1010: Participation Trophies | Skeptical Sunday

1010: Skeptical Sunday | Participation Trophies

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday Co-host Jason Pfeiffer. He is the editor in Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, among other accolades, and he just finished a trip of Rod with two small kids, which is actually much more impressive. Actually, Jason, if you ask me on the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life.

And those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers. On Sundays, though we do Skeptical Sunday, where a rotating guest, co-host and I breakdown a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as why expiration dates are nonsense, acupuncture, astrology, recycling, transcend, banned foods, GMOs, toothpaste.

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Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started on today's episode, we're taking a cold hard look at the participation trophy because here's the story everybody knows, right? We're told that in youth sports today, every kid gets a trophy. It doesn't matter if they win or lose, doesn't matter if they tried hard or not.

And at the end, they get this participation trophy just for showing up and trying. And this is a very bad thing. It's a corrupting thing. This teaches kids a terrible life lesson that you don't need to try hard because you get rewarded no matter what. And a lot of people have very strong feelings about that.

But my co-host today says that that's totally wrong. And he's here to defend participation trophies. And before we hear that defensive participation trophies. I'm curious, Jason, why do you care about this subject? Aren't you a business guy? What's Entrepreneur magazine doing with participation trophies?

[00:02:04] Jason Feifer: Yeah, it's a very fine question, Jordan, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to do this episode because I am going to dismantle the myth of the participation trophy. I will prove that the trophy is totally harmless and I know. This is gonna be controversial, but if I may speak to all the participation trophy opponents listening right now, you may, you may hate participation trophies, and you may think that they've ruined a generation of children, but you got participation trophies too.

You did. You may think I'm wrong, but I'm not wrong and I'm going to prove it to you, but. Before I get there, Jordan, you are right. Uh, you asked the question, why am I here? Mm-Hmm. Talking about this as a business guy, my job is to help people build businesses and to grow their careers. So what do I really know or care about?

Participation, trophies. But here's the thing, I. My work is really about understanding patterns of success, and I got interested in the participation trophy because the debate about it is really a debate about how successful mindsets are built. Yeah, that was your whole intro. The thing about the participation trophy is ruining the minds of children and they think that success is this totally different thing, and the irony of this whole thing is.

The participation trophy opponents think that they are the champions of hard work, but they actually have it 100% wrong. Like they misunderstand the trophies. They misunderstand what motivates people to success. They are ignorant of the trophies original origin, and they're telling the exact wrong story about what actions lead to success.

So before I start picking apart their argument, and I am very excited to do so, I feel like we should hear from some of the opponents, some of the people who are saying bad things about participation trophies and the kids who get them, because I don't wanna put words in their mouths, I want you to hear directly from them.

Alright, so Jordan, here is one such opponent.

[00:03:57] Steve Harvey: Now they got these things called participation trophies, where if your child just participate, he get a trophy. For just showing up, but kids need to know that when you grow up, you ain't finna get no trophy.

[00:04:13] Jordan Harbinger: So Jordan, do you recognize that voice? Yeah, that's Steve Harvey, the man with the big daytime TV show and a and even bigger mustache, actually,

[00:04:21] Jason Feifer: even bigger mustache, uh, hard to, hard to beat.

And his argument sounds good, right? He's like, these kids are getting participation trophies just for showing up. That teaches them the wrong lesson because in real life you don't get rewarded just for showing up.

[00:04:37] Jordan Harbinger: You have to work hard. And isn't that true? I mean, you're not actually rewarded just for showing up most of the time.

You do have to work hard,

[00:04:44] Jason Feifer: right? No, you do. You do. But also in real life, winning takes many forms and rewards come in many ways. When people oppose participation trophies, they're often setting up this very binary system. It's like either you win and get a trophy or you lose and you should get nothing.

You can hear that really clearly from I, I wanna play another opponent of the participation trophy. You can really hear that clearly from a guy named Jeff Walls, who's the women's basketball coach at the University of Louisville. His team lost a heartbreaker of a game in 2016, and then at the press conference afterward, he went on this rant, this viral rant about participation trophies.

Here's what he said.

[00:05:26] Jeff Walz: You finish last, you come home with, with a trophy. You kidding me? I mean, what's that? Teaching kids? It's okay to lose. And unfortunately, it's our society. It's what we're building for, and it's not just in basketball, it's in life.

[00:05:39] Jason Feifer: Okay. I think it's really valuable for you to have heard that.

So let's combine Steve Harvey and this basketball coach, and you get a fuller idea of their argument. Like I said, they're setting up this binary system. You win and get a trophy, you lose and get nothing. And they're saying. Kids should only focus on winning and only be rewarded for winning because in the adult world, you don't get rewards for losing, so you cannot and should not tolerate losing.

That's what they're saying. But that's a terrible way to think of things because failure often contains incredible data and insights that you can use to build something great. Like, okay, consider this guy Stewart Butterfield. He starts a video game company, he raises millions of dollars for it, but the video game is not successful.

So if this was a competition. Stewart Butterfield just lost. Mm. He shuts down the company. He returns what's left of his investor money, and then he's sitting around licking his wounds, thinking about what to do next, and he thinks, you know, huh? We made this really cool chat functionality inside the video game, and people seem to really like that.

I wonder, Stewart Butterfield thinks to himself, I wonder if that could somehow be its own company. And so he spins it off as his own thing, and

[00:06:57] Jordan Harbinger: that is now the company we know of as Slack. And if you don't know what Slack is, I'm kind of jealous because every company has it. Instead of email. Yeah. Or in addition to email.

And you must have a really nice calm life if you don't have Slack. And he's a billionaire. Yeah. I,

[00:07:11] Jason Feifer: I wanna live in your world because I'm sure I got 20 Slack messages as we were recording this part of the episodes. Yeah. That is where Slack comes from. That's the origin story of Slack. It was that failure that led to Slack.

And so what is the trophy in this story? What's the trophy? Stewart's first company failed, but it gave him an idea for a company that would succeed. Losing wasn't for nothing. That's what I'm saying here, Jordan, losing wasn't for nothing. You cannot simplify life into winning and losing. But wait, that's not even the worst part of it because Jordan, did you catch.

The glaring, enormous, outrageous, factual error in what Steve Harvey said.

[00:07:51] Jordan Harbinger: He said, kids don't grow up and get trophies, but doesn't he have like seven daytime Emmys? I mean, I guess those aren't participation trophies, but you know.

[00:07:59] Jason Feifer: No, no, I I suppose he actually

[00:08:01] Jordan Harbinger: won those. Well, he or purchased them. He

[00:08:03] Jason Feifer: won those.

He, he participated and he did well. Right. That's true. Trophy's all over the place for that guy, but no. That is not the glaring error. Uh, here I'm gonna just play for you this one little part that you probably missed. Now, they got these things called participation trophies. You catch that? Yeah. The glaring, enormous, outrageous factual error is the word now.

Ah, he said, now they got these things called participation trophies. Now, as in participation, trophies are new. The impact that they're having on kids is new now, today, right this second in our lifetime. This is what Steve Harvey is saying. It's all happening for the first time now, and that's what all participation trophy opponents say.

In fact, their entire argument hinges upon this belief that the participation trophy is new and therefore the impact that it's having is new. And therefore, the bad things that they can see in today's generation of young people is new. They can point to all these modern boogeymen like helicopter parents and Gen Z in the workplace, and they can say, all these new bad things are the fault of this other new bad thing, and this

[00:09:16] Jordan Harbinger: is,

[00:09:16] Jason Feifer: this is wrong.

This is wrong. Okay. I I won't just tell you what's wrong. I'm going to read from a newspaper article that proves it's wrong. The headline in this article was ready. This is the headline, many trophies for tossers in state. Turning. Doesn't

[00:09:31] Jordan Harbinger: that mean something? And, uh, different, uh, in the uk? Maybe, I don't know, maybe it's Canada.

[00:09:35] Jason Feifer: Uh, no, no, no. It's, it's, it's right here in the States. But, uh, the reason it sounds weird is because it's not from right now, that's a. A bit of an old story. Uh, here's the first paragraph from the story. Trophies galore. Trophies galore. Truly in this newspaper, trophies galore will be offered for the second annual Ohio State invitation High school basketball tournament.

Members of the victorious outfits will be given individual trophies. A participation trophy also will be given to each athlete playing in the series. That is the article that is from the article. Now, Jordan, wanna guess what year that article was from Tossers

[00:10:10] Jordan Harbinger: 1975. I'm not sure. Ah,

[00:10:12] Jason Feifer: you're close except not close at all.

1922.

[00:10:15] Jordan Harbinger: That says off my am mere 53. Ish years or whatever. Yeah. Uh,

[00:10:19] Jason Feifer: not bad. It's you, you, you close your eyes and through a dart and you hit the other side of the room. That is an article about participation trophies. It's from a newspaper called The Evening Independent of Massillon. Uh, it was in Ohio and it was printed more than a century before you and I recorded this

[00:10:33] Jordan Harbinger: podcast.

Okay. So a skeptic is saying, Hey, cute little article you found. Maybe it's mildly interesting. The term participation trophy was also used a century ago. But it doesn't disprove anything. Steve Harvey's not drafting a retraction right now. Maybe this wasn't widely used. Maybe it was just that one thing, and that's what made it weird and newsworthy.

[00:10:50] Jason Feifer: Yes, that's totally true. And if that was the only article, then it wouldn't mean anything. Steve Harvey still wins, but I have a hundred years worth of those articles. Mm-Hmm. A hundred. So, okay, it, it is time to back up and explain where participation trophies actually came from because it wasn't just created outta nowhere and it wasn't created yesterday.

It is deeply intertwined with the history of sports in America and really it's the product of some of the forces that shaped our modern world as we know it. Alright, that's a. Pretty big statement. So yeah,

[00:11:25] Jordan Harbinger: take us back. Where do we

[00:11:26] Jason Feifer: begin with this? I feel confident in proving. Okay. The big statement that I just said.

So, alright, we're gonna go back two centuries to the 1820s and here I'm mostly gonna be summarizing the work of historian David K. Wiggins, who is a preeminent scholar on this subject. So, uh, let's paint a quick picture of America. At the start of the 1820s. This is still very much a country in development.

The country only stretches from the Atlantic Ocean through to about the western edge of the Mississippi Basin. Mm-hmm. Maine and Missouri were just added as states. Right. Bringing you back to the 1820s here, slavery is widespread. James Monroe is president. The country is mostly agricultural and very puritanical, and they frown upon a lot of sports and child play.

And then. The Industrial Revolution begins and new immigrants start arriving and America begins to change A philosophy called muscular Christianity becomes popular.

[00:12:23] Jordan Harbinger: That sounds like a bodybuilding competition for priests. I don't know. The, the, the jacked Jesus invitational. I don't know. That's very, that's something I've never heard before.

[00:12:33] Jason Feifer: Uh, yeah. Get me, get me a ticket to that. I wanna see it. No, I, I can neither confirm nor deny, uh, anything that you just said there, but. Everyone in the 1820s would've been talking about this because muscular Christianity was a new way of thinking about hard work. Muscular Christianity was this way of talking about religious and patriotic duty, together, bundling it up with ideas of self-sacrifice, and manliness and physical discipline.

For as weird as that sounds, we actually still live with these ideas today. So like what I just said, mm-hmm. May sound foreign, but just check this out. So for example, let me read you something from the writer, Charles Kingsley, who wrote this in a book called Health and Education in 1874. He wrote, quote in the playing field, boys acquire virtues, which no books can give them.

Not merely daring and endurance, but better still temper self-restraint. Fairness, honor, un envious, approbation of another success and all that give and take of life, which stand a man in such good stead when he goes forth into the world.

[00:13:38] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so that's quite interesting because that's basically how we talk about sports right now.

It's like sports. Yeah. So training ground for life. The lessons you learn, play in whatever game, or the lessons you carry forever. It's like the whole premise of that Friday Night Lights movie.

[00:13:52] Jason Feifer: Yeah, that's exactly right. Clear eyes, full heart can't lose. Like it comes from sports and it comes from muscular Christianity.

Huh. And it's also why we're so worked up about participation trophies today, because if sports are seen as a central place for people to learn about life, I. Then anything that happens in youth sports will impact the way that kids understand the world and themselves. You see, we set this thing up and now we're

[00:14:17] Jordan Harbinger: freaked out about it.

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[00:17:26] Jason Feifer: Let's keep going with history.

Over the 18 hundreds, America changes. Like I said, the Industrial Revolution increases worker productivity and pay, which means that people now have more free time and money to spend. In response to that, a whole leisure economy pops up to serve these people, including. Professional sports. Professional baseball, for example, appears in the late 18 hundreds,

[00:17:48] Jordan Harbinger: but it's not just happy leisure time for everyone.

Right, because the late 18 hundreds, isn't that when child labor was legal or am I off again?

[00:17:56] Jason Feifer: You are correct. No, this is not happy leisure time for everyone by 1910. There were more than 2 million children under the age of 15 working in what came to be considered child slavery. Wow. So, over the course of the next few decades, that changes because of two big things.

First, a series of laws start outlawing child labor. By the way, that that is not an easy thing to do. It's like many, many laws and lots of pushing. It is really sad, sad history. Second states start to mandate that children go to school. Massachusetts was the first state to mandate that kids went to school in 1852, and then Mississippi was the last in 1917.

And while this is happening. People start sending their kids to school for the first time. People also start thinking differently about how they spend their time. I mean, this thing that I'm gonna say next is something that we just take for granted, but that actually had a starting point, which is kids suddenly had designated school time and free time.

That was a brand new idea for people at the time. And people of the day were like, uh, okay, what am I supposed to do with my kids when they have free time? Now that they can't work in the factory, a coal mine? They didn't know what to do and they didn't want their kids to just play unsupervised, so well, Jordan, you wanna take a guess at what they sent their kids to do?

[00:19:17] Jordan Harbinger: They sat around playing on the iPad? No, the TV wasn't invented yet, so they couldn't all sit at home watching Steve Harvey, I guess. And they can't with it. Shamefully, they can't work in the coal mine of the factory. Yeah. Terrible anymore. In their free time after school, so I'm guessing they play sports.

[00:19:32] Jason Feifer: That's it. Bingo. They play sports. Organized sports for kids is born. Now with that, schools create these leagues themselves. One of the first ones was called the New York City Public School Athletic League for boys. Which New York's public school system created in 1903 and then many other cities followed, and they really started to blossom into these youth leagues.

As we know today, parents would start organizing their lives around their kids' sports schedules, and parents would show up and get overly aggressive and start yelling each at each other. Like that all happened back then. That is not a new thing either. Wow. And then here's the next major plot twist in this story.

World War I, world War I rages from 1914 to 1918. And when it's over, Americans are absolutely exhausted by competition. Mm-hmm. And they start to think it's bad that we put so much pressure on our kids. Maybe actually our kids shouldn't even be playing sports. And over the next decade or two, a whole movement springs up against youth, sports and cities start to dismantle their youth sports programs.

In 1933, for example, Cleveland moved to ban all competitive athletics in junior high, and the school system's physical welfare director even told a local newspaper quote. It has been found that boys who take part in athletics on a competitive basis do not grow as much or as rapidly as boys who do not play on the school teams.

[00:21:00] Jordan Harbinger: Well, that kind of seems crazy. So cities start canceling their sports programs and they expect kids to just stop playing sports. I can't really imagine that parents or kids would stand for that if you tried to shut down high school football in Texas today, for example. There would be an actual civil war of some kind in the middle of that state.

[00:21:20] Jason Feifer: Yes, it would get bloody and violent extremely fast. You're right, this exhaustion after World War I is very real. This is a totally changed country and people are worried about putting too much pressure on their kids. That is all true, but many of them also like sports and they want their kids to play sports.

So we have some conflict. As a result, two things happen. The first is once the school systems start shutting down their programs, private companies spring up to create youth leagues themselves. So this is actually where a little league comes from. And the second thing is people start asking themselves, how can our children participate in sports but still be raised as healthy individuals who are not corrupted by overly stressful competition?

This is how they're trying to meld these tensions in America. People like sports, but they're exhausted by World War I and they're afraid of the impact that it has on their children. So how do they do these two things? Oh, you know what the answer is? Oh my God, is the answer. Participation trophies? The answer is participation trophies.

This is it. They start talking about playing for the love of the game. And all the great life lessons that you can learn from sports. It's that stuff from muscular Christianity, from the late 18 hundreds, which now finds a new life in the 1920s. And then, yeah, they start handing out participation trophies.

Participation trophies are just everywhere. Rewarding children for just playing. And I should stress, people at the time think this is a great idea. They love this idea. You can find articles about these trophies, these participation trophies in newspapers across the country. Remember at the, at the beginning when we were taping this episode, I said, I got a hundred years worth of these things, and now you know why.

In 1924, for example, the University of Minnesota created a 30 inch sterling silver participation trophy, which would go to the student who had the highest number of what they called participation points, whatever that even was. The local newspaper said that the participation trophy should quote. Create more interest in athletics than ever before.

[00:23:24] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, a, a 30 inch sterling participation trophy, it does sound pretty sweet. I mean, it's, it's anti-microbial, if nothing else, I suppose. Indeed.

[00:23:33] Jason Feifer: Right, and, and it gets better In the Birmingham News of Alabama in 1929, there's an article that says. One of the most coveted trophies competed for by playgrounds is the Rotary Club participation trophy.

A silver shield mounted on oak and surrounded by smaller silver shields

[00:23:51] Jordan Harbinger: that is very fancy. A lot of shields involved. They don't. They just don't make participation trophies like they used to Jason?

[00:23:57] Jason Feifer: No, no. I mean, maybe if they did, Steve Harvey would want one. Yeah, and here's the thing. As the decades went on, participation trophies only became more popular.

I talked about this with a guy named Dan Gould. He's the director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports, and a professor of student athlete development at Michigan State. He said that particularly in the 1960s and seventies, people started to become really interested in these new ideas about self-esteem and self-worth, you know, stuff that today we just take for granted.

But in the sixties and seventies, new ideas and parents wanted to know what can we do to help our kids build a better sense of self and participation Trophies were a, a good answer to that because it rewarded kids for just going out and being themselves.

[00:24:41] Jordan Harbinger: So, okay. This is pretty crazy. So let me just recap this briefly for people who are like, wow, these guys are excited about the history of participation trophies, youth sports leagues start in the early 19 hundreds basically because parents don't know what to do with their kids now that school's mandatory and they can't force their kids to work in factories building explosive shells or whatever.

Right. And after. After World War I, America's like, uh, wait a second, maybe sports isn't actually that good for kids. So they shift the focus away from the competition of sports and towards the love of sports and start rewarding kids just for participating in sports. And everyone thinks this is a great idea until when did we start hating the participation trophy.

Deciding that that was the root of why this current generation sucks, even though it's been around for like a century.

[00:25:30] Jason Feifer: Yeah, it's a really good question. So over its slate. The sports journalist Stefan Fais tried to find the very first time that participation trophies were considered a bad thing, and the earliest that he could find was an article in the Minnesota St.

Cloud Times in 1993. It's an interview. This, this article is an interview with the coach of a local girls softball team. She says, quote, we've got enough participation trophies. Now we'd like to get a place trophy.

[00:26:00] Jordan Harbinger: A place trophy. What is that like first, second, third, like a regular trophy as we know it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I

[00:26:05] Jason Feifer: think so. That's exactly right. Like the girls are just starting to take participation trophies as an insult. You know, they're like, we, we don't want these things anymore. We actually want do, well. And it is all downhill from there soon, newspapers around the country are running columns and commentary about how terrible participation trophies are, and by the early two thousands, some youth sports leagues are getting rid of the participation trophy entirely.

And then guys like Steve Harvey are going on TV to talk about how bad it is. You know, nobody knows exactly why this happened, like why there was this turn. Mm-Hmm. But it was probably tied up in all sorts of other cultural anxieties and debates that were happening at the time. You got these debates about whether parents are coddling their children and whether the next generation of workers are lazy and entitled, and I'm sure you throw the internet and the anxieties around that into the mix.

And I think people were just looking for some kind of explanation like what could be causing all these problems? What made these kids bad? And somebody blames the participation trophy, and it seems like a pretty good answer.

[00:27:09] Jordan Harbinger: You know, people are like, here's this trophy. People love black and white thinking, right?

They love their black and white thinking. Yeah. Oh,

[00:27:13] Jason Feifer: people love it. They just want the simplest possible answer. We want no nuance. We, we want no complexity. In our understanding of the world, that's where this is going. Here's this trophy that rewards kids for participating, which teaches them that they can get a prize without

[00:27:27] Jordan Harbinger: winning, even though this trophy's been around for a hundred years.

Suddenly this must be the reason. And it's like, dad, you probably got a bunch of these and you just didn't even realize, oh, well I turned out fine. Totally. Yeah.

[00:27:37] Jason Feifer: Right? Yes, exactly. Just nobody knows that. We're constantly treating old things as new. This, this is a problem that we just have. As humans. We, we, we don't have great institutional memory as humans.

Like, remember Jordan in the early 2010s, how everyone was worked up by the idea of selfies.

[00:27:55] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, you'd have whole entire TV news segments and magazine covers about selfies. Yeah. These kids, they keep taking selfies of themselves. That's, it's creating narcissism that everyone's a narcissist. Now look at these people taking selfies.

They're all a bunch of. Self-absorbed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's just over and over and over. You can't get away from it. Right.

[00:28:12] Jason Feifer: Over and over and over. And, and, and that's because they were all treating the selfie as new, right? Just like, just like people treat participation trophies as new, but the selfie, it wasn't new.

There's nothing new about that except maybe the word selfie. The first known selfie was taken in the year 1839 by a guy named Robert Cornelius. Mm. People have been taking selfies for as long as cameras have existed. We just don't remember. We have this terrible, terrible habit of treating old things as new to the world just because they're new to us.

[00:28:40] Jordan Harbinger: I will say it was really hard to take a selfie on a regular camera when you couldn't see yourself. You ever try it? Oh yeah. And you end up with like one picture. It's like half your face, mostly forehead and hair. The other one is like just nose and chin and then the rest of them you're never centered.

And it's like, yeah, you just take like four and one of them's kind of okay. And then you have to cut the edges off 'cause you have like Right. Someone's house in the background and then you

[00:29:00] Jason Feifer: gotta take it to Walgreens. Right. And pay a bunch of money and wait a week to see how terrible they were.

[00:29:04] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly, yes.

So, okay. That makes me think back to your point about Steve Harvey, not the Walgreens thing, but the selfie thing. You played this quip of Steve saying. Now we have these things called participation trophies, and you said his word now was wrong and that if you blow up that word, the entire argument falls apart.

And now I see why. Because for the argument against participation trophies to work, somebody's gotta believe that participation trophies actually hurt kids. It's like a kid gets a participation trophy. They somehow via that learn to be lazy and entitled because they got the same trophy as the winner, which it's not really the kid, but in truth, a hundred years worth of kids got participation trophies.

So if they were dangerous, that would mean that a hundred years worth of kids. We're all just ruined by these trophies and it's, it's funny 'cause you can see these same arguments with a lot of things and it's like, well, what? Why? Why, if this is so bad, wasn't it bad for the first hundred first century of its existence?

[00:30:04] Jason Feifer: Yeah, that's right. That's right. How is it inherently bad now, but not inherently back then? Yeah. Steve Harvey was born in 1957, which means that he grew up in the sixties and seventies during a golden age of participation trophies. That that's just a fact. So if people like him are complaining about participation trophies, they're trying to have the argument both ways.

If they really wanna complain about these things, then they somehow have to agree that participation trophies, the same exact trophies that we're complaining about today, somehow did not hurt their generation. 'cause you know, I don't hear Steve Harvey saying anything about how he was damaged by participation trophies, but.

He also wants us to believe that these old trophies, a hundred year old trophies somehow became dangerous in the nineties for some reason, and now they do hurt the new generation, but that doesn't make sense. It's the same trophy given out for the same reason. So it either hurts everybody or it hurts nobody.

[00:30:56] Jordan Harbinger: And what's the answer to that? Do participation trophies. Actually have a negative impact on kids. Is there science that we can look at? Either way? I'm so curious.

[00:31:05] Jason Feifer: Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to know too, because look, I get it. I get it here. This history stuff is interesting, it's fun, cool, whatever.

But the only thing that really matters to a parent is whether or not this stuff really does impact their kids. And I got a five and 8-year-old, I, I wanna know this stuff. So I called a guy who knows this subject perhaps better than anyone. His name is Dr. Ken Barish, and here's his resume. I. Clinical professor of psychology at Weill Medical College at Cornell University on the faculty of the Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, as well as the William Allenson White Institute Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program.

Geez, I don't know how you fit all that onto a business card. My

[00:31:47] Jordan Harbinger: goodness. Anyway,

[00:31:47] Jason Feifer: he's worked with children and families for over three decades, and he teaches postgraduate classes in adolescent development, psychoanalysis. Neuropsychological testing and child psychotherapy, and he has published several widely read articles on psychotherapy.

[00:32:01] Jordan Harbinger: I love that. You're like, this guy's hype man right now. Yeah.

[00:32:03] Jason Feifer: Mm-Hmm.

[00:32:06] Jordan Harbinger: Alright, let's hear it. For selfies, participation trophies, and now mindless consumerism. We'll be right back.

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[00:34:24] Jason Feifer: The reason I did that is is I wanna make clear, unlike Steve Harvey, who is qualified to host a Game of Family Feud, Ken Barish is actually qualified to tell us what's good for our families.

I want you to hear the professional diagnosis straight from Ken Ish's mouth. So here is a recording of what he told me.

[00:34:44] Ken Barish: I personally think that the whole controversy about participation trophies has taken on more importance than it deserves. I.

[00:34:52] Jason Feifer: Which is a nice way of saying, Ken thinks this whole thing is stupid.

That's the diagnosis. This is stupid. He told me, look, when a kid is really young, we should reward them for participating because at ages 4, 5, 6, maybe even older, what you want is participation. You just want them to get out there to try something new, to learn how to play with others, all that good stuff, you know?

And the participation trophy rewards the thing. We wanna encourage participation and then they get older and they learn the concepts of winning and losing and they wanna win. And then these kids are no longer interested in being rewarded just for participating. Here's Ken, one more time.

[00:35:36] Ken Barish: That's one of the reasons I think that they don't have the danger that people assign to them by 13.

To be a little bit glib about this, kids know that only one team wins the Super Bowl and only one team wins the World Series. So they don't want a trophy for a participation. It doesn't mean anything to them anymore.

[00:35:57] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Okay. That's a such a different way of thinking about it because, okay. What are critics like Steve Harvey actually worried about?

They're worried that participation trophies are this magical force that kids are powerless against. Like the kids will always just do whatever gets them the trophy. So if they get a trophy for winning, they'll wanna win. But if they get a trophy for participating, and that's it. Then they'll just be happy participating.

But of course, that's not how kids really think. Kids don't wake up every day. I. Optimizing their actions for trophies. They just wanna feel good about what they've done. Other, otherwise people wouldn't compare themselves to one another, which is like my, you know, unfortunately, one of my, uh, most sanity reducing hobbies.

[00:36:43] Jason Feifer: Yeah. Yeah. I, boy, wouldn't it be great actually if kids optimize their lives for trophies? I would give my 8-year-old a trophy for changing his damn underwear every day. 'cause he keeps forgetting to do it. But. He doesn't care about that trophy. Yeah. Rewards can indeed impact people's behavior and motivation, but only if it's a reward that people want.

That is the thing that participation trophy opponents always forget. Kids do not orient their entire lives around how they're being rewarded in youth sports. I mean, I guess maybe, maybe if the only thing that a child did in their entire life was play youth sports Morning tonight. With no other influences in their lives and no other way to learn anything and no other people to talk to than it is perhaps possible that they would start to think that the most important thing in life is a trophy.

And so they'd be satisfied just getting a participation trophy forever. But that's not the real world. Kids learn from what they see and hear and experience in the entire world around them. And it does not take long for them to understand the difference between winning and losing. And once they do, the participation trophy just becomes meaningless to them.

It's not, it's not harmful, it's not teaching the wrong lesson. They just, they just don't care about it anymore. You couldn't get them to care about a participation trophy if you tried, because the world is more complex and this. This Jordan brings us back to the point that I made at the very beginning about why I business guy who shouldn't really care about participation trophies gets so fired up about the participation trophy debate.

[00:38:21] Jordan Harbinger: This reminds me of the fact that I don't even care about real trophies myself. I have my, my degree from, or my diploma from high school. Mm-Hmm. It's in the thing, the manila. Crappy envelope that it got mailed in with the cardboard in it. My college degree is in a nice ish fake leather folio that I think, I don't even know.

I hope I didn't have to pay for that. 'cause it's in a drawer on top of my high school diploma and my degree from Michigan law, which is like, you know, it's a decent law school. Yeah. It's in a. Quite nice. Fake leather or real leather for all. I know Folio on top of my college degree, on top of my high school diploma.

And I have N actually, I say that they're on top of one another. I actually have no idea where any of those things are. Yeah, I was

[00:39:04] Jason Feifer: gonna say that's impressive that you even knew where they

[00:39:05] Jordan Harbinger: were now. Once my parents moved, they're in a bin somewhere and you know what's on top of that stuff. Like merit badges from Boy Scouts and probably a pair of socks that I've been looking for since the nineties.

[00:39:18] Clip: Yeah.

[00:39:18] Jordan Harbinger: I don't even know if I've ever even looked at these things other than to be like, oh, they did mail that. Cool. That's it. So the motivation comes from elsewhere. Yeah. And let's just remind people again, you're a business guy. You're the editor in Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. You host a podcast called Help Wandered, where you and your co-host Nicole Lapin.

They help people solve their trickiest work problems. You come on to Skeptical Sunday because you're saying, Hey, there's a reason we should be skeptical of this whole participation trophy thing. And that's because it's not just about sports or kids or a fun way to make fun of Steve Harvey for an hour.

It's about the very nature of what it takes to succeed. And I think that's kind of the key lesson here. Otherwise it's like, why spend so much time crapping on these things, right?

[00:40:00] Jason Feifer: Yeah, that, that's exactly right. And it's about how we tell the totally wrong story. About what success looks like and what it takes to get there.

Opponents like Steve Harvey want to tell a really simple story. There's winning and there's losing. There's hard work and there's just showing up. And so when a kid is really young, they say you must do whatever it takes to point them towards what it takes to win. But you know what? No. No, I, I reject that the world is unpredictable.

It's impossible to know how one thing impacts another. Who would've guessed that child labor laws would lead to the creation of youth sports leagues or that World War I would lead to the creation of participation trophies? You, you simply cannot know how one action leads to an outcome. And this uncertainty makes people so crazy, uncomfortable, not knowing what'll happen next, or how to control our lives or how to shape our kids' lives.

People do not like that, and so we often reject the premise entirely. We say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The world is not. Unpredictable. The world is very predictable. A leads to B leads directly to C. I can point to this one thing over here and I know exactly how it'll impact that one thing over there. And this I think is how we end up with debates, like participation trophies, because if the world is totally understandable as people want it to be, then fixing it is easy.

And finding the enemy is easy, and creating success is easy. And I mean, Jordan. How appealing would that be? You know? Mm-Hmm. How comforting and rewarding would that be? Yeah. We can identify bad things and then we can just backtrack to their origins and we can eliminate those bad seeds and then we can clear the pathway to success.

Just simple as that. But what if that's not true? I mean, let me rephrase that. It is not true. I'm flat out telling you. It's not true. The real truth is to paraphrase Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes. External things influence us, but we also influence external things. One person's insulting participation trophy is another person's satisfying reward.

So what is the true lesson of the participation trophy? To me, it is this. Winning happens in many ways, and it always has and it always will. And if you think that a stupid little participation trophy has anything to do with any of this, well then you are wrong. True success requires an open mind and complex thinking and an appreciation of what comes before, and a realistic assessment of what might happen next.

If Steve Harvey ever wants to do an episode on that, on his daytime television show, then call me up, Steve and we'll do our best to help people. And I will bring you a participation trophy just for trying.

[00:42:51] Jordan Harbinger: Jason, thank you for participating in this episode of Skeptical Sunday. Your trophy's in the mail, my friend.

Oh,

[00:42:57] Jason Feifer: yeah. I'm excited. I'll, I'll put it right next to, uh, your college teacher. My diploma from college. Exactly.

[00:43:02] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Find mine while you're at it. Thanks to everyone for listening as well. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

Transcripts are in the show notes and probably in your app now. Every app has transcripts. We don't even need to make 'em anymore. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. And I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

I know it's called x. I'm not calling it X though. Um, Jason, you can find Jason on his newsletter. One thing better at one thing, better email. I had no idea you could have email, but you're the only guy I know. That has gotten a email, one thing better email or on his podcast, help Wanted, this show is created in association with Podcast one.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. I basically got a participation trophy for law school folks, so. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on this show.

Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday. So if you think we really dropped the ball on something, let us know. We're usually pretty receptive to that. Y'all know how to reach meJordan@jordanharbinger.com. And remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love.

And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. Like your favorite friend who can't stop spit talking about participation trophies. Share it with them so I can get their, they can turn their IR towards me instead.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. Here's a trailer of our interview with Molly Bloom, who ran infamous underground poker games in Los Angeles and New York that were attended by a-Listers mobsters, and eventually landed her in hot water with the FBI.

If you've seen the movie Molly's Game. You'll know she was a master of psychology and used a lot of the tactics and techniques that she taught us here on the show.

[00:45:00] Clip: I went to LA and needed to get the first job that I could and got hired by this guy who, uh, was a pretty demanding boss. I was his personal assistant.

He said, I need you to serve drinks at my poker game. So I'm like, okay, great. And I bring my playlist and my cheese plate and I'm thinking, you know, the players are gonna be these overgrown frat boys, but then. Ben Affleck walks in the room and Leo DiCaprio and a politician that was very well recognized and heads of studios, heads of banks, and all of a sudden I had this light bulb moment that poker's my Trojan horse.

I just need the control and have power over this game because it has this incredible hold over these people. Why do these guys, with their access to anyone and anything, come to this dingy basement to play this game?

[00:45:49] Jordan Harbinger: What is the most money you've seen someone lose in one night?

[00:45:52] Clip: A hundred million dollars.

[00:45:54] Jordan Harbinger: How did the mob get involved?

[00:45:56] Clip: Around Christmas. Door opened and this guy that I'd never seen before pushed his way in, stuck a gun in my mouth. Then he beat the hell outta me and he kind of gave me this speech about how if I told anyone about this or if I didn't comply, then they would take a trip to Colorado to see my family.

And then the feds got involved and the first thing they did was they took all my money. I moved back to la, I'd gotten a pretty decent job. 10 days later, I get a call in the middle of the night. This is agent so-and-so from the FBI, you need to come out with your hands up. I walk into my hallway when my eyes adjusted to the high beam flashlights.

I saw 17 FBI agents, semi-automatic weapons pointed at me.

[00:46:36] Jordan Harbinger: If you wanna learn more about building rapport and generating the type of trust that Molly Bloom needed to run her multimillion dollar operation and hear about how it all came to an end, check out episode one 20 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.