in the last five years,
Speaker 1: but I can ramp up really quickly and I have
Speaker 1: all these components skills. Other person comes in and says, yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I could do it, no problem. Who's going to get
Speaker 1: hired right to me? Who was who actually might know more?
Speaker 1: Or the person who's like, yeah, totally, I know, I
Speaker 1: know exactly what this is. That approach works. People who
Speaker 1: are just overconfident oftentimes just get their way right right.
Speaker 1: When you were learning, did you feel like, when you
Speaker 1: were getting better, did you have a sense of yourself
Speaker 1: masculinizing yourself. Yeah, that's a funny way of putting it,
Speaker 1: but yeah I did. I had a conversation with my
Speaker 1: husband at some point where I said I need to
Speaker 1: grow bigger balls and he just looked at me like
Speaker 1: I was totally insane, and I was like, you know,
Speaker 1: I've just realized that I just I lack them completely
Speaker 1: and that's not good. He's like, yes, you do lack,
Speaker 1: and I'm okay with that. Here's the most unsettling thing
Speaker 1: about man splaining, and also the most unsettling thing about
Speaker 1: over confidence. Now that it's got a name, it just
Speaker 1: seems pathetic when some old rich guy tries to tell
Speaker 1: a famous female writer about her own book. We laugh,
Speaker 1: but we missed the point. The point is that most
Speaker 1: of the time he will leave that party feeling even
Speaker 1: more confident than he did before. Against the Rules is
Speaker 1: written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by
Speaker 1: Katherine Girardeau and Lydia Jean Cott. Julia Barton is our editor,
Speaker 1: with additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our
Speaker 1: fact checker and mil o'bell executive produces. Our music is
Speaker 1: created by John Evans and Matthias Bossi, a Stellwagen stympanette.
Speaker 1: We record our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly
Speaker 1: helmed by Tofa Ruth. Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame,
Speaker 1: John Snars, Carl mcgilori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Morgan Ratner, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Daniella Lakhan, Mary Beth Smith,
Speaker 1: and Jason Gambrel. Against the Rules is a production of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is
Speaker 1: a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening
Speaker 1: for four dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Look
Speaker 1: for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Keep in touch,
Speaker 1: sign up for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin dot Fm, or
Speaker 1: follow at Pushkin Pods. Define more Pushkin Podcasts, listen on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: I was thinking of my Rebetta Stulnes right, which I
Speaker 1: totally forgot hold on, hold on tofa Are you recording this?
Speaker 1: I was at a party and I was talking to
Speaker 1: a guy who worked in tech, and he was explaining
Speaker 1: to me how the business of podcasting works, and the
Speaker 1: thing about it is. I was genuinely listening to him,
Speaker 1: thinking that maybe he could tell me something I didn't
Speaker 1: know for some reason, like just silently letting him talk
Speaker 1: for like so long that eventually another guy who had
Speaker 1: been overhearing the conversation interrupted and said, are you seriously
Speaker 1: explaining to a professional podcast or the business of podcasting?
Speaker 1: And what did the guy do? Then he got embarrassed
Speaker 1: and he stopped talking. Yes, but think how many times
Speaker 1: that happens and nobody ever says anything. Yeah, well I
Speaker 1: didn't say anything.