0:15

Pushkin chariots

0:20

of fire. So

0:23

where does the power come from to

0:25

see the race to its hand from?

0:32

If you're into watching white guys run, the

0:34

movie never gets old. Even

0:36

if you're not into that. It has one of the best

0:38

coaching scenes ever filmed. Harold

0:41

Abraham's a British sprinter is about

0:43

to run thee hundred meter final in the nineteen

0:45

twenty four Olympics. His

0:48

coach gazes out of his hotel room

0:50

window at the stadium next door. The

0:53

pistol sounds. The

0:55

coach watches the sky over the stadium.

0:58

Then he spies the British flag rising.

1:02

That's how the coach learns that his runner has won

1:04

the gold. There's

1:12

a reason the coach isn't inside the stadium

1:14

watching the race. He's been banned

1:17

because he's a coach. In nineteen

1:20

twenty four, professional coaches are taboo.

1:23

They're considered a form of cheating the

1:25

steroids of the age. It's

1:27

aught to do with this idea of this emerging gentleman

1:30

amateur. So you were considered a gentleman

1:33

if you were like upper class born

1:35

into money. Tigan Carpenter

1:37

George is the co author of a book on the history

1:39

of coaching. It's one of those subjects

1:41

you don't really imagine there being a history of

1:44

what would have been the sports being played

1:47

in the early nineteenth century. So, I mean, the upper

1:49

classes would have been the typical

1:51

cricket, fencing, rowing

1:54

was quite a good one, Tennis,

1:56

probably not tennis as we recognize

1:58

it now. So there's

2:01

a sport called pedestrianism which emerged

2:03

sort of the early eighteen hundreds, basically

2:05

walking races. They

2:08

were very lower class sports because there was

2:10

lots of wagering and lots of gambling going

2:12

on in there, and the upper classes weren't interested

2:14

in that. Let me can let me stop you for a secon. Yeah,

2:16

so you're saying the lower class sport

2:19

was pedestrianism. Yeah.

2:21

So, And actually, if you go back

2:23

to the eighteen hundreds, they had stables

2:25

of pedestrians, which was basically

2:29

a group of men that would

2:31

travel around the pubs of Britain and

2:34

they would race against each other. Now

2:37

some of the things were ridiculous, so

2:39

it would be like five day races. It

2:41

would be who can walk a thousand

2:43

miles in the fastest time, and they

2:45

would get people to wager and bet on this there's

2:48

something really funny about the idea of

2:50

a walking race being

2:53

pub based. Oh yeah, so do

2:55

they have to walk in a straight line? Oh

2:57

no, No, they had like I mean, there was arenas

3:00

made for this. You know, this was big

3:02

money.

3:07

She doesn't even notice my attempting a joke

3:09

to an estorian of coaching pedestrians

3:12

or no, laughing matter. Because

3:14

they were the first athletes to employ coaches.

3:16

So they had specific diets, they had specific

3:19

routines they were experimenting.

3:21

They were getting their athletes to take

3:24

god knows what because they thought that these concoctions

3:26

would make them faster, and it would be people

3:28

would come to esteem to watch people walk

3:30

around the track. Yeah, I mean, there was all different

3:32

stuff. So when I say there was walking races,

3:35

but there was ridiculous things like

3:37

backwards races, like jumping races.

3:42

So coaching begins as an effort to get

3:44

working class people to backpedal

3:46

faster, but in the middle and upper

3:49

classes, coaching just wasn't done.

3:51

There was a belief, kind of in the early nineteen

3:53

hundreds that the middle and upper

3:56

class body was superior

3:58

to the lower class body. Therefore,

4:00

if it was superior, it didn't require

4:02

any sort of coaching or training

4:05

because it was superior, so they could

4:07

achieve what they wanted to achieve. But

4:09

without this sort of interference.

4:12

I think it was seen as interference from coaching

4:15

because that was what the lower classes did. By

4:18

the time the British elite finally started

4:20

to embrace coaching, it was less

4:22

a change of sentiment than an act of desperation.

4:25

We did alright at the nineteen o eight Olympics

4:27

because we created the program.

4:30

So when you've got things like tug

4:32

of war a model boat racing, you

4:34

know we did all right because we created

4:36

that program.

4:39

But once we started to compete against

4:41

other nations, so particularly sort of nineteen

4:44

fifty two, after Helsinki nineteen

4:47

forty eight, the other London Olympics,

4:49

there's a real cool for something

4:52

used to change. The British were basically

4:54

losing it everything by the nineteen fifties.

4:57

They hired coaches to fix the problem.

4:59

One coach was appointed to improve the training

5:02

of athletes in the entire country. Part

5:04

of his contract was that for

5:06

ten pound a week, so probably

5:08

about seven dollars a week, he could be

5:10

rented out to Cambridge University.

5:14

However, if he was rented out to Cambridge

5:16

University. He was told that he had

5:18

to use the service entrance to enter

5:21

the university because he was not

5:23

considered a member of staff, and

5:25

that he could only speak to the athletes if

5:27

they spoke to him first. This was

5:29

the British idea about coaches, that

5:31

there were a form of cheating or

5:34

a sign of natural inferiority.

5:37

The notion was so highly transmissible

5:39

that it in effected Harold Abrahams himself,

5:42

the same runner who in Chariots of Fire

5:44

had hired a coach to help him win the gold

5:47

medal. After Abraham's

5:49

running career ended, he was put in

5:51

charge of all of British amateur sports.

5:54

So he was happy to employ a coach and

5:56

use a coach all the time. It got him

5:58

further in sport. But when he was on

6:00

the other side of it, he then kind of

6:03

reverted to his amateur principles in

6:05

the sense of we don't

6:07

like coaches, We control coach, which they

6:10

know the place the administrators

6:12

are in charge, the coaches are their servants.

6:14

That's what they used to refer to them as. Now

6:18

I can see why some aristocrat might find

6:20

coaching distasteful. People

6:22

born on top always want for

6:24

everyone else to just stay in their places. One

6:27

way to do it is to make fun of people who try too

6:29

hard and ban any edge

6:32

that might help them to compete. But

6:34

the old aristocracy is dead. Now

6:38

everybody thinks it's good to try. Everybody

6:41

competes, and the people

6:43

who take their coaching most seriously the

6:46

aristocrats. I'm

6:52

Michael Lewis, and this is Against

6:54

the Rules, a show about

6:56

various authority figures in American life.

6:59

This season's about the rise of coaches. This

7:02

episode is about what happens when the edge that

7:04

coaching gives you starts to feel a bit

7:06

more like cheating. Earlier

7:29

this season, we heard about the way science

7:32

had transformed the coaching of pro baseball

7:34

players, and not just them,

7:36

but athletes of all kinds. Baseball

7:39

was just the cleanest case study of

7:41

how good players could be transformed into

7:43

great ones. It's all described in

7:45

a book called The MVP Machine, which

7:48

talks about the teams that led the way. The

7:50

Astros were really the first team that fully

7:53

embraced it, that invested more

7:55

heavily in the technology. And

7:58

we're really pretty ruthless when it came

8:00

to cleaning house and saying we're going to

8:02

bring in people who are receptive

8:05

to these new ideas, and

8:07

we're not going to give undue doubt friends

8:09

to tradition and experience. This

8:11

is Ben Lindbergh. He's the co author

8:14

of the MVP machine, at the

8:16

center of which sits the Houston Astros.

8:19

The Astros have been really cutthroat

8:21

in all kinds of ways. They've looked

8:23

for advantages that other

8:26

teams were wary of. Back

8:32

in twenty twelve, the Astros

8:34

hired a new general manager named Jeff

8:36

Lunow. He was one of the new

8:38

wave of moneyball guys changing

8:40

baseball, and maybe even more

8:42

fanatical about data than the original moneyball

8:45

guys. He had been a data

8:47

geek and consultant in Mackenzie but

8:49

went on to help run the Saint Louis Cardinals,

8:53

and when lu Now came to the Astros, he

8:55

brought science and technology with him.

8:58

The astros new coaches could do things

9:01

like turn a tiny, light hitting second

9:03

baseman named Jose Altuve into

9:05

a home run hitting league MVP. They

9:08

turned several average pitchers into stars.

9:15

In May twenty seventeen, the

9:17

Astro's bench coach Alex

9:19

Cora was working with the Astro's

9:22

most famous player, Carlos

9:24

Beltran. Beltran was in decline.

9:27

He was forty years old and had been in the

9:29

big leagues for twenty years now.

9:31

He was struggling to hit. Desperate

9:34

for help, any kind of edge,

9:39

The Astros coach suggests, how

9:42

about we use this technology we already

9:44

have, but to steal the opposing

9:46

catcher's signs, so

9:48

you know what's coming. Fastball, curveball,

9:51

slider. One

9:53

thing leads to another, and soon the Astros

9:55

coaching staff has installed a TV

9:57

monitor beside the dugout. It

10:00

displays nothing but the feed from the center

10:02

field camera. The

10:04

Astros management has written a software

10:07

program to decode the opposing catchers

10:09

signs, which they give to the coach.

10:12

The coach helps the players set up a signaling

10:15

program that's an old

10:17

technology. The Astros in the dugout bang

10:19

on a trash can. No bangs

10:21

means fastball, one bang means

10:23

curveball, two bangs means

10:26

slider, and so

10:28

on. Unlike the other

10:30

hitters in professional baseball, the Astros

10:33

hitters now know what's coming. That

10:35

year they won the World Series, people

10:37

were calling them one of the greatest teams in history

10:39

and It's a difficult thing to separate because

10:42

the Astros are a very talented team

10:45

who succeeded in legitimate

10:47

ways, but we're also cheating. It's

10:49

funny because if you have an organization

10:51

that is succeeding because of its informational

10:54

advantages, because if it's always

10:56

looking for the informational edge,

10:59

it is just a hop, skip

11:01

and a jump to let's get their

11:03

signs. Yes, you know, let's

11:06

use technology to actually infiltrate

11:08

the other organization. Yes. And

11:11

the camera that they were using to

11:13

relay the signs in real time, a

11:15

camera that was placed in the outfield was

11:17

actually a camera that was installed

11:20

legally for player development purposes.

11:22

We might never have known how the Astros

11:25

were using their center field camera, but

11:27

in the fall of two thousand and nineteen, a

11:30

former Astros pitcher told a reporter

11:32

what had been going on. The commissioner

11:35

of Major League Baseball opened an investigation

11:38

and published its findings. Then

11:40

all hell broke loose. In the words

11:43

of Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred,

11:45

the Houston Astros are currently undergoing

11:48

a quote really really thorough

11:50

investigation into the reports

11:52

that the team used cameras and other

11:54

technology to steal pitching signs from

11:56

the opposing teams. Now the story, the ESPN

11:59

was on it, Sports Illustrated was on it,

12:01

The world was on it. The

12:04

Houston Astros went from being the most envied

12:06

team in baseball to social pariahs,

12:09

booed wherever they went. But

12:11

this was about much more than a team's reputation.

12:15

Could you just describe what happened

12:18

on August the fourth, twenty seventeen.

12:20

Yeah, In August four, twenty seventeen, Mike

12:22

was brought in in the fourth inning. The

12:25

first pitcher had struggled. This

12:27

is a guy named Ben Macellis. He's

12:30

the lawyer for former Major League pitcher Mike

12:32

Bolsinger who's suing

12:34

the Houston Astros. So

12:37

Mike at that point was a middle

12:39

reliever. He threw twenty

12:42

nine pitches. Of the twenty

12:44

nine pitches, there were bangs, which indicated

12:47

that it was going to be a breaking ball. The

12:49

bang was sent from the dugout of the Astros

12:51

by banging on a trash can to

12:54

the batter to signify what pitch was going to be

12:56

thrown. And so there were forty

12:58

percent of his pitches there were bangs on if

13:01

you're wondering whether a big league pitcher has

13:03

ever before hired a lawyer to sue

13:05

an opposing team for the behavior of their

13:08

coaches. Well, no, this

13:10

is a first, But then the coaches

13:12

have never been able to generate this kind of edge.

13:15

It was a disastrous outing, and after

13:17

a performance that was so embarrassing like that,

13:19

the team lost confidence him. Frankly,

13:22

all scouts in the major's lost confidence in

13:24

him. He was demoted to the minor leagues.

13:27

Played well right after that in the miners,

13:30

but then couldn't find work in the majors because

13:32

he was viewed as having lost his last

13:35

shot that game. And for all Mike knew

13:37

until recently, he just thought he couldn't perform

13:39

that day. So he did in the

13:41

moment, did he have any sense that anything

13:43

peculiar was going on. He believed

13:46

that they were the greatest team he's ever played against.

13:50

He was just, you know,

13:52

shocked that day. He would say

13:54

that it seemed that they knew the pitches that he

13:57

was throwing, but he attributed it to

13:59

their great skill and their great determination

14:02

and being a great team, and that he

14:04

just didn't have what it takes anymore. Mike

14:10

Bolsinger was, in baseball terms,

14:12

a nobody. The astros

14:15

were the elites. When you're

14:17

a nobody and you go up against a member of the elite

14:19

and you lose, well, it

14:21

just confirms you're not good enough. You

14:24

assume you can't compete. You

14:26

never even know that the coach basically

14:29

rigged the game with

14:31

some software, a camera and

14:33

a trash candleid. The question

14:36

then is just how many games in life can

14:38

be rigged? So

14:53

thus the study of how people talk

14:56

is of course, you know, it's as old as people

14:58

basically. Mike Norton, psychologist,

15:02

professor at the Harvard Business School, he's

15:04

been studying the way people talk and

15:06

thinking about how they might do it better. A

15:09

lot of the research on conversation

15:11

is kind of about like underlying

15:13

grammar, you know, so it's sort of what are

15:16

the rules of language on

15:18

how it works and which words come where

15:20

and why in German are they over here? Which

15:23

is totally fascinating. But you

15:25

could read all of that and still have absolutely

15:28

no idea what you're supposed to say to someone

15:30

when you're meeting them for the first time. Like there's

15:32

no guidance, there's no help

15:34

for us in any of the things that we're

15:37

trying to get done, which is crazy

15:39

because we talk all day,

15:41

every day. It's the number one thing that we do.

15:47

We talk, but we don't know how to

15:49

do it effectively. But now

15:51

there are new piles of data, truly

15:54

massive numbers of sales calls, speed

15:56

dates, Twitter fights, and so on, all

16:00

recorded. I talked

16:02

about this a little in the last episode about

16:04

social scientists who have new computing tools

16:06

that make it easy for them to see patterns analyze

16:09

them. When you study

16:11

people's conversation, you discover

16:14

a funny thing. People

16:16

who are just trying to be liked and respected

16:18

have no clue how to do it. They

16:21

make all kinds of mistakes. Humble

16:25

bragging, for instance. There's two kinds.

16:27

Actually, there's complaint brags and

16:29

humble brags. Complaint brags

16:31

are this whenever a celebrity on Twitter

16:34

or Instagram writes ug dot dot dot

16:37

whatever comes after that as a humble bragg to

16:39

search for it. So they wrote they wrote

16:41

something like ug dot dot dot my hand

16:43

is so sore from signing

16:46

so many autographs. It

16:49

was just the best, the best.

16:51

So that's the complaint brag, right,

16:53

Oh, all, I want to do is tell you my hand

16:56

hurts, and then the other thing. And

16:58

the humble brag is the one which is almost more

17:00

common with celebrities, which is the um

17:03

so honored to be on stage with Bono to

17:06

receive this award. So

17:09

that's a humble brag. Mike Norton

17:11

set out two years ago to study it scientifically.

17:14

He worked with two other psychologists, Oval

17:17

Sayser and Francesca Gino. They

17:20

conducted weird experiments, like

17:22

having a person in a coffee shop try to

17:24

get other people to sign a petition, but

17:27

in some cases sprinkling into her chitchat

17:29

a humble brag. Other times

17:32

she just bragged. It turned

17:35

out people were more likely to sign the petition if

17:37

she just bragged. Mike

17:39

and his colleagues call their paper humble

17:42

bragging a distinct and ineffective

17:45

self presentation strategy. Their

17:48

case was airtight. If

17:50

you want people to like or respect, you, don't humble

17:53

brag. We

17:56

don't love people who bragg, but we

17:58

like them more because at least they're being honest, right,

18:00

at least they're just saying I'm awesome. It's

18:03

these humble braggers that are these kind of phony

18:05

and sincere people that really bother us.

18:07

It's a given

18:10

how much conversation happens that

18:12

people are pursuing this wily, inefficient

18:15

strategy. It's extraordinary how

18:17

common bad strategies are. It

18:21

really is, because you'd think if we practice

18:23

this from the time where two, you

18:25

know, all day every day, we would

18:27

have figured out what works and what doesn't.

18:30

But part of the reason we don't is because

18:33

people tend to be pretty polite. So

18:36

if you humble brag, I'm very unlikely

18:38

to call you out on it. So you

18:40

think it worked now. Later on, I'm going to go make

18:42

fun of you to other people, but you're not going

18:44

to know that I did that. And

18:47

that's why we're bad at talking. In spite

18:49

of how important it is and how much

18:51

we do it, we don't get enough

18:53

direct feedback. A handful

18:56

of researchers now study how people talk

18:58

and the strategies they use to be liked

19:00

and respected. They've uncovered

19:03

good strategies and some bad ones, and

19:05

it was probably only a matter of time

19:08

before somebody real all this insight

19:10

could be used to coach

19:12

people how to talk. Most

19:20

of social life, we're better at perceiving

19:22

strengths and weaknesses and others than

19:24

executing those same things ourselves.

19:27

We give different advice to other people than

19:29

we would enact ourselves in that same

19:31

situation. That's why coaches and third

19:33

party observers are so helpful. This

19:36

is Alison Brooks, another psychologist

19:38

at the Harvard Business School. You heard

19:40

her at the end of the last episode. She

19:43

just created a new class to coach her students.

19:45

It's called how to Talk Good. Her we're

19:48

not good at taking our own observations and applying

19:50

them to ourselves observations and judgments.

19:53

Alison knew how she wanted to open her class

19:55

with one powerful tool she could hand

19:57

students to improve their conversational

20:00

ability, topic selection. So

20:02

we have this paper about that's the framework

20:04

of how people choose topics, and the main empirical

20:07

finding in that paper is that we we have no idea

20:09

what other people want to be talking about. We're

20:12

really bad at reading them and what they're

20:14

saying. Machines are better at it, and

20:16

we probably think it's basically unknowable. That's

20:18

right. I don't know what's inside there. I don't care to know. I

20:21

don't even if I try it, I probably wouldn't know. M

20:23

all default to what I want to talk about. But

20:25

if you use people's words and feed it to a

20:27

machine, the machine knows way better, so it

20:29

is knowable. It's funny you when you watch dinner party

20:31

conversation. Yeah, average dinner

20:33

party conversation, the way it ends

20:35

up defaulting to less

20:38

than optimal topics. Yes, if

20:40

you empower people to switch topics

20:42

more frequently, the conversation is much more

20:44

interesting. It's just you need to feel empowered,

20:47

like it's okay to switch, and we're all on the same

20:49

page about that, right, Because

20:51

there are very obvious cues when a topic stagnates.

20:53

There's much more mutual silence, there's uncomfortable

20:56

laughter. Is we capture this in the data,

20:58

That bad dinner party moment has become a

21:00

subject of scientific inquiry, just

21:02

like humble bragging. What we have found in

21:04

our data is that people who are more

21:07

aware of what the topic is any

21:09

given moment, and some people

21:11

come into every conversation sort of with ideas

21:13

already about what they might talk about with any

21:16

given person, and those people

21:18

tend to be more interesting and engaging

21:20

conversationalist. So topic selection

21:22

is your first subject, that's

21:24

right, So it's the t of talk t a

21:27

L Kase

21:30

Allison was explaining to me, which you had planned.

21:32

I found myself thinking, like some old British aristocrat,

21:35

you mean to tell me that we're now not only going to coach

21:37

people, but coach them how to talk.

21:42

So I initially

21:46

signed up for the class because at times

21:48

I can be a very anxious

21:50

conversationalist. I

21:53

am great with my friends, but I get really

21:55

nervous about meeting new people,

21:58

and that kind of leads to a lot of nervous ticks

22:00

when I talk to new folks.

22:03

Meet Bridget Taylor, a student at the Harvard

22:05

Business School, enrolled in the class

22:07

how to Talk Good, heer like I

22:10

tend to talk way too much. I don't

22:12

ask enough questions, and

22:14

that just and also knowing that about myself

22:16

makes me even more anxious when I enter new

22:19

conversations. Let me let me stop you.

22:21

You don't sound like an anxious conversationalist.

22:25

Yeah, sometimes I think maybe it's in

22:27

my head a little bit, But

22:30

I mean I've definitely gotten a lot better at HBS,

22:33

just by brute force. It's such a social

22:35

school, and you have to

22:37

meet new people all the time, and you're here to

22:39

get a job, so you have to network all the time.

22:42

But it was a really big issue for

22:44

me before school. Um and

22:47

I used to have to take beta blockers sometimes

22:49

before big meetings or even just a

22:51

meeting with my boss because I would get so nervous.

22:54

But here, just you know, if I

22:57

would be popping like ten beta blockers a day,

22:59

if I, you

23:02

know, need needed that outlet. So

23:04

I've just become I've just become more accustom

23:07

accustomed to it. But it's still in my head that

23:09

I'm nervous. Do you think if

23:11

I came in and a sort of objectively

23:13

evaluated your conversational

23:16

abilities and compare them to

23:18

other people around you, that I would notice

23:20

you were deficient? Probably

23:24

not, your conversational

23:27

abilities might be something you can improve upon,

23:29

I'd be I'm highly dubious of the idea

23:32

that Harvard Business School students aren't already

23:35

at like the top five percent of social

23:37

skills and conversational skills. They wouldn't be

23:39

at the Harvard Business School if they weren't, yeh.

23:45

I talked to a bunch of students and they

23:47

all said they were taking the course because they felt in some

23:49

way inadequate. When it came to conversation.

23:52

I mean, one student in the class is a native

23:54

Chinese speaker who was troubled that she was

23:56

funnier in Chinese than she was in English.

23:59

She was striving to become funnier in a second

24:01

language. And if that didn't work out, there

24:04

were other tricks on offer in the class

24:06

we're learning about be interested

24:08

rather than interesting. You can

24:10

be a good listener and ask

24:13

questions and have a genuine curiosity

24:15

about who you're talking to, and that still

24:17

makes you a really excellent conversationalist.

24:19

You don't have to have the spotlight

24:22

and be the most interesting person in the room,

24:24

which has kind of been mind blowing for me personally.

24:28

Now, is this a scandal? It's

24:30

students at the Harvard Business School or the first to

24:32

learn these new data driven tricks of conversation.

24:35

Of course not. That's what

24:37

Harvard Business School does amplify

24:40

the advantages of people who are already winning.

24:43

I asked Alison Brooks if the course could eventually

24:45

do more than that, if the market

24:48

didn't matter at all, what would be the

24:50

fantasy about where you

24:52

would take it? Oh, so many directions,

24:54

I think A few answers. One younger

24:57

so to kids and development right, younger

25:00

children, particularly underserved populations,

25:04

racially diverse, socioeconomic, gender

25:06

diverse. These are the skills

25:08

that are would potentially propel people

25:10

to success in their lives. Really right,

25:12

because the Harvard Business School student does not

25:14

need to figure out how to make his status greater.

25:18

Exactly right. They want to, but

25:20

they don't need to. That's right. Just

25:46

now, we're living in a moment that highlights the

25:48

power of advantages. If

25:51

you're young and strong, you're more likely to

25:53

live than if you're old and weak. If

25:55

your company's big and rich, it's

25:58

more likely to survive. And if it's lean and

26:00

small, if

26:02

you have a great, big home with lots of places

26:04

to work and play, you're less likely

26:06

to go insane. And if you're jammed into some tiny

26:09

apartment. Whatever advantages you

26:11

had before the pandemic, well those

26:13

advantages are now amplified. People

26:17

who get a BA, on

26:19

average, make more money, have more

26:22

stable lives. Paul Tough is

26:24

the author of a book called The Years That

26:26

Matter Most. It's about

26:28

college and class mobility in America.

26:31

But there's also increasing evidence that where

26:33

you go to school matters too, and it matters especially

26:36

for low income students, first

26:38

generation students, if you're the first in your family

26:40

to go to college, where you go actually

26:42

has a really huge effect on your

26:45

future earnings. But it also gives

26:48

them often their first entree

26:50

into rich American

26:52

life and to sort of the culture of upper

26:55

middle class and affluent American society.

26:58

Gives them connections, gives them sort of the

27:00

social capital to understand how

27:02

the world works. Elite

27:05

colleges, of course know this. They

27:07

say they want more low income students,

27:09

but Paul found that the most selective colleges

27:11

had more students from the richest one percent

27:13

of Americans than from the entire

27:16

bottom sixty percent. So he

27:18

went looking for an explanation and found

27:20

it from an SAT coach.

27:24

It's man named Ned Johnson who runs his own

27:26

company, a very successful company in the Washington,

27:29

DC area called Prep Matters. And what

27:31

Ned says, and I think what a lot of them say, is that

27:33

the test measures your ability to take the

27:35

test. They no longer

27:37

believe if they ever did that the SAT really

27:40

measures your academic

27:42

ability or anything deep about you. It measures

27:44

how well you've been trained to take that test,

27:47

and how much does it cost to get that training

27:50

well? It depends. There's a wide variation.

27:52

Ned is pretty close to the top

27:54

of the financial scale. I think he charges

27:57

four hundred dollars an hour for his students,

27:59

so it's like hiring a lawyer. Yeah, it's huge,

28:01

it's huge. The sat

28:04

N ACT are the biggest obstacles

28:06

that poor kids have to overcome to

28:09

get into the elite schools. Their

28:11

grades are as good as the grades of rich kids,

28:14

but their test scores are systematically

28:16

worse than the scores of rich kids. I mean,

28:18

you know, I've had people go up hundreds of points in just

28:21

a couple of weeks. Sometimes that's

28:23

Ben Paris, who's coached these tests for twenty

28:25

six years, hundreds

28:27

of points. I've never actually had anybody

28:30

investigated for this, but there

28:32

are some students where actually they did so much better

28:34

on the second one where I was afraid they were going to get called in

28:37

because this school special fishy.

28:39

Yeah, yes, I mean, you

28:41

know, there there is a couple that I took that were

28:44

that were pro bono cases, and these are

28:46

just great kids. And one of them was

28:48

coming in at like seven hundred, and she

28:51

was working a part time job, had family

28:53

responsibilities, but she just fundamentally

28:56

didn't know how the test was put together

28:58

and what they expected. You know, she could study

29:00

all of math, but guess what, not all of math is

29:02

on the test. So by really focusing

29:05

her on what she needed to what was going

29:07

to get her points, and understanding how the questions

29:09

worked, she went up over a thousand

29:12

and so she went from not getting into college

29:14

or being stuck in remedial classes to

29:16

getting in and then never having

29:18

to take a remedial class. And you know, if I

29:20

had had more than a month with her, who knows how well she could have done.

29:27

That's a thought that Ben Paris had whenever

29:29

he coached poor kids, but it didn't

29:31

happen often. It

29:33

was a rich kids market. To

29:35

be a lucrative market, it kind of had to be,

29:38

because if everyone could afford SAT coaching,

29:42

SAT coaching would cease to offer an edge.

29:45

Everyone would just game the test in

29:47

the same way. That's what Paul Tough

29:49

found too. While it wasn't totally

29:51

true that you can just buy a test score,

29:54

it wasn't totally false either, but

29:57

he found something else, a sort

29:59

of moral vacuum at the heart of American

30:01

education. It gets noticed

30:03

mainly when someone from the outside walks in. There

30:08

was this one one young man named Ben

30:10

Dormus and be he

30:13

was this amazing guy, a senior in high

30:15

school in Washington. This Ben

30:17

was also from a less affluent home.

30:20

A series of lucky accidents had landed

30:22

him in the office of Ned Johnson, crack

30:25

test prep coach, who agreed

30:27

to give him SAT coaching for free. So

30:29

he got all of these advantages, and he worked

30:31

incredibly hard, and Ned helped him

30:34

improve his SAT score on the

30:36

math side by one hundred and something points, and

30:39

he got into Yale. But

30:41

Yale things got complicated because

30:43

this poor kid couldn't shake the sense that

30:45

getting into Yale involved some underhanded

30:48

trick. Ben really felt this

30:51

sense that he had been given something that

30:53

was unfair, and that while

30:55

he appreciated it, he could not stop thinking

30:58

about the people who had been left behind, because

31:00

he knew that he was actually no different than

31:02

the person that he was a few months earlier before

31:04

he'd gotten all this coaching, and that that guy

31:06

would never have gotten to Yale. But this guy

31:08

who got all this coaching did get

31:10

into Yale. He just keeps thinking

31:13

about, like, what how does that

31:15

system work? That system that he suddenly kind

31:18

of magically got entree into and

31:20

how can it be more fair? How can it be made

31:22

to be more fair? I'm interested

31:24

in this story because it gets at the great

31:27

unspoken question. Most of

31:29

the kids who get test coaching never asked the question.

31:31

They don't even think of what they have as an edge, since

31:33

all the other kids they know also have it. But

31:36

coaching is the great force keeping them

31:38

in the station to which they were born and

31:40

keeping less fortunate kids out of it. Arrest

31:46

warrants issued for forty six people

31:48

around the country, including coaches

31:50

and wealthy parents like Felicity Huffman,

31:53

we now know that some rich American parents

31:55

were taking the college testing game to its

31:57

logical conclusion. The star of

31:59

Desperate Housewives so desperate to

32:02

land her daughter in a top school, prosecutors

32:04

say she paid fifteen thousand

32:06

dollars to Singer to bribe a

32:08

proctor who would secretly correct

32:10

her answers. If

32:15

a test isn't measuring much except

32:17

your ability to take it, and you can

32:19

pay some coach to teach you to do that,

32:21

why not just avoid all the bother and

32:24

pay the coach to take the test for you. That

32:27

kid who got the SAT coaching and went to Yale

32:29

was right to feel uneasy. He'd

32:32

used a coach to help him climb to the top of

32:34

America's Steekas Slope. The

32:36

only difference between him and all the other

32:38

people on top was that

32:40

he could feel that it was slippery.

32:50

I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening

32:52

to Against the Rules. Against the Rules

32:54

is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The

32:57

show's produced by Audrey Dilling

32:59

and Catherine Girodo, with research

33:01

assistance from Lydia Jane Cott and

33:03

Zooe Wynn. Our editor is

33:06

Julia Barton. Mia Lobell

33:08

is our executive producer. Our theme

33:10

was composed by Nick Brittell, with additional

33:13

scoring by Stellwagen Symphonette. We

33:15

got fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our

33:17

show was recorded by tofur Ruth and Trey

33:19

Schultz at Northgate Studios in Berkeley,

33:22

as always thanks to Pushkin's

33:25

founders, Jacob Weisberg

33:27

and Malcolm Gladwell. So

33:47

my name is Tan Carpin to George,

33:50

my book is Overcoming Amateurism.

33:53

Amateurism coaching

33:55

traditions in British spoort. Do that

33:57

one more time so we have it clean I've

34:00

really just forgotten the name of my book, okay,

34:03

A History of Coaching in a History of

34:05

Sports Coaching in Britain, Overcoming

34:08

Amateurism. Yes, that's very British

34:10

of you, you that you see that you're

34:12

you spent so little time talking about yourself.

34:14

You can't even remember the name of your book. I know,

34:17

I know the first bit. I know the first bit because

34:19

that was the name of my PhD. But the end bit

34:21

it was, yeah, M so overcoming your

34:24

amateurism. History

34:26

of Now I forgot naked. Why

34:28

I feel like I just walked into faulty towers? All right?

34:30

Can you let's just

34:32

just introduce yourself.