Speaker 1: Pushkin chariots of fire. So where does the power come
Speaker 1: from to see the race to its hand from? If
Speaker 1: you're into watching white guys run, the movie never gets old.
Speaker 1: Even if you're not into that. It has one of
Speaker 1: the best coaching scenes ever filmed. Harold Abraham's a British
Speaker 1: sprinter is about to run thee hundred meter final in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenty four Olympics. His coach gazes out of
Speaker 1: his hotel room window at the stadium next door. The
Speaker 1: pistol sounds. The coach watches the sky over the stadium.
Speaker 1: Then he spies the British flag rising. That's how the
Speaker 1: coach learns that his runner has won the gold. There's
Speaker 1: a reason the coach isn't inside the stadium watching the race.
Speaker 1: He's been banned because he's a coach. In nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 1: professional coaches are taboo. They're considered a form of cheating
Speaker 1: the steroids of the age. It's aught to do with
Speaker 1: this idea of this emerging gentleman amateur. So you were
Speaker 1: considered a gentleman if you were like upper class born
Speaker 1: into money. Tigan Carpenter George is the co author of
Speaker 1: a book on the history of coaching. It's one of
Speaker 1: those subjects you don't really imagine there being a history
Speaker 1: of what would have been the sports being played in
Speaker 1: the early nineteenth century. So, I mean, the upper classes
Speaker 1: would have been the typical cricket, fencing, rowing was quite
Speaker 1: a good one, Tennis, probably not tennis as we recognize
Speaker 1: it now. So there's a sport called pedestrianism which emerged
Speaker 1: sort of the early eighteen hundreds, basically walking races. They
Speaker 1: were very lower class sports because there was lots of
Speaker 1: wagering and lots of gambling going on in there, and
Speaker 1: the upper classes weren't interested in that. Let me can
Speaker 1: let me stop you for a secon. Yeah, so you're
Speaker 1: saying the lower class sport was pedestrianism. Yeah. So, And actually,
Speaker 1: if you go back to the eighteen hundreds, they had
Speaker 1: stables of pedestrians, which was basically a group of men
Speaker 1: that would travel around the pubs of Britain and they
Speaker 1: would race against each other. Now some of the things
Speaker 1: were ridiculous, so it would be like five day races.
Speaker 1: It would be who can walk a thousand miles in
Speaker 1: the fastest time, and they would get people to wager
Speaker 1: and bet on this there's something really funny about the
Speaker 1: idea of a walking race being pub based. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: so do they have to walk in a straight line?
Speaker 1: Oh no, No, they had like I mean, there was
Speaker 1: arenas made for this. You know, this was big money.
Speaker 1: She doesn't even notice my attempting a joke to an
Speaker 1: estorian of coaching pedestrians or no, laughing matter. Because they
Speaker 1: were the first athletes to employ coaches. So they had
Speaker 1: specific diets, they had specific routines they were experimenting. They
Speaker 1: were getting their athletes to take god knows what because
Speaker 1: they thought that these concoctions would make them faster, and
Speaker 1: it would be people would come to esteem to watch
Speaker 1: people walk around the track. Yeah, I mean, there was
Speaker 1: all different stuff. So when I say there was walking races,
Speaker 1: but there was ridiculous things like backwards races, like jumping races.
Speaker 1: So coaching begins as an effort to get working class
Speaker 1: people to backpedal faster, but in the middle and upper classes,
Speaker 1: coaching just wasn't done. There was a belief, kind of
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen hundreds that the middle and upper
Speaker 1: class body was superior to the lower class body. Therefore,
Speaker 1: if it was superior, it didn't require any sort of
Speaker 1: coaching or training because it was superior, so they could
Speaker 1: achieve what they wanted to achieve. But without this sort
Speaker 1: of interference. I think it was seen as interference from
Speaker 1: coaching because that was what the lower classes did. By
Speaker 1: the time the British elite finally started to embrace coaching,
Speaker 1: it was less a change of sentiment than an act
Speaker 1: of desperation. We did alright at the nineteen o eight
Speaker 1: Olympics because we created the program. So when you've got
Speaker 1: things like tug of war a model boat racing, you
Speaker 1: know we did all right because we created that program.
Speaker 1: But once we started to compete against other nations, so
Speaker 1: particularly sort of nineteen fifty two, after Helsinki nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 1: the other London Olympics, there's a real cool for something
Speaker 1: used to change. The British were basically losing it everything
Speaker 1: by the nineteen fifties. They hired coaches to fix the problem.
Speaker 1: One coach was appointed to improve the training of athletes
Speaker 1: in the entire country. Part of his contract was that
Speaker 1: for ten pound a week, so probably about seven dollars
Speaker 1: a week, he could be rented out to Cambridge University. However,
Speaker 1: if he was rented out to Cambridge University. He was
Speaker 1: told that he had to use the service entrance to
Speaker 1: enter the university because he was not considered a member
Speaker 1: of staff, and that he could only speak to the
Speaker 1: athletes if they spoke to him first. This was the
Speaker 1: British idea about coaches, that there were a form of
Speaker 1: cheating or a sign of natural inferiority. The notion was
Speaker 1: so highly transmissible that it in effected Harold Abrahams himself,
Speaker 1: the same runner who in Chariots of Fire had hired
Speaker 1: a coach to help him win the gold medal. After
Speaker 1: Abraham's running career ended, he was put in charge of
Speaker 1: all of British amateur sports. So he was happy to
Speaker 1: employ a coach and use a coach all the time.
Speaker 1: It got him further in sport. But when he was
Speaker 1: on the other side of it, he then kind of
Speaker 1: reverted to his amateur principles in the sense of we
Speaker 1: don't like coaches, We control coach, which they know the
Speaker 1: place the administrators are in charge, the coaches are their servants.
Speaker 1: That's what they used to refer to them as. Now
Speaker 1: I can see why some aristocrat might find coaching distasteful.
Speaker 1: People born on top always want for everyone else to
Speaker 1: just stay in their places. One way to do it
Speaker 1: is to make fun of people who try too hard
Speaker 1: and ban any edge that might help them to compete.
Speaker 1: But the old aristocracy is dead. Now everybody thinks it's
Speaker 1: good to try. Everybody competes, and the people who take
Speaker 1: their coaching most seriously the aristocrats. I'm Michael Lewis, and
Speaker 1: this is Against the Rules, a show about various authority
Speaker 1: figures in American life. This season's about the rise of coaches.
Speaker 1: This episode is about what happens when the edge that
Speaker 1: coaching gives you starts to feel a bit more like cheating.
Speaker 1: Earlier this season, we heard about the way science had
Speaker 1: transformed the coaching of pro baseball players, and not just them,
Speaker 1: but athletes of all kinds. Baseball was just the cleanest
Speaker 1: case study of how good players could be transformed into
Speaker 1: great ones. It's all described in a book called The
Speaker 1: MVP Machine, which talks about the teams that led the way.
Speaker 1: The Astros were really the first team that fully embraced it,
Speaker 1: that invested more heavily in the technology. And we're really
Speaker 1: pretty ruthless when it came to cleaning house and saying
Speaker 1: we're going to bring in people who are receptive to
Speaker 1: these new ideas, and we're not going to give undue
Speaker 1: doubt friends to tradition and experience. This is Ben Lindbergh.
Speaker 1: He's the co author of the MVP machine, at the
Speaker 1: center of which sits the Houston Astros. The Astros have
Speaker 1: been really cutthroat in all kinds of ways. They've looked
Speaker 1: for advantages that other teams were wary of. Back in
Speaker 1: twenty twelve, the Astros hired a new general manager named
Speaker 1: Jeff Lunow. He was one of the new wave of
Speaker 1: moneyball guys changing baseball, and maybe even more fanatical about
Speaker 1: data than the original moneyball guys. He had been a
Speaker 1: data geek and consultant in Mackenzie but went on to
Speaker 1: help run the Saint Louis Cardinals, and when lu Now
Speaker 1: came to the Astros, he brought science and technology with him.
Speaker 1: The astros new coaches could do things like turn a tiny,
Speaker 1: light hitting second baseman named Jose Altuve into a home
Speaker 1: run hitting league MVP. They turned several average pitchers into stars.
Speaker 1: In May twenty seventeen, the Astro's bench coach Alex Cora
Speaker 1: was working with the Astro's most famous player, Carlos Beltran.
Speaker 1: Beltran was in decline. He was forty years old and
Speaker 1: had been in the big leagues for twenty years now.
Speaker 1: He was struggling to hit. Desperate for help, any kind
Speaker 1: of edge, The Astros coach suggests, how about we use
Speaker 1: this technology we already have, but to steal the opposing
Speaker 1: catcher's signs, so you know what's coming. Fastball, curveball, slider.
Speaker 1: One thing leads to another, and soon the Astros coaching
Speaker 1: staff has installed a TV monitor beside the dugout. It
Speaker 1: displays nothing but the feed from the center field camera.
Speaker 1: The Astros management has written a software program to decode
Speaker 1: the opposing catchers signs, which they give to the coach.
Speaker 1: The coach helps the players set up a signaling program
Speaker 1: that's an old technology. The Astros in the dugout bang
Speaker 1: on a trash can. No bangs means fastball, one bang
Speaker 1: means curveball, two bangs means slider, and so on. Unlike
Speaker 1: the other hitters in professional baseball, the Astros hitters now
Speaker 1: know what's coming. That year they won the World Series,
Speaker 1: people were calling them one of the greatest teams in
Speaker 1: history and It's a difficult thing to separate because the
Speaker 1: Astros are a very talented team who succeeded in legitimate ways,
Speaker 1: but we're also cheating. It's funny because if you have
Speaker 1: an organization that is succeeding because of its informational advantages,
Speaker 1: because if it's always looking for the informational edge, it
Speaker 1: is just a hop, skip and a jump to let's
Speaker 1: get their signs. Yes, you know, let's use technology to
Speaker 1: actually infiltrate the other organization. Yes. And the camera that
Speaker 1: they were using to relay the signs in real time,
Speaker 1: a camera that was placed in the outfield was actually
Speaker 1: a camera that was installed legally for player development purposes.
Speaker 1: We might never have known how the Astros were using
Speaker 1: their center field camera, but in the fall of two
Speaker 1: thousand and nineteen, a former Astros pitcher told a reporter
Speaker 1: what had been going on. The commissioner of Major League
Speaker 1: Baseball opened an investigation and published its findings. Then all
Speaker 1: hell broke loose. In the words of Major League Baseball
Speaker 1: Commissioner Rob Manfred, the Houston Astros are currently undergoing a
Speaker 1: quote really really thorough investigation into the reports that the
Speaker 1: team used cameras and other technology to steal pitching signs
Speaker 1: from the opposing teams. Now the story, the ESPN was
Speaker 1: on it, Sports Illustrated was on it, The world was
Speaker 1: on it. The Houston Astros went from being the most
Speaker 1: envied team in baseball to social pariahs, booed wherever they went.
Speaker 1: But this was about much more than a team's reputation.
Speaker 1: Could you just describe what happened on August the fourth,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. Yeah, In August four, twenty seventeen, Mike was
Speaker 1: brought in in the fourth inning. The first pitcher had struggled.
Speaker 1: This is a guy named Ben Macellis. He's the lawyer
Speaker 1: for former Major League pitcher Mike Bolsinger who's suing the
Speaker 1: Houston Astros. So Mike at that point was a middle reliever.
Speaker 1: He threw twenty nine pitches. Of the twenty nine pitches,
Speaker 1: there were bangs, which indicated that it was going to
Speaker 1: be a breaking ball. The bang was sent from the
Speaker 1: dugout of the Astros by banging on a trash can
Speaker 1: to the batter to signify what pitch was going to
Speaker 1: be thrown. And so there were forty percent of his
Speaker 1: pitches there were bangs on if you're wondering whether a
Speaker 1: big league pitcher has ever before hired a lawyer to
Speaker 1: sue an opposing team for the behavior of their coaches. Well, no,
Speaker 1: this is a first, But then the coaches have never
Speaker 1: been able to generate this kind of edge. It was
Speaker 1: a disastrous outing, and after a performance that was so
Speaker 1: embarrassing like that, the team lost confidence him. Frankly, all
Speaker 1: scouts in the major's lost confidence in him. He was
Speaker 1: demoted to the minor leagues. Played well right after that
Speaker 1: in the miners, but then couldn't find work in the
Speaker 1: majors because he was viewed as having lost his last
Speaker 1: shot that game. And for all Mike knew until recently,
Speaker 1: he just thought he couldn't perform that day. So he
Speaker 1: did in the moment, did he have any sense that
Speaker 1: anything peculiar was going on. He believed that they were
Speaker 1: the greatest team he's ever played against. He was just,
Speaker 1: you know, shocked that day. He would say that it
Speaker 1: seemed that they knew the pitches that he was throwing,
Speaker 1: but he attributed it to their great skill and their
Speaker 1: great determination and being a great team, and that he
Speaker 1: just didn't have what it takes anymore. Mike Bolsinger was,
Speaker 1: in baseball terms, a nobody. The astros were the elites.
Speaker 1: When you're a nobody and you go up against a
Speaker 1: member of the elite and you lose, well, it just
Speaker 1: confirms you're not good enough. You assume you can't compete.
Speaker 1: You never even know that the coach basically rigged the
Speaker 1: game with some software, a camera and a trash candleid.
Speaker 1: The question then is just how many games in life
Speaker 1: can be rigged? So thus the study of how people
Speaker 1: talk is of course, you know, it's as old as
Speaker 1: people basically. Mike Norton, psychologist, professor at the Harvard Business School,
Speaker 1: he's been studying the way people talk and thinking about
Speaker 1: how they might do it better. A lot of the
Speaker 1: research on conversation is kind of about like underlying grammar,
Speaker 1: you know, so it's sort of what are the rules
Speaker 1: of language on how it works and which words come
Speaker 1: where and why in German are they over here? Which
Speaker 1: is totally fascinating. But you could read all of that
Speaker 1: and still have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to
Speaker 1: say to someone when you're meeting them for the first time.
Speaker 1: Like there's no guidance, there's no help for us in
Speaker 1: any of the things that we're trying to get done,
Speaker 1: which is crazy because we talk all day, every day.
Speaker 1: It's the number one thing that we do. We talk,
Speaker 1: but we don't know how to do it effectively. But
Speaker 1: now there are new piles of data, truly massive numbers
Speaker 1: of sales calls, speed dates, Twitter fights, and so on,
Speaker 1: all recorded. I talked about this a little in the
Speaker 1: last episode about social scientists who have new computing tools
Speaker 1: that make it easy for them to see patterns analyze them.
Speaker 1: When you study people's conversation, you discover a funny thing.
Speaker 1: People who are just trying to be liked and respected
Speaker 1: have no clue how to do it. They make all
Speaker 1: kinds of mistakes. Humble bragging, for instance. There's two kinds. Actually,
Speaker 1: there's complaint brags and humble brags. Complaint brags are this
Speaker 1: whenever a celebrity on Twitter or Instagram writes ug dot
Speaker 1: dot dot whatever comes after that as a humble bragg
Speaker 1: to search for it. So they wrote they wrote something
Speaker 1: like ug dot dot dot my hand is so sore
Speaker 1: from signing so many autographs. It was just the best,
Speaker 1: the best. So that's the complaint brag, right, Oh, all,
Speaker 1: I want to do is tell you my hand hurts,
Speaker 1: and then the other thing. And the humble brag is
Speaker 1: the one which is almost more common with celebrities, which
Speaker 1: is the um so honored to be on stage with
Speaker 1: Bono to receive this award. So that's a humble brag.
Speaker 1: Mike Norton set out two years ago to study it scientifically.
Speaker 1: He worked with two other psychologists, Oval Sayser and Francesca Gino.
Speaker 1: They conducted weird experiments, like having a person in a
Speaker 1: coffee shop try to get other people to sign a petition,
Speaker 1: but in some cases sprinkling into her chitchat a humble brag.
Speaker 1: Other times she just bragged. It turned out people were
Speaker 1: more likely to sign the petition if she just bragged.
Speaker 1: Mike and his colleagues call their paper humble bragging a
Speaker 1: distinct and ineffective self presentation strategy. Their case was airtight.
Speaker 1: If you want people to like or respect, you, don't
Speaker 1: humble brag. We don't love people who bragg, but we
Speaker 1: like them more because at least they're being honest, right,
Speaker 1: at least they're just saying I'm awesome. It's these humble
Speaker 1: braggers that are these kind of phony and sincere people
Speaker 1: that really bother us. It's a given how much conversation
Speaker 1: happens that people are pursuing this wily, inefficient strategy. It's
Speaker 1: extraordinary how common bad strategies are. It really is, because
Speaker 1: you'd think if we practice this from the time where two,
Speaker 1: you know, all day every day, we would have figured
Speaker 1: out what works and what doesn't. But part of the
Speaker 1: reason we don't is because people tend to be pretty polite.
Speaker 1: So if you humble brag, I'm very unlikely to call
Speaker 1: you out on it. So you think it worked now.
Speaker 1: Later on, I'm going to go make fun of you
Speaker 1: to other people, but you're not going to know that
Speaker 1: I did that. And that's why we're bad at talking.
Speaker 1: In spite of how important it is and how much
Speaker 1: we do it, we don't get enough direct feedback. A
Speaker 1: handful of researchers now study how people talk and the
Speaker 1: strategies they use to be liked and respected. They've uncovered
Speaker 1: good strategies and some bad ones, and it was probably
Speaker 1: only a matter of time before somebody real all this
Speaker 1: insight could be used to coach people how to talk.
Speaker 1: Most of social life, we're better at perceiving strengths and
Speaker 1: weaknesses and others than executing those same things ourselves. We
Speaker 1: give different advice to other people than we would enact
Speaker 1: ourselves in that same situation. That's why coaches and third
Speaker 1: party observers are so helpful. This is Alison Brooks, another
Speaker 1: psychologist at the Harvard Business School. You heard her at
Speaker 1: the end of the last episode. She just created a
Speaker 1: new class to coach her students. It's called how to
Speaker 1: Talk Good. Her we're not good at taking our own
Speaker 1: observations and applying them to ourselves observations and judgments. Alison
Speaker 1: knew how she wanted to open her class with one
Speaker 1: powerful tool she could hand students to improve their conversational ability,
Speaker 1: topic selection. So we have this paper about that's the
Speaker 1: framework of how people choose topics, and the main empirical
Speaker 1: finding in that paper is that we we have no
Speaker 1: idea what other people want to be talking about. We're
Speaker 1: really bad at reading them and what they're saying. Machines
Speaker 1: are better at it, and we probably think it's basically unknowable.
Speaker 1: That's right. I don't know what's inside there. I don't
Speaker 1: care to know. I don't even if I try it,
Speaker 1: I probably wouldn't know. M all default to what I
Speaker 1: want to talk about. But if you use people's words
Speaker 1: and feed it to a machine, the machine knows way better,
Speaker 1: so it is knowable. It's funny you when you watch
Speaker 1: dinner party conversation. Yeah, average dinner party conversation, the way
Speaker 1: it ends up defaulting to less than optimal topics. Yes,
Speaker 1: if you empower people to switch topics more frequently, the
Speaker 1: conversation is much more interesting. It's just you need to
Speaker 1: feel empowered, like it's okay to switch, and we're all
Speaker 1: on the same page about that, right, Because there are
Speaker 1: very obvious cues when a topic stagnates. There's much more
Speaker 1: mutual silence, there's uncomfortable laughter. Is we capture this in
Speaker 1: the data, That bad dinner party moment has become a
Speaker 1: subject of scientific inquiry, just like humble bragging. What we
Speaker 1: have found in our data is that people who are
Speaker 1: more aware of what the topic is any given moment,
Speaker 1: and some people come into every conversation sort of with
Speaker 1: ideas already about what they might talk about with any
Speaker 1: given person, and those people tend to be more interesting
Speaker 1: and engaging conversationalist. So topic selection is your first subject,
Speaker 1: that's right, So it's the t of talk t a
Speaker 1: L Kase Allison was explaining to me, which you had planned.
Speaker 1: I found myself thinking, like some old British aristocrat, you
Speaker 1: mean to tell me that we're now not only going
Speaker 1: to coach people, but coach them how to talk. So
Speaker 1: I initially signed up for the class because at times
Speaker 1: I can be a very anxious conversationalist. I am great
Speaker 1: with my friends, but I get really nervous about meeting
Speaker 1: new people, and that kind of leads to a lot
Speaker 1: of nervous ticks when I talk to new folks. Meet
Speaker 1: Bridget Taylor, a student at the Harvard Business School, enrolled
Speaker 1: in the class how to Talk Good, heer like I
Speaker 1: tend to talk way too much. I don't ask enough questions,
Speaker 1: and that just and also knowing that about myself makes
Speaker 1: me even more anxious when I enter new conversations. Let
Speaker 1: me let me stop you. You don't sound like an
Speaker 1: anxious conversationalist. Yeah, sometimes I think maybe it's in my
Speaker 1: head a little bit, But I mean I've definitely gotten
Speaker 1: a lot better at HBS, just by brute force. It's
Speaker 1: such a social school, and you have to meet new
Speaker 1: people all the time, and you're here to get a job,
Speaker 1: so you have to network all the time. But it
Speaker 1: was a really big issue for me before school. Um
Speaker 1: and I used to have to take beta blockers sometimes
Speaker 1: before big meetings or even just a meeting with my
Speaker 1: boss because I would get so nervous. But here, just
Speaker 1: you know, if I would be popping like ten beta
Speaker 1: blockers a day, if I, you know, need needed that outlet.
Speaker 1: So I've just become I've just become more accustom accustomed
Speaker 1: to it. But it's still in my head that I'm nervous.
Speaker 1: Do you think if I came in and a sort
Speaker 1: of objectively evaluated your conversational abilities and compare them to
Speaker 1: other people around you, that I would notice you were deficient?
Speaker 1: Probably not, your conversational abilities might be something you can
Speaker 1: improve upon, I'd be I'm highly dubious of the idea
Speaker 1: that Harvard Business School students aren't already at like the
Speaker 1: top five percent of social skills and conversational skills. They
Speaker 1: wouldn't be at the Harvard Business School if they weren't, yeh.
Speaker 1: I talked to a bunch of students and they all
Speaker 1: said they were taking the course because they felt in
Speaker 1: some way inadequate. When it came to conversation. I mean,
Speaker 1: one student in the class is a native Chinese speaker
Speaker 1: who was troubled that she was funnier in Chinese than
Speaker 1: she was in English. She was striving to become funnier
Speaker 1: in a second language. And if that didn't work out,
Speaker 1: there were other tricks on offer in the class we're
Speaker 1: learning about be interested rather than interesting. You can be
Speaker 1: a good listener and ask questions and have a genuine
Speaker 1: curiosity about who you're talking to, and that still makes
Speaker 1: you a really excellent conversationalist. You don't have to have
Speaker 1: the spotlight and be the most interesting person in the room,
Speaker 1: which has kind of been mind blowing for me personally. Now,
Speaker 1: is this a scandal? It's students at the Harvard Business
Speaker 1: School or the first to learn these new data driven
Speaker 1: tricks of conversation. Of course not. That's what Harvard Business
Speaker 1: School does amplify the advantages of people who are already winning.
Speaker 1: I asked Alison Brooks if the course could eventually do
Speaker 1: more than that, if the market didn't matter at all,
Speaker 1: what would be the fantasy about where you would take it? Oh,
Speaker 1: so many directions, I think A few answers. One younger
Speaker 1: so to kids and development right, younger children, particularly underserved populations,
Speaker 1: racially diverse, socioeconomic, gender diverse. These are the skills that
Speaker 1: are would potentially propel people to success in their lives.
Speaker 1: Really right, because the Harvard Business School student does not
Speaker 1: need to figure out how to make his status greater.
Speaker 1: Exactly right. They want to, but they don't need to.
Speaker 1: That's right. Just now, we're living in a moment that
Speaker 1: highlights the power of advantages. If you're young and strong,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to live than if you're old and weak.
Speaker 1: If your company's big and rich, it's more likely to survive.
Speaker 1: And if it's lean and small, if you have a great,
Speaker 1: big home with lots of places to work and play,
Speaker 1: you're less likely to go insane. And if you're jammed
Speaker 1: into some tiny apartment. Whatever advantages you had before the pandemic,
Speaker 1: well those advantages are now amplified. People who get a BA,
Speaker 1: on average, make more money, have more stable lives. Paul
Speaker 1: Tough is the author of a book called The Years
Speaker 1: That Matter Most. It's about college and class mobility in America.
Speaker 1: But there's also increasing evidence that where you go to
Speaker 1: school matters too, and it matters especially for low income students,
Speaker 1: first generation students, if you're the first in your family
Speaker 1: to go to college, where you go actually has a
Speaker 1: really huge effect on your future earnings. But it also
Speaker 1: gives them often their first entree into rich American life
Speaker 1: and to sort of the culture of upper middle class
Speaker 1: and affluent American society. Gives them connections, gives them sort
Speaker 1: of the social capital to understand how the world works.
Speaker 1: Elite colleges, of course know this. They say they want
Speaker 1: more low income students, but Paul found that the most
Speaker 1: selective colleges had more students from the richest one percent
Speaker 1: of Americans than from the entire bottom sixty percent. So
Speaker 1: he went looking for an explanation and found it from
Speaker 1: an SAT coach. It's man named Ned Johnson who runs
Speaker 1: his own company, a very successful company in the Washington,
Speaker 1: DC area called Prep Matters. And what Ned says, and
Speaker 1: I think what a lot of them say, is that
Speaker 1: the test measures your ability to take the test. They
Speaker 1: no longer believe if they ever did that the SAT
Speaker 1: really measures your academic ability or anything deep about you.
Speaker 1: It measures how well you've been trained to take that test,
Speaker 1: and how much does it cost to get that training well?
Speaker 1: It depends. There's a wide variation. Ned is pretty close
Speaker 1: to the top of the financial scale. I think he
Speaker 1: charges four hundred dollars an hour for his students, so
Speaker 1: it's like hiring a lawyer. Yeah, it's huge, it's huge.
Speaker 1: The sat N ACT are the biggest obstacles that poor
Speaker 1: kids have to overcome to get into the elite schools.
Speaker 1: Their grades are as good as the grades of rich kids,
Speaker 1: but their test scores are systematically worse than the scores
Speaker 1: of rich kids. I mean, you know, I've had people
Speaker 1: go up hundreds of points in just a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: Sometimes that's Ben Paris, who's coached these tests for twenty
Speaker 1: six years, hundreds of points. I've never actually had anybody
Speaker 1: investigated for this, but there are some students where actually
Speaker 1: they did so much better on the second one where
Speaker 1: I was afraid they were going to get called in
Speaker 1: because this school special fishy. Yeah, yes, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: there there is a couple that I took that were
Speaker 1: that were pro bono cases, and these are just great kids.
Speaker 1: And one of them was coming in at like seven hundred,
Speaker 1: and she was working a part time job, had family responsibilities,
Speaker 1: but she just fundamentally didn't know how the test was
Speaker 1: put together and what they expected. You know, she could
Speaker 1: study all of math, but guess what, not all of
Speaker 1: math is on the test. So by really focusing her
Speaker 1: on what she needed to what was going to get
Speaker 1: her points, and understanding how the questions worked, she went
Speaker 1: up over a thousand and so she went from not
Speaker 1: getting into college or being stuck in remedial classes to
Speaker 1: getting in and then never having to take a remedial class.
Speaker 1: And you know, if I had had more than a
Speaker 1: month with her, who knows how well she could have done.
Speaker 1: That's a thought that Ben Paris had whenever he coached
Speaker 1: poor kids, but it didn't happen often. It was a
Speaker 1: rich kids market. To be a lucrative market, it kind
Speaker 1: of had to be, because if everyone could afford SAT coaching,
Speaker 1: SAT coaching would cease to offer an edge. Everyone would
Speaker 1: just game the test in the same way. That's what
Speaker 1: Paul Tough found too. While it wasn't totally true that
Speaker 1: you can just buy a test score, it wasn't totally
Speaker 1: false either, but he found something else, a sort of
Speaker 1: moral vacuum at the heart of American education. It gets
Speaker 1: noticed mainly when someone from the outside walks in. There
Speaker 1: was this one one young man named Ben Dormus and
Speaker 1: be he was this amazing guy, a senior in high
Speaker 1: school in Washington. This Ben was also from a less
Speaker 1: affluent home. A series of lucky accidents had landed him
Speaker 1: in the office of Ned Johnson, crack test prep coach,
Speaker 1: who agreed to give him SAT coaching for free. So
Speaker 1: he got all of these advantages, and he worked incredibly hard,
Speaker 1: and Ned helped him improve his SAT score on the
Speaker 1: math side by one hundred and something points, and he
Speaker 1: got into Yale. But Yale things got complicated because this
Speaker 1: poor kid couldn't shake the sense that getting into Yale
Speaker 1: involved some underhanded trick. Ben really felt this sense that
Speaker 1: he had been given something that was unfair, and that
Speaker 1: while he appreciated it, he could not stop thinking about
Speaker 1: the people who had been left behind, because he knew
Speaker 1: that he was actually no different than the person that
Speaker 1: he was a few months earlier before he'd gotten all
Speaker 1: this coaching, and that that guy would never have gotten
Speaker 1: to Yale. But this guy who got all this coaching
Speaker 1: did get into Yale. He just keeps thinking about, like,
Speaker 1: what how does that system work? That system that he
Speaker 1: suddenly kind of magically got entree into and how can
Speaker 1: it be more fair? How can it be made to
Speaker 1: be more fair? I'm interested in this story because it
Speaker 1: gets at the great unspoken question. Most of the kids
Speaker 1: who get test coaching never asked the question. They don't
Speaker 1: even think of what they have as an edge, since
Speaker 1: all the other kids they know also have it. But
Speaker 1: coaching is the great force keeping them in the station
Speaker 1: to which they were born and keeping less fortunate kids
Speaker 1: out of it. Arrest warrants issued for forty six people
Speaker 1: around the country, including coaches and wealthy parents like Felicity Huffman,
Speaker 1: we now know that some rich American parents were taking
Speaker 1: the college testing game to its logical conclusion. The star
Speaker 1: of Desperate Housewives so desperate to land her daughter in
Speaker 1: a top school, prosecutors say she paid fifteen thousand dollars
Speaker 1: to Singer to bribe a proctor who would secretly correct
Speaker 1: her answers. If a test isn't measuring much except your
Speaker 1: ability to take it, and you can pay some coach
Speaker 1: to teach you to do that, why not just avoid
Speaker 1: all the bother and pay the coach to take the
Speaker 1: test for you. That kid who got the SAT coaching
Speaker 1: and went to Yale was right to feel uneasy. He'd
Speaker 1: used a coach to help him climb to the top
Speaker 1: of America's Steekas Slope. The only difference between him and
Speaker 1: all the other people on top was that he could
Speaker 1: feel that it was slippery. I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to Against the Rules. Against the Rules is brought
Speaker 1: to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced by Audrey
Speaker 1: Dilling and Catherine Girodo, with research assistance from Lydia Jane
Speaker 1: Cott and Zooe Wynn. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mia
Speaker 1: Lobell is our executive producer. Our theme was composed by
Speaker 1: Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Stellwagen Symphonette. We got
Speaker 1: fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our show was recorded by
Speaker 1: tofur Ruth and Trey Schultz at Northgate Studios in Berkeley,
Speaker 1: as always thanks to Pushkin's founders, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: So my name is Tan Carpin to George, my book
Speaker 1: is Overcoming Amateurism. Amateurism coaching traditions in British spoort. Do
Speaker 1: that one more time so we have it clean I've
Speaker 1: really just forgotten the name of my book, okay, A
Speaker 1: History of Coaching in a History of Sports Coaching in Britain,
Speaker 1: Overcoming Amateurism. Yes, that's very British of you, you that
Speaker 1: you see that you're you spent so little time talking
Speaker 1: about yourself. You can't even remember the name of your book.
Speaker 1: I know, I know the first bit. I know the
Speaker 1: first bit because that was the name of my PhD.
Speaker 1: But the end bit it was, yeah, M so overcoming
Speaker 1: your amateurism. History of Now I forgot naked. Why I
Speaker 1: feel like I just walked into faulty towers? All right?
Speaker 1: Can you let's just just introduce yourself.