The History and Psychology of Underdogs

0:00people are the most consequential and dangerous forces on earth well personality psychology is about the nature of human nature it's about people and wouldn't that be useful to know it seems to me i can't i can't think of a more important problem you're listening to the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments the global leader in personality and leadership guided by your hosts hogan chief science officer and world-renowned personality psychologist dr ryan sherman alongside hogan's pr manager and

0:35resident storyteller blake lepp this podcast explores the impact of personality on life leadership and the nature of human nature hello everybody and welcome to the science of personality podcast i'm your host ryan sherman along with my co-host as always blake lepp say hello blake hello everybody and welcome back to the science of personality podcast episode 143 today ryan and i are joined by dr peter harms a frank schultz professor of management at the university of alabama's culverhouse college of

1:09business to talk about underdog leadership world history is littered with stories and legends of people or groups of people who have defied the odds in the face of almost sure defeat making them the closest thing to immortal a human being can fathom outside of religion and deities but how do they accomplish these incredible feats how do they find a way to make the impossible possible well this is something peter and ryan have been interested in for quite some time and today we're going to unpack

1:40their thoughts and theories on what i think is one of the coolest topics we've discussed on this podcast but before we get to our conversation with peter if you wish to give us any ideas for upcoming episodes or you want to ask ryan or me a question shoot us an email at hello at the science of personality.com or follow the science of personality on linkedin now let's get to it peter welcome to the podcast is there anything you'd like to share with our audience before we get started not a lot i'm thrilled to be back well peter i just want to say thanks for coming back to the

2:16podcast again for those of you who are long-time listeners you'll know that peter has been on our podcast maybe three or four times you might be the leading record holder now uh at this point actually i should have checked that before we got on here uh but uh one early episodes peter did one one of our uh still one of our most popular episodes on the dark side of personality peter is a leading researcher on the topic of dark personality and dark personality traits he's also a leading researcher on the topic of leadership uh among many other topics i invite peter uh has a career

2:51uh correcting the academic record uh to some extent as well he's done research on the topics of grit topics of resilience a lot of topics that actually tie in with what we're going to be talking about today and the topic of of underdogs and and leading underdogs and and leading underdogs to uh victory but uh for those of you who listened to i think maybe last year we did a maybe two years ago even we did a real mini episode on this topic and felt like it was time to expand on this a little

3:22bit more so um thanks peter again for for joining us today i'm so pleased to be here and uh yeah i think this is something that we needed to flesh out a little bit more you know i'm gonna go ahead and point this out ryan because usually you do this whenever we have our guests on and i still don't know what it means but for our audience uh if you're interested peter's h index is 72 which i i don't i still don't quite understand what that measures but but ryan seems to think it's an important thing and

3:53that sounds pretty high to me peter well yeah so technically an h index is having a number of that's the number of papers that you have that are cited that many times and that actually might be peter's sort of like 10 year h index you might have one that's even more uh more impressive all time i'm actually not not 100 sure about that but um but yeah essentially it's you've published this number of papers and then those papers have been cited by other people uh that that's the the sort of

4:25critical criteria for for an h index uh okay yes i do see yeah you're right blank it is 72 so that is correct so so what uh that that's that's a really i mean it's it's just sort of one way that academics measure how productive they are that's really one way to say about it and uh 72 is pretty pretty good number well thank you yeah it's um it's always fascinating to look back on that and think about when i was a grad student and looking up at the people and at some point you realize that you've

4:58become like one of those people that maybe grad students are looking at now and going gosh i wonder how he did that and so uh well another way to think about it is that these are x but each number is exponentially more difficult to get right so think about it this way if you have one paper and somebody else ever reads in sites that your h index is one right if you have two papers you need two people to read it and cite those two papers to get an h index of two so peters is a 72 to get to 73 he needs to have his 73rd ranked published paper get up to 73 citations right so each number gets

5:37increasingly exponentially more difficult to achieve so so yeah it's it's it's really impressive well thank you uh i worry though that uh we're taking away from the underdogs here when it comes to publishing you're certainly not an underdog anymore peter well i i feel like the underdog on most of these episodes so i'm just gonna go ahead and kick this thing off but you know peter i mentioned in the intro that you and ryan have discussed the topic of underdogs and underdog leadership for several years and you know we talked about it at psyop a few years ago in one of

6:10our many episodes so i'm curious uh a couple questions here how would you define underdogs first and foremost for our audience and then second can you talk about when and how this conversation about underdogs between you and ryan began okay so i'll define it first and i think you know if i i had to put my finger on it there's sort of a couple elements that are always sort of true of what we think of an underdog so when you know an underdog is uh someone whether that's a person or a group

6:41that starts with a real disadvantage in a and that's the first element a disadvantage in a contest that matters that's the second element and three where people expect them to lose and so all three of those elements are always in there a more succinct definition would just be being somehow behind in things that normally predict success and i think i've always been fascinated with this um i think a lot of people are but where it really came to a head for me and sort of um ended up in a conversation

7:17with ryan about this was back in uh 2022 um so i'm at the university of alabama which is in the sec um uh athletics division and in 2022 the uh mississippi state uh football coach mike leach passed away suddenly and it was really clear at that time that even though mississippi state wasn't like a dominant force in college football that people really really loved and respected mike leach as a coach

7:49and part of that was is because he was just an interesting character he had spent his entire career at schools like washington state and texas tech that you know within their states they were never the biggest or the best or the most prominent schools and so he was always fighting as like an under-resourced coach um but he leaned into this you know he he would use expressions like swing your sword and tell his guys to act like pirates and and basically would come up with these really unorthodox

8:21strategies for fighting the big dogs in football like your alabamas and your georgias and your floridas um because he knew that if he went head to head with them uh using their strategies they just had the personnel they had the skill they had the resources to beat him every time and the only way he was going to win was using these unusual strategies and the fascinating thing about mike leach is he didn't just understand this like he really got invested in this so he was an intense student of insurgencies

8:55and he read about them throughout history he in fact even taught classes at the universities where he coached on how to be an insurgent leader and so you know although i never met the man i'm just i was absolutely fascinated by this and um ryan and i happened to be meeting in tulsa and at least for me this was something that was in my head like hey i really really want to to study insurgent leadership um inspired by by my mike leach's story so um ryan's probably got his own way of coming to

9:33this and i realize insurgencies aren't the same thing as underdogs but we were talking about this and he's like i've got this great idea uh you know i'm interested in in underdogs and i'll let him explain that well well yeah actually in fact that's what i remember peter is that you came to to me talking about this topic of insurgent leaderships and how to lead insurgencies and and and sort of just it was really more from from that angle and i remember thinking man this is um you know this has huge connections to all kinds of other ideas and and it's sort of more common parlance for it i think

10:06we're sort of more um i don't know sort of more positively uplifting i think insurgent almost has a negative kind of uh a feel to it right um but the more positive the sort of tone on it is the sort of underdog i think underdog also encompasses a little bit more it's a little broader than than than the term insurgent but i i will say that for today's episode i did do a little bit of research and look up the origination of the term underdog and apparently it came into the late 19th century and it had to do with uh basically dog fights and that there would be a top dog the dog who won the dog

10:42fight would be on top and the the underdog would be the dog that ended up underneath and on the bottom and so that's where where this term actually comes from of course today uh it it really doesn't refer to dog fights at all it doesn't even refer to someone who's been beaten it refers to someone who is expected to be beaten uh which it which i think is kind of interesting itself but but that's how i remember coming to this peter was through this topic of insurgent leadership how do you win how can you compete when you are out resourced or um the odds are stacked against you and as we'll

11:16talk about today there's lots of cases in history um where these things began but but that's how i remember the conversation and and uh you and i sort of expanded it from there to talk about lots of underdogs more broadly yeah you're absolutely right and yeah our conversation kind of did go from you know maybe this sort of more militaristic um approach to a lot more to do with sports and business and political situations and i think um we're going to cover some of those in the the talk

11:49today well i mean ryan that's pretty interesting that you said that that was late 19th century that the term underdog was coined however i would say that the the fascination i would think has been around for a while so i guess that's my next question for you peter i mean even though the the term hadn't been coined yet is the underdog is it a universal story and has there historically been a fascination about them i mean i know that people today look back on these historical things but

12:22has this been a fascination that uh humankind has had throughout history yeah i i think there's plenty of evidence for that um there's it's universal in the sense that you know when we talk about myths and legends and history and the tales that we tell from long ago one thing you have to do is make sense of the way that the world is and when we talk about underdogs and underdog stories is they tend to be universal because they acknowledge truths one of

12:54those truths is that life isn't fair you're not going to go into fights and challenges always with the same resources that other people have the other reason it's universal is because we can all remember a time when we were weaker or smaller or less able than others we've all been children or some of us have been uh later born children in a family and looking up at older siblings but we all have been in a situation where we've been the lesser person and maybe been asked to compete against people who

13:26had more than us so it's a universal experience to be an underdog and i think the third thing is uh you know when we look back at myths legends and and lore um we infer character uh in the people who are willing to take on these challenges so in fact like the greek word character really infers someone fighting against almost insurmountable odds but being willing to do it uh and so we we think in moral

13:58terms about people who still fight still rise to the challenge even when the odds are stacked against them and you know there's a movie coming out uh very soon um on david and goliath and you know if you watch the trailers for it they're like one of the greatest stories ever told and it resonates not just within the judeo-christian tradition um but these kind of stories are present i think in in all religions and all cultures where you have you know a small weak person going up against the big strong

14:31uh champion and then using cleverness and adaptability and flexibility to outwit them but even within the judeo-christian tradition uh they you know for them it's a moral story as well this is not just that he's clever it's that you know david puts his faith in god and god is the one that sort of um directs that rock to to slay goliath at the end so it becomes a moral story as well about hey even when the chips are down this is how you should behave

15:03yeah i mean when i think about history i think that is the the one that comes to mind right as sort of that sort of universal story but i i suspect that uh as you mentioned peter that there are lots of stories in through most religions about sort of overcoming obstacles overcoming uh defeat uh you know surefire defeat i mean i think and we're going to talk i know about some military history and things like that as well but there's lots of examples from military history of of one army or

15:37one uh group that that's outnumbered i will admit that late in the evening i like to watch youtube videos covering ancient battles and i'm always fascinated by you know the the size differences in the in the you know this one will have 12 000 soldiers that are well trained and armed and this other group will only have like 3 000 and i go it's four to one ratio how on earth could this 3 000 group somehow win and and of course the reason these are stories the reasons these are interesting is

16:08because that group does win uh and i think that the david and goliath story really encompasses encompasses that right and and as you said judeo-christian sort of tradition but i think that's sort of built into our psychology right this sort of love for the underdog as well i mean what do you think about that peter to me it always feels like people want to see the underdog win they seem to be the the one that people are sort of rooting for where do you think that comes from psychologically speaking well i think part of it is just the novelty of it you know um again being at the university of

16:46alabama when it comes to football a lot of people got really bored with seeing alabama win the championship every other year and being in the championship every year you know so um they liked it when clemson bumped us off the first time but it got less interesting when they did it again they liked it when georgia you know finally rose up and did it but then they became the big bad on the block so i think there's there's some novelty there that that people like it but you know um again

17:17not a lot of us see ourselves in the light as we are the dominant character in our our own narrative you know um we work for other people we're dependent on having jobs and relationships and and there's just a lot of chaos in the world and very few of us feel like we're in control of everything and so i think the underdog story sort of appeals to that common sense of there's a lot of bad things that could

17:48happen but if if i work hard maybe i won't succeed but at least there's a chance that i will yeah i think that that is a really fascinating part of the underdog sort of story too peter is that you know there and there's there's stories in sports there's stories in and in politics and in business of these underdogs that everybody loves everybody loves this but then at some point they become the favorite they become the bad person they become the you know the evil empire

18:20so to speak and is are no longer favorite i think it's just really fascinating psychologically to see the same person or the same entity uh go from underdog that's beloved by everyone to this you know evil overlord sort that nobody likes um so anyway i know we're going to get into some of this later but to me that's one of the most fascinating parts about our psychology around underdogs well you know okay so here's the thing is underdogs that's the beauty of it is that it can come from

18:53all facets of life and like you mentioned ryan uh we're gonna we're gonna cover all these different areas today or several of them at least but let's start out kind of where we where we were we were going in that direction earlier on with the david and goliath so let's start out where some of these older underdog stories originated which is on the battlefield so peter i'm curious what are some of the more popular tales throughout the history of warfare and why are they so popular okay well i'll do

19:25the conventional ones in just a second but let me start with one of my favorite ones which is in the very first episode of the transformers uh cartoon from the 80s um they've just been sort of released from stasis and the decepticons are out marauding around and the autobots are sort of assembling their their group together and optimus prime basically tells his his guys that you know we need to fight against these evil decepticons and one of his soldiers says but we aren't fighters like them

19:58prime and if you remember the toys like all the autobots are like racing cars and ambulances and construction vehicles or uh you know they're all um civilian things but the decepticons are all um military um toys or you know forms and so uh the story is setting you up this gets into that universal aspect that the autobots are the good guys because they're at a disadvantage they only want to do good and productive things in the universe whereas the decepticons are out there just to do really really bad things and so that's it's not exactly a myth but for i think a lot of us

20:33who were born and grew up in the 80s um that was sort of a myth that we absorbed um but historically historically uh the obvious one would be like the 300 spartans uh which you know we've got a couple movies about now um where you've got this story of 300 brave spartans who go to thermopoly and hold off uh according to um you know the the history of the time two million persians and they don't win

21:03and and this is something i think that that we should have a conversation about here is like the underdog doesn't always win and we don't even always cheer for them because they win the the spartans lose it's inevitable that they're going to lose but they delay the persians long enough that the rest of greece has a chance to form a reasonable defense and they also make such a fight of it that the persians become really concerned that all greeks are going to have this kind of metal

21:36now these stories aren't always exactly true um you know if you actually ask historians they'll say well even if you read the ancient sources they'll say there were 300 spartans and about five to six thousand auxiliary troops that were helping them so it wasn't 300 it was you know over over five or six thousand of them and the persians didn't really have two million soldiers they had a group of a group that they were coming with but most of those people were doing like logistics there were probably

22:06only 250 000 soldiers uh nonetheless though as ryan was saying watching those late night youtube videos um six thousand against 250 000 is still a hell of long odds um for a fight but you know these losing battles those are the ones i think sometimes we remember uh the most the thermopoly think about the alamo down in texas dunkirk right um people making a last stand in the face of overwhelming odds

22:39and we remember them and you know you guys talked about like they become immortal stories not because they win but because they show us what people look like when they have nothing left to lose other than their core values what they believe in and what they're standing for and you know again for a lot of us um we might not have gone through this ourselves but we sort of experienced it um by proxy watching like the lord of the rings movies and if you remember like in return of the king which is the third one

23:11uh the city of gondor's under attack and salvation comes when theoden leads his his horse troops and they've been riding for several days non-stop to try to relieve gondor and they show up and they they come over a ridge just at dawn and there's about five thousand of them and they see an army that is overwhelmingly larger than them and they could just turn and walk away it's you know not

23:41their not their fight they know they're going to lose but instead failed and the king and this is like a hugely emotional moment for people who love that series you know he makes this speech where he's like spears shall be shaken shields shall be splintered a sword day a red day air the sun rises ride ride ride to you know uh ride for ruin and the world's ending and then they all start yelling death death death and they're not yelling death to intimidate their enemies they're yelling death because they all understand they're riding to their own death that there is no chance of victory for

24:17them but they want to put up such a fight at the end as to be worthy of of memory and and these are the stories that inspire us and sometimes even you know i talked about like mythologizing things i think americans identify with this if you go back and look look at like mel gibson's movie the patriot americans like to mythologize this idea that they were a bunch of plucky colonials who saw off the world's most powerful empire um and they still see themselves that way even in an era where

24:50you know they were the big dog in vietnam and afghanistan and they're you know abducting the president of venezuela and stuff like this like americans still in some ways want to believe that they're the underdog and um i know that that was a lot of examples there but it just shows you like how universal uh these things are well you know peter your examples bring up several things of first of all that you know in terms of the military examples like you said i mean i think that's the

25:20other one that you know resonates with many americans or any uh sort of uh country who uh revolted against their their uh colonial overlord uh is right this idea of revolution right this idea that revolution typically requires is typically an underdog versus you know an overdog typically that there's somebody who's in power and we're changing out uh who's in power um and so i do think yeah the american revolution is considered one of those sort of underdog stories how can this untrained

25:54set of militia uh beat you know the greatest army in the world but which comes to this really important question because you mentioned that the spartans lost you mentioned the alamo and that uh you know davy crockett and his group at the alamo lost um right but what does it really mean to win as an underdog and i think that's this is a point i know you've raised with me before which i think is really important to understand um so so can you tell our audience how do you define win and lose

26:26when you're in an underdog scenario you know like that's the thing is as an underdog you have to decide what your goal is sometimes sometimes your goal is simply to not lose you know the big dog in the fight is the one who has to win every time and you know i mentioned insurgencies but you think about uh as i was researching insurgencies most of the literature is from counter insurgencies where people like the us go into afghanistan and they have to stop people from blowing up bombs and the frustrating thing about

27:02counter insurgencies is to be successful you have to succeed a hundred percent of the time for terrorists like al-qaeda or isis they only need to succeed once for them to be successful and to declare success so they change the rules about what it means for the spartans again at thermopoly it was about delay they were never they knew they were never going to stop the persian army the idea was to buy time um at the alamo maybe they believed that they could win uh maybe they thought that there

27:39would be relief forces but ultimately victory for them was inspiring uh texans and then later americans to you know say we can stand up for ourselves we will not be bullied by um outside forces and so victory isn't always um just victory on the battlefield or success as the enemy would define it sometimes it's about what you leave behind what people feel and what they remember about you and that's why

28:14things like 300 and dunkirk and the alamo and even these things like in lord of the rings they hit so hard emotionally um because we recognize that sacrifice and it it compels us to believe in those values and that vision even more because we're like if people were willing to die for it it must have been something important and so the you know they gain immortality by the ideas that they they give life to even as they lose their own physical life you know you know peter and another

28:52example of thinking about you know changing the rules of of victory what it means to win i i the one that comes to mind for me is the vietnam war where you go okay at the time the united states military is probably if not definitely the most powerful military on earth and it is in combat with uh you know this north vietnamese army that is nowhere near the you know firepower or capabilities right um and if you ask many people many people would say that the u.s lost the vietnam war but

29:25other people might dispute that other people might say no no no look at the body counts let's total up the body counts you say look there's way more casualties on that side than on this side so therefore this side won the war but that really speaks to your point about changing the rules for what counts as a victory right so if you just want to say well body counts that's how you total up who won or lost the war um then okay then you come to one conclusion but another conclusion is no who gets to stay in power who gets to stay in control um who who achieves the objective they were hoping to

30:00achieve and to your point earlier when you're either an insurgent or you're an underdog sometimes you win just by not losing right that that's all you have to do is i just have to not lose i just have to keep fighting and that will be a victory and of course there's all kinds of things that have changed over time in warfare particularly with media coverage of warfare if we look at you know military history for thousands of years right of course there was no real media coverage of warfare um and wars that

30:31lasted a long time right so it used to be well you know the war lasts over the summer and and into the fall but then hey everybody's got to go home because we've got a harvest so there's no more war right now right um but as armies became more professional and war became year-round activity uh the the popularity and the support for the war became more and more important and so i think in those in that regard an underdog had more of a chance of winning if they could just win the popularity if they could

31:03win the support for the war contest even if they were losing the the war on the ground so to speak does that make sense to you yeah it does sometimes it's just about sustaining yourself you know you mentioned vietnam but the same thing happened in afghanistan um the taliban never beat the u.s militarily really in any large fixed battles they just out sustained them and said we're willing to keep fighting until the end of the earth and are you willing to do that and the u.s ultimately said no

31:34maybe a more pro-american um example of this would be captain america if you watch the beginning of that movie where he's a scrawny little guy he's sticking up for people and getting the crap beaten out of them but what does he say i can do this all day so you know the underdog if they're willing to sacrifice and they're showing you that amount of commitment to things sometimes the big dog walks away because they'll go this guy's crazy and i've got better things to do

32:05well okay so warfare of course that's that's one part or one area of the underdog story that we wanted to cover today the next one is one that i think a lot of people think about whenever it comes to underdog stories today um and maybe what we see unfold before our own eyes and that's sports so i think it's no secret that ryan and i if our you know to our listeners sports is something that

32:36we care uh dearly about but so do you peter and so because all three of us are huge sports fans you know let's go around the virtual table here and let's each share you know one or two of our favorite underdog stories in athletics so peter as our guest would you mind kicking this thing off okay i promised you guys i would give you one that maybe you hadn't heard of and so i'll tell you about the story of hara urara uh urara is a japanese racehorse who's famous for losing 113 races in a row and never winning a single one in her career and she was kind of an

33:14interesting whore she used to you know this is japan or whatever so she had like a hello kitty pink mask that she used to wear and in fact you can watch a documentary about her i think it's on netflix and it's called like uh the shining star of losers everywhere and this is somewhere around her 80th loss uh an announcer um sort of gave her that nickname and what was really interesting about hara urara is that she did become incredibly popular thousands of people would show up to watch her

33:45compete and lose and this is during japan's lost decade that this happened where the economy's in a funk people have lost their jobs you know japan had gone from being sort of the prominent economy the rising economic power in the world to this backwater and it seemed like a lot of people were seen in this racehorse their own daily struggles and the fact that she just never gave up she just kept trying and trying and trying never had a victory even um prime minister koizumi of japan at the time

34:19uh was quoted as saying uh you know i'd like to see haru urara win even just once the horse is a good example of how not to give up in the face of defeat and so she goes down in in history uh as this losing horse and the reason i kind of heard of her and now a lot of people have heard of her is because she was anthropomorphized in uh what became the mobile game of the year umemusume pretty derby as a short pink-haired girl with band-aids on her legs it's a game where you you train racehorses but

34:55they they look like humans and uh this has been an enormous game it's enormously popular and so there were all these people worldwide who now had um taken this character and run races with her and she loses all the time because the game intentionally gave her just terrible terrible statistics so that she would lose but people would see her as this like lovable loser and what i like about this story is not just how popular she became but people found out that the real racehorse was still alive

35:28and these global fans from all over the world started donating um because there was like this website that's like you can donate grass to retired racehorses and they sent her about 2.5 tons of the highest quality grass available for her in her old um age and uh you know she actually just passed away uh just a couple months ago um so this kind of uh you know she was hugely popular in her last years

36:00but i guess what what i find fascinating about this story is like she never won what she's really famous for is fighting the cheerful fight in the spite of the fact that you're at an incredible disadvantage and just never giving up and we saw people across the world sort of embrace that and say that's something to be respected and admired well that that's one i definitely had never heard of peter uh and uh so thanks for sharing that one uh you know i maybe i'll check out this documentary

36:36that you mentioned when i think about underdog sports i can think about lots of uh lots of examples at least from the u.s i'm sure there are many examples in the global football game that i will uh not think about or not remember or not know about and our listeners around the globe can complain about how uh how i'm not paying attention to the to the the most popular sport in the world but that's okay uh for me a couple come to mind uh right away and i don't want to steal any ones that

37:09you had in mind blake but one comes to mind for me is davidson college and steph curry so steph curry who's widely considered one of the best players probably one of the top five players in the nba today uh went to the small college davidson college in north carolina uh most people had never heard of this college and uh they made a deep run in the ncaa tournament and he was sort of seen as this small skinny right to your definition earlier peter seems to be disadvantaged doesn't seem to be that big

37:44doesn't seem to be that strong but a really good shooter could really shoot from the outside and teams were double teaming him and triple teaming him and just trying to keep him from getting the ball they won a game where he hardly got any shots because they refused to guard any of his teammates they just said forget it we're just not going to let him score i forgot who it was some team took great pride in keeping him under like 10 points in a game because they put like three players on him at a time and just and gave up layup after layup to his teammates but they refused to let him

38:15score at all in any case uh they made a deep run in the ncaa tournament but eventually lost uh again that they are again not the biggest basketball school and then when steph curry went to the nba played for the golden state warriors which had had a struggling franchise for a number of years and won some nba championships and again seen as a lovable guy just everybody wants everybody's rooting for steph curry this small skinny kid uh it has all the feel of an underdog but then they won

38:47one championship and then they won another championship and they set the nba record for wins in a single season and all of a sudden they sort of became disliked and hated and people said oh we don't want to see them win again they win all the time and they were that sort of this evil empire all of a sudden so to me it was this really fascinating tale if you watch his career how he went from underdog everybody loves him his favorite too now nobody likes him nobody wants their team to win uh not really a big favorite anymore but but that's one of my uh underdog stories that comes to

39:21mind in the world of sports okay for me this one actually came last year and i was giving this a lot of thought because of course i didn't want to pick one that you all had picked um but this one involves i'm going to go to the wrestling mat not the not the wwe uh you know hulk hogan style wrestling i mean you're you're you're wrestling you know you're you know on a mat you know you see it in the olympics you see it uh in collegiate wrestling um this happened last year in 2025 and it involved a match between the

39:57university of minnesota's uh gable steveson and my alma mater oklahoma state university's wyatt hendrickson and so uh a little bit of background on gable steveson he was the 2020 uh olympic gold medalist which actually happened in 2021 due to the the pandemic um so he'd already won gold uh he he won two national titles uh in college wrestling he took a little bit of time off considered it kind

40:27of like a retirement but for some reason i don't know how the wrestling rules work he was able to come back in 2025 as this 2024 2025 season as kind of this juggernaut that was untouchable in fact he'd only been beaten twice in his collegiate career by a total of two points to the same guy who was from penn state and that had happened earlier in his career he goes on to face wyatt hendrickson who had

40:58been undefeated throughout the year um and virtually unstoppable to that point but nobody thought wyatt hendrickson had a chance to beat gable steveson because you know you're talking olympic gold medalist uh he was 103 and two going into that he was uh minnesota's first five time uh all-american in wrestling just unstoppable force and wyatt hendrickson was thought to have zero chance

41:29and with about i i want to say it was about 30 seconds left it looked like steveson was gonna win and wyatt hendrickson turned it over on him and and got a takedown and took a took the lead with about 30 seconds left and was i mean had to dig deep down you could see it in this guy's face if you go watch this this match you had i mean it was unbelievable from the from the entry you know

42:01uh wyatt hendrickson you know comes out he's the underdog but he's playing copperhead road uh but you know coming in like it just there was just this feel to it like something might happen and wyatt hendrickson for that last 30 seconds he is holding on for dear life against uh the best wrestler he's probably ever gonna face and somehow held on until the the buzzer blew and and won that so gable steveson ends up going 103 and three and fun fact just in 2021 gable steveson had beaten

42:35wyatt hendrickson uh in the ncaa tournament 17 to 2 so um that was just a big one and and what's crazy you know people who listen to joe rogan podcast this gable steveson guy was just on there a few weeks ago and i'm like why is wyatt hendrickson not on here this is a more this is a cooler story than that but that's the one that that i uh wanted to share today because it was so recent and was so uh the probability of this was just so low is one of the the biggest upsets uh in wrestling

43:08history so that's the one i wanted to share with the group today yeah i i mean blake i think there are just so many in the sports world i mean i think the obvious one from the most recent the the many people at least in the u.s would be talking about would be indiana's football team the coming from basically the losingest football team in history i think they're the first team ever to get to 700 losses um and they did that just a couple of years ago maybe four years i think 2022 to winning the national championship this year i mean if you had said you know three years ago that they would win a

43:43national championship this year and and be the consensus undefeated top team in america people would say you're crazy it's indiana they're always so bad at football um but i think this all of this points to something really important that we haven't really talked about yet and i wrote something in my notes here for you peter let's talk about underdog tactics here right we've talked about military we talked about sports but what are some of the tactics that underdogs use to to be able to compete to be able to to have a chance at winning well like i said with leech it was about being unconventional

44:19about being fast you know he was sort of one of the big proponents of what they call the air raid in college football so you know just not letting the other guys rest not playing by their rules um i you know and you used to see it at um at alabama all the time sometimes when they would play other uh schools like citadel which is you know a little military college they would just run the wildcat like non-stop because and and saban would say it's hard to game against these guys because we

44:51spend all our time thinking about georgia and florida and tennessee and these guys are just doing something completely um unconventional but you know another thing speaking of sports that you see is coordination sometimes really matters more than i don't know raw talent so think of like the 2022 world cup you mentioned of you know the real football the global football the cinderella story of of the last world cup was morocco uh where you had basically a team with no superstars on it there

45:27were no none of these legendary players that make you know 50 million dollars a year and they knocked off spain and they knocked off portugal and they made it to the semi-finals as the first african and arab team to do uh so and in doing so they had all of africa and all of the middle east and i'll be honest probably a lot of the rest of the world cheering for these guys because it's like let's see what they could do and a large part of their cinderella story is just humility teamwork coordination

46:03and just you know genuinely wanting to be there and being proud of you know proud of their country in some ways maybe that a lot of like superstar professional athletes sometimes forget you know another one that you reminded me of some years ago and i won't i'll get the year wrong was i think iceland had a really big run 2016 to yeah which which is you know for a country of their size for such a population um to have such a an impressive run as right but you know to your

46:36point about some of the tactics you're right you talked about unconventional uh sort of tactics right i mean that that's sort of one one of the things that that we see as a sort of theme for underdogs right this um you you mentioned earlier this this sort of willingness just to not give up just say yeah well i'm going to just keep keep fighting i'm just going to keep playing um you know i wonder about some other kinds of things like psychologically like the sort of nothing nothing to lose kind of attitude that you get when you're the underdog i think a lot of athletes will tell you i'd rather be

47:09the underdog than be the favorite for a match because you sort of feel like there's less pressure on you you said earlier that if you're the favorite you have to win you have to win you don't have any choice right whereas the underdog if they lose you know yeah then they maybe i'm sure they personally feel bad but um you know nobody nobody questions them they don't have any extra you know everybody expected them to lose um so so they sort of have this this sort of psychological edge in that way as well that maybe that gives them the ability to do things in an

47:40unconventional manner the ability to play freer because hey if we lose we were supposed to lose anyway i think in the sports world you see underdogs also use other kind of tactics like in basketball in fact for example they instituted a shot clock because underdogs would say well look we know you're better than us so if there's too many possessions ultimately you're going to win out so let's just hold the ball for as long as we can let's make it as few possessions as possible to give ourselves a chance to win and so i think there are some of these kind of tactics both in the

48:13military space i think yeah i think uh you think about the american revolution people talk about well we're not going to march out there and fight you in pitched battle right where your army lines up against our army and we just fight it's no no we're going to fight you from from foxholes and we're going to fight you from behind trees and and over fence posts and things like that and in sort of unconventional warfare kind of ways seem to all be common tactics we see with underdogs and i'm sure we'll talk about some in the business world as well but anything to add around that

48:45peter yeah it's you know i think you're you're right about like changing the rules on that but you know from a psychological perspective what you're describing there is uh the people who expect to win are playing with a loss frame the whole time they have to think about what if i lose what how can i not fail you know whereas the underdog plays with that approach or gain framing which is like what do i need to do to achieve victory here so they're not going to second guess themselves

49:18probably as much and i think we know from the performance literature that you do tend to perform at a higher level if you're thinking about you know approaching tasks and and trying to achieve things rather than avoid failing yeah you know one of the things that i remember mike leach you mentioned earlier talking about was uh basically saying we're going to play super aggressively we're going to like what you see today in modern football is lots of teams go for it on fourth down but they were going for things on fourth down back then saying basically like hey if we don't if we don't play

49:52super aggressively and get a little lucky catch a few breaks we're going to lose anyway so to heck with it what makes the difference if we lose by let's say we play a very conservative strategy and we lose by two touchdowns people will say well you know they were going to lose what if we play a super aggressive strategy and we lose by four touchdowns well it's the same outcome people were going to say well they were going to lose but what if we play a super aggressive strategy and win by a touchdown right and that was the sort of the idea was we're just going to go for it and maybe we'll catch a few

50:23breaks and maybe things will bounce our way and we'll end up winning but if we don't go for it if we just sort of play in a conventional way there's no chance we're going to win yeah it's it's an issue of variance and you know i know this isn't a stats one but i mean if you've got a mean difference or an average difference in talent between two groups and you play towards your average score the lesser able group or team is going to lose almost all the

50:53time their only real hope is to create a lot of variance because that's the only circumstance where they're going to come out ahead of the other guys but they also may lose in a spectacular fashion and i think underdogs sometimes accept that that just can happen but the successful ones you know they're willing to uh to take the gamble gosh mike leach may he rest in peace wow he was a great soundbite for the media that was we're we miss him dearly but okay let's all right we we've

51:28we've gone down this sports rabbit hole and i kind of knew that we would and our audience probably knew that as well but let's transition to the business world now uh which can be as consequential and in some cases more consequential than even warfare so what are some of the more popular underdog stories in business okay well you know the place where you see the underdog story almost all the time is in silicon valley right at least at least to some degree almost all of these companies start

52:02with some story about borrowing money from their parents being in someone's garage putting things together you can think of apple you can think of dell computers um even companies like google will talk about like starting in on the market uh when yahoo kind of ruled the the roost and on all the things they had to do or facebook displacing myspace they all sort of talk about this and even though they're now like phenomenally successful and worth hundreds of billions of dollars um you know

52:35their their founding idea is always well we were a scrappy underdog at one point and you can even think now like in a contemporary example would be um open ai where it's like yeah you know what facebook and google and apple and amazon all these guys had hundreds of billions of dollars and all the best science computer scientists and they've got all the data in the world right and we're just like two or three hundred people and we're just kind of committed to like doing this benevolent ai approach

53:11and somehow they at least for a time they were sort of the dominant ai company for for a couple years now like arguably sort of google has sort of wrestled back the lead from them um but that's one of those sort of like it's a place where you always see the underdogs uh showing up yeah i think you're right here that typically the startup right the startup itself has this underdog feel right it's just us against the big people it's us against the world uh in fact it's psyop this year i'm going to be doing

53:45some presentation on looking at the largest private equity firms compared to some of the smaller private equity firms and and you can actually see personality differences in these two groups mostly driven by these uh smaller firms having to try unconventional strategies trying to do different things to compete with the larger private equity firms out there there's also these stories about business start there's one uh about this uh person ashley revel who was uh who's a brit uh who uh

54:18had was trying to start a poker business and decided to cash out all of his life savings 135 ish thousand us dollars and bet it all on on the roulette table and won the spin on the roulette table doubling their money uh and use that money to start their poker business which is now a successful poker an online poker business but they didn't have the money to do it right and there are these stories like that where somebody takes these great incredible risks i'm not recommending this by the way uh

54:50and and those kinds of things pay off to create you know these these people from underdogs situations into these um you know success stories later on yeah but but again you we also see some of the same themes in business that we saw earlier right think about google right i think people now look at google as this evil empire or meta slash facebook right it's the sort of evil empire but when they first started there was this new up and coming startup business people were excited about it people were rooting

55:21for them to win and now as it becomes you know sort of ubiquitous the term google has become ubiquitous with you know any kind of internet search as they become such ingrained part of our lives we find people rooting against them i mean there are many people that are you know i mean government agencies you know going after these these mega corporations but when they were young startups they they were the favorite everybody wanted to see them succeed um and so you know we see the same kind of patterns

55:53in business and i think again to that tactics question we talked about earlier peter one of the things that we see is these unconventional strategies trying to do things differently from everybody else realizing that if we try the same strategies that the big players and the big players in the market already have we're not going to be able to compete we're not going to be able to to catch up to them we're not going to be able to offer anything additional to what they're already doing um but any other examples like that to to you peter come to mind in terms of the sort of tactics that are used by these by

56:25these businesses to to pull off some of these underdog stories well let me tell you another reason maybe why the underdogs resonate with us so um the classicist joseph campbell had this idea of a meta myth a story that we have in every society and every religion in the world where you know a hero leaves their village and they go off on an adventure let's think of like frodo you know he's got to get rid of the ring where you meet an advisor who gives you a weapon or some knowledge or something like

56:57that you go into these worlds that you never really understood you overcome challenges and eventually you fight the big bad you win it and then you come back to where you were and you're changed fundamentally right so he talks about this hero's journey and we see that with harry potter and katniss everdeen and um you know wherever else whenever i watch shark tank i'm watching the hero's journey there these are often small business owners startups like you said they've got some idea they want to do it well why are they going on shark tank right because they lack the resources they

57:32lack the knowledge they lack the connections um to to make it and so they're going there looking for that advisor that person who's going to show them how they can fight it out in this world that they don't quite understand and they're not an expert in and hopefully on the other side you know their business will be successful they'll make millions of dollars and they'll return fundamentally changed from what they do and i think uh you know every time we go on trips with my family my kids always

58:03want to watch shark tank in the hotel they don't watch it at home they only want to ever watch it when we're on vacation but i think the show itself is so compelling because we're rooting for these people as underdogs and as these people on the hero's journey and we want to see them succeed okay let's transition here to politics now uh peter i'm curious what underdog stories stand out to you from a political standpoint and why you know i was thinking about this and it's like i think

58:34an easy one for me is lee kuan yu in singapore so if you think about um how singapore came to be it used to be a part of malaysia and basically the malaysian government kicked singapore out um because they were just trying to sort of get rid of some ethnic minorities and they're like you're on your own and so these guys become a city-state uh overnight with basically no resources whatsoever they got no water no gold no oil no nothing and lee kuan yu who is sort of the leader there you know through sort

59:11of sheer determination and grit and sort of you know albeit imposing some very sort of strict laws and things like that turns them into what is maybe like the most modern city in the world and you know one of the wealthiest too despite the fact that it has no sort of natural uh resources and so like i think of singapore as being in the the geopolitical world is like the the fundamental underdog who's who's really succeeded um but i'll give you another example that's maybe closer to home for

59:43a lot of people and it might be a little bit more controversial which is donald trump if you remember back when he threw his hat in the ring to become the republican nominee in 2015 a lot of people thought he was a joke candidate right he was a reality tv show guy um he had never held office before he was a guy who had been in like professional wrestling he'd been in the media a long time and he was kind of a businessman but in some ways a little bit of like a caricature of a businessman in many ways

1:00:15and he also didn't really seem to make a lot of sense for the republicans because he had only recently been a member of the democratic party he was friends with the clintons and oprah and a bunch of other notable uh democrats and you know good friends with chuck schumer and these guys and he talked weird and he was brash and he didn't seem to have a good handle on on world events or politics and um and then you know he was up against dynasty candidates like jeb bush who was a successful uh governor of florida at the

1:00:46time um but trump somehow leverages his outsider status he gets people to see him as an underdog as an outsider he runs an unusual campaign he gets a lot of free publicity by it but one thing that he really did and it's kind of like as a celebrity and a reality television star and a guy who'd been in the media he brought a lot of attention he brought a lot of people into the tent who would otherwise not be there and even if you look at his sort of most recent election he's fundamentally changed the

1:01:18nature of the electorate where you have a lot of minorities voting for the republicans now but even more importantly blue collar workers the working class is now his fundamental base which it wasn't traditionally for the republicans and in some ways you know whether you like his politics or not as a politician it's really impressive because he's a new york billionaire and somehow he's positioned himself as being the champion of the little guy and so you see that underdog story there

1:01:51yeah well i think that's uh probably one of the most uh powerful examples in recent memory and to your point peter uh back in 2016 uh trump certainly got himself to be viewed as the underdog right is is the and and you know it seems given what we know about the likability of underdogs that seemed to be you know a really effective political strategy i think if i were a political strategist that's the kind of thing i would be talking with people about is how can we convey this person as an

1:02:24underdog how can we create this image because as we've talked about earlier underdogs seem to be inherently likable they tend to be um you know just just more liked in general i mean there are other examples in uh u.s political history i think jimmy carter would have been another one uh you know talking about being a peanut farmer from georgia right sort of playing up this you know oh i'm not really a politician i'm not really you know um known for these kind of things and and and that that has a certain appeal um that that can create you know a certain fervor for for for these people

1:03:01as well but to your other point peter about tactics right you know trump certainly used very unconventional tactics um that we would not traditionally see used in the political arena and arguably those could have backfired right those could have went completely the wrong way he could have crashed and burned out immediately as as a candidate but they didn't and you could argue that maybe more politicians should try something unconventional should say hey if i don't try

1:03:33something pretty radical and pretty unconventional i'm not going to win anyway um which i think is a real central message for for anybody trying to be an underdog well and we saw one of the bigger ones just uh a couple of months ago and that's yeah i mean we talked about that on the derailers of the year episode but that guy started from scratch i mean to to being the mayor of you know arguably the the

1:04:04most uh powerful or or um you know popular city in the world whatever word you want to describe it that's probably the most important city in the u.s for sure for sure in the u.s yeah yeah and i mean with that comes a great deal of power but i mean he did that just talking to people on the streets um and well and again running an unconventional strategy right yep you know uh if you went and

1:04:35talked to a political strategist would they ever say hey you should run as a socialist you really need to advertise that you're a socialist that's what's going to get you votes right so that's pretty unconventional yeah okay well we've discussed you know all these different uh historically significant underdog stories across warfare athletics business politics and we've talked we've we've touched on some of the things that make them successful but i'm curious peter is there anything else that you'd like to note from a psychological standpoint that helps these underdogs win what do they have in common

1:05:11um you know outside of maybe these tactics they use uh well i think that there's always this sense of justice um both for us and the people doing it that you know we want to see what happens you know when the moral little guy triumphs over a big bad bully and it's a a narrative that we tell children or stories right like children's stories are often like that so it sometimes fits a a convenient narrative for us all um you know aside from what the underdog does i guess my what i would add here is

1:05:48it depends on what the big dog does at that time um there's something in business called the success trap where you know you get rich rich rich rich rich rich and some people were explaining this is why google sort of um fell behind in in the the ai race and why you saw people like myspace get overthrown or even yahoo is you get successful and you get good at what you want to do and then you start playing defense because you're like i don't want to lose what i've accumulated and you become less

1:06:21open to risk taking you become less open to innovation you become more reliant on doing the traditional things for you um that have always worked while the other guy is innovating and striking out at you and so the success trap is really sometimes about um complacency and that opens the door to successful insurgents or successful underdogs and you can see sometimes leaders will will recognize this so again being at university of alabama where they were so dominant in football for

1:06:55so long but what you saw with nick saban you know the football coach who was here is he knew that they were the big dog but he never wanted them to feel like it because he didn't want to have a sense of complacency and so he would hunt around the internet and the newspapers and all this looking for stories of like sports writers who would be like alabama's overrated alabama's not that good there's no way they're going to win and he would bring those in to the locker room to get his guys riled up and say do you see what they're saying about you they're saying you're not good they're saying that you don't

1:07:30deserve you know nil money you don't deserve to be rated as a five star are you going to let them say that to you and these guys would get really upset and really motivated um i i think sometimes you know we talked about it before being the underdog is motivational and sometimes even if you're not the underdog even just sort of getting an aspect of that mentality where that's that motivation where it's like i'm going to show you i'm going to try real hard because you don't think i can do this but i want to and so um you know that's the advantage that the underdogs have they've got

1:08:05that spirit and it's sometimes it's when the big dogs don't have that and when they're complacent that they open themselves up to defeat and so um you know it's the psychology of both actors i think that's really important yeah i when i think one of those that comes to mind for me peter is is apple as well right thinking about the ai race and thinking about you know a company that was known for so much innovation um you know without trying to be too critical here you know what's their newest product

1:08:36right what's the latest product i mean you know there was the iphone there was uh ipad yeah the ipad right it's just a derivation of the iphone right i mean uh apple music i mean what what what what's the next thing what's the thing they're bringing that's that's you know truly innovative and to your point sometimes you become really large and it becomes more about playing defense than uh about playing offense and uh i think that's exactly what you see with some of these former underdogs that

1:09:11become favorites uh they they do get focused on playing defense because playing offense is risky what if we bet everything on this and it fails right well why don't we just you know it's more of a short-term strategy right let me just keep keep keep the investors happy in the short term um so i can keep my job but perhaps selling out the the future of the company in doing so yeah i mean i was gonna say blockbuster had a chance to to buy netflix in its infancy

1:09:47and didn't you know that was they were they were playing too much defense and they really needed to get a little bit more offensive to your point there blake that's one way to defeat underdogs buy them yeah look for the underdogs and go buy them up peter do you have anything else to add on that one well it's just you know and it's not to say risks there's a reason why the success trap exists is because it's probably the safest strategy right like nokia tried to radically reposition themselves and uh when was the last time you saw a nokia product

1:10:22right so um taking risks is risky fundamentally um but it's also sometimes necessary to survive even if it increases the chance of your own mortality well uh actually nokia is still functioning um they they uh grew nine percent year over year last year so just fyi i'm not sure with what but yeah but i saw i had to fact check myself because i saw

1:10:53that somewhere so i just had to check it but um peter this has been an awesome conversation but i've got one last question for you we kind of end these things uh in a similar fashion and uh that is you know i want you to think of yourself as an underdog who defeated an opponent against overwhelming odds if in those shoes what wisdom would you share with those who might find themselves against similar odds so it's it's not exactly taking uh what you said imagine but it's not hard for me to

1:11:29like think of myself as an underdog because you know i'm an immigrant living in another country i'm a professor working in a discipline that i wasn't trained in or formally credentialed in and so i've always felt like sort of an outsider and maybe like i'm always fighting at a disadvantage because i didn't have um the social networks and the the the human capital and stuff like that that that other people did so it's definitely a mindset that i think i i readily embrace but i'll give you

1:12:02some advice here um how would you get there one define what success looks like to you so that's one thing we talked about earlier which is you know winning may not mean being number one it may simply mean that you just got noticed or you gained market share or that you continue to exist um so you have to define what victory looks like to you and that that's one thing the second is you know and again we've discussed this before don't play by the rules of the people who are invested in maintaining the status quo

1:12:35because they're going to set up the rules to advantage themselves so you've got to think about a way to you know introduce no ideas change the nature of the game and try to suit um your strengths i mean with my own career i read very extensively across a variety of disciplines biology anthropology classical literature chemistry so that i can come to problems in a way that isn't typical isn't conventional and sometimes it's just about even adopting ideas that are common in another area but have never made

1:13:11it over into the the topic that i'm researching and people will go oh you're incredibly creative and it's like not really i'm just good at adopting things you know and very humble about trying to learn uh new stuff um the third thing of course don't get complacent with just doing things uh the way that you've been successful or the way things are always done um you know one of the things i think that's brought me the most success as i've moved into other disciplines and other areas is just asking the

1:13:44question why are we doing things this way like i want you to explain to me why this is the right answer because a lot of times there's not really a good reason why we're doing things and so just questioning the assumptions questioning the status quo um you got to work hard i can't think of any examples in the insurgency literature where the insurgents were lazy and just sort of hung out waited for things to happen um they were all relentless when they're successful and then finally um i guess you

1:14:17just got to remember is that underdogs rarely win all by themselves they're not solo heroes um if you try to do everything yourself you're going to burn out uh you know so you do need social and emotional support around you even if the task you're doing is individual um to dedicate the amount of time and effort and things like that that you need to like overcome all the obstacles you're going to need some people to take the pressure off of all the secondary and tertiary um tasks and responsibilities in your life

1:14:50so having that network is super important well i think that totally summarizes this entire podcast in an amazing way and i mean if listeners are only tuning in for parts of the podcast i will say hey you got to go listen to peter summarize these key points here because that was fantastic uh peter i just want to say thanks so much for for coming on the podcast again and spending some time with us uh to to hear more about this fascinating topic and and really appreciate you joining us today

1:15:22thanks for having me guys it's been a blast and again it's a it's a great topic and i'm sure we're going to probably end up talking about it again at some point yeah peter uh thank you so much for joining us our audience is going to love this one and uh we'll look forward to to seeing you in psyop in new orleans and also having you back on the podcast in the future all right we'll see you there and that does it for the science of personality podcast episode 143 be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun and informative episode cheers everybody this has been the science of

1:16:00personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments you can access all episodes on our website thescienceofpersonality.com or on the streaming service of your choice see you next time you