Overconfidence and the Art of Knowing Yourself

Summary

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The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant

Episode: Overconfidence and the Art of Knowing Yourself

Date: April 9, 2026
Podcast Network: Vox Media
Hosts: Brené Brown & Adam Grant

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Brené Brown and Adam Grant dive into the themes of overconfidence, self-awareness, and the crucial skill of metacognition—thinking about your own thinking. They draw inspiration from Olympic skier Eileen Gu’s display of metacognition, explore how this skill helps defend against the Dunning-Kruger effect (the tendency of unskilled people to overestimate their abilities), and discuss practical ways to improve self-knowledge and calibration. The show balances qualitative and quantitative perspectives, weaving in personal anecdotes, research insights, and a candid look at their own cognitive missteps.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Olympic Inspiration: Eileen Gu’s Metacognition

(04:43 – 07:26)

• Eileen Gu is highlighted as a model of metacognition during a press conference, demonstrating her ability to think about and regulate her own thinking under pressure.
• The discussion starts with the reporter Charlotte Harper’s pointed yet warm question: "Do you think before you speak? Because your answers are so quick and so comprehensive?"
  • "I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking and I kind of modify it." - Eileen Gu (Paraphrased by Brené, 13:21)
• Brené and Adam break down metacognition as both awareness (“What am I thinking?”) and regulation (“Given that, how do I want to respond or adjust?”).

"Metacognition is the ability to notice what your mind is doing, evaluate it, and deliberately change it. There’s awareness and regulation."
— Brené Brown (06:27)

2. What is Metacognition and How Do We Build It?

(06:27 – 18:30)

• Adam: Metacognition is "the ability to think about your own thinking and then evolve it."
• Story: Brené shares a hospital CEO's struggle to understand metacognition, ultimately realizing her process of seeking understanding was metacognitive in itself.
• Adam emphasizes the role of intellectual humility in metacognition—acknowledging what you don’t know.
• Research indicates that reading, not just listening, improves critical thinking because it encourages active engagement—pausing, highlighting, and summarizing.

"When we're listening, we don't pause and replay nearly as much as we pause and reread. We're more absorbed in the experience as opposed to stepping out of it to analyze."
— Adam Grant (09:12)

3. The Power of Journaling for Metacognition

(13:21 – 19:27)

• Eileen Gu mentions journaling as key for breaking down her thought processes.
• Adam: Journaling is akin to "self-guided therapy." It allows for self-distancing—seeing your thoughts on a page makes them easier to evaluate.
• Brené adds humor about her artful journaling process, highlighting how creative approaches can reinforce self-reflection.

"Journaling...is essentially self-guided therapy. It’s a way of reflecting on your thoughts and forming a story and then self-distancing so your thoughts are staring at you from a page, as opposed to inside your head."
— Adam Grant (17:27)

4. Calibration—Matching Confidence With Reality

(11:38 – 12:02, 34:24 – 34:32)

• Calibration is described as the process of aligning your confidence with your actual competence.
• Adam: Good calibration is being confident when knowledgeable, curious/cautious when not.
• Poor calibration leads to Dunning-Kruger bias—overconfidence in the absence of competence.

"In some ways it's the most important skill, because if you get that wrong, everything else fails afterward."
— Adam Grant (11:38)

5. The Dunning-Kruger Effect Unpacked

(25:54 – 34:32, 36:16 – 41:02)

• Dunning-Kruger describes how people with limited knowledge or skill are most likely to overestimate their abilities. The effect peaks not with novices, but those with some experience (Mount Stupid).
• Both hosts share anecdotes:
  • Brené’s early overconfidence in pickleball, later recalibrated by a coach.
  • Adam’s overestimation of his ping pong skills until faced with a professional.
• The complexity and subjectivity of a field can make calibration even harder.

"David Dunning says when you lack the skills to produce excellence, you usually also lack skills to judge excellence."
— Adam Grant (31:23)

6. Cognitive Biases in Everyday Life

(37:46 – 42:48)

• Brené confesses to time estimation failures (planning fallacy), illustrating how even self-aware people can repeatedly misjudge.
• She describes using team tools like "Turn and Learn" for project estimation, showing deference to others’ judgment even when her instincts disagree.

"I've learned to defer to the judgment of people I respect and trust...who both hold a sense of urgency and a practical, excellent operational mind."
— Brené Brown (42:48)

7. Societal & Political Implications of Metacognition

(21:13 – 24:29)

• The hosts discuss how metacognition (and empathy) are often discouraged in systems of extremism or manipulation.
• Brené: If she were a despot, she’d attack skills that increase metacognition and empathy, which are crucial to resisting manipulation.

"The first two things that I would vilify are skills that increase metacognition and empathy. And that is exactly what's happening from the far right today."
— Brené Brown (22:43)

8. Explaining as Calibration; The Illusion of Explanatory Depth

(47:54 – 49:27)

• Adam discusses how teaching or explaining a topic is the ultimate calibration tool—explaining highlights the gaps in real understanding.

"We know from research on the illusion of explanatory depth that when you try to explain something that you think you know, you will find out really quickly when you don't."
— Adam Grant (48:20)

9. Can Metacognition Fix Overconfidence Alone? (Hard No)

(49:33 – 51:38)

• Metacognition alone is not enough; skill-building is also required.
• Research from the University of Edinburgh shows that improving metacognition without developing domain-specific skills does not reduce overconfidence.

"There’s no amount of studying your own mind around a topic that will increase your competence in that topic. It has to go hand in hand. Metacognition plus actual skills building."
— Brené Brown (49:37)

10. The Backfire Effect: When Metacognition Hinders Performance

(51:38 – 56:46)

• Adam explains how focusing on analyzing your knowledge can temporarily make you worse, by interfering with the autopilot of mastered skills (e.g., the "yips" in sports).
• Brené references “The Inner Game of Tennis,” explaining how performance equals potential minus interference. Learning new skills creates interference and frustration before progress.

"If you ask a golfer to explain their stroke, they actually perform worse afterward...you’ve taken a skill that was mostly automated, and you’ve all of a sudden made it conscious. And trying to think through the steps actually interferes with your ability to effortlessly execute."
— Adam Grant (51:53)

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Notable Quotes and Moments

On Eileen Gu’s mindset:

"How can I approach my own brain the way I approach my craft of free skiing? Which I think is recognizing that thinking is a skill that can be deliberately practiced and improved."
— Brené Brown (21:13)

On extremism and metacognition:

"Extremism on either side is fueled by self-righteousness, and thought is inextricably tied to moral indignation."
— Brené Brown (24:30)

On the fallibility of expertise:

"When you lack the skills to produce excellence, you often also lack the skills to judge excellence."
— Adam Grant (31:50)

On the discomfort of new learning:

"You are going to go backward before you go forward in metacognition and skills building. Even if what you’re working on is having more connecting conversations with your partner, staying curious with your children, it is not going to feel good when you’re trying it and learning it."
— Brené Brown (54:38)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:43 | Introduction of Eileen Gu's press conference moment | | 06:27 | Defining metacognition: awareness & regulation | | 13:21 | Tools for metacognition: journaling & self-reflection | | 17:27 | Journaling as self-guided therapy (Adam’s full explanation) | | 25:54 | Dunning-Kruger effect explained | | 31:23 | "Lacking skill = lacking judgment" — Adam on Dunning’s research | | 36:16 | Adam’s ping pong calibration anecdote | | 37:46 | The planning fallacy & workplace estimation challenges | | 42:48 | The role of "Turn and Learn" and deferring to wise crowds | | 47:54 | Explaining as a metacognitive calibration tool | | 49:33 | Metacognition alone doesn’t fix overconfidence | | 51:38 | The backfire effect: why analyzing your own knowledge can make you worse | | 54:38 | Performance = Potential – Interference (The Inner Game of Tennis reference) | | 59:12 | Key takeaways: normalizing metacognition & the need for both skill and self-awareness |

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Key Takeaways

• Metacognition—awareness and regulation of your own thinking—is central to self-improvement and counteracts overconfidence.
• Calibration is the ongoing process of matching your confidence to reality. It requires humility and community feedback.
• Teaching/explaining is one of the best ways to uncover what you know and don’t know.
• Skill and metacognition must advance together: reflecting on thinking isn’t enough without actual skill-building.
• Interference and discomfort are normal during deliberate practice and unlearning.
• Be wary of both overconfidence and the Dunning-Kruger effect, especially in complex or subjective domains.
• Societal forces often discourage metacognition and empathy, which are critical for resisting manipulation and polarization.

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Final Reflections

Adam:

"We should normalize the idea that I need to spend a lot of time observing how my brain works, figuring out what it does well, what it doesn’t do well, so I can achieve mastery over it—or at least not constantly interfere with it." (59:12)

Brené:

"Better skills plus better metacognition equals better calibration. Metacognition without skill or skill without metacognition—there’s a fragility to it that we need to be cautious about." (60:03)

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Useful for listeners seeking practical improvement, this episode provides a funny, honest, and deeply researched guide to knowing yourself, checking your confidence, and learning how to think about your own thinking—on the slope, on the court, or in any room where decisions get made.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Learn [e-mail] Support for this show comes from SASS. It's time to have an honest talk about AI. Not about whether it will replace us, but but about how it's becoming easier and easier to outsource our thinking to systems that people just won't understand. Thankfully, SAS has been in data and AI for 50 years and they believe in a pretty simple idea. AI should be explainable, well governed and worthy of Trust. Visit sas.com to see how AI should be built for high stakes decisions where the cost of getting it wrong is real and human accountability isn't optional. Learn [e-mail] that's SA sas.com we gather

[A]

here tonight to bring women back to their rightful place. The Testaments, a new Hulu original series from the executive producers of the Handmaid's Tale.

[B]

It's easier to accept a story than

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believe that the people around you are monsters. The battle isn't over. There comes a time when you have to take action, when you have to choose your own destiny.

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Never quite as it seems.

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Watch the new Hulu original series, the Testaments, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. Welcome to the Curiosity Shop, a show

[B]

from the Vox Media Podcast network.

[A]

Hi everyone, I'm Brene Brown.

[B]

And I'm adam. Brene.

[A]

Episode 4 okay, so in this episode we are going to talk about one of our favorite Olympic moments from Milan from this year. We'll spend the first half of the episode talking about Eileen Gu. We'll talk about her incredible display of metacognition during a press conference. And we'll also talk about in the first half how that level of thinking about your thinking really helps you defend against one of our least and most favorite biases, which is Dunning Kruger. And second half, we're going to take some questions. My social media has gone off the rails with questions for us, so I know yours has too. So we'll take a couple of those. Before we get started, I want to share something really funny with you. You ready?

[B]

Uh oh, I'm ready.

[A]

So you know how what episode were we talking about? The fact that you're a minimalist and I'm a maximalist. 2 Episode 2 so I think when we were talking, I said something like, hey, you know that meme on Instagram where they're like, I hate minimalism. I get a note from Hank Green, who's, like, one of my favorite people. I do, too. And he said, hey, by the way, that meme is me talking. I did not know that. Did you know that?

[B]

Had no idea.

[A]

Okay, let me just play it. It's so funny, especially when you think about it being Hank. Okay. They hate minimalism. That's not my vibe.

[B]

I want to feel like a wizard who is surrounded by the collections of his many adventures.

[A]

I am Hank.

[B]

But when you say it like that, I don't want to be a minimalist either.

[A]

I want to be surrounded like I'm a wizard surrounded by the collections from my many adventures. And I do see your Go Blue, Michigan thing right behind you. So you are a wizard, and you have collected something from your adventures.

[B]

It's true. But only a few things.

[A]

Okay, before we start, do you want to ask me about my sweatshirt?

[B]

I do now.

[A]

Okay. I need you to. I need you to tell me about your sweatshirt. I need you to feign interest.

[B]

Brene, I'm supposed to ask you a question about your sweatshirt.

[A]

Okay. This is my University of Texas Longhorn sweatshirt. Let's go. Texas walks off Oklahoma in the 10th. Women's and men's basketball, killing it in March Madness. Men's swimming, per usual, we win the whole thing. Natty Tower goes bright orange. I just want to start there. And if you can see behind the camera, we've got hook em signs going up all over the place. Cause I've got two Longhorns in the room with me.

[B]

Yeah, I cannot compete with that. But we are in the final four. Although by the time this plays, I think we're gonna have a winner on the men's side.

[A]

We will. And the women's side, right?

[B]

Mm.

[A]

I'm not sure about the dates, but okay. Adam, did you catch the clip of Eileen Goo's Olympic press conference where the reporter from the Athletic, Charlotte Harper, asked her the big question? She said, this isn't meant to be rude, but do you think before you speak? Because your answers are so quick and so comprehensive?

[B]

Yeah. I loved this moment. And my favorite part of it actually was it didn't happen on a slope. It was just. It was a seemingly innocuous interview.

[A]

Yes. And just to let you know, that Eileen Gu, if you don't know, specializes in freestyle skiing, competing across all three of those disciplines. Half pipe, big air, and slopestyle. She's the only freestyle skier ever to medal in all three at the Olympics. And she holds the Olympic record.

[B]

Oh, yeah. I mean, she's a superstar. She's also extremely smart. And this question from a reporter. Well, I didn't know who the reporter was when I first saw this clip. It sounded a little obnoxious. But it's not.

[A]

No. And I just want to give props to Charlotte Harper, the reporter from the Athletic, because it is. At first when I heard it, I was, like, kind of pissed off. And then you listen to the warmth and loveliness through which she asked the question. I want to break it down. So we both immediately go. And I've seen a lot of kind of analyses of this moment where people are missing the mark about what it is. I think it's metacognition. Do you think it's metacognition?

[B]

I do, but I need to spend more time thinking about that thought, figuring out if that's an accurate analysis or not.

[A]

So let's go back. Let's define it for everybody. It's the metacognition. I think, again, I'm going back to the chapter in Strong Ground where I tried to grab all the kind of the skill sets and mindsets to ready ourselves for the future that's already upon us. Metacognition is in the top five. It is the ability to notice what your mind is doing, evaluate it, and deliberately change it. Two pieces to metacognition, awareness and regulation. Awareness is what am I thinking? Assuming regulation, Given that, how do I want to respond or adjust? I mean, this has to be metacognition that we're seeing from her.

[B]

I think so. I mean, I've always thought about metacognition as the ability to think about your own thinking and then evolve it accordingly. And she's not only doing that, she's describing how she does it, which might be meta. Metacognition.

[A]

So one of the things that I think is interesting when we think about metacognition, I'm going to tell you a story that was also interesting. A month ago, I was with the CEO of a hospital here in Houston. I'm actually not in Houston, in Austin, but in Houston. And she said, I was listening to Strong Ground on my phone while I was walking. And when you got to metacognition, I was like, I don't think I get it. I'm gonna have to read that, not listen to it. So then I got home and I read it, and I'm like, okay, I need to reread it. And I made Some notes, and I highlighted the parts that made sense to me. And then I finally got it. Can you explain to us what it is? I was like, you just did. And she said, what do you mean? And I said, you came across something that you didn't quite understand, and you knew what it would take to get there. Would you agree that that's how it works?

[B]

Yeah, I think the. I mean, the first part is she had the intellectual humility to know that she didn't understand it.

[A]

Yes. Huge.

[B]

As opposed to just assuming, okay, I get it. And then to your point, she went and actually. Okay. I don't know if she'd read the whole body of research on how we're better at critical thinking when we read than listen, but clearly understood that intuitively and said, okay, I've got to really scrutinize this material to process it.

[A]

How clear and persuasive, in your opinion, is the evidence? Reading versus listening

[B]

is pretty consistent for critical thinking and depth of processing.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And I think that's in part because when we're listening, we don't pause and replay nearly as much as we pause and reread. We don't highlight as much. We don't summarize as much. We don't synthesize as much. We're more absorbed in the experience as opposed to stepping out of it to analyze.

[A]

God, that is really interesting, because one of the things. Some of the feedback that I get when I read my audiobooks, because I listen to. I only read nonfiction, and I listen to fiction, which is interesting, and I'm very clear about how I learn, because if you survive a PhD program, you either don't make it through. I mean, I think we started with 14 in my cohort, and we ended with three. You either don't make it through, or. Or you don't make it through. So you have to understand how you learn, because they assign to you more than what is humanly possible. So you have to learn how to do that. I think that when I'm reading my audiobooks, I will actually say, you know what? That was a big definition. I'm gonna reread it for you in case you're doing the laundry or walking or driving. Because I would have to go back and reread that if I was reading the actual book. So I'm gonna reread this to you right now. And I get a lot of good feedback about that. But I never. I thought it was just me.

[B]

It's not. And I love that you actually paused to do that, which never occurred to me.

[A]

You know I'm a pauser.

[B]

Yes, so I've heard.

[A]

Yes, I'm a pauser. Okay. The other part of metacognition that I think is interesting is because metacognition has four or five different parts to it. One of them is calibration. And I'm really interested in your take on this because I see you doing it in real time. Sometimes it's weird and you have a certain face that you make when you're doing it. I think so Calibration in metacognition is how closely your confidence matches reality. Good calibration is on things I know well, I'm confident on things I don't. I'm curious and cautious. Poor calibration is cautious. Chronic overconfidence or dunning Kruger, what do you make of calibration as a part of metacognition?

[B]

In some ways it's the most important skill, because if you get that wrong, everything else fails afterward, right? If you are confident where you should doubt yourself, and also you doubt yourself where you should be confident, then no matter how much time you spend thinking about your own reasoning, you're going to end up adjusting in the wrong places.

[A]

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[B]

Learn [e-mail] Support for this show comes from SAS. SAS has been in data and AI for 50 years, and they believe in a pretty simple idea. AI should be explainable, transparent, and well governed, because that's the only way it can earn your trust. From banks and boardrooms to hospitals in the halls of government, AI systems now inform decisions that affect millions of people every day. That's why SAS's core commitment to responsible innovation is more important than ever. So that every could we Is followed by a should we? And leads to a here's how it works. If that kind of clarity appeals to you, visit sas.com to see how SAS applies their simple guiding principles to a complex AI landscape where hard questions require reliable answers. Learn [e-mail] that's sas.com support for the

[A]

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[B]

Well, I think there's so many things that are interesting about this.

[A]

I know, right?

[B]

First thing That, I mean, I hardly know where to take this. I think the first thing that I'm really struck by is we actually, we all intuitively know that metacognition is an important skill. Anybody who's ever gone to therapy, Right. Is trying to use metacognition.

[A]

Wait, stop. No, I can't let that go. What does that mean? What do you mean, everyone that. I mean, if someone is like therapy consumer par excellence, is that what we're doing in there?

[B]

Well, I mean, some of it is also emotion, understanding and regulation. Right. I guess there's a cognitive and emotional and a behavioral component. But I think about cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, and that entire approach to trying to improve your life starts with the idea that you have some dysfunctional thought patterns and you need to monitor them, notice them, and then adjust them. And if that's not metacognition, what is?

[A]

That's true. This is the first time ever I've thought about addressing faulty thinking under a metacognition lens. Okay, so. And then tie it to journaling.

[B]

And that's for me. Well, so that, that's for me. Why, why journaling is such a powerful tool for metacognition is, you know, journaling, according to some psychologists, is essentially self guided therapy. It's a way of, of reflecting on your thoughts and forming a story and then self distancing so that your thoughts are, are staring at you from a page as opposed to inside your head. And then you can see them more neutrally. I don't quite want to say more objectively, but because you're separated from your thoughts, it's easier for you to evaluate them and figure out where are they accurate, where are they leading you astray? What do you think?

[A]

Now this is where I need help. Because then I write down in my journal what I'm thinking and then I bring my journal to therapy. I'm like, what do you make of this shit? That's my approach. And then I get some great feedback about great that you captured it. And then of course, the dreaded what do you think about this shit? You know, and then I'm like, oh my God, okay. Yeah, it's for me. Priceless. Okay, let's go to the next one.

[B]

Do you ever journal about your journaling?

[A]

No, I just watch reruns of Bridgerton. No, I don't do that. No. Or listen to like honky tonk country music on vinyl. That's what I do instead of thinking of journaling about my journaling. No, but you know, oh my God, maybe I Do. Because I do journal. And then I do go back and do art over my journaling that reflects what I'm learning from it. So I'll include a little picture of one of my pages if we can blur out the actual words. Because my journaling is my space where I'm like. And then I punched him in the throat. And then. So, yeah. So I think. But I guess I do, because I do do an artful recap. And I choose I watercolor over my journal. And I also use a lot of art and collage.

[B]

Wow. Of course, this is coming together in 3D and multicolor for me.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. And my journal just has words, I

[A]

have to tell you. One page that I thought was. I wrote down. I was trying to excavate. The team was trying to excavate the mental models that were driving some not impactful behavior at work. And I just wrote two or three things down in the journal that I thought were mental models getting in the way. One of them was, grind equals playing to win versus groundedness equals playing to win. And I have a huge John Deereen. He's an artist who I love. Giant 4 inch by 4 inch eyeball that I put on that page because that was like a third eye open moment. Okay, let's go. Let's go. Let's finish this. Okay, back to Eileen. She says, you can control how you think, and therefore, you can control who you are. And to me, this is an example of kind of metacognitive regulation, the ability to not just calibrate and develop knowledge, but to regulate yourself and your thinking. And then the last one is huge. And I want to talk about it because I think it's something missing that you're seeing in some of the new research that's looking at Dunning Kruger through a different lens. So I think it's really big. Eileen Gu says, how can I approach my own brain the way I approach my craft of free skiing? Which I think is recognizing that thinking is a skill that can be deliberately practiced and improved.

[B]

Whoa.

[A]

What do you make of that?

[B]

I mean, this is supposed to be what happens in school, right? We're supposed to get better at thinking. But I think most education systems confine us to, okay, here's how you get better at thinking about algebra so you can get more problems, right? Here's how you get better at thinking about an essay. And there's very little. Let's think about how to think more effectively regardless of what the problem is. How do you think effectively about your own biases? How do you think effectively about your interactions with other people? The fact that Eileen Gu recognizes all of that as a skill to develop and work on. I mean, to me, it challenges just something really fundamental that many people do that prevents that, which is they take their own thoughts as gospel. They have a thought, and therefore it must be true. And she has this great distance between her identity and her thought processes. You hear her saying, I want to think about and figure out how my own brain works so I can make it better and become someone different. As opposed to saying, I, I need to believe everything I think. I need to internalize every view that I hold, every assumption, every opinion, every belief. And I would love to better understand how we get more people to that point. Brene, do you have thoughts on how we can do that?

[A]

I mean, I just think it explains what's happening in this country, that if I were a despot, if I were a dangerous leader, the first two things that I would go. The first thing. The first two things that I would vilify are skills that increase metacognition and empathy. And that is exactly what's happening from the far right today. I mean, really, I think the first two things I would do is I need to make sure that people don't get too good at thinking, are too good at compassion or empathy, especially for vulnerable populations. If I can vilify any type of critical thinking, if I can vilify the process of deeper thought and then make sure people don't care for other people, I could rob you blind. I mean, really, that's the first place I go. I gotta be honest.

[B]

That's the playbook. And I think you're right. I think the far right may have started it, but I think the far left is doing the same thing. I think cancel culture. Cancel culture is a refusal to empathize with somebody who did something you find objectionable.

[A]

No, I think. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I also, I think what the two have in common is the inextricable connection of thought to moral indignation.

[B]

Say that again.

[A]

I think what extremism on either side have in common is fueled by self righteousness, and thought is inextricably tied to moral indignation. I think both of those things don't get us out of the peril we face right now. But I only see one side of them. I only see one side of the far. I mean, I don't identify with either side of those ideologically or politically. But, yeah, I don't even think it. I don't even think it is helpful to rank which one's more dangerous. But I do come from a social work perspective. Where are the vulnerable people getting hurt and at whose hands? And so I do have a bias there, for sure. And maybe it's a bias, and maybe I'm just right. I need to Eileen goo a little bit. Okay, let's get into how metacognition, and this is really speaking of an interesting kind of political connection and also social connection. Let's talk about what Dunning Kruger is. I've learned a lot about Dunning Kruger, actually, from you, from your podcast, and from your books. So why don't you walk us through what it is and what it isn't?

[B]

Okay. So the original finding is that the people who are least knowledgeable or at least skilled at a task are the most likely to overestimate their knowledge and skill. So the people with the worst senses of humor are the most likely to overestimate how funny they are. The people who struggle the most in emotional intelligence are the most likely to exaggerate how great they are at reading and managing emotions. The people who do poorly on a trivia test are the most overconfident about their expertise. And the list goes on and on and on. And this has been documented in so many different domains. But I think it's really important to caveat that this actually doesn't happen to complete novices. If you're a total beginner, you know you don't know anything. It's when you gain a little knowledge or a little skill that you start to get dangerous because your confidence rises faster than your competence. And then you can start to get trapped on what is sometimes called Mount Stupid, where you're at this point of very high confidence that is not matched by your own capability level. And then you're basically ignorant but arrogant. And I think what scares me about that a lot is at that point, you've lost metacognition. You believe you know things you don't, and you cannot see the errors in your thinking. I think flat Earthers are sort of classic Dunning Kruger victims. How'd I do? What'd I miss?

[A]

I think it's really interesting. One of the things that I remember when I first came across the research and kind of did a deep dive on it, is this idea of dual burden in Dunning Kruger. Like, you don't know, and you don't even know that you don't know. I gotta tell you from like, so I could. So this is one of the hardest things, I think, to lead if you're leading or managing someone who's got some dunning Kruger bias around their own ability. It's a very hard thing because they don't know that they don't know, literally. And so I find it to be very frustrating for people. But I am gonna tell a quick story about how I had dunning Kruger. Like, how. So when I first started pickleball, I played tennis for 40 years. And so the first time I went to go play, you know, everything's ranked by beginning, intermediate, advanced. And so I schlepped over to the beginner thing and was kicked out of the beginner group almost immediately. Not because I could play pickleball, but because this was not my first racket sport. You know, I understand how a ball hits the face of the paddle. I understand, you know, I can hit. I can hit balls. You know, I've done that for many decades. So then I was like, oh, God, I'm really good at this. I'm actually gonna be excellent at this. So I went over to advanced and signed up for open play in advance and lost every game. And then someone actually told me, I thought I was just having a bad day, but someone actually said, and listen, if you're playing pickleball, I'm not saying that 95% of white men over 50 are going to coach you without being asked, but I'm going to say if someone's coaching you when you haven't been asked, 95% of the time, it's going to be a white dude over 50. And one of these came up to me and said, listen, it's not fun for us when you're playing up like this. You don't. You shouldn't be in an advanced group. And I. Well, first of all, I was really embarrassed, with a little bit of shame rising because I hated that I overestimated my ability. But what was interesting is I went to the intermediate group, and that's where I should have been. But I immediately paid for an hour for a coach to watch me play. And there was a. This was kind of when duper scores, like your score ranking, like utsa, if you're from tennis or whatever, like, your score ranking lets you know what games you can be in. It's your tournament stuff. And so I said, I really want to be. And I think of myself right now in this beginning phase as a 3.75. And he said, you're a 3.2 on your best day. If I compiled all of your best moves into one game, are we on

[B]

a one to Five scale.

[A]

We're on a. Well, it goes up, but, like, for someone like me, you know, I'm going to probably max out at 4.5, you know, and so I thought, oh, my God, why? And he said it was interesting. Cause he gave me some information and he said, you're going to do this to the ball. If you want to be a 4.0, they're going to do this to the ball. You're hitting baseline drives and staying back at the baseline because you're a baseline tennis player. The game pickleball's won and lost at the kitchen. You're not coming up. You are slamming the ball into your opponents from mid court, and they're slamming it back on your tennis shoe string because you don't know how to reset and drop a ball. And at that moment, the Dunning Kruger was gone because I had the skill to predict accurately what my level was. Does this make this, make this story make sense?

[B]

Oh, this is so good. David Dunning says that when you lack the skills to produce excellence, you usually also lack skills to judge excellence. And so what you were doing was you were building that second set of skills so that you could figure out where you stood on the first.

[A]

Okay, you have to slow down. This is going to be really important for people. So say it again and get explicit about the story.

[B]

Okay, so David Dunning says when you lack the skills to produce excellence, you often also lack the skills to judge excellence. So your pickleball skill level was not at excellent.

[A]

No.

[B]

But also your knowledge was really low.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And you couldn't even gauge what excellent looked like. You didn't know enough about the game to figure out where on that spectrum you were. And what you were asking the coach for is a bunch of information. You were gathering data points about what excellence looks like so you could then put yourself on the map. And I'm assuming after you put yourself on the map, you then had a navigation plan for how you were gonna move forward.

[A]

Oh, my God, I did. There were like eight skills I had to improve, so I took two every six months. And it's interesting because. And I'm just gonna make this aside, I love pickleball. It is not going to ever have the viewership of tennis for this reason. You have to be a very good player to understand and appreciate what you're seeing on a pickleball court. If you're watching professionals, you can just walk out of the womb and go to Wimbledon and watch center court and understand, Jesus, these are athletes, like, beyond belief. You don't understand what it takes to do what people, the professionals are doing on a court in pickleball. Unless you play pickleball. So everyone who watches it thinks, oh, I can do that. It's like ping pong. It's like giant ping pong, you know. So this is really interesting.

[B]

Well, I think part of what's interesting about this is it makes me think about the fact that it's harder to gauge your own knowledge or skill level in tasks that are more complex or more subjective.

[A]

Say that one more time. Say that sentence one more time.

[B]

If you're doing something complex or if there's not an objective way to score it. It's easier to fall victim to Dunning Kruger. It's easier to be overconfident when you don't really know anything or you're not very good. So let me, let me give an example that that stands out. As we talk about this, I think, no, nobody thinks that they could win. Nobody thinks they could outrun Usain Bolt or Alison Felix as a sprinter. No, nobody thinks they could do a sub 2 hour marathon without being a world class runner. Because the times are really objective. And I can sit there just going all out on my treadmill and realize I can't even sustain for a mile what the winners do for 26.2 in a marathon.

[A]

Super clear.

[B]

Calibrated.

[A]

You're calibrated. Oh yeah. Okay, wait. Meta. So right now, metacognition, calibration.

[B]

Okay, Easy. When there's an objective standard that you can benchmark yourself against. I made the same mistake that you did in pickleball. In ping pong, I have good reflexes. I've always had good hand eye coordination. I grew up being one of the better ping pong players of anybody I played. And I always thought, gee, my athletic limitations that have plagued me in every other domain. Ping pong is probably something I could get really good at if I ever focused on it. Last year I went to a charity tournament.

[A]

No, you did not.

[B]

Okay, I did. It was in Philly and they said bring the family. So I went with a couple of our kids and it was a ton of fun. And I went in very confident and I got crushed 110 by a semi serious player who trains with pros. And then there was a world champion there and I said, okay, I've got to try my hand. Like let me, let me see how far off I am. It took me three tries just to get my paddle on their surf. And not, not only did I suddenly realize how far I was from Being any good at ping pong, just the, the amount of work that it would take to get there, I don't think I could physically pull it off. Like, I, I don't think I could transform my mind and body into that skill level. I'm like, okay, this is way harder than I thought. And I think that ping pong is simpler than pickleball in a lot of ways. But it's still complex and subjective enough that I couldn't tell where I stood and I didn't know all the things I would need to know and get good at in order to actually be decent at it.

[A]

This is so interesting because we have such a competitive ping pong family. So we have ping pong tables. We have a ping pong table in I guess what's theoretically a formal dining room in our house. Because like, first of all, no, I don't want to have anybody over. And two, if I have someone over, we're not doing anything formal. So we just said, fuck it, I'm putting a ping pong table there. And so we're very competitive. But it's interesting when I play people, we have to, first of all, we have to play. It's on. Like we got to play some ping pong.

[B]

That we can do.

[A]

Yeah, that we can do. But I play a very flat game. And so when you get to really good people, it's all speed, spin and angle. And it's like I can't answer a serve either. I could whip up on some people in my family, not my 20 year old son at this point, but because he's a spinny guy, you know, but it's, this is so interesting. So let's. Okay, so let's take this out of paddle sports and I'm going to tell you another, another Dunning Kruger place for. No, it's not dunning Kruger anymore. What do you call it? If you thought you were good at it, you learned you sucked. And it's true that you suck and you're never gonna be good at it. This is one of these areas for me, time estimation, which really matters at work. This is not a ping pong, pickleball, recreational fun thing. I am terrible at time estimation.

[B]

Oh, you're talking about the planning fallacy.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Where in the original studies it took people on average three to four times longer to finish a task than they estimated.

[A]

But I have a dunning Kruger with a planning fallacy rising.

[B]

Tell me more.

[A]

No, I've been trying to apply the same kind of calibration techniques where

[B]

you

[A]

write down how accurate you think you're going to be. You do it and you see how off you are on your prediction. Like, that's one of the skills that helps you develop metacognition and get over Dunning Kruger. Right. Prediction performance debrief. Prediction performance debrief. My prediction is always wrong on time estimation. My performance sucks. And the debrief, I'm not interested in even journaling.

[B]

Which are you. Are you wrong in the standard planning fallacy direction, though, that you think you can do things faster than you really can? Yes.

[A]

Like, yes. And I get frustrated with. I mostly think other people should be doing things faster. Like, for example.

[B]

That's a different conversation.

[A]

No, but for example, like, we were gonna have some. When Charlie was in high school, some of the water polo teen parents over for something informal. Cause again, my ping pong table's in the formal dining room. But we were gonna have them over and about an hour before they got there. I told Steve, I don't think there's enough color in the yard. I need you to run to Home Depot and get some flowers and plant them before people come over and listen to this. Wait, no, think this through with me for a second.

[B]

Flowers. Why aren't you growing faster?

[A]

No, listen. And he said, I'm on the clock. He said, listen, I'm not doing that. They're gonna be here in an hour. And I said, It'll take you 10 minutes to get to Home Depot, 15 minutes to pick out the flowers, 10 minutes to go back. That's like 35 minutes. And you can plant them in 20 minutes. I don't get the problem. Go ahead.

[B]

Yeah, I can't help you there.

[A]

Yeah, we didn't get the flowers. I'm just gonna say, obviously. And he said, I'm so happy to add color to the yard. I'll need one or two days in advance. Are you going to grow them? What do you think this is? Impatience?

[B]

Yeah, I was going to say I don't think either of us is patient at all. But what's interesting to me is that this is a repeated challenge in the same direction. So you know that you underestimate how long something's going to take. It happens. You've held yourself accountable by scoring yourself. And then what? Doesn't it bother you to repeat the same error over and over?

[A]

No, I'm just trying to find faster people. Okay, you know what?

[B]

You sound like half the managers I've ever worked with.

[A]

Okay, let me tell you what I do do. And then we'll have to come back because we do want to do the questions. Here's what we have done. This is a Scrum. This is a tool from scrum, our agile processes that I love. I'm obsessed with a lot of Scrum tools. We call it at Bieberg Brene Brown Education Research Group. That's our organization. We call it the Turn and Learn. So in a meeting we will say, okay, here's the project. Everyone understands the parameters and what we're doing. Everybody write down on a post it how many months we think this is going to take or weeks or whatever. And we'll do it in weeks. Because I already get anxious if we use months as the time increment. I like to use hours, but they've got me down to weeks. So weeks and on a count of three, we'll turn them over. And we do that to avoid, like, you know, halo effect, because people will see mine first and be like, oh my God, she's the boss and she thinks we can do it. So when we turn it over really quick, everybody's got the number of weeks, including, like the engineers and the operations people. And mine will say two weeks and theirs will say eight months. So, but. But I lose. So do you? I do. Oh, yeah, I do. Of course. Yeah, I do. I respect the process and I respect the fact that I'm not good at it, but I'm not able to change it because if I wrote eight months down on my post it, I would just be bullshitting to show how much I've grown.

[B]

So the underlying belief hasn't changed. The way that you form your expectations is flawed in the same way that it was before.

[A]

Maybe the anxiety disorder's still in place. I don't know. Like, maybe it's just. I can't stand it. Like, let's go, let's go. But I have learned to. I have learned to defer to the judgment of people I respect and trust who both hold a sense of urgency and a practical, excellent operational mind.

[B]

So I like what you're doing for calibration, which is you're not just anchoring on your own judgment. You're bringing in the wisdom of crowds. But you've also recognized that crowds vary in their wisdom. You've found people who are good at this specific skill with the kinds of tasks you're doing.

[A]

Yes, yes. Well, in this idea, which makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Because I look great. Look at me. Look at me, Brene Goo. Using my own mind to help

[B]

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[A]

Okay, I want to go to some questions for the second half. We only have about 20 minutes left. Maybe. Let's go some questions.

[B]

I do too.

[A]

Okay, I had one.

[B]

One other thing I wanted to just bring up here before we leave this.

[A]

Yeah, that's great. Before we leave our friends Dunning Kruger and the idea of metacognition and thinking about our own thinking. Any final thoughts on that before we go to questions from our first episodes?

[B]

Okay, two quick things on this. The first one is when we were talking about Dunning Kruger earlier, I kept thinking about Elon Musk and how the people who love him and the people who hate him are both missing part of the story. When I see Elon, I see Dunning Kruger. I see somebody who is brilliant at hardware, which makes him really effective at electric cars and rockets, but does not know that he is ignorant when it comes to software, which is one of the reasons why Twitter or X or whatever it's called now has run into so many problems. And I see his detractor saying, elon's a moron. No, this is domain specific. I hear his supporters saying elon's a genius. And I say, no, that too is domain specific. And If I were in his orbit, the thing I would try to help him do is calibrate. How would you tackle that? Brene, I would love to just hear, how do you think about getting someone in a position like that who's not calibrated to look in the mirror?

[A]

I'm torn between, like, unleashing right now or being more thoughtful and saying, I don't know him. I've never met him. I couldn't assess. But if we took someone like that, I actually think the problem that we're talking about now is maybe a first cousin of metacognition, especially when it comes to Elon, which is self awareness and emotional regulation and emotional awareness. So I don't think this is a. I don't know. I don't know him. So I don't know if this is a cognitive battle where, boy, how do we get someone to understand that their expertise is domain specific? And if we could get them to understand that, they might be able to apply some of the same things that are maybe more intuitive about their domain expertise to things where they want to learn and be better. But I think I would have to say that your lack of self awareness and your lack of emotional awareness is so great that not only are you not able to engage in smart metacognition, you're making decisions that hurt other people. And unless that's intentional, we got bigger fish to fry. What's your second one?

[B]

Okay, second one is, I think there's just a bit of a cautionary note as people work on metacognition, which is, on the one hand, there are real upsides of analyzing your knowledge and explaining what you know. We know from a long history of research on the teacher effect or the tutor effect, that when you explain things you know to someone else, you actually understand them better.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And you also get better at remembering them, which is great. We also know from research on the illusion of explanatory depth that when you try to explain something that you think you know, you will find out really quickly when you don't. And the studies on this are hilarious. You ask people, you can do it right after you ride a bike or flush a toilet. How do the gears on the bike work? How does that toilet flush? And you will hear people start to stumble and stammer and realize they don't have a clue how the basic machinery they've been operating their whole lives actually works unless they've really carefully studied it. And that that task right. Of saying, well, let me actually try to explain what I know is to me, the ultimate way to calibrate. Wow. So maybe wait, we should just pause there for a second and say, if you don't have that wisdom of crowds, if you don't have that wise crowd available to you like you do Brene, or like you've put together, or you're not sure who to ask. Right. Just the practice of explaining will help you figure out what you understand and what you don't. And I think that's probably something we could all do regularly.

[A]

I love this. Okay, I'm gonna add a third cautionary tale before we move on.

[B]

Wait, sorry. I have one other cautionary note on this part.

[A]

Perfect.

[B]

You go first.

[A]

Okay. Mine would be to say that you cannot metacognition your way out of a dunning Kruger bias alone. There's no amount of studying your own mind around a topic that will increase your competence in that topic. It has to go hand in hand. Metacognition plus actual skills building. So in pickleball, I couldn't just understand, oh, this is why I'm overestimating myself. And then all of a sudden, oh, I'm better at pickleball. No, I have to do the metacognition work of, oh, this is why I'm overestimating myself. Now I need to learn how to reset from mid court. I need to learn how to get up to the kitchen faster from the baseline. I need to learn how to do a better drop. So it's. So overcoming overestimation is not just about understanding your thinking, but building skill in that domain. And I think that's very important. I think that's really important because there's been some interesting research out of the University of Edinburgh where they had people that had real kind of measurable dunning Kruger around a topic. They really thought they were much better at it than they were. They skilled them up in metacognition, but did not give them any skills in what they thought they were really good at. And the metacognition alone didn't pull them up and out. You gotta do the skills building too in that area. Agree or disagree?

[B]

Hard agree. Okay, I think that is spot on. And it actually sets up the one other thing that I think needs to be just put on the table as a caveat, which is in the short run, getting better at metacognition can make you worse at the skill you're trying to build.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, God. Wait.

[B]

Which, I mean, just so frustrating.

[A]

You cannot open this door. We cannot change topics yet. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Why is That I hate this.

[B]

It drives me crazy. So the. My favorite demonstrations were with golfers where if you ask a golfer to explain their stroke, they actually perform worse afterward. And I think this is easier to unpack with our racket sport example. So if you ask a tennis player, walk me through the mechanics of your serve, then their serve will get less accurate. And what seems to be happening there is you've taken a skill that was mostly automated, and you've all of a sudden made it conscious. And trying to think through the steps actually interferes with your ability to effortlessly execute those steps on autopilot. And I think this is a version of what happened to Simone Biles in Tokyo in the 2021 Olympics when she got the twisties. There's a lot of research showing that when you have performance anxiety, it makes you more self conscious, and it starts to take what might be a routine that you normally do on autopilot and make it more salient. So you're actually thinking through, what am I supposed to do now? And that makes it more likely, if you're a gymnast or a diver, for example, you get lost in midair. If you are a baseball player or a golfer, you might get instead of the twisties, they would call it the yips. But it's the same basic thing, which is all of a sudden, like, I'm feeling anxious and I start to pay attention to, well, what is my arm supposed to be doing here? What is my leg supposed to be doing? And that interferes with my ability to smoothly just go through the motions. And I don't think this is just true for sports. I don't think it's just true for physical challenges. I think that anytime you do something, well, automatically, as you start to analyze it and describe it, you may take a step backward before you can take two steps forward. What do you think?

[A]

Oh, my God. So we are inside now. Look, this is a really important conversation, and it's a conversation that I think I'm learning from, and hopefully our listeners and people who are watching on YouTube will learn from. I say we pause the questions for the next episode and just finish up on this, because you've opened the door into what I think should probably be a full episode. But I have to say that you use the word twice, you use the word interfering twice, that you're. That when you start taking, when you stop playing from habit and you start working on something to improve, you get interference. And now you're inside of my favorite, a book that came out 50 years ago. I read Every year, every sports team that I work with, I use every leadership team.

[B]

Guess is it the inner game of

[A]

tennis with Timothy Galway? Yes. So the formula there, and we actually just did this with a group of 200 senior leaders. The formula that I think about all the time from that book, which is just, if you haven't read it, it's a classic. I mean, it's just so good. But I read it every year. The thing that I always think about with that is performance equals potential minus interference. And one of the big. We'll save that whole book for another conversation. But one of the things I think about all the time is performance equals potential minus interference. When you are working on skill development in a new area, that is absolutely interference. When I'm working on not staying on the baseline, but getting to the net very quickly in pickleball, I will get to the net and then I'll get slammed with a ball that I can't even answer because I'm not in flow. I'm not in flow. And when we see athletes who are winning at the highest level of performance, they are in flow. They are not thinking about the mechanics of a shot. They are relying on their training in what they've done, and they're trying to eliminate interference. They are not trying to break down every shot. They are not looking at their footing before the serve. They are not thinking about how they're taking a corner in F1. They are not thinking about who's down the pitch and where are they in relationship to the goalie. They are not doing that. And so helping people who are listening right now understand you are going to go backward before you go forward in metacognition and skills building is, is, we would be remiss without saying it, because even if what you're working on is having more connecting conversations with your partner, staying curious with your children, it is not going to feel good when you're trying it and learning it.

[B]

Not at all. And I mean, I, I, I ran into this when I was as a, as a shy introvert trying to get better at public speaking. I was working with a speaking coach who said, you don't have to shout every sentence. You're overcompensating for your fear that you're going to be too withdrawn and you're going to be boring. And it's actually modulation and variety that will keep your audience engaged and you need to work on that. I found that as I worked on that, I would stumble over my content. I tripped more on the stage. I was so focused on trying to get my pitch right and have awareness of and control over my tone of voice and the way that I was articulating things and how much emphasis I was putting in different places and even pacing that everything else fell apart. And I felt like I was getting worse as a speaker. But I had to get to the point where some of those adjustments would happen naturally and I didn't have to think about them anymore in order then to sort of put the pieces back together. And I would say there was probably a three month period where I felt like I couldn't give a talk without being completely in my head and ruminating about everything that was going wrong. And it was really frustrating, but it was, it was a necessary backward step in order to unlearn a set of habits that were, were holding me back from being able to deliver my message effectively. And I, I didn't think about this as a metacognition problem at the time of, oh, I'm taking something off of autopilot that was automated incorrectly and I need to now rewire it in order to, to put it back on autopilot. Yikes. That would have been helpful. Where, where were you 10 years ago?

[A]

Where were you when I was like slamming every ball from the baseline? Like, yeah, like I could knock the paddle out of your hand, but it's a different sport. And so, yeah, this is, this is such a good conversation. Let's save the questions for next time because they're, they're really good and they're complex and I think we can learn a lot from them. But I. We've covered a lot today. So any key takeaway for you today from our conversation starting with Eileen Metacognition, Dunning Kruger.

[B]

I think we've covered most of my key takeaways, but one thing we didn't maybe make explicit that we should is. As I listened to you talk about Eileen Gu. I'm struck by how rare it is for people to even admit out loud that they think about their own thinking and they work on improving their thinking. And I think the idea of normalizing, hey, my brain didn't come with an operating manual. It didn't come with an owner's guide. I need to spend a lot of time observing how it works, figuring out what it does well, what it doesn't do well, so that I can achieve mastery over it or at least not constantly interfere with it and have it interfering with me and my goals. I think that's something we should all aspire to do more of.

[A]

I mean, I really, I love that for your takeaway. And I'm gonna I plus that one. And I would say for me, as we normalize the discomfort and the building of this, I think my takeaway is better skills plus better metacognition equals better calibration. Metacognition without skill or skill without metacognition is. There's a fragility to it that we need to be cautious about. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's a wonderful way to wrap.

[A]

Yeah. I love it. See you next time. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brene Brown Education and research group and granted productions. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.

[B]

We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award winning [e-mail] thanks to

[A]

Canva for their support. With incredible tools to boost your design and productivity, Canva can help turn that idea into an actual thing. From presentations powered by AI to social media posts, from logos to websites, it's time to turn that idea into something real. Canva. It's the thing that makes anything a thing. Learn [e-mail] thanks to SAS for their support.

[B]

It's an important question to ask of any corporation. Are the company's values aspirational, or are they actually showing up in what people do? Data and AI leader SAS lands in the second category. SAS has 50 years of experience helping people and organizations make better decisions with data, and they brought that same rigor to AI, building accountability and human oversight into the technology itself. Visit sas.com to learn more about SAS's commitment to responsible, trustworthy AI. That's sas.com.